[shazbotter]

Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.

It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.

[femiagbabiaka]

Yeah this applies to nearly all of Europe IMO. Recent events show that the American Bill of Rights is definitely not a panacea, but at least there's some legal standing to push back against Orwellian measure like those put in place by the UK or the EU.

[tensor]

Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.

While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.

[fogx]

yea right. Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights), while the U.S. legal system offers almost no general privacy protection. On top of that, the NSA has a long history of warrantless surveillance and backdoors (Snowden, PRISM), with very limited oversight. In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.

[FridayoLeary]

It's not uncomfortable everyone knows it. The problem is with self righteous political activists masquerading as judges and civil servants who are so convinced of the justice of their cause that they feel no need to justify themselves to anyone and trample on dissent . And a class of elitist politicians with contempt for the people who voted them in.

[shazbotter]

Most of the comments here suggesting the UK it's evil have been downvoted. It's clearly still uncomfortable for a lot of people.

[dmix]

It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.

[felineflock]

You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

[parineum]

I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".

[const_cast]

The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.

I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.