I wonder who’ll be next week’s Prime Minister?
Politics and Current Affairs
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A thing that’s important to realise/remember is that at the heart of a lot of these transphobic movements – especially in the UK and the ones that claim to be left-wing – are some very weird and regressive strains of feminism. Female separatist, political lesbian types. The kind of people who think that there’s no such thing as consent under the Patriarchy and therefore all heterosexual sex is rape. A lot of them were able to carve out niches in the media and academia but their ideas began to fall out of vogue with mainstream feminist thought when the Third Wave began in the 90s. A lot of the core rhetoric comes from them, mixed in with the recycled 80s and 90s gay panic stuff the tabloids push out.
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I followed Graham Linehan’s twitter for a while to see what he is going on about but this guy is completely obsessed with the trans issue.
Yup. It’s bizarre behaviour really. Recent census data came back that the entirety of trans women in the UK amounted to 42,000, they could fit into a mid table football ground. 50% of people claim to have never met a trans person of any kind.
Linehan claims he is fighting for the safety of women but says nothing about the report into the Metropolitan Police today that said rape was effectively legalised because the conviction rate was so low. Instead of focussing on a massive existing threat, one in 4 women in the UK claim they have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, all his time is wasted on a theoretical one.
As people have sarcastically asked him – ‘is this your job now?’. It seems like it is and that’s a sad fall a man who was a genuinely excellent comedy writer.
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I think the truth is that (as with a lot of these things) the arguments that you see online or even in the media often don’t represent widespread feelings on subjects like this, the extreme positions get amplified as part of the discussion and it gives a false impression that there is a huge gulf of public opinion, with people clustered around two opposing poles and at war with one another, which I’m not sure is the case for the population at large.
In reality I think a lot of people support the right of trans people to live as they choose and (like Gar says) it’s a subject that probably doesn’t have a huge impact on their lives either way. The risk is that people get carried away by the media/social media arguments and end up with strong feelings about things that don’t really warrant that reaction.
I know from my own personal experiences with trans people that the issues that the media focuses on heavily are often not reflective of what is important to them – they’re not similarly obsessed with toilets and militant about pronouns, they just want to go about their lives without being hassled and with the acceptance they deserve.
One thing that I think is unhelpful is the crude and clunky language that is used to frame the arguments in the media, the attempt to boil down the argument to a discussion of exactly what Male and Female mean, or ‘gotcha’ questions about how you define a woman, or whatever. Often these end up feeling like a distraction, more often than not they’re focused on language and definitions rather than the underlying realities, and they often don’t have much nuance to them.
One positive I see is that the younger generation seem quite switched on about all this and I think there’s a general progressive momentum that is moving in the right direction. Again from my own experiences, my kids and their schoolfriends discuss gender issues openly and positively and there is a pretty decent level of understanding there, so it feel like (as with other civil rights aspects) there will be an aspect of generational change in understanding and acceptance.
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The trans issue is actually a way to attack gays and gay issues.
It’s more complicated than that. I know at least one gay person who has made anti-trans-rights comments (“mild”, but still enough to make me uncomfortable).
I’ve tried counter-arguing with “That’s exactly what people were saying to you 30 years ago…” but logic doesn’t seem to work in these cases.
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The trans issue is actually a way to attack gays and gay issues.
It’s more complicated than that. I know at least one gay person who has made anti-trans-rights comments (“mild”, but still enough to make me uncomfortable).
I’ve tried counter-arguing with “That’s exactly what people were saying to you 30 years ago…” but logic doesn’t seem to work in these cases.
The LGBT community can be very factitious. Like any community really, but you’ve got people who have most or all of the rights they see as important and are worried reactionaries will work to remove them if we’ve “go too far”, or have bought into respectability politics and see Gender Non-Conforming people as too extreme. There’s a lot of gay and lesbian people who are openly biphobic and see us as either “saucy straights” or people who “haven’t gone gay yet”, there’s a lot of gay men especially who are too young to remember how bad AIDS was, especially in the US and how lesbians were some of the only people willing to help them and wonder why are they in the same community at all…
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the extreme positions get amplified as part of the discussion and it gives a false impression that there is a huge gulf of public opinion, with people clustered around two opposing poles and at war with one another, which I’m not sure is the case for the population at large.
