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

Yeah i suppose you have a point. I never think of sovcit claims as credible, but if that’s what someone needs to hear or believe in a tough time, could be a different story

Its pretty easy to hear a credible-sounding claim and take it in, without doing the research to debunk it

Yes, that is exactly what sovcits do.

I suppose where we differ then is if sovcit beliefs are ‘credible-sounding’

On the other hand, belief in a widespread historical myth that has been argued by professional historians isn’t exactly ‘soveriegn citizen’ level - even if that myth has been overwhelmingly dismissed by the majority of their colleagues.

Its pretty easy to hear a credible-sounding claim and take it in, without doing the research to debunk it

Well, it was never going to look like the Americas even if it was true. The claim is that they discovered the land, not that they circumnavigated it or were able to chart the coasts with Renaissance-level precision.

There’s no good or compelling evidence. But there’s lots of ‘evidence’ that while dismissed by most academics, can be used in support of the theory in a vacuum, for example the existence of a pre-Colombian carving in Arabic (which isn’t actually that, but was believed to be by some).

The idea isn’t based on the map alone, it’s only one piece of the corroborating ‘evidence’.

Again, I’m not arguing that it’s a true claim, just that it’s not on the surface insane

Al-Masudi was a very able cartographer, and his 10th Century map of the world is really impressive. And yes, it includes a continent to the West of the Old World.

Obviously this doesn’t prove a genuine knowledge or discovery of the New World, but its a noted oddity.

The theory that a Muslim population discovered and settled in the Americas is widely discredited and shouldn’t been taken seriously, but it is a published theory and supported by at least some academics. Most though dismiss is as either ‘psuedo-history’ or even ‘propaganda’, so yeah…

This theory might be ahistorical, but how sinister it is is debatable (“Yeagley believed that Shabbas and the other authors were simply trying to gain acceptance for Arabs, further integrating them into American culture by making them ‘native.’”). The American myth making around Colombus might be more based in fact, but lets be honest, there’s a lot of fake history there too.

The word ‘admiral’ does come from the Arabic ‘amir’, - circuitously via medieval Latin and Old French.

So yeah the post is untrue, but I wouldn’t call it ‘insane’ necessarily. Its a reasonably common, and interesting, myth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masudi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/did-muslims-visit-america-before-columbus

“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”

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.

You have done a bad job, robot

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