Since the whole of British public life appears to have been swallowed up by the Harry's Place comments section circa 2005, it may be worth revisiting the peerless Encyclopedia of Decency, beginning with the Will-You-Condemn-A-Thon, still a familiar sight.
Next, Moral Courage, which has been very much in evidence in British politics and media over the past few years: so many brave men and women lining up to agree with their peers that we don't praise our own governments nearly enough.
Confronting Fascism, something that only newspaper columnists can engage in, and certainly not scruffy lefties trying to stop the EDL from marching through Tower Hamlets.
Nick Cohen may still be using the Decent Taxi as his primary mode of transportation.
These debating tactics (& others like them) had to be developed after 2003 to explain away the catastrophic outcomes of the Iraq war. The British commentariat is still full of people who honed such rhetorical skills as they posses in those years, hence *gestures at British media*
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As Dawn says, the grossly inappropriate tone of this article from IPSO's most implacable foe Lee Harpin stands out. But as one would expect from his track record, he doesn't supply the merest scrap of evidence to justify its main thrust. No breach of any rules, no "probe" either.
None of this violates any rule of the Labour Party (members are free to advocate things that aren't party policy). It's all based on a tendentious reading of the IHRA definition—which talks about "a state of Israel", not "the state"—that a lawyer could demolish in a few minutes.
While I'm prepared to believe Labour's current leadership is capable of all sorts of authoritarian excesses, this is clearly a boilerplate response that says nothing about the specific case. And no wonder she didn't respond: Harpin's record precedes him, after all.
Slow handclap for those liberals who clutched their pearls indignantly whenever anyone questioned the EHRC's credibility. Get ready for a lot more of this, and it won't just be directed against the socialist left—don't say we didn't warn you.
Can't think of any precedent for the EHRC adopting a "baffling methodology" to guide an official report that reaches conclusions at odds with the evidence but highly convenient for the British power elite. (Not in the last week, anyway.)
In 1992, the US Institute of Medicine predicted future pandemics and warned that Big Pharma couldn't be relied upon to develop vaccines: "There may be potentially catastrophic consequences if the development process is left entirely to free enterprise."
It's not a question of morality, just market incentives: it's simply not profitable to preemptively develop vaccines for potential threats. The incentives only come into play when, for example, you have a global pandemic with over a million deaths and massive economic damage.
This problem will still be with us even if we have a working vaccine for COVID-19—unless you assume this virus crossing over into the human population was a one-off fluke that we need never worry about again. Otherwise we need permanent public research.
Trump's presidency never posed a real & present danger to the Bidens, Clintons & Obamas of this world; he was never going to "lock them up". But as he scurries off, remember Michael Reinoehl, the victim of a state execution as crude as Fred Hampton's.
The NYT interviewed 22 witnesses and gathered a clear picture of a premeditated gangland hit by the US Marshals, a federal force controlled by the Department of Justice.
The hit had the enthusiastic endorsement (and quite possibly foreknowledge) of Trump, who described it as "retribution" (presumably for his far-right supporters). Some of the talk of Trump's authoritarian propensities was overblown, but this was clear as day.
It's now a week since Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the British Labour Party for telling the truth. Let's remember some of the episodes that didn't merit suspension from this august party:
1) Charging a dictator £5 million p/a to help spin away massacres of civilians
2) Lying to parliament about your knowledge of, and complicity in, CIA torture flights
3) Sounding the racist foghorn with talk of asylum seekers "swamping" British schools (even the Tory shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, said that David Blunkett's language was wrong)
Going to take an overnight break from the state of British Labour politics, simultaneously sinister and shambolic. But for the road, this is something I wrote about Labour after Corbyn before Starmer's victory that tried to look at the bigger picture. 1/
This seems right enough in hindsight (except perhaps for the bit about Starmer paving the way for a "more right-wing successor"—his 10 pledges have already been junked, there might be no need for that). *But* there's a second part to this argument ... 2/
The Kinnock–Blair 80s-90s mutation of the Labour Party wasn't just about inner-party battles, or even the general course of British history: it was very much part of a global picture. 3/