7 ms·

Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much mor

by steve1977 9mo ago

Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more. You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.

direwolf20 9mo ago
The reaction from the masses: "But that isn't true today, anything could happen in the future, and why should I invest so much work on something that's only a possibility?"
- whatshisface 9mo ago
  People do not have justifications for most choices. We watch YouTube when we would benefit more from teaching ourselves skills. We eat too much of food we know is junk. We stay up too late and either let others walk over us at work to avoid overt conflict or start fights and make enemies to protect our own emotions. If you want to know why Americans are allowing themselves to be gradually reduced to slavery, do not ask why.
  - soulofmischief 9mo ago
    It's disingenuous to say Americans are "allowing" themselves to do anything in the face of countless, relentless, multi-billion corporate campaigns, designed by teams of educated individuals, to make them think and act in specific ways.
    - iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
      This. As much as I would like to say 'individual responsibility' and all that, the sheer amount of information that is designed to make one follow a specific path, react in specific way or offer opinion X is crazy. I am not entirely certain what the solution is, but I am saying this as a person, who likes to think I am somewhat aware of attempts to subvert my judgment and I still catch myself learning ( usually later after the fact ) that I am not as immune as I would like to think.
      - LadyCailin 9mo ago
        Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit? Besides of course, Trump himself. Surely that must be his base, yes? Then followed by Americans at large. It’s surely not, say, Canada’s responsibility, no? There’s a spectrum of responsibility, and you can find out who is at the top of that spectrum of those that think the thing is bad, and hold them at least morally responsible. In this case, yes, that is individuals.
        TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
        His base are the 0.01%. They could end this tomorrow by phoning their pet senators and having a quiet word. The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.) Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
        And propaganda is multi-generational; these people have been eating their own filth for decades and have no idea.
        mrguyorama 9mo ago
        30 million Americans on the low end believe the earth is only thousands of years old and specifically deny the existence of plate tectonics and continental drift That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you. They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors. They aren't exactly voting for democrats. This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it. This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument. Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth. THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence. They live in a fake reality.
    - whatshisface 9mo ago
      It is not you who plants weeds in the garden but the wind, but the wind won't weed them back out again.
      - soulofmischief 9mo ago
        A valid perspective, and I agree that a democracy only works as long as its citizens remain civically engaged. Unfortunately, I think it's too late for the US in its current form, and it might not be long before we see it split up into smaller regions, unless something suddenly kicks Congress into gear and people break ranks to impeach and disparage the Trump administration.
        steve-atx-7600 9mo ago
        I can’t understand republicans in congress. They’d rather be a powerful dung eater than a respectable ex-congressman. Jan 6th should have been the last straw.
        trinsic2 9mo ago
        Its never too late, eventually things will turn and when that happens, you will be in either the right position, or the wrong position, depending on your actions.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
        That optimism doesn't readily apply to collapsing empires. If Congress doesn't get its shit in gear, the US is over. Our president is a hair away from sending military to arrest multiple governors of US states. Trust in this current government and Constitution are at an all-time low. It's increasingly likely that the US splits up into a few regional autonomous zones, but it's unknown just how insane of a civil war that could kick off. We are very close to the moment two different armed law enforcement groups end up in a skirmish, and that will kick things off.
        trinsic2 9mo ago
    - dpc050505 9mo ago
      Don't forget murdering protesters.
    - Barrin92 9mo ago
      >to make them think and act in specific ways. with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person. Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.
      - soulofmischief 9mo ago
        The problem is that by the time some people encounter these shocking images and videos of mass human torture, their priors have already been developed to reject their eyes and ears in favor of what the people with whom they've entrusted their safety tell them. These people think Charlie Kirk was on the frontlines of personal freedom, but look the other way when a man gets tackled and shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced. It's horrible, and inexcusable, but still crucial to understand through a framework that accounts for the effects of multi-generational propaganda peddled by the ultra-rich who have been shaping our thoughts and behaviors through advertisement and capital for hundreds of years.
        iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
        << shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced. Yes.. do I get to get between DEA and their intended target? No? If not, why not. If yes, why yes? The framing is silly. The death may be tragic and very much avoidable, but it was avoidable on both ends of this interaction. There is no comparison to Kirk here at all. He came to talk to people. Pretti went there as part of a signal group coordinating to obstruct a federal enforcement agency.. Ngl.. how people choose their heroes is beyond me.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- keybored 9mo ago
  I sometimes imagine that HN was a professional collective. Maybe working with the supply chain of foodstuffs. Carciogenic foodstuff would be legal. Environmental harzards getting into foodstuff would be legal. But there would be a highly ideological subgroup that would advocate for something that would very indirectly handle these problems. And the rest of the professional collective are mixed and divided on whether they are good or what they are actually working towards. A few would have the insight to realize that one of the main people behind the group foresaw these problems that are current right now 30 years ago. That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.
  - Rodeoclash 9mo ago
    The older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.
    - phatfish 9mo ago
      Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America? The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already). Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold. To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
      - mike50 9mo ago
        Many people in the UK were detained or interviewed by police for protesting Israeli actions.
p1esk 9mo ago
Privacy itself can become illegal just as easily as religion, etc. if we follow your argument.
- nfinished 9mo ago
  What point do you think you're making?
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - vladms 9mo ago
    My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term. I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- steve1977 9mo ago
  Absolutely - there are quite a few attempts in this direction.
- RicciFlow 9mo ago
  EU is literally debating about "Chat Control". Its purpose is to scan for child sexual abuse material in internet traffic. But its at the cost of breaking end to end encryption.
  - zugi 9mo ago
    > Its purpose is to scan That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose. The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.
RickJWagner 9mo ago
Don’t forget about social media posts. In the UK, people are being jailed for those today. Imagine if they used your past post history against you.
- iso1631 9mo ago
  In the US if you make a social media post threatening the president you are breaking the law and can be sent to jail just as much as if you said it
  - ambicapter 9mo ago
    Link?
    - RickJWagner 9mo ago
      Here are a few. https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/HHRG-119-JU00-20250903-SD039-U39.pdf https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/... https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-are-being-thrown-in-uk-prisons-over-what-theyve-said-online-can-free-speech-be-saved/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a... https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-communications/ https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...
      - ambicapter 9mo ago
        These are ALL about the UK, including the “congress.gov” link.
        RickJWagner 9mo ago
        My apologies. I thought you were asking on a different branch ( about the USA). The misunderstanding is my fault.
  - zugi 9mo ago
    These are both true statements, but there's a huge difference in scale. The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/2025#:~:text=According%20to%20an%20April%202025,4 https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China. The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.
zbit 9mo ago
Data are immortal times of peace are not!
dismalaf 9mo ago
Which is why I generally vote for people who believe in freedom versus an overreaching state.
- jfyi 9mo ago
  I need to get this super power. I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    I think it must depend on the country, right?
    - jfyi 9mo ago
      Yeah, or county... but same kind of difference.
charcircuit 9mo ago
Laws can not be applied retroactively. >ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more. In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity). Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.
- blibble 9mo ago
  > Laws can not be applied retroactively. I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake despots don't care about the law
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law >despots don't care about the law This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      > This is such a low probability scenario how is it a low probability scenario? it's happened before, in living memory (there are still people alive that survived the holocaust) and you're seeing the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota
      - charcircuit 9mo ago
        There weren't ex post facto laws being passed during the holocaust. >the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota This type of thinking is what is leading to the destruction of order there.
        blibble 9mo ago
        > There weren't ex post facto laws being passed during the holocaust. the argument isn't that states can't create ex-post facto laws (even though they can, see: any country with parliamentary sovereignty) it's that what the law says doesn't matter when the executive no is longer bound by the rule of law see: the United States under the Trump regime the fact that some previous legislature has passed a law saying that "using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal" is of no consequence when the state already has the database and has no interest in upholding the rule of law
leptons 9mo ago
They want to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization. So anyone that is against fascism (ANTI-FAscist) will be labeled a terrorist. Let that sink in for a moment. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
reneberlin 9mo ago
Don't forget your comments on HN, which, as we all know, don't go away. I think the chilling-effect is absolutely real now.

direwolf20 9mo ago

The reaction from the masses: "But that isn't true today, anything could happen in the future, and why should I invest so much work on something that's only a possibility?"

whatshisface 9mo ago
People do not have justifications for most choices. We watch YouTube when we would benefit more from teaching ourselves skills. We eat too much of food we know is junk. We stay up too late and either let others walk over us at work to avoid overt conflict or start fights and make enemies to protect our own emotions. If you want to know why Americans are allowing themselves to be gradually reduced to slavery, do not ask why.
- soulofmischief 9mo ago
  It's disingenuous to say Americans are "allowing" themselves to do anything in the face of countless, relentless, multi-billion corporate campaigns, designed by teams of educated individuals, to make them think and act in specific ways.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
    This. As much as I would like to say 'individual responsibility' and all that, the sheer amount of information that is designed to make one follow a specific path, react in specific way or offer opinion X is crazy. I am not entirely certain what the solution is, but I am saying this as a person, who likes to think I am somewhat aware of attempts to subvert my judgment and I still catch myself learning ( usually later after the fact ) that I am not as immune as I would like to think.
    - LadyCailin 9mo ago
      Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit? Besides of course, Trump himself. Surely that must be his base, yes? Then followed by Americans at large. It’s surely not, say, Canada’s responsibility, no? There’s a spectrum of responsibility, and you can find out who is at the top of that spectrum of those that think the thing is bad, and hold them at least morally responsible. In this case, yes, that is individuals.
      - TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
        His base are the 0.01%. They could end this tomorrow by phoning their pet senators and having a quiet word. The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.) Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
        And propaganda is multi-generational; these people have been eating their own filth for decades and have no idea.
        mrguyorama 9mo ago
        30 million Americans on the low end believe the earth is only thousands of years old and specifically deny the existence of plate tectonics and continental drift That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you. They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors. They aren't exactly voting for democrats. This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it. This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument. Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth. THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence. They live in a fake reality.
  - whatshisface 9mo ago
    It is not you who plants weeds in the garden but the wind, but the wind won't weed them back out again.
    - soulofmischief 9mo ago
      A valid perspective, and I agree that a democracy only works as long as its citizens remain civically engaged. Unfortunately, I think it's too late for the US in its current form, and it might not be long before we see it split up into smaller regions, unless something suddenly kicks Congress into gear and people break ranks to impeach and disparage the Trump administration.
      - steve-atx-7600 9mo ago
        I can’t understand republicans in congress. They’d rather be a powerful dung eater than a respectable ex-congressman. Jan 6th should have been the last straw.
      - trinsic2 9mo ago
        Its never too late, eventually things will turn and when that happens, you will be in either the right position, or the wrong position, depending on your actions.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
        That optimism doesn't readily apply to collapsing empires. If Congress doesn't get its shit in gear, the US is over. Our president is a hair away from sending military to arrest multiple governors of US states. Trust in this current government and Constitution are at an all-time low. It's increasingly likely that the US splits up into a few regional autonomous zones, but it's unknown just how insane of a civil war that could kick off. We are very close to the moment two different armed law enforcement groups end up in a skirmish, and that will kick things off.
        trinsic2 9mo ago
  - dpc050505 9mo ago
    Don't forget murdering protesters.
  - Barrin92 9mo ago
    >to make them think and act in specific ways. with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person. Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.
    - soulofmischief 9mo ago
      The problem is that by the time some people encounter these shocking images and videos of mass human torture, their priors have already been developed to reject their eyes and ears in favor of what the people with whom they've entrusted their safety tell them. These people think Charlie Kirk was on the frontlines of personal freedom, but look the other way when a man gets tackled and shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced. It's horrible, and inexcusable, but still crucial to understand through a framework that accounts for the effects of multi-generational propaganda peddled by the ultra-rich who have been shaping our thoughts and behaviors through advertisement and capital for hundreds of years.
      - iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
        << shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced. Yes.. do I get to get between DEA and their intended target? No? If not, why not. If yes, why yes? The framing is silly. The death may be tragic and very much avoidable, but it was avoidable on both ends of this interaction. There is no comparison to Kirk here at all. He came to talk to people. Pretti went there as part of a signal group coordinating to obstruct a federal enforcement agency.. Ngl.. how people choose their heroes is beyond me.
        soulofmischief 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
keybored 9mo ago
I sometimes imagine that HN was a professional collective. Maybe working with the supply chain of foodstuffs. Carciogenic foodstuff would be legal. Environmental harzards getting into foodstuff would be legal. But there would be a highly ideological subgroup that would advocate for something that would very indirectly handle these problems. And the rest of the professional collective are mixed and divided on whether they are good or what they are actually working towards. A few would have the insight to realize that one of the main people behind the group foresaw these problems that are current right now 30 years ago. That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.
- Rodeoclash 9mo ago
  The older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.
  - phatfish 9mo ago
    Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America? The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already). Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold. To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
    - mike50 9mo ago
      Many people in the UK were detained or interviewed by police for protesting Israeli actions.

