The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frank
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The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frankly, fascist sympathies are too heavily embedded within the ruling classes and security services of those countries, and removing them would involve a level of pain and commitment to principle that those in a position to actually do so are not willing to entertain.
What should be, at a bare minimum, in place is a commitment to uncovering and removing fascism from all levels of public life, backed by robust and mandatory civics education.
Western democracies are utterly incapable of doing this, and instead think that they can accommodate their own fascist undercurrents without them becoming overwhelming.
But with the dismantling of their own welfare states, they have nothing to fall back on, and so when economic shocks hit, the shit they have been hiding rapidly bubbles to the surface.
We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
“We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
@Idealistic Pragmatist :mstdn: It's somewhat notable that while the allies DID remove some of the most egregious fascists from what was left of German civil society after the war, I'm not sure how much the Soviet Union did, and the support for AfD is strongest by far in former East Germany.
It really blows my mind when a country explicit forbids fascist organizations in their constitution and then the constitutional court keeps approving the existence of multiple fascist parties, one of them very successful.
@Llwynog It has to be a continuous process, because if there's one thing that these bastards can do, it's play the long game.
But first, they need to root them out of their own parties.
Second, they need to fucking condemn shit which is currently being normalised or presented as "legitimate concerns".
Third, they need to divert significant resources into proper civics education to create a populace that is politically literate and able to spot and critically analyse their rhetoric and dog whistles.
And fourthly, there needs to be an understanding that it is an utterly illegitimate political stance, that is not to be tolerated in a society that values human rights. There need to be laws that proscribe fascist organisations. They need to be enforced, and the courts overseeing them need to kept free of the sort of creeping political influence that has caused institutional capture in the US.
the "western democracies" haven't taken fascism seriously because they were instrumental in its creation. they didn't try to lessen the influence of fascism after the second world war because they created it in the first place. they won't try to reduce it because fascism is essential to "western democracy".
John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of canada, inspired Hitler with his white supremacist screeds about "Aryan race".
the nation states who pretend to be a bolster against fascism did absolutely nothing to stop it when they had the chance. canada and USA gave no official support to the revolutionaries of the Spanish civil war. the Stalinists in Spain worked to prevent revolution, which fed dead antifascist bodies to Franco, who had Hitler's military support. the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade, which came from canada, an anti-fascist volunteer brigade which went to Spain to fight Franco, received no support. most of them didn't come back.
canada turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape Germany. canada had also put thousands of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps. nevermind the "residential schools" and what the reserve system for Indigenous people used to be. (guess who Hitler learned to use concentration camps from
the "welfare state" has always been a fascist idea. it was social democrats, read: reformers of capitalism, not socialists, who created things like welfare and universal healthcare which, while they seem like good ideas on their face, just look at what's happening now when the capitalists decide to dismantle these systems, which was bound to happen.
if you want to learn a quick history of "social democracy", find out who the Bolsheviks really were, and who had no problem with letting the NSDAP march in Germany.
it's not an accident that the ruling class is fascist. they invented this shit. it serves no purpose other than to uphold a white supremacist ruling status quo.
if you hate fascism, ask your doctor if tyrranicide is right for you!!
You need a tachograph if you are driving under UK/AETR working hours rules UNLESS you are collecting sea coal. You still need to keep to the time rules, but don't need the tachograph.
There are similar exemptions if you're going to repair a lighthouse, or are transporting a circus, or carrying live fish to an entrepreneurial activity within 100km(*), or returning milk containers to a farm...
But strangely, while all those exemptions are given in a schedule to the act, but sea coal is included in the main statute, ie roughly, "if in the schedule (lighthouses, circuses, entrepreneurial fish, etc) OR sea coal".
As far as I can tell (it's complicated; I'm not sure), a lighthouse repair person or their friend taking fish to an AGM doesn't have to *follow* the rules.
The unique thing about sea coal hauliers is that they (and only they) *do* have to follow the rules, but don't have to prove it.
But why? Delving into it further ... 🧵
(*) I assume these are entrepreneurial fisherfolk, not entrepreneurial fish.
As far as I can tell this is because sea coal transport, uniquely, was included in exemptions to "Community Recording Equipment Regulation" (EU 3821/85) but not in exemptions to "Community Drivers' Hours Regulation" (EU 4820/85).
Sadly, I've been unable to navigate these regulations but, as I currently have no proximal intent to transport sea coal, I will leave it here, unless inspiration strikes.
