UK Proposes Even More Stupid Ideas for Directly Regulating the Internet | Hacker News Reader

UK Proposes Even More Stupid Ideas for Directly Regulating the Internet

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218 pointsgroffee129 comments

This is the same country that considered their advances in computing during World War 2 to be so important that they hid them and left the USA to capitalise on the innovation.

We'll leave our poor UK cousins to carry out their "techxit".

Well, you just reminded me some urinal's brand "Brexit", no kidding.

Internexit

Yes, we are great at sacrificing long term benefit for short term advantage.

Apparently our ability to break various crypto systems was regarded as too sensitive. I believe we continued to break encrypted communications for some time after the war, including those of our allies.

Would be interested if anyone knows of a good history of this aspect of post war Britain.

Sexism is apparently a big reason. Many of the early British computing experts were female. At some point it was "professionalised" and these skilled and experienced women were displaced by less skilled and less experienced men.

Here's a New Statesman article about it: https://archive.is/zsijz

I've talked to a scientist couple who lived that !

Basically : women were obviously too dumb to do calculus (/s), they had to do discreet math. Then, the wife managed to pin down the characters the lab had to look for (it was statistics applied to biology/agriculture, before ADN was discovered). In the papers, only the couple family name appeared, no mention of 'madam', and it was declared once.

Fast forward two children later, she wants to come back to do science. Couldn't go back to the lab, refused to hire her. They both moved to another university who accept her to punch cards. She's a trained mathematician BTW. I think we're around 1965 or a bit later.

She basically take over the department. Every code has to go through her. The improvement in computation power make that if you want to make realists data models, it's way faster to use computers now. Even the husband has to go through his wife, before semi-joining the department (basically still a biologist specialized in population/genetics, but now he works with a lot of computers). A late child happens (71, my godfather), but this time the husband managed to keep her place. Then a bit later mainframes appears in the university , uni administration gains power over labs and departments, she is basically demoted to an advisory position (and the husband promoted to thesis master), and decide that she does not have to work for ungrateful bastard and just left before the transition to new computer is done, basically making all dependent departments loose multiple years.

> considered their advances in computing during World War 2 to be so important that they hid them and left the USA to capitalise on the innovation

Can you expand on that or provide a link? The codebreaking work (Colossus) was kept secret until the 70s but the researchers involved went on to successful academic and commercial projects immediately after the war, with ENIAC (a more general machine than Colossus) built in 1946. The story of the UK's computer manufacturing industry over the ensuing decades is a sad one, but I'm not convinced government secrecy over WW2 technology had much to do with it. I'm no historian, though, so perhaps you can set me right.

I think RSA is a more important example than WW2, but the GCHQ version was only 4 years ahead, 1973 rather than RSA's 1977.

possibly having most of the political leadership made of landed gentry / old money isnt beneficial to the development of society, as changes could easily became a threat to the status quo, thats why finance became the national industry post WWII, it aligned with the interests of the top brass.

This is something that comes up time and time again with our recent string of conservative governments, going back to Cameron. At this point I'm pretty convinced that it is a dead cat strategy to avoid us talking about the lack of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets.

Or maybe I'm just being hopeful.

How do people in UK feel about the food shortages?

Do they blame brexit?

I like to blame Brexit. In reality it's a combination of things going on, but Brexit certainly exacerbates them.

A lot of Europe is suffering shortages the same though, it's just that in the UK the supermarkets refused to pay more.

Whereas like here in Sweden you can buy tomatoes, but they now cost $10 per kg.

Production costs varying over the seasons or supply availability I can understand.

I can't understand how /every/ UK supermarket chain made the same decision to decline the higher costs without asking myself if they spoke to each other about it. Emergent behaviour caused by racing to the bottom?

Anti price gouging laws prevent them jacking up prices when there is tight supply. They literally can't offer to pay more.

And yet there is price inflation. How is that any different?

What laws? Would be interesting to see some analysis of this.

