I wonder who’ll be next week’s Prime Minister?
Politics and Current Affairs
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Its’ not just to distract from files being released,
It was never a distraction, it’s just Accelerationism. You can break things far faster than people can fix them and it’s all bad.
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mess with elections.
The GOP have been doing this for decades without ICE.
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For the UK contingent:
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Given that Labour were elected almost entirely on a platform of We’re Not The Tories, it’s baffling that now they’re in government they seem to think that they have to try and be some kind of shit Tory tribute act.
It’s always the fucking same, innit. Our Labour party is currently helping the conservatives dismantle our social system, and our Labour finance minister (and head of the SPD) has decided to spend the money budgetet for climate transformation instead on paying fees to the EU that we have to pay because we’re using too much CO2. Let’s say this again: We are not spending money meant to be spent on changing our society so we don’t use so much CO2 anymore on that cause. Instead, we will keep burning fossil fuels and spend that money on the fines we’re incurring by doing that.
I am not a violent man, I swear. But Lars Klingbeil is trying me so, so hard.
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Just read a bit by our national media on the declining acceptance of lgbt lifestyles. The person interviewed said “I assumed every next generation would be more prgressive.” It’s such a dumb normie view. And what does progressive mean in this respect? For some people “progress” would mean progress towards theocracy and illegality of homosexuality. Judith Butler famously called Hamas and Hezbollah progressive, well guess how they see homosexuality. Foucault thought the Iranian revolution was progressive.
I think she called them part of the global left because they’re anti-imperialist, which is different from being progressive in the liberal sense.
And while I think you’re not wrong about progressive being a subjective idea, I do get the sentiment of the interviewee. It certainly always felt like my generation was more open to differences in sexual orientation than our parents, and I’d also say I kind of expected things to keep going that way. It’s still strange to me that so many of the young generation want to go back to traditional ideas of Germany, including fascism becoming more attractive again.
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It’s still strange to me that so many of the young generation want to go back to traditional ideas of Germany, including fascism becoming more attractive again.
And that’s not just a German thing, the UK seems to be enjoying a bit of a retro fascist revival at the moment with all this fucking flag business.
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Just read a bit by our national media on the declining acceptance of lgbt lifestyles. The person interviewed said “I assumed every next generation would be more prgressive.” It’s such a dumb normie view. And what does progressive mean in this respect? For some people “progress” would mean progress towards theocracy and illegality of homosexuality. Judith Butler famously called Hamas and Hezbollah progressive, well guess how they see homosexuality. Foucault thought the Iranian revolution was progressive.
I think she called them part of the global left because they’re anti-imperialist, which is different from being progressive in the liberal sense.
And while I think you’re not wrong about progressive being a subjective idea, I do get the sentiment of the interviewee. It certainly always felt like my generation was more open to differences in sexual orientation than our parents, and I’d also say I kind of expected things to keep going that way. It’s still strange to me that so many of the young generation want to go back to traditional ideas of Germany, including fascism becoming more attractive again.
I think it’s despair of the people, and some sleight of hand by the fascists.
I think many people see there are many things worng with our society and they are desperate to grab alternatives, even if that means reaching for extremes.
Fascists say they favor a return to “the fundamentals of Western civilization” but that’s nonsense. I think there are many things about the real fundamentals of Western society which are actually good, and worth reaching for, but what fascists offer really is just the ugly parts, like racial hatred and totalitarianism.
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Well, at least Brazil got it right:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/11/americas/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-coup-trial-verdict-latam-intl
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Can we address the apparent elephant in the room?
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Can we address the apparent elephant in the room?
Trump’s cankles?
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Fucking stupid all over.
Saw Kirk’s wife, and basically, they’re setting him up as a martyr, and prepping for war.
Of course murder is wrong, and that should never have happened.
But the pure evil on a small ruling percentage of the right, coupled with pure silence from those that should protest makes a powder keg.
Yes, calling them Nazi’s is appropriate.
Preaching hatred, preaching stupidity, and bullying is just plain fucking wrong.But now things are going to get worse.
