I wonder what the difference in legal traditions is between the US and the Old World. The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it".
What informed this kind of difference? Is there one?
The US approach seems very much like the way Orthodox Jews follow the halakha by making workarounds around it.
If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.
In theory, the US system allows for those updates. In reality it's a little less clear. Currently we're absolutely moving to the fealty to the crown system and it's not great.
Any system that makes specific carve outs for anyone to not follow the letter of the law is not about enforcing the law, it's about maintaining control using arbitrary enforcement and chronyism (not sure of that spelling).
The system of workarounds for religious customs has always fascinated me. I will follow the letter of the law, because I have to. If I don't agree with the laws, I can move. If I was in a faith tradition and finding workarounds for the intent of the law, I would choose a different faith. To me it's very binary; either you are or you aren't [Religion]. Using technicalities on your deity just feels like a suckers game to make your current and any possible afterlife worse. Like God is just going to say, "oh man you really got one over on me." Makes zero sense.
> If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.
I think if you rewrite that to, “If the letter of the law is demonstrably out of sync with the public sense of the spirit of the law, then it should be amended,” I’m with you.
But I think that’s not what you meant? If you meant “the letter of the law should define prescribed and proscribed behavior exactly,” then I think that’s impossible.
There will always be exceptions, and no set of rules can be exhaustive. The system should allow for humans to recognize that fact.
> The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it".
The latter system is what happens if you actually have rule of law. The law says X is illegal, you did not do X, therefore you cannot be prosecuted. Meanwhile anyone caught doing X is prosecuted or it's a scandal that they're seen getting away with it.
The former is autocracy in a trench coat. Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.
Sadly the US is moving more towards the "traditional" system rather than the other way around.
Yes, I tend to agree. Understanding what forces brought it to be may help preserve it and bring it to more places.
The US is moving in various ways, true, but certainly I think the diminishing of Chevron deference is a move towards clearer law. Agency actors have always acted in a capricious way but they’re now far more susceptible to capture than in prior eras (or at least it’s much more visible) so reducing their power offers more transparency.
The US was moving in the wrong direction for a long time.
Three Felonies a Day
"
Silverglate’s book first explains how law should work, and then demonstrates how federal law really works as he weaves through dozens of cases showing clear prosecutorial abuse. An ugly, recurrent feature is that prosecutors often manipulate the media.
"
>Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.
You’ll see that a large number of people believe that while the letter of the law is violated, it’s not a big deal. I’m sure that applies all the way to the top.
> You’ll see that a large number of people believe that while the letter of the law is violated, it’s not a big deal.
The correct way to deal with this is to make the law do what people actually want. It's entirely possible to draft a law where actually blocking the sidewalk is a violation but the nose of a car extending into it by a few inches isn't considered blocked. And the way to get that law is to enforce the existing law so that the people who don't like it will have it changed instead of having a law that everybody is violating but only the disfavored have it enforced against them.
Well, that's a bit pie-in-the-sky, right? The 'correct' way is for no one to inconvenience someone else. I have no magic wand that can make that happen. I also have no magic wand that can make authorities enforce the law. The government is just a mechanism for people to share common resources in a way that enables groups to work together with some (aspired-low) degree of free-riding.
So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here. As an example, some kinds of laws are more effective than others.
The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.
> So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here.
The thing about "people" is that they're us. If we don't want a capricious autocracy then we have to make different choices.
> The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.
The reason those techniques work is precisely because people pretend to have rule of law while in practice facilitating tyranny and office politics. The sabotage operates by playing into the hypocrisy and demanding that all of the stupid rules people have been ignoring actually be implemented. The way to prevent it is to reform the rules, but that isn't in the interest of the people using vague/unreasonable rules to their own advantage, so actually reforming them encounters resistance and takes time and in the meantime you can keep using them to throw sand in the gears.
Notice how poorly that would work in both a formal authoritarian dictatorship and system with true rule of law. In the dictatorship the dictator does whatever they want and you can't make them do or not do anything by pointing to rules. In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.
I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate?
> In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.
Sounds like a description of Congress "massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time" with its huge bills of assorted hot-patches and root-kits and favors and bribery all baked into one big, beautiful bill.
In the UK there is substantial use of secondary legislation. This is where Parliament authorises someone else to make laws on its behalf in some context. These powers delegated by Parliament are usually mundane but can be extreme and there's no limit to what powers Parliament can delegate. Since politicians are lazy they tend to use secondary legislation all the time. This encourages a culture of legislative sloppiness.