I would say my ‘for you’ tab on Twitter amplifies trans issues massively. It’s not as anti-trans as many may imagine, I’d say the majority is sympathetic, likely following my overall liberal politics but it’s always there at the top of the feed.
100% this is amplified beyond logic really. The press try and ‘gotcha’ politicians on stuff like ‘what is a woman?’ questions but I don’t know how many people really care that deeply about it. We did get a lot of the same rhetoric about gay people 30 years ago in public toilets nothing much came of it or mattered. We had the same about people being encouraged to be gay by education, nobody would choose even now to be gay or trans when being straight and cis is so much easier in life.
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It seems like the parts of the discussion that catch the public’s attention are that kind of fringe issues, though, sadly. Seems to all revolve about Olympic athletes and that kind of thing when honestly, who even gives a shit about that? A good friend of mine decided to identify as a woman when she was in her twenties, and she’s working as a nurse in a geriatric home and weirdly she’s never participated in any Olympics at all!
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Yeah a lot of the focus is on certain excesses…Linehan linked to a list of transgender people who were convicted for sexual offences, including against minors, which is horrific and I hope they get the worst punishment available, but that doesn’t represent the transgender community as a whole. But it is what people hear about. Typically the newspaper doesn’t do stories about transgender people living normal lives.
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It seems like the parts of the discussion that catch the public’s attention are that kind of fringe issues, though, sadly. Seems to all revolve about Olympic athletes and that kind of thing when honestly, who even gives a shit about that? A good friend of mine decided to identify as a woman when she was in her twenties, and she’s working as a nurse in a geriatric home and weirdly she’s never participated in any Olympics at all!
The entire focus on sports, in general, has always seemed absurd to me. The percentage of people who identify as trans is like 1%. Of those we can assume half are men transitioning to women. Of that only another fraction are interested in sports and hardly any will likely be at an elite level. Which isn’t to say it’s not something sports orgs need to figure out, but it all feels so overblown. And it’s especially obnoxious when the same people pushing these things because they allegedly want “fairness for women’s sports” are also pushing anti-abortion legislation. It’s all just about cruelty at this point. Like, m sorry if your daughter comes in 4th instead of 3rd at some random track meet because she competed against a trans girl. I promise it won’t impact her life at all, bu it could make the world of difference to trans people if we just don’t act like dicks and include trans people in simple shit.
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They had a pollster on The News Agents podcast today and he said from their findings the vast majority of people (in the UK at least) are not as binary on the issue as the noise in the media. A lot of people had issues with fairness in sport but also supported self-ID.
I do see the concern with sports, there are factually advantages that cannot be controlled by hormones (bone strength, larger organs like lungs and heart etc) and unlike other realms of life sports are quite exclusionary by their nature.
Even so the reaction is still overblown, the IAA banned trans athletes this week with the admission from their boss, Sebastian Coe, that there aren’t any at the top level at the moment. At amateur level and played for fun, as Chris says, who cares?
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Donald Trump Just Proved He Is A Racist
So, his and his father’s denying African Americans housing and his persecuting the Central Park Five wasn’t proof enough?
A Facebook friend, RaShawn Seams, compiled this list:
“Whenever a Trump supporter asks you to “name one time Trump was racist,” feel free to link to this….
1973: The Nixon administration sued Trump for refusing to rent to black people.
1980s: Trump’s casinos were accused of hiding the black staff when Trump visited.
1989: Trump took out a full-page ad, arguing for the death penalty for a group of black men (The ‘Central Park Five’), effectively putting a bounty on their heads, and plaguing them with a lifetime of death threats. He was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination.
1991: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kinds of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day… I think that the [black] guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is.”
