A first year undergraduate should not also be having their first exposure to the boundless Internet.

In addition to all the below..by design a bunch of 18 year olds are suddenly out of the family home in some form of work or tertiary education, and we keep shunting the 'here's a bunch of painful lessons you learn as you get older' further into people's lives, when they are more catastrophic.

Sir Keir Starmer, reflecting on his plan to cut teenagers off from all of their friends and communities and isolate them indoors without even the mercy of entertainment: At long last, we have created the omelas child from classic sci-fi story "the ones who walk away from Omelas"

lol

Israeli politicians seem legitimately unable to understand that the Iran war is ending because the US lost badly and can not *actually* carry on as its strategic oil reserves are helplessly diminishing. This is something that always happens with fascist regimes.

all else being equal, a world where people's material needs are met regardless of their labor participation or lack thereof would be better than one where that is not the case

A lot of peoples' friends nowadays are people from other places, often other countries, that they meet online. These are real friends, and sometimes very good friends. You can't just "meet them IRL". This would literally cut teens off from many of their friends. Cultish stuff.

MP lost the case but it is manifest that they do not work for the public if emailing what are theoretically public servants about political concerns can have them calling the police on you

In the UK if you honestly express favourable views about activist groups the government dislikes loyalty squads take you to the gulag for cognitive recalibration. Inquisitors often ask people if they support dissidents to test their mindless loyalty to the regime

At this point between proscriptions, insane terror laws, getting tried by literal nobles, surveillance, censorship, banning children from talking to their friends or listening to music on youtube, could any reasonable person describe the UK as a modern, western liberal democracy?

The proposed youtube ban is effectively prohibiting underage persons from listening to music on their own terms, which I think is very apropos for the dank and miserable aesthetic of the backwater island monarchy. Frankly surprising no one thought of it before.

One of the most interesting interpretations of 1984, and somewhat supported by comments by Orwell, is that the rest of the world is normal and Britain was just, sort of, like that

Step 1: eliminate parks and other public third spaces Step 2: ban kids from being anywhere other than those spaces Step 3: kids stop going outside and find social connection online instead, as a result of 1 & 2 Step 4: eliminate kids’ ability to access THOSE social spaces Step 5: ???*

I would never say that "I support palestine action". Such speech would be illegal, you understand

As more of our social, cultural and economic lives are mediated by the internet, prohibiting teenagers from accessing the internet is just preventing them from accessing social life. You're not helping them lead "healthier" lives, you're putting them in solitary confinement.

age verification is the feckless centrist version of abstinence-only sex education.

The UK is sinking into Authoritarianism, the Far Right are rioting and trying to burn people alive, but the 'terrorists' who they crackdown on are the people opposing Israel.

Mandatory age verification and the banning modern public towns squares for young people is, and forever will be, governmental and societal abdication of responsibility so that those in charge don't actually have to dare hold big tech accountable for the very real public harm they can foster.

I don't think I know of another case in european history where an organisation has been treated as terrorist, not criminal, without it conspiring to murder people. Treating property damage as terrorism when it is communicative is very clearly politically motivated persecution.

Just so, and the whole point of declaring Palestine Action to be a terrorist group equivalent to Al Qaeda or ISIS was just this: to demonstrate that the government can and will arbitrarily declare you a terrorist, the courts will absolutely enforce that and the press will collaborate gladly.

What did the Axis of Abraham era, beginning in 2020 with the Israeli-UAE "peace" and culminating in a joint Israeli-GCC-US war on Iran, produce? An accelerated decline in US influence over the region, the reappearance of the Palestinian question, and an Israel more reliant on US goodwill than ever.

Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori has announced that she will seek to appeal to the Supreme Court "We will not stop fighting to overturn one of the most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern British history," she said Updates here: inews.co.uk/news/politic...

This seems genuinely fascistic. Hot take, I guess, but I don't think that people should be arrested and charged with terrorism for holding cardboard signs that say "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

Erm, the suffragettes were not peaceful protestors, Jesus

Palestine Action ban ruled lawful. Ridiculous. And you can expect this government and future governments to start using proscription very liberally. How long until e.g. direct action LGBT+ groups or even some trade unions are banned as terrorist organisations?