While the UK courts have given themselves the power to perform judicial review, there is no constitutional basis for this review and so the courts are reluctant to step on Parliament's toes because if they go too far they risk Parliament deciding that it doesn't like the courts' interference and removing their authority. This isn't a hypothetical and the courts have at times resorted to some crazy mental gymnastics to evade Parliament's attempts to prevent judicial review.
The US has a similar concept that enables federal agencies to make regulations on Congress's behalf but it's much more limited in scope due to the separation of powers and more solid position of the US Supreme Court.
I believe the analogous concept is Chevron deference here in the US. It must be a relatively easy optimization to make to reduce legislative load considering it arises so often. Interesting.
One funny thing in California that is relevant is lane splitting. It is legal but guidelines are decided on by the CHP (state police). In practice, this means they have discretion to pull you over.
I must imagine this is like the creation of Shadow IT in organizations. In the past, when you made it hard to get a server or whatever, you’d end up with your org building their software somewhere else where IT can’t see it.
This must be the legal innovation that matches that: if law is hard to pass, shove a bunch of things off into Shadow Legislative which can then change rules on a whim.
It’s essentially a mechanism to re-enable rapid decision making in a sclerotic system. So perhaps the US using it less than the Old World is simply an artifact of age (though extant nations vary, the legal traditions of the Old World seem to have endured) and in time we will see it dominate the US as well.
Considering the specific topic, I'm afraid we land on opposite sides here since I prefer clear rules made by the legislature and so Chevron deference inactivity is fortunate rather than unfortunate.
Whether or not the specific policy is good my preference is that changes to policy that have been in force for decades happen based on legislation and not the whims of 9 unelected people. We didn't get clear rules made my legislature, we lost an escape valve that allowed our regulatory apparatus to function while the gerontocracy on capital hill spun their wheels and left everything even murkier than it was before.
Chevron Deference was in force for decades but it was based entirely on[0] "the whims of 9 unelected people". The entire doctrine rests, like the present use of the Commerce Clause, on the Supreme Court choosing some particular interpretation. The nature of such things is that they're arbitrarily disputable and revocable[1].
It's somewhat unconvincing to me, and likely many others, that rules with force should be instantaneously created but cannot be instantaneously revoked. I think the two go together. If deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly delegate to an agency. If Chevron Deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly set that to be the default.
0: to use the terms you use, and not because I agree
1: as perhaps the current understanding of the Commerce Clause should as well
First hacker culture there ever was. Hacking the words of god, to make life easier. Makes you pre-disposed to excell in science, that kind of thinking and learning..
Probably because the US was founded by the immigrants who fled because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries, and designed a system that's diametral opposed to that, for better and for worse.
> immigrants who fled because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries
I'm not convinced, as the people who designed the US system had extensive exchanges with the ones who ended up designing the modern French one, which became the basis for most of the rest of Europe (bar the UK).
The US and continental European systems were both designed in concert and in opposition to how the old European monarchies worked.
>The US and continental European systems were both designed in concert and in opposition to how the old European monarchies worked.
Don't know the exact details about the US, but if you look at how the some EU countries and the EU is run today, it really isn't that much different than European monarchies of old in practice, even if on paper it's different.
Like, you have nobles from the ancient von der Leyen German noble family appointed to leadership positions by falling upwards via no direct election by the people, enforcing unpopular laws like chat control, that were rejected 3 times, by calling an emergency election during summer time when opposition was on vacation. And if you vocally criticize the nobility online too much, they'll ban your content on social media for some BS reason at best, or send police to your house with court orders to intimidate you at worst.
This isn't in opposition to monarchies, we just replaced monarchies with another form of power structure that has the same goal: keep the peasants quiet, obedient and paying taxes. There's a reason history keeps repeating itself: A fish coming from water will only know water.
But was the reason they left the legal tradition? In this telling of the story, they were fully aware of the legal tradition being the reason for their unhappiness. But is it true?
I know the original immigrants/colonists were looking for a specific kind of religious freedom they couldn't have, but you must be speaking of the later waves (which are the majority of people).
It made the case that (simplifying) individualists left for the US while collectivists stayed. And because of the massive scale of the migration relative to the populations, this meant that the two regions were permanently altered. Cool, eh?
But I don't know if the thesis has been supported by alternative tests. Essentially, it's what I feel is true, but I've felt many things are true and been wrong many times!
The original immigrants/colonists were Puritans and their approach to the governing and liberties, well, it can be arguably called proto-totalitarian. Remember, those were the same kind of people that managed, of all things, to push the Parliament to prohibit celebrations of Christmas and Easter during the English Interregnum, despite massive popular backlash. The Puritans in the American colonies had roughly the same attitude:
Christmas observance was outlawed in Boston in 1659, with a fine of five shillings. The ban
by the Puritans was revoked in 1681 by an English appointed governor, Edmund Andros; however,
it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the
Boston region. Before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was not widely celebrated
in the American Colonies.
