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Post by Jaga on Jul 24, 2019 7:18:16 GMT -7
Kai, yes, the battle for the soul of America. I noticed that the majority of Republicans are silent now. We will see. People who voted for Trump have a hard time to admit they made a mistake or Ytump is a racist. There is always a circular argument. If I am not a racist I could not vote for the racists etc etc This would seem to be more accurately a battle for the Soul of America rather than just for that of the Republican Party. We are currently defining our values for the future. Kai
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Post by Jaga on Jul 24, 2019 7:19:26 GMT -7
Pieter, did you see that Trump called these women of color "very racist" and "not that smart".
What do you think about the new prime minister in Britain?
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 7:48:41 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 7:51:11 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 7:53:57 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 7:55:24 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 8:09:27 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 8:40:27 GMT -7
Jaga,
I did not see that Trump called these women of color "very racist" and "not that smart". But if he did, what is the proof. Did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib made racist remarks? If they did there will be proof (images, audio recording or witnesses) and they will be confronted with these racist statements if they made them. I doubt it but I don't know. I have followed Trump for four years now and often see that he screams and states something, backs off and then repeats his accusations in a different manner.
I have to say that I have to agree with his statement on Nancy Pelosi though.
What do I think about the new prime minister in Britain?
Johnson is a controversial figure in British politics and journalism.
In 1987 he was fired as journalist by The Times for fabricating a quotation. As the Conservative candidate for Clwyd South in the House of Commons in 1997 his bumbling demeanour and occasionally irreverent remarks made him a perennial favourite on British talk shows. Johnson’s political rise was threatened on a number of occasions. He was forced to apologize to the city of Liverpool after the publication of an insensitive editorial in The Spectator, and in 2004 he was dismissed from his position as shadow arts minister after rumours surfaced of an affair between Johnson and a journalist. Johnson entered into the London mayoral election in July 2007, challenging Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone. During the tightly contested election, he overcame perceptions that he was a gaffe-prone and insubstantial politician by focusing on issues of crime and transportation.
Johnson was mayor of London. Johnson returned to Parliament in 2015, winning the west London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in an election that saw the Conservative Party capture its first clear majority since the 1990s. He retained his post as mayor of London, and the victory fueled speculation that he would eventually challenge Prime Minister David Cameron for leadership of the Conservative Party.
Some critics, however, charged that Johnson’s personal political ambitions led him to be less interested and less involved in his job as mayor than he was in self-promotion. Even before leaving the office of mayor—having chosen not to run for reelection in 2016—Johnson became the leading spokesman for the “Leave” campaign in the run-up to the June 23, 2016, national referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union. In that capacity, he faced off with Cameron, who was the country’s most prominent proponent of Britain remaining in the EU, and came under criticism for equating the EU’s efforts to unify Europe with those undertaken by Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler.
In May 2018 Johnson was the target of a prank—also thought to have been perpetrated by Russia—when a recording was made of a telephone conversation between him and a pair of individuals, one of whom fooled Johnson by pretending to be the new prime minister of Armenia.
Johnson stated about Brexit: "It is more than two years since the British people voted to leave the European Union on an unambiguous and categorical promise that if they did so they would be taking back control of their democracy."
"They were told that they would be able to manage their own immigration policy, repatriate the sums of UK cash currently spent by the EU, and, above all, that they would be able to pass laws independently and in the interests of the people of this country.…"
"That dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt."
Johnson is a controversial figure in British politics and journalism.
In The Economist's 2018 end-of-the-year awards for the worst in British politics, Johnson received the highest award (the "politician who has done most to let down his party and country"). The Economist described Johnson as one of the architects of the Brexit "catastrophe",
"In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years."
I see him as half a clown/joker and half a serious politician.
Cheers, Pieter
Sources: www.britannica.com/biography/Boris-Johnson / The Daily Telegraph / en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 8:49:59 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 8:51:15 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 8:56:03 GMT -7
This is a good BBC report about Boris Johnson, his bio and his character and personality
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 9:33:24 GMT -7
Jaga,
President Donald Trump wants to send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to their countries of origin. The four women are member of the Squad, an informal political grouping of four members elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections with support of the Justice Democrats.
Justice Democrats is an American progressive political action committee founded on January 23, 2017, by Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, and former leadership from the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Kulinski and Uygur are no longer affiliated with the group, but remain active supporters. Alexandra Rojas became executive director of the organization in May 2018. The organization formed as a result of the 2016 United States presidential election and has a stated goal of reforming the Democratic Party by running "a unified campaign to replace every corporate-backed member of Congress" and rebuilding the Democratic Party from "scratch" starting in the 2018 congressional midterm elections.
