Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Politics (Page 8 of 57)

The Turkish Event Horizon: One Science Fiction Fan's Thoughts on the Turkey Election

3 July 2018 / / 1 Comment

Nine days ago, the authoritarian president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prevailed in a surprise election. He is now expected to consolidate his power and further erode civil liberties.
My friend Mehmet, who is an avid reader of science fiction, just sent me a brilliant description of what it feels like to be a Turkish citizen right now, Reproduced with his permission.

We were really disappointed with the election results last week. It felt like crossing the event horizon to be sucked into the center of a black hole where reality is irreversibly bent and there is no way of going back. We both felt tired, depleted, lost for a couple of days but I guess we are adjusting now. For a split second hope was very vivid and then it went away again. We’re grasping for straws right now, but we know we have to find ways to be optimistic again. Some say black holes are beginnings of new universes, right?

Yeah But The Other Side Started It

14 May 2018 / / 0 Comments

Terrible, terrible scenes on the border between Gaza and Israel. The IDF have massacred 52 protesters.
Meanwhile, social media is full of people seeking to justify and excuse this violence. The main line being parroted seems to be that Hamas provoked the attacks, because dead Palestinians are politically useful.
There may be some within the Hamas leadership who think like that, but that does not excuse or mitigate the violence by Israel, a country that is supposed to be a democracy, that is supposed to respect human rights.
What we need to remember in these situations is that blame is not zero sum. It can be possible for Hamas to have malign motives in staging the protest and putting people in danger. That does not remove moral culpability from the Israeli soldiers who pulled the trigger; nor the Israeli politicians who endorse their actions; nor the American politicians who in turn protect those Israeli politicians from accountability. Continue reading

I Told You So! When Media and Tech Companies Fail To Self-Regulate, Governments Step In

4 May 2018 / / 0 Comments

Following the revelations about the harvesting of personal data by Cambridge Analytica and the ongoing worries about abuse and threats on social media, the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Communications last week began a new inquiry entitled ‘Is It Time To Regulate The Internet?’. At the witness sessions so far, peers have opened by asking each expert to comment on whether they favour self-regulation, co-regulation, or state-regulation.
The instinct to regulate is not limited to the U.K. Late last year senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said:

You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it… Or we will.

With the reader’s indulgence, these developments remind me of a point I made a few years ago at ORGcon2013, when I was speaking on a panel alongside Facebook VP for Public Policy EMEA, Richard Allan:

If we as the liberal free speech advocates don’t come up with alternative ways of solving things like the brutal hate speech against women, the hideous environment for comments that we see online, then other people are going to fix it for us. And they’re going to fix it in a draconian, leglislative way. So if we want to stop that happening, we need to come up with alternative ways of making people be nicer!

An audio recording of these remarks is on SoundCloud.
Its clear that neither Facebook, nor anyone in the technically minded audience at ORGCon, managed to solve the problem I raised. And lo! The legislators have arrived.

Review: THE ELECTION (ITV)

2 May 2018 / / 0 Comments

2nd May 2019
The chattering classes just love to compare the low turnouts at local and general elections, with the fact that people actually choose to pay money to vote for reality TV contestants. So it is surprising that the Television executives took so long to produce The Election.
It was doubly surprising that it was commercial ITV that gazumped the BBC in what should have been an open-goal commission for our public service broadcaster, and triply surprising that ITV, after being spectacularly dumped by Simon Cowell at the end of 2017, should have chosen to replace their flagship musical talent show with political programming.
We should be glad that they did so, because The Election has proved to be one of the best things on TV on this political cycle, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say we’ll still be talking about the show a decade from now… if it isn’t still on the air, a dozen series older. Continue reading

The Millicent Fawcett Statue is for My Great-Grandmother

24 April 2018 / / 0 Comments

The Millicent Fawcett statue by Gillian Wearing has been unveiled in Parliament Square today. It is the first statue in the square to depict a woman.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). This was a distinct organisation from the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) led by Emmeline Pankhurst. Unlike the ‘Suffragettes’, Fawcett and the NUWSS eschewed militancy and violence, an approach which appealed to my great-grandmother, Marjory Ingle. Continue reading

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