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imustbenuts · 18 days

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im free from yakuza kiwami 2. fuck the writing in this one. this was a complete mess of pulling from the most popular generic east asian drama tropes at the time of 2006 and having it be handled by a super inexperienced writer at the helm.

i went from having no expectations, got somewhat surprised, only to end up downing alcohol and laughing hysterically before the credits rolled. so that should set the mood for how i feel about this one. thought vomit under the cut, a lot of info dump about culture incoming

yakuza kiwami 2 is pure heterosexual east asian romance bullshit.

im gonna just. describe as best as i can what i know and remember from the general media coming out from the 90s to the 2010s in around this part of the world before i just start explaining why i think this story is a mess.

so. 2 parts i swear is responsible for this rubbish.

1) East Asian Beauty Standard

the general consensus for a beautiful feminine woman AT THE TIME in this sphere is the following

be willowy thin (fat = lazy and ugly)

have black hair that ISNT short (dyed = too much individuality, too much WESTERN INDIVIDUALISM, gasp how dare!)

fair skinned (bc dark = she works in the fields and is from a lower class)

young. if you heard of the term "Christmas Cake" in japan context, yeah. (ie women over age of 25 are undesirable)

be educated and refined, bc that indicates class and femininity (failing this means shes vulgar and gasp like a barbarian)

be submissive to her male peers in the sense that her authority cannot override his at least in public (for the sake of his face)

dresses feminine and not like a man (trousers and jeans are man-ish. traditional clothing, skirts and dresses are preferred. the further back the stronger this sentiment is.)

incidentally, theres a lot of classism tied to this EABS due to sinocentric culture influences. it has to do with the chinese court system and how korea and japan copied it and a lot of the culture wholesale but. anyway. thats like over 1000 years of history in there thats not really worth detouring to rn.

and also, the worth of a man is sometimes (not always) upheld by how classy and feminine this wife of his is. as of 2024 though, this line of thought is still around in the more conservative pockets. also, the education might not matter as much these days as how deep her and her parents' pockets and wealth are.

moving on.

2) media tropes

so. off the top of my head.

if you wanted a popular romance drama in this time period, the popular offerings no matter where you looked tended to offer the same flavors of tropes.

the woman always has dark hair, is fair skinned, thin and younger than her male love interest. ive never seen this broken or subverted in my time absorbing via osmosis the dramas playing on local tv growing up in the early 2000s.

everything else about her can be subverted though. sometimes she can wear fancy pants or have short hair to indicate her strong individualism. BUT, her personality no matter how strong it begins, no matter how her intro begins will 99% of the time encounter an effect where catching feelings turns her into a meek loyal woman to her love interest.

bc she cant override his authority in this culture context.

at worst, she becomes highly irrational and even hysterical in the dramas when bad things happen. this includes things like love triangle, or a fallout of family business, drama, plot or whatever. she would cry and sometimes even die.

see: sawamura yumi. sayama kaoru.

meanwhile, the male love interest can be anything. ive seen middle aged guys to young good looking upcoming actors playing the lead, with looks varying from haggardly okay to young and handsome. it. really depends on the genre.

depending on what specific country it came from, the drama would have the male either grow, become manlier (by learning honor ig), become stupid in the name of love, but he rarely if ever actually dies. the woman effectively becomes yoshi for mario to lauch off on when they're crossing a chasm

the romance is forced. a lot of the BIG LOVE SPARK ie kissing happens in tense moments bc it builds drama, but in reality comes too fucking close to sexual assault (some of the old jackie chan movies does this iirc for slapstick even)

see: sayama getting kissed right after handling her biological father's ashes less than 24 hours ago and admitting to kiryu that shes scared. this scene right fucking here.

bc in general, the scriptwriters for popular dramas tended to be guys themselves and tended to write more human dudes. and the women in the stories are reflective of the ideal societal expectation at the time: being a Refined Housewife.

so her character development is often headed in the direction of marriage and being a stay at home mom.

if it sounds a little like tradwife bullshit, it is.

Refined Housewife

(i have massive negative thoughts about this which i KNOW for a fact is a thing bc a lot of these societal culture femininity was impressed on me as a kid in a world where it was already getting increasingly impossible to have 1 spouse be a SAHP. and also i hated the whole thing about giving face to the patriarch of the house when i personally saw so much ego dick measuring from my uncles. anyway understand that this is both a bias an a lived experience, so proceed with that in mind)

there is a problem with the Refined Housewife expectation: education.

in general, education has been a good metric to judge how classy or smart one is in asia's largely on-the-surface meritocracy based culture. people will look at each other's school first and then judge them from there, and pretty hard too.

so everyone regardless of gender will be expected to study super hard. and bc having good test scores and going to good schools looks good for the family's face, parents will often pile on tuition to the child to get them a leg up in life.

bc also no good degree from good school means no future.

but then... the woman is expected to be a housewife. 🙃 meaning... the education, her accomplishments, are kinda... tossed away in this context. put a pin in this.

it wont matter how much she studied or accomplished, bc the expectation is that the woman would marry and obey her husband, and give him face/honor that way. the kids will come eventually bc having kids = being filial to ones parents in this context.

also uh. no, having adopted kids is not thought of as being filial. continuing the bloodline is.

and if you've been paying attention, then yes, ive been skirting around the backbone of sayama kaoru's writing foundations this entire time.

Her story has been butchered so clumsily i cant even...

lets just. ugh.

she fits the EABS standard, her tropes are trying to subvert the expectations of a womanly woman in this context, she has IMPRESSIVE education and career achievements. she works in a male dominated field, and is keenly aware of sexism. she is strong, stronger than her male peers, at least we are told.

by 2006s standards, its still considered a fresh take with those alone in japan. sexism there is its own flavor of crap. (if you noticed ive not spoken about LGBTQ+ stuff at all, its bc how ridiculously BINARY the expectation is at that point in time. it still is today but less so)

however, the writing has this sense of trying to copy the popular tropes at the time while not fully understanding and dissecting them, and ends up butchering sayama's character before the romance even properly began.

i mean, for fucks sake even, sayama and kiryu has a whopping 14 year age gap. when im told these are supposed to be believable people living in japan, this is too big for me to just go 'oh ok!'. and remember the Christmas Cake thing? shes 25. (FUCKING--!!!! !!)

the problem here that i see is the writer trying to apply all of those while trying to play the tropes straight. trying to imitate. trying to make a statement but then finding out theres nothing within yourself to stand by what you want to say and backtracking.

we are told:

sayama is strong yet she goes down with 1 slap by random thugs and needing kiryu to come in and body them. because romance ig.

we are told shes a yakuza hunter but she doesnt scare a single one beyond her introductory scene.

she goes from defiant and bossing kiryu around to getting her actions overridden by kiryu and ryuji, both men, towards the end

her subtext is that shes not feminine and therefore conventionally undesirable, but then kiryu tells her shes actually feminine and therefore desired, as if its all that matters.

she becomes so stricken by grief and freaked out that she runs off solo to deal with ryuji in the most out of left pocket planning ive ever fucking seen.

