I (and also my manager at the time) got hate mail after I publicly vomited my breakfast at this article when it was published, but look where are we seven years later. archive.ph/1OA3A

I start each day with that newsletter, where I read about serious proposals for “catch kit” laws, meaning you would be required to fish your miscarriage out of the toilet and submit it to the authorities for inspection on the assumption that you deliberately murdered your baby.

🇺🇸 merica 🦅

In that case please remember to make a submission to UKGov’s upcoming consultation on age gating VPNs because

Go out of the app, switch your VPN to elsewhere, come back into the app 😉

We’ll never get to change for anyone, for any harms, from any source, if one actively complicit group is exempted from the concept of “change” by birthright and by bus pass.

It’s not even anything to do with the internet. It’s the notion that one demographic has been excused from the expectation of having agency over their own lives, or being accountable for their actions, and believing otherwise is held to be a societal harm worse than the actual harm they’re doing.

Obviously you’ve never been part of a “traditional” Scottish family, because you would have learned the hard way that their own aggressive hostility towards you in defence of their entitlement to unaccountable irresponsibility is one of the pillars of their collective identity.

And we can’t even begin to grapple with these issues as long as we maintain (again, speaking from 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) the culture of snivelling, simpering, sycophantic deference to the >60/s, even when they are causing real life serious physical and emotional harm. Which they absolutely do.

You’re discounting the cultural factors in play: it is socially acceptable to criticise, correct, or interfere with the agency of a young person, but (speaking from 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) criticising, correcting, interfering with the agency, or doing anything other than cowtowing to an >60 is a crime worse than murder.

You're laughing, but this is an actual footnote I had to include in my master's dissertation.

During the phase of the OSBill where the Tories were determined to criminalise end-to-end encryption, it had to be face-to-face explained to them (I was there) that the Ukrainian military runs on a protocol the UK was targeting, therefore breaking it "for the children" would break Ukraine.

Let me know if you’re looking for something specific, given how the law’s seven year saga has been so broad that it quite literally put me into reading glasses. 🤓

Meanwhile here's an educational campaign targeted at the critical demographic of boys aged 11-18 on social media, encouraging them to use it responsibly. You mean to tell me that raising young people to become future adults is an alternative to infantalising them? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I personally had to tell the BBC to get stuffed after they stopped asking me for serious policy commentary and started contacting me wanting gushing personality/colour commentary about American tech bro billionaire celebrities 🤩, from me as a convenient token woman.

😁 yeah it’s been bizarre to be lectured on what’s best for this country’s children by women who couldn’t make a sandwich for themselves, or their children (that’s the nanny’s job)

I also wrote one myself but it got badly misinterpreted. But I made the point that Ofcom’s own stats show the over 60s having exponentially more screen time per day than teenagers, but that’s somehow ok because it’s the telly 🤷‍♀️ (and not even counting their Facebook time)