They don’t see what they are, but now they see themselves as the victim, but ready to fight back.(Side note:
Honestly believe 30% of the right has just lost perspective and goes with it, another 30% has no support and cowardly goes with it.
A small percentage is really the problem, but wow, never have I seen it this bad)
Just… arrgghh)The news just showed Kirk talking about the second amendment and how some shootings will have to be acceptable.
Asshole! I hated the fucking guy, and not sorry he’s gone.
(Sorry for saying that if it pushes a button)But it did not help, not at all.
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All the mainstream newspapers here are kind of praising Kirk as someone on the right who sought dialogue and wanted to have conversations about the right way to do things. Which is weird when… that was just his influencer shtick, right? Pretending to engage with left-wing students when actually that was just so he could generator 20-second-clips of him berating 20-year-olds on tiktok?
Yeah, it sucks that the right has another pretense to further militarise, but it’s not like they weren’t going to do that anyway.
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Are assassinations the ideal way to deal with situations?…Probably not.
But also…Fuck him🤷♂️…..He was a pos that spread nothing but hate and I’m not going to pretend to have any sympathy for him.
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When I think of the name Kirk, I am glad so far that what comes to mind first is the Enterprise.
They are all talking about the shooter who he is, and “How could it be?” (Even the Utah governor started out that he didn’t want to believe and announce it:”For the last 33 hours, I had been praying that this person was from another country. That he was not one of us. But it was one of us.” – Utah Governor Spencer Cox.)
But my gripe is all about voter mindset and behavior: the single issue voters, voting to oppress/spite other communities, voting because the candidate is “someone I can have a beer with”, racist voting, fickle voting, “price of eggs”, TV show personality, and on and on.
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Welcome back to the UK Donny, <Agent Smith> we missed you:
Channel 4 to mark Trump’s UK visit with ‘longest uninterrupted reel of untruths’
Broadcaster to dedicate Wednesday night schedule to unpicking US president’s false or misleading statements1 user thanked author for this post.
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Meanwhile Nepal has had what looks like a legit revolution, including burning down parliament and stripping politicians naked and dragging them through the streets. Not a lot of new about that in Western media, maybe they don’t want to give people ideas. There’s a new PM now but it remains to be seen what will actually change.
Honestly stuff like the rally in London is just tame and harmless, some silly people waving a flag and raising their fist and saying “we’re not gonna take it”. The people in Nepal were actually mad as fuck, desperate and ready to kill anyone that stood against them. In the West people are mostly tamed.
(I think there are probably some radical nazis among the crowd in London who would be ready to kill but I don’t think that is true for most of them, they’re probably more like boomer conservatives who think Starmer is a commie or something silly like that.)
Of course it’s mostly good that people are a bit more relaxed and not ready to freak out and start some violence but there must also be some willingness to fight tyranny when it occurs. Sometimes violence is justified, as a last resort, under extreme circumstances.
It’s an interesting thing with Nepal.
A guy on Bluesky I follow, roughly the same age as me and political leanings, took the piss out of someone commenting to one of his posts that kids weren’t reading about Charlie Kirk’s murder but the Nepalese revolution.
I asked my two teens on their Tik-Tok feeds and they actually backed up the Nepal side of the argument. They didn’t know who Kirk was but saw several Nepal videos.
The disparate way we get information now is fascinating. My Tidal app fed me a playlist based on what I typically listened to that I played in the car as I drove her to college, she’s 16, born in 2008 and immediately identified a song by the Cocteau Twins. At 16 I didn’t know who the Cocteau Twins were and they were contemporary but not on the BBC Radio 1 playlist. It would be the equivalent of me listening to tunes from 1956 of which I knew nothing.
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I’m actually fascinated by the way that for all its ills the internet has for the younger generation basically fucked up almost all the norms of regional bias. I see Americans say ‘shite’ in comments. The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now. Korean music and Japanese animation are what they care more for than most western fare even though they speak English all day at home. My wife now watches Swedish crime dramas and Dutch romcoms, the language less important than the blurb sounding interesting.
