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By mmarian 2025-07-282:33 The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
By kelsey98765431 2025-07-2813:492 reply This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
By ricardobeat 2025-07-2814:059 reply There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
It is absolutely possible and multiple providers already do it, just search for “residential ip vpn”. The legit ones pay people $20 a month or so to plug a mysterious box into their network which the provider will route traffic through. The shadier ones will just route your traffic straight through a botnet.
By account42 2025-08-048:13 If there is enough demand then IPSs themselves could offer this service to foreign customers.
By jonasdegendt 2025-07-2817:22 > There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites
They can, it’s just a lot more expensive than a $10 a month VPN. They’re typically metered and you pay by the byte.
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.
By eddythompson80 2025-07-2816:121 reply > As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
By xp84 2025-07-2915:33 This hasn’t been my experience at all. I use one of the big VPN services advertised on YouTube sponsorships (but not one of the ones you named) and watch Netflix Canada through it all the time. I’ve also been able to use iPlayer.
By Manuel_D 2025-07-2818:49 I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.
There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.
By zamadatix 2025-07-2816:27 Apart from the first month don't forget those that subscribe and forget about it or subscribe for Netflix and use it for something else on top of those that cancel after the first period.
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
By degenoah 2025-07-3015:11 considering PIA also still has their sponsors spill the usual "don't connect to a public wifi without a VPN! or else hackers can see everything!!" (SSL/TLS solved this problem a long time ago) yeah I would take anything they and many others claim in ads.
By otabdeveloper4 2025-07-2815:021 reply Streaming services don't have any incentive to ban traffic from non-residential addresses right now. But they might with enough legislative pressure.
By xp84 2025-07-2915:35 True! They only need to make a show of trying their best, in order to appease grumpy copyright holders. I don’t think I’d pay for Netflix anymore if I could only watch the pathetic US catalog, and there are surely many others like me. And Netflix knows that.
I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.
By SoftTalker 2025-07-2819:231 reply Your terms of service with the ISP almost certainly forbid any form of reselling, or sharing the connection outside of your household.
By immibis 2025-07-298:48 Which means it's legal if you don't get caught.
Literally - in most of the world terms of service have no legal effect and violating them is not a crime - they are merely a declaration that the service provider feels bad if you do certain things, and if they feel bad they might decide to terminate your account.
Most of them prohibit running servers at home and using p2p apps. Has anyone here ever gotten their connection shut off for either of these?
By mywittyname 2025-07-2820:05 > As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
And is_vpn(ip_address) is a service that's offered by a variety of vendors already.
By Eddy_Viscosity2 2025-08-0512:18 Netflix blocking just wasn't a big enough of a motivator to solve that problem. But messing with people's porn access would be. The internet was built on porn distribution.
By MisterTea 2025-07-2912:30 > There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale
Bot nets.
Netflix was blocking by endpoint IP? That is just a cat and mouse game. They should have been blocking if the MTU was not 1500 bytes.
By SV_BubbleTime 2025-07-2818:05 Hola, eso suficiente.
I mean, it’s more of a bot network really, but there is a massive amount of bandwidth there.
By spacebanana7 2025-07-2815:29 This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.
By tossandthrow 2025-07-2818:202 reply > One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
By NewsaHackO 2025-07-2822:27 Other counties and regions have or will have similar laws. I can definitely see the EU, UK and US collaborating on something like this.
However, if I was running a foreign site not subject to UK law or other privacy law, with UK visitors, and I was a ruthless businessperson, I'd definitely implement this verification thing in order to collect and store a photo of every visitor.
By tossandthrow 2025-07-2911:27 Not if it means that you don't get any visitors
By pc86 2025-07-2913:40 If you wanted to do this for some reason you'd just do it across the board and say it was for age verification. The reason nobody does it is because people are (rightfully) not okay with this nonsense.
This isn't about illegal sites?
I don't think many people object to blacklisting known sources of child pornography etc.
The fact is you now have to verify your identity (name and photo id) in the UK to access an adult subreddit.
By pc86 2025-07-2913:42 Nobody has ever objected to blocking access to those sites. Most people think the justice system in any developed country is much too lax on people that operate those sites and create its content.
This is a red herring for authoritarian tyrants in the UK to get more control over their population, which is all they're ever looking for.
By qingcharles 2025-07-2816:313 reply What kind of photo ID does the UK have? I didn't think there was any kind of national ID if you didn't drive?
