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by yomly 1661 days ago
I mean this is obviously reductionist but let's cherry pick some examples from the UK, bastion of the free.

It's run by an apparently corrupt government [0]

The NHS falls over every Winter, even without the help of a pandemic [1]

Backlogs on the NHS are now getting so severe that doctors are institutionally negligent - I know of two personal cancer cases missed for no good reason and GPs I know are confess to giving poor care due to being understaffed [2]

Knife crime is so much of a problem it gets its own page for statistics [3]. (Spoilers: there were over 3000+ knife related injuries in London in the last year)

And so, only when an MP gets stabbed to death is it newsworthy [4][5]

Police can barely keep street violence from breaking out, and for the rest of the country it's just bants [6]

They can't even keep their force from kidnapping innocent women off the streets at 9pm [7] and so now you their own advice is to not trust them [8]

For all the talk about democracy and freedom, it really seems like freedom is about the freedom for the strong to harm and extort others.

No thanks.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johns...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winte...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-...

[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox

[6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashe...

[7] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58745581

[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58753857

1 comments

People complain a lot about the amount of surveillance and petty authoritarianism of the UK also, so I don't know what your trying to achieve. From what I've seen in reality, most of the time it isn't about how much surveillance a place has, but how much the police force works on preventing it, the culture of people itself and poverty.