General CE Chat

All of the newspaper front pages embargoed till midnight, when a court order is lifted!
 
Horrible news from India:

India train crash: 115 killed in derailment near Kanpur

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-38041755

The death toll following the derailment of a train in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state has reached at least 115, with more than 150 injured, police say. Fourteen carriages of the Indore-Patna Express derailed just after 03:00 local time on Sunday (21:30 GMT Saturday) near the city of Kanpur. Rescuers are still trying to reach the injured and recover the dead from the twisted carriages.

The cause of the crash near the village of Pukhrayan is not yet known. However, the Times of India quoted sources as saying a fracture in the track could have been to blame. The death toll has been rising steadily all day and is expected to increase further.

Krishna Keshav, who was travelling on the train, told the BBC: "We woke with a jolt at around 3am. Several coaches were derailed, everybody was in shock. I saw several bodies and injured people."

Most of the victims were located in two carriages near the engine which overturned and were badly damaged. By late Sunday afternoon, rescue workers were still using heavy machinery to try to reach survivors. Senior railway official Pratap Rai told Reuters: "We are using every tactic to save lives but it's very difficult to cut the metal carriages." The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder, in Delhi, says rescuers brought out two children alive on Sunday morning, raising cheers from onlookers.

One passenger whose carriage did not derail told the Associated Press the train was going at normal speed. It stopped suddenly, said Satish Kumar, then restarted shortly before the crash.

Passenger Ruby Gupta, 20, was travelling to Azamagarh to be married on 1 December. She told the Times of India that most of the people travelling with her had been found but that her father was still missing. She said: "I cannot find my father and I have been looking everywhere for him. I have a fractured arm and my sisters have also sustained injuries."

Many anxious relatives gathered at the station in Indore, where the train began its journey, holding pictures of loved ones, the Times said.

Compensation

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: "Anguished beyond words on the loss of lives due to the derailing of the Patna-Indore express. My thoughts are with the bereaved families.

"Prayers with those injured in the tragic train accident."

Mr Modi said he had spoken to Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu, who was "personally monitoring the situation closely". On his own Twitter account, Mr Prabhu warned that "strictest possible action will be taken against those who could be responsible for accident". He said an investigation into the crash would begin immediately and compensation would be paid to "unfortunate passengers who died and to injured".

Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that India's National Disaster Response Force was overseeing the rescue efforts.

Kanpur is a major railway junction and hundreds of trains pass through it every day. Train accidents are fairly common in India, where much of the railway equipment is out of date. An accident in Uttar Pradesh in March last year killed 39 people and injured 150. Last year, the government announced investments of $137bn (£111bn) over five years to modernise and expand the railways.
 
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09...onalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/


A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs

THE PHRASE “FAKE NEWS” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

rest at link
 
As part of the deal President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence struck with Carrier, the company has promised to make a $16 million investment in its Indianapolis facility — an investment management plans to use on developing technology that will allow them to replace human workers with robots.

The company’s plans were confirmed by Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, Carrier’s corporate parent, during a CNBC interview earlier this week.

“We’re going to… automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive,” Hayes said. “Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we’ll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”
...
Puzder is a proponent of replacing human workers with robots, telling Business Insider last March that machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

CNN, citing a McKinsey & Co. study, reports that “45 percent of the tasks that U.S. workers are currently paid to perform can be automated by existing technology. That represents about $2 trillion in annual wages.”
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https://thinkprogress.org/carrier-automation-trump-deal-more-layoffs-db2554f46297#.xg4muv265
 
@Raoul
Can you explain why the racism thread was locked? I spent ~30 minutes reading the 1st few pages of (a very sloppily written) review posted by @Irwin , before realising I can't reply to it.
 
berbatrick said:
@Raoul
Can you explain why the racism thread was locked? I spent ~30 minutes reading the 1st few pages of (a very sloppily written) review posted by @Irwin , before realising I can't reply to it.
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A few prominent posters complained about the subject matter, so given that the thread fulfilled its purpose by providing a means to discuss the subject without derailing the Trump thread, I decided to close it and move on. If you want to discuss further, feel free to start your own thread.
 
Raoul said:
A few prominent posters complained about the subject matter, so given that the thread fulfilled its purpose by providing a means to discuss the subject without derailing the Trump thread, I decided to close it and move on. If you want to discuss further, feel free to start your own thread.
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"From what I've read, race alone isn't a great predictor of intelligence" isn't exactly thread material :lol:
 
http://indianexpress.com/article/op...ationalism-populism-authoritarianism-4444811/

Last month, one of The Economist’s cover stories highlighted the advent of “The new nationalism” in the world. In fact, this description needs to be qualified because the key figures at stake, if we go by the magazine’s list — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan etc — embodied the triumph of national-populism, and, to some extent, authoritarianism.

