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Our new online safety laws will make the internet a safer place for everyone in the UK, especially children, while making sure that everyone can enjoy freedom of expression online.
From the summary of an early reading of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, 2022.Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Hillaire Belloc, Matilda, 1907.
There are doubtless many technical differences between soft and hard totalitarianism, but one of them is surely the nature of power at its point of application. We might call the infringement of power as it impacts the individual “capillary”, after the tiny blood vessels that connect the body’s blood supply with its major organs and without which those organs could not function. Power is nothing without its application. Capillary power under soft totalitarianism does not take the form of night-sticks, tear-gas, and jail cells, but often presents as legislation. You will watch what you say in public if you know it may lead to your door being kicked in at 2am. But you will also be circumspect if the law of the land is engineered to outlaw certain opinions, and which, if infringed, could lose you your job, your bank account, and your credit rating. One such statutory instrument receives royal assent (and thus becomes UK law) this month, and King Charles III could be signing away his countrymen’s freedom of speech.
The Online Safety Bill: Emo
The Online Safety Bill (OSB), in its early parliamentary readings, was known as the “Online Harm Hill”, but re-branding was deemed necessary. (The word “harm” won’t go away, however, as we shall see). Governments have to sell legislation to the public in the same way as companies have to sell their product to potential customers, and there are rhetorical techniques that become familiar over time. Here, the stratagem is a classic advertising maxim: use children. With the OSB, the main point stressed to the British media — now a governmental policy delivery system — is the safety of children, who are thus used as a virtual human shield to make commentators reluctant to criticize the bill. This is the same country that endorses drag queen story hour in infant-school classes.
But the OSB cannot distract us with the little ones; it is aimed at adults. The first intimation of special interest comes 23 pages into a 255-page document, in Section 12, “Adults’ risk assessment duties”, which looks at the following:
5d. The level of risk of harm to adults presented by priority content that is harmful to adults which particularly affects individuals with a certain characteristic or members of a certain group. [Italics added].
This category will soon pull to the front of the pack of priorities, and the criteria for group membership will require close scrutiny as it is not inventoried. The issue of who might potentially be harmed is left vague:
“Section 18, 6b: “A member of a class or group of people with a certain characteristic targeted by the content.” [Italics added].
Does this mean that if I go to a Morris Dancing Facebook page and tell them they look stupid in those bells and flowery hats, I have harmed them by the criterion above? We are entitled to expect definitions of these groups and characteristics. We do not get them. We’ll look instead at what might harm these characteristic groups, and at what form that harm might take.
It is always worthwhile, in the UK at least, to look at already existing laws which cover the same area and see if the new legislation has extended powers already in place. With the OSB, we can go back to two legislative instruments which both cover much of the same ground, and show that the OSB, in terms of its capability to repress free speech, has had what we might call “gain of function”.
The OSB includes many things that are already illegal, but these are distractions from the online activity the government is actually going after, and how they intend to close it down. Dan Milmo is Global Technology Editor at The Guardian, and in a piece on the OSB he notes that it has been revised from its draft version to make clearer exactly what it is that is being criminalised, or at least having its criminal status aligned with online communication. As he writes;
The DCMS (The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) has published an updated list of … content, which includes: revenge porn; promoting suicide; people smuggling; drug and weapons dealing; hate crime; fraud; encouraging suicide.
They seem particularly keen on suicide, mentioning it twice. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, incidentally, covers four areas which are pure private sector. The government should have nothing to do with them apart from ensuring financial probity.
It seems to me that these categories are covered by the Public Order Act of 1986, which states that an offence has been committed if a person “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting”.
But it is the second category which introduces what we might call “usable ambiguity”. A new offence, the paper states
…will make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as ‘grossly indecent’, ‘obscene’ or ‘indecent’. Instead it is based on the intended psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress, to the person who receives the communication, rather than requiring proof that harm was caused [Italics added].
This last sentence dispenses with “proof” of “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” and shifts its ground instead to the even more ambiguous category of “psychological harm”, which does not require any proof other than the perception of the individual.
Again, I thought this was already covered, this time by the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, but in fact this is a perfect example of re-engineering legislation. The 1988 Act finds an offence has been committed if, firstly, a communication has been sent via media which include electronic transmission and containing the following:
i. A message which is indecent or grossly offensive.
- A threat, or
iii. Information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender.
Although the 1988 Act goes on to consider the causing of “distress or anxiety to the recipient”, this reaction is measured against what the OSB is calling “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” fit only to be discarded. The checks and balances formerly provided by legal definition are thus being replaced by the unquantifiable measure of “psychological harm” which requires no proof. As always in these times of destabilization, emotio is allowed to outrank ratio.
The OSB specifically and explicitly does away with defined categories, and we are left in the now familiar situation of the perception of grievance, upset, or threat by the receiver of the communication rather than the weighing of these responses against existing objective categories whose presence can be proved or otherwise in a court of law. What is known as “standpoint epistemology” is now present in legislation passed by the mother of all Parliaments.
