#2015 State of The Union

[thenewdemocratus]

New York Daily News: S.E. Cupp: 'State of The Union a Window Into Obama's Mind'

Source:New York Daily News What I don’t think that S.E. Cupp gets that is of course President Obama was taking a victory lap last night. Which is his right, because the economy is finally moving and moving well. No longer are we talking about one-percent economic growth and creating somewhere around a hundred-thousand jobs per month, with unemployment still well over seven-percent. We are seeing…

[moonshynecybin]

proximity curse rosquez. is this anything.

[reasonsforhope]

On her fingers, Chicago’s Chief Sustainability Officer Angela Tovar counted the city buildings that will soon source all of their power from renewable energy: O’Hare International Airport, Midway International Airport, City Hall.

[Note: This is an even huger deal than it sounds like. Chicago O'Hare International Airport is, as of 2023, the 9th busiest airport in the world.]

Chicago’s real estate portfolio is massive. It includes 98 fire stations, 81 library locations, 25 police stations and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — in all, more than 400 municipal buildings.

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours per year to keep the wheels turning in the third largest city in the country. Beginning Jan. 1, every single one of them will come solely from clean, renewable energy, mostly sourced from Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the Windy City’s carbon footprint by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, the city said.

Chicago is one of several cities across the country that are not only shaking up their energy mix but also taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new clean energy development.

The city — and much of Illinois — already has one of the cleanest energy mixes in the country, with over 50% of the state’s electricity coming from nuclear power. But while nuclear energy is considered “clean,” carbon-free energy, it is not considered renewable.

Chicago’s move toward renewable energy has been years in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s energy purely from renewable sources was first established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot struck a deal with electricity supplier Constellation to purchase renewable energy from developer Swift Current Energy for the city, beginning in 2025.

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.

Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits.

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said deputy chief sustainability officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the built-in market will help encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale: “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.”

Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, Orlando, Florida, and more than 700 other U.S. cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from World Resources Institute, but none of their plans mandate nearly as much new renewable energy production as Chicago’s.

“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called additionality, bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin. “They were the largest municipal deal to do this.”

Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs.

The economic benefits extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to flow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life.

“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.” ...

Chicago will meet its goal of transitioning all its municipal buildings to renewable energy by 2025, the first step in a broader goal to source energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035 — making it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.

With the incoming Trump administration promising to decrease federal support for decarbonizing the economy, Dane says it will be increasingly important for cities, towns and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies and meet local climate goals. He says moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable.

“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is definitely still worth the squeeze.”

-via WBEZ, December 24, 2024

[karenandhenwilson]

Let's talk about the 21st century and queer rights

Sometimes I see a post and wonder what kind of world people live in, how ignorant and hateful they are of the community they claim to be part of, and even the most recent history of that community.

I saw this post with this line in it: "Its the 21th century, are we still suppose to justify people who lie at their partners in order to protect their reputation?" And I'm not reblogging because I don't want to have it on my blog.

So, let's talk about the 21st century and queer rights in the US, shall we, @queershits?

Did you know that same-sex marriage in the US as a whole has only been legal since the Supreme Court decision on Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015? Prior to that, the first state to grant same-sex marriage was Massachusetts in 2004, while the first civil unions for gay and lesbian couples became legal in 2000. But at the same time, 28 states had banned same-sex marriage and the recognition of those marriages from other jurisdictions until 2015. In fact, the federal government had been banned from recognizing same-sex marriages by the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which had been voided by the Supreme Court decision in 2015 but has only been fully repealed by the Respect of Marriage Act in 2022. That's all the 21st century. And very recent 21st century!

When Hen and Karen adopted Denny in 2011, they weren't married. Because at that point in time, they weren't allowed to in California.

Did you know that until the Supreme Court ruling on Lawrence v. Texas on June 26, 2003, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in 14 US states? And that even with that ruling 12 of these states have not changed their state's constitution, so that these laws aren't executable but still on the book and regularly used to harass queer people? (And didn't the current Supreme Court just say after overthrowing Roe v. Wade they'd like to take a good long look at Lawrence v. Texas, too? People might lose their rights again in those 12 states if the worst comes to pass here.) That's all the 21st century.

Did you know that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" came into effect in 1994, allowing gay and bi people to serve in the US military as long as no one found out about their sexual orientation? If they were found out, they could face dishonorable discharges or even prison time. Either would be a permanent burden on their records for the rest of their lives. DADT was repelled in 2011 after a long and hard debate. That's well into the 21st century.

Karen explicitely states that DADT is part of the reason she didn't become an astronaut. (Though, NASA was never truly subjected to the rule as it is not a military organisation. But on the other hand, many of the astronatus are active or former military.)

Tommy was at the 118 in 2005. We know he was in the Army prior to joining the LAFD. That means Tommy served under the rule of DADT, which would have been an immense burden on him.

