East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021) | Hacker News Reader

East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)

maxhertzberg.co.uk

134 pointswalterbell241 comments

In the UK there is "social media intelligence", where AI systems scan the firehose of messages as they appear. [1]

So people have been arrested for posting something online, even if nobody appears to have seen it, and they delete it shortly after.

The policing is selective, depending on political view. For example, there were recently people with placards in London calling for the death of JK Rowling, which is de facto allowed by the police.

In comparison the wrong social media post can carry a lengthy jail sentence. [2]

The difference is so noticeable, it is now called "two tier policing".

If someone perceives something you say as "hateful" they can report you to the police, who can record a "Non-crime hate incident" against your name. [3]

This can show up on enhanced job checks, affecting employment.

It's very similar to a Stasi file.

[1] https://policinginsight.com/feature/advertisement/social-med...

[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-punishment-of-lucy-c...

[3] https://www.slaterheelis.co.uk/articles/crime-category/non-c...

UK has a two-tier justice system.

In fairness to UK, pretty much every place has a two tier justice system.

That absolutely puts no fairness to the UK, but puts all these other places at equal shame.

It didn't used to have:

The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England.

- Orwell

The dose makes the poison, and the UK is getting a big dose right now that they are not used to.

Plus the normal status quo is that you have an elite you cannot offend, now there are protected classes you cannot offend.

@ZeroGravitas bitten by Poe's law :(

You forgot to add a source for your claim that protestors called for the death of Rowling.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/22/trans-activists-...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14638683/Police-inv...

I haven't seen a single example of someone calling for death of JK Rowling specifically in any of those?

The only references to her I see is a sign saying "go shit on a pile of Harry Potter books" and people chanting "fuck JK Rowling".

It's an example of police ignoring death threats. It references Harry Potter, and JK Rowling is the most common target of the "TERF" epithet. In any case, it supports the claim that the UK police selectively enforce speech laws.

The original post said that people had placards “calling for the death of JK Rowling”. It may be that the poster’s overall point does not rely on this specific factual claim. But don’t try to muddy the waters around this: it’s a straightforward factual claim and people are right to ask if it can be sourced. So far it has not been.

If there was a protest where people had signs that said “death to <slur>” while screaming “fuck <member of group targeted by slur>”, and calls were made to defecate on that person’s art, would you say death threats were made about that person? Please take a moment to substitute various groups and people.

The legal system does not operate according to blanket statements. Police make a judgement of whether the death threat is credible. This depends on how specific the threat is and whether it occurs in the context of likely violence.

Ah so nobody called for the death of JK Rowling, but terfs in general, which she happens to be? A death threat by nonintrinsic affiliation if you will? Seems pretty stupid if you ask me.

Perhaps she could not make it her whole identity so that when people say "death to this specific type of bigotry", random people on the internet don't immediately make the logical leap to think people wish for her death specifically?

Hate speech laws are a very convenient tool for an authoritarian regime as their application is totally subjective. You could argue that saying "death to terfs" would mean only to end an ideology, but "death to Islam" would send you in prison as you are threatening muslims. In general, it's the same thing, but depending on the prevailing ideology, Police and courts can apply it selectively.

No, it's not the same thing at all, the same way saying "death to nazis" and "death to Germans" isn't the same thing. Being Muslim or a German is something you're generally born into because that's what your parents are, while the other two is something you actively choose to be a part of your identity as a full-grown adult.

A random dude you meet named Ahmed doesn't automatically translate into "he hates all non-Muslims", the same way a random dude named Hans doesn't automatically translate into "he hates all Jews".

On the other hand, openly affiliating yourself with terfs or nazis does automatically translate into you wanting some marginalised community to vanish or at the very least to make their existence more difficult than yours.

Following your thinking, given that no one is born muslim (it's a religion, apostasy exists), it's ok to say "death to muslims", just as it is ok to say "death to terfs"? If you tell me that the muslim religion isn't discriminatory, I'd like you to do some wikipedia reading about it first. You can start with the status of women, for instance.

The thumbnail might do in case you don’t want to watch the YT video :

https://youtu.be/8LO0I8v8EvE?si=y6numFgiqCYd-eLe

The placard carried by the individual* said “bring back witch burning… JK”.

* I don’t see calling for such a thing as a typical female trait, but then again these protestors did also desecrate a Suffragette memorial, so I expect their ideas are a little confused.

That isn't the part of the argument that needs a source - pretty much everyone who is anyone in the public sphere seems to have death threats made against them and threats of extreme violence are actually pretty common at protests. Guillotines at protests are a reasonably common fixture for example [0]. That is the reason the standard needs to be someone actually doing something before the police get involved - people say all sorts of threatening things in political contexts. It's pretty scary but it is better to tolerate it and let people get their emotions out into the open. They generally don't mean it.

[X] has has been subject to death threats at a protest is a pretty safe blind claim. Particularly for politicians, public figures, rich people, identifiable races and political groupings. Some yobbo will write something stupid on a placard and wave it around sooner or later.

[0] I searched for "guillotines at political protests" as a sanity check and straight away saw a "decapitate TERFs" placard. https://news.sky.com/story/scottish-politicians-and-jk-rowli...

Maybe so, but it's still important to callenge okeuro49's claims. Extremist takes like that give off an air of believability despite being unsubstantiated. Relying solely on the common sense of the readership leads to situations where extremist views simply drown out the rest. It should not be seen as acceptable to present a wilfully distorted view of the facts.

JK Rowling is famous, wealthy, a public figure and female. I guarantee you she has received death threats and the police have shrugged it off as not a credible problem.

Whether they are public or not is more of an academic detail, but given the level of hostility aimed at her it is a pretty safe bet that someone has somewhere whether or not it was reported on the internet. If someone wants to die on the hill of every claim being cited then fair enough, at least it is a principled hill. But this is like asking for a cite that US political debate got heated. Rowling has genuine anti-fans out there, I've seen totally spontaneous wild hate sessions break out against her in my wanderings through the internet. It'll have spilled out into real-world protest somewhere.

The original claim was that people were carrying placards at a recent protest in London calling for the death of JK Rowling. It’s not obvious that this has in fact happened, and it’s reasonable to ask for evidence of it.

Let me google that for you: https://celebrity.nine.com.au/latest/jk-rowling-slams-transg...

I'm just saying, I didn't even check before this comment. And who knew? bunch of death threats targeting Rowling with activists trying to make sure everyone can find her in meatspace in case the threat makes her quieten down. "Did she receive death threats" is really not the part of this to try and question. And if you want to make a point about did someone do it while at a protest - I mean yeah. Yeah they did. Maybe nobody bothered to record it, because that sort of thing is routine and boring.

If someone wants to attack the police response part that I have no idea about. Maybe they did respond and it was exemplary - that is the sort of thing that does need a source. But the death threats part is just another year as a public figure. There are a lot of death threats out there. And it'd spill over to placards.

EDIT And it turned out to be remarkably easy to find a citation, note the "decapitate TERFs" link 2 comments up. As expected. It's easy to tune out because in practice calling for the death of someone at a protest is in practice a pretty minor thing to do. Which TERFs do they want to decapitate if not Rowling? Is there fine print on the back of the sign that exempts her? Its Sky News so I I'll admit that is possible.

> if you want to make a point about did someone do it while at a protest

You make it sound pedantic. When drawing a parallel with the case of Lucy Connolly, the point is whether the behaviour incites hatred or violence.

Ok, so lots of sources that don’t show what was originally claimed (i.e. someone holding a placard at a recent protest in London calling for the death of JK Rowling).

I don’t know why it irks you so much that people would fact check this particular claim. I agree that it’s not central to the original poster’s overall point, but it’s not ok to invent facts just because your argument could probably get by without them.

https://x.com/helenlewis/status/1913857239691006057

Some photos of the placards, including "Bring back witch burning ... JK" and "The only good TERF is a ____ one" with an image of a person being executed by hanging.

The TERF one was posted earlier but obviously doesn’t mention JK Rowling. As to the other example, thanks for posting a source rather than just expressing annoyance that anyone would be asking for one. I think it takes some Yogi-level stretching to reach the conclusion that the person holding the JK placard is “calling for the death of JK Rowling”, but it’s at least in the right ballpark.

You are factually accurate. They probably just meant a warning immolation.

I expect the holder of that witch-burning placard is very much aware that "JK" will be taken to mean "JK Rowling". It's no coincidence.

That so many of these activists are holding signs which advocate the torture and murder of women who disagree with them says everything about their movement.

Oh sure I agree that JK refers to JK Rowling. I just mean that the sign is probably an ironic reference to The Witch Trials of JK Rowling rather than an actual proposal to burn JK Rowling at the stake. It’s in extremely bad taste and I don’t endorse it. However, I personally don’t regard it as a case of someone advocating for JK Rowling to be killed.

Sometimes there is a worthwhile discussion on the reach and breath of policing, sometimes ridiculous people with insane views and 0 technical or legislative knowledge make opinion eds for people to share as rage bait.

Please just look at the other content from the "lovely" Laurie Wastell of the spectator to find the kind of groups, opinions and places she wants to protect vs those she doesn't.

like I would be kinda embarrased to share news sources from people being actively sued for the harm they caused with their misinformation (in their case vaccine lies).

> If someone perceives something you say as "hateful" they can report you to the police, who can record a "Non-crime hate incident" against your name. [3]

this was a law introudced by a conservative goverment, as part of their increase in police tools, which in large part came from support for "anti woke" policing of the pro black protests that came after it erupted in america.

People like the previouslike mentioned Mrs Wastell advocated for stronger sentencing and more police, and now that the leopards are eating the faces of the people who spend all day on facebook sending death threats to muslims she is now so incredibly offended.

Btw another reason for the focus on the NCHI is because the police are swamped, the Conservatives under theresa may cut their budget 40% which meant they have way less people so to keep stats up, you gotta focus on the easy shit.

Maybe if we hadn't brought in consulting types who advocate for stats to show work progress, conservative cuts to salaries and advocated for "blue lives matter" which pushed for stronger sentencing laws we would not be here but somehow Mrs Whitehall and you will take 0 accountability and instead blame "woke judges" or some other nonsense as she does in her article.

If you really believe that your fellow citizens can be easily influenced to undertake extreme actions by a twitter post, why not end democracy altogether? Since citizens are seemingly perpetual minors who lack agency over their actions. This is why all authoritarian regimes absolutely love hate speech laws.

> If you really believe that your fellow citizens can be easily influenced to undertake extreme actions by a twitter post

so words have no capability of influencing people? Why speak at all if it can never change anyones opinion?

See what happens when you do reduction to absurdity of any argument?

But seriously, ask yourself: Is the entire ad industry a sham? Are state actors like the kremlin troll farms, the chinese fake newspapers and the cia meme department all wrong and no one can ever be influenced because they are adults and rational actors all the time? Are objectively effective misinformation campaigns like Brexit not proof of succesful compelling speech through channels like cambridge Analytica?

> why not end democracy altogether?

democracy is about empowering people. Leaving people to construct an identity through heaps of misinformation is not democracy, its insane and it cannot work.

> Since citizens are seemingly perpetual minors who lack agency over their actions.

Someone spending billions of dollars in anti intellectualism propaganda, political smear campaigns and capturing media networks is not the fault of the individual citizens, they are not minors they are victims of targetted hostile information hazards.

> This is why all authoritarian regimes absolutely love hate speech laws.

Authoritarian regimes tend to brag about how free their speech is. America spent the 50s chest bumping while sending people to jail over "communist ties" under mccarthyism, they spent the 60s bragging about free speech while sending students to jail for complaining about vietnam, they spent the early 2000s talking about free speech while punishing allies who did not agree with Irak (like France) and sending people to black sites like Guantanamo. And now they brag about free speech while the sitting president Elon decides which individual words get flagged in his social network and the vice president Trump jails 3 different judges over their rulings

you know all that free speech

Citizens are supposed to have critical thinking to distinguish what's right and wrong, what's true and false.

Freedom of speech allows to hear different views and apply this critical thinking. The problem is that you seem to know better and want to choose what's allowed and not allowed to say, given your political bias and contempt for your fellow citizens.

Last, democracy is not about empowering (what an empty word...) people, but about managing the various interest to end up with something that is acceptable. If a subgroup is being bullied, it is normal that it expresses its resentment. For instance, when white british people are being mass raped, and in some case, likely eaten[0], with no or little enforcement by the Police due to fear of being seen as "racists".

As a side note, all of the examples that you give are about reducing freedom of speech, so I don't really see your point. You could have cited the Weimar Republic, that had stringent hate speech laws, which did not prevent the access of the NSDAP to power.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Charlene_Do...

> Citizens are supposed to have critical thinking

i wish someone didnt dismantle the education department of the federal goverment....

> Freedom of speech allows to hear different views and apply this critical thinking.

thats all well and good except it has never existed in the US, with countless examples of people being jailed for wrongthink it just happened that those people were all leftist. The second accountability crossed the aisle the uproar began. No one gave a shit when people were sent to jail for protesting Vietnam, or when the black panthers where jailed on terrorism charges but the second someone asked if Rupert murdoch should be held accountable for spreading lies for 30 years then it became a chest thumping issue.

> The problem is that you seem to know better and want to choose what's allowed and not allowed to say, given your political bias and contempt for your fellow citizens.

56% of americans cannot read past a 6th grade level. its not contempt, its pity

> democracy is not about empowering

Demos - people. Kratia - power. Gezz someone should tell the greeks they dont even know their language.

> but about managing the various interest to end up with something that is acceptable

that is not democracy, that is politics. Democracy is a form of politics, which has certain principles, like empowering the people (in liberal western democracy this is usually views that spawn from the french revolution, aka humanistic principles, education and voting and creating political groups to represent interests.

> If a subgroup is being bullied, it is normal that it expresses its resentment.

being bullied and FEELING they are bullied are different things, and certain personality disorders, education levels and religious views have a much larger overlap with those feelings. I personally do not care that a bunch of rich christians feel they are the butt of the joke, they have both monetary and political capital their feelings are literally not supported by reality. And arguing about their feelings is a pointless exercise in trying to explain to a entitled child why they are wrong.

> For instance, when white british people are being mass raped

not happening. Source: white british person.

> with no or little enforcement by the Police due to fear of being seen as "racists".