The British would be used to this had they paid more attention to 1999’s Macpherson Report on the death of Black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. This report stated that any incident is deemed racist if the “victim” felt it to be so, or any third party. Presumably this third party could be your protective mother or another gang member. It’s all about how people feel about things, not what they are and are agreed to be.
The whole idea of replacing objective evidence of harmful online content with subjective perception and its attendant degree of psychological harm makes meaning rudderless and subject to whim. What if I were to write a barbed email to my ex-girlfriend, rich in expletives and full of truths aggressively expressed, and she read it and snorted with laughter, pausing only to have a good laugh about the email with her new boyfriend before deleting it? As I intended to cause distress, have I committed a crime even though none occurred? Or suppose my email was mild and rather affectionate, although it did inform my ex that I had slept with her sister. Does she then put on her tragedienne mask and go out to look for a police station (if she can find one in the UK) to report a hate crime and online abuse, because she is so upset? If emotio is given precedence over ratio when crafting legal legislation, then the criminal law becomes mere mood music.
The government’s wily use of language throughout the passage of the OSB is, as always, worth forensic inspection. Nadine Dorries, boss of the CDMS during the early stages of the bill and described rather appropriately as “Digital Secretary”, wrote the following:
This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech.
Fitting, really. A shrine is where people gather to remember the dead.
As well as the strategic vagueness of “psychological harm” or, as the press release also phrases it, “ruining people’s lives” (the life of a sensitive plant on social media doesn’t take much to ruin it), there is a very explicit type of online Thoughtcrime which interests the new lawmakers. Here, as well as seeing what worries the government as a narrative-spoiler, we see every ideologue’s old and trusted friend: moral equivalence.
The new communications offences will strengthen protections from harmful online behaviours such as coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence; and deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid treatments.
Just look at the company kept by those anti-vaxxers! Rapists, killers and wife-beaters.
Many on the Right are frustrated that a nominally Conservative UK government should come down so hard on free speech, something that should be a core principle for them. But why should they care about the loss of such a liberty when it is the only luxury they can’t themselves enjoy? Three categories mentioned in the early-stage OSB as beneficiaries of the protection the Bill seeks to afford are MPs, celebrities and footballers. These people have no freedom of speech, far less than we little people do, and the Klieg lights of the media are trained on them at all times for potential gaffes or hasty Facebook posts. Of course, they don’t care if the peons go to jail for voicing an opinion. MPs have to spend every day clinging to the guard rail of the gravy train, scared to death that they might tweet the wrong thing and lose their grip.
Then there is the question of messaging, and the bill aims to end double-ended encryption because, as you have doubtless guessed, this creates “a safe haven for paedophiles”. Won’t someone think of the children? We will be advised to do that while government turns its attention to its real quarry, adults.
Quite apart from anything else, encryption is a feature which attracts users, and if your business niche loses its USP (unique selling point, the grail of marketing), then you are just another provider duking it out with the others, who now have everything you have. But more importantly, encryption is essential for many people in these Stasi-esque times. I use an encrypted service because I have it on good authority that young and zealous social justice warriors frequently work for at least one major email provider, and are not above cancelling accounts for Wrongthink found while they rifle through your private correspondence, or at least correspondence you thought was private.
Media Coverage
British press coverage has been interesting through the course of the OSB’s passage through parliament. Britain’s Daily Mail is one of the leading newspapers in the world now, largely because they adapted to online publishing quicker than their competitors. They are also deemed “Right-wing” by the Left, and always have been. The Mail made some noise about the dangers of the OSB during its early readings in 2022, but the downside pieces tailed off in Spring of this year, to be replaced by features by and about women worried about their children’s potential misadventures online. The last piece the Mail ran on the subject had the headline: “Becoming a mother has convinced me we MUST protect children from the ‘Wild West’ of social media”. The piece was written by Michelle Donelan. Ms. Donelan is not a journalist by trade, but rather Britain’s Technology Secretary, and thus in charge of the OSB. As I said earlier, government has to package and sell legislation like any other consumer good, and the British MSM double as their PR department.
Enforcement
Finally, the government has the problem of enforcement, and for that it has weaponized the Office of Communications (OfCom). This body, among its many other duties, oversees political partiality in broadcasting, which generally amounts to going after the likes of GB News — as I wrote about here at Occidental Observer — while giving the BBC a pass on everything. But now they are free to roam social media looking for suspicious ideas too freely expressed.
Here is confirmation, if such were needed, that big tech are now essentially governmental sub-contractors, very powerful NGOs to which the political class has outsourced enforcement — malicious examples of what the British used to call PPEs, or public/private enterprises. Big tech is now the Man from MiniTru. And the OSB is also a flick of the riding-crop on the rump of big tech to make sure it does what it is told:
Previously the firms would have been forced to take such content down after it had been reported to them by users but now they must be proactive and prevent people being exposed in the first place.
That’s quite a statement. A government is telling private companies not to listen to its audience, but to listen to the government. This is how soft totalitarianism hardens.