While each national situation is specific, these new Caesars share common features illustrating different facets of these “isms”. To begin with, they have all conquered power by contesting elections. While de-democratisation is the order of the day globally, coups d’etat are not staging any comeback, elections remaining essential to political legitimacy. The question for these personalities is how to win them. Here they have capitalised on a whole set of common factors.

First, they have projected themselves as new men against old political establishments, whereas they were often already in politics for some time (but not centrestage) and part of the establishment (but not necessarily of the political establishment — of the business elite, for instance).

These new figures have exploited the resentment of the voters vis-à-vis the existing “system” in the context of rising inequalities and a socio-economic situation marked not by an open crisis but by frustrations, usually due to rampant joblessness. Sometimes the growth rate was still robust, but did not result in job creation meeting the expectations of the voters — because of de-industrialisation or mechanisation.

The national-populists played on these anxieties by making the most formidable promises and playing fast and loose with the truth — hence the notion of “post truth democracy” — in a way that is designed to make it hard for the citizenry to distinguish fact from fantasy. They call to mind the populists of the 1970s who, in Latin America and South Asia, from Juan Peron to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, mobilised the masses by committing themselves to structural reforms which never happened. But today’s populists do not indulge in socialistic references. They did not even present programmes, but bullet points encapsulated in slogans which are “empty signifiers”, to paraphrase Ernesto Laclau, such as “Making America Great Again”.

But the new leaders are populist in another way: In their capacity to relate directly to the people, situating themselves above parties and institutions. To establish this direct link with the people, they need both effective messages and channels of mass communication. Targeting the Other is the most effective message. All these leaders cultivate a nationalistic style with a xenophobic overtone which may have an ethnic or religious flavour. This register is effective because of the competition between “us” and “them” on the job market, but also because of the popular fear of the Other due to terrorist attacks and other conflicts. Hence the instrumentalisation of the threat posed by migrants, separatists or Islamists. The new national-populists keep promoting themselves as the protectors of besieged nations and even, sometimes, foster tensions for making their discourse more relevant.

The other repertoire they systematically resort to is managerial: They claim that they can run their country as a company, and sometimes emphasise that they’ve been successful businessmen themselves. To look like a CEO helps them to distinguish themselves from the old political establishment and to endow their promises on the economic front with some credibility. It also helps them to get support from the corporate sector.

Indeed, most of these leaders have risen to power with the help of sections of the business community, “crony capitalists” expecting benefits from this investment. Hence one of the contradictions of this new dispensation: While demagogues promise to fight the old state, they are themselves more business-friendly than market-friendly.

Businessmen fund the costly electoral campaigns of national-populists. They all resort to expensive international PR companies and invent new channels of communication, including holograms, in order to saturate the public sphere.

After reaching power, these new leaders continue to relate directly and constantly to the people, establishing a cult of the personality. His face and his body language inundate the public scene. More importantly, he maintains a semi-permanent state of popular mobilisation and piles on “decisive” moves. The opposition’s space mechanically declines, also because the centre of gravity of power shifts from parliaments to the seat of personal authority, not to say anything about the intimidation of dissenters who can be easily dismissed as traitors. Since the national-populist embodies his nation, those who fight him are considered anti-national.

National-populists undermine institutions by definition because they capitalise on the legitimacy coming from the people’s mandate for fighting alternative power centres enshrined in the constitution. Hence, attempts at reforming the legal framework, like in Turkey and in Sri Lanka, where Mahinda Rajapaksa drastically changed the procedure for appointing the judges.

National-populism is a phenomenon that is too new for conclusions to be drawn so far as its final outcome is concerned. Lessons can only be learnt from the trajectory of some of the oldest representatives of this league, Putin and Erdogan, who have taken over power democratically in countries which had benefited from the democratisation process of the 1990s with some of the most authoritarian historical backgrounds. While these cases may be somewhat extreme, they suggest that national-populists tend to accumulate power in their hands to such an extent that no checks and balances can survive. Constitutions have eventually to be reformed or twisted. Freedom of expression is gradually contained in the name of national interest and state security. Intellectuals and the judiciary are the first casualties — and then political opponents are at the receiving end.