Do you know that there is a defense called "LGBTQ+ panic" often used in combination with a defense of insanity, provocation, or self-defense? This defense tactic is only banned in 21 US states, and most of those bans are very recent. In 2018, only three states had banned this defense. In 29 US states people are allowed to say "this person is gay/trans/queer/etc and I felt threated by that fact alone so I saw myself with no other choice but to hurt them" in a court of a law and the jury has to consider that argument. That's the 21st century.

Let's take a look at the kind of world Josh, Michael, and Tommy would have been children and teenagers in. That's not quite the 21st century, but it's near enough.

Tha aids epemedic started in the 1980s, and is — for the record! — still ongoing. But in the 1980s it was very much deemed a problem of the gay community only. And many, many people claimed outrageous things like "they're getting what they deserve". Josh and Tommy are both 80s children, Michael was a teenager in the 80s. We know Tommy grew up with a bigoted and hateful man like Gerrard as a father. He probably heard the above quote and worse regularly.

Have you ever heard the name Mathew Shepard, @queershits? (If not, go and educate yourself!) Mathew Shepard was a young gay man tortured and murdered in October 1998. Josh and Tommy would have been teenagers or maybe young adults (as we don't know the exact age of either of them) when that happened. It was all over the news and there were, again, people not shying away from saying he got what he deserved. I've no doubt Tommy's father (and Gerrard) was one of those people.

That's the world Josh, Michael, and Tommy grew up in as gay men that Josh talked about. They didn't hide to protect their reputation, as it was put in the quote above. They hid to protect their life and well-being. Finding the confidence and security to let go of that kind of learned behavior to protect yourself is so hard. But all three did it!

There are still people today who have to hide like this in the US. Because they're born into the wrong family or the wrong neighborhood or the wrong religious community where being queer is still seen as a ground to hate them, to exclude them, to hurt them, to kill them.

The number of hate crimes is rising again. The hard-won rights and freedom of queer people are threatened again. It's the 21st century, but that doesn't mean we are always safe or that we don't sometimes have to do shady things to protect ourselves or that we can lean back and enjoy the rights we have. Because many of us all over the world either don't have any rights or are facing the very real danger of losing the rights again that those who came before us fought so hard for.

[glamnessaaumisc]

FUN AMERICA FACTS!

The US invented the Navy. The first boat was invented by Massachusetts native John Boat, who made boats so he could bring Christopher Columbus over.

The first Pilgrim to arrive at Plymouth Rock was Scott Pilgrim, who was famous for fighting the world. This fight is commonly known as World War I.

People know about the Lincoln and the Jefferson memorials, but few know about the 42 other memorials hidden all around the United States. Can you find them all?

Oil is grown on American soil and then exported around the world so other countries can dig it up themselves. This is known as OPEC, which stands for Oil Places Everywhere, Crazy! (Huh?)

Atlanta native Joey Steele was the second President of the Soviet Union. The Russians, humiliated that they elected a capitalist pig from the West, posthumously changed his name to Joseph Stalin, but do not deny he was born in Georgia.

Hurricane, Utah is technically the only state due to a legal loophole. The only reason we recognize 50 states is because that is how it has always been.

The least populous state in America is West Dakota.

Slavery was only banned in 2015 because they discovered the 13th Amendment had a typo all that time and "slavery" was misspelled as "slovery," thus invalidating the document. You can sue the government for making you think you weren't allowed to own slaves. Try it!

Few people know about the Understates. Go there.

There is a document hidden in an abandoned steel mill in North Carolina. Find it and you will legally own Mississippi.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[NYTimes is Private US Media]

On Saturday, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the governing Georgian Dream party, who built his fortune in banking, metals and real estate in Russia, said that the people of South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in the 1990s and expanded with Russian support in 2008, should receive an apology for the war that eventually broke out.

His comments at a rally in Gori, a town that was briefly occupied by Russian forces in 2008, were quickly condemned by pro-Western activists and the opposition. They also highlighted how Georgia’s relationship with the West has deteriorated over the past months.

On Monday, the United States announced that it had imposed sanctions against two Georgian officials and two activists associated with a pro-Russian political group that it said were involved in violent suppression of protests this year.[...]

In a statement, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president at the time of the 2008 war [and Governor of the Odesa Oblast in Ukraine from May 2015 until November 2016, before being stripped of Ukrainian Citizenship], called Mr. Ivanishvili’s statement “an unprecedented betrayal” and “an insult to the memory of the heroes who sacrificed for our country.”

“He asked Georgians to apologize for the invader,” said Mr. Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year sentence in Georgia on charges related to abuse of power that he says were politically motivated.[...]

In 2009, an independent fact-finding mission set up by the European Union found that the war was initiated by “a sustained Georgian artillery attack” that was not “justifiable under international law” but that “much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defense.” The report also accused all sides, including separatist formations, of violating international humanitarian law.[...]

