Britain should scrap its online safety bill

Now, it’s not about “stick your head in the sand”, so much as it is realising that on both sides of the aisle you’re reading from the same script - the same paradigm, the same dichotomy of stay or go, the same stage and set dressing. Your protests are expected, appreciated, and necessary, as they further the narrative, and deepen his power - because power flows from narrative, from the ideas which you accept as “just is” within the story, as it doesn’t make sense without them - never mind that it’s all a fantastical fabrication.

This is how kings are made. Johnson has been telling a particular story for a while now, in which he becomes king. It gave him vast popularity in the run up to the mayoral election (apt control of narrative is commonly called charisma), and from there, he’s been punting the same can down the road whilst we all chase it like rabid dogs.

This only ends when a better, stronger narrative comes along - and nobody in any position to challenge him has it.

Labour own a narrative in which they stumble onwards, tripping on their scabbard as they scramble up the dusty ramparts of Fort Johnson, and are stuck in it, as they mistake their narrative for their reality.

For instance, they initially approached the antisemitism debacle by treating it as a valid issue - they played whackamole with the press on it, and it kept the story (“Labour are antisemites”) prime in the public mind. The whole thing has been rather quiet lately, because they changed tactics, are are hiding from that narrative and are hoping it will wither away. It might - but it only takes an ember to rekindle a bonfire.

Rather, they should be getting ahead of the story, and should pick on, oh, I don’t know, the greens, kick off a rumour that they’re a Masonic cabal of drag queen drug lords and make them defend it, and drag the Tories into that mess. The crazier and broader the accusations the better - grapeshot gives a lot of holes to patch, and distracts from the one which hit below the waterline. Play it right and you make everyone remember that it was the Tories that started it, as labour smearing the greens makes no sense. Punching up and doing minor damage makes you look weak and petty, punching down and demolishing an innocent makes you look strong. Children understand this - the world is a schoolyard.

I wrote a little while back about narrative control as being the thing which divides the ruling classes from the consumer classes - I went to a similar school to Johnson, and the main thing you’re taught, albeit largely unwittingly (you have to follow the lessons which aren't spoken), is how to dominate narrative.

So, you want Johnson gone, you need either events to run roughshod over his constructed reality, and that would take something very substantial - or you need a greater master of human reality.

Thing is, as long as the techniques of narrative control remain the domain of the elite, passed on to their children through expensive institutions and family neuroses that spread mimetically through the affected population, the leaders will continue to be from the same caste. Occasionally someone from the outside stumbles over the alchemy of mind control, and they do things with it, often involving gas and guillotines, but it’s the exception, not the rule, and from the perspective of the entrenched ruling classes reinforces the need to gatekeep.

So. Johnson will likely one day go, but the disease that allows Johnson will remain until the next revolution.

[2] TV stations are dead. Sell them all.

If a good health check to my political views comes at the price of an awful mental health check, I’ll pass.

I will seek balanced views. Not a car salesman with the power to influence lives.

I've personally noticed a tone shift since the referendum towards stronger conservative views in the Telegraph and Times. This doesn't seem to be borne out in polling, but I wonder whether that is because the entire political discourse has shifted: - https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/is-the-daily-t...

Because the media are fairly non-central (particularly the right-leaning media), it's not very easy to find compromise. The stances taking by e.g. the Telegraph on transgender rights is fairly non-subtle. I don't think the rights of immigrants qualifies as a discussion where "it's just politics" applies. Since the referendum, the very core rights and institutions at the heart of the UK have been damaged and eroded, and that makes for conflict.

I think the context of with whom one is discussing really matters, and online for the most part, there is a strong in-group/out-group identity that makes it very hard to have reasonable discussions that don't dissolve into flame wars.

In person, I agree that it's good to be open minded and discuss things with people whose views you might usually not align with.

Indirectly related is the Paradox of Tolerance: that tolerance without limit is eventually destroyed by the intolerant.

But my remark is really about how, in almost 200 comments we've gotten distracted and almost entirely avoided dealing with the arguments on their merits.

While made of smart and sincere people, in-toto governments are idiots, and dishonest idiots at that. We can surely take that for granted. But they remain idiots because we, as citizens, fail to correct them. Have all the "experts", advisors, consultants, lobbyists, think-tanks, specialists and witch doctors not understood the first thing about the complex dynamics of strategic limitation of information hazards, scale, freedoms, or enforceability, to come up with such a blunt and naive bill? How can we "hackers" help them see better? Or do we also not understand, and the only solution that will prevail is "Shut it all down!"

I assume you just mean the state pension here. Occupational pensions have long been a significant part of our pension system that tends to get ignored. The auto-enroll workplace pension introduced in 2008 seems to have been very successful too.

Overall, if I remember correctly, the UK actually has the second total pension assets in the OECD, and one of the highest per capita.

Besides, British pensions are lower because British pensioners paid much less pension contributions than other European pensioners.

It is a fact that the current government stance on Brexit is both exacerbating the labour shortage and damaging the country’s supply chains. And it would be totally disingenuous to claim that this doesn’t stem from an idiotic stance on migration from the EU, that has been part of the Conservative manifestos/programmes since at least 2008 and that lead to their last N electoral victories.

Which countries do you count as “top tier”? I migrated to Germany, I pay the same healthcare costs as anyone else here. I can’t remember exactly what my combined ID card and work permit cost, but it was a 2-digit number. I think naturalisation here is about a tenth the cost of the U.K. also.

The triple lock has been temporarily suspended (with the wages element removed, so becoming a double lock) for 2022-23. The government has repeatedly said, and it was re-stated again by Sunak just the other day, that after this year the triple-lock will be reinstated for the rest of the parliamentary term.

Critically, the consumer price index part of the lock is still in place, so pensions will still rise in line with inflation (as measured by CPI) in 2022-23.

There are indeed many indications of the UK being welcoming to foreigners relative to other countries For example, the UK government's recently announced plan to export refugees at great expense to Rwanda with seven days notice doesn't have majority support in any group except the pensioners the policy is designed to appeal to...

It serves the same role as the US social security scheme with a different accounting treatment.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/how-uk-house-p...

Anyway, absolute freedom of speech doesn't exist and shouldn't exist. It's an insane idea.