i think so.
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
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
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
Trump, as a professed Christian, could possibly take a "widow's mites" approach to a bribe from 4chan.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
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.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
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.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
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.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
529,454 signatures and counting
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
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.
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.
They don't.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
I really wonder if true
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
[1]: https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
Any notion that the UK is actually run by the people is nonsensical, the so called democracy is pure and utter theatre.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
(Bitorrent encryption was largely a reaction to ISP shaping/blocking a couple decades ago.)
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
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.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
Perhaps more appropriate:
* Instructions for making an illegal firearm
* Unpopular political opinions
* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection
* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public
* Using a VPN
* Holding a sign at a protest
There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.
IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
This is an exercise in censorship, in a sense. So is blocking spam.
OP’s point stands. Information flow requires regulation in any society. I’ve been something of a free-speech absolutist most of my life, but I’m strongly re-thinking that after seeing Europe and America fall to what can only be described as populist stupidity.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
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.
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
Shame and ostracisation handled this through antiquity. There is no evidence introducing those elements online cannot work.
> would at best create an echo chamber of government supported online stupidity and misinformation
But that’s what we got anyway.
It’s just as clearly the case that a lack of regulation amplifies people willing to be stupid online. Taking that amplification away takes us back, per your worst case, to what we have now.
Because these are ultimately excuses for spying on adults
> This bill requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.
What is an "online platform", and how would they know the visitor is under 17?
I mean, this is why state and government came into being, so nothing strange with such expectation.
Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?
Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?
(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335065
Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
Facebook, Youtube and others put in effort to take down illegal content.
4chan only does the bare minimum such that they don't gain too much relevancy in the public eye.
UK or other countries may decide that 4chan doesn't to enough and ban it because of the help of 4chan in faciliating the spreading of illegal content.
So again, where is the difference between 4chan which hosts/spread illegal content and other sites where we're fine with banning them?
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
The digital credentials API trial seems interesting though: letting the browser verify your age without sharing any other personal details. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.
Even highly educated people are susceptible to propaganda eventhough they consider not https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
The hope is that the punishment proscribed by the law is enough to make people think again before breaking it, and, if the law involves depravation of liberty (jail), that people who do break it are removed from society for a limited amount of time to prevent them further transgressing.
This is civics 101, honestly, anyone that's a student of history understands that laws are created because all other forms of preventing what society agrees to be bad behaviour have failed.
Laws, therefore, are the last resort, because everything else has failed.
Edit: I just want to add (here, because it's too late to edit my original comment) that someone /flagged/ my comment that disagreed about there being a thing where speech/information flows completely uninhibited - hilariously proving my point :-)
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios
Doesn't work with all email providers though, from their FAQ:
Proton mail isn't supported (I'm guessing because of the way Proton encrypts your email at rest?).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Sounds brilliant, lets do this.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Thought you might find it helpful.
I'm no brexiteer but ... it's not like the Tories were going to hand him the keys to Number 10 and say "Have at it". He wasn't an MP at all at that point.
It's like the "Idiots didn't even know what they were voting for!" argument. Sure, they didn't. Because the people who actually had the power to make a plan to vote for, declined to do so, specifically to increase uncertainty and perception of risk for voting leave.
You can blame Farage and brexit voters for a lot (and you should!) but neither he nor they ever had the political power to make or execute a plan.
There are no drawn or otherwise images on 4chan that are illegal under United States law.
If the UK government is worried about children exposed to harmful content, well, let us first remember that they are assisting and supporting the massacre of children in Gaza, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of them. And when that stops - I suppose they're welcome to suggest content filtering software to parents.
This had until recently been only tested for top-down information. Nowadays, everyone can be a broadcaster and we're seeing quite different results.
I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
No it doesn’t. I can easily go to any number of local shops and buy a knife without any hassle.
It's creating the infrastructure for mass surveillance (this is mass surveillance) and shifting the Overton window.
You're fine with this, what's the next target. They're already onto the subject of VPN's.
Do you like the taste of bacon?
Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.
While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.
The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Criticism
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.
For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
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
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.
In the UK. Their abuse will be restricted to people living within their borders unless the US allows it. The UK is not in any position to harass US companies, even more so now that they lack EU's backing.
Only UK residents (including their children) will really be harmed by this nonsense.
Anyway, 4chan barely keeps the lights on as it is. Worrying about 4chan bribing politicians is absurd. Either politicians will help 4chan out of some sense of self-interest, or they won't help at all.
I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.
If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.
And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.
As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing). “Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.
And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.
This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.
It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
> managed democracies you see out East
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
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.
What evidence do you have that this is a reasonable concern?
I've seen plenty of hard-core porn since the age of 10 and turned out just fine. I don't know anyone in my generation that has said otherwise.
This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
> The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten
> Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity.
That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't.
All of them. No exceptions.
None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.)
And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends.
There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up.
And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech.
This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
If porn was the only thing getting affected, I would gladly support all these surveillance tactics, every single one of them. Porn and prostitution in general is riddled with trafficking, drug addiction and other forms of exploitation.
The reality is that what's at stake here are things that (unlike porn) are not harmful to us, but very important to us. Like the ability to have a free space for thought and information sharing without the oversight of anybody else, not least a potential adversary. This defence is very important against a tyrannical state.
But let's ignore all that and instead make it about children's right to "explore their gender and sexuality" on the internet. This is what I saw some guy arguing a few days ago.
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
"Police drag away a man for saying he likes bacon near a sprawling mosque construction site" (https://www.wndnewscenter.org/we-like-bacon-man-arrested-for...)
A 30-kiloton nuclear explosion was used by the USSR to extinguish a large natural gas fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field
They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
What does this mean
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
One can slowly understand why the fabric of a SEEMINGLY unfair, un-meritocratic, rule bending, society that limits vertical movement slowly ebbs apart.
