From age and ID restrictions on the Internet, to charging rappers with “terrorism,” the U.K. is demolishing the most basic civil liberties. If we let them, U.S. leaders may be close behind.
From age and ID restrictions on the Internet, to charging rappers with “terrorism,” the U.K. is demolishing the most basic civil liberties. If we let them, U.S. leaders may be close behind.
Just what the fuck is this timeline? I was born in Russia and spent a good chunk of my life basically idolizing USA, UK, EU, other European countries, English-first countries, etc.
By the time I had the language and professional skills to try and migrate into a probably really good life, suddenly there’s a rise of authoritarianism, loss of privacy, rollback to the political right and intolerance and hatred and whatever.
There’s still a long way for these nations to go before things are as bad as here, but the differences still are dwindling at an alarming rate and I often find myself wondering if it’s gonna be worth the effort if I want to eventually move to someplace that still respects privacy and freedom and is sensible about the Internet and digital technologies.
There’s still a lot of perks from knowing English as well as I do, but at this point, I think I’d have to learn German or Swedish or some other northern EU language if I ever make up my mind.
And by the time I’m ready, these countries will roll out some bullshit, too, right?
And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails - but gamers’ emails are ignored…
It’s all so demoralising. I miss looking forward to the future with hope and excitement for things.
what’s happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it’s dying, it didn’t work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of “When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left”
So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We’re seeing it in real time.
But this has happened time and time again. We’re a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it’s always the same song and dance “well lets go this way, sure it didn’t work out last time but I don’t believe it’ll happen to us THIS time”.
So it’s not so much “what the fuck is this timeline” but rather “well it’s our generations turn for bullshit”. And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn’t experience it, but their parents did, and now it’s our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but…we as humans sure do love watching reruns.
i believe that “far-right” sentiments are a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat.
if your tribe is in danger, you start kicking the foreigners out, you start going back culturally to what you perceive as “safe”,
it’s literally like if a windows computer fails to boot properly 3 times in a row, it re-boots into “safe mode”, which is a locked-down, dumbed-down, simplified version of the actual os. we are the computer. if people experience hardships too often throughout their daily lifes, they start “dumbing down” and “rebooting into safe mode”. just that that safe mode causes more hardships for everyone else. and that’s where we’re at right now.
Correct. In a less obvious way we can even see it at play here, in this (interesting) discussion.
So far, in the comments trying to design a culprit, I have yet to read one that doesn’t blame some ‘other’ group, be it the far-tight, the rich, the boomers, the US, Russia, and so on. Forget the names and the personal preference: each one is that ‘foreigner’, someone that is not us on which we put teh blame. The issue is among us, with all our differences and contradictions (even sometimes our hatred of one another). It’s not ‘them’ causing the issue ‘we’ are the victims of.
As long as we keep looking for someone else than us to blame, well I don’t see things getting much better anytime soon. Which is sad because if they don’t start getting better soon they will get real worse, real a fast.
Posting that from France, a country that once valued freedom so much as to make it one of its three core principle. But that was back then.