10 years ago tomorrow, William Mair murdered Jo Cox at a constituency surgery, and since then the two legacy parties and the principal insurgent party in the UK have essentially been in competition for his vote when he's eventually released from prison.

Honestly, it takes a glance at a SCOTUS decision in comparison with the obscene charlatanery that passes for judicial reasoning, even at the highest levels, in the backwater island monarchy to understand how well structured the US judiciary is.

I once met a guy calling himself a gabriel winant groyper, and I keep thinking how strange it is that someone would want to use a handle referencing gabriel winant (no offence to him, but it's strange when people lock into niche personalities with mostly limited reach like this)

Mainstream media is 24/7 saturation of poor people committing petty crimes. Shoplifting out of control! Venezuelan thugs are stealing your apartment! Meanwhile billionaires are genocidal serial killers and treated like the pillars of our society

btw few will appreciate how grimly funny it is that this judge both issued a gagging order so that the filton four could not explain their motivation to the jury, and then also sentenced them according to a special intent provision requiring them to have had a specific motivation

Since some people appear to not understand this, jury trials are not a right because juries are well positioned to investigate or assess facts or correctly apply any sort of legal reasoning. They are uniquely ill-equipped to handle anything technical involved in determining guilt

The way no one even bothers to try to stop Elon Musk anymore - he's allowed to take hundreds of billions of dollars in exchange for empty promises, or incite pogroms and push white nationalism, and no one pushes back or tries to constrain him at all - feels like a society that's simply given up

Everyone realizes this is just marketing at this point.

So it seems like Israel just perceives everything everywhere as a threat. Also if you were to apply the standard you apply to Lebanon consistently, you would support the bulldozing of dozens of Israeli villages until the Israeli state took care of its settlers, would you not?

Joe Biden repeatedly appealed to the Israelis to exercise restraint, they ignored him because they knew he wouldn't do shit, & they were right, because he did not care about Palestinians enough to risk a dime of political capital. He might as well have made fart noises into the phone.

Netanyahu & co. did not seriously listen to Biden, & they do not seriously listen to Trump, because they will not take any of our complaints seriously unless we take the money away. This is cruel to Israeli civilians who may be endangered by our withdrawing support. That is not our fault.

Pro-Palestine marches will openly be called "hate marches" in the press, but these arsonist pogroms, illustrated by a burned-out bus, are simply "disorder"

This idea that Israel wants a sovereign Lebanon with a viable Lebanese Army is belied by the fact that Netanyahu himself explicitly stated in a recent interview that he wants all of Lebanon demilitarized

Some cultures ARE much better than others. For instance, social conservatism is a stain on civilized life, one wholly devoid of epistemic, moral or aesthetic value. This simple fact should not be dismissed simply because these very same people misapply this judgment to others.

Here is one of Netanyahu's "rivals" saying it out loud: if Israel is disallowed from bombing Beirut as it pleases then it has lost.

Plenty of American liberals are totally capable on a constitutional level, in their being, to see why Russian minimum demands are actually incompatible with a just or manageable peace in Ukraine, but still refuse to see how Israel's self-radicalization has made their minimum demands the same.

I often quote Israel's own leadership on here for two reasons 1) They publicly define their own parameters for success routinely, and they are completely different from what Western media claims them to be. 2) It's useful to reiterate to people that these goals are incompatible with negotiations.

All Labour would have to do is change the voting method and Reform would be a far less grave threat. If they won't do the obvious thing, the dreaded proportional representation, they could at least do RCV so they wouldn't have to do all this difficult coordination on where to compete w/minor parties

To paraphrase @diplomatofnight.com on another issue, they reason they act like they have total impunity is that they have always been given total impunity. It is an entirely rational decision to treat their opponents with contempt, because their opponents have contempt for themselves.

questions like "Do the people who clean my house have other, smaller people to clean their houses?"

Her work and words live on.

Damn. She was still young, and to die now… this sucks so much. RIP.

‘Famine is a word that has a specific meaning’ ‘Genocide didn’t happen in Gaza.’ Pure evil. When you arrive at the point where you are Nickel and diming calorie counts to defend your stance, you’ve lost your soul to pure evil.

This is beyond ridiculous. She was suspended for acknowledging that Palestinians exist. Not even endorsing a Palestinian state, addressing borders or anything, just the basic acknowledgement that some people are Palestinian. All because one student complained.