By pjc50 2025-07-298:39 We don't have national photo ID, but you do need it in order to vote, rent, buy a house, or have a bank account; several of those processes include mandatory immigration status checks too.
It's a stupid equilibrium.
By alt227 2025-07-2818:42 Passport
By lavezzi 2025-07-2822:41 provisional license, passport, etc.
You need to be able to shut down websites and apps which do not implement age verification.
Right, anything that doesn't cooperate with the ID verification is defacto illegal in the UK's eyes?
By immibis 2025-07-2815:57 not de facto illegal, but actually, de jure, illegal
Yes... and for clarity, perhaps I should have instead said for the implementation of this law to actually make any moral sense, which is like saying for this chocolate tea pot to be functional on a daily basis, one would have to provision a way of shutting down sites which refuse to participate in the age-verification laws of the UK.
Doesn't make any sense, it's in Netflix's interest to prevent this, but it's the opposite for porn sites.
Porn sites don't have any interest in keeping this law either. Nobody with a functioning brain thinks you should have to upload your government ID to a website to browse content, no matter what that content is.
By djao 2025-07-301:54 That's what OP said. Netflix and its customers have opposing interests. The customers want to use VPNs, whereas Netflix doesn't want to allow VPNs. The customers don't care about following anti-piracy laws, whereas Netflix wants to enforce them.
The situation is the opposite for age verification laws. In this case, both porn sites and their customers have aligned interests. Both sides want to allow VPNs. Both sides want to abolish age verification laws, and if that is not possible, to circumvent them.
By baby_souffle 2025-07-2817:511 reply Only a little bit of legislation would be needed to change incentives around though
By ivanjermakov 2025-07-2818:271 reply How so?
By immibis 2025-07-298:53 a new law saying if you use a VPN you go to jail. Like they have in China and Iran.
By qingcharles 2025-07-2816:282 reply I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.
A lot of countries in the Middle East throw gay people off the roofs of buildings as punishment, let's assume for the sake of argument that anything we do that moves us closer to the Middle East is the wrong thing to do.
By qingcharles 2025-07-2916:20 I don't know that "a lot" of countries in the Middle East are regularly throwing gay people off buildings, but I agree with your second point that we shouldn't look at their censorship as an example of something great to follow.
I would add that from my experience with the Gulf, at least, the ME has created one of the gayest places on Earth. The separation between genders has led to a disproportionate number of women and men semi-openly sleeping with their own gender in a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" way.
It feels like the "punish them for being gay" is used, like the poster below you mentions, as a way to turn the screws on you when they need something to use against you for another reason.
By mywittyname 2025-07-2820:391 reply It's probably more a matter of, "let everyone engage in illegal activities, which we can then use to turn the screws on them if they ever need to."
This is a ubiquitous tactic at the highest level of law enforcement.
By johnisgood 2025-07-306:45 That is what the UK has been doing and is doing, along with most if not all Governments. One just has to take a look at UK's 2003 Communication Act. It can be selectively enforced against you if they do not like you.
By NoMoreNicksLeft 2025-07-2814:141 reply >For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
If the vpn endpoint is in Rome or New York City, how will the UK government force that non-British vpn service and that non-British porn site to verify the age of anyone using it?
It's easy enough to get a list of IP addresses from those vpn services and just block them if you're Netflix, but to force compliance on anyone traversing the tunnel is another thing entirely. The UK government would have an easier time banning vpns outright.
By mywittyname 2025-07-2820:49 International treaties.
These can be wildly effective at such matters. I'm sure most countries can come to some understanding with the UK on the matter; be that foreign aid, trade concessions, assistance with their own law enforcement, or perhaps acknowledgement/support on the international stage.
By account42 2025-08-048:09 > One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
That would be quite the overreach as those endpoints are no longer under the UK jurisdiction and there is no way for a website to tell if the user connecting through them is or is not in the UK.
By Group_B 2025-07-2817:13 There’s also P2P VPN services which pretty much make it impossible to block
By thallium205 2025-07-2816:081 reply "All VPN services must also perform age verification." Done.
By pc86 2025-07-2913:46 All this will do is put UK-based VPN businesses, if that's not already an oxymoron, out of business.
The UK can't tell a company in Cyprus or Switzerland to do anything unless they're ready to tell the SAS to put their boots on.
