I suppose I’d call myself more curious than sceptical - I could look shit up and I can’t be bothered - but how do you define when humans became humans? I imagine its an estimate based from anthropological and fossil records and stuff

They definitely didnt help, nor did the right wing media or the Labour Party centrists undermining him

But ultimately he lost because of Brexit.

In his first election, despite the pressure against him, he took the Tories to a hung parliament and forced them to make a deal with the DUP. Cos people were sick of Austerity and liked his domestic platform

But when managing Brexit became the main issue in 2019(?), Johnson had a really strong message of ‘oven-ready brexit’, ‘get it done’, and Labour didn’t have a coherent strategy. They didnt want to go full ‘reverse it’, cos lots of votes for Brexit came from Labour seats. They also didnt want to go full ‘get out deal or no deal’ because generally the left and progressive voters were anti-brexit.

Corbyn was elected to the leadership on the strength of his domestic and anti-austerity policies, and when the focus shifted to Brexit he was out of his comfort zone.

That’s my analysis anyway. I liked Corbyn’s foreign policy, but it wasn’t what built his popularity

I was sceptical of this claim so I did some research - 700,000 is almost certainly too high, but other than that it’s disturbingly true:

The 700,000 number comes from a Russian parliamentarian in 2023, and refers to orphaned and abandoned children Russia has ‘protected’ from conflict zones in Ukraine. A later Russian report walked this back a bit, and claimed that most of this number were children accompanied by family voluntarily escaping the fighting by feeling into Russia.

Obviously we should be sceptical of what Russia says about this, but this is not the same number as the number of children abducted - not even Ukraine alleges it to be this high.

The number of children abducted and forcibly deported was officially reported by Kyev to be 19,000 to 20,000 at the time of the above claim based on the data (nearly 30,000 now). The real number is almost certainly higher - many Ukranian officials believe the actual amount is higher, with one saying it may be into the ‘hundreds of thousands’. A US report in 2022 estimates that Russia has “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported… 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia”

Even if we take only the low amount that can be fairly positively stated as abductions, that’s nearly 30,000 children. Various reports have shown some of these children being given new Russian identities and false birth certificates, and being put up for adoption in Russia. Some have testified to being indoctrinated and shown pro-Kremlin propaganda.

This broadly constitutes Cultural Genocide - whether it technically is or not is for academics to argue over, because the legal definition of genocide is complicated and so much is unkown.

Whether or not you want to call it a Genocide, it is undeniably a War Crime. The ICC has issued arrest warrents for Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over this.

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.

You have done a bad job, robot

they don’t believe in western religious tenants like gods and afterlife

Yeah, but their whole point is that this doesn’t undermine their status as a religion. It doesn’t make them ‘a joke or parody religion’, which is the phrase you initially replied to:

This is a common misconception. TST is not a joke or parody religion.

What makes you say that?

They don’t exist as a semi-serious troll organisation to undermine Christianity is my point, they take their beliefs and religious status seriously.

They don’t believe in a supernatural power, but they see themselves as a serious religion with serious beliefs. From your link:

‘[Satanism is] a narrative structure by which we contextualize our lives and works. …[it is] a body of symbolism and religious practice — a sense of identity, culture, community, and shared values.’

They have seven Tenets, none of which are directly about other religions - although one does mention being opposed to ‘distorting scientific facts’. Most are about compassion and individuality.

‘Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought.’

Agree with them or not, but they see themselves as much more than some kind of shell religion to undermine Religious Exemption statutes

It isn’t opening in a strip club, they’re turning the location of a closed strip club into a restaurant.

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

I think Occupy was really interesting, and part of the reason was the lack of a clear and actionable message

I fully agree that the best and most effective protest movements are those with clear goals and demands, and Occupy wasn’t that

What it managed to do really effectively was bring all kinds of people and ideologies together - there were the active leftists and anarchists, but also liberals and the middle class and all sorts. I’ve read articles and accounts that talk of just every kind of person spending time in that main/original camp, and it spawned a lot of similar events here in the UK

Ultimately it had the same kind of energy as the ‘If you want it, war is over’ billboards of the late 60s. And absolutely thats frustrating from an activist p.o.v

But on the other hand, it did in a lot of ways shift public perspective. I’d stop short of saying it changed the paradigm, but it definitely contributed to an anti-neoliberal, anti-free-market normalization

So yeah, idk. It didn’t really achieve anything; the issues it tried to tackle are still omni-present. But maybe it did do something in some hard to quantify, nebulous ways. Its interesting at least 🤷‍♀️

But yeah really not a blueprint of an effective protest in a majority of ways

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

I mean, unless there was a hoax that led to widespread belief that they were gonna launch a bomb

Its suspicious if its out of nowhere, but less so if its in response to an existing rumour

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

It was awful

Sidcup is in Greater London, the borough of Bexley. Zone 5.

Which is why this story involves TFL (transport for london)

Abuse doesn’t erase privilege, but equally privilige doesn’t erase trauma.

The idea of privilege is helpful in acknowleging differences in lived experiences, in particular in areas where certain demographics benefit from the status quo and may be blind to challenges faced by others.

But privilege isn’t necessarily helpful in trying to gauge somebody’s broad personality and motivations, as in this case. Granted, his economic privilege is probably relevent in so much as it enables a naive ideolisation of penniless wilderness living, but it doesn’t lessen the potential contribution of his trauma towards the desire to live an extreme lifestyle

Particularly as almost everybody has some sort of privilege, and lacks others. There’s no single-word term as far as I know, but ‘not suffering abuse as a child’ is a type of privilege that this guy did not have

I agree that he shouldnt be lauded and the myth-building of him is dumb, but according to his sister the driving reason behind him wanting to do this was his ‘physically and verbally abusive’ upbringing…

So i think theres more accurate and interesting takes than he was ‘pampered’

No sitting president has ever lost their party’s primary

LBJ dropped out of his party’s primary, and although it was far too soon to say if he would have lost, he faced strong opposition in New-Politic anti-war candidates Kennedy and McCarthy. He is on record as worrying about the primary and it doubtless played a big part of his dropping out

Kennedy of course got shot, and the more conservative Humphrey ended up with the nomination over McCarthy (or late entry McGovern), sparking riots at the DNC. The situations and systems were quite different, but i think there’s some parallels with Biden/Clinton vs Bernie there

I think Truman also dropped out rather than fight a tough primary, but i don’t know so much about that

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

Because its really not about whether or not the historical Jesus was or could have been white - its about the fact that white cultures will almost exclusively portray Jesus as being their own race for reasons that have nothing to do with historical interpretation of demographics is the middle east in ~0ad

People calling out White Jesus arent doing so because of a ‘notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearences’, but instead because of a hypocrisy of many Christian groups - in particular in the evangelical American right - to almost literally whitewash Jesus to look more like themselves, while often dehumanizing the people that look like Jesus ‘probably’ looked like.

Its really not about a historical question of the average middle-eastern skin colour two millenia ago. I assure you that the vast majority of ‘White Jesus’ portrayers have not engaged with that question and do not care about the answer. So to look to that as a refutation of the criticism is really missing the point.