Comment on UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the press never talked about it ever again.
So there is zero surprise that they’re doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.
atlien51@lemm.ee 3 days ago
What’s with the UK being a totalitarian shithole? Like…they tout bs about democracy and freedom all day long. So what gives their agenda over the past couple decades?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements who can’t really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they’re culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a “Britain won WWII” movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).
Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you’ll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to “end” Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).
At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather “flawless” and “impeccable”) and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can’t let others see that they’re sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called “Public schools” over there because supposedly “anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there” though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed.
To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their “Democracy” is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be “managed” via multiple “backdoors”, such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive “Public” Schools that only the children of the elites attend).
In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the “lower” classes is done in two ways:
There was a period when the UK wasn’t as bad in this sense following WWII, as in the post-War period millions of the “plebes” had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat is a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police which is mainly a middle and working class institution)
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 days ago
About appearances there’s also that everybody has what you’re describing in their stereotype of Britain (if not itself, then the Harry Potter universe at least), but feels that there’s something “true”, “real”, “deep”, “magical” about it.
It’s the feeling that “yes, that’s ghoulish, but maybe in the end that’s for the better, how do we even know?”.
A lot of cheap fantasy books in Russia in the 00s had that feeling too communicated, it’s probably one of the things that prevented the Russian society from being alarmed about the regime we have now.
The worst propaganda tool in my opinion, because it makes a person look at mafia and think “it’s mafia, but maybe I shouldn’t judge it like mafia, what if they’re secretly beneficial”, or look at jihadist bandits and think the same, or look at a fascist dictatorship and think the same. And worst of all, because in such it exploits openness of mind, as opposed to most other propaganda.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.
In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.
(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty fawning coverage of it in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)
In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.
Most don’t really don’t recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society in their own country works.
supernight52@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Moderates think that “both sides” have good points, but should meet in the middle. They work with whoever guarantees comfort and power. They poison society.