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Must be fake news, I was told this wasn’t happening and if you think it was happening you would be an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist.
What, that Erdogan is using his influence on Turkish Germans? That’s not news, dude. It’s new that he’s establishing a political party, but no-one sane has been debating that Erdogan is massively trying to take an influence in Germany, up to this point mainly with his state newspaper/television and with the German mosque association, Ditib.
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This could be a precedent from now on, if it’s proven that a parent has practically been an enabler:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/jennifer-crumbley-guilty-verdict-parents-mass-shooters/story?id=107000948
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-yorks-closely-watched-house-race/story?id=107159121
I’ve seen the commercials ad infinitum on this seat left by George Santos. The link makes a point that it is
being observed because of the House majority and how the vote in suburban areas could be this year. Interesting.And the commercials will be gone too. 🤣
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And the commercials will be gone too.
Hate to give you the sad news, Alfred; but this special election is just to fill Santos’ seat until the regular election at the end of the term…which will happen in November, which means (according to news reports) Suozzi and Pilip commercials will be back on your television screen (and mine) this summer.
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When’s he going to actually pay these? $80 odd to Jean Carroll, now $355m to New York, all the legal bills.
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Isn’t this what super PAC money is for?
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I’m sure he’ll be able to get some great deals once he’s President again.
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He’s already getting away with it
An excerpt from the above article:
Over the last two years, Trump’s Save America political action committee, his presidential campaign and his other fundraising organizations have devoted $76.7 million to legal fees. Campaign finance experts expect Trump will try to spend PAC money to defray the cost of his judgments in some way.
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He’ll just go cap in hand to his supporters to pay his fees and he’ll probably get away with it.
Trump launches gold high top sneaker line a day after $350m court ruling
Before clicking, try to guess whether this is an Onion article or genuine news.
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Really this is all a reminder that a fine just means crimes are legal if you’re rich enough or connected enough to easily pay it.
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Whereas if you’re too poor to pay, you can go to jail for fare-dodging. Not to drag that discussion up again…
Fun aside though: The German expression for fare-dodging is “Schwarzfahren”, which would translate to “black travelling”, and because of efforts to avoid potentially racist language, some people have been calling for the use of a different terminology. The adverb “schwarz” has a tradition of being used to signify things done in secret, often illegally – “schwarzbrennen” means privately producing schnaps, “Schwarzarbeit” is non-documented labor and so on. “Schwärzen” for smuggling goods goes back to at least the 18th century. So, you know. It’s one of those things.
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I mean, we still have traces of that kind of thing in regular use in English too, like talking about the black market or black hats or whatever.
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Yep. It’s not really all that surprising, it’s stuff you can best do under cover of night, or that you do in metaphorical darkness. I suppose it’s just because it’s an everyday thing that people get fined for doing it and so on that turned this into a bit of a discussion. Well, for a while. I don’t think it led anywhere or that anybody bothers to actually fight for a change there.
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Cleaner gets fired over taking a discarded £1.50 tuna sandwich for lunch.
The law firm Devonshires? Doesn’t care about the sandwich and didn’t want anything done by the cleaning company, Total Clean.
Looks likely that Total Clean are going to be deservedly taken to the cleaners:
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This would be interesting:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/letitia-james-shes-prepared-seize-trumps-assets-pay/story?id=107381482
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Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup rebrand drops dead lion
Things I have learned from this story (and a Daily Mail version I shan’t link to)
- The lion on the Golden Syrup can is dead – I never looked closely enough to realise
- It’s surrounded by bees, not flies
- This is for religious reasons
- Some people in the CofE seem to think that Golden Syrup gets a sales boost at Easter. And especially for being Christian somehow.
Ok, I won’t link, but here’s a quote in the Daily Heil story from a CofE person and it’s just, I mean…
I am sure the Lyle business doesn’t mind benefiting from sales and Christian branding every Easter, so why do they feel the need to eradicate their connection with their Christian founder’s iconic logo which tells a story that works for every generation?
I mean is it a story that works for every generation? That a lion died and some bees made honey on it? A story so poorly communicated that I surely can’t be the only one who didn’t get that from the can at all.
The new logo is pretty great imo. Very swish hair.
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Ants colonise Dreamcast controller.
Australia-based YouTuber and vintage hardware restorer RyanUkAus recently posted a video about a rather alarming discovery he made in his workshop, which is where he keeps some of his retro gear. While tidying up one of his desks, he disturbed a Dreamcast controller he’d had in his collection for a few years. This triggered a wave of Australian black house ants to appear and swarm the work surface.
I’ve leave off posting any of the images directly.
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Tell me you didn’t read it without telling me.