and then yells as she takes out her police baton to take down the big yakuza dude, drawing attention and turning herself into a hostage.

i know the writing will fumble but i didnt expect it to fumble this bad.

for all the good the surface chemistry kiryu and sayama has, its being undermined by a fundamental failure to understand tropes and then using said tropes as a crutch so much that everything here has become a bloody mess.

this failure of over-relying on tropes without understanding them extends to yumi too. sawamura yumi was young and beautiful, and became the Refined Housewife to the Not-Male-MC and ends up regretting it, and gets killed for it.

her defining trait is that she is beautiful in subtext. thats. thats what the tattoo is. in a world where the tattoo makeths the person, thats what she is and all that she is.

dear lord.

ive read up a bit more on sayama and you know what. good that she chooses her career over kiryu. the romance would have caused both of their characters to explode with the trajectory this was heading in. ffs sayama could have had her own game. she has so MUCH potential.

and also GOOD that the writer is forced to think of kiryu in the position of the Stay At Home Parent for haruka and the orphanage down the line!!! subverting the fucking traditional BS expectation! yes!!!!!

all i got was sayama and kiryu making out before the bomb went off in front of my alcohol and salad while they're like 'eh, haruka will forgive us for dying :')'

and i ran out of alcohol.

sexism? maybe. incompetence? definitely.

hhgrhgrhrghrghrgrhgr wow this got long. ugh. guhhhhhh.

#yakuza #ryu ga gotoku #sayama kaoru #kiryu kazuma #yakuza kiwami 2

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starleska · 2 months

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I am definitely here to find out more about your OC Harper if you wanna share 👀👀👀

oh my god yes yes yes thank you so much Jam i would LOVE to gush about Harper Spiel and their bizarre backstory, thank you so much 🙈💖 Doctor Who OCs are so fun to make!

my dear Harper's story begins right after the events of The Giggle! Harper Spiel is a 26-year-old ludologist, or games specialist: a former world champion in several board games who turned their fascination with games into a lucrative career. previously they worked with the British government investigating high-profile gambling rings and other criminal operations which involved gameplay mechanics! 👀

following The Giggle, UNIT wanted to find out all they could about the Toymaker, and so they hired Harper to create a full report on him...against The Doctor's wishes, and without his knowledge. during their research, Harper discovers that the Toymaker is not an isolated incident: he has cropped up in gaming lore and texts throughout history as a godlike entity no one can win against. most people would steer well clear...but Harper takes this as a challenge 🔥 so, they begin a series of experiments with the Toymaker's Toybox. Harper spends weeks trying to engage the Toymaker without opening the box, attempting to coax him into a game, but comes up short. until they have a mad idea! on their birthday, Harper brings a sand timer to the Toybox, and challenges the Toymaker to emerge before the sand runs out. they have no way of knowing if the game is accepted... until a bang!! then, a flash of light...and the vague image of a grin with far too many teeth, beaming through the fog. when Harper awakes, they are no longer in their own timeline. they are in 1984, in an empty lot where the UNIT building hasn't even been constructed yet! 😱 it takes a few days for the Doctor - specifically the Sixth Doctor - to find Harper, and it's because the TARDIS has become absolutely fixated on London in 1984 and he can't work out why. this leads him to Harper, who the Doctor recognises as a temporal anomaly: a living entity displaced in time who should not be able to exist in this reality, but has been rejected by their own. according to the Doctor, Harper's birthday - originally March 22nd, 1998 - is now March 22nd, 1956...which would make them 65 years old according to their original reality!! if not...that means they're minus 40 💀 the Doctor, horrified by this mess, takes Harper into the TARDIS and tries to bring them back to 2024...but the TARDIS nearly implodes! he then tries every workaround he knows, but something about the game Harper opened up with the Toymaker has caused their own timeline to shun them. like it or not, the only safe place for Harper to exist (at least without increasing timey-wimey shenanigans) is within the TARDIS 😉 so!! Harper gets stuck with the Sixth Doctor, to his chagrin and their delight. Harper is familiar with the Doctor, but only his most recent regenerations, and they take delight in playing off his bombastic, arrogant personality. they're always getting stuck into some part of the TARDIS they shouldn't be, or wandering off and nearly causing a category 5 space-time event. they're a magnet for disaster and time distortion, and it drives the Doctor mad! 🙈 but as funny as their relationship is, there is real grief here. the Doctor soon recognises Harper to be somewhat like him: a scientist whose fascination often overrides their emotions, so the process of understanding that they will never see their friends again (as they have no family to speak of) is tough. it doesn't take long for the Doctor to soften towards Harper...after all, Harper is something which the universe itself is trying to reject. who can relate more to that than the Sixth Doctor, whose regeneration was characterised by fear, anger and feeling like an alien in his own body? aaaand that's Harper Spiel!! unwitting companion to the Sixth Doctor and challenger of the Toymaker 🥰 their adventures would be characterised by them attempting to find some way back to Harper's original timeline safely, with Harper insisting they need to find the Toymaker to make it happen...😭

#giggles oh i love making Doctor Who OCs. everyone should do it!!! thanks so much for asking about Harper 🙈#also yes - Harper's birthday (dd/mm) and the time they get yeeted back to (dd/mm/yyyy) is the start of Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor 😉#i needed a ridiculous character to ship with both of my favourites okay and THIS WAS THE COMPROMISE #doctor who oc #harper spiel #the doctor x oc #the toymaker x oc #sixspiel #toyspiel #sixth doctor #6th doctor #the doctor #the toymaker #doctor who #dw #starleskasks #starleskawrites #long post

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mitigatedchaos · 3 months

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I've been mentally categorizing you as a pretty clean example of the 'new right'; editorializing with 'extreme' feels like it's giving more heat than light but w/e. It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

And like, at the end of the day, your overriding issue of concern is to codify racial differences as beyond the scope of policy intervention. Whatever else you want it to be, that project is and always has been a keystone of the right's ideological basis and coalition-building.

When I was a child, in the year 2000, the Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion just to sequence the human genome. Now that costs less than $1,000. Genetic engineering was science fiction.

In 2017, the FDA approved the first commercial gene therapy, Kymriah. It costs $475,000. If monogenic gene therapy costs $500,000 in 2020 and declines in cost by half every 5 years, then by 2035 it costs $62,500, and by 2050 it will cost around $7,800.

I recently posted a criticism of Hitler, and I'll bring up part of it because it's relevant here - Hitler apparently thought the world was going to be consumed by Malthusian total war, and that the only thing to do was to win. However, in many developed countries the fertility rate has been below replacement since around 1973, or for about fifty years as of 2024.

World War 2 started in 1939. Hitler killed millions of people. 1973 was a mere 34 years away.

The BAPism cluster is implicitly based on the biocapital meltdown theory. Its logical conclusion would be a return to pre-industrial mortality rates. In terms of actual science, at least one researcher said that it's a mystery how mutational load hasn't killed us 10 times over already - that amount of uncertainty is not a sound foundation for radical policy.

