I mean, among "younger" American HNers (those who went to middle or HS in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s), MacOS X Leopard or Windows 7 was probably a much more foundational desktop OS - most of our school computer labs used one or the other, as did our families.
I could make a similar argument for Win7 and the indie gaming scene.
Nah, Windows 7 RTM was ~a month before most school years started back up in 2009 so relatively few schools even considered starting to roll it out until at least 2010 (usually upgrades are done by then, not just beginning). E.g. I was class of 2012 and it wasn't until my senior year the rollout started (it was about less than half complete that year). Meanwhile they had us doing Microsoft Office classes twice a week on XP since 2003.
Can't say for Macs, the district hadn't used those since the iMac G3. After I graduated it was only a couple of years (maybe 2015?) before they rolled out Chromebooks, so 7 didn't even have much staying power.
No way. I'm in that group, and not only did every school computer lab I encountered run Windows, everyone I knew had Windows at home. Macs simply are not as common as you're thinking.
What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)?
It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. No excuse for that.
Targeting civilians in places like Tokyo or Dresden didn't even help the war cause much. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
Yes war is the supreme crime and what we should avoid in the first place. Still there are different ways you can conduct war.
A nuclear exchange would necessarily target civilians and be unlike anything before in history. It's a nightmare scenario that has to be opposed at all cost.
Unfortunately in total war situations the line between civilian and not is blurred and not just blurred by the aggressor (as a sibling comment has pointed out). That doesn't really justify anything though, I agree, and something like a nuclear war targeting civilians is just terminal for civilisation.
>The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
You're reading from a curiously misinformed understanding of history. The USSR defeated the Nazis by killing millions of them while also burning, bombarding and destroying their cities and anything else in its way en masse during a ferociously bloody campaign of revenge mixed with genuine military imperatives. Soviet soldiers also committed what are probably some of the biggest mass rape epidemics in modern history against their German enemy's women once they entered their territory. This in particular was immaterial to Soviet victory and not an official Soviet policy, but I mention it to underscore that there was absolutely no shortage of war crime-worthy targeting of civilians in many ways, and on a colossal scale by the Soviets too.
Read about the invasion and ethnic cleansing of East Prussia if you like. At least couple hundred thousand German civilians died as a result of that alone. None of this at all compares to what the Nazis did during their eastern conquests of course, but while a war crime is a war crime, degrees exist. Thus, it's not surprising if allied moral and military conduct was on a very long leash given such extremely savage enemies as Germany and Imperial Japan.
> The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
In our shared reality(?) the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi's in parallel with the mass bombing of industrial areas, factories, ports, dams, and general war making infrastructure, much of which was within German cities.
The Soviet Union defeated an increasingly under supplied resource starved German military.
There is a paradox called “logical insanity.” The novel Catch 22 deals with this irony: basically, the idea was that the war was killing thousands daily, so in order to end it as fast as possible, they planned to be as brutal as possible. But what were alternatives?
Drop the bomb somewhere 'harmless': how would that convince the War Cabinet of anything? The point of all weapons is to harm to convince the enemy to stop and re-evaluate their costs.
Blockade and starve the Japanese out? Possibly millions dead. Invasion? The Japanese leadership thought that up to 20M of their own people would perish trying to repel the US landings.
And that's just the Japanese numbers: what about all the peoples that were still living under Japanese rule in Manchuria, Korea, etc?
And what about the American lives, which were Truman et al's first responsibility?
If you're going to rip off one of Dan Carlin's show titles this way, be so courteous as to provide the reference. It's pretty good, as so is a lot of his stuff, him hailing from back when podcasts were still delivered synchronously via terrestrial broadcast.
Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
> Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost.
That's the problem.
Japan not surrendering even when they knew.
Per Japanese documents even after one bomb was dropped they still would not surrender. It took the second bomb, and even then the war cabinet was split on 3-3 on whether to surrender.
Two bombs dropping only got them to the point of a tie. The Emperor had to be called in to break the tie after two bombings.
And the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to enter the war. That was already in their calculations and they still were for fighting.
