UK government surveilling social media of teaching assistants

My first objection is that any intolerant minority then becomes the arbiter of shame. By nature an intolerant minority is the last category of groups that should have that power.

Second is the question of where you draw the line. Mason Greenwood was cancelled after audio recording emerged of him raping his girlfriend. Kurt Zouma was not cancelled after recording emerged of him kicking his cat. Should he have been? Any answer you give is based on your personal values around punishment for crime and behaviour towards the defenceless. I'm anti-punishment but also anti-cruelty, so it's a head-scratcher for me. What about drink-driving? Parking tickets? You see the problem?

I'm fine with deplatforming the genuinely loathsome, given some consensus on what that is...

...but one of the early cancellation twitstorms was over some hapless male nerd making a sexual joke about USB sticks within earshot of (I'm doing my best to phrase this in a value-neutral way, and I mean no imputation beyond this specific individual) a tumblerina.

I stipulate that it's a horrible experience to be female at a very male tech conference, and that may have given her good reason to be sensitive, but AFAICT the joke in itself was merely unfunny and not inherently offensive to anyone who isn't already primed to explode. I presume that tumblerina received some genuinely bad behaviour previously at the conference, from men unnamed, but hapless nerd was the one she could name, so she did.

Aaanyway. Tech nerd got cancelled. Then tumblerina got cancelled; both of them, understandably, for becoming liabilities to their employers. And much heat was generated in twitter datacentres. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup.

So I refute your claim that "no-one is getting cancelled unless they're doing something shameful". I'd argue that neither of those two people should be ashamed - their sins are no more than common human failings that I hope Osiris would gloss over in his reckoning.

Stepping back, I'm concerned with your comment's assonance with "nothing to hide". I find that mentality deeply problematic. I accept authority only grudgingly, as I believe that organised crime is inevitable anyway, but it doesn't sit right to celebrate that some group that holds power over one, in which one has no representation, can use that power to harm one, using dogmatic justification and motivated reasoning. I really hate your position. Please soften it, so that we can have more forgiveness in the world.

No, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked.

The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union.

But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it.

Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house.

Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.

I don't think legal is always the line when considering what's right, or particularly in this case whether it's surveillance.

Ah! I now see why you think he is bad at politics. I'm sorry to shatter your illusions.

In a better system, it would be. But this is UK politics. If you don't win outright, you lose. Therefore, for most of us, we don't vote _for_ our preferred candidate, we vote _against_ our enemy. I haven't had the luxury of voting Lib Dem for years - I'd just be throwing my vote away.

Starmer only needs to present himself as the end of the tories. That's what the country wants more than anything else. They would vote for a sack of potatoes if it looked like the best chance of rooting out the tories.

No matter how credible, sane, fully costed or appealing his policy may be, the Mail and the Sun will use it to sow FUD, and his vote will decrease. Fuck, you think our electorate votes on policy? No, my friend. They vote based on emotive rhetoric.

If he remains anodyne, his enemies can only clutch mist. The plebs can project their desires onto him. He presents very little attack surface to the media.

Contrast with Corbyn. Out of context, when offered his manifesto policies, the plebs liked them far better than tory policy - yet he failed to win. Why? Because he was wide open to attack. The media painted him as a crank. They drowned him in FUD. Swing voters voted against him because they thought he'd crash the economy or disband the army or something. They didn't read his manifesto - they read Littlejohn lying about his manifesto. They read clickbait published by motivated liars in their Facebook feeds.

For clarity, Corbyn would have been a poor PM, but hopefully you now see that leadership quality is immaterial to the electoral process. If not, look outside.

No; Starmer must at all costs avoid throwing away his victory. He must stay mum except for occasionally - not too often - giving a little shove when the Tory self-destruction looks like slowing down. Keep the focus on them and win by default.

France had a system to can social media for tax fraud in 2021:

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-starts-scrapping-soci...

One NGO that fought this was la quadrature du net, here is there post about it (in french):

https://www.laquadrature.net/2019/11/05/le-parlement-doit-re...