Comment by 31337Logic
8 hours ago
Yeah, you're right. It's totally fair to compare how the EU treats its people to how Iran is treating its people right now. Good job. :-/
8 hours ago
Yeah, you're right. It's totally fair to compare how the EU treats its people to how Iran is treating its people right now. Good job. :-/
it's a very weird kind of propaganda I see a lot of lately.
Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic. Doubt it? be showered with cherry picked micro facts that on the surface are similar.
This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
This seems to happen a lot.
The UK is doing some shitty stuff and a man was arrested for wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt a few weeks ago, “Palestine Action” being a proscribed group in the UK, and showing support being an offence. When the mistake was realised he was released after a few hours with an apology.
These things are objectively terrible, shouldn’t be happening. The UK government is under popular and legal pressure to un-proscribe the group as hundreds (thousands?) have been arrested and charged.
But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It’s the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.
It’s really weird to watch.
I would see it as moving the baseline, which Europe and (more historically) UK was for many people in civil rights area. If we just say that authoritarian countries are still worse, this partly implies that what Western countries are doing is becoming acceptable, as long as it is still "better" or "less bad".
The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.
As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.
But defending the arrest of the man with "Plasticine Action" t-shirt as a mistake (only realized after a "few" hours, god damn!), is god damn ridiculous.
About 2 decades ago I read an article about how bureucracies don't even allow for humor any more, e.g. even clearly joking about having a bomb in the airport is now taboo. Something about rigid inhumane inflexible rules, in my vague memory of that article.
Where airport security has to examine babies for terrorist motives, because it's written in the rules, fuck human reasoning!
Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...
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It's not literally the same of course. But you should wonder, how much of the difference is due just differences in how much they need to do?
If South American dictatorships could have their way with less blood and less noise, don't you think they would prefer that?
I'm reminded of a tragicomic recent admission from Nate Silver of 538 fame. He said Disney almost never interfered in their editorial process, as if that was a good thing. What that really meant, after all, was that Disney was perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but almost never felt the need to. (As you would expect. I mean, why would Disney care about political polling?)
Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.
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The people complaining probably live in the UK or are related to it somehow. Then it would make sense that they are more worried about authoritarianism in the UK rather than in South America.
And even if the man was wearing a proper "Palestine Action" shirt that'd still be pretty concerning. It is an insane stretch to say that wearing a shirt represents a matter for police action. How far the world has moved on from when the UK could be considered a forward-thinking bastion of liberalism.
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I live in EU and I oppose internet cenorship, privacy invasion and many other bad things the governments have been doing for years now.
I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there, neither does anyone else commenting here it seems... but many of us do live in EU, and are bothered by EU doing the same thing as iran, even if it's on a smaller scale (for now). You can't support censorship at home and then act outraged when someone else just implements more of it... even though some do, as long as the censored things are the things they personally don't like.
To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.
TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
If not for EU there would already be multiple states with privacy invasive systems seen in UK.. We are close of getting there and they keep on trying, but so far the blocking states are enough as majority.
Sure EU has some fkn horrible sides to it, such as the anonymous vote to get big stuff through when a majority should be enough as democracy depicts, but currently 2 states out of all EU states can block the big decisions...
> I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there
You also don’t live in the United States, or in Israel or Palestine but folks tend to forget that it seems.
But you can do something anyway which is to be aware of the atrocities committed by Iran’s regime, make sure your government is aware of your opinion, you can protest outside the Iranian embassy in your country, help Iranian dissidents, help Iranians find sneaky ways to get internet access, &c.
I’m not expecting anyone to do those things but I find this “I don’t live there” argument continue to creep up whenever it comes to Iran but it never enters conversation when it comes to specific other countries.
> TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
Sure but you don’t have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.