Apparently Calibri is un-American because it's easier for people with dyslexia to read.
Seriously.
State Department to switch from "woke" Calibri to Times New Roman
Perhaps Rubio should also insist they write everything in BOLD CAPS like the glorious leader?
ETA: what I hadn't noticed initially was that Rubio specifically calls it out for being a DEI_A_ initiative. Apparently accessibility as a whole is now un-American.
I haven't been able to bring myself to actually read the new US National Security Strategy, but according to reports the highlights from the European perspective appear to be:
Adoption of the White Supremacist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory as official US Government policy.
The US must therefore divorce itself from Europe because some European states might become non-White* majority in the future. (I think the appropriate description for this triumph of logic is utterly barking, the EU states average 5-15% non-EU born citizens, and that includes Brits nowadays, the only exception is Liechtenstein, and that has a population of 40,000, plus the whole international banking and financial services hub thing going on).
Apparently the US has to protect Europe against 'civilizational erosion' by working to undermine the EU and further the Far Right, because protecting your population against racial hatred is contrary to the sacred principle of free speech.
Meanwhile, South of the Border, they're reinstating the Monroe Doctrine because apparently the South American states need an American guardian to tell them who they can have relations with.
As I said, I'm sorry, but WTAF?!?
* They don't actually say 'non-white', but they're fooling no one.
Pretty much all the senior members of Trump's cabinet created a chat group to discuss attacking the Houthis, and didn't notice they'd accidentally included the editor of The Atlantic.
Posted this earlier in the comments to the Guardian's live politics feed, pointing out the massive gap in the logic of Labour's disability benefit cuts:
Completely missing from Labour's whining about the difficulty of getting disabled people into work is any discussion of the far cat in the room - the widespread experience by disabled workers of discrimination in the workplace from management (and colleagues, but mostly management). A gag clause means I can't name the national flagship company where a very senior manager engaged in a multi-year campaign to drive me out of the company, to quote him 'your disability is a threat to my schedules' (it wasn't), and where the rest of management closed ranks around him when I challenged him on it through the grievance procedure.
The DWP's Disability Confident campaign asserts it isn't disability discrimination, managers are just 'embarrassed', which goes down about as well with disabled people as you might imagine.
Unless Labour sets about a serious campaign to drive disability discrimination out of the workplace, then the only logical conclusion is that they don't care about getting disabled people into the workplace, just off the benefits bill. And that's disability discrimination as government, as Labour Party, policy
Deeply, deeply furious with Starmer over this.
When asked why, he said "The man's repellent'.
And he's right.I stayed up until 4AM, then the programme I was doing some work in while listening to the BBC election show crashed, and given it would take a while to restart, plus the Beeb were running Suella Braverman's victory speech (bah!), I said 'bugger it' and went to bed. I'd probably have stayed up longer if I hadn't ended up with less sleep than planned on Wednesday night.
It says something that the exit poll for a massive Labour majority actually seemed disappointing, I was hoping for less than a hundred Tories surviving. OTOH it did predict all three Medway constitituencies (Chatham, where I live, Rochester and Strood, and Gillingham) going Labour, which turned out to be the case. It's just a pity I think my new MP, Tris Osbourne, is completely wet. Vince Maple, the former Labour candidate would have been far better, but he's now running Medway Council instead.
I did get to see Grant Shapps (Defence Minister) lose his seat, his reference to the armed forces in his concession speech was the first time I've ever thought he sounded sincere in his entire 20 year parliamentary career. Unfortunately IDS retained his, even with an exit poll forecast of a less than 1% chance of him surviving, as the vote to unseat him, while easily large enough, split between the current Labour candidate and the former Labour candidate running as an independent - not the only time Keir's party discipline ended up shooting Labour in the foot.
I'm worried about where the Tories will turn for a new leader, hard right is probably the answer given Penny Mordaunt, the leading moderate, lost her seat. On the plus side so did arch-brexiteer and ultra-libertarian Steve Baker. Unfortunately that probably reduces the choices to Suella Braverman (dangerous) and Kemi Badenoch (even more dangerous).
And even more worried about the Reform vote (a substantial part of which is undoubtedly the racism/far right vote), Farage in parliament is going to be thoroughly unpleasant.
I just hope we can have a solid Labour government for the next five years that convinces the floating voters that Labour can do the job. Ideally while the Tories and Reform tear each over to shreds.