This is nonsense. There is no UK "price gouging" legislation applicable to paying more to import foodstuffs

The law is against 'unfair business practices', but the Competition and Markets Authority took action when businesses raised the price of hand sanitizer when there was lots of demand in 2020.

Now businesses generally can't make big price shifts due to increased demand or constrained supply.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-and-trade-bod...

The CMA investigated whether firms were stockpiling hand sanitizer and making excessive profits on it by creating artificial shortages, at a time when hand sanitizer was being promoted as an essential good. As your link acknowledges, they then promptly closed all the cases without further action.

Paying more to suppliers to import a particular non-essential foodstuff in a year in which most food prices have risen is even less likely to invite action.

If fuel prices can legally double overnight and fuel vendors make larger markups as global prices stabilise without the CMA batting an eyelid, it's quite hard to pretend that the CMA is the obstacle to us having access to the same food supply chains as European supermarkets...

Except that isn't a law. Although if they were all shown to be acting in concert, not buying tomatoes in order to get a better price. That would be illegal.

Well, it's winter now - I'd expect off season fruits and vegetables to be more expensive? Or do you mean that tomatoes are more expensive now than last winter?

"off-season tomatoes" hasn't been a thing in decades. Tomatoes are available at affordable prices all year long.

Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

Where I live ( France), at the height of the season, and assuming you live in the south, good tomato will cost about 2-3$/kilo. In winter you can indeed buy tomatoes (for more money) which look like tomatoes but are tasteless and are therefore a different kind of product. It might be possible to get good tomatoes as well, but I assume this will incur a significant premium, at which point I no longer consider them affordable.

>Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

They have always been affordable, now they are not

I understand what you mean, I may not have been very clear at all by adding product quality to the mix. So let me try again.

At least in France, there are price fluctuations : typically in season is 2 eur/kilo and off season is 4 eur/kilo (and these are current prices), which means twice as expensive.

My question to the poster living in Sweden was, given that we are in winter: are in-season tomatoes 10$/kilo as well, or is it only the case for off-season tomatoes, and in-season are still 5$/kilo, which, while expensive, is much more affordable ?

You should try canned tomatoes.

I sometimes use tomatoes for my winter dishes (pizza, Ukrainian borscht and Indian Dahl), it used to be terrible. I've since learned that most canned vegetables do not have anything added when canned (not even salt or similar, it's just hot water basically), changed to that, and now I cook almost as much in winter than I do during summer.

This is very true, and what I do now. This doesn't work for all vegetables, but works really well with tomatoes.

Grown in massive greenhouses require electric etc thus the cost has gone up because the cost of fuel has gone up, including transporting these things across the continent.

Thanks, this is very interesting. So basically the on/off season cycle gets a lot worse because off season requires more power.

I still do not get why people buy those sad pale tomatoes in winter.

I've never seen a "sad pale tomato", regardless of the season.

The dutch greenhouse tomatoes were so sad and pale in the 90s our eastern neighbours called them 'holländische Wasserbombe' (dutch waterbombs). They're better nowadays. As it turns out it's more profitable to plant tomatoes people actually want to eat...

Tesco tomatoes are a bright, happy red - and remain so even after six months in the fridge.

Yes can't easily use the colour to judge how tasty tomatoes are, some of the best ones I've ever had were a big green looking, but were grown in the Portuguese sun naturally.

Not enough. UK popular media reporting focuses on the supplier's blaming this on 'the weather', or energy prices in production countries [0][1][2][3].

No real discussion on how European shelves don't appear to have this problem.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64718826

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/22/aldi-asda-m...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/tesco-and-aldi-to-ration-some-veg...

[3] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/food/1737097/Supermarke... ... etc

A big chunk of the problem is competition law preventing prices increasing in events like this.

Supermarkets in France just increase the price for tomatoes for a few months and pay suppliers slightly more to get the stock they want.

In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption, meaning suppliers prefer to direct scarce goods to France instead, where they earn more. That makes scarcity in England worse.

