But at what cost?

Video from Will Hayward's Instagram.

Edit: title's poor formatting comes from the fact I was half-asleep when writing it. Please ignore the comma between 'Gaza' and 'genocide'.

👂

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/781821

Her post:

“Closing down gender clinics isn’t enough to end this scandal. The whole idea that trans is a type of person must be eradicated.

As long as society pretends it’s normal to want healthy body parts chopped off, vulnerable people will continue to be harmed.”

These are the people working alongside “LGB Alliance” and EHRC TERFs working hard to exterminate trans people from public life.

Her name is Mia Hughes and she’s with Genspect, an anti-trans organisation pushing propaganda and bigotry.

Other countries which have banned or restricted communism outside of Europe include:

• Indonesia
• South Korea
• Saudi Arabia
• UAE
• Qatar
• Oman
• Bhutan
• Malaysia

First of all I’m asking this question in good faith and to help myself work through this issue from a leftist perspective as while I’m in the UK the only discourse I have seen on this is very US centric.

I was always very against legalizing firearms for civilians for the usual reasons of it increases the likelihood of gun violence. However I have been thinking lately (on theoretical level of course) of how leftists are,traditionally, in support of the working class being armed.

The reasons such as how gun control in the US has been largely racialised and used to disarm black Americans, indigenous peoples and political dissidents make sense to me and I agree. I have also been, as a woman of colour, in multiple situations personal safety wise where even just having a gun to show to the man harassing me/threatening me would immediately change the power dynamic and eliminate the threat. For example, I have had a man harass me at my door for months and the worry I’ve had is what if he gets angrier and tries to push in. In this situation, if I were armed I guarantee this man would feel less comfortable door knocking and trying to intimidate a woman he knows is living alone. So I see the argument that women and PoC would be able to defend themselves for instances of harassment.

Similarly I agree and understand groups in the US who use their arms for this reason e.g the Black Panthers “cop-watch” and now how they are responding to ICE.

I can’t reconcile however how this affects again my initial position that more people owning guns will inevitably lead to more gun violence (I.e what’s to stop the bad actors also picking up a gun, school shootings etc).

Basically I just want to understand how to work through this with theory or others thoughts and some research so that I have a more cohesive opinion on this that isn’t just contextualised in the US

So something I've increasingly noticed in UK political discussions is how quickly people dismiss controversial political developments as "American politics" or "American culture wars".

Whether it's trans rights, immigration, racism, sexism or broader debates about identity, there's almost always someone insisting that we're importing American problems and that Britain never used to be like this.

But why do we keep pretending the UK is somehow fundamentally different?

We're two countries with closely connected histories, shared cultural influences, deeply entrenched class hierarchies, histories of colonialism and racial discrimination, and political institutions historically dominated by white men. Why would we expect our political cultures to be completely different?

To be clear I'm not denying that American political discourse influences us lot. Obviously it does. American media, politicians and online movements have enormous international reach. But I think we can agree influence isn't the same as invention right?

The UK had racism before American social media existed. We had misogyny, homophobia and transphobia long before anyone started complaining about American culture wars. Our newspapers, politicians and institutions have been perfectly capable of manufacturing moral panics without needing instructions from Washington.

What particularly frustrates me is how this framing almost absolves the country of responsibility. Rather than examining why these attitudes already exist here, we treat them as some foreign contamination that's somehow infected an otherwise tolerant society.

It also works in reverse. When progressive movements gain attention, they're sometimes dismissed as American imports too, as though we couldn't possibly have developed their own objections to discrimination and inequality.

I think there's a wider reluctance in UK political discourse to acknowledge how much of what we criticise in America also exists here, sometimes in slightly different forms. Just don't get why are we so determined to portray these problems as uniquely American instead of acknowledging that they're also British problems...