We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
A BBC story with that title warmed my heart.
A group of villagers who fought to overturn a council’s crackdown on second home-ownership say they are “proud” of their “David and Goliath moment”.
About 18 months ago, the council of Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, made what it called a “proactive step” to limit the number of second homes in the area.
Gwynedd Council, which reasonably enough calls itself by its Welsh name Cyngor Gwynedd since it is in a Welsh-speaking area, is currently under the control of Plaid Cymru.
It hoped that by introducing legislation requiring homeowners in the county to seek planning permission before turning a residential property into a second home, it would help local people who were being priced out of the market.
But some residents of Abersoch, a village on the LlĆ·n Peninsula which sees about 30,000 visitors during peak summer months, said the knock-on effects from the legislation – known as Article 4 – had been tough.
They described tradespeople needing to look for work further afield and long-time visitors feeling unwelcome.
The People of Gwynedd Against Article 4 campaign group took legal action against the council, Cyngor Gwynedd, and in November 2025 Article 4 was quashed.
Good for the campaigners. The BBC article later quotes two solicitors who brought the case on behalf of “People of Gwynedd Against Article 4”:
Laura Alliss, 38, who lives in Abersoch, said she initially threw away a council notice about Article 4 before she said she realised it affected everyone in Gwynedd.
“I just threw it in the bin because it just said it only affected you if you were a second homeowner, which we weren’t,” she said.
Enlli Angharad Williams, 29, who grew up in Abersoch, realised Article 4 “really impacted” her ability to re-mortgage when coupled with an existing Section 106, external restriction.
The two solicitors helped get a judicial review commissioned after ÂŁ105,000 was raised by a fundraising group.
Enlli said her friends and family were initially “quite angry” after she put her name down as a claimant against the policy, until they came to understand its impact.
Enlli described it as a stressful time, saying she was “ecstatic” at the decision to scrap the policy, adding: “I’m proud of the community, actually.
“I think it’s shown how much community there is left here.
“We can’t live without the tourism here.”
There cannot be that many Welsh solicitors called “Enlli Angharad Williams” (for those familiar with the IPA, her first name is said /ËÉnÉŹi/) so I am pretty sure that the Enlli Angharad Williams who appears on the “Meet the team” page for a Welsh law firm (and volunteers for the Abersoch lifeboat) is the same person as the lady just quoted. The page says that “Enlli is a fluent Welsh speaker and is happy to discuss matters in the medium of Welsh”. I’m glad to see Welsh speakers push back against the ill-considered tendency of Plaid Cymru to curtail property rights whenever they can. What Plaid Cymru think they are doing is enabling young adults who grew up in Welsh-speaking households to afford to be able to buy houses in their local area, hence keeping it Welsh-speaking, rather than being priced out by the English-speaking people who buy second homes there. But nothing drives young families out of an area faster than a lack of jobs. There are parts of Liverpool – one of them ironically called “Kensington” like the swanky London borough – that were so depressed that in 2013 Liverpool city council was selling houses there for ÂŁ1. Sure, that is at the extreme end of the spectrum, but there are plenty of places in the UK now, both rural and urban, where houses sell for prices that wouldn’t buy you a broom cupboard in London, and wouldn’t buy you much in Gwynedd either. Why? Because the jobs are elsewhere. And after a few years of that, the people are elsewhere too.
I missed this story when it came out a few days ago. It is still relevant. It will be relevant so long as the patterns of human behaviour observed in the Salem Witch Trials last, which is likely to be a long time.
“The Met was duped by fantasist Carl Beech. A decade later, the real victims are still suffering”
Here is an excerpt:
Ten years ago this month, Harvey Proctor, the former Conservative MP, received a letter from the Metropolitan Police informing him that he would not be facing charges of multiple child rape and murder.
Following an 18-month investigation, which had cost more than ÂŁ3m, the countryâs leading police force had concluded there was, after all, not enough evidence to prove that he had been part of a VIP paedophile ring that had spent years torturing, abusing and killing children.
There was not enough evidence, of course, because the entire thing had been made up by a fantasist called Carl Beech, who was, in fact, a paedophile himself.
and
The police investigation â which became known as Operation Midland â began in earnest in November 2014, when Beech, an NHS manager, went to police, claiming to have been abused for almost a decade by a powerful cabal of politicians, establishment and military figures.