Citation? I've seen two articles on UK price inflation and none of them mention this problem of competition law. Price inflation does exist in the UK.

[1] "According to the BBC report, the UK “imports around 95% of its tomatoes and 90% of its lettuces, most of them from Spain and north Africa, according to trade group the British Retail Consortium (BRC).”

Morocco has responded to the shortage claims by noting that the extreme weather that has been sweeping the country has had a huge impact on fresh produce."

>In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption

UK Supermarkets have contracts with suppliers which are not brilliant, its how supermarkets have become the controlling middleman in the food supply chain in the UK, and as they also employ large numbers of people in the UK, some 2nd only to the NHS which is the largest employer in the world making the USSR seem febrile, they can hold the British Govt to ransom with employment figures, like one did in the 90's when Labour got into power.

Just about the only thing they have honoured in the past is the MOD orders for food get picked first at the expense of the store's orders, during the Balkans conflict.

If a law or regulation does not exist for some activity, it will be exploited if it can make the supermarket money and they are so slow paying, ignoring your supplier credit terms, typically taking 6 months to pay up. They offload admin costs onto you by making you submit your invoices into their systems, but you can pay for a more streamlined efficient way to submit your invoices as another example.

They are not alone though, all big businesses have their questionable tricks, and one of the major causes of these shortages is lack of investment in the supply chain for extreme weather, in this case cold weather that hit north Africa and Spain. The UK has been living too cheaply, through efficiency and lack of investment, something COVID also highlighted to the world with JIT supply chains.

Elements of the global supply chain had little to no redundancy built into it for "natural" events, which COVID highlighted and ionosphere heaters[2] continue to highlight under the guise of extreme weather events! [3] The science is out there if you want to be informed and not be fed your opinions.

[1] https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/02/354180/food-shortag...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater [3] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=846f8785-9613-4...

UK competition law does not prevent supermarkets putting up prices, and the Competition and Markets' Authority to intervene in cases of abuses of market power does not extend to UK supermarkets being banned from paying more for imports than French supermarkets

The UK: the place where it is never the fault of Brexit but there is always an obscure and self-contradictory justification for crazy things that started happening the day after Brexit and that never happened before.

Today is the turn of competition laws that, we are told, don’t allow supermarkets to increase prices - while food inflation is in the double digits.

Brexit is a symptom of the underlying incompetence of the British political class, not a cause.

> Brexit is a symptom of the underlying incompetence of the British political class, not a cause.

It's not incompetence. It is deliberate sabotage.

The economy is being smashed to pieces so the Conservatives can steal it and sell the bits off for a quick fix of cash. They're all junkies, who will steal whatever public property they can to sell, and now they've worked out they can do it to the whole country.

I think there's a complex interplay between their incompetence and maliciousness.

They are both, but the incompetence means that the maliciousness, while intended ends up manifesting in some unintended way.

> They are both, but the incompetence means that the maliciousness, while intended ends up manifesting in some unintended way.

Oh yeah absolutely, the whole idea of Kwasi Kwarteng deliberately tanking the pound sterling by about 60 billion so that his wee pals at Odey Asset Management could clean up a few million quid was absolutely premeditated sabotage, but everything that followed on from that was like some fucked-up lovechild of The Sorceror's Apprentice and some malign bottle genie's implementation of the "Invisible Hand".

Partly Brexit, but partly our model of capitalism is broken. Our energy prices going wild means that local growers who rely on LED lighting out of season simply turned the lights off as there was no conceivable way of them producing economically.

That, in turn, is because despite the "subsidy" we have allowed our energy market to be designed around investors rather than consumers. Most of the continent has shielded consumers from the brunt of price rises: we haven't.

Really, it is just the brokenness of a British ruling class that prefers the success of the financial sector to a decent quality of life for citizens. It isn't caused by Brexit, Brexit is just a symptom.

