Every day we get closer to an Orwellian society. The United Kingdom may already be one.
Almost the entire western world is going authoritarian. Very worrying trend. It has to be stopped.
the only thing that can really stop it IMO is mainstreaming decentralized social media and messaging services.
You’d need to effectively replace Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp etc… The only thing that totally keeps us from 1984 is that all these platforms for now have decided to be relatively free and impartial (compared to how bad it could be). But that could change at any time if the powers that be decide to on a whim. They could completely ban all privacy, pacificsm or any kind of political opposition tomorrow.
No it won’t stop it. Blood and violence is needed but we are sheep.
From the fact Britain produced Orwell, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, I figure the UK has always been some shade of “Orwellian”.
The UK ain’t part of the EU mate
It’s worse in Germany.
France is doing the exact same shit as the UK with age verification…
Not officially, but the same powerful monied interests control both.
Not any more 😭
Old enough to remember how Europeans smugly thought that they lived in some sort of an enlightened and free society.
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Having supposed freedumbs is literally what y’all have been braying made the West different from Russia and China.
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The distinction with China is in actual human rights like people being able to afford housing, food, and education. People not having to worry about losing their job and ending up on the street or being able to retire in dignity.
Whataboutism
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Lol. Incoherent
No one in those countries believes that they live in a free, enlightened society…
But the west always portrayed otself in such a light… Now everyone knows their politics are just as ugly as Chinas, Irans or Russias politics.
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lmfao people literally get arrested for social media posts in UK and Germany
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My comment likewise touches on the fact that people living under western regimes are disappeared in regular course of business. In fact, there’s far more evidence for people disappearing without any reasonable grounds in the west than there are in China.
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On average, US security forces summarily execute three people a day.
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A friend of mine travelled to China, to talk about politics with locals they used his phone because they were afraid of their govt listening in. So yeah maybe the EU/US ain’t so bad.
We are living in Orwellian society, it’s just the news catching up with reality.
The news has been trying to obfuscate this awareness for as long as possible.
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Sign ups for Swiss VPN providers from the UK are up massively, nobody will use their ID for porn.
Must be a great time to be in þe VPN market.
As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.
then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function
A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.
On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.
I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.
Not even close to the horrors of an Orwellian society and saying it is is an insult to the characters in those books. It isn’t great though, and it’s heading in a troubling direction
I think the characters in the book will forgive as that’s a work of fiction and they are not real. That’s like saying I insulted Bugs Bunny for having big teeth. We’ll get through this calamity. ✌🏻
I’m the guy that gets offended on behalf of what ever I want.
and it’s heading in a troubling direction
I’d say it’s heading in an orwellian direction…
Oh no! Wouldn’t want to insult those fictional characters
The UK would be one if anyone could be bothered to run it properly.
They’re looking to install Nigel Farage as their prime minister. The island is derelict.
Not quite.
Farage keeps running around saying “Pick me! Pick me!” and the press keep asking “Is farage a viable candidate?” while not offering the same credence to anyone else.
The British public are “We’re fucking sick of this bollocks from the establishment” and a lot of them are falling for the privately educated ex city trader Farages nonsense that he’s a “man of the people” because all the centrist parties are saying “aren’t immigrants awful?” in an attempt to distract from their own incompetence and quite frankly, the left is 10 years behind in offering a coherent alternative to all the bullshit.
a lot of them are falling for the privately educated ex city trader Farages nonsense that he’s a “man of the people”
This parallels Trump, but I think it’s mostly not that people are really fooled into believing these wealthy politicians are just like them. I think the attraction is more that the current system isn’t working for a lot of people and hasn’t been for a long time. Someone who offers to tear it down can attract a large following even if they don’t have a good proposal for what to replace it with.
It took a while for me to see that because I find the racist and nationalist beliefs of the likes of Trump, Farage, and the AFD so appalling it’s hard to see anything else.
Definitely, it’s them playing stupid so centrist liberals will mock them because they can’t help themselves and they use that to say to the genpop “look, I’m just like you and these sneering elites are laughing at me, and by extension you”
I think the attraction is more that the current system isn’t working for a lot of people and hasn’t been for a long time.
Exactly. They play the outsider who has the balls but not embroiled in the quagmire, to come and “drain the swamp”
The perverse hilarity of trump saying this is that he is the 1%, he is the trust fund kid that had everything handed to him on a platter. He literally is the swamp (a corrupt child rapist)
Farage in the UK went to one of the top schools (Dulwich college) where he was disciplined for singing Hitler youth songs. He got a job in the city through his dad as a commodities broker before going into (disrupting) politics and people seem to believe his shit when he acts like he’s one of the common folk!
People need their heads banging together falling for that shit!
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As an American it’s nice to see were not the only ones in a complete downward spiral.
EDIT: wild that there are users pretending to be butthurt by this obviously joke comment so they can farm upvotes from the tens of users on Lemmy
As an American, no it’s not nice. Why would I want more of this shit elsewhere?
Also, Americans are subject to supporting this bullshit. If any company in the us (or in the world really) owns or maintains data that the EU qualifies as adult-oriented, they have to either maintain a means of actively prevent EU users or support the filtering and tracking that the EU mandates. If not, they can be fined by the EU, and as long as there is a financial relationship between the us and EU, the fines will be enforced.
This has global impact.
I’m curious if more companies will move their hosting to countries that are non compliant with EU regulations and move to accepting payment from cryptocurrency only. I would not be surprised if x-rated content providers were to move to such places.
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Wishing ill on people, eh?
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Thanks, but you’re a tad late
Nice? I wish it was just the US so getting to another country would make it safe for us. This is awful.
It’s nice to see that the rest of the world is just as bad as U.S.
The EU is using genocide censorship as an excuse to abort all “freedom” laws. A hillarious twist.
Orwell never could have imagined society as it exists currently.
For the age verification is it possible to sign a petition? I think is not too late to join forces… or anything but not letting them go further… as of the chat control probably only contacting the representatives. I really hope lawyers and businessmen try to fight it…
how will this “client side scanning” be implemented?
it’s, not only worrying, but very confusing.
Have you already written to your members of parliament about chat control, and possibly other matters? Seriously, do it. There is very little you can do, but this might actually help. Slightly. Maybe.
Is this thread about the rising fascist movements? Oh…
Is it about the refugees from their colonies they drown in the Mediterranean? Oh…
Well is it about the pivot from renewables and nuclear to oil and gas? Wh… well what is…
Oh. This is a thread about your online treats.
#1 on lemmy ‘top in last 12 hours’
you are saying that as if all (or any) of those would have started to be a problem just in the last 12 hours…
and this is not about “online treats”, but online threats. It’s not just netflix, amazon and other silly unnecessary things, it’s everything, including every forum where people can organize and discuss things, fucking youtube with their tons of knowledge based content, …
but sure! we have 4 other problems, count climate change too, that’s 5, we really should just ignore this one because it’s literally meaningless!
You’re right! I forgot about the genocide your governments are enabling!