He had already met with Tom Watson, the Labour MP, who enthusiastically encouraged him to take his allegations to Scotland Yard and then, without any due diligence, made a speech in the Commons warning of a âpowerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10â.
The list of those Beech â or Nick, the pseudonym he was given â accused read like a Whoâs Who of the 1980s establishment.
He named Edward Heath, the former prime minister; Lord Brittan, the former home secretary; Lord Janner, the former Labour grandee; Harvey Proctor, the former Tory backbencher; Field Marshal Lord Bramall, the former head of the Army; General Hugh Beach; Field Marshal Roland Gibbs, the former Chief of the General Staff; Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6; Michael Hanley, the former head of MI5; and Major Raymond Beech, his own stepfather. He also threw Jimmy Savileâs name into the mix, perhaps to add a semblance of credibility (Savileâs crimes had become known in late 2012).
The list of people “Nick” claimed had abused him was a great deal longer than that. The Times journalist David Aaronovitch wrote an article (which I cannot now find to link to) before “Nick’s” true identity had been revealed that dared to question Beech’s tale on logistical grounds. I say “dared to” because at that time the witch-hunt was at its height and the comments filled up with people who said that for Aaronovitch to quibble about the likelihood of so many of the most scrutinised men in the country (including Edward Heath who as a former Prime Minister was given round-the-clock police protection) being able to slip away for murder parties quite that often must mean that Aaronovitch was in on the conspiracy too.
The Telegraph article continues,
In December 2014, in line with a new national policy that demanded the police must start from a position of believing all victims, Scotland Yard held a press briefing at which it declared Beechâs claims to be âcredible and trueâ. Seasoned crime journalists present, including me, were somewhat surprised to hear detectives declaring allegations to be âtrueâ at the outset of an investigation.
Sir Richard believes that this was a fatal mistake from the police. âFor senior officers to stand outside New Scotland Yard and say Carl Beech was credible and true before they had even spoken to him or read his interviews really was outrageous.â
The senior officer who stood outside New Scotland Yard and said that Carl Beech’s accusations were “credible and true” was Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald. It was no mere slip of the tongue. Here is a BBC video from 2014 of him repeating it. I once thought that the presumption of innocence was drilled into every police officer.
What happened to Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald? He and the other officers who led Operation Midland to disaster were allowed to retire early on full pensions.
What happened to Tom Watson, the Labour MP who used Parliamentary Privilege to amplify Beech’s accusations in Parliament? Sir Keir Starmer sent him to the House of Lords. He should now be addressed as “The Right Honourable the Baron Watson of Wyre Forest”.
What happened to Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP falsely accused of multiple rapes and murders of children? He lost his job and his home and says he will never feel safe again.
What happened to Field Marshall Lord Bramall and Leon Brittan? They did not live to see their names cleared. Their last days were darkened by the knowledge that millions of people believed they had raped and murdered children, because the police said the accusations were true.
What happened to “Nick” a.k.a. Carl Beech? He was released from jail early having served less than seven years of his 18 year sentence.
The Telegraph reports,
Donald Trump has postponed strikes on power plants in Iran for at least five days.
The US president said the two countries had entered talks on a âcomplete and total resolutionâ of hostilities.
On Saturday night, Mr Trump set a deadline of 48 hours for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face attacks on energy facilities.
The threat prompted Iran to publish a list of retaliatory targets, including a nuclear plant that powers Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Mr Trump said: âI am pleased to report that the USA, and the country of Iran, have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.
âBased on the tenor and tone of these in-depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the department of war to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.â
Iran denied that direct talks with the US had started. One headline on Iranian state TV said: âTrump retreated after Iranâs decisive warning.â
Other than seeing Iran free, I don’t even know what I want to be going on.
I was going to say that Guido’s headline cannot be improved upon, but, on second thoughts, the headline-writer really should have mentioned that the hamster was dressed as Godzilla. Details matter.
