Search the Community

I'm 100% pro-choice for the woman. It's her body, her choice, her rules and her decision to make to have babies or not, not anyone else's. I personally hate and can't stand kids and toddlers at all TBH. I've been around my baby cousins enough to know that they are very demanding and require a lot of attention, money, food, clothes and etc to raise, which is a responsibility I don't want for myself. I won't ever take another man or woman's package either myself. I love my independence and freedom way too much to waste it on other human beings personally at least anyways. I don't want a life partner (man or woman) or kids, for I myself. And I stand corrected for life at least for me personally anyways. How about you? Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Do you want kids or not for you personally? Do you want a life partner (man or woman, both and/or marriage) personally?

John Bolton, a former United States ambassador to the UN and ex-White House national security adviser, has admitted in an interview he had helped plan coups in foreign countries. Bolton made the remarks during a CNN-interview with anchor Jake Tapper in which he also suggested that former US president Donald Trump was not competent enough to pull off a "carefully planned coup d’etat". Bolton casually said: "As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat – not here but, you know, [in] other places – it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he [Trump] did." When pressed on which attempts he was referring to, Bolton said that he was "not going to get into the specifics," before he mentioned Venezuela. "It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed," Bolton said. "I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me [beyond Venezuela]," the CNN anchor said, prompting a reply from Bolton: "I’m sure there is." We all knew about this, of course, it's more of a confirmation than anything else. But it's still shocking to hear a former US official so casually admit to these things. And it's a shame that his remarks haven't received more media attention in the US and around the world.

Joe Biden apparently assured rich donors at a fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected. Biden also told donors at the event that the rich should not be blamed for income inequality and that he would not “demonize” the rich, while also promising that the rich donors' standard of living would not decline in any way. Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected | Salon.com WWW.SALON.COM Along with praise for the "civility" of racists, Biden assures donors "no one's standard of living will change" Can someone explain to me how it's possible that Joe Biden is still the leading candidate in the Democratic primaries? Stuff like this should disqualify him immediately among the voters.

Last year, and for the first time, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which publishes annual reports on the development of democracy, demoted the US from a full democracy to a flawed democracy. CNBC reported on this story: And apparently, Americans can't blame it all on Trump. The US has been on the brink of becoming a flawed democracy for several years, and it would have slipped below 8.0 no matter the election result in 2016. Instead, the EIU says dwindling trust in the US political system, the government and its elected representatives are the cause for the US becoming a flawed democracy. What are your thoughts on this story? Can the US become a full democracy again, or is it going to slip further down in democracy rankings?

Do people that identify themselves as "left" on the political scale feel a greater personal responsibility to reduce their climate impact than people on the right side of politics? I do believe that this could be the case. To be able to shed some light on this question I will use a statistical program called SPSS and data from the European Social Survey (ESS). In my analysis, I want to investigate whether people's political affiliation matters when it comes to feeling a greater personal responsibility for reducing climate change. As such I will use two variables from ESS, these are: Placement on left right scale. To what extent feel personal responsibility to reduce climate change. The two variables contain 14 and 15 different response options, which also include answers such as "Do not Know" and "No Answer". The political variable includes 11 answer options, from "Left" to "Right." The climate responsibility variable contains just as many possible response options, from "Nothing at all" to "Much". In this particular test, I only want to see the opinions of people who identify themselves on either of the far ends of the political scale. As such I have encoded these two variables through the recode function in SPSS so that only answers from the two "extremes" are reflected in the output. In other words, I only have respondents who have answered that they belong to the far left and right on the political scale. I've done the same with the climate responsibility variable. Alright, let's get the result! The first table shows that due to the recoding we only have answers from 575 people, which is only 1.7 percent of all respondents in the ESS data. So please, don't take this blog post too seriously. The other table is much more interesting for us as it shows the actual answers to our question. In the above table, we see that 65 percent of those who identify as "left" feel a great personal responsibility to reduce their climate impact. Which can be compared with only 46 percent of those identifying to the "right". Only 35 percent of the people who identify themselves as "left" think they have no personal responsibility, compared to 54 percent on the "right" side of the political scale. As we can see, more leftists feel they have a considerable personal responsibility to reduce their climate impact compared to their political opposites on the right.

Czech Republic re-elects far-right president Miloš Zeman Anti-immigrant and pro-Putin leader takes decisive victory over liberal opponent Jiří Drahoš. Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/27/czech-republic-far-right-president-reelected

Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland Chelsea E. Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to Wikileaks, has filed to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings. Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/chelsea-manning-files-to-run-for-us-senate-in-maryland/2018/01/13/6439f0d0-f88c-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.htm

Al Jazeera America has published a good opinion piece by Dan Froomkin in which he discusses the failure of mainstream media to report on the shutdown of the US government. Froomkin argues that his fellow colleges have misled the public on the true cause of the shutdown and that US mainstream media has failed to hold the responsible parties accountable. "...journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse." I believe Froomkin is right when he argues that this is a failure for journalism and democracy. But it’s not just about the recent shutdown of the US government. The same reasoning can be applied to the climate change crisis, where the media keeps portraying it as a debate – even though the deniers have nothing but lies and misinformation to back up their claims with. Froomkin’s reasoning here can also be applied to the failure of Western media, in general, to combat the dangerous development of extreme right-wing parties in Europe. With that said, I do think that Froomkin puts too much blame and responsibilities on the individual journalist. After all, a journalist can only do so much. At the end of the day it’s the corporations that run today’s global news organizations that sets the agenda and decides how and which stories get reported (check out: The mass media and our environment).

Please note that this blog post is from 2012. I'm just testing to import older blog entries from Tumblr to my new blog here on Redly. Things to regulate according to GOP: Woman’s uterus? Yes! Dirty and climate killing greenhouse gas emissions from power stations? No! This picture holds a lot of truth considering the front-runners in the 2012 Republican primary and their depressing views on climate change and women’s rights. Rick Santorum, for example, is a climate change denier and has said that environmentalism is “a religion that’s being pushed on the American Public”. That statement is kind of ironic in light of his extremely religious and medieval-age ideas and views on birth controls, abortion and other women’s rights issues.