The Social Justice cluster are based on a theory of social causes, but their social approach doesn't work and the social interventions we do have are relatively weak and tend to fade out. Despite this, they want a system of formal racial benefits and penalties throughout all of society, and prefer to use one particular race as their moral dumping ground for all problems. They're the kind of people that would sabotage hiring for air traffic controllers.

Neither philosophy is based on a realistic assessment of the situation. Both are based on despair over genetic fatalism.

I'll go over 4 possible future cases, the relationship between the Rationalists and what you call the "New Right," and some of what I think will happen to the coalitions in 10-20 years.. (Total post is ~2,600 words.)

We already paid the staggering oppression setup costs for the 2008 world system. It's a sunk cost. Now is not a good time to engage in a radical political program involving much higher oppression, suffering, or material costs on the basis of very limited evidence.

Let's talk about the possibilities. When it comes to the things people complain about, there are basically three possibilities: { mostly_genetic, partly_genetic, barely_genetic } As for the genetics industry, we can treat it as having two possibilities: { improvement, stasis }

Genes and the environment are not actually independent. I work based on a theory of compounding capability. Someone with a higher ability can take better advantage of positive events ("positive shocks," such as a scholarship or inheritance), and has more options to mitigate the downsides of negative events ("negative shocks," such as a fire or illness).

Someone's genes influence the environment which they create around themselves, and the environment influences just what they can accomplish with those genes.

So we can actually collapse the first set of possibilities into just two: { partly_genetic, barely_genetic }. We can basically break the situation down into four cases.

(barely_genetic, stasis): It turns out that the genetics industry is a one-trick pony and can only cure a few terrible genetic diseases, and for no cheaper than $500,000 a pop. However, this is a different situation than the one we're in now. Currently, we have about 50 years of social interventions with relatively little to show for it. If in 2050, the genetics industry can only influence (and predict) some very narrow/minor stuff, then we'll have 30 years of mucking about with genetics with relatively little to show for it. At that time, it would be more reasonable to consider radical politics. (Though actually effective radical policy might look quite different from what contemporary progressives would imagine.)

(partly_genetic, stasis): In this scenario, it turns out that the genetics industry is not that bad at predicting things using genetics, but actually influencing them proves much more difficult for some reason. This seems like a rather unlikely combination, but was one of the sources of fear of genetics in the 90s and '00s - genetics could only show you someone's doom, and thus couldn't save anyone, only be used as a rationalization to leave some people to suffer and die.

By now, some of you have probably realized what the joke behind the #librx posts is. Just because we're in such an incredibly inconvenient scenario doesn't mean we need to let BAP deploy bodybuilder death squads that hunt fat people for sport. Both the bloodgild (vampire prison), and admitting college students based on their test scores per calorie, are fairly ridiculous policies. But if we take reactionary assumptions about underlying conditions, that doesn't necessarily mean we can't create more soft-touch policies than reactionaries would prefer.

(barely_genetic, improvement): This is not far from the scenario envisioned by sterile, party-line New York Times Futurism. In this scenario, the genetics industry enables us to cure a variety of health problems, but shows little ability to influence the things that people complain about.

From a policy development perspective, this puts us in an improved position compared to where we are right now. A powerful ability to manipulate genetics makes it much easier to determine what is not genetic, and thus makes it easier to narrow our search for successful social policy.

(partly_genetic, improvement): This is a new era. Three things.

1 - If genes are significant driver of performance, then the ability to alter genes allows us to use money to buy increased performance. This means that resource transfers are single-round and possibly even a net economic investment, and not just a moral or political benefit we're buying with our economic surplus.

Right now our means to convert money into performance are limited.

2 - Due to compounding capabilities, if genes drive performance, and we can alter genes, then this frees up potential for success with social policy. Suppose someone is a drug addict who has a genetic propensity for drug addiction. (This is a made-up example.) If the biological risk of drug addiction is changed (and this is a big if), then the ability of a rehab program to not only get this guy off of drugs, but keep him off of drugs, is improved.

3 - One of the primary arguments for cruel right-wing policy is conservation of scarce genetic capital. This does not completely eliminate such arguments, because it's necessary to retain a corps of personnel to maintain the necessary biomedical equipment, and to maintain a society that can continue to field this industry. However, such arguments are dramatically reduced in scope, and shifted towards things like reproductive alignment, prevention of excessive reliance on capital-intensive systems of reproduction, and other future bioconservatism.

This scenario is likely to introduce all sorts of new problems, including a new ideological mania where people insist that society has to be perfect, so natural reproduction must be outlawed and some genes must be made illegal. (Maintaining human freedom in this new high-energy, high-capital equilibrium will require new ideological development.)

It's very clear in the associative sense (you hang out with people on the right), in the stylistic sense (your writing is easy to match with the Moldbug, Land, ZHPL cluster), and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

The position of Scott Alexander circa 2013-2014 was that the current rate of gene burn does not constitute an emergency as technology is likely to change the game within 100 years, and that biological causes (in general) are not frightening because they seem likely to be easier to deal with than social causes. In 2017, he argued that people shouldn't worry too much about their personal aptitude test scores.

Mitigatedchaos is to the right of the median capital-R Rationalist - most of them are committed to the Democratic Party, and quite a few here wouldn't agree with my opinions on polyamory or borders. Mitigatedchaos has an overall more conservative portfolio than the typical 2014 rationalist on a number of metrics, including on bioconservatism ("reproductive alignment" being one example).

(A 2014 Rationalist, of course, would find describing beliefs as a "portfolio" (along with other investment terms) to be quite intuitive.)

Nonetheless, stalling for time until the genetics industry comes online is one of the positions that is mainstream within the rationalists.

What do Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common? Imagination.

Take technology. Change it. Does that change other aspects of society?

If you are Ted Chiang of the New York Times, this is inconceivable to you. The Democratic Party has a position and a coalition right now, therefore the Democratic Party will have that same position and coalition forever. The work of futurism is merely to tell readers of the New York Times that they will believe the same things in 2050 that they believe right now.

What do Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and Zero HP Lovecraft all have in common?

They have a tendency to view the world in terms of dynamic systems (rather than static ones) and evolutionary dynamics. This is the kind of person who can think of an organization becoming misaligned, or organizational linkage limits, or limitations resulting from information processing and transmission. Or think of "coordination problems" as their own thing. You know, like in Meditations on Moloch.

With a few exceptions, the left coalition haven't done much interesting ideological work since the second term of the Obama Administration. It's largely conflict theorist stuff for winning interpersonal and institutional conflicts, shutting down criticism, and gaining power. No more "creating a free society through digital media piracy;" now it's all guns and bombs and knives and everything has to be tied in to the central narrative conflict about identity.

It's difficult to learn about a system when it's all functioning smoothly. It's when a system breaks that you start really learning about the internals. Compared to 2008, in some sense the left coalition's ideology-forming system is "broken," or more compressed into a particular, narrow range.

As a political theorist, I've learned a lot.

I learn from Social Justice by watching the conflict and then synthesizing theory about it. Watching events like, "It's inequitable and therefore racist to teach algebra to 8th graders," tells us a lot about political maneuvering, coalitions, and ideology, but the actual idea itself is just flat bad. It's observational, like a zoologist studying animal behavior in the wild.