But you do realize that in cabinet meetings after the atomic bombings, the bombings themselves were only scarcely discussed? It is unknown how much impact the atomic bomb had on their decision to surrender, but it is certainly only one of many factors.
> Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
"definitive"? What does that even mean in a field of study like history? You're telling me there has been zero new analysis on the subject since 1995? No new insights?
And even that assumes that Alperovitz's initial premises were valid, that he did not miss any evidence,or exclude or discount any because his own biases and such, and so that is conclusions followed logically from all of that.
There is nothing comparable to this particular book or study, that I know of. The entire book is dedicated to that question, and investigates all the key players and decision makers deeply.
fair enough to notice though that while the Soviet Union may have had agreed to enter the war with Japan (at the Potsdam conference ?), it had not done so by the time the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was dropped. It did declare war on Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing. In a way ... Stalin chose the "let's go to war with Japan" date opportunistically. When it was clear there could be much gain without too much pain.
Which is not a dissimilar thing to the US "wavering" over the commitment to an invasion of Japan. The nuclear bombs "resolved" that. We'll never know what would have happened otherwise.
The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Any global consensus on avoiding repeating this low point in human history needs to acknowledge the prime movers behind birthing the bomb into existence in the first place. Much ink has been spilt debating morality, but on the raw mechanics the historians are in alignment with each other - doesn't matter if you ask Richard Rhodes, Robert S Norris, or Alex Wellerstein:
Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction.
(compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history)
If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC).
edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
In any moral framework that does not include perfect knowledge of the future, the nuclear bomb is morally defensible at worst, and morally required at best. Sheer number of lives saved? The Nuclear Bomb ended the war. Number of Japanese lives saved? Nuclear bomb wins. The "non-violent" option of a blockade? It would have resulted in millions dead. The Japanese farming system completely collapsed in 1944. Many still starved even after the surrender, as the allies rushed to get food and aid to Japan.
What about a pure Soviet entry into the war? You have to look at what happened to Poland and Eastern Europe when the Soviet army invaded. Once again, by any metric, this was the best possible outcome at the time.
But it was unquestionably a local maximum - the best solution at the time, with horrific consequences afterward.
That's the pitfall these discussions invariably fall into - debating the morality of deploying rather than the wisdom of developing a capacity in the first place. The primary justification for secretly studying the feasibility of the fission chain reaction was the fear that Germany (not Japan) might be developing an atomic bomb of their own (an early form of the subsequent Cold War's 'can't prove a negative' about what weapons the Soviets might be developing).
While the debate on the bomb is not and never will be settled, I'm not sure I'd call the bloodshed caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be unnecessary: it ended up a war that had caused so far millions of death.
Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.
>And what social epistemology, actually?
Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar would later make the case that the physicists would have done these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.
The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.
Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:
"The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was. With the pace of science in this present century it was inevitable that means of mass destruction should appear. Since the concept of one world under law is far in the future, it was also inevitable that great states should face one another thus armed. If there were no A-bombs the confrontation would still have occurred, and the means might well have been to spread among a a people a disease for a chemical that would kill or render impotent the whole population. History may well conclude, if history is written a century from now, that it was well that the inevitable confrontation came in a spectacular way that all could recognize, rather than in a subtle form which might tempt aggression through ignorance. At least we all know, we and the rest of the world, that there are A-bombs and what they can do."
Why is this special? The Japanese killed ~7 million Chinese, 0.5 to 1 million Filipinos, 500k in Korea, you can keep adding them up. Then Japan loses 0.2% of all their atrocities and it's the worst thing ever? No, it's not the worst thing ever, not even close. Sure, we'd all like it to never happen again. But if I had to pick one thing not happening again I'd pick saving all others that died in WW2 over this one incident.
The reason this is special is because no one else used a nuclear bomb, before this event or after. That's basically the definition of "special" and the number of Chinese that the Japanese killed has nothing to do with it.
Picking anything other than the nuclear bomb to never happen again is moronic because the planet can survive the other things, but if nukes were to start flying again, it would most likely not end with just two. Other countries have those weapons now too and such a war has the potential to be last one ever fought.
The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash.
The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc.