There is much written about the Puritans in the North America; their ideas, sadly, influenced the American political thinking and culture a lot.
> because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries
48/56 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were born in the 13 colonies, and I think for a lot of them what they hated about the way the system worked is that they weren't fully part of it. ("No taxation without representation")
It's be one thing if it was just privacy invasions to save the children, but no it's also freedom of speech, removing jury trials, and probably other things.
Because England is very old it has a whole bunch of things which did charge a toll and then that expired, so, nope.
It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetual". Feel free to build a time machine and go tell your past selves that's not a great idea after all.
But well, nothing is forever. In five hundred years that perpetual toll on a road is obsolete because hardly anybody owns a private vehicle so the toll mostly just moves (local) government money from one pile (funding transport) to another (build infrastructure) and it's not a very efficient way to do that. Or the bridge falls down and its replacement doesn't have a toll because people were sick of tolls. Nothing is forever.
In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.
That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.
This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.
Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.
I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.
The Wikipedia page implies that all the designated "Category 1" websites will now either have to collect ID from their users worldwide, or remove any presence in the UK.
Edit: there's a list of the Category 1 services at
Did you actually read the article. Ofcom used a "novel reading of the law" to exempt Wikipedia.
The law it seems already covers Wikipedia. Ofcom are choosing not to enforce. I interpret the watchlist comments as ofcom setting up a defensible position for themselves.
Yes the law is probably wrong to include Wikipedia, but the enforcers of the law seem to have common sense. Which overall seems to be a win.
I did read the article, yes, and it is clear to me that this is a bug, not a feature. Ofcom were suddenly able to find a "novel reading" when directed to do so by a court as a means to temporarily make the problem go away and to avoid having to weaken the legislation.
They know full well that if a successful legal challenge forced them to weaken parts of the OSA by removing service categories from scope, that they'd effectively open the floodgates to more challenges over other categories. The government and Ofcom don't want their precious work ripped up and the courts seemingly don't want to be responsible for doing so.
Whatever loophole they've found, it is practically a certainty that it will be addressed in the future.
The UK has "parliamentary supremacy" which means legislation passed by the parliament overrules everything else. If the court determines the legislation has a problem, it goes back to parliament to make sure parliament intended a certain interpretation, but parliament can either change the law, or they can say the court is wrong and the law stands.
That's (mostly) true for "primary legislation" (Acts of Parliament) but "secondary legislation" (regulations, orders, rules and so on) can be challenged and potentially overturned/similar in the courts. This partly reflects the fact that secondary legislation usually receives significantly less parliamentary scrutiny (and in some cases none at all). The legal challenge which Wikimedia brought here was to secondary legislation - regulations made under the OSA by Ofcom - not to the OSA itself.
Ofcom's interpretation and enforcement of a law is not immune from judicial review, however. The courts can rule that Ofcom misinterpreted the law or acted outwith their remit or didn't have the necessary legal foundation for a decision. At which point Parliament have to consider whether or not to revise the law or whether to leave their primary enforcer with their hands tied.
> or they can say the court is wrong and the law stands
Surely the way that parliament says the court is wrong is to re-legislate. They can't just have a vote and say "that interpretation is wrong" if, for example, the Supreme Court rejects their interpretation.
I don't know the exact process but I don't see why they couldn't do that. Parliamentary supremacy means that Parliament is supreme. What they say, goes. It's a dictatorship of elected MPs, hopefully kept in check by the need to be elected.
They can't do that because it would make a mockery of the legal system. Parliament does outrank the Supreme Court, but they do that by passing legislation, not just having a vote and going "no, sorry, lol". The whole legal system is built on precedent, which is incompatible with parliament overriding it piecemeal.
Technically, according to the framework under which it governs itself, Parliament could pass almost any bill, including things like bills of attainder that are panned globally as violating basic freedoms (for good reason). It just “chooses not to” (or rather is restrained by increasingly lax public oversight).
No actually, it's not a "win" if everything is formally illegal, and everyone lives in fear that if they don't keep appeasing the faceless unaccountable bureaucrat, they will be prosecuted tomorrow.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
I'm guessing they won't do it because it will finally wake the public up to all of this, I.e. bad press + scrutiny. The law should be applied equally to all, it shouldn't be a popularity contest.
and if it is a popularity contest, mystifying that wikpedia would qualify, it has many serious flaws (generally of the form that a small number of zealots can control the messaging on topics they are obsessed with where most people just want information and are unaware that there are people who don't share their enthusiasm for truth)
Considering wikimedia hosts what most people would consider porn (randomly came across a video of a couple going at it once) without any ability to filter it from the rest of the content/hide by default, it's not that surprising they are covered, I'm more surprised ofcom relented.
