There are always best and worst case scenarios.

We are currently comprehensively losing the battle for 3C@2100 (which comes with increasingly harmful-to-devastating impacts in the intervening years and decades: future climate refugees will make the current not-far-off-a-London a decade seem like a picnic. A situation fascists will no doubt exploit).

It looks like the only way to prevent 4C plus and, a future Earth only described in science fiction, is mass civil disobedience.

But the UK government appears to be the worst in any civilised country in terms of squashing dissent, and most of the public appears to be more concerned with not being delayed on their commutes.

This might be true, but the legality or otherwise of any particular action is irrelevant, given the unjust nature of the law and its prosecution.

(What, you might not be allowed to associate with other people, attend multiple protests or cover your face, and the police insist upon being allowed to be violent and you can’t respond??? And attempting to stop the rise in fascism, or trying to get somebody to take action on what is unequivocally going to be devastating climate change makes you a domestic terrorist??? I thought I was in a civilised country?)

Your post is so off the mark that it is probably best classed as energy-sapping support of the far right.

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 answers were alarming

And what were the answers?

The two most common complaints on the Reform supporters’ websites are that immigrants are bad and the Government doesn’t care about ordinary people.

This is ‘alarming’?

The idea that after more than thirty years of a Red Tory Labour party, they have any time whatsoever left to demonstrate they ‘care about ordinary people’ to new and future reform party voters shows how out of touch the writer, and if this site is representative, then the media in general is. (I can’t read anything on this site as at the time of this post is temporarily busy or unavailable.)

Brexit is another expression of this exact same dynamic that to history might look like an ignored warning shot. Absolutely nothing was done to try and ameliorate living conditions for poor people in the UK in the intervening years. they were vilified as racists for freely voting in what they considered was their best interests. The Labour party have simply continued austerity since coming into office last year.

I despise this rise of the far right (I don’t want to be trapped on a small island with Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson with no freedom of movement across the rest of Europe) but I understand the anger those former working class reform voting people feel. And although I disagree with the new reform voters’ response: place the blame on immigrants (who should really be allies), and vote for a reform party that clearly won’t have their interest at heart either, I have come to terms with the fact that we will reap what successive former governments have sown.

I don’t see any evidence whatsoever that any of the mainstream parties have the capability to reverse the decades of decisions that have lead us to this point. You can’t cut everything that provides quality of life, including access to education, then expect a considered intelligent response. You don’t get governments that protect bankers, and the house price rises from which bankers profit so handsomely, for years and years while a large proportion of the population are completely left behind without any push back. This is that push back. Reform will not hurt those bankers in any way. The home ownership ‘electorate’ class have never got out and protested on behalf of the poor when it is against their personal interest, unions and other organisations that might have defended these people’s rights are gone, protest increasingly becoming criminalised, so the far right it is very likely to be.

Fair enough, maybe they did and government’s chose not to act.

Edit - but even if they did, they have been busy taking away British people’s rights to privacy and protest, rather than addressing the growing issue of the USA turning to a Russia that threatens Europe. Ultimately the result is the same. Complete failure of those services, in conjunction with government, to provide an open and free, civilised society.

The US has always got the dollar-as-global-reserve-currency out of its military spending, which is a large part of how post second world war America accrued a huge portion of unearned global wealth. Trump, those that voted for him, and those that spent decades creating this situation for personal enrichment are rapidly hastening the end of this situation.

Oh well if Will Geddes says “there might be all sorts of tricks and stunts … but this wouldn’t be one of them” then I guess that’s the truth sorted out.

The question for me is why didn’t our intelligence services - who want to spy on everybody all the time - understand the risks and inform former governments to prepare? We now need weapons. We needed them three years ago.

I remember Sunak sitting down with Musk at some conference or other very recently, when in fact we should have been preparing for what this individual and his mates were preparing to do once in office.

Our intelligence services were and are too preoccupied with labelling teachers doctors and scientists as domestic terrorists for protesting that climate science is being ignored to devastating coming effect, and banning protests, rather than dealing with the actual threat. Unless of course they don’t really see Musk and Trump as at least an ideological threat.

Well most of that wealth is in the Tesla meme-stock (whose valuation he uses as collateral for credit), encompassing various nonsense-ventures, the roadster that never materialised, the electric articulated truck with thermonuclear-explosion-proof windscreen that doesn’t exist, a fake remote controlled robot, self-driving cars without the necessary sensors, not to mention a whole host of other stuff like a Mars colony that cannot possibly happen while observing the laws of physics as we understand them. Sorry but it was all such obvious bullshit to anybody that even paid a little bit of attention. How none of it was fraud is beyond me (free speech!). Instead of getting prosecuted governments (not limited to republicans) gave him contracts worth billions with which he extended and consolidated his burgeoning power.

There is a whole host of people who facilitated Musk’s rise to power, from billionaire-owned media outlets failing to question his bullshit, to $TSLA owners who have probably profited quite handsomely in the last few months. But I suppose that is the nature of capitalism laid bare - I’ll get mine and fuck you.

If it is true that one of China’s policies, with regard to beating America over the last and coming decades, was ‘do nothing and win’ we can see exactly why through Musk’s story.

1. Get out of this relationship.

2. Most of us have been around some kind of illegal or unlawful behaviour we wouldn’t report to the police. Anything to do with child sex abuse isn’t one of those behaviours. The only alternative to reporting him, or giving him a strictly timed opportunity to report himself that I can immediately think of, is if there is some sort of working ‘treatment’ that I am not aware of, that this person signs up for.

I am not a psychiatrist, but I imagine that somebody can become conditioned to respond to one or another type of porn and that sometimes this conditioning can be reversed. I also imagine there are people that look at certain images who it is better for everybody if they get treatment and fix themselves rather than be criminalised.

Edit - I am showing my age with how I describe this, but there are cartoons on my ‘all’ lemmy feed which are of females who have women’s bodies, but basically very young faces. (You all know them. I know I sound like a grandparent.) My point is, in terms of conditioning these could easily be a ‘gateway’ to more problematic then illegal material that millions of young people must be subject to as a matter of course. I can see there could be lots of people somewhere along that pathway that need to stop what they are doing, and change, but shouldn’t necessarily be criminalised.

Either way, get out of this relationship. Forget trying to fix them or any of that stuff. You can’t just leave a potential future abuser out there without doing something, but cut your losses and move on.