Peter Kyle - Bansturbator of Limited Intellect

A minister for Science who can't understand basic logic

[Note: I prefer to not use good old Anglo-Saxon 4 letter words, however readers should feel free to sprinkle them to taste as they read this]

In the UK there’s a significant storm surrounding the Censorious “Online Safety Act” which is forcing online clubs and societies to close and resulting in social media censoring speeches in Parliament. And then there’s the censoring of rape gang victims stories and (non-serious, humorous) posts about Two Tier Keir

Weirdly enough¹, VPN companies report a surge in UK demand for their products as, among other things, the OSA has resulted in all kinds of websites, not just the obvious porn ones but also places like discord, insisting that visitors with UK IP addresses show ID. Though as The Register points out the show ID thing seems to fail laughably and the obvious next step of banning VPNs² would put the UK in select group of countries that are notable for their commitment to freedom and safety like “Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Belarus, and China”. Moreover, as residents from those countries have shown repeatedly, these VPN bans are also easily circumvented.

Needless to say, quite a few people in the UK, including Nigel Farage, think that the OSA, despite its good intentions to protect the children, is a poorly crafted law that results in widespread censorship without actually ensuring that anyone, let alone any poor widdle child, is actually safer.

I mention Mr Farage because when he said that he was accused of being on the side of Pedophiles, Groomers and Perverts by the Labour Minister for Science, Peter Kyle, who is the man who gets to decide if anything else needs to be banned by the act.

Kyle, according to Wikipedia, has

a degree in geography, international development, and environmental studies, and later a doctorate in community development

and yet seems unable to grasp some fundamental principles of logic. In fact he quite literally follows the Politician’s Fallacy:

1. We must do something

2. 'This' is something

3. Therefore we must do 'this'

He has no excuse since he was born in 1970 so Yes (Prime) Minister would have been on the TV as he was a zitty teenager. Worse he extends it to the activists version:

1. X is bad (for children)

2. A says it stops X

3. If you disagree that A stops X then you are in favor of X

This is an elementary failure of logic. Let me illustrate

1. Drunk driving kills innocent children

2. Banning alcohol stops drunk driving

3. If you disagree that banning alcohol stops drunk driving then you are in favor of drunk driving

Kyle wrote a whole article for the Torygraph (link via Samizdata) where he explains that “Part of the internet is bad (for children)” and completely fails to explain how his favorite OSA is the only way to stop the children from finding the bad part of the internet. The closest he comes is at the start where he implies that some loser sending a dickpic DM to a minor was an offense that could only be prosecuting because of the OSA.

While it is possible that no existing statute could cover that, though I am doubtful³, that entirely fails to explain why all the other bits of the OSA that end up censoring speeches in the Houses of Parliament and events on the public highways of the UK are required.

Kyle of course doesn’t care about that. He wants to protect the childrens. He also wants to find a way to slime Nigel Farage because Farage stands for everything that Kyle hates. Hence he is happy to double down and repeat ad nauseam where ever he can that Farage is the kiddie fiddler’s best friend.

The problem for Kyle and his fellow Labour party people is that the British populace, even the teenagers who are going to get the vote next election, can see that this is bovine fecal matter. In fact of course, many of the teenager new voters will have been precisely the ones who found a way to bypass the online ID / age verification thing so they can see that it’s all bovine fecal matter and those that haven’t personally had to bypass the stuff will know people who have.

This is a problem because, how can I put it politely? right now the UK is suffering a certain major lack of trust in the quality of the government. This lack of trust in HMG is exacerbated when they then hear ministers like Kyle bleating on that if you oppose the OSA you are a pedophile after lots of people have pointed out gienormous problems with the act and which the voters have themselves observed. Those problems are pretty fundamental ones such as

1. it doesn’t work at its intended objective

2. yet it causes a lot of hassle to people who are trying to do entirely legal things

Needless to say it doesn’t help that when it comes to actual child safety Kyle was right on the side of the rape gangs and their government enablers by voting against the establishment of a national inquiry into the problem⁴.

For more on the basic hypocrisy see this substack

Predator politics

But What About His Intellect?

It’s pretty clear from the above that Kyle is a bansturbator. He loves banning things but how about his intellect?

Sadly the above shows that he is also lacking in the brain department. The flaws in the OSA have been pointed out by all kinds of people (see the substack link above for some), yet Kyle sticks to the simple activist fallacy “if you are against it, you are for the pedos”.

Now if he is really stupid he believes what he says. This is possible, but is a clear sign of an intellect on a par with Hank “Guam capsizing” Johnson.

More likely he is well aware that the OSA is rubbish but thinks that he can get some political benefit from deploying the activist’s fallacy on Farage. The problem with this are the likely, and predictable, second order effects. Specifically the way that it implicitly labels anyone who objects to the OSA and all Reform supporters as pedo supporters. Combined that is somewhere north of a third of the electorate - and it could easily be over half. Alienating over half of the people who you want to vote for you/your party is not generally speaking a good electoral strategy. Now it is true that there are in theory four years to go before another general election so conceivably the electorate will have forgotten, but if the tarring of Farage as pedo-enabler is forgotten then what was the point of doing it in the first place?

Finally there’s the possibility that he thinks the censorship possibilities of the OSA are great and he wants to distract from them by claiming it is for the children when actually that isn’t why he likes it. This is plausible, he wibbles on about mis-information and the like in his Torygraph piece.

Now of course there’s misinformation and misinformation. One of the things censored (as noted at the top) was the following testimony of a rape gang survivor

Just possibly making this kind of embarrassing information harder to access might be beneficial to both politicians and bureaucrats. But again if he thinks this he’s missing obvious second order effects. In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon, explains this clearly:

[T]here is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.

Thanks to the Covidiocy it became quite clear to a significant fraction of the UK population that the governing classes were rank hypocrites who felt laws did not apply to them. Subsequently, and particularly after the Southport murders a year ago, it has also become clear that said classes have active contempt for the rest of the population. And relatedly, that the police has morphed from being there to prevent crime to being there to prevent wrongthink and that instead of concentrating on clearing up burglaries or cracking down on rapists they prefer to go after people who say mean things on social media.

This is not what a healthy democracy looks like. The OSA is just more fuel to the fire and brazenly claiming that it is for the children is not a way to restore trust in government. The fact that Kyle seems unable to grasp this is indeed a sign of his low intellect. The fact that this low intellect appears to be shared by many other members of the government (and indeed many of the previous Tory government) is not an excuse.

1. That’s sarcastic, just in case you missed it. There will be other out breaks of it in this post

2. Samizdata reports that the BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.”. They recommend that UK residents get a VPN nayway, as do I. And if HMG wishes to object I refer them to Pressdram v Arkell

3. For example, unless some moronic government repealed it, the law that prohibited people under age from buying magazines on unclothed ladies or the one about indecent exposure would seem entirely applicable.

4. Not that a national inquiry is likely to do much, but voting against it is not a good look.