Just because there's a video of sexual acts doesn't mean Wikimedia exists for the prurient interest. It's not like Wikimedia is hosting a clip from "Backdoor Sluts 5", it's really just video of sex in the academic sense. Does a young child need to watch it? No, but I also don't think it should it should be censored. A teenager below the age of majority may benefit from seeing what sex actually is. So often a teenager's first visual experience with sex is from unrealistic porn. I'm not saying a realistic depiction of sex should be included in every sex ed classroom lesson but it should be freely available.
>Just because there's a video of sexual acts doesn't mean Wikimedia exists for the prurient interest.
nice goalpost move. just because wikimedia doesn't exist solely for the prurient interest doesn't mean that it should therefore provide pornography to children in places that have made that illegal.
And just because you tilt the table toward providing pornography to children doesn't mean I should be downvoted for honest debate.
Governments would rather censor the whole internet before putting people who have credible allegations of sex crimes against children under investigation and in handcuffs when appropriate.
You can pin it down to less than maybe half a dozen cases that made the newsun the UK. I suppose politics has always been reactionary like this and explains why somewhere like Australia which doesn't really have its own culture still has different laws in response to different outrages
There's no conspiracy here; the UK government is not wanting to censor Wikipedia (honestly!) - what this really is is the consequence of poorly written legislation introduced at the behest of tabloid-newspaper-supported children's online safety nonprofits - they have a very high level of public support (from parents stressed-out over how bad the Internet is thesedays, which is fair enough!) - and this translates into strong political support, which leads to MPs actively avoiding listening to technical experts and other opposition voices because no-one wants the Daily Express to call them out as being on the side of (vague and nebulous) Internet child sex predators (or "the paedos" for short, in UK tabloid speak).
...and none of this has anything to do with Prince Andrew et al (because that's in real-life, not on the Internet).
It's the exact same process that lead to the 2010s IWF/Cleanfeed/Wikipedia block over controversial 1970s music album art.
It's idiocy and fear of a rabid public, not a conspiracy.
Yes, building prisons is expensive. But the current UK government seems to treat it as a physical impossibility, while releasing violent offenders early due to lack of capacity.
a lot of uk prisons are effectively private. companies like serco and g4s get paid millions to run everything with zero oversight. its not quite as bad as the worst cases in america (no legal slavery for prisoners) but the government is definitely overpaying for bad services.
early release is not a problem by itself. honestly the best way to reform the criminal justice system would be replacing fixed prison terms with release based on a psych evaluation and completed volunteer work. of course when you need to release offenders for capacity you should start with the least dangerous ones and i dont think thats happening here, its just random or going off time served.
We have a story in the news currently about a foreign child gang rape leader (yes, those are things in the UK) who raped at least 30 children and was released early after serving just 14 years in prison.
We have major children sexual abuse scandals in this country basically every year too. Politicians never care about that though.
I wonder what the difference in legal traditions is between the US and the Old World. The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it".
What informed this kind of difference? Is there one?
The US approach seems very much like the way Orthodox Jews follow the halakha by making workarounds around it.
One is following the law and the other isn't.
If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.
In theory, the US system allows for those updates. In reality it's a little less clear. Currently we're absolutely moving to the fealty to the crown system and it's not great.
Any system that makes specific carve outs for anyone to not follow the letter of the law is not about enforcing the law, it's about maintaining control using arbitrary enforcement and chronyism (not sure of that spelling).
The system of workarounds for religious customs has always fascinated me. I will follow the letter of the law, because I have to. If I don't agree with the laws, I can move. If I was in a faith tradition and finding workarounds for the intent of the law, I would choose a different faith. To me it's very binary; either you are or you aren't [Religion]. Using technicalities on your deity just feels like a suckers game to make your current and any possible afterlife worse. Like God is just going to say, "oh man you really got one over on me." Makes zero sense.
> If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.
I think if you rewrite that to, “If the letter of the law is demonstrably out of sync with the public sense of the spirit of the law, then it should be amended,” I’m with you.
But I think that’s not what you meant? If you meant “the letter of the law should define prescribed and proscribed behavior exactly,” then I think that’s impossible.
There will always be exceptions, and no set of rules can be exhaustive. The system should allow for humans to recognize that fact.
Here is a fun exploration of that concept: https://novehiclesinthepark.com/
> The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it".