The Allies did various fire-bombings.
The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
I totally disagree about the difficulty of describing horror, since the linked article is one of many to have received critical acclaim for providing quality descriptions of WW2 experiences (my recommendation is 1952's The Naked Island).
Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
Well, op may be making the point that even the best description of horror is little compared to experiencing it. Watching a video of the horror itself (e.g. combat footage, a beheading, open-heart surgery) pales in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.
> The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?
The fault of this event lies on Japan, not the US. Japan was the aggressor who started the war. Japan was "fighting to the end" and gave no indications it would surrender. It is estimated that the war would go on to 1947 had the bombs not been dropped. That would have caused the deaths of millions or tens oof million more people. It is a tragedy that people died, but the blame lies in Japan's actions, not the US'.
I guess technically Japan didn't "make" the US drop the bombs, they just started a war against the US and brought them into a situation where they had to choose between continuing to send millions of its soldiers to die in the the deadliest war of all time, or defending itself against the aggressor by dropping the bombs. Are you happy with that?
Likewise, I guess technically Hamas didn't "make" Israel defend itself. They just fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately against Israeli civilians and launched the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, where 1200 Israelis were murdered, tortured, raped, and/or kidnapped for being Jewish, and brought Israel into a situation where it had to choose between continuing to allow for its population to be a victim of massacres threatened by a total war of annihilation, or defend itself by destroying Hamas.
You've heard about the legislation for this, right? The sites you use probably presume you're over 18.
But that's not the most disturbing thing, what's disturbing is the way "terrorism" or "proscribed organisations" are defined, and you're not allowed to voice support for them.
I'm honestly unsure if you're genuinely that dumb or you're just doing a really, really good job satirizing the people who got us here.
Every step of the way so far useful idiots have come out of the woodwork to defend each and every incremental encroachment on our rights using some sort of tortured logic that uses some mumbo jumbo about common good to justify it while downplaying the danger and over-selling the benefit.
The weapons grade irony here is that, either by satire and sarcasm or by genuinely being that stupid you have gone too far, to the point of absurdity, you have (perhaps intentionally, perhaps unwittingly) distilled these stupid people's stupid belief down to basically one sentence "the slippery slope isn't real and everything is fine because we have a piece of paper" and when you lay it out like that it's obvious that that is a belief nobody who's got a couple brain cells to rub together would hold.
A piece of paper means nothing if people don't want it to and we will slide down the slippery slope unless there's a force stopping us.
A slippery slope is fallacious when the argument is made with little evidence or reasoning to connect the current state/action to the supposed bottom of the slope.
Whether or not you agree with the reasoning is one thing, but there’s been a great deal of argument and discourse talking about the ways we are approaching worse and worse things, and the ways we have purportedly already progressed down the metaphorical slope.
Acknowledging fallacy is one thing, but categorically dismissing all arguments that discuss the (observed and/or potential) repercussions that can arise from current trends and actions on account “slippery slope is a fallacy”, with absolutely zero critical thinking applied to argue against the reasoning and/or alleged evidence of the slope is, well, unreasonable, I feel.
You can argue that the original comment just said “it’s a slippery slope!”, and so that specific conversation is not very valuable, but there’s a lot of surrounding discourse that makes “haha you’re wrong/your topic is invalid because you only said slippery slope!” Is obtuse at best.
And if I didn’t clarify enough, it’s not as if “slippery slopes” don’t and/or physically can’t exist. It’s just that frequently people claim there is one with no argument to support it, just that “it is” a slippery slope, and that it is scary/true just because of the way that it is. That’s fallacy.
The worst part is that I don't disagree that the US and UK are moving toward fascism - or at least some form of ethno-state where a WASPish core retains rights and everyone else has to fend for themselves.
What I am asking for, and pointing out, is that we can do better. It came from a moment of pedantry and honestly a pet peeve. Take what I said with a grain of salt.
yeah, it might be better to talk about a frog in a steadily warming pot rather than losing traction on a slope, but now I'm worried about your username lol
UNRWA managed to distribute food without killing Palestinians, as did many other agencies. I don't see why GHF has to commit these frequent massacres in their aid distribution.
