Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right) with this comment.
Because it's an incredibly stupid claim that firearms would somehow improve the situation? I mean, we had a live-fire slow-burn civil war in the UK for decades (1970s-2000). It didn't help.
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people.
I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests.
Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
I think in the modern era, a movement to curtail Government power in the United States would be better served by refusing to pay taxes than military action.
An even simpler and more effective solution would be to just stop voting for authoritarians. I don't think anything has served as a more consistent death knell for an American politician than being branded "soft on crime".
If you go farther back to before NI existed, the reason the UK finally gave up and let Ireland have independence is because the Irish used violence against the British who were abusing them.
There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time.
I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
Are you talking about the conflict over northern Ireland like in your other comments? If not I have no idea what shooting Aramlite was involved in or what conflict they had with the UK.
If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so many people were suggesting and is now basically a tug-of-war over blanket bans of property people currently own when the politicians will openly admit it will have no impact on violent crime and is intended to be symbolic. What I'm saying is that's already tyranny and is stupid.
> in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates
HN is not the place to spread simple misinformation. Homicide rates in the UK are lower than in the US, and are completely unremarkable internationally:
With homicide rates I'm referring to London. But you're right I should have been more specific - I too live in a place with a declining and exceptionally low homicide rate and have to put up with people who think confiscating property is a reasonable response to mass shootings elsewhere.
London doesn't have a high homicide rate either. Nor is its homicide rate increasing. See e.g. the following if you have (perhaps?) misinterpreted recent news stories that compared crime statistics for a single month between London and NYC:
Not sure why you think the UK has a high murder rate, it's relatively low, better than average for Europe or the Euro area, and in the top 20% worldwide.
At about 0.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides, it's quite a lot lower than the 4.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides in the USA, which is solidly mid-table.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the United States has at various stages of their history introduced rather more onerous violations of civil rights than "porn passes" without so much as a whimper of opposition from gun owners..
As this overlaps with another thread, I'm just going to link there [1]. Suffice to say that the fact that blacks in particular were unarmed during the most oppressive days of the US was absolutely not a coincidence and there were laws passed preventing this both directly (e.g. literally blacks may not own weapons) and indirectly (e.g. - you must pay a $200 'tax' to own a weapon).
There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed. Even long after the civil war laws were passed to implicitly prevent blacks from being able to obtain guns. For instance the National Firearms Act of 1934 put a whopping $200 tax on firearms purchases. The goal, like many earlier bills, was just to ensure that blacks and poor whites could not effectively arm themselves. Even the gun control act of 1968 was influenced out of a fear that black groups, such as the Black Panthers, were starting to arm themselves and demonstrate accordingly. There's a really interesting article on that here [2].
And actually this is a general theme throughout history. For instance gun laws which effectively disarmed their target population played a crucial role in the numerous 20th century genocides. From the Jews in Germany, to the Armenians in Turkey, to the "intellectuals" in Cambodia, to subversives and dissidents in Stalin's Soviet Union, and many more. First came the the restriction of guns then came the unveiling of what the beasts behind these governments truly were.
This of course is not to imply that all efforts at gun control come with some ulterior motive, but simply to exemplify that governments that do have that ulterior motive tend to be damn scared of an armed population.
>There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed
Those laws were passed because black Americans in the South did have easy access to guns following the civil war. The guns don't seem to have helped them much.
You can please provide a source instead of just stating things that don't really make any sense? Guns were quite expensive and there were countless laws preventing blacks from owning or buying guns as well as making it a crime to provide them to blacks. "Blacks had easy access to guns" does not follow from these facts.
>The end of the Civil War left an army of occupation in the South. The natural tensions of military occupation were exacerbated by black troops. Only a fraction of Union troops occupied the South after the war, and the balance mustered out according to length of service. Because blacks were not admitted into ranks until the middle of the war, they were retained at a higher rate, making the occupying force “blacker” than the one that won the war. The roughly 200,000 black Americans who served in the Union Army comprised an estimated 10 percent of the North’s total fighting force. But by the last quarter of 1865, blacks made up about one-third of the occupation army. Many Southerners took this as a deliberate Union insult.
The slave population in 1860 was about 4 million. ~150k surviving black soldiers with an unknown number who decided to stay in south, doesn't really justify stating that blacks had easy access to weapons.
That said, I think you were also stating something different than I was. In particular a recurring theme in history is that people don't tend to fiercely resist disarmament. So even if blacks had easy access to guns prior to disarmament, we would have expected them to give them up with relatively minimal resistance. This happens time and again because disarmament, in and of itself does, not seem particularly heinous. But the problem is that the heinous acts, that would more clearly justify violent resistance, start only after disarmament - when it's already too late.
>So even if blacks had easy access to guns prior to disarmament, we would have expected them to give them up with relatively minimal resistance.
That seems to pretty clearly undermine the whole case for guns somehow preventing violations of rights.
>~150k surviving black soldiers with an unknown number who decided to stay in south, doesn't really justify stating that blacks had easy access to weapons.
Then why did they bother passing the laws? It's also patently absurd to suggest that an occupying army doesn't constitute a significant force. No citizens' militia is likely to approach the capabilities of a 150k well-organized soldiers.
The reason the laws are passed is because of an awareness that the acts they planned to engage in might justifiably result in violent resistance. And this is, again, a very typical pattern. Guns prevent egregious violations of rights. But egregious violations of rights tend to be preceded by confiscation of guns or other forms of gun control, which is generally not seen as sufficient justification for violent resistance.
This is even more true when the control is done through more clever means. For instance one way that black individuals and poor whites (who were just as much a cause for concern - see: armed labor strikes) were prevented from having access to weapons was by putting absurdly large taxes on them. Since the tax ostensibly affects everybody equally, it makes it much more difficult to argue that it's discriminatory even though such acts 100% through and through were aimed with exclusively discriminatory ends in mind.
> Guns prevent egregious violations of rights. But egregious violations of rights tend to be preceded by confiscation of guns or other forms of gun control, which is generally not seen as sufficient justification for violent resistance.
Again, if true, that clearly undermines the claim that guns prevent violations of rights.
Only in the same sense that ice can help cool you down on a hot day is undermined by the fact that the freezing temperature of ice is 0.
I'm not much of a gun person, but in looking at the history of guns and the quite ambiguous information on positive impacts of control - I've become not only more understanding, but also in support, of their efforts to maintain their rights to arm themselves.
The UK has always been this bad. It's Mary Whitehouse or the Lady Chatterly trial all over again. Public discourse is a hypocrisy-ridden disaster. The Daily Mail has been a big driver for this, while they profit from an endless stream of prurient bikini pictures.
The few million middle-class voters in marginal constituencies whose votes actually matter are easily convinced by the papers that the Internet is out to corrupt their children (and frankly they have a point), and therefore go along with bureaucratic-authoritarian "solutions" for it.
He's half-right; Cromwell was not a popular uprising, and was so unpopular during his rule that the UK returned to monarchy afterwards.
I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
Not primarily a popular uprising, but definitively a revolution and not a mere palace coup. The wars went on for many years, large numbers fought on both sides and there were significant social and political changes as a result.
And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I.
We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
Oh, and wasn't the verification supposed to be free? So now are we supposed to either risk our credentials being stolen or pay to view free website content?
If you want to raise a generation of people capable of hiding their online activity more effectively trying to get between a teenager and smut is basically the way to do it.
I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods.
-A suitable VPN will make it appear that you are in a country with more enlightened censorship laws than the UK.
I can hardly see say, SwissVPN adapting the block list for customers whose traffic originates in the UK.
The upside of this whole debacle is that the UK government have finally created a strong incentive for the UK population to educate themselves on online privacy and censorship evasion; the EFF should send Theresa May a (snarky!) thank you-note.
"Some 56 per cent of British adults admitted to watching pornography in a 2014 study carried out by The Observer." Looks like 44% of British adults are liars.
I know you're joking, but you raise an interesting point. I honestly think porn is potentially harmful, and having stopped watching it myself, understand why 44% would too. It's brutally extreme depiction of sex almost desensitises the brain to the actual experience, at least in my experience. Especially with the endorphins reinforcing the behaviour, it can get close to an addiction.
How long will the 16 digit code last for? How truly anonymous are those codes? If my code is leaked will it be possible to view all of my porn viewing activity?
Why is reporting on this so terrible? I actually don't have a problem with requiring age restrictions on certain content online I just have no confidence that it will be implemented securely and anonymously when there are no competent journalists to hold politicians to a high standard.
Who decides what is or isn't an X-rated website? Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law?
How are websites going to get blocked? DNS filtering? Asking the sites operators to block all traffic from the UK by default?
Interesting point. Issuu.com do online magazines, mostly the usual fashion/motoring/sport/and so on, but there is some stuff on Issuu that stretches racy a little thin.
> Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law?
No. This is a Brexit-style law, the point is to send a message, through the newspapers. Not to be bothered with any details about how it might actually work.
I can write a scalable webservice that is able to detect such content with 90%-95% accuracy including locations of offending areas; based on some very recent (2 months old) Deep Learning research. I presume they can do that as well and take 5-10% failure rate as acceptable. If I were running my own social network and wanted to keep it clean, I'd use it without any hesitation. But those are technical means, this is a political issue.
Nicely done. Next step, remove cash to trace all the porn pass purchases. Although I suspect most people don't even care and will use their debit card already.
Is not it better to block access to porn sites by parents' request? So that people without children don't have to bother.
Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm.
So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.
70 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadFree speech and ownership of self and property follows.
I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests.
Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so many people were suggesting and is now basically a tug-of-war over blanket bans of property people currently own when the politicians will openly admit it will have no impact on violent crime and is intended to be symbolic. What I'm saying is that's already tyranny and is stupid.
HN is not the place to spread simple misinformation. Homicide rates in the UK are lower than in the US, and are completely unremarkable internationally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
The homicide rate in the UK has also been declining quite sharply for the past 20 years or so, as you can determine via a quick Google search.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43628494
Again, it's really simple to check these facts before spreading misinformation.
At about 0.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides, it's quite a lot lower than the 4.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides in the USA, which is solidly mid-table.
(I took the data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5 )
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095043
It doesn't seem to be in practice. Did it stop segregation in the South, for example? That was a far more egregious abuse of power than a porn pass.
And actually this is a general theme throughout history. For instance gun laws which effectively disarmed their target population played a crucial role in the numerous 20th century genocides. From the Jews in Germany, to the Armenians in Turkey, to the "intellectuals" in Cambodia, to subversives and dissidents in Stalin's Soviet Union, and many more. First came the the restriction of guns then came the unveiling of what the beasts behind these governments truly were.
This of course is not to imply that all efforts at gun control come with some ulterior motive, but simply to exemplify that governments that do have that ulterior motive tend to be damn scared of an armed population.
[1] - http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html
[2] - https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_...
Those laws were passed because black Americans in the South did have easy access to guns following the civil war. The guns don't seem to have helped them much.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/02/what-reconstruction...
>The end of the Civil War left an army of occupation in the South. The natural tensions of military occupation were exacerbated by black troops. Only a fraction of Union troops occupied the South after the war, and the balance mustered out according to length of service. Because blacks were not admitted into ranks until the middle of the war, they were retained at a higher rate, making the occupying force “blacker” than the one that won the war. The roughly 200,000 black Americans who served in the Union Army comprised an estimated 10 percent of the North’s total fighting force. But by the last quarter of 1865, blacks made up about one-third of the occupation army. Many Southerners took this as a deliberate Union insult.
That said, I think you were also stating something different than I was. In particular a recurring theme in history is that people don't tend to fiercely resist disarmament. So even if blacks had easy access to guns prior to disarmament, we would have expected them to give them up with relatively minimal resistance. This happens time and again because disarmament, in and of itself does, not seem particularly heinous. But the problem is that the heinous acts, that would more clearly justify violent resistance, start only after disarmament - when it's already too late.
That seems to pretty clearly undermine the whole case for guns somehow preventing violations of rights.
>~150k surviving black soldiers with an unknown number who decided to stay in south, doesn't really justify stating that blacks had easy access to weapons.
Then why did they bother passing the laws? It's also patently absurd to suggest that an occupying army doesn't constitute a significant force. No citizens' militia is likely to approach the capabilities of a 150k well-organized soldiers.
This is even more true when the control is done through more clever means. For instance one way that black individuals and poor whites (who were just as much a cause for concern - see: armed labor strikes) were prevented from having access to weapons was by putting absurdly large taxes on them. Since the tax ostensibly affects everybody equally, it makes it much more difficult to argue that it's discriminatory even though such acts 100% through and through were aimed with exclusively discriminatory ends in mind.
Again, if true, that clearly undermines the claim that guns prevent violations of rights.
I'm not much of a gun person, but in looking at the history of guns and the quite ambiguous information on positive impacts of control - I've become not only more understanding, but also in support, of their efforts to maintain their rights to arm themselves.
That's what Theresa May is.
Oh and Bernie Sanders is even more left wing and will probably win the next election.
Centuries of public consensus that a paternalistic government is tolerable, or even good.
The few million middle-class voters in marginal constituencies whose votes actually matter are easily convinced by the papers that the Internet is out to corrupt their children (and frankly they have a point), and therefore go along with bureaucratic-authoritarian "solutions" for it.
(There have been plenty of other revolutions and uprisings, though most were either elite coups or unsuccessful).
I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I.
We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
It's hard to make a rebuttal to that in the UK without being pilloried
If you want to raise a generation of people capable of hiding their online activity more effectively trying to get between a teenager and smut is basically the way to do it.
I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods.
Also hello escalating arms race.
VPNs do next to nothing and require a credit card.
Tor will definitely benefit from this however.
If they sidestep your ISP's block list that's hardly nothing?
I can hardly see say, SwissVPN adapting the block list for customers whose traffic originates in the UK.
The upside of this whole debacle is that the UK government have finally created a strong incentive for the UK population to educate themselves on online privacy and censorship evasion; the EFF should send Theresa May a (snarky!) thank you-note.
Maybe we could look forward to teenagers coding their own keygen or hammering the portals attempting to brute-force them with random numbers ... ;-)
Why is reporting on this so terrible? I actually don't have a problem with requiring age restrictions on certain content online I just have no confidence that it will be implemented securely and anonymously when there are no competent journalists to hold politicians to a high standard.
How are websites going to get blocked? DNS filtering? Asking the sites operators to block all traffic from the UK by default?
No. This is a Brexit-style law, the point is to send a message, through the newspapers. Not to be bothered with any details about how it might actually work.
Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm.
So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.