20 Comments

George Orwell warned. We never listened because we were too busy chasing money to buy things we didn't need. With the rest of our time we were conforming. We forgot that morality, love and dedication - things that take effort to live - cannot be bought. Consequently, we suffer our slavery we purchased.

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Who actually decides what is fake or real "news" or which news media... so much for the puppeticians..🤑🤑🤑🤑

Freedom of expression and choice is the fundamental human right.

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I'm appointing myself as the Arbiter of Truth :)

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Do you think the loss of our freedoms is ratchet-like, only ever going in one direction, or is it possible we can win back, under some future government, the freedoms we see gradually slipping away?

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It is like a cancer on society the tyranny of political control. How much are you willing to sacrifice for freedom and liberty? Freedom isn’t free. We have the same stuff going on in the US. 🙏❤️

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In my lifetime the amount of freedom I was happy with was indeed free. Why is it suddenly necessary for people to sacrifice something for it? When you say 'Freedom isn't free', do you mean always and everywhere or just now in this place?

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A favorite quote from President Ronald Reagan who was a friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” WW1 and WW2 were times when blood was spilled for the sake of freedom. If we fail to fight as individuals on a daily basis for the principles they were willing to die for, their sacrifices will be for naught. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep Europeans from immigrating into Eastern Germany. It was built to keep Germans from leaving. History repeats itself. Much like the ratchet you spoke of.

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Whilst you thought freedom was free, it was being stolen.

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The words to an old song come to mind "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,,"

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The first step is to ask what are we doing about it.

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And the other saying: "there's nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose"

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I'd prefer us not to reach that Zelensky position.

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True. He's personally had a pretty good time of it all at the expense of Ukraine and the west who kept throwing money at him.

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Truth is fake to fake people

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But a real child can be brainwashed.

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Yes, the children are the casualties of this war on our minds, and we have to continue to teach them critical thinking skills 🤔

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It's a conundrum for me that every arsehole I despise was once an innocent child.

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Last week in North Wales someone had daubed "Free Speech" on a sign, in Britain someone felt the need to do that.

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I think you've missed another big one. Islamaphobia. In the face of this one, all the others are chicken feed.

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I actually think this stuff might be beneficial. My generation, in our 40s now, grew up believing we could trust the Guardian, the BBC and the Labour Party, and many people still do; but the kids of today have spent their entire lives immersed in a rich soup of bullshit and the thing is, they know it. While our parents told us not to believe everything we saw on TV, but both we and they continued to, our kids have grown up with the concept of “influencers”; they understand about algorithms; they have all had the first hand experience of seeing their own output and input get filtered. They know about shadow bans.

The other thing is that although everything is biased and filtered, it is nevertheless true that we have access to information now, from other places, that we have never done before. In no previous round of israeli atrocities in Gaza, have the photos and footage been seen around the world on a daily basis, but they are now. Maybe they’ll try to put the cat back into the bag but they will fail and get badly scratched in the process.

Not only are our kids reading and listening to Gaza, but they are talking to and playing games with Russian, Iranian, Chinese and Indian kids. They have friends from every country. And in fact, not only the kids because many of these game types have existed for 20 years. Ask yourselves: how long could the cold way have continued if significant numbers of British and American people had Russian friends that they spoke to regularly?

Removing rights from a population who are accustomed to them historically hasn’t gone well, which is why it’s been given to Labour to do: to reduce opposition from people who should know better, and so that they get the backlash (along with the backlashes for destroying the NHS and starting world war three).

Starmer hasn’t got a chance in the next election. We need to make sure there is a socialist option on the table outside of Labour, so that when Labour has collapsed, something remains to oppose fascism. But I’ve got a little feeling that with every passing year that the teenagers of 2008 remain economically excluded, the pressure for movement to the left will increase steadily.

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