links for 2009-06-09
June 9, 2009-
We tend to think about America as a country, like all other countries of that era, where slavery was legal. This is a vast understatement, it would seem. More accurately, we were a country in which half the society, the antebellum South, was a slave society.
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5. The most famous pirates were the best ones. The reason you’ve heard of most well-known pirates is because they were captured and either killed immediately (as with Blackbeard, for example), or brought to trial, where their exploits were written down. It’s reasonable to assume that a pirate who managed to avoid capture entirely was better than one who couldn’t, don’t you think?
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I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike the Greens. I’m a fan of a number of their members, and they’ve done vital work pushing climate change up the national agenda. I have huge respect for figures like Patrick Harvie from the Scottish party. My hope is that by ramming home this message I can encourage them to properly consider their policies.
The first and most important thing for the party to do is to acknowledge that their policies are far out of step with the scientific community. They genuinely don’t seem to realise this, and I suspect this comes from a lack of engagement with actual scientists.
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• Low expectations limit job choices, watchdog says
• Fear of failure hampering working-class pupils -
Nevertheless the commentariat will continue to treat British fascism as an exclusively working class phenomenon. It will continue to call for an ’open debate’ about migration that has been going on for about half a century now, a debate that has always and exclusively been framed by the anti-migration right. It will continue to treat the working class as it treats inner-city Muslims – like a monolithic bloc, a quietly foaming dog that may go crazy any second.
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British National party MEP and former National Front chairman who started political life in group set up in honour of Hitler
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What would have happened if hanging chads and the Supreme Court hadn’t denied Al Gore the White House in 2000? Many things would clearly have been different over the next eight years.
But one thing would probably have been the same: There would have been a huge housing bubble and a financial crisis when the bubble burst. And if Democrats had been in power when the bad news arrived, they would have taken the blame, even though things would surely have been as bad or worse under Republican rule.
You now understand the essentials of the current political situation in Britain.
