From age and ID restrictions on the Internet, to charging rappers with “terrorism,” the U.K. is demolishing the most basic civil liberties. If we let them, U.S. leaders may be close behind.
So did people in the 80’s (before internet) have more free speech than now, or less?
Can’t anyone just build their own website and “free speech” all they want?
Private media owners always had control over their property, that isn’t new.
America is already well on its way to lose free speech as well. We have a secret police called “ICE” now, so it’s only a matter of time unless the “resistance democrats” finally do their fucking job
Could? go publicly criticize the Pedo in chief and watch what happens
The idea that America EVER had free fucking speech is propaganda. There is no such thing, not in the US and not anywhere. Nations have to control their propaganda or they lose their power. Want an example? Just log into your favorite feed-site in another country and look how radically different every post, every comment and every news story is. Our perspective in the US is as cultivated as it is anywhere else.
The only way we would ever have truly free speech in any capacity would be if we had a borderless world, and I don’t see that happening as long as we have money and classes.
Short of some alien species descending and absorbing everyone into a hive-mind, this isn’t going to change for a thousand years at least.
It’s the useful idiots on the left who keep saying freedom speech is a dogwhistle.
I think it’s odd (and pretty terrifying) the U.K. and U.S. have been on such similar and almost coordinated authoritarian tracks over the last few years. It started with a lot of gradual steps and more recently they seem to be ramping things up (which also seems pretty common for authoritarianism/by the time most people notice something weird is happening it’s too late).
Both ramping up A.I. to spy on, and control/micromanage their own civilians while refusing regulations or any public accountability for the A.I. they’re developing.
April 2024: U.S., U.K. Announce Partnership to Safety Test AI Models
Feb 2025: UK and US refuse to sign international AI declaration
May 2025: Brexit’s Failures Could Foreshadow Trump’s. Just Not in the Way You Might Think.
We have been on the same track in many respects since Reagan/Thatcher.
Britain never had free speech and always have been a absolute nanny state. It’s a prime example that government overreach does not result in any safety improvements.
Many people seem to ignore that british legislation is choke full of gag laws and restrictions on pretty fundamental rights.
Yeah why shoild they be able to tell me to wear seatbelts.
What is this ‘could be’ business?
“and america could be next!” they literally have domestic concentration camps in america there is no freedom there
But how nice of the headline to imply such things don’t exist while pretending to be shocked about other things
How many whistleblowers and reporters did Bush and Obama charge with the Espionage Act?
A lil late on that
Come on… Things have been getting worse for a while, but this is a huge turning point
I’d still like to see the numbers comparatively
What are you talking about? What numbers?
Numbers are a tool. This is apples and orange drink, you can’t reduce this to numbers
Whatever the fuck that means
It means that you’re asking for a metric that will not inform the subject at hand. Even worse, it will muddy the issue even more and mislead people
Math is a tool, and if misused it does damage, like any tool
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Pretty much every company that matters decided to go full 1984 censorship and surveillance all at the same time. And the governments are more than happy to play along. UK, US, etc. Pretty much all of “the west”
Hopefully we’ll see more fediverse instances that allow freedom of speech.
They are paving the way for feudalism to replace liberal democracies,
Big time.
And thanks for the link! learned a new philosophy tag for the silicon-valley-government-buying-neo-nazi-death-cult.
🌠the more you know (about the enemy) and all that. . .
Just what the fuck is this timeline? I was born in Russia and spent a good chunk of my life basically idolizing USA, UK, EU, other European countries, English-first countries, etc.
By the time I had the language and professional skills to try and migrate into a probably really good life, suddenly there’s a rise of authoritarianism, loss of privacy, rollback to the political right and intolerance and hatred and whatever.
There’s still a long way for these nations to go before things are as bad as here, but the differences still are dwindling at an alarming rate and I often find myself wondering if it’s gonna be worth the effort if I want to eventually move to someplace that still respects privacy and freedom and is sensible about the Internet and digital technologies.
There’s still a lot of perks from knowing English as well as I do, but at this point, I think I’d have to learn German or Swedish or some other northern EU language if I ever make up my mind.
And by the time I’m ready, these countries will roll out some bullshit, too, right?
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails - but gamers’ emails are ignored…
It’s all so demoralising. I miss looking forward to the future with hope and excitement for things.
As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.
That is, I expected things to get worse, but not “avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones” levels of worse.
Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.
But I thought there’s some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that’s not what I see.
As a bit of gloating - at least now the “why are you not all revolting against Putin” Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.
in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity
that used to be the case, back in 1960s when the economy was booming and workers were in high demand. they got paid a lot, and if you have money, you can do whatever you want and live a good life, in the US at least.
