That's exactly it. The proscription is ridiculous and delegitimises the whole concept of proscribed organization. It collapses into "mere support for Palestine is an arrestable offense". This didn't work against Sinn Fein and it will not work now.
Also the whole thing moved incredibly quickly; it went from new organization to banned almost immediately. I'm fairly sure that other groups previously like the Greenham Common camp didn't get this treatment.
It was reasonable to arrest people who actually broke into the base and those who organized it. Going after those speaking in support is what's excessive.
> It was reasonable to arrest people who actually broke into the base and those who organized it. Going after those speaking in support is what's excessive
Speaking out, yes. Helping organize? No.
Where the UK took it over the top was in using terrorist statute to shut down the organisation. That was unnecessary. But if the organisation helped organise the action—and this is not yet proven—its assets should have been frozen while the organisation and its leaders are investigated. If the organisation were found to have knowingly aided and abetted the break-in, it should have been shut down.
All of this could have been done using mostly civil and a little criminal law. None of it required terrorism laws.
> Also the whole thing moved incredibly quickly; it went from new organization to banned almost immediately.
Are you sure? They were founded in 2020.
You can argue that destroying property may be legitimate protest, but that is not all they did. In 2024 they used sledgehammers to destroy machinery in an Elbit factory. Again, arguably legitimate protest. But then they attacked police officers and security guards who came to investigate with those same sledgehammers. That is in no way legitimate.
If the government was going to proscribe them for anything it should have been for that. The RAF thing was indeed bullshit.
Anyway, it seems to me that to simultaneously believe that
a) telling a group of people that they can't use a particular name is an unacceptable attack on our freedoms yet
b) physically attacking people with sledgehammers is OK
I think it's general knowledge that the UK military is a paper tiger, I think Charlie Stross said something about it being enough to defend one small village or something like that (he occasionally comments on this site so may correct me).
I think that damaging what little remains of its defences, which may exist mostly to keep the nukes safe so nobody tries anything, is still a really bad idea. Especially given that the US is increasingly unstable and seems like it may stop responding to calls from assistance from anyone else in NATO, and the UK isn't in the EU any more and therefore can't ask the entire EU for help either just the bits that are also in NATO. Theoretically the UK could also ask Canada for help, but right now it seems more likely that Canada will be asking all of NATO except for the USA for military aid to keep the USA out.
(What strange days, to write that without it being fiction…)
Making it life appointments only makes things much worse. It is not possible to be depoliticized in a polarized environment; look at what happened to the US supreme Court, or the Polish one.
For what it’s worth the SC happened in the US because there is too much agreement between parties. The republicans are the bad cop to the democrats more presentable bad cop. They feel they are losing control of things so capitalism is taking a turn towards increased repression. There wasn’t opposition to the packing of the court, both parties have the same masters.
Oh. Cass. She was given the peerage for constructing the Cass Review, an extremely one sided anti trans "review" of the science around puberty blockers. I suspect she's against VPNs and in favor of total information control of children because of trans panic.
Yeah, I've often thought about what I'd do instead and there's no legitimate alternative. It might help developers feel better if they had some kind of "friendly name" functionality (ie - if registrations in the Registry had a package-identifier style string alongside), but that also wouldn't have flown when COM was invented and resources overall were much more scarce than they are today.
While they're not "the same", classic COM (or OLE? the whole history is a mess) did actually have ProgIDs, and WinRT introduces proper "classes" and namespaces (having given up global registration for everything but system provided API's) with proper "names" (you can even query them at runtime with IInspectable::GetRuntimeClassName).
Microsoft tried to do a lot with COM when they first released it, it wasn't just a solution for having a stable cross-language ABI, it was a way to share component libraries across multiple applications on a system, and a whole lot more.
> but that also wouldn't have flown when COM was invented and resources overall were much more scarce than they are today.
And this ultimately is the paradox of COM. There were good ideas, but given Microsoft's (mostly kept) promise of keeping old software working the bad ones have remained baked in.
> You should be able to compile a relatively small, trimmed, standalone, AOT compiled library
Yes-ish. We do AOT at work on a fairly large app and keep tripping over corners. Admittedly we don't use COM. I believe if you know the objects you are using upfront then code generation will take care of this for you. The other options are:
- self-contained: this just means "compiler puts a copy of the runtime alongside your executable". Works fine, at the cost of tens of megabytes
- self-contained single file: the above, but the runtime is zipped into the executable. May unpack into a temporary directory behind the scenes. Slightly easier to handle, minor startup time cost.
(Mind you, that very individualism is why they're not already unionized)
reply