theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of [m/neoliberal](http://kbin.social/m/neolib

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2 yr. ago

In general I get that and my instinct was similarly that it was strange not to use the word. I'd use Taoiseach for Varadkar in a way I wouldn't use the native language word for other world leaders, because I think of Ireland as a primarily English-speaking country and that's the word they still use whilst otherwise speaking in English.

But then again, I can also see that British readers like you and I who follow current affairs are going to be a lot more familiar with the term Taoiseach (or, in Calamity Truss's case, the 'Tea Sock') given it's the country next door and so hugely intertwined with British politics. I could name every Taoiseach in the last quarter century just by virtue of how much those individuals have featured in UK news - through the peace process, the financial crisis and then Brexit. I couldn't do that for the leaders of any other foreign country of Ireland's size. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume the average US or other reader might not not know what a Taoiseach is.

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that's a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best...

I mean I suppose there are a few ways you could read this.

One is that the NYT article was inaccurate - it wouldn't be the first time that fake news around this conflict has travelled halfway around the world before the truth has had its breakfast.

But another interpretation is that tight-knit communities don't want the full horror of the final moments of these girls and women to be so publicly exposed to the world. The article points out that the NYT article effectively identified the individuals and that can't have been a helpful experience for their surviving families and friends.

There is very little to read into this. Rochdale is an unusual constituency, Galloway is an unusually high profile candidate, there was no official Labour or Green candidate. Still, he failed to even win 40% of the vote yesterday.

This sort of thing is his speciality. He's personally won three seats from Labour over the last few decades but never in circumstances that can be repeated by other candidates in other seats. This will be no different.

Also he's a deeply unpleasant individual. It's frustrating that the false charge of antisemitism gets thrown round like confetti by supporters of the Netanyahu regime, because when an actual bonafide antisemite like Galloway comes along people don't realise that this time the shoe does fit. His previous support for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party is total horseshoe theory stuff.

Totally. In my alternative scenario where she was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl called Shania, the Daily Express would have turned her into a Madeleine McCann-like figure and campaigned every day on their front pages to 'bring our girl home'.

A child who was groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists is now being punished for it. Also this is a punishment that is only being applied to her because she has Bangladeshi ancestors so the government argues she is hypothetically eligible for a Bangladeshi passport (which the government of Bangladesh has no intention of giving her), and so the Tories can pretend they're not illegally rendering her stateless.

This is literally a punishment that, by the Tories' own formulation of their rule, would not be applied if the sex trafficking victim was a white girl called Shania with English parents instead of a brown girl called Shamima.

We're supposed to be a country where people are treated equally before the law. But the Tories are now claiming that they and any future government has the right to render any Briton with some hypothetical right to a foreign passport (for example, most second generation immigrants and every single Jewish Briton) stateless at the whim of the home secretary.

I'm all for appropriately punishing people for the crimes they commit. But we usually don't deprive solo-nationality citizens of their citizenship (leaving them stateless) for the crimes she is accused of - this is a punishment that is only being applied to UK (including UK-only) nationals who have recent foreign ancestors (i.e. so who could hypothetically - but often not in practice - be eligible for another country's citizenship - in her case, Bangladesh). We also don't usually apply extreme punishments like this to people for crimes committed as children, and we don't usually punish children who were groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists as if they were the perpetrators.

The reality is that if Shamima Begum was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl whose parents and grandparents were all from Surrey, the media would have described her as a victim of sex trafficking; and the law that permits this punishment to be applied to her could not even have been used.

The legal system should not treat UK citizens differently according to whether or not the Tories think they look a bit foreign.

It's more than just a product of it - it's the main factor.

Over the last half century or so, the UK has experienced around 200 civilian deaths from Islamic terrorism and around 2,000 civilian deaths from Irish terrorism. Which community do you think the far-right in the UK tend to target?

Muslim immigrants will have de facto faced as much (if not far more) hostility and prejudice before any of those events.

What changed is that by the late 20th century, it had become politically unacceptable for right-wing parties to be perceived to be preying on overt racism towards their countries' brown-skinned citizens. But the War on Terror at the start of the 21st century created a new organising framework for nativists, whereby they could incite hatred against exactly the same brown-skinned people as before, but claim they were targeting them for their religion and not their skin colour. At the heart of it is still the same prejudice towards those who are different, it's just that the aspect of difference they choose to focus on today is more politically acceptable than the one they used to focus on.

From the perspective of a brown-skinned Muslim immigrant, the ideological hoops the far-right jump through are likely irrelevant. These people were targeted by nativists before, and they get targeted by nativists now.

I mean, bigotry and unenforceability aside, it's also pretty unambiguously illegal.

Italy is a signatory to the ECHR which creates an explicit right to privacy (Article 8) and freedom of religion (Article 9).

The Italian constitution itself also specifies a right to religious equality before the law (Article 8).

I was similarly pretty confused here that it was referring to the little seaside town in Yorkshire, which I assume all these other Scarboroughs (that I too had never heard of) are named after.

Ahh, that makes sense!

I'm unsurprised that a religious school is failing to teach science properly, but which bits of geography are they objecting to?

Perhaps today is a good day for my voice to break!

Worf's Klingon prosthetics literally changed between season 1 and seasons 2-7 of TNG. This obviously raises serious continuity issues about whether seasons 2-7 of TNG are even canon...

https://screenrant.com/star-trek-worf-tng-klingon-makeup-change-reason/

Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim head of state in western Europe in 2023 when he was appointed First Minister of Scotland.

This is a really specific point, but the sub-heading irks me in several ways.

First, how do so many people not know the difference between a head of state and a head of government? Scotland's head of state is Charles III.

Second, by what definition is Yousaf the first Muslim head of government in western Europe? I assume they must at least mean 'in western Europe in the modern era', since various parts of Iberia obviously had Muslim rulers for over seven centuries in the Middle Ages.

Third, Scotland isn't an independent state, and the head of government of the United Kingdom is Rishi Sunak. So if they're counting Humza Yousaf, that means they're counting leaders at sub-national levels of government (such as devolved government in the UK, Länder in Germany, etc). But if they're counting devolved government, why does Humza Yousaf (first minister of Scotland, population 5.4 million, since 2023) count but Sadiq Khan (mayor of London, population 8.8 million, since 2016) apparently doesn't?

Anyway it was two right-wingers in the second round so

A centrist, europhile, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism, former patron of Helsinki's Pride event, vs the literal Green League candidate.

Michael Gove says a lot of things.

Cheap food imports? During a cost-of-living crisis? Blasphemy! Bring back the Corn Laws!

[Mogg] declared the death of "Davos man" - members of the global and political elite who descend on a Swiss ski resort every year for a global economic forum.

Ah, yes the famously left-wing extremists of ... the World Economic Forum.