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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)


  • 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






  • 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.


  • 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