In a press conference on Friday, Gerrard said: “I want to make it clear that the symptoms that some patients described after having Covid-19 are real, and we believe they are real. What we are saying is that the incidence of these symptoms is no greater in Covid-19 than it is with other respiratory viruses, and that to use this term ‘long Covid’ is misleading and I believe harmful.”
The researchers acknowledged the findings are associations and do not represent prevalence, and acknowledged limitations in that participants who attended hospital or had pre-existing illness were not identifiable. They also said because 90% of people in Queensland were vaccinated when Omicron emerged, the lower severity of long Covid could be due to vaccination and the variant.
Prof Philip Britton, a paediatric infectious diseases physician from the University of Sydney and a member of the Long Covid Australia Collaboration, welcomed the study given the lack of published research from Australia in this area.
However, Britton said the study’s conclusion that it was time to stop using terms such as long Covid was “overstated and potentially unhelpful. Long Covid has been a global phenomenon, recognised by WHO.”
Prof Jeremy Nicholson, the director of the Australian National Phenome Centre at Murdoch University, said the question of whether long Covid is unique “cannot be simply answered in this work”.
“The study is observational, based on reported symptoms with no physiological or detailed functional follow-up data. Without laboratory pathophysiological assessment of individual patients, it is impossible to say that this is indistinguishable from flu-related or any other post-viral syndrome,” Nicholson said.
I know a good few people hit by this, their lives before and after Covid have changed in ways they couldn’t imagine.
So I’ve a rather low level of tolerance for your crap-stirring antics.
It’s also all but guaranteed that the usual suspects will abuse and misrepresent this limited and careful study for their own malign ends.
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https://abcnews.go.com/US/sam-bankman-fried-sentenced-thursday-financial-fraud/story?id=108554809
Wow on the crypto guy…
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25 years. Not bad!
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Is it only me in seeing the comedy of a guy running a crypto scam having the name Bank-man-fried? Because that is perfect.
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Sam Bankman-Fraud’s been a common joke with a lot of my friends
When the story broke out and he was being implicated for the huge billion dollar losses, on interviews he was always “Oh shucks. I had no idea…. I am so sorry for the people who lost…”
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https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-immune-prosecution-criminal-hush-money-case-judge/story?id=108818369
So he is not immune from prosecution.
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Jesus, that’s depressing. You people really need to get this thing of the President supposedly not being equal before the law fixed.
In US law, it is common for a judge to cite precedent than to take on the task of interpreting judicial law; interpretations are more properly handled by the appelate court or the state or federal Supreme Courts. The judge in this case can’t just cite what we all know; instead, he told Trump’s lawyers that they submitted the immunity defense too late ACCORDING TO THE LAW. I’m sure the next thing we will read is that they’re filing an appeal to the State Supreme Court. And so on, and so on…
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No delays.
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Just might set the tone for similar cases from now on.
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https://abcnews.go.com/Business/congress-potential-tiktok-ban-how-would-it-work/story?id=109490158
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I saw the news late night where the cops were called in and they broke up the camp
https://abcnews.go.com/US/live-updates/college-protests-israel-palestine-war/?id=109734946
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We’re likely getting a former police and security service chief as our next prime minister, a dude named Dick Schoof. He’s not in any political party, he’s sort of a compromise candidate all the coalition partners can agree on. Right wingers are mad about it because he’s “deep state” and his security service department called right wingers a threat.
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Some good news:
BREAKING NEWS: Iberian lynx rebounding thanks to #conservation action.
The Iberian Lynx has improved from Endangered to Vulnerable on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, continuing its dramatic recovery from near extinction.https://t.co/xg2pl9acXB pic.twitter.com/ZrfJGzsg9u
— IUCN Red List (@IUCNRedList) June 20, 2024
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tossed out everything smelling of woke
And how did they define “woke”? Because right now that’s a massive warning sign.
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Oh, there’s not really a warning sign needed, they’re pretty obviously the Left Party only you can be a little racist and hate minorities in general. More specifically, the Left Party has been focusing a lot on inclusiveness and on the rights of refugees and so on, which has led to a split within the party that has now led to the creation of a new one. They’re basically populists merging a leftist approach to taxation and workers’ rights with a conservative/right-wing approach to society.
Like I said, the only good thing about them is that there’s a chance they’ll weaken the actual fascist in the upcoming elections in Eastern German counties.
Fun fact: One of the driving forces behind this besides Wagenknecht herself is Oscar Lafontaine, who back in the early 2000s split our main socialist party, the SPD, by founding the Left Party and taking about 10% of the voters off the SPD (making it impossible for them to get back into power for a loooooooooooong time after Schröder). And now he’s resplit the split-off party. He’s really great at fucking up left-wing parties, that man.
