SSCReader
1mo ago
They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.
- DEI statements aren't as common as you might think, I am a straight white man in academia and i've never had to write one. We have a couple of "out" Trump voters (admittedly in the economics department which is the most conservative in general I think), and while it does skew left overall, there isn't a lot of antipathy to the Red Tribe, because they don't really think of them at all. We're in a Blue city so its not like they come across that many in any case. They are steeped in Blue culture and Blue ideas. They're not even thinking about building walls to keep them out. Too busy fighting for grant money or hating dumb students of today and their short attention spans.
Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.
As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.
All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.
SSCReader
1mo ago
The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded<
This is untrue. There was plenty of hate for Pakistani muslims in the 80s and 90s when this started. So that cannot be the whole story. The first reason it wasn't stopped and why white prostitution gangs still operate in the same way is that no-one really cares about the victims. Underclass girls who drink and do drugs and are from broken homes or in care are seen as a problem, as scum. I've heard the cops say it, in towns just down the road from Rotherham. Their own families barely care for them let alone anyone else.
That is the true and ongoing failure here. Condemned by conservatives for loose morals and sin and condemned by liberals for being chavvy and ill educated and low class.
They will continue to be victimised by one group or another for these reasons. Its Russian gangs in London, Sectarian ones in Northern Ireland, but the victims remain the same.
A lack of hate is not the issue by far. There is more than enough of that. It's not enough compassion. Not enough love.
Child prostitution is popular because there are always men who will pay for it. Always. Lock up the offenders of course, but just like with drug dealers, a new one will be along in a minute. You have to want to protect the victims not just punish the guilty. You have to want to see them not as a problem but as broken girls from broken homes who need help and treatment. But they aren't easy to work with or help so even the most compassionate of social workers or police officers becomes a jaded burned out cynic soon enough. I've seen it happen in my days working in social care. So then the cops treat the girls as prostitutes and drug addicts not as vulnerable children. No humans involved as the saying goes.
That is the almost insumountable problem. Anyone who wants to help is set against an almost unending torrent of misery and exposed to the sordid underbelly of human desire. Not many come out of it with their compassion intact. But that is what is needed, not more hate.
SSCReader
1mo ago
His description of having to hide who he really is, could nearly word for word be from a gay man in the not so distant past. That he is discriminated against from a black man in the 50s and 60s and so on and so forth.
SSCReader
1mo ago
I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.
Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.
90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.
This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.
It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.
What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.
I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.
For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.
But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.
I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.
SSCReader
1mo ago
A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.
I can't find an attribution either, beyond unidentified Roman soldier. I did come across it in some book about Rome (hence why i knew roughly how it went so I could Google it), but I can't remember which, or whether it was attributed there or not.
We have some attributed quotes which say roughly the same thing, though of course how much is based upon them actually seeing Celtic women vs hearing stories is difficult to determine.
“The women of the Gauls are not only like men in their great stature, but they are a match for them in courage as well.” — Diodorus Siculus
“A whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one [Gaul] in a fight, if he calls in his wife, stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.” — Ammianus Marcellinus
I think the evidence does suggest Celts were on average a couple of inches taller than Romans so probably Celtic women were taller than Roman women in the same way. Whether or not there was a besotted Roman soldier who wrote about Celtic Muscle Mommies compared to the small boring Roman women with that specific quote is unclear. I would heavily suspect that even if that is an actual quote the average Celtic woman was not actually as strong as any Roman man.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.
Ah that is because she uses the most powerful technique known to any race. The double fist punch. She uses it like 15 times in that 1 minute clip.
SSCReader
1mo ago
- But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal.
Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.
Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:
From a Roman soldier:
“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”
You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:
"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"
But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.
As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.
It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.
I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.
SSCReader
1mo ago
At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard,
Certainly in Howard. Valeria is described as being strong (while still being feminine). Maybe the original Red Sonja (who inspired the later Red Sonja in Conan comics) might count.
"She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance." - This is the start of the description of Valeria. He does say she is unusual in her strength though.
"Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight. It was Red Sonya who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper." - She is splintering mail with sword strokes and reaping men like grain, which takes some level of strength.
"With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turkish dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt." - Red Sonja again rescuing the main character - overpowered a man, throttled him, then throws his body away, like a sack.
SSCReader
1mo ago
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups
Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.
Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.
Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.
The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
SSCReader
1mo ago
The Tirs (Tairngire and na Nog) are fun! I ran a game where my players woke up with their menories wiped and had to piece together they had completed a run for the Elves in Tairngire which went down a storm.
