“Raheem Sterling is dat Nigga” – Explanation below

The following is an oldie but a goodie and was first told to me by a Polish relative decades ago:

The European DreamThe European Nightmare
The British are the policeThe Germans are the police
The Italians are the loversThe Swiss are the lovers
The French are the cooksThe British are the cooks
The Germans are the car mechanicsThe French are the car mechanics
The Swiss run everythingThe Italians run everything

Given what’s been happening in Europe it’s not as funny as it used to be, and in Britain in particular I’m no longer so sure that there’s much difference between the German and British police, or their “justice” systems:

[C]lause 18] will amend the Equality Act to force employers to “take all reasonable steps” to insulate their staff from “harassment” by “third parties”.  In other words, this will mean publicans can’t tell their customers risqué jokes or express heterodox opinions in case they are heard by a member of staff who may take offence. Why? Because according to the employment tribunal, “harassment” includes remarks that a person with one or more “protected characteristics” might find upsetting. 

It’s already being called the “Banter Ban” and it’s going to be interesting to see how they enforce it.

Will there be lists of banned words displayed behind the bar – “mothers”, “breast-feeding”, “woman” added to the usual “we will not serve alcohol to under-age or inebriated customers”? How about “banter bouncers” to snitch on customers and boot them if they say anything the trans server (they/them) might object to? Perhaps you’ll have to show not just proof of age but proof that you’ve passed courses in unconscious bias and diversity?

Is it any wonder that a recent survey in Britain revealed that:

Out of over 6,000 polled, 65% think Labour is out of touch with working people, 54% say the state intervenes too much in people’s lives, and half think Labour ‘loves to ban things we enjoy‘

Is it any wonder that earlier this year US Vice President Vance asked the Euros whether they still actually believed in the same things anymore that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with America to defend against the Soviet communists during the Cold War? He admitted that during the Biden Administration the US had been just as bad when it came to State censorship.

But as this British article points out Vance was delivering a message that was about far more than supposedly shared values, pointing out that the previous US government didn’t just outsource censorship to private companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, but also foreign nations:-

Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including US companies – to change their behaviour in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the ‘Brussels Effect’, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

Meow! But it happens to be true.

 This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube into signing the ‘Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online’ which required the ‘removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours’ and ordered them to ‘remove or disable access to such content’. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of ‘trusted reporters’…Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalised a vast array of ‘misinformation’, or the UK’s ‘Online Safety Act’ which made illegal such vaguely hateful behaviour as causing ‘needless anxiety’ and ‘non-trivial psychological or physical harm’.

Little ole’ New Zealand gets a shout-out as well:

The construction of this counter-populist system was formalised as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the ‘Christchurch Call to Action‘ summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers and ‘civil society and partner organisations’ to ‘eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online’.

As always read the whole thing and then reflect on why the recent American pushback on this fascist bullshit is bi-partisan:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud,
…
Oregon’s Ron Wyden (D) teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British…Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted dat

The article shows the trans-Atlantic connections on this matter, going back a decade to the mass shooting in San Bernadino with a couple of Islamic Jihadists and the FBI’s demands to Apple to crack open their encrypted cellphones. An Act went before Congress to modify Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow search warrants to force such things but it never went anywhere as the FBI cracked the phones anyway, using an Australian firm called Azimuth, which wasn’t revealed until 2021.

Now the British have passed such an act anyway (the Investigatory Powers Act or IPA) and just two days later parallel changes were made to Rule 41 in America. 

The Stasi goes international.

There’s a hilarious coda in the article (if you’re in the mood for black humour) about an IPA where Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans and the British Police got very upset about messages with bad words and “abuse”:

Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “Raheem Sterling is dat Nigga” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest [as they praised their soccer heroes]

Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, was in the thick of it in 2019, issuing warnings about how his Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue: “While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited.”

Now however it looks like efforts by government officials to completely wipe out encryption have failed, and events have taken a new turn. “Wild,” is how the Senate aide characterized the Wyden-Biggs letter, resuming another bipartisan fight put on hold nine years ago. “I’d forgotten what this looks like.”

Yay for bi-partisanship, although this is less Democrat-GOP bi-partisanship than Individuals v. State. Again, read the whole thing.

Meanwhile back to Britain, where you may remember this guy?

He’s the young man who stabbed three little girls to death while they were at dance party, then had the Police, PM Kier Starmer, the rest of the Labour Party and much of the British Establishment pretend for months that he wasn’t an Islamic Jihadist who had done it because… he’s an Islamic Jihadist. People got thrown in jail for saying that online.

As the truth became known the same people pivoted to talking about youthful “loners” influenced by those dreaded Social Media algorithms that feed hatred. This bullshit has thus extended into the entertainment industry.

As Mark Steyn said of this Establishment approach:

If you take seriously the bollocks peddled by the government and its media poodles, the biggest threat to social tranquility in the UK comes not from “refugees” or ongoing Islamisation but from the “far right”. Okay. If you say so. In that case, do the math: England has a population a hundred times the size of Ulster’s Catholic community. A take-up rate equivalent to the IRA’s would be tens of thousands.

Over thirty years just a few hundred IRA terrorists were able to kill politicians, one member of the Royal family, come close to killing others, as well as killing and wounding large numbers of civilians and police in thousands of attacks. Steyn links to the following discussion (1.5 hours) which, as he says, is disturbing as much for it’s matter-of-fact style as the subject matter, which is the coming British Civil War:

Louise has the voice of a lovely English rose and Professor Betz is a mild-mannered soft-spoken Canadian, and such accents calmly discussing the road to “civil war” makes it far more unsettling than if it were just another blowhard roaring from his cyber-bunker. Especially when Mr Betz, who has advised governments around the Commonwealth on “counter-terrorism”, says right at the end that it’s too late to prevent it, and it’s time to work on mitigation strategies to secure the nation’s great artistic treasures and its nuclear weapons.