Mr. Ivanishvili, who entered Georgian politics in the early 2010s, promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the United National Movement, a pro-Western party that was in power during the 2008 war, after parliamentary elections next month.

After the elections, he said, “all the perpetrators of the destruction of the Georgian-Ossetian brotherhood and coexistence will receive the strictest legal response.” He called the opposition “criminals” and “traitors” who “in 2008 burned our Ossetian sisters and brothers in flames.”

“We will definitely find strength in ourselves to apologize,” said Mr. Ivanishvili, who is officially an honorary chairman of the governing party, but who is widely believed to be its shadow leader.[...]

In May, defying large-scale protests, the Georgian government passed a law that aims to limit the influence of pro-Western nongovernmental groups and media outlets in the country.

16 Sep 24

[metamatar]

With a budget nearing $1 billion, Frontex is the EU’s best-funded government agency. [...] including by helping Libya’s EU-funded coast guard send hundreds of thousands of migrants back to be detained in Libya under conditions that amounted to torture and sexual slavery. In 2022, the agency’s director, Fabrice Leggeri, was forced out over a mountain of scandals, including covering up similar ​“pushback” deportations, which force migrants back across the border before they can apply for asylum.

[...] EU hopes to extend Frontex’s reach far beyond its territory, into sovereign African nations Europe once colonized, with no oversight mechanisms to safeguard against abuse. Initially, the EU even proposed granting immunity from prosecution to Frontex staff in West Africa. [...] 26 African countries have received taxpayer euros aimed at curbing migration through more than 400 discrete projects. Between 2015 and 2021, the EU invested $5.5 billion in such projects, with more than 80% of the funds coming from developmental and humanitarian aid coffers.

[...] Besides the surveillance tech the DNLT branches receive, migration data analysis systems have also been installed at each post, along with biometric fingerprinting and facial recognition systems. The stated aim is to create what eurocrats call an African IBM system: Integrated Border Management. [...] no European countries maintain databases with this level of biometric information.

[...] In Niger, for instance, the EU helped draft a law that criminalized virtually all movement in the north of the country, effectively making regional mobility illegal.

[vague-humanoid]

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article298113948.html

An Idaho House committee will consider a formal statement asking the U.S. Supreme Court to end same-sex marriage nationwide and allow the state to restore its ban on such unions. Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, proposed the measure that calls the 2015 decision from the nation’s highest court to legalize same-sex marriage an “illegitimate overreach.” It asked the court to reinstate the “natural definition of marriage” — saying that is between one man and one woman.

[thenewdemocratus]

William Galston: ‘State of The Union, President Obama in Campaign Mode: Pushes Middle Class Agenda’

Source:Brookings Institution– President Barack H. Obama (Democrat, Illinois) giving his 2015 SOTU. You can also see this post at FRS FreeState, on WordPress. “As President Obama strode to the podium to deliver his 2015 State of the Union address, he had good reason to feel confident. Helped by a surge of job creation, and probably by lower gas prices as well, public satisfaction with the state of…

[fatehbaz]

Hmm. Alarming trend in mass incarceration in Central America.

Also: Very disingenuous wordplay here.

Where do we begin?

-- Very disingenuous for multiple outlets to run with "the West”. Though this initial AP article does specify that this refers to the Western Hemisphere, the choice to run headlines with “West” kinda implies that there are no other island prisons in “The West” (as in the European Union, the United States, Australia, etc.).

-- One of the most infamous incarceration schemes on the planet is Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” a “solution” to refugee migration centered on the imprisonment of asylum seekers on island prisons, including the infamous prisons at Nauru and Manus, both opened initially in 2001, and re-fortified after 2012. (Nauru is extremely isolated, in the South Pacific, 3000 kilometers away from the Australian coast; the Manus detention centre is far away off the northeast coast of Papua.) Since 2012, over 3,125 people have been sent to Nauru while over 4,180 people have been sent to Manus. (The “last refugee held on the Pacific island of Nauru under Australia’s offshore detention policy” was “evacuated” to mainland Australia only on 24 June 2023, not even a month prior to this headline.)

-- Obviously the EU incarcerates refugees on Mediterranean islands, notoriously at Moria on Lesbos, whose international reputation as the home of Sappho has been supplanted by its reputation as a de facto prison for asylum seekers. In October 2015, over 10,000 people landed on Lesbos in just one day. In 2017, the island averaged 2,500 arrivals per month. By 2019, humanitarian investigations showed that over 10,000 people were being held in a facility with a maximum capacity of 3,000. In 2020, fires left over 12,000 refugees on the island without shelter. By December 2021, Doctors Without Borders raised alarm that over 2,200 refugees were living in “dire” conditions on the island. As of early 2023, Lesbos (along with Kos, Leros, Chios, and Samos) is hosting over 4,500 people who are stuck in “reception and identification centers.”

