Thread: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

  1. #6661
    irontaino's Avatar Protector Domesticus
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    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Former prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, has been assassinated. He was gunned down with a homemade shotgun.

    Mr Abe was giving a speech for a political candidate in Nara at a road junction when the attack happened.

    Eyewitnesses said they saw a man carrying what they described as a large gun and firing twice at Mr Abe from behind. The former prime minister fell to the ground as bystanders screamed in shock and disbelief.

    Mr Abe did have a team of security police with him. But it appears the gunman was still able to get within a few metres of Mr Abe without any sort of checks or barrier.

    Photos circulating in the aftermath of the shooting showed the suspect standing just behind Mr Abe as he delivered a speech from a traffic island in Nara city.
    Last edited by irontaino; July 08, 2022 at 10:54 AM.
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  2. #6662
    Vanoi's Avatar Dux Limitis
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    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/wing-evan...042532622.html

    https://abovethelaw.com/2022/07/pray...ustice-hmmmmm/

    Praying with justices? Having dinners with them? An entire operation by conservatives to influence right-wing members of the court on current political issues?

    And to top it all off Peggy Nienaber, the person claiming to pray with justices, have dinners, and generally have access to, is the executive director of the Liberty Counsel. The Liberty Counsel regularly files amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. Alto cited their brief in his majority decision to overturn Roe v Wade.

    No conflicts of interest here right?

  3. #6663

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Vanoi View Post
    No conflicts of interest here right?
    Not necessarily. Apparently this is pretty normal.

    https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2022...u-know-n481245

    First, though, let’s scroll to the bottom of the article, where we discover that this turns out to be de rigueur at the Supreme Court. In fact, that gets explained by a legal scholar from the Left-leaning Brookings Institute and UCLA almost at the very end of Rolling Stone’s hyperventilation, and only given a single paragraph:

    Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
    So it turns out that this is a big, huge, fat nothingburger. It’s even more silly given the fact that Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel weren’t even parties to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. The parties in this case were the state of Mississippi and the abortion clinic that Mississippi’s law would have impacted. Lots of organizations submit amici briefs to the courts, and no one has ever suggested that judges should then hermetically seal themselves away from said organizations and members.

    In Dobbs, multiple Catholic dioceses submitted amici briefs, as did the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Does that mean that the Catholic justices should refrain from going to Mass? How about the amicus brief filed by Howard University School of Law — does that prevent any justice from speaking at the university or attending any of its events? Should the justices bar entry into their chambers by any member of the leadership of the American Bar Association on the basis of their amicus brief? How about the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Organization of Women, 236 members of Congress, or the ACLU? Should they all be expelled from the justices’ offices, especially given how often they file such briefs in high-profile cases?
    Last edited by Prodromos; July 09, 2022 at 02:13 AM.
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  4. #6664
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    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Prodromos View Post
    Not necessarily. Apparently this is pretty normal.

    https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2022...u-know-n481245
    As stated in my article it's not just prayers that's the problem. Not surprised that the conservative blog Hot Air didn't address that.

  5. #6665

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    As liberals/leftists come to realization that the next leader of the Conservative Party will likely be non-white, the race-essentialist narrative is shifting:

    When Sunak launched his campaign to be the next prime minister, the QC and campaigner Jolyon Maugham responded with a pointed question on Twitter: “Do you think the members of your Party are ready to select a brown man, Rishi?” After receiving criticism for this question, Maugham explained why he asked it: “My point was, I want, we should all want, greater representation of people of colour leading all political parties.” If that is the case, Maugham should be pleased by the upcoming Tory leadership contest: Sunak, Javid, Zahawi, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch have all announced they are standing for the leadership. But that is not the case.

    There’s a deeper point to Maugham’s statement, which he doesn’t spell out but is clear from the incredulous tone of his tweet: that there is a dissonance between ethnic minority people and the Conservative Party. This point was explicitly articulated by Nadine White, the race correspondent of the Independent, when she tweeted: “Can you imagine a Black or Asian person leading the Conservative Party? Others argue that the very concept is diametrically opposed to the party’s core values.” The implication of White’s tweet is that the Conservative Party is so profoundly racist that any leader of it from an ethnic minority constitutes a deep contradiction that needs to be explained.