Last but not least, these new demagogues have had little hesitation in resorting to force (including private armies, militias). Their wars have been internal to their countries first — to repress separatists and terrorists — but external too, subsequently, either because of their aggressive nationalism or because their instrumentalisation of popular sentiments degenerated in forms of violence one can control only up to a point.

Less extreme cases — like Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand or Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka — suggest that national-populists have sometimes had to leave power because of the resilience of opponents and their own mistakes. Often, authoritarian leaders make mistakes because of their very modus operandi: Gradually insulated from the real world, they do not listen to advice, and nobody dares to tell them the truth anyway. As a result, naked kings may initiate moves which can boomerang. When such developments occur before the complete devastation of the democratic legacy, democracy can be revived, like in Sri Lanka today.
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The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False

JULIAN ASSANGE IS A deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents).

But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by the Guardian which recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims – fabrications, really – were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combatting it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.
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https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29...nterview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/
 
Pexbo said:
They are. There's plenty of people like me who use a train once in a blue moon but pay taxes. Similarly, there's plenty of visitors to the country that use the trains a lot for a short period of time but pay no taxes.
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Are you suggesting that the daily commuters don't pay taxes? Those are the people most effected by a fare hike.
 
Wednesday at Stoke said:
Are you suggesting that the daily commuters don't pay taxes? Those are the people most effected by a fare hike.
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I'm saying that not all customers are tax payers and not all tax payers are customers. Therefore you have to treat them both as seperate entities when you consider the impact.
 
Pexbo said:
I'm saying that not all customers are tax payers and not all tax payers are customers. Therefore you have to treat them both as seperate entities when you consider the impact.
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Businesses set fares based on their largest clientele, that in this case is the daily commuter who pays for the rail and also pays his taxes, the two are not mutually exclusive and you can't treat them as separate entities.
 
Wednesday at Stoke said:
Businesses set fares based on their largest clientele, that in this case is the daily commuter who pays for the rail and also pays his taxes, the two are not mutually exclusive and you can't treat them as separate entities.
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You're missing the point entirely though.

There is actually three entities to consider here:

1. Those who pay taxes and use the rail service.

2. Those who don't pay taxes and do use the rail service.

3. Those who do pay taxes but don't use the rail service.

The tax payer is footing some of the bill for the rail network modernisation. Now why should people that come under bracket 3 not be considered? I pay taxes and I don't use the rail service so why should I be subsidising the tickets of people who don't pay taxes and do use the rail service?


Just because there are tax payers who use the rail service doesn't mean that's the only person to consider when you decide how much tax should go towards the rail service.
 
Pexbo said:
You're missing the point entirely though.

There is actually three entities to consider here:

1. Those who pay taxes and use the rail service.

2. Those who don't pay taxes and do use the rail service.

3. Those who do pay taxes but don't use the rail service.

The tax payer is footing some of the bill for the rail network modernisation. Now why should people that come under bracket 3 not be considered? I pay taxes and I don't use the rail service so why should I be subsidising the tickets of people who don't pay taxes and do use the rail service?


Just because there are tax payers who use the rail service doesn't mean that's the only person to consider when you decide how much tax should go towards the rail service.
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I'm not sure what percentage of people use the train service but don't pay taxes (lets assume tourists). Like I said the largest customer base for the train service is the daily commuters and I think those would be a majority (75-85%) of the train passengers. I'd venture to guess they are also local citizens who pay their taxes. So essentially the government is double dipping into their pockets.

If you are so concerned about subsidizing for people who don't pay taxes, then have a different fare for commuter card holders and people who buy one off tickets. We have that in Copenhagen, the regular commuters with commuter cards pay less than half the price for the same journey as the ones who buy a ticket at the counter. Raising prices across the board and then claiming that the burden is being distributed between the taxpayer and passenger is quite simply not accurate.
 
Wednesday at Stoke said:
I'm not sure what percentage of people use the train service but don't pay taxes (lets assume tourists). Like I said the largest customer base for the train service is the daily commuters and I think those would be a majority (75-85%) of the train passengers. I'd venture to guess they are also local citizens who pay their taxes. So essentially the government is double dipping into their pockets.

If you are so concerned about subsidizing for people who don't pay taxes, then have a different fare for commuter card holders and people who buy one off tickets. We have that in Copenhagen, the regular commuters with commuter cards pay less than half the price for the same journey as the ones who buy a ticket at the counter. Raising prices across the board and then claiming that the burden is being distributed between the taxpayer and passenger is quite simply not accurate.
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It is though. Because again, you are not considering tax payers who don't use the rail service when you say that. You can't just expect people who don't use the rail service to think it's perfectly OK to subsidise the cost of a rail users commute when the road they drive to work on is left in disrepair. That's why there has to be a balancing act.