1992: Trump’s casino was fined $200,000 for transferring black dealers off certain tables to appease racist patrons.
1993: Trump said Native American casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: Trump ran a series of attack ads against Native American casinos alleging (with no proof) that they were guilty of crimes.
2004: Trump fired a black contestant from ‘The Apprentice’ for being over-educated.
2010: Trump argued in favor of segregating Muslims in Lower Manhattan.
2011: Birtherism. Trump alleged that Obama was Kenyan based on nothing but skin color. He never apologized nor renounced that claim.
2015 (1): Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime and drugs” to the U.S.
2015 (2): Trump called for “a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S.”
2016 (1): Trump called for a Mexican judge to recuse himself based on nothing other than his race. Paul Ryan said this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
2016 (2): Trump regularly retweeted material from white supremacists and neo-Nazis during his campaign.
2016 (3): Trump tweeted a picture alleging that Hillary was Jewish, or controlled by Jewish people.
2016 (4): The Trump campaign adopted Nixon’s “Law and Order” rhetoric which was based in racial fearmongering.
2016 (5): Trump told black voters “What do you have to lose?”
2017 (1): Trump asked a reporter to set up a meeting with the black caucus simply because she was black.
2017 (2): “…some very fine people on both sides” said Trump of a violent Nazi rally.
2017 (3): Trump said people from Haiti “all have AIDS” and people from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America.
2018 (1): Trump called Haiti and African countries shitholes.
2018 (2): Trump referenced the trail of tears to mock Elizabeth Warren.
2019: Trump tweeted that four black and brown congresswomen should go back where they came from. Then attacked Elijah Cummings. Then Baltimore. Than Al Sharpton.
2020: Trump called black protesters “THUGS” just days after calling white protesters “very good people.” Then he threatened to direct the military to shoot the black protestors in the street.”
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Nice list you posted @todd.And yet… He got 70M who voted for him.
I understand the postings that the Dems aren’t saints.
But it seems that many vote over someone “down to earth and can sit and have a beer with”,
promising gas prices, tax cut, evangelical theology, and so on, but not exactly over the
deeper issues that will have a bearing the next 10-20 years.It is not so much that MTG, Boebert, Gaetz, etc. are in office.
It is that a LOT of people agreed and voted them in.1 user thanked author for this post.
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Trump: Nobody laughed at our country when I ran it. pic.twitter.com/NS42mVkfYD
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 25, 2023
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It would be interesting to see just how right wing Israel needs to be before the US thinks twice about unwavering support for its every action.
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Considering how batshit toxic and criminal the right wing of the US is, I suspect the answer is that Israel could never be too right wing to lose the unwavering support of the US.
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Trump: Nobody laughed at our country when I ran it. pic.twitter.com/NS42mVkfYD
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 25, 2023
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The way Israeli politics has gone over the last 20-odd years, often with the same bastard at the heart of it, Yahweh could incarnate on earth, tell Netayahu he’s an idiot and get told to fuck off by him, with his backers howling support.
It’s that messy and FUBAR.
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It’s a very complex setup in that region. It has to be understood though that the settlers are religious extremists. There is no logical reason to claim those areas, the land is barren, has no water, and they put themselves under a lot of risk when they could live in Tel Aviv or Haifa on the Med which are lovely and safe. Crazily in Haifa they had a display just before Christmas with Muslim, Jewish and Christian symbols and no issues day to day with communities together.
I’ve travelled most of the region with an Israeli born Jewish guide, she gave a very pro Israeli viewpoint but thought the settlers were nutjobs. They are now a big part of the coalition though.
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All the shit Trump needs to be indicted for, and what they get him with is paying a porn star not to tell people he smashed?
Well, they got Capone for tax evasion.
Also… what they’re hopefully going to get him for isn’t that. It’s for paying her hush money from his campaign funds, which basically means he stole that money from the people who donated for him to run for president. That’s a quite a serious crime, I’d say.