This is different from how I relate to the Rationalists or what you call the "New Right." Both Scott and I understood the theory of racism as self-perpetuating, as every sufficiently smart liberal would have back in 2008. There, the relationship is more horizontal.

There's a crossover or flow of ideas or concepts between the Rationalists/Post-Rationalists and the "New Right" because they're the two major groups on the public Internet studying or inventing theory in a way that's of much interest, currently. (The exceptions mostly aren't far from the neighborhood, here. The actual community of people having these ideological or philosophical discussions is smaller than we would have naively expected back in 2008.)

In 2017, Scott published a review of Seeing Like A State, which focused on the concept of legibility (which I sometimes speak of in terms of "dimensionality;" this is an immensely powerful concept that has guided some of my thinking on the nature of capital). This is of interest if you're a "New Right" person or a smart liberal.

For the right-wingers, it's interesting because it sets limits on the appropriate scope and nature of state power.

For the smart liberals, it's interesting because it's part of the set of much more advanced arguments for liberalism based on the limits to obtaining and processing information, and the limits of what can be known, similar to the economic calculation problem.

But if you're Social Justice, then you want to flatten everyone into a limited number of legible categories, so that you can discriminate against them to "correct" "for past injustices."

To take it back out to the conflict analysis level again, Social Justice's actions aren't that interesting at the object level. However, criticisms about "what isn't captured in the metrics" would have been a more advanced critique back in like, 2010. From the conflict analysis perspective, this suggests that the body of ideology is changing in its interpretation as it moves into the hands of different people, which suggests different motivations and different levels of capability.

That is interesting. "How many bits of complexity can our ideology support, and how does it handle under compression?" is an interesting question both for right-wingers and smart liberals.

and in the operational sense (you critique the left primarily and the right only parenthetically).

Republicans can't even manage to produce enough professional-class personnel to staff the government without having to rely on like 30% Democrats (there's a chart somewhere about this).

A lot of assertions that the right wing have power are based on observing things that aren't necessarily caused by the right wing and concluding that the right wing intended for these things to happen, and therefore caused them, and therefore have an immense amount of power.

There is basically no risk of BAPism coming into actual power over the next 20 years.

Social Justice and the broader left coalition choking the genetics industry to death before it can come online, though? That's just assuming that they apply the same playbook to it that they apply to every other industry. (Imagine if they fucked it up as bad as housing is fucked in California.)

If smarter liberals within the coalition were going to stop them, then why haven't they stopped them already?

Between the right-wingers and the left-wingers, the right-wing ideas are generally more immoral or crueler but more functional, while the left-wing ideas are more moral on the surface but are anti-functional.

Think of reduced environmental restrictions vs "degrowth."

We've had social conservatism before, and liberalized out of it. Given that [the left have more power] × [their ideas are more destructive], yes, I primarily criticize the left and criticize the right less often and less severely at this time. I could make a pretty sophisticated argument against a number of right-wing ideas, but that's not really of benefit right now.

In the medium term, it makes sense to align with the right-wingers for the next 10-20 years, as growth in the genetics industry is fueled by the immense demand for near-miraculous cures.

After that medium term, it's much less clear what happens. At some point between 2030 and 2045, different questions within the field of genetics are going to undergo partisan polarization, and it's likely that the makeup of the two coalitions (as well as their ideology) will change.

As we saw from the coronavirus, partisan polarization is unpredictable and varies based on the initial state of the system and the order in which an idea is passing through a coalition. Observing it in action is quite the argument against maintaining a high partisan alignment.

Anyhow, I think you can call mitigatedchaos "right-wing," but I put way too much effort into hedging everything to call it "extreme right." It's about as far to the right as a lot of people are willing to read, as if it were a cottage right next to the jurisdictional border, with a big sign next to it marking out the border line, reading "Right-Wing Beyond This Point."

#anons #asks #politics #blog meta #the rationalists #flagpost #longpost

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catdotjpeg · 4 months

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With hundreds of Palestine supporters packing the meeting room and the hallway outside, on January 23 the Minneapolis City Council’s Committee of the Whole voted 9-3 (with one abstention) to pass a Palestine ceasefire resolution. The next step [is] January 25, for a full council for a final vote. The committee voted in favor of eight amendments to the original resolution, all of which clarified or strengthened the resolution. If the nine council members who voted for the resolution in committee all stand firm, they would have enough votes to override a potential veto from Mayor Jacob Frey, who has publicly criticized the resolution.

The Free Palestine Coalition has organized a campaign to press the city council to pass a strong resolution. They’ve generated thousands of emails and calls to councilmembers. The coalition also organized a large rally outside City Hall the Saturday before the vote. Increasing numbers of cities around the country are passing resolutions calling on the Biden administration to advocate for a ceasefire to stop the carnage in Gaza. The language in the Minneapolis resolution goes further than many that have passed in other cities. While many cities’ resolutions start with October 7, the Minneapolis resolution puts the current events in historical context, saying, “Whereas, the ongoing bombardment in the Gaza Strip comes in the context of the 75-year displacement of Palestinians and in 2016 the United Nations Security Council found the settlements in the occupied West Bank, which have gone on for 56 years, unlawful, and the 17-year blockade of Gaza; and…” The Minneapolis resolution also uses the word “genocide” in two places, referencing statements by the United National Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and the South African case before the International Court of Justice arguing that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza.

-- "Minneapolis Palestine resolution passes committee, heads for final vote" from Fight Back! News, 24 Jan 2024

#minneapolis #palestine

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aimeedaisies · 2 months

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'He's frustrated': King Charles's nephew Peter Phillips says monarch's cancer recovery 'taking a little longer'

A senior member of the royal family has provided a major update on King Charles’ cancer battle and told Sky News Australia whether the monarch is likely to visit Australia as planned later this year.

Published March 24, 2024 - 8:00AM

King Charles has released a statement on Princess Kate’s announcement she will undergo chemotherapy. The statement, which comes from a Buckingham Palace spokesperson says King Charles is "so proud of Catherine for her courage in speaking as she did". King Charles, who is also receiving treatment for an undisclosed cancer, says he has "remained in the closest contact with his beloved daughter-in-law" after they both spent time in hospital together in January. Both the King and Queen "will continue to offer their love and support to the whole family through this difficult time", the statement added. Princess Kate was made aware of a cancerous presence following tests in the aftermath of her abdominal surgery in January.

Royal family member Peter Phillips has revealed his uncle King Charles’s cancer recovery is “taking a little longer” but insists the King remains in good spirits amid his health battle.

Phillips, 46, is the only son of Princess Anne and her first husband Captain Mark Phillips. He was Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip's first grandchild.

At the time of his birth, Phillips was 5th in the line of succession to the British throne but has fallen down to the 18th position following the births of his cousins and their children.

Phillips is currently visiting Australia as patron of charity ISPS Handa, which supports disabled sportsmen and women, and sat down for an exclusive interview with Sky News Australia’s Royal Report where he opened up about Charles’s cancer recovery.