This is also not true. It is a literal talking point of Tommy Robinson, famous neo nazi, over the grooming gang that affected a small town in britain a few years ago.

i know YOU dont care, because you are just here to racist dogwhistle but I will explain the context for the people who might stumble upon your comment.

A small town in england had a serious problem, a group of men where grooming and hurting little girls. The police and local council were aware, however the town being small were scared that such a big scandal would tarnish their reputation. The police force, lacking funding and training fucked up the case beyond recognition and asked for support, the local council told them to keep it under wraps. A reporter a DECADE later brought the case up, as little girls were still being harmed. Due to how the justice works in the UK there is a media blackout (no one is allowed to report while a case is active) in this media blackout Tommy Robinson made up the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist. Once the case was settled, a local council man (who was aware of the problem before it came to light) repeated Tommy Robinsons views as it exculpated him of letting little girls get hurt with his knowledge.

Other mass grooming cases with white perpetrators like the catholic schools in scotland case, reported by the same reporter and also decades long was somehow not national news in the same newspapers that reported the Tommy Robinson "fear of being racist" lines.

A neo nazi made up a lie, based on nothing and a council man who allowed the pain of minors in his council repeated it to not be accountable for his failings as a man. And now youre here a decade later, repeating it because you either know its false but want to spread hate, or dont know its fake and are contradicting your own claims that people are critical and can distinguish true and false.

> As a side note, all of the examples that you give are about reducing freedom of speech

by goverments bragging about their freedom of speech. You said countries who hate freedom of speech are the auth ones, I gave you examples of the country who uses the word freedom more than they use the word "the".

> which did not prevent the access of the NSDAP to power.

The big difference there is that Germany was an incredibly poor and unstable country. Syria is not haviing a civil war due to their freedom of speech laws, and neither did Germany. How free the press is in Sudan is not the reason they are being investigated by the UN for genocide.

Then how about empowering them to - speak? Not just say what you believe is allowed to say (this is authoritarian).

I'm talking about the practice of democracy, by the way.

And regarding mass rapes, being British yourself is clearly not a reference for truth. The wikipedia article I linked mentioned a mass grooming case in this town. You can't close your eyes on the evidence each time it doesn't follow your totalitarian narrative and expect that people will just shut up. Or you have to pass laws to do it, which ends up with the toxic situation of the UK, that has nothing to envy to the USSR.

Which is kind of funny given that you have laws to punish people who said something "creating anxiety", which is ... a feeling and totally subjective?

And there is no difference with Germany. Freedom a speech isn't something only for the affluent, first world. And the war in Syria started due to political repression against free speech being expressed against the regime. It didn't end so well for said regime.

> Then how about empowering them to - speak?

The strain of anti intellectualism has been a constant thread... nurtured by the false notion that democracy means my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge - Isaac Asimov

Being able to speak is not the same as having something to say. Knowing when to shut up is an important part of being a rational adult.

> I'm talking about the practice of democracy, by the way.

North Korea practices your democracy, they get to vote. Is that enough?

> he wikipedia article I linked

and I gave you a 3 paragraph explanation on the case. The police never said that, a neo nazi and a failing politician did. You are actively repeating lies while saying people are smart enough to never fall for them, are you just not aware you are being duped?

> You can't close your eyes on the evidence each time it doesn't follow your totalitarian narrative and expect that people will just shut up. Or you have to pass laws to do it, which ends up with the toxic situation of the UK, that has nothing to envy to the USSR.

yeah yeah if we dont allow racists to repeat lies then we end up like Venezuela. I get the vibe, but howabout we jail neo nazis, and hold youtubers to the same standards as news so we dont allow misinformation to spread so wide that people are repeating their narratives years later?

> Which is kind of funny given that you have laws to punish people who said something "creating anxiety", which is ... a feeling and totally subjective?

Those laws were passed by the "anti woke" party to have vague sentencing to punish people like Just Stop Oil and the black rights marches. It is not the kind of "cancel culture gone mad" you think it is, it is the exact kind of entitled, feelings > reality nonsense I am arguing against. You just dont like when the "woke" judges use the rules you wanted passed to hurt others

> Given that you seem to like etymology, I'm sure you'll enjoy to know that the modern acception of "intellectuals" was coined by Maurice Barrès. Here is a translation:

"Nothing is worse than these gangs of half-intellectuals. A half-culture destroys instinct without replacing it with consciousness. All these aristocrats of thought are keen to show that they do not think like the vile crowd. We see it all too well. They no longer feel spontaneously in agreement with their natural group and they do not rise to the level of clarity that would restore them to a considered agreement with the mass."

Which is quite in line with your thought that the masses are not to be trusted they must shut up!) and should be shepherded very closely by gifted individuals (like you) to avoid any wrongthink.

> Regarding democracy "empowering" certain people creates as well power imbalances. Thus, you need institutions and boundaries such as a constitution. And freedom of speech allows to express yourself when those imbalances become too strong. Poor white people speaking out in the UK is often bellitled by elites as racism. In reality, it's the result of decades of discrimination against them, starting at school. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...

> Regarding the grooming gangs, if you had read the wikipedia link, you would have known that Tommy Robinson has nothing to do here and that the case was brought by a feminist activist. Maybe feminists should shut up, too?

> I get that you want to jail many people for thinking and saying things you don't like. Sounds like a totalitarian regime to me. Don't whine because Trump jails pro-palestinian protesters, then?

> I don't care who passed those ridiculous gagging laws in Britain. It doesn't matter. As with Weimar, the same laws were passed by well-meaning centrists, and then used by nazis. History rimes.

> Which is quite in line with your thought that the masses are not to be trusted they must shut up

Did you just quote a Nazi about how intellectuals are a problem and we should get rid of them? Like how ar eyou so intune with fascism that you somehow quote one of the fathers of ethnic nationalism, a guy who came up with incredible heinous stuff about the jews and had some weird hard on about spain being some kinf of African enclave in europe.

You know he believed the same anti intellectualist nonsense that gave birth to "lets shoot people with glasses" in east asia right?

> and should be shepherded very closely by gifted individuals (like you) to avoid any wrongthink.

god no, its so much better to let a dude tell you that the jews want to replace you with black people and should be all murdered. That is certainly a better political theory after all the mass is right and we write for a newspaper that does not influence public opinion. Do you see the grift being repeated nowadays or are you still not noticing?

> And freedom of speech allows to express yourself when those imbalances become too strong

somehow its always predominantly powerful groups who both feel they have been hurt by the imbalance. spending 400 million a year on a think tank about how your 300 million a year tax bill is too high is certainly a strategy that only the Koch brother could understand. Then again Robert Murdoch spent almost no money in making a jewish person the next evil mastermind with Soros and that worked with almost no effort, he actually made billions of fox and daily mail so I guess some hatred does pay off.

> Poor white people speaking out in the UK is often bellitled by elites as racism.

what the fuck are you talking about? Priti Patel,on rishi sunaks goverment, was on TV telling poor whites they were gonna send brown people like her mom to a prision on Rwanda.

Like a billioanire president, with a multi millionaire immigrant minister telling white people they were gonna deport themselves happend. And I dont know what more elite than that you can get.

> if you had read the wikipedia link

You should read the 5 reports on the case. might get you a bit farther than the wikipedia page.

> you would have known that Tommy Robinson has nothing to do here

Why would tommy rbinson show up there? The media was silent so a neo nazi spent 5 years doing youtube videos and tweeting is not something that belongs in wikipedia. Its something that you should look up and think about the repercussions yourself.

The media could not talk about the case, so he tainted the well by creating the narrative. By the time the police inquiry was released it was too late because he had already fucked up all the headlines. In the 2001 Weir inquiery political correctness and race never show up. In the 2020 report the police say it was a key issue. You can trace the before and after of Tommy Robinsons involvement, in the 2 reports before it does not show up weir and haile. In the jay one 2013 it shows up as a potential issue, but not found to be significant in the conclusiosn and by 2020 the internal police report they claim it was a big deal.

The narrative was shaped and the police found a scapegoat. Jayne Seniors who reported the case endlessly from 2002 to 2007 and got an MBE after, said she was met with indifference and no one mentioned the race of the perpetrators.

> the case was brought by a feminist activist. Maybe feminists should shut up, too?

the case was brought up by a thousand people, it went on from the 70s. The police ignored all calls from working class girls, they ignored video evidence, they ignored the findings of Anne Halls in 2004, the report of Weir and haile in 2001 and 2004, they ignored the letter a girl wrote to a judge describing the process and actions taking place. The only person they didnt ignore was the journalist who made the story national news.

> I get that you want to jail many people for thinking and saying things you don't like.

I dont, the law was brought up by conservatives who had their feelings hurt.

> Don't whine because Trump jails pro-palestinian protesters, then?

wait but you said america had free speech and uk is a total ussr hell hole? So now you agree that IT IS happening and free speech does not exist in america and you dont care. So you were pretending all along?

> I don't care who passed those ridiculous gagging laws in Britain

you should, because you spent the entire time talking about the woke brigade, and how america has freedom of speech. and its untrue in both counts

> the same laws were passed by well-meaning centrists,

the laws were passed by authoritarian right wingers who needed vague laws to jail disruptive protests. and as per usual libertarians only showed up when bigots where affected. Only liberty you care is about offending and bieng racist then you dont care about freedom of speech, you care about freedom of consequences

> then used by nazis.

like your friend Barres? The national socialist of france who hated democracy and you decided to use as an example somehow. No to liberal democracy, yes to antisemitism to unite france. What a brilliant thinker you have in your quiver. Is Goebells gonna be your next text? Or do you prefer to use obscure writers so people dont notice, maybe Corradini? Or has stormfront not given you access to the italian writers yet?

> Maurice Barrès wasn't a Nazi, and was a famous novelist of the XIXth century. He was part of the Académie Française, which is the most respected cultural body of the country. In this quote, he isn't against intellectualism, but against intellectuals thinking that they form a second society above the plebs, and who think better than them. Your ad hominem arguments are ignorant here, sorry.

> You seem to lack media litteracy. Pritti Patel did nothing and the UK witnessed its largest immigration flow during the last conservative rule. Saying things is worthless if not followed by actions.

> I talked about Robinson because you brought it up, and now it's my fault? lmao

> I agree that free speech is decreasing in America. However, it's still much better in the US than in UK.

> "I dont, the law was brought up by conservatives who had their feelings hurt." -> You just said that you wanted to jail neo-nazis in the previous post.

> "authoritarian right wingers" - very good example of the overton window theory. UK conservatives are centrists at best.

> Barrès is not my "friend", I'm citing him for the historical perspective on what an "intellectual" is, in the concept of "anti-intellectuallism". Sorry for you if you have a hard time thinking with abstract objects that don't involve qualifiying anyone you don't agree with of being a "nazi".

As a side note, quite revealing that of this flurry of comments, lacks the one regarding the working-class whites being the category that benefits the less from the school system. Maybe UK could have invested more in schools, and less in gender-affirming transitions?

> Maurice Barrès wasn't a Nazi

being involved in the national socialist movement in france would make one a nazi.

> In this quote, he isn't against intellectualism

he was though, so are most fascists. Better to find an external threat, use populism and claim anyone who can see through the lies is a pompous university know-it-all, you know like every single fascist movement has ever done.

> against intellectuals thinking that they form a second society above the plebs

of course, pretending to represent "the people" gives a ton of credance to your argument, sadly his platform reached nowhere and only the absolute losers of vichy france, which made a goverment that last about 15 minutes ever paid any attention. Also just to be clarify, they got into power through violence not by any will of the "people", you know the masses they pretended to represent

> Your ad hominem arguments are ignorant here

Ad hominem are attacks to a person not to content, but I attacked his political career not his person. You used a quote of a nazi to defend anti intellectualism it just not worth examining the myriad of ways it fails, populism never works

> You seem to lack media litteracy

works better when you proofread

> Pritti Patel did nothing

She proposed the nationality and borders act of 2022, which would have barred her own parents from entering the UK when they arrived.

> witnessed its largest immigration flow during the last conservative rule.

rich people love cheap labour, but also the UK is desperate for certain jobs and the locals think they are both too good to do them and too arrogant to learn. Also the highest increase was by and large university students, a group with 0 expense on education, low expense of healthcare, and a massive bill (20-35k per year at uni + living expenses). It is literally the best group for immigration

> Saying things is worthless if not followed by actions.

a number of the bills passed, including the interim agreement with Rwanda, for which the UK paid 200 million to allow them to send asylum seekers to a prision in the middle of nowhere. Because validating the feelings of bigots was worth more in political capital than actually just hiring a few more clerks to process the asylum requests faster so they can either be accepted or denied

> now it's my fault?

its not your fault, but his inclusion was relevant, regardless of his appearance on the wikipedia article

> I agree that free speech is decreasing in America. However, it's still much better in the US than in UK.

no, its just as bad. They just bump their chest louder, but the UK never had anything half as bad as Mcarthysm to give an obvious example

> You just said that you wanted to jail neo-nazis in the previous post.

treason is not speech, and neonazi believes/actions and politics are treasonous to the UK. You cant blitz london and ask for a megaphone

> very good example of the overton window theory.

the overton window is not how far right or far left a country is, its the ideas that are so assumed they dont even get discussed. If you want an example of the Overton window you can use the Atlantic pact, the US being Allied with Europe. That was so basic that everyone in europe and america took it for granted until Trump 3 months ago decided to shit on 50 years of precedent. The Tories in the Uk being extremely right wing has nothing to do with the overton window.

> UK conservatives are centrists at best.

centrism makes little sense as a political theory. Right wing ideologies believe in hierarchies (god over men, rich over poor, men over women) and left wing ideologies believe in reducing or removing hierarchies. Being a centrist at best would be wanting to allow some hierarchies but not others, which is possible but its not a very coherent political stance.

Uk conservatives are monarchists, most approve of the church of england, they are aggresive capitalists and most are in some regard anti any societal structure beyond binary men and women. They are in almost every regard Right wing. Their economic plans are regressive not progressive, so entrenching economic hierarchies over uprooting them.

Calling them centrist is not possible, unless you define being right wing as being far right in which case they are furhter to the left.

> Barrès is not my "friend"

I forgot people who quote nazis tend to ignore metaphor im sorry. I will only use 2 syllable words too just in case.

