brizzle365: the US seen whispering softly in UK's ear..."From you dad, I learned it from watching you"

Yeah, no.  This would absolutely fall under the First Amendment.

There is a reason why having an "unwritten constitution" means that you have a constitution that's worth the paper that it's written on.

Xzano: So I guess the next step is to cut out the eyes of those who have seen the propaganda and the tongues of people who talk about it (either directly or indirectly).

No, of course not.  What they'll do is give you drugs to make you sick while they force you to watch it.

This text is now purple: How this will be used is in retrospect.

They'll find a list of what you've seen, then declare one of them to be propaganda.

Europe always wonders why fascism keeps popping up there and not here. God bless their myopic, totalitarian little hearts.

I smarted this.  The way to prevent that sort of thing isn't to restrict speech.  The antidote to speech you abhor or find dangerous isn't less speech, it's more speech.  Restricting speech specifically because you don't like the political content of it is what totalitarian states do.

Dinjiin: This text is now purple: Dinjiin: So as long as you haven't pissed off the Crown, you'll be somewhat safe.

If the above is true, you live in a totalitarian state.

Well, yeah, that's kind of why people are freaking out about this.  But don't think for a minute that there aren't other laws already on the books in most countries that have the same issue.  IIRC, there was some drug dealer in town who was slapped with an extra 5 years time for a bunch of unrelated charges, one of which was having unlicensed dogs in his possession.

The better question to ask is: what shade of gray is our totalitarian state drawn in?  Why does it appear to be getting darker?

Don't confuse selective enforcement of non-political statutes and regulations with the selective enforcement of expressly political ones.

The first case isn't totalitarianism.  The second one is.

It may be "soft" velvet-glove style totalitarianism, but charging people with a crime for viewing propaganda is in and of itself inherently evil.  It's not the same thing as enforcing a law against having an unlicensed dog once that person comes to the attention of law enforcement for another crime.

This text is now purple: Dinjiin: So as long as you haven't pissed off the Crown, you'll be somewhat safe.

If the above is true, you live in a totalitarian state.

If you piss off the government and they criminally charge you for reading propaganda, you might be in a totalitarian state.

DON.MAC: dittybopper: Don't confuse selective enforcement of non-political statutes and regulations with the selective enforcement of expressly political ones.

Can't they be reduced to the same things at both ends of the spectrum? Al Capone wasn't busted for tax evasion because that was all they could get him on, they busted him because he was a political embarrassment.

No, they really can't.  One is ideologically based ("Don't watch ISIS propaganda because it's illegal").

The other is not.  Al Capone was an embarrassment because he was violating laws that weren't expressly ideological in nature, and he was clever enough to get away with it for a while. Those laws applied to everyone regardless of their political bent, whereas forbidding you from watching the propaganda from organizations on some sort of a watch list is inherently ideological.

Gordon Bennett: dittybopper: brizzle365: the US seen whispering softly in UK's ear..."From you dad, I learned it from watching you"

Yeah, no.  This would absolutely fall under the First Amendment.

There is a reason why having an "unwritten constitution" means that you have a constitution that's worth the paper that it's written on.

Am I right in thinking that you are taking the term 'unwritten constitution' to mean the laws aren't written down at all? Do you think they're passed on by word of mouth? Telepathy? Just sort of assumed?

That's not how this works.

Yeah, it kind of is.

The "unwritten constitution" of the UK is a series of laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, and even some unwritten traditions that have built up over the centuries.

That means that there is no one single primary document that is the highest law of the land.

When you don't have an express list of "Thou Shall Nots" that the government must follow, they can do pretty much whatever they want.  Any protections put in place by Parliament can be expressly repealed by Parliament just as easily.

In the US, in order to change the Constitution, you not only need 2/3rds of both houses of Congress to agree, you also need 3/4ths of the state legislatures to ratify any changes.

From a practical standpoint, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are considered sacrosanct.  While you could theoretically amend or repeal them, in practice that won't work.

You have to remember that US law and UK law are based upon the same principles.  US law is an offshoot of British law as it was in 1776.  They didn't just make shiat up out of whole cloth.

But one of the things they did do is expressly lay out precisely what government was allowed to do and precisely what it wasn't allowed to do, and while recognizing that times change and the Constitution will need to change, they also recognized that fundamental changes shouldn't be as easy as a simple majority in the national legislature.

In short, we have an express written constitution here in the US because it was recognized that not having a single supreme document that is the highest law of the land is one of the bad things about the UK.