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I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be

I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law. 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.

specproc 1y ago
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like. 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".
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- simmerup 1y ago
  So naive. Talking points from the mouthpieces of the CCP and Russia who would love us to believe we’re all the same
  - closewith 1y ago
    No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys. 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.
    - simmerup 1y ago
      I consider it naive to even start talking about nation states in terms of ‘good guys’
      - closewith 1y ago
        Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys. 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.
        SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
        Yes. I don’t know why anyone would point to people with the safest and most economic mobility in history as some sort of success story!
        closewith 1y ago
        > the safest and most economic mobility in history Do you believe this is the US?
  - specproc 1y ago
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > managed democracies you see out East Can you name some? I am confused by this term. 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).
  - specproc 1y ago
    I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction. 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. [^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
  - kissaprofeetta 1y ago
    Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      > Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. On the surface, this is true. When you look deeper, you will realise that LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) is so large, that it acts as a platform, instead of as a single, monolithic political party. Within the LDP are various factions that win or lose elections and premierships. It is also interesting to compare the Singaporean "democratic" system versus the Japanese one. Very quickly, you will realise that "single ruling party" looks different once you understand the details.
- baud147258 1y ago
  While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
  - closewith 1y ago
    The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
    - throwaway65042 1y ago
      So if Germany supports Israel bombing Gazans they are bad, but if China supports the Russian bombing of Ukrainians, suddenly it's a lot better?
      - closewith 1y ago
        Maybe re-read my comment. 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.
        AlexandrB 1y ago
        From the perspective of the Gazan parents, the worst of all should be Hamas (who is actually directly responsible for their situation) since they insist on poking the bear and getting Gaza into military conflicts they can't win.
        shazbotter 1y ago
- lyu07282 1y ago
  > We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to 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."
  - Ray20 1y ago
    > believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism 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.
    - lyu07282 1y ago
      Propaganda tends to make the victims of that propaganda sound incoherent, but that's ok, the only purpose it really serves today, is to explain to you why you can't have health care.
- torginus 1y ago
  What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law. - 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.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people. 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.
    - stevekemp 1y ago
      And by contrast it is America which which has the civil forfeiture practices.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law. 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.
pjc50 1y ago
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
- bigfudge 1y ago
  Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms. 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…
  - cess11 1y ago
    War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trump-middle-east-israel-ceasefire-saudi-humanitarian-aid https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum... https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-podcast-gaza-israel https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
  - bhawks 1y ago
    |Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media. 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.
    - bigfudge 1y ago
      The IRA were literally blowing up shopping centres around the time their speech was restricted (not banned) on national TV. Sinn Fein mps were elected because of our weird fptp system and the extreme concentration of nationalist voting blocks. 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.
luke727 1y ago
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. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
- torginus 1y ago
  Are you (or do you know) many 'average Brits' who would agree with this statement (as applying to themselves)?
  - luke727 1y ago
    I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
    - kypro 1y ago
      For what it's worth as a Brit I agree with you. 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.
      - luke727 1y ago
        It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government 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.
- dismalpedigree 1y ago
  Except conquest by the Germans. Much to Hitler’s dismay, the Brits very much refused to accept that.
  - okasaki 1y ago
    They accepted what their government told them, which supports the point.
    - monkey_monkey 1y ago
      You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
      - okasaki 1y ago
        The British were also very evil, but they got to write the history books.
        voidUpdate 1y ago
        Just to clarify, what you're saying is that the nazis weren't actually all that bad, the British history books have just deliberately written them as bad people?
        shazbotter 1y ago
        I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another. 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.
ozgrakkurt 1y ago
