one shitpost at a time
"It’s not that the vision of the UK being projected around the world at the moment has no truth behind it. As Carl Jung said of projections generally: “It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out.” The UK unambiguously has two-tier policing, at least in one sense: it has aggravated offences and non-aggravated ones. We also have a judicial system focused on maintaining public order and so likely to engage in example-setting, and politicians across the board who agree that visibly harsh sentences have a generally deterrent effect.

After a decade of institutionally adopted white guilt in many quarters, it is indeed possible that sometimes the judiciary punishes white offenders disproportionately relative to other ethnicities for the very same crimes — though cherry-picking individual decisions to compare them, as Musk and others are doing, is a terrible way to establish this as true. What does seem clear is that elements of the establishment are markedly more at ease castigating white working-class people than non-white ethnic groups, including where speech inciting racial and religious violence is concerned. [..]


Progressives who once lauded him [Musk] as an ecological revolutionary, marshalling tech to save humanity, now see him as a pantomime villain who must be stopped at all costs. This week, for instance, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf called him “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” responsible for “the most wicked evil possible” in amplifying “far-Right white supremacist ideology”. As usual, this sort of hyperbolic overstatement produces defensive overcompensation from the Right, with some conjuring up a noble warrior saving liberal values and the West, one shitpost at a time. No mention tends to be made of the way his platform’s algorithms continue to monetise polarisation and forever culture wars on a scale of which Putin would be proud."

Kathleen Stock