> I'm citing him for the historical perspective on what an "intellectual" is, in the concept of "anti-intellectuallism".

you cited him, as a defender of anti intellectualism, as if knowledge was somehow incapable of being in tune with "the masses", a populist idea very similar to the ones of early fascist italian writers, later copied by many of the great purges in east asia.

YOu have to be extremely insecure to be scared of smart people. Every country thrives on its capital, on its resources, on its connections and on its human capital. Removing them out of fear will leave your country supremely disadvantaged.

> anyone you don't agree with of being a "nazi".

The dude wrote extensively about his anti semitism, his ethnic nationalism, his will to create a national identity around the concept of removing the jews from france. HE WAS A LITERAL MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY.

> lacks the one regarding the working-class whites being the category that benefits the less from the school system

they are also the voting group that puts education the lowest, the have the highest dropout rate outside of vulnerable groups and they are one of the lowest participants in extra school activities (like helping with homework) with their kids.

Immigrant parents who prioritise education smoke them in results.

i didnt mention that point because its been done to death, culturally poor white families have not culturally prioritised education. In america they have the same problem, most math olympiad kids are either immigrants or sons of immigrants.

> and less in gender-affirming transitions?

the UK education budget is 115 billion per year, the nhs has spent around 50 million a year on gender care.

Maybe you can ask an immigrant kid to help you with the math

> A small town in england had a serious problem, a group of men where grooming and hurting little girls.

The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns. It wasn't just Rotherham. This is trivially provable by simply going to the Wikipedia page. It's also still ongoing.

> the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist

This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists, but what was actually found in the council report.

> The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-289516...

You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs: https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/18/rotherham-police-chief-admits...

I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this and still post about it. I do think this is one of those stories that is so horrifying it's better not to think about it. But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.

> The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns.

and most cases, as the scottish one the perpetrators were white, so the case did nt become a part of the "mass grooming brown people" narrative.

The issue is not minor and the reasons why it happened were apparent, from lack of care, to institutional pride to just abject neglect. Girls in underfunded council homes, at risk of homelessness, in orphanages being taken advantage with video evidence sent to the council, a channel 4 documentary from 2004 and still took a decade and a journalist uncovering it AGAIN for it to finally be tackled.

That is not the result of "staff being nervous bout identifying the origings of the perpetrators" because that came after the thing was uncovered. There was a video, sent to the council that was ignored.

> This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists

It was constantly, uncessantily repeated by Tommy Robinson and his ilk. Some lovely "reporters" from some online media also tweeted about it, they now have jobs in places like GB News.

> what was actually found in the council report.

the report that came after the trial? The report that could use that excuse to ignore their decade of abject neglect to the suffering of those girls?

Yeah I am sure there are plenty of other excuses in the report, you know where there was 0 mention of the "fear of being racist", in the channel 4 documentary from 2004 that dealt with it while it was happening.

> what was actually found in the council report.

Here just if we are quoting the report let me just jump to the conclusions

"The Jay report found no evidence of children's child social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators".

Individual reports of people feeling nervous do not somehow make the racist narrative true, the systemic review of 1400 cases showed that it was not the cause of the mishandling. A judge IGNORED a letter from an abused girl, like being scared of being called racist never was the reason

> You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs

The police were found REPEATEDLY fucking up the case beyond recognition, the initial inquiery in 2001, the weir report, literally stopped reporting to the police finding their intervention from "poor professionalism practice from early stages" to end up not even sharing information due to "police response being so often inappropiate".

The Jay report in 2013 found that the police dismissed victims deeming them "undesirebles" and staff who reported the issue where met with indifference and scorn.

The police that ignored 1400 kids being hurt in their town want you to believe they were too scared to stop it?

Btw the report was so damming that the chief of police was "asked to step down". so yeah def it was the woke people not letting him prosecute that was the issue.

> I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this

I am not. The narrative has been taken 20 years to build, the reports bring up "fear of racial tension" in increasing order, from not appearing in weird report in 2001 to being the subject of most of the complaints the iopc found in 2021. That gradual build up of "oh we wouldve stopped it but we didnt wanna upset the pakistanis" is not but the increasing deflection of responsabilities by members of councils and police who had the means and simply did not care. They let girsl in vulnerable posiitons be hurt, knowing full well it was happening and then they scrambled for a scapegoat, and the scapegoat was "we would be called racist".

Again there are plenty of grooming cases in the UK, the glasgow case, the well cathedral case etc. all long loong case, all with the police knowing, all ignored. But those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men, which is unsurprising as they are the mayority in the country. Most of the victims of CSA are kids in vulnerable positions, drugs, lack of parents, behavioural issues, homeless and those are the groups least likely to be helped by police. Put 2 and 2 together and you see why they get hurt and why the police fail. Then when it all goes public, they scramble and in this case Tommy Robinson came up with the Asian grooming gangs moniker and the tabloids repeated it and now a decade later suddenly every cop wants to say it was the fear of being called racist why they did not answer to the people in danger.

You can check the weir report and see that it's not there. and then in 2014 AFTER the media blackout and the tommy robinson campaign it appears for the first time. and suddenly in 2020 it is mentioned multiple times.

> But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.

Its not dismissing it. It just about the ACTUAL changes needed to affect change. The inquiry found that social care staff was underfunded, that the police routinely ignored evidence, that they ignored video evidence, that their behaviour was unprofessional and inadequate. The Sarah Evrand report found the same failings, a completely inadequate police force full of racist, mysoginistic behaviour that leads to poor performance.

You could kick out every asian person of the UK and you will still have 16 year long grooming cases if the police do not implement needed changes. Because the glassgow case was also almost a decade long and just as bad as Rotherham in the most harrowing cases. And despite being white as snow they were monsters and the police failed to protect those kids too

Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators. It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.

This is clearly not the same sort of thing as the “usual” case of individuals abusing their power and trust over children in their care.

It takes very little work to find more and more examples. Why are you pretending they don’t exist?

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_sex_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring

The list goes on and on and reading through the cases, most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.

Edit: I just looked up this Glasgow case and it’s not even close to the same scale, Rotherham was literally three orders of magnitude worse in terms of victims. Of course a criminal ring that victimizes 1000x the number of children will get more attention.

Edit2: of course, you can google almost any UK city and find a grooming gang story - here’s one where asylum seekers ran a massive grooming gang in Glasgow, much bigger than the case you mentioned: https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5215881/police-scotlan...

> those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men

I’m not sure why you mention this given you immediately dismiss it. The per capita rate is not even comparable. To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls. Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people - but that’s an absolutely bonkers per capita discrepancy and for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people. Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (almost never in these organized gangs vs single abusers) and “well if the cops were better” instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”

You certainly don't have to convince me British police are among the worst in the world, it's obvious the British institutions hate lower class British people and there's plenty of videos of police going hard after people for not paying their TV license, criticizing the school board, or livestreaming unapproved opinions while ignoring murders, rapes etc. It certainly isn't just these cases, they apparently also let e.g., the Russian mob murder people, but god forbid you press send on a bad tweet.

> Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators

The police disagree. The reports on the issue find that the most common race reported is white man.

> It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.

just to be clear most of those cases the perpetraros were british, they were just of asian origin. Foreign born is the kind of dog whistle that makes the discussion complicated cause its hard to believe in good faith when the alarm bells of bad faith show up so early.

> Why are you pretending they don’t exist?

no one is pretending they dont exist. The issue is not whether they exist, the issue is whether race is WHY they happen, and both reports show it's not. Its police, and council negligence and none of the towns have had systemic overhauls on either of those institutions.

Grooming is not less bad if the person apprehended is white somehow. And most of them are, and the only difference is not in scale, its in reporting. Reporting largely following national interest based on,no small part, the narrative set during the rotherdam case by Tommy Robinson.

> most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.

yes and you will also find in those reports that they think one of the highest affected groups are asian women, who simply do not go to the police due to being routinely ignored. If they are systematically ignoring white girls imagine how little of a shit they would give if an indian looking girl came saying a white guy did it. (As per the sarah everand report they would give negative fucks, they might even hurt her more and get away with it)

> The per capita rate is not even comparable.

It is comparable, and the only two inquiries on it disagree, the internal police report says there is a disproportionate number of asian men, the goverment inquiry says there isn't. What they both agree on is that most cases do not have a listed ethnicity for the perpetrator and that some police departments wrote the same one for all the accused, regardless of their actual race so groups of half pakistani ethnicity half white, all got asian as their ethnicity which was corrected after the Jay report. This was systemic to some of the police departments surveryed.

> To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls.

the borough has 250,000 people and the cases date back to the 1970s. It was not 5 guys doing 1400 girls out of 100k people in successsion. It was a systemic failiong of council,judges and police to take seriously the findings of the weir, hail report and the repeated and conclusive pleas of Jayne Senior.

The police not once said they were scared of being racist when Jayne Senior brought up the abuse she was seeing, they dismissed her and met her with indifference and scorn, she brought it up countless times between 2002 and 2007, she was awarded an MBE for not giving up on those girls. None of the police officers were individually named in the Jay report about how shit they treated her and how little they cared about the girls.

There is more on the report about their dismissal to aid working class girls (regardless of crime being reported) than there is about the ethnicity of any perpetrator.

> Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people

the mayority opinion of reform voters is that this is not the case. Something you just say "of course" to, is not the widely accepted belief of a large voting block of the country despite the facts agreeing. And part of the reason they believe that is because of a narrative built around the Rotherdam case.

> for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people.

9.3% of the UK is asian. if it was an obvious cultural problem there would be much much bigger consequences. The asian community is incredibly well integrated in british life, we have every kind of person from hard working, working class people owning off license stores to billionaire banker wankers like Rishi Sunak. You can go any thursday afternoon to Bank station and half the guys in vests and shirts are of Asian descent. You can go to any pub when england is playing at cricket or football and find countless asian people.

Saying there is an "obvious cultural problem" seems like another dogwhistle to generalise racial tension rather than address the findings of the reports which all highlight cultural indiference at every mayor british institution, clasicism, racism and mysoginy in the police and over reporting of the racial aspect by the media.

> Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (they don’t)

THE GUYS AT ROTHERDAM WERE BRITISH. having a pakistani grandma does not make someone not british...

Also you said "of course the mayority are native people" (btw white != native) and now youre saying they dont do it? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

> “well if the cops were better

im not shrugging and saying if the police were better. I am actively repeating the findings of all the large scale inquiries on the police. weir, Jay, Casey and Sarah everand reports all found the police to be inadequate, unprofessional, and in many cases actively malicious. Not only not helping but making things much much worse.

How many more millions spent, how many more 300 page reports, how many more embarrased chief of police resignings do you need to witness to figure out what everyone else already knows, that the police are not fit for purpose.

> instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”

6 reports on the case and none came to that conclusion. Also "introducing these people here"? Do you not know WHY and HOW asian people are in the UK?

Like you invade a country, make them part of the common wealth, force your language on them, make their country poor and endlessly brag about how britain is the gem of the empire and youre surprised some might wanna come over?

I know racist people tend to be thick as pig shit but you might not pass a citizenship test if you really know so little about england. You could be deported if you had to actually show you understand the country you think you belong to before getting your passport.

They are there because the British government made a deliberate policy decision to bring them there. It is perfectly reasonable to ask if this policy decision was in the best interests of the populace at large. Immigration (and emigration) are not sacred cows above political debate. Nor did the existence of the British Empire necessitate it; that's simply a post-hoc rationalization of the policies that British politicians implemented.

I realize that in England you are not allowed to think in these terms - it's all unmitigated good and beyond the pale to even consider it as anything but the just deserts of...whoever, but that doesn't actually make it so.

I also don't think it's productive to pretend British is not an ethnicity as well as a nationality. Being born in England does not make you ethnically English and isn't racist to say so, anymore than being born in India made Kipling Indian. Even in terms of culture or nationality it seems pretty meaningless when you don't have strict assimilationist policies.

> to bring them there.

jesus so you do not actually know the history of your own country. Travel and emigration between Commonwealth states has a number of conditions, that while easier to navigate that complete immigration are still conditional on a huge number of factors.

> It is perfectly reasonable to ask if this policy decision was in the best interests of the populace at large.

considering every economic metric has increased since the 1950s and that since the 2008 recession economic growth is basically linear with immigration numbers, one would easily argue that yes. the primary interest of the population is the economy, the economy grows with immigration thus those two are convergent interests.

> Immigration (and emigration) are not sacred cows above political debate

sure, but not understanding why there are asian people in the UK, not understanding colonialism, not understanding migration patterns, or how immigration ACTUALLY works (they do not bring them over, they come themselves). Means that it is less of a debate and more of a class I would have to teach to get you up to speed first.

The reason you do not debate quantum physics with a 4 year old are not because they are beyond debate

> Nor did the existence of the British Empire necessitate it

it is debatable whether there is a moral requierement over conquered countries. Many empires would argue that citizenship is inarguable, as you are a colony, you are roman or macedonian. other empires would not allow full citizenship but allow travel and belonging to the empire, such as the spanish and british empires. Some more critical political actors would argue that once you conquer someone and subjogate them you have a responsability and a debt to that people.

however you cut it, the existance of the british rule over india and pakistan inexcusably link both countries, to the point where people moving between them is so expected it might as well be a necessity.

> that's simply a post-hoc rationalization of the policies that British politicians implemented.

no the discussions of the structure, and belonging of the countries and citizens of the commonwealth predate the political policies that increased migration by centuries

> I realize that in England you are not allowed to think in these terms

reform was ahead of the polls last year, the daily mirror and the sun are the most read newspapers. Why are you all so absurdly whinny about how you are not allowed to do what you actiively do and think and say every day.

> it's all unmitigated good and beyond the pale to even consider it

In what universe is this the case? Anti immigration platforms have had a strong support in the uk for decades. This country started the skin head movement as a far right, nativist, racist violent subculture. None of that makes any sense in a country where people cant even consider immigration as nothing but positive

> I also don't think it's productive to pretend British is not an ethnicity as well as a nationality.

and you can think that, but that does not make people not native or not english. you can say they are culturally not english, or have asian heritage. But that does not make someone foreign born, or not native.

Most british people now are way less "ethnically" british than 50 years ago. Cockney is gone, chinese and indian have replaced chippies and eel pies as working class takeaways, the conservative party has had 3 women and an indian guy in a row, the mayor of the city which brings all the money in has indian heritage.