At the same time “global economic integration” and “global trade” including outsourcing of production to countries with cheaper labor were sold to the populace as a logical continuation of liberal democracies. Increasing efficiency, thus increasing the level of life. That the level of life also depends on having leverage, and moving critical production outside means reduction of leverage, nobody thought (well, the majority of population didn’t think that, bread and circuses).
While this is a system old as humanity, Chinese imperial bureaucracy and Roman one and Assyrian one and Persian one worked like this, to build hierarchical systems. Troops quelling rebellions in one province are from one in the opposite part of the empire. Troops fighting wars in a province are never local, because wars between empires always involve stimuli to change masters. Bureaucrats are too foreign, everything is foreign and not reliant on locals. Even food and drinks are sent from other provinces and tightly guarded - despite that being far more expensive then than now.
So today in a western country all the digital products are made mostly in other countries, all the electronics are made mostly in other countries, much of the food and much of the clothes and much of everything. And this is treated like the good free western way of life. The further from WWII, the less everybody feared such a situation.
While the firmer is integration, the harder it’s to leave it, and the harder it’s to leave, the less meaningful any freedom is - your vote matters only for the bosses in you part, and they have the combined power of the bosses to deceive you, to misdirect your vote, or to plainly steal it, or to go around it.
Historically integration built empires.
The USSR, a recent example of an honest attempt at autarky, which is often used as an example of who tries autarky and why, didn’t really try. It’s the other way around actually, in 20s it was rather democratic, in 30s it was basically buying foreign technologies and machinery for gold and grain for everything (that’s the Stalin’s industrialization), in 40s too (war and all), and the only parts of its history where it really was trying to do autarky significantly enough was during the Thaw and Brezhnev, and while that didn’t work so well, that’s also the most democratic period of its history.
But at the same time high autarky degree means lower level of life. I’ve been excited with Trotskyism once, despite most of time being a ancap. Because, well, it involves direct democracy and mass participation in all political activity, and no career bureaucrats and politicians, the need for that is substantiated by any limited minority of politicians or bureaucrats being possible to covertly threaten, blackmail, buy, groom, etc.
I don’t subscribe to their “democratic planning of the economy using modern means of computation” thing - I agree it’s possible if Amazon is doing just that on scale far bigger than needed for a government in one country, don’t get me wrong, and that demands fewer resources than all this “AI research around”, but there’s inherent degeneracy in such a planning system because, as a specific example, you don’t know you have to design and produce a good that would be in high demand but isn’t already produced.
I think Trotskyism in many of its parts is still very good, actual participation not only is beneficial for the system, it also gives the populace the psychological understanding that politics is not about casting your vote once or twice for the guys who frighten you less. Feeling of holding the wheel. Personal responsibility and ability to change things for good. These are important exactly to compensate worse level of life (locally worse, because good level of life combined with tyranny eventually becomes worse too) emotionally, because otherwise it’ll be impossible to institute a political system nobody wants.
There’s always Canada, a similarly large yet sparsely populated land with awful winters and bad food, you’ll fit right in.
Excuse me, bad food? I’ll have you know we have at least 10 flavors of poutine truck at every public event
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails
They didn’t just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn’t be ignored. Gamers haven’t done that, unfortunately.
what’s happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it’s dying, it didn’t work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of “When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left”
So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We’re seeing it in real time.
But this has happened time and time again. We’re a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it’s always the same song and dance “well lets go this way, sure it didn’t work out last time but I don’t believe it’ll happen to us THIS time”.
So it’s not so much “what the fuck is this timeline” but rather “well it’s our generations turn for bullshit”. And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn’t experience it, but their parents did, and now it’s our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but…we as humans sure do love watching reruns.
it is a simple as the rich thinking they no longer need plebs soon
it is no coincidence this is happening during the blown up of AI
i believe that “far-right” sentiments are a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat.
if your tribe is in danger, you start kicking the foreigners out, you start going back culturally to what you perceive as “safe”,
it’s literally like if a windows computer fails to boot properly 3 times in a row, it re-boots into “safe mode”, which is a locked-down, dumbed-down, simplified version of the actual os. we are the computer. if people experience hardships too often throughout their daily lifes, they start “dumbing down” and “rebooting into safe mode”. just that that safe mode causes more hardships for everyone else. and that’s where we’re at right now.
Don’t get your hoped too high on Germany, Switzerland and Austria…
Früher war mehr Lametta?
I don’t know, but we just got the governmental trojan back in law. It goes back and forth…
Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You’ll be fine.
