Tag: Hatred

The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) has rejected any regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and Britain in the Brexit deal, but there is already some divergence – and it will help keep the lights on, and the food safe, at the party’s annual conference on Saturday. Northern Ireland gets its electricity and trades its livestock in ways which distinguish it from mainland Britain and which have nothing to do with Brexit. Hard, soft or no Brexit, Britain must begin to heal its wounds | Martin Kettle Read more Northern Ireland is part of a single electricity market with the Republic of Ireland, it applies extensive checks on livestock coming from Britain and has distinct rules on the transport of hazardous waste – pragmatic, uncontroversial measures which are not deemed threats to Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. However, DUP leaders who gather in Belfast for the party’s conference will thunder anew against different rules for Northern Ireland and Britain envisaged in the Brexit deal, branding them an existential threat to the union and therefore reason for the party to issue its own threat to pull the plug on Theresa May’s government. The former foreign secretary Boris Johnson is expected to amplify that warning in an address to about 600 party faithful. Sammy Wilson, one of 10 DUP MPs who shore up the Westminster government under a fraying confidence and supply agreement, branded the leaders of the business and farming groups as “puppets” of Downing Street. “If you see divergence between GB and Northern Ireland, it would only be in those areas where it would make sense for Northern Ireland to be aligned with the EU,” she said. “It won’t be the case that a whole raft of EU law is dumped on Northern Ireland. “There cannot be a border down the Irish Sea, a differential between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK,” the party leader, Arlene Foster, told the BBC last month. Blanket opposition to any new regulatory divergence has shredded the DUP’s relationship with May, endangered its pact with her government and alienated traditional business and farming allies.

The last two weeks have produced the following headlines: “Is identity politics ruining democracy?”, “Divided we stand: identity politics and the threat to democracy”, “Can liberal democracies survive identity politics?” and “Identity politics is destroying us”. Identity politics, like multiculturalism or political correctness, is one of those terms that has come to mean whatever you want it to mean, so long as you don’t like it. There is always identity in politics. Those with a crude notion of class contend that politics driven by identity divides people, dilutes solidarity, and diverts energy from addressing material concerns such as pay and conditions. When British women are being paid 18% less than men, gender is a material concern; when for every $100 in wealth a white person has in the US an African-American has just $5, race is a material issue. Indeed by rendering it more inclusive and better informed, it should make that solidarity more effective. Others insist that what you are should determine what you should do and how you should think and act. These are all issues to contend with when contemplating the role of identity in politics. But quite how we get from here to the “threat to liberal democracy” is a mystery. A century after some women got the vote in Britain, and 50 years after the US Civil Rights Act, it is as good a time as any to understand that were it not for people mobilising on the basis of their identity, we wouldn’t have a liberal democracy at all.

We are seeing a disturbing uptick in political violence mostly from the left. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in…

While Election Day is still months away in November, early voting in North Dakota begins next month. The campaigns are still trying to make their cases, and besmirch their opponents, before voters begin locking in their ballots in just a few weeks. They're going to get nastier the closer we get to Nov. 6. We voters are the problem. Candidates savage one another on the campaign trail because it works. We complain about negativity in politics, but negativity in politics is a sound strategy because we, the public, buy into it. Voters complain about "the swamp" in Washington D.C. yet also want the feds on the hook to solve their local problems. The truth is that it's really a grassroots thing. A bottom up thing. Campaigns are exercises in character assassination because voters respond to that sort of thing.

While Election Day is still months away in November, early voting in North Dakota begins next month. The campaigns are still trying to make their cases, and besmirch their opponents, before voters begin locking in their ballots in just a few weeks. They're going to get nastier the closer we get to Nov. 6. I'm sure I'm not revealing anything to you folks. We voters are the problem. Candidates savage one another on the campaign trail because it works. We complain about negativity in politics, but negativity in politics is a sound strategy because we, the public, buy into it. Voters complain about "the swamp" in Washington D.C. yet also want the feds on the hook to solve their local problems. The truth is that it's really a grassroots thing. Campaigns are exercises in character assassination because voters respond to that sort of thing.

No, not Macron and Trump; rather, for the United States and France. But with the American president alienating many other world leaders, his working relationship with Macron, who is as willing as Trump to fête and be fêted, is signaling that no ally in Europe, or the world, perhaps matters as much to the White House than Paris. Just 15 years ago, Republican leaders in Washington snidely disparaged the French because they refused to follow Americans blindly into the Iraq War. The president invited no Democrats to the Tuesday dinner, making the point that like-minded foreigners are welcome but that Americans of the opposition party are not. Congressional Republicans long ago traded their political ideology for Trump. That’s literally trading country for party. In the world of militaries and national security politics, this all matters. The French flip-flop is yet another example of how Americans should know that the messaging and posturing of global political leaders often have little to do with, nor do they reflect the reality of, the military and intelligence relationships. Others are fighting and training forces in Africa, often alongside U.S. troops, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger. That’s the diplomatic work that we’ve already started but we have to finish.

The San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association wants you to distrust, resent and despise your city government. That’s not how Chris Steele would put it, of course. At a press conference this week, moments before delivering petitions to City Hall that call for monumental amendments to the city charter, the fire union president sought to portray those demanding change as “regular people.” The changes would cap a future city manager’s salary at no more than 10 times that of the lowest-paid city employee; make it easier to take city ordinances to a public vote; and prohibit the city from going to court over labor agreements. “It seems like the mayor wants to characterize this as a union issue,” Steele said at the news conference. “So these groups are going to talk to you and tell you why it’s a people issue.” Behind Steele stood Antonio Diaz, a failed candidate for mayor who earned less than one percent of the vote last year. In a previous interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Diaz spoke about his “hatred toward the government.” “I’ve basically struggled with the city politics for about 15 years just to get a declaration of a date recognizing indigenous people,” he said. “Was more filled with hatred toward the government because of my oppressed condition. But I’ve learned … you can only meet force if you address it with force.” To Diaz’s left stood perennial council gadfly Jack Finger, hoisting a sign that read, “Take That, City Council!” In his regular tirades against city government, Finger has dealt in explicit racism and homophobia — once expressing outrage that the city spent tax dollars in support of a Latino-centric event, for instance. In recent elections, as the fire union has refused even to negotiate that contract, Steele has sought leverage in the composition of city council, endorsing candidates presumably friendly to the union’s collective bargaining demands.

Republican and Democratic independent leaners will tell you that the harm of the opposing party's policies is the major reason they're leaning toward one party. For years, Americans have been getting more intensely distrustful and negatively biased against members of the opposing parties. Seventy-one percent of Republicans say a major reason for identifying with their party is that Democratic policies are harmful to the country. That's up from 68% from when the same question was asked in spring 2016. Sixty-three percent of Democrats say that the other party's policies being harmful to the country is why they identify as Democrats. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon. Political scientists and pundits were tied into knots trying to explain why white voters without a college degree were drawn to Trump. The parties themselves have become much more ideologically cohesive, much less likely to be composed of ideological diversity or dissent. In tests of subconscious association, hostile feelings are elicited by partisanship are comparable -- or even stronger than -- those elicited by race. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls."