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UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

alecmuffett.com

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Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#451

Post by piker »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #443
piker wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you understand. Either of those arrests are unconscionable by American standards. Most U.S. folks would be shocked to ever see such a thing, so it’s necessary to first show it to level-set that non-US jurisdictions don’t have any concept like the 1st Amendment. It wasn’t a slight in any way. It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned b…

I feel like we are talking at cross purposes here and this all feels very broad, so I’m still not entirely sure what you are driving at other than “in the UK people are being silenced and arrested for what I consider to be acceptable speech” in some general sense. I don’t know what the line is, I don’t know what the numbers are, I really don’t have any sense of the scale or specifics of your claim. I was responding t…

Yes, I think we'll have continued difficulty reconciling this understanding.

It's almost impossible to get arrested for posting something that isn't CSAM or literal state secrets on Twitter in the US. Even so-called "hate speech" is broadly protected in the US by the First Amendment. In fact the American Civil Liberties Union (which is loathed by the American right) has gone to bat and litigated on behalf of the KKK of all organizations, for example, to protect those rights.

If you send "menacing" notes to someone, that can be a part of a larger crime like harassment, assault or stalking, but as noted in the chain, that's not what's being measured here.

So the fact that people are being arrested at all for tweets is not "what I consider to be acceptable speech" but in fact what the US generally considers to be protected speech. Any number above 0 that doesn't reference child porn is infinitely more than you'd expect to see in the US. That's the difficulty we're having.

[Edit: I understand US != UK. The American flag only flies in the embassy here. I just wanted to provide the context of those arrests and these numbers to US readers who will find them surprising.]

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#452

Post by t00 »

left-struck wrote: post #348
reenorap wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000+ arrests a year for posting offensive tweets? The fact there is no freedom of speech in UK and the politicians will willfully arrest people for wrongthink is disgusting. It means that any rational person will keep their mouths shut for fear of getting arrested.

Have you read 1984? This sounds like something leading up to the situation in the book, certainly not the worst parts.

Orwell was a licenced critic even if anti-imperialist at heart he sold his soul to fight communism putting imperialist issues aside.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#453

Post by fao_ »

piker wrote: post #451
Forgeties79 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are talking at cross purposes here and this all feels very broad, so I’m still not entirely sure what you are driving at other than “in the UK people are being silenced and arrested for what I consider to be acceptable speech” in some general sense. I don’t know what the line is, I don’t know what the numbers are, I really don’t have any sense of the scale or specifics of your claim. I was responding t…

Yes, I think we'll have continued difficulty reconciling this understanding. It's almost impossible to get arrested for posting something that isn't CSAM or literal state secrets on Twitter in the US. Even so-called "hate speech" is broadly protected in the US by the First Amendment. In fact the American Civil Liberties Union (which is loathed by the American right) has gone to bat and litigated on behalf of the KKK…

My wife in the USA had semi-anonymous texts send to her personal over a course of 2 years. They included her home address, her mother's home address with a picture of the home, and they stated that they would kill her and anyone she loved.

She never saw justice for it. The police said there was nothing they could do, despite having the phone number it came from, because it was across state lines.

The texts stop, and we suspect that it coincided with a specific person who went to jail for a year or so for unrelated offences around the time that the texts stopped.

That person is still out there.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#454

Post by fao_ »

ipaddr wrote: post #310
fao_ wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the curr…

Freedom to choose clothing wouldn't fall under any version of freedom of speech? I would would work with your fellow citizens to change that.

I think the issue here isn't "freedom of speech", its that people who claim to want "freedom for speech" are either using it as a shield to say vile things to other people, or they feel that "freedom of speech" is the only thing one needs to guard against fascism.

The resulting difficulty is that the former is demonstrably true, and the former is demonstrably false.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#455

Post by fao_ »

istjohn wrote: post #312
fao_ wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on those descriptions... it sounds like he was pretty clearly racist? From the article: > Sentencing Thompson, Judge Temperley had said of the zero tolerance approach being taken by courts: > “This offence, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest up and down this country. And I’ve no doubt at all that your post is connected to that wider picture. > “I don’t accept that your comme…

Yes. It's a horrible sentiment, and he should be able to air it. Free and open discourse requires me to allow you to say things I dislike in exchange for you tolerating my saying things you dislike. It isn't free speech if you're only allowed to say popular things.

As a minority, I do not hold the same view. I understand your position, however, my personhood is often demonstrably conditional on the speech that other people spread about me and people like me. In the last decade I have seen fascist speech go unpunished and, consequently, the increased spread of the idea that I and people like me are not people, that I am simply an evil and horrible person for my genetic identity, forever tainted, an "undesirable", and a very suitable target for being marginalised and erased (often violently) from society. I have already been victim to these effects, as have my friends, and I have seen others, those with a different skin colour on top of the genetic difference, bear the effects tenfold. I have known of people murdered in the streets for simply having my genetic trait, even if it didn't hit the international news, I saw how people spoke about it online even despite the hate speech acts. That another one of us dead was a good thing.