The latter system is what happens if you actually have rule of law. The law says X is illegal, you did not do X, therefore you cannot be prosecuted. Meanwhile anyone caught doing X is prosecuted or it's a scandal that they're seen getting away with it.
The former is autocracy in a trench coat. Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.
Sadly the US is moving more towards the "traditional" system rather than the other way around.
Yes, I tend to agree. Understanding what forces brought it to be may help preserve it and bring it to more places.
The US is moving in various ways, true, but certainly I think the diminishing of Chevron deference is a move towards clearer law. Agency actors have always acted in a capricious way but they’re now far more susceptible to capture than in prior eras (or at least it’s much more visible) so reducing their power offers more transparency.
The US was moving in the wrong direction for a long time.
Three Felonies a Day
" Silverglate’s book first explains how law should work, and then demonstrates how federal law really works as he weaves through dozens of cases showing clear prosecutorial abuse. An ugly, recurrent feature is that prosecutors often manipulate the media. "
https://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-t...
>Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.
This situation currently describes the USA.
And that's bad, right?
I think it’s a matter of belief and while I’d prefer adherence to the rule of law and enforcement in general I can see why people allow for not-that.
As an example, here’s a post on /r/sanfrancisco https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1uvebed/block...
You’ll see that a large number of people believe that while the letter of the law is violated, it’s not a big deal. I’m sure that applies all the way to the top.
> You’ll see that a large number of people believe that while the letter of the law is violated, it’s not a big deal.
The correct way to deal with this is to make the law do what people actually want. It's entirely possible to draft a law where actually blocking the sidewalk is a violation but the nose of a car extending into it by a few inches isn't considered blocked. And the way to get that law is to enforce the existing law so that the people who don't like it will have it changed instead of having a law that everybody is violating but only the disfavored have it enforced against them.
Well, that's a bit pie-in-the-sky, right? The 'correct' way is for no one to inconvenience someone else. I have no magic wand that can make that happen. I also have no magic wand that can make authorities enforce the law. The government is just a mechanism for people to share common resources in a way that enables groups to work together with some (aspired-low) degree of free-riding.
So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here. As an example, some kinds of laws are more effective than others.
The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.
> So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here.
The thing about "people" is that they're us. If we don't want a capricious autocracy then we have to make different choices.
> The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.
The reason those techniques work is precisely because people pretend to have rule of law while in practice facilitating tyranny and office politics. The sabotage operates by playing into the hypocrisy and demanding that all of the stupid rules people have been ignoring actually be implemented. The way to prevent it is to reform the rules, but that isn't in the interest of the people using vague/unreasonable rules to their own advantage, so actually reforming them encounters resistance and takes time and in the meantime you can keep using them to throw sand in the gears.
Notice how poorly that would work in both a formal authoritarian dictatorship and system with true rule of law. In the dictatorship the dictator does whatever they want and you can't make them do or not do anything by pointing to rules. In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.
I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate?
> In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.
Sounds like a description of Congress "massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time" with its huge bills of assorted hot-patches and root-kits and favors and bribery all baked into one big, beautiful bill.
In the UK there is substantial use of secondary legislation. This is where Parliament authorises someone else to make laws on its behalf in some context. These powers delegated by Parliament are usually mundane but can be extreme and there's no limit to what powers Parliament can delegate. Since politicians are lazy they tend to use secondary legislation all the time. This encourages a culture of legislative sloppiness.
While the UK courts have given themselves the power to perform judicial review, there is no constitutional basis for this review and so the courts are reluctant to step on Parliament's toes because if they go too far they risk Parliament deciding that it doesn't like the courts' interference and removing their authority. This isn't a hypothetical and the courts have at times resorted to some crazy mental gymnastics to evade Parliament's attempts to prevent judicial review.
The US has a similar concept that enables federal agencies to make regulations on Congress's behalf but it's much more limited in scope due to the separation of powers and more solid position of the US Supreme Court.
I believe the analogous concept is Chevron deference here in the US. It must be a relatively easy optimization to make to reduce legislative load considering it arises so often. Interesting.
One funny thing in California that is relevant is lane splitting. It is legal but guidelines are decided on by the CHP (state police). In practice, this means they have discretion to pull you over.
I must imagine this is like the creation of Shadow IT in organizations. In the past, when you made it hard to get a server or whatever, you’d end up with your org building their software somewhere else where IT can’t see it.
This must be the legal innovation that matches that: if law is hard to pass, shove a bunch of things off into Shadow Legislative which can then change rules on a whim.