Adolescence just won a truck of (deserved) Emmys but UK TV has been doing that kind of brilliantly acted social commentary for decades, it’s just now it got on Netflix with an easy button to watch if you live in Wisconsin. In 1988 I saw the first showing of Akira in a non Asian cinema with an audience of 200 people at a festival. This weekend an anime film debuted at $70m in the US.
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Good to see you back btw Gar, how are you doing? Long time no see.
Maybe we can get Jim O’Hara and Ronnie to come back too…
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I’m actually fascinated by the way that for all its ills the internet has for the younger generation basically fucked up almost all the norms of regional bias. I see Americans say ‘shite’ in comments. The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now. Korean music and Japanese animation are what they care more for than most western fare even though they speak English all day at home. My wife now watches Swedish crime dramas and Dutch romcoms, the language less important than the blurb sounding interesting.
Adolescence just won a truck of (deserved) Emmys but UK TV has been doing that kind of brilliantly acted social commentary for decades, it’s just now it got on Netflix with an easy button to watch if you live in Wisconsin. In 1988 I saw the first showing of Akira in a non Asian cinema with an audience of 200 people at a festival. This weekend an anime film debuted at $70m in the US.
I wonder how many millions of people around the world saw the Canelo vs Crawford fight this past Saturday, simply because it was on Netflix?
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A co-worker had to tell me there was a school shooting the same say Kirk died.
I hadn’t heard a thing about it.Assassination in Utah, school shooting in Colorado: one day in US gun violence | US gun control | The Guardian https://share.google/T36rpJIddD3LNLa7J
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So that London “march”, aka the Great Booze-Up, the bots and Tommy Ten Names claims 3m marched.
The Met say 100k.
Actual, realistic estimate? 55-56k!
London Pride in July broke the 100k mark.
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The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now.
Which is good, because series meaning both a year’s run and the show entirely was pretty confusing.
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They love flags Arjan, really love flags. And they want the country back from… something. And women to get their tits out for the lads.
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That’s really sinister. A very troubling sign.
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The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now.
Which is good, because series meaning both a year’s run and the show entirely was pretty confusing.
To be fair originally it wasn’t. A series was a programme, a season was a series. ‘The programme will be coming to an end with its last episode today’ would be how it was used in the 1980s. It got muddled around the time box sets came in and labelling them series or season and the US and UK terms getting interchanged a lot. So now it’s probably better to use a standard.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78n455mj08o
Four arrests after Trump and Epstein images projected on Windsor Castle
Four men have been arrested after images of Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle on Tuesday, as the US president arrived in the UK for a state visit.
They were arrested on suspicion of “malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor” and remained in custody, Thames Valley Police said.It doesn’t say, but I assume this is Led By Donkeys again.
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Bingo!
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ABC Suspends ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ “Indefinitely” Over Charlie Kirk Comments – Hollywood Reporter
The network’s decision comes after affiliate group Nexstar said it would pull the late night show, and the chairman of the FCC suggested he might take action against ABC.
Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show is being suspended by ABC over his viral comments about Charlie Kirk.
A network spokesperson said Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be “preempted indefinitely.”
The network’s action came just after Nexstar, one of the biggest owners of local TV stations in the country — including 28 ABC affiliates — said it will preempt the series for the immediate future. A source said that ABC had also heard from at least one other station group about the show, suggesting that an affiliate revolt may have played a role in the decision.
The dramatic move follows Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to take action against ABC affiliates in the wake of Kimmel suggesting the Kirk shooting suspect was a MAGA Republican during a monologue earlier this week.
A source tells The Hollywood Reporter Kimmel was prepared to address the backlash on Wednesday night’s show. He planned to explain what he said and demonstrate how it was taken out of context.
When asked by THR, the source said that Kimmel was not planning on apologizing. He felt that what he said did not require an apology.
“I want to thank Nexstar for doing the right thing,” Carr told THR. “Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”
Kimmel’s original comments were as follows:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Then on Wednesday, Carr went on a podcast where he slammed Kimmel and declared that affiliates should “push back” on ABC and say, in effect, “Listen, we’re not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we’re running the possibility of license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
Nexstar currently operates mostly in small or midsize markets, though they include the ABC stations in New Orleans and Salt Lake City.
