I don’t know if this is 100% strictly privacy related but I think it does fall in the sphere of protecting one’s right to express oneself privately.

"Government officials have drawn up deeply controversial proposals to broaden the definition of extremism to include anyone who “undermines” the country’s institutions and its values, according to documents seen by the Observer.

The new definition, prepared by civil servants working for cabinet minister Michael Gove, is fiercely opposed by a cohort of officials who fear legitimate groups and individuals will be branded extremists.

The proposals have provoked a furious response from civil rights groups with some warning it risks “criminalising dissent”, and would significantly suppress freedom of expression."

      • 520
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        I also left, for me in 2021.

        Life really is better if you can get out. The process is no walk in the park but it is a temporary pain.

        • Bappity
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          11 year ago

          I think one of the things I’ll miss the most if I do is the London underground. it’s such a convenient form of travel for me

          • 520
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            Many major cities in Europe have a metro system similar to London Underground. I live in Barcelona, and their metro has LU beat hands down. Trains come literally every two minutes and cost a little over a Euro when you buy a 10-ride ticket

    • clara
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      191 year ago

      if you’re serious, then here’s two places i recommend to make a start on that train of thought

      https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org should clue you in on which “advanced economies” might skew towards the life factors that interest you

      and https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool might help you narrow down which of these will be a better cultural fit

      i’m aware there’s a lot of subjectivity in these two links but, it could help you make a start.

      many people are great at saying “get me out of here” online, but not many people follow up that thought, and ask themselves “but where to?”

      be one of those who answers the second question. start working on your escape today! 💪

    • SokathHisEyesOpen
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      21 year ago

      You down with CCP (Yeah you know me)

      Who’s down with CCP (Every last homie)

      You down with CCP (Yeah you know me)

      Who’s down with CCP (All the homies)

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    61 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Government officials have drawn up deeply controversial proposals to broaden the definition of extremism to include anyone who “undermines” the country’s institutions and its values, according to documents seen by the Observer.

    The new definition, prepared by civil servants working for cabinet minister Michael Gove, is fiercely opposed by a cohort of officials who fear legitimate groups and individuals will be branded extremists.

    Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, described pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London as “hate marches”, prompting dismay from many participants who consider themselves peace campaigners.

    Martin Bright, editor-at-large, Index on Censorship, added: “This is an unwarranted attack on freedom of expression and would potentially criminalise every student radical and revolutionary dissident.

    The government’s 2011 Prevent strategy defined extremism as the “active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.

    Under the proposed definition in the documents, extremism would be the promotion of any ideology which aims to “overturn or undermine the UK’s democracy, its institutions and values; or threaten the rights of individuals or create a permissive environment for radicalisation, hate crime and terrorism”.


    The original article contains 948 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • @[email protected]
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      201 year ago

      Lol fr. It’s like they watched all the movies and books about dystopia and thought, “okay, this looks good, let’s do this”

      Even the wording and grammar sounds like they are doing a 1984 parody

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        Honestly a lot of things today seem like funhouse mirrors of scifi dystopias. There is something to be asked of chicken or the egg with our similarities. Did the writers just think about how we would eventually end up and just got slightly wrong with the details or did someone with terrible social skills and a fucked up hyper focused head think it was a good idea and aimed to make it reality.

        It happens all the time with items from Star Trek. Literally engineers wanting to make the gadgets they saw and even Meta pulls it’s name from a dystopia novel that Zuck thinks is neat instead of horrifying.

        So do we put forth ideas only to normalize them and make them true? Do thoughts become reality whether good or bad? Or do people have the ability to extrapolate where we are heading through guess work and random chance with enough time and effort?

        Because I’m horrified if twilight becomes real… Oh God is it already real?? Has anyone been to Utah lately?!

