"it's for the children" as trojan horse

tyranny in the guise of safety

if you would learn who rules you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

the source of the quote seems contested, but the sentiment it embodies is not and as much of the intrusive globalist cabal/cool kids table of davos/WEF or whatever other club of rome inheritors are currently kicking around on private jets from which they tell us not to use plastic straws finds itself increasingly on the wrong side of sentiment, it seems they are increasingly keen to gear up make to a play for ongoing power in spite of their loss of ongoing popularity.

and the best way to do that is censorship, mean, rotten, down and dirty censorship with a side order of “we’ll arrest you if you notice.”

lose the debate?

silence debate.

you think it’s a joke

but then you realize it’s not.

it’s telling that both the UK and germany have rapidly rising opposition parties that the current folks in charge are desperate to disenfranchise.

and this one is especially insidious because it’s clear how badly many of these regimes want to arrest for wrongthink and throttle wrongspeak, standards that they themselves seem sure that they and only they are fit to set.

they’re never going to be able to sell that, it’s a rancid product. they tried to mandate digital ID and currency and people smelled the rat.

so they got a bit cunning and dressed it up as a moral crusade to “protect the children.” but it’s not: it’s a trojan horse for a fully locked-down ID mandatory internet in which only approved outlets may serve and approved speakers speak.

and no amount of saccharine appeal to “protecting childhood” should convince you otherwise.

but starmer got not only ratioed but community noted on twitter. not a good look for a budding digital censorship czar. care to wager this is exactly why he wants control of social media?

they cannot win in the open agora.

so they need to destroy it.

(if your stomach is strong, watch the video, it’s something.)

they’re going to “fix technology intruding into children’s lives” by intruding into the life of every adult. because you cannot do this without doing so. this requires ID. how can you keep out the kids without it? it’s basically “everyone on the internet gets carded.” no more anonymity. chilling stuff in a place where you can get arrested for making memes about social issues. astonishingly, it looks like “bluesky” may be exempt from this (not sure it’s certain yet) but that sort of tells you everything you need to know about how this is intended to lean politically, no? (similar thing happened in austraila)

it’s now about your kids’ safety, it’s about the politicians’.

and be serious, the kids will go through this nonsense like a light saber through tissue paper. VPN, fake ID, fake face, AI spoofing, who knows. this will make the war on drugs look like a rousing success in terms of efficacy and, like the war on drugs, it’s only going to work on squares. they don’t actually care if young nigel is on twitter. they care if the kinds of people who are critical of the government are.

this seems to be part of the whole EU “we need to take control of social media” playbook. they are trying to “build their own” and they know they can’t.

australia and the UK have bans announced. canada, spain, germany, denmark, and france, are all working on it.

and some of them have designs WAY past mere ID.

this too is for “protection.” the early intent is to “search for nudes” and prevent under 18’s from taking or sending nude pics or accessing them, but this too is just another trojan horse. if you seriously believe that once a state has the power to demand full phone scanning it will stop at “just hunting the pedos” and “policing the teens being a bit racy” then i have a bridge to sell you in london. if you look behind the big wooden horse, you can see it in the background…

they want device level lockdown and scan to stop you from spoofing ID and to make sure they can see ALL your content no matter what kind of encryption you use in transmit or storage. open it? gotcha.

this is “orwell was an optimist” levels of big brother and it’s setting up a serious fight.

and it’s deeply, dangerously disingenuous from the side of censorship.

call me my cynical paws, but when the same people who tell you the great danger to kids is nudes and social media have allowed a grooming gang scandal to rage on for decades and seem oddly disinterested in even understanding it, much less stopping it, so i find it more than a trifle difficult to take them at their word here.

and it’s spreading to everywhere where regimes are unpopular and flailing.

it’s actually an interesting litmus test: what country that is imposing these has a strong government who is not threatened by raid gains from the right?

france, germany, UK, australia, even the danes are a minority coalition and the nationalist DF party just tripled its vote share and the “blue block” right are rapidly approaching the same size as the governing coalition.

and these guys? well, nuff said.

this feels like the move of a whole set of failing regimes whose own people have had about enough of them and who see opposition parties rising to prominence.

this is how you make political dissent illegal and track every post and pontification.

this is how you allow your side to do and say whatever it likes while everyone else is hamstrung.

it reminds me of this: fentanyl floyd rallies are A OK, but church or the gym or, heaven forfend, protesting against lockdowns is not.

those are health risks.

it’s all the same repetitive pantomime.

one law for me, another for thee.

try criticizing it if you need a lesson on who’s in charge around here.

are these seriously the kind of people you want to give the keys to the internet turnstile?

you think they’ll use that power for good? they’ll stop at just age and porn?

fall for that one and you’re cooked.

10 years ago, this might have worked.

but this is just foolish.

this battle is long since over.

they already lost the arms race.

it’s amazing how fateful a one simple exchange can be.

the freeing of twitter (now X) was a watershed and its ownership by possibly the one truly uncancelable human on the planet is fascinating.

what do you do against a guy who: has his own AI, launches a meaningful number of your satellites, and astronauts, and now has a global satellite internet system that no nation state can really block?

if you want to make elon his next trillion, make the internet unsafe for most of the west and see what happens when you can get high bandwitth starlink on a mobile phone handset (current handset bandwidth is low, upgrades planned).

the tech is going to move too fast for the censors and the commanding heights of space have been ceded to the resistence.

these aspiring censorious suzerains will wind up alienating those they seek to cow and making their messages resonate with those who might otherwise stand aside.

you simply cannot win a fight like this.

bringing censorship to a fight against youth movements is like bringing jam to an ant fight.