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Re: Your local news

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Sun Feb 11, 2018 11:39 pm

Cobra-D wrote:....So am I the only one who thinks the response wasn't all that bad? Dude made a project that some didn't agree with, school said they'll look into it but most likely didn't break any rules, you guys acting like they threw the kid in a gulag.

At any rate the project seemed like something done to be contraversial as kids tend to do.


I should have been clearer. I'm not outraged at the school, though I still agree with Logan's overall sentiments. This is a news story specifically because the kid's project embraced an idea that is generally considered offensive or unacceptable. I bet there were other projects that made at least some factually inaccurate claims but which wouldn't/didn't make headlines because the subject matter didn't upset anyone.

I'm rather uneasy about a station even reporting on this random kid because, even though the student wasn't named, this could be humiliating/alienating to him and make him less receptive to criticism of his ideas (sometimes people double down when they feel attacked). Statements from the school such as the following might be problematic in that regard: “We understand it concerns a lot of people and doesn’t reflect our culture here.”

It remains to be seen what all the school will do, but if all that happens is that this project gets taken down because it offended people and is deemed racist, I will have an issue with it, in large part because it would be a missed opportunity to educate the kid about his project in a productive way. If those kinds of projects are prohibited in the future, I would also have objections (unless careful steps are taken to clarify why certain ideas are incorrect and not merely undesirable). I don't think that such responses would teach the student much, except to not express controversial views in settings where people might get upset. I'd much rather he think about and question his project in terms of facts and methods with the added consideration of social and historical context.

Thinking about possibly productive responses, this issue raised in the article could be a fantastic point for the school to discuss with the offending student and the student body at large:

Students in the program have similar economic backgrounds and belief systems, creating an echo chamber, she and other HISP students said. HISP students don’t get the insight of people of color or from lower socio-economic backgrounds.


Hopefully the school's reaction ultimately achieves a discussion about these kinds of issues rather than couching things in terms of racism or discrimination per se. My main worry is that the lesson from this will end up being "avoid saying upsetting things" rather than "here's why what you said was wrong."
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Re: Your local news

Postby NathanLoiselle » Mon Feb 12, 2018 1:11 am

I'm not upset that the kid made a project. I'd be upset if he passed the assignment though.
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Re: Your local news

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Mar 06, 2018 10:47 pm

One of the prominent politicians of our governing party, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office (whatever the hell that is) János Lázár is trying to scare us with the apocalyptic future that awaits if we allow any migrants. For that purpose, he went to Vienna and filmed himself there. He put this video on his Facebook page:

https://streamable.com/bs4m6

He's talking about how there are barely any "white Christians" left in this district, that it's been taken over my migrants, that he tried to talk to them but they don't speak German (but no example of this is shown) that the streets are dirty and crime rates are high, and that is coming to us if we allow migration. All the while, he's standing on perfectly normal streets that look clean to me. It's a lot cleaner than our capital, Budapest, where I live, and I didn't see any homeless people either. He's not even putting any effort into his xenophobia. I'm sure Vienna has streets that look worse.

(Edit: Facebook removed the video, so I replaced the link. Lázár now complains that his right to free speech is being violated. There's no such right on Facebook: it has rules about what you can post, and if you violate them, your post will be removed.)
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Re: Your local news

Postby Aquila89 » Sun Mar 18, 2018 12:51 pm

The Washington Post now published an article to how our government descended to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorizing.

Less then one month before the parliamentary elections, there's only one issue according to Fidesz, the ruling party; migration and George Soros who is driving it. On March 15, a national holiday celebrating the 1848 uprising against Habsburg rule, Prime Minister Orbán gave a speech before a huge crowd of his supporters. He did not talk about the economy, education, health care, corruption, anything like that. He had one message: if you don't vote for Fidesz, Soros will destroy the country by flooding it with migrants. Every opposition candidate is a Soros agent.

I am not exaggerating. I quote from the official translation of his speech from the government's official website.

We must be prepared for a situation in which ultimately in every constituency our candidate will be standing against one Soros candidate. Perhaps more will seem to be standing, with some of them pulling the handbrake, others withdrawing at the last moment, and still others acting as though they are not even present. We must be prepared for them adopting disguises, like last time, when they hid behind a candidate posing as an independent. They dare not admit the identity of their master. They know that they don’t stand a chance if they stand in front of the whole country and openly declare who they serve.


