just to be completely clear, the amount of military power and political influence Israel has has NOTHING to do with its settlers being Jewish. Israel is a force for American & European interests in the region and they're just doing what America does and allows/encourages its close allies to do.

war crimes aren't considered war crimes when someone America finds useful is doing them. european and american pushback against anyone criticizing Israeli apartheid & genocide is 100% because these crimes are useful to American & European hegemony.

Governments that are deeply antisemitic, like France, aren't suddenly caring about Jewish people. Jewish people, persecuted the world over, don't hold some kind of hegemonic power outside of Israel.

The state of Israel and its attendant brutal treatment of the locals are both incredibly useful to the US, and American hegemony means we're expected to celebrate both.

not bc they're Jewish. this isn't a break in the pattern of western antisemitism and it's not evidence that antisemitism doesn't exist.

it's just like how you could get fired for saying shit against the US war in Afghanistan when i was growing up. it is 100% about US military and political interests (ok slightly western europe too but lbr)

I fully agree on your stance with the Yoda problem the Old Jedi Order had got going on, but why do you think the order was corrupted? Is the EU a source? (Because I haven't seen them as corrupted in the films.) Thanks for the great blog and sorry for my bad English!

Because the Prequels are about corruption, about how power corrupts (all kinds of power). Because George Lucas literatlly spelled it out to everyone who was interested in hearing. Because the Prequels are allegory for political instability and the role society and organizations play in the rise of authorianism.

The story being told in ‘Star Wars’ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not. – George Lucas in 2005

[The Jedi] sort of persuade people into doing the right thing but their job really isn’t to go around fighting people yet there are now used as generals and they are fighting a war and they are doing something they really weren’t meant to do.They are being corrupted by this war, by being forced to be generals instead of peacemakers. – George Lucas for E! Behind the Scenes - Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

The prequel trilogy is based on a back-story outline Lucas created in the mid-1970s for the original three “Star Wars” movies, so the themes percolated out of the Vietnam War and the Nixon-Watergate era, he said. Lucas began researching how democracies can turn into dictatorships with full consent of the electorate. In ancient Rome, “why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew?” Lucas said. “Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It’s the same thing with Germany and Hitler. “You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody’s squabbling, there’s corruption.” [x]

I’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: corruption is so more than embezzling money or bribing officials. Corruption is dishonesty; it’s a change of purpose. It’s not as simple as being ‘evil’. And it’s not just about the big events, it exists in our daily lives too. It’s in our behaviors, our choices, even in our beliefs.

When you create a organization with the purpose of protecting all human life but then you take control of an army of slaves, that’s corruption. When you’re an elected official lying to the public and your superiors to protect your romantic interests, that’s corruption.

As I wrote before:

In the Jedi’s case, they corrupted themselves when they, by choice, failed to perform their duties. The Jedi Order maintained its status by promising to defend the Republic and all its citizens. When they failed to act on that promise and still claimed the rewards that function provided, they became corrupt. They were no longer providing the service they promised they would but they still were collecting the rewards of that position.

They corrupted themselves when they failed to stop slavery; when they allowed the rampant corruption in the Senate to go unquestioned, when they failed to investigate claims about criminal activities; when they caused mass starvation; when they refused to return missing children to their parents; when supported untrustworthy politicians to maintain their own political status; when deployed children into war zones; when they refused to send any kind of help to protect people from criminal activities; when they expelled their own members without a proper investigation or trial; when they put political prisoners in secret prisons without trial, investigation, legal council, visitation or chance of parole; when they allowed themselves to become militarized; when they played a role in the enslavement of clones; and when they lied and withheld information from the Senate.

These are all examples of the Jedi council putting what *they* thought was right above the law and above their own initial role in the Republic. It’s them breaking their promise to the Republic. Palpatine kept pushing them into making terrible decisions, and to keep their position, they wielded, thus, they corrupted themselves. Ahsoka’s trial is a perfect example of this. All the evidence was circumstantial and they were not entirely sure she was guilty but because of the political pressure they were under, they expelled her and forced a 16 years old to face a potential death penalty by herself. That’s corruption. That’s putting your own interests above the interest of the greater good. It’s doing harm to keep your status.

Anakin’s relationship with Palpatine is another great example: it was forbidden for padawans to leave the Temple with a Jedi companion, especially to spend alone time with a political. But, the moment Palpatine used his influence, they wielded even though Palpatine had no legal claim over Anakin. But, because pleasing the Chancellor was more important than keeping tradition, the rules were broken. It is another example of them forsaking their own rules and tradition for political gain.

Want another example of the Jedi corrupting their purpose and believes in the movies, just look at how Yoda and Obi-wan handled the Vader situation. They lied to Luke to get him to kill his own father. Instead of showing compassion, they plotted to kill Vader without any sort of real attempt to reach him. if luke had listened to them the rebellion would’ve been destroyed and all hope would have been extinguished. That’s why Luke is the best Jedi, because he didn’t corrupt his purpose.

I know I’ve said this a million times already but NONE of that makes the Jedi the bad guys, or worth of extermination. It only serves to make them human.

It’s not that hard to see. I mean, we are living pretty chaotic and desperate times, people are angry and afraid and it seems more and more people are letting themselves be influenced by such times. fear makes people do desperate things. that’s what happened to the Jedi. they weren’t evil people who needed to die. They were just people, normal people who were pushed into a desperate situation and in their fear and despair, they made some wrong choices that led bad things.

PS: thanks <3

oh, and as for today's nz news (and you guys may have heard too due to the US firing a 'warning' rocket to show they'll help protect the pacific if china does move), we may be getting into eu-russia style tension soon because china is just like....casually pushing into the south pacific and trying to build bases on nations that they have funded millions to for years. they essentially spent a long time buying out nations (like the solomon islands) and making huge infrastructure investments in order to slyly extend their reach and what they consider their territory (despite what international law and those actual countries think) without instigating conflict. aka, soft power neo-colonialism. we recently realised how bad it got because we've caught them with large spy ships in AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND WATERS, our zones that they are not allowed to cross without permission, threatening other ships along maritime routes, and also cyberattacking our systems. they also bought an australian island. just...bought it. because south and indo-pacific island nations are poor, they're ripe for corruption via ccp economic backing of pro china leaders.

but now they're getting more and more bold and aus has denounced them, which has caused them to get hard tariffs, but nz has been too chicken until recently to say anything, and even now, the gov is on the fence, because 1. they make up a massive portion of our exports, tourists, and exchange students (most of whom are pretty nice, i mean like 8% of nz citizens are chinese, they moved here for more opportunities and freedom), so we'd lose massive amounts of money, and 2......our military is piddly. our navy is two cruddy ships. TWO. if china tries to reach into our territory (which is actually a lot further up than people think, a lot of both uninhabited and inhabited islands are under our jurisdiction. for the larger inhabited ones, they have their own governments, but rely on our supplies and protection), or even just other independent islands that see us as their closest friends and defenders, then we're potentially fucked. i mean, we have the us now showing that they'd aid (as well as japan), but like....AHHHHHHH.

oh! and they're potentially considering to invade taiwan as well, there are such strong warning signs that multiple governments are like "CHINA STOP, THAT'S A VERY BAD IDEA".

here in nz, we've always seen ourselves as kind of away from risk of being a warzone, i mean, almost all nuclear missiles literally can't even reach us, so our military is nothing, and we've never felt any danger since ww2 with japan. but now china is creeping up and we're just panicking, the government and military have no clue as to what to do. they only just released an unredacted (and so fully confronting china) report that identifies china as an extreme danger to our national interests for the first time. and probably like every other time we've spoken against them, they'll just casually threaten us :|

what the fuck is 2021.

Thess vs Centres of the Universe

Nope. Gotta vent about a thing.

A webcomic writer I used to respect ... well, I don’t follow his Twitter anymore but I follow an artist friend of his, who reblogged and agreed with the following sentiment: “Just remember how much better 2021 was than 2020″.

Keep in mind, dude’s Canadian. And as far as I’m aware, not stuck in Alberta. So I probably shouldn’t rage overly about the fact that dude clearly isn’t paying much attention to ... well, anything that isn’t in his immediate orbit. For him, I guess it’s “Well, we have a vaccine now, I could see family and friends over Christmas, and things are settling down, so 2021 was obviously better all the way around”.

Yeah. Tell that to the people in Afghanistan. Tell that to the women in Texas. Hell, say that to my face - me and everyone else who lives in this country. Because believe you me, on balance ... 2021 was way worse for most of us on this wet little ball of rock.

Since I don’t live in those other countries, I’ll talk about living in England. The fuel shortages. The food shortages - those are still ongoing, by the way. The rise in National Insurance contributions coming at the same time as the drop of the vital £20 per week Universal Credit ‘uplift’ and increases in the price of heating and electricity. Hell, the number of electricity providers that went under this year was fucking insane. Then consider the government mired in sleaze, forgiving themselves their trespasses and no one seeming to care because they’re more angry about being asked to wear masks and get life-saving vaccines. The bill that gives carte blanche for police to stop and search whoever they want for whatever reason they care to give, criminalises pretty much all protest and forces trans women into male prisons. The bill that showed the government giving up even the pretense that they’re not stealth-privatising the NHS. The discussion of the Human Rights Act needing to be scrapped because it’s been ripped wholesale from the EU, led by a man who has gone on record, on multiple occasions, as saying he doesn’t believe in human rights. The fact that this country is taking a line on refugees that Trump would have been proud of - the response to nearly 100 refugees dying on a small boat while trying to get to England was largely, “Well, they shouldn’t have come here and we’re looking at making sure that death is more of a risk if more people try it”. (Seriously, Priti Patel has been on about pushing refugees back with fucking gunboats.) All that on top of some of the highest Covid numbers in the world - and that’s hospitalisations and deaths, not just cases. Given how small our population is in comparison to countries that have fewer deaths? Oh, yeah, and also remember that the way the NHS and the pandemic have both been mishandled has led to people having to be treated in fucking parking lots.

Do not tell me that 2021 was better than 2020. Yeah, it was the year that Trump left office and that left a lot of people breathing easier. Yeah, I was even one of them. However, our country hasn’t got rid of its Trump yet and won’t for another few years - and that’s if they lose the next election. Hell, there’s worse than Johnson - smarter and crueller than Johnson - waiting in the wings if the party libertarians decide that they’ve gone as far as they can with the mussed buffoon in charge. So, y’know, given where the country in which I’m basically stuck living has been going this year? No. 2020 was bad. This is worse. Maybe what that webcomic writer is living is not worse. His experience does not speak for everyone, and he is not the centre of the universe.

I’m glad he had a somewhat better year this year. However, on a public forum, he’d probably be better off remembering that other people are living a different experience to him. Like, Texas’ horrible abortion law. The fall of Kabul. Brexit kicking off in force. A good chunk of the world has spent this year suffering in ways that made the lockdown look like chicken feed. Yeah, having dinner with my parentals this Christmas was nice. It doesn’t compensate for the hell I’m living now.

So ... yeah, seriously, I’m angry enough about basically everything, mostly because next year isn’t looking any better on my end. I’m planning on metaphorically slaughtering 2021 in the messiest ritual I can find and then putting its head on a spike on the battlements as a warning to 2022.

...Happy New Year, I guess.

📷 Michael Yon@MichaelYon 📷4 hours ago

Afghanistan SITREP From sourceOCC, 12:00 AMWestern nations race to complete Afghan evacuation as deadline loomsWestern nations rushed to complete the evacuation of thousands of people from Afghanistan on Wednesday as the Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops drew closer with no sign that the country's new Taliban rulers might allow an extension.In one of the biggest such airlifts ever, the United States and its allies have evacuated more than 70,000 people, including their citizens, NATO personnel and Afghans at risk, since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban swept into the capital Kabul to bring to an end a 20-year foreign military presence.U.S. President Joe Biden said U.S. troops in Afghanistan faced mounting danger and aid agencies warned of an impending humanitarian crisis for the population left behind.Biden said they were on pace to meet the deadline, set under an agreement struck with the Islamist group last year to end America's longest war."The sooner we can finish, the better," Biden said on Tuesday. "Each day of operations brings added risk to our troops."Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was growing concern about the risk of suicide bombings by Islamic State at the airport.British foreign minister Dominic Raab said the deadline for evacuating people was up to the last minute of the month.Tens of thousands of Afghans fearing persecution have thronged Kabul's airport since the Taliban takeover, the lucky ones securing seats on flights.Many people milled about outside the airport - where soldiers from the United States, Britain and other nations were trying to maintain order amid the dust and heat - hoping to get out.They carried bags and suitcases stuffed with possessions, and waved documents at soldiers in the hope of gaining entry. One man, standing knee-deep in a flooded ditch, passed a child to man above."I learned from an email from London that the Americans are taking people out, that's why I've come so I can go abroad," said one man, Aizaz Ullah.While the focus is now on those trying to flee, the risk of starvation, disease and persecution is rising for the rest of the population, aid agencies say.1/4A U.S. Marine with the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-Central Command (SPMAGTF-CR-CC) escorts a child to his family during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan,"There's a perfect storm coming because of several years of drought, conflict, economic deterioration, compounded by COVID," David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, told Reuters in Doha, calling for the international community to donate $200 million in food aid."The number of people marching towards starvation has spiked to now 14 million."The EU said this week it was planning to quadruple aid and was seeking coordination with the United Nations on delivery as well as safety guarantees on the ground.The U.N. human rights chief said she had received credible reports of serious violations by the Taliban, including "summary executions" of civilians and Afghan security forces who had surrendered. The Taliban have said they will investigate reports of atrocities.The Taliban's 1996-2001 rule was marked by harsh sharia law, with many political rights and basic freedoms curtailed and women severely oppressed. Afghanistan was also a hub for anti-Western militants, and Washington, London and others fear it might become so again.LAND ROUTESA NATO country diplomat in Kabul, who declined to be identified, said several international aid groups were desperate to get Afghan staff out and neighbouring countries should open their land borders to allow more people to leave."Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan should be pulling out far more people using either air or land routes. It's vital air and land routes are used at a very fast pace," the diplomat told Reuters.The Taliban said all foreign evacuations must be completed by Aug. 31, and asked the United States to stop urging talented Afghans to leave, while also trying to

