Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online
FishFace@lemmy.world 6 days agoDoing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.
But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)
There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.
He did it anyway, that’s intent.
I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying. That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success. It is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success. Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact - not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else. If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.
The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.
but their intent is usually to do something shady
Citation needed.
People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.
im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’
Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)
Senal@programming.dev 6 days ago
I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.
So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.
Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.
Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily a good indicator of idea.
Agreed
Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.
Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.
There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.
So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.
That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.
It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”
There is an example of action not based in incompetence.
Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.
I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.
In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.
That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )
Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.
That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.
Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.
I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.
as i said earlier, it’s not
so much as it is
“Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.
FishFace@lemmy.world 6 days ago
That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.
No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.
Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City. I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>
It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.
If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it. Politics is not the realm of headcanon.
Senal@programming.dev 6 days ago
Yes, as I’ve previously pointed out, there are examples of this happening.
Can i prove it’s a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I’m not going to, but I’ll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.
I’m not sure why you asked about how i do predictive analysis and ask questions that ignore the answer.
I’m not saying this specific action can be proven to be a bad idea before it happens, i have, many times said that i judge these things based on what has come before and the outcomes of those things.
Read the rest of my replies for examples of how this works.
Again ignoring the idea of power as a motivation, but sure sunak probably had/has other avenues to money (and power).
If you are judging the potential benefits of being an MP/PM solely by the salary they pull in you have already failed to consider all of the relevant information.
You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.
I genuinely don’t understand how you think arguing this point and ignoring a large chunk of the salient information would work.
You have to be trolling at this point, so I’ll say it once more and then I’m just going to point at this line again in the future.
The things that they say and the outcomes that resulted from that don’t match a lot of the time, after-the-fact explanations add flavour sure, but given how often this makes little difference this makes i will continue to base my predictions on what they stated they were going to do vs what happened.
Reading alexanders biography isn’t going to change the outcomes or the stated intents of the time.
Assuming he’s not lying or spinning, which is a big if given his track record, then i might get some insight as to his stated intention, which i will still judge against the outcome.
This is the same method i would use for all political biographies.
If i say something is absolutely true, then i should back it up with absolute proof, this applies to everyone.
If state something is my opinion (or it’s clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.
This is how debate style conversations generally work.
I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.
I mean, go up a few lines in your response for this banger :
You can’t have it both ways.
Without objectivity you are left with subjectivity, also known as personal opinion and perception (headcanon)
FishFace@lemmy.world 6 days ago
What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious. To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.
So my background assumption is that people are honest. Seeing examples of people being dishonest doesn’t really change this background assumption much, because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalance.
Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.
You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.
Some politicians (like BoJo) have genuinely been caught lying with high confidence and high frequency, and so this baseline assumption doesn’t apply to them.
It’s about confidence. People in this thread expressed with no hint of doubt that the politicians who wrote the legislation did it for kickbacks from big tech. This is in spite of the fact that they have no direct evidence of this and it’s implausible on account of big tech being unhappy with this law. This isn’t simply healthy skepticism, it’s the same old useless cynicism.
The context was that you can’t just air your personal fan-fiction about politicians’ motivations and personal beliefs as if they were something more than that, so an excuse that “it’s just an opinion” doesn’t wash when the video linked by OP is putting this idea (that the law was written at the behest of big tech) forward seriously.
By all means have your justified beliefs about politicians. But so far the only politician you’ve actually mentioned convincingly as being corrupt is Boris Johnson. You haven’t, for example, leveled any attacks at Oliver Dowden who was the Minister for DCMS at the time of passing the Act. His register of interests does not mention any gifts or meetings with big tech firms.