Westminstenders: Blue Passports

[RedToothBrush]

Yay for the blue passports.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all

May next year bring us £350 million for the NHS, cake, unicorns, financial passporting, access to the single market, Irish love and of course control to the people.

(Apologies been up to my eyeballs. Normal service will resume after Christmas).

Tackling hate speech

The new German law caused Twitter and then Facebook to delete the account of the far right Afd leader after she posted a racist comment about Muslim men

She has a nasty history of hate speech - now she can't spread it so easily

The Network Enforcement Act gives social media firms 24 hours to remove content considered hate speech, threats, sedition or slander.
Or face up to a €50 million fine.

https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/twitter-and-facebook-block-german-politicians-posts-870590?

BigChocFrenzy - do you think the German authorities can get Twitter to remove The Donald's tweets and account on the basis that he foments racism and hatred, as well as advocating mutual destruction

If only that weren't so true

cardinal I think that was a mixture of some trolls / bots being trained to goad, while staying within the rules
… and a few posters who let themselves be goaded into breaking the rules

Rather like on the street: if someone is annoying but just legal, it is the person who swings a punch at them who gets deleted.
Classic tactics.

on Westministenders, we don't feed 'em

People are registering German SM accounts prettybird for those reasons and to block other similar.

pretty If Trump clearly tweets / messages hate speech, those posts might well get deleted in Germany

I'm pretty sure his account won't get deleted though:
it lies with the social media firm whether they are prepared to invest the manpower into checking every single message of known transgressors.

They weren't with the AfD leader, but I'm sure they - US companies at least - would decide to do this rather than delete a POTUS account.

Also, imo, the AfD tweets were far more dangerous in Germany than tweets from a foreigner, even POTUS
Especially as many AfD supporters are the least likely in Germany to understand English anyway, especially Trump's version !

@redtoothbrush well deserved

Germany also deleted satirical tweets as part of these new measures, which is where the problems might start. Will try to find the article I saw.

This might be of interest to some of you (you might persuade him and then influence momentum and then who knows what might happen)

Owen Jones🌹
@OwenJones84
I don't like Brexit. I'm not convinced the referendum result can be reversed, but I want to hear a compelling counter-argument. So - without yelling at me! - let me know your thoughts >> www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/stop-brexit-campaign-vote-leave-populist

Not sure any of us understand Trump's "English" #bigly #covfefe

The war with bannon is going well. Have some more of the latest trump words (that will definitely raise an eyebrow)

Thanks for that pain He's been a bit of a scamp @OwenJones but there's a lot of bridge building going on, everywhere. Kudos to him for that tweet.

This looks like it's completely fixed, and on paper this coup looks like it is, but with the @50 challenge, the Adonis HOL challenge, the constitutional pickle of TM challenging the HOL, the position she then puts the queen in, and the pro EU grassroots, and pro EU MPs gathering strength, who knows how this one will turn out.

There's definitely a conscious commitment to working across all the parties to get this one sorted.

On the other hand !!!!!

Toby Young quotes on breasts, eugenics and working-class people

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/03/toby-young-quotes-on-breasts-eugenics-and-working-class-people
…
On ‘universally unattractive’ working-class students at Oxford
In a 1988 book The Oxford Myth, Young wrote about working class students, or “stains,” arriving at Oxford.

It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate …
Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs.
Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.

Netanyahu asks if African ‘infiltrators’ [refugees] can be forcibly removed from Israel

Depressing - the far right in Israel has the same racist mantra as the far right everywhere
BUT
International laws about accepting refugees were motivated by the horror of Jews fleeing the Nazis, but being refused refuge by many countries.

I'm surprised that Netanyahu and his US-funded racists keep getting elected in Israel, that they ever gained support in the country of Golda Meir and kibbutzes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/benjamin-netanyahu-asks-if-african-migrants-can-be-forcibly-removed-from-israel
…
Netanyahu instructed the national security adviser, Meir Ben Shabbat, to look into forced expulsion as his cabinet met to approve a plan to offer 40,000 peoplee^ the choice of being deported with a cash payment or being incarcerated indefinitely.
…
Referring to a widely reported deal to pay Rwanda $5,000 per person to accept the migrants, the groups added:
“Rwanda is not a safe place.
All the evidence indicates that anyone expelled from Israel to Rwanda finds himself there without status and without rights, exposed to threats, kidnappings, torture and trafficking.”

Congrats red

Wrt to Trump-glish, I caught myself saying bigly the other day. Having admonished myself out loud for sounding like him and pulling off an impression that made my DC laugh, dc2 asked what a Donald trump was. I said he was the president of the united states and he's definitely an idiot so ok to call him one (DC's have been told not to call people idiots randomly recently). Dc2 then turned to dc1 and said you are such a Donald trump.

I have accidentally swapped my DC's term of abuse now

During my early 1980s post-doctoral fellowship, I shared an office with a visiting Israel professor who was a Holocaust survivor - he showed me the brand on his arm
He used to have huge kitbags of his possessions and he kept checking they were still there. Poor man.

He was always anxious about rightwing politics, especially in Israel.
He vocally hated Begin (the rightwing leader then) as a Nazi (which shocked me, coming from him)

Netanyahu has swung far more to the right than Begin, along with the batshit US fascists

I suspect that, like in the UK, the old wartime generation were more outward looking and less nationalistic than the boomers
Somehow, human experiences of the horrors of the 1930s and WW2 , lessons learned, didn't get passed down properly to enough boomers.
(yes, I'm a boomer too and we're not all the same, but each generations tends to be shaped by its experiences, to share certain attitudes)

Hashi Remember that you can correctly tell the DC to use "trump" as an alternative to "fart"
You would be widening their vocabulary as well as their political knowledge.

Congratulations!!

I'm so pleased for Red, the Westminenderz, and the posters of Mumsnet, who have supported Mumsnet as a space to communicate, learn and exchange ideas - and as a predominantly female space at that. A very rare thing; a good thing.

I'm waiting for a health appointment at my local hospital. It's been cancelled and re-scheduled once so far. I'm expecting it to be cancelled again (as a result of this current freeze of non-essential procedures). Even if it's not cancelled, I'll have been waiting 6 months by the time I'm seen.

The NHS is being destroyed.

Thanks All.

I am somewhat embarrassed.

So sorry to hear about your cancelled ops, cat
I hope they can fit you in v soon

We had a similar situation for at least a decade from the late 1980s:
I had to pay for my late mum to have knee, foot and eye surgeries, because I was told the waiting list for non-urgent ops was 2 years - she would have waited in pain and further reduced mobility & quality of life.
After that, I took out private insurance for myself (noone would accept mum) while fit, in case I also became uninsurable - as I have noone to pay for me.

Anyone who is poor and without family who can pay for private care, or uninsurable, is screwed
The wealthy will be fine
The others who don't see the problem just haven't experienced it yet

Enjoy your MN , red

Congratulations Red!

from another lurker. These threads are awesome.

Well done, Red. Very well deserved.

Well deserved 🍸to Red. More prestigious than the New Year's honours list imho.

Arise Dame RedToothBrush of Westministenders 🤺