We’ll see if they get him for this. I’m sure there are more lawsuits to come anyway. Trump has treated the law an an optional kind of thing all his life, and this shit is coming to bite him in the ass.
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Same way Elizabeth Holmes got done for defrauding investors and not, say developing a product that incorrectly diagnosed a patient has being HIV-positive.
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As for downtown NYC, I guess I was a Tuesday too early. 🤣
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No way in hell this should be legal:
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No way in hell this should be legal:
This suddenly went from being about lack of gun control in Tennessee to being about Republican racism in Tennessee. Way to go, GOP!!
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President Biden should pardon Trump. It’s the right thing to do.
Yeah, I sincerely doubt that.
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Well, that was a terrible article.
For one thing, just to point out the glaringly obvious, Nixon had actually resigned, which could be seen as an admission of guilt an an act of repentance. Whereas Trump called for revolution and is going to run again. Nixon had removed himself from the playing field of politics and it was clear he wouldn’t do further damage to the US democracy; with Trump, it’s the exact opposite.
Also, the article didn’t actually make an argument of its own, it just quoted Ford about Nixon. And the obvious reply to that (apart from the difference mentioned above) is, well, if they had fucking tried Nixon, maybe there wouldn’t have been so many presidents who thought crimeing would be an awesome thing to do. Maybe if they had just for once shown that there are fucking consequences to betraying the trust of the people instead of demonstrating that the political class will always have each other’s back above anything else, there would be a few more honest fucking politicians around.
Of course, the actual argument here is that it’s not just a few people who believe Trump is a persecuted hero, but almost half of the country, and that actually putting him in prison (where he belongs) may lead to worse consequences down the road as militias of crazy Trumpers form and start attacking people. Or whatever. But, you know, fuck that. It’s either now or never, and if they fail to convict an obviously guilty billionnaire now, the justicy system might as well just pack it in and everybody give up on ever improving anything at all in that country.
(If you’re cynical, I suppose there is also a strategic argument for keeping him around: Trump is such a highly controversial figure that another presidential run by him would get people out voting and pretty much guarantee a democratic win. Plus, the Republicans would rip themselves apart trying to prevent his candidacy.
If he’s in jail during the next election, on the other hand, the left will kinda feel that they’ve won no matter what and whoever runs instead of him (probably DeSantis) will look better in comparison, so they’ll have trouble getting the votes, and the problem is that someone like DeSantis will propagate exactly the same policies, but be more competent in actually pushing them through while in office.
So, in that cynical way, it could be argued that it would be better for the country if Trump stayed out of jail.) -
President Biden should pardon Trump. It’s the right thing to do.
Yeah, I sincerely doubt that.
To put it mildly…Fuck that. Look I’m not convinced Trump gets convicted f anything. But if he does, he should rot. Like Nixon should have. Part of the reason we’re in this mess is because Nixon was let off the hook. Let Trump off the hook too and it tells every politician that aspires to be president that they truly will be above accountability no matter what they do. We tried it with Nixon and we’ve been paying for it ever since. But this is classic conservative logic: just do the same shit that’s failed in the past over and over again. Because we swear it’ll work eventually.
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That could have been one factor why they decided he was a threat to the status quo and why he had to be defeated, and why he is the one to be jailed.
Threat to the status quo? He tried to destroy the country and has done serious damage to the US.
Trump broke the fucking law to the point no one could look the other way. He incited an insurrection. The man is a criminal and desrves to be locked up. There is absolutely no defense of Trump.
DeSantis will be just as bad for the US as Trump, though probably less overtly criminal.
What you need to understand is that Republicans and conservatives are bigots and fascists. They are doing everything they can to make this country for a paradise for affluent white males at the cost of everyone else.
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No way in hell this should be legal:
It is to be expected. Then there is this observation of an even more recent shooting:
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There is an argument that most recent US presidents should be in jail. Certainly Bush, and Obama probably.
