Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.

While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.

yea right. Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights), while the U.S. legal system offers almost no general privacy protection. On top of that, the NSA has a long history of warrantless surveillance and backdoors (Snowden, PRISM), with very limited oversight. In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.

Most of the comments here suggesting the UK it's evil have been downvoted. It's clearly still uncomfortable for a lot of people.

You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.

I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.

I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".

> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…

You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.

It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.

That is a good definition of not having free speech. If it can be whittled away every year at the stroke of a pen by a single parliamentary body (without judicial oversight) it's not really a right, it was just a temporary policy like taxing some new product.

|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.

I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.

I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.

I'm not looking this up at work, but didn't OBL have a mainstream media interview in the 90s?

Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.

https://www.today.com/video/leader-of-islamic-jihad-militant...

> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…

clips can be easily and readily found on most social media sites like youtube.

the really scary ones generally are only in arabic with arabic names and titles, so the english-only gringo demographic aren't going to see them

War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum...

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...

Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.

The problem with the nitpick is it inevitably runs into the issue of who the authority is here, and, by the very nature of the beast, said authority is disputed here. It seems small, but in reality it’s the whole thing.

Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.

Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.

Ironically, Stephen Rea was in V for Vendetta, a film about a British surveillance state.

The revisionsism and one-eyed delusional rewriting of history is, almost, amusing.

The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly.

Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".

Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.

Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.

They accepted what their government told them, which supports the point.

I think we should distinguish between someone with bad intentions in a position of power, and the entire power of the state being taken over by people with bad intentions. The possibility of the former does indeed seem like a good argument for not building total surveillance systems. But I read the comment as talking about the latter.

I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.

My money is on 'never', but who knows. Perhaps people will miraculously get smarter.

Don't worry, the Democrats and Republicans will have those parties outlawed or otherwise neutralized before they become a threat.

I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell. But your analogy breaks down because the shop owner chooses the products to sell in his shop. The porn mags aren't in the shop unless he specifically arranges to sell them, so it's easy to say he's responsible for keeping kids away from them.

An ISP doesn't do that. A better match for an ISP would be the trucking company that hauls magazines (porn and otherwise) from publishers to shops, or the company that maintains the shop's cash register.

> but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines

They weren't made to guarantee no child could peek at them, no, but they do have age restrictions that are followed (a child who picks one up couldn't buy it) and they were often on the top shelf. The kind of thing a basic risk assessment would flag "hey we keep the hardcore porn in front of the pokemon magazines...".

> The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops

The pictures emit photons which fly through the air to the child. The air is the shop.

Or for websites your computer is the shop.

The ISP is not the shop. Nor in the OSA is it viewed as such. The company who makes the service has some responsibility.

> So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs.

This fundamentally cannot work for what is in the OSA, and if you cannot see why almost immediately then you do not know what is in the OSA and cannot effectively argue against it. It is not a requirement to add age checks to porno sites.

Again that's a second order thing as I said, and those are choices by reddit - not mandated by the OSA.

> When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult.

Again, not required by the OSA.

Age checks are not fundamentally required by the OSA. It's really, really important that if you want to argue against it you argue against what's actually in it.

> You are covering for a bad law

Read the post again. I am not. I am trying to show those against it that they are failing to argue effectively against it.

This is a very valid point and importantly one of the more detailed issues.

So it's a good one to start with when arguing against the OSA - you say harm but what does that mean? What must sites assume it could mean? And examples of helpful kinds of things that would fall under at least the risk of getting caught out.

> What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.

The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.

But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.

> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff

Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.

> It's why you know the water's safe to drink

Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.

> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Scott_(criminal)

> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.

https://troymedia.com/lifestyle/your-money/debanking-is-otta... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/a...

> It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan

> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...

> It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/tax-evasion-by-wealthiest-am...

I mean, I get that it could be worse, but...

This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.

For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.

It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.

This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.

> there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy

The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.

Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.

Anyone who thinks the West is the better guy needs to look closely at the Western-backed Genocide in Palestine.

The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.

Russians of any gender or minority could vote for their representative in 1917. Women in the States only got full suffrage in 1920, African Americans in 1965. So no real pedigree there.

No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.

Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.

British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.

Not everyone you disagree with is a CCP/Russia/<insert_scapegoat> mouthpiece.

I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.

Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:

- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.

- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.

- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]

People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.

[^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo

Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.

> believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism

The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.

The people will always get the politicians they deserve.

> now everyone is talking about the Government

How are they talking about it?

Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic. Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...

British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!

Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.

I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.

Apathy is approval of the status quo.

Tumultuous in what way? There's so little distance between Conservative and Labour today that it really doesn't matter who's in power.

Sick enough to stop it or only sick enough to vote for the other party who has been doing the same shit but everyone has forgotten now?

Maybe you're not as average as you think you are.

and yet they keep voting for blue labour or red labour…

I'm speaking like someone who has to live with the consequences of horrible legislation like this because I live here.

My comment provoked you enough to create an account just to make a throwaway insult reply to it. I think perhaps it hit closer to home than you would care to acknolwedge.