You can rarely solve a social problem by technical means alone. Get involved.
The reason the government is full of decrepit dotards, blustering fanatics, and greedy criminals is because nobody else seems to want to participate anymore.
Who wants to hide whatever, can already assume the current methods of communications are compromised.
I think it will be a cat and mouse game, where people will be finding more and more creative ways of exchanging keys and disguising encrypted messages in seemingly normal conversations or images.
It will be again something that won't affect serious criminals, but will give government an insight into who is committing wrong think of the given year (as these things change over time).
I can also imagine, given the wages in the UK are pretty bad, especially for engineers, many of those working on the necessary infrastructure would be tempted by the ideas of insider trading, leaking company and private secrets to the highest bidder and so on.
It feels like this government just doesn't give a flying toss and they just want take a dip into people private lives and see what they can get out of it.
What is even more worrying is that the opposition also supports this bill.
No because people with enough influence will terminate your hosting, domain name, isp, bank account, or just get your site blocked. See kiwi farms, nigel farage, and the wikipedia-iwf dust-up.
Mastodon and the fediverse are close, maybe, but many instances refuse to "speak" to one another because of their users.
Exactly. Last election cycle we saw all sorts of excuses to deplatform certain communities and viewpoints, some very disagreeable but some just had a different point of view on some health related topics.
It is a very good example though.... It's a horrendous site, but freedom of speech doesn't only apply to people I like or accept. Censorship always starts with the weakest and most hated target, then moves onto the less controversial ones.
"That is not the case in large parts of the world" that doesn't mean giving up and accepting it. "Are you defending X?"-type attacks are horrendous and just contribute to polarisation. Everyone deserves free speech, not just people I like.
In large parts of the world people might not agree that everyone deserves free speech. Sorry for the early Godwin, but for example Nazi apology is not protected in Germany and I suspect most Germans agree that it shouldn't.
Personally I am not sure why users and admins of Kiwifarms are not considered to be complicit in harassment and stalking (and also how in the world SWATting can basically go unpunished), which are crimes and not even protected by the first amendment. In contrast whistleblowing is protected.
I mean..... if it's a crime, okay, that's a law enforcement matter. If the kiwifarms site operators get convicted for harassment and stalking, that's fine by me.
What is not fine by me is saying they don't deserve free speech even if they haven't committed a crime.
And again, this is anything but a universal value. Hate speech is not protected everywhere even in the absence of crimes, and many people over the world agree that it shouldn't.
Exactly, and that's the problem. If people don't agree that it should be protected, then they don't really support free speech. Which is fine but then they shouldn't be surprised when the next person to be censored will be them.
Wikileaks perhaps. They got cut off by mastercard but I don't recall hearing them lose their hosting or domain name. Although I wonder if you'd be one to consider them "russian disinformation" and therefore deserving of being shut down. The pirate bay? Lost many domain names at various times and probably hosting too. Are they also deserving of it due the the scale of the copyright infringement they help? Personally I think piracy is a moral imperative these days.
Wikileaks had their DNS cut off by Dynect - who lied about it being because of a non-existent DoS attack, when in reality they were getting their nuts squeezed by the State Department to deplatform them.
There's Freenet but these sorts of projects generally have issues because the biggest segments of society that want impossible-to-censor are also the worst.
Wasn't this somewhat true of VPNs say 10 years ago?
My perception back then was that people who used VPNs were generally dodgy people who wanted to illegally download things online or mask their identity while doing various other illegal things.
But in recent years geo-restrictions, ISP blacklists, and data collection have forced more and more users to use VPNs to the point where their use today is fairly common.
Obviously I'm not in favour of this legislation, but I would hope that the more the governments seek to censor content and attack encryption online the more people will use services that are un-censorable and encrypted.
Short of requiring spy-ware on all of our devices there's fundamentally very little governments can actually do to prevent this. In fact, the harder they fight the more they'll push people out of their reach.
> because the biggest segments of society that want impossible-to-censor are also the worst.
This is not true, this is slander. Child pornographers use whatever is available to them. Censors, however, spend all of their time trying to associate people who wish to speak, listen, and associate freely with child pornographers.
If everyone can understand something, then repeating it won't lead any place new. We're trying to optimize for curiosity [1], so we're trying to avoid repetition [2].
That goes double for the repetitive+indignant sort of internet comment—those almost always lead to shallow conversation.
Lords and dukes don't give a monkey - in fact, the House of Lords has largely been a progressive organ over the last 20 years. Turns out that, once they're given a sinecure, political hacks and flunkeys often rediscover their ethics and morals.
This is more the "Online Harm To Tory Propaganda And Election Chances Bill".
"They" don't believe in democracy anyway, they like to make people think they believe in democracy, but really they're like any other despots around the world.
we are currently under a right wing government whose media friends smeared their only real opposition as... a dangerous communist who would destroy the country. their main opposition now are copying more and more of their policies.
they are not, in fact, communists and are pretty far away from ever being left of centre.
A Right wing government would stop mass immigration and not promote leftist social values as current UK government/establishment does. Far away from right wing, certainly not nationalist in any way.
are you trying to suggest that the tories are "promoting leftist social values"? considering their mediocre at best treatment of minority groups, [citation needed]
also one of their most controversial bills would lead to "illegal" immigrants being sent to Rwanda
skewed American perspectives aside, I genuinely fail to see how anyone would interpret them as anything left of centre-right
Pretty much everywhere? The tories are shifting further right. In the US the republicans have been on a path straight to totalitarism (some of their members are calling to forbid Democrats from voting when they move states), Israel, many European countries have growing far right parties who are typically just a thin layer of legitimacy on top of far right ideology (take the AFD in Germany or the FN in France who have significant contacts with Neonazi activists).
A right wing, especially a "far" right wing, government would have mass deportations, stop immigration, promote nationalist ideology, and not allow let alone themselves push things such as pride and other left wing social values.
There doesn't exist any single example of this in the Anglo-sphere, nor the UK itself.
Yea a faction tried, but on balance of power were denied, and the overall effect was still a net increase of immigration.
"net migration to the UK rose to a record high of around 504,000 in the year to June 2022, driven by an increase in the number of non-European Union nationals.[13] The government registered 45,755 people arriving by small boats in 2022, 60% higher than in 2021, according to the Home Office. That has led to a record backlog of 161,000 asylum cases."
A right wing government in rule would not allow this. It happened and continues to, therefore a right wing government is not in power.
>And maybe the Madagascar Plan?
Right now. Obviously they have been in power in the past. If net foreign migration is positive by large margin, then clearly they are not effectively in power now. If the courts overrule any marginal plans to change this (which themselves don't affect the overall numbers materially) then they are not in power now.
The overall net numbers are intentional. If they wanted to decrease them they could do so by dealing with the backlog of claims and providing safe routes.
But it’s the divisive propaganda that they want. Sod the humans.
If you want to define right wing rule as only "talking about doing right wing things" then ok. I define it as doing them and achieving them, which would amount to actually stopping immigration and starting deportations to equal net negative immigration. So as to your point exactly, the net positive numbers are intentional, or are not stoppable for whatever inconsequential right wing elements exist as they don't have the power to achieve right wing outcomes.
The sum-total of political power when you mix all factions together, and judge things by results of what is happening, not only what is said, then constant positive net foreign migration and an overall consensus of this continuing doesn't support right wing government rule.
>do so by dealing with the backlog, providing safe routes.
If you mean safe route back to their country of origin, that is certainly a possible option that a right wing government might pursue. Since that isn't happening, there isn't a true right wing government in power and hasn't been for some time (have to include the courts here too).
There are factions that maybe talk a good game, and don't move the needle on policy or even consensus rhetoric. That's not a point in favor of right wing politics being in power.
considering their other actions (including requiring voter ID despite very few cases of voter fraud in the last election - a move which just so happens to favour older voters (who are more likely to vote for the tories) and which harms younger voters (who are more likely to go elsewhere)), I think they do
It seems that “government” the noun, tends toward autocracy and that democracy is a curious detour that is fun while it perseveres but it looks like many governments are tending less democratic. We’re not seeing this only in despotic systems or right wing or left wing, all of them are becoming more authoritarian. France, Canada, the US as well as the usual suspects.
Remember 1984, written by Englishman George Orwell? It's worth remembering that in part that was a commentary on British society, through a future lens.
When the UK does things which remind of you that, it isn't a coincidence. To be clear I'm not saying "this is literally 1984" or anything like that, I'm just trying to explain how "surveillance state" and "UK" have a LOT of known history.
1984 also wasn't about being watched at all times, it was about how the government had _the potential to_ watch its citizens at any time. And how the citizens changed their behaviors due to this. I mean the government doesn't watch you in the bathrooms, but they are scraping all internet info, have a lot of cameras, and are even flying planes in the sky to record data. People may not be watching those things, but they do exist. I think the big difference is that most citizens aren't aware of this level of invasion into their lives and they haven't really changed their behaviors because of it. That's probably the biggest difference between 1984.
To me (i live in the mainland EU) it looks like a testing ground, to see what passes and what doesn't, so that then our unelected EU officials can try to implement it here too. Be it ACTA, many many attepmts to outlaw encryption (or at least add some key escrow system, or centralized encryption system instead of e2e), etc.
is it me or the UK is becoming some sort of a surveillance state right in front of us just like china
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).
One side-effect of that data being collected, though, is that a technologically advanced country like China could quite easily pilfer the data for their own purposes, not to mention the Five Eyes who don't even need to steal it! For actions in public anyway (like protests), that doesn't particularly matter, but it could be disastrous if anonymity is being relied on:
British investigative journalist Joe Bloggs wants to research a country's human rights abuses. Joe visits said country with a strong alibi, and covertly discovers the truth. He returns to Britain, publishing under a pseudonym a critical newspaper report exposing the matter. The British intelligence services note that he did so, not because he's under suspicion for anything but simply because they can. The country that he was researching intercepts that intelligence, learning of the journalist's pseudonym.
What do you think is going to happen to poor Joe when he revisits the country to do some more investigation?
> The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You'll need to provide better citations than just saying that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anyone else, when we have less than the US or Germany, and less per capita too.
Becoming? Laws have been rewritten as to allow the arbitrary detention and charging of anybody since the 2000s. Online, it has got incredibly bad.
A few years ago, it was an arrest every 2 hours over mild internet comments, or 3300 a year. The number is much higher now, but I don't know what it is, specifically. One of the worst parts I can think of is criminally charging teenagers with hate speech for posting rap lyrics.
I don't like this at all, especially in a world where we are finding out so many top scientists lied or fabricated data in their research.
The PRESIDENT of Stanford just resigned!
It's clear we cannot trust the institutional powers to self-regulate and do the right thing.
The Science is settled and the science is holy, it came down to us from the anointed scientists and anyone who disagrees with or questions the science is a dangerous heretic, wishing to spread misinformation and promote hate.
You aren't qualified to ask questions, the science is settled the science has spoken, you are a lowly non-government non-scientist and you are not to get out of line. After all you know who else questions the science, climate deniers, and anti-vaxxers and Neo-Nazis and transphobes. So don't question the science it is settled, and you better no longer talk back to your betters.
"They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of Science, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain statistics out of it, however little meaning those statistics conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching an instrument, however unimportant, or of hearing new Scientific revelation, however superflous.
"The Science," they exclaimed, "feeds us and protects us and elevates us; with it we speak to one another, with it we teach one another, in it is the totality of being. The Science is the friend of rationality and the enemy of superstition: the Science is omniscient, unquestioned; blessed is the Science." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer."
- A parody of The Machine Stops
That was the politicians who did that. They even disincentivized valid research and policies that would help. (I.e. testing strategies, masking, quality of masks, programs to get masks out, etc)
Yep, this will get downvoted, but during covid, A LOT of stuff got censored as "misinformation", that later got proved to be true by the same authorities and scientists (expert groups, etc.), without any apology or even acknowledgement of "the past" and "the current truth". And I'm not talking about the 5g conspiracy theories, we started all this with "masks don't help".
The inflation is translatory was a known lie by political nonpolitical entities though. They can't say the truth: the country is bankrupt and the only way to press the brakes is to jack rates to 30-70%, which will thusly destroy the economy. The other option is ww3 or debt default, in which case the US loses reserve status and all US living quality plummets to the dark ages.
A LOT of stuff got censored as "misinformation", that later got proved to be true
What that means is that people were sharing unproven things. Some of the things were later proven, and some weren't. Censoring everything until it's actually proven science is not a bad strategy when people are willing to inject themselves with bleach because they're so desperate for a cure.
But gravity is not proven either, and a bunch of physics is just theories still.
We don't censor those.
Why should we censor lab leak theories? It was a valid theory even then and still is. I mean... to go to extreme, why should we censor reptilian 5g zuckerberg-is-a-robot theories at all, why censorship?
People were spraying their houses with vinegar before too, and we didn't censor that, even if it wasn't proven either.
On the other hand, we had real world data that vaccinated people "don't get sick", and we didn't censor that either:
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
> What that means is that people were sharing unproven things. Some of the things were later proven, and some weren't.
For example, early in the pandemic when the surgeon general of the USA and the top doctor of Canada both advised against wearing masks, would you classify that as the authorities "sharing unproven things"? Perhaps they should have censored themselves, instead of shutting out the voices who pointed out that the worldwide evidence was overwhelmingly in favour of masks being effective?
I've seen people say this, but I've not actually observed that at all.
What got censored exactly?
Personally I feel I got to know everything in proper time as knowledge was being formed and refined.
I think it might be because I know how to read papers and understand nuances? And the average person take policies as the same as high confidence proven scientific conclusions, as opposed to the best guess of the time by some policymaker that needs to make a decision without the full information?
> “There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
This was a clear recommendation to not wear masks (unless you're caring for sick people), and overnight it turned to mandatory masks. This is not some random person somewhere, but someone who has to say stuff directly to "average people".
> I've seen people say this, but I've not actually observed that at all.
> What got censored exactly?
Zerohedge was kicked off Twitter for suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a likely candidate for the origin.
We're seeing that Fauci & Ecohealth co-ordinated the paper to "debunk" the lab leak theory and now the lab leak is looking to be the most likely culprit (it is not without precedent, the 1977 Russian Flu turned out to be a lab leak from gain-on-function research).
Ivermectin, was another. Complete with "horse de-wormer" smears and deplatforming campaigns all over the place.
If you don't know of any instances where this has happened, you either did a masterful job tuning it all out, or still believe 99% of the b/s.
Can you please post a source for the ivermectin point? If I understand your comment you're suggesting that it is effective against covid, but I may be misunderstanding.
"Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of everyday routine, the security of the familiar, the tranquillity of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the fifth, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well, certainly, there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. They were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words; they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot."
UK MPs: "We're very worried about people debunked due to their repulsive beliefs".
Also UK MPs: "We believe ISPs should be able to deinternet people's views based an arbitrary computer models of dubious accuracy."
How long before these two views are exposed as contradictory? (Or do they just resolve that internally as "we only support dewhatevering people we don't like"?)
Ah ha, but you can't have "repulsive beliefs" if we suppress them... like they do in much of Europe!
It seemed like most MPs weren't actually bothered about debanking, it's been going on for several years now and surely many of those people affected wrote/spoke to their local MP. It's required someone like Farage to kick up a fuss about it. Hopefully we'll see proper legislation to prevent it going forward but I won't hold my breath.
The next government is going to be even more all-in on the authoritarian/blasphemy-laws nonsense.
110 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadThe reason the government is full of decrepit dotards, blustering fanatics, and greedy criminals is because nobody else seems to want to participate anymore.
I think it will be a cat and mouse game, where people will be finding more and more creative ways of exchanging keys and disguising encrypted messages in seemingly normal conversations or images.
It will be again something that won't affect serious criminals, but will give government an insight into who is committing wrong think of the given year (as these things change over time).
I can also imagine, given the wages in the UK are pretty bad, especially for engineers, many of those working on the necessary infrastructure would be tempted by the ideas of insider trading, leaking company and private secrets to the highest bidder and so on.
It feels like this government just doesn't give a flying toss and they just want take a dip into people private lives and see what they can get out of it.
What is even more worrying is that the opposition also supports this bill.
Mastodon and the fediverse are close, maybe, but many instances refuse to "speak" to one another because of their users.
That is not the case in large parts of the world. WikiLeaks might be a better example.
Personally I am not sure why users and admins of Kiwifarms are not considered to be complicit in harassment and stalking (and also how in the world SWATting can basically go unpunished), which are crimes and not even protected by the first amendment. In contrast whistleblowing is protected.
Non-controversial sites do not get shut down.
> Non-controversial sites do not get shut down.
A.k.a "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".
My perception back then was that people who used VPNs were generally dodgy people who wanted to illegally download things online or mask their identity while doing various other illegal things.
But in recent years geo-restrictions, ISP blacklists, and data collection have forced more and more users to use VPNs to the point where their use today is fairly common.
Obviously I'm not in favour of this legislation, but I would hope that the more the governments seek to censor content and attack encryption online the more people will use services that are un-censorable and encrypted.
Short of requiring spy-ware on all of our devices there's fundamentally very little governments can actually do to prevent this. In fact, the harder they fight the more they'll push people out of their reach.
This is not true, this is slander. Child pornographers use whatever is available to them. Censors, however, spend all of their time trying to associate people who wish to speak, listen, and associate freely with child pornographers.
Politicians being censors?! no way in a democracy(rollseyes)
They say
As they cart you off to the gulag.
That goes double for the repetitive+indignant sort of internet comment—those almost always lead to shallow conversation.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This is more the "Online Harm To Tory Propaganda And Election Chances Bill".
Hey, let's not forget that Labour also supports this bill.
they are not, in fact, communists and are pretty far away from ever being left of centre.
also one of their most controversial bills would lead to "illegal" immigrants being sent to Rwanda
skewed American perspectives aside, I genuinely fail to see how anyone would interpret them as anything left of centre-right
And this is their prestige. At least the one-nation Tories can see through it, even though they were expelled in the 2019 putsch.
</s>, obviously…
You’re so scared of reds under the bed that you can’t see what the (increasingly far-)right wing are doing to you.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/suella-braver...
There doesn't exist any single example of this in the Anglo-sphere, nor the UK itself.
And maybe the Madagascar Plan?
"net migration to the UK rose to a record high of around 504,000 in the year to June 2022, driven by an increase in the number of non-European Union nationals.[13] The government registered 45,755 people arriving by small boats in 2022, 60% higher than in 2021, according to the Home Office. That has led to a record backlog of 161,000 asylum cases."
A right wing government in rule would not allow this. It happened and continues to, therefore a right wing government is not in power.
>And maybe the Madagascar Plan?
Right now. Obviously they have been in power in the past. If net foreign migration is positive by large margin, then clearly they are not effectively in power now. If the courts overrule any marginal plans to change this (which themselves don't affect the overall numbers materially) then they are not in power now.
But it’s the divisive propaganda that they want. Sod the humans.
The sum-total of political power when you mix all factions together, and judge things by results of what is happening, not only what is said, then constant positive net foreign migration and an overall consensus of this continuing doesn't support right wing government rule.
>do so by dealing with the backlog, providing safe routes.
If you mean safe route back to their country of origin, that is certainly a possible option that a right wing government might pursue. Since that isn't happening, there isn't a true right wing government in power and hasn't been for some time (have to include the courts here too).
There are factions that maybe talk a good game, and don't move the needle on policy or even consensus rhetoric. That's not a point in favor of right wing politics being in power.
You can tell because this is a right-wing government trying to do this while Communism and Marxism are left-wing ideologies.
"Online harms are extremely dangerous to our democracy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYj11qWb-M
When the UK does things which remind of you that, it isn't a coincidence. To be clear I'm not saying "this is literally 1984" or anything like that, I'm just trying to explain how "surveillance state" and "UK" have a LOT of known history.
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).
British investigative journalist Joe Bloggs wants to research a country's human rights abuses. Joe visits said country with a strong alibi, and covertly discovers the truth. He returns to Britain, publishing under a pseudonym a critical newspaper report exposing the matter. The British intelligence services note that he did so, not because he's under suspicion for anything but simply because they can. The country that he was researching intercepts that intelligence, learning of the journalist's pseudonym.
What do you think is going to happen to poor Joe when he revisits the country to do some more investigation?
> The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country.
https://aithority.com/news/top-10-countries-and-cities-by-nu...
China has 200 million CCTV cameras
US has 50 million
Germany 5.2 million
UK has 5 million
> The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You'll need to provide better citations than just saying that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anyone else, when we have less than the US or Germany, and less per capita too.
A few years ago, it was an arrest every 2 hours over mild internet comments, or 3300 a year. The number is much higher now, but I don't know what it is, specifically. One of the worst parts I can think of is criminally charging teenagers with hate speech for posting rap lyrics.
You’re about a decade late here
It's clear we cannot trust the institutional powers to self-regulate and do the right thing.
The Science is settled and the science is holy, it came down to us from the anointed scientists and anyone who disagrees with or questions the science is a dangerous heretic, wishing to spread misinformation and promote hate.
You aren't qualified to ask questions, the science is settled the science has spoken, you are a lowly non-government non-scientist and you are not to get out of line. After all you know who else questions the science, climate deniers, and anti-vaxxers and Neo-Nazis and transphobes. So don't question the science it is settled, and you better no longer talk back to your betters.
"The Science," they exclaimed, "feeds us and protects us and elevates us; with it we speak to one another, with it we teach one another, in it is the totality of being. The Science is the friend of rationality and the enemy of superstition: the Science is omniscient, unquestioned; blessed is the Science." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer." - A parody of The Machine Stops
Then we saw it again, with "inflation is transitory, we aren't even thinking about thinking about hiking interest rates...".
What that means is that people were sharing unproven things. Some of the things were later proven, and some weren't. Censoring everything until it's actually proven science is not a bad strategy when people are willing to inject themselves with bleach because they're so desperate for a cure.
We don't censor those.
Why should we censor lab leak theories? It was a valid theory even then and still is. I mean... to go to extreme, why should we censor reptilian 5g zuckerberg-is-a-robot theories at all, why censorship?
People were spraying their houses with vinegar before too, and we didn't censor that, even if it wasn't proven either.
On the other hand, we had real world data that vaccinated people "don't get sick", and we didn't censor that either:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
For example, early in the pandemic when the surgeon general of the USA and the top doctor of Canada both advised against wearing masks, would you classify that as the authorities "sharing unproven things"? Perhaps they should have censored themselves, instead of shutting out the voices who pointed out that the worldwide evidence was overwhelmingly in favour of masks being effective?
What got censored exactly?
Personally I feel I got to know everything in proper time as knowledge was being formed and refined.
I think it might be because I know how to read papers and understand nuances? And the average person take policies as the same as high confidence proven scientific conclusions, as opposed to the best guess of the time by some policymaker that needs to make a decision without the full information?
> “There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
This was a clear recommendation to not wear masks (unless you're caring for sick people), and overnight it turned to mandatory masks. This is not some random person somewhere, but someone who has to say stuff directly to "average people".
Zerohedge was kicked off Twitter for suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a likely candidate for the origin.
We're seeing that Fauci & Ecohealth co-ordinated the paper to "debunk" the lab leak theory and now the lab leak is looking to be the most likely culprit (it is not without precedent, the 1977 Russian Flu turned out to be a lab leak from gain-on-function research).
Ivermectin, was another. Complete with "horse de-wormer" smears and deplatforming campaigns all over the place.
If you don't know of any instances where this has happened, you either did a masterful job tuning it all out, or still believe 99% of the b/s.
Or are you asking for a source on somebody getting deplatformed for saying that, and Dr. Peter McCullough comes to mind there.
The Great Barrington Declaration was also de-indexed from Google for disputing lockdowns.
[0] https://www.quotes.net/mquote/131160
How long before these two views are exposed as contradictory? (Or do they just resolve that internally as "we only support dewhatevering people we don't like"?)
It seemed like most MPs weren't actually bothered about debanking, it's been going on for several years now and surely many of those people affected wrote/spoke to their local MP. It's required someone like Farage to kick up a fuss about it. Hopefully we'll see proper legislation to prevent it going forward but I won't hold my breath.
The next government is going to be even more all-in on the authoritarian/blasphemy-laws nonsense.