Those of us that drive are already getting "double dipped" as we pay a huge amount of tax on our fuel and then have to pay a yearly road tax on top of that. Then there's toll bridges to consider.

But no you're absolutely right, my taxes should definitely be going towards making it cheaper for other people to get to work for less.
 
D.C. Area Jewish Family Targeted With anti-Semitic Threats After Voicing Support for Black Lives Matter
'Enjoy the mayhem,' letter bearing yellow star, word 'Jude' and crosshairs sign told the Franklins. Police at first said no signs point to anti-Semitism, but later announce incident a hate-crime.

Anti-Semitism in the U.S. conquered the headlines on Monday, after 15 Jewish Community Centers across the country received bomb threats and were evacuated. The threats turned out to be false alarms, but they still managed to create at least a temporary sense of fear for some people. A Washington, DC resident whose children were evacuated from the local JCC told Haaretz: "I am sure there was never an actual security threat, but extremely unpleasant nonetheless. I didn’t relish having to explain to my 4 year old about his first encounter with anti-Semitism."
In the D.C. Metro area, another case of anti-Semitic threats became national news during the weekend, when a Jewish family in the Maryland suburb of Rockville received a threatening letter adorned by a yellow star. The local police is investigating the case as a hate crime.
The incident occurred after Sonya and Mikey Franklin hung a banner outside of their apartment last week in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. They took down the banner within days, after the association at their apartment building asked them not to display political messages. Still, two days after their sign was taken down, a hand-written note containing anti-Semitic symbols and threats was left in their car, which was vandalized during the night.

The Franklins informed the police about the incident on Sunday, and while the police arrived and examined the letter, the couple was disappointed when the initial police reaction was to say that "there's nothing in there that is anti-Semitic" and that it's unknown what the word "Jude" means. A local police spokesman added that the letter was most likely written by kids. On Monday, however, the police announced it was treating the event as a hate crime, and that it was committed to providing "the highest levels of police services" to all residents.
Mikey Franklin posted a photograph of the letter on Twitter, and it was retweeted and shared by thousands of users. He says that following the initial tweet, he has received hundreds of supportive messages from friends, neighbors and even complete strangers on the internet – but at the same time, has also become exposed to vast anti-Semitic harassment on social networks. "My Twitter mentions are full of Nazis now," he explains. One popular Neo-Nazi publication published a picture of the Franklins' months-old baby.

Over the weekend, anti-Semitism made headlines also in the state of Montana, where far-right activists plan to hold a protest march next Monday in the town of Whitefish. The march will take place on Martin Luther King Day, and is a reaction to attempts by the local Jewish community to limit the operation of a Neo-Nazi website from the town's area. Over the weekend, a counter-event was held in Whitefish, under the title "Love Not Hate," bringing together residents who oppose the upcoming far-right demonstration. A local police chief told Montana Public Radio last week that if the Neo-Nazis and their sympathizers "are going to protest in our city, I want them to understand they're going to do it our way, or we're going to kick their ass."
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berbatrick said:
Thanks for the link. It made me realise that in my school, we never learnt about British colonialism outside India and the US. We knew a little about the Opium Wars, French in Vietnam, Spain and Portugal in South America and the way the continent of Africa was divided into different colonial zones was briefly mentioned. But literally nothing about the Middle East apart from Ataturk.
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I heard that the british used Government of India funds to aid the initial wahabi surge in arabia.
 
VidaRed said:
I heard that the british used Government of India funds to aid the initial wahabi surge in arabia.
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Nah that would be the third 'Wahhabi surge'. Two Saudi states that had very little contact with the British had come and gone before the Government of India actively started supporting Ibn Saud against his Ottoman-aligned rival Ibn Rashid (also a Wahhabi) in the decade prior to WW1 - Ibn Saud's victory established the third Saudi state which we know today.
 
2cents said:
Nah that would be the third 'Wahhabi surge'. Two Saudi states that had very little contact with the British had come and gone before the Government of India actively started supporting Ibn Saud against his Ottoman-aligned rival Ibn Rashid (also a Wahhabi) in the decade prior to WW1 - Ibn Saud's victory established the third Saudi state which we know today.
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That is what i meant. There earliers adventures resulted in getting there heads chopped off in istanbul.
 
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