The Daily Sceptic features this article by Daniel LĂŒ: “Why Using Parliament to Police MPsâ Opinions is More Dangerous Than the Opinions Themselves”. It starts,
Let us be clear at the outset about what this article is not. It is not a defence of Zarah Sultanaâs views. Her statement that âZionism is one of the greatest threats to humanityâ is analytically indefensible. Zionism is a broad political movement encompassing positions ranging from liberal democratic to nationalist. Declaring it one of humanityâs greatest threats is not an argument, it is a slogan, and a lazy one. Her follow-up post, âthey love killing kidsâ, is cruder still. It reduces a complex military conflict to a tribal smear, and it does so in a political climate already corroded by bad-faith rhetoric.
None of that, however, is the point. The point that tends to get lost whenever someone unpopular says something unpleasant is that the mechanism now being used against Sultana is more dangerous than the posts themselves. A complaint has been submitted to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, reported by the Telegraph on March 14th, alleging that the posts constitute âa modern iteration of the medieval blood libelâ and breach the MPsâ code of conduct. If that complaint proceeds to a full investigation, the long-held principle that elected representatives cannot be called to account before a parliamentary watchdog for their political opinions will be broken.
and ends with this:
I freely admit that Sultana is not a natural free speech advocate. She has supported deplatforming voices she disagrees with and co-leads a party in explicit opposition to liberal freedoms. She would likely not extend the same defence to her political opponents. None of that matters. The principle does not depend on the virtue of its beneficiary. If we only defend the free speech of people we agree with, we do not actually believe in free speech. The liberal tradition holds that the stateâs coercive mechanisms should not be used to adjudicate between competing political opinions, however much those opinions horrify us.
The right response to Sultanaâs posts is scrutiny, challenge and the kind of forensic public argument that exposes weak thinking for what it is. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has a proper role in British democracy: investigating corruption, expenses abuse, conflicts of interest and harassment. Deciding which political opinions about live foreign policy conflicts are permissible for elected representatives to hold is not that role. The Commissionerâs own rules say as much.
I urge you to read the part in between. It is a strong re-statement of basic principles. And defend Zarah Sultana’s right to speak freely as an MP, vicious and stupid though she is.
Fewer Britons giving to charity, study says, with donations down by ÂŁ1.4bn, reports the Guardian.
The article gives cost of living pressure as the main reason for the decline in giving. Commenters in this thread on the UKPolitics subreddit also mention invasive chuggers and the fact people tend not to have cash on them these days.
The article itself continues,
Peter Grant, an expert in philanthropy at Bayes Business School, said the decline in giving also reflected a more polarised society. âCulture warâ attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media on voluntary organisations such as RNLI and the National Trust had undermined the wider legitimacy of charities among some donors.
Maybe, but far from being the victims of “attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media”, a lot of charities seem to have been eager to volunteer for the front lines of the culture wars.
This excerpt comes from the section of the website of Oxfam International headed “What We Do”:
3. Center decolonial and feminist practice in our organization
Decolonization is intrinsic to achieving gender justice for all. Our sector comes from an extractive colonial history â hetero-patriarchal and racist in nature. Neocolonial dynamics continue to shape our sectorâs work and approaches. We will evolve into an organization that centers decolonial and feminist practice by building on our principles and initiatives to deeply integrate them into every aspect of our work.
There speaks a soldier of the culture wars. How long did they expect to keep waving their banners without anyone noticing that they had picked a side?
I believe that Oxfam does still occasionally do the “help suffering people in emergencies” thing that most of those who buy from or volunteer to work in their charity shops think is their main purpose. That’s my excuse for buying that nice scarf I saw in their window the other day, anyway. But I wonder what proportion of what I paid for that scarf went to pay the salaries of the sort of people who write “hetero-patriarchal” with a straight face. And writing guff about “neocolonial dynamics” is actually one of the less bad things some of Oxfam’s paid staff have got up to over the last few years, as can be seen by reading some of the many previous Samizdata posts about Oxfam at this link.
Added later: Here is another example of Oxfam’s enthusiastic participation in the culture wars:
JK Rowling: Oxfam sorry for video after ‘cartoon JK Rowling’ accusation.
Oxfam has apologised after posting an animation for Pride Month featuring a character in a “hate group” who some say resembles author JK Rowling.
The charity has denied the cartoon woman with red eyes and a “Terf” badge is based on the Harry Potter writer.
In trying to make a point about “the real harm caused by transphobia”, Oxfam said it had “made a mistake”.
