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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • While this prosecution was completely fucked up and was 100% linked to the criminalisation of abortion (and therefore miscarriages and pregnancy in general), the issue was that following the traumatic premature birth she didn’t immediately remove the baby from the toilet

    Moving north wouldn’t have helped on paper, as the alleged crime of letting your baby drown is still illegal

    That said, possibly a more progressive state might have had the good sense to not prosecute or even treat this as a criminal matter. On the other hand, the DA where this happened was a Democrat according to the article

    A grand jury declined to indict her, so it ended ‘okay’, apart from all the unnecessary additional horrific trauma inflicted on a grieving mother and being a harrowing sign of dark repressive times





  • There was a really good article on this and unfortunately I can’t find it now to share

    But the gist was that Titan exploited a bunch of loopholes, among other things. The paying customers on the sub were in fact ‘marine researchers’ who coincidently made a donation, and things like that

    Some of the people who were at one point involved but left due to safety concerns raised the issue with OSHA (? - or whoever the more specific body was) who repeatedly failed to investigate or take any action

    So for me, whether or not they are able to charge the company, the industry regulators and government bodies overseeing them need to face some questions and judgements too (though it would take a more knowledgeable person than me to know what exactly that looks like)





  • I’d like to recommend The Trojan Horse Affair. Its a limited series and a few years old now, but a a really interesting listen

    Its about the scandal in the UK in 2013, where an anonymous letter ‘exposed’ an Islamist conspiracy in Birmingham schools to radicalise children.

    The investigation in the podcast is helmed by two people; a rookie journalism grad who is muslim, and an experienced white journalist. The contrast in perspectives and emotion between them adds to it

    And yeah it’ll probably make you angry, and for those not in the UK it might key you in a bit on the tensions that do and don’t exist with British Muslims, how they’re viewed and treated by lots of parties here (including the Government)



  • So you’ve called me an ‘armchair genius’ twice in that comment - I’m sorry that I didn’t fight in WWI, but I am allowed to discuss the definition of Nationalism. You have no idea about my life or my background (or my chair), so leave that out.

    Sure, Post-Colonial Nationalism as a movement played an integral role in establishing independence from European powers. That doesn’t change the fact that Nationalism is a European paradigm that contributed to the exploitation of these places in the first place.

    The fact that Nationalism opposes foreign influence over ones own country - and therefore is an effective ideology of opposition in regions affected by European exploitation - says nothing about Nationalism’s inherent militarism and codification of heirarichal power.

    So yes look at Nationalism as a factor in establishing independence, but then look at where Nationalism leads after that.

    Lets take Nigeria in the 1960s. Nigerian nationalism helped oust the British, cool, that’s great. Then the Nationalist government inflamed ethnic tensions until Ahmadu Bello was assassinated in a miltary coup, and the following ethnic violence led to Civil War.

    While you wait there for me to talk to “every nation state in the (so called) “3rd World””, maybe do some reading that isn’t an internet definition written by people Just like me (whatever that means…)

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/45341491

    And if you come back to me, do it with argument and not random personal attacks next time, thanks







  • Just in the spirit of pedantry, its not really true to say that the US system predated most parliaments.

    Like, maybe its technically true now due to the expansion of democratic and republic systems in the post-colonial era, but parliaments in Western Europe were plentiful and long-established in 1776.

    The first American government was notable in that is was completely divorced from a hereditary Monarch, and I don’t wanna downplay that, but a system in which a representitive body of land-owners is elected by an enfranchised class to decide policy and even pass legislation existed in, for example, Iceland since the 10th Century, Catalonia since the 12th, England since the 13th. It was arguably the standard during the enlightenment in Europe.

    My two cents, the US system does seem to be remarkably inflexible. I guess it’s complicated to unpack why exactly, but a combination of myth-making, bad-faith originalists, and the sheer size of the country probably all play a part in it


  • They definitely didnt help, nor did the right wing media or the Labour Party centrists undermining him

    But ultimately he lost because of Brexit.

    In his first election, despite the pressure against him, he took the Tories to a hung parliament and forced them to make a deal with the DUP. Cos people were sick of Austerity and liked his domestic platform

    But when managing Brexit became the main issue in 2019(?), Johnson had a really strong message of ‘oven-ready brexit’, ‘get it done’, and Labour didn’t have a coherent strategy. They didnt want to go full ‘reverse it’, cos lots of votes for Brexit came from Labour seats. They also didnt want to go full ‘get out deal or no deal’ because generally the left and progressive voters were anti-brexit.

    Corbyn was elected to the leadership on the strength of his domestic and anti-austerity policies, and when the focus shifted to Brexit he was out of his comfort zone.

    That’s my analysis anyway. I liked Corbyn’s foreign policy, but it wasn’t what built his popularity