Shadowrun is one of my all time top RPGs and settings.
SSCReader
1mo ago
If we look at Shadowrun another cyberpunk game from 1989, they do have the United Canadian and American States or UCAS which is basically the North Eastern part of America and Canada merged together. It has Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan as states.
Then the Confederation of American States in the South and a bunch of Native American nations in between after the resurgence of magic and several pandemics and volcanos erupting.
Mexico has been taken over by a conglomerate which is both simultaneously Aztecs gone back to sacrificing people on pyramids and a merging of the drug cartels.
SSCReader
1mo ago
I regret you were too late but Nybbler already beat you to it, so we had traced back to Baldassaro and also to another article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which has another unsourced quote about the 1928 ban in Chicago. Though as knowledge is its own reward so I hope you do not feel your time wasted!
Still being banned for being communist means my overall point holds thankfully.
SSCReader
1mo ago
So I tracked back that quote to Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa in 2014 but it seems she sourced the quote from R. Wolf Baldassarro in 2013 who doesn't appear to have named a source that I can find. The "strong leadership roles" wording does appear to be his paraphrasing with just the "ungodly" wording being a quote in his original piece.
"Nevertheless, it has come under attack several times. Ministers and educators challenged it for its “ungodly” influence and for depicting women in strong leadership roles. They opposed not only children reading it, but adults as well, lest it undermine longstanding gender roles."
I did find an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which said this:
"In 1928, you would not have been able to find “The Wizard of Oz” at the Chicago Public Library; librarians there considered the book “not literature, but, somehow, rather evil for children.”" but again the quote is unsourced. The Chicago Tribune was extant in 1928 so I assume they would maybe have internal archives so as to verify that the banning actually happened, but it isn't specified in the article.
I do concede however that I cannot find a contemporary source for those quotes. Though I also can't find a contemporary source for the 1928 banning at all. Possibly buried in a newspaper archive I would need a library card to access, ironically enough.
For the 1950's though I think we have better evidence (this piece is about state librarians in Florida):
"When it came to employing the tactic of using the public’s anticommunist sentiment to remove the works of Baum from public libraries (and thereby empower the library in its fight against communism), Dreier and Dodd were not alone. These localities joined Detroit, Washington, D.C., Chicago, (ironically) Kansas City, and other local library districts across the nation in purging their shelves of the works of Baum. "
"Dreier was arguing that his movement to improve the quantity and quality of Florida’s libraries was a necessary front in the Cold War. He viewed libraries as extremely important institutions that would create a populace capable of defeating the Soviet Union in the marketplace of ideas"
This paper is sourced from letters held in the Florida State archives from the 1950's and illustrates that seeing libraries as a cultural weapon was already happening then.
"Outside the pages of his library newsletter, Dreier was an even more strident anticommunist. Elsewhere he wrote vitriolic propaganda pieces with stark depictions of leftists:
"The socialist is smarter than the capitalist. He has to be to get what he wants. The capitalist is the producer. He raises the fruits and vegetables. He makes gadgets. He accumulates profits. That’s when the socialist, himself unable to create anything, steps in and passes laws that compel the capitalist to turn part of his profits into socialist projects. The time will come when the socialist will actually pass laws that compel the producer to surrender complete control of what he has created."
"Given his antipathy toward leftist politics, the fact that Baum’s work was often suspected of containing subversive political ideas gave Dreier additional impetus to support Dodd’s list of books to be removed from Florida’s libraries."
Whether it applies to Baum in 1928 or not, the evidence is that libraries were already seen as a battleground for cultural clashes well before the current timeframe.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Even if no-one does respond, we have to do our best to write as if they will and we want them to. Otherwise we'll get fewer and fewer people who will.
And I did have a response, I was rewriting when he got banned. I don't know if I would stand up for all of it, but he is wrong about leftism murdering his neutral libraries and wearing the skin suit. It was already murdered when anti-Christian and anti-American books were banned back in the day and libraries had a very different lean. When the Wizard of Oz was banned because witches are theologically evil or portrayed women in leadership roles. It was already a weapon in the culture war, that's why leftists got involved. Because they felt just as disgusted by the way it was previously as he does now. It's a new zombie in the skinsuit that he doesn't like but there will always be a zombie.