    • @[email protected]
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      Having lived in various countries in Europe including over a decade in the UK, my theory is three fold:

      • It already started with a system were power is dynastic (not just because of the monarchy and an unelected 2nd chamber were many members inherit their position but also because it has a well-entrenched system of private schools which tie to elite universites and from there to political, media, corporate and judiciary to positions) were there used to be some level of noblesse oblige (the duty of the upper classes toward “their lessers”) which is now completelly gone: the UK copied the “everybody for themselves” spirit from the US (but not the “go getter spirit”) into a system which was already incredibly stratified into classes and riddled with priviledge, so it basically ended up just being used by the rich scions of the rich to tell themselves their wealth is due to personal merit and from which it “logically” follows that the poverty of the poor is due to them being lazy and the rest of of the population should just do as they’re told by such clearly superior people.
      • Starting in the Thatcher years the Press in the UK was bough by a handfull of very rich people who don’t pay tax in the UK, most noteably Murdoch. That fully privatised and Press whose ownership was then heavilly concentrated, was then used for propagand purposes, pushing anything and everything to make the power of the state subservient to the power of money, mainly by removal of regulation and lowering of effective corporate taxes and taxes for the wealthy (though the UK already had unique legal frameworks to allow the very wealthy to avoid all tax, most noteably the Non-Resident Tax Status) as well as views such as the above mentioned one that poverty is caused by laziness and being wealthy comes from merit.
      • Being a de facto Two Party System due to a First Past The Post representative allocation system that makes it extremelly hard for a third option to rise to power (and on the rare occasions when they get close - about once every half a century - they’re quickly “put back in their place”), the extreme right in the UK, rather than try and gain power through the popular vote (as you see, for example in The Netherlands, where they float around the 15% mark) were they would require millions of votes to get power, have instead just infiltrated one of the power duopoly parties and thus only needed about 50k votes to take power (by outvoting other factions inside that party to elect their people as leaders). Once they dominated the Tory party, the First Past The Post system makes it extremelly hard to dislodge the party even though it has massivelly changed, and you even get effects like the other mainstream party of the Party Duopoly shifting its policies more towards the agenda that’s being set by the far right now in power.
      • SokathHisEyesOpen
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        51 year ago

        They’re not a monarchy though, and haven’t been for a long time. They’re a parliamentary democracy, or at least they have been. They’re definitely edging dictatorship.

      • ThenThreeMore
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        41 year ago

        Oh yeah, because authoritarianism doesn’t give large chunks of the labour party massive hard ons too.

        If they’d had their way all our biometrics would be on a database and we’d have to have our id cards with us at all times.

        • @[email protected]
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          Yes, that’s true. Recently though, the ones responsible have been Tories. But I agree. There’s a general tendency in the governing culture of the UK to override basic rights in the name of expediency or convenience for the government.

          • ThenThreeMore
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            21 year ago

            Oh absolutely. I just think that there’s a danger that people will think if the Tories are out of power all of these kinds of proposals will just disappear.

    • ShadowRam
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      251 year ago

      UK has always been slowly moving towards 1984.

      They shear amount of CCTV is extremely unsettling for foreigners visiting.

      • Phanatik
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        221 year ago

        This is one I’d say is comparing apples to oranges. They each are good and bad in different ways. The unfortunate thing is that our current government wants the UK to be more like the US which will be a net negative to everyone in the UK. For example, they’ve been gutting the NHS for years to pave the way for a privatised hellscape.

      • @[email protected]
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        Not having healthcare is kind of a big deal. It’s easy for us Europeans to forget the implications, but for a significant portion of the US populous, if they get sick they’ll either go bankrupt or they’ll simply just die. Which is insane.

      • @[email protected]
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        71 year ago

        I dont care to compare. I dont need to lord over people on whose country is turning more shit. Just do what you can to stop this current worldwide rise in fascism. VOTE (if you can).

      • @[email protected]
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        “Better than the US” is a bit too unspecific to judge. If you mean for privacy, the UK is certainly on the bad end of things.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        These things are multifaceted.