EDIT > The reason I said rule bending is simply, one of the most successful people I know just lied about their academic achievements, no one seemingly bothered to check, and they took the position of someone who was honest. This must be somehow related.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
are on the same "side" with you. A country is not divided into two (or more) political sides. A country is divided into classes.
It was even how modern voting system originated. See: Estates-General, Prussian three-class franchise, etc.
See also: both parties of the US didn't release Epstein files.
I agree! But where to draw the line? Your examples include crimes (distinct from whatever speech/expression) that are far beyond where anyone is saying should be allowed. This seemed a bit disingenuous to me. I was trying to engender a higher-quality discussion.
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
Great timeline here: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-v...
This is not a throwaway account or comment - it is my first and only HN account.
The comment I made was not an insult, but was made to flag the ignorance and stupidity of yours - maybe take a look at the subreddit and see if you can see some parallels. If you have taken it as an insult then that's fine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
Rather what you need is a means for propaganda to be rapidly identified and refuted with counterarguments in a way that its would-be victims can see it.
Turnout in the latest presidential/general elections:
2025 German federal election 82.5%
2024 United Kingdom general election 59.7%
2022 French presidential election 73.69%(I)/71.99%(II)
2022 Italian general election 63.85%
2023 Spanish general election 66.6%
2024 United States presidential election 64.1%
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
America ! America! God Shine Her Light On Theeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
It's easy to sit in a hole 20 feet deep and criticize the west for only being an inch above ground.
It's just a bit clunky to find. You need the channel id which you can find in the page source somewhere.
Note that this is a regular rss, not podcast rss.
You must not work with video.
Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.
Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can unblock that content, either by calling the provider or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?
It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew.
The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.
That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.
I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Nobody really cared and nothing changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Scott_(criminal)
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
https://troymedia.com/lifestyle/your-money/debanking-is-otta... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/a...
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
> It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/tax-evasion-by-wealthiest-am...
I mean, I get that it could be worse, but...
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
So it seems you aren't internally consistent.
Rather than the angry denial and cries of censorship that often occur after someone points it out.
does not mean
>the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives
The average Brit doesn't want foreign entities pushing porn and self harm / pro suicide stuff to their kids. Can you perhaps see the difference there?
I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever. The Brits are ok telling JD Vance et all chill.
Yes, it's spelled out very clearly to be based in intent and not outcome here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
If anyone is trying to "gaslight" anyone, it's going to be in the direction of justifying the actions of Israel (or the West's support of or complicity in it).
Why won't the government do something is the refrain that everyone including opposing parties are saying. God forbid anyone should take initiative on anything.
And the state keeps on expanding year after year. I cannot remember the last time someone did not promise to shrink the state/government and once elected did a complete 180. It's bonkers.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
And yes, there are people—like you—who continue to act like there is "the other side" when the way people characterize themselves outside of partisan affiliation is much more nuanced and complex. Eg there are many, many Americans who are anti-war, but there is simply no anti-war vote on most ballots, nor certainly any anti-war party.
In other words, manufacturing consent got us into this mess, social media just makes us anxiously aware of how bad mainstream media was at capturing the political sentiments of the people who live here. That includes, yes, radicals (violent bigots & ideologues), but this also includes realizing that many or most people have no idea what the party whose candidates they vote for actually stand for.
I've put a lot of effort in surrounding myself with people very unlike myself in the last year for reasons, in-person, around real-life activities and scenarios, where politics is simply not relevant outside of stimulating conversation. What I've put together is that basically nobody in this country is both well-educated about politics and satisfied with either party. We've somehow created a two-legged monster that doesn't want to do, you know, the actual substantial end of democracy. Now, I discovered this in the real world, but social media has made it much easier to see if you relentlessly block all "both sides"/"other side" partisans and look directly to values, struggles, desires, etc.
But, this does take discipline, and if you're trying to tune out, you're a prime candidate to be taken directly into outragetainment.
Any country that has its wits together would do well to establish sovereignty over its communications infrastructure. It's quite telling that the only country that has been able to stand up to American bullying is China because they were smart enough to not outsource control over their information space to the US.
And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink
Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.
Notably this (64%) is higher than even the Democrat level up until about 2012, after the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
You sound like someone who is excusing domestic violence by saying, "if she didn't want to get hit, she shouldn't have talked back".
Fuck Hamas, I don't support hamas, but like, Israeli actions in Gaza are clearly inexcusable.
Put another way - is this a case of the tyrannical calling the free tyrants? If Orwell or Huxley taught us anything it's that this how a state maintains its illusion/power - manipulating language and perception to make their control seem necessary/liberating.
Until we can decouple those things, banning porn has the effect of criminalizing LGBTQ lives.
When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.
It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
Individual broadcasters are also the largest detractors along with supporters.
If I put you in a bottle and told you that it was “the fascists” that proposed and implemented this exact law you would be raging.
I personally, would appreciate the intellectual honesty on this. Thank you.
On the other hand, you'll find plenty of Republicans today who would say that they think legal immigration is great.
The main point is neither of those were ever true and the situation with Democrats was largely caused by the outsized influence of vocal minorities, not of actual sentiment. Similarly, there are plenty of Republicans who think that the current actions of ICE are over the line but won't speak up.
Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.
Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.
"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.
I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on.
Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly.
> Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations
Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
Not trying to start an argument, because I could indeed be missing some crucial info here, but what kind of adults aren't allowed to purchase alcohol or lottery tickets in the US?
The most scrutiny I ever got while attempting to purchase either alcohol or lottery tickets in the US was the establishment's employee glancing at my ID (and even that happens less than 1/5 of the time for me).
I'm not sure how fair argument that is. When you're literally the owner of the platform, of course you'd use your real name and the names of the companies you own, on the platform you just bought. Doing anything else would be weird :)
The British were evil, the Chinese were evil, the Japanese were evil, the Belgians were evil, the Spanish were evil, the Incas were evil, the Mongols were evil, the French were evil, the Iroquois were evil, the ancient Egyptians were evil, etc etc etc.