Politicians represent the country, if politicians are corrupted and stupid then the country is corrupted and stupid
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
  - aa-jv 1y ago
    The people will always get the politicians they deserve.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      nobody "deserves" stephen miller.
      - aa-jv 1y ago
        They do, if they don't elect someone better. Apathy towards politics is how we get bad politicians. This has been proven throughout history.
        GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        no. nobody deserves the leadership of bigots. i don't care how apathetic you are, i still want better for you than that.
        aa-jv 1y ago
        The point is, you ARE responsible for the politicians that govern you.
- account42 1y ago
raincole 1y ago
> your political opponents 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.
- shazbotter 1y ago
  The sooner Americans realize the democrats and the republicans aren't actually in opposition, the sooner we maybe get some parties who are.
  - raincole 1y ago
    My money is on 'never', but who knows. Perhaps people will miraculously get smarter.
  - account42 1y ago
    Don't worry, the Democrats and Republicans will have those parties outlawed or otherwise neutralized before they become a threat.
  - jajuuka 1y ago
    I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.
    - shazbotter 1y ago
      Newsom is a fucking nightmare. Willing to burn every minority community alive if it gets him 5% at the ballot box.
- singleshot_ 1y ago
  Here’s a guy who doesn’t remember the Civil War.
IanCal 1y ago
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*. 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?
- alansammarone 1y ago
  This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
  - IanCal 1y ago
    Age checks are not fundamentally required by the OSA. It's really, really important that if you want to argue against it you argue against what's actually in it.
wat10000 1y ago
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
- numpy-thagoras 1y ago
  But that is astonishingly idealistic in the best case. 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.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    I think we should distinguish between someone with bad intentions in a position of power, and the entire power of the state being taken over by people with bad intentions. The possibility of the former does indeed seem like a good argument for not building total surveillance systems. But I read the comment as talking about the latter.
Nursie 1y ago
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Nobody really cared and nothing changed.
shazbotter 1y ago
Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state. 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.
- dmix 1y ago
  It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
  - parineum 1y ago
    I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
    - jkaplowitz 1y ago
      > in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites". 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.
  - felineflock 1y ago
    You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
intalentive 1y ago
A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  It's the direction the state is taking, not the political establishment. Elections are fine because they won't change anything in the way the state is run. If you want proof look at Israel. The moment the right wing, which has been continuously elected into power for the last 20 years or so, and have a clear and undeniable mandate tried to bring the institutions more in line with the people they suddenly found themselves innundated with protests and outright rebellion. Democracy has its limits apparently. I hate to see the UK sliding in that direction.
  - monkey_monkey 1y ago
    The revisionsism and one-eyed delusional rewriting of history is, almost, amusing.
    - FridayoLeary 1y ago
      Yes of course. Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. It's an old, tired narrative and most of the country can see through it which is why he keeps getting elected.
      - andrepd 1y ago
        >Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. Well yes this, but unironically. Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.
oliwarner 1y ago
That isn't how this came to be. 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.
catigula 1y ago
It's quite simple: European states require serious restrictions on liberty in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things they feel they're doing.
- okasaki 1y ago
  Good things such as supporting Israel's genocide
- mothballed 1y ago
  One of the weirder ones was up until ~2021 it was illegal in Germany to display the YPG flag (that is you would get stopped by police but not necessarily prosecuted) but not to engage in YPG activities. https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-ypg-and-ybS-flags-not-banned-49191 https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-yp...
- azangru 1y ago
  > in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things Who is electing the leaders of those states if the things they do are incredibly unpopular?
  - catigula 1y ago
    The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly. 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.
    - vizzier 1y ago
      It is worth noting that the principles behind the online services act are still broadly popular in the UK https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
therealpygon 1y ago
See what is happening here in U.S. as an example; our government was rather easy to corrupt in less than a few months once all the pieces were in place (regardless of who put them in place and for what reason).
almazglaz 1y ago
Both tories and labour are doing the same kind of politics and are not different at all. From their POV us, people, are the bad guys who has to be restricted.
star-glider 1y ago
It's honestly even dumber than this, because most of these countries are on the knife's edge of 50/50 popularity between the nominally progressive party and the nominally conservative party. So the odds that your opponents come into power within your lifetime are approaching 1.
dumbledoren 1y ago
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law. 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.”

