Disappointing that a project that should ostensibly care about preserving the open, non-centralised internet takes the time to namedrop and talk about making "compromises" against preserving a well-known, medium-sized clearnet forum legally operated from a US-based LLC. Still-living independent forum sites in this day and age have unrivalled SNR of actual human-to-human communication, there should be no better candidate for archival. It's sad that a self-hosted archival tool has to apologise for any "evil" content it might be used for in the first place. Tape recorders do not require a disclaimer about people saying "hate speech" into them.
Sorry which medium sized forum are you referring to?
I love forums and want them to continue, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I dislike them as a medium. I was just pointing out that public sites in general have started to see some attrition a bit lately for a variety of reasons, and the tooling needs to keep with new mediums as they appear.
I also make no apology for the content, in fact ArchiveBox is explicitly designed to archive the most vile stuff for lawyers and governments to use for long term storage or evidence collection. One of our first prospective clients was the UN wanting to use it to document Syrian war crimes. The point there was that we can save stuff without amplifying it, and that's sometimes useful in niche scenarios.
Lawyers/LE especially don't want to broadcast to the world (or tip off their suspect) that they are investigating or endorsing a particular person, so the ability to capture without publicly announcing/mirroring every capture is vital.
what? I think you have posted in the wrong thread or something...
User A complained about a forum, user B asked what they were talking about, and I guessed as to the meaning of user A's complaint. So why am I acting like anything?
Ahh that makes sense. Well all I can say to that is that it's not up to me what's evil. The point I was trying to make is: sometimes you want to archive something that you don't endorse / don't want to be publicly linked.
You might not want to amplify and broadcast the fact that you're archiving it to the world.
>What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child).
What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home?
These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation?
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.
I think those are all good points, which is why I opened my comment with "Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular" since I didn't have much context about how you were using that phrase. I was more responding to the phrase itself since I've seen it used a lot of times to castigate people for trying to vote for things that might actually benefit them.
I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.
Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?
Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.
I think I agree that the nuance is lost with our voting system.
It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.
It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.
With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:
* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.
* No clear majority in the GE
* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".
* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.
* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;
* Referendum fails
* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.
* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.
Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.
Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.
Unrelated but nice to see that my tonedeaf and somewhat rude comment sparked such an interesting conversation.
I think I learned something reading this comment chain, so thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…
>People would rather lurch even further right for answers
God forbid we have an even more "far right" government than the one that has overseen a full decade of all-time-high immigration, has utterly failed to stop the years-long exponential increase in illegal boat border crossings, has swept under the rug the revelations of rape gangs operating in towns and cities all throughout England, has rolled out the red carpet for agitative gender and race activist groups to take root in every institution from museums to universities to primary schools to the civil service, ....
I think we're more in agreement than you think; the difference is that I think that this is the nature of the right wing in the UK in general.
The issue is that the right wing will tell you things you want to hear and then either: not do those things, or they "solve" them in a way that cuts you off at the knees.
I'm not sure if it's a right wing thing in general but it's definitely something I see the right wing in the UK and US do a lot. Populism seems to be a lot about treating symptoms not causes, so if there's a migration crisis: lets make life so bad in the country that people don't want to live here!
Not to mention that the phrase has existed for over 100 years, which is quite a long "late stage" for an economic system that's arguably only a few hundred years old. It's used in conversations like religious doomsday predictions, to conjure up the idea that the collapse of capitalism (and subsequent revolution) is coming Any Day Now.
It wears especially thin when people use the phrase to imply that companies overlooking the environment in the following of money is a brand new thing.
This is the same argument that communists use all the time
"Socialism/Communism is great and we should all live under that system as it is self-evidently the best"
"Well, there were some pretty bad aspects of the USSR and communist China, maybe we should take heed of those."
"Actually, I now choose to define communism as a perfect, not-yet-realised ideal. Any criticism you have of the closest existing system is actually a criticism of State Capitalism and not applicable to real communism."
---
"Capitalism is great and we should all live under that system as it is self-evidently the best"
"Well, there are some pretty bad aspects of the capitalist systems, maybe we should take heed of those."
"Actually, I now choose to define capitalism as a perfect, not-yet-realised ideal. Any criticism you have of the closest existing system is actually a criticism of Corporatism and not applicable to real capitalism."
Fair point. That might be the case... I fail to see how Capitalism inevitably requires Big Government in the same way that Communism inevitably requires centralized power but it might be my problem and you might be right. I'll have to spend more time thinking about it.
I always thought about it as an indirect connection. Capitalism -> Economic Prosperity -> People become more socialist -> Big Government that undermines Capitalism. But that might be wrong. Have to think about it some more.
> I love these conspiracy theory level claims that groups like the ADL are massive power brokers with far reaching influence that can just dictate the advertising spend of multi-billion dollar companies without warrant.
The bill was presented as an appeal to body autonomy in children and protecting their interest, however it was pointed out that Iceland allowed for operations on intersex babies without consent and would deport children back to countries where they were not protected.
It was a bill proposed by a progressive party member without consulting religious groups in the country. National polls never had more than 50% support, and it was challenged by both Muslim and Jewish communities in Iceland. There was a concern that it would set a precedent in Europe for religious discrimination. There was never a vote and it was withdrawn after international outcry.
So to frame it as though the ADL waved it's hand and made the government change it's mind is misleading and dishonest.
Which was entirely fair considering that extremely significant, costly parts of the EU structure and policies are essentially special conditions to other countries. The Common Agricultural Policy was/is basically a free fund of N billion EUR/year to France.
It all goes back to the fact that the entire EU has grown out of what was ultimately a deal between France and Germany, which has always left the UK out as the other one of Europe's big 3 countries. In fact France even blocked the UK from joining at all in the first place.
Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement" and not worthy of any discussions on democracy and sovereignty, I'm always surprised that so many Europeans, even high-level politicians, seem to have taken the decision to leave in such an incredibly personal way. Even the leave campaign itself was squarely against the EU as an institution, not a judgment on the EU member states and the people who make them up.
'Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement"'
The mistake I see here is that you are saying "The argument" and "is" implying that there is a singular argument/factor/opinion in play. This kind of simplification is not the way forward.
Having to pretend GB and NI are different countries seems like the inevitable outcome of the Good Friday Agreement (or at least one interpretation of it) that requires you to pretend that parts of two different countries (NI and IE) are the same country. That was obviously not going to last indefinitely as long as the two places are ruled by different sovereign states (in this case, the UK and EU).
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