The decision by Nexstar comes as the broadcast station is seeking FCC approval for its $6.2 billion mega deal to acquire Tegna, a deal that would make Nexstar by far the largest owner of local TV stations in the country.
The FCC would have to raise the 40 percent ownership cap in order to let the deal advance. It is not clear if Tegna will follow Nexstar’s decision. Tegna operates 13 ABC stations, including in Austin and Sacramento.
Carr has used his perch to launch investigations into broadcasters that have caught the ire of President Trump, with their DEI policies the most frequent target. However, he has also sent letters about select content, and the FCC investigation into last year’s CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris remains open.
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Can we stop pretending we still even remotely resemble a democracy?
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Can we stop pretending we still even remotely resemble a democracy?
The US has effectively been a failed state for decades, and I’m afraid Trump is just speed running the decline.
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Jon Stewart is taking over the Daily Show desk tonight (he usually only does Mondays).
I think he might have something to say.
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Saw a great thread on Threads as to why the right-wing remains so insanely mad, despite having everything in terms of political power and a compliant media and companies supporting them. The answer was the outlook requires a sense of permanent, ongoing threat. Thus, they can never claim to have won because then the threat that justifies everything is gone. It’s why the beast is insatiable and applies much wider than the US.
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Saw a great thread on Threads as to why the right-wing remains so insanely mad, despite having everything in terms of political power and a compliant media and companies supporting them. The answer was the outlook requires a sense of permanent, ongoing threat. Thus, they can never claim to have won because then the threat that justifies everything is gone. It’s why the beast is insatiable and applies much wider than the US.
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Interesting. Zappa said this 40 years ago about the direction of the country. Heading towards a fascist theocracy. They belittled him, but he said what he said:
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But will it be an Amish or Mormon theocracy?
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counterpoint: If the media and newspapers lie, and make terrible bloopers all the time, they should be punished.
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But will it be an Amish or Mormon theocracy?
It’s more about the evangelicals, the Moral Majority as they were called.
Interesting thing Zappa said when a government that prefers a moral code from one belief system and using it as a basis for legislation that leans on the religion, very conservative, very right wing… If you said that to a Midwestern evangelical, they would apply it to an Islamic country that imposes the Kohran, sharia law, etc.
They wouldn’t say that their imposing school prayers, 10 commandments posted in school, trying to remove evolution from k-12, eroding the separation of church and state, Roe v Wade, promoting a purity culture, engaging in the cultural war/debate in overall media, influencing state funded museums and institutions etc., has anything to do with it. The cognitive dissonance…
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Albania has appointed a minister who is an AI bot…
We’re done folks. The clankers are taking over.
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Dolan’s Claim, “Kirk Is a Modern Saint Paul” Refuted by NCR: “He Was a Racist”
A cardinal claims Charlie Kirk is a modern Saint Paul…however he also says he never heard of him before the shooting…
I think it would be truly embarrassing really if the actual numbers of ‘never heard of Kirk before the shooting’ were discussed a bit more. I am very online and check news/politics every day and I was at best vaguely aware of him as a right wing podcaster.
There was a Reform councillor in south Wales last week who stormed out of a meeting because there was no minute’s silence or similar tribute to Kirk. I can say with a lot of confidence that 99% of the constituents in Torfaen had no fucking idea who he was before he made the news for being shot and would take a decent wager said councillor was among that group.
For all its other ills in recent years under Musk it hasn’t been really acknowledged enough how Twitter, which has always had one of the smallest social media platforms, way smaller than Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok etc, has been held up as the crucible of public opinion because it makes life easy for lazy journalists who can submit stories using just cut and paste.
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I think it would be truly embarrassing really if the actual numbers of ‘never heard of Kirk before the shooting’ were discussed a bit more. I am very online and check news/politics every day and I was at best vaguely aware of him as a right wing podcaster.
Same here. Interestingly though my kids had both heard of him and seen several of his videos, which shows how this stuff finds its way to certain audiences but not others.
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Pam Bondi coming out against hate speech and saying it should be prosecuted is a bold move.
I notice a lot of politicians don’t really have principles about this stuff, it’s just if we do it, it is good, but if you do it, it is bad.