I sense a bit of a flaw in this strategy, given that 4chan being banned in UK would presumably block any payments for passes from UK-origin banks/cards made to 4chan bank accounts as well.
Other examples include "appeal to prurient interest" even when the "interesting" activity is not illegal.
[] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36...
An ISP doesn't do that. A better match for an ISP would be the trucking company that hauls magazines (porn and otherwise) from publishers to shops, or the company that maintains the shop's cash register.
https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-yp...
>The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
It does if you go on and read the judgement, which cites that that it is reasonable to initiate a stop for obscenity, which was part of the reasoning used to grant QI.
So if you want a ".no" domain, prove that you are Norwegian, the limits are to prevent the kind of abuse we see in most other TLDs (domain squatting, etc...). All that seem reasonable to me. Some countries put less restrictions on their own TLDs, especially tiny countries with interesting TLDs which they see as a revenue source, that's fine too, but to each his own.
If you don't like it, use any of the generic TLDs. AFAIK, Norway doesn't put any restriction on them.
Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.
But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.
You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.
It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.
https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/
Can’t do that with your debit card.
In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary.
Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.
That's why I wrote, "A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print." Web sites should also follow the laws of the countries where they are based, but not be required to follow other countries' laws. In the specific case here, a UK body is trying to collect daily fines from a US based web site (4chan.org) with no physical UK presence.
> An ISP doesn't do that.
For over a decade, they have been blocking traffic to/from web sites deemed unsuitable for children, by default. Which should make people wonder what this adult verification is actually for.
The 'pen' says they are not allowed to keep grazing their cattle there in Clark county, yet they still are to this day.
For example, somebody might say that they hate tiny airline seats and they’d gladly pay substantially extra for more legroom. But then they’ll be presented with a choice of an airline ticket with more legroom, or the exact same ticket but with less legroom for $3 less, and they’ll choose the latter. Their revealed preference is that they don’t actually value legroom very much, despite what they say.
Likewise, if someone says that they support immigration, but you vote for and continue to support someone who opposes immigration to the point of carrying out heinous human rights abuses against legal immigrants, well, actions speak louder than words.
I’m pretty sure this is the “virtue signaling” that people are always going on about. Supporting immigration is seen as a good thing, so people say they do. But when it comes down to actual concrete policy, they don’t. This used to be covered by the fig leaf of “we support legal immigration” but that’s gone now.
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.
This is one of the many examples of the consequences of actions stretching out much further than many realize. A famous quote from Stalin is that, "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." His Machiavellian vision likely had him seeing himself as the savior of the USSR, when in reality his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
My question was about the stricter limits on purchasing alcohol or lottery tickets in the US (which were brought up in the comment I originally replied to), because that was the first time I heard about that. I was curious what those alluded-to limits were, and I still have zero idea.
Using more current context, leadership and events seems like a more realistic view of things. Which doesn't mean the UK is a shining beacon of freedom or democracy, but just to better explain why things happen instead of blaming events of leaders who are not in office or even alive.
I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.
It's permanently and sociologically walled off from me in ways that I don't care to overcome. If I was interested in music discovery in 1980, how many record stores would I have had access to that I could walk into and just browse? How many of those are still around today? While radio was still pretty bad in 1980, it wasn't 12-stations-of-ClearChannel bad... I've heard those same 300 songs on an endless loop since I was a child.
This varies a lot by country. The French are still known for their protests, certainly not nearly as violent or disruptive in the modern day as their famous 18th-century revolution but very much quite impactful even so. And German trade unions use strikes very effectively to have a fair outcome in contract negotiations with employers.
Countries in the English-speaking world, certainly including the UK but also the US and Canada, seem a lot more deferential to elites in many ways than most of continental Europe.
They weren't made to guarantee no child could peek at them, no, but they do have age restrictions that are followed (a child who picks one up couldn't buy it) and they were often on the top shelf. The kind of thing a basic risk assessment would flag "hey we keep the hardcore porn in front of the pokemon magazines...".
> The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops
The pictures emit photons which fly through the air to the child. The air is the shop.
Or for websites your computer is the shop.
The ISP is not the shop. Nor in the OSA is it viewed as such. The company who makes the service has some responsibility.
> So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs.
This fundamentally cannot work for what is in the OSA, and if you cannot see why almost immediately then you do not know what is in the OSA and cannot effectively argue against it. It is not a requirement to add age checks to porno sites.
Site-blocking won't work, and NERF'ing the world under the guise of protecting kids is a poorly obfuscated despotic strategy. Bouncy castle politics only undermine institutional credibility. =3
Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".
Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.
Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.
We already have largely decentralized speech in the US via the internet. And much like how the printing press gave everyone a voice or how radio created Hitler, the internet is the modern age vehicle of populist messaging.
The reason someone like Trump can rise to power and consolidate said power is because he speaks simple and lies work in a decentralized system. Populist messaging is built on the fact that humans are naturally drawn to simple solutions and emotional responses. 90% of the time throughout American and European history, if you just tell people "this is ethnic/racial group X's fault!", that works.
Well yes this, but unironically.
Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.
1. What republican constituency wants and what republican polices are do not align. For example, most Republicans support Donald Trump. Most do not know anything about Donald Trump's policies. Most will directly say they disagree with a policy, and yet they will still support Trump. If you tell them said policy is a Trump policy, they will either say that it's not true or say that they misspoke, and they do agree with it.
For example, practically all of Project 2025 has been well underway. Prior to the election, it was clear that republican constituents DID NOT support Project 2025. However, if you simply say Project 2025 policies without using the word "Project 2025", then they do support it.
2. Republicans and conservatives at large will just lie if they believe you are willing to make a moral judgment on them.