By ivanjermakov 2025-07-2818:27 > but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP
It's up to service provider to implement such involved checks. Not sure about e.g. Netflix allocating resources to implementing this, clearly resulting in customer loss.
I expect service providers to cut corners to both comply with local laws and not frighten customers away.
By apatheticonion 2025-07-302:071 reply Does IPV6 change this dynamic at all?
It's conceivable that a VPN provider could change the V6 IP on their server every hour for the rest of time and still get unique addresses.
If the VPN server only has an IPV6 address and no V4 address, can they connect to the target website?
By gorgoiler 2025-07-304:12 IP addresses are routed in aggregate groups using BGP. The groups are called Autonomous Systems and are handed out to ISPs. Your home ISP has a bunch. The ISP that hosts your virtual server has some too. You can see the one you’re connecting from right now with tools like https://bgp.tools and https://bgp.he.net.
The number of these systems scales in a reasonably tractable way — on the order of the number of ISPs and physical Internet infrastructure around which traffic needs to be routed.
As well as making aggregate routing possible you can use the ISP’s registration details see what location (or legal jurisdiction) a whole chunk of address space has. Hopping around IP addresses will give you unique ones every five minutes but they’ll all still be inside 2001:123::/32 from AS1234 aka Apathetic Onion’s Finest Habidashery and Internet Connections LLC, Delaware, USA.
By babypuncher 2025-07-2822:40 I don't think the incentive structure is there for porn sites to start blocking VPNs the way Netflix does. And legislation requiring them to would be pretty toothless since the only mechanism they rely on to enforce the rules is making local ISPs block the offending sites.
Maybe time to start a second, parallel version of the internet. Something with mesh networks.
By immibis 2025-07-298:53 https://dn42.network/ - don't actually use dn42 since many participants won't be fans of your high-traffic idea, but make a new network with a similar design. (You may get some of the same people to participate in both networks)
By newtonsmethod 2025-07-2821:37 Netflix in fact works better on a VPN for me . Maybe they made it that way.
By chrismatheson 2025-07-288:255 reply is TOR an answer to this ?
By firefax 2025-07-2814:31 >is TOR an answer to this ?
I've found Tor is mostly useful for reading, not participating. Exit nodes get blocked from registering on most sites. One workaround is to register at a café or library then use the account over Tor, but sometimes even if you're being civil (see my comment history for a a pretty good picture of the style of discussions I have anonymously) sometimes you'll wake up to find the account nuked.
Tor exit nodes are the _first_ thing they ban! If your origin is not from within one of the top residential ISPs then you can expect to be selected for enhanced screening.
By gadders 2025-07-2815:09 I heard on here I think (but can't confirm) that renting a cheap server in a data centre and sticking your own tailscale on it is the best way to go.
By HDThoreaun 2025-07-2810:132 reply It is incredibly easy to tell if someone is using TOR. It would be banned before VPNs
By mywittyname 2025-07-2820:51 Only if you want your traffic to flow through NSA-backed honeypots and get caught up in a dragnet.
I mean, it's probably the case that traditional VPNs are also dragnets to some degree, but TOR is a confirmed NSA dragnet.
By swores 2025-07-2814:33 I think you may have misunderstood what "socialists" means (or accidentally written it instead of a different word which wouldn't be so out of place in that sentence?).
Hey, not sure if this is bad HN ethiquette (probably is) but I haven't found any other option to contact you. I posted the list you asked about in another thread about a week ago.
By Pooge 2025-08-0218:10 Awesome, thank you!!
By lucasRW 2025-07-298:30 1. Conservatives and Labour have an equally disastrous role in the current mess and have mostly overplayed their differences. 2. Particularly in the UK, the law is one thing. The application another. In practice, Keir Starmer, just yesterday, was claiming that there was no censorship in the UK, they were "just safeguarding children from suicide" (by censoring videos of protesters outside the Britannia hotel in Canary Wharf :o) )
By Philpax 2025-07-2814:18 Huh?
It is only a matter of time before they attempt to regulate VPN usage. Here is an article written by a British MP hinting at that:
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/onli...
It definitely seems like she’s conflating two issues: access to pornography and child grooming. I don’t see why she thinks regulating VPNs would reduce the latter.
