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Keir Starmer's suppression of free speech in the UK is expansive in its scope. Doomberg reports:
According to the BBC, a 40-year-old man was recently charged for social media posts that “were alleged to contain anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.” The characterization of the latter as offensive has raised more than a few eyebrows, including ours (and now, probably yours). Warnings have been sent across British airwaves to avoid posting or retweeting anything that could be interpreted to cause harm, “regardless of their intent.”
One particularly concerning trend is the manifest effort to include so-called “climate denialism” under the umbrella of hate speech, exposing those with alternative views on energy policy to potential legal jeopardy. In a piece we wrote in March titled “Climate Newspeak,” we chronicled how the self-appointed internet watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) was agitating to include opposition to wind and solar projects as “New Denial,” which they helpfully defined as “rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions to climate change.” At the time, the CCDH—led by founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, who was previously a political strategist for the Labour Party—was demanding censorship of a wide range of popular YouTube channels.
These channels include the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Action for America, the Hudson Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the National Center for Public Policy Research, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and the Heartland Institute.
When attacks on free speech include the suppression of supposedly harmful thoughts having to do with science and physical reality...and speech suppressors are most unlikely to consider this sphere out of bounds to their activities... then there will soon be a palpable and harmful impact on that society's well-being and on its overall economic and military capacity. In my post Starvation and Centralization, I cited a passage in Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, set in a country that was never explicitly named—though is clearly Stalin's Soviet Union:
A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance : it can decide the issue of the next war. If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him. If he was wrong...
Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture. When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to "interfere with" what has been determined to be the One Best Way. A society's feedback loop is broken, mistaken decisions will be unrecoverable. In the real-life Soviet Union, the official enforcement of the crackpot theories of Trofim Lysenko did great harm to the country's agricultural output. In today's UK, the "hate speech" designation of energy wrongthink increases the odds that that country will follow Germany's disastrous energy policies, with baneful consequences in the form of further deindustrialization, widespread impoverishment, and harm to UK and European security.
No one should think that the US is immune from this phenomenon. If the Democrats win the presidency... and especially if they also maintain or increase their grasp on Congress, you can expect a similar broadening of the concepts of "hate speech" and "denialism"... with penalties attached... on this side of the Atlantic.
Discussion (31)
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The slide of the United Kingdom into illiberal despotism is one of the truly huge and alarming things happening in the world today, and it doesn't get nearly the coverage it deserves. I think it has the potential, if not quickly reversed, of being an historic catastrophe.
UK law enforcement has even threatened to charge and extradite foreigners who violate their censorious social media regulations. This has prompted me to address pointed criticisms of their immigration policy and the conduct of their large population of mostly Muslim ersatz asylum seekers on Twitter every few days, along with an invitation to contact me if they want my address in order to initiate the extradition process.
Incidentally, the error the folks in the UK made was to think that, since they were frustrated by the so-called conservative governments they'd elected, they'd give more liberal folks another try. What they got is what our government will try to give us, I think, if we make the same mistake.
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How is this surprising?
The criminalization of anyone not complying with any official narrative has been ongoing. The official COVID narrative provided for the corruption of any type of feedback loops that normally allow a society to discuss all sides of an issue, rather than the one that the Powers That Be have decided upon.
The COVID era with all its officials, its bureaucrats and citizen synchophants helped establish the right of the State to adopt whatever narrative and policies that the Deep Global State wished to impose.
Since April 2020 when in Blue states we were slammed with lockdowns, forbidden to go to the beach or playgrounds, anyone protesting any of this was treated as being mentally defective. (Or worse - the individual clearly wanted to kill granma.)
The same thing took place in Great Britain.
Couldn't visit relatives in hospitals even as med personnel killed our relatives off. Meanwhile in other nations, like Japan, sensible measures were taken and people survived at a rate 62 times better than ours in the USA. (Japan's medical establishment has not yet been bought out by governmental entities connected to Big Pharma and the WEF.)
Looking purely at the symbology, a mask across the face is exactly what is required of those who are sex trafficked.
Britain has experienced a centralized agriculture with top down protocols enforced since back in the 1990's. Sure since the hoof and mouth disease episode things have been somewhat more relaxed.
But no one responsible for the government-insisted upon elimination of cows, sheep and goats was ever punished or even verbally humiliated by authorities.
After all, a guy named Neil Ferguson and his computer programs had indicated the only way to save British cattle was to kill most of them off.
He was never punished or even demoted. Instead as long as Bill Gates' massive donations to Imperial College continued, this man was kept in the right place and the right time so that in Spring 2020 he could issue the proclamations of another computer program. This time around the faulty computer program showed that 3.2% of all who were infected with COVID would die.
This began years of diminished opportunities for small business owners, for needed education for our youngsters, for people keeping their true health as the vaxxes ruined the health of 16% of all who have taken the mandated vaxxes.
So today COVID restrictions are being replaced with the policies coming about from the Deep Global State's faulty ideas about the "Climate Crisis" and the need for farmers to be supervised. Such cow-pucky concepts are now given free rein.
Just as catastrophically problematic, in Great Britain there are many reports of how farmers are systematically being eliminated through various pricing maneuvers managed by the food distribution cartels.
Many of these faulty "Climate Crisis" ideas are now embedded in every other TV series and movie. You can't watch a National Geographic special without being informed for at least 5% of the program's entirety as to what steps need to be undertaken to help prolong the planet 's life by another decade or two. (Even if the show is supposed to be about elephants on the African veldt or koala bears in Australia.)
The younger generations are fully indoctrinated, and there is most likely no way of ever reaching them.
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The current UK governing establishment also seems set on the apologize-for-everything-about-this country strategy. The mayor of London is erecting memorials to the pain and suffering brought about by Britain's participation in the transatlantic slave trade...but no memorial for theRoyal Navy West Africa Squadron and its many sailors who fought and died to end the slave trade.
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One thing to always point out is that in Great Britain, citizens do not necessarily own a fire arm.
Of course owning a fire arm did not necessarily help US citizens out during COVID. After all, if your business was shut down by authorities, just how would the individual use that weapon to stop that bureaucratic activity from occurring? Could a citizen go ahead and use a gun to take out an entire department of local bureaucrats?
So would our more liberal ability to have weapons help us out during the next few crises?
Reports are coming about of a new type of "peace officer" whose units will be up and operating here in the blue states.
People in small towns from Maryland to California are nervously noticing up to 30 people dressed in uniforms of a special type of police officer.
mdsp.maryland.gov
Open link
Why over the last few weeks would people in small towns need this type of increase in police personnel? Why are huge military aircraft, which weigh as much as 100 tons, routinely operating out of a public air field in southern New Mexico and then flying off to and landing at a public airfield in Sacramento? (It is my understanding that it is illegal for a US military airplane to casually use public airports.)
An overview of the aircraft:
simpleflying.com
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It's not surprising at all to anyone who's been following events in the United Kingdom for the past three-quarters of a century.
As such a one, I am not in the least surprised.
This has nothing to do with COVID, and everything to do with the country's exhaustion after WWII, and--as a result--its long-standing (and hopeful) infatuation with the all-powerful state and its ability to solve every social crisis. All you have to do is look to the history of the NHS, and extrapolate from that. Doing so gets you to where the UK is today in pretty short order.
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