I understand where you are coming from, but the encryption is not secure if somebody else holds your password.

Then there is the other issue of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, or some other entity the likes of Russia, and now America promote, and bang goes journalist’s and activists’ anonymity. It would be great to have it both ways, but it isn’t possible.

I worked in recording studios for nearly a decade about twenty years ago or so ago, recording all kinds of stuff including film and tv scores.

Producers and composers were overwhelmingly from a privilieged > public school > Oxbridge background. Presumably the lack of representation from other groups is either the same or worse now.

The people I worked with tended to have grown up with money/privilege (meaning it is easy to piss about producing films). But some kind of Oxbridge old boys network/snobbery mostly covers why this lack of opportunity for the general public exists. Of course Oxbridge is all about nepotism and privilege. I have lived around very privileged people and very underprivileged people. I haven’t noticed one iq point of difference between the two cohorts. If anything, being forced to struggle makes people atronger (until the amount of hardship to be endured becomes too much).

I can say that it was often the ones that acted like they expected to be waited on hand and foot, who didn’t show any class whatsoever when it came to actually paying their bills on time (often if at all).

British society is rife with it. Ultimately these type of people being in charge makes our society extremely weak. As we move beyond 20th century political/economic liberalism this weakness will be exploited by adversaries.

The question is do you want serious cyber criminals, and whatever authoritarian government shows up at some point and starts tearing up the already increasingly authoritarian UK rule book (hi America) to have access to all communications? Should they have access to journalist’s sources, and other activists’ communications? Should cyber criminals have access to all financial data?

You don’t get one without the other. Encryption either works or it doesn’t. And you can certainly assume that dedicated nation state actors (who will and do work with people that do not want a liberal open society in countries across the world including the UK) will quickly develop the capability to circumvent any exploitable encryption.

In this case the increasingly authoritarian/data-totalitarian UK government and secret services has been trying to do it in secret. They want their eyes on everything at all times and damn the consequences for an open society. They sure are doing their bit to end the 20th century idea of a free, open, tolerant society I grew up being told existed.

Then again, I watched some sort of parliamentary enquiry more than a decade ago where somebody from gchq nonchalantly admitted they abuse UK citizen’s human right of privacy as a matter of course and everybody in the room just shrugged. It caused no ripple at all in the press. No doubt the likes of gchq face all sorts of threats we the public are not aware of, but they appear to operate with no checks and balances whatsoever, and they are playing right into the hands of extremists who want to see the end of an open society in order that their extreme views become more acceptable.

It must be said that personal privacy is a cornerstone of a civilised society. You either have that or you don’t. For many people, particularly those that pay attention to this stuff, we have already gone too far. There is a lot an individual can do to mitigate the intrusion of US tech corporations, but destroying encryption, in a world where so much can only be done online, affects everybody regardless of personal choices they have made. To try and do it in secret is even worse.

The biosphere is a metastable system. We are in the process of knocking it out of the state in which we have thrived, to something far less hospitable to human life. In the process so many of these fossil fuel reserves will burn. Various previous carbon sinks are already sources.

There is always a best and worse case scenario, so always a reason to take action, but a great deal of harm is already locked in.

Human ingenuity is a hell of a thing, but forget Musk’s always-an-obvious-con of colonising Mars, there is a much better chance (imho) that humans don’t survive re-colonising this new planet Earth over the coming centuries to millennia than travelling across the galaxy in what is, let’s face it, a Star Trek inspired fantasy.

People of Eastern European origin were used as scab labour, on the red tories watch, to undermine pay and conditions for UK based workers of whatever origin.

Which was a huge part of the anti-EU sentiment (in the Northern city I come from and lived in at the time) that led to brexit.

The bbc and billionaire owned media framed the debate as ‘liberalism’ (do they mean economic or social liberalism? Because they are two opposing things) against xenophobia, while omitting the stories of all of those people who had been hammered be their loss of pay and conditions. Framing and omission are the bbc’s (and other nation state information operations’) stocks in trade.

My guess is that it would take telling the blokes I grew up with “you’re racist” about three time (for complaining about the huge reduction in their quality of life caused by the importation of cheap Eastern European labour), before they turn around and say “ok, fuck you, where is the racist party for me to follow then?”

The sad thing is this response suits the same billionaires and establishment figures that put Farage on tv every week on politics tv shows for years despite having no MP’s in the first place.

“They do the jobs British people don’t want to do”. Actually we don’t want anybody doing those jobs for that pay. If you’ve said that take a look at yourself. Think.

Why stop at the highlands? There are parts of various places including most of the home counties and London that would be much improved by the reintroduction of hundreds of wolves.