Purple and Black
Taking Independent and Unofficial Back

Political Hodgepodge

maplenpg said:
It's a mess isn't it? We're the laughing stock of the world, but worse people are dying whilst they play about with the country's laws and finances. We haven't really had a PM all year, not properly. Johnson went missing, then he disappeared for months, and Truss did far less than 45 days as everything shut down for 10 days for the Queen and then another 10 days for Conferences. She only ever did two weekly PMQs.

I doubt Johnson will get back in. He's like Trump, he likes the headlines. He's too controversial right now. I think he will come back (though I hope he doesn't), but I don't think he'll do it now.
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Going to be interesting to watch.
 
GemInEye said:
I feel for you all.
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To be honest, I think what happens in the US will impact what happens here. If Trump comes back, then Johnson will without doubt. If Trump doesn't, then I think Johnson won't return either. They're both just narcissists, in it for the power and the glory, not for the people or the country.
 
I thought of starting a thread titled ‘political violence’ but I don’t want to go there yet,
 
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Not meaning to ignore the topic of ye’s meltdown, I have to go back to the attack on Paul Pelosi, for a moment. Two things I want to share come from different angles. One is from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an academic who studies strongmen and authoritarianism. She gives perspective on the continuing threat of political violence and why it’s happening here.


The other has to do with misleading media coverage, in this example, as shown in the NYTimes.


Which article appears in the NYTIMES ‘below the fold’. In other words it was relegated to a lesser place than some comparative fluff about elon musk, which had the topmost real estate on the front page.

While here’s the cut-and-dried frank explanation, in one sentence:

 
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GemInEye said:
What about Kanye's meltdown? He's gonna lose everything.
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I listened to an extended interview of ye by lex fridman (lex fridman podcast #332) . ye spoke a lot about jewish bigwigs in the music industry and how he'd been wronged by them. Also, how he was 'jew' (as distinct from 'jewish'). I don't know Kanye West's music and have never tried to find out much about him, aside from what the tabloids and clickbait headlines communicate. Lex Fridman tried to impress the harms of anti-semitism and tried to give ye different language options to express himself but without much progress. I was busy writing gotv postcards, so it was background noise, for the most part. Still, I was glad to have heard what the hubbub is about.

Anyhow, here's an opinion piece by Charles Blow of the NYTimes [10.30.22] as a better alternative for stimulating discussion.

The Self-Destruction of Ye
 
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barnswallow said:
I listened to an extended interview of ye by lex fridman (lex fridman podcast #332) . ye spoke a lot about jewish bigwigs in the music industry and how he'd been wronged by them. Also, how he was 'jew' (as distinct from 'jewish'). I don't know Kanye West's music and have never tried to find out much about him, aside from what the tabloids and clickbait headlines communicate. Lex Fridman tried to impress the harms of anti-semitism and tried to give ye different language options to express himself but without much progress. I was busy writing gotv postcards, so it was background noise, for the most part. Still, I was glad to have heard what the hubbub is about.

Anyhow, here's an opinion piece by Charles Blow of the NYTimes [10.30.22] as a better alternative for stimulating discussion.

The Self-Destruction of Ye
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I like that, it pretty much sums it up.
 
Here’s an interesting interpretation of seemingly disparate events into a comprehensive singularity (word?). I hope you can access the whole thread. I’ve read the links to the shorter articles but not the ‘books’. Anyway, food for thought and insight into others’ ways of thinking, perhaps. Keywords: Putin, Ukraine, golden billion, muskmelon (my bush II way to refer to elon musk - simply couldn’t resist, twitter-purchase, etc

 
Using twitter has provided easy access to important interesting news stories. While I know that there’s a fair chance that the tweets I’ve embedded will become inaccessible sooner or later, I’m too lazy to make the extra effort to use other media sources when I find something that interests me.

 
Since I can 'gift' 10 articles from the NYTimes (enabling you to avoid a paywall) and since I want to read this article and I have a few more articles I can gift before the end of January:

How Barr's Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled [NYTimes;1.26.23]

The basic gist is that Barr and Durham engaged in a lot of cruddy behavior. They pretended to be acquiring damning evidence in their investigation of the investigators investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, while actually uncovering nothing except a potential story of more t---- corruption, which they buried.

It all adds up to further evidence of the corrupt nature of Barr's days as the AG of the US.

A better summary from TPM (with reporting on other topics in their morning memo):
The Worst Attorney General In 50 Years Was Even More Corrupt Than We Thought [1.27.23]

And, another take, from Kevin Drum:
The Durham investigation has been a fiasco from start to finish [1.26.23]

We have expectations/assumptions about how our system of government should work. Come to find out, with t----, the great destroyer, with a natural instinct to locate every exploitable vulnerability and a magnetic attraction to the unseemly but not strictly illegal, there are holes a-plenty. One is a distance between a president and their attorney general. Another, a distance between the attorney general and any special counsel they may appoint. t---- chose Barr to replace Jeff Sessions as attny general, after Barr all but telegraphed his willingness to do t----'s dirty work.

William Barr Did What Donald Trump Hired Him to Do [Slate;3.24.2019]
 
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This one explains one example of ‘dark money’, a donor to Democratic causes, which caught me off-guard because the Supreme Court case ‘Citizens United v Federal Election Commission’, decided in 2010, was a conservative, Republican-based effort, which split the court down ideological lines, with all the conservative justices deciding in favor and the liberal justices, against.

How an obscure mega-donor’s giving highlights our dark-money fiasco [WaPo;4.6.23]

I like this one for its clarity. Also, click on the link highlighted as Citizens United v FEC in the article for a reasonably short explanation of the case.
 
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