Actually, the right has always been very consistent in this in the US. They preach free speech when it comes to hate speech against minorities or death threats against the left, and for them free speech means that no private individual should be allowed to speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia etc.. But wherever they are in power, they actively practice government censorships against everthing they don’t like, banning books from school libraries and persecuting criticism against the authorities. The Trump admin is super-charging this, but it’s what the Republicans have always done.
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Depends on who you mean by “the left”. Are there people on social media pushing for cancelling people simply for not being careful with their language? Sure. But have they done it as a government in power?`Not in the US, I think.
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This is the end point of the crusade to criminalise people for accurately portraying Charlie Kirk in a public space:
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Dolan’s Claim, “Kirk Is a Modern Saint Paul” Refuted by NCR: “He Was a Racist”
A cardinal claims Charlie Kirk is a modern Saint Paul…however he also says he never heard of him before the shooting…
I think it would be truly embarrassing really if the actual numbers of ‘never heard of Kirk before the shooting’ were discussed a bit more. I am very online and check news/politics every day and I was at best vaguely aware of him as a right wing podcaster.
There was a Reform councillor in south Wales last week who stormed out of a meeting because there was no minute’s silence or similar tribute to Kirk. I can say with a lot of confidence that 99% of the constituents in Torfaen had no fucking idea who he was before he made the news for being shot and would take a decent wager said councillor was among that group.
For all its other ills in recent years under Musk it hasn’t been really acknowledged enough how Twitter, which has always had one of the smallest social media platforms, way smaller than Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok etc, has been held up as the crucible of public opinion because it makes life easy for lazy journalists who can submit stories using just cut and paste.
It is very very odd. Like some kind of hysteria.
I mean this was the cardinal of New York who said it…he never heard of Kirk before but decided to compare him to Saint Paul, of all people. You would expect a cardinal to have some sort of sophistication, some gravitas, and some awareness of the political climate. But no. It’s literally like Fox News places the “Kirk is a saint” tape in their head, and they repeat it like a mantra…like they’re automatons.
It’s good that that Catholic newspaper refuted him, but my God!
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One of my most socialist ideas is that every major newspaper should be forced to make their basic reporting on current events freely available. Then they can charge for more in depth coverage, and other material.
I would add that it be as factual and unbiased as possible. Just give the basics: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. No opinion, no spin.
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UKians seething about the US is always funny. You lost, get over it.
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Building the panopticon.
Google already built it, we just didn’t notice.
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There’s a petition against those digital ID cards on the UK government website that’s hit nearly 1 million signatures in under a day.
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There’s a petition against those digital ID cards on the UK government website that’s hit nearly 1 million signatures in under a day.
Well, at least Starmer’s finally united the country.
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Well, not if what we get in its place is fascism. And that seems to be the way things are going.
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Fascism is what we have now. Or a Brave New World control state. There will be a few enlightened ones at the top and the masses will “own nothing and be happy” while under surveillance 24/7.
We need a radical divorce from this. I don’t know if this can happen or how to do it. But the road we’re on leads to hell.
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To lighten the mood a little, it’s election season here, specifically the Presidential election is on at the end of October. Now the Irish President is basically an elected version of the British Queen, and as such has basically no power – they open and close the Oireachtas, sign bills into law and can send a bill back to the Oireachtas to be discussed further (but that last power has never been used), and represents the nation at various diplomatic affairs.
Naturally with the stakes so low, the campaigns are dirty as fuck. Nominations closed last week and the field is quite small – only three candidates, the fewest since 1991 (excepting 2004 when Mary McAleese ran uncontested and was automatically re-elected). And because there’s a two term-limit, the current president,
YodaMichael D Higgins can’t run again.But before we get to the candidates, I gotta talk about the also-rans. See, if you’re an Irish citizen and 35 or older, you can try and get on the ballot. All you have to do is secure the backing of 4 local councils or 20 members of the Oireachtas. And that means that you see a lot of people getting out in public to try and curry support. For added fun most County Councils do a single session where all hopefuls have to make their case one after another.