Peter Phillips told Sky News Australia that his uncle King Charles is "feeling frustrated". Picture: Sky News Australia.

“He's in good spirits,” Phillips revealed during the sit down with Sky News Australia host Caroline Di Russo.

“I think, ultimately, he's hugely frustrated. he's frustrated that he can't get on and do everything that he wants to be able to do.

“But he is very pragmatic (and) he understands that there's a period of time that he really needs to focus on himself.”

Charles, 75, was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer while undergoing a separate procedure to treat an enlarged prostate in January.

Buckingham Palace confirmed the diagnosis on February 5, sparking a global outpouring of concern for the new monarch who only ascended the throne about 18 months ago.

Although Charles has mostly withdrawn from public life, he continues to receive his government red boxes and hold meetings with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to ensure the United Kingdom can function as normal.

Phillips revealed that Charles was “pushing” staff to resume more of his royal duties against the advice of his doctors.

“He is always pushing, his staff and everybody and his doctors and nurses to be able to say ‘actually come on, you know, can I do this? Can I do that?’" Phillips said.

“So the overriding message would be that he's obviously very keen to get back to a form of normality.

“And he's probably frustrated that, recovery is taking a little longer than probably he would want it to.”

The monarch’s illness has cast doubt on a range of royal engagements slated for 2024, including Charles and Camilla’s first planned tour of Australia since becoming King and Queen, respectively.

However, Phillips revealed that Charles and Camilla are “very keen” to visit Australia as soon as the King’s health has stabilised.

“They would obviously love to see as many people as possible,” he said.

“You know, they are they are very keen and very active to be able to, you know, be seen and meet as many people as possible from all walks of life.

“And that is, you know, that is what their, their sort of set the goal on being able to be seen to be, you know, accessible to as many people as possible.”

Phillips sat down with Sky News Australia prior to Princess Catherine announcing her own cancer battle on Friday.

The Princess of Wales released an emotional video revealing she is undergoing chemotherapy treatment after being diagnosed with the disease earlier this year.

#peter phillips #king charles iii #article

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top-secret-suicide · 6 months

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Things trump has stated he wants to do if he is reelected in 24:

End birth right citizenship for kids of illegal immigrants (very clearly unconstitutional)

End DACA

Oversee the biggest mass deportation ever for any and all illegal immigrants, giving national gaurd full reign to deport any undocumented immigrant (would absolutely destroy our economy)

End all racial equity programs and give himself full reign to fund anyone who he believes was discriminated against (January 6ers, proud boys, etc.)

Allow presidents to deny funding approved by congress (he was impeached for this when he withheld resources to ukraine.... would pretty much just kill the checks/balances and the power a president has)

Give himself the right to enact martial law if he believes police aren't doing their job in stopping protests

End public school diversity, inclusion and equity programs and cut funding for public schools who he believes are teaching critical race theory (none are)

End early and absentee voting so people can only vote on election day with voter ID

Give himself the full authority to fire any federal officer who he believes is "corrupt or incompetent" and replace them with loyalists (aka, fire his political foes and replace them with ppl who will do his dirty work for him)

Let's make one thing perfectly clear: trump is a clear danger to our country. We are not exaggerating when we say trump is dangerously close to Hitler. The things he wants to do have one very clear similarity with all of them: it gives HIM MORE POWER and takes power away from other branches. It gives him authority to define things such as critical race theory or gender ideology. It allows him to override the constitutions meaning. Everything gives him more power and THAT is dangerous. Lots of things would hopefully get shut down in court (as they should) but it proves that trump truly believes he should have full control if he's president, it completely goes against our founding fathers and the creation of checks and balances

It's not that biden is good, he's not either, but I will gladly vote for biden for another 20 years over wanna be Hitler trump. Every person needs to step up and vote blue in 2024, we must stop trump from destroying our country.

#democrats #politics #political #liberal #fuck billionaires #fuck the rich #fuck trump #trumpforprison #biden 2024

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 months

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By: River Page

Published: Feb 2, 2024

"Companies also cannot take race-motivated actions to maintain a demographically 'balanced' workforce." — Commissioner at Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Andrea R. Lucas in Reuters, June 29, 2023

"An unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice." — 42 USC § 2000e–2(m) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

---

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, tech companies promised to hire more minorities. One company that claims to help them do it is Gem, and although you might not have heard of it, you’ve probably heard of some of its 1,200-plus clients: Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, Discord, Zillow, Stripe, Affirm, and Grammarly, just to name a few. Although Gem’s software is primarily used for things like non-race- and gender-based recruiting, payroll, and benefits management, John, (not his real name) — who worked for Gem as a sales development representative through a B2B outsourcing firm from March to July of 2021, told us that the prospective corporate clients he talked to were most interested in Gem’s “diversity enhancing” capabilities. Essentially, they had race- and gender-based hiring quotas and wanted to use Gem’s software to meet them. He said one prospective client, an executive at the Bay Area-based AI and robotics research arm of one of the world’s leading car manufacturers, told him explicitly: “I need more black candidates this month.”

According to its website, Gem’s software allows recruiters to track “gender and race/ethnicity throughout the entire hiring funnel.” Essentially, it appears to include a comprehensive race and gender tracking system designed to help companies fill race- and gender-based quotas with precision. For example, in a 2021 diversity webinar posted on YouTube, a Gem employee seemed to explain how the software could show how many candidates a company would need to reach out to if it had three engineering positions open, but didn’t want to hire men for them (in her words: “wanted to give women a chance”). In the same video, she demonstrated how to break down each stage in the hiring funnel by race, and explained (but did not show, probably for privacy reasons) how companies could further track how their recruiters’ own efforts break down along the lines of the company’s race- and gender-based hiring quotas, so that the company may “hold them accountable.”

[ Screen capture from Gem’s diversity webinar ]

All this requires a lot of data. According to a recent LinkedIn post by Gem founder Steve Bartel, this data can come from three sources:

Self-ID: the demographic data collection on job applications

Manual override: the recruiter reports your race and gender based on visual cues such as your LinkedIn profile picture

Predicted: Gem’s proprietary AI determines a candidate's race and gender based on machine learning (Bartel notes this is only for aggregate/anonymized use, meaning that the UI doesn’t allow recruiters to see which race was assigned to individual candidates)

John told me that, of Gem’s features, its race- and gender-identifying AI was the biggest selling point. “A key part of the pitch was to tell clients that Gem uses AI and machine learning to determine race and gender.” (This is especially ironic, given the panic about “racist AI” that has consumed every discussion about artificial intelligence for years.)

“One thing that cracked me up was that recruiting/DEI buyers at companies would ask, ‘Is this legal?’” John told me. “Not because they were offended by how obviously racist the software was — they loved what they saw. The concern was pushback from their legal team.” He said this question was asked so frequently that Gem’s Chief Legal Counsel had a prewritten response to the question that would be passed along to clients who asked.

