Kepler-186

Hello Reds. What a win that was then

Best wishes and I hope you have a speedy recovery mate.

Hello Reds. What a win that was then.

Good half of footy that.

Just for you lad

The new Labour MP for Hastings acquitted herself well on Politics Live against the bellend Tory Lord and vicious Thatcherite hag Annabelle Denham. Helena Dollimore MP.

Seems the Guardian CEO is trying to sell off The Observer to Tortoise Media, a small start up media group ran by one of their mates. Journalists are taking strike action in December, including Carole Cadwalladr. Link below details what’s afoot, and has a speech she made 2 days ago about press freedom. https://open.substack.com/pub/broligarchy/p/how-to-speak-truth-to-power?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

No surprise really. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/texaco-franco-spanish-civil-war-rieber/

Further excellent analysis from Heather Cox Richardson. November 11, 2024 (Monday) The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes. In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.” Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career. In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings. The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax. Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn. Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent. Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election. All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968. While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status. The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power. In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters. One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

Goldie Looking Chain Full Kit

On iPlayer? If it is it’s a good series mate early 00s only been put on iPlayer for first time this year.

Good ebbening Reds. What a win that was then.

This is from a FB post by political journalist Heather Cox Richardson. The screenshots are her notes/sources. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/podcast? November 8. 2024 (Friday) Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump. Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.” Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.” Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region. Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote. In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law. When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region. Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

Well I don’t hang around with golf club racists, bankers and members of the Conservative Party. You’ve deleted that many accounts you don’t even remember when posters have interacted with you. I don’t need to justify myself to you. You hang around with people who think Liverpool is a shit hole but lack both the political and historical acumen to understand why it’s economically depressed. Then you get arsey with people who pull you up on it. I help other people by not being a right wing fucking cunt and by organising in my community against a destructive road and subsequently forming a community action group to pressurise the council ( one of the hardest hit by ToryFibDem cuts) to better deliver for all residents. Thinking of standing for MP on the trickle down economic platform. Maybe in Walton.