And you can feel threatened by that, but Southport and Costwolds bring fuck all to the economy nowadays, regardless of how much you mystithise the posh brit with his hunting jacket and greyhound.

> Even in terms of culture or nationality it seems pretty meaningless when you don't have strict assimilationist policies.

yeah no, none of them have assimilated, there is no way you can find asian people in british pubs, running pubs, running councils, running the country, heading banks and hospitals. You will never find a british indian doctor, its crazy all they do is dance bollywood songs and make grooming gangs. If not for you and your brave opinions no one would have ever said anythign. How brave of you to just repeat racist lies, say that 10% of the people of the country cant assimilate and take no pride in the history of your own country or understanding of the history and significance of the commonwealth agreements

The UK on a per capita GDP PPP basis is as poor, or poorer, than the poorest US state, Mississippi. [1] Immigration, trade policy, privatization, and financialization have cut the working class population off at the knees. It's an economically miserable country temporarily sustained only by the continued extraction of wealth in London, activity that continues only through inertia. This should be shocking given the starting point.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/britain-mi...

Even side from that, I think the view that a country's good is defined by GDP is entirely wrong.

Re: your migration comments, immigration is a matter of public policy. It is not possible unless the state encourages and allows it. It isn’t something that just happens because other people want to come.

> The UK on a per capita GDP PPP basis is as poor, or poorer, than the poorest US state, Mississippi.

Lets go through some basics, 40% of missippi's budget comes from federal money. California aint paying the tab of the UK, so yeah numbers look worse.

the UK budget for a person includes healthcare, and rent is cheaper (except london). On average UK residents have more disposable income and higher quality of life (longer life, fewer jail time, less child and mother deaths).

No one in the UK would trade their life for the same money, way more driving, worse food, no healthcare and a opioid epidemic all over the place.

> Immigration, trade policy, privatization, and financialization have cut the working class population off at the knees

the highest spending of the working class is housing which was cut by a conservative goverment to entrench purchasing power on the boomer generation. Cutting council house builds in the 70s was the biggest mistake in the recent history of the country

the idea of those kind of trade offs, similar to the US becoming a world currency is that the population would up skill. Replace mines with modern industries and services, which have higher quality of life and lower risk.

> It's an economically miserable country temporarily sustained only by the continued extraction of wealth in London, activity that continues only through inertia. This should be shocking given the starting point.

cool theory, but london is not continuing through inertia, it got ahead of wall street as a financial hub. We are literally the worlds largest financial centre. The fact that its not shared properly is an issue, but no country gets to be numebr 1 in such an incredibly competitive industry "through inertia"

> I think the view that a country's good is defined by GDP is entirely wrong.

why bring up missisippis then?

> immigration is a matter of public policy. It is not possible unless the state encourages and allows it. It isn’t something that just happens because other people want to come.

yeah an there is a need for immigrants. Between the lack of births, the lack of university spaces etc we need way more nurses than the UK can graduate per year for example. You also have the historical context of the UK being an empire and still having relationships with the countries it owned. There are plenty of people in Australia, Canda, Nigeria, India whose grandparents were born in UK, then moved to a different country and now their grandkids might wanna come back. Or grew up in an ex colony and think of the UK like many UK students think of europe, as somewhere to go an study or visit or dream of moving to some day.

You can make immigration harder or easier as public policy but it is also something that just happens. Outside of like north korea pretty much every country has people who come in and go out, for a myriad of reasons

> the UK budget for a person includes healthcare,

I don't think you understand how GDP PPP works, but you understand this makes the UK look even worse, right? At any rate the point is the fact this comparison can even be made is grim: the UK as a whole's best argument for "we're better off than Mississippi" is "well, we uh, have the NHS." Yeah, basically every country has universal health care - it's not impressive...especially when wages and benefits are so poor in the UK that you have to import people to man it rather than drawing in the people you already have. Even the average Mississippian probably gets equivalent care through the byzantine US "universal" system (a quick Google shows 25% of the population is on Medicaid plus another 15% on Medicare, many hospital systems are owned by the government, etc.)

> and rent is cheaper (except london).

The average rent excluding London is 1341 pounds[1], or about $1800. The average rent in Mississippi is $1150. [2]

> No one in the UK would trade their life for the same money, way more driving, worse food, no healthcare and a opioid epidemic all over the place.

The article I linked was from someone who emigrated from the UK to Mississippi. I've also never, ever heard anyone compare UK good favorably to US Southern food. Or any food, really.

Perhaps most importantly, the government of Mississippi and the police don’t have hatred and resentment for the lower classes. Lower class ethnic British people are clearly reviled by their government and the upper classes, regardless of what party is in charge. Even excluding the racial angle, you yourself mention that with how the police spoke of and treated the girls in those scandals.

> the highest spending of the working class is housing which was cut by a conservative goverment to entrench purchasing power on the boomer generation. Cutting council house builds in the 70s was the biggest mistake in the recent history of the country

I don't care whether the "conservatives" or the "liberals" or the "greens" or anyone else did it (do you think I like Thatcher?), the fact is the UK has been horrifically mismanaged and went from one of the wealthiest countries in the world to one for whom the average person is more badly off than the average person in most advanced countries.

> it got ahead of wall street as a financial hub.

Being a financial hub is not great for anyone except the 1%, but nevertheless NYC is a larger financial hub than London, despite, once again, the enormous advantage London should have had. [3]

However, I would agree: if the US doesn't do something soon, it will end up like the UK: the elite and the rich do great, while financialization, free trade, and migration destroy the middle and lower classes. That's what we're already seeing. If we don't wake up, the dystopia seen in the UK is our future.

> yeah an there is a need for immigrants.

Yes, capitalists love cheap labor. We always have labor "shortages" that magically can only be solved by dumping supply on the labor market. The birthrate argument is particularly silly, since immigration depresses native births. [4] It's also a worldwide problem except in some developing countries, so the "we have to be nice" argument is ultimately hollowing out the countries the migrants come from.

> but it is also something that just happens. Outside of like north korea pretty much every country has people who come in and go out, for a myriad of reasons

Migrants come because the can get money. They can get money because of government policies that specifically enable them to get jobs and benefits. In other words, they are incentivized to come and policies are developed to support and assist them. Without these carrots, migration plummets. UK political leadership made a deliberate choice to pump the UK full of migrants, one that would have been opposed by the population had it been a referendum. Indeed in the UK case, it's been particularly obvious that voting for politicians that claim to oppose migration just gets you even more immigration.

[1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/average-asking-rent-outside-l... [2] https://www.redfin.com/state/Mississippi/rental-market [3] https://www.zyen.com/publications/public-reports/the-global-... [4] https://cis.org/Richwine/Impact-Immigration-US-Fertility

If you think an enhanced dbs check can affect your job wait to see what posting on social media will do.

Censoring of messengers can destroy early warning signals of systemic risks.

That’s the point, eh?

I must admit I'm struggling to see the problem. If someone is hostile or prejudiced against people of a certain race, sexual orientation or disability then they should be excluded from jobs working with those people.

No, you see I can be hateful and not suffer consequences or else 1984. Also I should be allowed to vote and promote ideas that will actively harm people, gleefully admit it, and celebrating their suffering but it is not ok to stop me. As the famous poem goes first they came for the neo nazis and i did nothing, then they came from the online racists and i did nothing and now they are coming for me the lowly bigot and there is no one left to defend me.

Or something like that, I barely read anything that isnt a tweet length and preferably full of slurs.

(Trying to write a modern "modest proposal" is hard when reality is so blatantly stupid)

The problem here is that I could go to the police, report Tony Edgecombe as he told me at the coffee machine that devs who use 4 spaces instead of tabs are pure human scum who should be deported, and it will be written in your file. You then have no way to erase it.

The problem with thinking that such practice is totally ok, is that one day it will turn against you. Pro-Palestine liberals discovered this at their expense after the Trump election and the recent crackdown on their movement.

>The problem here is that I could go to the police, report Tony Edgecombe as he told me at the coffee machine that devs who use 4 spaces instead of tabs are pure human scum who should be deported, and it will be written in your file. You then have no way to erase it.

The police would laugh at you before they sent you on your way.

Dig a little deeper on any of the examples you see posted here and you will find people inciting violence or racial hatred. We have had laws against this stuff for fifty years.

>Pro-Palestine liberals discovered this at their expense after the Trump election and the recent crackdown on their movement.

We aren't the US.

Yes, it was a joke. That said, you don't get the point - it's arbitrary and there is no way to prove that it's true. Yet, it will still be recorded. And yeah, saying once something wrong shouldn't follow you all your life. This is classic legal harassment and intimidation, similar to what was practiced in the USSR against ethnic minorities.

Regarding pro-Palestine protests, it was an example about how being fine with freedom of speech restrictions can come back and bite you in the ass. It always does.

>That said, you don't get the point

I understand the point you are making, I just don't agree with it.

>it's arbitrary and there is no way to prove that it's true

You aren't going to get a record on hearsay.

>Yet, it will still be recorded.

I don't think you understand how policing works in the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...

Well: - Criticizing a Islam and muslims is considered a NCHI. It's already amazing that criticizing religion is forbidden in democracy. And it's kinda funny given that said religion contains a lot non-avoidable rules that would make any liberal blush very hard (38). Saying "muslims should be stopped, by force if necessary, from practicing genital mutilation on young boys" leads to an NCHI.

- NCHI can be without victim! Just like blasphemy, in the old times (38).

- "Freedom of speech" reserves are vague, and unlike other cases, do not include examples.

- Not using the right invented pronouns can lead to the record of a NCHI (42).

- It doesn't have to be a recurrence, a single occurrence is enough (14).

- It is evaluated on the basis of if it "disturbs someone" (14), which is totally subjective and as such can lead to unfair consideration.

- It can be reported by someone who isn't the victim, but who witnessed it. Hearsay is mentioned as being ok (15, example G, J).

- "Antagonism" is enough to record a NCHI (15). Amazing, really.

- They admit that all of this bullshit is highly subjective, so Police "should use judgement". I really wonder how an Indian police officer will "use judgement" when evaluating an affair involving Pakistanis, for instance. This opens the doors of so many arbitrary procedures.

- If an offense can't be a crime, a NCHI can still be reported! (J)

- Overall, nothing requires the police officers to confirm that what is being recorded really happened.

Living in an ex-soviet country, this is typical of the stories you can hear about how the KGB operated in the population.

And regarding the famous "UK policing". They sent a man to prison for 20 months because he...shouted at a dog. Even a Russian prosecutor would be embarrassed to read such a ridiculous affair. I have a hard time understanding how the UK isn't considered as an authoritarian regime.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2nm5jgxlko

>And regarding the famous "UK policing". They sent a man to prison for 20 months because he...shouted at a dog. Even a Russian prosecutor would be embarrassed to read such a ridiculous affair. I have a hard time understanding how the UK isn't considered as an authoritarian regime.

>https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2nm5jgxlko

Every time I read a link from you people it involves some racist thug either engaging in violence or encouraging someone else to do so. I remain unconvinced by your arguments.

>They sent a man to prison for 20 months because he...shouted at a dog.

The police don't send people to prison, the CPS and courts do that.

There was a CCC talk on the practices of the Stasi some years ago (I forget exactly which year).

What stayed with me from the talk was that they had shown recovered Stasi photos of a young man's home where he had a wall dedicated to American iconography.

The speaker stated that in the current era this would just be trivially collected from social media instead of needing to gain physical access to property.

Edit: It was 32C3 What Does Big Brother See While He Is Watching at appx the 40m mark.

Thanks for the pointer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2oAOieECk

> Over the course of three years, I was able to research the archives left by East Germany's Stasi to look for visual memories of this notorious surveillance system and more recently I was invited to spend some weeks looking at the archive by the Czechoslovak StB. Illustrating with images I have found during my research, I would like to address the question why this material is still relevant – even 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The birthday party with Stasi members dressed up as the individuals they spy on is really brutal, the costumes themselves were likely confiscated from their victims. Stereotypically confirming that "German sense of humor is not a laughing matter". There is always a brutally cynical undertone in their jokes.

Are you just taking internal jokes of a repressive regime as representative for a country?

Most of bureaucrats of any 20th century regime, first or second half the century, remained working within country's structures after the fall of the regime. If not for government officially, then at least in law, debt collection, or security industries. The general attitude hadn't changed only because the regime failed.

British jokes can be deadly, too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeMnPyusuBE

> The difference is so noticeable, it is now called "two tier policing".

That’s what Elon Musk calls it. In fact, the difference in the case you mention is simply that:

(i) Inciting racial hatred is a specific offense which doesn’t require a credible death threat. There is no offense of inciting hatred against TERFs. Like that or don’t – but the police don’t make the laws.

(ii) The context of Connolly posting during the riots in which actual violent crimes against minority groups were being committed.

You put hateful in quotes but I do want to point out that this is the tweet from the thing you linked:

> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it

The context also needs to be noted. This was part of the social media storm that whipped up a wave of right-wing, racist hatred and violence in the wake of the Southport riots. No such waves of violence have sprung out of trans activism.

There is no "far right" or people being "whipped up". Disorder is a consequence of failed government policy.

E.g. from 2023: "Northern seaside town now a 'powder keg' over asylum seeker tensions"

"The tension in Skegness has grown after hundreds of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Albania were crammed into former tourist hotels on the seafront."

"Cars have been vandalised, shop windows broken, mattresses set alight and scuffles reported between migrants and security staff. Officials say 229 asylum seekers are staying in up to seven hotels on and around the town’s promenade, but locals say the figure is more like 700."

> There is no "far right" or people being "whipped up".

The wikipedia page about the riots has 127 mentions of "far-right" [0]. From the very start there were links between the protestors and organisations like the EDL. The online misinformation was spread by far-right influencers such Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, and Andrew Tate, as well as a host of global right-wing accounts. The organisation Alliance4Europe which campaigns against online misinformation found that "non-domestic far-right groups played a significant role in inflaming tensions following the Southport murders" [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots

[1] https://alliance4europe.eu/the-international-far-rights-impa...

Far-right, unfortunately, is something of a trigger word suggesting Wikipedia is about to become unreliable in its coverage. As far as I can tell any suggestion that immigration levels should be low is likely to be a far-right position which means it is a very large tent. A tent that includes some undesirables and a lot of quite normal people.

