Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

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The outcome I'm observing is isolationism.

Brexit means that doing business with the UK is suddenly much more complex and expensive. Mandatory backdoors would break many products, and then products which rely on those products. The UK has 67 million people, or just under 1% of the world.

What's cheaper:

- Compliance (especially with unethical laws like this one); or

- Dumping 1% of your customers?

The flip side is that if I'm opening up a branch somewhere, will I do it somewhere where:

- A bunch of my tools don't work, and I need to jump through a whole bunch of hoops? or

- Just over the canal in France, across the Pacific in the US, or better yet, a little further over in some place like Czechia?

As with many isolationist regimes, England is also among the most despised countries in the world. Ever seen the Clockwork Orange? England has done some nasty shit to a lot of people around the world. It has no shortage of enemies, but it seems to be isolating itself from its former friends....

I'm waiting to see how this whole thing plays out, but I'm not bullish on the UK. If things go the way I think, I'd feel bad for Scotland. They'll have zero percent of the fault, and fully share in the consequences.

> Just over the canal in France

Issue though is that France seems to be taking a similarly dystopian route in terms of privacy and surveillance.

And it’s not just the thought that a rogue government or police employee can access anyone’s device, nor that criminals can use the same holes to steal data, it’s the idea that we are laying out all the infrastructure needed for an authoritarian regime to control the population. Don't get me wrong, the former two are extremely worrying but the latter is beyond extreme.

It’s as if we are collectively building turn key infrastructure for an authoritarian regime.

Essentially, once the infrastructure is in place, all you need is the right political climate and the wrong person in the right place.

They wouldn't need to spend decades building a future stasi or gestapo. All they need is to adjust parameters and fine tune laws. And with europe being the powder keg it is that scenario is not as far fetched as one might think.

> I'm waiting to see how this whole thing plays out, but I'm not bullish on the UK.

On this front, the way i see it, the uk might eventually split, with England becoming a bit like the Netherlands, or perhaps Austria. A bitter former colonial power, developed, but irrelevant on the global scene. Bullying a developing country here and there, trying to maintain the image, but eventually overtaken.

An alternative is to try and force a conflict where the uk somehow ends on top - particularly since europe needs a viable alternative to germany. But hard to pull through by a country where eggs are still rationed.

  If things go the way I think, I'd feel bad for Scotland. They'll have zero percent of the fault, and fully share in the consequences.

Why feel bad for folks in Scotland in particular? Why not for the folks in London (a larger, more geographically concentrated group, which also voted to remain)?

(Not being snarky - I'm genuinely curious.)

I don't like guilt-by-association, but here's a short list of things the folks in Scotland didn't do:

- Genocide against the people who lived in America

- Bring India to its knees, from one of the richest to one of the most impoverished nations in the world

- Addict China to opium

- Irish potato famine

I'd talk about Africa, but that's a lot more diverse. A lot of England's current wealth came by theft, rape, and murder. If you're living in London, both your social infrastructure and your housing prices are powered by blood money from the British Empire. If you moved to London from Algeria (and I intentionally picked a non-British colony), your children are benefiting from schools funded by interest on investments from blood.

From a policy perspective, things get very nuanced. I'd like to right historical wrongs, but I don't feel good about guilt-by-descent. If your grandparents did something bad, that shouldn't count against you. If you have stolen money and goods, they should be returned. On the other hand, simply living in London shouldn't lead to any policy consequences (and things get especially complex with e.g. Indian or African immigrants, escaping parts of the world devastated by the British).

But I wasn't talking about policy, but whom I'd feel bad for. From an emotional perspective, things are simpler:

- English museums have relics plundered from India, Nigeria, etc.

- They believe they have a moral right to other culture's most prized relics, and won't return them.

Scotland was never imperial, and has had a mixed history with England.

And building even more on the emotional component, I haven't been there a lot, but the way I was treated in Scotland was very different from how I was treated in England. I have wonderful memories from one of those visits, and bad memories from the other. As much as I've only been there briefly, I just really /like/ Scotland.

I read somewhere that more than 50% of London population is immigrants. The immigrants bear no guilt for what English people did in the past, if they live in a house built with money coming from colonialism, they paid money for that, did not get it for free.

English people shouldn't bear guilt for it either. They should learn about it for sure, it's history.

But why people think it's okay to hold the current generation responsible for things previous generations (in this case quite far back) did is just juvenile.

As soon as the "current generation" decides to return plundered cultural artifacts, give me a call.

Here's a short list of things the current citizens of England didn't do:

- Genocide against the people who lived in America

- Bring India to its knees, from one of the richest to one of the most impoverished nations in the world

- Addict China to opium

- Irish potato famine

Furthermore, the narrative that Scotland is subservient to England, and not equally complicit in the historical crimes of the *union of England and Scotland* is misleading. The 1707 Acts of Union [1] were introduced by both nations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707

If:

- Your father became rich as an inventor, creating wonderful gadgets which improved the world

- My father was a warlord

- My father murdered your father, and stole $1M from him;

- invested it; and as a result

- my family now has $1B

- your family is deeply in poverty

You're poor, uneducated, and hungry. I'm at Harvard, have a trust fund, and in connected political circles. I haven't done anything wrong myself, but I did inherit blood money.

What should happen?

It's not obvious.

Great-great-grandfather?

On the Scotland point, all I can say is that it's more complicated than you present. I did NOT present a narrative of either Scotland as subservient to England, and my exact phrasing was that it has a "mixed history with England." I stand by that. I don't think "equally complicit" is any more accurate than "subservient." The last Scottish independence vote was a 45/55 split.

As for "current citizens," you can look up more recent colonial issues, like the Mau Mau Rebellion.

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