    The problem with this mindset – framing the relationship between ethnic minority people and conservatism as a remarkable contradiction – is that it justifies the racist hostility directed against many prominent conservative politicians. In aligning themselves with the party, so the argument goes, they have fundamentally betrayed their identity. The nature of the insults that someone like Badenoch receives reflects this dynamic – she is called a (racial slur), a (racial slur), and so forth, by many people who strangely also call themselves anti-racist. In reality, political allegiances are more complex: they don’t reflect someone’s identity but their values, and this cuts across race and ethnicity.

    The first woman to be the prime minister of the UK was a Conservative politician, and so was the second. The third female prime minister might also be a Tory. Labour has never even had a female leader. It seems likely that the first Asian leader of Britain will be a politician from the Conservative Party, and so will the first black prime minister of this country. A large part of all of this is explained by Britain’s being is a small-c conservative country. Any future prime minister is likelier than not to be a Conservative: there has only been one Labour leader born in the past 100 years to have won a general election, and that was Tony Blair.

    A second point worth reflecting on is that Labour does not have a monopoly on virtue when it comes to bigotry. The first Labour leader, Keir Hardie, viciously campaigned against Lithunian immigrants in Scotland. It was a Labour government that introduced the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which discriminated against Asians trying to come to Britain from Kenya, and which Auberon Waugh, in the Spectator of all places, described as “one of the most immoral pieces of legislation to have emerged from any British Parliament”. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, became the second party to be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – after the BNP.

    But the third and most pressing point is this: why shouldn’t an ethnic minority person be a Conservative? If we accept that not all ethnic minority people are the same – which should be the first plank of anti-racism – then we have to accept that they do not all share the same political perspective. And nor should they. Political pluralism should be staunchly defended: it is as important an element of diversity as any other.

    https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfi...n-white-leader



  6. #6666
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    Quote Originally Posted by Prodromos View Post
    Not necessarily. Apparently this is pretty normal.

    https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2022...u-know-n481245
    I think in my coubtry that would seen as improperfor either side of poltics. Tgere was a serious conflict on ibterest when rhe major keft wing leader married the dajghter of the Glvernir General, and he was mot voted in in part because of this.

    The US system works well, but I'd say any politician "fraternising" or otherwise being close to the judiciary iza weakness; FDR was an effective presjdent but his rule weakened democracy in the US and if he did this its a bit of clue its bad.
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  7. #6667

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    https://www.newsweek.com/american-ex...others-1728064

    "Unfunded state pension liabilities total $8.28 trillion or just under $25,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States," the report began, citing the unprecedented nature of public pension indebtedness.

    The reason this matters to taxpayers, the report said, is simple. "State governments are obligated, often by contract and state constitutional law, to make these pension payments regardless of economic conditions. As these pension payments continue to grow, revenue that could have gone towards tax relief or essential services like public safety and education is spent paying off these liabilities instead."

    The states with the highest unfunded
    liabilities per capita included the usual suspects: California ($38,713), New Jersey
    ($39,849), Connecticut ($40,427) and Illinois ($41,656).

    New Jersey's total risk-free unfunded liabilities are over $370 billion, New York has $508 billion, and California's is an astonishing $1.5 trillion, the report revealed.

    How did this man-made economic crisis happen? "In New Jersey, the tax recipients are more organized than the taxpayers," a public pension reformer in New Jersey once said.

    Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had this to say about the system he once tried to reform. "One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits," Christie said. "What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment."
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  8. #6668

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    EU funds are put to use to endanger people's lives out of political spite:

    Classified Report Reveals Full Extent of Frontex Scandal

    The EU’s anti-fraud office has found that the European border agency covered up and helped to finance illegal pushbacks of asylum-seekers in Greece. The report, which DER SPIEGEL has obtained, puts pressure on the EU Commission – and could also spell trouble for Frontex's new leadership.
    A single pushback case does a good job of illustrating almost all of the misdeeds of which OLAF investigators are now accusing Frontex. During the early morning hours of August 5, 2020, the Greek Coast Guard towed an inflatable refugee boat behind it. About 30 refugees had been sitting on the vessel. The Greeks actually should have brought the asylum-seekers safely to shore and provided them with the chance to apply for asylum. Instead, they dragged them back toward Turkey.
    Investigators claim that the Frontex heads prevented the proper investigation of the pushback. Instead, they withdrew a plane that had been patrolling the Aegean Sea on behalf of Frontex. Officially, it was said, the aircraft was needed in the central Mediterranean. The truth, though, was that Frontex wanted to avoid recording further human rights violations.
    The investigators also detail how Frontex used European taxpayer money to fund pushbacks in at least six instances. The incident on August 5, for example, involved the Greek Coast Guard vessel "CPB 137." The agency had co-funded the boat’s mission. The agency’s leadership knew exactly how delicate the matter was – and concealed this from all subsequent inquiries made by the European Parliament and Frontex’s Management Board.
    Kalnaja has herself stated that she has not read the OLAF report – this despite the fact that the it reveals a whole series of structural problems that don’t have anything to do with Leggeri. For example, it states that Greek border guards apparently place pressure on Frontex officials if they try to report pushbacks, as previously reported by DER SPIEGEL. The Greeks often conceal arriving refugee boats by not recording these "ghost landings" in the corresponding Frontex database.
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  9. #6669
    swabian's Avatar igni ferroque
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    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post
    EU funds are put to use to endanger people's lives out of political spite:

    Classified Report Reveals Full Extent of Frontex Scandal







    Yeah, well. Holding an infant in the camera like that above sea is nice and dandy, but why exactly is the EU eligible for saving the world? Did it occur ever to the inclined gentlemen that this is actually not within the power of the EU and her 'maritime extensions'?

  10. #6670

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by swabian View Post
    Yeah, well. Holding an infant in the camera like that above sea is nice and dandy, but why exactly is the EU eligible for saving the world? Did it occur ever to the inclined gentlemen that this is actually not within the power of the EU and her 'maritime extensions'?
    It's really not about saving the world though. It's about endangering people's lives while violating international human rights.
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  11. #6671

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    European taxpayers should not be held fiscally responsible for people that try to enter Europe illegally.

  12. #6672
    swabian's Avatar igni ferroque
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    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post
    It's really not about saving the world though. It's about endangering people's lives while violating international human rights.
    I don't think there is a human rights violation of any sort going on. What violations are you refering to?

  13. #6673

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by swabian View Post
    I don't think there is a human rights violation of any sort going on. What violations are you refering to?
    Pushbacks at the EU's external borders
    Pushbacks in international and EU law
    In various judgments, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has condemned pushback practices as collective expulsions based on Article 4 of Protocol No 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
    EU law
    EU law enshrines in primary law the right to asylum and the right to international protection (Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights). The EU law also provides for the prohibition of collective expulsion and the principle of non-refoulement (Article 19 of the Charter).
    Regulation No 656/2014 (Sea Borders Regulation) governs surveillance of external sea borders by EU Member States within the context of operational cooperation with Frontex. Article 4 ensures the protection of fundamental rights and the principle of non-refoulement. According to Article 4(3), before any rescued person is disembarked, forced to enter, conducted to or otherwise handed over to the authorities of a third country, the Frontex operation must conduct a case-by-case assessment of their personal circumstances and provide information on the destination. The rescued persons must also be given the opportunity 'to express any reasons for believing that disembarkation in the proposed place would be in violation of the principle of non-refoulement'.
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  14. #6674

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    Sounds like EU law should be either updated or simply ignored due too lack of modern relevance.

  15. #6675

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    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    Sounds like EU law should be either updated or simply ignored due too lack of modern relevance.
    Asylum is a fundamental right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Geneva Convention of 1951.
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  16. #6676

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Yeah and there is a process for that. Welfare migrants trespassing into another country doesn't make them asylum seekers.

  17. #6677

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    Yeah and there is a process for that. Welfare migrants trespassing into another country doesn't make them asylum seekers.
    Welfare migrants do not risk their lives by cramping on a small boat with dozens of people to find themselves capsized and ashore dead on an Aegean beach. They usually fly in as a tourists and stay past their visa. In any case, that process you speak of can not be executed while Greek ships funded by Frontex use long sticks to push such boats away from Greece.
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  18. #6678

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Welfare migrants do not risk their lives by cramping on a small boat with dozens of people to find themselves capsized and ashore dead on an Aegean beach.
    So you are saying that anyone that trespasses into another country is an asylum seeker?

  19. #6679

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    So you are saying that anyone that trespasses into another country is an asylum seeker?
    That's one thing I didn't say.
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  20. #6680

    Default Re: Discussion and Debate Community Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post
    That's one thing I didn't say.
    Okay, so then we both agree that European authorities are correct in shooing away illegally trespassing boats.

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