By pjc50 2025-07-2815:58 Everyone always does this. Then they conflate mention of LGBT topics with porn so they can equate it with "grooming". Not helped by the UK's anti-trans panic of the last few years (self-ID was such a mainstream idea that it was in the 2018 Tory manifesto)
By johnisgood 2025-07-286:291 reply It does not. As I have said before, pedophilia is rampant on Roblox and Discord. Go monitor those platforms, and hold these platforms responsible, not VPNs. Regulating VPNs will not reduce child grooming, and I am sure they are not stupid enough to actually think it does.
Or, to put it another way, in order to protect the most children, focus your efforts on where the most children actually are, not where you're afraid they might end up.
By johnisgood 2025-07-2813:30 Pretty much.
She doesnt, she just wants to put in Putin-like levels of control and surveillance for the same reasons Putin does.
By userbinator 2025-07-286:282 reply Jinping is probably a better comparison.
By pydry 2025-07-2811:45 Jinping would be a better comparison if you wanted to downplay all of this - he's less of a persona non grata.
All 3 like to crack down on free speech and monitor internet traffic for identical reasons though.
How would you know? In countries without free speech where anti-government speech is illegal, the only legal speech is pro-government or neutral.
I would know cuz there are independent polls made by western NGOs: https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
Immaterial how independent they are because it's completely impossible to get honest opinions of repressive regimes. The people within the regime have no real way to know whether a poll response will make it back to the government or not, so they must assume that it will. When the repercussions for having the wrong opinion are that you disappear or find yourself "volunteered" for the front line, it's best to either lie or say you think the leader is a top bloke.
You can watch Youtube videos of citizens refusing to answer contentious questions quite easily. I believe William Spaniel has produced videos (relating to the Russian General Election) where he points this out, too.
When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly, but the approval is still estimated to be about 50-70%. In western countries governments with clear minority support start to be almost the norm.
UK government approval has surpassed 50% in a handful of polls in over 10 years, and approval peaks are typically immediately after elections before the government starts to implement its policies. The approval is currently 14%.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-app...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
By scott_w 2025-07-2821:48 > When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly
Bear in mind that the person answering the poll still lives in an oppressive regime where wrongthink can get you killed. You spend your whole life training yourself to never say anything bad about the government in public. Would you be able to turn it off?
Also, there’s literally no free press in these countries. The government will get primarily positive coverage whatever they do! The current Labour government could only dream of such coverage!
How can you tell it is a repressive regime? They have elections, a press and they are pretty satisfied about their form of governance, actually much more than their western counterparts.
So let me sum this up. We cannot ask the people. We cannot base ourselves on how their institutions function and how well they perform.
This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs), and everything outside of their little group of friends is a masquerade. The issue with that is that westerners disconnect themselves from reality. They are losing ground and it shows.
LOL, who ran against Xi in his last "election"?
Which "free press" runs stories against Xi?
Where is the other half of the bell curve of public opinion that's critical of the CCP?
Yeah they have elections alright, you can vote for any Xi Jingping you want to.
In Switzerland we don't elect our Federal Council, which is our executive branch. A bit like in the UK too. Would you say its what matters in a democracy?
By qwytw 2025-07-3022:14 Well Switzerland (being closer than most other countries to a direct democracy) would be the polar opposite of China though?
By johnisgood 2025-07-308:48 Any thoughts on http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm?
if people refuse to answer contentious questions about their regime... it's probably repressive.
Germans and Americans refuse to answer contentious questions about the genocide of Palestinian... They also probably live in a repressive regime, right?
(Also I agree with you, Russia is a capitalist dictatorship)
By immibis 2025-08-073:38 I live in Germany. It's repressive as fuck. Not being repressive in the standard ways isn't the same as not being repressive. You can say you don't like the chancellor or the party all day long, but you can get arrested for even calling the P_________n situation a g______, for saying anything bad about any person (even if true), doing pretty much anything requires a government license, owner-operators have unlimited liability for everything their business does unless they jump through a whole bunch of hoops and put up a $25k bond, and the government still keeps a registry of where every Jew lives just in case they need that again.
Everything interesting mostly flies under the government radar. There's a lot of it.
"Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
There is democracy in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Just say, "I'm a tankie and I support Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
> Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP.
I personally see nothing wrong with this. The word "authoritarian" is virtually meaningless. And those local elections are paramount; Locally elected representatives end up electing MPs on the provincial level, then they chose MPs of the National People's Congress. The rest is common sense: just because we are used to "elect" pedophiles, racists and parasites doesn't mean all other countries should do the same.
