Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,333]

1 minute ago, Vesper said:

Trump is going around cosplaying as a garbabe man, but still wearing a dress shirt and a tie.

madness

 

Trump's truck stunt backfires as he misses door handle twice and nearly falls over

Donald Trump was seen struggling to open a truck door and nearly fell over in a humiliating video from his garbage stunt in Green Bay, Wisconsin

https://www.express.co.uk/news/us/1969578/donald-trump-truck-stunt-backfires

 

 

He copied Annegrette Karrenbauer of CDU who was dressing herself as cleaning lady.

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

POLLSTERS METHODS - SIMULATION
-------------------------------------------
I ran computer simulations with random numbers and with conditions similar to those of the coming American election.
The purpose was to measure the effectiveness of swing theory v. the simple method.
My results show that for small-medium sample sizes the swing method is definitely better.
But as the sample size increases the simple counting method tends to get better and even surpass the swing method in accuracy.

Edited October 31, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,087]

Sweden’s libraries caught in a political row about drag story hour

https://theconversation.com/swedens-libraries-caught-in-a-political-row-about-drag-story-hour-241159

Drag story hour is “nothing other than indoctrination and sexualisation of children”, claimed Sweden Democrats politician Jonathan Sager during a session of the local parliament in Kalmar, southern Sweden, in 2022. He was reacting to plans to organise a drag story hour event at the local library, where drag queens would read to children, challenging norms of gender and sexuality. He called (unsuccessfully) for the event to be cancelled.

For someone not familiar with recent political trends in Sweden, Sager’s view may seem out of character for a country known for its tolerance and progressive approach towards sexual minorities. But just like other countries, Sweden is experiencing a backlash against drag story hour events. Public libraries have repeatedly been the target of hatred and threats from radical right actors, including politicians. Culture wars, often associated with the polarised political climate of the US, have now firmly taken root in Scandinavia.

In the US, objections against drag queen story hour form part of a larger wave of protests against LGBTQ+ content in libraries, also manifested in attempts to have certain books banned. Although book bans are not as common in Sweden, tensions have arisen over what children read and who reads to them.

As a result, public libraries, and especially their reading promotion activities for children, are now at the centre of polarising conflicts between the radical right and its opponents.

Sweden is far from immune to the global growth of far-right influence. Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna or SD), became the second largest party in the national parliament following the most recent election in 2022. The current government depends on their support to function. The party has neo-nazi roots and, despite cleaning up appearances, its representatives still push overtly anti-immigration, white supremacist viewpoints.

Like many parties of the radical right, SD promotes a conservative view on culture, gender and family, so its opposition to drag story hour is not surprising. However, there is a deeper conflict over the future of Swedish society at play here, too.

We looked at five instances of political conflict around drag events at libraries in Sweden, finding common themes of dispute over culture and what constitutes a good society.

‘Defending’ our children

In Kalmar, as well as in Trelleborg, another municipality in southern Sweden, local Sweden Democrats have (unsuccessfully) tried to block drag story hours at libraries by arguing that they were “defending” children. In Kalmar, the organiser was accused of “sexualising children”, as though there is something inherently sexual about a drag queen wearing a dress. Sager argued that material that is “gender creative, gender critical or norm critical” should not be used for events involving children.

Historically, reading promotion activities are part of this fear of harmful influence. For instance, certain types of fiction have been portrayed as having a demoralising effect, leading to initiatives that encourage children to read “quality literature” instead. In Sweden, there is less of a debate around the content of children’s literature, so there aren’t US-style arguments about banning books. But there are heated conversations around the act of reading, especially with children.

Reading together teaches children to support democratic values, such as by fostering empathy and understanding. Drag story hour fits well with this perspective because it promotes values of acceptance, diversity and positive self-identification. These are values that are expressions of the characteristic emphasis on equity and pluralism in Swedish cultural policy.

But by ticking these boxes, drag story hour clashes with the politics of the radical right, making the conflict emblematic of a larger tussle over the direction of Nordic cultural policy.

The dilemma of the safe space

The dispute around drag story hour has also inflamed arguments about the meaning of safety in a modern society. Is the safest option to bring security into a library or does that very security compromise the library as a safe space?

In the municipalities of Älmhult and Olofström, in southern Sweden, libraries decided against holding drag story hours because of safety concerns. They felt that bringing in guards was not an option because that would be “completely at odds” with the openness of the library. Visible security measures were seen as incompatible with being a safe space.

In Malmö, drag story times went ahead with security guards in place. Here, a decision had been made that security measures enabled the library to be a safe space via drag story hour.

The controversies over drag queen story telling events at public libraries in Sweden continues. Recently, a drag queen story group filed a charge against 106 people – including five SD politicians – for hate crimes. At the same time, public libraries in many parts of Sweden continue to report successful story telling arrangements in the face of opposition from the radical right.

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

6 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Sweden’s libraries caught in a political row about drag story hour

https://theconversation.com/swedens-libraries-caught-in-a-political-row-about-drag-story-hour-241159

Drag story hour is “nothing other than indoctrination and sexualisation of children”, claimed Sweden Democrats politician Jonathan Sager during a session of the local parliament in Kalmar, southern Sweden, in 2022. He was reacting to plans to organise a drag story hour event at the local library, where drag queens would read to children, challenging norms of gender and sexuality. He called (unsuccessfully) for the event to be cancelled.

For someone not familiar with recent political trends in Sweden, Sager’s view may seem out of character for a country known for its tolerance and progressive approach towards sexual minorities. But just like other countries, Sweden is experiencing a backlash against drag story hour events. Public libraries have repeatedly been the target of hatred and threats from radical right actors, including politicians. Culture wars, often associated with the polarised political climate of the US, have now firmly taken root in Scandinavia.

In the US, objections against drag queen story hour form part of a larger wave of protests against LGBTQ+ content in libraries, also manifested in attempts to have certain books banned. Although book bans are not as common in Sweden, tensions have arisen over what children read and who reads to them.

As a result, public libraries, and especially their reading promotion activities for children, are now at the centre of polarising conflicts between the radical right and its opponents.

Sweden is far from immune to the global growth of far-right influence. Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna or SD), became the second largest party in the national parliament following the most recent election in 2022. The current government depends on their support to function. The party has neo-nazi roots and, despite cleaning up appearances, its representatives still push overtly anti-immigration, white supremacist viewpoints.

Like many parties of the radical right, SD promotes a conservative view on culture, gender and family, so its opposition to drag story hour is not surprising. However, there is a deeper conflict over the future of Swedish society at play here, too.

We looked at five instances of political conflict around drag events at libraries in Sweden, finding common themes of dispute over culture and what constitutes a good society.

‘Defending’ our children

In Kalmar, as well as in Trelleborg, another municipality in southern Sweden, local Sweden Democrats have (unsuccessfully) tried to block drag story hours at libraries by arguing that they were “defending” children. In Kalmar, the organiser was accused of “sexualising children”, as though there is something inherently sexual about a drag queen wearing a dress. Sager argued that material that is “gender creative, gender critical or norm critical” should not be used for events involving children.

Historically, reading promotion activities are part of this fear of harmful influence. For instance, certain types of fiction have been portrayed as having a demoralising effect, leading to initiatives that encourage children to read “quality literature” instead. In Sweden, there is less of a debate around the content of children’s literature, so there aren’t US-style arguments about banning books. But there are heated conversations around the act of reading, especially with children.

Reading together teaches children to support democratic values, such as by fostering empathy and understanding. Drag story hour fits well with this perspective because it promotes values of acceptance, diversity and positive self-identification. These are values that are expressions of the characteristic emphasis on equity and pluralism in Swedish cultural policy.

But by ticking these boxes, drag story hour clashes with the politics of the radical right, making the conflict emblematic of a larger tussle over the direction of Nordic cultural policy.

The dilemma of the safe space

The dispute around drag story hour has also inflamed arguments about the meaning of safety in a modern society. Is the safest option to bring security into a library or does that very security compromise the library as a safe space?

In the municipalities of Älmhult and Olofström, in southern Sweden, libraries decided against holding drag story hours because of safety concerns. They felt that bringing in guards was not an option because that would be “completely at odds” with the openness of the library. Visible security measures were seen as incompatible with being a safe space.

