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Does anyone expect any different from the government who has participated in the active and ongoing political persecution of Julian Assange for now 11 years?
by ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Does anyone expect any different from the government who has participated in the active and ongoing political persecution of Julian Assange for now 11 years?
- asdff 3y agoYou don't even have to get geopolitical to rip on the UK nanny state. TV detector vans are straight up Orwellian to a point where one would consider it a parody from a comedy sketch if it weren't a real thing.
- ben_w 3y agoI keep forgetting that people still have TVs. I guess you can call the detector vans Orwellian? But only in so far as they were probably fictitious and strongly implied things that they couldn't do, which isn't the usual usage but kinda fits with the general category of propaganda about what the authorities can do — it was technically possible but unlikely to be affordable when they were making the biggest deal out of it, much easier to take the list of addresses which don't have a licence and look through the windows or knock on the doors and pretend that the van driving the inspectors had the electronics for what would later be called Van Eck phreaking. What is much closer to "so Orwellian you'd expect it in a comedy sketch parodying UK politics" are the pro-CCTV posters around London in the early 2000s, one of which I managed to spot in real life when passing through the city: https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/ That and the way the heavy-handed Met police response to the vigil held by women protesting misbehaviour by the Met police.