Macron wakes up and starts wondering how to piss off young people even more
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I think it’s part of the effort to enforce penalties against the parents of the kids involved in the protests, too:
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“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety . “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world. It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
The map, observably made by a child thanks to its chalk-scribbled dolphins and even a hashtag bobbing around Earth’s vast bodies of water, drew the ire of cinema gatekeepers in Vietnam this week. The drawing depicts what has been called a representation of the “nine dash line,” which reinforces China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. Vietnam disputes those claims and believes it violates the country’s sovereignty. Officials subsequently pulled the release of “Barbie” in the territory.
As for the how the map functions in the movie itself? Keeping spoilers at a minimum, Robbie’s Barbie is facing an existential crisis in the walls of her pink dream world. McKinnon’s Weird Barbie encourages her to go on a journey of self-discovery and provides her with a map to “the Real World,” one made with whimsy by a fellow doll. What some have taken to represent the “nine dash line” is what one sourced described as “journey lines,” the serial dashes often used in family animation and kid’s drawings to represent where a character has traveled to or from.
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Maybe there’s not a finger of him there, but it sure is pissing off a lot of people.
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Australian politics: Robodebt was a scheme where people who had received means-tested payments, typically Jobseeker (the Dole) had an automated system go back over their records, sometimes years later, and compare their payments with their income. The thing is, the payments are fortnightly, and based on that fortnight’s income. So if you spend a few months on the Dole with no income, then land a great job, well, you’re off the dole and everyone’s happy. Or if you had odd-jobs, where one week you’d make motza, and spend the next couple of months eating ramen. Except this scheme wouldn’t look at the fortnight-by-fortnight income, it would take your annual income and divide by 12. Suddenly it said you were overpaid in those lean times, and it would demand arrears. Sometimes tens of thousands. And the burden of proof was placed on you to have kept all your payslips from years ago from a job you may not have any more from an employer who may no longer exist, and if you didn’t pony up, they’d send the debt collectors after you.
People died.
The thing is, people knew from the planning stages that this was wrong on every level, and the senior bureaucrats and the (conservative, of course) ministers, one of whom became (the most hated and incompetent of Australian history) prime minister, just gleefully gaslit everyone.
When it finally couldn’t be denied any more, the government came to a group settlement with everyone caught up in it. For $1.6 billion.
And now the 990 page Royal Commission report. It is now a statement of considered legal fact that the cruelty was, in fact, the point. It wasn’t even a side-effect: the entire point was to squeeze money out of people who couldn’t afford to pay it, on the basis that they couldn’t fight back.
The minister and then prime minister most central to the whole clusterfuck was Scott Morrison, who responded
“I reject completely each of the findings which are critical of my involvement in authorising the scheme and are adverse to me. They are wrong, unsubstantiated and contradicted by clear documentary evidence presented to the Commission.”
But then, gaslighting is Morrison’s only skill. (Even though as PM he lost the last federal election, and was forced to step down as leader of the Liberal Party, that remora is still hanging on in the back bench, like Boris was until the Partygate results were about to come out. Just showing that Morrison doesn’t even have the good sense or ability to feel shame shown by Boris Johnston.) The rest of Australia is now on tenterhooks hoping to discover whether Morrison is one of those referred for criminal prosecution by the Commission. (please please please)
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“The government must accept the Magna Carta as common law if pleaded as such. We are pleading such,” the statement reads, repeating the typical language of pseudolegal groups like Sovereign Citizens and the Freemen on the Land movement.
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Far-right violence on the march again, warns French intelligence chief
Recent incidents involving harassment of mayors indicate that hardcore groups are becoming emboldened.
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My eyes! They burn. Not only is the Magna Carta irrelevant, I didn’t read through to what jurisdiction that was but it’s likely it never applied there, but also: it’s not common law stupid. That’s precedent, not written law.
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Wait, they’ve been attacking mayors since the spring, but all the privacy-violating laws and harsh penalties for protesters got passed ASAP after reactions to the cops killing Nahel. That was a tipping point after years of brutality and inequality in law enforcement.
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so, I guess the question for EU folk is whether you’d want to be associated with a country that intends to leverage EU institutions for selfish reasons.
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He can go fuck himself.
No fucking way. First step if Turkey wants to seriously entertain EU membership is that prick is arrested.
US unwisely pushed it before, this time it can back the fuck off. Erdogan’s Turkey is not welcome.
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We should yoink that idea.
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