Back in the '80s my British father would get as far as opening his mouth to use the Swedish he’d been practicing before the shopkeeper would preempt him in flawless English “How can I help you, sir?”.
My inlaws actually don’t speak any English and they’re the first adult Swedes I’ve known that don’t. Fortunately I speak Swedish fluently but it was comedically awkward for my wife’s previous British boyfriends!
You can now do secondary schools in English in Finland.
Except if you speak Finnish or Swedish as a native language.
Fucking stupid addition. Some right-wingers afraid of Finnish dying must’ve added it to the legislation but it’s beyond silly and not having it would promote integration of non-Finnish speaking immigrants with Finnish/Swedish speaking natives. And there definitely isn’t a lot of people who would prefer doing secondary school in English. Probably more from the newer generations but still a tiny minority.
It seems that our leaders idolize Russia back. 🤣
It’s all about this,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Apparently, Putin’s regime is seen as an example for our leaders to follow.
P.S.: Without the direct threat that the communist USSR posed to Western elites, social-democracy faded away as the rich became more and more emboldened.
Dear christ, is there anything Russia isn’t responsible for? Apparently we’re all puppets in the West, easily hypnotized by gifs generated on washing machine CPUs, and conveniently it’s never our own making.
Please seek therapy. This “Russia Russia Russia” thing is McCarthyist hysteria on steroids.
You’re idolizing Russia as much if you think they’re somehow behind everything you don’t understand or like.
What’s the difference between your elaborate near-psychotic take and any other conspiracy theory?
Russia Russia Russia. Jesus motherfucking tapdancing Christ on a rubber crutch.
I dropped a plate this morning, Russiaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!!!
Read again. 🙄 Read again and if you still think I’m blaming Russia in the previous comment, read again until you understand what I said.
FYI Germany has been rolling out bullshit already, so that’s one out for the count. I’m in a similar situation to you, and I think it’s time to give up on the traditional first world. The future for economic immigrants is honestly pretty bleak, but your best bet is either the sane part of Eastern Europe (here’s hoping Ukraine pulls through with its democracy intact), South America or somewhere in Southeast Asia if you’re looking for a democracy with a decent standard of living.
Well, UK partially aside, your country is the root cause of all the shit happening here. Specifically Putin el Puto.
Well, not so much “cause” as pouring gasoline on what was a light smolder.
You’re shifting way too much blame on Russia. Our democracies are failing by themselves, because of complacent politicians who care more about their career and being elected than doing good for their countries. Politicians who learned they don’t have to apply their promises and everything will turn out fine. Voters got pissed and fell for far right lies and propaganda.
It turned into a roaring fire by itself. Putin just made sure the fire doors don’t shut.
Well, it is one big process.
Hard to trace the power which allowed for all those slow processes of subversion to happen, but a lot of it stems ultimately from the USSR’s breakup and those who managed to make profit on it.
Western countries’ MIC’s which no more had to prepare for real war, so same big funding, but less accountability. Western politicians making profit on reducing their militaries - it’s a profitable process of selling properties and scrapping tech and such. Western advisors in ex-USSR helping their new mafia elites. Western businesses who first managed to secure some agreements to do business in ex-USSR.
Then - the tech sector, via plenty of qualified labor from ex-USSR moving to USA and other western countries. Cheap fossil fuels sold by Russia to EU countries, which became a major factor in their economies in the 90s and 00s.
Politicians in this were very notably not complacent, just looking out for themselves and noticing opportunities for themselves.
Also a lot happened just due to technical progress and lack of macro-level competition. Soviet system notably had deadlocks because interested parties couldn’t agree to one countrywide system. Suppose USSR somehow managed to survive till now, with its collegial and totalitarian-bureaucratic, but not mafia-style, government. Then total surveillance being introduced in the West now and long ago in China wouldn’t be successfully implemented in the USSR, for the similar reasons EU countries want to have their own surveillance, but not US surveillance over their citizens. In USSR it would be between ministries and factions not willing to be controlled by others. So in USSR there’d likely be some status quo.
I mean, it’s purely a hypothesis, it already imploded and there’s nothing more to say about this. Just - such things as now would sometimes happen during the Cold War too, but having a big totalitarian state as a counterweight helped a lot. Like an example of what will happen if this is allowed, and like an alternative (if we are going to have totalitarianism, then let’s at least have the red workers-and-peasants kind), and like a real threat in case of weakening of western nations.
So one can imagine that USSR’s breakup did lead in many ways to what we have now. At the same time had it not happened, then maybe on my side of the screen everything would already be surveilled (or maybe it is).
i wish people like you could take a moment to contemplate on the simple fact that russia is not to blame for every single problem that US and UK have internally. if there’s a car crash in US, people are gonna blame russia for it. if the vegetables go mold, people are gonna blame russia for it. it’s always somebody else’s fault. how about you take some self-responsibility?
