Interesting Links for 27-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. The US health system is now overseen by vaccine deniers. The effects are entirely predictable

(tags:disease pandemic usa vaccines doom )

2. Hong Kong children urged to get Covid jabs as 'whole paediatric ward full'

(tags:pandemic HongKong china children doom vaccination )

3. An Oral History of 'Lilo & Stitch' (the original)

(tags:animation movies Disney Hawaii history )

4. German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button (if they have an "accept all" button)

(tags:cookies surveillance germany dataprotection GoodNews )

5. It makes no sense to cut funding to mental health services when that costs you money in the long run.

(tags:mentalhealth money edinburgh )

6. How much energy does AI use?

(tags:ai electricity )

7. Owls! in! Towels!

(tags:owls cute photos )

8. Explaining a 31-month sentence for a tweet

(tags:racism riots uk law )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

thankyou for 7! a bit of a break from unending climate and health doom.

my own doom I can live with. doom for my darling wee cat I cannot :-(

[andrewducker]

I'd like to avoid doom for you. And your cat. And me. And my family. And as many other people as we can manage.

[channelpenguin]

Indeed. I'll drink (tea) to that!

[toothycat]

5. "It makes no sense to cut funding to mental health services when that costs you money in the long run" - sadly, the incentives don't work out that way:

* cost-cutting today means "savings" that you can claim credit for today

* long-term fallout will happen under a future government, who will take the blame - any pushback they might make on that will be lost in the general "everything bad is the fault of a previous government" rhetoric that previous governments flooded us with and so taught us to ignore

[reverancepavane]

Also in bureaucracies it often simply a matter of shifting the costs off your desk. It doesn't matter if the nett result to society as a whole is greater, it's no longer being paid by your department and you have achieved considerable cost-savings within your department. Well done!

Of course this means that [eventually] someone else will have to to pick up the slack, but that's not your problem. Or it gets placed back on your desk and you claim you don't have the funding for it, so you will need supplemental grants to administer the scheme.

[hilarita]

Indeed - this is how we can spend more and more on healthcare, because running down preventative, early intervention, and/or GP care saves money in the short term, and we can watch the soaring cost of secondary care. (See also; cutting social care budget for similar consequences... and cutting Sure Start...)

It's really really depressing.

[juan_gandhi]

#8. Why is it racist, I wonder. Is it because everybody knows the race(s) of illegal immigrants, whom Connolly was talking about? This probably means that she was reflecting the common feelings in the country. (I'm clueless about what's going on actually, so all this looks pretty weird to me. To me, she was expressing her opinion. I believe, the only illegal part of her tweet was the word "mass", because with mass deportations you won't be able to maintain human rights. The rest: deportations, burning hotels, it's all legal, if done in a due process. Say, if she wrote something like "we need a legal process to deport illegal immigrants, and we need to destroy the hotels the only purpose of which is to host illegal immigrants", would that be legal?

As an immigrant, I'm pretty much against illegal immigration. But which immigration should be viewed illegal, must be carefully defined. Refugees, are they illegal? I don't think so.

[andrewducker]

If you incite violence, by saying that we should set fire to hotels full of people, then that's a crime. If the people in the hotels are mostly not White British, then that's going to be taken as racism, particularly if the context was lots of rumours about a murder being carried out by an immigrant.

She could have disputed all of that, of course. But she pleaded guilty.

(Also, those are normal hotels, just currently being used to house asylum seekers.)

[juan_gandhi]

That part, whether the hotel is supposed to be full of people, escaped me. Maybe she meant it, then yes. But I just didn't see it in the text.

Well, she pleaded guilty to avoid a harsher punishment, I suppose.

And thank you regarding what kind of hotels we were talking about. It's a different case in San Francisco, so I was not aware.

Ok, in short, it's a British context.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. I absolutely don't mind explaining, because I expect that it's very different for different people!

[haggis]

The other connection was that the only thing that was known about the Southport killer at that point was his race and that was the thing he had in common with most immigrants living in those hotels.

Calling for people to be burned alive in response to a vile but unrelated crime is absolutely a criminal act, as David Allen Green notes.

[juan_gandhi]

Definitely. But whether one can read in that tweet a call to burn people alive, it varies, probably, with the culture. I just couldn't imagine.

