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A Chinese comedian made a joke that some extreme patriots interpreted as a slight on the Chinese army, though it apparently didn't say anything about the army. The government forced him to publish a confession of guilt, then silenced him on communication platforms.
UK thugs plan to use face recognition in the center of Cardiff to find people wanted for various reasons.
The supposed occasion for this is that Beyonce is giving a concert in a stadium in Cardiff. But the facial recognition won't be limited to the stadium and its entrances.
Nor do we know that the tracking and data collection will not extend to everyone else who passes by. In fact, UK ministers are considering running facial recognition on everyone who shows up in a thug's body camera.
The UK is full of cameras, and I suspect many of them are surveillance cameras (images transmitted to some network which can recognize faces later). Those cameras could become, or perhaps already are, the introduction of Chinese-sty;e surveillance in Britain.
That could be, or perhaps already is, part of the system of heightened repression in Britain. Do they use video tracking to figure out who to arrest for planning to walk slowly, or glue perself to the street?
There is no need for the software to gauge a person's ethnicity if it identifies each person against a database that record's per ethnicity.
Warning: canceling events because of extremists' threats is treated by the extremists as a victory.
The article refers to right-wing extremists, but I think it applies to leftist extremists too.
PEN America joins banned authors as well as students and their parents to sue a school department in Florida for implementing DeMentis's censorship law.
The Oxford Union invited a speaker who argues that "transgender people cannot expect all the rights afforded by biological sex." Activists who hold the contrary position are accused of making threats against the Oxford Union (a right-wing club with some sort of affiliation with the university) to get her disinvited.
I can't tell for certain whether this is a significant threat, or whether it relates directly to that invitation, but many assert that it does.
My position on the issue is that the biological females and the trans people are both basically right, and I hope they work out a modus vivendi that they can both live with. I don't have an opinion on what that modus vivendi should be — I have nothing at stake in that issue myself.
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