persuade people at the airport to go home, saying they had nothing to fear."Foreign troops should withdraw by the deadline. It will pave the way for resumption of civilian flights," Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter."People with legal documents can travel through commercial flights after Aug. 31."The Dutch government, echoing some other governments, said it was all but certain that many people eligible for asylum would not be taken out in time.Dutch troops had managed to get more than 100 people to Kabul airport, Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag said, but hundreds of others risked being left behind.The U.S.-backed government collapsed as the United States and its allies withdrew troops two decades after they ousted the Taliban in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda, whose leaders had found safe haven in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.Taliban leaders have begun talks on forming a government.OCC, 1:45 AMWhat Will the Taliban Do With Their New US Weapons?With its quick seizure of power, the Taliban also acquired U.S. military equipment left behind by the withdrawal or abandoned by Afghan forces.What Will the Taliban Do With Their New US Weapons? Capturing the enemy’s weapons has been a standard guerrilla tactic for centuries. The American Army could not have succeeded against King George III without seizing the king’s food and armaments. It is one thing to capture weapons and other materiel; it is another to be given the enemy’s gear on a silver platte In the images of the Taliban fighters flooding the streets of Kabul, one detail attracts attention: the lack of the ubiquitous Kalashnikov. Few Taliban appearing now carry the signature weapon of insurgent fighters, the AK-47, and its countless variants from the handmade PakistaniA Taliban fighter stands guard at a checkpoint in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, August 22, 2021.Capturing the enemy’s weapons has been a standard guerrilla tactic for centuries. The American Army could not have succeeded against King George III without seizing the king’s food and armaments. It is one thing to capture weapons and other material; it is another to be given the enemy’s gear on a silver platter. In the images of the Taliban fighters flooding the streets of Kabul, one detail attracts attention: the lack of the ubiquitous Kalashnikov. Few Taliban appearing now carry the signature weapon of insurgent fighters, the AK-47, and its countless variants from the handmade Pakistani versions to the updated Russian AK-19. Most of the Taliban in Kabul’s street seems to prefer American M4 carbines and M16 rifles with their many gadgets attached, from expensive optics to laser sights and flashlights, an uncommon picture in contrast to just a few weeks earlier. The answer to the question concerning the source of these small arms is straightforward: war looting. Another and more important question needs an answer: The fate of the extensive military materiel that the U.S. left behind during its withdrawal or that which was in the hands of the Afghan forces that melted so quickly away as the Taliban advanced. As a landlocked country, Afghanistan makes moving military materiel back to the U.S. neither an easy nor an economical endeavor. Much was removed anyway, and much handed over to Afghan government forces. What couldn’t be taken back, was left. Blowing up in situ large quantities of war materiel is cheaper than shipping it out of Afghanistan. Still, that option creates toxic legacies that would affect the local population for a long time, as happened in Iraq. Nevertheless, lack of time and unreasonable expectations on the survivability of the Afghan security forces caught the Pentagon by surprise. According to Joshua Reno, author of “Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness,” recirculating weapons in the places a military force leaves when the battle is over will augment the risks that small arms or other weapons are going to fuel and intensify civil war or instability. According

to a top Pentagon logistics specialist, there is no clear record of the quantity and quality of military equipment left behind. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated that the Taliban probably would not give such materiel back to the U.S. at the airport, adding a note of farce to an already disastrous situation. One of the immediate conclusions drawn from the less-than-optimal U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan is how the U.S. can minimize the chances of future disasters stemming out of the Taliban’s use and trade of abandoned U.S. and Afghan military materiel. U.S. military and intelligence had already walked that path in the 1990s, after the anti-Soviet mujahedeen pushed out the Soviet Union. The task at that time was to recover Stingers, highly sophisticated portable surface to air missiles. In order to have a chance against the Soviet Union’s heavily armed attack helicopter Mil Mi-24, essentially a flying tank, the U.S. had equipped the mujahedeen with Stingers in the 1980s. As soon as the war ended with the Soviet defeat, the possibility of those Stingers being employed for terrorist attacks or falling into hostile government hands ignited a hunt to get the portable missiles back. The U.S. intelligence community scrambled to buy them back, allegedly at $100,000 per unit, or obtain the portable missiles by any means. Steve Coll in his acclaimed book “Ghost Wars,” mentioned that when the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, an estimated 600 of the 2,300 Stingers provided by the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan war remained unaccounted for. Tehran was competing in the same race to acquire as many of the wayward Stingers as possible. Providentially, the threat of a terrorist using a Stinger to shoot down an American passenger plane did not materialize, nor did the Taliban develop a successful insurgent anti-aircraft campaign with the leftovers. And yes, history repeats itself. Today’s quantity and quality of weapons that the Taliban are hoarding since their lightning advance will arguably have unintended negative consequences far from Afghan borders. Sales to hostile governments and on the black market may provide additional revenue to the Taliban and increase uncertainty and instability not only in Central Asia but beyond. Militant organizations such as the Haqqani network, already in Kabul, possess the capability to smuggle weapons from Afghanistan to the Middle East, the African continent, and even to Southeast Asia. Possible scenarios range from small arms used to foster instability in the region or night vision goggles and military-grade communication equipment reaching other militant groups, including the Islamic State. More significant items now in the hands of the Taliban, such as helicopters, can neither be maintained nor flown due to a lack of Taliban pilots and trained maintenance crews. The materiel, however, could be handed over to countries interested in sensitive U.S. technology, and that list is not short. The war looting includes armored Humvees, aircraft, and attack helicopters, as well as military scout drones. Most of the Afghan Air Force’s aircraft were used by Afghan pilots to escape into neighboring Central Asian countries as Kabul fell, but the number still parked on Afghan airfields is unknown. The fall of Kabul, predictably, has been compared with the fall of Saigon. Most of the analogies point to helicopters leaving the roof of the American Embassy. However, another analogy worth referencing is related to the North Vietnamese political commissars’ scrambling to reach the ARVN and South Vietnamese police’s archives to locate the list of intelligence officials and collaborators. In an era of Big Data and databases stored in the cloud, there is a sudden realization that deleting data from the servers and smashing hard drives is not a bulletproof solution. Moreover, there are severe concerns that hundreds of military biometric devices, abandoned in U.S. bases, left a digital breadcrumb trail that the Taliban will use to locate and target former security officials and government supporters.

Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, in short HIIDE, devices are meant to digitally identify friends from foes via a biometric reading, against databases with fingerprints, iris scans and distinctive facial features. Similarly, social media users in Kabul left a digital trail not only on their mobile phones but also on the internet. It’s now digital proof that can be used against them when the Taliban feels confident of their grip on power and local media control. Discounting the Taliban’s capabilities in accessing actionable digital intelligence could be a mistake. Besides the probable support that the Taliban could receive from foreign intelligence services, it is not wise to disparage the ingenuity of militant groups in harnessing low-tech schemes to counter high-tech weaponry. An example is provided by the case of pro-Iranian militants in Iraq using $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to monitor the unblinking eyes of U.S. drones. The threat of insurgents intercepting drone video feeds has been patched with encrypted communication; however, examples of low-tech tactical efficiencies abound. Since a decade ago, the Taliban have been using off-the-shelf commercial drones to shoot propaganda films and provide aerial scouting and to guide kamikaze flying bombs. This is a playbook borrowed by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The recent Taliban capture of Boeing ScanEagle drones, developed for surveillance, could add a new capability to the fighters’ growing arsenal. Also, their tactical use could evolve into alternative and deadly options. From a propaganda perspective, the videos of Taliban fighters parading in Afghan cities with their U.S. war trophies increase the criticism of the Biden administration’s withdrawal decision. Although it remains unclear how the Taliban will govern Afghanistan, the propaganda value of their white flags waving in the wind from the top of U.S.-made Humvees inspires other jihadist and radical Islamist groups to imitate the Taliban’s actions. The perception of augmented combat capabilities provided by the war looting could also push Central Asian countries to strengthen their bilateral security ties with Moscow and Beijing, no matter what, in the face of a Taliban with modern equipment. Sun Tzu, the revered author of the “Art of War,” quoted shoulder to shoulder with von Clausewitz in contemporary Western military PowerPoint presentations, states that the golden rule is to know your enemy. Probably 20 years were not enough.OCC, 2:55 AM Biden, Stoltenberg

Facebook vs Australia

There's an old Irish joke whose punchline goes, "If you want to get there, I wouldn't start from here." That's basically how I feel about the so-called Australian "link tax" and Facebook's retaliation.

Let's start with the fact that it's not a link tax - it's a form of arbitrated collective bargaining that's meant to correct an imbalance in negotiating power created by monopolization.

The problem that the system is supposed to ameliorate is that the ad-tech platforms cheat. They lie about the reach of their ads. They lie about the performance of their ads. They rig markets so they can price-gouge. They collude to rig prices.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3500919

They design their systems so publishers leak intelligence to them, then they exploit that leakage to gouge the publishers further. It hurts advertisers, readers and publishers, and it's the result of an illegal, collusive, corrupt ad-tech duopoly.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

The existence of an advertising duopoly, meanwhile, is the result of lax antitrust enforcement. Facebook and Google were permitted to execute a long string of anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions, producing the hyper-concentrated market we see today.

The obvious remedy to this situation is to break up the monopolies, but that is off the table (for now). 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy says that monopolies are efficient and breakups don't work, so we're left yanking on other policy levers.

For example, ad-tech pioneered a long, accelerating trend to surveillance. Their reach meant they could gather data on nearly everything that happened online (Facebook Like buttons, Google Analytics). Their capital meant they could strangle privacy laws in the cradle.

Eventually this became too much to bear. The EU passed the GDPR - but without breakups or other explicit antimonopoly measures. The result was that FB/Goog had to look down the back of the sofa for change to pay for compliance.

Meanwhile smaller, EU-based competitors (who were much dirtier than FB/Goog because they needed to behave worse to be economically viable in the cracks left by the duopoly) were driven out of business, handing even more market-power to Googbook.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3477686

Which brings me back to Australia. It's undeniable that publishers get ripped off by Googbook. Their ad marketplaces are frauds from top to bottom: fake metrics for fake users seeing fake ads, run on bid-rigging and self-dealing.

Publishers that complain about this get slammed: Googbook uses the fact that they have created anticompetitive, vertically integrated cartels to tie a willingness to submit to crooked ad payments to traffic.

That means that publishers who make a stink about being ripped off - or who take measures to prevent leakage of their internal business data - have their traffic switched off. This is possible because regulators permitted vertical mergers between search/social and ad-tech.

This vertical integration is the source of confusion about whether this is a link-tax. The goal of the regulation is to clean up the ad markets, but Googbook use links as a stick to beat up publishers when they don't submit to corrupt ad practices, so links get implicated.

But the regulation's primary levers are transparency: it forces Googbook to disclose which data it harvests from publishers and how it uses it; it forces Googbook to disclose algorithmic changes that will result in significant changes to ad performance.

Just as importantly, it forbids Googbook from using their search/social business to retaliate against publishers who object to bad practices in their ad-tech units.

At Matt Stoller writes, the idea "is to mimic a healthy market, where there is transparency of data and a robust set of buyers and sellers instead of a few dominant platforms."

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/facecrook-dealing-with-a-global-menace

The hope/wish is that all this transparency and guaranteed of non-retaliation might means Googbook ending their market corruption so publishers will get a fair price for their ad-inventory. And if they don't, there's an arbitrator who hears both sides and sets prices.

This is how collective bargaining often works - when you have one side of a deal who has all the power (like a big employer) and a diffuse set of actors who lack power (like workers), an arbitrator hears both sides and hands down a deal that's meant to be fairer.

But of course, this isn't a negotiation between workers and employers: it's a bargain between a cartel of news organizations and a search duopoly. That's not ideal! For starters, it means that the government gets to decide who is a "news organization."

That's *ripe* for abuse. News organizations are expected to report on the government *and* the government gets to decide whether they are entitled to participate in collective bargaining with Googbook, which could mean the difference between financial viability and bankruptcy.

Remember, one of the problems this system is supposed to resolve is powerful entities (Googbook) using their power to punish news organizations for complaining about their behavior - governments were in that game long before Googbook came into existence.

And there's another problem: the structure of the Australian news market, which is yet another highly concentrated industry, dominated by a rapacious billionaire who uses his power to manipulate politics: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch conquered Australian media the same way Googbook conquered the net: through anticompetitive conduct that was waved through by collusive regulators who never met a monopoly they didn't view as efficient.

It's not wrong to say that the only reason this regulation got off the drawing-board is that Murdoch viewed it as a way to shift a few balance-points from Big Tech's side of the ledger to Big Media's side.

Can't we - journalists, readers - hope for something better than being dominated by a different set of giants and praying that the new boss drops a few more crumbs than the old boss?

Goddamned right. The Australian reg tries to get a fair shake for the independent press as well as the Murdoch press, setting out some objective criteria for who is entitled to enter the bargaining unit.

But the fact is that monopolies reproduce themselves. As David Dayen describes in MONOPOLIZED, when a monopoly forms, all the other participants in the supply chain have to monopolize or die.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Big Pharma gets monopolized and squeezes hospitals. Hospitals monopolize to fight back and squeeze insurers. Insurers monopolize and squeeze...us. We're the only ones who don't get to organize to push back.

The people's countermonopolistic entity is the democratic state.

The state's job is to prevent monopolies from forming, and it has failed to do that job for 40 years. Now it's stuck trying to fix the effects of monopoly without fixing monopolies themselves.

40 years ago, we got rid of the idea of fighting monopolies because they corrupted our governments and working lives - we replaced it with the neoliberal idea of "consumer welfare," which held that only "bad" monopolies should face enforcement.

What's a bad monopoly? It's when companies conspire to raise prices. That's why the US government clobbered the Big Six publishers when they leaned on Amazon to stop engaging in predatory ebook pricing.

But while the "consumer welfare" monopoly enforcement is aggressive when two or more companies collude to set prices, it has n*o problem* if those companies merge with one another and then do exactly the same thing.

When the CEOs of two companies conspire to set prices, it's illegal. When they merge their companies and engage in the same conspiracy, it's not. Collective bargaining is out, monopolization is in. That's why the Big Six publishers are now the Big Four.

"If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." The highly monopolized news sector is mainly controlled by extremist billionaires and private-equity looters. The principal beneficiaries the Australian regulation are part of the problem.

That doesn't change the fact that Googbook are a corrupt, collusive duopoly. It also doesn't change the fact that there are a *bunch* of indie news-outlets that got to ride on Murdoch's coat-tails in this regulation.

As with the GDPR, the question to ask is whether this will strengthen or weaken monopolists, and there, I think, is some cause for hope. Forcing Googbook to reveal their data-collection and algorithmic practices and prohibiting retaliation is a solid anti-monopoly move.

Likewise, establishing a precedent for inter-industry collective bargaining is a useful harm-reduction measure for dealing with a monopolized market while we muster political will for breakups. It sure beats the alternative of merging every industry into its own monopoly.

It's a confusing issue. Link-taxes are bullshit and they're *pro*-monopolistic, since big companies can afford them and little ones can't. But this isn't a link tax - the only reason it seems like one is because links are the stick that Googbook beats its supply-chain with.

