- build a wave machine to stop (drown?) immigrants coming from France
- build a floating wall in the Channel to stop immigrants from France
- send asylum seekers to concentration camps in some remote islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
- send asylum seekers to concentration camps on abandoned oil rigs in the North Sea
- reintroduce capital punishment (but she wasn't Home Secretary at the time)
The UK equivalent was entrusting all drivers with a box of coins so they can use the phone boxes. Should have hear run out, the PM could call the operator and request reverse charge connection (with UK strategic command or sth presumably). This was also deemed failsafe, as there are many phone boxes around the country.
It was once described in length on QI...
This was in the 1950s and is described in Peter Hennessey's excellent book The Human Button.
It's been a while since I read the book, but from memory the cabinet office also purchased an AA membership so that the prime minister's driver would have a key giving them access to the private AA phone boxes that were fairly common back then. They had an arrangement with the AA call handlers to allow the PM to be connected to the appropriate part of government in an emergency.
Meanwhile the US and Russian government probably had satellite...
"Will you accept this collect call from: LAUNCH-THE-MISSILES-DO-IT-NOW?"
The beard tax was cool, I also liked the sober pubs as described in the Licensing Act 1872 section 12: “Every person found drunk in any highway or other public place, whether a building or not, or on any licensed premises, shall be liable to a penalty”
I love the idea of "finding oneself in a state of manifest drunkenness", how on Earth could that have happened?
Some of my favourite legalese euphemisms.
What is your source? I hardly believe she said that and still a home minister of a free and democratic society.
> Downing Street has asked officials to consider the option of sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea and is the driving force behind proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
> The documents suggest officials in the Foreign Office have been pushing back against No 10’s proposals to process asylum applications in detention facilities overseas, which have also included the suggestion the centres could be constructed on the south Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Helena.
I'm iffy on terming this "concentration camps". It fits the technical definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_... as examples), but the line between "concentration" and "extermination" camps like Auschwitz has been entirely blurred for decades.
Also, didn't they actually spend millions on the porn filter just to call it quits later? Surely schools could've used that money instead.
You will not understand British politics until you realise that she is in power because of, not despite, these stupid suggestions. They're what you have to say to get there. That's why Johnson performs the idiot act.
He was probably born in the UK, went through schools there, maybe his parents did too. But let’s just make it clear, he’s not British in the same way that someone white is. Or, you know, Pakistani, but from an upper-middle-class family of doctors.
No one reports that Wayne Rooney is British, of English origin.
When talking about a hate crime the ethnicity of the perpetrator is hardly irrelevant. And for any terrorism-related incident the first question is going to be whether or not the perpetrators were domestic or foreign (especially if they just murdered a member of the government) - as this shapes the response massively. If this person was raised abroad and brought radicalism with them that’s totally different from someone raised in the UK who has been radicalised online (or possibly even in the community).
Political correctness aside, it's mostly either local nationalists (which are native, noone "let them in", and there's nowhere to deport them), or first or second generation immigrant islamists (which someone actually let inside the country relatively recently). If it's an immigrant, people of course want to know where they came from... and very few of them come from eg. japan. I know this fuels steretypes, but ignoring statistics is also bad.
Also, make your pick. What was this guy? British? Radical Islamist? Somali? I think these are reasonable labels. But “British but you know, kinda foreign” is unfair. It’s saying, well it’s kind of our fault, we can’t blame any foreigners, but oh look he’s really Somali, so it’s fine. Stiff upper lip prevails, unblemished.
Disagreeing with this is akin to putting your head in the sand and wishing for a reality that simply is not there.
I feel like the focus on “Somali” is meant to deflect any responsibility on domestic matters. This guy apparently was born, bred, schooled in the UK. Maybe he was radicalised by hardcore Somali-heritage islamists (if that’s a thing), but then it’s a failure of UK domestic policy for creating an environment, or cause, for them to organise, and UK domestic security for preventing this.