My mental image of sea coalers is a romantic one, of rugged men with horse and carts in the waves. Now I mention it, I've never seen a horse with a tachograph.
The attached (~2min) video includes not only Hartlepool sea-coalers, but some fencing in St Moritz, and a man from Sunderland who survives bricks being smashed on his head.
Titles read: "Caught By The Camera".Various locations of events.Various shots of a fencing demonstration in a nightclub in St Moritz. The diners in the club...
Another name for hydrochloric acid is muriatic acid. My Latin ears immediately pricked and wondered if this was squished down mice (mus, muris) or something to do with destroying a wall (murus, muri). But no, it's derived from the Latin muriaticus meaning "pickled", from muria "brine". Thus neatly connecting it to another name for hydrochoric acid: spirit of salt.
@wynke I have just looked up "offal" to see if this CW was in fact labelled strictly correctly, and I'm facepalming at not realising hitherto that it's cognate with _afval_ (and _Abfall_).
@pseudomonas That one was pretty obvious to me, but then I'm Dutch so I learned 'afval' first. (And my brain really likes to find these connections between languages, although I miss many too.)
A good word in the lingo of the Olympics is "repechage" which is a sort of second chance to get through to the next stage of a competition. I assume it's from the French and means something like "fishing again"
If Kamala Harris picks Josh Shapiro to be her VP pick, understand that this is who will be on the ticket with her:
"Palestinians will not coexist peacefully. They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” - Josh Shapiro.
TERFs having a normal one, destroying women’s sports because some of the cis competitors maybe remind them a bit of trans woman, none of whom ever qualify for anything anyway, even when allowed to compete.
@KateKarnage I always forget who said "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit", but it seems really applicable here. (I know it from Flavia Dzodan but IIRC she's quoting someone else).
I know much of the commentary around the Olympic a boxing thing is well meaning, but please avoid using or boosting the term “biological woman”.
“Cis woman” is more accurate. “Biological woman” is meaningless. Which bit of someone’s biology do you mean? Hormones, primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes? (Bear in mind most people don’t know what their chromosomes are)
The term comes from transphobic efforts to other trans women and has no other value.
My submission for Slanted - Experimental Type 3.0:
Unicode Spaces There are invisible characters in the UTF-8 unicode character encoding standard. This experiment measures the width of each invisible character with p5.js to dynamically manipulate the kerning of single characters. By analysing the brightness of pixels of an image and inserting white spaces at the corresponding lines and characters, image patterns are emerging in the text through white space.
@Cyberspice Mm, I think I first encountered the term when @Sarah Brown was learning to SUP. No weirder than any other weird word in a specific context, like "squelch" when talking about radio.
Cass deserves to go down alongside Wakefield in my opinion. This is a wholly biased piece of work, produced to order, and to suit an agenda, and that agenda is profoundly hostile to trans people. erininthemorning.com/p/british…
The British Medical Association, the professional organization representing doctors in the United Kingdom, has called for a public critique of the review and to bar its implementation.
@christineburns @Lazarou I am expecting the Sir Humphrey move shortly. The one where you decide there are "questions to be answered" (but never specify which questions) and refer it to a public enquiry so that people throw pies at each other whilst you look on from afar without getting messy.
@StrangeNoises @christineburns @Lazarou The rampant transphobia in British politics today is an ideological Rorschach test for any government. It's esseitnally a canary in the coal mine for far right radicalization, because transphobia was a core Nazi policy back in 1933: that Streeting has even a millisecond's hesitation over trans rights is a very bad indicator …
and also *owns* the BMJ. The CEO of the BMJ even emailed all staff recently about how great the Cass report was. The BMJ is editorially independent, but this is a direct slap.
seriously! There are a lot of parts I'm sure I don't understand, but even just the experience of sexism my trans friends have told me about are so illuminating.
Why researchers aren't begging you all for your insights is beyond me.
and clearly since it is so unknowable, male and female must be complete opposites that could never possibly understand each other, live equitably, etc.
Speaking only for myself (a cis woman), I'd worry that it might seem like an impolite question to ask a trans person. I wouldn't ever ask such a thing, unless I knew the person quite well (and even then I might hesitate). I wouldn't want to make someone feel "othered" just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Arrived on time, would have had plenty of time to make our connection of 15 min. But No. This was not bookable, only the one with 75 min layover. And thanks to the mandatory reservations, you can't just hop on the earlier train. Spain, wanna work on this or invest another billion on a new high speed line? Both saves one hour. Choose wisely. #Madrid Puerta de Atocha, #Castilla #España #TrainTravel #connection #Reservation
Back in 1997, when organised trans activism was a new thing, it was incredibly hard to get famously-shy trans people to stand together on the street. And afterwards the brave few would melt away into the crowd. It seems to me that the big unintended consequence of right wing attempts to crush us has been to unify us and bring trans folk out in our tens of thousands to say “No!”. Never back a minority into a corner with survival and freedom at stake. You create the thing you fear the most.