Who would dare to.. but then some have great ideas like one would need an ""economic NATO"" (if such thing would just exist... against China ofc) like Liz Truss recently... lol satire cannot make this better.

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Supply-Chain/Economic-NATO...

I live in the UK and do not follow the news. I am not aware there is a food shortage!

Be careful not to read the news, your larder and fridge will suddenly be bare ...

There is a shortage in some out of season fruit/veg, I really have not been impacted at all. Importing less food staples, and eating/growing food within our climate range is no bad thing.

You really think that an issue as important as basic food supplies is going to be bumped out of the headlines by a tedious government consultation on internet governance?

That's exactly what's happening. I'm in the UK and I was unaware of the problem with our food supplies

Total agreement. As a longtime anglophile, I believe the UK governance literally conforms to Yes Minister.There exists a strong bijection between any ongoing UK crisis and a corresponding Yes Minister episode. I have discovered a wonderful proof for this theorem but the HN margins are too narrow.

I'm going to admit to a little jealousy here. In the states, we get fake UFOs.

Yes Minister is a documentary about pre-Thatcherite Britain.

1. The civil service has been hollowed out; it is now largely reliant on external consultancies and outsourcing firms for many important functions (e.g., Crapita).

2. It’s lost power at the same time. Simon Case is the weakest cabinet secretary in living memory. The last reasonably powerful cabinet secretary was Sir Jeremy. It’s not so much that parliamentary parties are in charge—though they’re not blocked; rather, nobody is in charge at all.

3. Political advisers now no longer find their path blocked to the same extent, but end up burnt out by political events: see the farce of Cummings’ plan to hire some mathematicians ending up cancelled because he couldn’t be bothered to filter out people unironically advocating the sterilisation of the Untermenschen. Since the SPAD system is so ad hoc, it of course manages even less than the Butskellite civil service did.

When someone's life is spinning wildly out of control, they tend to grab onto whatever they can within reach, fixate on and micromanage it, in an attempt to feel a sense of control. Apparently nation states can feel and act the same too.

And centuries, as with the victorians.

And then we have UK's child Canada trying to their spin on the internet with bill C-18. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Strangely, we get flooded with resumes from England and Canada here in America.

Yet the reverse almost never happens.

Surely, these laws will help reverse this brain drain...

But that's about the $. Nevertheless, plenty of Americans do apply for work in Canada.

Quite happy working in the UK still. There is no brain drain past the usual one related to being a tiny island but there is a shortage of staff. And we get paid handsomely not to fuck off :)

Might want to check up on dev salaries outside of the UK, I found the norm pretty terrible relative to CoL in London...

In fintech operations. Salary is very much fine over this side of things. In fact we get paid more than our US counterparts.

"In fact we get paid more than our US counterparts."

That is almost never the case in the UK.

We also get paid holiday and sick leave, and can leave work at 5pm without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Around the 2000 years and the dot com boom, When I worked at a very large and well-known US software company, on-site for an external (German company) partner, their campus parking lots filled up around 9-10 am and emptied at 4 pm. Long midday breaks in the (several) restaurants on campus, or the sports building, many driving off-site for eating in some nearby city (many to choose from on the SF Bay Area peninsula).

True, the Americans didn't get much vacation, when I and some German colleagues went skiing over that long fall weekend (forgot what holiday it was) the resort was suddenly empty exactly at the end of the holiday, while we Germans stayed a day longer.

However, during regular hours it's pretty casual. My job involved traveling to many IT companies all over the country, I don't think the insane hours are anywhere near normal apart from some very few companies and not for long. The best you will get is people pretending to work - often enough I saw lots of "office golf" and web browsing or being out for coffee breaks, lots more than people actually working. That was before the wave of remote work so I think I saw the "real work". I'm fine with it, I think that's sane and reasonable for these kinds of jobs.

On the other hand, what I saw from low-level service jobs was really bad. It seemed to me that those employees do have it hard and are under constant supervision with little authority to do anything or to use their brain, just follow the script and call a supervisor if any actual decisions have to be made, and they really have to work those hours.