For example, if you ever go on Hinge or Tinder or whatever dating app you choose, Republican voters will almost all be "apolitical" or "not interested in politics". They will not mention who they voted for and they will purposefully deceive potential partners so they can avoid what they feel is a moral judgement.
Probably republican voters here felt the question was asked in a pointed or morally judgmental way, so I'm sure a good amount just lied and said they do support immigration. If you then poll how many voted for, say, Trump, who is explicitly anti-immigration (not anti-illegal immigration, anti-immigration) then your numbers will change.
Now, this IS NOT to say that republican voters are stupid or liars. The republican party is, right now and for the past decade and then some, run by populist leaders.
This is the direct result of populist messaging. There are also populist leftist leaders - they just do not currently exist in the US.
Not because the will or the struggle of the people.
Gorbachev began to abolish the aforementioned totalitarian measures, creating the opportunity for a party coup. If totalitarian control had not been weakened, nothing would have prevented the Soviet Union from existing to this day.
> Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR
No, he didn't do that. He loosened the totalitarian control, and that was it. Then other opportunistic leaders of the Communist Party took advantage of the situation and seized power, dividing up the resources of the huge country among themselves. And because the old regime was full of shit and everyone knew it, no one stood up for it.
> his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
Rather, his actions were the reason why the Soviet regime lasted so long. I mean, the unviability of the socialist project was a proven fact in 1918, long before the USSR was even called that. And everything that happened after that was simply an attempt to cling to power by totalitarian and terrorist methods, first by Lenin, then by Stalin.
For instance if you went up to an average Republican and said 'So what do you think about the human rights abuses being carried out against legal immigrants?' The overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
It's like if you went up to the average Democrat and asked them what they think about having explicit LGB books made available to minors in schools? Again the overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
The 'other side' these bubbles build up simply doesn't exist in reality.
clips can be easily and readily found on most social media sites like youtube.
the really scary ones generally are only in arabic with arabic names and titles, so the english-only gringo demographic aren't going to see them
Kier Starmer may be a wildly unpopular leader, even within his own party, and may have declared inconvenient protest groups to be terrorists so they can be banned, and may support a porn ban and an encryption ban, and an expansion of police facial recognition, and may back jailing people for misinformation posted on twitter that lead to riots, and may happily play lapdog to the wildly unpopular Trump government for little benefit.
But he will not call off the next elections, or refuse to step down. He is nowhere near popular enough to succeed at that, even if he tried. He can't even get his own party to pass his government's flagship spending reductions.
I think this is beside their point. Police are practically given qualified immunity by default; the case isn't strictly "lost" at this stage, it's lost if that decision is appealed and upheld until the victim is out of appeal options.
To your point, the summary judgement is still a clear injustice and it does practically give police the ability to stop speech whenever they want. But there's an element of random punishment if the person they stop has the resources to appeal the first decision. I'd be surprised if that appeal would be lost in this case given the main problem was the content of the expression; that's a pretty cut-and-dry 1a violation.
(It's a separate issue but there's another problem with the cases in which the officer loses qualified immunity in that the city they work in (tax payers) will pay the damages to shield them from consequences. I forget the legal mechanism but it pretty much always happens.)
What happens is generational shifts over longer periods of time mean that draconian law or feature has more and more chances to be used by someone with bad intentions. It's the law of large numbers or murphy's law in full effect, it's not just 1 or 2 people.
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
Has the userbase changed so much? If this is hackernews, what about the general population of developers?
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
A fundamental right that is being challenged every 6 month or so for the last 3 years with the push for Chat Control.
> In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
Absolutely false. With the way the EU commissions work, all you need is to buy or lobby your way in single one place and then you can push for any agenda that you want.
So it's a good one to start with when arguing against the OSA - you say harm but what does that mean? What must sites assume it could mean? And examples of helpful kinds of things that would fall under at least the risk of getting caught out.
While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
All burned alive at the altar of money.
It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.
I know Republicans. I talk to Republicans. They know about this stuff and they're fine with it. They know they're not supposed to be, so they deflect. They'll say what's happening to immigrants is no different from being arrested for a crime you didn't commit, then released. They'll insist that the victim was a terrible criminal regardless of the facts. What they don't do is express any reservations whatsoever about it.
I suppose you might make an argument that this deflection indicates an overall approval of immigration since they need to find excuses to support the administration's anti-immigration actions. I would argue that if you claim to believe one thing, but you always find an excuse to defend actions against it, then you don't actually believe it.
Polls are not magic opinion-finding systems. They report what people say. This demonstrably frequently diverges from what people actually do, think, and feel.
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
For real though, IRC is still where old-school nerds are still out there chatting in my experience.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
> UK
...
Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information.
Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet.
> The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
You can't even make this shit up.
I personally don't like the Texas v Johnson decision. Burning flags is un-American and should be illegal. How is that dictatorial?
But here's something from today: "A lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koruWF1cfyc
And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
Counter to the above is that, your bad actor may be my leader. People like convenience. When someone is expressing what you want to say, in a better and smarter way, you just reshare/retweet them. And the 'other side' will feel like your leader is a 'bad actor' who is flooding the system. So even the method of resharing/retweeting needs some sort of provenance/single use only. So you can 'agree' with your thought leader, but they shouldn't be able to mass manufacture consent. Since you might even reshare 'fake news' since you generally trust your leader. It's messy, not sure what that would look like - every post that starts getting traction needs to be fact checked? Community Notes on X is a step in the right direction maybe.
>This reluctance extends to different types of platforms. Only around a third would be likely to provide age proof for messaging apps (38%) or social media sites (37%). For user-generated encyclopaedias like Wikipedia, half (51%) say they would be unlikely to submit any proof of age. Just 19% say they would be willing to submit proof of age for dating apps, lowering to 14% for pornography websites.