-- And in the Western Hemisphere? The US prison at Guantanomo, also on the coast of an island in this same sea.

-- One of the most notorious island prisons was the early twentieth century French penal colony on the periphery of the Caribbean region at Guiana (run by a France, a “Western” power, in the Western Hemisphere), known internationally as “Devil’s Island.”

-- The federal government says the prison will be built “in harmony with nature.”

-- A prison ... in harmony with nature.

-- An island prison in the Caribbean, a region fundamentally and intimately connected to centuries of imprisonment, plantations, Indigenous genocide, antiBlackness, racial castes, and chattel slavery, all achieved and enforced through the bounded, isolated geographic containment structure allowed by islands.

-- And this is extra-worrying, because it seems it’s a regional trend, evidently for Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.

-- Merely a few days before this headline about Honduras, international outlets were profiling Honduras’s direct neighbor, El Salvador, with headlines like “Inside El Salvador’s new ‘mega prison’” (Al Jazeera) and, within the past couple months, headlines like “Prisoners are being tortured to death in El Salvador’s prisons” (VICE News).

-- From less than a week before this AP headline, we have BBC: “El Salvador’s secretive mega-jail.”

-- Don’t forget nearby Tapachula’s detention of asylum seekers.

Still discussing implementation of literal island prisons despite our collective familiarity with carceral archipelagoes.

[reasonsforhope]

Hazel Chandler was at home taking care of her son when she began flipping through a document that detailed how burning fossil fuels would soon jeopardize the planet.

She can’t quite remember who gave her the report — this was in 1969 — but the moment stands out to her vividly: After reading a list of extreme climate events that would materialize in the coming decades, she looked down at the baby she was nursing, filled with dread.

 “‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do something,’” she remembered thinking...

It was one of several such moments throughout Chandler’s life that propelled her into activist spaces — against the Vietnam War, for civil rights and women’s rights, and in support of environmental causes.

She participated in letter-writing campaigns and helped gather others to write to legislators about vital pieces of environmental legislation including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, passed in 1970 and 1972, respectively. At the child care center she worked at, she helped plan celebrations around the first Earth Day in 1970. 

Now at 78, after working in child care and health care for most of her life, she’s more engaged than ever. In 2015, she began volunteering with Elder Climate Action, which focuses on activating older people to fight for the environment. She then took a job as a consultant for the Union for Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. 

More recently, her activism has revolved around her role as the Arizona field coordinator of Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. Chandler helps rally volunteers to take action on climate and environmental justice issues, recruiting residents to testify and meet with lawmakers. 

Pictured: Hazel Chandler tables at Environment Day at Wesley Bolin Plaza in front of the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2024.

Her motivation now is the same as it was decades ago. 

“When I look my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, my children, in the eye, I have to be able to say, ‘I did everything I could to protect you,’” Chandler said. “I have to be able to tell them that I’ve done everything possible within my ability to help move us forward.” 

Chandler is part of a largely unrecognized contingent of the climate movement in the United States: the climate grannies. 

The most prominent example perhaps, is the actor Jane Fonda. The octogenarian grandmother has been arrested during climate protests a number of times and has her own PAC that funds the campaigns of “climate champions” in local and state elections. 

Climate grannies come equipped with decades of activism experience and aim to pressure the government and corporations to curb fossil fuel emissions. As a result they, alongside women of every age group, are turning out in bigger numbers, both at protests and the polls. All of the climate grandmothers The 19th interviewed for this piece noted one unifying theme: concern for their grandchildren’s futures. 

According to research conducted by Dana R. Fisher, director for the Center of Environment, Community and Equity at American University, while the mainstream environmental movement has typically been dominated by men, women make up 61 percent of climate activists today.  The average age of climate activists was 52 with 24 percent being 69 and older...

A similar trend holds true at the ballot box, according to data collected by the Environmental Voter Project, a nonpartisan organization focused on turning out climate voters in elections. 

A report released by the Environmental Voter Project in December that looked at the patterns of registered voters in 18 different states found that after the Gen Z vote, people 65 and older represent the next largest climate voter group, with older women far exceeding older men in their propensity to list climate as their No. 1 reason for voting. The organization defines climate voters as those who are most likely to list climate change, the environment, or clean air and water as their top political priority.

“Grandmothers are now at the vanguard of today’s climate movement,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project.

“Older people are three times as likely to list climate as a top priority than middle-aged people. On top of that, women in all age groups are more likely to care about climate than men,” he said. “So you put those two things together … and you can safely say that grandma is much more likely to be a climate voter than your middle-aged man.” 

In Arizona, where Chandler lives, older climate voters make up 231,000 registered voters in the state. The presidential election in the crucial swing state was decided by just 11,000 votes, Stinnett noted.