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Honestly, woke itself is a warning signal. I think it is basically subversive marxist ideology left over from when the Soviet Union was injecting that stuff into our society. (Together with our own self hating whities of course, who glom onto it)
You know that’s literally an antisemitic conspiracy theory, right? Like actual Nazi shit?
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Honestly the right here is as idiotic as the left, I don’t want to defend our right wingers. Peope who are lawfully here deserve all the same rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association etc. I don’t like Wilders and his hate boner for all Muslims, I did mention on this forum some statistics that said they were overrepresented in certain crimes, but that doesn’t mean I want to hurt random Muslims or take their rights away.
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You don’t think Soviets tried to subvert Western institutions?
There’s a difference between acknowedging espionage and propaganda campaigns took place and repeating literal Nazi talking points.
Not to mention that last time I checked, the Soviet Union fell over 30 years ago so I’m unsure how their actions are relevant to the modern day.
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And are the “Khmer Rouge level maniacs” the ones “infiltrating your society with woke”?
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Like that Stonehenge shit. Basically it is just anti-European, destructive ideology. “No but the rain will wash that paint off.” So would you be OK with defacing mosques in the same way? After all Saudi Arabia is where most of the oil comes from. But nooooo, that’s Islamophobic. Likewise the people who deface monuments and paintings are anti-European. You see that their targets are all beloved sites and objects of European heritage. And that’s OK for them, because that is what they hate. We have it coming because we’re evil oppressors.
Uh, I think you’re coming at this one from the wrong angle. Extinction Rebellion and groups like that choose mainstream cultural icons because they want to get as much attention as possible by mainstream society. It’s not because they’re anti-European, it’s because they’re European. They’re working inside their own culture because therein are the people whose actions they want to influence.
It’d be great if people in Saudi-Arabia would be doing similar things, but you can’t influence Saudi-Arabian policy by defacing mosques in Europe. That’d just be insane.I think we’re really already in a kind of low level civil war, between leftie idiots and rightie idiots.
Honestly I can’t blame anti-climate-change groups for feeling like they’re in a war. They are trying to prevent an extinction event for all of humanity. If that doesn’t justify war-like tactics, what does?
(I am not saying I agree, but mainly because those kinds of tactics don’t lead to results. If they did, the question of morality would become rather more complex.)2 users thanked author for this post.
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It’s also worth noting that all the things people say Extinction rebellion should try doing instead of defacing monuments and art? They tried them and got no coverage. A climate activist literally committed suicide by self-immolation in front of the Supreme Court in the US two years ago and odds are this is the first time you’re hearing about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Wynn_Bruce
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It’s also worth noting that all the things people say Extinction rebellion should try doing instead of defacing monuments and art? They tried them and got no coverage. A climate activist literally committed suicide by self-immolation in front of the Supreme Court in the US two years ago and odds are this is the first time you’re hearing about it.
This is probably more an indictment of the media more than anything else, but it seems to me that the Extinction Rebellion’s message gets lost in act of vandalism itself. People see something famous getting defaced and don’t hear their message. Literally, actions are speaking louder than words, but the message isn’t coming through. Plus, they are vandalizing things people have an affinity for, which does not build sympathy for them and their cause.
Now, if they were vandalizing things people DON’T care for, like the property of polluting companies and their leadership, people would probably be more likely to listen and support them. That creates a direct connection between the message and the cause of the problem. Painting Stonehenge closes people off to what you are saying.
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Now, if they were vandalizing things people DON’T care for, like the property of polluting companies and their leadership, people would probably be more likely to listen and support them. That creates a direct connection between the message and the cause of the problem. Painting Stonehenge closes people off to what you are saying.
They did that too, their first tranche of paint bombing was oil company offices. It also got ignored.
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Actually they’re still targeting offices. These are from the last few months alone.
Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil target multiple insurance offices
The fact that you haven’t heard about this kind of makes Lorcan’s point about these attacks not gaining the same traction, but I do still agree with Todd that the message is somewhat lost in the attacks defacing famous artworks and monuments – even though it gets them on the news, I don’t feel as though it’s shifting the needle in terms of the debate or public awareness, and isn’t leading to any positive policy action.
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The other thing to remember as well is that the measure of successful protest and activist campaign is historical rather than the way they’re seen by contemporaries. Martin Luther King was deeply unpopular in his day, was frequently treated in the news media of the day the same way BLM often is, his name was tied to violence. But now he’s treated as a platonic ideal of a protestor.
