Comment by monooso
13 hours ago
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
> 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.
Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!
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Kier Starmer seems to be doing everything an establishment plant would - an establishment that really doesn't like the idea of a Labour government.
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http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more people realizing that it is true, as it always has been.
You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.
Some parts quoted:
> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.
> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]
See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").
He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:
> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
Vote with your feet (and wallet).
> Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
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And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not impossible. It happened before.
However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.
This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months it's all cracked wide open.
Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.
A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for
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Oh no not Trump. We wouldn't want that, better vote for the other extreme who will end up passing largely the same kind of laws but with slightly different excuses.
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
He did. He came back about 6 years later because immigration was up not down.
UKIP was dead when BoJo was in power. But of course, the Tories under May, BoJo and Sunak amped up immigration to record levels, so now there's a stronger case for Farage to contest. While UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism, Reform has openly racist undertones in their pitch to voters.
> UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism
Or rather euroscepticism was the dog-whistling for racist arguments that, since Brexit happened, don't need to camouflage anymore.
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.
> Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this
He seemed pretty fixated on "monotheism" being a particular problem, as though two gods were fine.
Why? People make all kinds of empty promises to get into power.
True but all the other parties are currently saying that they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our country’s history.
This is government overreach and they know it.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goals but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or wikipedia.
Spotify has my PI already. Wikipedia I was using today as normal.
The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Just keep porn away from your kids please and let's hope we do better for the next generation.
> Don't like Farage. At all I love the way folk feel they have to apologize to HN users (guess which way the majority lean) when they recognize someone like Farage has a point.
Ugh, that quote is a disgusting way to argue. It's akin to saying that all vegetarians are nazis because Hitler was a vegetarian.