Image: IPWAI (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Australian_newsagency_Pinewood.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

A Civil Disagreement Chapter 1

The First Compromise

The voices in this chapter are the Territories of Missouri and Arkansas, along with the Unorganized territory.

United States' POV

"We can't let another slave state into the Union! If Missouri is going to become a state, it needs restrictions on slavery!" James Tallmadge Jr., a senator from New York argued. I sighed.

'Or he needs slavery because Missouri relies heavily on it.'

This was the same argument as always. Slavery or not. Ever since the slave trade was banned and states started banning slavery, things have gotten more tense between the states, and not just on a political scale. This issue had to be resolved, which meant that the two sides needed to stop being stubborn.

And if I knew my people that was never going to happen. They didn't know how to back down. It was a great quality in certain situations. And this wasn't one of those situations. Why did everything always have to be so divided?

"If we do that, then the free states will gain a majority in Congress. I refuse to let that happen." A senator from Mississippi argued.

'I agree. There must be a balance.'

"If Missouri's a slave state then we'll have the same situation!" A senator from Massachusetts argued back. I sighed. Both sides raised a fair point. Keeping balance between the free and slave states was important. Without balance the argument over slavery was just going to get worse.

Congress continued to argue as DC and I tried to meditate the argument. I was glad that the states had decided to keep out of this meeting. The arguing was bad enough and they didn't need to make it worse. After a another hour of back and forth arguing Congress ended for the day and me and DC got ready to leave.

"I swear the Senate can be worse than my siblings." DC muttered as she walked out of the room, her face, a dulled version of my flag, alight with frustration. I smiled and laughed.

"They're just stubborn. We'll come to a solution eventually. Besides, I prefer the arguing. It shows people care about what happens in the government." I told her. It was better when they got a voice. I didn't want to be like British Empire, and smother their voices.

'Trust their voices and trust ours. We are you, and will help you.'

'Just make Missouri a slave state and get this mess over with.'

"You may prefer it, but by god can it be annoying. At least the states listen to me. The senators always look down on me because I'm female." DC said. I sighed.

'D's more capable than every Senator there. They're all just idiots.'

Unfortunately, DC was right. While DC had been working with Congress since her birth, the Congressmen didn't always take her opinion into account, due to her gender.  It makes me wish she had been born a man. The she would get the respect she'd deserves during Congress meetings. DC and I made our back to our home in the countryhumans. We walked into our house still discussing ways to allow for Missouri's statehood.

"Is Missouri a state yet?" Tennessee asked from where she was sitting with the newest state, Alabama. Both of their faces were their state seals. I shook my head, causing Tennessee to sigh.

'I wish. This is taking forever can't they just come to a decision already?'

'I wish Congress worked that way, but you know it doesn't.'

"Seriously? Can't they just admit Missouri so we can be done with this whole thing. A free state will be admitted eventually. The balance won't be off for that long." South Carolina said, his face showing his seal. I always found it odd that the states got their seals instead of a dulled version of my flag, but I certainly was glad for it.

I would have to live in a house where 23 people had the exact same face as me. All the states had their seals instead of my flag, which was nice. Aside from Ohio, who still hadn't created a state seal and Vermont, who had his own flag. Louisiana walked into the room, looked at the expression on South Carolina's and Tennessee's faces.

"No pass? Unis, Père, pourquoi devez-vous rendre votre gouvernement si compliqué? Rien n'est fait dans un laps de temps raisonnable." (United, Father, why must you make your government so complicated? Nothing gets done in a reasonable amount of time.) She said. Despite being part of my country for eight years, Louisiana still preferred her mother's language of French, and had not made any large attempts to learn English.

"Vous savez pourquoi c'est compliqué. Je suis un syndicat qui essaie d'obtenir une représentation égale au gouvernement. Cela complique les choses." (You know why it's complicated. I'm a union who is trying for equal representation in the government. It makes things complicated.) I told Louisiana. She sighed.

"C'est juste différent de ce à quoi j'ai toujours eu à faire face, même si ce n'est pas une mauvaise chose. J'aime avoir une voix." (It's just different than what I've always had to deal with, although that's not a bad thing. I enjoy having a voice.) She responded.

"Please clear this up before the Florida's officially join because of they start pushing for statehood and becoming a slave state, Congress is going to lose their minds." Georgia said as she and Massachusetts walked into the room.

"Agreed." I muttered, before Massachusetts spoke up.

"Father!" He said, holding out some papers to me.

"Hello Massachusetts. What's this?" I asked. Massachusetts smiled.

"The District of Maine wants to become it own state. This could help your problem with the Territory of Missouri's statehood. Missouri become a slave state, and Maine can become a free state." Massachusetts said. I stared at him.

'I'm amazed. That's actually not a bad idea.'

I was slightly shocked by what I just though. I shouldn't think that about Massachusetts or any of my children. Why was that thought there? I wasn't turning into British Empire, right? Massachusetts has had good ideas before. Just because he's stubborn and has anger issues doesn't mean he's not smart.

'He's smart. And also just like you.'

"Oh thank god. If this helps end the arguing over the balance of free and slave states in the Union then I'm all in." DC said. I nodded in agreement. The sooner we could get this argument out of Congress the better.

"We'll bring it up to Congress tomorrow. Thank you Massachusetts." I told him, before heading off to be. Hopefully with this proposal we could finally put the argument of the proper balance of states to rest. For now at least.

——————————————————-

The next day DC and I made our way back to the Capital building, ready to propose Massachusetts' plan.

"I hope this works. I don't want to be stuck in the Senate debating this issue forever." DC said. I nodded in agreement.

"Agreed. And this plan can be applied to future situations as well. We let in a free state and a slave state in pairs to try and avoid arguments about how its going to upset the balance in my country." I told DC.

'Or Congress will remain stubborn idiots and this problem never gets solved.'

'They're Americans. Our thing is being stubborn idiots.'

I pushed my thoughts away. While they brought up good points, that wasn't something I wanted to be focusing on today. I was here to present Massachusetts' plan and hopefully, finally, put this problem to rest, once and for all.

"Here to make another claim about how slavery needs to be illegal in the Union?" A souther senator asked a northern one as we walked into the Senate. The northern senator scowled while DC sighed.

"And so it begins." She muttered as we walked into the room.

"United! Glad you're here. Now tell us, which side are you on?" A senator called from somewhere in the room.

"The side that is able to create a compromise, which I actually have. Well, Massachusetts helped create it. The District of Maine wants to become its own state, so he proposed that we admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. Then there will be no upset in the balance between free and slave states." I announced to Congress.

"Well...that seems like a fair trade off, but I have some questions. What about the other American Territories? Will slavery be legal there too?" A senator questioned.

'Depends on the need of the territory. That's why there are free and slave states after all.'

"That's not something we worked out. This was jus the basic outline of a compromise for Missouri's statehood." DC explained. A northern senator scoffed.

"Of course a girl wouldn't plan ahead. Why is she even allowed in the Senate? She should be caring for the state while United does the actual work." He muttered

"DC is allowed in the Senate because she is the capital and had more experience than you. Her gender doesn't make her any less capable." I told him. The senator's eyes widened after I said that. Clearly he wasn't expecting to be overhead.

"I apologize." He said, "I'm just frustrated by the lack of results."

I raised an eyebrow at the empty sounding promise, but put it out of my mind. I had more important things to deal with, and I wasn't going to waste today in Congress arguing with a senator over how capable my daughter was. I had done that before, and all it did was prove that that argument was a waste of time.

"Slavery should be allowed in the territories. It's legal by federal law, and therefore should be allowed in the territories. If they really don't want slavery, they can push for statehood as a free state." A senator argued.

'He makes a good point. If slavery becomes illegal in the territories someone will most likely argue that it means slavery is illegal in the entire Union.'

"If we were to use this compromise, than what would be the terms? We have the outline, but now we need to figure out the specifics." Another senator argued.

"So we forget about the territories?" The same senator that wanted slavery in the territories said.

"No. The issue of slavery in the territories will be settled but whatever compromise you are able to come up with." DC said. The senator nodded.

"Well. Let's create this compromise." He said. The Senate immediately erupted into debate.

'Even with a compromise proposed their arguing'

'But at least we're getting somewhere now.'

And we were getting somewhere. It took a few more weeks of debate and compromise, but eventually the Missouri Compromise had been put together. Along with some...questionable... concerns by northern senators.

"The admission of another slave state will increase southern power. The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise gives southerners more seats in the House than they would have had if the number was based on the free population alone. Moreover, since each state had two Senate seats, Missouri's admission as a slave state will result in more southern than northern senators." A northern senator told me once.

"Yes, I know that, the southern states are bigger and can hold a larger population. They were going to overtake the north in the House eventually." I responded. The senator looked shocked.

"It's the South!" He said.

"And it's also a part of my country. Regardless of whether you believe in their beliefs or not, they're here, and are going to stay as a part of my country." I told him, ending they conversation. That conversation still bothered me. The North seemed to be a bit paranoid about giving the South more power.

But this was just a situation of conflicting ideas. It would die down eventually.

Remember your Revolution. You know what conflicting ideas can lead to.

I pushed that thought out of my head. We had a compromise. We had a new slave state and a new free state. We had the Missouri Compromise Line. Things were going to turn out fine. I was being overly paranoid.

Things were going to be fine. It was just an argument in Congress about slavery. We've been having those since before I declared independence. This situation wasn't new.

So why did this compromise make me feel so uneasy?

“A long thread about my personal experiences during this election dealing with my Labour voting family deciding to out themselves as casual racists by voting Tory / Brexit Party in traditional Labour "Red Wall" heartlands

I come from a genuine working class family .

Grandparents were miners and domestic cleaning staff

Dad was butcher , mum was a cleaner and when she remarried after their divorce she married a miner .

I grew up in a two up two down terrace house that my parents rented from the local Co-op society and then moved into a council house in Kendray (Barnsley) when my mum remarried .

One grandad was a NUM union rep ( at Woolley Colliery alongside Scargill )

Other grandad was a NUPE union rep .

Mum and her sister were both UNISON union reps .

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that we were a proper Labour supporting family , cut us in half and we would have Labour running through us like a stick of Blackpool rock .

And yet in this election I was the only one still voting Labour, in traditional "Red Wall" Lab areas.

I'm in Sheffield but my family is split across the Barnsley area, some in Dan Jarvis' constituency, some in Steph Peacocks and some in the Penistone area that's just turned Tory.

How the hell did this happen ?

Why did my mum and step-dad and my Dad and step-mum all vote Brexit Party ?

Why did my brother and his wife and my aunt and uncle both vote Tory ?

They're not stupid people , my step-mum is a nurse and educated to degree level , my brother an accountant and educated to degree level and my sister-in-law a teacher educated to degree level .

We all lived through Thatchers annihilation of our communities when she went after the unions and destroyed Barnsley after and during the Miners strike .

My step-dad lost his job when Woolley Colliery was closed and never worked again .

So how the hell did they all come to abandon Labour and vote for parties whose policies are the complete antithesis of their own needs and aspirations ??

To answer that you've got to look further back than just this last few weeks or months or the last couple of years .

You've got to look a lot further back .

Before the Miners strike everyone I knew lived and worked in Barnsley , my grandparents jobs were in Barnsley , my parents jobs were in Barnsley , my aunt's and uncle's all worked in Barnsley as it seemed did all my friends families.

The aftermath of the strike changed that .

Most people were employed at the Pits or in industry connected to the Pits or in the service industries like retail , pubs etc where the Miners spent their wages.

When those wages went then so did the local economy.

New Labour in 1997 gave people hope of a change but all they brought to the area were low paid minimum wage jobs to replace high paid skilled industrial jobs .

People thought that New Labour when they got in would regenerate and revitalize these traditional working class Lab heartlands.

They didn't.

Yes we got a far better funded NHS and Sure Start etc.

But areas like Barnsley just got left behind , their Labour votes taken for granted.

Life had changed .

Only my mum still worked in Barnsley .

I moved to Sheffield because of work . My dad ended up in Stoke were he met my step-mum before they returned to Barnsley .

My brother , his wife and most other family members worked in other nearby towns and cities , even though they still lived in Barnsley .

Some like my Step-dad and aunt and uncle relied on the benefits system to see them through to retirement age .

Then along came the banking crisis , followed by the high street crisis that saw the likes of Woolworths bite the dust .

Quickly followed by a Tory & Lib Dem government pushing their disastrous Austerity policies.

Areas like Barnsley took another hammering .

Jobs lost in the local economy which had never recovered from Thatcher thanks to New Labours indifference.

Cuts to essential council services and cuts to the NHS locally meaning longer waiting lists and crowded doctors waiting rooms .

And in amongst all this comes Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson .

The poisonous bastards gave everyone in areas like Barnsley exactly what the needed , exactly what they wanted .......

Someone to blame.

Immigrants .

Immigrants let into this country by the EU.

Immigrants taking our jobs .

Immigrants using our NHS

Immigrants taking our council houses

Immigrants filling up our doctors waiting rooms

You see it couldn't just be the Tory's fault that things were rough because it hadn't gotten any better whilst Labour was in power.

So it has to be someone else's fault .

So Farage and Johnson must be correct when they blame immigrants and tells us all politicians are the same

Both narratives that have been pushed relentlessly by Farage , Vote Leave and Johnson

Farage and Johnson must be correct if the news on the telly says the same thing and asks them to come on all the time to talk about it .

Farage and Johnson must be correct if the newspapers all print the same stories blaming immigrants for taking our jobs and our houses and clogging up our NHS .

And Farage and Johnson must be correct if everyone on Facebook is posting the same Memes especially if greasy Brenda from the local chippy is posting it cos she obviously knows here stuff !!!!

Under Thatcher we knew who to blame , the Tory's.

But under Blair who did you blame for life getting no better because of New Labours indifference ??

The politicians , both sides because they are all the same , none of them give a stuff about us .

Under austerity who do we blame ?

Not the Tory's cos they've told us that we are all in this together and there is no other way , we have to all make sacrifices .

So we blame the immigrants , the ones that the EU are forcing us to take .

And by default because we tend to class anyone who's different to us as a potential immigrant then we blame any and all ethnic minorities

All of this whipped up to a frenzy since 2016 by the likes of Farage , Vote Leave , Tommy Robinson , Katie Hopkins , Hartley-Brewer , Rod Liddle and Boris Johnson and his Tory cohorts.

Aided and abetted by the usual cast of idiots at the BBC , ITV and Sky .

Sadly I watched this unfold with my own family over the last 3-4 years and didn't do anything like enough to try and counter it

I ignored the initial flurry of anti EU comments and social media posts partly because I was voting leave too, albeit for completely different reasons

I spent far too long just telling them to stop spouting racist bollocks when they moaned about immigrants instead of actually sitting down and explaining why the stuff they were reading , watching and sharing was wrong and factually false .