(Fidesz candidates refuse to go to debates with opposition candidates. They declared the entire opposition to be illegitimate.)

Orbán also included some threats:

We are calm and good-humoured people, but we are neither blind nor gullible. After the election we will of course seek amends – moral, political and legal amends – but we cannot waste our strength or our time on that now.


What amends that will be? Who will be punished and how - for the imaginary crime of supporting the nonexistent Soros Plan of replacing Hungary's population with third-world migrants?

We can only guess.
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Re: Your local news

Postby aBagofYoughurt » Fri Mar 23, 2018 3:11 pm

The Norwegian minister of justice, Sylvi Listhaug,resigned this week following a motion of no confidence against her by opposition parties. If you've heard of Listhaug before, it was probably in connection to her flopping around in the ocean. She's known primarily for really not liking immigration.

A Facebook post of hers, where she claimed that the Labour party "“believes the terrorists’ rights are more important than the nation’s security", sparked quite a few reactions, both from the people and other parties.

The NY Times summarized it pretty well.
Ms. Listhaug and her right-wing Progress Party, which is a junior partner in a fragile coalition, supported a bill that would have allowed the government to strip Norwegian citizenship from those suspected of joining terrorist or foreign militant groups, without a court hearing. After the bill was defeated earlier this month, she lashed out online.

In a Facebook post, which she has since taken down, she said the center-left Labor Party “believes the terrorists’ rights are more important than the nation’s security,” and attached a photo of two veiled and gun-toting fighters from the Shabab militant group in Somalia, thousands of miles away.

That hit a nerve in a country with still-raw memories of its worst terrorist attack in modern times, in which Labor members were the targets. In 2011, a far-right, anti-Islam extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a bomb outside a building housing offices of the government, then led by Labor, killing eight people, and then went to a Labor youth camp on Utoya island, where he shot dead 69 people, most of them teenagers.

The Facebook post, which coincided with the premiere of a film about the 2011 massacre, set off an escalating social-media war between Ms. Listhaug’s supporters and her foes, as she first refused to back away from it and then apologized repeatedly.



Here's also a Washing Post article about the whole debacle

In short, politician who's anti-immigration shares dumb Facebook image about another party liking terrorist, said party has been the primary target of a terror attack, people get upset, she resignes, angry yelling on everyone's Facebook feed.
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Re: Your local news

Postby cmsellers » Fri Mar 23, 2018 6:57 pm

Aquila89 wrote:He had one message: if you don't vote for Fidesz, Soros will destroy the country by flooding it with migrants. Every opposition candidate is a Soros agent.

I am not exaggerating. I quote from the official translation of his speech from the government's official website.

We must be prepared for a situation in which ultimately in every constituency our candidate will be standing against one Soros candidate. Perhaps more will seem to be standing, with some of them pulling the handbrake, others withdrawing at the last moment, and still others acting as though they are not even present. We must be prepared for them adopting disguises, like last time, when they hid behind a candidate posing as an independent. They dare not admit the identity of their master. They know that they don’t stand a chance if they stand in front of the whole country and openly declare who they serve.

So the antisemitic, anti-immigration Jobbik is secretly working for a Jewish dude who wants to flood the country with immigrants?
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Re: Your local news

Postby Aquila89 » Fri Mar 23, 2018 7:09 pm

cmsellers wrote:So the antisemitic, anti-immigration Jobbik is secretly working for a Jewish dude who wants to flood the country with immigrants?


Clever, isn't it? Only our brilliant Prime Minister could figure out a conspiracy so insidious.

(Jobbik isn't openly anti-semitic anymore, for instance they issued a Hanukkah greeting last year. But they are still right-wing nationalists and anti-globalists, the idea that they would support a globalist liberal billionaire to flood Hungary with Third World immigrants is ludicrous.)
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Re: Your local news

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Tue Mar 27, 2018 4:06 pm

Congress might actually lose Karnataka which is stressful as fuck for anyone who doesn't want BJP/NDA to consolidate their power even further than they already have.

Even if the BJP was anywhere as good to Indians as they tell us they are, a strong opposition's essential to good governance, and Sonia and Rahul downgrading to a permanent opposition party's a real danger right now. The worst thing is there's nothing they can do to recover, regional parties aren't playing with congress right now, and regional party support is the main reason Congress is any good in the first place.
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Re: Your local news

Postby Ladki96 » Tue Mar 27, 2018 4:29 pm

{{{lemons}}} on the positive side of news, there is this!

