#trump uk visit

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Green Day - American Idiot 2004

"American Idiot" is a protest song by the American rockband Green Day. The first single released from their seventh studio album American Idiot, the song received positive reviews by critics and was nominated for four 2005 Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Best Rock Song, and Best Music Video. It is considered one of the band's signature songs. In advance of Donald Trump's visit to the UK in July 2018, a campaign to get "American Idiot" to the top of the UK song charts was launched. On the Official UK Charts dated 13 July 2018, the song re-entered the UK Singles Chart at 25 and the UK Singles Downloads Chart at number 2. In 2019, Billie Joe Armstrong began changing the lyric "I'm not a part of a redneck agenda" to "I'm not a part of a MAGA agenda" during live performances.

The single peaked at number 61 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Green Day's first Billboard Hot 100 chart entry. The appearance of "American Idiot" on the US singles charts occurred just prior to Billboard's inclusion of Internet download purchases into their Billboard Hot 100 chart data, which would have made a significant difference in the song's peak had it benefited from the new chart tabulation system. "American Idiot" became Green Day's first top-five single in the UK, peaking at number 3, and it debuted at number 1 in Canada, their only #1 single there. In Australia, the song reached number 7. At MTV's Video Music Awards, the music video won the Viewer's Choice Award and was also nominated for Best Art Direction. "American Idiot" was ranked the number 13 Single of the Decade by Rolling Stone magazine in 2009. VH1 also placed the song at number 13 on its Top 100 Songs of the 2000s in 2011.

"American Idiot" received a total of 94% yes votes!

[sonicasura]

You know what's annoying about the whole Gaza Genocide situation? The fucking pandering of the ICJ, ICC and the countries that honestly support Palestine. Entire Zionist occupation has been breaking international law constantly throughout this entire tragedy with no backlash.

USA and UK recently fucking bombed a section of Yemen with the Trump trial as cover. Israel continuously ignored rulings from ICJ to stop their bullshit. Even moreso when Hamas have actually been civil to ceasefire proposals and is willing to go to trial if arrest warrants for them were made.

Israel's government has proven to not be trustworthy with every single throwing a tantrum whenever something doesn't go their way. NO MORE. I say it's time for either UN peacekeepers or another country to go into Palestine and drag their asses OUT.

Netanhyu doesn't want any Israeli hostages to come back alive. From the message of Alexander Trufanov, one such hostage, they want to bring back corpses as it is much cheaper option. Proof further confirmed when a recent report showed an IDF soldier killing another before they could get captured by a Resistance Fighter or the recovered few soldiers in Jabaliya area.

The Israeli Government doesn't care about anyone out in Palestine coming back alive. Joe Biden wants to profit off the genocide, Jill Biden doesn't care either just in case anyone wants to bring up a potential divorce. We don't need bloody pandering with proposals and discussions when it comes to international law anymore.

Palestine alongside everyone else suffering from this genocide deserves direct action to be done. Israel, America and their allies have destroyed more war standards than fucking HITLER. Drag the IDF out of Palestine entirely. Slap on those arrest warrants. Then we can actually get the hostages from both sides back home as the Zionist regime responsible are tried for their crimes.

One massive step for Palestine will be a giant leap for the world. To do this means no one is above international law and the corruption deep in every government can finally begin to be rooted out. Should another genocide occur after this then justice shouldn't be allowed to pander again.

GET MOVING ICJ AND ICC.

For anyone in the United States, on June 8th, there's a protest to surround the White House for the Rafah Massacre. Netanhyu is visiting Congress so be on guard about more spontaneous law passing. Also please be careful as police brutality is guaranteed and who knows what they will dish out to remove Pro-Palestine protestors off grounds.

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #17

May 3-10 2024

Vice President Harris announced 5.5 billion dollars to build affordable housing and address homelessness. The grants will go to 1,200 communities across all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico. 1.3 billion will go to HUD's HOME program which builds, buys, and rehabs affordable housing for rent or ownership. 3.3 billion is headed to Community Development Block Grants which supports housing as well as homeless services, and expanding economic opportunities. Remaining funds focus on building housing for extremely low- and very low-income households, Housing for people struggling with HIV/AIDS, transitional housing for those with substance-use disorder, and money to support homeless shelters and homeless prevention programs.

At the 3rd meeting of the Los Angeles Declaration group in Guatemala Security of State Blinken announced $578 million in new US aid to Latin America. The Los Angeles Declaration is a partnership between the US and 20 other nations in the Americas to address immigration, combat human trafficking, and support economic development and improved quality of life for people in poor nations in the Americas. The bulk of the aid, over $400 million will go to humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people. Inside of Venezuela over 7 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance due to decades of political and economic instability. Over 7 million more have been forced to flee the country and live in poverty across the Americas. The aid will help Venezuelans both inside and outside of Venezuela.

The Department of Energy lead an effort to get the G7 to agree to phase out coal by the early 2030s. The G7 is a collection of the 7 largest Industrial economies on Earth, the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy. To avoid catastrophic climate change the International Energy Agency believes coal needs to be phased out by 2035. However this has been a sticking point with the G7 since 1/3rd of Japan and 1/4th of Germany's energy comes from Coal. This agreement to phase out represents a major breakthrough and the US plans to press for even wider agreement on the issue at the G20 meeting in November.

President Biden announced a major investment deal in Racine, Wisconsin, site of the failed Trump Foxconn deal. In 2018 then President Trump visited Racine and declared the planned Foxconn plant "the eighth wonder of the world.". However the promised 13,000 jobs never materialized and the Taiwan based Foxconn after bulldozing 100s of homes and farms decided not to build. President Biden inked a deal with Microsoft for the land formally given to Foxconn which will bring 2,000 new jobs to Racine to help replace the 1,000 job losses during Trump's Presidency in the community.

200 tribal governments and the US territories of American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, published climate action plans. The plans were paid for by the Biden Administration as part of a 5 billion dollar Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program. The federal government is supporting all 50 states, territories, DC, and tribal governments to draft climate action plans, which will be used to apply for more than 4 billion dollars in grants to help turn plans into reality

As part of marking Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Biden Administration announced a number of action aimed at combating antisemitism and supporting the Jewish Community. This included $400 million in new funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. The Program has supported Synagogues and Jewish Community Centers with security improvements like bullet proof windows and trainings for staff in how to handle active shooter and hostage situations. The Department of Education issued guidance to all schools districts and federally funded colleges stressing that antisemitism is banned under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These actions come as part of the Biden Administration's National Strategy To Counter Antisemitism, the first ever national strategy addressing the issue by any Administration.

