All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Catlady in training]

I am shocked you said this. Much of what you say I tend to agree with but this was too much.

I have been supportive of immigration into Europe for years, even when many people I know who lean liberal on pretty much every other issue have been voicing concerns about the sheer amount of people and the lack of a system that would ensure enough integration and better tracking of where people are. You just need to look up how the person who murdered two people in Brussels this year had been able to move all over Europe to see how the latter has failed. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67195715
At some point we need to sit down and accept that there is a big institutional problem if teachers have to be afraid of being stabbed or beheaded in their schools, news reporters are afraid to report the news and call terrorists terrorists and regular people are afraid to go out to large gatherings in some cities.
Or maybe we can wait few more years, normal politicians can pretend all is fine because they are afraid to be labeled racist and watch how populist extremist politicians gain even more votes, even though they definitely don't have any solution either and are just capitalizing on people's fears to then push their own authoritarian agenda.

Please don't see my posts as an invitation to make racist comments. We still have bigger problem with home grown right-wingers like Identitarians than with Islamists, and the far, far majority of Muslims in Germany are peaceful and productive members of society.

I would really like to believe that it's just a small minority. What would help is if the majority that does not support terrorists or any of the radical agenda had publicly distanced themselves from it. There were for example Jewish people in the US who have distanced themselves from Israel's actions and say they support Palestinian state. I have not seen any such statement from any Muslims who would distance themselves from the actions of the radicals and terrorists, or from the actions of the protesters who regularly shout about their wish for a genocide. (It is of course possible I have missed it if it didn't make headlines, as I had to limit how much time I spend reading news in the last few months, it's been a pretty hard time.)

That was something else entirely. It was the kind of thing people say when a white person is harmed by any person of color. Which is well past Islamaphobia. If the attackers in question had been African, Indian, South American, etc it would still have the same chilling meaning. "They" can't be around "Us".

Except that the others don't have a similar history of radicalization and terrorism so there is no comparison to be made. If the topic was MAGA white supremacists who have a history of domestic terrorism and mass shootings, I think that similar generalizations would be showing up left and right here.

[Catlady in training]

Some small victory for women in Poland:


Poland violated human rights of woman in abortion case, European court rules

Poland’s 2020 abortion legislation violated the rights of a woman who was forced to travel abroad to access an abortion, the European court of human rights ruled on Thursday.

The court found that while the legislation, which prevented the applicant from accessing an abortion after her foetus was diagnosed with trisomy 21 (Down’s syndrome), did not legally amount to “inhuman or degrading treatment”, it did violate her right to privacy and family life, protected under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Poland was ordered to pay the applicant €16,004 (£13,800) in damages.

“We fought for this decision for every woman living in Poland,” Federa, a Polish woman’s rights organisation that had lawyers representing the applicant, said in a statement. “This verdict is a milestone and another argument that Polish law, which causes so much suffering for women in Poland, must change.”

The woman, known as ML in court papers, became pregnant in 2020. During the 14th week of pregnancy, the foetus was diagnosed with Down’s, and the woman was scheduled for an abortion in a Warsaw hospital on 28 January 2021.

However, a ruling of Poland’s constitutional tribunal – which criminalised abortions carried out on “eugenic grounds”, that is due to foetal abnormalities – came into effect just one day before her procedure. ML’s doctor informed her that due to the new legislation her abortion appointment was cancelled and that she would not be able to access the procedure at any Polish hospital.

ML then travelled to the Netherlands, where she terminated her pregnancy on 29 January.

“In her rapidly deteriorating mental state, ML had to organise a trip abroad within a few days, leaving her family and loved ones in Poland,” her lawyers said. “For an abortion, which only a few days earlier would have been performed for free in a nearby hospital, she had to travel to the Netherlands. She spent more than 5,500 zloty (£1,100).”

In its decision the court stressed that the European Convention of Human Rights was based on the principle of rule of law, but said that Poland’s overhaul of the judiciary cast doubt over the “lawfulness” of the constitutional tribunal that issued the 2020 ruling. Consequently, the court found that the interference with ML’s article 8 rights was not “in accordance with the law”.

“We expect the new Polish government to liberalise abortion law,” said Federa. “A return to the legal situation before the ruling of the Polish constitutional court is not enough – what is needed is access to legal abortion regardless of the reason.”

Donald Tusk became Poland’s prime minister this week, almost two months after a parliamentary election handed a majority to an alliance of opposition parties. His appointment puts an end to eight years of rule by the nationalist, populist Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Here's hoping that the new government will do some serious changes to the abortion laws as soon as possible.

[The Cool Thatguy]

I agree. I guess it’s easier to slam Israel, unfortunately, Netanyahu and the IDF have given protesters plenty of ammunition.

I guess it helps that we actually see Netanyahu . It's easy to pretend that Hamas doesn't exist when they hide all their spokesmen (many who live abroad and could thus easily be held to account).

[Mister Mets]

James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, wrote about how he got fired for approving a piece by Tom Cotton. He has extensive email correspondences and verbatim quotations.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/...s-lost-its-way

He thinks there's major bias at the Times.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

His biggest regret at the Times is when he had to tell someone who worked under him that there is a double-standard.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

He notes how the op-ed was mischaracterized in the Times.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times. I asked the Times if the media reporter’s behaviour was ethical. The spokeswoman, Ms Rhoades Ha, did not answer the question but instead wrote in an email that the reporter was assigned to the story after posting the messages in Slack and the “editors were unaware of those Slack messages”. The reporter, apparently asked by the Times to write to me, immediately followed with an email that said: “In the heat of the moment, I made comments on an internal Slack channel that, as a media reporter, I should not have” but that “the factual reporting I contributed to the story is not at issue.” (I am not naming this journalist because I do not want to point the finger at a single reporter when, in my view, an editor should be taking responsibility for the coverage.) Ms Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.

