Interesting Links for 24-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Would Labour's plan to put water bosses in the dock over sewage dumps work?

(tags:environment water uk labour )

2. 'Our System Needs to Be Broken, and He Is the Man to Do It' - an interview with a Trump supporter

(tags:politics usa doom )

3. More details emerge on the Chinese Hugos fiasco

(tags:hugo awards fandom china corruption )

Comments

[cmcmck]

A lot of evangelicals will vote for him because they think he is the sign of the end times and the way he carries on they could well be right!

[channelpenguin]

sigh. you know I DO understand the seductiveness of "end times" thinking (is that Eschatology?). It is a bit like "live fast, die young" - you don't need any more long-term worries or thinking or effort. Fuck your pension, looking after your health, fuck the environment... Just party on!!!! (well, in my version. I guess the religious still need to behave so they make the entrance criteria for which ever afterlife party they have signed up for!).

2.

[channelpenguin]

That is just batshit.

Democracy - the least-worst system* But still shit. Humans depress me. I expect I am not hugely better than the average voter at understanding many things (or being bothered to). I *think* my logical faculties are a tad better, but that's decades of a job in which it is crucial. And I think I am probably still not as good as I would like (and like everyone to be, when it is called for!)

*(well, when combined with a background assumption of egalitarianism, else its legitamised mob rule...)

Re: 2.

[dreamaastrid]

I'm convinced that people voting for Trump are bat shit insane. So called 'Christians' people are voting for a disgraceful human being who is morally bankrupt. He's been found guilty of sexually assault, cheated on multiple wives, and has 91 felony counts pending and tried to overthrow our democracy. So hoping enough of his base has died off over the last 8 years (Republican counties had far more deaths from COVID because they refused to mask or get vaccinated) that he doesn't get re-elected.

- Trump is nothing but a narcissist; a sociopath; a vile, divisive, hate mongering, spiteful, petty, vindictive, bully; and a pathologically lying Con Man.

- He was sued for racial discrimination for refusing to let blacks rent apartments in the buildings he owned in NYC

- He would routinely go backstage at the Miss Teen USA Pageant to creep on the girls as young as 15 in various stages of undress. Many girls testified to this, & he even bragged about it on The Howard Stern Show

- He created a fraudulent "Trump University" that scammed thousands of people. He settled a lawsuit with former students for $25 million

- He was fined $10 million when it was found his Taj Mahal property had committed "significant & long-standing Anti-Money Laundering violations"

- He was fined $2 million by the State of NY for illegal activity during the 2016 election

- He's made it his business practice through the years to scam contractors doing work on his construction projects and withhold payments

- He set up a charitable fund for kids with cancer and stole all the money from it

- He took out full page ads in the newspaper calling for the Death Penalty for the Central Park 5, then never apologized when they were all exonerated for the crime

- He tried to ruin a 92 year old woman’s life after she refused to sell her house to accommodate Trump building one of his golf courses

- He lied about the value of his business and even his own NYC penthouse apartment, even overstating the size of it to be 30,000 sq feet, when it is actually less than half that at only 11,000 sq feet.

- He took $1.9 million out of campaign donations prior to the 2020 election and shifted it to his own personal account

- He mocked a disabled reporter

- He's openly bragged about using his celebrity to sexually take advantage of women and "grab them by the p*ssy"

- He referred to third world countries as "shit holes" and accused Mexicans of being "rapists"

- Before he was President, Trump criticized Obama for the amount of time he was playing golf, stating that "If I'm ever President I'll be too busy working to have time for golf". And then once he became President, he proceeded to spend more than 20% of his days in office on a golf course.

- He diverted military funding to build his wall that never got finished & which Mexico didn't pay for

- He increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion

- He had a composite .95% GDP for his term, one of the worst in history. Economic growth also never even reached 3% at any point in his term, despite his campaign promise to grow the economy by 4% annually

- He had 3 of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history

- He mismanaged the pandemic response badly, refused to wear a mask because it messed up his makeup, and health experts believe more than 250,000 Americans died unnecessarily because of his behavior and his handling of the pandemic

- He charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties

- He hired his grossly unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House

- He continually denied science and climate change, and even nominated a climate change skeptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental issues

- He attempted to get the US Justice Dept to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a woman who accused him of sexual assault

- He has continually refused to denounce QANON & even retweeted QANON propaganda over 250 times

- He tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida

- He fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his Muslim travel ban

- He repeatedly falsely claimed that mail-in voting is inherently fraudulent, despite the fact that we've had mail-in voting since the Civil War and there's never been widespread voter fraud that affected the outcome of any election

- He fired the head of election cyber security after he told Trump that the 2020 election was secure

- He grifted his supporters for over $250 million after the election under the guise the money would be going to support his election fraud case. That's not where the money went. He didn’t spend one dime of that money on a single election audit or other effort to overturn the election

- He summoned PA state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election

- He made a seditious phone call To GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he attempted to strong arm him like a mob boss into “finding him the votes” he needed to change the GA State election result in his favor. He then threatened him with potential criminal consequences if he would not comply - He tried to weaponize his own Justice Dept, to lie and “Just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest up to me…”, despite the fact he’d been told repeatedly that every single one of his election fraud claims was pure bullshit

- His continued lies, hate speech, and propaganda about the election in the weeks afterwards literally fomented an angry mob of Trump supporters who felt compelled to riot at the Capitol on 1/6 to "stop the steal" and disrupt the certification of a dutifully elected President.

- He's endorsed by white supremacist, Nazi-loving, Qanon-believing, domestic terrorists.

- the worst part about the January 6 riot? Trump watched the events unfolding at the Capitol on TV with absolute glee from the dining room while shoving Big Macs in his face and doing absolutely NOTHING. It wasn't until 187 minutes later (that's 3 hours and 7 minutes, in case you're mathematically challenged) that he was literally forced to act.

- Trump supporters are failing to realize that they've all been brainwashed by the biggest Con Man in American history to believe that Trump is someone that he absolutely is not

- Donald Trump is an opportunist, a Con Man who's been playing the system for his personal benefit, grifting the system for financial gain

- He believes windmills cause cancer

- Thought we had airplanes during the Revolutionary War (the first US airport wouldn’t open for another 135 years)

- Stated that "we'd have less Covid cases if we tested less"

- Questioned whether injecting disinfectant might be a viable Covid cure

- Trump claimed that if Biden is re-elected, he’ll lead us into World War 2, which we already fought and won more than 70 years ago

- Trump claimed that he beat Obama in the 2016 election…. 😂🤣😆….

- He alienated our allies and coddled enemies

- He's hateful, spiteful, vindictive and uses people thoughtlessly

- Trump lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes

- Americans voted out Donald Trump in the last election due to his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, his economic policies, his personal behavior, and his record on other issues

[bens_dad]

1. I accuse the sub-editor responsible for that headline of a Tory bias.
I read the headline and assume that the piece will tell me that threatening to jail water bosses won't make our water cleaner.
The article is far more reasonable than that.

I'm impressed if the Tories really managed to up the max civil penalty from £million/4 to £billion/4.

What is the rule about questioning headlines always being answered in the negative ?

[andrewducker]

There's a jokey rule about it. But it's not true. Headlines with questions in them are more likely to be true than false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#Studies

[cellio]

Does anything prevent Worldcon 2024 from holding The Hugos That SHould Have Been 2023 alongside the 2024 ones? That doesn't fix the Chengdu shenanigans, but for authors fans feel were robbed, can something be done?

[andrewducker]

They can decide to do so, but without a whole bunch of rule changing (which can only happen at a Worldcon, and must be ratified at a future one if I understand correctly) they won't be official.