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

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

#211

Post by skippyboxedhero »

perching_aix wrote: post #155

I'm aware this is a cultural difference, government betrayal and overreach are hotbutton and mainstay topics in the common culture of the UK and related states (e.g. the US). It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale. Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to ab…

The reason why this is the case in the UK is because we have two different parties and an election, and we have ended up with the same result.

The reason why people think it is a slippery slop is because it is. Government shouldn't have any of these powers. In the UK, it has been proven over many years that this power cannot be wielded effectively by people working for government or oversight provided by elected officials.

As an example, the OSA...no-one needs this. You may not be aware but there is a massive issue with parenting in the UK. Children are turning up to school at 4 years old unable to communicate with adults (with no learning difficulties) or use the toilet. There is a very strong belief amongst civil servants (not ministers, they are basically irrelevant) that the state must step in to perform parenting functions. Does this sound like a good idea? This is the justification in many of these areas, Ofcom use to be a small agency that regulated what commercials could run on TV, it is now grown into Newspeak regulator...this isn't over 20 years, this has happened within the last three years.

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

#213

Post by dijit »

piltdownman wrote: post #31
geremiiah wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a prevalent notion within UK establishment circles, "we are being attacked from both sides, therefore we must be right/balanced/fair", which is totally not how it works. You see used for example to defend the supposed impartiality of the BBC.

The BBC has never been impartial to internal concerns - domestic politics in particular. Leveson Inquiry recommendations not being implemented is the tip of the iceberg in relation to the extent of client-journalism it engages in with regard to the Conservative party. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-sc...

The thing is, the BBC is incredibly partial, depending on which area of the BBC we're talking about.

BBC News on the web vs BBC News the programme, vs BBC worldwide (which is a seperate org inside the BBC), then there's regional BBC and the prime time talk shows (the hard hitting Andrew Neil and co).

So, when someone says "the BBC is biased against the left" or "the BBC is biased agains the right"; ironically they can both be right, and it's not an indicator of impartiality. It depends on which section of the BBC we're talking about.

And you're totally blind to the bits of the BBC you agree with; you will think those bits are the impartial ones.

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

#214

Post by solumunus »

9JollyOtter wrote: post #192
chimprich wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has never been his opinion. There are many interviews with him on YouTube and I suggest you listen to them. I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings. He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit…

> I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings. The statements you have made don't really line up with the interviews I've listened to. The context around the events and what his involvement was and was not, is important. You are leaving out key information that he mentioned in many interview appearances. > He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out) Without r…

> It may have been different if…

Genuinely, how? Give me the best case scenario.

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

#215

Post by cameronh90 »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
pjc50 wrote: 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).

> Anecdote is not data. This is a situation where the data may not be capturing the reality, though. An increasingly common tactic for decreasing crime statistics is to reduce reporting of crimes. The more difficult you make it to report a crime, the better the crime numbers look. In one city I’m familiar with, it became so well known that reporting small crimes was a futile endeavor that people just gave up. It was…

That’s why we have the national crime survey, performed by the ONS.

Correlating it with police stats and murder stats suggests that reporting and recording is actually going up as a proportion of crime. Petty crime like shoplifting has gone up, but relatively speaking most people would probably take that over stabbing and murder even if ideally we’d have neither.

There’s this weird trend that’s taken over social media trying to portray London as a lawless hell hole but few people who actually live here are experiencing it that way, and the stats back that up. It’s largely people outside London that are claiming the crime is bad here.

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

#216

Post by foldr »

JCattheATM wrote: post #167
Nursie wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arresting people for holding up a blank sign is very different and much worse. On the contrary, it’s no different whatsoever from corralling away protest until it’s out of sight in an approved zone, and arresting anyone who expresses dissent in sight. It’s exactly the same use of police in concealment of dissent by the state. > Do you agree it was a problem Of course, it’s fucking awful. It’s your contention that “…

> On the contrary, it’s no different whatsoever from corralling away protest until it’s out of sight in an approved zone, and arresting anyone who expresses dissent in sight. You are not being genuine here IMO, and this seems to be a case of the very tribalism I spoke of. The two are not remotely the same. One is restricting a protest to a zone. The other is punishing people for what they are saying, even when what t…

As another poster has already pointed out to you, the person holding the blank piece of paper was not arrested. A number of the arrests of anti-monarchy protestors were subsequently ruled unlawful (e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyenzdz66wo).

All of this was widely reported in the British media and generally agreed to be a bad thing, so it doesn't really fit with your narrative of Brits being in denial about these problems.

By being sloppy with the facts you're only reinforcing Nursie's point that much of the discussion around these issues on HN is based on exaggeration and poorly sourced claims. That's what people actually object to, but you misinterpret these objections as a defense of police overreach.

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

#217

Post by 9JollyOtter »

foldr wrote: post #150
RansomStark wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what you mean by English. England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport. so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group. I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's…

The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry. No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s…

There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better.

Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.

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

#218

Post by tavavex »

logicchains wrote: post #88
pjc50 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> maybe if she'd had a gun she wouldn't have been shot

And how do you imagine that, exactly? You think that cop was fine shooting her for driving away in panic, but would patiently wait for her to grab a gun? And what would you like a person in her situation to do with the gun? Shoot him? The fact is, pulling a weapon in front of a US cop is begging to be killed on the spot. A common point of advice is that if you're stopped in the US by police, you should never look like you're reaching for anything, because the worst-case penalty for that is death. It instantly escalates the situation to life-or-death for a group of people that is largely already itching to pull the trigger.

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

#219

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Ntrails wrote: post #107
OgsyedIE wrote: post #40

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…

> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required. That said... I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, int…

I would, because despite having no idea how to accomplish any of that, I know how to delegate to people who do.

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

#220

Post by downrightmike »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #40

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…

Costs are inflating because they have more money than things to invest in. Same thing happened to Spain after the new world was found and exploited.

All that gold and silver just went to paying off foreign debt and inflating local markets.

Same thing is happening because the UK only have the London Financial hub going for it.

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