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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • I remember from an older article that it’s a very small college and the new republican dean/president/chairman (I forgot what he was) is being paid $ 700 000 per year, about $1000 per student. I’m certain that he isn’t the only person making bank from this. It seems to be a grift to funnel tax money into the pockets of friends and sycophants, and while the college board tries to make itself relevant in the eyes of their maga public, the future of the students appears to not be a consideration, because they’re not the ones paying for this circus.

    Apparently fighting the republican culture war is very profitable for republican grifters.







  • They don’t have to prove that someone is not a qualified elector to disenfranchise them, throwing up barriers to make it very hard / impossible to vote is enough. In the past the federal government could intervene if something like that happened, but that’s not really possible anymore thanks to the current scotus, so it’s up to the states.

    And this state is now laying the legal groundwork: If “every” persons with xxx qualifications has the right the vote by law and new measures get implemented that make it practically impossible to vote for certain people that fit those qualifications, then those people had a right withheld from them.

    If “only” persons with xxx qualifications have the right to vote by law and new measures get implemented that make it impossible to vote for certain people that fit those qualifications, then … nothing. That’s the difference between “every” and “only”. Changing the wording to “only” allows the state to legally pile on extra requirements and barriers.

    Examples of groups of people that I’ve seen disenfranchised by state actions: Prisoners, felons who have done their time, college students, minorities, inner city people, military abroad. Some of these news articles will have been attempts that were not (yet) successful.

    I haven’t read the full wiki article, but I expect those examples to be in here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States



  • EPP is centrist, not far right, and they work together with greens + socialists + liberals. The national parties that are members of the EPP, that I know, are the old christian democrat parties and in terms of the USA Overton window, they would be to the left of USA democratic party. The far right only has about a quarter of MEPs.

    "Combined, the three political groups on the right have 187 MEPs, just over a quarter of the total, but they are viewed as unlikely to form a coherent and united bloc. Following the election, leaders of the EPP, S&D and Renew Europe groups stressed their commitment to working together as a pro-EU “democratic alliance”. The S&D and Renew Europe, together with the Greens/EFA, also stressed that they rejected cooperation with groups on the right, including the ECR. "

    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10068/


  • The parties that I know in the EPP (Belgian and dutch) are definitely to the left of the USA democrats, which isn’t very hard. On the national level, member parties of EPP will work and have worked together with their s&d counterparts in many countries. And in the eu parliament, s&d, renew and EPP have indeed worked together for many years.

    So yeah, they definitely would not be in Trump’s camp. I don’t get how one can claim that EPP is far right.


  • I’ve got the impression that Tucker Carlson is going after Alex Jones his audience. Tucker Carlson peddling crazy conspiracy theories right when the chickens are coming home to roost for Alex Jones, imo that’s no coincidence. Tucker never was stupid, he just has no morals, so he never had a problem with publicly stating stuff that he personally didn’t believe in. Grifters gonna grift.





  • Trump is happening because far right republicans realized after Watergate that if they wanted to get away with crimes in the future, that they needed to have news that presents “alternate” facts that are favorable to their narrative or that would at the least muddy the waters. Roger Ailes his plan worked basically.

    Without censoring his appearances, Trump comes across as petulant/weak/selfish/stupid/hateful/… Without censoring his history, republican voters would have known that he was a serial scam artist, serial adulterer, … Basically without that alternate fact media supporting rightwing skullduggery, there would never have been a president Trump.

    Imo it’s nonsense to claim that Trump getting elected, is happening because voters are angry because of mysterious reasons that no one can figure out, when those voters are so misinformed that they consistently vote against their own interests and believe stupid conspiracy theories that are being pushed to rile them up against the “other”. As long as that many people live in an alternate reality based on lies and hate, there is no helping them. So the challenge becomes: how do you bring them out of it and how do you prevent it from happening again in the future.



  • The consequences of prolife politicians and their voters: “This corresponds with a 7% absolute increase in infant mortality overall ( ≈ 247 excess deaths; 95% CI, 73-421) and 10% in infant mortality with congenital anomalies ( ≈ 204 excess deaths; 95% CI, 60-348) in relevant months after Dobbs.”.

    The excess deaths are still ongoing probably and i’m interested in extrapolating it to a per year statistic, but I can’t make out over how many months this data was, that part of the article reads like a convoluted mess for me and I have no desire to decipher it.