There is an odd situation where apparently countries can simultaneously adopt anti-growth policies while having an infinite surplus of real resources to handle more migrants and anyone who believes otherwise is de-facto attempting to restart the Jew ovens whether they personally deny it or not. Where a more charitable view would be if a country maintains high immigration into a situation where real resources don't grow that is quite possibly leading towards a genocide. People aren't all smiles and sunshine when times get tough; it is more sensible to engineer society towards prosperity.

Not so; Keir Starmer is talking about cracking down on immigration and is certainly not far-right. You veer into the far-right when you dehumanise immigrants and use terms like "cockroaches", "Muslim invasion", or "great replacement".

Keir Starmer is pushing [0] pretty standard far-right conspiracy theories about how the government was running an open-borders experiment, by design, in contravention of stated policies.

> ...and is certainly not far-right.

He's quacking like a duck. Talking about open borders is fair game for being identified as a dog whistler for people who believe in the great replacement theory - particularly when it is framed as duplicitous and intentional. I'd agree that it isn't, but once Wikipedia starts breaking out "far right" that is the sort of standard that can be applied.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-migratio... - although humorously it is apparently standard practice to redact parts of speeches as political in a political speech given by a politician.

Yeah I have to eat my words. Keir Starmer is a terrible example given how much he's banging on about "open border policies" and "small boats". A few tens of thousands - often of the most needy refugees - come in small boats. It's a capitulation to the far right and I reckon it's going to blow back in Labours face much as some of Blair's policies did.

I mean, look, my position is that "far right" is a meaningful concept even if it's somewhat nebulous at the edges. And as far as I can tell, Wikipedia is well justified in its mention of far right influence on the riots. And the Wikipedia page defining the concept of far right is pretty cohesive and compelling. I don't think that simply wanting low immigration makes someone far right. But immigration control is a massive point for the far right because it's a low hanging fruit. It's easy to scapegoat immigration as the principle cause of crises in housing, cost of living, and the NHS. Lots of people are tempted to point fingers at the "other" in times of insecurity.

PS Does a policy/narrative stop being far right as it becomes more popular? Maybe in an "Overton window" sense, but obviously not at a global and historical level. Mussolini becoming popular in Italy did not mean he was no longer a far right fascist.

The EDL hasn't been around for years.

The "far right" narrative is to hide state failure.

Even the group "Hope not Hate" (former far-left "Searchlight" publication) admitted the "far right" narrative was a hoax. [1]

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1933625/uk-riots-list-hoax

Is that the article you meant to link? It says that a specific document was a hoax, not the entire concept of the far right.

Was the misinformation even material? The perpetrator of the Southport stabbings was the child of recent African immigrants, so I don't see how the true facts of the case would have calmed any right-wing unrest.

The furore was whipped up on the basis of the perpetrator being Muslim, illegal, and an immigrant. In my opinion it fed off the residual unresolved tensions of grooming gang cases. But of course the actual perpetrator was none of these three things.

> on the basis of the perpetrator being Muslim, illegal, and an immigrant.

Let's not kid ourselves - it was on the basis of the perpetrator being non-white/non-ethnically-British. There's no shortage of the protesters being accused of racism, but now we're supposed to pretend it was about religion or following the law? That's called trying to have your cake and eat it to.

You reckon the riots would still happen if the story was that the perpetrator was - let's say - an aboriginal Australian or a pygmy from New Guinea? Highly doubtful. The narrative had to align with what the far right have been spinning up for the last decade or so.

You mean in the wake of the Southport child murder mass stabbing, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Southport_stabbings

Yes. But specifically I'm referring to how a group of far-right social media accounts exploited that tragedy to whip up a violent frenzy of riots, starting with Southport.

> So people have been arrested for posting something online, even if nobody appears to have seen it, and they delete it shortly after.

The message you are quoting is now being propagated,which is unfortunate.

Most of the western world is moving to a risk based legal system and has a proportionaly measure build in.

If the message in question had a limited reach, then it should not lead to a conviction.

Just like we don't convict people who has inappropriate thoughts or write inappropriate things in their diary.

I'm not sharing the message because it brings me joy to have it shown to more people. I think it's a pretty reprehensible thing to say. I'm sure people say worse into their personal diary or even among friends and that is not criminalized. I might possibly even consider the defense of "oh nobody really reads my posts anyway and I deleted it quickly".

But I absolutely will not stand for trying to claim that the post was scare-quotes "hateful". It was hateful, full stop. This is not polite discourse that was unfairly marked as hate because of some political slant. It was clearly hate, even if wasn't seen by anyone, even if it got deleted.

Hate is a normal thing in human societies. Freedom of speech also encompasses expressing hatred and negative feelings. What you can do to mitigate it is to solve the problems that create hate. In the case of the UK, addressing the mass-rapes of British girls, among other things.

Sending people to prison for social media posts is a typical totalitarian move, similar to what you find in China, North Korea or Russia. None of the underlying issues are solved by intimidating your population, who, at some point, will just start to leave quietly.

Lots of countries outlaw hate speech. I know that Americans tend to think that this is a slippery slope to totalitarianism, but much of the rest of the world disagrees. And America in its present state isn't a great advertisment for its own particular model of public discourse and political freedom.

Obviously, you can also be jailed in the US for social media posts that break the law. Here is one example:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/social-media-influencer...

It's tasteless to bring up rape cases that are irrelevant here. The tweet we're talking about was posted in the wake of the Southport stabbings. Nobody can seriously suggest that historical failures to investigate rape cases in Pakistani communities can be related to an outburst decades later about burning down hotels housing asylum seekers.

I am not trying to say that it was not hateful - and proper moderation should be in place. Just like it has always been.

I am merely trying to say that there should be proportion in the reaction.

The society does not give you a death sentence to jay walk.

I'm not arguing with you. I'm arguing with the quotes around "hate".

> If the message in question had a limited reach, then it should not lead to a conviction.

her husband shares a prominent political position. Her reach and views way larger than her twitter following. By association alone she has authoritative voice.

If Melania Trump was tweeting about racist things, how quickly she deletes the tweet would not be the main issue to give a prominent example

If Melania posts some distasteful ideas, she won't go to prison since US citizens have freedom of speech, unlike in the UK and their Orwellian laws.

> US citizens have freedom of speech

just a reminder that anti protest laws now allow people to be send to prision for speech. But I guess as long as hippie looking they/them who are pro palestine at uni go to jail instead of racist white people then the US does not have Orwellian laws.

Please never actually read the book or else you might need to stop using it as a adjective because doublethink is what you are actively doing right now

Given how "hippie looking they/them" wanted to silence their political opponents in the past administration, it's kind of ironic how life comes back at you, fast?

Also, kudos for the classist part assuming that I have never read a book.

> wanted to silence their political opponents in the past administration

Literally when? Bezos bought a newspaper, Elon bought Twitter, Trump was on TV daily (and not being prosecuted by the DOJ), Ben Shapiro was again the most promoted video network in facebook, RFK was spreading misinformation left and right and is now telling the worls that autistic people can never pay taxes while Elon pays his salary.

Like name 1 person who was silenced? it is literally impossible to not hear the constant, incessant, child like whinning. you can have the senate, congress, the supreme court and the presidency and still act like victims. Crash the economy and its always someone elses fault.

Accountability is perhaps a value you should cherish more than silence, cant have that can we

I mean, we are coming out of a decade of cancel culture on campuses[0]. Elon Musk was clearly radicalized by it, which led him to buy Twitter.

Jordan Peterson's fame was partly due to him standing up in front of the obligation to use various pronouns at work, with the threat of getting fired.[1]

[0] https://archive.is/6zyUA

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695

> we are coming out of a decade of cancel culture on campuses

You should read your own article. A drunk dude kissed a girl without asking, and his friends thought that was kinda shit an uninvited him to a christmas party. That is the cancel culture that is "silencing" people?

Nigel Farage is on TV day in and day out lying about things but one white dude from Oxford uni got univited to a christmas dinner...

> Elon Musk was clearly radicalized by it,

No he wasn't. There are plenty of theories about Elon Musk descent but none of them stem from any real pushback against cancel culture. His image began being tarnished with him calling a dude who saved some kids a pe do over not using his submarine. When he bought Twitter he made the point he wasn't gonna change much etc, 3 months after purchasing it he said he was not interested in politics and would not donate to any candidate, then he donated 400 million to Donald Trump's campaign.

Whether you wanna go down the route that his daughter being trans affected him, his friendship with epstein and Maxwell, his open ketamine use, or his ties to Russia (such as allowing Russia to use starlink, or cutting Ukraine off in parts of the conflict) its hard to know when and were he went from "i love the lgbt, green energy and im iron man" to "im gonna retweet neo nazis talking about replacement theory". But it has nothing to do with cancel culture.

> Jordan Peterson's fame was partly due to him standing up in front of the obligation to use various pronouns at work, with the threat of getting fired.[1]

That is not true. The law in Canada did not even say that. He was famous because post Obama the number of conservative causes was dwindiling and a number of think tanks found trans issues to be a perfect powder keg (they use similar reasoning Nazi's did when they burned trans research in the 30s). Its small, polirising, nuanced and most people have never seen or interacted with trans people or issues. It has a great ability to mold the talking points without any input from the actual people being discussed (its the same issue they love Fetuses and pregnant women, you can say anything without the fetus ever contradicting you).

In this push of think tanks he was used as a standard bearer, and given way more attention and money than any of his points ever deserved. The anti feminist videos on youtube, and a man on a suit disucissing against overly emotional 18 year olds became an entire genre of bad faith arguments (on both sides of the aisle, there are now plenty of "owning trump voters" content).

He then wrote a book about doing your bed, some insanely inacurate attempts at jungian psychology to impress 15 year olds and the money to push his videos on youtube did the rest.

The reality of a figure like Peterson is that he is a very flawed, and intellectually limited individual. His work on semiotics is super interesting but outside of his niche field he is clearly out of depth. His own personal failings, despite humanising him, make for a tragic figure when you realise many young men who are lost look up to him.

I have 0 issue with someone promoting some version of neo stoicism and how being a man should be, but when you get addicted to benzos and fly to russia to give yourself permanent brain damage because you are too much of a wuss to survive the withdrawl symptons then you should drop your philosphy because it clearly does not work.

Wow. Thanks for inspiring me to ask. Why haven't they covered this in South Park yet? It would make such a great episode.

Summary:

Jordan Peterson, after becoming a media figure, struggled severely with benzodiazepine (benzo) addiction (drugs like clonazepam, often prescribed for anxiety). In 2019-2020, his health sharply declined:

He had a severe physical and psychological dependency on benzodiazepines.

He reportedly developed "akathisia" — an intensely painful restlessness often associated with withdrawal or side effects.

After several unsuccessful treatments in North America, Peterson was taken to Russia by his family, where he underwent a medically induced coma and controversial detox procedures to try to end his benzo dependency.

Why Russia?

At the time, his family said that the treatment options available in the West were either not effective, too dangerous, or unavailable. Some reports indicated that the Russian clinic used unorthodox treatments — things that might not be approved or widely practiced in Canada or the U.S. The whole episode was seen by many critics and even supporters as deeply tragic and unsettling, especially for someone whose public message was based on personal responsibility, resilience, and stoic perseverance.

Outcome:

Peterson survived, but his recovery was long and painful. Later interviews (including one with his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson) showed him visibly frail. His cognitive sharpness, many observed, seemed noticeably impacted for some time afterward.

Jordan Peterson: Health Problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson?utm_source=cha...

Jordan Peterson suffers year of 'absolute hell' and needs emergency treatment for drug addiction that forced him to withdraw from public life, daughter says:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/jordan-peter...

Controversial Scholar Jordan Peterson Treated for Addiction in Russia:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/02/10/controversial-scho...

Drug Experts on Jordan Peterson Seeking Treatment in Russia for Benzo Dependence:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-drug-experts-say-about-...

The Jordan Peterson Benzo Story — Terminology, Rapid Detox, and Media Coverage:

https://www.easinganxiety.com/post/the-jordan-peterson-benzo...

I read the article, it goes in depth to explain cancel culture in campus, its origins, has various testimonies. Cancelling and censorship is a classic of anglo puritanism, which you represent well in this discussion.

Same for Peterson, you can argue as you want, the article says that he would be fined for not calling someone with their invented pronouns. And yes, that's how he got famous since it gave him media coverage. I'm not discussing his intellectual merits here, but freedom of speech. I don't think that you have the ability to separate topics, so it's kind of pointless.

Trans issues are a very good case of why we need freedom of speech, and why threatening to kill people who do not agree with you is rather bad? It deals with underaged people at a time they are vulnerable, the evidence regarding the treatments is rather weak and it was ultra marginal before media gave it a large positive coverage.

And yes, a father saying that his daughter shouldn't have to share showers or toilets with biological men is totally reasonable in his freedom of speech to say it.

> it goes in depth to explain cancel culture in campu

which is why it opens up with its most harrowing tale, to really grip the readers attention. The black tie christmas invites of upper middle class chemical undergrads

> the article says that he would be fined for not calling someone with their invented pronouns.

the law however did not. It was adding gender expression to the list of protected categories. Which their neighbours in america had since 1964. No one in america in 1965 was being fined for not using made up pronouns, they just werent fired for being openly gay.

Bill C-16 has a wikipedia page and its super easy to read, the fact that Jordan peterson was bad at reading, is no excuse for you to follow suit.

> I'm not discussing his intellectual merits here,

would make for a short discussion

> It deals with underaged people at a time they are vulnerable,

Its funny you birng up anglo puritanism and then throw a random "will someone think of the children" plea.

99% of trans issues have nothing to do with minors, gender dysphoria can start in puberty but most pathological symptoms tend to become needing of intervention in early twenties mid twenties.

access to work, home, education, healthcare and public spaces are most of the concerns of trans people. A population who have shown absolutely no historical pattern of problematic behaviour, whose research shows repeatedly that they are normal humans and whose ostracising has led to countless problems both for them and people around them.

Its not that different from the left handed hate from years ago. And tying kids hands behind their back and forcing them to be right handed caused stuttering, suicides and long term education problems. not sure how denying that trans people exist is not gonna end up just as badly.