"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"
"Pressure was brought to bear not only on the materials in the library but the staff who ran it. Loyalty programs sprang up around the country beginning in 1947, the year that President Harry Truman enacted a federal program for employees in the executive branch. Typically, these programs required that employees sign an oath indicating whether or not they had had or continued to have any affiliations with organizations considered subversive"
"The 1960s brought about turmoil in libraries across the southern United States. African-Americans attempted to access white libraries across the American South."
Once libraries are used as a cultural weapon, you cannot be surprised when your opponents decide it is a weapon they need to contest.
Whether equity based weeding is right or wrong is irrelevant, you can prefer one or the other, but starting history 20 years ago obscures WHY these things happen now. Why did a coalition of the left want to control libraries? Because those libraries had previously been weaponized against their coalition - feminists, leftists and black people at a minimum. Free and neutral libraries had already been skinned and inhabited long ago. It's just a fight over which zombie gets to wear the skin so to speak. And I am sure the Christians in the 1920's would argue that libraries had been corrupted and that is why they needed to assert control and ban ungodly books ,and the patriots of the 50s would cite the rise of un-American communists for why they had to fire people and so on and so forth.
If you hit someone with a club and then they wrest it away from you and hit you with it, your complaint about your opponent using a weapon is void. Your real issue is that your opponent has the club not you, not with the concept of the club being used as a weapon at all.
Probably with some introspection about why you feel violent disgust, so you can control that reaction I think. The below is my own interpretation and idea of the space.
The whole point of the space is I should want even (or especially perhaps!) the people I find violently disgusting to read what I say and want to respond to me so we can have a dialogue.
So if I am going to talk about something I find disgusting I have to take a distant view of it and try to be more dispassionate.
You'll note many people who catch repeated bans it's because they can't (or won't) disguise a seething anger that underlies their post. They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with. They are writing from emotion first and foremost.
I could rant for days about the damage the Christian "brain parasite" does, and have in other places, but here if I post about it, it has to be with the idea I WANT Christians to read and engage. And calling their faith, something they feel very seriously about a parasite is not going to optimise for light over heat. It's starting an argument not a discussion. Its already a steep ask for them to try and discuss their own heartfelt beliefs with criticism, so my job is to try and make that as easy as possible for them, by trying to remove as much heat as I can.
I rewrite my posts usually after thinking if I were an X, how would i feel about the language being used to talk about the principles and actions I hold dear? How do I alter it so we can engage in a discussion not a fight? Try to put myself in the shoes of whoever I think believes the things I hate or find disgusting and edit my wording to offend them the least possible to make my point. I'm not always successful I don't think, but I have never got a ban or even a warning (that I recollect), so I think I get reasonably close.
You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space. But of course for most people they don't want to communicate with people like that. So not everyone is a good fit for what the space is supposed to be. If you can't at least pretend you WANT to engage with someone whose ideas you hate viscerally and are critiquing and make some effort to aid that, you'll probably be picking up Mod actions sooner rather than later.
Edit - spelling
SSCReader
1mo ago
Even if we don't strip citizenship from people who have come to reject those ideas, I am okay with making their lives otherwise so unpalatable that they renounce citizens on their own.
Why not the opposite? Reform the nation on the beliefs that the now majority of your citizens espouse? To an extent that is what the Civil war did no? Massive disagreement about a specific ideal, fought a war over it, reformed shattered state with the new status quo in place (to an extent at least).
Or to put it another way was the Confederacy or the Union the anti-American ones in this context? Slavery had been part of America for some time, so was the abolition unAmerican or was the fact slavery contradicted some of the idealistic founding rhetoric enough to make abolition actually the American thing to do?
SSCReader
1mo ago
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Are you sure? Even last year homicide seems to have fallen again and certainly in PA's large cities we are now at a near 10 year low, and much much lower than we were in the 80's.
In Philly the homicide rate peaked at over 44 (per 100,000) in the mid 1980's. Dropping to about 16 in the early 2010's, it peaked again at about 35 in 2021 but has dropped again down to just over 17 for 2024. And so far in the year it is about 35% down on last year, which means we might actually get the lowest homicide rate in the last 50 years in 2025. Pittsburgh's numbers seem to following the same rough trajectory.
For the whole US the peak appears to have been 1991 with 10.7 before reaching a low of 4.7 in 2014 before increasing to 7.75 in 2021, and decreasing to 5.2 for 2024. So similar trends across the nation. Estimates for the 1950s and 60s put the figure around 5 then as well. So 2024 was one of the least violent (looking at homicides) years in modern US history.