Don’t let defensiveness lead you to say nonsensical things. Nearly every single country in the EU has a worse-than-trumpian party waiting in the wings, or even in power, see Hungary. Ascribing some sort of special property to the EU, a region with absolutely terrible standards for personal liberty, because at the moment there is more respect for liberal democracy there than elsewhere.. well it’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.
Or, using logical constructs - "A therefore B" is not made invalid by "C therefore B".
In contrast, my own country Canada is far more at risk of the rise of an authoritarian adjacent party. A party with majority control has too much power here, and lack of proportional representation also means that majority control can be achieved with less than 50% of the voting population supporting you.
This is why I say the EU has better protections. The existence of parties that want more authoritarian control shouldn't be a measure of the health of a democratic system. In fact, somehow forcing these parties out would be pretty against the principles of democracy and free speech.
I do suppose its worth asking the question of whether democracy should allow the voting down of democracy itself, but I don't think the EU is at risk of that as a whole, even if a few member states are.
I didn’t agree with banning Gerry Adam’s voice and had sympathy with the nationalist cause, but let’s not make out like these were mainstream figures. Adam’s and McGuinness were apologists for people waging war against the British state. I strongly suspect a communist group with similar aims would get short shrift in the US.
Free speech is never absolute. Europe and the US have different mechanisms to protect free expression, but net they don’t end up in very different places.
Do you think Black Americans, or native Americans feel shame when visiting these museums?
Or are they not "our people" to you?
The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.
The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.
That's the thing, when you draw the line you no longer have "free" speech/expression, you only have "speech that's not considered a crime"
The examples are what society have collectively decided are forms of speech/expression (yes they are all speech/expression) that people shouldn't be free to use.
*pirate, for lack of a better term. I couldn’t give a fuck what people call it.
1. Degrees / magnitude. How many cases of dictatorial behavior were there with Obama vs Trump? Every president signs executive orders, but trump signs a lot more of them.
2. Defiance to checks in power. The current administration seems uniquely defiant of both the legislative and the judicial branches, both in rhetoric and act.
It's not all about getting your way... well maybe the better way to say it is that the left got their way, for sixty years. And some of those wins from that period for the left were built on shaky ground. There has to be give and take in any healthy political system.
And now they are using a protected class loophole to keep doing it? After it was struck down by the Supreme Court?
No, but it's different when my opponent does it.
And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)
Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.
I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.
Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.
https://stallmansupport.org/#intro
and a bunch of HN pages:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3417033
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20989696
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
but can you perhaps post links to text about the other figures?
The youth desire a strong executive. They don't yet understand why it can be a bad thing, because they have little experience with people having power over them that aren't their parents or teachers.
The middle aged desire a strong legislative branch, the most fair branch of government. They have enough life experience to understand why. They are not quite old enough to be set in their ways just yet.
The elderly desire a strong judicial branch. Judges are almost always old, and biased towards the opinions of the elderly, left or right.
There is nothing wrong with a strong executive. It is just completely at odds with those who still control the vast majority of the money and power, and of course, mainstream media: the Boomers. JFK, Great Society, these are marked by a desire for a strong executive. Ironic, of course.
A strong executive can stop them, and the Boomers have never been told 'no' in their entire lives. Really truly, everybody was young in the 1960's. They warped society to their will, just like the people in every baby boom in history. You misinterpret their tantrum as something substantive.
Q: Are there today, or have there ever been in history, any non-corrupt governments (that by your implication are invulnerable to lobbying)?
I’m pretty sure lobbying is a thing everywhere, regardless of corruption. People want the government to do stuff and will try to make it happen, from autocracies to direct democracies and everything in between.
Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.
I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.
Most of my communist friends are not authoritarian communists (aka tankies). A tankie is a very specific type of communist who believes in central autocratic power and a single party.
I think you'll find most modern communists tend to prefer a worker led democratic government. And people like myself prefer a syndicalist democracy without a central government.
I consider tankies my opponents, just like I consider all authoritarians my opponents.
If you have a centralized system with Sean Hannity getting on the television and saying things which are clear, simple and wrong, you still have the exact same problem. Decentralization can only improve it because then it's not only him and the more complicated truth is at least available instead of the simple lie being the only thing on offer.
And this is what I mean by "in a way its would-be victims can see it".
People don't have time to investigate every throw-away simple lie, but it gives you the opportunity to sample. You follow Bob and he says a bunch of stuff and every time there is a whole complicated discussion that you usually don't read because you don't have time. But once in a while you do.
If every time you do, it turns out Bob is right, you can be more confident that the stuff he says is usually right even when you don't have time to check. If every time you do, it turns out Bob is wrong, the opposite. It provides the opportunity to evaluate credibility.
But that only works if you have a system where anybody can reply to anything and actually be seen. If you have a system where a central gatekeeper can make criticism and counterarguments invisible, you lose.
You should look into it, some time.
Besides -- If you don't tolerate intolerance, you're intolerant (of intolerance). So you shouldn't be tolerated. Right?
Meanwhile the centralized platforms then have the incentive to maximize engagement and the power to structure things that way. And that's how you get Trump, because polarization drives engagement.
that by itself doesn't mean much. More EOs and especially illegal ones produces more injunctions.
> No, but it's different when my opponent does it.
No it's not different but the amount that's done matters. I for one have no issues calling out overreach by "my" side as well (which is more than can be said about most MAGAs). But I'm also going to call it out when the "other" side is doing it as normal course of governing vs being the exception.
How many legislations has this administration proposed let alone passed? vs how many EOs signed just since Jan?
Mandatory disclaimer that /pol/ is only one board, and most of 4chan is not actually politics.
This is just a small summary. Foreigners are not visiting the US, not because they don't want to or don't like the US, but because they are afraid of visiting a non-free country. It's not worth the risk of getting detained because you posted a negative comment online about a government official.