> the evidence regarding the treatments is rather weak

in what universe? Lets start with some stats, 96% of people do not regret transitioning which is the highest acceptance rate of any medical treatment (people who had transplants of live saving organs regret at 6-8% for example)

transitioning has shown to reduce suicide rates by 300% of people who suffer from gender dysphoria. reduced depression on similar rates.

Happiness surverys show overall increase in life satisfaction post transition for people suffering from gender dysphoria.

Like what "evidence" are we missing, when the treatments have been known for a century and the results are conclusive on every single country that offers them?

> it was ultra marginal before media gave it a large positive coverage.

You have it backwards. it is still ultra marginal and the media who started covering it was not positive, it was a orchestrated think tank choice to go after trans rights. It began in 2013 when overall american opinion on gay rights flipped, suddenly going after gay marriage was a vote loser instead of winner so they pivoted to trans rights. Groups like Atlas, or the heritage foundation have open papers on it. Same with other terms like DEI or Critical Race Theory they are all openly created narratives by think tanks with predicated interests that extend far beyond the thing being attacked.

> And yes, a father saying that his daughter shouldn't have to share showers or toilets with biological men is totally reasonable in his freedom of speech to say it.

And I would love to see the explanation of what "biological male" means, cause I think 99% of people stopped reading biology in 4th grade and perhaps do not understand how complicated shit is.

Should we have someone in the door of showers and bathrooms doing check ups on which bits people have before they shower? Would a father be happier with her kid having her bits inspected "for her safety", cause that has happened. Bathroom laws in america meant that the police get called (usually on uglier women, or butch lesbian, poc women, hairy women, taller women) and they need to "prove" they can enter that bathroom.

also transmen exist, would a father be happy with someone who looks 100% like a man walking into the shower because of his assigned sex at birth?

Its almost like "totally reasonable" gets complicated fast, and you just let a dude walk into the loo and your daughter have her knickers inspected all to protect her from something that isnt happening. Great job dad

Sources for your allegations ? The statistics I saw, showed in contrary an increase in suicide rates. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11063965/

Even if it was lower, I'm not sure that it's the right treatment. Of course, cutting arms will solve most finger infections, but it isn't likely to be the best way to treat it.

By the way, UK supreme court defined what is a biological sex: the one you had when you were born. Sounds fascist, right?

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t

And yes, if there are spaces for girls only, it's for a reason, and one of them is to keep perverts away. But I guess that the rights of those girls do not count, either.

> Sources for your allegations ?

not an allegation. You should avoid big words if you dont know what they mean.

> The statistics I saw, showed in contrary an increase in suicide rates. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11063965/

Surgery is not a common part of transitioning. Transitioning treatment, which is what I said, is usually a process where the most common plans include hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers and therapy and lifestyle changes.

If you want actual data on it there was a recent meta study "Suicide-Related outcomes following gender-affirming treatment: A review" by Danial Jackson.

They analysed 23 studies and almost all mention and quantify reduced suicidiliaty, from less ideation, to less attempts, to less overall suicides compared to control groups.

> Even if it was lower, I'm not sure that it's the right treatment

you might not but every doctor association has, and they agree it is.

> Of course, cutting arms will solve most finger infections, but it isn't likely to be the best way to treat it.

cool analogy, but taking reversible pills and going to therapy is not the same as chopping anything off

> UK supreme court defined what is a biological sex: the one you had when you were born.

yeah thats cool and all, except sex assigned at birth is wrong in 1/2000 cases. So 34,000 people in the UK had their sex changed by a doctor after the one they were born due to either error, intersex conditions or nonconclusive genital development.

Btw genital inspection is one 3 ways to "biologically" determine someones sex, the other two are chromosomal make up (XX, XY or intersex) and the third is Phenotipic developemnt (long hair and boobs or beard and bald). The judge does not explain which one he means, but none of those 3 categories are Binary they are all Binomial. I know its not important for the judge, but it is important for biology, so its perhaps important that he would know anything past Grade 6 biology before putting it on a ruling...

> if there are spaces for girls only, it's for a reason, and one of them is to keep perverts away.

and how does this work exactly? Like actually going through the implementation of it. You need to prove you belong in an all womens space, so someone inspects your bits to make sure you belong? Like a little girl wants to go to the loo, but she must first go through the V inspector to make sure she can pee sitting down?

Is this the pervert protected future you imagine?

Transmen going to women only spaces is also gonna be a shitshow regardless of what their birth certificate says

If this guy walked into any women's bathroom they would call the police

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/04/19/dsc_0636_slide-c...

There are almost 0 cases of transpeople being perverts, 99% of them just wanna live their life and just exist. If they go to women spaces is probably to escape from the same problems that women go to those spaces for.

Or do you think this girl is safe in a mens bathroom?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/euphoria-hbo/images/d/d4/H...

I read the study, the author is much less affirmative than you and spends a lot of time explaining that the data is really subpar:

"A dearth of high-quality studies that evaluate outcomes in suicide following gender-affirming treatment poses severe limitations on the extent of claims made during the informed consent process for gender-affirming treatment. An abundance of claims that are not backed by evidence does not represent quality empirical evidence but rather guidelines endorsed by various medical organizations."

Another way of saying that what doctor associations is groupthink rather than evidence-based medicine. Also, you use a classic motte-and-bailey tactic here, to limit treatments to hormonal ones, excluding surgical. Of course, some hormonal treatment symptoms are not reversible.

Regarding young girls, we didn't have problems before. So I don't see why you're looking for a special "method" for this. And whatever the status of trans people, a pervert could well say that he is one to enter in safe spaces for women. We see this already well in sports, and with the obvious, and sometimes dangerous problems associated.

> Another way of saying that what doctor associations is groupthink rather than evidence-based medicine.

Way to read that in the worst way possible. Their biggest issue was how disparate the data was. I shared that one because it had the largest sample of papers, but there are plenty of other meta studies, and individual studies with the same conclusions

The website "What does scholarly research say about the effect of gender transition" by Cornell university did a review of 55 papers, found 0 that said it caused harm and 93% that said they improved life for trans people.

For an individual paper with good peer review and sample you can read Mental Health outcomes in Transgender and Non binary youth receving gender affirming care by Dana Tondoff, where they found that there was a 73% decrese in suicidicality and 60% decrease in depression.

Like its not group think when no one has done any research showing it does not work and plenty have shown it does

> Also, you use a classic motte-and-bailey tactic here, to limit treatments to hormonal ones, excluding surgical.

its not a tactic, it is literally the most common prescribed treatment for gender dysphoria. its like discussing cancer, teh most common treatments are surgery and chemotherapy. Some people get radiotherapy and they have much worse outcomes, because they were in a worse spot to begin with, not because radiotherapy does not work...

> Regarding young girls, we didn't have problems before.

but according to you all these spaces were created to safe them from perverts. So no problems, other than the rampant perverts?

> So I don't see why you're looking for a special "method" for this.

because you wanna enforce gender discrimination spaces based on genetials. So someone gotta check you got the right ones, or else a pervert could go in. So to "protect" your daughter you now have a way more invasive system than just letting people pee

> And whatever the status of trans people, a pervert could well say that he is one to enter in safe spaces for women

So the problem is not transpeople but perverts pretending to be trans people. So we should punish transpeople to protect girls from the perverts pretending to be trans people. Should we not just deal with the perverts and leave the transpeople alone?

> . We see this already well in sports, and with the obvious, and sometimes dangerous problems associated.

there have been 0 issues with transpeople in sports. The IOC has allowed trans women in the olympics since 2004, they have won 0 medals.

if transitioning was an overt advantage, if transwomen would 100% beat regular women then every medal would be won by a transowman. However its literally never happened.

The only cases of transpeople in sports that get discussed are Lia Thomas, a university swimmer (who won 1 race) and who is like 1 minute behind the best times of Katie Ledecky which is a cis swimmer. And thats about it.

The only scientific review of trans people in sports was done in the US army and they found no significant advantage in strength after 1 year in HRT and only 15% in cardio but the sports assoc always recommend 2 years on HRT and Athletes are 40-70% faster than regular women so transwomen would still be 30-50% slower than them. transitioning also makes you lose 60% of your muscle mass, the controlled test means they suually have lower levels than regular women and the "denser" muscles tend to get tired quicker due to worse oxygenation.

Transwomen in sports is a non issue, and the more it gets repeated the more it proves that the people who are against trans people simply have not thought about for longer than "oh a man shouldnt compete against women" and never again.

An average girl is 5'6, and average man is 5'9 so transwomen should dominate in basketball. Except the average WNBA player is 6'2.

Transwomen will never win in sports because athletes are the end of the tail distribution and transowomen are randomly sampled. A selected sample will always beat a random sample if the distributions are close.

if I have a dice with 5 numbers and I can throw it 100 times and pick the 3 highest, and you have a die that goes up to 6 but you only throw it once, I basically always gonna beat you.

This whole thread reminds me of the "I Have Been Silenced!" cartoon[1].

1: https://leftycartoons.com/2018/08/01/i-have-been-silenced/

Melania Trump literally did spread racist lies on national TV. And when confronted with evidence that directly contradicted her racist lies that she could not refute, she justified her racist lies with her racist "feelings".

Melania Trump Supported Her Husband's Racist Birtherism Claims on TV:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/melania-trump-supported-her-...

>People need to stop talking about "freeing Melania."

>An old clip resurfaced on the internet over the weekend of Melania Trump supporting her husband Donald Trump's claims that former president Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

>On April 20, 2011, Melania appeared on the Joy Behar Show and backed up her husband's allegations that Obama wasn't born in the state of Hawaii like live birth records suggest.

>"It’s not only Donald who wants to see [Obama's birth certificate], it’s American people who voted for him and who didn’t vote for him. They want to see that," she argued. Behar then made the point that the birth certificate had already been on display and all over the internet. "We feel it’s different than birth certificate," Melania responded.

Melania Trump On Obama's Birth Certificate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6i0YlHriKk&t=98s

>Joy asks Melania Trump if Donald is really going to run for president or if it's a publicity stunt & why he's obsessed with President Obama's birth certificate.

Unfortunately we are at the stage in the UK now where people do receive visits from the police to (and I use the exact language of the police here) "Check their thinking". This is a consequence of attempting to police speech which previously fell below the level of criminal activity, but now may have been elevated to a crime via volumes of new hate crime laws. Indeed society has now decayed here to such an extent that we have "non crime hate incidents" which still fall below the criminal threshold but warrant an investigation by the police.

That certainly doesn't meet the threshold for a credible threat.

It's a despicable thing to say, and it seems like even she realized that when she calmed down and deleted it. But what's the basis for treating it as a crime?

It wasn’t prosecuted as a death threat, so it’s not really relevant whether or not the threat was credible. The relevant offense is inciting racial hatred.

Ok, so it is very much political. Similar principles are being used right now to punish supporters of Palestine under the guise of preventing anti-Semitism.

Brief expressions of anger after a mass killing don't justify imprisoning someone.

Edit: the enforcement is political, I mean. Basically, not all hate speech is treated equal, it depends on who the speech is about, and what concerns the government. In the US it was terrorism after 9/11 and opposition to Israel now. It sounds like in the UK right now it is anti-immigrant sentiment. At least in the US we have a strong First Amendment to protect us from the government policing our speech.

The tweet was posted elsewhere in this thread. It doesn’t express any political view. It just says hateful stuff.

To your edit: If you’re making the comparison to anti-TERF “hate speech”, then it’s not treated equally because the law itself doesn’t treat racism on a par with anti-TERF sentiment. You can disagree with that, but it doesn’t show unequal policing of the law as-is.

From OP's post, it wasn't treated as a crime. I would absolutely expect a background check to reveal statements like that, that people voluntarily, publicly post.

No, that was a separate detail in OP's post. According to the second link, the woman who tweeted that received a 31-month sentence, as the post says: "the wrong social media post can carry a lengthy jail sentence".

That's disturbing. Instead of the govt. going after people we should enable people going after people.

That's how it's done in real life and that's how we protect ourselves from arsholes in real life. That's why the police is only involved when some actual danger is present, you are not expected to just endure the constant harassment.

IMHO someone being a complete cunt and you not having a recourse is also not acceptable. It's terrorizing people, there must be a mechanism to stop these people and that mechanism should not be police intervention.

The things they do should somehow stick to their name for example or you should be able to go after them just as brutally. Honestly, I like 4Chans way with dealing with people much more than restricted, moderated police involved crap that the Web has become. Someone built a following, then they harass people but your only recourse is legal stuff and you can't do doxxing, can't use bad words etc because you get banned/demoted/shadowbanned/rate-limited. It's not working, it's destroying the society.

For example, the women jailed for just tweeting plead guilt that she was spreading materials with intention to stir racial hatred. In a real life such person will be quickly stopped one way or another, she will be confronted and then removed or ignored. If her material is actually good, it will be noted and supported and the issue resolved. Online is not like that people with agenda lie, spam and annoy people without facing a pushback or consequences. It's not a real discussion, it's not real problem solving.

Just wait until you see the difference in how the police treat someone between defending yourself and attacking someone in the UK. Note: Don’t try to defend yourself if you know what’s good for you.

The police is not always present and you don't have to attack anybody. For most cases it is good enough to be able to show credible defence. If you you are able to smack someone, they will get smacked if they insist and remember it even if afterwards you go through legal trouble(they will also get into legal trouble). Police and the courts cant un-smack them. As a result, people feeling causing trouble tread more carefully and don't cross a line unless they are fully motivated to go through all this.

Streets are significantly more polite than the online places and I think its because of the dynamic of it and not the people - they are the same people.

I really can’t tell what you are trying to say?

This case sounds crazy, I cannot even imagine loosing a child and how anybody could expect someone to keep sane in those conditions.

Beyond this, there is a very clear difference between inciting hatred towards a group of people based on race, religion, nationality, origin, etc, and towards a single individual without those aggravations. The law is quite clear about this distinction in various countries (Public Order Act in the UK for instance), and the penalties are rightfully much stronger when one would try to instil hatred towards a racial (or other) group.

There's not actually.

So Britain is not a liberal democracy anymore? Are you sure you aren't falling for some propaganda here? This just seems very unlikely.

If this were actually true Britain would be violating basic premises of what is considered justice in a liberal democracy. Policing someone based on whether the targets of their threats are politically acceptable is obviously not are tactics used in autocratic regimes. Loyalists e.g. in Russia are free to threaten the opposition however they like at worst getting a slap on the wrist. At the same time much less serious threats against the regime are harshly punished.