Right, except that all credible reports from the US government and senior Israeli military officials indicate there was never any large diversion of UN aid to Hamas. It was just a fog-of-war story made up by the Israeli government as a supposedly plausible reason to hermetically seal Gaza and prevent millions of civilians from receiving food.
Sources:
NYT: No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
This is not as clear as you say. "No proof" and "no evidence" doesn't mean it didn't happen. Hamas controls Gaza with an iron fist. They are the ones carrying guns. They have no qualms about torturing, threatening, executing anyone who doesn't tow the line.
Hamas didn't just steal all the aid and put it in its tunnels. Hamas exerted influence by controlling the aid and its distribution. It did also steal some of it. You are to some degree misrepresenting the Israeli concern. Israel isn't simply concerned about Hamas stealing all the aid, it is concerned both about stealing and reselling (which does happen) and about control of the aid as means of continuing to establish itself as the governing body of Gaza. The UN agencies have and do work with Hamas in Gaza since nobody can be in Gaza without working with Hamas.
The NYT article is doing some hair splitting:
"Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid."
"Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment." - I like that last bit.
Your Reuters article also says: "A State Department spokesperson disputed the findings, saying there is video evidence of Hamas looting aid, but provided no such videos. The spokesperson also accused traditional humanitarian groups of covering up "aid corruption.""
and:
"The study noted a limitation: because Palestinians who receive aid cannot be vetted, it was possible that U.S.-funded supplies went to administrative officials of Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza."
"Satterfield said “there’s no question” that the terror group has worked to take “political advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.”
Hamas operatives have made a point of “flaunting” their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process.
However, Satterfield maintained that “the bulk of all assistance delivered by the UN and by the international organizations has gone to the population of Gaza and not to Hamas. Full stop.”"
These are not contradictory, Hamas controlled the aid, but still the bulk of it got delivered. The problem is the control they asserted. Israel has tried, via GHF, to take them out of the loop. Nobody is disputing that when aid was flowing in it did eventually end up reaching the people (who sometimes had to buy it).
Yes, I buy most of that, nothing is black and white. Hamas definitely controls Gaza and are the ones with guns, and certainly took whatever advantage they could and continue to. The commenter I was responding to just said "UNRWA gives the aid to Hamas" which I didn't find justified by any reputable source at all.
Many details on the ground are hidden in a fog of war and propaganda from all sides. I just think a couple measures of success of food distribution are to step back and ask, "are people able to get food without being killed on a daily basis?" and "is the population generally receiving food and not starving to death?". And it seems pretty clear to most of the world the answers to these are emphatically "No" since the time the GHF was put in control of food distribution, and when all established aid groups were blocked from providing humanitarian assistance.
Cutting off food supply drives up the prices, both causing mass starvation and providing a great opportunity for Hamas and other entities to resell food at huge profits. If there was more than adequate food instead, then nobody would be starving to death, and Hamas would not gain much benefit from reselling food.
The thing is there's no relationship between Israeli actions and the actual food supply in Gaza. They were supposedly on the verge of starvation, Israel cuts off the supplies for a while while they shift over to the GHF and it isn't bring out your dead time? Gaza famine is the new wolf. Look at the real famines in the world (places like Sudan), look at Gaza.
>Hamas didn't just steal all the aid and put it in its tunnels. Hamas exerted influence by controlling the aid and its distribution. It did also steal some of it. You are to some degree misrepresenting the Israeli concern. Israel isn't simply concerned about Hamas stealing all the aid, it is concerned both about stealing and reselling (which does happen) and about control of the aid as means of continuing to establish itself as the governing body of Gaza.
IDF is worried that if Hamas distributes the aid they might be seen as a government?
Israel doesn't like getting out humanitarianed by literal terrorists? That does sound embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough to literally kill people over.
>These are not contradictory, Hamas controlled the aid, but still the bulk of it got delivered. The problem is the control they asserted. Israel has tried, via GHF, to take them out of the loop. Nobody is disputing that when aid was flowing in it did eventually end up reaching the people (who sometimes had to buy it).
