After the pleasant surprise of the Alberta provincial elections in Canada that showed a swing to the left, the opposite happened in the UK in elections yesterday, with the Conservative Party surprising the pollsters by gaining an outright majority in the British parliament, winning 331 out of 650 seats, a gain of 28. The Labour Party lost 25 seats to end up with 232 and its leader Edward Miliband has resigned as party leader.
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The US Supreme Court ruled back in 1973 in Roe v. Wade that abortion is legal within certain limits and set in motion a prolonged campaign by opponents to overturn that ruling. What opponents have tried to do is rather than overturn that decision directly, to adopt a policy of trying to make it harder and harder for women to get one. This has taken the form of adding restrictions that make it difficult for clinics to operate, thus forcing many to shut down and forcing women to travel to distant locations.
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When I think of great American journalists, I do not think of people like Edward R. Murrow that the media establishment reveres. I think of I. F. Stone. His basic working principle was that you had to assume that governments lie and work from there. He later extended that principle to corporations too.
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Omar Khadr is a Canadian who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, tortured, and taken to Guantanamo at the age of 15 making him the youngest person there. (I have written about his case back in 2010 and 2012.) He then spent nearly 13 years there and was tortured repeatedly, then pleaded guilty to a war crime, and was then sent back to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence.
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Last year The Electronic Intifada re-published a Facebook post by a 39-year old Israeli lawmaker named Ayelet Shaked who was first elected to parliament in 2012, in which she said that the entire Palestinian population was the enemy and Israel was at war with the “entire [Palestinian] people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure”, and made the case that their destruction was justified. She even referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes”.
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The election of a black president seems to have completely unhinged some people who are convinced that he is a Kenyan Marxist who seeks nothing less than to install a communist dictatorship. This is yet another even more extreme example of the white paranoia that I linked to yesterday and it is not limited to just a few crazy fringe elements. In certain parts of the country it has gone mainstream, as we see from the armed militias that have taken it upon themselves to prevent government agencies from doing their work.
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The New Democratic Party has surprised everyone by winning the Alberta province elections in Canada, ending 44 years of conservative dominance by the Progressive Conservative party and elevating Rachel Notley to be the head of the provincial government. (Thanks to reader left0ver1under for alerting me to the Alberta result.)
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Zeke Miller writes that the Republican party faces an even worse debate problem than they had back in 2012 when the huge number of debates they held seemed to turn voters off as it gave their candidates many more opportunities to stumble and to attack each other.
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Thanks to PZ Myers, I learned about an email exchange that Sam Harris had initiated with Noam Chomsky about morality as applied to the actions of governments and other political entities. Myers gives an entertaining round-by-round account but I want to focus on a couple of points from that exchange that particularly struck me as key to their differences in content and style of argument.
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