“Older climate voters can really throw their weight around in Arizona if they organize and if they make sure that everybody goes to the polls,” he said. 

Pictured: Hazel Chandler’s recent activism revolves around her role as the Arizona field coordinator of Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.

In some cases, their identities as grandmothers have become an organizing force. 

In California, 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations formed in 2016, after older women from the Bay Area traveled to be in solidarity with Indigenous grandmothers protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. 

“When they came back, they decided to form an organization that would continue to mobilize women on behalf of the climate justice movement,” said Nancy Hollander, a member of the group. 

1000 Grandmothers — in this case, the term encompasses all older women, not just the literal grandmothers — is rooted at the intersection of social justice and the climate crisis, supporting people of color and Indigenous-led causes in the Bay Area. The organization is divided into various working groups, each with a different focus: elections, bank divestments from fossil fuels, legislative work, nonviolent direct actions, among others...

“There are women in the nonviolent direct action part of the organization who really do feel that elder women — it’s their time to stand up and be counted and to get arrested,” Hollander said. “They consider it a historical responsibility and put themselves out there to protect the more vulnerable.” 

But 1000 Grandmothers credits another grandmother activist, Pennie Opal Plant, for helping train their members in nonviolent direct action and for inspiring them to take the lead of Indigenous women in the fight. 

Plant, 66 — an enrolled member of the Yaqui of Southern California tribe, and of undocumented Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry — has started various organizations over the years, including Idle No More SF Bay, which she co-founded with a group of Indigenous grandmothers in 2013, first in solidarity with a group formed by First Nations women in Canada to defend treaty rights and to protect the environment from exploitation. 

Pictured: Pennie Opal Plant has started various organizations over the years, including Idle No More SF Bay, which she founded in 2013 alongside Indigenous grandmothers.

In 2016, Plant gathered with others in front of Wells Fargo Corporate offices in San Francisco, blocking the road in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline, when she realized the advantages she had as an older woman in the fight. 

As a police liaison — or a person who aims to defuse tension with law enforcement — she went to speak to an officer who was trying to interrupt the action. When she saw him maneuvering his car over a sidewalk, she stood in front of it, her gray hair flowing. “I opened my arms really wide and was like, are you going to run over a grandmother?”

A new idea was born: The Society of Fearless Grandmothers. Once an in-person training — it now mostly exists online as a Facebook page — it helped teach other grandmothers how to protect the youth at protests. 

For Plant, the role of grandmothers in the fight to protect the planet is about a simple Indigenous principle: ensuring the future for the next seven generations. 

“What we’re seeing is a shift starting with Indigenous women, that is lifting up the good things that mothers have to share, the good things that women that love children can share, that will help bring back balance in the world,” Plant said...

[Kathleen] Sullivan is one of approximately 70,000 people over the age of 60 who’ve joined Third Act, a group specifically formed to engage people 60 and older to mobilize for climate action across the country. 

“This is an act of moral responsibility. It’s an act of care. And It’s an act of reciprocity to the way in which we are cared for by the planet,” Sullivan said. “It’s an act of interconnection to your peers, because there can be great joy and great sense of solidarity with other people around this.”

-via The 19th, January 31, 2024

[mariacallous]

BERLIN — For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party in Germany has won the largest piece of the electoral pie in a state election.

Mainstream politicians and Jewish leaders are expressing alarm following Sunday’s elections, in which the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic and pro-Russia Alternative for Germany party came out on top in the state of Thuringia, with 32.8% of the vote.

The 11-year-old party also earned second place to the traditional conservative Christian Democratic Union party in the neighboring state of Saxony. Both states are in the former East Germany.

“No one can brush this off as a ‘protest’ vote anymore,” Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said in a statement late Sunday.

“Exactly 85 years after the start of World War II, Germany is in danger of becoming a different country again: more unstable, colder and poorer, less secure, less worth living in,” said Knobloch, a former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who herself survived the Holocaust in hiding.

The election came just over a week since a Syrian refugee was arrested after a deadly stabbing spree at a festival in the city of Solingen, and only days after Germany resumed its program of deporting refugees convicted of crimes. The knife attack, in which three people were killed, reignited popular anxiety about social unrest connected with the more than 1 million refugees admitted to Germany since 2015.

AfD stresses isolationism, takes an anti-EU and pro-Russian stance, and is accused of fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment. Some of its most extreme representatives have also belittled the Holocaust, saying that Germany has paid enough penance for the sins of an older generation.

Mass protests against the party took place earlier this year following revelations that the party had held a secret meeting at a lakeside villa to discuss plans to deport foreigners, including those who had become German citizens. Prominent neo-Nazis attended the meeting, according to the news organization that broke the story, inducing painful echoes of the gathering of Nazi leaders at nearby Wannsee in 1942 to devise a plan to deport and then murder Jews.

