Civil Liberty

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in America, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, announced that the paper’s opinion section would henceforth focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets”.

Anything inconsistent with this view would not be published, according to his statement. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned, as he should have.

ou’ll recall that Bezos barred the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris in the last weeks of the 2024 election. Subsequently, the paper wouldn’t print its cartoonist’s drawing showing Bezos and other oligarchs bowing to Trump, leading the cartoonist to resign.

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter in 2022, laid off everyone who was filtering out hateful crap on the platform, renamed it X and turned it into a cesspool of lies in support of Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry.

How very dare anyone allow people to say what they think?

Britain has launched a crackdown on “hypermasculine” social media after digital watchdog Ofcom urged technology giants to take action against “misogyny influencers”.

I always think of social media as being intensely feminine. The fashions, backstabs and general ganging up are far more like a gaggly of teenage girls than anything else.

The technology regulator has proposed new measures aimed at tackling online abuse of women and girls, urging social media sites to go “above and beyond” the legal duties required under the Online Safety Act when tackling sexist speech.

And there’s a lovely example. Yes, yes, sure, it’s legal, you’re allopwed to do that but don’t because it’s hurty.

We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation.

That people do their own thing is a problem for democracy? What?

Psychiatrists have warned there may not be enough doctors in their profession to meet the needs of the assisted dying Bill.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP behind the Bill, tabled a raft of last-minute amendments last week – scrapping the involvement of a High Court judge and handing the final decision to a three-member panel, comprising a social worker, a lawyer and a psychiatrist.

But two eminent professors of psychiatry have warned that staff shortages could make the inclusion of psychiatrists unworkable.

Sigh.

You’re not being asked to do anything. Well, other than just leave a pile of signed and otherwise blank permissions by hte door.

Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal.

The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains.

As well as democratic governments, it has interacted with dictatorships, sanctioned regimes and governments accused of human rights abuses, including the police in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

That is, Google obeys the law.

Obviously, the law in a specific place can be good or bad by our standards. But it is still the law in that place. And do we actually want private sector companies deciding which local laws they’re going to follow? Or not?

Imagine if Google – unilaterally – decided not to obey UK law. The Observer’s reaction would be?

A Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum in Britain was finally granted the right to stay after joining a terrorist organisation just to boost her claim.

If you do join a terrorist group then you *can* stay.

The judge who gave the 49-year-old woman the right to stay acknowledged that she was not being honest about her political beliefs and had become involved with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) only “in order to create a claim for asylum”.

The woman, who came to the UK in 2011, joined IPOB in 2017. A separatist group that has been blamed for acts of violence against the Nigerian state, it has been banned as a terrorist organisation by Nigeria but is not proscribed in the UK.

Upper tribunal judge Gemma Loughran ruled that the asylum seeker’s activities on behalf of the group meant she had a “well-founded fear of persecution” under human rights laws due to her “imputed” political opinion.

At which point the usual observation. The moment you’ve got a system of any complexity at all then folk will try to beat that complexity.

“But no one would cut their dick off just to win bicycle races.” “But no one would reject a job to stay on welfare” “But no one would join a terrorist group just to stay in the country” – yes, they would. Observably.

But no one would talk Granny into topping herself…….

Pro-Palestinian activists were planning a demonstration through London as the Oct 7 massacre was taking place, it has emerged.

At 12.50pm on the day of the 2023 terror attack, while it was still ongoing, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) notified the Metropolitan Police that they intended to hold a protest.

A PSC organiser told police over the phone that the group planned to march through London on the following Saturday, Oct 14, a freedom of information request revealed.

At least it wasn’t before…..

Border Force officers are to gain powers to stop suspected child sex offenders at airports and search their phones and laptops, as part of new “world-leading” laws to stamp out online child abuse.

Officers will be able to compel travellers to unlock their devices to be scanned on the spot for abuse images, if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect them. Offenders face up to five years in jail if illegal content is found.

The law is one of four to be announced on Sunday by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to fight a tenfold increase in illegal online child sex images, amid a surge in AI-generated content.

Which ferret chewing on whose synapses led to a concentration upon airports? Anmd answer came there none. But this?

Anyone caught with the AI tools designed to generate highly realistic illegal child sex images will face up to five years in prison. Offenders convicted for possessing “paedophile manuals” which teach people how to use AI to create sexual abuse imagery will be jailed for up to three years.

The AI tools will be just like any other AI tools. So, umm, that’s a pretty wide ranging offence being created there. Similarly, a manual that used the word “ferrets” instead of “children” would perform the same education.

This is either simple idiocy or the creation of one of those ghastly offences that we don’t, in fact, want government to have the power over.

My expectation is that within a decade AI – of a certain level – will just be a chip on a motherboard. A chip that’s on every motherboard because why not? A law like this would mean that anyone walking through an airport with a laptop has such AI generating capability – 5 years!

Mr Trump also declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to back the tariffs, which allows sweeping powers to address crises.

If the ability to declare emergency powers exists in an emergency then, somewhere down the line, a poluitician will declare an emergency in order to be able to use the emergency powers.

Britain’s emergency act allows government to take anything – any property at all – off anyone whenever. For, say, “climate emergency” reasons. Which is comforting, no?

