Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of m/neoliberal
Totally. In my alternative scenario where she was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl called Shania, the Daily Express would have turned her into a Madeleine McCann-like figure and campaigned every day on their front pages to ‘bring our girl home’.
A child who was groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists is now being punished for it. Also this is a punishment that is only being applied to her because she has Bangladeshi ancestors so the government argues she is hypothetically eligible for a Bangladeshi passport (which the government of Bangladesh has no intention of giving her), and so the Tories can pretend they’re not illegally rendering her stateless.
This is literally a punishment that, by the Tories’ own formulation of their rule, would not be applied if the sex trafficking victim was a white girl called Shania with English parents instead of a brown girl called Shamima.
We’re supposed to be a country where people are treated equally before the law. But the Tories are now claiming that they and any future government has the right to render any Briton with some hypothetical right to a foreign passport (for example, most second generation immigrants and every single Jewish Briton) stateless at the whim of the home secretary.
It’s more than just a product of it - it’s the main factor.
Over the last half century or so, the UK has experienced around 200 civilian deaths from Islamic terrorism and around 2,000 civilian deaths from Irish terrorism. Which community do you think the far-right in the UK tend to target?
Muslim immigrants will have de facto faced as much (if not far more) hostility and prejudice before any of those events.
What changed is that by the late 20th century, it had become politically unacceptable for right-wing parties to be perceived to be preying on overt racism towards their countries’ brown-skinned citizens. But the War on Terror at the start of the 21st century created a new organising framework for nativists, whereby they could incite hatred against exactly the same brown-skinned people as before, but claim they were targeting them for their religion and not their skin colour. At the heart of it is still the same prejudice towards those who are different, it’s just that the aspect of difference they choose to focus on today is more politically acceptable than the one they used to focus on.
From the perspective of a brown-skinned Muslim immigrant, the ideological hoops the far-right jump through are likely irrelevant. These people were targeted by nativists before, and they get targeted by nativists now.
I mean, bigotry and unenforceability aside, it’s also pretty unambiguously illegal.
Italy is a signatory to the ECHR which creates an explicit right to privacy (Article 8) and freedom of religion (Article 9).
The Italian constitution itself also specifies a right to religious equality before the law (Article 8).
I was similarly pretty confused here that it was referring to the little seaside town in Yorkshire, which I assume all these other Scarboroughs (that I too had never heard of) are named after.
Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim head of state in western Europe in 2023 when he was appointed First Minister of Scotland.
This is a really specific point, but the sub-heading irks me in several ways.
First, how do so many people not know the difference between a head of state and a head of government? Scotland’s head of state is Charles III.
Second, by what definition is Yousaf the first Muslim head of government in western Europe? I assume they must at least mean ‘in western Europe in the modern era’, since various parts of Iberia obviously had Muslim rulers for over seven centuries in the Middle Ages.
Third, Scotland isn’t an independent state, and the head of government of the United Kingdom is Rishi Sunak. So if they’re counting Humza Yousaf, that means they’re counting leaders at sub-national levels of government (such as devolved government in the UK, Länder in Germany, etc). But if they’re counting devolved government, why does Humza Yousaf (first minister of Scotland, population 5.4 million, since 2023) count but Sadiq Khan (mayor of London, population 8.8 million, since 2016) apparently doesn’t?
Anyway it was two right-wingers in the second round so
A centrist, europhile, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism, former patron of Helsinki’s Pride event, vs the literal Green League candidate.
Bed bugs eunt domus!
For most things, the European Council already decides things by qualified majority voting (typically requiring the support of 55% of member states representing 65% of the EU’s population). This was enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. But extending QMV to matters that currently need unanimity would require treaty changes, which by definition would need every EU member to sign up. There are limited incentives for smaller members (let alone problematic members like Hungary) to agree to more QMV since unanimity gives them disproportionate influence.
It is really inspiring that so many Germans are coming out to make their voices heard like this. It’s easy to tell a pollster you don’t like Nazis; but coming out on the streets week-after-week in the middle of winter like they’ve been doing recently shows commitment.
Reminder also that whilst it’s a very fun story, this claim was:
a. written as part of a hit job by two right-wing Brexiter journalists in the run-up to the referendum as part of a wider effort by the right to discredit the centrist establishment in the months before the vote (see also: Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigning from Cameron’s cabinet in protest at the work and pensions policies he had conceived and implemented over the previous six years…); and
b. never substantiated by any evidence that those two Brexiter journalists were willing or able to provide, despite them claiming in the book there was a photo.