My understanding of bigger salaries outside the UK is that they are based on longer working hours, with very little focus on quality of life outside work. This may only apply to the US, but in any case I’ll always personally consider off-work time a very precious requirement.

How many hours do you think the average US programmer works?

probably almost four to eight weeks more per year than the average British or European programmer. In the EU and UK most countries have about six weeks of mandatory paid time off per year, and strict limits on overtime work.

Anecdotally from my own experience in the US I'd say Americans work probably about 20% more hours annually. Even people who had comparable vacation would often only take two weeks, and weekly hours seemed to be closer to 40-45 than the 35-38 that's common in Europe.

edit: btw that's not industry specific, it's a long running trend: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...

I mean, I went from 11 weeks of PTO to 8 and I still have trouble adjusting 3 years later, I can't imagine having only 2.

If I ever see something comparable to https://levels.fyi in UK, I might be interested… but for now, UK compensation levels are usually laughable compared to US or, say, Switzerland (and US companies pay better than Swiss).

There is nothing wrong with this consultation, this article is a hack job designed to make the UK look like some anti tech loony bin.

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/computer-misuse-...

Serizure of IP's and domain names backed by court order is a proportionate response to cyber crime. A magistrate is unlikely to approve such an order unless they have a good amount of evidence that the end-users of these domains and/or IPs are nefarious.

The courts are too busy. Cases like this, with one sided representation, they just do what they're told

Calls for UK ban on pre-payment meter installations made under court warrants https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/29/calls-for-uk...

Courts waved through warrants to forcefit prepayment meters https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64524156

Prepayment meters: magistrates told to stop allowing forced installations https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/feb/06/prepayment-met...

From the comments here, I’m amused how ready people are to immediately believe anything written on the internet without question. Does critical thinking go out of the window if it appears on a website?

The article links to an official government consultation document from the Home Office.

That said, a lot of UK consultation docs never even makes it into parliamentary committees, much less makes it onto the floor even if supported by the majority government, so while people should get involved in the consultation it's a bit early to worry that this has a real shot.

UK invented the Ministry of Silly Walks, so why not the Ministry of Silly Internet Regulation?

Indeed, John Cleese might do a good job of making fun of our government in this instance. He was quite on point with his poke at NFTs, I wouldn't put it past him understanding the nuance in these issues.

Cleese recently said he is leaving the UK.

Given that he was a proponent of Brexit, I think he really should be forced to stay.

I understand the impulse, but punishing people for having the “wrong” opinion is despotism.

This is not a punishment so much as saying that a captain should go down with his ship, or that someone that's made their bed should now lie in it.

It’s not a punishment: it’s simply reaping the benefits of the promised sunlit uplands, after he removed the ability of so many others to move.

Cleese has in recent years unfortunately increasingly demonstrated that he didn't so much act in Fawlty's Towers as just be himself.

Sure, for some weak definition of "proponent"... I'm bored of everything being polarised. I guess it's easier for people who fear discourse in the grey to just shout heretic and hide in the crowd:

> The Monty Python comic had been portrayed in the press as having strong views on Brexit – but Mr Cleese said he has ‘no strong views’ and had been in favour of reforming the EU Commission. “If they don’t reform it, I’m in favour of Leave but I said nobody understands the economic impact,” he said.

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/movie-news/a...

As we can see with Assange case, I think that the core of political leaders there are corrupted by lobbyist, like for Australia.

Was it the same UK government that put Turing into jail?

Technically he was never in jail - he was given the choice between imprisonment (homosexuality was a criminal offense back then) or chemical castration. He plead guilty to "gross indecency" and was ostracized by the scientific community until his death.

The British government issued a formal apology and overturned his conviction around a decade ago.

The state forced him to undergo chemical castration.

Same state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a secret up until after his death.

Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth became Queen and head of state. She could have simply overturned his conviction. The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.

