I cannot fathom how an entire nation of people can allow themselves to be duped so well, by so few. The entire 'keeping people safe' position is a button that gets pushed and pushed - do the English really fear for their lives so much that they are willing to give up so much freedom, and to allow a powerful elite to rule them? The answer, centuries old: YES.
It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity. This notion of the elite nature of the British Empire serves no purpose other than to polarize the people of that tiny nation against all others .. and this is terribly shocking.
The British people will never be truly safe for as long as they continue to deny their own empires criminal behaviour. What England did to Ireland; what it did to its colonies; what it continues to do in foreign lands, daily - this is the true source of danger for the English people. No amount of pontificating/Mind Control being force-fed on the British public will ever address the dire straits in which England has forcefully left millions of people, not subjects of their empire but nevertheless victims, all over the world.
The same reason as in every western democracy, including the US: massive marketing budgets & the media.
> It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity.
What absolute nonsense. So many countries have committed atrocities on a similar level, and many more recently than the British empire. Should the Norwegians be crippled by guilt for the actions of the vikings? Should the Americans be crippled by guilt for crimes against the native people? Should the Japanese and Germans be crippled by guilt for atrocities committed in WW2? People don't live in the past.
Yes, they should be crippled by guilt. Guilt is good -- it prevents you doing the same bad things again and gives you a perspective of what you did.
People might not live in the past, but countries carry their past with them.
The fact that the actual people that started the Vietnam war have died, doesn't mean that the country and the organisations that they worked in died with them. Those should carry the guilt forward. (Of course, instead they usually carry forward the same long term strategic planning that led to their previous attrocities).
What I mean is, countries are not discreet: they are continuous. A country has a history like a person has. Its history doesn't die and start from zero with each generation.
That's even an accepted norm of international relation even when the change inside a country is from a state to another (e.g the US after independence) etc. It's called "succession of state")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states
Now, of course the truth is that they are not crippled by guilt at all -- they never stopped doing crimes on humanity and on their own citizens ever. Look what they are doing to the native americans in Dakota still. Look at Zimmerman.
Once you start stepping on our rights we stand up like the best of them though. See recent stories about a guy who got told by his bank that he couldn't withdraw his money unless he told them what he wanted it for. That made dinner table conversation amongst my family. Net neutrality, data protection and privacy in the digital age is all too abstract though.
That said, it's pathetic that there are regular arrests here for people being mean to one another on Twitter (death threats aside). There's a large celebrity base calling for more of this, and it relies on the polices ability to access ISP records quickly for very little.
2) David Cameron is in no way representative of the British or the English.
Please stop painting us all with the same brush.
Right, because you don't have a representative government. At all.
Most English people today don't know anything about what's supposedly been done to Ireland in their name. Neither are they duped by the rhetoric, but democracy is sufficiently weak that they don't have a voice.
I don't think most people around the world have an issue with colonial Britain either.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but many outside the western world consider the UK to be one of the chief evil influences in the world.
This is a type of article that Hacker News fucking sucks at - ignorant flamebait attracts indignant comments which get many upvotes. Ignorance is spread and people don't bother finding out the reality.
The problem is that it is fiction, so I don't worry all that much about privacy of characters, because they don't exist. It is also absolute, in terms of us knowing who the bad guys are, and why. So while it might be a realistic enough view on events that happen in real life, it's still bound by it being a TV show and therefor I'm not too sure if we could ever use it to illustrate, let alone prove anything this important (our privacy).
I should hope that the prime minister of the UK makes this distinction, too, before basing any actual decision on it.
While I strongly oppose any warrant-less surveillance bills. I can agree with the statement. Nothing makes me a sympathise with the police more than crime dramas. So much to the point where I feel some American TV procedurals are almost propagandist and a lot of people assume the police have more rights than they do because of TV. But this is reality and things aren't as black and white as that.
All you can really tell from that statement though is that script writers enjoy adding in wiretapping, etc as it's both reasonably engaging to watch and really easy to write about. It says nothing whatsoever about actual policing or indeed the ramifications involved.
From the boingboing article - "David Cameron: TV crime dramas prove we need mass warrantless electronic surveillance"
Wat.
blinks Wat.
This must be stupidest thing I've ever read in my entire life. It's like saying that we should all affix a gun to our hand because it works so well in FPS.
Or that hiding in a corner makes you recover from cancer. I don't care if he didn't say it really.
I blame either him for saying or the journalist for writing so illogical.
"In the most serious crimes [such as] child abduction communications data... is absolutely vital. I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."
It's a weak position, but he is using an analogy, so that makes (slightly) more sense.
I wonder how much of such data can be used in a police investigation? I'm actually Ok that they use it to prevent a crime, but charging you for it, if they don't have any legal evidence is also fine by me.
I would argue that it's the leaders and governments who should be crippled by guilt. It's useless for me to carry the guilt of the British empire when my ancestors were working class and had no influence over those decisions (and, in fact, were Irish when you go back more than a few generations - should I be angry at Britain in that case?)
No. People should by all means recognise the privilege they have and make ethical decisions based on that privilege - but they shouldn't be 'held responsible' for it as if they're criminals themselves.
Based on these numbers, it seems difficult to claim that the leader of any political party represents the views of Britain as a whole.