In the 2018 elections, 26 of the 79 candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats won their respective primary elections. Seven of these candidates won in the general election: Raúl Grijalva, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal.Who was born where?Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, New York City, on October 13, 1989, to Blanca Ocasio-Cortez (née Cortez) and Sergio Ocasio in a Catholic family. She has a younger brother, Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez. Her father was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family and became an architect; her mother was born in Puerto Rico.Ayanna Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but raised in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of mother Sandra Pressley (née Echols), who worked multiple jobs to support the family and also worked as a community organizer for the Chicago Urban League advocating for tenant's rights, and father Martin Terrell, who struggled with addiction and was incarcerated throughout Pressley's childhood, but eventually earned multiple degrees and taught at the college level. The marriage ended in divorce.The eldest of 14 children, Rashida Tlaib (née Harbi) was born on July 24, 1976, to working-class Palestinian immigrants in Detroit. Her mother was born in Beit Ur El Foka, near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Her father was born in Beit Hanina, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. He moved first to Nicaragua, then to Detroit. He worked on an assembly line in a Ford Motor Company plant. As the eldest, Tlaib played a role in raising her siblings while her parents worked, but the family had to rely on welfare for support.Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (born October 4, 1982) was born in Mogadishu on October 4, 1982, and spent her early years in Baidoa, Somalia. She was the youngest of seven siblings, including Sahra Noor. Her father Nur Omar Mohamed, an ethnic Somali, worked as a teacher trainer. Her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, a Benadiri (a community of partial Yemeni descent), died when Ilhan was two. She was raised by her father and grandfather thereafter. Her grandfather Abukar was the director of Somalia's National Marine Transport and some of Omar's uncles and aunts also worked as civil servants and educators. She and her family fled Somalia to escape the war and spent four years in a Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya, near the Somali border.After first arriving in New York in 1992, Omar's family finally secured asylum in the U.S. in 1995 and lived for a time in Arlington, Virginia, before moving to and settling in Minneapolis, where her father worked first as a taxi driver and later for the post office. Her father and grandfather emphasized the importance of democracy during her upbringing, and at age 14 she accompanied her grandfather to caucus meetings, serving as his interpreter. She has spoken about school bullying she endured during her time in Virginia, stimulated by her distinctive Somali appearance and wearing of the hijab. She recalls gum being pressed into her hijab, being pushed down stairs, and physical taunts while she was changing for gym class. Omar remembers her father's reaction to these incidents: "They are doing something to you because they feel threatened in some way by your existence." Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old.
Omar attended Edison High School and volunteered there as a student organizer. She graduated from North Dakota State University with a bachelor's degree, majoring in political science and international studies in 2011. Omar was a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Jul 24, 2019 10:35:22 GMT -7
In the span of a few days, two very different events unfolded that will, together, shape U.S. politics for the next decade. At a rally in Greenville, N.C., the president of the United States, though he later tried to deny it, egged on a crowd to chant “send her back,” echoing not only his own racist tweets from a few days earlier but also the language of American nativists down the decades. From the 19th-century movements that sought to send emancipated slaves back to Africa to the anti-Catholic “Know Nothing” party and the Ku Klux Klan, the notion that only certain kinds of Americans are “real Americans” is one that we have heard many times and know very well.
In the 1890s–1920s era, nativists and labor unions campaigned for immigration restriction following the waves of workers and families from southern and eastern Europe, including Italy, the Balkans, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
An immigration reductionism movement (Opposition to immigration) formed in the 1970s and continues to the present day. Prominent members often press for massive, sometimes total, reductions in immigration levels.
What started ten years ago as a groundswell of conservatives committed to curtailing the reach of the federal government, cutting the deficit and countering the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party has become a movement largely against immigration overhaul. The politicians, intellectual leaders and activists who consider themselves part of the Tea Party have redirected their energy from fiscal austerity and small government to stopping any changes that would legitimize people who are here illegally, either through granting them citizenship or legal status.
Journalist John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker Trump is transforming the GOP into a populist, nativist party:
Trump has been drawing on a base of alienated white working-class and middle-class voters, seeking to remake the G.O.P. into a more populist, nativist, avowedly protectionist, and semi-isolationist party that is skeptical of immigration, free trade, and military interventionism.
Donald Brand, a professor of political science, argues:
Donald Trump’s nativism is a fundamental corruption of the founding principles of the Republican Party. Nativists champion the purported interests of American citizens over those of immigrants, justifying their hostility to immigrants by the use of derogatory stereotypes: Mexicans are rapists; Muslims are terrorists.
“Send her back” also chimes beautifully with the modern language of the European far right, especially the Identitarians, a conspiracy network that believes in the existence of a secret plot, organized by Jews, to replace white Europeans with brown ones. The group, which assiduously seeks followers in the United States, calls repeatedly for “remigration” — in other words, “send them back” — and promotes the idea online whenever it can. Some of Trump’s followers surely recognize those ideas even if they don’t know where they come from. Already those ideas appeal to an extremist fringe: Both the synagogue shooters in the United States and the mosque shooter in New Zealand were inspired by them.
Many miles from Greenville, a group of intellectuals met in a D.C. ballroom. These were “national conservatives,” thinkers and writers trying, in the wake of the president’s destruction of American conservatism as we know it, to build something new in its place. This is not an easy task. If William F. Buckley and National Review laid the groundwork for Reaganism, the situation is now reversed: Trump’s 2½ years in office have undermined whatever remains of President Ronald Reagan’s impossibly sunny vision, and intellectuals are racing to keep up.
The question is whether it is possible — in the atmosphere created in the United States by Trump and in Europe by the Italian, Austrian and Hungarian far right, among others — for intelligent people to build on the word “nationalism,” as opposed to “patriotism,” without becoming, in practice, the Heideggers to his Hitler, or the Webbs to his Stalin: philosophers working, whether they acknowledge it or not, to justify the instinctive racism and vulgarity seen in Greenville and thus help make a corrupt president palatable to the wider public. This is not a new problem. As far back as 1927, in “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” French essayist Julien Benda denounced the “scholars, philosophers and ‘ministers’ of the divine” who “share in the chorus of hatreds and political factions” on both the right and left, and in retrospect he was correct.
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