If only the British government had extended the same humanity to Turing himself.

It’s not crazy, it’s exactly what would be expected from any State throughout history. The people who are crazy are the ones who expect something different. As far back as Plato’s Republic, both theory and practice of State require sacrificing the individual for the greater good - where the greater good is defined by those in power. Of course I fully support the State and you should to or else.

If I understand correctly, the “chemical castration” that Turing was subject to, is the same substance that nowadays US kids with gender disphoria are prescribed.

There’s a difference between using it as treatment vs punishment though. That’s like saying they use the same substance for lethal injections (pentobarbital) for treating anxiety.

The US prescribes Diethylstilbestrol against gender dysphoria? I would like a source for that.

You mean the effects of drugs have different uses in different contexts?! What?! That's amazing!

Next you'll be telling me warfarin can be used for something other than killing rats!

What the UK legal system did to Turing was barbaric.

Let's agree on that.

> Had he not cracked the enigma's cryptography ..

Err - that was some Polish cryptographers, they also designed and built the first bombes (mechanical decrypters).

Enigma wasn't the only or most significant crypto system used by the Germans during WWII either - William Tutte cracked the Lorenz cipher and Bletchley was packed to the gills with talented mathematicians and engineers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...

Wikipedia article "Cryptanalysis of the Enigma" from your first link mentions also Turing's involvement.

Absolutely, he came in late stage and built upon the work done by the Polish mathematicians who reverse engineered and "cracked" the enigma encoding in addition to building the first generation bombes that mechanically automated decryption stages.

I'm a fan of Turing's work, his crypto contributions, his work on the halting problem, his mercury delay line memory tubes, etc.

I'm not a fan of stealing credit from the Poles that deserve it.

The monarchy hasn't directly interfered in government or law like that for a very very long time... it would have established a difficult precedent for Elizabeth II if she'd on day one suddenly did so

I consider this to be direct interference

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

Indeed if it's true and accurate, that would be.

Horrible indeed but it wasn't just Britain that failed in extending humanity. According to Wikipedia, in America, 'Prior to 1962, sodomy was a felony in every state, punished by a lengthy term of imprisonment and/or hard labor'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat...

Same state, different government.

No, because 1) Turing wasn’t jailed and 2) The Government doesn’t put people in jail; that’s the courts.

Speaking from a US standpoint:

1. The legislature makes laws

2. The courts make judgements based on those laws

3. The police officers drag people into jail

All 3 are part of the government.

The UK isn't the US. The UK government does not work like or even resemble the US government.

Looks the same setup as the US. Courts are part of the government https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/our-justice-sys...

Here’s the relevant part to this thread from the page you linked:

“The justice system is one of the three branches of the state. The other two branches are the executive, or the government, and the legislature, which is the two Houses of Parliament”

In the UK, "the Government" is a phrase more akin to "the x Administration" (where x is the President) in the US; although technically it includes the parliamentary majority as well as the executive.

The latter isn't correct or at least incomplete on two accounts:

- The investigators and prosecutors are dependent on the government.

- A judge sentences, but doesn't carry out the punishment.

But certainly the initiative to investigate and prosecute Turing did directly come from the government. It was after all the PM who apologized for it.

In the same sense that the Biden administration put homosexuals, suspected communists and people who violated desegregation laws in jail, perhaps...

Totalitarian country with beautiful parks.

I once again find myself apologizing for my country and trying to explain that in 20 years our (very severe) boomer infestation will be fixed and we'll be a real place again.

Sorry.

I'm afraid to say that in 40 years, the next generation will be apologising for you.

Edit: by which I do not mean to insult you. I am saying that Britain has structural and cultural problems that transcend generations. It's popular for younger generations to blame "boomers", but in reality later generations will come in for the same criticism.

They will!

Though I don't think any generation will every be as spoiled as the boomers. I doubt I'll get to pull half the shit they have even in my wildest dreams...