specproc 1y ago

The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.

bayindirh 1y ago
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like. 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".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
simmerup 1y ago
So naive. Talking points from the mouthpieces of the CCP and Russia who would love us to believe we’re all the same
- closewith 1y ago
  No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys. 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.
  - simmerup 1y ago
    I consider it naive to even start talking about nation states in terms of ‘good guys’
    - closewith 1y ago
      Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys. 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.
      - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
        Yes. I don’t know why anyone would point to people with the safest and most economic mobility in history as some sort of success story!
        closewith 1y ago
        > the safest and most economic mobility in history Do you believe this is the US?
- specproc 1y ago
throwaway2037 1y ago
> managed democracies you see out East Can you name some? I am confused by this term. 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).
- specproc 1y ago
  I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction. 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. [^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
- kissaprofeetta 1y ago
  Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. On the surface, this is true. When you look deeper, you will realise that LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) is so large, that it acts as a platform, instead of as a single, monolithic political party. Within the LDP are various factions that win or lose elections and premierships. It is also interesting to compare the Singaporean "democratic" system versus the Japanese one. Very quickly, you will realise that "single ruling party" looks different once you understand the details.
baud147258 1y ago
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
- closewith 1y ago
  The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
  - throwaway65042 1y ago
    So if Germany supports Israel bombing Gazans they are bad, but if China supports the Russian bombing of Ukrainians, suddenly it's a lot better?
    - closewith 1y ago
      Maybe re-read my comment. 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.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
        From the perspective of the Gazan parents, the worst of all should be Hamas (who is actually directly responsible for their situation) since they insist on poking the bear and getting Gaza into military conflicts they can't win.
        shazbotter 1y ago
lyu07282 1y ago
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to 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."
- Ray20 1y ago
  > believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism 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.
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    Propaganda tends to make the victims of that propaganda sound incoherent, but that's ok, the only purpose it really serves today, is to explain to you why you can't have health care.
torginus 1y ago
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law. - 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.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people. 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.
  - stevekemp 1y ago
    And by contrast it is America which which has the civil forfeiture practices.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law. 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.

pjc50 1y ago

The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?

bigfudge 1y ago
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms. 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…
- cess11 1y ago
  War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trump-middle-east-israel-ceasefire-saudi-humanitarian-aid https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum... https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-podcast-gaza-israel https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
- bhawks 1y ago
  |Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media. 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.
  - bigfudge 1y ago
    The IRA were literally blowing up shopping centres around the time their speech was restricted (not banned) on national TV. Sinn Fein mps were elected because of our weird fptp system and the extreme concentration of nationalist voting blocks. 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.

luke727 1y ago

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. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.

torginus 1y ago
Are you (or do you know) many 'average Brits' who would agree with this statement (as applying to themselves)?
- luke727 1y ago
  I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
  - kypro 1y ago
    For what it's worth as a Brit I agree with you. 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.
    - luke727 1y ago
      It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government 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.

dismalpedigree 1y ago
Except conquest by the Germans. Much to Hitler’s dismay, the Brits very much refused to accept that.
- okasaki 1y ago
  They accepted what their government told them, which supports the point.
  - monkey_monkey 1y ago
    You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
    - okasaki 1y ago
      The British were also very evil, but they got to write the history books.
      - voidUpdate 1y ago
        Just to clarify, what you're saying is that the nazis weren't actually all that bad, the British history books have just deliberately written them as bad people?
        shazbotter 1y ago
        I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another. 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.

ozgrakkurt 1y ago

Politicians represent the country, if politicians are corrupted and stupid then the country is corrupted and stupid

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
- aa-jv 1y ago
  The people will always get the politicians they deserve.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    nobody "deserves" stephen miller.
    - aa-jv 1y ago
      They do, if they don't elect someone better. Apathy towards politics is how we get bad politicians. This has been proven throughout history.
      - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        no. nobody deserves the leadership of bigots. i don't care how apathetic you are, i still want better for you than that.
        aa-jv 1y ago
        The point is, you ARE responsible for the politicians that govern you.
account42 1y ago

raincole 1y ago

> your political opponents 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.