Manoj and Babli are surely smiling from the sky =)
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Re: Your local news

Postby Aquila89 » Sat Apr 07, 2018 4:16 pm

Diversity of opinion in rural Hungarian newspapers:

Spoiler: show
Image


The title means: "cast both votes for Fidesz!" (in the upcoming parliamentary election). Both votes because in Hungary people vote for individual candidates and party lists. The grinning guy is Lőrinc Mészáros, former gas-fitter, current billionaire businessman and media mogul, owner of many newspapers and a TV channel. His extraordinary success has obviously nothing to do with the fact that he's a personal friend of the Prime Minister and the mayor of his home village.
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Re: Your local news

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Apr 10, 2018 6:50 pm

Well, the elections happened, and for the third time, Fidesz won a resounding victory, after running a single-issue campaign. The single issue was: "vote for us or George Soros will flood the country with migrants and Hungary will cease to exist."

That was it. If Fidesz politicians talked about anything else, it was only in relation to migrants, as in "if we're flooded with migrants, we won't have money for social security, the economy will collapse, etc."

A liberal website analyzed the transcripts of eight interviews Orbán gave since December (all to pro-government outlets, of course; he hasn't given an interview to an independent outlet since 2010). He used the words "Soros" "migrants, migration" and "immigrant, immigration" 216 times altogether. He used the words "healthcare", "doctor" "hospital", "education" , "school", "student" and "teacher" zero times (discounting the times he used them in metaphors wile talking about migrants).

The public media was transformed into the government's propaganda outlet. (You can see the photo of newspaper covers in my previous post. Same with television, same with radio). They ceaselessly talked about the dangers of migration, about how every opposition politician is a Soros agent, while never mentioning the dismal state of healthcare, education and the government's massive corruption issues (can't really call them scandals when they fail to reach the public's consciousness).

It worked. Independent media outlets interviewed poor people in run-down villages. They talk about how there are no jobs and all the young people leave. But they're voting for Fidesz because otherwise migrants will come in and rape all the women. They said so on the TV and on the radio. They wouldn't say it if it weren't true.

The opposition remains hopelessly incompetent and splintered. Until Fidesz has such control over the media, it'll remain unbeatable.
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Re: Your local news

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue Apr 10, 2018 10:34 pm

It seems to me that what Hungry needs is a little Facebook love from Russia. Then everyone would vote for Putin and not Fidesz. And who doesn't want Putin in power? No, really. I need to know so that I know who to oppress.
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Re: Your local news

Postby cmsellers » Tue Apr 10, 2018 10:46 pm

NathanLoiselle wrote:It seems to me that what Hungry needs is a little Facebook love from Russia. Then everyone would vote for Putin and not Fidesz. And who doesn't want Putin in power? No, really. I need to know so that I know who to oppress.

Sounds like you're hoping someone will Putin a good word for you on your KGB application.
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Re: Your local news

Postby IamNotCreepy » Mon Apr 30, 2018 7:58 pm

A man pled guilty to a murder from 1974 and was released from jail right away with time served after being in jail less than a year.

What makes this story interesting was that this was with the blessing of the victim's family. The state had a shaky case and worked out a deal where he would be released if he admitted guilt and answered any questions the family had.

To them, it was more important to get answers about what happened than to seek retribution against him. He did seem to be genuinely penitent over what he did.

Apparently the whole courtroom ended up in tears.
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Re: Your local news

Postby gisambards » Mon May 07, 2018 9:14 pm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-44032295

There's been some sort of shooting resulting in a currently unresolved armed standoff with police in the city of Oxford (as in, where Oxford University is).
I don't currently live in Oxford but it's mostly where I grew up, and it's definitely not the sort of place you expect this sort of thing. Apparently the guy's only shot one person non-fatally and is now holed up in a residential building with police trying to talk him down (the reports aren't fully clear, but if I'm reading the BBC coverage right it seems like he was shooting out of the house that is now surrounded), and it's not obvious whether the initial shooting was random or targeted - the shootings that do happen in the UK tend overwhelmingly to be gang-related, just because in the cities it's way easier for criminals to get guns. Although I can't help but notice that this is happening in Paradise Square, which is literally right next to (as in, within a block of) both Oxford Castle, which is a big tourist attraction, and the Westgate, which is Oxford's biggest shopping centre - this is probably coincidence however, and even if it's not he clearly didn't get very far.
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