palordrolap

“Mooom, he’s on my side of the car! He’s touching me! Make him stop!”

“I’m not touching you! You’re on my side of the car! You’re touching me! Mom, it’s all his fault.”

Only enemies of Israel conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment. (If you have a “but what about…” to that, read it again.)

“He sees it the way we’ve told him to see it. Absolutely masterful following of instructions.”

The quotes were because “home” both is and isn’t the right word. There are a lot of people in this world who might still think of the house they grew up in as “home” on some level, but in many cases, that property is in the hands of strangers now.

For example, I have a relative who not only lived in but was born in a house that remained in the family until a couple of decades ago, and I think they’d dearly love to be able to go back there. Even so, I don’t think the current occupants would be best pleased if my relative decided to go “home” without some kind of arrangement, especially if they decided they were going to move in.

Feel free to generalise or pick apart this metaphor.

Israel does not have to be Zionist Israel.

Now, I’m sure the Palestinians would rather have it that, after WWII, people hadn’t come “home” to settle in the area in the first place, but if it had been handled better, and without, you know, all the genocide, they might have been more accepting of the idea.

Maybe not much, but definitely way more accepting than they are now.

It may be worth noting that this is in The Telegraph, occasionally referred to as “The Torygraph”, a nickname earned for being the slightly less rabid, but still very much right-leaning newspaper. “Tory” being used in the pejorative sense.

In that newspaper, the thought of the UK being untrustworthy or that Brexit was a bad idea must be carefully skirted at all costs. Then again, that seems to be government policy no matter who the government is these days.

This is just based on vibes, but I don’t think Starmer thinks he can change Trump. He’s being as non-committal as possible and treating Trump with the same sort of respect he’d like in return. Trump’s used to the cold shoulder or barely concealed anger from - ostensibly anyway - politically opposed politicians, so he actually reciprocates.

But, nice as this all is, it’s almost certainly a scorpion and frog situation. I expect Trump will be looking for some way to exploit this, and I don’t think Starmer’s blind to that. Starmer’s hoping we can get to the other side of that particular river, like, say, the best possible outcome in four years, without anything terrible happening to Britain (that hasn’t already).

Any obvious attempt at preparation for the worst will be taken as an act of subterfuge* and almost certainly hasten any unpleasant behaviour on his part.

* I’m not sure whether Donny knows that word, but he damn sure knows the meaning of it.

Your first two lines need a caveat: … at a local meridian as chosen by the will of the people*.

Otherwise you end up in situations where every individual location sets their clock by local noon, which varies by longitude. If you think it’s bad there are a handful of different time zones across your continent, wait until it’s different from one end of town to the other.

The British invented (or popularised) standard time to avoid those sorts of problems. Problems that didn’t exist until high-speed long distance travel became a thing. And time zones were a later addition because Britain didn’t need any, but they’re also somewhat necessary.

* for “will of the people”, read “will of the ruling class” as necessary. See: China.

The only plan Russia and its allies will accept is one that has Ukraine’s complete, immediate and unconditional surrender. Anything else will be “dismissed” in similar fashion.

Many white supremacists believe in the One-drop rule. Basically, to them, if you have even a single black ancestor within the last three or four generations, you’re black even if you don’t think you are, and should be treated as such.

Obama didn’t even have the good grace to look white* so his ancestry doesn’t even matter. To them he was black.

* I am, of course, being sarcastic here.

Going to assume you mean the meme.

Blake Boston, the guy whose picture was used for Steve, was alive and well as of August last year, at least according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA296fsdaB4, and there’s no obituary showing up online.

The Wikipedia article for the meme would almost certainly have been updated if there’d even been a whiff of that.

He should spend more time admiring the view out of various upper storey windows.

The problem is, it’s probably true that a greater than average proportion of certain minorities find themselves in legally questionable circumstances more of the time. This is because they’ve always been treated poorly, and had to adapt to survive.

And now those communities have generational problems and familial mental health issues because the fundamental base of their society and community has been damaged, leading to a vicious cycle of maltreatment and increased criminality.

In general, the solution is rehabilitation, not imprisonment. But it’s going to have to be a multi-generational multi-community effort, because for any specific criminalised individual, there’s no guarantee that one person can be rehabilitated; they might be too far gone.

Don’t get me started on the ham-fisted idea of taking children from affected families and raising them away from “bad influences”. It sounds like a great rehabilitative step on paper, but the evidence shows that it’s almost always the wrong thing to do. And it’s usually a convenient way to destroy families, community morale and culture foreign to those who would take the child away, anyway.

I mean, ideally it would be nice to rewind the clock and get all colonial Europeans out of the Americas (and elsewhere) so that the damage never happened in the first place, but those ships have long since sailed. Literally and figuratively.

The real reason that none of this is being fixed is that it’s cheaper and easier to simply lock up those who fall foul of the law. There’s racial profiling in there too, sure, but that’s all part of the cheap and easy part.

A real fix needs time, money, intelligence, compassion and effort, and those are in woefully limited supply. Sometimes deliberately so.