While I wish the UK would just rejoin the EU outright, I don't see the EU allowing the UK to retain the Pound, and I can see the jingoists making much of joining the Euro. (Also there are acknowledged structural problems with the Euro that need to be addressed).
But a Norway style association would be brilliant. I'd settle for that for now.
@Remittancegirl The EU would demand a commitment to adopt the Euro. But for how that's treated, just look at the Zloty—20+ years after Polish accession and the Zloty is still in use there. Ever since the Greek crisis, the EU has been remarkably lackadaisical about specifying a timeline for convergence.
Sadly, I have been taken off the electoral roll and cannot vote in this election because I have lived outside of the uk for more than five years.
However, if you CAN vote, please do. Also, please check to see what type of identification you are going to need to vote, because they've gotten tricky about it.
Don't let the bastards make you feel like it's not worth bothering. It is.
Have you got reason to believe all politics is bollocks, and there is no party that represents all of your aspirations?
Then please vote to punish the motherfuckers who've been in power for 13 years and presided over the poisoning of your water, the decimation of your healthcare system, Brexit, the deaths in care homes, and the corruption.
If you don't punish these fuckers by ousting them after all this shit, you teach EVERY politician that there are no consequences to their perfidy.
These shits are DEPENDING on your apathy. They're depending on you feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, alienated. They are itching to make you vote for a party that cannot possibly take power by ratcheting up your disagreement with some of the opposition's policies. They're going to find every wound that divides us and pour salt in those wounds.
Please... do not let them do this.
Make these bastards pay of all the misery they've inflicted on the UK, while they and their friends grew rich.
I don't share political views with the conservatives on the SCOTUS, but I was under the shameful misapprehension that they were not unintelligent men, that they were capable of rational thought.
But I was wrong. Because not a single one of them managed to figure out that a President who is immune from prosecution for assassinating a political rival cannot possibly HAVE a congress who might impeach him. Do they imagine congresspersons do not fear death? #SCOTUS
@Remittancegirl
I was talking to my cousin about this. He visited me from Argentina last week. He’s a lawyer and got into politics for four years. He said people entering politics usually had principles they wanted to see enacted, and ambition.
But after four years, he was exhausted. The only people left around him where the crazy ones, who only had ambition - and nothing else.
@Remittancegirl my partner has a doctorate and uni level teaching experience. He worked at the provincial legislative library recently and was struck by the fact that most of the elected members (especially those in the governing party) were reading at a high school level.
@Remittancegirl this is very dangerous but I'm also curious what cat autism is supposed to look like, and how it would be different from just having a normal cat
I'm so fucking deeply pissed off. I've tried to find a way to frame this with a wider lens, but that will take a while.
The SCOTUS has decided that the conceit of putting their finger on the scales is more important than affording the American people the opportunity to make an informed choice in the upcoming election.
Following @Illuminatus's succinct post, the larger problem highlighted by this petty decision is the paradox of the court's 'supremacy' and the fact that they are life-appointments.
The reason for life-appointments was to free justices of pressure to serve any master other than the law and the good of the country.
Clearly that intention has been unmoored. A court that knowingly delays justice with an election hanging in the balance is an illegitimate court. #SCOTUS
The phrase "Justice delayed is justice denied" is fundamental to jurisprudence.
SCOTUS's granting of certiorari on the DC appellate court's decision cannot be decontextualized. They may be venal, but they're not stupid. They KNOW that granting cert is justice denied and that the consequences are as grave as any consequence can be.
@Remittancegirl The same trend is running in the UK (note increasingly ideological Tory attacks on liberal arts education from 2010 onwards) and elsewhere.
Commercializing higher education and turning a degree into nothing more than an admission ticket to skilled employment (with huge loan debt attached) was part of the post-1968 fightback against student activism, itself a side-effect of having over-educated the next generation of electors (oops, not so easily led by propaganda).
@cstross@Remittancegirl Another chunk of this is an increasingly sharp separation between "educated" and "can alter the material world by their own efforts". There's increasingly strong class barriers being installed to make sure nobody with money has any contact with reality whatsoever.