Frank Zappa explained that long ago:
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
> The irony as you parrot brainwashed tropes.
You clearly insulted them, and now you're lying by claiming that you didn't. Nobody is falling for it, as evidenced by the fact that your comment was killed by flags.
> as people like you tend to say "your feelings aren't my problem"
...and now you're being bigoted and clearly breaking the HN guidelines. You should stop now.
There's like dozens of people in the world that can do these things, and they need to want to use their intellect for such a thing. Unfortunately, communism is just philosophically derelict, until another great thinker comes along.
This broke down instantly as soon as the same party got all three branches of government.
The actual place to look for serious US speech restrictions is "obscenity", like the Comstock laws, and modern things like Mississippi Internet age verification.
> Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years.
This is why conversation, and free flow of information, from people of different worldviews is so critical for a functioning society and avoiding radicalism. And I have to say I'm still not certain what you're even talking about, whereas I assume you think literally every American knows exactly what you are trying to reference. But this is again an issue about bubbles, and what I was getting at with if you asked an average person about some trending talking point. On the overwhelming majority of issues, most people's response is going to be 'What are you even talking about?'
Life is full of tradeoffs and this is no exception. I quite like the .no TLD - I find it lends itself to fun product / side project names. It's just a pity that I'm limited to 5 with the .no TLD :)
But what about Bookchin, Kropotkin, or the people of Rojava? Bakunin? Thoreau?
Well, I disagree. What evidence do you have to demonstrate that a) this is true and b) it's so unassailable that one could not deny it?
Because it sure reads like, "I have a worldview. I will assert that it is true and talk down to anyone who does not accept my worldview as truth." It's a way to paint your discussion partner as an intellectual lesser, while adroitly dodging critique. You'll have to do better than just asserting something is true because you said so.
What on earth are you on about?
The UK is certainly a democratic state, it holds free, fair and transparent elections. Governments change regularly in line with these. The current prime-minister went to a grammar school, the deputy PM went to various 'standard' state schools.
Yes, bad laws and authoritarian impulses can and likely will have far-reaching effects, but that's hardly new or unique to the UK, the US has a history of spying on its entire population as well, from room 641A (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to the Snowden revelations and Palantir. It also has a load of states adding access restrictions and age checks of one sort or another to the internet.
The people of the UK are largely in favour of these sorts of rules, as they are in a bunch of other places. They may be wrong but that doesn't mean democracy is failing.
This "The sky is falling!" rhetoric is why geeks are very rarely taken seriously in these debates.
It’d be like saying an 18+ limit for buying booze means full DNA tracking because otherwise we don’t know if people are over 18 or just look it.
That is more of an own goal situation than it is a Labor mandate for their Good Works, in my opinion, the opposition is beyond woeful, for all the reasons you've rightfully pointed out. Muppets, for sure.
But they've been in power before (especially at the state level), and when they make similar mistakes and are too close to the opposition, they get the boot. Labor should be smarter and care about labour, because the centre-right NSW faction that runs the federal party worry the hell out of me long term for the health of the party. We cannot trust the LNP ever, but we need Labor to be good stewards too, and in my experience they really aren't if they get complacent
But that's not what the OSA is. Instead it's the government deciding how all kids should be parented. And of course it doesn't just affect the kids now because to be effective all adults need to prove they are not kids to view "harmful" materials, with all the chilling effects and collection of sensitive data that that entails.
> I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever.
Hence the original acknowledgement:
> The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives.
Do you think this is a contest where as long as you can find other countries with similar shit you don't score last?
That's why we are where we are, because "both sides" want to have that control, they just want it for themselves and not those that disagree with them.
I would surmise that while 90%+ of guys are porn users, a nearly negligible percent are current or former channers, and most only associate chan sites with fringe groups that took them over.
Only if you ignore everything about what got Hitler elected.
"Populists" winning is ALWAYS a result of the status quo being unacceptable to the general population. If the establishment is unwilling to fix that then they deserve to be removed from government. Free flow of information isn't responsible for that.
Your government is completely out of control. I can't care about you if you, UK citizens, choose not to do anything about it. You are the only people on the planet in any position to do anything about this.
Good luck.
Are there? It sounds like you consider the general public to be your enemy in which case you absolutely should have no say in how a democracy is run.
No, that's the natural result of a representative democracy. You only get one vote so all nuance has to be boiled down to a single choice.
Yes, one could cook up all sorts of uses for the things called nuclear weapons, which we designed by people to kill other people. But we don't have to pretend to be stupid and assume nuclear weapons don't, I don't know, exist in a context of warfare which shapes their design and warrants actual thought about their use and regulation?
The restrictions on not owning too many domains are reasonable if still too lax IMO.
Also EU has a lot of rights on paper that don't exist in reality. Free speech? Come in my country, you can go to jail for speech, there are several ways, way too many. Rights to property? Good joke. What rights do we really have in EU? I don't know any.
I completely disagree that even a tangentially related, much weaker concept ("having a list of IDs and what you've watched") is "second order" effect. This is a question relative to one's values, which is at the heart of the discussion, but as I'm concerned that cartoon version is a zeroth order effect - much more relevant than all the other points you make, which are at best less important (some might be completely irrelevant to me).
I couldn't care less about the technicalities cooked up by ofcom. Those will be left for a judge to decide and will depend on the political winds. Again, I'm just answering your point - "requiring X if kids are involved" is on the face of it obviously absurd and bad. And the analogy with alcohol, even though not great, might help make it clearer: to the extent that it is enforced, it is absolutely the case that it introduces a much weaker form of mass government surveillance.
The distinction clarifies the idea: if every store was required to check your ID digitally, in real time, and storing that information (which, mind you, makes it trivially accessible by anyone, in particular law enforcement), then the government has arbitrary power to stop anyone from buying anything ("oh, I see your ID is associated with X - sorry, we can't serve you right now" - replace X with your favorite group, idea, arbitrary law), to track their every movement (since you need to buy things fairly often), etc.