I have also been witness to the power that physical violence inflicted upon these people has had in silencing that rhetoric and the spread of those ideas. I have seen how fascists go into hiding when they feel they will be the victims of violence, and I have seen how easy it is to break apart these networks by simply restricting the speech of a handful of people, or removing them from the platform.

I very much do feel, that either I am in a concentration camp in the next ten years, or these people are imprisoned. Prison is the lighter sentence for fascist rhetoric, and represent sane and sensible consequences for suggesting that an entire group of people who hold no specific ideology are evil. Remember that a war was fought, and the alternative to imprisonment for fascist rhetoric is letting it grow so large that the only inevitable solution is a war where people are murdered for their fascist rhetoric.

Before comparing the third paragraph with the first, please remember, that these people can simply choose to not say vile things about people with my genetics. If they do not wish to go to prison, maybe they should not make wide fascistic statements about people with my genetics being murderers and pedophiles — both claims that are starkly in opposition to the evidence. I am 60% more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to the baseline, cisgender female population. I cannot change my genetics, nor would I want to if I had the option, and my genetics do not represent my ideology or how I behave or act in public or private.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#456

Post by Defletter »

u_sama wrote: post #418
Defletter wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you are stripping all context and content. You are pretending that protest organising and calling for the burning down of a building populated with asylum seekers are the same thing. I vehemently reject this facetious framing.

You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement. The police record suggest the opposite. Take the example *Bernadette Spofforth, 55*, she shared false information that the attacker was an asylum seeker, adding "If this is true, all hell will break loose." (not false btw) Deleted it, apologized. She still got arrested, held 36 hours, and then *released without charge because of insufficient evidence*. No call f…

> You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement.

You should tell the right wingers that. Here's some of the right-wing sources I found when searching Ground News for some articles about Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocating for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers:

- "British Mother Jailed for Tweet: ‘I Was Starmer’s Political Prisoner’" (The European Conservative) (https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/british-mothe...)

- "Lucy Connolly considers legal action against police after being jailed for race hate tweet" (LBC) (https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/lucy-connolly-first-interview-...)

- "‘Silencing the right!’ Free speech boss rages over Lucy Connolly’s ‘absolutely heartbreaking’ admission" (GB News) (https://www.gbnews.com/news/free-speech-lucy-connolly-admiss...)

You may notice a theme amongst these articles about how "it was just a tweet" and "she's a political prisoner" and "calculated move to suppress conservative viewpoints on immigration". This is what the right does. I'm not conflating legitimate criticism with incitement, they are, and they're using their massive media empires to spread this conflation.

This is just going to fix itself with more speech, right?

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#457

Post by bamboozled »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #444
bamboozled wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a boiling frog, "oh it's minor, it's minor, it's just jokes, it's just a little bit"...

lol I mean it's objectly minor compared to the UK I'm not going to say it's great over here but we aren't jailing people for mean tweets. Seriously get some perspective man.

Why don’t you get some perspective ?

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#458

Post by bamboozled »

beeflet wrote: post #446
bamboozled wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm. Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail s…

Oh no, online propaganda and smear campaigns

Very immature and weak retort. The House of Lords will have you for dinner.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#459

Post by kubb »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #450
kubb wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Country X should change it’s laws because Y” is a belief you can have even if Y is not shared by enough people in Germany to make that change. Claiming that Germany recently introduced a law prohibiting criticism of politicians is an admission of belief in something demonstrably incompatible with reality.

My mistake. My comment should have been "doesn't Germany have laws criminalizing the insulting of politicians?"

Still the answer would have been “no”.

If you want to keep both narrative and truthfulness, you should ask “doesn’t Germany have laws criminalizing insults, and someone had to pay a fine after insulting a politician”.

Still not very authoritarian on a global scale. We have countries where politicians are exempt from criminal prosecution via presidential pardons and countries that kill dissidents. These countries form alliances and align their foreign policy.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#460

Post by hexbin010 »

varispeed wrote: post #125
int32_64 wrote: post #26

It's so organic and grass roots and good for democracy™ that every single Western country suddenly decided that eliminating privacy online in lockstep was the top priority despite none of the ruling parties running on it as a platform or with any meaningful referendums from the voting public. But to what end?

> Role and responsibilities of MI5 in law > The Security Service Act 1989 sets out our functions and gives some examples of the nature and range of threats we work to disrupt. > In summary, our functions are: > to protect national security against threats from espionage, terrorism and > sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democra…

Your account is very curious. You constantly attack many British institutions (NHS, parliament, MI5 etc) and you're not a native English speaker.

You claim to pay tax in the UK. You dislike many many aspects of the UK fundamentally so I'm curious, why stay?

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