Civil Liberty

A Finnish member of parliament has been found guilty by the country’s supreme court of inciting hatred after claiming that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder”, in a conviction that prompted criticism from far-right government ministers.

But illegal to say or suggest? Fuck off.

And to think, there are people who suggest we should rejoin such people in political unions, eh?

The court ruled her claim that homosexuality was a disorder of psychosexual development was incorrect.

Seriously, the court ruing on whether a statement is true or not? Doesn’t matter if it’s incorrect – we’re all allowed to be wrong as well as right.

It was one of the most disproportional votes-to-seats results seen anywhere in the world. But then, nowhere in Europe but the UK still uses first past the post.

The first-past-the-post system was the fortress sustaining the old parties, but “small” party interlopers it was designed to keep out have stormed the walls, and could yet overrun the castle. YouGov finds that Nigel Farage could become prime minister on a 23% vote, against the strong wishes of three-quarters of the country. Voting has become a fruit machine with random results when tiny shifts bring cascading seats.

The consequences run deeper than fair voting or psephology. The primacy of a few voters in a few marginals has profoundly distorted the way we live. Our exceptional inequality, among the the worst in the developed world, is exacerbated by our two-party system. Still we suffer the after-effects of Thatcherism and austerity – extremist approaches that would be mitigated in a proportional system. Revealing research from Compass this week tracks how two-party politics began falling apart as more middle-class voters, also suffering from a cost-of-living squeeze, were ignored by a system that took them for granted but provided no better representation to low-income voters in urban seats.

As the results of democratic elections might bring about a winner Polly doesn’t like then and therefore the system of democracy must be changed.

Which is to wholly miss the point of elections, of democracy. They’re a way of changing the rulers without bloodshed. If you change the system so that the rulers casnnot be changed then that’s not democracy.

David Lammy is to face down Labour rebels next week by pressing full steam ahead with his controversial plans to curb jury trials.

The Justice Secretary is due to unveil the legislation without any alterations despite fierce opposition from within his own party.

Legal professionals are also almost unanimously opposed to the plans, which would see up to half of jury trials scrapped and replaced with judge-only courts or magistrates.

You know, actual fascism and where is The Sage?

Don’t forget, jury nullification is the whole point of the exercise.

For nearly two decades, the US quietly funded a global effort to keep the internet from splintering into fiefdoms run by authoritarian governments. Now that money is seriously threatened and a large part of it is already gone, putting into jeopardy internet freedoms around the world.

Managed by the US state department and the US Agency for Global Media, the programme – broadly called Internet Freedom – funds small groups all over the world, from Iran to China to the Philippines, who built grassroots technologies to evade internet controls imposed by governments. It has dispensed well over $500m (£370m) in the past decade, according to an analysis by the Guardian, including $94m in 2024.

We’re gonna need that sort of aid when the Starmerites really get into their groove.

Allies of Sir Keir now stand accused of using false information contained in the firm’s report to smear the journalists and the newspaper, wrongly accusing them of being stooges for Russia, which it claimed had probably fed them information hacked from the Electoral Commission.
Worse still, Labour Together tried to use Britain’s intelligence agencies to amplify the smears, by encouraging them to launch an investigation based on the dodgy dossier, which they hoped would then be reported by the Left-wing press.

Just all of them, into jail.

No reason, just because.

That people who actually know what they’re doing, have direct and personal expertise in hte subject under discussion, get to moderate the laws that are passed?

A professor of palliative medicine gets to weigh in on an assisted dying bill? This is the very point, no?

Then this:

What’s unconstitutional about a house of the legislature discuyssing a bill?

But while Gap’s public profile says the app is encrypted and does not share its data with third parties, Iranian digital rights experts say their investigations contradict those claims.

A report from FilterWatch, an organisation monitoring Iran’s internet censorship, has accused Gap Messenger of being among the “main actors and entities that participate in the Iranian government’s internet control and suppression efforts”.

So, yoiu’re running an app inside a country with rules about such apps. You obey the law of that country, obviously. Even more so if it’s a local app, not some foreign one.

This is what everyone shrieks X, Facebook and all the rest must do, right? Such insistences upon the law don’t work if we try to confine it to only those we consider nice, obviously.

A Dutch anti-immigration influencer who has promoted conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” appears to have had her authorisation for visa-free travel to the UK revoked.

Migration numbers certainly lend some support to that replacement idea. So what is it that makes it a conspiracy theory?

And yes, we need something more than that it is either wrong or unfashionable.

Erfan Soltani reportedly facing imminent execution
Erfan Soltani is reportedly facing execution in Iran on Wednesday after he was tried, convicted and sentenced, following his arrest on Thursday.

The 26-year-old was arrested in Karaj, a city on the north-west outskirts of Tehran, at the peak of the protests before the internet black-out. Soltani is one of the many thousands of protesters arrested last week.

Amnesty International has highlighted his case, warning of concerns that Iranian authorities might “once again resort to swift trials and arbitrary executions to crush and deter dissent”.

According to information gathered by Amnesty, the group said an informed sourced learned on 11 January that officials had told Soltani’s family he was sentenced to death. Soltani had lost contact with loved ones on 8 January amid mass protests and the regime’s internet shutdown, the group said.

Iran is the world’s most prolific executioner after China, according to monitors. Last year, it hanged at least 1,500 people, Norway-based Iran Human Rights group said.

Likely that they do this hundreds of times, if not thousands.

The question then becomes, well, what happens next? A very harsh calculus – do they hang enough to cow the population, or does the population get enraged enough to start hanging back, from lampposts?

No, I have no insight into what does then happen.

No woman or child should live in fear of having their image sexually manipulated by technology. Yet that is what many have faced in recent days with Grok.