The scale and functioning of the internet is what distinguishes it from the physical space.
Just because you have a good master, doesn't mean you're free. You're only free when you're not not subject to anyone's good will towards you. I'm not an anarchist - there are real problems and there are laws that are necessary to solve these problems, your examples are clearly neither and so are on the face of it, absurd and laughable.
You say people don’t know about this stuff. My experience is otherwise. Maybe you’re right. I don’t think so.
> I couldn't care less about the technicalities cooked up by ofcom.
Then you will be incapable of discussing it with anyone looking at how things are implemented and will continue to make assertions that don't match what they're seeing.
> if every store was required to check your ID digitally, in real time, and storing that information
Which has no parallel to what's in the OSA.
But yes, in a world where "moderation" is mandated by law, there'd be no alternatives.
They are both types of democracy.
(Yes, the ‘royal’ family should be relieved of all their holdings and tossed out on the street, leeches that they are, but that’s beside the point)
Many of the people sent there were in the US legally.
But thank you for illustrating the deflection I was talking about. This is how these conversations always go for me. First the ignorance, "I don't even know what you're referring to." Then the minimization, "it's not so bad," "you're being hyperbolic." Finally the justification, "this is nothing new," "they were all illegals anyway."
The US does not get to dictate what happens to a person in a country once they're deported. That is up to the host country. El Salvador has been going through an extreme crackdown on gangs over the past several years sending them from one of the most dangerous countries in the world with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, to a country with a homicide rate a fraction of the US' and one of the 10 safest countries in the world! [1] The deal between the US and El Salvador for hosting prisoners was for a relatively small number of deportees who were vile enough that even their home countries refused to accept them back, leaving them in a state of limbo.
And the deportees were overwhelmingly not in the country legally. The media made this claim based on people who were admitted to the country via the CBP One app. But those admittances were all rescinded in April. At that point users of the App were notified of the change, the app was updated to 'CBP Home' and updated to work as a tool to help people self deport in a way that would not imperil their chance of legally applying for a visa or citizenship to the US in the future. Those who chose to stay in the US beyond that point were doing so illegally, and were informed that they would be arrested, deported, and permanently prevented from ever legally entering the US.
https://www.gallup.com/analytics/356996/gallup-global-safety...
You think (or at least say) it's a tangent because you're deflecting. This is basically a No True Immigrant argument. I point out immigrants being abused, you come up with reasons why that doesn't count. I'm sure this would continue. I could talk about, say, a green card holder who gets arrested by ICE because of a decades-old marijuana offense and then after being held in bad conditions for several days is released into the middle of the night with no way to get in touch with anyone she knows, and you'll just say that they have a right to do this because of that marijuana offense, or this is standard treatment, or some other such faff.
Your definition of "reasonable" is always going to be someone else's "too broad" or "too narrow", "too woke" or "too fascist". There's no escaping that.
The comment I was replying to was
> "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
You've spent your time since trying to define what can and cannot be spoken about - which is exactly what the original comment said was bad.
1. Who Are YOU to define what can or cannot be spoken about?
2. Why do you think that YOUR contributions are "reasonable" but someone pointing out several of the existing restrictions on "free speech" that people happily agree on isn't?
Also, FTR I thought to also include the following speech restrictions:
- Trademark infringement
- Copyright infringement
- Patent infringement
- Non Disclosure Agreements
edit: The fact of the matter is, people generally don't realise how restricted speech is in the world (regardless of where you are)
If a state wants to further censor people all they need to do is convince people that the speech category is harmful in some way or other, and boom, it's illegal.
If so, then yes, that’s the point I was making, which refutes the statement that lobbying only does something if the government is corrupt. If not, then I’m confused, please help me understand what I’m missing.
But then I'm not in NSW and I must admit what I hear coming out of NSW is worrying - protest clampdowns, police effectively putting an end to a lot of festival culture by charging enormous amounts and illegally strip-searching teens. Minns seems like a right arsehole.
Cook's a right arsehole too, mind, but more in the "Sell everything out to the mining corps, environment be damned" way than the authoritarian way.
Because if not this is of course rather silly, as the two have little in common besides moving. Legal immigration to the US is absurdly difficult and entails extensive vetting, qualification, and a lengthy process of 'proving' oneself. Illegal immigration requires breaking the law to enter a country, breaking the law to remain in that country, and then generally also continuing to break the law as you reside in the country. So with one you're getting the best of the best and with the other you're getting people who view the law as something to be followed when convenient.
Here's a news link https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/01/23/use-of-eu-fund...
I don't have time/will to find more consolidating information but some EU-Elites regularly use NGOs to support their own policy goals, against member states governments and their populations. They always excuse themselves by saying they fund everyone... but one side of the issue usually gets more funds than the other.
If I recall correctly in one "EU wants to monitor the internet" regulations, EU directly funded targeted AD campaigns to convinced some Member state populations to support it so the government would change its intended vote. They were caught and backed off. Then they funded some NGO to do it :D
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." You can't claim to only be against dishonest men when you do this sort of thing.
I do think that this administration's actions against illegal immigrants have been so bad that everyone responsible should be imprisoned. But they are not only against illegal immigrants.
Obviously you don't think people like this are desirable immigrants, so this likely gets back to the bubble issue. While it's possible I'm referencing the wrong case, I suspect the issue is more like that whatever bubble you consume did genuinely just frame this as 'Trump deports man for decades old marijuana conviction' when I think you can see that that is plainly false. But if anybody mentioned this in your bubble, they would certainly be rapidly silenced because rage is far more relevant than facts in these bubbles.
