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A comment on The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and Freedom of All Internet. Parent comment

Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by xeonmc on Thursday September 21, 2023 @05:32AM (#37595293)
So what you’re saying is, they’re just incompetent rather than malicious?
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by dagw on Thursday September 21, 2023 @05:40AM (#37595344)
How anybody can look at the past few years of the Tories and go "there is a group of people clearly capable of planing executing a genius level long term strategy with finesse and subterfuge", is beyond me.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by smolder on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:07AM (#37595549)
Feigning incompetence is classic passive aggression and always has plausible deniability.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by blakblakarak on Thursday September 21, 2023 @07:01AM (#37595905)
…because the Tories are the ones being manipulated. A PM earns less than 200k£, a Minister even less and an MP even less - they’re incredibly cheap to ‘buy’.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by mavhc on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:09AM (#37596444)
We should pay them 10x more
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by polygamous_bat on Thursday September 21, 2023 @10:08AM (#37597847)
... because a billionaire will look at the £2M price tag for the British PM and throw up their hands and say "shucks"?

As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.

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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by sanitycheck on Thursday September 21, 2023 @05:40AM (#37595345)
It's definitely both.

Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.

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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by t43562 on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:03AM (#37595524)
We have to excercise our choice whether or not we are delighted about the other options. We cannot let any party get too entrenched or feel too safe.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by sanitycheck on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:18AM (#37595623)
If the message "I suppose I'd rather eat cat shit than dog shit" is then interpreted as "I really love cat shit, feed me more" I'm not sure that works.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by t43562 on Thursday September 21, 2023 @10:10AM (#37597869)
It's more like crop rotation than a message. If you grow the same crop in a field too often then it impoverishes the soil and allows pests and diseases to build up.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by FujiApple on Thursday September 21, 2023 @05:42AM (#37595365)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by salawat on Thursday September 21, 2023 @05:54AM (#37595466)
Stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Try again.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by squarefoot on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:25AM (#37595661)
There's no such thing as an incompetent politician. They may be technically illiterate, but their personal goal is to maintain power, and a good part of the time they don't spend telling bullshit to the public is spent asking their experts in a given field (IT in this context) to find ways to do something that would increase their power and also can be advertised as good for the people by telling more bullshit.
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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by trackflak on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:46AM (#37595812)
This is what I was getting at - it is impossible for us underlings to imagine what it is like to have the grasp of power over millions of individuals and innumerable resources. We might experience something of it if someone comes to us for help, clueless, and sense we can say or do certain things that would profit us at the expense of the needy person.

Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.

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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by gnfargbl on Thursday September 21, 2023 @06:59AM (#37595894)
> There's no such thing as an incompetent politician.

I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.

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Re:The UK Parliament Undermined the Privacy, Security, and F... by jdietrich on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:37AM (#37596705)
>their personal goal is to maintain power

The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...

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