p1esk 9mo ago

Privacy itself can become illegal just as easily as religion, etc. if we follow your argument.

nfinished 9mo ago
What point do you think you're making?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- vladms 9mo ago
  My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term. I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
steve1977 9mo ago
Absolutely - there are quite a few attempts in this direction.
RicciFlow 9mo ago
EU is literally debating about "Chat Control". Its purpose is to scan for child sexual abuse material in internet traffic. But its at the cost of breaking end to end encryption.
- zugi 9mo ago
  > Its purpose is to scan That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose. The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.

RickJWagner 9mo ago

Don’t forget about social media posts. In the UK, people are being jailed for those today. Imagine if they used your past post history against you.

iso1631 9mo ago
In the US if you make a social media post threatening the president you are breaking the law and can be sent to jail just as much as if you said it
- ambicapter 9mo ago
  Link?
  - RickJWagner 9mo ago
    Here are a few. https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/HHRG-119-JU00-20250903-SD039-U39.pdf https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/... https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-are-being-thrown-in-uk-prisons-over-what-theyve-said-online-can-free-speech-be-saved/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a... https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-communications/ https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...
    - ambicapter 9mo ago
      These are ALL about the UK, including the “congress.gov” link.
      - RickJWagner 9mo ago
        My apologies. I thought you were asking on a different branch ( about the USA). The misunderstanding is my fault.
- zugi 9mo ago
  These are both true statements, but there's a huge difference in scale. The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/2025#:~:text=According%20to%20an%20April%202025,4 https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China. The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.

zbit 9mo ago

Data are immortal times of peace are not!

dismalaf 9mo ago

Which is why I generally vote for people who believe in freedom versus an overreaching state.

jfyi 9mo ago
I need to get this super power. I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.
- actionfromafar 9mo ago
  I think it must depend on the country, right?
  - jfyi 9mo ago
    Yeah, or county... but same kind of difference.

charcircuit 9mo ago

Laws can not be applied retroactively. >ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more. In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity). Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.

blibble 9mo ago
> Laws can not be applied retroactively. I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake despots don't care about the law
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law >despots don't care about the law This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.
  - blibble 9mo ago
    > This is such a low probability scenario how is it a low probability scenario? it's happened before, in living memory (there are still people alive that survived the holocaust) and you're seeing the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota
    - charcircuit 9mo ago
      There weren't ex post facto laws being passed during the holocaust. >the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota This type of thinking is what is leading to the destruction of order there.
      - blibble 9mo ago
        > There weren't ex post facto laws being passed during the holocaust. the argument isn't that states can't create ex-post facto laws (even though they can, see: any country with parliamentary sovereignty) it's that what the law says doesn't matter when the executive no is longer bound by the rule of law see: the United States under the Trump regime the fact that some previous legislature has passed a law saying that "using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal" is of no consequence when the state already has the database and has no interest in upholding the rule of law

leptons 9mo ago

They want to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization. So anyone that is against fascism (ANTI-FAscist) will be labeled a terrorist. Let that sink in for a moment. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...

reneberlin 9mo ago

Don't forget your comments on HN, which, as we all know, don't go away. I think the chilling-effect is absolutely real now.