But while support for the AfD dipped in polls at the time, it soon rebounded and then accelerated. Now, it has achieved breakthrough results in state elections and raised concerns for next year’s national elections.

The party — whose Thuringen leader, Bjoern Hoecke, has been convicted twice of using a Nazi slogan to boost his party — is unlikely to form a ruling coalition in either state, since it is shunned by other parties. Still, it will have additional seats in the state legislatures and will have the numbers, particularly in Thuringia, to interfere with some governing decisions.

A far-left party, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance or BSW, also produced notable results, coming in third in Thuringia with 15.8% of the vote. Last month, the current head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, warned that the party, which has accused Israel of genocide in its war in Gaza, was “fueling hatred of Israel in Germany.”

The new election results bode ill for Germany’s future, Schuster said on Sunday.

“Can we recover from this hit?” Schuster wrote in a column in the Bild newspaper. “Our free society must not fall, especially in the face of Islamist terror. Unvarnished truths — honesty and sincerity — are needed, not populist pseudo-answers from radical parties.”

In Thuringia, the mainstream Social Democratic Party barely squeaked in, with 6.1%. Several parties, including the Greens and Free Democratic Party, received so few votes that they will not have any seats at all.

BSW also came in third in Saxony, with 11.8% of the vote, following the AfD with 30.6% and the CDU with a narrow win at 31.9%.

Younger voters overwhelmingly favored the AfD in this week’s elections, according to an NTV-Infratest exit poll.

“The survivors are asking themselves: ‘Didn’t we do enough to teach, to tell, to show?” Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, told the Guardian.

Some Jewish leaders say German politicians would do well to address the concerns apparently expressed by voters this weekend.

“The election results in the German federal states of Thuringia and Saxony are a clear wake-up call to the centrist parties in Germany to listen to the real concerns and fears of the people,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said in a statement. “When half the population votes for parties on the extreme fringes, their problems must be addressed openly and honestly.”

Sunday was an “insanely sad” election day, German Jewish journalist Samira Lazarovic wrote on Facebook. She said her 96-year-old father compared the outcome to the opening salvo of World War II, exactly 85 years ago.

Lazarovic said it was is urgent to reach out to younger voters. “It’s not that we know better than they; but we should shape the future together.”

Obviously, it wasn’t enough to take to the streets and protest against the far right, she added: “Populists all over the world have one thing in common. They mean exactly what they say and do everything they can to turn their words to deeds.”

[bidotorg]

"June 26, 2015, is a landmark date in American LGBT history. On that day, the US Supreme Court extended marriage equality to all fifty states and struck down state bans on same-sex unions. That court decision has transformed life — for the better — for LGBT people across the country."

[mapsontheweb]

European Union, EEA and candidate states in July 2024

by DrNeutrino 

European Union (EU) contains 27 member states. There are 9 candidate states: Turkey (1999), North Macedonia (2005), Montenegro (2010), Serbia (2012), Albania (2014), Ukraine (2022), Moldova (2022), Bosnia-Herzegovina (2022) and Georgia (2023).

About states aspiring to join EU:

Kosovo is an applicant and recognised as potential candidate.

While Armenia is not officially neither an applicant nor a potential candidate, I have included it in the category, as the Armenian PM has stated that the country will apply to by fall 2024 and in 12 March vote at European Union it was confirmed that Armenia meets the requirements for applying.

Turkey’s accession negotiations were frozen in 2019 due to democratic backsliding. In 2023 EU rejected Turkey’s proposal to unfreeze the accession negotiations in exchange of letting Sweden accede to NATO.

The application of Ukraine and Moldova is in screening phase which is prerequisite to opening 35 acquis chapters.

North Macedonian application will proceed to opening acquis chapters once the country approves a constitutional amendment related to Bulgarian minority. Albanian application is tied to North Macedonia.

Georgia passed a foreign agent law on 14 May, which is viewed anti-democratic and contradicts the conditions for EU candidacy. Due to this, the accession process was suspended on 9 July and the money for accession assistance was frozen.

About states which are not aspiring to join:

Norway rejected membership in 1972 and 1994 referenda.

Iceland applied in 2009 and was on fast track for membership, but the application process was frozen after 2013 election and withdrawn in 2015. There has been discussion of referendum to resume application.

Switzerland applied to EU and EEA in 1992 but joining was rejected in a referendum on the same year. Instead Switzerland has bilateral treaties with EU.

United Kingdom joined EU in 1973 but membership was rejected in 2016 referendum, and UK withdrew in 2020.

EU has plans to reform before the next enlargement, which has a target year 2030.