I ignored the anti Corbyn comments because I just assumed that when it came around to election time they would just hold their noses and vote Labour as we had all done for years before regardless of the leaders popularity , just as they all had in 2017

I finally realised I hadn't done enough when the election campaign kicked in .

I only work part time now and that's from home so I'd decided to get fully involved in the campaign both on the ground locally and on social media .

Boy did I get the shock of my life when I started posting stuff about Labours plans and manifesto on Facebook .

I got absolutely frigging mullered ...........

by my own family members and friends.

My posts were full of comments from them with arguments and rhetoric that had been drummed into them by Farage and Johnson over the last few years .

My timeline was full of anti Labour Memes .

It got that bad that I ended up deleting my Facebook account .

Most of the family aren't speaking to me and Boxing day this year when we traditionally all meet up at my mum's is going to be an absolute nightmare .

Then you realise it's not just yourself and your own family thats experiencing this .

You speak to a friend in Rotherham and find they've had the exact same experiences.

You get a call from your oldest son in the armed forces to tell you that he's up on a charge after getting into a scuffle with some of his colleagues after being called a muslim loving terrorist supporting traitor just for sharing some Labour stuff on social media

Living in Sheffield possibly led to me being a little insulated from Labours problems .

It's a multi cultural city and apart from the usual quota of nobheads and Tommy Robinson types we all live side by side with few serious problems.

Brexit didn't seem to be as big an issue inside the city as it did in the out-laying towns .

But in fairness things never got as desperate or demoralizing in the cities as they did in the town's and old industrial area's

We weren't looking quite as hard for someone to blame

Corbyn had a definite image problem on the doorsteps .

He had a massive target on his back and there's no denying that the media were able to hit it's bullseye with alarming regularity

But this hadn't been insurmountable during the 2017 election even in areas like Barnsley and Rotherham.

And I genuinely believe that had Jeremy Corbyn been just as intolerant towards immigrants and ethnic minorities as the Tory's were we would have had a very different result.

After all the country happily elected an absolute racist bigot instead of Corbyn

That's an absolutely disgraceful situation to find ourselves in especially when you also come to the realisation that members of your own family voted this way .

How do Labour get voters like my family back ???

More to the point do we actually want them back ???

I'm not sure I want to be related to my own family members at the moment because of their willingness to blame immigration and ethnic minorities for all our ills .

And yes we may have had the policies that would have addressed the problems that led to them voting for the Tory's / Brexit Party but you can't enact those policies if you don't get into government in the first place .

Would a different leader have made a difference to these voters ??

Yes to some of them .

Would a different Brexit policy have made a difference .

Definitely , to most of them

Did they vote this way because they're racist ???

Who genuinely can say ???

I hope that for the ones related to myself that it isn't a deep seated racism , rather just a reaction to a constant and unrelenting malign influence of the mainstream media , targeted Facebook memes and snake oil salesmen like Farage , Johnson and Cummings .

But I guess we won't know that until 2024 when we go to the polls once more , with a different leader , with Brexit no longer an issue and with the realisation that even outside of the EU nothing has changed in Barnsley and similar towns under this bastard of a Tory government”

Link below:

Brexit: An Unwinnable War

How do you stage a coup? You start a war. You fan its flames, until it grows out of control. You make it so that it’s impossible for the moderates to win, showing them as out of their depth, needing a stronger, unconventional hand to sort the mess out. Then you step in, and find that you can get away with breaking all the rules...

Act 1 - Project Fear

The spark was the slow part. There had always been rumblings of discontent around the UK’s place in Europe, dating right back to our accession to the European Community in 1972, and intensifying since the project formally became a political European Union in 1993. 

There had been a referendum in 1975, won by a 67.2% vote to remain, but the question was raised again after the 1993 Maastricht Treaty. No referendum was needed for the government to sign up, but neighbours Ireland and France held one to confirm the decision, and many in the UK thought they deserved the same. That year saw the birth of a number of protest parties, the most successful of which, UKIP, continues to pressure for ‘Brexit’ today.

After years of pressure from UKIP and the sizable Eurosceptic wing of his own Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron finally gave into their demands. In 2016, a referendum was held, with one simple question: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? No details were provided as to what the latter option would look like. That was down to the campaigns to provide.

It turned out that it was actually many options hidden within one. Every leaver had their own idea of what shape Brexit would come in. Many talked about the Norway model, a country with full access to single market, but which is obliged to make a financial contribution, accept most EU laws, and which has free movement with the rest of the EU. Others suggested a Swiss model, part of the EFTA but not the EEA, making a smaller financial contribution to access specific areas of trade, and again with free movement. 

Still others spoke about Turkey, with no membership of the EEA/EFTA but its own customs union with the EU, to avoid the need to impose tariffs on exports. They were a dozen combinations available. What was certain was that there would be some sort of deal, and it would be quick and painless to negotiate. What was clear was that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market” as Daniel Hannan, known as the Godfather of Brexit and a major push behind it, had said the year before. I have saved a full raft of quotes from other Leave leaders for Act 2, below.

On 26 June, senior Leave campaigner and PM hopeful Boris Johnson wrote an article confirming that the UK would remain part of the single market. In government and parliament, discussing how to implement Brexit, the main debate was between full access to the single market or only a customs union. There was no mention of crashing out with no deal. There was certaintly no mention that, in August 2019, over three years after the debate, we would be no closer to a resolution.

The Leave campaign seemed happier telling voters what the former option on the ballot would look like. The electorate might have thought they already knew what staying in the EU would look like, seeing as it was just the continuation of a fairly agreeable status quo, but they were corrected with a spate of glossy leaflets from the multiple Leave campaigns, and the same talking points brought up in every interview.

One colourful infographic, common across the material, tried to spread fear that the entirety of Turkey’s 76 million population was about to move in next door. The truth is that Turkey is nowhere near joining the EU, and that the UK has a veto (i.e. even if they tried to join, we alone could stop them). Turkey cannot join the EU unless the UK wants it to. But if you say “Turkey is joining the EU”, or treat it as a done deal, and slap FACT on it, people will get shocked. If you highlight it in orange and red with a big red arrow of Turkish people swarming into the UK, people will be worried. That’s what you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s true.

I use the term ‘swarming’ advisably, because although it’s a despicable way to describe to human beings, dehumanising them to insects, vermin, it’s the term that David Cameron used in July 2015, shortly after plans for the referendum were confirmed. As shown in other Leave material, such as the UKIP poster above that has been frequently compared to the Nazi propaganda below it, this debate was consistently coded with xenophobia and racism, an attempt to win by appealing to voter’s fears of mass immigration, the need to secure our borders, even though this was a picture of refugees moving approximately one thousand miles away and several countries away from the UK. 

If there was any doubt over the racial intention, the original photograph for this poster is below. It has a prominent white face at the front. Now note the way the original has been cropped and where the single opaque box of text has been placed, with everything else transparent. Note which one individual has been covered up, with all of the others put on show.

Even if they weren’t abhorrent, the claims around immigration are also not true. The UK already has control of its own borders. Whilst some other EU countries like France and Germany have chosen (of their own will), to have open borders with each other, in a region called the Schengen Area, the UK had the free choice not to be a part of this. This means that the UK has full border checks on every individual entering the country. The UK’s agreement with the other EU countries is that nationals of those countries (not refugees from the Middle East passing through) can stay here on a three month visa, but after that it’s our choice.

In addition, that agreement has always been subject to ‘grounds of public policy, public security or public health’, which effectively means that the UK can choose not to let in any individual they don’t want to. The UK has specific power to expel any EU citizen who they believe poses ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’, and the country they came from has to accept them back.

In short, the UK only needs to accept productive members of society. Indeed, all research (including by the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility) has shown that immigrants make a net contribution to the country’s economy, and many industries are dependent on migrant workers. The campaign to ‘end uncontrolled immigration from the EU’ or ‘protect our security - open borders gives criminals and terrorists an easy route into the UK’ is therefore another straight-up lie designed to leverage people’s base xenophobic fears. 

The frequently repeated idea that the NHS and UK benefits system are being exploited by migrants is also fake. Not only do migrants pay £78,000 more into the UK government over their lifetime than they take out over their lifetimes, but the NHS specifically depends on immigration: 37% of doctors qualified overseas. The problem with long NHS waiting times is not because the system is overcrowded, but because it is understaffed, and immigrants are the solution rather than the problem. But this is a government policy problem, and for too long they have found it easier to blame the people coming here to help. 

Before the referendum, David Cameron had also secured the UK further powers in restricting benefits paid to migrants, a massive compromise from EU principles of fairness which would have given the UK privileged status amongst member states. There would be a 4 year break before benefits had to be paid to EU citizens working in the UK, with tax credits phased in over the same period. EU migrants without a job would be restricted to claiming jobseeker’s allowance for 3 months, and then deported after 6 in they were still unemployed. Benefit payments would be fixed to the amounts available in their home countries, removing any incentive to come to the UK to claim them. 

This is all without even considering a fourth angle, that the freedom works both ways. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens exercise their right to visit and live in and work in the EU, just as happens the other way around. Finally, it’s worth noting that immigration from the EU makes up a minority of total migration to the UK, even with these supposed ‘open borders’, and specifically when net migration is considered. Most of the people coming for the long term do so from elsewhere in the world, where we have never had ‘open borders’ but still freely choose to let them in, suggesting that immigration numbers have always been up to the UK government and migration from EU countries will similarly continue at a similar rate no matter what the border situation is.

There were many other obvious lies at the time, such as the suggestion that the EU were in the process of building an army, a completely transparent attempt to spark fear, but they were told so often that they started to be believed. On the other side, all concerns about the risks of leaving were dismissed as Project Fear, a classic example of projecting: as the Leave campaign were in the business of fearmongering, it helped distract from that by accusing their opponents of the same at every opportunity.

Project Fear became a term used to silence all dissent as part of some elitist conspiracy. Some experts said that Brexit will cost the economy? Project Fear. Since the referendum the value of the pound has dropped off the charts, the UK has experienced negative growth at a time of economic success for its neighbours, and Sony, Dyson, Flybmi, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Moneygram, Philips, P&O, Airbus, Barclays, Hitachi, JPMorgan, Citibank and other firms have announced they are closing their UK operations and moving to Ireland or the Netherlands or other countries who still have trade links with the EU. Brexit hasn’t even hit its hardest yet, and it had already cost the economy £66 billion by April this year, about £1,000 per person. It turns out that the experts were exactly right.

Project Fear said that leaving threatened a break up of the UK. “If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger”, Michael Gove countered in May 2016, but the referendum vote has predictably intensified movements for Scottish (and Northern Irish) independence, as well as creating an endless dispute over the Irish-UK border, reopening scars that were just started to heal. Again, it seems that the people who knew what they were talking about... actually knew what they were talking about. The Leave campaign told people to ignore these false warnings as part of elite conspiracy, writing off the expertise of academics and industry leaders as ‘this country has had enough of experts’, an unexcusable anti-intellectualism that excused all lies and criticised anyone who dared to point out the truth.

They still put their fingers in their ears now, when reminded that those warnings have virtually all come true. This weak, the government’s reports on Operation Yellowhammer were leaked, their own forecasts suggesting a massive negative hit from leaving without a deal. When Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State for Business and Energy, was asked about them on TV, he described his government’s own projections as scaremongering and Project Fear, confused as to which lie he was supposed to be telling. Lead Brexiteer Michael Gove came out to dismiss them as the ‘worst case scenario’, even as a Whitehall source clarified ‘this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios – not the worst case’.

It isn’t the first time. Theresa May withheld projections and legal advice from voters and MPs, and her government was the first ever to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately hiding the facts to push through her votes: in contempt of democracy, in contempt of the truth, adding constitutional offences to the free-flowing lies that have been a feature throughout. Amongst all of them, perhaps the biggest lie was that Brexit was about the sovereignty of the UK parliament, taking back control from the undemocratic elites: from Theresa May and Boris Johnson we have seen two unelected Prime Ministers who have tried everything they can to circumvent British democracy, as detailed below.

Headlines

1 killed in shooting in Seattle’s protest zone (AP) A 16-year-old boy was killed and a younger teenager was wounded early Monday in Seattle’s “occupied” protest zone--the second deadly shooting in the area that local officials have vowed to change after business complaints and criticism from President Donald Trump. The violence that came just over a week after another shooting in the zone left one person dead and another wounded was “dangerous and unacceptable” police Chief Carmen Best said. Demonstrators have occupied several blocks around the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct and a park for about two weeks after police abandoned the precinct following standoffs and clashes with protesters calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality. Best said the shootings are obscuring the message of racial justice that protesters say they are promoting. “Two African American men are dead, at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter. But they’re gone, they’re dead now,” the police chief said.

Two Friends in Texas Were Tested for Coronavirus. One Bill Was $199. The Other? $6,408. (NYT) Before a camping and kayaking trip along the Texas Coast, Pam LeBlanc and Jimmy Harvey decided to get coronavirus tests. Both tests came back negative. Then their bills came. And that’s where the similarities stopped. The emergency room charged Mr. Harvey $199 in cash. Ms. LeBlanc, who paid with insurance, was charged $6,408. Ms. LeBlanc’s health insurer negotiated the total bill down to $1,128. The plan said she was responsible for $928 of that. During the pandemic, there has been wide variation between what providers bill for the same basic diagnostic test, with some charging $27, others $2,315. It turns out there is also significant variation in how much a test can cost two patients at the same location.

Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’ (NYT) “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd pleaded in May, appealing to the Minneapolis police officer who responded to reports of a phony $20 bill and planted a knee in the back of his neck until his life had slipped away. Mr. Floyd’s dying words have prompted a national outcry over law enforcement’s deadly toll on African-American people, and they have united much of the country in a sense of outrage that a police officer would not heed a man’s appeal for something as basic as air. But dozens of other incidents with a remarkable common denominator have gone widely unacknowledged. Over the past decade, The New York Times found, at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words--“I can’t breathe.” The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65. The majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were black. Many of the cases suggest a widespread belief that persists in departments across the country that a person being detained who says “I can’t breathe” is lying or exaggerating, even if multiple officers are using pressure to restrain the person.

Mexican president to fly commercial to the US (Washington Post) When Mexico’s president travels to the White House next week, he’ll have to reckon with the same questions travelers everywhere are asking. How early do you need to arrive at an airport these days? Will the middle seat be left empty? During the layover, will the food court be open? Next week, Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be the rare foreign head of state to fly commercial to meet the U.S. president. The populist leader promised to sell Mexico’s presidential jet when he began his term in 2018--part of a larger effort to throw off the luxe trappings of the country’s highest office. He has also opened the presidential palace to the public, and is ferried around the capital in his own Volkswagen Jetta. While the jet is still unsold, López Obrador has stood by his pledge to fly only on commercial airlines.