shazbotter 1y ago
The sooner Americans realize the democrats and the republicans aren't actually in opposition, the sooner we maybe get some parties who are.
- raincole 1y ago
  My money is on 'never', but who knows. Perhaps people will miraculously get smarter.
- account42 1y ago
  Don't worry, the Democrats and Republicans will have those parties outlawed or otherwise neutralized before they become a threat.
- jajuuka 1y ago
  I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.
  - shazbotter 1y ago
    Newsom is a fucking nightmare. Willing to burn every minority community alive if it gets him 5% at the ballot box.
singleshot_ 1y ago
Here’s a guy who doesn’t remember the Civil War.

IanCal 1y ago

I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*. 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?

alansammarone 1y ago
This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
- IanCal 1y ago
  Age checks are not fundamentally required by the OSA. It's really, really important that if you want to argue against it you argue against what's actually in it.

wat10000 1y ago

Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.

numpy-thagoras 1y ago
But that is astonishingly idealistic in the best case. 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.
- wat10000 1y ago
  I think we should distinguish between someone with bad intentions in a position of power, and the entire power of the state being taken over by people with bad intentions. The possibility of the former does indeed seem like a good argument for not building total surveillance systems. But I read the comment as talking about the latter.

Nursie 1y ago

> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Nobody really cared and nothing changed.

shazbotter 1y ago

Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state. 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.

dmix 1y ago
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
- parineum 1y ago
  I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
  - jkaplowitz 1y ago
    > in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites". 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.
- felineflock 1y ago
  You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

intalentive 1y ago

A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".

FridayoLeary 1y ago
It's the direction the state is taking, not the political establishment. Elections are fine because they won't change anything in the way the state is run. If you want proof look at Israel. The moment the right wing, which has been continuously elected into power for the last 20 years or so, and have a clear and undeniable mandate tried to bring the institutions more in line with the people they suddenly found themselves innundated with protests and outright rebellion. Democracy has its limits apparently. I hate to see the UK sliding in that direction.
- monkey_monkey 1y ago
  The revisionsism and one-eyed delusional rewriting of history is, almost, amusing.
  - FridayoLeary 1y ago
    Yes of course. Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. It's an old, tired narrative and most of the country can see through it which is why he keeps getting elected.
    - andrepd 1y ago
      >Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. Well yes this, but unironically. Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.

oliwarner 1y ago

That isn't how this came to be. 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.

catigula 1y ago

It's quite simple: European states require serious restrictions on liberty in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things they feel they're doing.

okasaki 1y ago
Good things such as supporting Israel's genocide
mothballed 1y ago
One of the weirder ones was up until ~2021 it was illegal in Germany to display the YPG flag (that is you would get stopped by police but not necessarily prosecuted) but not to engage in YPG activities. https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-ypg-and-ybS-flags-not-banned-49191 https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-yp...
azangru 1y ago
> in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things Who is electing the leaders of those states if the things they do are incredibly unpopular?
- catigula 1y ago
  The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly. 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.
  - vizzier 1y ago
    It is worth noting that the principles behind the online services act are still broadly popular in the UK https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...

therealpygon 1y ago

See what is happening here in U.S. as an example; our government was rather easy to corrupt in less than a few months once all the pieces were in place (regardless of who put them in place and for what reason).

almazglaz 1y ago

Both tories and labour are doing the same kind of politics and are not different at all. From their POV us, people, are the bad guys who has to be restricted.

star-glider 1y ago

It's honestly even dumber than this, because most of these countries are on the knife's edge of 50/50 popularity between the nominally progressive party and the nominally conservative party. So the odds that your opponents come into power within your lifetime are approaching 1.

dumbledoren 1y ago

> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law. 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.”