[dostoyevsky-official]

Why Syria Matters to the Kremlin

Syria is important to Moscow because intervening there in 2015 allowed Putin to reverse the narrative of Russian decline that had taken hold since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia would no longer be what then-President Barack Obama dismissed as a declining “regional power”—it was to be a decisive great-power patron of the Assad regime, and as such, it would rewrite the playbook of outside intervention in the Middle East. American-led interventions, such as the invasion of Iraq and the NATO campaign in Libya, shattered states and bred chaos. Russia would have the opposite effect, preserving Syrian sovereignty and regional order. To understand Russia’s military position in Syria, consider that when Moscow first intervened there, in September 2015, it did so with a surprisingly light footprint and a long-term plan to modernize and strengthen the Syrian military. Moscow deployed just 2,500 to 4,500 personnel to Syria at any given time, focusing on air power, air defenses, and special forces, while relying on Iran and its proxies to supply ground forces. Ultimately, the Kremlin sought to build the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) into a professional fighting force capable of independently securing Assad’s rule, and so it poured resources into modernizing the SAA’s command structures, improving battlefield coordination, and equipping units with advanced Russian weaponry. [...] The collapse of regime defenses revealed that Russia’s long-term strategy to professionalize Assad’s military had failed. These setbacks will not drive Russia out of Syria, however. The Kremlin has too much at stake. It has already leveraged its Syrian intervention to rebuild its Middle Eastern influence, positioning itself as an essential mediator among Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, the United States, and Israel. Moscow has also secured lucrative economic contracts for the reconstruction of Syria. Given the stakes, Moscow will be compelled to adapt rather than withdraw. It will likely seek to strengthen military cooperation with Iran, including by finding a role for Iraqi militias and recruits in Syria. As consuming as the war in Ukraine has been for Russia, the Kremlin does not see it as superseding its Middle East ambitions. That’s because Syria is not just a military outpost. It is a cornerstone of Russia’s claim to great-power status, a theater where it can demonstrate its diplomatic reach and its counternarrative to Western interventionism. This explains why Russia continues to invest in Syria even as it fights a costly war in Ukraine. Moscow may adjust its tactics, but abandoning Syria would mean surrendering something far more precious than territory: Russia’s hard-won position as an indispensable power broker in the Middle East.

3 December 2024

[hussyknee]

it’s rare to find a sinhalese person (online atleast) who is supportive of tamil self-determination. genuine question: among leftist circles in sri lanka, how common is such a stance?

I don't know whether I'm a reliable source to answer this question because I'm very jaded about this in general. A couple of days ago, someone on the Sri Lanka Reddit started up discourse about Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's choice to reject identifying with the country that tried to genocide her people, which I'm still chewing wire about. I'm a very isolated person with a very small social circle of like-minded leftist friends. They're mostly not SinBud and anti SinBud nonsense, but none of them are Tamil and I'm the one who really convinced them about Eelam I think. The people I learned from, who are out there doing the work of building inter-ethnic dialogue and overturning Sinhalese propaganda, might have a more hopeful view.

Thing is, there's no one "leftist" faction here because "left" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the West. The Rajapaksas' party SLPP is socialist, a legacy of the SLFP that they branched off from, that was the party aligned with the USSR. They and their voters and their saffron terror acolytes (Buddhist priesthood) are all for public infrastructure they can rob blind and central government they can use to crush minorities, and build on the nationalist fervour of genocidal Sinhalese Buddhism that's served both major parties since independence.

There's quasi-communists, descendants of the ethnonationalist Marxist JVP that rose in opposition to the class corruption of ethnonationalist USSR-aligned socialist SLFP and enthonationalist US-aligned neoliberal UNP. The current JVP party itself is no longer communist; their coalition the NPP are mostly just very pro-union social democrats, and they've since distanced themselves from their ethnic myopia, possibly due to suffering much of the same state terrorism as minorities via militarisation and policies like the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). They're the most vocal about the abolition of the executive presidency, the removal of all martial law mechanisms and the PTA, defunding of military and police, and restructuring and executing the long-mismanaged socialist infrastructure. These are usually the working class and university students, but their base has been growing in other demographics too, since we "held our noses and voted" for the Yahapalana government in 2015 and it ended up fucking us over. But despite their sympathy with the suffering of Tamils and Muslims and favouring the devolution of power, most still cling to the idea that Sinhalese majoritarianism is a fair result of democracy.

The kind of pro-LGBT, anti-racist, feminist liberals that would pass muster with the western left otoh, are a minority of urban, English-speaking middle class. The younger of this crowd is increasingly favouring the aforementioned NPP (that is rapidly marrying the economic left with the social consciousness led by western dialogues that otherwise go against their traditional rural working class base), but that is very new and hampered by decades of Red Scare propaganda. The minority communities and the urban liberals traditionally vote for the current neoliberal party, that has distanced itself from their virulent nationalism over the last thirty years and basically modelled itself after the US Democrats (diet right-wing as opposed to nuclear right-wing) Their idea of reducing corruption and increasing efficiency is privatizing everything, makes the right pro-feminist and pro-LGBT noises, and coasts on the minority votes on the promise of never actively feeding ethnosupremacy, even if they won't do anything about it either. The Sinhalese affiliated with this party are deeply uncomfortable with if not entirely resistant to the idea that the North and East are Tamil lands colonized by the Sinhalese. Just like the quasi-communists, urban liberals are aware of the corruption and complicity of the Buddhist priesthood in ethnofascism and are prepared to do exactly as much nothing about it.