This is the moment to address decades-old problems, UK PM Johnson says (Reuters) Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday that Britain must seize the moment in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to fix decades-old problems and narrow the productivity gap with its competitors. “We must work fast because we’ve already seen the vertiginous drop in GDP, we are waiting as if between the flash of lightning and the thunderclap,” he said. “We must use this moment now, this interval to plan our response and to fix of course the problems that were most brutally illuminated in that COVID lightning flash: the problems in our social cares system, the parts of government that seemed to respond so sluggishly.” He said Britain was not as productive as many of its competitors, and while London was the “capital of the world”, much of the country felt left behind and “unloved”.

EU reopens its borders to 14 nations but not to US tourists (AP) The European Union announced Tuesday that it will reopen its borders to travelers from 14 countries, and possibly China soon, but most Americans have been refused entry for at least another two weeks due to soaring coronavirus infections in the U.S. Travelers from other big countries like Russia, Brazil and India will also miss out. Citizens from the following countries will be allowed into the EU’s 27 members and four other nations in Europe’s visa-free Schengen travel zone: Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay.

Europe sours on global powers (Foreign Policy) A new poll from the European Council of Foreign Relations shows the extent of the damage the coronavirus pandemic has wrought on attitudes toward the United States. The decline was most dramatic in Germany, Denmark, and Portugal where at least 65 percent of respondents said that their view of the United States had worsened during the pandemic. It’s not just bad news for U.S.-Europe relations; Russia and China also suffered reputational damage, according to the poll.

China passes sweeping HK security law, heralding authoritarian era (Reuters) Beijing on Tuesday unveiled new national security laws for Hong Kong that will punish crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison, heralding a more authoritarian era for China’s freest city. China’s parliament passed the detailed legislation earlier on Tuesday, giving Beijing sweeping powers and setting the stage for radical changes to the global financial hub’s way of life. “The punitive elements of the law are stupefying,” Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong’s law school and a barrister, told Reuters. Britain and some two dozen Western countries urged China to reconsider the law, saying Beijing must preserve the right to assembly and free press. Washington, already in dispute with China over trade, the South China Sea and the coronavirus, began eliminating Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law on Monday, halting defence exports and restricting technology access. China, which has rejected criticism of the law by Britain, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan and others, said it would retaliate.

Christian television station in Israel loses license (Foreign Policy) Israeli regulators have revoked the broadcasting license of an evangelical Christian television station for misrepresenting its mission. Ward Simpson, the CEO of God TV and the station’s owner, had attracted the scrutiny of regulators after appearing in a fundraising video after the license was granted saying “God has supernaturally opened the door for us to take the gospel of Jesus into the homes and lives and hearts of his Jewish people.” He later clarified that he was not trying to convert Jews; he was simply seeking to get them to accept Jesus as their messiah. Regulators said God TV is welcome to reapply for a license if it vows to describe the nature of its broadcasts more honestly.

Syria faces mass starvation or mass exodus without more aid, WFP says (BBC) Syria faces the risk of mass starvation or another mass exodus unless more aid money is made available, the head of the UN World Food Programme has said. Ahead of a donor conference in Brussels on Tuesday, David Beasley told the BBC a million Syrians were severely food insecure and some were already dying. More than 380,000 people have been killed and 13.2 million others—half the pre-war population—have been displaced inside and outside Syria since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. "The whole world's facing crisis unlike anything we've seen probably in everyone's lifetime. But, quite frankly, what's happening in Syria is unprecedented. It's the worst of all storms coming together," Mr Beasley said in an interview. "If we don't have the money, here's the bottom line: you're going to either have mass migration, [or] starvation, and exploitation by extremist groups," he warned. "I think the people will leave, just like they did five or six years ago."

Coronavirus Is Battering Africa’s Growing Middle Class (NYT) James Gichina started out 15 years ago as a driver shuttling travelers from the airport, worked his way up to safari guide, and with the help of some bank loans, bought two minivans of his own to ferry vacationers around. But when the coronavirus pandemic cratered the tourist industry and the economy, Mr. Gichina removed the seats from his minibus and started using it to hawk eggs and vegetables. With what he now earns, he said, he can barely afford to pay rent, buy food or send his 9-year-old son to school. “We have been working hard to build better lives,” Mr. Gichina, 35, said of his colleagues in the tourist sector. Now, he said, “We have nothing.” As the coronavirus surges in many countries in Africa, it is threatening to push as many as 58 million people in the region into extreme poverty, experts at the World Bank say. But beyond the devastating consequences for the continent’s most vulnerable people, the pandemic is also whittling away at one of Africa’s signature achievements: the growth of its middle class. About 170 million out of Africa’s 1.3 billion people are now classified as middle class. But about eight million of them could be thrust into poverty because of the coronavirus and its economic fallout, according to World Data Lab, a research organization.

Through Thick and Thin

Characters: Germany, Prussia

Summary: Germany and Prussia have never felt able to express their frustrations with one another. Finally, they're able to have the heart-to-heart their family desperately needed for either of them to move on and heal.

Prussia walked out onto the balcony. He came up behind his Germany and dropped the note onto the table next to the ashtray. Gilbert couldn't hide his smirk. "We live in the same house. You could come into my room and ask, though I do appreciate the extra work." Germany looked up at his brother. He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "You know I've never been good at asking for things out loud. Beer? They're ice cold." Gilbert took him up on his offer, cracking open the bottle that was laid out for him. He slunk down in the chair besides his brother and kicked his feet up onto the rails. In silence, they gazed out across the Berlin skyline. The stars were barely visible beneath all the lights, but it was beautiful in its uniquely artificial way. It was home, after all.

"So, West, why'd you wanna talk? Something on your mind?" Prussia assessed Germany out the corner of his eye. Physically, he seemed in perfect shape. Gilbert never knew what was going on his head though, so how he was really doing was anyone's guess. "No one's been giving you shit right? I've kicked everyone's ass on this godforsaken continent and I'll do it again if I gotta, just say the word." He wrinkled his nose. "Is it Feliks or Francis? They're always starting shit." Ludwig was thankful that the night made it harder to see. He couldn't stop himself from rolling his eyes and wincing. Why would he expect dissolution to calm his brother down, even after all these years? Gilbert, for better or worse, was Gilbert and that meant he was always itching for a fight. Still, Germany couldn't hold back his tongue. "And if it is them? What are you going to do? Invade them? With what army?" He rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to force out any irritation he was feeling. "No, they're all pricks. I've learnt to ignore them. I just...wanted to talk. We're family, we're allowed to do that." He received no answer. For his part, Gilbert was still nursing his wounds from that surprise attack. Really, going after the fact that he didn’t have a body politic anymore? What a low blow, especially considering who’s fault that was. He pushed the growing fire to the bottom of his belly, smiled and raised his glass. "Yeah! Of course we can! I was just caught off-guard since you always prefer radio silence, but we can try talking!" He clinked his glass with Ludwig's. "Cheers, West!" In unison, they drank. Each chugged down half of their beer and tried to focus on the positives of what this could be and ignore any resentment they held for the other. They hadn't actually talked in half a century. Why would they be able to now? Nothing had changed for them substantially to bring it about. It would be another failed attempt at family reunification, with both of them calling up Roderich tomorrow to complain about each other to him. That would be better than fixing anything. Ludwig sighed. If he'd really believed that, he wouldn't have asked. They used to be close - incredibly close - and could get that way again. He'd have to force himself and his brother to be honest with each other, a difficult task but not impossible. He set down his glass and ran a hand through his hair, letting some slicked-back strands loose. He'd take a cue from America's playbook. "Gilbert, is there any reason you hate me or is this who you’ve become?" Gilbert spat out his mouthful of beer. Foam dripped down from his chin as he turned to Ludwig, making him look like a wolf sick with rabies. "The fuck did you just say to me? You're not too old to get hit!" "That was harsh, my apologies." Germany flinched at the sound of his own voice. He spoke to his own brother like he spoke to some ally. “What are your issues with me? Your resentment towards me makes living with you unbearable at times.” Prussia finished his bottle of beer. He'd need some alcohol in his veins to make it through this conversation. He looked back out over Berlin, imagining what it used to be like when he was still a nation and his royal family was still important. "Well, Luddy dear, this may come as a surprise to you, but I'm essentially dead. I've got control of a section of my old kingdom that doesn't even bear my name. I'm seen as some militaristic outcast when France and Britain are as guilty of the same. And, worst of all, my name has become synonymous with crimes you committed without hesitation! Ones that I never wanted part of and took part of multiple efforts to sabotage." He glanced at his brother sharply. "I do hate you in a way cause you've been nothing but trouble for me. I wish Austria had been your brother instead, unification was the worst mistake of my life." Gilbert got up and opened another bottle. He swigged down half of it, looking anywhere but at Ludwig. "Germany was supposed to be a vehicle of power for me and my leaders. Initially, it was. But then we were forced to officially lose the war and my leaders let Germany grow into its own thing, fucking it all up for me. You were meant to be a puppet and nothing more, Holy Rome with a new name and under new ownership." He smiled sadly at the sky. "Though, I can't blame France and Britain for seeing through that plan. I didn't really try to hide it, but it did hurt when they destroyed it.” He winced. “Twice." Germany realized he was laughing. He was running on autopilot, unaware of what he was doing until after. "You piece of shit, you still blame me for the war? The war that's been over for more than seventy years?" He launched up and began pacing the length of the balcony. His blood was boiling, he hadn’t allowed himself to feel this enraged in decades. "Take the blame for something for once in your life! There's blood on your hands too! That hatred, that anger was something your people already had towards every group we - yes, we, Gilbert! - targeted! I don't care if you were selling secrets to Churchill and de Gaulle, you followed orders!" He took a deep breath, calming himself considerably so he was no longer shouting. "Fine, you were morally superior to me from the 1930s till 1945. Does that make you happy? Are you satisfied? What will make you feel better about that, Gilbert? Because how you feel about your involvement is more important than how the rest of the world - the rest of the world on the right side - saw your actions." Prussia lit a cigarette slowly. He took a deep drag and lifted his middle finger up. "Kiss my ass, you little shit." He let that hang there while catching his thoughts. It took every ounce of strength in his body to not throw Ludwig off the building. He would if he knew it would kill him. "See, I was selling secrets. I'd bring food and medicine to the camps and smuggle people out of ghettoes on inspection. I did what I could. So, I'm a bit better than you because I wasn't evil. I was disgusting, but not soulless. But, if you'd kept my fucking government, it might've been different because those assholes would have faced some resistance. That couldn't happen though because big, bad Ludwig wanted to prove himself as the strong leader of the Totally-Not-Prussian-But-German Republic." He smiled like a wolf. "You sure proved yourself, West. Did a real great job with the reins." He snorted. "If I had it my way, I wouldn't have trusted you to lead a horse, much less a people." Germany snapped. "I've got it now! I know who you remind me of!" "A competent nation who can actually win a war?" He waved his hand. "Please, you gave up that title with the Schlieffen Plan. No, you remind me of Britain. Washed up, stuck in the past, and full of distaste for your successor. No wonder you two were allies for so long. Though, I suppose you'd blame me for that falling through as well. Do you blame me for Fritz's death and Napoleon's destruction of your washed-up army too?" Germany smiled when he saw that got his desired reaction. "Shouldn't you be proud of me? I'm now able to do with peace what you could never achieve through war. Finally, a truly essential part of Europe and I haven't had to invade anyone for it." “You wouldn’t have to be such a pussy if you could actually win! What a shame you’re more Saxon and Bavarian than Brandenburger or Prussian! Besides, don’t you just act as a sugar daddy for half of the EU while selling yourself out to Russia and France? That’s a real-” Prussia cut himself off. The absurdity of the entire situation dawned on him when he looked at Germany, really looked at him for the first time this evening. Seeing his younger brother looking so angry and understandably upset at him sent a wave of nausea over Gilbert. If they really wanted to repair things, this wasn’t the way to do it. It was time he swallowed his pride and acted like the older sibling. Gilbert took a deep breath and opened the door to the living room. “Come on. Shouting at each other for all our neighbors to hear isn’t doing anything. We can stop being dicks now. It’s obvious we’re both hurt.” Taken aback, Ludwig complied and made his way to the couch. Gilbert took over the opposite end and let out another long exhale. “Alright, I’m gonna try to be an adult so have some mercy on me, alright?” Happy that that got a smile out of brother, Gilbert proceeded. “It’d be bullshit to try and act like I didn’t mean all that cause I did. I’ve been feeling like that for decades now. And we can deal with that later, but let me answer your original question without having a tantrum. “Yeah, West, I am pissed at you and a part of me really hates you. You took my job and left nothing for me to do here. And, when I did have power, you stripped that away from me the first chance you got because you thought your way was better since you needed to prove yourself. I know I’m guilty of a fair amount - I wouldn’t argue that, I’m haunted by a lot of that just like you - but that doesn’t erase what I, as Gilbert, tried to do. And that’s what gets thrown away and...why? Because I’m related to you means what I did to try and help meant nothing? That because my state was being occupied and I couldn't lead my people in revolt discounts what I did as a person? That my personal rebellion doesn’t matter because it was small? Then, on top of all this, being called blood-thirsty and the source of all your worst traits and having you agree with it! For fuck’s sake, why would I wanna talk to you? You’ve got this picture of me in your head, doesn’t seem like you need the real deal anymore.” Germany had been looking at his hands the entire time Prussia spoke. What Gilbert said hurt, especially because he knew this was the truth. The real truth, not spun in a way that was meant to cut as deeply as possible. Still, a little voice nagged in the back of his head that this wasn’t fair and he couldn’t resist giving in. “Gilbert, if you had told me this earlier then I would’ve been more understanding and have let you help out with various things. I didn’t realize this meant so much to you. You always said you were happy having the house to yourself and about finally being free from the burdens of nationhood.” Prussia winced. Ludwig really believed those transparent lies. Everyone else knew he was so obviously faking it, everyone except the one person who mattered most. He shook the hurt out of his head. They were slowly fixing that problem now. He smiled. “You say that, but you’ve never told me why you’re so pissed at me. Hell, you still haven’t.” His face turned pink. Now was as good a time as ever. “Ah, well, how do you think it’d feel to live in the shadows your ‘awesome’ brother? I’ve known since the beginning everyone preferred you. Russia and Britain were the most obvious ones. Neither of them could trust me as far as they could throw me and they’d constantly ask me about you or look disappointed when they saw me walk into the room - hell, Russia still does that. Even our leaders wanted to work with you. Bismarck saw me only as a tool, as did each kaiser and the military establishment. When the empire fell, they were desperate to cling onto their Prussian titles, but not the German ones. Especially Wilhelm. He was fine with abdicating as emperor, but losing you?” He scoffed. “Well, we all know you’re the real prize. “Then, when I finally had something that was unmistakably my own, you opposed it. You wanted to continue doing things your way. I was done with your way - your way caused us to lose the Great War. I wanted my people to stop being proud of being Bavarian or Saxon or Prussian and instead be proud to be German. That...didn't work out as planned and I was naive enough to believe you and Austria would stand by me, admit that we’d all done wrong, and work to make amends with the rest of the world. His maneuvering out of it didn’t surprise me, nor did the Allies accepting it contrary to fact, but your attempts to disgusted me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s blood on your hands. I believe that you helped people, but I also saw you when you didn’t find it advantageous to be the hero, when you seemed to have no reservations in participating in all those horrible things we did. You’re better than me for trying to fix what you did immediately, but you were still part of the machine.” Neither of them spoke. They were mulling over each other's words, trying to figure out where they fit in their perceptions of how the last century had gone. Their messy relationship was beginning to make sense and they could feel their family slowly melding back together. Gilbert chuckled and leaned back into the couch cushions. He grinned wide at the ceiling. "I've been holding that in since you fucked up the march into Paris in 1914. I really do hate your dumbass. I don't get how you can be related to the greatest military mind of all of continental Europe and then lose every battle against a real opponent." He laughed a bit harder. "I wouldn't have trusted you against the Swedes in Pomerania." Ludwig opened and shut his mouth like a fish. That blindsided him. Was it an insult, a joke, a mix of both? He began mapping it out in his mind and started stuttering out a defense. Gilbert hit him in the side of the head with a throw pillow. "It's a joke! Kinda. Seriously though, who invades Russia? You're so intelligent and then you do stupid shit like that." Germany threw the pillow back. "Shut up, please. I have to hear it from every enlightened World War Two historian, I don't need to hear it from the most awesome and powerful of all the European armies, the general who commanded them all with grace and courage. Have I kissed your ass enough yet to get you to drop it?" He couldn't stop the corners of his mouth from lifting up into a smile. Prussia leaning over and throwing him into a good-natured headlock was the answer he needed. They laughed and the tension started to leave the room. Optimism for the future began to fill them both. Gilbert freed Ludwig from his grasp and crossed his arms behind his head. "It's gonna be a bitch, but we'll get through this. You and I, we can survive anything." He winked. "We're pretty awesome like that." Ludwig smiled at his brother, enjoying Gilbert's presence for the first time in years. "Yeah, it'll take time. But, we'll be alright. One way or another we always are."