The 2016 Brexit referendum was the dirtiest election in living memory in the UK. It was plagued by fake news and Russian interference. Isabella Oakshott herself is known to have covered up evidence of Putin’s links to the Brexit campaign and her domestic partner is literally the current leader of Reform UK (the party formerly known as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party). She is not a credible or impartial figure.
There are totally things Cameron should be criticised for over his time in government, but that is no excuse to parrot Brexiter (and possibly Russian) fake news that was designed to discredit moderates and favour the far-right.
Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world, richer than France or Germany.
And much of that wealth was built on exports of beef, especially to Britain. But that was well over 100 years ago.
Now, thanks to a profound economic crisis, it languishes in around 70th place, according to the latest figures from the World Bank.
It wasn’t ‘an’ economic crisis that caused that change. It was a long-term political crisis. The fundamental cause of Argentina’s economic decline was political misrule - the combination of decades of political instability, military juntas, protectionist trade policies and hyperinflationary monetary policies, all of which discouraged long-term investment and left Argentine businesses and industries inefficient and uncompetitive.
Argentina dropped out of the developed world because the Argentine political class chose to drop out of the developed world.
Argentina is what those Americans flirting with the idea of re-electing Trump should be thinking about. Right now, MAGA, protectionism and political chaos are a one-term aberration in American politics. If they bring him back, if they make Trump’s form of politics a regularised part of the American political culture, Argentina is their future.
No, they can do more. The nuclear option is to use Article 7 to suspend Hungary’s voting rights at the European Council if they deem that Hungary is acting against the EU’s values.
Stopping the flow of EU funds is part of the escalation route towards that but they won’t do it unless they’ve exhausted other options - it’s a tricky balancing act to cajole Orban into behaving like a European, and once they use Article 7 there will be no more escalation threats available.
It’s not Orban’s party but that doesn’t excuse him. He’s been in office for the last 14 years and deliberately cultivated a political climate of aggressive nationalist conservatism fuelled by propaganda about historical greatness and foreign betrayal. He’s the one who has moved Hungary’s Overton window so far to the far right that politicians such as these can get elected.
I mean, it’s worth being clear: these are EU citizens who did break the rules, in terms of not registering their (supposedly ULEZ-compliant) cars before driving into the ULEZ zone in London as they are required to. For UK-registered cars, TFL can determine ULEZ compliance directly from the domestic car registry database, which they can’t for foreign cars.
The complaint against TFL is much narrower: the company they used to chase down these rule breakers then itself seems to have broken data protection rules, since ULEZ breaches are civil not criminal matters and so the relevant EU rules didn’t allow for their information to be shared.
But at its core - if these people had just registered their cars as required before they drove into London, none of this would be an issue. It’s not about UK authorities unfairly targeting EU citizens (not least as it’s London we’re talking about - Remainer central!)
Someone should explain to her that all those roubles that appear in her bank account when she says these things aren’t actually worth very much.
It’s worth saying that both major parties are way out of line with the electorate on this - polling of whom shows:
there were consistent majorities for Remain from about mid-2017 until Brexit happened; and
there has been a consistent polling plurality for Rejoin pretty much since that point onwards (and sometimes outright polling majorities for Rejoin).
So neither of those parties are currently speaking for a large (and possibly majority) share of the electorate on this issue. When such situations arise, it’s rare for the electorate to be the ones who have to change their mind and accord with what the politicians think…
What I expect will happen in the coming years (particularly after Labour go into government next year) is that the Lib Dems will get increasingly bolshy on this issue and probably build towards announcing a Rejoin manifesto in the run up to the 2028/9 general election, and Labour will start bleeding votes to them. That will force Labour to shift its position (in the same way they shifted their position on a People’s Vote after the Lib Dems trounced them in Labour strongholds at the 2019 EU elections).
By the end of this decade, Rejoin will be a very mainstream position among British politicians in the way it already is with British voters.
Yeah, Spanish. That’s the point. There were penguins, then was French, it was Spanish, it was British. It was never Argentinian. There were never civilians there.
The only civilians who have lived there are the Falkland Islanders, who identify as British. Argentina’s claim is based on the Spanish once having a very limited military presence there, on which basis they want to assert some sort of imperialist sovereignty over a bunch of civilians whose ancestors have been there for hundreds of years and who have only ever considered themselves British.
I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.
You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.
You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.
Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.