It might be assumed that the battle for free speech is being fought on level terrain on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not. While America still has the First Amendment woven into the very origins of its founding constitution, the United Kingdom has no such thing, and is about to add to its own body of regulatory law in less libertarian ways. The Magna Carta is often invoked as the British equivalent of the First Amendment, but this is wishful thinking once you see the denuded state of that founding document. Of the original 63 clauses present when King John signed Magna Carta in 1215, 59 have been repealed. The only important one left states that the government can’t throw you in jail without a trial. What the current government is doing to get round that is to widen the criteria of what can land you in court with the Crown as your opponent.
Conclusion
The OSB is a legislative instrument essentially intended, despite its pretensions, to police social media. Policing speech (or writing, if expressed online) is interesting in the UK. The fact that the actual British police are more likely to be found snooping online or participating in a gay pride march than doing any actual policing is duly noted, but this legislation will empower the state literally to act as commissars of what is said online, and by extension what is thought. It’s okay to like the British Blair — not Tony Blair but Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, which was a pen-name), but he must be lying in an unquiet grave.
The OSB is being presented as the benevolent state guarding its children from the predations of malevolent parties, but its own malevolence will be reserved for adults who speak out of turn. And this type of online infraction no longer leads merely to account suspension or deletion, but in some cases to jail.
We are used to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World being held up as a mirror to our current predicament. But there is a third novel in Britain’s dystopian trilogy. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a politician visits a jail to look for a subject for the Lodovico treatment which is designed to cure the offender of the impulse to violence. The reason the minister wants prisoners released safely back into society, and something of the sort is already happening in the UK, speaks to us: “Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”.
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Leave it to Perfidious Albion to pass “Holocaust” denial laws without a stir. Equally great to protect the business of plandemic/”vaccines”, “climate change”, etc. as well.
Really, the First Amendment’s existence is one of the best arguments in favor of the US’s secession from Britain that I can think of.
On the 8th day, Satan invented the transistor! And hell was wrought.
From Old Victorianism to preserve the traditional to the New Victorianism to enforce the new.
The New is the erasure of Britain.
Britain has been toast for some time…these restrictions only apply to commoners, of course, the nobility and the wealthy continue to do whatever they want, and have sex with children if they feel like it, with Scotland Yard being warned off…And lately they’ve been stirring up a war with Russia, just to make things worse, with a military that can’t even warm Russia up….
Whatever happened to Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner?
MiniTru indeed.
It so happens that I am re-reading Nineteen-eighty Four at the moment and am reminded of Orwell’s astonishing prescience about the way things were going. The day-to-day life of Airstrip One is obviously imagined through a 1940s lens, with a dependence on paper, a monocultural white society, etc. He did not foresee the personal computer of course, nor the invasion of these shores by aliens, but he gets the zeitgeist absolutely right: the self-censorship, the ever-shifting boundaries of what the state considers acceptable, the Niagara of lies it spews continuously forth.
Orwell may have made a conscious decision in the naming of Goldstein as the archetypal traitor and O’Brien as the high-level party member, for he was a working writer and needed to pay the bills. He had fallen foul of Victor Gollancz over Homage to Catalonia and moved to Secker & Warburg, who published both Animal Farm and Nineteen-eighty Four. Frederic Warburg would have been unlikely to approval the reversal of those names that the whole thrust of the novel seems to require.
Bolshevism, after all, lies at the heart of the Party.
“Governments have to sell legislation to the public in the same way as companies have to sell their product to potential customers…”
I can’t for the life of me see why. It’s not as if British citizens had the slightest power or influence over the UK government. Why would they care what citizens think?
A million people demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq. That made no difference. Today most citizens would probably want to see Israel refrain from murdering Palestinians. Who asked for lockdowns, masks, and lethal injections?
But we got them regardless.
The First Amendment’s protections are easily evaded. It forbids the government to punish or prevent free speech – but not corporations or individuals. So the government just has to instruct employers to fire anyone who speaks out of turn.
“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them”.
– Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Ch. XX
The entire British government is funded by the economic activity of the citizens. If censorship was really something the citizens cared about, all they would have to do is cease all economic activity for just one weak, and the whole British economy would come crashing down, putting the entire government out of business.
The British people are enslaving themselves, and it’s not that big a deal to them, since they are being provided with adequate recreational activities.
Unfortunately, one very important point is missing here. The primary aim og the OSB is to protect Jews and Israel from any harm. By that it means, any criticism of Israeli and Jews crimes against Muslims and Palestinian will not be tolerated. For example, if one writes that the Israelis (the Jews) army bombed and destroyed the Al-Ahli Christian Hospital in Gaza murdering more than 500 children, he or she will face dire consequence.
Remember, say what you like about the Nazis, the Nazis never bombed a hospital full of Jewish children. No Moslem ever spat on a Christian priest in Jerusalem. Jews are doing it every day. Don’t dare to critique Jews online. The OSB will get you.
It’s hard to believe what’s happened to Britain in recent years. The place is unrecogniseable from when I lived there for ten years. The Grey Zone’s article on the persecution of Craig Murray spells out the oppressive, totalitarian measures now in place as well. It’s disgusting.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/17/assange-craig-murray-detained-uk-terror/
👍👌
An interesting idea. I have also recently re-read Nineteen-eighty Four. You have it wrong.
Orwell/Blair was with a Trotskyite militia in Spain, and Goldstein is clearly a Trotsky (Bronstein) figure. Whether he now exists or not and where in the fictional time is irrelevant.
As a reader, Winston has vague childhood memories of the earlier Ingsoc Party.
Also, the idea is that Ingsoc grows out of the British Labour tradition, which also existed in other parts of what became Oceania. They may have copied Bolshevik (at the fictional time, Eurasian) techniques and attitudes, but have a separate origin.
Animal Farm is more clearly a simple allegory of the history following the Bolshevik coup d’etat, Snowball = Trotsky (Bronstein) = Goldstein, Napoleon = Stalin = Big Brother = Ingsoc Inner Party.
In the two more Jewish of the three 1950s film and television adaptations (i.e. the two other than the BBC adaptation), they change Goldstein’s name so that it isn’t identifiably Jewish, in one it becomes ‘Callidor’, I forget what they made it in the other. That runs counter to your thesis.
Well articulated.
Notice that in the carefully worded legal language of the First Amendment, freedom of speech and of the press are not enumerated as positive rights that people possess, but rather as activities which only the national Legislative branch may not infringe upon. In the next clause of the amendment, Bill of Rights author James Madison specifically defines peaceful assembly and petitioning the government as rights of the citizenry.
In eighteenth century legal usage, “freedom” was synonymous with “privilege” or “immunity,” defining something granted (or removed) by civil or clerical authority, whereas “rights” were considered natural and inviolable. Notice also that this amendment provides no protections of these granted freedoms from the Judicial or Executive branches, or state or local governments or non-governmental agents.
Anti-Federalists, primarily wealthy men fearing that a strong central government would infringe on their local power and privileges, demanded some guarantee of rights as a condition of accepting the new Constitution, so attorney Madison craftily created something that appeared to do so.
Britain is vile shit with vile shit governments but a left wing, libertarian, counter culture, upbeat working class population totally ignored and terrorized by these Nazis in power.
Oops! I meant to thank my respondent!
Would FOIA requests in the right places reveal those communicated instructions?
Britain, that exemplar of the Nanny State, has doubled down to become the Ninny State.
Watch out, USA. Many ideas, from silly to destructive, cross the pond. It could happen to you. Be glad that you are fortunate to have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. It beats the alternative.
The 1988 Act finds an offence has been committed if, firstly, a communication has been sent via media which include electronic transmission and containing the following:
i. A message which is indecent or grossly offensive.A threat, or
iii. Information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This means all Unz commenters, are guilty and if living in the UK should be jailed. Its all a bloody nonsense ! The way around this is very simple. Use the mail ! LOL
Hence a chap can send an anonymous note to a hoe that says “You are a slut tart who likes to gobble black cock. I hope your Jamaican BF gives you an STD that rots your tongue and kills you !” Be sure to use gloves, wipe the envellope and indecent note clean and do not lick the flap or stamp LMAO.
This fulfills all the requirements of the crime bill but when the Police show up you can innocently say you dont know anything about any letter or even the recipient.
This is a no win for the long arm of the law. These days people dont have any spare cash so fines are a non starter. If the alternative is jail there is no space what with all the violent criminals already locked up and languishing at taxpayer expense. As a final revenge, when the dust dies down you can send an anonymous letter to the chief constable saying ” Your wife has a nice pussy and loves to give head. She likes my BBC even more because apparently you cannot get a rise from your small willy. Keep chasing those criminals so me and my mates can keep boffing her. PS dont forget to get beer this week”. Copy the rest of the policemen at the station. LOL
The atmosphere in the UK is oppressive but only for whites. The darkies and hordes of refugees say BOLLOCKS to any and every law. Will they pursue Abdul in a no-go area for threatening to throw acid on one of his wives Farida because she is fucking Mohammed and Faisal ? Whites need to follow suit and get foxier. Until you get to the stage where you dont give a shit these daily and never ending laws will pull a chap in every direction driving him to drink.
In the meantime you can imagine the cost to chase down senders of millions of daily vile indecent emails etc which threaten bodily harm. The law can barely keep up with the murders, knife attacks, assaults, robberies and rape.
I met a London Bobby in Boquete/ Panama this past summer who sold his flat, took his pension and fled the UK. The UK is also on track for losing policemen who have had enough and are not only leaving the force but fucking off out of the country.
Meantime, to continue your written vendetta against people who have pissed you off stop using electronic means. USE THE MAIL !
working class people are too stupid to figure out that it is quite easy to get around this using certain operating systems and with OpenSSH configured as a VPN with the SSH traffic anonymized through the tor network or chaining it to go through several international hops.
Silly moron : the internet is not for stupid peasants !
It’s true that there is a (perhaps rather significant) difference in language and wording between e.g. the First and Second Amendments:
vs
Perhaps there is historical background to the word choice, some debate at the time vis-a-vis ‘shall make no law’ vs ‘a right of the people’.