As the Democratic primaries start to heat up, it’s become clear that Bernie Sanders wants to hit Joe Biden hard on trade:

When people take a look at my record versus Vice-President Biden’s record, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA—he voted for NAFTA. I helped lead the fight against permanent normal trade relations with China—he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership—he supported it.

Since 2016, American politics has focused quite heavily on immigration. It’s a much more visible issue than trade. Immigrants and refugees are physical people you can see, or even interview. The border is a place you can go, a wall is a physical thing that either gets built or it doesn’t. Some of us are friends of immigrants, some of us are immigrants, but all of us are descended from people who came over here at some point. Trade is different. The effects of trade are hard to see and hard to measure. You can see stuff in your local big box store stamped with “Made in China,” but otherwise trade doesn’t make itself obvious to you unless you’re one of the people who loses a job to outsourcing. So the mainstream press doesn’t write about trade very much, unless it’s implying that President Trump is going to visit unspeakable horrors on us through a trade war with China. Even the left press is typically quiet about it. This is a shame, because trade has much larger impacts on ordinary American workers than immigration does.

Many economists love free trade. They love to point out that free trade means that goods are made in the places where it’s cheapest and most efficient to make them. That drives down consumer prices and it increases headline economic growth rates. If you want GDP growth, free trade is great. The trouble is that this “efficiency” is all too often achieved by lowering labor costs and offering firms tax breaks and loose regulations. An American worker is expensive compared to a worker from a poor country. If we recklessly remove trade barriers, our workers lose negotiating leverage with their employers. Some Americans lose their jobs and others see their wage growth decrease, halt, or reverse. And in the meantime, the race to the bottom on taxes and regulations means less money for public services and infrastructure. It often means poorer quality goods, unsafe working conditions, and all manner of abuses great and small.

But not every job is tradeable. You’d be hard-pressed to outsource teachers, or doctors, or the waiter at your local diner. Trade now accounts for about 27 percent of U.S. GDP:

If you’re in a non-tradeable sector, initially trade just lowers the cost of your consumer goods. It’s only when the people who are laid off in tradeable sectors begin competing for jobs with you that you start to see trade erode your negotiating leverage. It’s only when the state lowers taxes and regulations to compete to hold onto jobs that you notice budget cuts to public programs and sliding standards. If you’re not thinking about it, it’s easy to not even recognize these things as related to trade.

Trade also inhibits investment in labor-saving technology. If you can reduce labor costs by outsourcing, you don’t need to make more expensive investments in automation to get costs down. So while trade increases economic growth rates and makes consumer goods cheaper, it also reduces the bargaining power of workers and slows technological development. The short-run growth comes at a long-run productivity cost. It’s difficult to predict or measure how much technological development and worker bargaining power we give up when we sign free trade agreements, and this makes it very hard for economists to account for these things when estimating the consequences of trade deals. It’s much easier to focus on headline growth increases and drops in consumer prices.

At the same time, if we refused to trade with other states, we’d make it much harder for their economies to develop. Many countries are able to goose development by exporting goods to the United States. Their workers are paid inhumane and substandard wages by our standards, but even these meagre wages are often more than they would have been paid for the subsistence agricultural jobs that often predated the arrival of American firms. The right loves to point out that workers in sweatshops are still often paid more than they were paid when they were peasant farmers. But this wage increase doesn’t necessarily make these workers happier. As countries industrialize, there are massive increases in the number of hours expected from workers, especially in places where labor laws are weak. This is visible in the history of western industry. British and American workers saw their hours increase dramatically before labor laws intervened:

Industrialization was so miserable for most workers that they were compelled to organize to a degree never before seen. Medieval peasants didn’t build trade unions, and neither did the rural peasants of today’s developing states. So while sweat shops might put more money in peasants’ pockets, they’re not necessarily make their lives better, at least not in the short to medium-term.

What about the long-run? In the long-run, developing countries might hope that by sacrificing the lives of their peasants to the corporate behemoths they can one day achieve prosperity comparable to what the rich states experience. For them, free trade with the western states is a form of indentured service—they hope that by turning their people into slaves for the west, eventually enough western investment will trickle in to enable them to make “the leap” and become rich themselves.

What right do we have to deny them that choice? We might point out that given the reality of climate change, the choice is suicidal—it’s not possible for everyone to live like Americans. But this doesn’t stop developing countries from trying. India’s carbon emissions increased by 6.3 percent in 2018. A few weeks ago I discussed this with a couple Indians who support the Modi government, and they made the understandable point that India faces crippling poverty today, poverty it can erase with economic development. They say they’ll worry about the environment later. Can we blame them for feeling that way?

Yet at the same time, we are socialists and that means we’re meant to care about American workers. Our workers face job loss, wage stagnation, and austerity if we trade with countries without making any provision for the race to the bottom on wages, taxes, and regulations. Eventually, they face the consequences of climate change too. If we won’t defend them from these forces, why should we expect them to support us? And what good is a socialist movement that doesn’t care enough about its workers to defend them?

This is what the right wants—a false binary choice between helping poor people in developing countries and defending poor and working people at home. It wants to frame trade as a dichotomy between free trade policies that lift poor countries out of poverty while making consumer goods cheap for us and protectionist policies that defend American jobs while keeping poor countries poor and expensive goods expensive. The right wants to use your compassion for postcolonial peoples to make you stab your neighbors in the back. And before too long, it won’t just be your neighbors who suffer—you too will end up afflicted with the consequences of austerity, poor quality products, and chronic under-investment in infrastructure and productivity. It’s already happening. Look around you.

So what is to be done? We don’t have to accept this false choice. We can trade with other countries on terms that protect our workers and force other states to treat their workers better than we treated ours in the 19th century. Rich states should demand, as a condition of trade agreements, adjustments in wages, taxes, and regulations to reduce or eliminate disparities in the treatment of rich workers and poor workers. It’s one thing if we import stuff from a foreign state because that state has real productive advantages in making the stuff. It’s quite another if we’re importing stuff from a foreign state because that state is treating its workers like meat.

Right now, free trade agreements are being used to run down workers in rich states while giving workers in poor states far too little compensation for far too much hardship. The USA and the EU command access to gigantic consumer markets, and they have a lot of leverage over governments in developing countries. Instead of using that leverage to push these governments to offer up their workers on a platter for transnational corporations to devour at their leisure, we ought to use our leverage to secure workers around the world fairer deals. Beyond this, we ought to demand that developing states take action to ensure they fight poverty in a clean, sustainable way—and supply them with the investment and extra help, where necessary, to do this.

This is what a socialist trade policy looks like—not unadulterated protectionism, but trade deals that put workers first by creating strong international minimum standards on wages, taxes, and regulations. This must be led by the USA and EU, because only they command enough market share to successfully push governments in poor countries to adopt more humane and sustainable models of development.

(Continue Reading)

Hong Kong Protests: How Does This End? https://nyti.ms/2rSYDLn

Hong Kong Protests: How Does This End?

A bill before Congress would put the United States squarely on the side of the protesters, even as the demonstrations seem to spin out of control.

By The Editorial Board | Published Nov. 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 17, 2019 |

After nearly six months of escalating protests, Hong Kong is a mess, its reputation for efficiency in tatters, its economy in recession, its roads and rails often blocked. And there is no end in sight.

That poses a quandary for those who admire and support the protest movement, but who recoil at the notion of such a unique and vibrant enclave self-destructing. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the movement has no leadership, no coordinating committee to advise, to cheer or to warn.

In the end, however, there is no choice for those who cherish freedom but to support the protests, as a bill pending in the United States Congress does. The protests may be counterproductive, destructive, leaderless and even futile, but for these same reasons they are an altruistic, self-sacrificing and genuine demonstration that people who have known freedom, even in a limited form, refuse to surrender it.

It is doubtful that Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, understands the resistance or the longing. Those who rise to the pinnacle of a secretive, authoritarian, coercive system like China’s are molded to believe that you can control all the people all the time, if you can only find the right combination of sticks, carrots, lies and information filters. To them, any dissent must be a political plot hatched in dark foreign corners.

What Mr. Xi does instinctively understand is the threat posed by Hong Kong while he is waging a global propaganda offensive, backed by the lure of China’s enormous market. A Tiananmen-style crackdown, he knows, would be disastrous for China’s standing and image. But letting the protesters have their way, he believes, would show weakness and potentially encourage repressed minorities in China, such as the Uighurs, Kazakhs or Tibetans, to push for their rights.

Lacking any means for winning the Hong Kongers’ hearts or minds and unable to give in to their demands, leaders in Beijing and their loyalists in Hong Kong, including the administration led by Carrie Lam, see no alternative to exerting ever greater police force. And that serves only to further inflame the demonstrators.

Foreign governments, too, confront a dilemma. On the commercial side, overt support for the protests could lead to a loss of Chinese business. President Trump, for one, has stayed largely silent on the latest protests, even while grappling with Mr. Xi on trade, evidently seeking not to trammel the chance of a deal. There is also the problem of supporting demonstrations in which protesters have sometimes resorted to violence, even if police violence has been far greater and more systematic. Nothing justifies setting an opponent on fire, as one protester apparently did.

These incidents of violence must be noted and condemned. But they are inevitable in confrontations with police that have been escalating over many weeks. One thing remains incontestable: In this protracted and painful confrontation, the people of Hong Kong hold the moral high ground in their determination to decide their own fate and to reject the animal farm that China would put them in even before the transition to full Chinese control in 2047, the date established in the agreement that ended Britain’s control over its former colony.

There is no way to predict how long the protests will continue, or what will be their outcome. But the people of Hong Kong deserve support, and Mr. Xi should be left with no doubt that violent intervention will carry an immediate and heavy price.

The bill before Congress, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which accuses the Chinese government of creating more chaos and warns of new sanctions, has the support of both parties, and should be brought to a vote without further delay. Painful as it is to observe, this is a struggle that the free world must support.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

Can Hong Kong’s Courts Save the City?

Don’t count on it.

By Audrey Eu Yuet-mee, Ms. Eu is a barrister and former legislator in Hong Kong. | Published Nov. 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted Nov 17, 2019 |

HONG KONG — It both comforts and depresses me, as a lawyer who has practiced for four decades, that every day over the past few months I have been besieged on Facebook by anxious Hong Kongers urging me to take legal action to help protesters.

I have been asked to demand investigations into mysterious deaths, allegations that people have been raped while in police custody and claims that police officers have been impersonating protesters. Some people seek redress for police brutality. Others want to pre-empt the routine use of tear gas in crowded public transportation, old people’s homes, shopping malls, universities or the central business district.

That people come to me is comforting: It suggests that even though the government and the Legislative Council have failed us, Hong Kongers still believe in our judges. It is depressing because I fear that they will be disappointed.

Initiating litigation against the government, particularly in very political cases, is an uncertain and very expensive endeavor at any time. The government has unlimited money — the taxpayers’ money — to hire a large legal team, and so even if it loses a case in the first instance, it can appeal it all the way to the final court. You, the citizen, might have found lawyers to represent you for free, but should you lose, you may have to foot the government’s legal bill — in some cases, risking bankruptcy.

The odds are also stacked against you. Judges are conservative by nature and trained to give the establishment a wide margin of appreciation. They are not the ones fighting protesters on the streets; they are not the ones making the tough political decisions. They should be slow to criticize those in the hot seat for getting something wrong.

More ominous, in 2014, the Chinese State Council issued a white paper about governance in Hong Kong, which required, among other things, the city’s judges to be “patriots.” Way back in the summer of 2008, Xi Jinping — then China’s vice-president, now its president — called on the three branches of government in Hong Kong to “cooperate.”

For China’s leaders, law is a political weapon; they routinely refer to governing the nation “in accordance with the law.” This may sound like the same thing as “the rule of law,” but it is nothing like that: It merely justifies the rule of those in power and ensures that they are above the law.

If judges in Hong Kong issue a decision with political consequences that the Chinese authorities deem unwelcome, it can always be overruled by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, which is vested with the ultimate authority to interpret Hong Kong’s Basic Law, or mini-constitution. Let us not underestimate the tremendous pressure many of our judges have faced dealing with the highly sensitive and politically charged cases that have come to them in recent years.

