Reading

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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 04:00
Look at this nonsense: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair. “I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.” Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 03:00

We at HBO recognize that our audience’s values have evolved. Similar to the recent edits of Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl, we will be revising our older shows with dated attitudes and values that do not reflect the current state of the world. This network has a responsibility to protect our viewers from the narrow-minded opinions of the past, which is why our first sensitivity reading will be of a generation-defining classic from a bygone era, Entourage.

Entourage was very much a product of its time, and 2011 was an entirely different chapter in this nation’s history. We have since undergone vast shifts in our views on women, race, and Ed Hardy. We don’t want modern audiences to have to confront this potentially offensive content or wonder how this show, an unironic love letter to douchebags, was ever considered worthy of being broadcast on HBO.

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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 03:00
Following up on Tom’s post below: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a horrifying bill Wednesday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care. The new law will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures” and qualifies this care as a form of “physical harm.” Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:52

The Grayzone has obtained video recordings of well-connected figures within Moldova’s political and business community openly testifying to rank corruption within the country’s government and economy, while outlining schemes to enrich Western investors for an appropriate fee. The invasion of Ukraine placed the tiny country of Moldova on the immediate periphery of a conflict with global significance. Bordering Ukraine, counting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians as citizens, and home to the breakaway region of Transnistria, Moldova’s doggedly pro-Western government […]

The post Leaked recordings expose shocking state corruption in ‘US governed’ Moldova appeared first on The Grayzone.

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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:30
Of brown shirts and Charles Bronsons Charlie Sykes writes at The Bulwark, “A few months ago, in a particularly dark mood, I wrote a column suggesting that cruelty was no longer the point in MAGA World…. Trump has already pivoted to brutality, and there is nothing subtle about it.” “As it turns out, I may have understated the case,” Sykes quips: They are not alone, you are not surprised to know. Stephen Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” weighed in on the killing of homeless Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, declaring, “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely, by the way, not of their own volition, you’ve put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.” In essence: When in doubt, take them out. Trump, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis have all rushed to celebrate Daniel Perry, the man charged with killing Jordan Neely. But DeSantis raised the ante, by calling him a “Good Samaritan,” and raising money for his defense.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Derek Parfit’s approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral theory-building. For it places intolerable pressure on what might seem like an uncontroversial moral principle: that if something is wrong, it must harm some particular person or group of persons.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage of the mass protesters, Black political rights still depended on federal enforcement. And the more the national government intervened, the more whites associated it with a loss of freedom.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
History was expunged from the national school curriculum more than a decade ago because, it was claimed, there was no interest in it. Evidently, the political establishment continues to fear that knowledge of their history might further empower young people, who are more interested in good governance than in the ethnic politics of elderly men reluctant to concede power.
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Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
Lucian Freud’s etched portraits look at first like mangled bits of realism but are in fact stealthy works of cubism: many selves, many facets, many moments in one. They display two kinds of time: the time it took to make the work, and the person the portrait anticipates as a result of that long observation. 
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 00:00
The British and American right differ in the weight they place on ideological purity. With a limited cast of characters – and an even smaller pool of funders – British conservatives can ill afford to divide their world into neoliberals and traditionalists. At NatCon London, the tirades about woke universities and pronouns often obscured political differences, but they can’t conceal them completely.