I’m not saying this is easy, rather that this is where the onus lies. But when we say “ah he’s Somali”, suddenly it’s someone else’s fault.
When a white British guy, with a name like Gary or Shaun stabs a teacher, say, you get stories from people who went to school with Gary or Shaun. He was an alright guy but a bit extreme when angry, maybe. Or no one would see it coming, he was a quiet guy. Why did no one see it coming? Ah well you can’t prevent everything.
But this guy is Somali, it’s their fault. I mean, ok he’s British but you know what I mean. Different British.
If people stop rewarding this kind of writing, their wellbeing is not threatened in any way. If companies fail to observe the competitive edge which their competitors are utilizing...
With any terror event, tragic as it might be, the aftermath tends to be way more impactful than the actual event. The death of 5,000 people in WTC started at least one UN-sanctioned war and cost the lives of many times more than the airplane strikes.
So yes, I’m choosing to focus on the aftermath. But Sir David, rest in peace.
It's a high profile job and the danger comes with it. If you're the one writing laws for everyone to follow, it's highly likely that many people will want you dead.
It's a "fun" fact that US presidents have a nearly 20% death rate for example.
This type of attack happened in 2016 when another MP was killed, in 2010 when it was an attempted murder (the MP survived), in 2000 (MP severely injured, his assistant was killed).
Before that there was the attack on the entire government at the party conference in 1984 by the IRA which killed 5 (including one MP), and assassination of the Northern Ireland secretary in 1979.
(Details seem to be scarce because it's sub judice, but presumably US media might have something?)
So with magical authoritarian thinking: 1) a troll is someone who rudely disagrees with a public person; 2) assassins and terrorists are people who very rudely disagree with public people; Conclusion: people who rudely disagree online are proto-terrorists.
I don't see how social media anonymity == internet anonymity?
Do you think the issues of Grenfell could have been solved by immediate action? I think an enquiry to figure out what went wrong was necessary.
You also seem to think there’s been a swift, wide reaching response to the MP’s murder. I’m not sure what that is, since this policy proposal has merely been mooted.
As for encryption, does this mean we can't do online banking if it's outlawed?
This isn’t true everywhere, and phone numbers work internationally. I’ve got a Weibo account with a +1 US phone number and it works (surprisingly). The problem with the phone number system is that quite honestly, it’s only not anonymous in cities/states/countries that make it closely linked to identity.
It will be licensed. Banks will have a license. Companies will be able to apply for VPN to carry on (and required to monitor employees traffic)
I wonder if the world always seems like this in real time. When I first learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was described as a bit of a mild thriller with a happy end, much ado about nothing. But it must have seemed like apocalypse about to happen.
"Privacy activists oppose EU plans for a GDPR-compliant Whois v2" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28892013
Even with projects like GDPR, we're trying to build some pro-citizen rules. But we've still done nothing to defend or enable individuals, to grant them powers & rights to operate independently & freely online. There's no bill of hosting rights, that I'm aware of, anywhere on the planet. I want to see a nation step up & try to enhance & promote speech & data of it's citizen's in an supernational context. Our citizens have a right to have their words online! We are actively building & encouraging hosting solutions to enable that!
- Don't care about the content of the tweet (no fact checking boards)
- Don't care to register who sent it (no privacy leak to government)
"Attack" the structure:
- Heavily tune down features that can enable posts on social media to go viral. Basically ban virality. Boosting high-emotion posts above all else is the largest systemic issue.
Yes, it's heavy-handed, but it's not censorship. It's not registering who has which political opinions. It's just changing the rules equally for all, to create a better forum.
The problem is that Yyu'd essentially be killing one of the primary revenue generators for these companies, which are already built on top of fundamentally unsustainable business models in terms of actually managing content. The thing is that you'd have to define what exactly "high-emotion" posts are and how content will be assessed, which is effectively a form of censorship.
