Black lives matters were race related riots and violence also. Starmer took the knee in solidarity with these violent looting criminals but is cracking down on free speech because of these ones .
Violence is violence, looting is looting, protest is protest.
The last one should be allowed in any civil society, the two former should be put down regardless of perpetrators
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murder is murder
We are working on that
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Musk is the Pablo Escobar of toxic disinformation
Fintan OâToole
One law for the megarich provocateur, another for the poor idiots who follow his lead. The idea of two-tier policing â the false allegation that immigrants are allowed to get away with everything while white âpatriotsâ get punished for expressing their righteous outrage â is one of the memes of the far-right insurrection across these islands. The irony is that it is true in an entirely different sense.
The stupid nobodies will feel the full weight of the law. The most powerful spreader of disinformation, Elon Musk, basks in the reassurance of his own impunity. This two-tier policing fatally undermines the efforts of democracies to defend themselves.
Last week in England, a 55-year-old woman was arrested over an online post inaccurately âidentifyingâ the suspect accused of killing three young girls. Chief supt Alison Ross said this was âa stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracyâ. She added that âwe are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in personâ. On Friday, two young men were jailed â one for 20 months, the other for more than three years â for provocative posts. One of them was so thick he posted under his own name while boasting that he had âwatched enough CSI programmesâ to ensure he would âcategorically not be arrestedâ.
Weâre going to see a lot more of this â including in Ireland. Far-right groups in the Republic are closely intertwined with their mentors in Northern Ireland and Britain. They share an information â or rather a disinformation â space.
Responses to online provocations will therefore have to be aligned too. There will be more prosecutions of individuals who share fake stories that feed into violent attacks on immigrants, religious minorities and asylum seekers.
Low-hanging fruit
But the eejits who get caught are low-hanging fruit. Typically, theyâve been hooked by the algorithms engineered by the social media companies to mimic addictive drugs. Their brains have been rewired by constant exposure to conspiracy theories and hate content.
Thus, the war on disinformation begins to look very like the war on drugs. One of the great social disasters of the contemporary world was the policy of arresting and imprisoning drug users. It caused immense harm to individuals, families and communities while doing nothing to stop ruthless suppliers from creating an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The Pablo Escobar of toxic disinformation is Elon Musk. His lying is a fully integrated business. He simultaneously produces, consumes and distributes disinformation.
Last week, at the height of the far-right violence in England and Northern Ireland, Musk chose to amplify the propaganda of the insurrectionists. He repeated the âtwo-tier policingâ conspiracy meme, calling Keir Starmer âtwo-tier Kierâ. He encouraged his followers to inhale apocalyptic hysteria: âCivil war is inevitable.â And he shared what purported to be a news article from the Telegraph (actually created by the fascist Britain First party) claiming that Starmer was considering sending rioters to âemergency detainment campsâ in the Falklands.
These interventions were specific and purposeful. Musk was acting as a fascist provocateur. And doing so through a platform (X) he personally controls and on which he has 193 million followers. A platform, moreover, he has deliberately and knowingly opened up to fellow far-right agitators.
Musk has aligned himself quite openly with English fascist Tommy Robinson, bringing him back on to X last November, responding favourably to one of his posts and publishing on X a âdocumentaryâ made by Robinson that has been judged to be in contempt of court. Thanks to Musk, Robinsonâs tweets over the weekend when the rioting broke out were (according to analysis by the Tortoise website) read more than 160 million times.
Musk isnât doing this only because incendiary content has become a big driver of Xâs business model. He is sincerely committed to far-right provocation.
As time has gone on, Musk has become more and more like his father, a full-on, down-the-rabbit hole conspiracy theorist. In his biography of Musk, Walter Issacson quotes one of the fatherâs emails to his son suggesting that in Muskâs native South Africa âwith no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the treesâ and calling Joe Biden a âfreak, criminal, paedophile presidentâ.
Musk has inherited his fatherâs taste for labelling anyone he doesnât like a paedophile. His attitude to violence perpetrated against elected politicians and their families was revealed when Nancy Pelosiâs husband was attacked with a hammer by an intruder to the family home. Musk directed his followers to a far-right conspiracy website that suggested (falsely) that Paul Pelosi might have been injured âin a dispute with a male prostituteâ. Musk winked: âThere is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eyeâ.
Last weekâs interventions show that Musk has now become completely disinhibited. He is fully committed to the far-right creed that civil wars between patriots and globalists have already begun. As he put it in one of his tweets about the riots in England, âif incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitableâ. Attacks on Muslim shopkeepers are, in other words, the fault of the Muslims for not becoming white and Christian.
What are democracies going to do about this? The only political entity that has shown any real appetite for taking Musk on is the EU Commission, which last month made a preliminary finding that X is in breach of the Digital Services Act because its âverified accountsâ are deceptive, its promotion of advertising is not transparent and it refuses to provide real-time data to allow action against disinformation.
This is welcome, but even if X is eventually found guilty, it will face financial penalties, not criminal sanctions. Musk, as we know, is quite happy to lose money in the promotion of far-right causes.
What has to happen is that Musk is held personally to the same standards of criminal justice as random idiots who join his chorus. He is, he says, against two-tier policing. Take him at his word.
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Mate, Ronnie O Brien won Time Person of the Century once. I wouldnt be going on online polls.
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There are some things great about Britain tbh.
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I think heâs great.
Could happen anywhere I suppose but unfortunately I think I read one of the series was robbed and another one was defaced.
The owner of the building tends to remove and sell it seems.
It should be safe enough in London zoo.
Satellite dish was stolen within 2 hours.
Banksy has had a great Olympics.
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How come Britain stopped making affordable decent motor cars? The British mentality not up to it?
Sure thatâs part of the craic.
As a teenager in 2012, Lola Anderson was inspired by the London games - so much so that she wrote in her diary it was her âbiggest dream in lifeâ to row in the Olympics and possibly win gold.
But the British girl then threw the note in the bin as she âdidnât believeâ it would happen.
Unbeknown to the child, her father Don kept the piece of paper in a safety security box, and passed it to her in 2019 when he was being treated in hospital.
Two months later, he died of cancer.
The Team GB rower, 26, has now claimed Olympic gold and tearfully reflected on the treasured diary entry following her triumph on the water at the Paris games.
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TNH
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The cars used to be made in Britain by Roberts, not theyâre manufactured abroad by robots.
The robots work cheaper than the Roberts.
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Apparently it did. Affordable decent motorcars id say less likely
Its all going to shit over. Molly mae and Tommy fury are no more
A brilliant piece of distraction work by starmer
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Jermaine Jenas âŚâŚ.SACKED by BBC
What he do?