Well that was my point wasn’t it. If they’d jailed Nixon, maybe Bush would’ve thought twice about faking evidence in order to get his country to enter a war of aggression.
Ironically I think it was Trump who started with threats to jail political opponents. That could have been one factor why they decided he was a threat to the status quo and why he had to be defeated, and why he is the one to be jailed.
Nah, it was always clear that he’d never actually call for anyone to suffer legal consequences for their actions. Just election bluster.
On the other hand, he did almost get a few colleagues lynched, which was probably the point at which a lot of them thought “Fuck that guy”.
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Well, some say liberal democracy, some say oligarchy. Potato, potato.
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You could make it cheap, but introduce a quota. So everybody at any income level could afford to fly – but you’re only doing it once per year, I don’t care if you’re Elon Musk, you get one trip and that’s it. That would be the fair way to limit it.
Edit: which I now realise is just re-stating what Christian said :D
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To go from Houston to El Paso, it is a 10-hour drive
But does anybody need to go to El Paso?
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The question is, what’s the alternative. We can’t keep making flying so cheap that everybody can afford to have multiple flights in a year, that’s just too damaging. It’s pretty obvious you at the very least have to stop subsidising kerosine on the EU level (which is an insane policy), and that’ll make flying somewhat more expensive.
So what is the alternative? One that’d be satisfying to a left-wing mindset? Probably not making this dependent on what you can afford, but rather do a limitation on the absolute number of miles any person is allowed to fly, so it’ll be the same for the rich and the poor alike. If that was in place, you wouldn’t need to drive up prices by calculating the CO2 costs of flying and putting those on the tickets.
Would that be a satisfying solution for you, Arjan? I mean, it wouldn’t be politicially realistic, but it would be the kind of thing a proper left-winger should at least suggest.
It is kind of mad that I am planning a trip now to the UK in July and the most environmentally friendly method of travel, the train, is incredibly expensive. I found a flight from Cardiff to Dublin that is half the price of a train from London to Oxford.
There must be some weird structures at play that make that possible. It generally doesn’t make logical sense.
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Trump says he will ‘never’ drop out of 2024 race – even from jail
That, I’d like to see. Trump in a jail cell, I mean.
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We pay road tax here so I think it is pretty common but yeah I have no idea how it stacks up. I mean it isn’t massive amounts of money Even 20 years ago I did pay more in the UK for a single train journey to London than the road tax on my car cost for a year. (A Ford Fiesta so in the system at the time on engine capacity at the lowest rate of about 55 quid).
The Welsh government has been rather bold in committing to no major road builds in future because analysis has shown that building more lanes and road capacity just sends more people into cars and the jams return soon enough.
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“plebs don’t fly” is not acceptable.
I don’t think anyone suggested it should be but also we have a weirdly skewed system not really based in distance and energy expended but variations of support and subsidy.
We should focus more on the options. France I think had a good idea on cutting short distance journeys by air. London to Edinburgh is not a journey that is significantly faster whatever option you take (if you add in check in and luggage collection time). Right now the cost is the opposite of the least environmentally damaging.
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I don’t know. But “plebs don’t fly” is not acceptable.
So you’re not interested in the actual problem or possible solutions, you just want to seethe in anger at the Dutch left. Gotcha.
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Fucking Brexit. Another casulty of that goddamn, macho bullshit:
Scratch being able to get on the Orient Express in London.
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It’s not my job to come up with the solution, I’m just a moron talking about stuff on a comic book forum, but if I see them giving a “solution” that makes poor people’s lives shittier, yes I will seethe.
My point is that I was suggesting alternatives, and you weren’t interested in discussing any. You’re not politician but since you reject one suggested solution to air travel’s contribution to climate change, it’d be the natural next step to discuss alternatives.
I don’t think these politicians and opinion makers are really left wing, they’re elitists. I voted for a left wing party last time, just one that wasn’t in their camp.
Well, whoever “they” are. But sure, yeah, I get that. It’s pretty much how I feel about our labour party (SPD) and their current leadership.