Earlier this week, the police and anti-riot squads attacked the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, firing hundreds of cans of tear gas and rubber bullets, and spraying parts of the campus with a toxic blue liquid. By Tuesday night, the university gym had been turned into a makeshift hospital, as though on a wartime battlefield. Joseph Sung Jao-yiu, a former vice chancellor of CUHK and a gastroenterologist, came with a team of doctors to help treat the injured — more than 110 people.

The police did have reason to take action that day: The CUHK campus is connected to a public footbridge that hangs over a major highway, and the footbridge was occupied by protesters who were throwing bricks and petrol bombs, blocking traffic and endangering the public.

Whatever the protesters were doing did not justify the authorities’ disproportionate response, however. Even CUHK’s current vice chancellor, Prof. Rocky Tuan, wasn’t spared being tear-gassed: He tried to defuse the situation with the police, but was told that he could not control his students and now was no time to negotiate. The clashes lasted for hours. Black mushroom clouds hung high above the campus and could be seen from a great distance.

Late Tuesday night, at the height of the confrontation, I was approached by Jacky So Tsun-fung, the president of the CUHK student union. He wanted to apply for an urgent injunction to stop the police from breaching the campus without a warrant and bar the use of crowd-control weapons without the assent of university authorities. Some students had become very emotional; word was circulating that one of them (and perhaps more) was considering suicide. But the judge declined to hear the application that night and wanted the police to be notified.

I met Mr. So the next morning. He has a shy, boyish face, delicate features and a mat of hair like a K-pop idol. The first thing I did was give him a big hug. His shoulders felt too small for the large burden he was carrying. I don’t mean just the burden of litigation; I mean the burden of being young in Hong Kong these days and daring to stand up or speak out. Young people are targeted, stalked and at risk of physical attack. Even secondary-school students in uniform have been stopped on their way to school, searched and harassed by the police.

There is no denying that violence has been committed by the protesters, too. But during our hearing on Wednesday, while the police’s lawyers wouldn’t tell the court how many tear-gas canisters officers had used at CUHK, they were quick to say how many petrol bombs had been thrown at them.

Never mind, apparently, my argument that at times as difficult as these, there is all the more reason to hold authorities accountable for any abuse of power. And that we, the public, are looking to the courts as our last safeguards. The judge dismissed our application.

And yet the Hong Kong courts have readily granted the police sweeping injunctions. There was one last month, cast in broad and vague terms, that barred anyone from “unlawfully and willfully” disclosing the personal information of police officers or their relatives. Naturally, no one was there to argue against the measure: Why did the court find it necessary to enjoin putative and nameless defendants from breaking the law?

Also last month, the government issued a regulation banning face masks at gatherings. Even as it insisted that Hong Kong was not in a state of emergency, the administration of Chief Executive Carrie Lam ordered the mask ban by invoking outdated, colonial-era emergency legislation — paving the way for more draconian measures in the future. Several legislators have challenged the regulation in court. A ruling is expected Monday.

Whatever the outcome of that case, it would be naïve at this stage to think that a few lawyers and judges can defend the rule of law in Hong Kong. Once the city’s pride, the rule of law cannot survive under the pressure of a government that does not respect fair play, freedom or democracy.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

Hong Kong Protests: Activists Clash With Police Near Besieged Campus

The multiday siege escalated on Sunday, a day after unarmed Chinese soldiers stirred fears by staging a choreographed photo op.

By Mike Ives, Tiffany May and Katherine LI | Published Nov. 17, 2019 Updated 9:50 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted November 17, 2019 |

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong police on Sunday clashed for hours with antigovernment activists who were staging a siege-like occupation of a university campus and blocking an adjacent cross-harbor tunnel, the latest escalation in a monthslong crisis gripping the city.

The standoff on the fringes of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in which a police officer was hit in his leg with an arrow, shattered a fragile calm that had returned to the Chinese territory after a workweek marred by severe transit disruptions and street violence.

Schools across Hong Kong were canceled for Monday. And on Sunday evening — after protesters set fire to two bridges near the harbor tunnel and police officers appeared to surround them — the force threatened to use “lethal force” to arrest those who did not surrender.

The Hong Kong protests began in June over legislation, since scrapped, that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China, and have expanded to include a broad range of demands for police accountability and greater democracy.

Here’s the latest.

A FIERY CAMPUS STANDOFF

The police on Sunday fired gas and sprayed water cannons at young demonstrators who were continuing a multiday occupation of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and blockading an adjacent tunnel that connects Hong Kong Island with the Kowloon Peninsula.

Ensconced above the Kowloon streets in fort-like enclosures, some of the protesters spent hours throwing gasoline bombs, some from improvised catapults. Others were armed with bows and arrows, and the police said an officer had been hit in the calf with an arrow.

After nightfall, the protesters set fire to a flyover near the tunnel and a pedestrian bridge leading to the campus, forcing an armored police vehicle to retreat and setting another on fire. A riot police officer warned that protesters were surrounded and that the force would use lethal force against them if they did not surrender.

“Time is running out,” the officer said on a loudspeaker.

Dozens of hard-line protesters also clashed with riot police in Mong Kok, a working-class neighborhood, apparently to divert the force’s energies away from the campus.

The PolyU campus, which sits beside the harbor tunnel and a Chinese military barracks, is one of several that young protesters had occupied days earlier, turning them into quasi-militarized citadels. Most of the other sieges gradually tapered off.

The Sunday clash came on the heels of a particularly intense week of transit delays, street scuffles and flash-mob-style demonstrations across the city. The unrest was prompted in part by the police shooting of a young demonstrator at point-blank range. He survived.

A RARE PROPAGANDA STUNT

On Saturday, Chinese soldiers jogged out of their barracks near Hong Kong Baptist University and cleared bricks from streets that had been swarmed days earlier by young demonstrators.

The soldiers wore T-shirts and basketball jerseys, rather than military uniforms, and carried brooms instead of weapons. Their appearance threatened to inflame tensions in the semiautonomous Chinese territory, where many are deeply sensitive about what they see as Beijing’s growing influence over their lives.

The Hong Kong garrison of the People’s Liberation Army is based in 19 sites once occupied by the British military before the former colony returned to Chinese control in 1997. But even though Chinese troops have been stationed in Hong Kong for years, it is highly unusual for them to venture into the city.

Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution says that P.L.A. forces “shall not interfere” in local affairs and that the local government may ask for the army’s assistance for disaster relief and maintaining public order. The Hong Kong government said in a statement on Saturday that the soldiers’ cleanup had been a self-initiated “community activity.”

The cleanup, which was lauded in China’s state-run news media, prompted a torrent of criticism from local residents. On Saturday, 24 lawmakers from Hong Kong’s pro-democracy legislative minority issued a joint statement saying that the local government and the P.L.A. had ignored restrictions imposed on the troops by local laws.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

Sorry if I'm bothering you, but I just want to ask: how accurate do you think Matpat's theory on Article 13 is? A lot of people have been panicking about it (including me), but now that I've seen your posts on the subject, I'm really starting to doubt if there is anything to be afraid of. It's just hard to focus on looking for facts when the entire website is panicking, so I hope you can kind of clear this up for me (and a lot of others). Again, I hope I'm not bothering you! Have a nice day!

It’s no bother at all! I said I was here to answer all of your questions, so that’s what I’m going to do!!

But. Oh god. This whole mess started with a YouTube video, so I guess it was only inevitable that it would finally circle back to another one.

Okay so. I’ll be honest, it took me about 3 hours to get through this video. 18, if you count the fact that I started it before I went to bed last night. And like. He’s not wrong about a lot of things. But he’s not a lawyer, or a law-maker. And he’s definitely not a European one. Which you kind of need to be to understand what the hell is going on here.

He’s just misinterpreting a lot of things. And he’s misunderstanding how the entire EU-law system, and Europe's law tradition in general, works. Which, like, he’s an American, and not even an American lawyer, so no one can really blame him for that. But what frustrates me, and what actually makes me really fucking angry, is that he’s somehow claiming that he does understand this and that he somehow holds the authority to explain it to others. Which he clearly doesn’t.

So okay. What is going on in MatPat’s video. A lot of shit.

What first struck me is that he misses the bots. Like, his entire fear mongering tactic is based in this idea that all media platform would have to develop content ID bots. And that would indeed be a bad thing. But what he forgets to mention is that the bots have been removed from the new draft text. The draft that he, by the way, quotes himself. So I don’t know if he forgot to read the entire article, of if he just forgot to mention it. That’s very unclear.

But what really struck my nerves, and what made me so upset that I actually couldn’t fall asleep last night, was that he claims that the term “good faith” is somehow too vague and is because of that bad legal writing. And I’m not going to lie, that got my goat.

“Good faith” is like the least undefined term within all of European law doctrine. It’s about the most important principle we have. Bona fide, anyone? YEAH. That’s good faith. Trust me when I say that all lawyers, and everyone that has even gotten close to working with rights, know what “good faith” means. God, we have over 400 000 books and articles on “good faith” just in my uni library. “Good faith” is so far from an undefined term.

And no, “good faith” doesn’t somehow mean that copyright holders will have the final say in what will and won’t constitute as a copyright infringement. What “good faith” means, very simply put, is that you have to have trust in each others good faith while dealing with each other. You must be able to trust that the copyright holder is indeed the copyright holder, and that the media platform is indeed able to fulfill the obligations that’s put on them. When the directive says that they should cooperate in good faith, it means that they must cooperate in a way that the legal barrier for good faith is reached. I get that this is all sounding very weird, but that is kind of what you have lawyers for. We’re supposed to have read those 400 000 and more books to be able to conclude if something has been conducted in good faith or not. But no, this writing does not in any way open up for an arbitrary interpretation of copyright law. It does make things a lot more legal-technical, but that’s the way copyright law is looking right now.

And then. I don’t know what happens next honestly. He somehow manages to connect the “good faith” requirement and the conclusion that content ID bots will somehow stop content from being uploaded??? That’s a mental jump that I really can’t follow, but okay. 

First of all, because the bots are no longer on the table. Second of all, because dealing in good faith has nothing to do with the bots. But if we forget all about the bots altogether, good faith will still never give copyright holders the right to file unfounded copyright infringement claims. Either something is copyright infringement, or it isn’t, and the copyright holders and media platforms should cooperate in good faith to make sure that copyright infringement doesn’t happen, and you always have the legal framework in the back to make sure that unfounded claims of copyright infringement doesn’t happen, and that the requirement of good faith is met.

And this is complicated, I get that, but that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along. Copyright law is weird and complicated as fuck.

He also can’t make up his mind if content ID recognition is a good or bad thing. Like first he says that if they had kept the bots in the text (and that’s where he says that the bots have been removed from the text, but he doesn’t clarify that further) then everything would have been a-okay, but then like 5 minutes later he says that the content ID (which!! Isn’t even in question anymore!!!!!!!) is the work of the devil. And I’m sorry, but I’m on a bit of a personal vendetta against YouTube right now, and this is exactly the stance that YouTube themselves have taken. They’re going “oh, article 13 is literally hell brought to life!!!!” but then in the next breath they go “BUT BOTS ARE A GOOD IDEA”, and I’m getting whiplash just trying to keep up with them. It’s contradictory as hell, and I can’t even figure out what people are really worried about or not these days.

I think a lot of people are just screaming because they want to scream, but that’s another story.

He also says that the directive will be “implemented by the end of this year” which is just an outright lie. Even if you’re generous and stretch that to the end of 2019, it’s still an outright lie. The next round of votes happens in early 2019, and EU bureaucracy is a literal hellscape, so that’s just not happening.

He also compares this to GDPR, but I’ve already explained why can’t do that. Regulations and directives are completely different legal documents, and unlike regulations, directives have to be actually implemented into each member state’s national law system. And you always have an implementing period of at least 2 years for this. But like, that’s the lower bar. You can push the high bar pretty goddamn far. It’s not unusual to see member states take up to 5-6 years to implement directives, and the commission can’t really do anything about it, as long as the member state can prove that they’re working on it.

Like, I don’t remember just what it was we were supposed to regulate, but I remember we studied this one directive that Sweden took like 7, if not 8 years to implement. And we where honest to god just stalling, because we didn’t really want to regulate what the directive said that we should regulate, and we needed the time to find a way to work our way around it. So when the commission came knocking to check if we had implemented the goddamn directive yet, our government was all like “oh no, you see, this is very foreign to our law system, and we have a very hard time seeing where it could fit in, but look at all these reports we’re writing and at all these experts we’ve hired to try and work it out”, and as soon as the commission had left again, seeing how we were at least giving the impression of trying to solve it, they were all like “OKAY BACK TO STALLING”. So depending on your member state’s outlook on this directive, there’s really no telling on how long it will take before it’s implemented.

The claim that the European copyright has a narrower definition of “fair use” is also just an outright lie. This is the exceptions and limitations to copyright that the InfoSec directive allows;

(a) use for the sole purpose of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source, including the author’s name, is indicated, unless this turns out to be impossible and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved;

(b) uses, for the benefit of people with a disability, which are directly related to the disability and of a non-commercial nature, to the extent required by the specific disability;

© reproduction by the press, communication to the public or making available of published articles on current economic, political or religious topics or of broadcast works or other subject-matter of the same character, in cases where such use is not expressly reserved, and as long as the source, including the author’s name, is indicated, or use of works or other subject-matter in connection with the reporting of current events, to the extent justified by the informatory purpose and as long as the source, including the author’s name, is indicated, unless this turns out to be impossible;

(d) quotations for purposes such as criticism or review, provided that they relate to a work or other subject-matter which has already been lawfully made available to the public, that, unless this turns out to be impossible, the source, including the author’s name, is indicated, and that their use is in accordance with fair practice, and to the extent required by the specific purpose;

(e) use for the purposes of public security or to ensure the proper performance or reporting of administrative, parliamentary or judicial proceedings;

(f) use of political speeches as well as extracts of public lectures or similar works or subject-matter to the extent justified by the informatory purpose and provided that the source, including the author’s name, is indicated, except where this turns out to be impossible;

(g) use during religious celebrations or official celebrations organised by a public authority;

(h) use of works, such as works of architecture or sculpture, made to be located permanently in public places;

(i) incidental inclusion of a work or other subject-matter in other material;

(j) use for the purpose of advertising the public exhibition or sale of artistic works, to the extent necessary to promote the event, excluding any other commercial use;

(k) use for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche;

(l) use in connection with the demonstration or repair of equipment;

(m) use of an artistic work in the form of a building or a drawing or plan of a building for the purposes of reconstructing the building;

(n) use by communication or making available, for the purpose of research or private study, to individual members of the public by dedicated terminals on the premises of establishments referred to in paragraph 2© of works and other subject-matter not subject to purchase or licensing terms which are contained in their collections;

(o) use in certain other cases of minor importance where exceptions or limitations already exist under national law, provided that they only concern analogue uses and do not affect the free circulation of goods and services within the Community, without prejudice to the other exceptions and limitations contained in this Article.