I asked if it was accurate and fair to report that Cotton called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”, as the June 4th story still does. In response, Ms Rhoades Ha supplied an opinion from a Times lawyer which noted that Cotton called for a military presence to “deter lawbreakers”. The lawyer argued that because some protesters violated curfews, failed to get permits or disperse when police ordered them to, they could be considered “lawbreakers”, just like the rioters and looters Cotton explicitly referred to. I followed up, saying I was seeking an editorial rather than a legal opinion, and asking again whether the Times believed its characterisation of Cotton’s argument was not just accurate, but fair. Ms Rhoades Ha again referred me to the lawyer’s opinion.

He makes a distinction between liberalism and illiberalism.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

What still seems most striking about the Cotton episode is how out of sync the leaders of the paper were with the ascendant, illiberal values within it. Cotton’s essay brought into focus conflicts over the role of journalism that had been growing within the Times for years, and that the leadership has largely ducked away from. Is it journalism’s role to salt wounds or to salve them, to promote debates or settle them, to ask or to answer? Is its proper posture humble or righteous? As journalists trained in what was once the conventional way, with the old set of principles, Sulzberger, Baquet and I reacted similarly to Cotton’s essay: here’s a potentially consequential idea from an influential voice. It may make readers uncomfortable, and they should know about it and evaluate it partly for that very reason.

The New York Times had published op-eds by the Taliban, and would publish op-eds calling for crackdowns on Hong Kong protestors.

Publisher Sulzberger does not respond to the specific claims.

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/sta...66654430073172

I'm posting a Twitter link because the Times link gets ****-ed here.

[thwhtGuardian]

I agree. I guess it’s easier to slam Israel, unfortunately, Netanyahu and the IDF have given protesters plenty of ammunition.

I don't know, I think it comes from expectations. People expect terrorist organizations to be terrible and beyond reason while we expect nations to act in fair and balanced ways, so it doesn't make sense to protest Hamas and say, "Do better!" because you know damn well they aren't but as an actual nation you expect the Israeli government to not treat the Palestinian people like animals and hope that protests will put enough international pressure on them that they might change.

[The Cool Thatguy]

I don't know, I think it comes from expectations. People expect terrorist organizations to be terrible and beyond reason while we expect nations to act in fair and balanced ways, so it doesn't make sense to protest Hamas and say, "Do better!" because you know damn well they aren't but as an actual nation you expect the Israeli government to not treat the Palestinian people like animals and hope that protests will put enough international pressure on them that they might change.

I agree, but only to a point.

Like it or not, Hamas is the government of the Palestinians, just as Putin is the ruler of Russia. Shrugging off their actions as 'monsters gonna monster' only emboldens them.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler.

Trump went on to say his criticism is of immigrants from all over the world, including Asia and Africa. No mention of Europe. Hmm, I wonder white, er, why?

[The Cool Thatguy]

Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler.

Trump went on to say his criticism is of immigrants from all over the world, including Asia and Africa. No mention of Europe. Hmm, I wonder white, er, why?

Knowing Trump, he probably blames all of Asia for Covid and thus, his election defeat.

[Tami]

Knowing Trump, he probably blames all of Asia for Covid and thus, his election defeat.

Either way, it's still coming from the Hitler playbook, only with Trump's own spin to it.

[Farealmer]

Except that the others don't have a similar history of radicalization and terrorism so there is no comparison to be made. If the topic was MAGA white supremacists who have a history of domestic terrorism and mass shootings, I think that similar generalizations would be showing up left and right here.

Except the detailed break down you gave in this post wasn't what you said. You made a backhanded statement on "cultural enrichment" "paying off". As if multiple cultures coexisting is the problem rather than terrorists being the problem. It was a bad take regardless of how you frame it.

[thwhtGuardian]

I agree, but only to a point.

Like it or not, Hamas is the government of the Palestinians, just as Putin is the ruler of Russia. Shrugging off their actions as 'monsters gonna monster' only emboldens them.

It isn't the government of the Palestinians though, any more than say the Bloods are the legitimate government of LA; it's just a larger scale.

[LoganAlpha30X33]

Hamas is the government of those Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinians in the West Bank have a different government, and yeah Gaza is not an independent country, much of the fuel and electricity and such that they need to survive are provided not by Hamas but by Israel. I am not sure that Gaza could support itself without help.

[The Cool Thatguy]

It isn't the government of the Palestinians though, any more than say the Bloods are the legitimate government of LA; it's just a larger scale.

They are of Gaza, at the very least.

[worstblogever]

Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler.

Trump went on to say his criticism is of immigrants from all over the world, including Asia and Africa. No mention of Europe. Hmm, I wonder white, er, why?

Because he's a white nationalist.

And if you support him or the GOP right now, you're supporting white nationalism.

That's me pointing to an open door for some folks to exit the white nationalist party, and hoping they take it.

[CaptainEurope]

Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler.

Trump went on to say his criticism is of immigrants from all over the world, including Asia and Africa. No mention of Europe. Hmm, I wonder white, er, why?

So he's saying "Man, the cultural enrichment is really paying off." but in his own style?