What I'm trying to say is that Sinhalese Buddhist ethnosupremacy is baked in to the Sri Lankan political fabric. "Left" means jack shit when it comes to whether Tamils have rights, in much the same way that the western left agrees on everything except Palestine. It's a political no man's land everyone tries not to look at.

The fundamental problem is that Sinhalese people who know enough about 1958, 1983, or the full scope of genocide perpetrated against Tamils during the last push of the war, let alone all 26 years of it, are very much in the minority. It takes a particular education to understand that "Sri Lanka" is a post-colonial invention that took over from "Ceylon", which was nothing but a construct for the ease of British administration. As far as I know, this education is confined to activist organizations and whoever followed my sociology program. So my kind of anarchist leftism that calls the war a Tamil genocide with their whole chest, calls the priesthood saffron terrorists, and recognises Eelam, is vanishingly small, afaik.

To be honest, I never really questioned the propaganda and narrative we've been spoon fed myself until I went to Canada when I was 23 to complete my anthro degree (became disabled and dropped out after). One thing that struck me was how racist the Sinhalese diaspora was. I was raised SinBud, my school didn't admit any non-Sinhalese, half my uncles were in the military, but these people that had left the country decades ago still hated Tamils and Muslims in a way that nobody else I knew did. I wondered whether this was what it had been like when it had all started; whether this hatred that seemed to have been preserved in amber was a true taste of what had ignited Black July. Suddenly the attitude of the Tamil diaspora towards the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese people didn't seem so unreasonable.

Then, later in the same uni term, I went to an art exhibition of a white artist who travelled the world collecting information about their genocides and made art about them, and found a painting depicting Sri Lankan Tamils in 2008. Promptly had a meltdown. Went to the lady and told her tearfully that it was all propaganda, we didn't really hate Tamils, not even my uncles in the army hated Tamils, it was a war, the LTTE had terrorized us for my whole lifetime. Bless the woman, she didn't fight me, just let me cry at her and patted my hand and pretended to take me seriously. This made it easier for me to really think about what I knew once I'd stopped wailing and stamping. It prompted a years-long self-interrogation and fact finding that made me unearth how much brainwashing had been done to us by everyone, from our families to our school textbooks to news media. It's like the air we breathed was propaganda. And I still didn't know a fraction of what life had been like for Tamils (or Muslims) and the scope of atrocities perpetrated by the Sinhalese until I began my Society and Culture degree at the Open University when I was 30. The first year textbooks were only broadstrokes facts, but at last I found out about Gnananth Obeysekera, Prageeth Jeganathan, Stanley Thambaiya, Malithi DeAlwis. Their work on nation-making, ethnicity, historical revisionism, genocide and ethnic conflict and state terrorism...everything I should have been taught as a child. The chapters on the rapes and murders and shelling and war crimes and IDP camps were..indescribable. That was what properly radicalised me about Tamil self-sovereignty, because there's clearly no possible way the Tamil people will ever be safe and safeguarded under a Sinhalese majoritarian government.

I had to drop out of that programme too because of my health. But during the mass protests against the government in 2022, I learned even more about Tamil indigeneity, the extent of JR Jayawardena's crimes, and the persecution of Marxists and victims of the '71 and '89 insurrections. So much of the protests and their encampments were directed and galvanized by social media, that organised online and in-person lectures, teach-outs, and live discussions that anyone and everyone could attend right alongside the protests. I've never seen that kind of truly democratized, free, egalitarian civic education and discourse before. That was the very first time I saw academics, survivors, refugees and human rights activists being given a respectful platform, the masses hearing firsthand accounts from people of the North and East and witnesses of Black July. April to July 2022 was a truly golden bubble of time where I saw people finally start listening, believing, and challenging all their convictions. It was the closest we ever came to realising the hope that things could be different; that we could, as a society, understand how Sinhalese ethnosupremacy had been the black rot killing this country from the first, stop being racist Sinhala-first cunts and actually hold any of these murderers accountable.

Teach us to hope, I guess.

But I suppose it's no small thing that I learned about the Tamil resistance and struggle and taught all my friends about it. I'm sure they're informing their own circles in small ways too. These tendrils are hard to see, but they exist and grow. Especially with the fall of the Rajapaksas and their Bhaiyya contingent, more people can see ethnosupremacy for the grift that it is, and the younger generations are less defensive, more willing to listen and eager for justice and change. So I guess the answer is: not very common, but less uncommon than it used to be.