If what you say were true and not just some propaganda operation, then the British political system has slid sharply towards authoritarianism. Obviously liberal democracy is more than equality before the law, but is one important pillar. This happening is incompatible with my view of the UK.

There's no doubt that the part about the police investigating and recording non-criminal speech is true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-crime_hate_incident

And according to these solicitors, such records are used in background checks:

https://www.slaterheelis.co.uk/articles/crime-category/non-c...

On this topic, I can't recommend enough the movie "The life of Others" (2006). Depicts surveillance in Eastern Germany and the state of sheer fear and paranoia its citizens had to live in.

In some European countries, if you apply to rent an apartment, the landlord can see you failed to pay 1 month rent several years ago.

That's just a tiny example.

Is this control and surveillance or ... democracy and freedom ?

I have a tenant who has been living in my garden house for two years without paying rent. It is almost impossible to solve this situation. I am not even allowed to turn off the water or electricity. There are always two sides to every coin.

You wish to increase his rent 10% annually and after move out keep his deposit 6 months. Then confiscate 50% of the deposit for "damages". You wish!

In fact, I would first like to see rent being paid at all. And I don't have a deposit to keep.

My experience as a legit and regularly paying tenant are equally awful.

That sucks. What law protects your renter?

Squatting laws, sounds like.

In Germany you have to file an action for possession ("Räumungsklage"). But that takes years (I brought it on its the way immediately). You cannot act on your own, it has to be legally enforced. But the legal system in Germany takes ages and human rights are higher than tenancy rights (usually good!). This often leads to deadlocks where nothing happens because you cannot evict someone and put them on the street.

Another case where the ‘winning move’ is to either have enough money small issues like this are in the noise, or no money at all (on the books) so society goes out of it’s way to not do anything.

Also known as ‘on both ends of the economic spectrum exists a leisure class’.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that, but it fits perfectly!

What country?

Germany, of course.

That’s just crazy. Were they ever a paying tenant and stopped paying. or just random stranger who broke in and decided they now lived there?

It was the neighbour whose house had burned down, and my mother let him move into our garden house (because winter was coming). They agreed to make a rental contract. But after he moved in, he refused to pay anything and since then it has been impossible to change that.

Thank you for explaining. It’s disheartening that this happened when trying to help that person.

In the US, the government is using everything you ever said on any social medial to deny you access to your job, the country, or benefits.

Just a tiny example.

Too scary and sad.

Comparing agents that will go into your home and move things around to drive you crazy and directly torturing you, with a debt registers is not a comparison I see as successful.

It is way more democracy and freedom than living in a state with an entity like the Stasi, a mixture between the NSA and the Gestapo, which is used to curb any opposition, at least.

It's not perfect, but this alternative is way worse.

And in the US, landlords can pull credit reports from private companies, and if the private company says you missed a credit card payment a year ago they'll reject you.

If the private credit score company returns a wrong score because someone else has the same name as you and they mixed up some records, well, it's a private company, you have no recourse.

Since it's not the government, but a for-profit private company, it can and will also sell your information.

If you opt out of this private company's system, landlords can and will reject you.

It is well known that the US is the most free country in the multiverse, so I would say no, having a government do it is not freedom (that's a social credit system like china has), but if instead it's a private company creating that credit score, that's freedom.

What law do you want to have to prevent this? Companies are people, and if your two previous land-lords are free to gossip about whether you paid rent (free speech), of course equifax should be able to sell that information (also free speech). People's right to privacy stops where free speech, and the ability of private entities to profit and raise GDP, starts.

This system absolutely sucks.

If you ever find yourself on the wrong end of it, read this article for advice but also explanations: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

Understanding how the system works, which buttons work and which don’t is half the battle.

Free speech does not include slander or lies. Like when credit score company makes a mistake.

You can sue the credit bureaus for inaccurate information. I did using a contingency lawyer and it worked. Depending on your actual damages, you can win significant money. The FCRA and other laws can be very powerful.

That statement needs a fact check. Which countries exactly?

From wikipedia surveillance movie list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_survei..., these might interest a tech audience:

  Antitrust (2001)
  Anon (2018)
  Closed Circuit (2013)
  Eagle Eye (2008)
  Equilibrium (2002)

Stasiland by Anna Funder is also a great read on the topic. And then there’s Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond The Wall” which takes a comprehensive look at the DDR.

Have you seen it available somewhere in Europe recently?

I've been looking for it for a while, with no success. I'd be happy with anything from DVD to archive.org/youtube upload or whatever.

It is available from Amazon.de on blu-ray (probably also on Prime Video depending on the country), under the original German title: Das Leben der Anderen.

You can find it on bittorrent: https://bt4g.org. That's a DHT search engine. Put in your query and sort by seeder count, then use the magnet link to load it onto a bittorrent client (e.g. qbittorrent).

You can check: https://www.justwatch.com/de/Film/Das-Leben-der-Anderen

Seems to be available in Germany and some other countries, but not here in Sweden at the moment (I think it used to be on Netflix here).

The section at the end about support and solidarity is the most important bit.

Personally, I feel like Zersetzung has already been a thing in the US since at least 2014. Modern social media is very, very good at getting people to shout at each other and do nothing. People don't talk to each other, they shout to themselves while watching the telescreen.

I feel like it started 2001.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the terrorists might have achieved many of their goals years later.

Bin Laden wanted to create a unified Islamic Caliphate uniting Muslims around the world, and overthrowing governments in the Middle East and Arabic world seen as usurpers and puppets of the west and zionists.

I don't think he particularly cared whether or not people in England or America got locked up for social media posts or other alleged freedoms. I don't think he would have been thrilled about the state of the Middle East today, if he were alive to see it.

What's happening in western countries is significantly the doing of (and almost certainly in line with the goals of) our ruling classes. Breaking down social cohesion, reducing the population of a country to little more than its head count and what it can do "for the economy", and pitting different groups to fight against one another are all key to ruling in their own interests.

I had a similar thought a while ago. If the goal of the terrorists was to shake the system in such a way it destroyed (or seriously harmed) itself, that goal was achieved. I believe the authoritarian ICE deportations without due process are essentially the imperial boomerang of the Guantanamo Bay-style human right abuses that followed 9/11.

In human history stretching the homelands rules beyond recognition when acting abroad has rarely turned out well for the homeland in the long run.

How does one reconcile the idea that the Stasi disappeared political opponents regularly but also engaged in weird stuff like moving people's socks around.

> The final stages entailed psychological and physical harassment: moving things around at home (one morning the alarm clock goes off at 5am instead of 7am, and the socks are in the wrong drawer, there’s no coffee left …); damage to bikes and vehicles (eg slashing tyres); the spreading of rumours as mentioned above; ordering goods and making appointments in target’s name etc.

I get that sometimes a "broken" opponent is more useful than a dead one as they can sabotage the whole cause, like this article implies. But if you hold as much power as they did then it seems very unlikely to me that using resources to troll someone like this provides an effort/reward ratio that would be interesting to someone with that much existing power

Perhaps for the same reason Russia's intelligence forces does it? They kill people in an obvious manner to send a message and the message is to demoralise, destabilise and psychologically harass other people. "I could be next"

I'm not sure if the Stasi disappeared people in an obvious or hidden manner though. Maybe they did it more frequently than modern states assassinations? In both cases it shows that the life of any person is not important to them - what's important is the effects an action causes.

You can't disappear everyone. Deniable punishment of possible precrime would create superstitions for the general population to be on their best behavior. Sabotage that slows down an adversary would enable more time for surveillance.

See "predictive policing", https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

> One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.” In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.

The question you ask is really important, because it shows how devious the Stasi regime was and why it lasted half a century. Why would they do this? Why would they go through these lengths to destroy a person so entirely they wouldn't even need to disappear them?

The Stasi knew that power is never that absolute. The GDR was built upon the idea that is was good, not evil (like the West). You can't be good and regularly disappear public figures, especially those from intellectual cycles. Additionally, people were aware of the oppression as is. If the GDR would have simply disappeared people, there would have been revolts. Germans were too connected to the other reality.

Here is a popular song from that time

I think what I want,

and what makes me happy,

but all in silence,

and as it befits.

My wish and desire

no one can forbid,

it remains so:

thoughts are free.

...

And if they lock me up

in a dark dungeon,

all that is purely

futile work;

for my thoughts

tear through the barriers

and walls in two:

thoughts are free.

The song predates the GDR by at least a century though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei

The Stasi documented what they did in quite some detail and most of the documents were not destroyed during the fall of the wall. So, there is no need for speculation.

I'm by no means an expert on the matter but as far as I know, the Stasi did not disappear political opponents regularly, at least not after Stalin's time. I looked over the article and didn't find that claim but if I missed it and it's in there, then the article is wrong about it. The Stasi had a large array of measures at disposal. Some people were cleared for moving out of the country to West Germany. Others went to prison. Some people were exposed to radioactive materials. Others got a better job that moved them away from other dissidents.

Specific "Zersetzungsmaßnahmen" you and the article mention were very rare - we're talking about an estimated few hundred to thousands cases in total. When they occurred, however, they were extremely devastating because not even experienced critics of the system imagined them. We're not just talking about switching socks and replacing good milk with spoiled one in the fridge. There were also cases of medical doctors prescribing the wrong drugs, for example, worsening the symptoms of diseases.

As far as I know, who became the victim of these special measures may not have been a fully rational decision. It seemed to be based to a large extent on the preferences of the case officers in charge.

Broader measures against critics of the system were far more common, however, and way more pervasive than what most people suspected at the time. For example, the father of a former girlfriend of mine was a famous GDR rock musician. He later found out from the archives that the Stasi planned and supervised his whole life and managed to break up his former band without anyone suspecting it. One guy moved somewhere else for work, another went to prison, and he moved elsewhere, too. There were also way more informants than he ever suspected. Basically, the Stasi and their informants interfered with what other artists he met, were he and his band mates got work, and so on. They planned over years. It went far beyond the usual method of giving people a telephone and letting them hear a loud click when the tape was switched on (they did that, too!).

> it seems very unlikely to me that using resources to troll someone like this provides an effort/reward ratio that would be interesting to someone with that much existing power

Nevertheless, this happened. The Stasi was a huge bureaucratic organization with ideology at its core, built after the example of the KGB. Stasi officers considered themselves fully in the right, defending their people against counter-revolutionary and decadent activities. Goals ranged from "helping" citizens get on the right track towards socialism in a friendly but firm manner, over collecting information about potential adverse political activities, to completely destroying enemies of the state and doing counter-espionage.

Divide and conquer.

I'm pretty sure that the intelligence services nowadays condone the contemporary identity politics revolution because it distracts people (especially the youth) from the actual problems of society.

I am old enough to remember the time where revolution meant actively fighting the oppressors or those in power, not posting on twitter about who has what between their pants and to which bathroom they should go to.

Anything other than this is missing the point.

You are probably thinking of the Gerasimov doctrine (or so we call it) where they would use any non-military means to simply but effectively destabilize the enemy society. I'm sure you can see it at work all around us.

It's remarkable how quickly Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe the moment Soviet support went.

Despite decades of intense propaganda, killings of people in uprisings and the methods of Stasi as described in the article.

Even with all that effort most people didn't believe in the regime.

So it's hard to say whether the Stasi's tactics worked. Only people in the regimes like Ceausescu and Honecker actually thought people liked it. And perhaps not even them.

If people believed in the regime, they wouldn't have needed a Stasi to impose it upon them.

Soviet support? More like Soviet control.

And also intimidation and threats. All of the the regimes collapsed swiftly once Gorbachev declared there will be no Soviet military response, like there was in 1956 and 1968. One wonders what would have happened if Poland in 1981 didn't feel like the Soviets will repeat that; there are some reasons to believe they would not.

As for your last point, Solzhenitzyn said something memorable about that -

'We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.'

It makes you wonder if 'disinformation' actually works if the mass propaganda of totalitarian regimes fails so dramatically.

There is an interesting book called 'Not Born Yesterday' that points out that people are pretty skeptical .

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45358676-not-born-yester...

Russian disinformation campaigns the past 20 years have been outrageously effective.

Only because of the invention of western platforms tuned by the brightest minds in the world to enable the maximum amount of brainwashing

Still proof that propaganda works, and is growing over time.

That's not true. Old-school disinformation platforms like TV, bought political parties, etc., worked and still work fine for disinformation and division. If you're not familiar with the subject, you'd be surprised just how inventive these campaigns can be.

Not as well as the modern adtech industry. Radio and TV were child’s play in comparison.

I love it how Americans point to such quotes without realizing that this is how most corporate jobs function.

A thousand big companies is still better than one gigantic state company. I’d prefer a million small companies though

Any large, hierarchical organization is likely to end up resembling this, be it public or private.

By the way, this American is Norwegian and didn't even set foot on US territory until my early twenties... :)

In our time, the lie has become the pillar industry of the internet.

As someone from a post-Communist country, unfortunately it didn't, exactly. The former ruling class just switched colours and looted the country during the "privatisation" phase of democratisation. People were never properly educated on democracy and stuff, and most of the parties that sprung up were just pure garbage interested in looting.

30 years on, the political landscape is still a disaster. Media is a shit show in the hands of a few. A lot of the older people (40+) long for the "good old days". A lot of the young have ran away for better opportunities. Democratic participation is very low.

The fall of the Communist regimes and subsequent liberalisation and democratisation were managed incredibly poorly in most of those countries. Yes, standards of living are much better, but if you ask a lot of the people, things are worse (because they're incapable of introspection, have been fed propaganda on Facebook and shit media, etc).

Actual support from the people was not wanted or needed by these regimes. They were content with having support by their party lapdogs, the kinds of people with no skills or personality, that would inform on their peers and magically become the factory's overseer. Those people owed everything to the system and they were the key to it continuing.

Everyone else was just kept in line. They set up both positive and negative incentives. Be neutral and you can live an OK life. Be a good communist and you can climb socially. Meet your West German uncle too often, or don't show up to the Labor Day parade and get a threatening talk. Actually voice your opposition to the regime and you may well find yourself in a Stasi torture prison.

Socialist doctrine said that socialism would be so good that people would soon(TM) embrace it organically. Of course they didn't, because it never delivered on anything and some western media still made it behind the iron curtain. Seeing a western supermarket shelf while you had to bribe someone to get spare parts for your washing machine is stronger than any propaganda.