* Mainland UK reliably gets a grand total of 1 or 2 cases of personation** in a general election (vs about 31m voters) , so the Tories brought in a requirement for photo-ID, which many young, elderly or disabled people simply don't have. The estimate was it stopped at least 14,000 people from voting at the local elections at the polling stations, and many more who just didn't turn up, and local elections only cover about a third of the country at a time. Jacob Rees-Mogg actually admitted at the Tory Party Conference that it was a deliberate attempt to exclude non-Tory voters.
** Pretending to be someone else to vote, contrary to Section 60 of The Representation Of The People Act, 1983.
Just had a frightfully posh Tory volunteer on the phone trying to convince me to vote Tory. I'd say I gave him short shrift, but he didn't get off that easily, it was definitely long shrift!
He seemed to make a definite effort to avoid discussing national issues, but I started with the disabled people killed by DWP sanctions, the increasingly corrupt nature of disability assessments, and then segued into their deliberate attempt to court the Reform vote by returning to their Nasty Party roots, throwing up first immigrants, then trans people, and then disabled people (again) as objects for hate. Told him they were deliberately indulging in bigotry to court the racist vote.
Poor guy barely got a word in edgeways.
Honestly, you'd think they'd have a note against my number saying 'Lost Cause', or possibly 'Flee, you fools!'.
After no national Tory ads through the whole campaign (and only one local one, but for somewhere 130 miles away), I've had three different ones on Facebook today.
The first one I didn't pay much attention to, it's the second that sticks in mind with its claim Kier is going to 'rig' the electoral system, by allowing 16yos to vote.
Never mind that historically EU citizens have been able to vote and in some cases still can.
Just waiting for them to start in on the seas turning to blood, great beasts slouching towards lucrative contracts on the lecture circuit, and so on.
... The Daily Torygraph is predicting:
Labour: 516
Tories: 53
Lib-Dem: 50
SNP: 8
Reform: 0 (Yes!)
With Sunak to lose his seat. *snigger*
The Tories' head of campaigns has had to take a leave of absence in the middle of the election, because his wife's the latest Tory found to have placed a bet on the election date. I wonder how she could have guessed what it would be....
So far that's two Tory candidates and one of Sunak's close protection officers found betting on the date. It's like the Tories corrupt everything they touch.
And the fact the cop has been arrested and suspended, while the other two are still Tory candidates really doesn't look good.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/20/gambling-watchdog-looks-into-second-tory-candidate-over-alleged-election-bet-laura-saunders
I know a lot of the Tories secretly dream of emulating Liz Truss and slashing taxes no matter what it does to the economy.
I just didn't expect the Chancellor to come out and say it.
On the plus side, the IPSOS MRP assessment is out, and they're predicting Labour 453, Tories 115. When the previous worst (well, since 1906) Tory result was 167 in the Tony Blair landslide win in 1997. And it could get worse, 56 seats with a Tory lead are considered too close to call.
On the FFS side of things, they're predicting Farage will get in. I suppose we can hope for an expenses scandal.
Utterly puzzled by this article in the Guardian: The most effective cure for Northern Irish unionism? Attitudes in England, which itself is puzzled that Brits from the mainland keep thinking of Unionists as Irish.
It's perhaps summed up by this quote:
"This mainland indifference towards Northern Ireland was exemplified in a 2020 YouGov poll which showed that 54% of the British public would not be bothered either way by Northern Ireland leaving the UK.
This disconnection is partly the result of a lack of education and knowledge: pupils in England learn little to nothing about the Irish famine, the Irish war of independence, the creation of Northern Ireland, and the subsequent decades of violence."
There's apparently no consideration for even a moment that the problem might be Unionism itself, not the mainland Brits. I've got a pretty good understanding of all of those, did much of them in O Level history, learned more later, and Unionism doesn't come out of the 20th Century looking like anything the majority of the mainland wants a part of. And it hasn't gotten better since, if anything the media coverage of DUP shenanigans at Stormont probably massively exacerbates that tendency.
I'm really not sure what the point of the article is, or even whether it's aimed at mainland Brits or Unionists.It's not entirely abled short-sightedness here, they really are stuffed WRT accessible routes into town. The Maidstone Road is the main road into town and runs down a steep ridge, the only alternatives are almost as steep and funnel into the Maidstone Road, and can only be reached down even steeper roads (steep enough my car struggles, never mind my chair!). None of the 15 minute city theorists have ever really accounted for cities that aren't remotely flat and how disabled people are meant to manage them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure
