81–90 of 93 posts
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"you would hesitate at calling Frankenstein human " Completely off topic nit-pick, and not to devalue your point (which I fully agree with), but Frankenstein was the scientist not the monster.
But when you think about it, wasn't Frankenstein the real monster?
Side note: well worth a read. Fascinating 19th century look at the psychology of man.
Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend? So the pattern is basically, pass insane laws because "terrorist" then use the incredibly broad and overreaching laws beyond abuse for anything they want to do. Exactly the pattern law enforceme…
Am in the UK, no one is worried about this. FYI we don't have the freedom of speech guarantees that the US does, and this doesn't really bother people. TLDR; storm in a teacup.
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It's still democracy and it still protects against extreme runaway government power. Ultimately the issue is that people want this. People are scared of terrorists. People do want the government to bend the rules to track them down. That's exactly what democracy is supposed to be. What it's not supposed to be is what everyone wants, fair, right or ensuring people's information is kept secret from the government. In s…
> People are scared of terrorists. Are they? If they are it's irrational, you're far more likely to be killed by a falling fridge or alcohol induced liver damage. Attacking a bogyman in an attempt to take eyes off what your government is really doing is quite sickening. Everyone would be significantly better off if we stopped parading around with 'defense' funding and put it to something with a perceivable impact lik…
Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend? So the pattern is basically, pass insane laws because "terrorist" then use the incredibly broad and overreaching laws beyond abuse for anything they want to do. Exactly the pattern law enforceme…
> Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend? Exactly this. I'm British and I'm completely fucking tired of living here and watching how right-wing, xenophobic, poor-bashing and just all-round ignorant and unpleasant people are and are be…
Because the UK I know from my history readings has things like the cold war, the Falklands war, massive tribal struggles between political left and right, and if you go back to Orwell's time you find he found it tough to get published because the idea that Stalin was a bad guy was deemed terribly gauche.
The UK has not had any truly evil governments for a very long time (perhaps, if we judge them by the standards of their day, the answer might be that it's never had an unusually evil government). It's not like Germany where they're super sensitive about privacy and democracy thanks to their experiences the Nazis and then the communists. So not very surprisingly, British people tend to be very trusting of their governments as they never saw how bad things can really get. See: popular support for Cameron executing a British citizen by drone strike, merely because he was in Syria and GCHQ promised cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die that he was a Bad Guy™.
This lack of experience doesn't excuse things, mind you .... just explain them. British people (like me) should look to the experiences of other countries to learn from their mistakes and should make sure to avoid them.
But modern UK is not significantly worse than even the recent past where it did things like run a global empire, persecuted gay people, had no minimum wage, etc. And Cameron, for all his faults, has actually been a pretty centrist PM (for a Tory). Certainly more than his backbenches would like.
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The illusion of choice. These papers do run many stories that are anti-government true. But for certain issues they line up behind the government. The Snowden files story was initially fully covered only by the Guardian -- who have since had a change of Editor after their offices were raided by the security services and equipment smashed. There has been (until now) almost no coverage that the government wants to pass…
The mostly foreign-owned UK press exists to sell newspapers, not to conspire against the public on purported issues of national security. There's almost no coverage of the Draft Communications Bill or DRIP because the average UK citizen doesn't find some legislation that might be debated which might compel ISPs to hold the same sort of data they already hold for a bit longer to be particularly intelligible, never min…
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> Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend? Exactly this. I'm British and I'm completely fucking tired of living here and watching how right-wing, xenophobic, poor-bashing and just all-round ignorant and unpleasant people are and are be…
I think you're wearing rose tinted glasses. You say "are becoming" but do you have real evidence that the past was a utopia of rationality where propaganda fell on deaf ears, nobody was ever scared of any threats and everyone loved deeply religious immigrants? Because the UK I know from my history readings has things like the cold war, the Falklands war, massive tribal struggles between political left and right, and…
My personal and political beliefs seem to be completely at odds with most of the British public and I feel like I would be crazy to stay. I mean, we have a monarch and an unelected upper house of parliament. What the hell am I doing here?
My identity as a British person means very little to me. I was born on this patch of dirt, someone stamped 'British person' on my arse and here I am.
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> A populist viewpoint with no basis whatsoever in reality. What you just said serves no purpose. Can you please provide sources and alternative viewpoints people can actually discuss, rather than belittle someone for commenting on a story?
Happily. http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/spy-career-s... http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3180 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/forget-bon... For starters. They're not normal people, in that they're recruited by elitist institutions from other elitist institutions. Not dissimilar to how branches of our industry work, although the profile for who they want is somewhat different. But for t…
Coming here is like entering a weird extremist alternate-reality echo chamber on the weirdest issues the tech industry seems to have a hard-on for. Poll us on any issue relating to technology or politics and you will find we are so radically different from the general population.
And we're (almost) all white, middle-upper class Indian or East Asian men. If the intelligence community is anything like that I'm much more afraid than before I read your post.
And the fact that you start out by saying they are cherry-picked from elite institutions and then you go on to say they are normal -- the first notion completely contradicts the second. Elite institutions often come with narcissism, a notion that you know better than the rest of the world, a single-minded determination that it takes to excel in a particular area (the educational system) eschewing any other considerations it takes to be a full, complete normal human being.
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It's still democracy and it still protects against extreme runaway government power. Ultimately the issue is that people want this. People are scared of terrorists. People do want the government to bend the rules to track them down. That's exactly what democracy is supposed to be. What it's not supposed to be is what everyone wants, fair, right or ensuring people's information is kept secret from the government. In s…
People are scared of what they're told is scary. You and I aren't scared of being bitten by a black widow while we sleep because we know the chances are remote (or in my case, nonexistant given where I live), and it's not really something we think about. The media constantly harassing the population with the big bad scary terrorist who's out to get you, of course people watching said media are going to be scared of t…
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> That's not simple at all I did not mean simple in terms of implementation; you're absolutely right :) > and restrict freedom of the press while you're doing it Yeah. I think there's better ways. There's a lot to it... we need to incentivize media to report on the facts without twisting them, criminalize abuses of trust and power, create meaningful "trust rating" systems that actually impact audiences' willingness t…
What we need is better education, teaching critical thinking, and scepticism. If more people had the skills needed to look at a newspaper report and see that it's fabricated nonsense then no one would buy that newspaper, incentivising them to report on reality instead. Sadly, politicians quite like the ability to manipulate the public via their friends in the press, and very few of them are going to campaign for maki…
I believe that media outlets used to have to compete on credibility - a little critical thinking distributed throughout the population made a difference. But with so much consolidation of mass media, especially behind the scenes, one is left picking between only a few fundamental options. If they're all trash, where else are you going to go? It much tougher to take a principled stand and reject all mass media outlets rather than the easy route of identifying with the ones that better stroke your biases.
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That's probably still more likely than being in a terror attack.
Maybe, but at that point does your brain think in terms of probabilities and expected values anymore (if it ever did)? For example, when you're comparing prices at a store, you might be so rational that you perfectly compute the expected payoff for each product and choose the optimal one. But does your brain work the same way when deciding whether to steal the product too? If the expected payoff for that was higher,…