USAID announced $220 million in additional humanitarian aid to Yemen. This new funding will bring US aid to Yemen over the last 10 years to nearly $6 billion. Currently 18 million Yemenis are estimated as needing humanitarian assistance, 9 million of them children, and the UN believes nearly 14 million face imminent risk of famine. The US remains the single largest donor nation to humanitarian relief in Yemen.

The Department of Interior announced nearly $150 million to help communities fight drought. The funds will support 42 projects across 10 western states. This is part of the President's $8.3 billion dollar investment in the nations water infrastructure over the next 5 five years.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Just saying like . Of your countries list a lot of these Are heavily criticised by those who take a stance against Israel’s government and current political status. Turkey and Northern Ireland being listed are banger examples. Also of the countries you listed with official religions, the depth of which religion is involved in general affairs varies drastically. I’m Scottish, you listed Scotland, the Church of Scotland has literally no influence on politics and laws, its heritage / a left over item by English Protestants more than anything. I do in fact, firmly think any country having an official religion meddling in state affairs is bad, actually, but the list you pulled together has such massive variety it’s not really making a big point imo. Afghanistan and like Scotland have very different levels of religious control over government and every citizens life. Both shouldn’t be there but, not comparable aside from the simple fact they have an official religion 😭

Cool. Tell me more about what level of ethnic or religious identity you think is okay in a modern nation state? Not joking - I think that's an important conversation to have and I'd like to have it.

I agree that the UK's level of religious establishment is mostly harmless. There is real freedom of religion, despite the fact that the Monarch takes vows to protect the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. There is real freedom of religion despite the fact that public funds go to religious schools. I don't think those circumstances are ideal, but I think the UK lives up to Enlightenment Liberal values by truly protecting religious freedoms for religious minorities and having laws against religious discrimination.

The same cannot be said, for instance (as you mention) for Afghanistan, Iran, or Egypt.

Meanwhile, non-Jewish Israelis have the exact same legal rights as Jewish Israelis. (If you would like to dispute this fact, please cite sources). As every citizen of the UK has equal rights of religious freedom, so do the citizens of Israel. Israeli non-Jews are judges and members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset.

So, how does this differ from the UK?

I totally agree with you that ANY establishment of religion is potentially problematic- But if Israel's identity as a Jewish state is bothersome while it has true freedom of religion which none of its neighbors have, I'm asking why Israel is singularly bothersome to its detractors for having an ethnic/religious identity.

And, again, I really would like to hear *answers* to this question which leverage facts and reason.

Lastly, thank you for offering a differing view without resorting to slurs or telling me to kill myself. I value and appreciate your civility more than I can adequately express.

It is one of my life's ambitions to visit Scotland. I loved how the Scots responded to Trump's visit. David Tennant made my week with this one.

Wishing you well in these awful times.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Tulsi Gabbard’s history with Russia is even more concerning than you think

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, documented the deaths of 503,064 people by March 2023. It said at least 162,390 civilians had died in that same time, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for 139,609 of those deaths.

But Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, viewed it all as a “regime-change war” fueled by the West and aimed at removing the dictator from power. She saw Assad – and Russia, when it entered the conflict – as legitimate defenders of the state against an extremist uprising.

In 2015, when Russia entered the Syrian war on the side of the dictator Assad, Gabbard expressed support for the move, even as the civilian toll from Moscow’s devastating airstrikes grew into the thousands.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911,” she wrote on Twitter.

It was precisely because of her support for Assad and Russia’s war that Moustafa was keen for her to attend the congressional delegation to southern Turkey to meet the victims of the conflict.

“From experience, everyone that we bring over to the border, and they see the victims, they always come back with a realistic view of what’s happening and who is behind the mass displacement and killing and atrocities and so on, and so that was the objective,” he said. “What was shocking was her lack of empathy. She’ll sacrifice the facts, even when it came to little girls in front of her telling her they got bombed by a plane – it didn’t matter.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her various conspiracy theories about the war.

“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he told The Independent.

Lister said her views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”

They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons attack against their supporters to provoke Western intervention against Assad — something the US intelligence agencies she will soon lead had concluded was false. She declined to call Assad a war criminal when pressed, despite masses of evidence, and used a video of Syrian government bombings to criticize US involvement in the war.

“Her descriptions of the crisis in Syria read like they were composed in Assad’s personal office, or in Tehran or Moscow – not Washington,” Lister added.

Gabbard was not swayed by meeting the victims of Assad’s airstrikes in 2015. In fact, two years later, she went to Damascus to meet the Syrian president in person and came away even more convinced of her opinions.

The congresswoman said her visit to meet Assad – the first by a sitting US lawmaker since the conflict began – was aimed at bringing an end to the war.

“I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace,” she told CNN at the time.

Fire rises following a Syrian government airstrike in Aleppo in 2016 (AP)

Gabbard was forced to defend her embrace of Assad and other dictators during her 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Democratic primary debate, she clashed with Kamala Harris, who accused her of being “an apologist for an individual – Assad – who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

“She has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on,” added Harris, who would subsequently drop out of the race and later be selected as Joe Biden’s running mate.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard again defended Russian aggression.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter in 2022.

Gabbard appeared to fall for various conspiracy theories about the conflict that were promoted by Russia, as she had done in Syria. One of those conspiracy theories was a Russian claim about the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that were supposedly producing deadly pathogens.

She later walked back on those remarks, suggesting that there might have been some “miscommunication and misunderstanding.”

Gabbard’s frequent echoing of Kremlin talking points has earned her praise in Russian state media. Indeed, an article published on 15 November in the Russian-state controlled outlet RIA Novosti went so far as to call Gabbard a “superwoman.”

The possibility that Trump would tap someone with Gabbard’s history to be America’s top intelligence official shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who followed the president-elect’s first four years in the White House.

During his 2018 summit with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the then-president was asked if he believed the US intelligence community’s assessment, which stated that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.