[ Source: Gem’s website, February 1, 2024 ]

The "Diversity Recruiting" section of Gem’s website offers a slate of what it calls “Case Studies” — essentially customer testimonials — where companies explain how they used Gem to hire based on race and gender.

In a case study for payroll firm Gusto, Gem seems to indicate the company used its “Candidate Rediscovery” tool to hire based on candidates’ race and gender. In Gem’s language, Gusto used the tool to “unearth talent who is vetted — and diverse — ultimately reducing time-to-hire.” In other words, companies could use Gem’s software to find people with specific racial and gender-based characteristics that meet the position’s requirements and hire them quickly, while weeding out similarly qualified candidates who are, presumably, white or male or both.

In a case study about the telecommunications company Twilio, Gem seems to describe how one of its senior recruiters was able to avoid hiring men with their tool:

Gem’s metrics have also helped [the recruiter] zero in on stages in the interview process where the team is falling short on equitable gender hiring. “For one division, we intuited that we were hiring more women than the average team—and we were! We were prepared to roll off our passive sourcing efforts for that division, but I don’t like to make a move without looking at all the data first. That’s where Gem came through.” [The recruiter] dug through the data in more detail and discovered that the proportion of male candidates was actually increasing quarter over quarter—so much so that, by Q3, they would have made significantly more male than female hires. “If we hadn’t had access to that data, we wouldn’t have been able to identify that trend and strategize on how to allocate our resources properly.”

This is easily interpretable as: We thought everything was fine until Gem showed us that by Q3 we might hire a disproportionate number of men in a division that a disproportionate number of men applied to work in. It's worth noting that when announcing massive job cuts in 2022, Twilio’s CEO bragged that the layoffs had been carried out through an “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

In another testimonial from Chili Piper, an inbound conversion platform for B2B revenue teams, the company’s Talent Ops Manager says she used Gem to discover that URG (under-represented group) candidates were dropping off after the company stopped including a video submission in the application (itself seeming to indicate that a significant proportion “URGs” were being advanced through the hiring pipeline because of their race or gender). She successfully lobbied to bring the video submission back and modified the assignment. “Now it’s like, sell us a new smartphone: something that really levels the playing field and lets us see candidates’ creativity, communication, and approach in action. It’s not necessarily entrenched in experience in tech and SaaS sales.” Since then, the company has “seen a decisive shift in the demographics of candidates who make it to the interview stage of our process. We have seen a 54% increase in URG candidates and a 31% increase in female-identified candidates making it to the first round of interviews. Offers extended to, and offers accepted by URGs have increased.”

In other words, Chili Piper's testimonial seems to indicate that Gem showed the company that when it stopped asking applicants to submit a video that allowed them to see their race and gender, they stopped hiring more minorities. So they brought video back, and seemed to effectively lower their standards by changing the assignment to one in which industry experience was deprioritized.

Gem’s own hiring practices also raise red flags. An internal jobs board from June 2021 provided to Pirate Wires shows that under a field titled “Diversity Search,” positions are either listed as “Open,” “Women,” “URM,” or “Women & URM,” suggesting that certain positions were closed off to straight white males, or perhaps that women and minorities were being sought after in those positions. We sent the screenshot of the internal job board — with company name and other identifying information redacted — to a tech industry employment lawyer, who said:

Without knowing more about the company or getting clarification on what some of the designations mean on the chart, it looks a bit problematic. The law allows companies to set “targets” and “goals” as they relate to the hiring, retention, and promotion of women, veterans, and underrepresented minorities (those targets/goals must be temporary). But the law does not currently allow private companies to set aside or otherwise designate specific positions for such group members. There are some grey areas for certain types of federal contractors, but it’s the exception to the rule.

As a non-lawyer, I’ll not comment on the legality of Gem’s hiring practices. However, I will say the company seems to use unorthodox recruiting methods. In Gem’s diversity webinar I referred to earlier, one of the hosts said, “Here at Gem, each time we open a new req [position], we actually focus solely on sourcing URGs, and in conjunction [with that] we don’t post the job on the career site until other levers need to be pulled…”

The host then explained how she found candidates of specific races and genders at Gem, telling the audience: “Sourcing for URGs may require you to shift some fundamental ideas you have about what a quote-unquote good candidate looks like.” Next, she described how she would go through LinkedIn, searching for candidates with stereotypically minority names, who use neo-pronouns, or who went to minority-majority schools, among other tactics.

[ Slide from Gem’s diversity webinar]

When asked for comment, a representative from GEM told us “Our product provides interested customers with insights that help them build a diverse talent pipeline. We work closely with legal counsel to ensure our platform complies with all applicable laws and welcome potential customers looking to learn more to reach out to us."

Gem: a company that apparently doesn’t post some job announcements publicly without searching for specific races and genders on LinkedIn first. A company whose value proposition is to help companies hold their recruiters “accountable” for hiring too many of the wrong race and gender. A company that created an AI that predicts your race and gender. A company whose AI tracks race throughout the hiring pipeline so efficiently that, allegedly, even woke companies question its legality during sales calls. Gem is the company that vast swaths of the tech industry are using to hire.

So if you’re in the business, and you’re a Derrick O’Donnell or a John Chau, good luck out there. I think you’re gonna need it.

[ Via: https://archive.md/gxFMK ]

DEI is discrimination.

#River Page #Gem Software #discrimination #racial discrimination #Title VII #Civil Rights Act #Civil Rights #DEI bureaucracy #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI must die #wokeness #woke #cult of woke #wokeism #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

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coochiequeens · 4 months

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It sounds like this guy just recently changed his name if a law that covers name changes over the past five years is barring him from running for office. How long as this 50 year old been living as a woman?

A transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat has been disqualified for failing to disclose her former name on petitions circulated to voters, in violation of a seldom-enforced state law.

Local election officials informed Vanessa Joy, who hoped to run as a Democrat for Ohio House District 50, that she was not eligible to do so, despite having collected the signatures necessary to run.

Joy sought to run in a firmly Republican district covering Stark County, just south of Akron.

Officials said Joy violated a little-known Ohio law requiring candidates for public office to list any name changes over the previous five years on their signature petitions. The law, passed in 1995, has several exceptions, including for candidates who change their names after they are married.

Joy, who has legally changed her name and her birth certificate, told News 5 Cleveland and the Ohio Capital Journal on Wednesday she had not been aware of the law before being removed from the ballot. Ohio’s 2024 candidate requirement guide makes no mention of it.

Joy said that, as a transgender woman, she should not be required by law or expected to publicly disclose her deadname, which is the name she used before transitioning.

“In the trans community, our deadnames are dead,” she said.

Intentionally or repeatedly using a transgender or gender-nonconforming person’s deadname is viewed by many in the LGBTQ community as an expression of hate toward transgender people, and major social media platforms including TikTok and Discord have banned deadnaming under their hateful conduct policies.

X, formerly known as Twitter, banned the practice until April, when the policy against it was quietly removed.

Joy added that requiring transgender candidates to list their deadnames on documents like signature petitions would “undoubtedly” prevent other transgender people from running for office.