It’s essentially a mechanism to re-enable rapid decision making in a sclerotic system. So perhaps the US using it less than the Old World is simply an artifact of age (though extant nations vary, the legal traditions of the Old World seem to have endured) and in time we will see it dominate the US as well.
Cheveron deference is no longer active unfortunately
Considering the specific topic, I'm afraid we land on opposite sides here since I prefer clear rules made by the legislature and so Chevron deference inactivity is fortunate rather than unfortunate.
Whether or not the specific policy is good my preference is that changes to policy that have been in force for decades happen based on legislation and not the whims of 9 unelected people. We didn't get clear rules made my legislature, we lost an escape valve that allowed our regulatory apparatus to function while the gerontocracy on capital hill spun their wheels and left everything even murkier than it was before.
Chevron Deference was in force for decades but it was based entirely on[0] "the whims of 9 unelected people". The entire doctrine rests, like the present use of the Commerce Clause, on the Supreme Court choosing some particular interpretation. The nature of such things is that they're arbitrarily disputable and revocable[1].
It's somewhat unconvincing to me, and likely many others, that rules with force should be instantaneously created but cannot be instantaneously revoked. I think the two go together. If deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly delegate to an agency. If Chevron Deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly set that to be the default.
0: to use the terms you use, and not because I agree
1: as perhaps the current understanding of the Commerce Clause should as well
First hacker culture there ever was. Hacking the words of god, to make life easier. Makes you pre-disposed to excell in science, that kind of thinking and learning..
Probably because the US was founded by the immigrants who fled because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries, and designed a system that's diametral opposed to that, for better and for worse.
> immigrants who fled because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries
I'm not convinced, as the people who designed the US system had extensive exchanges with the ones who ended up designing the modern French one, which became the basis for most of the rest of Europe (bar the UK).
The US and continental European systems were both designed in concert and in opposition to how the old European monarchies worked.
>The US and continental European systems were both designed in concert and in opposition to how the old European monarchies worked.
Don't know the exact details about the US, but if you look at how the some EU countries and the EU is run today, it really isn't that much different than European monarchies of old in practice, even if on paper it's different.
Like, you have nobles from the ancient von der Leyen German noble family appointed to leadership positions by falling upwards via no direct election by the people, enforcing unpopular laws like chat control, that were rejected 3 times, by calling an emergency election during summer time when opposition was on vacation. And if you vocally criticize the nobility online too much, they'll ban your content on social media for some BS reason at best, or send police to your house with court orders to intimidate you at worst.
This isn't in opposition to monarchies, we just replaced monarchies with another form of power structure that has the same goal: keep the peasants quiet, obedient and paying taxes. There's a reason history keeps repeating itself: A fish coming from water will only know water.
Right, that's what I'd lean to as well.
But was the reason they left the legal tradition? In this telling of the story, they were fully aware of the legal tradition being the reason for their unhappiness. But is it true?
I know the original immigrants/colonists were looking for a specific kind of religious freedom they couldn't have, but you must be speaking of the later waves (which are the majority of people).
I remember ages ago reading this paper (PDF warning): https://annesofiebeckknudsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...
It made the case that (simplifying) individualists left for the US while collectivists stayed. And because of the massive scale of the migration relative to the populations, this meant that the two regions were permanently altered. Cool, eh?
But I don't know if the thesis has been supported by alternative tests. Essentially, it's what I feel is true, but I've felt many things are true and been wrong many times!
The original immigrants/colonists were Puritans and their approach to the governing and liberties, well, it can be arguably called proto-totalitarian. Remember, those were the same kind of people that managed, of all things, to push the Parliament to prohibit celebrations of Christmas and Easter during the English Interregnum, despite massive popular backlash. The Puritans in the American colonies had roughly the same attitude:
There is much written about the Puritans in the North America; their ideas, sadly, influenced the American political thinking and culture a lot.> original immigrants/colonists were looking for a specific kind of religious freedom they couldn't have
The ones who landed at Plymouth Rock were, sort of, but I'm not sure how representative they were of the time.
> because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries
48/56 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were born in the 13 colonies, and I think for a lot of them what they hated about the way the system worked is that they weren't fully part of it. ("No taxation without representation")
Oh so the muppets have finally started thinking about the practicalities of what they’re yolo legislating
They just know they can't afford the power right now to do it. They would if they thought they could get away with it.
The Ministry of Truth approves of Wikipedia, for now.
I suppose it's part of UK culture to be authoritarian which is how Orwell predicted it, but it's uncanny.
It's be one thing if it was just privacy invasions to save the children, but no it's also freedom of speech, removing jury trials, and probably other things.