The evidence seems to suggest that not only can we actually maintain a level of violent criminality much higher than we are currently at (not that I am saying that is a good idea of course!) that our current rate is not actually all that high (historically) as the Covid era increase has largely now vanished.
Just for comparison, my homeland had a homicide rate about 31 per 100,000 at the peak of the Troubles in the early 70's but had decreased to about 0.8 before Covid. It spiked up to around 1.3 during Covid and dropped back to 0.7 in 2024.
I think the evidence shows that public order can in fact be maintained with significantly higher levels of criminality and lower levels of punishing bad people. I am not advocating for that being a good idea just to be clear!
Just pointing out we do have a pretty high tolerance all in all, and that if current means whatever punishing we are doing in 2024 and so far in 2025 it seems to be working pretty well.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Though of course non-combat skills actually out scale combat skills in Skyrim quite significantly. With alchemy and smithing alone (even setting aside the infinite loop trick) you can loop to create weapons that will kill even a max levelled Draugr in 1 or 2 hits even on Legendary difficulty, and boost your combat skills with alchemy if you wanted to. Not to mention you'll be rolling in gold to pay for training in combat skills if you want.
The equivalent to AI in the real world perhaps? The self-improving loop leaving behind the basics of ships and planes.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Remember when Cameron promised the referendum in 2013 he was in charge with a coalition. That gave groups an out-sized power. There absolutely were enough in the euro-sceptic camp to cause him problems with votes because he didn't even have a majority on his own. The conventional wisdom as shown below was primarily because of the euro-sceptics with SOME others because they feared UKIP would cost them seats. But the biggest concern was the euro-sceptic bloc. Without them he probably could have wrangled the rest, because it was the euro-sceptic wing which was feeding the fears of the others. Cameron did not want a referendum. He did so because of the pressure he was under driven primarily by the euro-sceptic power bloc which was able to muster first 60, then 80 MPs to defy the government in votes, then over a hundred demanding a referendum. He only had 306 MPs at this time so over 100 is definitely enough to force any issue. As they did when they rebelled and sided with Labour.
"For Clegg, the reason Cameron moved to a referendum commitment was to manage his divided party.19 Echoing Harold Wilson’s 1975 European Community plebiscite, rather than a conversion to the merits of direct democracy, Cameron needed a mechanism to control an issue that was destabilising his party.20 As early as October 2011 Cameron had ‘faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving 60 Tory backbenchers’.21 However, the pressure ratcheted upwards later in October when 81 Conservative MPs voted for a referendum in defiance of a three line whip. Both Cameron and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke forcefully against the motion in the House of Commons yet could not prevent a larger rebellion than anything seen during the Maastricht legislation in 1992.22 Political pressure from Conservative MPs continued to grow. In June 2012 John Barron MP collected over 100 signatures from Conservative colleagues asking Cameron to commit to a referendum after the 2015 general election.23 The PM publicly rejected this from Brussels which angered his critics and eroded his ‘authority over the party’.24 Pressure rose further in October 2012 when Conservative rebels united with Labour to defeat Cameron in Parliament over EU budget contributions."
"Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition, were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage."
SSCReader
1mo ago
Well when we start enforcing the Johnson amendment on any church there is some room to talk about that. Given the amount of religious endorsements Trump got, its a wash, or perhaps even tilted towards Republicans just given numbers.
Either churches get to endorse or they don't. (I'd prefer not myself) but singling out black churches is just an isolated demand for rigor currently.
Also happy to remove tax exemption from both black and white churches just to be clear.
SSCReader
1mo ago
Setting aside I think you're just wrong about the vote rigging, and that the black voting bloc has its own ideological things it wanted from Democrats, that make it willing to put up with some LGBT stuff, thats just reinforcing my point, the ideologues in the DNC were the ones pulling the strings, they had good control over congressional Democrats, doesn't matter how many moderate officials you appoint. Doesn't matter if the President is a pragmatist who just wants power, as long as he has it theres no point in going to war with the ideologues on his own side.
Sure trans kids, sure DEI and affirmative action even if unpopular. Sure flipping your own views from a few years ago upside down, Why would they care? The pragmatist just wants to win. If he can win without having to dial down his own side, so much the better, its political capital he doesn't need to spend.
Theres always reasons why it is different. But there are reasons why the Democrat coalition looks like it does. In the US for example being black or gay is very predictive of political persuasion at somewhere around 90% voting Democrat. That can change over time but currently it is not orthogonal to political persuasion.
More options
Context Copy link