In Malmö, drag story times went ahead with security guards in place. Here, a decision had been made that security measures enabled the library to be a safe space via drag story hour.

The controversies over drag queen story telling events at public libraries in Sweden continues. Recently, a drag queen story group filed a charge against 106 people – including five SD politicians – for hate crimes. At the same time, public libraries in many parts of Sweden continue to report successful story telling arrangements in the face of opposition from the radical right.

What do they say ?
Tell us a story.

[Vesper 30,087]

lol, fucking snowflake male RWers

the motherfuckers think they own their wives, and can treat them like chattel

and far too man RW women gutlessly go along

Conservatives in furor over Julia Roberts ad

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4964265-kamala-harris-ad-julia-roberts/

A new Harris-Walz campaign ad voiced by actor Julia Roberts encourages women to vote for Vice President Harris in the presidential election, even if their husbands are backing former President Trump.

The Roberts ad also alludes to abortion rights, which is seen as a pivotal issue in a race that has seen Trump with big polling leads among male voters and Harris with a large lead among female voters.

“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” Roberts says in the ad as a woman on screen meets up with her husband after casting her ballot for Harris.

The voter winks at a fellow female voter as her husband asks if she made the “right choice.”

Republicans have responded to the video with outrage, with some claiming that a wife lying about her vote is as bad as an affair.

“If I found out Emma was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said on air Wednesday in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. 

Other GOP members including Charlie Kirk said the thought was “nauseating.”

In criticizing the ad, he discussed a husband working hard to afford his wife’s lifestyle, and then said a wife who lied to her husband about whom she backed would amount to undermining her husband.

“I think it’s so gross. I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go you know and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth,” Kirk fumed to radio host Megyn Kelly.

“Kamala Harris and her team believe that there will be millions of women that undermine their husbands and do so in a way that it’s not detectable in the polling,” he added. 

In response to his statements, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called Kirk a “twit.”

“Listen to this twit make Donald Trump’s closing argument. Women, you know what to do. #VoteKamala,” Cheney wrote in a post on the social platform X.

Cheney is one of the highest-profile Republicans backing Harris for president.

 

[KEVINAA 129]

 

953 Billion Dollars has been wiped out from the US stock market today

The USA and world economy fully crashing just before Halloween night ends in USA eastern time.

[Vesper 30,087]

CNN apologises for pager comment by conservative panellist to Mehdi Hasan

Ryan James Girdusky removed from NewsNight show after telling fellow guest ‘I hope your beeper doesn’t go off’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/29/cnn-apologises-pager-comment-ryan-james-girdusky-mehdi-hasan

CNN has apologised to its viewers after a panellist on its NewsNight programme made derogatory remarks implying that a fellow guest on the show, the broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, was a terrorist.

Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative commentator, told Hasan, a Guardian US columnist and former host on MSNBC, who is Muslim, that he hoped his “beeper doesn’t go off”, in an apparent reference to Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon with exploding pagers last month. The wave of coordinated explosions killed 12 and injured thousands.

“Did your guest just say I should be killed on live TV?” Hasan asked the show’s anchor, Abby Phillip.

After a commercial break, Phillip issued an on-air apology to Hasan and viewers and said Girdusky had been removed from the show.

“I want to apologise to Mehdi Hasan for what was said at this table. It was completely unacceptable,” she said. “I want to apologise to the viewers at home.”

 

In a subsequent statement, CNN said there was “zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air” and that Girdusky “will not be welcomed back at our network”. Hasan retweeted the statement on X.

Earlier in their heated exchange, Hasan had said that if people on the far right “don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing, stop saying”. Girdusky interjected by saying Hasan was called an “antisemite more than anyone at this table”.

After Hasan said he was used to being labelled an antisemite due to his support for the Palestinian people, Girdusky said, “Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” He attempted to apologise amid crosstalk and sought to justify his comment by indicating he thought Hasan said he supported Hamas.

In a later post on X, however, Girdusky appeared to double down on a more antagonistic approach. “You can stay on CNN if you falsely call every Republican a Nazi and have taken money from Qatar-funded media,” he said. “Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for.”

[Vesper 30,087]

24 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

 

953 Billion Dollars has been wiped out from the US stock market today

The USA and world economy fully crashing just before Halloween night ends in USA eastern time.

last 24 hours

last year

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,087]

[Vesper 30,087]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-10-31-refusing-vote-for-harris-mass-immigrant-deportations/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents transfer an immigrant after an early-morning raid in Duarte, California, June 6, 2022.

With polls showing that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running even in nearly every swing state, this election will turn on the decisions of very small subsets of voters. One of those subsets surely isn’t contemplating voting for Trump, but may end up electing him anyway.

I refer to those voters so understandably appalled by Israel’s war on Gaza and the toll it’s taken in innocent lives that they may not vote, or vote for Jill Stein, as a way of protesting the Biden administration’s continued provision of arms for Netanyahu’s war, and Harris’s refusal to cleanly break with that policy.

It’s by no means clear how not voting for Harris will stop Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the attendant slaughter of innocent lives. It is perfectly clear, however, that it will imperil millions of innocent lives right here in the USA should it lead to a Trump victory.

I refer to the immigrants among us whose forced deportation is the fundamental plank in Trump’s platform, the one issue he stresses in every one of his otherwise disjointed speeches, the sine qua non of his pledge to make America great again. To accomplish that deportation, he’s made clear he’d order the National Guard to sweep through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, and might well order the Army to clear out areas like the Bronx, East Los Angeles, and Chicago’s West Side as well.

The government’s count of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is roughly 11 million, but Trump and JD Vance routinely inflate that number to 20 million or more. And even in the very, very, very unlikely event that deportations are confined just to the truly undocumented, they would still separate immigrant parents from citizen children, and banish Dreamers—undocumented immigrants brought here as children by their parents—to countries that are utterly alien to them. At minimum, the process will destroy hundreds of thousands of families and devastate entire communities. The toll in innocent lives—not killed, but effectively crippled—will be huge.

And this is the most predictable consequence of a Trump victory. His demonization of immigrants is the central message of his campaign, and a campaign (inevitably entailing some violence) to deport them follows as the night the day.

I don’t doubt that those campaigns will meet serious resistance in our cities, as those opposed to them will take to the streets in very large numbers. I also don’t doubt that the ranks of those demonstrators will include some of those whose opposition to the U.S. military aid that has enabled Israel’s war on Palestinians impelled them not to vote for Kamala. After all, if they’ve refused to vote for Harris due to their revulsion and rage at the loss of innocent lives, the assault on immigrants will likely lead them to feel comparable revulsion and rage.

It’s by no means clear, however, that those imperiled immigrants will welcome those Harris-abstainers to the ranks of their supporters. They may reason—actually, they almost surely will reason—that progressives who didn’t vote for Harris didn’t think that the innocent lives of the immigrants among them mattered very much. Some of them might even conclude that those Harris-refuseniks didn’t give a flying fuck about them.

This is something that voters infuriated by U.S. Gaza policy and still wrestling with how to vote might want to think about.

[Vesper 30,087]

🤣

Edited October 31, 2024 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Saudi foreign minister denounces Israel's north Gaza assault as genocide

RIYADH (Reuters) -Saudi Arabia denounced Israeli attacks in northern Gaza as genocide on Thursday, telling foreign investors that some bilateral agreements it has been negotiating with Washington are "not that tied" to normalisation of its relations with Israel.

 

Speaking on stage at an investment conference in Riyadh, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said Israeli actions in northern Gaza could only be described as a form a genocide that was feeding a cycle of violence.

He reiterated the kingdom's position that it would not recognise Israel without a Palestinian state, adding on that proposed step, Saudi Arabia is "quite happy to wait until the situation is amenable," before moving ahead with normalisation.

"We look at just what's happening now in north (Gaza) where we have a complete blockade of any access for humanitarian goods coupled with a continued military assault without any real pathway for civilians to find shelter, to find safe zones, that can only be described as a form of genocide," he said.

"It is certainly against humanitarian law, international humanitarian law, and is feeding a continuing cycle of violence."

[Vesper 30,087]

out in the open

fuck these fucks

 

[Vesper 30,087]

[Vesper 30,087]

🤣