Comment by bArray

> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.

I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.

The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional controls for users (something that would have prevented this).

I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”

Did it occur to you they only voted against it because they knew it would pass anyway, so they could afford scoring some brownie points?

That's not necessarily a position you have to fight. You can also take the standpoint that if the UK government can't protect your private data, then how can a data provider. There are many such cases:

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-06/hacker...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/21/immigration...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/britains-nh...

I genuinely thought that Farage would finally fuck off after brexit happened. I hadn't really figured that he's in it for the attention rather than the politics

They voted against it because they thought it didn't go far enough.

> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.

It's the UK's Stop Making Me Defend Trump[0].

[0] https://pjmedia.com/charlie-martin/2017/01/20/stop-making-me...

They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get stoned to death.

Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.

Why? People make all kinds of empty promises to get into power.

Ugh, that quote is a disgusting way to argue. It's akin to saying that all vegetarians are nazis because Hitler was a vegetarian.

If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.

The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.

> The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings.

Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and I doubt they were all intending to go back on their campaign promises from the start or that they were really convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over powerpoint in closed door briefings.

I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.

A big problem is private entities do so much spying, it becomes hard to argue against.

We collect tons of data on people to sell ads. Why not to save children?

Why do you think politicians are idiots?

Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.

If these claims are accurate, then the solution is obvious: elected officials who are themselves domain experts in this. They can then explain to their colleagues why these arguments are bullshit.

But, I expect that that won't help because your claims don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act in good faith and like the government that they're a part of having such power.

Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.

> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections

This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.

>The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power

Since its foundation, has the US government ever actually reduced its powers? It established itself with limited power.. But since then, its power has only increased via amendments, to the point where the President is effectively an uncontested emperor type figure.

> The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power.

This is not an example for an existing government reducing its power. It's rather an example of revolutionaries recognizing this very problem and attempting to prevent it. As we have found out since then, their solution isn't as foolproof as they had hoped.

Pass.

Im glad not to be confined by historical rules invented by people who could not hope to predict the future, and would not choose to put that kind of burden on my descendents.

Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look at the evidence:

- US is about to have military on the streets during peacetime with no terror threat within a codified constitution

- UK has had military on the streets in response to terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over many (10+?) documents ranging from Magna Carta in the 1200s to the Bill of Rights in the 1600s to documents written in the 1800s and then more modern Acts of Parliament.

Importantly the UK constitution can slowly change which means the UK has never had a revolution and never will do. Whereas the US constitution is rigid which achieves the opposite: when it does change it'll be dramatic and as a result of another violent revolution.

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No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.

And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn’t do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has, at Canada’s request, and in the same act removed its own power to legislate for Canada going forward.

(Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it wanted, which took half a century and the requesting Canadian government still very controversially did not win the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.)

With that said, there is an important structural difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity.

This means that the Canadian situation is not really a counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined, which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if they can all agree as required.

However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments such that they mostly don’t attempt them any more, so the eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not lost it de jure.

The Thai monarch actually has power though which makes the constitution meaningful. A constitution between two parties where one has no power is meaningless.

Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.

Ironically, while I am absolutely not a monarchist, it provides a kind of stability to British democracy, because it mostly transcends party politics, unlike other presidential systems.

Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political parties as a threat to their republic.