That seems roughly as feasible as banning maths.
People with extreme views don’t care if their voice is public.
(Pop quiz: which newspaper columnist has been cited approvingly in more than one mass shooter manifesto?)
Rather comically, the morons in control of the social media companies have done Trump an extraordinary favor. They've made him look better than he otherwise would by denying him access to the megaphone. They're considerably helping him in the lead up to 2024 by keeping him off the social media platforms where he'd otherwise be constantly putting his foot in his mouth and reminding center voters why they elected Biden. The best thing social media companies could do if they wanted to stop the inbound 2024 Trump campaign, would be to let him actively Tweet.
Not to mention the internet is global, so really they can't enforce anything.
> Priti Patel considering removing right to anonymity on social media to stop ‘relentless’ abuse of MPs
If they weren't so corrupt and inept they wouldn't be subject to 'abuse', it comes with the job.
Edit: also to add, abusing people online is an easy form of 'slactivism', people let off steam, it keeps them lazy and complacent, stops them taking action in the real world.
If that venue is removed, i.e arresting people for name calling on Facebook (which is already happening) then actual actions in the real world will escalate and dealing with name calling will be the least of these peoples problems.
It indeed comes with the job, but I think you are trying to shift the blame too much. Politicians cannot possibly do their job in a way that appeals to everyone and step on no one's toes. And some people out there are not entirely sane and the Internet has given them wings.
Every public figure, not just politicians, is a target of stupid hate. Actors, singers, journalists: if your face surfaces on people's screen too often, you will collect a team of disgusting haters.
The job of politics is contextually assigning weights to the interests of different social components: that some temporarily lose something as their interest is valued as minor in a big picture is part of the game. The phenomenon of «corrupt and inept» is completely different.
Anything can be the target of the hate of morons: that is noise by definition. Move above the noise, and reasons arise why some collect targeted ire more than others. That is not frequency related exposure («too often»). It is, correctly, exposure as «corrupt and inept», and something very frequent in some big tribes (surely 'cultures' would be improper) must be added: bestiality. The ways of the worse populists (speaking not from the head to the heads, but from the nasty bits to the nasty bits) are common, in some areas, to many paupers-in-spirit attempting to be culturemakers owing to the drives of ignorance. Rare in the UK (apparently), extremely frequent elsewhere.
Shifting potentially dangerous content from Twitter and Facebook to small, specialised sounds like a win win.
It'll be another guaranteed win, like FOSTA and SESTA in the US. Thank Congress that child prostitution has moved to places that law enforcement have no access to, and that sex workers require middlemen again in order to work.
/s, hopefully obviously.
They then demonstrated how you didn’t even need the person you were doing this to to be dead, as they got a provisional driving license in the name of David Blunkett. Who was the Home Secretary at the time. And is blind.
Apparently the UK police still use the Jackal method as of last year, though obviously no system can possibly prevent actions by its own enforcement body: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/07/met-police-l...
The UK should propose the outlaw of all bunny killing videos. Relatively benign you’d think, but as a sideshow it would require some kind of way of blocking the bad guy bunny killers and the way to do that is with a Great Wall of China^WTunbridge Wells^W^W^W^W^Wnational firewall.
Actually, it’s even more meta. The UK establishment has no intention of doing anything as base as constitutionally accountable lawmaking. Far better to allow these US corporations to dodge tax on their UK income, then threaten to crack down on the tax dodging unless FB/GOOG/ELLO bend to the government’s privately (and extra-parliamentary) will.
but again, i just want to look at this less from the UK perspective, and to note once again this is some part of the world imagining it's going to create a strong guidelines for how the rest of the world has to operate.
Or it is anonymous tweeters of course.
I noticed one Conservative MP followed by thousands of bots presumably there to make him seem like an influencer to the algo. Then these weird networks of retweeters pile in to amplify what he said.
But it is everyone else who is at fault....