However a decision like Schenck v. United States, as well as the various gun laws, shows that a prohibition or a right ultimately depends on a majority of justices willing to uphold it, and/or the circumstances seen as justifying an abridgment never coming about:
The American constitution is a dead piece of paper and it never applied to the American working classes, anyway, you dummy !
At least the Trots are not supporting Israel or the anti-Palestinian censorship.
Palestinian author Adania Shibli “shut down” at the Frankfurt Book Fair
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/19/zylv-o19.html
Many articles at the WSWS condemning Israel.
Interestingly, AOC now supports the Zionist state and sending .missiles for the Iron Dome.
AOC backs US funding of Israeli missile defense
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/19/zblj-o19.html
This isn’t too politically inclined, but Sunak is trying his hardest for a smoking ban. A nanny country in a nutshell. Nothing surprises me anymore with totalitarian approaches of things.
Am re-watching the most Jewish TV version of 1984, made in 1953, in that one Goldstein is re-named Cassandra, a woman’s name.
Any rule, law, order or clause in a constitution or other document seeking to define or limit government which endorses a violation of the individual and collective rights of humanity should be unenforceable world wide. I believe the constitution took away more rights than it defended.
Wake up humans, the governments that govern you exist at your pleasure, not theirs.
Governments are given names, problem is: names are identifiers of objects [“UK, USA, RF etc] which can serve as convenient proxies to enable the very few to hide their actions, corruptions and intentions. The very few are those who occupy positions of authority within the structure of governments and those who direct, command, influence or those who have relations with those very few, for purposes not related to the betterment of, and to the equality of, all mankind. <- it is this feature of government that recognizes corruption anywhere in its system is unacceptable.
But several human rights have not yet been expressed in the documents that govern those who govern.
1. A guarantee to timely, adequately, accurately and precisely inform those who are the governed about the conduct, affairs, and relations of those who perform the duties of government.
__The right of the governed to be fully informed means no government official, no human in any department __of government no contractor and no special interest beneficiary to a government should be empowered to __conduct any part of the affairs of government in secret from any of its citizens.
Secrecy allows politicians and others to engage in corruptions and to use false hoods and deceptions to justify them.
2. Included in the documents that govern those who govern should be guarantees that the few cannot arrange or __provide for their own security such that the few cannot be removed as a result of an expression made by the __collective majority of those who are the governed.
In other words, governments must warrant that those who serve it functions, are vulnerable to removal whenever the collective action of those who are the governed collectively decide removal is necessary.
and of course that means, the collective must be given an opportunity to vote on removal whenever removal comes into question.
3. Included in the documents that govern those who govern should be guarantees that no action may be taken __by the few without first receiving a majority or better approval from those who are the governed.
The human right of self-determination as to who and how the collective should be governed, is universal, global. This right already exist in many documents that govern governments, but it is often abridged by humanity itself, because humanity is often negligent in performing its duty to alter or abolish government when those who command governments challenge the collective rights of humanity.
The American Declaration of Independence goes
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. — that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government……..
Human neglect to defend human rights against government initiated challenge is addressed in the American declaration of independence:
"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for One people to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them ….."
Empowered politicians should hold authoritative positions in the structure of government, and programs of government should be prosecuted, only as long as the governed are willing to put up with them.
I have been thinking a lot about Britain lately. They may have “won” the war, but they sure lost the peace.
Just like all the other trend lines, it just means that we will no longer be able to speak freely on the Internet, and will instead, be forced to have private conversations, in person, which is better for organizing, and OpSec anyway.
We’ll be back to passing out flyers, or printing guerrilla newspapers, or maybe trading thumb drives with loads of data installed.
“Big Government” knows that “the masses” are unhappy, and cannot be controlled, so this is just another effort to squelch dissent, and keep it from going viral.
Tyrants gonna tyrant.
Keep calm, and put the kettle on.
The weirdest thing is how the right support this Marxist terror.
Dr. Syed Mujahid Kamran on the origins of the Official Secrets Act.
https://www.mujahidkamran.com/articles.php?id=113
Thanks for a fine article.
The points you raise vividly illustrate why UK is known as Perfidious Albion.
Cynical hypocrisy disguised by Monty Python bumbling idiocy.
Let me guess you are another idiot American ? America — the same country that prosecuted or wants to prosecute Julian Assange and Edward Snowden ? The same American government that wanted to or did ammend Code § 230 of the Communications Decency Act ? :
“…So I think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we had[on the internet], say, twenty years ago—because the surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet—are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free, these clever rats running around the opera house.”–Julian Assange circa 2012
working class people are too stupid to figure out that it is quite easy to get around this using certain operating systems and with OpenSSH configured as a VPN with the SSH traffic anonymized through the tor network or chaining it to go through several international hops.
Silly moron : the internet is not for stupid peasants
Still believing in Santa Claus and “Our Constitution”, are you?
And jesus is coming back aaaaany day now.
Probably not wise to urge people to break the law by sending harassing letters either.
Pink Floyd summed up the country best:
“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. The song is over, thought I had more to say.”
“Thanks.”
