zlacker

>to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense. From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.

This is a very dangerous measure of how worryingly authoritarian or not a particular place is becoming. People's perceptions are notoriously subject to all kinds of blindness and unknowns. The perceptions of most average Germans living in the first years of the Nazi state were also of minimal concern for authoritarianism, and little more than a series of modest blimps on the radar, and where did that take them?

This is not to compare the underlying savagery of something like the Nazi state with the soft bureaucratic smarminess of the modern UK, but the underlying risks of any creeping authoritarianism are the same: a steady normalization of deviance.