If you don't fight government overreach now, it becomes permanent.
As my dad told us every time we crossed a bridge when we were kids:
"Tolls are a ratchet - they only move in one direction."
An example of the opposite happening in Ontario in 2022: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/highway-412-418-tolls...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_toll_roads_in_...
Because England is very old it has a whole bunch of things which did charge a toll and then that expired, so, nope.
It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetual". Feel free to build a time machine and go tell your past selves that's not a great idea after all.
But well, nothing is forever. In five hundred years that perpetual toll on a road is obsolete because hardly anybody owns a private vehicle so the toll mostly just moves (local) government money from one pile (funding transport) to another (build infrastructure) and it's not a very efficient way to do that. Or the bridge falls down and its replacement doesn't have a toll because people were sick of tolls. Nothing is forever.
In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.
That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.
This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.
Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.
I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.
The River Severn bridges connecting Wales and England were marked toll free in 2018 after 50 years of collecting tolls: https://www.visitmonmouthshire.com/plan-your-visit/how-to-ge...
Some folks might consider 500 years "permanent."
Yes, but that doesn't mean we all need to stoop to that level
There are plenty of pubs and houses in the UK called The Old Toll House so I know for sure that some have ended
"Toll House cookies" (chocolate chip cookies) are named after an inn that was named for a tollhouse on an old Massachusetts toll road.
The High Court judgment referred to is available at https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Wikimedi...
I'm not sure if Ofcom's subsequent notification to WMF is publicly available anywhere.
Identity verification should be illegal by default and companies that want to do it should have to prove it's absolutely necessary for their business.
The Wikipedia page implies that all the designated "Category 1" websites will now either have to collect ID from their users worldwide, or remove any presence in the UK.
Edit: there's a list of the Category 1 services at
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
I.e., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, Whatsapp, X, YouTube.
Plus others at the Category 2A or 2B levels.
Edit: well, it says they are "Providing user identity verification options." Unclear to me when they are supposed to get users to verify identity.
In other words, "stay where you are for now, we promise to extend the legislation to cover you in the future".
Did you actually read the article. Ofcom used a "novel reading of the law" to exempt Wikipedia.
The law it seems already covers Wikipedia. Ofcom are choosing not to enforce. I interpret the watchlist comments as ofcom setting up a defensible position for themselves.
Yes the law is probably wrong to include Wikipedia, but the enforcers of the law seem to have common sense. Which overall seems to be a win.
I did read the article, yes, and it is clear to me that this is a bug, not a feature. Ofcom were suddenly able to find a "novel reading" when directed to do so by a court as a means to temporarily make the problem go away and to avoid having to weaken the legislation.
They know full well that if a successful legal challenge forced them to weaken parts of the OSA by removing service categories from scope, that they'd effectively open the floodgates to more challenges over other categories. The government and Ofcom don't want their precious work ripped up and the courts seemingly don't want to be responsible for doing so.
Whatever loophole they've found, it is practically a certainty that it will be addressed in the future.
The UK has "parliamentary supremacy" which means legislation passed by the parliament overrules everything else. If the court determines the legislation has a problem, it goes back to parliament to make sure parliament intended a certain interpretation, but parliament can either change the law, or they can say the court is wrong and the law stands.
That's (mostly) true for "primary legislation" (Acts of Parliament) but "secondary legislation" (regulations, orders, rules and so on) can be challenged and potentially overturned/similar in the courts. This partly reflects the fact that secondary legislation usually receives significantly less parliamentary scrutiny (and in some cases none at all). The legal challenge which Wikimedia brought here was to secondary legislation - regulations made under the OSA by Ofcom - not to the OSA itself.
Ofcom's interpretation and enforcement of a law is not immune from judicial review, however. The courts can rule that Ofcom misinterpreted the law or acted outwith their remit or didn't have the necessary legal foundation for a decision. At which point Parliament have to consider whether or not to revise the law or whether to leave their primary enforcer with their hands tied.
> or they can say the court is wrong and the law stands
Surely the way that parliament says the court is wrong is to re-legislate. They can't just have a vote and say "that interpretation is wrong" if, for example, the Supreme Court rejects their interpretation.
I don't know the exact process but I don't see why they couldn't do that. Parliamentary supremacy means that Parliament is supreme. What they say, goes. It's a dictatorship of elected MPs, hopefully kept in check by the need to be elected.
They can't do that because it would make a mockery of the legal system. Parliament does outrank the Supreme Court, but they do that by passing legislation, not just having a vote and going "no, sorry, lol". The whole legal system is built on precedent, which is incompatible with parliament overriding it piecemeal.
