alt Hacker News> Because this is leaning on blaming to UK for everything the US is doing to itself an awful lot.
Hasn't the UK had a culture of surveillance (the famous CCTV cameras) and arresting people over online wrongthink for quite some time though? Who inspired who?
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No it did not. Online right wing is trying to push narrative that is all.
No, not really. This is a narrative that is pushed by certain segments of the American right (and some of their UK allies). It easily dominates online discussion in an environment where the majority of people posting have no direct experience of life in the UK. Actual life in the UK is very unlike what you would imagine on the basis of reading HN threads, or Elon Musk’s twitter feed.
I suspect that most people with first hand knowledge have simply given up trying to contribute to HN threads about the UK. There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the UK, but here (as you can see from the title) the discourse has degraded to such an extent that the mythically awful UK is held responsible even for bad laws passed by American legislature.
The US has a history of arrests over "wrong think"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-com...
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/new-hampshire-police-a...
https://www.fire.org/news/lawsuit-ex-cop-sues-after-spending...