And I wish people like you remembered that countries that don’t speak English existed, because I’m in Finland not USA.
Blaming Russia for the inadequacies of much more powerful nations like the US is pretty ignorant, imo.
Of course those countries had issues - including the USA.
But it’s Russia that interfered enough to put the far right in those countries in power. Like I said, they poured gasoline on what was already a fire
A few stolen elections in a row were approved by US politicians and various European politicians almost unanimously, because of “supporting Yeltsin against reaction”, and “if not this imperfect democracy, then Commies or neo-Nazis”, and “but we’re having a reboot of relations”, and then with almost open realpoliticking shit about how Putin is convenient to do business with, and if there’s a change of regime, it won’t be as easy.
So I would argue about root causes a lot. Especially since the root cause would be Western interference during USSR’s breakup, first aimed at preserving USSR, then after that failing aimed at preserving Russia as 1) some sort of superpower, 2) authoritarian regime led by Yeltsin’s crowd.
It doesn’t even matter that they likely didn’t know what they were doing, likely led by Tom Clancy books style idiotic ideas of the dangers and chances in that process, and the main “threat” perceived was some “radical reactionary takeover” leading to someone launching nukes just for the sake of it. It even reads idiotic, but such opinions were said officially, however nuts it was.
EDIT: And also there’s the subject of Ukraine’s nukes. If someone didn’t know, it’s not Russia that pressured Ukraine to get rid of its nukes in favor of Russia. It’s USA. Convenient to have one hegemon in a region, with whom you can deal, except that hegemon might eventually accept the idea that they are the hegemon.
This is absolutely insane. Russia is NOT the root cause of anything bad happening in the United States. Pull your head out of your ass.
I’m in Finland. I’m also referencing the EU member countries, not just the USA. A lot of the issues here are literally due to Russia.
Edit: Trump and Republican ties to Russia are definitely also a thing.
Russia only helped spread the cancers that were already here
Basically yeah. Spread and grow.
But metastasized cancer is much harder to get rid of, and that’s what Russia has ensured on happening.
Ah come on. It is still assholes here deciding to be assholes.
Hopefully this doesn’t devolve into another USA vs UK shit flinging contest. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, Trump and Starmer are both utilising state power to crack down on dissent and opposition. Those of us who are opposed to this shit are on the same side.
100%.
Doesn’t matter the country.
Do you work for a living?
Do you want to live without fear of governments and corporations breathing down your neck waiting to make an example of you or profit from you?
…Then we should be on the same side. Simple as.
Good-natured jabs aside, of course. ;) Love ya, Brits. <3
That was lost a while ago, but it’s nice more people are noticing that it’s getting worse.
Uh, America had free speech? First I’m hearing about it.
With a president meddling in both universities and media free speech, there is no way to seriously say USA has free speech.
But even before these issues freedom of speech was very challenged in USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_IndexIf you’re wealthy enough, you can do whatever you want.
Freedom™
thank you random Canadian Lemmy user!
/s
You’re more than welcome!
I think the US will be fine as long as we don’t repeatedly elect some kind of cabal of pedophile authoritarians.
You mean the Republican party? At this point I’m convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.
It’s a YUGE stretch to assume there were no democrats in the Epstein files.
Maybe, but they aren’t nearly as authoritarian.
Yes they are.
You’ve just been duped into thinking they’re not.
You mean the Republican party?
Yes that’s the joke lol
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It’s just very unnecessary when you’re repeating the joke
Well if you check other replies, others clearly don’t agree that this only applies to Republicans.
It doesn’t change the intent of the joke
I mean they re-elected Bush so.
Ted Cruz
Irony is truly lost on this platform
I feel like that was the entire intent of the comment you are replying to
It definitely was, please see my other comment below somewheres
why do you say that? seems like a pretty ironic thing to say. found it!
I think it was being downvoted or something, or maybe I just anticipated people not picking up the invisible /s. No clue at this point, I had some beer demons in me last night
What’s happening in Britain, thought current government was a good one?
Labour is centrist and they desperately want to exert more control. English are sheep, so no one will protest daddy government.
Supposedly centrist. They’re curious whether being populist right wing on some issues will win over Reform UK voters. It’s just that they’re so curious and are doing this so often that they’re well on their way into morphing into a right wing party.
so no one will protest daddy government.
Yea this is a problem…
Someone call up the fine people of France and ask for lessons on how it’s done!
(Heck, we North American should, too…)