By qwytw 2025-07-3022:19 There were/are people who didn't personally see anything wrong with Stalin et al.
> doesn't mean all other countries should do the same
That's the great part right? If you were in place like that you wouldn't know that you "elected representatives" are any of those things since there would be no free press and exposing them would probably be illegal anyway. Ignorance is bliss, I guess that's one way to experience the world..
Organisations try to measure this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
You are quite literally commenting on a topic where Brits are complaining about our democracy. You will find reams of articles about the problems with western democracies.
However, you're also commenting about countries that quite literally changed our governments in the last year. USA voted in Trump, the UK voted in Labour. Germany just voted in a new party.
China and Russia, the main comparison points, have not changed government since the 90s. This is nothing to do with phenotypes, it's 100% just looking at the facts.
Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.
Regarding China, their leading party hasn't switched in 80 years, but their policies have and have plenty actually. Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things. I'd argue, for example, that Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence, is still considered by many in the west as a functioning democracy.
By qwytw 2025-07-3022:23 > I'd argue, for example, that Japan, that has been ruled
Seems like a somewhat tangential point to make? The people in Japan did get a choice to vote for another party.
By scott_w 2025-07-2815:00 > Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.
Ah yes, I recall that famous incident where Keir Starmer had his political opponents thrown out of a window. Oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...
> Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things.
It's part of the package but clearly not all, as many organisations focused on improving democracy and governance will clearly point out.
> Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence
Whoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Japan#Result_in_h...
---
In any case, I think all the replies have made my point for me that your dismissal of our rhetoric as based on "western arrogance" are simply nonsense. It's in fact you who's displayed a lack of understanding of those you argue against.
By Saline9515 2025-07-2811:071 reply Which is the aim of restricting every information channel and starting the brainwashing in primary school? I'm sure Kim Jong Un is very popular in North Korea, too!
This is an insane take. You'd know this if you had ever talked with a Chinese person before instead of believing the silly propaganda they spread in your "free" press.
By Saline9515 2025-07-2820:01 I indeed discussed with many young chinese persons while at university and found everyone mostly unaware of the real history of the CCP in the XXth century.
The only ones with a realistic view of what's happening are the sons of the CCP hierarchs, who are emigrating to Canada or Australia.
By mitthrowaway2 2025-07-2816:09 It's a fair take and I expect that Kim Jong Un truly is very popular in North Korea.
By dkdbejwi383 2025-07-287:001 reply Do they regularly poll British political parties for popularity in China?
It was obvious to everyone that i was talking about the popularity of these govts in their respective countries.
By dkdbejwi383 2025-07-287:321 reply What’s your source for the labour government’s unpopularity? Not that I necessarily think you’re wrong, it’s just more indifference towards them that I see, more of the same etc.
By jbstack 2025-07-288:26 Here's a couple of recent Yougov polls:
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52187-political-favou...
"Keir Starmer falls to lowest net favourability rating on record"
"Labour’s popularity hit isn’t merely limited to Keir Starmer, with worst-ever net favourability scores also recorded this month by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner (-31) and home secretary Yvette Cooper (-25), while Rachel Reeves has equalled her -48 net favourability rating recorded in mid-April."
"65% of Britons dislike the Labour Party, the most in the eight years YouGov has been asking the question"
By UncleMeat 2025-08-0112:42 In the Project 2025 documents, the core things that they discuss regarding porn bans are "gender ideology" and "sexualizing children." Banning access to information with lgbt themes is not some incidental part of this but is a core goal of the effort, at least in the US.
By commandlinefan 2025-07-2820:451 reply I always keep hoping one of these authoritarian measures will kick off a resurgence of a truly uncensorable platform like Freenet or I2P - the big reason they're currently so unusable is mostly lack of participation.
By t0lo 2025-07-293:54 same. as much as i ironically support social media age gating i do hope it creates a new internet frontier for the educated and technologically inclined
By orthoxerox 2025-07-287:401 reply > Sarah Champion is Labour MP for Rotherham.
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
By ifwinterco 2025-07-289:451 reply Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a classic YooKay 2025 moment
I assume it's because she is quite well known for not taking the grooming gangs' side.
By ifwinterco 2025-07-307:50 Fair enough, I shouldn't have commented without knowing the full context