The law’s enforcement also comes at a pivotal time for transgender people in Ohio, as the state legislature gears up to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) veto of House Bill 68. The legislation would ban minors from obtaining gender-affirming health care and prevent transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams that match their gender identity.

Ohio House Majority Leader Bill Seitz’s (R) office told The Hill on Wednesday the House expects to have the votes necessary to override DeWine’s veto. A vote is expected Wednesday.

“The only thing that we can do is try to fight back,” Joy told local media. “That’s why there are so many trans candidates in Ohio.”

At least three other openly transgender candidates have entered the race for the state House. It is not yet clear whether they will also be disqualified.

#It's a birth name #Dead name is just being dramatic #Women who change their name due to marriage or divorce don't act that way concerning their former names #usa #Ohio #Vanessa Joy is a man #Voters have a right to know what kind of person he was for almost 50 years #A TIM thinks that a law should not apply to him because it upsets his gender feels #If that rule is scrapped than how many people with criminal histories will run for office with new names?

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tolnas-vault · 1 month

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Fic Review: and death shall be no more

Reviewed: April 13 2024

Fic Data

Rating: T

Status: Complete

Word Count: 5691

Main Ship(s): Morena Dekarios/Withers

Side Ship(s): None

Other Side Character(s): Tara, Gale Dekarios

Summary:

Five times Withers came to visit Morena, and the one time she went to see him. OR: low key Death and the Maiden trope but it’s a sixty-five-year-old woman and Jergal.

Ao3 Stats (As of April 13 2024)

Morena Dekarios/Withers Works on Ao3: 2

Morena Dekarios works on Ao3: 143

Withers works on Ao3: 360

Review (Mild Spoilers Only)

Warnings: Major Character Death, let's just say Withers first meets Morena when delivering some rather bad news.

Favorite Quote:

“Withers,” Morena said, patiently. “I am sixty-five.”

“Thou hast plenty of time,” he said dismissively; she and Tara shared another look, less humorous this time.

“Is that merely a figure of speech?” Morena asked finally, hesitantly.

“No.”

Main POV: Morena Dekarios

Thoughts:

I knew I had to read this work when I first started curating fics for my rare pair blog. What sort of rare pair reviewer would I be if I didn't review the really rare pairs?

I'm so glad I read this. It was heartbreaking of course. Morena is going through the worst thing a parent can go through, and the fic does not hide her pain.

But you see the woman who raised the little boy who cried over burned flowers. You see the mother of the man who appreciated the beauty in everything. You see where so many of Gale's best attributes came from. This is the woman who faced death with a cup of tea.

And you also see Withers as a character. A figure that, though grim, is not lacking in empathy. One who got so weary from the sad reality of his position he gave it up to The Dead Three. One who longs for companionship, though he doesn't quite understand this fact.

This fic is such a beautiful reflection on death, grief, mourning, and love. An absolute must read.

Who I'd recommend this fic to: Anyone who has ever had to choose, or contemplated choosing the Gale death option at the end of BG3. I see you honor mode players. This fic provides catharsis for that decision without overriding it.

#baldur's gate 3 #morena dekarios #bg3 withers #withers #morena Dekarios x withers #tolnas vault #tolna reviews #rare pair #rare char #rare char fanfic #rare pairs fanfic #bg3 #baldurs gate 3

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beardedmrbean · 2 months

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Spain's lower house of parliament, the Congress of Deputies, approved on Thursday a bill granting amnesty to Catalans involved in a 2017 independence referendum.

The bill passed with 178 votes in favor and 172 against.

Justice Minister Felix Bolanos says the amnesty law would affect "around 400 people."

The plans to provide amnesty to Catalan separatists has been controversial, sparking far-right demonstrations late last year.

What else do we know about the bill?

While Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists initially expressed unwillingness to provide amnesty, elections in July resulted in a hung parliament and Sanchez required the support of Catalan separatist party Junts to form a government.

The amnesty bill must still clear the Senate, in which the conservative People's Party (PP) holds a majority of seats.

The PP has vowed to delay the passage of the measure, accusing the government of "buying" votes from separatist lawmakers to stay in power. However, the Congress can override a Senate veto with an absolute majority vote.

Six weeks ago, an earlier version of the bill was voted down by the lower house, with Junts' seven lawmakers voting against it, arguing that it did not offer sufficient protection against charges of terrorism or treason.

The amended version of the bill defines terrorism by a 2017 EU directive, according to which it would have to have caused serious human rights violations.

Catalan leader mulls return from exile

Former leader of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont, who fled to Brussels after the independence vote and now heads Junts, said he hoped to return to Spain after the law comes into effect.

"The amnesty responds to a goal... to overcome an erroneous period of judicial and police repression of a political movement," Puigdemont said in a post on the platform X, formerly Twitter.

Puigdemont said that amnesty was a "prior condition" for further negotiation with the central government.

He stressed that the bill was "not an end point" for Catalonia's independence ambitions.

#nunyas news

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humanrightsupdates · 4 months

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Kenneth Smith is scheduled to be executed in Alabama on 25 January 2024. His jury voted for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, but the judge imposed a death sentence, under a judicial override system outlawed in Alabama in 2017. The state tried to execute Kenneth Smith in 2022, but this attempt by lethal injection failed. The state will this time deprive him of oxygen using nitrogen gas, an execution method not previously used. Twenty-two years old at the time of the crime, Kenneth Smith is now 58. His prison record is one of non-violence, self-improvement and helping others.

The crime involved the murder of a 45-year-old woman in her home in Alabama on 18 March 1988. The prosecution submitted evidence that her husband had recruited Billy Williams, who then engaged Kenneth Smith and John Parker, to kill her. The husband, a preacher who was in debt and wanted to collect life insurance, committed suicide a week after the murder; Billy Williams was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP); John Parker, was sentenced to death, and executed in 2010. Kenneth Smith was also sentenced to death, but his 1989 conviction and death sentence were overturned on appeal because of racist prosecutorial jury selection tactics at the trial. At the 1996 retrial, Kenneth Smith was again convicted. The jury – made up of seven Black women, four Black men, and one white woman – voted 11-1 for LWOP, but the judge overrode their decision and passed a death sentence.

The judge found one aggravating factor – that the murder was committed for pecuniary gain – and decided that this outweighed the mitigating circumstances, which were Kenneth Smith’s young age at the time of the crime, his lack of significant history of prior criminal activity, good prison record, childhood deprivation and neglect, as well as his remorse and voluntary confession to his participation in the crime. The judge would later suggest in an interview that he had overridden the jury’s vote because Kenneth Smith “deserved the death penalty” and that “some people serving on juries… don’t want the responsibility to sentence someone to death”.

The state is proposing to attempt again to execute Kenneth Smith, this time by the method of “nitrogen hypoxia” during which nitrogen is fed by tube into an airtight face mask worn by the person being executed, depriving him or her of oxygen and causing eventual death. The US Supreme Court noted in 2019 that nitrogen hypoxia had “never been used to carry out an execution” and that the first state to do so would be “the first to experiment with a new untried and untested method”. Now Alabama, a state with a record of botched executions and a lack of transparency and inquiry into such failures, is the one moving ahead with this method. Kenneth Smith’s lawyers assert that he is being used as “the test subject for this novel and experimental method” and that “if not performed correctly, execution by nitrogen hypoxia can result in another botched execution that risks leaving Mr Smith with permanent injuries”.