Your response will illustrate to many more why it is not just because of the UK “elite” that it is called Perfidious Albion. Even common morons like you contribute.
What a pity you use a Cornish name, amadan.
An honourable celtic nation, but perhaps you are simply a drunk venting.
Your guess btw is incorrect.
Ref Julian Assange, please see —
https://www.unz.com/pescobar/slouching-towards-the-final-solution/#comment-6213805
Moron.
Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Hillaire Belloc, Matilda, 1907.
For the record, this is from Bellocs’s classic “Cautionary Tales for Children”, which is pretty funny and clever.
Yes ! I also believe in the tooth fairy as well. When I was a boy I even saw Santa and his reindeers land on my roof.
Seriously though, as any barrister or policeman will tell you, there are so many laws which even the legal chaps are unfamiliar with, that ALL of us are lawbreakers and thus recurrent criminals. The stupid ones, the small fry are all locked up, but the real criminals, the ones making the serious money and free as the summer birds are our dear leaders. Life is unfair LOL.
These days when dealing in an Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves environment one has to adjust ones behaviour and morals accordingly ie honesty is no longer the best policy.
As for written harassment, we ordinary citizens cannot so indulge. However, if we lay out a few quid, there is always a legal chap who can do the harassing for us “Without Prejudice” LMAO
This is a predator/ prey world and we must each decided which we want to be. What do you want to be when you grow up ??
The truth will hurt our credibility and aid our enemies
You’re a better man than I am!
We lost the Empire in 1914. By 1939 Britain was effectively broke and WW2 left it ruined. Outside the towns and cities, in the countryside, there is something left of what England used to be – Shakespeare’s England, let us say, but what remains is shrinking and being degraded. As for the urban areas, they may be politely described as mediocre. The big cities are the worst, and London is a nightmare. Compare it with Moscow:
Video Link
Conclusion
Human Freedom has been replace by Rabbinical Absolutism.
Note:
Since another word for freedom is indeterminability, human freedom produces maladaptations. But it is also capable of producing adaptations, of course.
Hence its value.
Rabbinical Absolutism, on the other hand, can only succeed in making life less free and more maladpative. The explanation for this is found in the fact that it prohibts any and all feedback and correction, which is the source of human adaptability.
Depends which Trots.
WSWS has long had articles that are surprisingly worth reading.
I suspect that if one met or were at a party with most writers from it, though, most would be much like being with a Forumite, Scientologist, or Trotskyite in general, just creepily cultish.
Can’t say too sure, but as a free-thinking old-school Stalinism with Japanese characteristics and nationalism type, perhaps some may be alright.
To be repetitive, and repeat my own line ‘WSWS does have a surprising portion of good articles’, and I recommend selective reading to anyone on or reading this site.
Only thing to keep in mind is that they still have an idea of ‘Trotskiyte correct line’, and it is sometimes too subtle for the naive to see.
Nope, you are obviously the moron since you replied to only one thing I said. Anything, that happened , to Julian, in Britain or the UK was at the behest of the Draconian American government. America’s goal after WWII was to replace the British empire so now America throws its weight around and causes more havoc globally than the British empire by being more warlike.
Furthemore, Julian used Debian for his exploits and clearly certain, OS’s probably configured : such as OpenBSD and Debian are part of the solution. However, Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means that you are too retarded and incompetent to configure Debian let a lone OpenBSD :
janner@blackhole:~$ neofetch
janner@blackhole
—————-
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) x86_64
Host: *edited out*
Kernel: 6.1.0-13-amd64
Uptime: 2 hours, 8 mins
Packages: 2501 (dpkg)
Shell: bash 5.2.15
Resolution: 1366×768
WM: sway
Theme: Breeze [GTK2/3]
Icons: breeze [GTK2/3]
Terminal: foot
CPU: Intel i5-7200U (2) @ 1.860GHz (cpu freq on lower settings via TLP on battery)
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620
Memory: 2130MiB / 15747MiB
janner@blackhole:~$ dpkg -l | grep firejail
ii firejail 0.9.72-2 amd64 sandbox to restrict the application environment
ii firejail-profiles 0.9.72-2 all profiles for the firejail application sandbox
janner@blackhole:~$ dpkg -l | grep harden
ii hardening-runtime 2 all Runtime hardening configuration files
janner@blackhole:~$
janner@blackhole:~$ sudo apparmor_status
apparmor module is loaded.
53 profiles are loaded.
…
janner@blackhole:~$ sudo ufw status verbose && nmap 127.0.0.1
Status: active
Logging: on (low)
Default: deny (incoming), allow (outgoing), disabled (routed)
New profiles: skip
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-10-19 14:42 EDT
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.00033s latency).