Compare the pictures in that BBC article and see if you believe Oxfam when it said that “There was no intention by Oxfam or the film-makers for this slide to have portrayed any particular person or people.” I do not. In the Telegraph’s account of the same story, the resemblance is even clearer. Some smart work by the Telegraph’s picture editor has almost certainly found the very photograph of Ms Rowling which Oxfam’s cartoonist had in front of them when they drew the middle witch.
That’s taking a side. I have read several comments by people who are on the same side who acknowledge and deplore this. When you alienate half the population, don’t be surprised when they stop giving you money.
This letter appeared in today’s Guardian:
What needs to be spelled out to the politicians looking to consult people about digital ID is that you cannot have a universal digital anything until you have universal phone coverage (UK digital ID scheme to have limited use before next general election, minister says, 10 March). When the old copper phone lines are switched off, we will be cut off because no provider will invest in our area, and this is not untypical of large areas of Devon.
That means that any digital ID accessed by phone will not be available to us unless we go and park in a layby every day where we can get signal. Does Darren Jones, the prime ministerâs chief secretary, even understand this point? We are not refuseniks. We just live near a hill, and so we wonât be able to do our car tax, get our medical records or anything else as things stand.
This is not a lifestyle choice either because we had a properly functioning analog TV signal as well as a landline when we moved here. We canât give out our mobile number to anybody important because we know that the device will let us down, and we are paying the same as everyone else â have been for years.
Teresa Rodrigues
Crediton, Devon
This is a good argument against digital ID in itself and is also likely to work well in the public sphere. I welcome any blow against digital ID, and I sympathise with Ms Rodrigues, but I must acknowledge that there is a problem for libertarians here.
As the letter says, the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) landline phone network is in the process of being replaced. This link takes you to the government guidance page on “Moving landlines to digital technologies”. The government and the phone companies present this transition to “Digital Voice” as being un upgrade for which we should be grateful. It is not an upgrade for me and I am not grateful. Compared to some, I am not badly affected, but I have lost the convenient ability to dial six digits instead of eleven for a local number, and, more worryingly, Digital Effing Voice doesn’t work when there is a power cut, which we have fairly often. For those who live in rural areas, such as the writer of the above letter, it will be much worse. A friend of mine lives in Scotland, has very poor mobile signal at the best of times, and regularly experiences days-long power cuts due to snow. That’ll be fun when the landline doesn’t work. Next year’s papers will be full of stories about old people in isolated houses who died because they could not call for help in an emergency. This change is not being done for the benefit of the customers. It is being done because the “new digital technologies using the internet such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Digital Voice or All-IP telephony” cost less to run than the old technologies.
What to do? If I was a socialist or a big-state Conservative, I would immediately say that the old copper phone lines must be maintained despite the expense in order to protect the vulnerable and to keep the system working in the face of attack or disaster. As a minarchist, I might be able to say the same, but given that the actual socialists in power and the big-state Conservatives who preceded them have not taken that route, when I have no doubt that they would have been happy to trumpet that they were doing so, I would guess that the extra expense of maintaining the old system must be insupportable.
Or am I wrong?
The Daily Mail features this story about a pro-Palestinian activist:
Thomas Bourne, 39, an Islamic convert who uses the social media handle ‘White British Muslim’, approached the Jewish comedian, 51, last month after spotting him on an escalator.
He said: ‘I was going up the escalator and looked to my side and saw someone giving me an uncomfortable even hostile look and I realised it was Matt Lucas.
‘My instant reaction – as anyone’s would be who was going to confront someone – was to pull out my camera phone and shout “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”
‘As a result of that video and a subsequent Daily Mail article I actually lost my job.’
As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,
Sounds like a totally normal thing a normal person would do. Normally.
Bellend acts like a bellend and suffers repurcussions.
Every personal interaction a chance to show one’s virtues, just gotta make sure it’s captured on camera and uploaded to social media immediately. What a miserable way to live.
The interview with Mr Bourne at the PoliticsJOE podcast, from which the Mail took the story, can be seen here. The section quoted by the Mail is excerpted right at the beginning, and the video Mr Bourne himself made is shown at 8:07 and can be seen here. The interviewer, SeĂĄn Hickey, sympathetically introduces Mr Bourne with the words, “We’re going to be talking today about an incident that you found yourself involved in” as if Mr Bourne had no choice about initially accosting Matt Lucas, filming him while shouting “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”, confronting him further at the top of the escalator (while making a point of loudly repeating his name so everyone would know it was someone famous), continuing to follow him and argue with him despite Lucas’s non-confrontational answers, and then putting the resulting video on social media.