First up: Conor McGregor, a man who doesn’t seem to realise that the rape verdict was the final nail in the coffin for his popularity at home, he’s really only got inroads with the far right any more. Ignoring the fact that every county council and just about every TD and Senator announced up front they wouldn’t back him, he still made a whole load of noise around running, with a manifesto full of things he’d do that are well outside the powers of the Presidency. He started going on about getting his supporters to sign a petition, nothing came of that, and he dropped out of the race the day he was due to speak before the Dublin City and Kildare County councils, cried to Elon Musk and went on about changing the constitution so the process was more democratic. As someone who’s worked two referendum campaigns, good luck with that one, fucko.
Next is Peter Casey, businessman, former Dragon’s Den host and racist. He came second in the 2019 election with 23.3% of first preference votes, his popularity skyrocketed from a constant 2% in polls after he decided his platform would be bigotry against Travellers. Thankfully no council decided to back him. He’s run in just about every election since then and lost horribly each time, so I’m beginning to think it’s a humiliation fetish.
Gareth Sheridan, another businessman who’s spent most of his adult life in the US put his name forward, and he managed to actually get two council nominations. As well as Casey, the last two elections had a couple of other people who’s qualifications bouled down to “I’ve run one or more companies, and may or may not have been on the telly as a result”, and he tried to continue that trend.
Maria Steen went the Oireachtas route, but fell short with only 18 nominations. Steen is someone I’m painfully familiar with, she’s a spokespoerson for the Iona Institute, one of the religious conservative groups who have fought back against various progressive causes in Ireland, notably Repeal and Marraige Equality. Back in the 80s during the campaign for the 8th Amendment, they were shipping headbangers around to phyiscally assault and intimidate campaigners. Steen’s a real piece of work but an accomplished public speaker when she can stick to her taking points. Apparently her followers started hassling TDs and Senators online in an attempt to get them to support her, and shockingly this turned people off her! Since not being able to get on the ballot, her supporters have been flooding comment sections on Irish news sites and social media screaming about her exclusion from the ballot being undemocratic and claiming they’re all going to spoil their votes. Given how few people actually spoil their ballots I’ll believe it when I see it.
So who got on there?
Jim Gavin is Fianna Fail’s candidate. He’s never held political office before, but was a Commondant in the Air Corps (he served in a staff position during UN operations in Chad) and manager of the Dublin Gaelic football team – he’s considered one of the best GAA managers in the history of the sports, so he has some history of public service at least. Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach and pivotal figure in a number of corruption trials during his time in office had put out feelers to be the Fianna Fail nominee but thankfully massive public backlash convinced him to crawl back in his hole.
Heather Humphries is the Fine Gael candidate. She was elected as a TD in 2011, served in various ministerial positions from 2014 until last year when she decided to not run for reelection. She was also deputy leader of Fine Gael for most of last year. So she’s got a lot of parliamentary experience. Critics are pointing out that she’s a protestant from a border town and refuses to answer questions about whether she or her husband were in the Orange Order. She describes herself as a Republican though.
Catherine Connolly is a united left candidate, backed by… deep breath… Labour, the Greens, the Social Democrats, Sinn Fein, Solidarity and People Before Profit as well as a number of parties with no seats in the Oireachtas. She’s an independent TD in Galway West at present and was Leas-Ceann Comhairle (deputy speaker of the house) for Dail Eireann between 2020 and 2024. She’s facing scrutiny over her support for Palestine, including statements about self-determination that are being taken out of context as support for Hamas, a trip to Syria she went on in 2018 where she didn’t expressly criticise the Assad regime, and nominating the journalist turned conspiracy theorist Gemma O’Doherty during the 2018 Presidential election.
Given my broad oppositon to Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for being neoliberal shitbags, I’m going to be putting a single preference on a ballot for the first time and voting for Connolly.
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UKians seething about the US is always funny. You lost, get over it.
This is an example of why we shouldn’t just buy the framing of internet memes. A quick Google shows the author is from Wisconsin, his Substack contains this line:
I am American, yes—but I no longer see myself as merely just “American.” Not in the narrow way nationalism demands.
