Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see nobody's willing to engage with the actual Armalite vs government shooting war that happened in the UK.
Are you talking about the conflict over northern Ireland like in your other comments? If not I have no idea what shooting Aramlite was involved in or what conflict they had with the UK. If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so ma…
UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the c…
There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time. I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about…
Not sure why you think the UK has a high murder rate, it's relatively low, better than average for Europe or the Euro area, and in the top 20% worldwide.
At about 0.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides, it's quite a lot lower than the 4.9 per 100,000 intentional homicides in the USA, which is solidly mid-table.
(I took the data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5 )
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates HN is not the place to spread simple misinformation. Homicide rates in the UK are lower than in the US, and are completely unremarkable internationally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... The homicide rate in the UK has also been declining quite sh…
With homicide rates I'm referring to London. But you're right I should have been more specific - I too live in a place with a declining and exceptionally low homicide rate and have to put up with people who think confiscating property is a reasonable response to mass shootings elsewhere.
London doesn't have a high homicide rate either. Nor is its homicide rate increasing. See e.g. the following if you have (perhaps?) misinterpreted recent news stories that compared crime statistics for a single month between London and NYC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43628494
Again, it's really simple to check these facts before spreading misinformation.
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the c…
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the United States has at various stages of their history introduced rather more onerous violations of civil rights than "porn passes" without so much as a whimper of opposition from gun owners..
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Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about the conflict over northern Ireland like in your other comments? If not I have no idea what shooting Aramlite was involved in or what conflict they had with the UK. If you're referring to northern Ireland, my point is not that we should get into a back-and-forth of cases where guns did and didn't prevent tyranny - my point is that the debate has seemingly skipped the "reasonable regulation" so ma…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strate...
Okay. Again - I'm not saying you can chuck some guns at people and expect them to be free forever. Is there more I should engage on?
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can write a scalable webservice that is able to detect such content with 90%-95% accuracy including locations of offending areas; based on some very recent (2 months old) Deep Learning research. I presume they can do that as well and take 5-10% failure rate as acceptable. If I were running my own social network and wanted to keep it clean, I'd use it without any hesitation. But those are technical means, this is a…
Does it handle literotica? (Could the UK under the new law?)
No, just images. But it might be doable as well - look at a recent post from fast.ai for text classification.
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oliver Cromwell would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War (There have been plenty of other revolutions and uprisings, though most were either elite coups or unsuccessful).
He's half-right; Cromwell was not a popular uprising, and was so unpopular during his rule that the UK returned to monarchy afterwards. I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
Not primarily a popular uprising, but definitively a revolution and not a mere palace coup. The wars went on for many years, large numbers fought on both sides and there were significant social and political changes as a result.
And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I.
We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#58Is not it better to block access to porn sites by parents' request? So that people without children don't have to bother.
Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm.
So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the c…
>Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. It doesn't seem to be in practice. Did it stop segregation in the South, for example? That was a far more egregious abuse of power than a porn pass.
There were laws in most states banning blacks from owning guns [1], presumably largely out of fear that they might fight back if armed. Even long after the civil war laws were passed to implicitly prevent blacks from being able to obtain guns. For instance the National Firearms Act of 1934 put a whopping $200 tax on firearms purchases. The goal, like many earlier bills, was just to ensure that blacks and poor whites could not effectively arm themselves. Even the gun control act of 1968 was influenced out of a fear that black groups, such as the Black Panthers, were starting to arm themselves and demonstrate accordingly. There's a really interesting article on that here [2].
And actually this is a general theme throughout history. For instance gun laws which effectively disarmed their target population played a crucial role in the numerous 20th century genocides. From the Jews in Germany, to the Armenians in Turkey, to the "intellectuals" in Cambodia, to subversives and dissidents in Stalin's Soviet Union, and many more. First came the the restriction of guns then came the unveiling of what the beasts behind these governments truly were.
This of course is not to imply that all efforts at gun control come with some ulterior motive, but simply to exemplify that governments that do have that ulterior motive tend to be damn scared of an armed population.
[1] - http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/racial_laws.html
[2] - https://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/the_nra_once_supported_gun_...
Re: UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the c…
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the United States has at various stages of their history introduced rather more onerous violations of civil rights than "porn passes" without so much as a whimper of opposition from gun owners..
As this overlaps with another thread, I'm just going to link there [1]. Suffice to say that the fact that blacks in particular were unarmed during the most oppressive days of the US was absolutely not a coincidence and there were laws passed preventing this both directly (e.g. literally blacks may not own weapons) and indirectly (e.g. - you must pay a $200 'tax' to own a weapon).