The video embedded in this tweet from Laurence Fox apparently shows someone being arrested for tweeting. I cannot see the video, but the top comment says,
“Chap shares a post by @LozzaFox and the police arrest the chap, even though Laurence is actually stood there 👀
This is disgraceful. People upset by hurty words need to turn the Internet off and remember the old children’s rhyme – Sticks and Stones.”
Apparently the arrest had something to do with that meme that shows four LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flags (my goodness, “Newsround” has changed a lot since John Craven presented it) arranged so that the triangular inserts form a swastika. Fox’s Wikipedia entry says, “In June 2022 Fox tweeted an image of a swastika made from the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag with the caption ‘You can openly call the [Union Jack] a symbol of fa[s]cism and totalitarianism on Twatter. You cannot criticise the holy flags’. This led to him being temporarily suspended from Twitter for a day.”
This tweet from Richard Taylor of GB News may show the same video.
As you can probably tell, I am not at all sure what is going on. Is my inability to play the video censorship by Twitter, or just my old computer not being up to the job? Some accounts seem to imply that that the threatened arrest was not carried through, although that reassures me very little. As we have all seen, making the process the punishment has been a very successful way for the police to chill free speech while avoiding having to defend their actions in court.
I have a super fast computer, and the first video didn’t play for me either (just the first few seconds.) Looks more like a technical problem than out and out censorship though. (Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.)
Three posts down, the quoted discussion of the Tory leadership election ended
(Assuming the situation is as Natalie suspects) it will be interesting if the two remaining candidates get asked their attitude to this kind of police treatment of retweeters of the remark of a rival party leader, and informative if they are not.
Well, one can always go full suffragette on them. Full on mass civil disobedience – the day of twitter “violence.”
I’m retired, nothing they can really do to me. I can’t get fired. They can’t touch my money (I’m not in Canada). If detained, I can put off organizing my garage for a few weeks without much worry.
Clog the cars, jails, courts – in the US you can insist on a jury trial which burns two court days.
Maybe this storming of the woke Bastille will be by people with bad knees and annuities.
-XC
PS – Don’t glue your hands to anything, I’ve seen the video from Finland. Ouch.
All the links worked for me just fine.
Link please, no idea what you are talking about.
France, not Finland.
Sorry, it’s twitter, but if you have Brave and adblocker they at least don’t make money off ya.
As Perry has pointed out before – the Corporations and so on do NOT want Marxism (they want some form of Saint-Simonism rather like the Fascism of Mussolini – where there is Collectivism but the rich get to keep their life styles – rather than being shot or sent to a Gulag).
However, this does not stop the Corporations, and the government bureaucracy, embracing Frankfurt School of Marxism (Herbert Marcuse and all that – yes I know that Marcuse never actually worked in Frankfurt, it is turn of phrase) – with Freedom of Speech denounced as “Hate Speech” or “Repressive Tolerance”.
Essentially the international establishment have decided to use Frankfurt School Marxist means (such as “Hate Speech” bans and the general “disadvantaged groups” excuse for censorship and persecution – which really got out of control under the Obama Administration in the United States) for Fascist ends (the objective of creating a Corporate State).
It is very unfortunate.
I have Brave and adblocker 😉
The endless pushing of Frankfurt School doctrines (on race, and sexuality and ..) by the Corporations (see their advertisements and so on) is very unfortunate.
The Corporate Managers do not seem to grasp that by their war on Western society, Western civilisation, they are cutting out the ground from under their own feet.
Their objective may be a Corporate State (rather than formal Marxism) – but they are likely to end up with a total breakdown of society, chaos ending in nothing but ashes and dried blood.
I absolutely agree with XC. We need to start thinking in terms of civil disobedience, refusing coppers service in shops and the like.
[…] As I have often said, once the principle of free speech is gone, what speech is censored is merely a matter of who happens to be momentarily on top at that time and place. Notice how far removed both the recent examples are from the true rule of law. In Scotland the woman was arrested under the vague catch-all charge of “breach of the peace”. In Wales the threats against the man by an officer of the law had no legal basis at all. (England is just as bad. Trust me.) […]