The technology to do this exists. The technology is not exclusive to Grok. There are open source AIs that can do this – perhaps not as well but that’s only a matter of time. We’re in Cnut territory therefore.

Liz Kendall is the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

A thousand years and they’ve still not got the message.

Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.

There has been widespread anger after the image tool for Grok, the AI element of X, was used to manipulate thousands of images of women and sometimes children to remove their clothing or put them in sexual positions.

Or even, don’t be such a Cnut.

The tool is out there, the ability to do this exists. It’s not limited to any one platform, there are open source equivalents and so on. OK, maybe the open source is a generation – 6 months say – behind but it’ll undoubtedly get there. A tide that simply cannot be commanded to recede.

Iran was plunged into a complete internet blackout on Thursday night as protests over economic conditions spread nationwide, increasing pressure on the country’s leadership.

While it was unclear what caused the internet cut, first reported by the internet freedom monitor NetBlocks, Iranian authorities have shut down the internet in response to protests in the past.

Even, could be useful to have essential infrastructure that is not provided by the state……

Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told Times Radio: “[This] will send a really massive chilling effect on everyone else who’s discussing the subject [internet regulation] at the moment.”

The Americans have a very clear view of what free speech means. You get to say it.

“We desperately need a wide ranging debate on whether and how social media should be regulated in the interests of the people. Imran Ahmed gave evidence to the select committee’s inquiry into social media, algorithms and harmful content, and he was an articulate advocate for greater regulation and accountability.

The Americans are against rancid little shits who say otherwise.

Well, there we are.

Sarah Rogers, an official at the state department, posted on X: “Our message is clear: if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”

Quite.

The UK has given its final warning to Roman Abramovich to release £2.5bn from the oligarch’s sale of Chelsea FC to give to Ukraine, telling the billionaire to release the funds within 90 days or face court action.

Keir Starmer told the House of Commons the funds from Abramovich, who is subject to UK sanctions, would be converted into a new foundation for humanitarian causes in Ukraine and that the issuing of a licence for the transfer was the last chance Abramovich would have to comply.

Rich bloke they don’t like very much. Steal his stuff.

Britain’s the home of civil liberty doncha know?

The former federal minister Josh Frydenberg said on Wednesday the event at the beach had been inadequately protected.

“How, with some 1,000 people here in a heightened threat environment, did we just have three police, ill-equipped to provide the first and fundamental duty of both the state and the federal government, to protect the safety of their citizens? We need answers, we need solutions, we need action.”

A couple of thousand people around a beach area and park. The real question is why would anyone have to worry about whether 20 odd police (in the whole area) isn’t enough policing. We’re not going to turn the whole of life into an armed camp now, are we?

Or there’s the other one the FSU told me about. A 14-year-old boy was identified as being a threat because of a painting he did in his art lesson. It was a portrait of Nigel Farage. Later he asked a teacher if she liked his work and what she thought of illegal asylum seekers pouring into the country. He became, immediately, a “safeguarding concern”, and when his dad complained to the school he was told — in a lengthy essay, which I have seen — to basically sling his hook. The essay cited the Equality Act 2010 to suggest that the boy’s apparent liking for Nigel Farage and disaffection with the level of immigration “could potentially highlight discrimination against personal attributes that are legally protected”. In other words, in this case, as in the two above, individuals were persecuted and identified as safeguarding concerns because they shared the views of the majority of the population.

It’s just not called censorship. Yet you end up on a register anyway, barred from many a job.

I suppose it’s all about who sits on these boards. What kind of person thinks to themselves one evening: hell, I’ve got time to spare. Do you know what I’d really like to do? Sit on a safeguarding board and stop people getting jobs if they don’t agree with my political views.
Call me a cryptofascist but I think just one kind of person makes that kind of decision, and they are probably not the easy-going, amiable, centrist coves you might wish were entrusted with such responsibilities. They are people who are motivated by the single idea that their views are right and inviolable and anyone who transgresses them deserves all they get

One of those things I keep saying. As soon as there is such a cefntre of power in a society then those who desire power over others will vie to conquer that centre. So whatever the initial aims, however pure the set up, it will always be colonised by the same vile little shits.

Its most recent action was to slap a €120m fine on Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) for making users pay for blue tick authentification without doing any effective verification.

As opposed to, say, trying to fine into oblivion anyone saying things against the current political zeitgeist.

India’s telecoms ministry has privately asked smartphone makers to preload all new devices with a state-owned cybersecurity app that cannot be deleted, a government order showed, a move likely to antagonise Apple and privacy advocates.

Now, not that I know this, but I would suspect that a very wide definition of security is being used here. The ability to check who is using naughty words perhaps. Voicing badthink.

OK, one part of that is not true. It’s not that I do not know this and merely think it. Given how governments work I do know this….

This term, the US supreme court will decide whether a law prohibiting conversion practices infringes on constitutionally protected free speech. During last month’s oral argument in that case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether the regulation wasn’t “just the functional equivalent” of another recent supreme court case. In June, the court upheld a ban on a different treatment – puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth. “It just seems odd to me that we might have a different result here,” she said. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, meanwhile, likened conversion therapy to a dietitian telling a client to do something physically harmful, saying: “I don’t think the state has to provide a study to show that the advice is not sound.”

The constitution doesn’t uphold freedom of medical treatment. It does freedom of speech. ‘Mazin’ that a judge is confused over that.

This before we get to what they’re going to try to define “conversion therapy” as. For some at lesat “You sure?” would count as that….

How could you suggest such a thing?

Ofcom has ordered social media companies to combat online misogyny by changing the algorithms that push hateful content to users.

The regulator has moved to crack down on the “manosphere” and violence against women as part of its mission to make Britain the safest place to be online.

It’s telling people what they may see or hear, not censorship.

Tsk.