Not shown: 999 closed tcp ports (conn-refused)
PORT STATE SERVICE
9050/tcp open tor-socks
janner@blackhole:~$ cat /etc/tor/torrc | grep 127.0.0.1
SocksPolicy accept 127.0.0.1/8
janner@blackhole:~$ sudo spectre-meltdown-checker | tail > ~/b0rk && cat ~/b0rk | grep SUMM
> SUMMARY: CVE-2017-5753:OK CVE-2017-5715:OK CVE-2017-5754:OK CVE-2018-3640:OK CVE-2018-3639:OK CVE-2018-3615:OK CVE-2018-3620:OK CVE-2018-3646:OK CVE-2018-12126:OK CVE-2018-12130:OK CVE-2018-12127:OK CVE-2019-11091:OK CVE-2019-11135:OK CVE-2018-12207:OK CVE-2020-0543:OK
janner@blackhole:~$ dpkg -l | grep openssh
ii openssh-client 1:9.2p1-2+deb12u1 amd64 secure shell (SSH) client, for secure access to remote machines
https://blog.stribik.technology/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html
janner@blackhole:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep tor
deb tor+http://2s4yqjx5ul6okpp3f2gaunr2syex5jgbfpfvhxxbbjwnrsvbk5v3qbid.onion/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb tor+http://2s4yqjx5ul6okpp3f2gaunr2syex5jgbfpfvhxxbbjwnrsvbk5v3qbid.onion/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb tor+http://5ajw6aqf3ep7sijnscdzw77t7xq4xjpsy335yb2wiwgouo7yfxtjlmid.onion/debian-security bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Hurr Durr Durr … shut up retard ! Bow down before the global hacker rebel elite ! We won’t be saving the masses, just ourselves :
*A moment of silence, please*
*pendragon action mode* : I am pouring some beer, from an Olde English, 40z, bottle on the ground in loving memory of Alan Turing :
“…So I think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we had[on the internet], say, twenty years ago—because the surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet—are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free, these clever rats running around the opera house.”–Julian Assange circa 2012
Hardly, and how? Watching an old video?
Really, one project I would like to do as a commentator, not commentor, on this site would be an essay on 1984 and the three 1950s TV and film versions, am expert on it, but will I ever get around to writing it? Think so, but too many IRL things (tax etc.) to work out first. Earliest start I could imagine, Feb. next year.
You, Simon, do what you can in Airstrip One, joke stickers and posters for example, can be very effective. Must sleeping now. Cheers.
Britain’s Worst Amendment: The Online Safety Bill
I say:
White Core America is proposing a Free Speech Army to bust up and destroy Comcast and Viacom and Disney and Fox News and the internet outfits and all other corporate propaganda apparatus elements.
Once we restore some bit of Free Speech in the USA, that will be the time when White Core America can go bring back some Free Speech to England.
FREE SPEECH ARMY IS ON THE MARCH!
We need a militia-type old stocker aware military command structure to protect and advance free speech and the corporate mass media globalizer goons are in the way of free speech.
Initial funding for the FREE SPEECH ARMY could be provided by the Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP).
Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) further explained:
The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) will pay each American who has all blood ancestry born in colonial America or the USA before 1924 a cool ten thousand dollars a month. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank shall work together to electronically conjure up the cash out of thin air, just like the ruling class is doing now.
Nigel Farage got a big reaction out of his People’s Army rhetoric and the FREE SPEECH ARMY might have polemical legs in the USA.
I recall just a few years back Jew oligarch Moshe Kantor bragged about how Jews would work at creating LAWS to “protect Jews” as laws once passed are very hard to change. So the lying Jews want to be able to silence anything they don’t like.
Free Speech restoration and the political decapitation of the evil and treasonous anti-White JEW/ENGLISH Ruling Class of England will commence when the fiat currency asset bubbles implode.
We are almost at 5% on the 10 year government bond in the USA, but I see that the U.K. is only at 4.65% on their 10 year government bond, and that must go to 10% before the proud and patriotic TRUE CORE ENGLISH Ruling Class can completely and totally politically decapitate the evil and treasonous anti-White JEW/ENGLISH Ruling Class of England.
Implode The Asset Bubbles And Politically Decapitate The Treasonous Ruling Classes Now
The Tory Party in England is anti-White and anti-English.
The True Core English nation must destroy the Jew-controlled Tory Party starting now and the True Core English political party must become the opposition party to Labour in England.
The JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire and the JEW/ENGLISH Ruling Class of England are using mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and state-sponsored anti-White totalitarian multiculturalism to attack and destroy the historic English nation and the historic American nation.
The ruling classes of England and the American Empire are using mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration as demographic weapons to attack and destroy the true ancestral cores of England and the USA.
IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW
DEPORT THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW
FREE SPEECH NOW
POLITICALLY DECAPITATE THE TREASONOUS RULING CLASSES NOW
Oh, it’s still there, but if you say anything from there that offends or upsets a minority, you will be taken to gaol.
Excellent article, tracing the logic of these legal categories, and how they supersede existing laws. Similar laws are being tricked out for Australia – it like an international plan has been put in place …
Hate Speech Child Endangerment
It’s all the same stuff. Germany has long made much use of Child Endangerment, and it’s using Volksverhetzung heavily, too.
Shaddup a yoo mouth.
jews have been making a tough bed (coffin?) for themselves.