That assessment was based on analysis of what was determined to have been state-sponsored campaigns of fake social media posts and ersatz news sites to spread false stories about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as cyberattacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and prominent operatives associated with the Clinton campaign.

But Trump, who’d just spent several hours in a closed-door meeting with Putin, stunned the assembled press and the entire world by declaring that he trusted the Russian leader’s word over that of his own advisers.

​​"President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be," he replied.

Trump would go on to repeatedly clash with his own intelligence appointees during the remainder of his term. He sacked his first DNI, former Indiana senator Dan Coats, after Coats repeatedly declined to back away from the government’s assessment of what Russia had done during the 2016 presidential race.

Larry Pfeiffer, the director of George Mason University’s Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, said Gabbard’s apparent susceptibility to foreign disinformation and her affinity for strongmen will give pause to American allies with whom the US routinely shares intelligence on common threats.

Intelligence services, he explained, are notoriously territorial and tight-lipped on sources and methods – particularly when it comes to so-called human intelligence, or Humint, which refers to information collected by and from spies and sources within hostile governments.

Pfeiffer said foreign allies are likely already concerned about how a second Trump administration will handle intelligence, given the president-elect’s record. He also predicted that Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI would cause even more problems among skittish partners.

“I think they wouldn’t feel like they’ve got an American confidant that they can deal with on a mature level,” he said. “I can guarantee you that the foreign intelligence services of Europe, including the Brits, are all having little side conversations right now about … what is this going to mean, and how are we going to operate, and what are we going to do now.”

Gabbard has taken the side of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as the Russian president (AP)

The former US intelligence veteran also said Gabbard’s record of spreading foreign talking points calls into question whether she will be able to carry out the DNI’s important responsibility of briefing the president on threats to the nation.

He told The Independent: “Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, you look at her long history of statements that seem to come out of the Kremlin’s notebook, her propensity to be influenced by their viewpoint – [it] raises questions as to whether she has the ability to present the intel community’s perspective as it is, or is she going to be one who’s going to want to discount it, influence it, color and change it, or ignore it and just present her own view?

“I think it also raises questions of judgement. You know, here’s an individual who seems very prone to misinformation, prone to conspiracy theory. That should worry anybody who’s worried about America’s national security,” he added.

Trump’s selection of the former Hawaii congresswoman could be a problem for the senators tasked with confirming her, on several different levels. For one, the position is unique among cabinet agencies in that there are strict requirements for who can serve in the director’s role.

The text of the 2004 law which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington and the intelligence community’s failures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, specifically states that any person who serves in the DNI job “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

The first person to serve as DNI, John Negroponte, was a widely respected foreign service veteran who had served as US ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Honduras and the Philippines, as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, and as a deputy national security adviser during the Reagan administration. The next three people to hold the office were flag-rank military officers with significant intelligence experience.

Pfeiffer, a US intelligence veteran of three decades’ standing who once ran the White House Situation Room and served as chief of staff to then-CIA director General Michael Hayden, told The Independent that Gabbard’s experience in the House and her military service, while admirable, do not match the standards envisioned by the authors of the 2004 law which established the office.

“That’s national security experience … but she was a freaking military cop … operating at a largely tactical level, not that strategic, long-term national security perspective that one would expect,” he said.

Gabbard may have left the Syrian conflict behind, but Moustafa still works with its victims every day. And he believes the connection between her views on Syria and Ukraine is clear.

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

[mariacallous]

Ukraine faces a precarious future amid waning Western support. The immediate peril comes from the 2024 US presidential election, but the fundamental problem has been the failure of Europe to commit to the defeat of Putin’s invasion.

The new NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, lost no time in visiting Kyiv after he assumed office, where he ‘pledged continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia’. Doubtless his words were sincerely intended, but he knows there are serious political headwinds across Europe and the US.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky senses this too as he briefs his ‘Victory Plan’ around European capitals following a mixed reception in Washington.

The forthcoming presidential election in the US represents the point of maximum danger. A win by Donald Trump could see him placing a phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin as early as 6 November. Any such call would set expectations of a negotiated settlement, with discussions possibly beginning in the early months of 2025. 

Nobody should want this war of ‘meat grinder’ savagery to continue a day longer than necessary. However, Zelensky would have much to fear from a deal negotiated by Trump. The 2020 Doha Accords with the Afghan Taliban have been described as the worst diplomatic agreement since Munich in 1938. Fortunately, Trump was prevented from reaching a similarly disastrous deal with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. 

In any such deal, Zelensky would be unlikely to secure the recovery of Crimea and the Donbas, reparations for the massive damage to his country, war crimes trials or membership of NATO. He might be able to bargain the Kursk salient in return for control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. But, without NATO membership and its Article 5 guarantee, there would be nothing to stop Putin from continuing the war after a couple of years of recovery and rearmament. 

For Europe, too, there would be peril. Both Georgia and Moldova look particularly fragile and vulnerable to Russian active measures or hybrid warfare. Even the Baltics would be justifiably nervous, in spite of their NATO status.

However, it would be misleading to blame everything on Trump. There have been plenty of prior indications of trouble ahead.

US support has always been too little, too late. Given the sheer scale of Washington’s military support this might sound absurd, but President Joe Biden’s hesitancy in allowing Storm Shadow missiles to be used against targets inside Russia is indicative of a general trend. As the head of a global superpower, Biden has always had one eye on ensuring that the war does not get out of hand and become nuclear. The result has been that Ukraine feels it has been given enough not to lose but not enough to win. 

In Europe the support has been varied. Some countries, such as the Baltics, the Scandinavian states, the UK and Poland, have done better than others. Hungary has been hostile, and may soon be joined by Slovakia and Austria. Germany has provided the most weapons but has been politically unreliable. Its refusal to supply Taurus missiles and its public debate about reducing its defence budget have sent all the wrong messages. German companies continue to retain significant interests in Russia, and the advance of Alternative for Germany in elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg reminded Chancellor Olaf Scholz that there is little support for the war in Eastern Germany. President Emmanuel Macron of France, having been mercurial about Ukraine from the outset, received a similar jolt from the far left and far right in legislative elections in July. 