Technically, according to the framework under which it governs itself, Parliament could pass almost any bill, including things like bills of attainder that are panned globally as violating basic freedoms (for good reason). It just “chooses not to” (or rather is restrained by increasingly lax public oversight).
The verdict was based on the Ofcom regulations, not the Parliament act though.
> Ofcom were suddenly able to find a "novel reading" when directed to do so
You have discovered politics
No actually, it's not a "win" if everything is formally illegal, and everyone lives in fear that if they don't keep appeasing the faceless unaccountable bureaucrat, they will be prosecuted tomorrow.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
I'm guessing they won't do it because it will finally wake the public up to all of this, I.e. bad press + scrutiny. The law should be applied equally to all, it shouldn't be a popularity contest.
and if it is a popularity contest, mystifying that wikpedia would qualify, it has many serious flaws (generally of the form that a small number of zealots can control the messaging on topics they are obsessed with where most people just want information and are unaware that there are people who don't share their enthusiasm for truth)
Considering wikimedia hosts what most people would consider porn (randomly came across a video of a couple going at it once) without any ability to filter it from the rest of the content/hide by default, it's not that surprising they are covered, I'm more surprised ofcom relented.
Just because there's a video of sexual acts doesn't mean Wikimedia exists for the prurient interest. It's not like Wikimedia is hosting a clip from "Backdoor Sluts 5", it's really just video of sex in the academic sense. Does a young child need to watch it? No, but I also don't think it should it should be censored. A teenager below the age of majority may benefit from seeing what sex actually is. So often a teenager's first visual experience with sex is from unrealistic porn. I'm not saying a realistic depiction of sex should be included in every sex ed classroom lesson but it should be freely available.
>Just because there's a video of sexual acts doesn't mean Wikimedia exists for the prurient interest.
nice goalpost move. just because wikimedia doesn't exist solely for the prurient interest doesn't mean that it should therefore provide pornography to children in places that have made that illegal.
And just because you tilt the table toward providing pornography to children doesn't mean I should be downvoted for honest debate.
Actually, Wikimedia Commons has a category for pornographic videos.
Could someone seek a private prosecution to make a mockery of the law?
> based on a novel reading of the law
So they found a loop hole. Why do they need to find a loop hole in their own law, why not just make better laws to start with.
You know why all who grew up under the soviet regime in the eastern block are totally alergic to englands direction nowadaways.
Wikipedia is still on the Ofcom watchlist and might be designated Category 1 at some point.
Sounds like turnkey fascism.
Governments would rather censor the whole internet before putting people who have credible allegations of sex crimes against children under investigation and in handcuffs when appropriate.
It isn't and never has been about the children.
You can pin it down to less than maybe half a dozen cases that made the newsun the UK. I suppose politics has always been reactionary like this and explains why somewhere like Australia which doesn't really have its own culture still has different laws in response to different outrages
There's no conspiracy here; the UK government is not wanting to censor Wikipedia (honestly!) - what this really is is the consequence of poorly written legislation introduced at the behest of tabloid-newspaper-supported children's online safety nonprofits - they have a very high level of public support (from parents stressed-out over how bad the Internet is thesedays, which is fair enough!) - and this translates into strong political support, which leads to MPs actively avoiding listening to technical experts and other opposition voices because no-one wants the Daily Express to call them out as being on the side of (vague and nebulous) Internet child sex predators (or "the paedos" for short, in UK tabloid speak).
...and none of this has anything to do with Prince Andrew et al (because that's in real-life, not on the Internet).
It's the exact same process that lead to the 2010s IWF/Cleanfeed/Wikipedia block over controversial 1970s music album art.
It's idiocy and fear of a rabid public, not a conspiracy.
Yes, building prisons is expensive. But the current UK government seems to treat it as a physical impossibility, while releasing violent offenders early due to lack of capacity.
a lot of uk prisons are effectively private. companies like serco and g4s get paid millions to run everything with zero oversight. its not quite as bad as the worst cases in america (no legal slavery for prisoners) but the government is definitely overpaying for bad services.
early release is not a problem by itself. honestly the best way to reform the criminal justice system would be replacing fixed prison terms with release based on a psych evaluation and completed volunteer work. of course when you need to release offenders for capacity you should start with the least dangerous ones and i dont think thats happening here, its just random or going off time served.
UK is the worse for this too.
We have a story in the news currently about a foreign child gang rape leader (yes, those are things in the UK) who raped at least 30 children and was released early after serving just 14 years in prison.
We have major children sexual abuse scandals in this country basically every year too. Politicians never care about that though.
Andrew Windsor walks around a free man.
Thinkudur chiddrun