anon1385

>they're mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users' choice in browsers

I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.

I would have agreed with you in the past. And I still do when it comes to defending a lot of the BBC content that doesn't come from the news department.

But BBC News is just so bad and utterly corrosive that I'd abolish the entire institution just to get rid of it. Yes I know other UK media is all as bad or worse, but none of them have the public standing or institutional power that the BBC has. I don't think there's any way of reforming the news department at this point. It's not just a matter of a few bad shows or bad 'journalists'. The entire ethos/mission of BBC News is fundamentally broken. They don't know how to do journalism as a public broadcaster, and I don't think they could ever learn how. Certainly not within the current media culture in the UK.

This incident isn't a one off. It's typical. The only unusual thing is the program got cancelled and they actually deleted the article - usually they double down for weeks and refuse to admit fault. I'm guessing that's only because crypto isn't (yet) a partisan culture war issue in the UK media.

I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time.

I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).

>The defining characteristic of cancel culture has always been using collective online action to have someone ostracized from social or political circles, removed from their job or professional relationships, etc.

That's because the whole thing is a moral panic imagined by liberals in the media who were mad that people could reply to them without the filter of the NYT letter pages editor (it was then embraced by conservatives as well for similar reasons and because "you can't even say X anymore" is convenient way to push the buttons of older conservatives). Most of the supposedly dire results of being 'cancelled' are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people because most of them are various forms of 'not getting as many media gigs'. Ordinary people can't get 'cancelled' because we don't make a living going on CNN or giving talks at universities.

Sure you can cherry pick examples of people saying something stupid on social media and their workplace massively overreacting (similarly you could find real examples behind the moral panics of the 80s and 90s - well ok, maybe not actual demonic possession but most of the rest of it was based on at least a few semi-real cases). That's not what any of the people crying about cancel culture care about. If it was they'd be advocating for stronger protection for employees.

The desired solution is of course always to regulate social media so that the nasty mob can no longer reply to opinion columnists and they can go back to splitting their time between writing poorly researched rants and trying to get academics who disagree with them fired.

The defining characteristic of cancel culture is people with massive platforms who spend a lot of time trying to get people fired for saying then they disagree with complaining when people are rude to them on twitter (at best, much the time they are crying about people politely pointing out mistakes in what they are arguing).

'Today' is tabloid bilge and has played a big part in the dumbing down of political discourse in the UK. It's hard to take any of the rest of your recommendations seriously when they start with Today.

Certainly there are other BBC programs that are better, and a small number that are very good, but at this point I honestly don't think they are enough to make up for how awful BBC News is and how much damage it's doing to UK society. In the past I would have made excuses for the regressive way the BBC is funded, but it's really hard to do that now.

Maybe you aren't old enough to remember but plenty of people were up in arms in 2000 as well.

I can't comment on what popular sentiment was in 1888.