As a liberal, I am instinctively deeply alarmed by the concentration of so much power in the hands of one individual. Even if I liked Musk, I’d say it was dangerous. I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals – whether capital L members of the Liberal Democrats, or like-minded people beyond our party and around the world – to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people.

That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them. And whether it’s Elon Musk’s control of X or Mark Zuckerberg’s control of Meta, there’s no doubt that the social media and artificial intelligence revolutions have concentrated enormous power in the hands of a few incredibly wealthy people. That is a big problem we need to address.

Putting that power in the hands of government is worse. You know, the grand liberal lesson of the 20th century?

Ministers must enforce a ban on foreign state ownership of newspapers to force the sale of The Telegraph by an Abu Dhabi fund, the former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has said.

That’s theft.

You’re restricting who may sell what to whom. Curbing their ownership rights that is – thieving from them.

Fuck off.

Elon Musk forced the Government into commissioning new grooming gangs inquiries, a minister has admitted.

Chris Bryant, a junior culture minister, said it was “certainly true” that the billionaire owner of X had “expedited” fresh investigations into the scandal.

Platformer has obtained what it calls “the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram.” Examples include “trans people aren’t real. They’re mentally ill”, “a trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man” and “a trans person isn’t a he or a she, it’s an it.”

Here’s the thing.

It’s not just trans people. It’s pretty much anybody who isn’t MAGA. And it’s not really new, because marginalised people have been trying and failing to get Meta to moderate hate speech for a long time. But what’s different is that this is now policy, and the policy explicitly says that hate speech is fine when directed towards specific minorities.

Hate speech is indeed free speech, yes.

Bloke on M4 has a very useful take on social media censorship.

Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP and chair of the science and technology committee for the House of Commons, which is investigating how online disinformation fuelled last summer’s riots, said Zuckerberg’s decision to replace professional factcheckers with users policing the accuracy of posts was “concerning” and “quite frightening”.

“To hear that Meta is removing all its factcheckers [in the US] is concerning … people have a right to be protected from the harmful effects of misinformation,” she said.

It is not true that Tractor Production Statistics have been missed! Shoot the Wreckers!

People smuggling suspects face ban on travel and internet use
Those suspected of involvement in serious crimes will face ‘severe curbs’ on their activities before they are arrested under expansion of court orders

Just no.

You want to charge somebody then do so. If they’re a flight risk then on remand. If not, then bail.

No, really, think on this a little. Imagine someone wanted to do me in – do as in severely inconvenience rather than knock off. Or, if you prefer your politics another way, Ritchie. So, claim that I’m (we’re) being investigated over involvement in people smuggling.

A claim of investigation doesn’t need much evidence after all. I’m now (we’re) cur off from hte internet. Our jobs are gone, our incomes.

Who wants government to have that power.

No, jokes about Ritchie, at this point, don’t cut it.

Kill someone’s income merely at the point of investigation? Nope….

The other day, Dame Esther Rantzen announced some wonderful news. In an article she’d written for a national newspaper, headlined “The 10 things that make me so happy to be alive”, she revealed that “the new wonder drug I’m on”, known as Osimertinib, may hold back the spread of her stage-four lung cancer “for months, even years”.

Fantastic. I’m so glad to hear it. I just have one small, gentle question.

Is this the same Dame Esther Rantzen who has been leading the campaign to legalise what she calls “assisted dying” (and which some of us prefer to call state-sanctioned suicide)?

Logically fun that is.

In Catholicism suicide is the ultimate sin. For it’s despair at God. Now, even I don’t believe that and yet. Thereis an element of it here, no? Esther’s used by the PM as an example of who should be allowed to demand to be topped. She’s terminally ill, see, less than 6 months etc. And then summat turns up. The universe changes its mind for those not running with the idea that God does.

Esther Rantzen fought for ‘assisted dying’. Now she’s surely killed it off

That’s probably not true because this is politics we’re talking about, not some part of life where people think. But, perhaps it should make some think?

The unhinged presentation of Muslims on GB News has been exposed. What will Ofcom do about it?
Miqdaad Versi

People are allowed to be unhinged. That’s what being a free country means.

As long as there’s no libel – and no, that’s not the same as being mean to a religion – and no incitement to immediate violence then that’s that. Called free speech.

Thousands of British military personnel who were dismissed from service because of their homosexuality will be able to apply for payments worth up to £70,000 each from today, to recognise the distress caused by a ban that applied between 1967 and 2000.

The terms and conditions of employment were made clear. Why should compo be offered?

I’m fine with those terms and conditions having been changed. But why compo for people having breached their employment contracts?

Jury trials could be scrapped for thousands of offenders under plans being considered by the Government to reduce record court backlogs.

Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, is under pressure from senior legal figures to introduce a new “intermediary” court comprising a judge and two magistrates to replace the traditional jury.

They would try cases where offenders faced crimes meriting no more than two-year prison sentences such as assault of a police officer while resisting arrest, racially aggravated criminal damage, dangerous driving and possessing a class C drug like cannabis.

More serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter, sexual assaults including rape, assault causing grievous bodily harm, aggravated burglary and arson with intent would still be tried before a jury in the Crown Court.

Supporters claim the new intermediary court – advocated more than two decades ago by Lord Justice Auld in a report commissioned by Sir Tony Blair’s government – would speed up justice without undermining the right of an individual to a fair trial.

Fuck them.

The jury is our protection against them, the State.