To the other point. I don’t think the ‘you lost’ thing really resonates 250 years on. It probably weighs as heavily on the average UK citizen as the Netherlands not owning Indonesia, Turks pining for the Ottoman Empire or the USA wanting the Philippines back. Not at all really.
I think it is fair to point out hypocrisy at times from Brits and other Europeans criticising the USA (an example is on immigration where they always been far more draconian than the US). Trump is awful though, gun deaths are high, too many people go bankrupt from health issues and I don’t think it serves anyone well to pretend they don’t exist or they can’t comment.
It reminds me a bit of a BBC Hardtalk show I saw maybe 20 years back when I first arrived in Malaysia and the foreign minister basically defended every tough question with ‘you are foreign so don’t understand’ and when that failed with ‘the British did terrible things in 1857’. While true was hardly relevant to the questions being asked or the responsibility of the 35 year old British woman of Indian heritage asking them.
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Talking of the US, if New York was cut off from federal funds and decided to withold its tax revenue, what happens to the rest of the US? Asking for, er, someone…
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Talking of the US, if New York was cut off from federal funds and decided to withold its tax revenue, what happens to the rest of the US? Asking for, er, someone…
Saw this on Facebook, which may give you some insight.
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An excellent column by Patti Vasquez (The Patti Vasquez Show), a writer, comedian, and radio host from Chicago. She hosts Driving it Home with Patti Vasquez on WCPT 820 AM, Chicago’s Progressive Talk.
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Trump Country Is Going Broke
Tensions are crazy high right now. Many of us are angry at the chaos, the violence, at watching everything we warned about come true. But the way to turn this around isn’t through matching their hate. It’s through relentlessly showing working Americans what’s actually happening.
Every foreclosed farm is a Trump voter who could be reached. Every parent facing a $372 per student education cut is persuadable. Every suburban Republican watching their property taxes explode while their services disappear is a potential ally against authoritarianism.
Democrats- we need to start talking about the bills people can’t pay. Healthcare costs. Housing prices. Grocery bills. School budgets. Property taxes. These aren’t just economic issues – they’re proof that MAGA governance is a scam that hurts the very people who vote for it.
Red states handed Trump his victory. Now they’re getting destroyed by it.
Across Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and Ohio – the heart of MAGA country – cities are slashing services, gutting education, and watching their budgets implode. Fort Worth is scrambling to close a $17 million deficit. Kentucky depends on federal funds for 30% of its budget – funds Trump is cutting. Florida faces a potential $7 billion shortfall while spending $505 million to enforce Trump’s immigration policies.
The leopards are feasting in Trump country. Unfortunately, we’re all on the menu.
Texas delivered Trump his biggest victory margin. Texas is now delivering the biggest budget disasters. Houston officials are calculating how much of their $6.7 billion budget will vanish under Trump’s spending freeze. San Antonio depends on $325.5 million in federal funds that keep low-income families housed. Dallas has the worst taxpayer burden in Texas at $13,000 per person.
“If confusion and chaos were the goal, mission accomplished,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said about Trump’s policies.
These are the suburban Republicans who drive $80,000 F-150 Platinums to HOA meetings in master-planned communities. The ones who post Facebook rants about “welfare queens” while their kids attend publicly-funded schools, drive on federally-funded roads, and drink water from government-maintained systems. They genuinely believed economic devastation was reserved for “those people” in blue cities.
Meanwhile, rural America collapses. Farms bankrupted by tariffs, China refusing to buy American soybeans, rural hospitals shuttering after the “big beautiful bill” gutted their funding. They told themselves they were different. They had real jobs. Good insurance. They were insulated.
While MAGA was outraged by drag queens and library books, Trump quietly withheld $6.8 billion in federal education funds Congress had already approved. After-school programs serving 1.4 million children are shutting down. Trump’s proposed budget cuts Department of Education funding by 15% and eliminates all $1.3 billion for English language learners. In Kentucky – deep Trump country – the highest-poverty schools could lose $372 per student.
These are their kids’ schools. They voted to destroy them because they were mad about pronouns. But math is “woke” now, while inspecting children’s genitals for sports is a legislative priority.
