Yes I mean, he’s not wrong but his thing about Ukraine is driven by his Churchill obsession, not by real world ethics

Individual politicians and political parties routinely use count a vote as approval. In that way, if no other, voting does serve to support the existing system.

I don’t think that tracks.

The highest turnout in any US election since 1908 was 62% in 2020, and at no point has a party won an election and been like ‘look at all the people who didn’t vote, I guess we don’t have a mandate to govern’

Parties win elections and govern in power with less than 50% of voters backing them all the time, it’s literally the standard. A low turnout will not change the way any party acts once in power.

same thing lol

Except for immigrants, queer people, black people, Muslim people, and women. For those groups it is decidedly not the fucking same

But because the Democrats aren’t going to reverse capitalism and it doesn’t affect you personally, who gives a shit, right? Fuck everybody apart from you

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

Right, I was trying to imply that it wasn’t really okay, hence the ‘okay’ in inverted commas and stuff - this obviously isn’t okay

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

I think it means + more than zero but less than one

So like, +(between 0.01 and 0.99)

They’re using it as (+0<1), there’s no - here bc that would be + (the other candidate)

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)

‘There’s no point voting against Hitler right now because the opposition is right leaning and may one day grow into Hitler’

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

In the UK, you can’t decide whether to ‘press charges’ or not, the decision is the CPS’s.

But in practice, saying you aren’t interested in pursuing a conviction often ends it, because:

1 - the prosecution must be ‘in the public good’ which is undermined if the victim isn’t interested

2 - a lot of the time the testimony and cooperation of the victim is key to the prosecution case

3 - the system is horribly underfunded so if they can justify dropping it they will

I read in the paper today that a bankruptcy court is going to take 40% of Katie Price’s OnlyFans income

When i saw this headline my brain skipped to Rudy Giuliani’s OnlyFans income

Has Rudy Giuliani considered OnlyFans?

“Yes, I lost this election, but I’m young, beautiful, and rich as f**k,” she concluded. She lost her job at Purina dog food over her extreme rhetoric and her campaign was unable to purchase ads.

She came 6th. Its funny, but I think she was never a real candidate and hasn’t learned anything

• guns
• freedom
• profitable good healthcare
• freedom
• national security
• guns
• white supremacy The American Way
• Your rights if you count
• christianity?
• freedom
• transphobia family values
• the cops’ ability to commit unchecked violence
• guns and freedom
• 1940s textbooks

All of these things are at risk.

I think she does - the bill is about materials being sent home with kids from schools that include sodomy or grooming or the incredibly vague ‘lgbt agenda’

It’s designed so that instead of banning books individually, they can just sue for anything they don’t like.

The headline makes it sound ridiculous - and in a way it is, of course - but it’s potentially dangerous. I don’t know how much sway her organisation has, if it’s big or niche. Hopefully zero

“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”

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

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.

It’s very debatable if trump’s EO would have capped the price of Insulin or Epipens in a meaningful way - and its factually wrong that it was the same cap and legislation that Biden put into place.

Trump’s EO meant that Federally Qualified Health Centers would have to offer Insulin and Epinephrine to “Low Income Individuals” without health insurance "at the discounted price paid by the FQHC grantee or sub-grantee under the 340B Prescription Drug Program” plus a “minimal” fee.

From your own link, FQHCs already had a requirement to not charge anything to people in poverty, so “If ‘low income’ is defined as under 100% of poverty, this may not really change anything. Even if the income level is set somewhat higher, most patients likely would still have been protected by the sliding fee scale without this change”.

This link, like your others, is from 2020. I don’t know how “low income” would actually have been defined since it wasn’t scheduled to come into place until Jan 22nd - during Biden’s administration.

It’s true that Biden froze this - as others have mentioned in this thread, he put a 60 day freeze on all pending legislature when taking office, which is a fairly standard practice.

Biden’s own Insulin cap was part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and capped the price of Insulin to $35 monthly for products covered by Medicare D.

So yeah I concede that it’s an oversimplification to say that Trump did nothing and Biden did everything, but… the Insulin cap is Biden’s legislation. Trump did not cap Insulin or Epipen prices during his 4 years in office.