I love them all*, but the IT Crowd is at the top for me

(*Graham Linehan is a prick)

Bill is the pony that travels with the Fellowship from Bree to the Mines of Moria. I hope he has a good birthday

For anyone who is politically involved and knows the issues, Walz won by having better and more consistent positions; as well as Vance saying some scary fascist level shit

But I fear that most undecided voters aren’t in that camp, and for those people Vance did well just be being coherent and vaguely normal.

Vance lied and twisted the truth a bunch, but if you just tuned in without knowing all the facts and context, that wasn’t necessarily clear

For me though I was pleasantly surprised by Walz actually making a moral case for immigration, you don’t see that nearly enough

I don’t know why you’re being down voted, he is literally a billionaire

‘No ethical billionaires’ apart from this guy apparently

The Stanford Prison Experiment. But it shouldn’t be taken seriously, it was terribly done, biased and unscientific

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

Could be interesting to run something similar under actual experimental conditions, if that was doable

I don’t know why you are using in person community praxis as a refutation of an online space being toxic

Real life isn’t online, the issue is an online space being shitty

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)

Who is this mythical ‘Britain’ that is saying this? Is it the King? Is it Farage? Or is it the 8% of our population with South Asian heritage? We’re a multi-cultural nation. The colonial and imperial roots of that absolutely can’t be ignored, but they don’t erase the stake that BAME people have in this country.

Some British people originally came from the sub-continent; get over it

I’m not denying the fucked up colonial history. You seem to be denying that South Asian immigrants are British - they are

Well, they were British chefs with South Asian heritage who of course were indirectly here because of horrific Imperialism

But it is British, its very British. Despite what Farage and co want you to believe, we’re a multi-cultural nation and have been for centuries.

British-Indian cuisine is at this point distinct and diverse enough from traditional Indian cuisine that it is its own thing. And its super widespread - even the racists discuss how shitty they are over a curry

“Simpon, huh? New man?”

“Actually sir, he thwarted your campaign for Governer. You ran over his son. He saved the plant from meltdown. His wife painted you in the nude.”

“Uh, doesn’t ring a bell”

These political groups are formed by members elected by national voters. A group can be formed as long as they have at least 25 members from at least one quarter of EU countries. They’re pretty much analogous to a party, they work in broadly the same way. In the Image above they’re broadly organised from Left to Right politically:

The LEFT group is, well, pretty left. They include Communists and Socialists, and in their own way can be a bit eurosceptic, although they typically want to reform or replace the EU rather than just disbanding it.

The GREENS are also pretty left, with a focus on Climate, Animal Rights, Income Equality, Feminism, that sort of thing. They are generally pro-Europe.

The S&D group are center left. Members tend to be from say, the Labour party of various countries. They want things like fairer employment and more regulated market. They were the largest party in the EU until 1999, now the second largest.

RENEW are Center, pretty Liberal (in the Phil Ochs sense). They’re pro-business and want a strong economy, but they at least talk up things like civil rights and social welfare (I don’t know enough about them to judge how well they do in practise). They’re very pro-EU, and have billed themselves as ‘the Pro-European political group’.

The EPP are center-right, pretty conservative. Lots of ‘Christian Democratic’ representation. Neoliberal, want more defence spending, pro-Europe, pro-Ukraine. They say they’re focused on the climate, but the Greens say that that’s a lie. They’ve been the biggest group since 1999.

The ECR calls itself center-right (but is really a bit right-er), and ‘soft-eurosceptic’. This Eurosceptism is their main thing: They support the idea of the EU, so they say, but they want to prevent it from going ‘too far’, with too much oversight, integration, and immigration. Some members are your standard conservative types, some are far-right.

The ID group is far-right. They don’t like the EU, and are opposed to it interfering with the ‘sovereignity’ of States. Anti-immigration, anti-‘islamisation’, pro-nationalism.

Nonaligned (technically ‘non-inscrits’) are just that - they haven’t joined with any of the above blocs.

These projected results broadly show increased support for the right over the left, but more sharply show gains for the Eurosceptic ID and Non-Inscrits (who often are Eurosceptic, but not always and I don’t actually know the individual cases here) at the expense of the pro-EU Greens and Renew. So it doesn’t look great for fans of the European Left.

If this is truly and legitimately where it ends - doorknocking - then its an annoyance and nothing more

But the real issue is that in the US the evangelical Christian scene has a lot of overlap with various racist/homophobic/right-wing/etcetc scenes

You can ignore ‘have you heard of our saviour Jesus Christ’ visits with a shoulder shrug, but I bet a lot of people have genuine safety concerns about this information being available to this crowd

The last time I was in Berlin, the year before Covid, they had set ups in some of the parks which were like painted lines and ‘boxes’ on the floor

Weed dealers were allowed to sell within these lines (probably not actually legally, but with an understanding that the police would leave them be? Not sure of the specific rules) but not outside of them

This meant that people who weren’t interested wouldnt have their park time marred by shady people coming up and trying to sell them drugs, and people who were interested could just go to one of the dealers in the lines

It was just a better, safer way of doing things. Everybody won.

Actual legalisation is the next step of course. Criminalisation of something as minor of weed just creates crime and danger, it doesnt reduce it. So this is good news

100km (64? miles), for charity. It took 31 hours, so more than a day but it was all in one go

It was awful

Grabbed a chicken, plucked it turned it into a man, then threw it at a lecture

This just isnt true. I’m not saying this to defend Israel and their actions in Gaza - its just really important to not get swept up in falsehoods, particularly at a time when legitimate criticism of Israel is being portrayed as antisemitic.

There are allegations that Israel administered a birth control drug - which has to be readministered every three months - to Ethiopian immigrants without informed consent. The investigation into this was flawed, but there is literally no evidence to suggest that anyone was forced or coerced into taking this.

What does seem plausible and even likely based on the facts is that doctors often made little or no effort to overcome language and cultural barriers and make sure that consent was fully informed and patients were completely aware of the effects of the procedure.

This is definitely an issue in and of itself, and is a level of societal racism. But what it is not, is ideoligical forcible sterilization.

Further, when you say ‘Ethiopian Jewish women tried to invoke the Law of Return’ the implication is that Israel was really against Ethiopian immigration. In reality, the Israeli government worked with the US to actively enable this - in 1984 Israeli covert forces worked to evacuate the Beta Israel community from Sudan to Israel during the civil war there (this is known as Operation Moses).

Basically, there is so so much to legitimately criticise the Israeli government for right now. Repeating misinformation like this just straight up doesn’t help.

Yup! And all we get for it is healthcare, childcare, college tuition, pensions, sick leave, maternity leave…