The most visible sign of a failure of collective determination to defeat Russia was the decision not to seize Russian financial assets frozen in Western banks, but instead to use them as collateral to raise a much smaller loan. Yes, there would have been a theoretical risk of undermining faith in the Western-dominated financial system, but few countries are yet ready to entrust their savings to Chinese or Indian banks. Furthermore, it would have sent a message to Putin not to invade other countries. 

Meanwhile, the crisis in the Middle East has diverted foreign policy and public attention. In Iraq and Afghanistan 20 years ago, the West demonstrated that it does not have the policy bandwidth to cope with two simultaneous campaigns. The events since 7 October 2023 have done untold damage to Ukraine’s prospects and to the West’s much-vaunted rules-based international order.

A newly elected President Trump would rightly claim that, once again, the US has shouldered the main burden of Western interests with inadequate support from its NATO allies. He would point (correctly again) to the mounting military pressure on Ukraine, its difficulties in replacing front-line soldiers, and the effects on global food and fuel prices. With the war raging in the Levant, he would refer to the US being over-extended once again in ‘forever wars’.

A newly elected President Kamala Harris could be expected to follow the path trodden by Biden. She would inherit his caution at unduly provoking Putin and his reticence about Ukraine joining NATO. Furthermore, her freedom to supply Ukraine with additional weaponry could be restricted by the make-up of the two houses of Congress. 

There could be a third outcome to the election: a Harris victory that is contested by Trump. In such circumstances, we could see an absence of US foreign policy for a period of weeks or months. 

Barring a mutiny by Russian forces or a crisis in Moscow, the prospects for Ukraine (and therefore Europe) look grim. The irony is that Putin would claim victory in spite of his campaign having been a costly disaster.

What would a betrayed Ukraine look like? At least it would retain some 82% of its territory. A guilty West would doubtless provide aid to rebuild infrastructure. It might be given a pathway to eventual EU membership (unless that option had been bargained away at the negotiating table), but joining the Western club may have lost its appeal at that point. Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs would re-emerge from hibernation. The old post-Soviet cynicism would replace the youthful enthusiasm of the Maidan generation. There would be antagonism towards those returning from abroad after avoiding the fight, and – of course – thousands of grieving families.

This should have been Europe’s war to manage. In spite of decades of discussion about European defence, it proved too convenient to rely on US largesse. This made Europe a prisoner of US electoral factors. It also caused Europe to shirk the difficult decisions that helping win the war entailed: the big increases in defence expenditure, the 24-hour working in ammunition factories, the hikes in food and energy costs and the political risks such as seizing frozen assets. What remains now for Europe is to secure a place at the negotiating table and to argue for NATO membership for Ukraine as part of any settlement.

Failing that, the West will have years to repent the betrayal of the courageous Ukrainians, whose only crime was their wish to join the Western democratic order.

[celticcrossanon]

BRF Reading - 13th of September, 2024

This is speculation only

Cards drawn on the 13th of September, 2024

Question: Where will Harry be living on his next birthday (i.e. in a year's time)?

Note: I had three destinations in mind and I drew a card for each one. These are the results.

Interpretation: The UK

Card One (The UK): The Knight of Pentacles

The Knight of Pentacles is the card for a sun sign Virgo, and Harry is a sun sign Virgo, so this says that Harry will be back in the UK for next year's birthday. The Knight is an action card, but it is the slowest moving of the Knights in the tarot deck, so this will be a very slow move - things will move forward inch by inch, slowly but persistently, and eventually he will be back in the UK. Pentacles is the suit of money, status, material things etc so that will be Harry's reason for moving back to the UK - money and status.

Card Two (America): The Nine of Pentacles

This is traditionally the card of the wealthy, independent, single woman or person, so it looks like living in America is associated with a divorce for Harry. The Nine of Pentacles is about achieving material success, being self-sufficient, having a solid financial footing - everything that Harry wanted to achieve in America but failed to do so. Nines are high up in the tarot deck, so this is quite high in status, but it is not a Knight, which is higher in status, and that higher status is what Harry will have in the UK.

This card is a strong indicator of Harry living in America as a rich single person, so he may move there and live on his family's money after the divorce, or he may visit there and live the high life while he is there on visits. However, the Knight of Pentacles as Harry's card trumps this one as an indicator of where he will live, so it looks like he will be based in the UK, although he may spend a lot of his time in America.

Card Three (Somewhere Else): The Page of Wands

Pages are messengers, and Wands are PR or creative endeavours, so it could be that Harry starts another creative endeavour in yet another country, or that he is putting out PR about moving to another country or working in another country at this time next year (like the whole 'Harry in Africa' PR we had a few years ago). Again, I feel that if he does plan to work in another country, it will not be permanent, and his base will remain in the UK.

Underlying Energy: Two of Pentacles in reverse

This card tells me that things are badly out of balance. This card is about spending your resources wisely, choosing between different investments, balancing your work and home life. In the reverse things have become out of balance, you are overextended financially, things are messy and chaotic, and/or you are overwhelmed.

This card tells me that Harry is in a mess financially (as we all sort of know). His life is not balanced, he has more outgoings than incomings, and his affairs are in a huge mess. This card also tells me that Harry will take more than he gives financially, he is not a good investment, and that looks unlikely to change for the rest of his life (so no new news there). This is an issue that will have to be addressed sooner or later - either Harry has to tidy up his affairs himself or he has to get someone to do it for him. This financial mess would also be the reason that Harry moves back to the UK - he wants to live off his family's money, having wasted/spent all of his own.

Conclusion

It looks like Harry may be living back in the UK by his next birthday, and he will most likely be single. He may have trips to America where he lives the high life and a rich, luxurious lifestyle, but I don't think he will be living there permanently (most of the year, possibly, but he won't be based there). He may go to other country(s) for 'work' to improve his PR image, or just talk about doing that in the press, but he will remain based in the UK.

Remember, this can change. This is how the energies are pointing at the moment, but they can change over the course of the year. If the crown passes to Prince William in the next 12 months, or if there is a behind the scenes regency, then Harry is going to find it a lot harder to come home than he is at the present.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

On his campaign plane between rallies, Donald Trump reminisces about meeting the Royal Family during his UK State Visit on 3-5 June 2019.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lorenzo Tondo, Bethan McKernan, and Peter Beaumont at The Guardian:

Israel and Hamas have begun a long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza with the release of three Israeli female hostages in exchange for 90 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, in the first tentative steps to end 15 months of brutal war that has claimed almost 47,000 Palestinian lives in the coastal strip.