The communism collapsed because it was no longer possible to keep the knowledge of the 80s American supermarket hidden from them. That's it. If the communist regime provided what CCP does now - there would be absolutely no collapse.

And yet the CCP won't allow any elections.

If the CCP did, how many of them would get elected ?

You know, USSR had elections, and people actually went and voted.

In Soviet elections, most ballots had a single candidate - the one nominated by the local party committee. Typical example: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Ussr_...

(Sometimes you'd have the arrangement where there's token opposition that is similarly nominated, much like DPRK today.)

As for people going to vote, that was actually enforced. While there was no law about it, strictly speaking, not going to vote would likely earn you a reprimand at work.

That's the point. "Allowing elections" is not enough.

It's worth repeating a tactic from every state's intelligence playbook, but I note that this article gives an interesting angle to this.

Informants and spies are almost always those at the top of your group, they are the leaders, the ones with the money, the ones with the van, the people with the time to help out, to print your flyers, the people who can organise and transport. Spies are going to be the people above you that you trust. Spies will be your friends. In the UK, police informants even fathered children with members of their infiltrated groups! They are not going to be the new strange people who join and are look nervous but who make excellent and easy scape goats. States want the maximum value for their intelligence, the spies are going to be at the top of your group.

The article suggests one way around it, to have flat organisations: to not have leaders. It gives resilience if when a person is compromised the group can continue, or when there is no leader the amount of information or damage that leader can cause would be less. Another way potentially would be the cell format, used in some of the worst terrorist groups, only operate in cells of 5 or less and only one of those in each small group have contact with only 1 other cell.

Informants fathering children with their sources was also a thing in the DDR. Often the lines were blurred because informants were former activists that were turned by threats and blackmail. But I personally know a woman who had 2 children with a guy who turned out to be an informant that had been specifically set upon her and her group of friends. She found out only after 1989 when the files were opened.

I really think the incoherence of modern reform movements (Occupy, BLM, Defund Police, etc) is the result of modern political suppression groups having enough tools in their toolbox to eliminate leaders of these movements.

Without a strong voice, the movement devolves into contradictory platforms, which results in no action.

Science-fiction industrialization (TV series spoiler), Emperor Clone Cleon (Day) and Azura, "Foundation" S1E10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05qXF5QLWw

> Do you know how many people we uncovered?

Article mirror: https://archive.is/d1rzC

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of...

> Hubertus Knabe studies the Stasi — and was spied on by them. He shares stunning details from the fall of a surveillance state, and shows how easy it was for neighbor to turn on neighbor.

During COVID face masks were enough. Fine speculators earner low hundreds trading them, politicians made frauds worth millions, anyone could pick on any stranger not wearing or wearing them incorrectly, law enforcement could impose the most ridiculous fines. It's so trivial to make people yap at each other.

Not wearing one implied a lack of care for others in your society.

Wearing them imposed minimal burden, so why are you surprised when you signal that you don't care about others in your society, that they responded in kind?

You’re basically admitting you are one sided on this topic and couldn’t understand why this was the perfect tool to divide and conquer people

Have you considered that perhaps they understood exactly that, and maybe better than you?

What clue makes you think that ?

What better tool is there to divide and control people than something basically inconsequential that someone is willing to get worked up over?

    Not wearing one implied a lack of care for others in your society.

Is a belief held only by one side

I think the same applies to "I don't want to wear a mask", no?

Except masks were a societal necessity to prevent further spread of an airborne pathogen - people not wearing masks were choosing to put their neighbours at risk of death.

I'm not sure what a "fine speculator" is?

In the UK the Tory ruling party used mask supply, and it seems other contract-based fraud (Covid website, at least), to steal £Billions from the Exchequer.

As in fine grained, individual. There were no bulk packages larger then maybe ten pieces. Everything larger was immediately split and sold with profit in small shops, open air markets, on gumtree/ebay/craigslist or some other local clone website.

„The first stage of Zersetzung was a comprehensive evaluation of state-held data and information, eg medical records, school reports, police records, intelligence reports, searches of target’s residence. At this point they were looking for any weak points (social, emotional or physical) that could be used to put pressure on the target, eg extra-marital affairs, criminal records, alcoholism, drug use, differences between the target and their group (eg age, class, clothing styles) that could be exploited to socially isolate them.“

Thanks to social media and big data this is a lot simpler nowadays.

Everyone is a member of the secret service with different clearances. Also, everyone is an informant. Also, everyone is a mutant. Also, everyone is a member of a secret society. Being a mutant, informant, or a member of a secret society is a crime.

The computer is your friend! Everyone loves the computer. Just don't let it know that you are a mutant, an informant and a member of a secret society.

As I said before, exactly like the Paranoia GURPS plot.

„the grassroots opposition movements made the biggest contribution to the revolution that started in East Germany in autumn 1989“

That is a myth german people like to believe. In fact the real reason for the breakdown of communist east europe was that the governments of East Germany, Hungary, Poland, USSSR … were bankrupt:

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/grenzoeffnung-1989-schu...

As long as dictatorships are doing well economically, they will find ways and means to suppress uprisings. This makes effective economic sanctions, including harsh penalties for companies that do business with dictators, all the more important.

So much effort and resources only to produce Trabants and Wartburgs. You will know them by the cars they produce.

https://www.theverge.com/electric-cars/655527/slate-electric...

indeed. the economic circumstances that produce. the situations that produce. a system that produces. which collapses and gives way to.

Well... ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjzpx_jUUA0

East of Iron Courtain represents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUxoiHfAFBo

Yes it was that bad it's not a parody. Lincoln was comparatively better which also explains weird sentiment towards "American cars" of people who were young in that era.

/me looks at most British and American cars...

And even the crappiest British car was better than the lawnmower that seated 4 that was the Trabant (ok maybe not the reliant robin, but still)

Look at the state of russian dissidents and opposition nowadays and you see Zersetzung at work.

Time and again we see how half-assed dictatorships don't work. Soviet Union and the Eastern Block failed because they tried to be nice. By doing so, they achieved the worst result possible: cynical, profoundly disillusioned society and an economic failure on top of that. They should've either folded when they realised that "classless and stateless" Communism was never going to work - which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.

There is no such thing as "Socialism with a human face". It is so anti-human, it can only exist by hard coercion, or not at all.

Are you using Socialism and Communism interchangeably?

Communism goes further than Socialism (or Socialism doesn't go as far as Communism), Communism is more extreme, cold and hard and not at all blurry-edged, according to my understanding anyway.

All instances of -isms eventually fall to the unrelenting winds of human nature. Not necessarily due to the ideals within the -ism itself.

Well, Communism was seen by countries we call "Communist" (GDR, Soviet Union, Red China in Mao era, and the like), as something potentially possible in some distant future, it was their endgame (some claim, only notionally so, with no actual plan of getting there, but it doesn't matter really). What they had in reality, they called "Socialism".

Socialism is the "form of industrialised society where private ownership of means of production is outlawed". Communism is the (hypothetical) "classless, stateless society".

The above comment chain is what is wrong with us. We talk about labels more than we talk about issues.

Labels are a distraction. If you have a conversation about real things I find we agree nore than we disagree.

But disagreement is what is fomented by our oppressors, because it distracts us from fighting them.

I agree. No matter how you call it, society without private ownership of means of production - without legalised ability to build capital and gain economic power by extracting value from productive assets for private gain - cannot work except by hard coercion provided by relentless, unblinking, crushing force. Just because a society like that is contrary to human nature and every bit of freedom we get, we will use to circumvent and undermine it.

And difference in terms - socialism vs communism - is just a west/east terminology difference.

Soviets called what they had "socialism" and what they (as they claimed) wanted to get, "communism".

The West called what Soviets had, "communism" and the social order in "soft" Western countries like Sweden or 1960s UK, "socialism". Which was "a society where private ownership of means of production still dominates, but is heavily taxed, and proceeds are used to fund a lot of social programs and public infrastructure, housing and other programs are centrally planned long term". Soviets never accepted that as "socialism" and kept saying that this term was only used by the West manipulatively to disarm the Western working class, and they were probably right.

Nevertheless, words (let's not call them labels, maybe terms) are what allows us to communicate ideas. While yes communicating about real things is the real deal, having a common understanding of words, language and concepts, is what allows everybody to have discussions. Labels are just shortcuts which may or may not be understood the same way by the participants, so such clarifications are always necessary at the beginning.

Socialism has practically infinite different meanings depending on whom you ask (and in what country). There’s nothing that ideologically unifies Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bernie Sanders, and Joseph Stalin other than being somewhere left of center, but all of them would have described themselves as socialists.

Socialism is defined by social ownership of the means of production. But in those countries, the society did not really have a say in managing the means of production, everything was in the hands of the 'avantgarde party' which inevitably led to centralization of power in the hands of a small clique.

Total socialism is of course unworkable anyway, but this was no socialism.

Well, defining any social order in this manner will result in the same conclusion. Just as with democracy, the power is never in the hands of people.

Defining it negatively though - as a social order in which the private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed.

In democracy the power is to some extent in the hands of the people. That even enables partial socialism, when e.g. some industries or transport companies belong to the state, but rest of the economy is private. But if there is no democracy, there is also no socialism.

> private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed

It did not exist, it was merely declared to exist by law. And there are several issues with that, one is that means of production are also your hands and your head and you can always refuse to use them, explicitly or implicitly, however painful that may be. And the second one is the existence of huge informal economy that has supplanted the shortcomings of the formal one and that one has always been dependent on private production and this has been the case in all 'communist' economies AFAIK. It was certainly the case in communist Czechoslovakia where I lived.

Socialism is not Communism.

What is your definition of socialism and communism? “Socialism” is used with a very wide set of definitions. Both the French socialist party (which is at most center-left) and the East German SED would have described themselves as “socialist”, and surely the latter at least would have thought socialism was incompatible with capitalism and that communism was its end goal.

Communism was always the goal if we’re talking about those countries. We were “building communism” and socialism was just a temporary pit stop on the way.

> which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.

That’s a good point. The system worked so “well” before, during and a bit after WWII was because of the absolute terror and demand for obedience. With the willingness to kill, enslave, starve and terrorize people by the millions, one can achieve “great” economic results and military victories.

I can't be the only one seeing the strong parallels between 'Zersetzung' and late stage twitter cancel culture.

So there is no surveillance in Europe ?

Like: EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption! (https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/eu_backdoor_encryptio...)

P.S. Again, just a tiny example

> than political grassroots activists have today in places such as Western Europe and North America

That (2021) from the title is on the mark, as I think that by now, 2025, it has been made quite obvious that political protests in the West can only get up to a certain point, after which you risk prison, job loss or a combination of the two (even bough January 6 and the associated political repression took place in early 2021, so maybe the author should have already been aware of it)

It was, of course, quite unfortunate that the footsoldiers carrying out an illegal coup faced sanction, while their leaders got off scot-free. (Well, most of them, Guiliani seems to be deeply fucked, and now that he's no longer useful to the regime, has been thrown overboard.)

(I'm sure someone will now chime in to explain to us how no, it's quite normal for a mob that's trying to overturn the results of a democratic election to break into a capital building while congress is in session, putting it under lockdown. And then someone else will chime in how it's exactly like a bunch of college students protesting by sitting down in the hallways of a campus building that they on any normal day have full access to and refusing to leave.)

Incidentally, the organizers of that putsch are now imprisoning people without trial in foreign concentration camps, and are refusing court orders to have them released. This is also, of course, above-board behaviour, and demonstrates that they have nothing but the deepest respect for both the law, the democratic process, and the checks and balances that safeguard us.

> even bough January 6 and the associated political repression took place in early 2021

Repression for a coup attempt is the expected and wanted outcome.

Also, please stop mixing the US, maybe Canada and UK with "the West". Political protests in France remain quite powerful, even if they haven't managed to force the government to go back on some long promised and long needed reforms (pensions).

> Political protests in France remain quite powerful,

Political repression against the gilets jaunes was quite powerful, too, thanks for reminding me. It was surreal to be stopped in the middle of no-where, Pays de la Loire, by a bunch of gendarmes who were holding submachine guns, and all that because it was still gilets jaunes season (early autumn of 2019, if I remember right).

Heavy handed policing is not political repression.

And yes, police, gendermerie and the army patrolling in France are armed. There have been enough terrorists attacks in recent memory that this is the norm. None of those weapons were ever used against protestors of any kind ("less lethal" ones have been, sometimes to lethal or crippling effect to innocent bystanders or protesters).

January 6 was an attempted coup de etat and high treason, not a protest.

It was not persecuted nearly enough - participants would've deserved the death penalty.

The part of it that took place at the rally was a protest. A lot of people attended it, and went home.

The fraction of them that went on to break into the capitol was a failed coup.

I see it as a modern day equivalent to Mussolini's March on Rome.

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

That looked more like an attempt to overthrow a democractically elected government by a mob of primitive brutes than 'political protest' to me tbh.

If anyone was attempting to overthrow anything, they would have been well armed. Not strolling around as if on a guided tour. Nobody overthrows a government by carrying protest signs. And grandmas aren’t using hanging out on the “front lines” taking photos with their iPhone. The leftist rioters that attacked police stations and burned courthouses — that looked a lot more like an insurrection to me.

https://youtu.be/Y6Apmdeoxys

1. Many of them were armed.

2. A mob of people doesn't need to be armed to be a deadly threat. In fact, just the prior year, someone - successfully - made the same argument for killing two unarmed people at a protest. The courts ruled in his favor.

3. Not a single person among those prosecuted has been acquitted by a jury. Only two were acquitted at bench trials. But I'm sure your opinion on this matters more than the findings of the courts... It's strange how juries of their peers kept voting to convict them.

> Not strolling around as if on a guided tour.

Is it common for guided tours where you come from to be trying to break through a doorway, on the other side of which is an armed policeman, warning them that they'll be shot if they come any closer? Or to attack policemen with flagpoles? Or to climb the walls of a building?

Or to smear human shit over the walls of someone's office? Steal documents from them?

What do you think Trump would order done to a mob of a thousand people climbing over the fences and breaking into the White House, in an effort to overthrow him? Think he'd be smiling and directing them to the gift shop?

Where the hell does this revisionist history come from?

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