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Fucking Brexit. Another casulty of that goddamn, macho bullshit:
Speaking of Brexit casualties, and also speaking of seething with rage, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but we’re doing our first school trip to the UK this year with our 7th graders and it turns out that if you don’t have an EU passport (and some of our kids don’t, mostly those with refugee status), you need a visa that you don’t have a hope in hell of actually getting because communication with the institute that’s supposed to give them out is probably impossible and you have to pay a hundred bucks in advance and then they’ll give you an appointment or not, and if they do it’s posssibly in a city on the other end of Germany. So you can just scratch that and those kids can enter another frustrating experience of systemic discrimination into their journal as they can’t go on the trip with all their friends. Thanks, Brexit!
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Yep. It’s had some very limited coverage over here but foreign school visits to the UK have collapsed. The cause? A bureaucratic hellscape that European schools are looking at and going: Nope, fuck that. Instead they are, not unreasonably, picking other, easier destinations within the EU.
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I don’t think these politicians and opinion makers are really left wing, they’re elitists.
I think this ‘elite’ stuff is very abused and contradictory to be honest.
We have recently had ‘anti-elite’ candidates in the US and UK from the right who were born into extreme wealth and privilege and if you look behind the rhetoric their policies are basically about retaining that. Trump passed almost nothing of consequence in his term apart from massive tax cuts at the high end. He spoke a lot about returning jobs but did nothing really about it apart from reduce environmental controls.
Saying that I do recognise that there have been big failings on the left, they have rather glossed over post industrial areas to woo the city dwelling middle class. Despite that you do have to follow the money back, conspiracies are there to deflect from that really.
It was noted recently by a very balanced news source that Liz Truss blamed the ‘deep state’ and ‘woke culture’ on preventing her radical tax reduction package. In fact nothing prevented her, she did it and passed it, the market tanked because it wasn’t funded and made no sense. If you live in a post industrial area or rely on state benefits do not wish for right wing solutions as they will fuck you in the arse.
If you were in the US or UK equivalents you won’t be debating flight quotas because ever travelling overseas without a high paying job is impossible.
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I don’t think these politicians and opinion makers are really left wing, they’re elitists.
I think this ‘elite’ stuff is very abused and contradictory to be honest.
We have recently had ‘anti-elite’ candidates in the US and UK from the right who were born into extreme wealth and privilege and if you look behind the rhetoric their policies are basically about retaining that. Trump passed almost nothing of consequence in his term apart from massive tax cuts at the high end. He spoke a lot about returning jobs but did nothing really about it apart from reduce environmental controls.
Saying that I do recognise that there have been big failings on the left, they have rather glossed over post industrial areas to woo the city dwelling middle class. Despite that you do have to follow the money back, conspiracies are there to deflect from that really.
It was noted recently by a very balanced news source that Liz Truss blamed the ‘deep state’ and ‘woke culture’ on preventing her radical tax reduction package. In fact nothing prevented her, she did it and passed it, the market tanked because it wasn’t funded and made no sense. If you live in a post industrial area or rely on state benefits do not wish for right wing solutions as they will fuck you in the arse.
If you were in the US or UK equivalents you won’t be debating flight quotas because ever travelling overseas without a high paying job is impossible.
I know it’s a controversial word, but I think it fit with the column I read. This guy doesn’t care about poor people, whereas he himself flies 20 times a year. I think elitist is fitting as a description.
But I know the word gets abused a lot. It’s ridiculous when Trump or the tories use it to attack to their opponents.
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Does Tim Scott have a path to the presidency?
Yeah, I’m highly skeptical of the GOP getting behind a non-White candidate.
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Does Tim Scott have a path to the presidency?
Yeah, I’m highly skeptical of the GOP getting behind a non-White candidate.
Especially since Trump has stored the hornet’s nest of bigots in the country where they feel comfortable being openly racist.