As the fighting ceased, hundreds of aid trucks queued to enter Gaza to deliver supplies to its 2.3 million residents, 90% of whom have been displaced by the conflict, many multiple times. The halt in the fighting and the exchange of hostages for prisoners, while representing the first key hurdle in the complex ceasefire deal, was delayed for several hours amid a dispute between Israel and Hamas that underlined continuing concerns over the fragility of the agreement.

The ceasefire came into force a day before the inauguration of the incoming US president, Donald Trump, who had demanded an end to the fighting in Gaza as Hamas released the women to the Red Cross in a crowded square in central Gaza City – including the joint UK-Israeli citizen Emily Damari. Damari was released with Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, who were all violently abducted on 7 October 2023 during Hamas’s surprise assault on southern Israeli communities bordering Gaza. In images shared by her family after her release, Damari, who lost two fingers after being shot during her abduction, is seen smiling as she hugs her mother and talks to family members by phone. As the Israeli hostages were released, Red Cross officials were working in Israel’s Ofer prison to process the release of Palestinian prisoners. In Gaza, thousands of Palestinians burst into the streets as the ceasefire began as others set off on foot even before it officially took hold to visit homes from which they had been displaced. Welcoming the truce on his final full day in office, the US president, Joe Biden, said: “After so much pain, death and loss of life, today the guns in Gaza have gone silent,” adding it now fell to the new Trump administration to implement the rest of the deal.

Ceasefire has begun.

[the-invisibility-bloke]

Getting to Know You Thingi.e. (my laptop autocorrected "ie" to "i.e." because once upon a time I told it to, I suppose, so I'm leaving it because it's ridiculous)

Thanks for the tags, @lqtraintracks, @nv-md, and @galaxostars! Looks there are multiple versions floating around (telephone game?) so here's my mashup:

Last song: Either something I'm pondering for HD Wireless or the Cabaret cast recording... nothing like 1930s Berlin to boost the spirit

Favourite colour: Turquoise

Last movie: Wicked, I think? (this is starting to sound like I'm only into musicals, way to be cool)

Last TV show: One of those Harlan Coben mysteries on Netflix, makes workout time go faster

Sweet/spicy/savoury: It's homophobic to make me choose

Relationship status: Oof

Last thing I googled: ...Gay porn. I had a rare couple hours home alone, don't judge me

Current obsession: I'm 20 years late to Drarry, does that count? But still Sirry, Heddy, any good cross-gen shenanigans.

Looking forward to: Trump's hopefully painful death. Finishing my dirty Pottercest so I can start playing dolls with Drarry. Visiting the UK in May. A bottle glass of wine after Sobriety Month. Overcoming dysphoria, depression, etc.

Last book: Lord of the Flies, which I'd never read. Made me wanna shove some fictional boys on a deserted island and see what cooks.

Favorite animal: Quokka or sloth

Last meal: Smoothie

Socks/slippers/bare feet: grippy socks grippy socks grippy socks (there is no carpet in my house, it’s grippy socks or death)

Last thing that made me laugh: My partner making weird noises, I think

Favorite lazy-sunday activity: Sitting in front of the fire with coffee and writing fic

I forget who's done this already but um... @mirdeli, @smehur, @faeries-withspirits, @citrusses, if the mood strikes!

[reality-detective]

* * * Las Vegas Shooting * * *

Part 2

What else was going on during the LAS VEGAS SHOOTING that they didn’t want us to know about?

There were two things/motives going on with this FALSE FLAG…possibly more.

Let’s talk about the first one. 👇

Let’s take a look at this VERY IMPORTANT Q drop.

We have talked about many of these elements… pointed out by Q…in reference to the Las Vegas shooting.

The other elements will be discussed as we dig further.

☝️That Q drop (#92) was dropped on NOVEMBER 5th!!

In the movie “Back to The Future”…the professor and Marty proclaimed “TIME TRAVEL was discovered on NOVEMBER 5th!”

One backstory to this presentation… May 30th, 2022 presentation titled “Capitulation/Trump’s World Tour.” This becomes relevant to the Las Vegas Shooting!

the Patriot Act several times now, and how that act, which was signed by President George W. Bush after 9/11…gave our government, the NSA, and the intelligence agencies the ability to spy on us Americans.

When Trump came into office, he was able to use the Patriot Act in his favor.

He was able to connect all the dots with the cabal… who was connected to who…who was funding who, etc.

TRUMP “HAD IT ALL!”

Trump knew about the Saudis' role in the plot on 9/11, their massive amounts of funding to the Cabal (including to the Clintons and the DNC), and the child trafficking.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the biggest contributors to the Clintons and the DNC, not only owned the Four Seasons, but also was a large shareholder of Twitter, Apple, and Citigroup.

He was also not a fan of Donald Trump. They routinely got into it on twitter, such as the exchange below. 👇

After Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia and his infamous sword dance ceremony in May, 2017, there was a power change in Saudi Arabia.

King Salman was now at the helm with his son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Bin Salman would go on to help Trump and the White Hats bring down Twitter, Google, and Facebook.

Those stories are also in the “Capitulation/Trump’s World Tour” presentations from May 30/31st, 2022.

The May 2017 meeting between Trump and King Salman (and his son Mohammad), was not just another meeting. It was a business meeting.

Trump was more than willing to help Saudi Arabia’s decline in oil profits due to the boom in fracking. He allowed them to be listed on the New York stock exchange.

In return, he got the Saudis to make significant changes, such as liberating women, the end of illegal funding, no more contributions to American politics, no more supplying funds to terrorists or splinter groups, and of course to put an end to the child trafficking.

If they didn’t take the deal Trump threatened to declass everything he had on them from the NSA. King Salman took the deal. All of a sudden, women were allowed to drive, ISIS was retreating, and Syrian rebels suddenly ran out of ammunition.

Although King Salman cooperated…not all the royalties in Saudi Arabia were happy…especially those who were losing the power they once had.

They also didn’t want to become liberal.

Many came to resent King Salman, and started to plot against him, his son Crown Prince bin Salman, and President Trump.

At the forefront of this anti Trump/anti King Salman movement was Ahlaweed bin Talal, and the previous Deputy Crown Prince, Muqrin, and his son, Mansour.

