The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
> It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves
of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
As you said, that's a bit hypocritical. 4chan content is legal content, they're operating as a lawful company. In fact, they ban most ways to stay anonymous (tor, vpns, known proxies), so if you want to commit crimes, don't do it on 4chan.
Mandatory disclaimer that /pol/ is only one board, and most of 4chan is not actually politics.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
The main difference I see is part of the government of "the west", e.g. US, hasn't been able to get all the way to how China operates yet, not that they don't want to. Given the chance, which looks like they're getting, China (the government) is what they want to be.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
Ah no on a topic of censorship someone was saying how good western countries were before about personal freedoms and I called out that lie as many of those freedom are just for TV shows and literature only. All citizens did not and still do not enjoy all the freedoms he is spouting the only difference the restrictions are being more broadly applied so he is effected so talks about the past was better. The past was better only for white skinned straight man maybe you could add rich as when when it come to personal freedoms
You are heavily mixing freedom with access to opportunity. They are not the same.
I come from an Eastern European country. Before 1990, if I would have wanted to not study and only drink and let my live go like Diogenes, that would have never worked. The authorities would pick me up from the street and forcefully make me go work something, even if I don't like it. Even if I have studied, the authorities still may decide where I can go to work. The possibility to decide how I can build or fuck up my own live - this is what I understand as freedom.
Opportunity - this is something very different. And to that I can agree with you about the "white skinned man", even if it is very far away from my understanding about the world because of where I was born and how I lived.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