Visibility has also helped a lot more of us come out. I remember my first BiCon and there only being a few of us. Then a few years later there were loads of us.
@geekylou I remember attending a BiCon in 1996 in Kingston on behalf of Press for Change and being saddened by the strength of anti-trans sentiment — not many people, but they were loud and assertive. Not the most relaxing of weekends, sadly, but it was not unusual for LGB gatherings to have that schism back then. The type who harboured such antipathy were the sort that resurfaced as fans of the LGB Alliance 25 years later.
July 28, 2024- “Covid travel warning issued to anyone going on holiday to Greece, Portugal and other EU countries” ”The WHO has issued a stark warning to tourists heading abroad for the summer holidays. People are being urged to take Covid precautions including getting vaccinated, wearing masks and doing tests. The WHO emphasised that the pandemic is far from over..” “In Portugal, the number of cases recorded surged by 700% between May and June, hitting 10,000 in July. Cases are also rising in the UK, with almost 18,000 new infections detected despite no routine testing.”- chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/t…
American Christians will tell everyone who isn’t them that we’re “special snowflakes” who need to toughen up, and in their next breath go utterly fucking nuclear on Facebook because the French dared to depict Bacchanalia.
France: Any journey shorter than 4 hours by train should not be allowed to be taken by plane.
Me, after using French railways for a couple of weeks: They’re running plane services for distances of only 100km?
I’m honestly shocked at how functionally useless French railways are. “Welcome to our interchange. Please wait 2 hours surrounded by screaming kids and chain smokers for your connection. No you can’t have a fucking coffee”
Dear the UK, you have it better than you could possibly believe.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ So my recent experience is Brittany, which has a couple of mainlines and a bunch of feeder lines. The feeder lines just ... do not link up with the mainline services. In Portugal, which also has this sort of arrangement on a massively shrunk network, the trains on feeders are timetabled to meet connections,. and the connections will be held if necessary. In the UK, connections are typically not held, but are frequent enough that it doesn't matter.
In France, neither of these appear to be true. You are left at a railway station and the next mainline train doesn't even stop there, despite it being an interchange with hundreds of people waiting on the platform. When one finally does stop, it's utterly rammed.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ I can't agree. The UK, even in places as remote as North Wales, actually tries to timetable branch line shuttles to connect to mainline services in less than ninety minutes.
In France, it doesn't even seem to occur to them that this is a thing they can do.
@TimWardCam GB Rail doesn't wait for stragglers if the two trains are run by different companies (previously, different sectors) but at least if you have to wait an hour for the next clockface-ish service, the company causing the delay repays some of the ticket price. If you can plan to arrive an hour earlier than needed, it usually works well. If less, then it can get stressful
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ These were very clearly not lines short of slots. The branches were literal shuttles where they had pretty much total freedom of scheduling. Train goes from one end to the other. Has dedicated platform at the mainline station. Massive amounts of dwell time. There is literally nothing else on the line.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ Closest equivalent I can think of in the UK that I’m familiar with is the Dengie Peninsula shuttle. Literally the only scheduling issue is that the train coming the other way needs to be in the passing loop to go past.
I’m fully aware of all the issues that you highlight. This wasn’t that. Connections just aren’t a thing, and it seemed systemic too. Get to the terminus of one of these branches and there’s a taxi rank. There are no taxis in it. Ever. There’s a piece of A4 with the numbers of a few minicab companies. The shuttle comes in 4 times a day. The idea that the people getting off it might want a taxi to the next town over, or a bus (because, surprise surprise, the buses do not attempt to link up with train times either), appears to be utterly alien.
@TimWardCam well, we do have some 1 #train per 2 hour services overdue for improvement like Peterborough-Ipswich and a few daily oddballs like Cambridge-Harwich, but in general, GB regional service frequency beats French. Slower and fewer high speed services in GB though. Lots of 180 and 160kph lines with little bits of 205.