DONALD TRUMP and the Saudi Crown Prince MOHAMMED bin SALMAN were meeting secretly in Vegas to discuss the impeding arrest of the Saudi Prince's.

The Las Vegas Shooting was an Assassination Attempt against Donald Trump and The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia…by Mossad, ISIS, The FBI, Australia, and possibly UK Spooks or intelligence operators.

DIVERSION

LAS VEGAS SHOOTING

The shooting out of Paddock’s window was supposed to be a diversion. There would have been a lot of gun shooting noises during the assasination attempt, so the attack on the crowd was to cover-up the gun fire that would have ensued.

The real shooting took place from black helicopters and men on the ground, with very little coming from Paddock’s room.

Remember the real story…Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the attempt on his life.

Steven Paddock was a C*I*A pilot who smuggled guns and children for the Saudis. His role at the Las Vegas shooting was the diversion tactic for the hit teams.

Eventually Trump and his team got wind of the assassination plot against them.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was secretly ushered out of the building, and rescued by a helicopter that came in and rescued him.

Trump and bin Salman’s security detail also created a diversion story saying that Bin Salman was over playing cards at the Tropicana Hotel.

There are pictures of bin Salman leaving the entrance to the Tropicana…but it turns out that was just a decoy and a ruse in order to get bin Salman out of the Mandalay Bay hotel, which they did successfully.

The black helicopters belonged to the Mossad (Israeli Intelligence)…who fired machine guns at the crowd and at Bin Salman’s rescue effort.

This is the reason they turned off their transponders, to cover-up their role in the shooting.

How did TRUMP know Bin Salman was going to get assassinated?

What if Q drop 92…which gave us all the Las Vegas shooting hints…was purposely dropped on November 5th, because…according to the movie “Back to The Future” November 5th was the day time travel was invented?

Was time travel involved in the Las Vegas shooting?

I have mentioned that Donald Trump could be a time traveler!

On October 5th, 2017…just four days after the Las Vegas shooting...Chief-of-staff John Kelly summoned:

the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

NSA boss Mike Rogers,

Pacific Commander-In-Chief Harry Harris,

and combatant commanders to the White House.

This was to bring all hands on deck to back Trump against the deep state, and the cabal.

Continued in Part 3

All links connected 👇

[dorka]

Most mar a garbage day is megirta (egybol ossze is omlott a site)

Over the weekend, the always-excellent John Burn-Murdoch, over at The Financial Times, posted an alarming bit of demographic analysis that has now gone very viral. It’s from a column Burn-Murdoch wrote titled, “A New Global Gender Divide Is Emerging,” which shows a tremendous political gap forming between young men and women around the world.

Burn-Murdoch followed up the column with a lengthy thread on X hypothesizing as to what may be causing this gap and thousands of other users have offered up their own diagnoses, as well: Smartphones, video games, economic inequality, lack of education, an over-correction post-#MeToo.

Interestingly enough, though, the bulk of Burn-Murdoch’s reporting focuses on South Korea, the US, Germany, the UK, Spain, Poland, China, and Tunisia. Which, aside from China and Tunisia, were all countries I worked in, covering elections and far-right radicalization, in and around the time period those countries’ respective political gender gaps began widening. I’m not saying I have a tremendously in-depth understanding of, say, Polish toxic masculinity, but I did spend several days there following around white nationalist rappers and Catholic fundamentalist football fans. And, in South Korea, I worked on a project about radical feminists and their activism against the country’s equivalent of 4chan, Ilbe Storehouse.

In fact, between 2015-2019, I visited over 20 countries, essentially asking the same question: Where do bad men here hangout online? Which has given me a near-encyclopedic directory in my head, unfortunately, of international 4chan knock-offs. In Spain, it’s a car forum that doxxes rape victims called ForoCoches. In France, it’s a gaming forum that organized rallies for Marine Le Pen called Jeux Video. In Japan, it’s 2channel. In Brazil, it’s Dogolachan. And most, if not all, of these spaces pre-date any sort of modern social movement like #MeToo — or even the invention of the smartphone.

But the mainstream acceptance of the culture from these sites is new. Though I don’t actually think the mystery of “why now?” is that much of a mystery. While working in Europe, I came to understand that these sites and their culture war campaigns like Gamergate were a sort of emerging form of digital hooliganism. Nothing they were doing was new, but their understanding how to network online was novel. And in places like the UK, it actually became more and more common in the late-2010s to see Pepe the Frog cosplayers marching alongside far-right football clubs. In the US, we don’t have the same sports culture, but the end result has been the same. The nerds and the jocks eventually aligned in the streets. The anime nazis were simply early adopters and the tough guys with guns and zip ties just needed time to adapt to new technology. And, unlike the pre-internet age, unmoderated large social platforms give them an infinitely-scalable recruitment radius. They don’t have to hide in backrooms anymore.

Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.

The biggest similarity, though, is in what I can cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.

(X.com/jeremykauffman)

Taylor Swift, an extremely affluent blonde, blue-eyed white woman who writes country-inflected pop music and is dating a football player headed for the Super Bowl. She should be a resounding victory for these guys. Doesn’t get more American than that. But due to an actually very funny glitch in how they see the world, she’s actually a huge threat.

Pop culture, according to the right wing, should be frivolous. Because before the internet, it was something sold to girls by corporations run by powerful men. Famous pop stars through the ages, like Frank Sinatra, America’s first Justin Bieber, or The Beatles, the One Direction of their time, would be canonized as Great by Serious Men after history had forgotten they rocketed to success as their generation’s Tumblr Sexymen. But from the 2000s onward, thanks to an increasingly powerful digital public square, young women and people of color were able to have more influence in mainstream culture and also accumulate more financial power from it. And after Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was able to connect this new form of pop influence to both liberal progressive politics and, also, social media, well, conservatives realized they had to catch up and fast. And the fastest way to do that is to try and smash the whole thing by dismissing it as feminine.

Pop music? It’s for girls. Social media? It’s for girls. Democrats? Girls. Taylor Swift? Girls and also a government psyop. But this line of thinking has no limit. It poisons everything. If Swift manages to make it to the Super Bowl, well, that has to become feminine too. And at a certain point, the whole thing falls apart because, honestly, you just sound like an insane loser.

