• 4 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The Democrats do not have a realistic chance of winning against Trump because the Democrats are entirely incapable of challenging power. It’s the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. They won’t do anything for the people they need to vote for them because if they do the people who fund them will stop funding them.

    Obama and Sanders both excelled at small-dollar donations, of course. Sadly, Obama was a silver-tongued coward and the Clinton Democrats made sure she didn’t repeat the mistakes of 2008 in 2016 by not bothering to sign up voters in case they killed her in the primaries again.

    They dig their own grave and they do so willingly because it makes them exceedingly rich.





  • Demanding that people vote for the least worst option without any content other than sneering at them for apparently not realising that one of the options is worse, is doing exactly that.

    It’s straw-manning the arguments of people who want (and desperately need) the Democrats to be better and are putting serious thought, time and energy into how that is possible in a world controlled by billionaires who unleash fascism the moment their power is threatened.

    And they’re doing it with a lazy, cynical, Bill Maher-wannabe take because apparently they think this is a good look?

    They’ll be the death of us all.












  • Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).

    But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.

    When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.

    It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.

    Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.

    [The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]



  • I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

    One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

    Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

    This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

    The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.