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I think there’s a difference though – in the end, the brutality against MLK or Ghandi is what swung public opinion. The Extinction Rebellion guys are willing to take a beating or go to jail, but it is far more difficult for them to get public sympathy both because reactions against them aren’t as brutal and because the injustices they protest against aren’t something you can already see; you have to rely on the public’s imagination, and more importantly on the media to provide the facts. Which they have been failing to do. I was fucking livid when at the high time of their actions here in Germany, the media kept failing to show the reasons why they were doing what they were doing. The facts of climate change should’ve accompanied EVERY report on this and every TV news about it to provide that context. Especially on the public TV channels. The media are failing us very badly when it comes to this.
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I don’t think you can rate the efficacy of an activist campaign by how the Media (and social media) covers them, to be honest. Thinking back to my own experiences with Repeal, we were constantly berated in the press for doing it wrong – we were too extreme by being trans-inclusive, one time we did a banner drop during a march from a then-vacant building, and that was played as being disrespectful of private property. We took over O’Connell Bridge on International Women’s Day and that was going to alienate the entire city of Dublin. When the anti-choice side had posters up before us it was a sign that we were going to lose the referendum because we were slow off the mark. When we crowdfunded our posters it was seen as a desperation move. The now-infamous REPEAL jumpers were derided as trivialising the topic. And this wasn’t weird fringe weirdos, this was the biggest newspapers and the state broadcaster saying this stuff. Polling consistently showed that a YES vote hovered around 40-50% with NO and Undecided comprising the rest, and this was spun as a disaster for YES because if all the undecided people chose no, we’d lose. Never mind that historically the undecided people don’t vote in referendums – which bore out on the day.
And within hours of the results being announced the spin begun, with government and media talking heads going on about it being a forgone conclusion, ignoring the massive grassroots campaign we’d cultivated over like 5 years, dismissing how young people had gotten engaged in the campaign, and so on. I was actually talking about it with a colleague at Pride on Saturday, that our personal archive of the campaign is of vital importance because we’ve been written out of the official story of Repeal.
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Arjan, we get it: knife crime exists. I don’t think you continually posting links to every single stabbing is really doing anything of worth, certainly not to your own mental health. If you keep fixating on negative news that, ultimately, has very little bearing on your own life, you’re just going to drive yourself to ruin.
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This shit will just keep getting worse and worse.
This shit actually kinda got better:
A freedom of information request published by the Met police details the number of stabbings, both fatal and non-fatal, between 2017 and 2023. There were 10 stabbings last year, none of which was fatal. The peak was seen in 2019 when there were 18 stabbings. The lowest number of incidents, seven, was recorded in 2018 and 2022.
All of the stabbings which occurred across that period were non-fatal, save one in 2022.
The Solingen thing has plunged the whole of Germany into a xenophobic debate though, it has to be said. And it’s going to have a massive influence on our elections.
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As we proceed…
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was arrested and charged with sex trafficking. Here’s how the news unfolded
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From the last reports, it’s not like they used some freaky super-weapon that makes pagers explode. They just managed to sell them a load of pagers that were stuffed with explosives.
Regardless of dubious morality and of consequences, this was a really impressive operation. Bloody hell.
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Yeah, I have to say I’ve been dismayed by the general reaction of “wow, cool” to these mass extrajudicial killings, just because they were pulled off somewhat daringly.
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I don’t seem to remember the general reaction to 9/11 being respect for Al Qaeda’s organizational skills and clear proficiency in project management.
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But firing rockets at the other side also always runs the risk of hitting civilians
I mean, so does exploding devices in people’s pockets when you have no idea where they are or who is with them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a lot of people harmed by this aren’t angels, but this isn’t some kind of precision-targeted surgical strike.
I would say that there’s a danger of all sorts of unintended consequences, but the truth is I think “unintended” is the wrong word, the people behind this don’t give a shit either way.
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Yeah, that’s fair.
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Well, the situation remains: Netanyahu has nothing to gain with peace; in fact, he will lose everything the moment peace happens. So ensuring they’re stuck in a multiple-fronts forever war is good for him.
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So does mine. But then again, my position has always been that it isn’t Germany’s job to criticise Israel when it comes to human rights. There’s plenty of countries who haven’t committed a genocide against them; those are more likely to be heard, would be my guess.
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In all honestly, I want the death penalty for something like this. After a fair trial of course.
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I just can’t conceptualize the absolute scumbaggery of ordering others to lockdown while actually organizing sex parties yourself. Truly the vilest of the vile.
I think he title of “vilest of the vile” should be reserved for people like Trump who told everybody that COVID was nothing to worry about and that we don’t need to wear masks or maintain social distancing, and who actively insulted and denigrated people at his rallies and other appearances who actually wore masks.
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