MAGA voters never understood that Red states are “taker states.” They receive far more federal money than they send to Washington. Kentucky is among the top five nationally, receiving 30.1% of its budget from federal funding. That’s $4,850 for every person. Indiana gets 25.7%. Ohio takes 21%. Even Florida depends on the federal government for 32% of its budget.
They mock California and call it a liberal hellscape. The sunshine state sends more to Washington than it gets back. It’s subsidizing them.
The “big beautiful bullshit bill” cuts the federal aid keeping their states alive. Medicaid for rural hospitals, education money for schools, infrastructure funds for roads. They voted to kill the very things keeping them afloat.
State Senator Paul Bettencourt insists cities aren’t “starved” because they can just ask voters to raise taxes. Sure, Paul. The same voters who elected officials promising to eliminate taxes will happily vote to raise them.
Austin is asking voters to approve a 20% property tax increase just to maintain basic services. That’s an extra $303 per year before the real cuts hit. When ACA subsidies expire, health insurance premiums will spike between $360 and $1,860 per person annually. Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston are all facing massive tax increases or complete service collapse.
They believed they were voting against taxes. They voted for the biggest property tax increases in history.
While red state cities collapse, Wall Street thrives. JD Vance’s investment fund profits from the economic chaos. When cities sell assets or privatize services, private equity swoops in. When family farms fail, agribusiness giants buy the land at fire-sale prices.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model, Trump’s own “alma mater” – projects his tariffs will reduce GDP by 8% and wages by 7%. A middle-income family faces a $58,000 lifetime loss. That’s not Woke spin, that’s Wharton.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful (Bullshit) Bill” slashes non-defense discretionary spending by $163 billion. It creates $5 trillion in revenue losses while gutting everything from education to infrastructure. The only thing beautiful about it is if you’re a billionaire getting another tax cut.
MAGA voted to “take back our country.” Private equity took their cities instead.
Texas Republicans who spent decades claiming government is the problem are discovering what happens when government can’t afford to function.
But, we all suffer for their choices.
Blue states will bail them out. Again. Our federal tax dollars will flow to states that voted to destroy themselves.
They voted to hurt all of us. For what? Trans athletes? Immigrants picking strawberries? Masks during a pandemic?
But, maybe their pain is our opportunity to show them exactly who did this to them.
Every property tax bill is a resistance flyer. Every school closure is a campaign ad. Every shuttered hospital is proof that fascism doesn’t deliver – it only destroys.
When your property tax bill arrives, post it with context: “My taxes went up $500 because Trump cut federal aid.” In local Facebook groups complaining about potholes, respond: “Trump cut infrastructure funding by $163 billion.” At city council meetings, bring printed copies of Trump’s budget cuts.
Document everything. The teacher buying supplies = Trump’s education cuts. The family driving two hours to a hospital = Trump’s rural healthcare devastation. The farmer at bankruptcy auction = Trump’s tariffs.
Match faces to numbers. Make it real. Make it impossible to blame anyone else.
To every suburban Trump voter watching their city council desperately try to avoid bankruptcy: This is what you voted for. Not to hurt urban liberals, but to destroy your own city, your own home value, your own kids’ schools.
They thought they were protected by their zip codes, their income levels, their melanin levels. They thought economic catastrophe was for “those people.”
Surprise. They are those people now. We all are.
Be sure to take note of how the leopard’s breath smells MAGA. They are eating extraordinarily well these days. And they’ve developed quite a taste for suburban Republican faces.
While Trump plays power games and the media chases whatever authoritarian nightmare drops today, the bills keep coming. Property taxes keep rising. Schools keep closing. Hospitals keep shuttering in every red state that voted for this.
That’s the story we need to tell.
Not the palace intrigue.
The bills. The bankruptcies. The collapse.
Grab those bills. Post those notices. Film those closures. Show every struggling family exactly who’s picking their pockets. Make it personal, make it local, make it relentless.
Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies when people can’t pay their bills and blame the wrong people for it.
We have the receipts. Let’s use them.
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And because there’s a two term-limit, the current president, Yoda Michael D Higgins can’t run again.
What was Higgins’s deal before he was President?
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