If Hamas delivers the aid as it is intended to be delivered that is fine. The issue is starvation, not who gets the credit for ending starvation. Pretending otherwise is ghoulish.
I think the most common string of arguments is that Hamas steals all the food being brought into Gaza, causing extreme food scarcity. Then Hamas corners the market on all food, raises food prices with its monopoly, and extracts big profits from the rest of the Gaza population. The claim, in conclusion, is that well-intentioned aid organizations bringing food into Gaza to feed starving people are actually funding Hamas.
The argument has proven totally wrong, because as every single humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza has repeatedly warned in recent months, famine conditions are the direct result of Israel generally disallowing food and other aid into Gaza since March. Had Hamas actually diverted billions of dollars into their food storage tunnels, then logically they would've continued selling it at market price when demand is high now. But actually in reality, there's nothing to buy. [1]
The market solution to prevent Hamas from profiting off food is to first allow in enough food to Gaza such that babies are no longer starving to death, and to then bring in so much food supply that prices decrease until it's no longer economically profitable to resell food, because it's widely available. That solution is never brought up for some reason.
They keep warning. Israel cuts off supplies while changing strategies, nothing changes. That could not have happened if the original situation had been dire.
You claim there's nothing to buy but where's the evidence? They've managed to find another "starving" baby--once again, serious medical issues. As before, the relatives look fine.
And your "market" solution assumes there is a fair market. It can never work in the face of Hamas taking enough to cause scarcity.
I always wonder about these sorts of comments. If the people writing them found out the facts were different, would they feel dismay at how terribly wrong they were? Feel remorse?
Or would they just find another way to argue?
(This is of course, if they believed in it to begin with. Some just pretend.)
1) The claim was the situation was dire, starvation imminent.
2) Israel cut off the supplies while restructuring the system.
3) That didn't result in a bunch of bodies.
#2 is undisputed. Just look at the news about #1, I can not see this as reasonably disputed. That leaves only #3. Hamas doesn't show any inability to get their claims out, thus why in the world should I think there's a bunch of people dead of starvation.
If I'm breaking it down wrong, show where. If you disagree with any of the subpoints, show where.
This is simply not true. The first part isn't true, people have gotten killed during UN related aid operations. The second part isn't true either, GHF has not committed "frequent massacres" during aid distribution. The single event I've heard about involving GHF directly is where there was a stampede in one of their facilities:
The IDF has used live fire for crowd control but there is zero evidence that it directly or intentionally attacked civilians. This is definitely a problematic practice but the exact causes and the number of casualties related to these events is unclear.
What has happened though is that Hamas attacks aid distribution centers, e.g.:
What's also true is that the UN and Hamas are doing their best to make sure the alternative efforts to distribute good to Gazans fail. Neither of these organizations actually care about Gazans. They care about their existence and power.
In practice there isn't freedom of speech. The UK government violates that all the time. Their agencies operate in secrecy and they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders.
I would not hold up any country because there are flaws everywhere; and I don't like writing about free speech because it has different meanings for everyone. But even in our puny Slovakia raiding newspaper offices and taking peoples private data at the border is not something that would happen and didn't happen for at least the last 25 years or so, even though we had and currently have horribly bad governments.
The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.
There's some truth in what you say, but it's filtered through a distorted lens.
Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.
The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.
There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).
The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.
Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.
But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
> In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class
And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...
> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries
We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.
To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.
You're using the word "class" in two different contexts here. The "class" in "upper class" is not the same as the "class" in "ruling class". This may seem pedantic, but when people say that the UK is a class-based society they're explicitly talking about the former. That's not to say there isn't overlap, but they're still two distinct sets.
I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
> I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.
> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.
I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.
That's fair. The government certainly shouldn't be acting like this, and if Slovakia is better in this area, then that's certainly something the UK should seek to emulate.
It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.
However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
> On December 7, 2022, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, an option to enable end-to-end encryption for almost all iCloud data including Backups, Notes, Photos, and more. The only data classes that are ineligible for Advanced Data Protection are Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, in order to preserve the ability to sync third-party clients with IMAP, CardDAV or CalDAV.
