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The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

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81–90 of 327 posts

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also never look at what current government is going to do with the framework, but what future much worse government could use it for.

Does it get worse? They are making a benchmark that is hard to beat.

I wouldn't like to see all the legal infrastructure they're putting in under a Reform UK government - I'd imagine they'll use it for far more nefarious means.

That being said - the blame lies squarely with Labour here. I have a gut feel a lot of it has to do with donors to the Tony Blair Institute.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#83
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how you think being shot by authorities is less bad than being talked to for shitposting on X

[flagged]

Over here, the police have fatally shot a grand total of 88 people in England and Wales since 1990. So yeah, police shootings are pretty big news, and while they are sometimes justified, people certainly would get outraged by anything resembling the recent ICE shootings.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#84

This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity. The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate. So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.

Also never look at what current government is going to do with the framework, but what future much worse government could use it for.

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#85
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "doesn't work"? Doesn't work to prevent crime? Or doesn't work too suppress dissent?

It's been a while since I watched it, but doesn't it falsely imprison people because they disregarded some of the data that went contrary to other data?

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Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#86

The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price. Almost all physical goods have die…

I would say "so diesel uses should be encouraged to transition to electric where feasible", except the government has also dropped the ball on electricity prices and is now looking at increasing taxes on EVs.

> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.

This is spot on, though. I joke that instead of state controlled media we have a media controlled state.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#87

That’s just the way “freedom news” is framing it. Social movements don’t just happen from grassroots these days. They’re seeded by foreign states. A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting. If you don’t provide an id you get a limited number of views. And I don’t see anything wrong with a preventative system in principle, we should be able to join up social services information with policing, b…

> A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting

It’s strange times when even the comments on posts about government overreach are calling for more government overreach and limitations on speech and privacy.

Do you really want to have to verify your ID to post anything online, including HN?

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#88
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort. You forgot gun control. That's the first thing they took away. Thereafter, freedom after freedom has been made optional by the government [1]. When government becomes overreaching, and you don't have the means to protect yourself and your rights, that's where it goes. [1] I said "government", but probably "regime" wo…

The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE. (to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)

>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.

The woman who was shot was a democrat without any guns, maybe if she'd had a gun she wouldn't have been shot.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#89
post #79
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).

Sure; but the article's premise is that street crime is falling (and as a result, the police, which, presumably, has more free time on their hands, can focus on other things). Assuming petty crime is street crime, and seeing that you agree that the police suck at it, is the article's premise correct?

Yes, it’s correct. Violent crime in London and the UK more generally has been on a long term downward trend. This is not incompatible with there being spikes in some specific categories of crime. But it’s consistent with the trends for homicide, for which the statistics are pretty hard to dispute, and where London has fewer per capita than Berlin, Brussels and Paris (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homic...).

You’re posting an article by someone with eccentric views on a lot of topics and an anti-multiculturalist agenda to advance. (For example, they believe that Rishi Sunak is not English.)

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort. You forgot gun control. That's the first thing they took away. Thereafter, freedom after freedom has been made optional by the government [1]. When government becomes overreaching, and you don't have the means to protect yourself and your rights, that's where it goes. [1] I said "government", but probably "regime" wo…

I still don't know what's so important about guns and how it's a metric for freedom.

As Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.
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