Congratulations, the US Supreme Court, for making a sensible decision based on Constitutional precedent that horrendous rightwing idiots will pretend is overreach until long after we're all dead. To celebrate, here is a nostalgic musing on religion in education. There was a strange Welsh Baptist chemistry teacher at my high school who ran a renegade version … Continue reading Today we’re all gay Americans
Category: Bit of politics
One of the most interesting questions after the 2015 UK General Election is, how could all of the electoral polling possibly have gone so incredibly wrong? Labour and the Conservatives were predicted to be neck-and-neck and both short of forming a government on their own, with Labour losing about 50 seats in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalist … Continue reading There was no late swing, and there were no shy Tories
The UK's New Economics Foundation, who style themselves as nef because that's the sort of thing that was cool in 2003, are one of the worst think-tanks going [1]. With a couple of weeks to go before the 2015 General Election, they have jumped on the election news bandwagon. Their effort is well up to their normal … Continue reading FPTP doesn’t mean your vote is wasted – just ask a Scot
As I noted last week, celebrated male feminist Sam de Brito wrote an extremely embarrassing article in 2005 praising the pick-up artist seminars organised by RSD, the company that now employs borderline-rapist Julien Blanc. After online political magazine Crikey picked up my story, frog-in-a-sock de Brito issued a petulant denial, both in the comments to … Continue reading Some men never learn
There's an absolute stinker of an article in today's New York Times, emotively talking up an terrible lawsuit. When stripped of irrelevant interviews with soldiers' widows and scary quotes from showboating neoconservative lawyers, here's the actual story. The US didn't take the news very well when its puppet state in Iran had a revolution in … Continue reading Time to sue Henry Ford for complicity in car bombings
This Sydney Sunday Telegraph piece from a few years back has disappeared down the News Corp memory hole, oddly enough. Before you give it a read, here's a bit of context on the protagonists. RSD is the pick-up artist company that later hired despicable pro-rape arsehole Julien Blanc, of #takedownjulienblanc fame [1]. Sam De Brito … Continue reading Memory hole? Fixed that for ya
Boston Review editor Simon Waxman wrote a piece this June in the Washington Post, saying that the US Army's decision to name its weaponry after Native American tribes - like the Apache helicopter above - is worse than the Washington Redskins' decision to keep its gross racial slur name. Waxman is white and not of Native … Continue reading No, white people, we don’t get to decide what’s racist
US-based banana producer and importer Chiquita, the world's largest banana company, is almost certain to be bought by a Brazilian consortium, after the collapse of its attempted tax-dodge reverse takeover of Irish-based banana importer Fyffes. In some ways, this is an entirely normal business story. It features the collapse of the easy, painless [1] tax … Continue reading The death of the banana republic
There were two by-elections this Thursday for UK parliament constituencies, both in England: Clacton-on-Sea, in Essex, and Heywood & Middleton, in Greater Manchester. The Clacton one isn't particularly interesting: a vaguely crazy Tory MP decided to defect to UKIP, as MPs are allowed to do in a Westminster system, and decided to waste everyone's time … Continue reading The Heywood & Middleton result shows Ed Miliband will be the next PM
The picture is a Banksy mural. It was painted on 30 September 2014, and erased by the end of 1 October 2014. The story was reported by UK media on 2 October 2014 as being "erased after 'racist' complaint", with the implication being that - despite its clear antiracist message - minority groups were offended … Continue reading Not a case of political correctness gorn mad