all according to bibi's plan
CURRENT EVENTS - May 8-14
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all according to bibi's plan
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May be anomalous, may be a canary like in Italy, France, etc.
Reform UK makes big gains in English local elections - BBC News
Nigel Farage's party gains its first foothold in local government after seizing hundreds of seats.www.bbc.com
“Nigel Farage's Reform UK has made big gains in English local elections, cementing it as a prime challenger to Britain's traditional main parties.
It won 677 of around 1,600 seats contested on Thursday across a clutch of mainly Tory-held councils last contested in 2021.
Reform seized control of eight authorities from the Conservatives, including former strongholds Kent and Staffordshire.
The party has also won control of Doncaster, the only council Labour was defending, and Durham, where Labour was previously the largest party.”
Starmer accused of echoing far right with ‘island of strangers’ speech
Prime minister’s immigration speech was likened by MPs to rhetoric of Enoch Powell
Keir Starmer has defended his plans to curb net migration after an angry backlash from MPs, businesses and industry to a speech in which he said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tough new policies.
The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.
Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.
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Episcopal Church refuses to resettle white Afrikaners, ends partnership with US government
(RNS) — 'In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,' the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said in a letter.
religionnews.com
(RNS) — 'In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,' the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said in a letter.
In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday (May 12) that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Silence Dogood
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Shocker
theel4life
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Damn, even Zen is more subtle than you. You need to up your game a bit. Your accuracy rate has to be in the single digits. A good troll has to have some air of believability. If you're getting horselaughs, you're failing.
Mulberry Heel
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I think one of the real problems - not only of Labour but of the Democrats here and other center-left parties in some other democracies such as Germany and France - is that they are not seen by the public as reform parties in a time of great economic change and disruption, but as status quo parties that are willing to tinker at the edges of reform without really doing much. In fact, in some cases, like Starmer, they seem to be bending over backwards to appease the hard right in their nations instead of being bold and charting their own course. And of course they're never going to get more than a handful of votes at most from those people, yet they continue to try over and over. It's like Chuck Schumer's statement earlier this year that he thought that Senate Republicans will surely turn against Trump at some point because so many of them have told him privately that they hate Dear Leader so much.
It seems like most of these parties are trying to position themselves as the "safe and sane" alternative to the nuts opposing them, but they also give the impression to voters that they're not in favor of any real change. It's not a good time to be a status quo party almost anywhere, yet that seems to be the order of the day for many of these center-left parties.
England and Wales, like most of Europe, have fertility rates well below the replacement rate of 2.1. It’s about 1.44. Scotland’s is lower - it’s in the 1.3’s.
Without immigration, the UK dies.
The US fertility rate is 1.66; we crossed the 2.1 threshold in about 1970. Without immigration, we’d be in a world of hurt.
Without immigration, the UK dies.
The US fertility rate is 1.66; we crossed the 2.1 threshold in about 1970. Without immigration, we’d be in a world of hurt.
Don't go confusing people with the facts again. Besides, no abortion, no birth control, relaxed interpretations of consent and no porn or sex education should quickly remedy the need for those people.
If the Saudis, Qataris, and Emiratis line up to kiss his ass and rain praise down on him like his Cabinet routinely does, Trump will perk right up.
If they aren’t talking about Trump, he’s bored.
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If Biden stories help keep your mind off the Trump fuckery, then so be it.
superrific
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Not really. It was mostly Merkel, IIRC. The Germans were by far the biggest pushers of austerity. The UK's austerity was put in place by David Cameron, a conservative.
The losers from austerity were Spain, Portugal and Italy. And Ireland. None of them had much choice, because they don't control their own currency. This is a major drawback of monetary union, probably the most important one.
theel4life
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Silence Dogood
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ChileG
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superrific
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I would disagree. In the US, our liberal president pushed through a stimulus, not austerity.
Germany wasn't being liberal with its push to austerity. That was the conservative side of the CDU. It's fundamentally circular to say, "the CDU is overall liberal so liberalism is the problem" when the CDU was acting decidedly anti-liberal.
The problem in Europe is the German fetish with sound money. It's not entirely irrational for Germany; after all, monetary profligacy helped create Hitler. I think the time has come to move on. But anyway, that's the story of austerity in Europe, as I understand it having followed quite closely through the writings of Paul Krugman.
I would say that by far the biggest issue for the right-wing in Europe is the same issue as here: racism and xenophobia. The "government has failed us" is mostly just an excuse or a euphemism. For example, I seriously dated a liberal Austrian woman in the early 2000s. She really didn't like the Turks who had settled in Vienna. I wasn't sure if her attitude was racist or just an inconvenience experienced by a young woman; at the time I gave the benefit of the doubt, though in hindsight I think there was definitely racism involved. Point is, even the educated elites in Europe (she was/is a neurologist) can often be uncomfortable with outsiders. Sometimes, as in the Balkans, it becomes quite a bit more than discomfort.
Right wing politics has long been defined in terms of exclusion of some out group, whether it's foreigners or Jews or immigrants or dark skinned people. That's what it will continue to be. The trains running on time is just a coverup.
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Liberals don't have that strong core of voters that will vote Republican because of guns, race and God, no matter what the reality of what is best for the country might be. That's not the only people they draw or the only reason they draw them but it gives them a solid voting bloc that Democrats can't match.
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