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What’s really crazy is that there is nothing in the US Constitution prohibiting a convicted felon from becoming President. And even though it makes no sense (to me) that anyone would vote for a convicted felon, Trump’s base would still vote for him, and so would a lot of non-Trump Republicans and Independents who decide they don’t like the Democratic candidate.
The Dems best chance would be if the GOP chooses to nominate someone else (Desantis?) as their official candidate, and Trump runs as a third-party candidate. But this is not likely as long as the current Republican regime is in place.
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He did say once that he could kill someone in public and people would still vote for him.
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Well, claiming that Jewish people don’t experience racism is certainly a fairly decisive way to end your political career.
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And there’s never been any anti-Irish attitudes in the UK, right? Wait…
Abbott’s apologised, which is something in this age of never apologise that too many politicians do, see Raab.
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Meanwhile, at 3pm everywhere in the UK:
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Tucker Carlson is officially out at Fox News: click
Pretty huge deal, even if there’s still tons of trash at that network.
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Tucker Carlson is officially out at Fox News: click
Pretty huge deal, even if there’s still tons of trash at that network.
I saw an article last week that Rupert Murdoch wants Maria Bartiromo and Janet Pirro fired because of the Dominion settlement. I think there will be more people leaving the network very soon. Fox News still has the Smartmatic lawsuit to deal with and the Dominion settlement will not help that.
The fun part is seeing where they go. Newsmax and OAN are facing their own lawsuits with Dominion and Smartmatic. I saw that they may file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to avoid getting hit too hard financially. They may be a bit reticent to hire ex-FN personalities anytime soon as it could be considered a bad look for them in the lawsuits.
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Yeah, the lawyers for Smartmatic have already said they won’t settle for less than Dominion and that they’re going to demand a full retraction of the lies. Hopefully more heads roll at Fox, but right now I’m happy Tucker is at least off their airwaves for a little while now. Wasn’t something I expected to see.
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Peru has three ex-presidents in one jail. Seems to be the US’s future.
For the first time ever Peru has jailed three ex presidents simultaneously. They are all in the same jail too, a special facility where only ex leaders are housed https://t.co/DzisS8SSwi
— Marcelo Rochabrún (@mrochabrun) April 23, 2023
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The Carlson story has gotten better – he got fired!
He finished his Friday show with “we’ll be back on Monday”, having no clue he wouldn’t be.
I would wager he is not going to be the last to be fired either. I can imagine there was quite a bit of shitting and vomitting by some people after news that he was gone had gotten out.
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More seriously, this does show how spectacularly crappy US employment law is.
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It’s plausible that Carlson was a contractor rather than an employee, it’s very common for media personalities to structure their payment this way for tax reasons. If that’s the case he wouldn’t have any employer-employee relationship with Fox even if the US did value workers.
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Neo-Nazi gang aims to make New England a white ethnostate: report
I live in New York, which borders the New England region. I’m not trusting they won’t eventually try to cross over.
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Florida, man:
https://time.com/6274762/disney-sues-ron-desantis/
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Montana:
This might go under the radar, (like the fact that more states under the GOP are banning books), but it reminds me of
that writing “First they came for…”. It is very subtle.To put it in scaled down percentages, this:
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Should credit be given to a govermment for almost abandoning an act of utter stupidity?
On the one hand, the news reported by the FT, the act to scrap 4,000 pieces of EU legislation without guaranteed replacements is welcome. But they still intend to scrap 800.
https://www.ft.com/content/ce458b68-b0ea-453f-8730-a174256e7c4e
And the general areas of scrappage? Emissions trading and product safety. If asked to select specific ones to scrap? Brexiteers fail to do so.
Hopefully, the remaining dregs of this absurd undertaking will also be also abandoned.
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Richard Sharp has resigned as Chairman of the BBC.
The next person for the job is?
I have informed the BBC that I am very much available to be chairman pic.twitter.com/SSD13Fwp7y
— Joe Lycett (@joelycett) April 28, 2023
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Lauren Boebert Proves MAGA Is Dying
Probably not quickly enough.
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