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Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 21:58

Even as its fortieth anniversary approaches, the repercussions of the 1984-85 miners’ strike continue to reverberate. For almost a year, 180,000 miners — alongside their families and allies drawn from a plethora of other social movements — fought valiantly in defence of their pits and jobs, and in defiance of the Thatcher government. Their defeat […]

Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 20:39
Modularity is the mark of a type of independence from context. The same functional relationship between variables will hold in a given component of the contributing mechanisms whether or not there is a change in a different component. The total effect may change when different components contribute, but the operation of the modular mechanism will […]
Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 13:27
The – Australian Election Study (AES) – is the “leading study of political attitudes and behaviour in Australia” and has been running for 35 years. It provides a great time series for investigating electoral trends. The most recent analysis covers the period of the most recent federal election (May 2022). The data shows that Labor…
Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 12:00
And none too soon The Army will remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington this week and the wingnuts are having a hissy fit, as usual: A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place. It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial, and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill. The memorial “commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.) claimed.
Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 10:30
This one is from Hussein Ibish in The Atlantic who notes that we are seeing a ton of polls that show Biden in deep trouble and that everyone is on tender hooks, praying that things turn around and quickly. His analysis, however, asserts that Trump is going to lose, full stop. As he says, “Democrats, and any other sensible voters who oppose Trump, need to forcefully remind the American people about how disastrous he was as president and inform them of how much worse a second term would be. Thankfully, that is not a hard case to make.” He points out that Trump has many advantages, starting with his cult (my word not his.) And the tribal nature of politics dictates that most Republicans will vote Republicans no matter what. And then there’s the right wing propaganda machine, particularly Fox News which will help his press his case that he’s a victim of persecution by the “deep state.” The electoral college advantage is obvious and Biden is old and has left some segments of the Democratic coalition dissatisfied so there’s that. However: Trump’s flaws look far worse today than they did eight years ago.
Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 09:31

Consider two phenomena that might seem unrelated. This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing a marked increase in overdose fatalities nationally. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN that she had expected overdose deaths to decline after a sharp spike during the pandemic. Instead, such fatalities have only gone up. Meanwhile, by the end of November, Donald Trump was riding high with nearly 60% support in Republican primary polling. In the past 43 years, according to the Washington Post, no candidate has had such a commanding lead and failed to win his party’s nomination. On the face of it, his astonishing poll numbers would appear to have nothing whatsoever... Read more

Source: Today’s Most Dangerous Drug appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 09:07

Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021. The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University […]

The post Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis appeared first on The Grayzone.

Created
Mon, 18/12/2023 - 07:30
The day Tom Sullivan joined Hullabaloo Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Happy Hollandaise this year. As always, I’m incredibly grateful for your support. I’m also incredibly grateful for Tom Sullivan, the man who writes two elegant and important posts here each morning, 7 days a week without fail. While I’m still sleeping out here on the west coast, Tom has already started the day with fresh insights, good humor and principled, meaningful analysis of our chaotic political scene. And then he goes out and works on organizing North Carolina into the blue state it’s meant to be. I’d met Tom and his lovely wife at Netroots Nation years ago and we hit it off right away. But when I came across a great post on his old blog Scrutiny Hooligans I realized that I really needed him over here. I asked him to fill in for me for a few days and the rest is history. I cannot thank him enough. There is never a day that I’m, not reminded how lucky I am that he said yes that day. As you no doubt realize, this is not exactly a big money enterprise. When I moved over to WordPress a couple of years ago I made the decision not to run ads anymore.