Zi0nist owners of US/UK keep the great journalist Julian Assange in jail. The Empire of Lies has been killing Assange, alone with killing any pretense of freedom of speech
It’s awfully hard to challenge Terrorism Act Section 7 for the worst, most despicable neoSoviet shitlaw. This is a law that only serfs of a family of corpsefucking pedos would obey.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7
Britain’s only military competence is gibbeting detainees from front-end loaders for cowardly torture. The islet sustains itself solely by sucking CIA ass, and it will with luck be nuked to lifeless desert in the war their Potemkin military started with sabotage and irregulars in cowardly sneak attacks.
Why do these censorship laws appear as though they have all been written by women?
Be nice to your sister or I will send you to your room without dinner.
Maybe some freedom-loving, rational laws would be useful rather than the authoritarianism that comes with females in the top jobs.
British people need to be banned from the Internet entirely.
This all started with The Race Relations Act of 1965.
Very sad. And so avoidable. The wars with Germany could and should have been avoided. Interestingly, Winston Churchill, the great “hero” of British lore was all for both of them. Pat Buchanan wrote a great book about the unnecessary wars.
I meant that you are a better man for being able to tolerate watching that garbage!
I’m British so I don’t follow US news so closely. But wasn’t there a story about how the federal government asked some of the big social media companies to impose censorship – and that came out in the end.
Thx. for and LOL at the lame and gratuitous insult.
Sunak doesn’t give a shit about kids who smoke – or about kids who do anything, or about anything else in Britain. He’s a useless, do-nothing, imagination-free, privileged multi-millionaire Goldman Sachs globalist Yes-man, who’s just killing time in the UK till he moves across to the US to take up a dozen seats on the Boards of New York and Boston finance houses for the rest of his worthless career. Although he’s figured out that, as Prime Minister, he has to be seen to be “doing something” – or at least pretending to – he’s simply incapable of keeping that gormless, bewildered “rabbit-in-the-spotlights” look out of his eyes, especially when things are going badly. “I’m Indian – How the hell did I get here ??” You were Selected by the men behind the curtain, friend. You’ll find out why when requests for Favours begin to arrive.
The bad news for Sunak is that the good times – when he made the worst conceivable decision any Chancellor could ever have made with no responsibility at all – the 18-month Covid lockdown national salary furlough which promptly bankrupted the country – and then conspired to back-stab and chuck overboard a democratically-elected party leader and serving Prime Minister by blaming him for the economic disaster which HE himself had caused – are well and truly over now. Sunak’s party-wide AND national electorate ratings have been plummeting for many months, and in case his timeless classic Indian incompetence and idleness isn’t enough he’ll also leave the country with one final nice little grenade on the table: a lying, incompetent and deeply dangerous full-on Woke Socialist government next year, which will send what’s left of an imploded “Conservative” party into the political wilderness for the next ten or fifteen years.
With any luck at least it’ll guarantee he’ll be the first AND the last Indian Prime Minister for a few generations.
How do we explain that in the US, it seems we have far more “free speech” than in the UK? The US and its vast array of high-tech spying apparatus, via Google, etc. could severely clamp down on ALL citizens using “free speech.”
Instead, the current UK government is demanding that none of the public be allowed to speak their mind.
What’s most remarkable is that most UK citizens are NOT radically inclined.
Perhaps there’s the reason: the current govt. is inhibiting free speech, merely because they can.
“Perfidious Albion” is only “known” as such by historically-illiterate bourgeois traitors who don’t have the first idea where the phrase actually originated – let alone from whom, or why.
You’re talking about fine, honourable, old-fashioned, hard-working, honest, despairing, lost and naive, trusting English people. You must be thinking about the deranged, hate-driven, anti-White, anti-Christian, Satan-worshipping, nation-wrecking Talmudist Zionist filth who control them – and control everything.
From my reading, your ‘Conservative’ party is screwed as far as the next election. Keir Starmer is married to a Jewish woman, and the children are all being brought up as Jewish, one should really say Israeli.
In his youth and later, he was involved in a form of Trotskyism termed Pabloism (look it up, it’s worth finding out the political history), that was very strange, but really is close to the U.S. variants that evolved into neo-consesvatism.
FOUR years ago we Brits would say “Not a chance of such restrictive rules to remove freedom of speech could be enacted”. But we’re now in the New World Order and those that know the truths must remain silent or must face incarceration.
But, we’re beginning to fight back as millions more realise what the WEF ‘s Elite have achieved in such a short period, through FEAR PORN and heavy-handed authoritarian overreach.
We, the British public, denounce the existence and validity of the, now CORRUPTED, organisations known as the World Health Organisation & the United Nations.
Every injection touted as a vaccine must immediately carry LIABILITY for INJURIES and DEATHS caused by these deadly Gene Editing Poisons!
Mick from Hooe (UK) Unjabbed to live longer!
A subtle revelation and cry for the downfall of your PM Boris.
PenGay (aka pendraggin) thinks of Alan Turing every time he drops his soap in the homo bath houses he frequencies. It has also been proven by Reddit researchers that PenGay is actually a negro American who despises white people for constantly demonstrating what an assclown he really is. Lol