You know, if you think of the Christian god from the perspective of a "jealous god and your admittance to heaven solely depends on your submission to HE", christian support of Trump kinda makes sense.
Of course, any such god is quite transparently The Bad Guy which is the core problem with such thinking, whether in support of Trump or Christianity.
Any god who cares about worship rather than good deeds, I'll meet in hell and I will have no mercy for them.
And honestly, my reading of the bible would seem to indicate that should any "god" be so real and so evil, the human spirit should absolutely be able to reject and physically kill them. I almost hope it's true because shit bro Final Fantasy in real life let's fuckin' kill 'em
@juddlegum deconstructs then skewers MAGA and political-chattering-class talking points (even from “libs”) about Trump’s guilty verdicts.
I’ve been saying that the judgment is rare not because Bragg is biased (out to get TFG) but because his ACTIONS WERE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE. Judd says is better and with a bigger mic.
@br00t4c
"For many Chinese people my age or younger, finding out what happened at Tiananmen marks a moment of political awakening, a painful rupture from the past one used to know. Tiananmen is no longer a place; it is an event encapsulating the best and the worst of China. It becomes an open wound. To hold this knowledge is to assume a responsibility. One feels constantly interrogated: What can you, the living, do to not betray the dead?"
Not good. "The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House..."
New executive editor (breaking news) is ex-WSJ and will run the paper thru November. His replacement is from The Telegraph.
New publisher (late 2023) is ex-WSJ (Rupert Murdoch/FOX) and UK Telegraph (which has endorsed the Conservative Party in every UK general election since 1945).
This is how Bezos joins Wall Street billionaires who are endorsing Trump.
Capitalism is that system of relationships in which human beings want other human beings to do the work so that they can enjoy the profits without doing the work.
@WarnerCrocker “One gets the impression reading the dissents that they think of the 'right to vote' in talismanic terms, as though it were a kind of superpower of citizenship, to be wielded in times of trouble whenever and wherever desired," Stegall [author of the majority opinion] wrote. "Our view is both more realistic and practical as well as more legally and constitutionally precise."
Freaking yikes.
One thing to argue it’s not in their constitution, another to say…that.
@WarnerCrocker Alright, House of Representatives. Time for you useless Republicans to get off your lazy butts and work out a deal with the Democrats that will pass a NEW LAW.
Come on everyone, be serious with me for a moment. Yesturday was BEYOND reason enough to understand that trump will never be president ever again, if he's even still alive come November. Enough of this fear mongering doomsday paranoia. You Americans won an exceptional victory yesturday! Let us dance naked in the streets and celebrate the end of trump! No more need to worry and give yourself anxiety, take the win and party!
As @davidallengreen observes, in the wake of the Angela Rayner tax affairs smear & the Civid era 'beargate' accusations (against Rayner & Starmer), the fact that these accusations resulted in investigations that cleared their subject(s), one might hope that the weaponisation of police referrals has now been revealed as a illegitimate partisan tactic.
But, the problem is how to differentiate between these vexatious accusations & those with merit...
@blepharon@davidallengreen@ChrisMayLA6 Wasting police time is s5 Criminal Law Act 1967 "Where a person causes any wasteful employment of the police by knowingly making to any person a false report tending to show that an offence has been committed,". I don't think you'd be able to show that the reports about beer were knowingly false.
1/ Okay, while the Trump verdict has been very riveting, I'd like to talk about failure states in democracies for a bit.
Any stable democracy needs peaceful transfers of power. If a ruling government loses in an election and thus loses power, they are free to moan about it - but in the end, they should leave office without violence because (unless they screwed up bigly) they realize that they will likely return to power one day. They are invested in the system, and do not want to overthrow the basic democratic order of their country - because it works for them.
Thus, a country needs multiple parties with an investment in democracy, who are willing to form a government - but who are also willing to leave peacefully. If this is not the case, then the democracy in question is in a failure state.
An good (or rather, very very bad) example of a "proportional representation" democracy in a failure state was the late Weimar Republic. Starting in 1932, the NSDAP (Nazis) and the KDP (Communists) received a majority of the vote and thus representatives. Both wanted to overthrow the Republic and its democracy in its own way, and thus it became impossible to form a democratic government - let alone switch between different ones. But the Weimar Republic had problems in this regard even earlier, since there were numerous miniscule parties with only a very small number of candidates. They only cared about a small number of issues, had no motivation to compromise, and thus were not willing to join a working government.
3/ Meanwhile, First Past the Post voting systems - as seen in the #USA and the #UK - massively favor a two-party system. That means that if one of the parties is no longer committed to the democratic order of the nation, its democracy automatically enters a failure state - as there can no longer be a peaceful transfer of power. If there's one party which is willing to overthrow the democratic order of the country when they get into power - as the Nazis did during the Weimar Republic - then they must not attain power, or else it's game over for democracy.
But then the other party - which is (hopefully) still committed to democracy - must not lose power, because then it's game over for democracy. But when one party has to be constantly in power in order to save democracy, then a peaceful transfer of power is no longer possible! Thus, this democracy has entered a failure state. It is inevitable that frustration with a particular government will grow over time, yet this frustration cannot find release because the government must not be voted out of office if democracy is to survive.
Thus, the only way for democracy to survive if the not-democratic party either reforms itself or is displaced by a new party - and the latter is extremely difficult to pull off under a FPtP voting system, since such voting systems massively discourage first parties.
4/ We are seeing what this means in the #USA (I don't follow #UK politics as closely, but my impression is that it's not quite that bad yet). The #Republicans have fully committed to #fascism . The #Democrats are the only viable non-fascist voting option, and thus must not lose power if whatever democracy the USA has left is to survive. In a healthy democracy, voters could voice their dissatisfaction with the ruling party by voting for another party - but that's no longer possible in the USA, because if they do that in sufficiently large numbers, the USA will no longer have a democracy.
Thus, the only hopes the USA have of surviving this is for the Democrats to hold out until either (a) the Republicans reform themselves and purge their fascists (which seems exceedingly unlikely), or (b) collapse and are replaced by a party that is committed to democracy and the peaceful transform of power. Which also seems exceedingly unlikely.
The whole situation in the USA is horrible, and I feel for all Americans who suffer under it - although if the USA becomes a fully fascist nation, no person on Earth will ultimately be safe. But I feel that this whole mess is also a searing condemnation of the "First Past the Post" voting system, since it makes reaching such a failure state fairly easy.
This is a retropost. Written in January 2023 but published long after I left the Civil Service. One of the weird things about working in Westminster is how terrifyingly normal it becomes to work in grand old buildings, stuffed with grand old artworks, and staffed with grand old politicians. You turn a corner and there's ……
@Edent A trouble-making part of me hopes that that weird stick structure on the filing cabinet behind you was a gift to a Prime Minister from a visiting dignitary and this blog post will cause a diplomatic incident 😂
