toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
9mo ago
So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped
I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.
The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.
toadworrier
8mo ago
South Korea even had a female head-of-state.
So did Pakistan.
toadworrier
1yr ago
So I don't think things will change.
Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.
Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.
toadworrier
11mo ago
and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud.
What's the dynamic here?
In a Banana Republic, voters tolerate this sort of thing because they know that corruption investigations only happen because of political will. So even if your man is corrupt, caring about it would be unilateral disarmement. In the US, this is more or less the situation already with Trump, but I'd imagine Texas politics is too one sided for that to be the issue.
One-party states can easily be corrupt -- after all there's no effective opposition. But what leads to voters shrugging it off like that? Why are they so desperate to elect this particular man?
toadworrier
9mo ago
The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).
toadworrier
10mo ago
DeSantis has done lots to hobble woke indoctrination in education and also to energise citizens against it. That's been his most powerful point of leverage as as a state governor. The Presidency has different points of leverage.
Ironically Hanania has done more than anyone (except maybe Chris Rufo) to document how much of the modern woke-imperium is upheld by American law, especially civil rights law. Hanania is also the one who pointed out how much of that is actually done through executive orders. Any republican could deal a big blow to that, and their respective track records show DeSantis is likely to actually do it while Trump is not.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. ... So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find
So you answer your own question!
toadworrier
10mo ago
Australian Covid hysteria quietly died in Christmas of 2021. The governments ruined the Christmas of anyone travelling across the border, only for Omnicron to come and sweep the country. Within a few months nearly everyone had had the disease and found it to be no biggie.
Politicians quietly rolled back all the mandates etc. But in Canada they were still doing it and were only talking about changing things when the Truckers hit.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In one of history's little winks almost the first book this happened to was 1984.
Some copyright SNAFU meant that Amazon had distributed the thing when it wasn't allowed to, so they disappeared it off people's Kindles. This wasn't an attempt at censorship, other editions were readily available, but it was a clear case of memory-holing.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.
toadworrier
5mo ago
police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.
This bit does sound like a historical holdover, since certain respectable political parties both north and south of the border have friends in interesting places.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I think Australia is a very unusual case, because for us, until Christmas '21, Covid suppression actually worked. This was because we closed the borders fast enough to keep the numbers at a level where test & trace was enough. Although we became lockdown poster-child, we were actually far more open for most of the time because there was simply no Covid around to suppress.
Then came the Delta wave, which we might or might not have got on top of with lockdowns and travel restirctions. But what we definiately did do was ruin Christmas, especially for those of us travelling to Queensland. And at just that time, Omnicron comes along knocking both Delta and Covid suppression sixes-at-will. The whole country just gave up, except for some idiots at the Saturday Paper who thought that politicians overruling public health bureaucrats was "the tail wagging the dog".
In other words, by luck or good management, Australians -- including the decision makers -- supported lockdowns when they worked and gave up on them when they stopped working. In other countries, the lockdowns never worked, but were still enforced (with public support) for at least as long as in Australia.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions,
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
toadworrier
3mo ago
That's why you have to show up and play the game. "Go fuck yourself" is not a sufficiently legalistic non-answer.
BTW: A lot has happened since this original thread and it's impressive how badly this tactic went for these people. I state again however: this is the standard way to behave in front of such committees. Or at least it is here in Australia.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Wouldn't it have been nice if all the indictments were like this.
toadworrier
1yr ago
indictment of the American right, that there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
Doing that sort of shit on abortion clinics certainly has saved any babies. If anything, it's done the opposite.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Do you think "Trump Banged Pornstar (at least) Once" is really a secret worth paying millions to keep? I'm half surprised he didn't pay her to make a movie about the incident.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Me.
Institutions matter.
toadworrier
10mo ago
while roughly zero Americans can pronounce (or know about) "Tadeusz Kościuszko.")
Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
...
toadworrier
10mo ago
the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).
So after all those betl-and-road-initiative projects failed, the Chinese want to lose more money and influence?
toadworrier
11mo ago
They are in somewhat of a win-win situation, because even if their constitution gets rejects, they'd be left with the status quo-which they'd be happy with. The main task for them is to get through it without somehow re-energising the opposition.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
toadworrier
10mo ago
They lose money, but not necessarily influence, as they can leverage the loss of money for concessions in other areas, such as Chinese access into other infrastructure or concessions to allow Chinese-only installations
This is what I thought the belt-and-road was for. Pretend loans, that are actually payments to buy influence. But no, apparently the Chinese actually ask for their money back, and do so much more insistently than the IMF etc.
I'm particularly familiar with Sri Lanka. That stuff you might have heard of about the place failng organic farming was BS. That nonsense was government copium because they couldn't buy fertilizer, because they ran out of dollars, because the Chinese had lost patience.
The result was that China's friends in power got literally run out of town while protesters jumped into the presidential swimming pool. The new president is nobody's friend, but is now going cap in hand to the IMF.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Indeed.
But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
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