[haggis]

There were riots and crowds of attackers outside buildings where immigrants are forced to living happening at the time she posted that tweet. It wasn't theoretical and the context wasn't ambiguous. It was a deliberate call for mass murder.

[channelpenguin]

It's actually happened here in Germany, places have been set on fire, and I think people hurt/killed. (I don't deliberately watch/read/listen to news for at least 20 years, for my own mental health and survival, so I'm not sure of the details.)

[juan_gandhi]

Yes, I got it. I was too naive. Thank you.

8

[zz]

one of my problems with all of the hate crime/terrorism/etc elimination of free speech is that society/law treats things like tweets as some sort of Serious Publishing, rather than the modern version of venting down the pub. we need to adapt to the fact that "putting things in writing" doesn't mean what it used to.

Re: 8

[andrewducker]

If you want to vent down the pub to your 5 mates then feel free.

If you stand in front of 30,000 people in a public square and shout "Let's burn the hotels to the ground with the bastards still inside." then you are *also* going to prison.

Edit: The good news is that the equivalent of "You and your mates venting down the pub" exists! It's chat! You can go on to Messenger, or Signal, or WhatsApp (or even Twitter Messages if you really want to), and vent to your hearts content, and chances are that even if someone leaks it that the police won't care!

Re: 8

[zz]

> If you stand in front of 30,000 people in a public square and shout
awkward analogy. there's a difference between doing that on a PA with all the people listening to you, vs most people not paying attention and not even hearing you, and twitter is the latter.
and deleting the post shortly after is the equivalent of the few people listening to you telling you to fuck off, and you walking away.

> then you are *also* going to prison.
which should be based on harm done and future harm prevention, not arbitrary tough on crime bullshit.

> and chances are that even if someone leaks it that the police won't care!
well that's just not true. people absolutely get prosecuted for things said in "private" online conversations.

Re: 8

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

As another commenter has said, people absolutely do get prosecuted for private conversations.

What bothers me about this case is that "Do X for all I care" is not the same as "Let's do X". It's a statement of callous indifference, not an incitement to anything. I've never seen anyone acknowledge this, either when she was first charged and people were discussing it, or in the more recent discussions prompted by the failed appeal.

(and if the OP's position on that is that it was her own fault for pleading guilty: is that his position on criminals in general, even knowing the way the system pressures and threatens people to plead guilty?)

I'm also bothered by the inconsistency on what kinds of speech count as incitement to violence, such that this counts and merits 31 months in prison, but "k*ll the J*ws, r*pe their daughters" (clearly phrased as an instruction, and clearly targeting a specific ethnic group) doesn't, and "kill your MP" (again, clearly phrased as an instruction, and targeting specific individuals, which I thought was worse legally speaking) doesn't.

In an ideal world I would prefer none of these speech acts to be criminalised (although they should be condemned and disapproved of), but in a world where Connolly is in jail, the others should be too.

Re: 8

[andrewducker]

I agree that the consistency is terrible.

(And I'm against punishing people for pleading innocent. Seems likely to lead to bad things.)

Re: 8

[juan_gandhi]

It's not "a world", it's just your country. It's different in different countries.

But it's a great point about selecting protected groups of population. That's also "racist" (it's in quotes because these days everything's racist).

Re: 8

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I meant "a world" in the sense of "possible worlds"; in the same sense as I said "in an ideal world" - not in the sense of "this is the case globally".

Would you prefer "In a world in which *the UK* imprisons Connolly, *the UK* should also imprison these other people"?

Re: 8

[juan_gandhi]

I don't think my preferences are relevant. Frankly, I don't even know which one is right.

[ninetydegrees]

4 Please make it a EU law. Actually please make reject all buttons mandatory in the EU.

[bens_dad]

The Hanover Administrative Court said that what happen violates an existing EU law - err *two* existing laws -the Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act and the GDPR.

These existing laws are probably already incorporated into national laws; this is a precedent which local courts within member states are expected to take into account, and probably follow.

[ninetydegrees]

Nice, thanks for taking the time to clarify.

[anna_wing]

The owls look just like my Cats In Towels, ready to be vaccinated...

COVID in spreading in Southeast Asia, so I've started carrying a mask around with me again.

[cellio]

Those owls are just what I needed amidst all the -- flails arms -- stuff going on. Thank you.