I do not know if London Transport has any rules against shouting at strangers you think are looking at you funny, filming them, and putting the video on social media without their consent. If it does have such rules, they were not enforced on this occasion. Mr Bourne was not punished by London Transport. Nor was he punished by the law. This is not a free speech issue. The only bad result he suffered was that his employer no longer wished to have him on their roster of fundraising consultants. I can see why Mr Bourne might not be an asset for an organisation trying to raise funds.
Ill fares the land. Ominous tidings abound, such as MPs giving ministers powers to restrict the entire internet, World War III breaking out, and Winston Churchill being replaced by a badger.
But who could fail to feel hope stir in their bosom when the headline “Zack Polanski repeated claim hypnosis can increase breast size, BBC interview reveals” is a serious and genuinely consequential piece of political news?
Polanski the politician can be judged by the fact that he wants to arrest the president of Israel and build a relationship with Vladimir Putin. It becomes ever-clearer that before Polanski was a charlatan in politics he was simply a charlatan. But I am not convinced that his claim to have inflated women’s breasts by mesmerism is truly culpable. He seems to have half-believed it himself, alongside a more plausible theory that what he was actually doing was increasing the women’s self-confidence. There do not seem to have been many complaints from his customers. At some level I expect they understood that what they were buying from him was an hour with someone who would listen to them and then say soothing words. He should have stuck with his previous, more honourable profession. “With my help you can wish your boobs bigger” is less of a lie than “This time, rent control will work”.
Maybe I imagined it.
I thought I saw the first few seconds of a scary video, either put out by the Home Office “Prevent” scheme or by some NGO with a similar remit. The video featured a teenage actor – white and male, obviously – portraying a boy lamenting that he had got a criminal record after impulsively posting hate speech online. I remembered the title as being something like “It just takes a few seconds to get a criminal record” or “It only takes a few words to get a criminal record”. From what little I saw of it, the video seemed more sinister than 99% of the hate speech it aimed to combat – because it was not put out by some Twitter-addled rando with thirteen followers but by His Majesty’s government, or an organisation closely associated with the same.
Ya know how it is. I just saw a second or two and thought, “I might blog about that”, but I was too busy to note it down. And now it’s disappeared. I put a query into CoPilot, which might have been unwise, and got this:
đ Official Home Office Video Link
đ„ âIt Just Takes a Few Words to Get a Criminal Recordâ â UK Government (Prevent)
YouTube (Official UK Government Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw (youtube.com in Bing)
This is the authentic version of the video youâre looking for. Itâs produced as part of the UK Governmentâs counter extremism and online safety messaging aimed at young people.
đ What this video covers
âą Warns young people that posting extremist or hateful content online can lead to:
o Arrest
o Prosecution
o A criminal record
âą Uses a serious, cautionary tone
âą Shows teen actors in realistic online scenarios
âą Designed to discourage impulsive posting of harmful content
The link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw says “This video isn’t available anymore”
That “anymore” suggests it did once exist, but I am beginning to wonder if I did not hallucinate the whole thing and spur the A.I. to join in my hallucination by means of my prompts.
Assuming I did not imagine it, can I get this video back from the void? I’ve tried the Wayback Machine without success.
UPDATE: That was quick. My thanks to commenter nbc who said, “This one?”
Yes. This one.
https://xcancel.com/Steve_Laws_/status/2029317472059359438
It took me about a second of scrolling down from that post to find views expressed by Steve Laws that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, he mocks Laurence Fox for saying, in the context of the child-killer Ian Huntley being attacked and killed by another prisoner, that even the most depraved criminals should be protected from vigilante justice in prison. Steve Laws appears to be an actual far-right person. They do exist. But as I have said before, “if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.”
The video appears to have been put out by the police rather than the Home Office, and shows a boy – not “a boy” in the sense of “a young man”; a child of about thirteen – tearfully saying “I just got all my devices taken away by the police. My mum couldn’t believe it. I might get a criminal record and not be able to go to college. I only shared a link. I just thought it was funny. But it was terrorist content, and that is not a game, it’s real life.”
