[didntcheck]

I also live in the UK, and I in fact care about both of these. "Things are worse in America" is a tired and harmful cliché frequently used to deflect valid complaints about affairs here. Is the Trump administration really the low bar we're happy with?

And I'm afraid we're long past the point of dismissing police and state overreach into freedom of expression as an "American/right-wing myth". The Julian Foulkes case [1] is just one recent example - and no, the fact that they apologised in this one case, featuring an important person, that received substantial media attention, is not enough to reassure me that it was an error

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0j718we6njo

[foldr]

> "I am pleased that Kent Police has apologised to him and removed the caution from his record."

This is bad, but corrective action was taken. You can look through the news in pretty much any country and find some examples of the police abusing their power or arresting people for stupid reasons. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t bad or that it’s not worth drawing attention to. But cherry picking these kinds of incidents can give people outside the UK a deeply misleading picture of what life is actually like here (see e.g. the green account posting elsewhere in this thread for one example).

[Latty]

I explicitly said that the UK wasn't free of issues: my pointing out the US was worse wasn't defending our own, simply making the point that some Americans tend to massively exaggerate the UK's issues while pretending the US doesn't have any.

Average people from the UK are going to assume that any pushback on speech controls is nutters if the message comes with absurd exaggerations and outright lies. There are legitimate cases of overreach from our legal system, but too often the focus is on someone actively calling for violence, and those are not the same.

[haswell]

> …while pretending the US doesn't have any.

As far as I can tell, the comment you replied to did not do any such thing.

[foldr]

They’re referring to the comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44198428

[haswell]

Yes, I’m aware. I should have said “referred to” instead of “replied to”.

[foldr]

Hmm, to me that comment is clearly making a comparison between the US and the UK and suggesting that the UK is in a worse position with regard to freedom of expression (“from across the pond”).