Take action now

#human rights #amnesty international #urgent action #death penalty

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 5 months

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Brazil's Haddad unveils set of tax tweaks to ensure balanced public accounts

Brazil's Finance Minister Fernando Haddad unveiled on Thursday a set of tax adjustments aimed at restricting tax benefits on various fronts to ensure fiscal compensation for waivers that were not originally budgeted for next year.

Speaking at a press conference, he stressed that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration would continue to persue balanced public accounts in 2024.

The minister had previously indicated that the government would present a substitute proposal for a bill that extended payroll tax exemptions for 17 labor sectors until 2027 after Congress voted in December to override President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's veto of it.

The bill's fiscal impact had not yet been incorporated into the 2024 budget.

#brazil #brazilian politics #politics #economy #fernando haddad #taxation #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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millennial-review · 2 years

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1. Supreme Court destroys E.P.A. ability to regulate carbon emissions.

Today the Supreme Court destroyed the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Essentially getting rid of any ability to fight climate change and severely limiting federal authority to do so. In a 6-3 vote, in West Virginia v. EPA the court sided with Republican states and fossil fuel companies that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was wrong when it held the Clean Air Act gave the EPA significant power over carbon emissions. The decision deals a significant blow to any attempts to fight climate change and almost certainly spells significant hurdles for future efforts.

2. Supreme Court set to gut election protections, rig elections.

The Supreme Court agreed to take up a case next term that could give state governments almost total control of elections, even overriding state courts. The case Moore v. Harper centers the controversial “independent state legislature theory” which posits state legislatures have total control over federal elections. The case revolves around a dispute stemming from a Republican congressional map that was so gerrymandered state courts found it impermissible and told Republicans to correct it. The courts in North Carolina issued their own map and the state legislature of North Carolina sued claiming they had sole jurisdiction to make those decisions. If the court sides with the theory it would give Republican state governments significant control over federal elections just in time for 2024.

3. Stock market has worst half year since 1970.

To quote the Washington Post, “The stock market closed out its worst six-month stretch to start a year since 1970, as inflation-driven upheaval has spread across nearly every part of the economy.The S&P 500 index edged 0.9 percent lower Thursday to bring its 2022 losses to 20.6 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which fell 1.3 percent, has tumbled nearly 30 percent this year, while the Dow Jones industrial average’s 0.8 percent drop put its year-to-date decline near 15 percent.” While the stock market doesn’t measure the health of the economy for most working people, it is a good indicator what capital might do next. And with inflation concerns front of mind a fed engineered recession seems all but inevitable.

4. Florida judge blocks 15 week abortion ban.

The legal fight over reproductive rights continues as a Florida judge throws out Florida’s 15 week abortion ban. Joining judges in Texas and Kentucky who likewise threw out their state’s bans, Second Judicial Circuit Court Judge John Cooper issued a temporary injunction blocking the bill and leaving Florida’s law open to abortions up to 24 weeks. For now Florida remains one of the most open states in the South in terms of abortion regulation. This is just one small part in the on going legal battle over what terms with which a state can ban abortion. Even though Roe has been overturned many of the concepts, such as a right to privacy, are being invoked by judges overturning bans for the time being. How it all shakes out remains to be seen but without federal action from Democrats these court rulings are only a temporary solution.

5. Biden backs ending filibuster to codify abortion rights.

Joe Biden announced today that he backs ending the filibuster to codify abortion rights, specifically by making a carve out in the procedural hurdle for voting rights. While that is exactly what should be done it’s a rather hollow gesture that won’t mean much without significant political maneuvering to make it happen. Joe Manchin has long been skeptical of the Democrat’s position on abortion and has always been explicitly against ending the filibuster for anything, let alone abortion which he believes is unpopular. If Biden isn’t willing to play hardball, investigate Manchin’s daughter for pharmaceuticals fraud, something to put the pressure on, it’s a rather hollow gesture.

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foreverlogical · 1 year

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Nevada Democrats just passed a constitutional amendment that would add the state's six electoral votes to a multistate compact that would elect the president according to the national popular vote, with the ultimate aim of sending the measure to voters for their approval.

By referring an amendment to the ballot, Democrats can avoid what would be an all but certain veto from Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo. However, they'll also have to pass the same amendment again after the 2024 elections and then persuade voters to back it in a 2026 referendum before it could become law in time for the 2028 presidential election.

If successful, Nevada would enter the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a multistate agreement under which member states would give their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Importantly, the compact would only come into effect once states with a majority of electoral votes have joined. As shown on the map at the top of this story (click here for a larger version), the 16 current members have 195 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the compact; Nevada would bring the total to 201. That would still leave the consortium 69 votes short of its target, but there's a tough but plausible path to triggering the compact by 2028. Campaign Action

This is actually the second time Nevada Democrats have tried to join the compact, after passing traditional legislation in 2019. However, Democrat Steve Sisolak, who was governor at the time, unexpectedly vetoed that previous attempt because he believed that swing-state Nevada would see its influence diminish if the nation switched to relying on the national popular vote. Sisolak subsequently lost reelection to Lombardo last year, and because Democrats are one seat shy of the two-thirds supermajority needed to override vetoes in the state Senate, passing an amendment is the only option currently available to them.

Up until now, all of the other jurisdictions that have joined the compact, which includes 15 states and Washington, D.C., did so by passing ordinary statutes rather than amending their constitutions, with a key reason being that this approach doesn't require voter approval to become law. That, however, has left such laws more vulnerable to being rolled back.

In fact, the one and only time a state has directly voted on whether to participate in the compact came in Colorado in 2020, when Republican opponents used a ballot referendum to try to veto a law that Democrats had passed the previous year. While Coloradans ultimately voted 52-48 to reject the GOP's veto attempt and remain in the compact, that result was much narrower than Joe Biden's 55-42 victory in the state during that same election.

Support for the compact has often (though not always) broken down along partisan lines, so given Biden's much smaller 50-48 margin in Nevada, a similar underperformance there in 2026 would be enough to sink the effort. However, it's possible that Nevada voters would react differently to the proposal three years from now than Coloradans did in 2020, especially given that Donald Trump's attempt to overturn his loss following that election underscored some of the very real flaws of the Electoral College. Polling has also continued to find solid majorities nationwide in favor of switching to the national popular vote.

Hell yeah! Democrats and progressives simply crushed it from coast to coast on Tuesday night, so co-hosts David Nir and David Beard are devoting this week's entire episode of "The Downballot" to reveling in all the highlights. At the very top of the list is Jacksonville, where Democrats won the mayor's race for just the second time in three decades—and gave the Florida Democratic Party a much-needed shot in the arm. Republicans also lost the mayor's office in the longtime conservative bastion of Colorado Springs for the first time since the city began holding direct elections for the job 45 years ago.

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