Didn't immediately notice this came from you. So, had already imagined a story where this came from the desk of a BBC colleague of this guy (the bearded English philologist and Assyriologist in the pic). It had sat on her desk in a small office on Crete, and was connected to a teletype in a quiet corner of Broadcasting House. Dispatches were delivered by bicycle courier to theBritish Museum for translation, before being courierd back to Broadcasting House for distribution.
Trump has failed so often at things that were handed to him that it is legendary. He failed running casinos, where the house famously always wins.
We have to work to make sure he fails again, but it is my firm belief that most of his actions will hurt his chances as much as help him. He's the scorpion who stings himself.
not at all. to quote adam schiff: “There is no better matchup than this superb former prosecutor against this convicted criminal, and she’ll prosecute the case against Trump every single day.”
my concern is that, as someone who has watched family members age and memory loss/dementia settle in that in three months we were going to do this anyway. The man didn't know who lifelong friends of decades were and his schedule has been cut to the bone for the past nine months
You’re absolutely wrong on this. Dems, independents, and disaffected republicans are going to vote for Harris in droves. She was a prosecutor and California’s attorney general. She knows how to handle criminals like Trump.
While I agree this isn't optimal, it's not fatal as long as the Dems get 100% behind the new candidate ASAP. Who should, by my way of thinking, be Kamal of course.
Every Bloomberg that tries to take her down will go dirty. They will be united it tearing her down in ways that don’t get us a Democratic President, but just flood the zone with shit.
Edit: the first Bloomberg, this one named Manchin, didn’t last a full work day against her.
@theory At this point it's pretty clear she's the candidate. And people are excited (I know I am). She got an all time record in donations and 28,000 people called to volunteer within a day.
"Revelations 13:1 says 'I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name'. Assuming that the horns are indistinguishable, in how many ways could they be distributed among the seven heads? (Assume that the blasphemous names are all different.). What if each horn is different?"
I get 16 choose 10 = 8008. If the horns are distinguishable, then it's just 7^10. Clearly the horns are meant to be indistinguishable since 8008 seems a much more portentious number than 282475249.
11-4, Israeli occupation of Palestine is unlawful. 11-4, Israel is obliged to bring to an end its unlawful presence in Palestine as quickly as possible. 14-1, Israel is obliged to cease immediately all new settlement activities. 14-1, Israel must make reparations to Palestinians. 12-3, all states are under the obligation not to recognise as legal the unlawful occupation of Palestine. 12-3, international organisations including the UN are obliged not to recognise as legal the unlawful occupation. 12-3, the UN and the GA and SC should consider the modalities to bring occupation to an end.
In the court ruling, the court finds, inter alia, that all signatories to GCIV (4th Gevena Convention) must refrain from aiding Israel to continue the unlawful occupation, must carry out whatever actions are compatible with the UN Charter and international law to help bringing occupation to an end, and must clearly distinguish between Israeli territory and the illegally occupied Palestinian territory.
It's an advisory opinion but
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ICJ ruling just came out:
11-4, Israeli occupation of Palestine is unlawful. 11-4, Israel is obliged to bring to an end its unlawful presence in Palestine as quickly as possible. 14-1, Israel is obliged to cease immediately all new settlement activities. 14-1, Israel must make reparations to Palestinians. 12-3, all states are under the obligation not to recognise as legal the unlawful occupation of Palestine. 12-3, international organisations including the UN are obliged not to recognise as legal the unlawful occupation. 12-3, the UN and the GA and SC should consider the modalities to bring occupation to an end.
In the court ruling, the court finds, inter alia, that all signatories to GCIV (4th Gevena Convention) must refrain from aiding Israel to continue the unlawful occupation, must carry out whatever actions are compatible with the UN Charter and international law to help bringing occupation to an end, and must clearly distinguish between Israeli territory and the illegally occupied Palestinian territory.
It's an advisory opinion but it is a huge huge win for Palestine, and could have very relevant implications in using domestic courts to curb collaboration with occupation in other states.
Emma (has_many_books of old)
in reply to Emma (has_many_books of old) • • •Neil Hopkins
in reply to Emma (has_many_books of old) • • •John Pettigrew
in reply to Emma (has_many_books of old) • • •Emma (has_many_books of old)
in reply to John Pettigrew • • •Peter Scott
in reply to Emma (has_many_books of old) • • •Pass on a fist bump to the lad (or whatever is youth currency for well done)
Emma (has_many_books of old)
in reply to Peter Scott • • •Peter Scott
in reply to Emma (has_many_books of old) • • •then do it!
Passing random felicitations of (to him) strangers might increase his “mother is weird” level.*
*all teenagers have a parental weirdness gauge