That’s way more than the few exceptions that MatPat lists. And he’s also completely incorrect in European copyright law not somehow being flexible? Like, we’re not idiots, c’mon.

EU law isn’t stagnant; they’re living instruments, and we always interpret them in the light of the contemporary time. This is a skill all European lawyers are mercilessly trained in. EU law documents are worded “vaguely” and openly because we need the space to be able to make different interpretations depending on the situation. Like, the claim that point k, that lists caricatures, parodies and pastiches is somehow narrow? No?? This is where memes, and all other forms of parodies and caricatures and pastiches falls in. But just because you call something a meme doesn’t mean that it can’t be copyright infringement. You still have to make an evaluation of the actual situation. And that’s where lawyers and judges in every single member state come in; lawyers and judges who have been trained in both copyright law and EU law, and who knows how to interpret both the national law and the directive.

Because, once again, this isn’t aiming at making Europe into one coherent law system. It’s aiming at harmonizing the European law systems, but at the end of the day, it’s still always up to each and every member state of how they want to implement the directive.

Then there was the safe harbor issue. In this he actually is correct. The very aim of article 13 is to remove the safe harbor and to put a share of the responsibility of the copyright infringement on the media platform. Like, that’s the entire idea behind the article. So, once again, if you think that this is a bad idea, then yeah, go ahead and keep fighting article 13. And I’m not here to get political, but just why is the idea of removing the safe harbor such an egregiously bad idea? You as an individual is not going to be affected by it. It’s these big, multi-billion companies that will have to pay content creators their fair share of illegal copyright infringement. And why is that bad for you? Just food for thought.

And as usual, I have no idea how understandable this whole mess is, so don’t be afraid to ask me follow up questions, or anything else that you’re wondering over, and I’ll try to answer as best as I can!

fireeaglespirit said: This is like a global trend. We were right.. BTW how is the brexit thing going? Are people around you happy about it?

Okay before I start this I will just say - I don’t intend to do this often as I and others come to this part of tumblr/fandom as an escape from RL and Politics. 

Also this is my opinion so I’m not tagging it in the main tags but if it does get there then I’m not apologising for it as it’s from my observations and research.

Okay briefly...this sums Brexit up and the depths (avoidable depths) to which it will sink - 

As for the question you had about what people around me think...it’s honestly hard to get a real definitive answer as so many are in their own echo chambers and each camp has their own news sources and spin that has of course been mercilessly used by nefarious groups to continue to confuse and split people and generate apathy and despair. 

However what IS clear is that it is a complete shambles (as we predicted), many people want a People’s Vote and I believe a majority (I hope) would vote Remain (in the EU). The issues are that Government (despite being crazy, weak and likely traitors in some form or another  - by inaction if nothing else) can’t seem to be stopped because the Opposition is also divided and led by someone  - Jeremy Corbyn - who I used to have a lot of respect for as a man of principle and the people, but who now has been shown to be backward, stubborn and small minded in his views and surrounds himself with Yes men. This has been frustrating in previous years but when this crucial vote has clearly been illegally funded and manipulated by R*ssia and the Far Right and only they and elitist hedge-fund managers are profiting, then I feel it is a complete dereliction of duty on behalf of Corbyn and as such I now want him gone. There is also disturbing links between a senior advisor of his and R*ssia and these have yet to be investigated (nothing is being f*cking investigated like it is in the US) and I don’t think Corbyn is a traitor, I do think his character means he can be manipulated (a bit like Eddard Stark if you will.)

I know his and his camps argument (although they are not being honest about it) is that they think the EU is bad for rebuilding Britain on socialist lines and they want to take into account the many dis-enfranchised parts who vote to Leave. I know the EU isn’t perfect and I also believe in idealist causes like dismantling Capitalism - I’ve created both a social enterprise model and a storytelling model to help do that - but when a) the result was done illegally b) it directly helps R*ssia, the Far Right, Trump etc and c)puts us in such a terrible position then that is not the way to go. 

The previous (decent) Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a great point that basically this ‘taking back control’ nonsense is a fantasy. However they see it there are undeniable facts in the world today - there are 3 main trading  law-makers - EU, the US and China. If you aren’t a lawmaker then you are a lawtaker - the UK will have to take what it is given and will have given away all its power - fact. Plus I don’t want chlorinated chicken from the US just cos Tory scum are making fat-cat deals with Trump. Seriously these people would sell their own grandmas to make a profit!

Another thing is the despair we feel. It’s like we can’t do anything against this runaway train. All the elements in the US that are being investigated by Mueller are present here in the UK and in fact Bannon said they used Brexit as a petri dish for Trump. But we have no Mueller, and we have no Blue Wave Democrats now elected to hold our shit government to account as they get progressively worse and worse. Some people try their best but it’s not enough.

I really hope that things take a change for the better. I try and see it as the Hegelian dialectic I talked to you about or the Alchemical stages of Nigredo and Albedo when the two opposites come up and fight only to be transmuted into something better. As a Jungian I have seen the beginnings of that in the world and in my dreams so I have faith but it is very hard, hard because all this is avoidable but these people on all sides are pushing us towards this terrible own goal.

Finally I just feel so sad because so many here saw this in 2016 and voted Remain. My generation in particular (who will be the worst affected) overwhelmingly sees itself as European and I and many feel this awful Tory party have treated our colleagues and allies in Europe shamefully. TBH I think they have dealt with the UK with a lot more grace and respect than they deserve but I stress so many of us did not and do not want this to happen. All I can say is that P*tin must be laughing so hard at all this - well played - very Caesar divide and conquer.

Anyway I try not to think about it too much and just do what I can do day to day. In my deepest heart I do feel that this is part of a world transformation  - the bad is being exposed and hopefully transmuted but it will take time and a lot of pain that could have been avoided. Until then I will keep one of the British things I am proud of - our self deprecating humour. It has had a lot of chances to be exercised in the last couple of years!

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation…

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation…

 O would, or I had seen the day

That treason thus could sell us,

My auld gray head had lien in clay,

Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour,

I'll mak' this declaration;

We're bought and sold for English gold -

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

 Interpretation of poetry has never been my strong point, but I’d hazard a guess that The Bard was pretty pissed off when he wrote these words.  More than 200 years later, I have to wonder – are we still a “parcel of rogues in a nation”?

 I started off 2019 with two resolutions:

1.     Don’t worry about things until they happen

2.    Stop tweeting

 I lasted until the 2nd of January before I came across a tweet from the Scotsman…”End indyref2 talk in 2019, campaigners TELL @NicolaSturgeon” and felt compelled to retweet with a sarcastic comment and a bemused emoji. Fast forward a few hours and I’m awake at 3am, anxious about the state of the country and a Brexit that hasn’t happened yet.

Earlier in the year, to relieve my anxiety, the “other half” begrudgingly agreed to me stockpiling food.  So I set about compiling a “Brexit Cupboard” filled with pasta, rice and other staples from the continent such as olive oil and sundried tomatoes that may be hard to come by in the even a no-deal Brexit scenario.  I received a lot of stick for this from friends and family, who suggested that I was catastrophising and perhaps I had too much time on my hands, being on maternity leave at the time.  It was time I went back to work.

 Brexit cupboard ready to go, I still find myself awake at stupid o’clock in the morning, so in another attempt to get a decent night’s sleep I thought I’d try to take the thoughts that are troubling me and put them down on paper….

 Back in 2014 when Scotland voted No, I was heartbroken but I understood and accepted the result.  I don’t blame my friends and family who voted No (openly).  Initially, my gut reaction was No.  It was a risk, but I decided that since it was such a serious decision, I should partake in some research.  I had never been interested in politics before and, prior to 2013, wasn’t even registered to vote.  Coming from a predominantly socialist family, I was conscious that my vote should be an informed decision and not based on what those around me thought.  The more I read, the more convinced I was that Scotland should be independent, and the more incensed I became that we weren’t already.

 I joined Twitter, entered into discussion with “Unionists”, asking questions and looking for a reason as to why Scotland should remain as part of the UK. I am still looking.  For one single reason.  Instead I have received nothing but condescending replies, questioning my intelligence and level of education, or lack thereof.  One lovely chap asking, “not very bright are you?”. Regarding the ever divisive topic of Scottish Independence, polite discourse quickly descends into “sharing and pooling” and “fiscal transfer” and “go away, you don’t understand”.  I’ve tried with GERS.  I really have, and I don’t think it’s that GERS figures are beyond the comprehension of the average “cybernat”.  Just that they are far too dull to hold the attention of all but the most dogged “Britnat”, who would rather see Scotland burn to the ground than be independent (they might get their wish come April).  They wait eagerly for “GERS-figures day” every year and, like a dog with a bone, rip them to shreds and shout “See!  They are your own government’s figures and they show that Scotland is too wee, too poor!  Get back in your box”.  From what I can understand, these figures are based on Scotland being part of the so-called “United” Kingdom and can’t be used to predict what an independent Scotland would look like so I really don’t see what all the hoo-hah is about to be honest.

 Sometimes I think, in an alternative universe, where Scotland voted Yes four years ago, what would my unionist friends and family think if the country was in the state that it is now?  I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be biting their tongue, going by the continuous loop of “SNP-bad” rhetoric that still prevails, despite none of this current shit-show being of their doing.

 Looking at the state of affairs, it is extremely disturbing to see what people will accept nowadays.  If you had told me four years ago that the UK would be stockpiling food and medicine, preparing the army for civil unrest and that Schrödinger’s drones would cause Gatwick airport to grind to a halt, I would have said, no one in their right mind would vote for that….but then again, they didn’t put that on the big red bus.

 Credit where it’s due to the Westminster establishment, they have been extremely clever in this respect.  Of course it would never have worked to put “Vote for martial law” on the bus!  Instead, over two years they have, little by little, gone from “£350 million for the NHS!” to “a no-deal scenario wouldn’t be the end of the world” with Westminster’s very own resident hobbit Michael Gove kindly suggesting that we allow people to scavenge on rubbish heaps.  Even better, it will give us a chance to go back to the good old days of the Blitz when everyone pulled together.  To anyone who says that, I say, get yourself down a trench during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  I visited the WW1 battlefields in 2015 after 97 years of peace, and it was traumatising enough.

 To anyone who is (even now!) unsure about whether Brexit is all bad, I simply say, look at who supports it…for the love of God!  Imagine, stumbling across a party and looking around to see Boris Johnson, Hobbit Gove, Nigel Farage, Andrea Leadsom, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, John Redwood, Vladimir Putin and last but by no means least, the smiling assassin, Jacob Rees-Mogg and his fellow Dickensian panto-villain Julia Hartley-Brewer (never trust anyone with a double-barrelled surname).  I would be turning on my heel and getting out of that place before they started burning £50 notes (or as it will be known post-brexit…$5,000,000).

 I happen to think Theresa May herself would also be at that party.  I am not for a minute buying that she was ever a Remainer.  I reckon her husband (senior executive at an investment fund that profits from tax-avoiding companies) would stand to lose a pretty penny from the EU’s Anti Tax Avoidance Directive which was presented on 28th January 2016 (!) and requires its member states to apply these measures as of 1st January 2019…3 months before the Brexit deadline.  Coincidence?  No deal has always been the end goal and who better to run down the clock than the cringe-worthy curtseying Theresa May who campaigned so emphatically for Remain? Theresa May, who is trying to broker a deal that is best for the WHOLE country and one that supports the democratic vote…the last democratic vote you’ll ever have, by the way.  Because now democracy means that when you voted once, based on an illegal campaign that no-one has been held accountable for, you are no longer entitled to change your mind because that is what democracy means now. Is Theresa May the Keyser Söze of Westminster?  Albeit her daft walk at the end is to the tune of Abba?  Is she that clever and forward-thinking to have orchestrated this whole clusterbourach?

 No, she is merely a puppet and her strings are being pulled by disaster capitalists who know exactly what they are doing.  They will have prepared for every eventuality.

 Panto villain Mogg has been popping his polite, well-spoken, over-privileged and under-achieving head up recently to air his views whenever he can on the main-stream media.  I noted that he voiced his support of the late Margaret Thatcher featuring on the new £50 note.  Margaret Thatcher, who was a known admirer of General Pinochet.

 This is a quote from Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine:

 “The British prime minister was well acquainted with what she called “the remarkable success of the Chilean economy”, describing it as a “striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons”.  Yet despite her admiration for Pinochet, when Hayek first suggested that she emulate his shock therapy policies, Thatcher was far from convinced.  In February 1982, the prime minister bluntly explained the problem in a private letter to her intellectual guru.  “I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.  Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution.  At times the process may seem painfully slow.”

 I wonder if 30 odd years is slow enough and I think by “quite unacceptable”, she means this…

 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-pinochet-affair-i-saw-them-herded-to-their-death-i-heard-the-gunfire-as-they-died-1179543.html

Make no mistake, this is a right-wing coup.  It’s just that it’s being carried out in an orderly fashion – the British way.

 No one wants to talk about Brexit anymore.  The majority of the people in my life are completely ignorant about the consequences of a no-deal scenario, blissfully so, and encourage me to join them. The apathy shown towards the biggest political disaster to happen to this country in living memory is beyond my comprehension.  So half the country is sleepwalking and half have just about reached Brexit saturation point and all the time we are being nudged, slowly towards the edge of the cliff. ….and when we’re pushed over the edge, there will be Sajid Javid waiting on an armed boat shouting “CRISIS! - NO MIGRANTS ALLOWED!”.  The neoliberals stand to make a tidy profit while the country is reeling from the chaos that would inevitably ensue from a No-deal. We can look forward to the swift privatisation of our Health Service, abolition of the welfare state, chlorinated chicken, etc.

 In 2014, Scottish independence was about hope and the ability to control our own affairs.  Now, it’s about the survival of our democracy.  If Scotland is not independent come March 29th 2019, I predict that, freed from the burden of EU laws, Westminster will adopt Henry VIII powers to abolish the devolved parliaments.  It has already shown what it is capable of, and its contempt of the Scottish parliament, by taking them to court over the Continuity Bill.  Scotland has barely been mentioned throughout the Brexit “negotiations” and has been disregarded and disrespected at every turn.  We are absolutely not, as was promised, “Better Together”. Independence is the only option now and I, for one, hope to begin 2020 as part of an independent Scotland with my human rights still intact.

 However, if anyone is reading this in a post-Brexit version of “The Handmaid’s Tale”….nothing to see here!  All left-wing views out the window.  God save the Queen.