[tomorrowusa]

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made a surprise visit to Kyiv to reaffirm UK support for Ukraine.

Sir Keir Starmer has arrived in Kyiv to sign what Downing Street is calling a "landmark 100-year partnership" with Ukraine. The pact would formalise economic and military support already pledged to the country, and offers more. It is the prime minister's first visit to the country since taking office last summer, in a show of support for Ukraine days before Donald Trump re-enters the White House. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is keen to discuss firm security guarantees from key allies such as the UK, wary that a new US administration could start pushing Ukraine to make peace with Russia. [ ... ] Speaking as he travelled to the country, Sir Keir said: "This is not just about the here and now, it is also about an investment in our two countries for the next century." "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin's ambition to wrench Ukraine away from its closest partners has been a monumental strategic failure. Instead, we are closer than ever, and this partnership will take that friendship to the next level," he added.

The visit comes just days before pro-Russia Donald Trump is to be sworn into office in the US.

Sir Keir's visit also takes place just a day after Germany's defense minister paid a visit.

We need to face the fact that Russia is at war with us. The Cold War effectively resumed shortly after Putin took power 25 years ago and he has gradually ramped up his aggressiveness. His intention all along has been to restore the Soviet Union in all but name.

Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk has credibly accused Russia of conducting a terrorist campaign in the West.

A Russian Airline Bomb Plot? What To Know About Polish PM's Accusations

Russia has been using merchant ships to sever undersea cables connecting NATO countries.

Finland police say Russia-linked ship held in severed cables probe may have dragged anchor for 60 miles

Russia is a terrorist state and its dictator Vladimir Putin should not be pampered with visits to Mar-a-Lago.

[mariacallous]

The snow lay in drifts over the railway lines at Auschwitz, when Keir Starmer went to pay his respects last week. His wife, Victoria, the granddaughter of Polish Jews who fled to sanctuary in England, stood beside him in the biting cold looking out over the tracks that once ferried unimaginable numbers of people to their deaths.

Afterwards, the prime minister talked about the relics of the dead discovered when the concentration camp was liberated: the piles of shoes, many in children’s sizes, and the suitcases hurriedly packed by people forced from their homes. What he had seen would stay with him, he said. It was “the ultimate warning … of where prejudice can lead”.

Starmer did not have to add that the shadow of war now hangs over Europe once again, or that once again dark forces are rising. There has been an apocalyptic enough feel to these past days leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration, with Joe Biden warning of the US’s descent into oligarchy and a deep air of foreboding hanging over EU capitals. But nonetheless, the moment resonated.

Starmer was visiting Poland to make common cause with the country’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, who recently ousted a rightwing populist government and whose country would be on the frontline of any confrontation with Russia. By way of painful contrast, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were meanwhile preparing to rub shoulders at the inauguration with leading lights of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland – a pariah in its own political system but apparently not at the White House – and Spain’s far-right Vox party, plus other guests of honour chosen to usher in the era of Trump.

The new order couldn’t “come soon enough”, Truss tweeted from Washington, alongside a picture of herself in a red Maga cap. Farage, meanwhile, settled for a triumphant: “We are so back.” He has a more longstanding friendship with the president than any other British politician – at the weekend, he bragged of having “genuine friends on speed dial”in the new administration – and knows Trump won’t necessarily stick to going through normal diplomatic channels. Last week, Trump aides reportedly met senior Reform UK figures to discuss how they could work together.

US presidents have always sought to promote like-minded leaders, including sometimes over the heads of elected governments. But previously that itch for regime change hasn’t felt like a threat to old friends in Europe. Now, even longstanding allies must watch their backs as money and ideas flow across the Atlantic to rightwing populists seeking actively to destabilise them, mining the same veins of anti-immigrant feeling and economic frustration Trump did.

Talk of the White House plotting to make Farage prime minister by 2029 still sounds wildly overblown for many reasons. Not least because there are powerful downsides for British politicians who get too close to a president still viewed with a hefty dose of suspicion on this side of the Atlantic, and because the president probably doesn’t care enough about British politics to expend that much energy on it. (As Farage discovered when Trump’s incoming counter-terrorism chief said Britain should repatriate the former Islamic State bride Shamima Begum from Syria, it isn’t always easy being his friend, let alone his enemy: there’s no answer to that conundrum that pleases both the president and Reform voters.)

But Reform will try to use Trump’s presidency as a battering ram to break down British norms, arguing that if the US can rip up net-zero plans to get growth or ruthlessly deport foreign-born criminals, why can’t we? Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s weaponising of the grooming gangs scandalshowed how destructive even sporadic missiles lobbed from Trumpworld can be, especially if British politicians are willing to help him identify targets.

Starmer’s first step should be to make clear that there’s nothing patriotic about colluding with foreign interference, and that Trump’s little helpers serve nobody’s interests but their own. But where there are legitimate grievances, those must eventually be confronted.

Last week, at an event convened by the thinktank British Future to discuss lessons learned from losing ignominiously to Trump, the blunt message from former Kamala Harris adviser Frank Sharry to his friends in the Labour party was that ignoring far-right wedge issues simply doesn’t work.

When record numbers of immigrants crossing into the US prompted talk of a border crisis, Sharry said, the Biden administration didn’t “lean in”, it ran away from the argument. Though by last summer it had developed effective answers – a combination of border enforcement, deals with neighbouring countries and undercutting people smugglers by opening more legal visa routes was actively bringing numbers down – it didn’t even defend its own record, fearful of upsetting the liberal end of its electoral coalition.

Sharry, who spent decades working for pro-refugee charities before joining the Harris campaign, had helped craft messages for her that were designed to sound tough but fair, in line with mainstream American views. But months of radio silence, he suggested, had allowed Harris’s opponents to misrepresent her as an extremist favouring completely open borders, even as the rightwing news ecosystem in the US platformed open conspiracy theories about the Democrats supposedly wanting to flood the country with immigrants who could then vote for them.

The lesson, not lost on Downing Street, was that it’s not enough just quietly to do what works: you have to shout about it, even when your own side hates to hear it. Millions now get their sense of what is happening not from the mainstream media but from emotive snippets on social-media platforms already rife with disinformation that are now (thanks a bunch, Mark Zuckerberg) scrapping factchecking. If governments can’t dramatise what they are actually doing, the truth will be lost in the coming hurricane.