        Privacy? Hell no.

        Healthcare? Absolutely (though trending the wrong direction)

        Public transport? Better, though again heading the wrong way.

    • Buelldozer
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      For fucks sake, that shit was passed and then either expired or was repealed TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

      This level of “Whataboutism” shouldn’t even be possible.

      • Nougat
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        The Alien and Sedition Acts are widely known as some of the worst legislation ever passed in the US, in large part because of the Sedition Act, which was used to suppress speech critical of the Adams administration.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          Yes, but this is a thread about UK trying to criminalize dissent in 2020s. What the US did hundred+ years ago is wholly irrelevant to the discussion of UK policy in modern times imo.

          • Nougat
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            11 year ago

            It’s relevant because it’s another example of criminalizing dissent, and it was a bad idea even then. “We’ve been over this, the world knows this is a bad idea.”

            But fuck historical context, right?

            • @[email protected]
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              Yes it’s another example of something similar, but again, with the vastly different times, cultures, technological capabilities, and legal frameworks, I’d argue that relevance is largely nonexistent or the connection between the two attenuated to the point that any similarities are largely useless for comparison and irrelevant when discussing the issue in the current context.

    • @[email protected]
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      71 year ago

      Thankfully it only lasted 2 years. But during that time it sounds like it was a plan to suppress the presidential competition that backfired. It’s good to know that humanity has always sucked.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    Sweet Jesus, it really is time to bail. Any recommendations on where to go? I’m hearing the weather is much better in France and Spain.

    Is Scotland on board with this dictatorship malarky or are they fighting it? I didn’t see them kick up a fuss about the online safety bill which made it to law, which makes me think they aren’t fighting it.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 year ago

      Yeah but how do we leave without a crap ton of money to buy our citizenship in another country?

      I was considering moving to Scotland if they vote to leave the UK and rejoin the EU

      • SokathHisEyesOpen
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        51 year ago

        You don’t have to buy citizenship in the United States or Canada. Both countries are also fighting internal fascism, but it’s not as bad as what we’re seeing in the UK.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Yeah but how do we leave without a crap ton of money to buy our citizenship in another country?

        Well, there’s always the right to live and work in the rest of the EU…

        …oh wait.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        I honestly dont know how most of us can make a move happen. Its a shit state of affairs.

        I hoped that Scotland was going to be our get out of jail card too. I’m still hoping.

    • ivanafterall
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      41 year ago

      Macron in France has seemingly had similar fascist quivers running down his leg.

    • @[email protected]
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      France is right behind the UK right now. It’s not as bad yet but will be in the near future.

  • downpunxx
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    31 year ago

    As it turns out Countries which fought the Nazi Reich, at great cost, which have been hit with massive Muslim Terrorist attacks don’t take too kindly to hundreds of thousands of Muslim terrorists, and Islamic terrorist supporters marching through their streets screaming “Kill All The Jew”, I mean, who knew

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      don’t take too kindly to hundreds of thousands of Muslim terrorists, and Islamic terrorist supporters marching through their streets

      Hundreds of thousands of terrorists marched through the streets? Lol.

    • be_excellent_to_each_other
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      21 year ago

      Countries which fought the Nazi Reich, at great cost, which have been hit with massive Muslim Terrorist attacks don’t take too kindly to hundreds of thousands of Muslim terrorists, and Islamic terrorist supporters marching through their streets screaming “Kill All The Jews”

      Citation needed for the bolded bit. I must have missed the coverage of this event.

        • be_excellent_to_each_other
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          31 year ago

          I know I know - asking for citations is my standard response for folks of that ilk. Magas get the same treatment.

          Generally they reply with nothing but the sound of crickets.

  • @[email protected]
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    For those that don’t know, look at Michael Gove -

    And remember that wimpy kid from your school who was horribly, horribly bullied

    Then think about what a fuckin psychopath they’d be now if they were in a position of power