We had streets, but now there's just police

[sovay]

The aftermath of the hate march barrels on. Once again reality proves it can get away with the parallelism so often denied fiction, as the judge who refused to dismiss charges against non-violent protesters pepper-sprayed by police turns out to have a history of pepper-spraying violence himself. Handcuffing a woman for doing her legal job is horribly less surprising in the current climate, but it's still not a good look. While we have a corruption scandal breaking, yet. Dammit, Boston.

In political news of countries not my own, I am interested by the order of voting operations laid out by David Schraub in his consideration of Tory Islamophobia, Labour anti-Semitism, and the existence of the Lib Dems, who he feels strongly deserve more attention: "What It Means for Jews to Vote Tory."

Courtesy of spatch: I did not realize until I saw this tweet that it was Werner Herzog's birthday. I am charmed to see him on location for Fitzcarraldo (1982); that's Fitzcarraldo's parrot on his shoulder, inclining me to believe it was actually Herzog's parrot in a cameo role. I have belatedly realized that there are ways in which I link this movie with A Canterbury Tale (1944).

I appear to be fending off a cold. Dammit, body.

Comments

[yhlee]

I hope your body fends off the cold successfully!

*support support*

[rydra_wong]

In political news of countries not my own, I am interested by the order of voting operations laid out by David Schraub in his consideration of Tory Islamophobia, Labour anti-Semitism, and the existence of the LibDems, who he feels strongly deserve more attention: "What It Means for Jews to Vote Tory."

I don't think he's wholly off-base, but I'd want to add a lot of nuance. The problem with the Tories right now isn't just Islamophobia and Brexit. Johnson's a wholly amoral sociopath and has now committed himself to going full Trump, embracing a very scary kind of hard-right populism, and planning a deliberate "culture war" strategy for the general election. He happily went along with massive corruption of the democratic process in the Vote Leave campaign and is already threatening democratic procedures. Tories winning now would be equivalent to Trump winning in 2020; it would give him permission for everything.

Plus, war in Northern Ireland.

Plus, the Tory "grave and systematic" violation of the human rights of disabled people, which has literally killed hundreds of people and will continue to kill people (and force others into institutions) unless assorted cuts and rule-changes are reversed.

(One of the issues some people have with the Lib Dems is their past willingness to form the coalition with the Tories under which some of these human rights violations started.)

So I'd skew much more heavily towards the major priority right now being to block/eject the Tories by voting for whoever the non-Tory front-runner in your constituency is (whether that's Lib Dem or Labour or SNP or Plaid Cymru or Green), unless said front-runner is an anti-Semite (or TERF or homophobe etc. etc., lots of shit going around).

I think Jeremy Corbyn's a anti-Semite (I started out thinking he was maybe merely naively willing to overlook it in people on his side, ended up concluding that he's outright anti-Semitic himself) and also STUNNINGLY INCOMPETENT AND STUPID. The fact that the Tory party are collapsing in front of us and he still might not win the election is a measure of how incredibly inept and toxic he is.

But, horrifyingly, he's not the worst possibility out there right now.

[wpadmirer]

You would think better of Boston. (sigh)

I hope you fend the cold off successfully.