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

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

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

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

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

It was awful

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.

Im not sure what the evidence was, but there was a 3 year investigation, and two other cases were not brought to charge due to lack of evidence. The prosecution case involved the Scientology cover-up, including attempts to get one of the women to sign an NDA

Its probably also worth mentioning that his victims were also Scientologists, and therefore ‘forbidden’ from going to the police.

When they did, they were labelled ‘fair game’ and harrassed by the ‘church’.

So there was also a Civil suit - filed before but put on hold until after the Criminal trial - that has The Church Of Scientology itself as a co-defendent

One of the things Masterson’s lawyers were accused of doing was leaking discovery documents from the Criminal case to Scientology’s attorneys in the Civil case

This just isnt true. I’m not saying this to defend Israel and their actions in Gaza - its just really important to not get swept up in falsehoods, particularly at a time when legitimate criticism of Israel is being portrayed as antisemitic.

There are allegations that Israel administered a birth control drug - which has to be readministered every three months - to Ethiopian immigrants without informed consent. The investigation into this was flawed, but there is literally no evidence to suggest that anyone was forced or coerced into taking this.

What does seem plausible and even likely based on the facts is that doctors often made little or no effort to overcome language and cultural barriers and make sure that consent was fully informed and patients were completely aware of the effects of the procedure.

This is definitely an issue in and of itself, and is a level of societal racism. But what it is not, is ideoligical forcible sterilization.

Further, when you say ‘Ethiopian Jewish women tried to invoke the Law of Return’ the implication is that Israel was really against Ethiopian immigration. In reality, the Israeli government worked with the US to actively enable this - in 1984 Israeli covert forces worked to evacuate the Beta Israel community from Sudan to Israel during the civil war there (this is known as Operation Moses).

Basically, there is so so much to legitimately criticise the Israeli government for right now. Repeating misinformation like this just straight up doesn’t help.