Bleak as all this sounds, however, this is no time to abandon hope. Sharry opened his remarks by saying he was delighted to be in a country where democracy still has a future, which both was a joke and wasn’t. There aren’t many cracks of light in the darkness now, but Britain, like Poland, has somehow bucked the odds by turning left just as much of the world seems to be turning right. Whether by luck or judgment, we seem to be at a different stage of the political cycle; still four years to go until the next election, a system that for good or ill makes life hard for small insurgent parties, relatively stable institutions, the capacity to toughen social media regulation, and a national inclination (be honest) towards a quiet life. But first, we’ll have to ride the storm.

[ceasarslegion]

Uncle story?

Oh boy!

So the first thing i need to say about my uncle is that he is an idiot. Terminally stupid and also the most self-righteous bastard I've ever met. Truly deadly combo.

I must also start by clarifying that this is not the same openly gay uncle who is a Scottish lord and ran for mayor of a small Saskatchewan town because he was bored and won and then showed up to all the official things in a top hat. That is technically my great uncle and on my dad's side. We must not smear that uncle's name due to confusing him with my mom's brother who is too stupid to realize how stupid he is and thinks the fact that no one can understand what the fuck he's ever talking about is a sign of intelligence.

So my uncle is openly gay. And he lives in the UK as a dual dutch-canadian citizen. He is engaged to an Israeli man (do not discourse on this post. I mention his nationality to highlight something else I will mention. Just some guy who doesn't even live there is not responsible for a certain conflict going on). He also grew up in Dubai but family went back to Canada for a spell around when he entered high school. He works as a travel agent last time I checked, but he can never hold down a job for more than a few months without getting fired so who knows at this point.

You're with me, yes? Gay, immigrant, fiance from another country, grew up in the gulf?

This motherfucker. Said he would vote for Trump if he were american and that brexit was a good idea. And is anti-immigration. And thinks feminism is cancer. And once tried to convince my mom that men across the UK were being arrested for "stare-rape" which is apparently when you just look at a woman in public and she can then claim you raped her with your eyes. And thinks pride is pedophilic. And thinks bisexuality is just people who want to be special and can't pick a side. And the only person he's still on speaking terms with in my immediate family is my grandma who is just as toxic as he is stupid.

My dad once said, word for word, while a few drags into a blunt: "if I ever see [uncle] again, I'm going to beat the shit out of him for what he said about my son." I don't know what exactly happened to get him kicked out of my parents apartment when they cut ties with him during a visit, but I know it was a screaming match over something to do with me. I had long moved out at that point so I wasn't there to see it. And this is coming from the mouth of the same guy from my red bull and snickers post, my dad is not a violent or scary guy and I've never seen him lay a hand on anybody.

My uncle and I used to be really close when I was a kid because he's a very artistic person, and I was too. We were the two creatives in the family. Also as a queer kid who didn't know he was trans yet I was naturally drawn to queer masculine influences. This fell apart pretty quickly when I started like, growing into my own person instead of a carbon copy of the people around me. He was steadily becoming dumber and dumber to me but it really came to a head in 2016

So trump wins the US election. I am still living in Abu Dhabi at this point and I had just graduated high school in June of that year. My boss is American. She is devastated and says she's going home early that day because she needs a few hours to process what's gonna happen now. At my desk I make a Facebook post saying that if any of the americans I knew refused to vote over your own self-righteous bs that I don't want to talk to you again because you clearly cared more about having the moral high ground than sucking it up for the people who trump will go on to hurt. This post is a big hit among my Arab majority peers.

This goes on without incident. 3 months later my uncle comments a big essay on it sucking trumps dick and saying some pseudo-qanon shit about Hillary Clinton. I respond citing actual sources and hit him where it hurts: Mike pence's then-plan to divert AIDS research funding into conversion therapy.

I go back to work (I am at work when the response happens too). About an hour later my phone buzzes on my desk. I open it to an essay twice the size in my messenger DMs from him crytyping about how I've changed and turned into such a whiny SJW, how I'm no longer the same person i was when I was 11 (damn I hope so), how I'm such a bully now (YOU CAME ONTO *MY* POST 3 MONTHS LATER???), and uh, no word of a lie, that he can't be racist because he dated a black man in high school. I. I never mentioned race in the post or my response to him. He brought that up on his own.

I ended up calling him out on it by replying to his public comment with "hey if you're gonna cry about how you're not racist in my inbox for pages and pages on end like that because someone said you were being stupid at least do it in the same place you were flaunting your idiocy, damn."

We didn't talk for a good couple years after that. And then something came up and we talked again for a bit, I don't remember exactly what anymore but we had to interact in person for it. I was willing to be civil, he started by doing the equivalent of crossing his arms and pouting until I said sorry for how mean I was to such a sensitive little muffin on the internet. Very mature guy I'm related to here isn't he. Insane how he's the uncle and I'm the nephew huh

This lasted for a good 2 weeks. Because the pokemon sun and moon leaks happened and I showed him the character models for red and blue and joked that they looked like a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in Hawaii. Pokemon was one of the few things we could still agree on at this point, so i was trying to bridge a gap with a family member with it. Thinking that he would appreciate the joke as a gay man.

He exploded at me. Like full on screaming exploded at me over that. He yelled about how homophobic I was, that i had no right to call myself queer because I hadn't been sexually assaulted or threatened to be murdered (HE HASNT EITHER??? LIKE HE VERY MUCH HASNT 😭😭😭 also you are making a LOT of assumptions about the life of someone you made NO effort to be a part of despite him giving you every olive branch you could possibly grab), that it was insulting to every gay person in the world to say that the best representation we deserved was pokemon (THATS NOT WHAT I SAID??? Also what's wrong with a gay pokemon character 😭 how is that insulting 😭😭) and that I had no idea what it was like to suffer for my identity. He said this while I was living in a place where queer people got executed for being moral degenerates btw.

Something in me snapped that day and I responded with "oh tell me more about how hard your life was in your dubai villa with an in-ground pool and a hired nanny. I'll truly never suffer as much as you have. Tell me more about how you threw the first brick at stonewall."

My parents had to stop themselves from laughing at that response and steered me out before my uncle could explode even more, and I never talked to him again.