That is a deeply sinister message for the police to be putting out, particularly in that it is aimed at children.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Schuerzinger has provided a direct link to the video: https://www.instagram.com/terrorismpolice/reel/DVd1g1bkg7I/. It came from an Instagram account called “terrorismpolice”. The final frame shows a police logo and the words:
COUNTER TERRORISM POLICING
A.C.T.|ACTION COUNTERS TERRORISM
WHAT YOU SHARE LEAVES A TRACE
CLICK TO FIND OUT MORE
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
Has your child spotted our latest campaign on their feed? đ
Weâve launched a digital campaign aimed at teenage boys to highlight the real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online.
The content is being promoted on platforms young people already use, to reach them where they are.
Our message is simple: sharing extremist material can lead to serious legal and life-changing consequences.
It’s not just a laugh. What you share leaves a trace.
Learn more about the campaign and the message behind it via the link in our story.
Two questions occur to me:
1) Why was the video removed from YouTube? Hostile comments?
2) Is the video an accurate portrayal of the likely “real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online” when the sharer is a child and the content is something the child shares because they think it is funny? If it is not an accurate portrayal, then the police officers or police employees who made the video are deliberately frightening children with misinformation regarding the law. People have had the police turn up at their doors to issue a “friendly warning” for less. If, however, it is an accurate portrayal of the real world – that is, if children really are being given criminal records for sharing (not creating, sharing) comic memes of whose extremist origin they were unaware, then we are further along than even I thought.
Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
Green Party policy âAbolish Landlordsâ: solving the housing crisis
The Green Party’s ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy could end the housing crisis with a number of measures that will benefit tenants
âThe Private Rental Sector has failedâ, reads the Green Partyâs statement to âAbolish Landlordsâ motion, adopted as party policy at Octoberâs Green Party Conference. Key elements of its plan to tackle the UKâs endemic housing crisis include:
Abolishing Right-to-Buy legislation and introducing Rent Controls.
Levying more taxes on landlords, including Land Value taxes and national insurance on rental income.
Ending Buy-to-Let mortgages.
Subsidising councils to buy back properties that have not been insulated to EPC rating C or have been vacant for more than six months.
Speaking to Alex Mace by email, Worcester Cityâs Green Party councillor and co-sponsor of the motion, he told me that âAbolish Landlordsâ âtakes actual concrete steps to solve the housing crisis that are largely how our original stock of council homes were built through the 50s, 60s and 70sâ, including establishing âa state-owned housing manufacturer ⊠to deliver housing at scaleâ. While the motion does not actually outlaw landlordism, it âseeks to make it significantly less attractive to be a private landlordâ.
I’m getting a “defund the police” vibe. Tell the base that the slogan means exactly what it says, while telling the rubes that it doesn’t, with scope to row back on either position when convenient.
By the way, here is the Greens’ policy on migration, as stated on their website:
The Green Party in government will:
Implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration
Treat all migrants as if they are citizens
Give all residents the right to vote
Help families to be together
Dismantle the Home Office
Abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition
Abolish the ten year route to settlement
Stop the profiteering from application fees
Stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status
Accept our responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot.
Taylor Lorenz is the one who doxxed Libs of TikTok, who came this close to lionising the murderer Luigi Mangione, and who for some reason habitually lies about her age, but she makes some excellent points in this article: “The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”.
Excerpt:
While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.
And while some claim the laws would curb big techâs power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big techâs power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.
If we want to fix the problems with social media, the place to start is through comprehensive data-privacy reform and consumer protections. Governments could also take action to break up big tech companies and prosecute them for anti-competitive behaviour. Lawmakers, who claim to care about children, could pass broader social and economic policies that we know would meaningfully improve childrenâs lives. Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens. Any policies that limit online access should centre on the most vulnerable children and adults.
To enact the social media bans being proposed around the world requires some system of age verification, which inherently means expanding surveillance technology. Because algorithmic systems cannot accurately estimate age, verifying a userâs age also requires collecting highly sensitive data or government documents to support the biometric data harvested. The laws being considered donât all stipulate which system will be used, but there are significant privacy and safety concerns with all of them.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, âPorcupinesâ, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