Not likely. Millennials aren't undergoing conservatisation with age. We'll likely be the first generation to leave the country better than we found it since the silent generation.

There are historical reasons for why this is, too: the looting of the public realm in the 80s was designed to make working class people (largely boomers) think like conservatives by giving them a chance to "win" from their capital (especially houses) rather than their labour. Once you sell this stuff off, there's nothing left to bribe the next generation with, and here we are.

I'm sure we will make some mistakes, but we simply don't have the opportunity to do as badly as the current boomers are doing.

> I'm afraid to say that in 40 years, the next generation will be apologising for you.

No doubt they will be deeply critical of our permissive and egalitarian views.

I'm disappointed to see that teenagers these days are very much aligned with the Blackshirts, splitting off into increasingly fragmented groups that they define by their weirdass microdifferences.

I'll be dead by then, though, but I'll still be right.

I've never quite understood why saying something like this is still socially acceptable.

I know that my own Mum and Dad didn't vote for the current government nor do they support blunt, poorly thought out Tory policy. Yet I know so gen z and millennial people that do.

If you want to apologise for something why don't you take responsibility for your own ageism, it's repellent.

To charitably interpret parent’s comment, boomerism is a state of mind and not exclusively an age bracket. There are plenty of young boomers and plenty of boomer-aged open minded people.

tirrany of majority is a thing, Boomers are one of the majority groups in society thanks to their lower childbirth rate. Hoping their biasies die with them of old age is a meek statement.

I'm personally really angry at the amount of debt it will be left as inheritance by our subsidized european parents/grandparents among a lot of other "intergenerational gifts".

Assuming there's anything left of the country and it doesn't devolve into a lawless wasteland once basic infrastructure like healthcare, law enforcement, education, transport, etc has collapsed.

Here is something even more stupid from the UK:

   Reading ‘Lord Of The Rings’ And ‘1984’ Could Lead To Right-Wing Extremism, Gov’t Report Warns

https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/16/reading-lord-of-the-rings...

Edit: Someone from the UK govt downvoted me :D

Do you have a source that actually quotes the government document it references? Your link is just a rehash of an original piece which itself offers literally no evidence of it's accuracy. In point of fact, I searched further and found this[1]...

>Fox News Digital could not verify the extent of the list of books, movies and shows flagged under the government program and the Home Office could not verify the existence of the list.

As of now, Murray's claims are the only thing any other outlet has cited as "proof"; can you provide something a bit more substantial before possibly spreading FUD?

[1]https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-counterterrorism-program-fl...

William Shawcross's Independent Review of Prevent [0] has on page 24

> 3.46 While the products related to Islamist terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology, mostly Islamic State and al-Qa’ida, much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold for even non-violent extremism.

> 3.47 This material tends to deal with broader themes and often covers content that relates to narratives on social media. These products not only covered non-violent far right extremism, but also examples of centre-right debate, populism, and controversial or distasteful forms of right-leaning commentary and intolerance. Some of this material falls well short of the extremism threshold altogether.

> 3.48 I saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”. The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon.

Emphasis mine.

So it is certain that some mainstream books were considered signifiers of right-wing extremism by Prevent's Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU), but I haven't seen any official publication of exactly what the list contained.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-revie...

So, in other words, "No". I had already ctrl+f'd the Shawcross review document for specific titles referenced by Murray and others, and nothing was listed.

The more I read about this, the more it feels like far-right circles are seizing on your highlighted point and adding their own "details" (eg, Murray naming specific books), or spin, to push a narrative that supports them.

1. Give me an example of this set "historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon," or do you think the set is a null set?

2. This is a common pattern in left wing propaganda I have seen play out. Example:

  Propagandist: “Plain bellied sneetches are bad"    
  Mary, the plain bellied sneetch: Am I bad?     
  Propagandist: Lol, show me where I mentioned "Mary" is bad. Plain bellied sneetches are always eager to jump to conclusions! lol.

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