And consider that the media you're consuming is driving you to think that not only are these actions "heinous" but even that the current administration should be imprisoned for what they're doing, and I expect you probably wish even worse - though may not be willing to say it. This is the exact radicalizing phenomena I was talking about at the very top of this thread.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/vorasack-phommasith-green-card-revo...
She wasn't deported, hooray! She was still held in bad conditions for over a week, denied necessary medical care, and then released far from home with no resources.
Do you think this is acceptable treatment of a legal immigrant? Or do you believe that an old marijuana conviction is enough to consider her "illegal" and thus doesn't count as an action against legal immigrants? Or maybe it's just cherry-picked and not representative?
Please explain how "the media [I'm] consuming is driving [me] to think that" sending people to CECOT without trial is heinous. (Note that the "without trial" part is an intensifier, but it would still be heinous even with one.) I'm pretty sure it's the conditions in CECOT and a belief in basic human rights that drives me to think that. Are you asserting that CECOT is actually fine and I'm getting a distorted picture of what it's like there? Are you asserting that my belief that it's heinous to imprison people in awful conditions would disappear if I had a more objective view?
Do note that every time you justify one of these things, you're proving my point. You need to go for the ignorance angle if you want to argue that a vast majority of Republicans support immigration. Arguing that they are aware of what's happening but it just doesn't qualify as being against immigration is not going to work.
But they were and they are in power now.
So this Self-Victimisation which became even more popular on the right then on the left, is outdated. It was false before but today its falsehood is reality.
Using the IRS to target your political opponents should have been disqualifying. Running guns to the cartels should have been impeachable.
Parents now would probably be arrested and their kids end up in foster care for giving their children a similar education.
What did not exist in that that time was the avalanche of extreme content that has become mainstream and accessible to the point that it would even overwhelm my own parents' teaching methods, let alone those of most parents who were much less open or equipped to have such conversations.
I encountered BDSM porn around the time I was 12, and was groomed over IRC by an adult posing as a minor who wanted to have sex (this was 1992). That person sent me VHS tapes in brown boxes through the mail. I can't stress how extreme and unusual this was at that time, and I'm lucky I had the parents I had.
My rationale for thinking that this is a problem is that (1) most parents do not prepare their kids for this, and (2) such a thing becoming commonplace is a massive societal burden that will result in psychological damage not just to individual kids, but to their own offspring and to society as a whole.
Letting children see nude pix in Playboy and explaining to them how sex works has been considered taboo and borderline abuse since I was a kid in the 80s, but my parents did it anyway. I agree with you that educating your kids is the best way to protect them from real abuse. But in this context, the outside world has to be considered all groomers and abusers. The world is full of pedophiles and people who want to take advantage of others. Porn sites and the infiltration of extreme BDSM into the mainstream are examples of this. I stress that it's fine for adults and no adult should have their private lives pried into by any government. I'm just saying that there is a real problem, societally, with allowing kids to be exposed to the lusts of random people on the internet, and that problem will compound over time until you have a society like Russia or Appalachia where everyone is raped at 12 and rapes children when they're adults. In other words, a death spiral.
And more generally, again look at what you're doing here. You're not really making any argument against the claim that e.g. Republicans support immigration. You're instead looking for some random anecdote that turned out poorly on the enforcement against illegal immigration. People in the hundreds of thousands have now been deported. If 99.9% of these cases are handled in the most amazingly professional and reasonable manner, that still means hundreds would not be. You're fishing for that 0.1% to try to frame that as being representative of the 99.9%. I think it's equally obvious that there probably are some issues at the fringe, there always are, as that that things are going perfectly smoothly and reasonably in the overwhelming majority of cases.
As for CECOT, I've already answered this. The US does not deport El Salvadorans to CECOT. They deport them to their home country. What happens at that point is up to their home country. And El Salvador has cracked down hard on any sort of viable gang affiliation which has sent their country from one of the most dangerous in the world to one of the top 10 safest places in the world with a genuine government approval rating that is at 90%+.
Your incredible condescension is not helping your argument any. I got the entire story at once. The only thing that saved her from being deported was the timely action of her husband and her lawyer to get the conviction vacated before that could actually happen. If the lawyer hadn't been quite as good, or the local court hadn't been quite as fast, she would have been deported like ICE wanted to. Do you find that acceptable? Do you think that doesn't qualify as being anti-immigration?
A million fucking apologies for being imprecise with my description, jesus.
> The US does not deport El Salvadorans to CECOT.
Absolutely complete 100% horseshit. The administration deported them in full knowledge of where they were going to end up. They knew it, and you know they knew it. Saying they didn't deport people to CECOT is like saying that I didn't kill the guy, I just pushed him out the window, gravity and the pavement are what killed him. Civilized countries do not deport people when they're facing horrible human rights abuses on the other end.
And what about all the Venezuelans who got deported to CECOT? Did their home country suddenly switch? Is Venezuela too dangerous and CECOT was better? Did the administration think El Salvador was a nice safe place for them to go, and were totally blindsided when they ended up in CECOT? Come on, man. You're either being ridiculously disingenuous in a bizarre attempt to make a point, or you're proving my point by doing exactly what I said these supposedly "pro-immigration" people do, making the absolute worst excuses to defend the clearly anti-immigration actions of this administration.
The reason the Venezuelans were deported to CECOT is because Venezuela refused to accept them. They needed to be deported but no country wanted them. So they ended up in CECOT with the US paying a tidy sum of money for that. They were eventually transferred from CECOT back to Venezuela in exchange for Venezuela releasing a number of political prisoners. Obviously there's some classified behind the scenes stuff going on beyond that, but it's a pretty good ending to the story there.
And once again the treatment of illegal immigrants and being for or against legal immigration are two very different things. In those 0.1% of cases where something goes awry obviously I absolutely hope they improve their systems to do a better job. But, by and large, they seem to be doing a phenomenal job of dealing with a problem that never should have been allowed to reach its current magnitude.