alanjjohnstone
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Biden relaxes some of the US abortion foreign aid laws.
The article goes back to 18th C…so a very contemporary analysis (irony).
I’m reminded that they say India inherited two things from British rule, the railways (that is just getting around to building high-speed trains) and the civil service.
I once met a rich Swiss businessman who was starting up a company to provide luxury hotels with their own bread-making facilities, as he had done in many other countries.
Usually, he explained, it requires a briefcase with a few folders in it for all the government applications forms. But in India, he told me, it needed a full filing cabinet, each drawer packed with papers for each separate government ministry and he still hadn’t gone through the complete process, after months of bureaucracy.
I once had to walk by a building site where the same man was using a sledge hammer all day long to break up some huge boulder. He was at it for a week or so. A pnuematic drill would have broken it up in an hour or two…but with low pay it was cheaper to employ a person with a sledge-hammer than use a jack-hammer.
I think the real problem is the roll-out delays. Where i live it won’t begin until 14 February.
Even within a sophisticated health service network as in Europe, the pharmaceutical corporations are unable to ramp up production and fulfil their delivery promises.
As someone said the slow-down costs lives.
We now have the possibility of the EU restricting the export of the vaccine.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-eu-vaccine-exports.html
An article about the farmers protests in Mumbai by the adivasi (tribal) community
https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/we-have-marched-before-we-will-march-again/
Our message should be that the repeal of three laws does no more than return the farmers back to the status quo – exactly where they were – which was never ever good. Socialism is the only option for real progress. But our problem is how to get that message communicated.
Biden’s executive orders are receiving much attention from the president-friendly media. But what are the real effect of them?
One such presidential order is to phase out the Department of Justice’s contracts with privately managed prisons.
The federal Bureau of Prisons — which makes up slightly more than 8 percent of the current U.S. penal population — but just 9 percent of the people incarcerated under the Bureau of Prisons are held in a private prison.
Biden has excluded the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore privately run immigration detention centers, from his order. In contrast to the small percentage of private prisons within the Bureau of Prisons, the majority of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities are currently under private contracts. Yet there is no indication that the Biden administration will extend the executive order to the Department of Homeland Security.
Biden’s Private Prison Executive Order Doesn’t Undo Mass Incarceration
Another story of Twitter’s right-wing slant
Twitter’s Latin America Coordinator Exposed as Right-Wing Operative
In the weeks following Twitter’s censorship of Trump, the company intensified its crackdown on left-wing Mexican activists. A group of prominent supporters of López Obrador were suspended in coordinated fashion, suggesting they were being targeted not for violating any terms of use on the website, but because of their politics.
The new US secretary of state saying American sanctions against Tehran will not be lifted until it comes back into verifiable “full compliance” with its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal.
Antony Blinken said Iranian compliance would take some time, indicating there is unlikely to be any major movement in negotiations until after the Iranian presidential elections in June.
Yet again confusion over vaccine efficiency still continues.
Jim Naismith, professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford and director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, said: “It is really important to read what has been said, German scientists conclude that the Oxford /AZ vaccine is safe and it is effective for under 65s. Their assessment is that effectiveness is not yet demonstrated for over 65s. They have not said the vaccine is ineffective for over 65s.”
It is a little more difficult to garner information of the Farmers Strike from other regions of India since the media attention and focus is upon Delhi. However, adding a state name such as Tamil Nadu to the search brings up those local news features.
What is to bear in mind with India politics is the differentiation between what is called the Centre – ie Modi’s government – and all the other state governments, many held by Modi’s opposition. (Congress and CPI(M) are as you say offering their support to the strikers for partisan reasons but from all accounts are not in any control of it.) Therefore, the farmers strikes are not prominent actions.
Nor is there likely to be any contingents of farmers from, say, Kerala, travelling to Delhi to protest. It is a very long journey to make.
A poll of what some parts of India think are the main concern.
So there are other issues of importance to Indian workers, one being unemployment (perhaps reflecting the urban populations). Only Kerala had the pandemic as a main worry (maybe because of its tourism. Goa, the other tourist spot wasn’t featured in the poll)
I can’t be sure but i wouldn’t judge the status of farmers from the fact that there are tractors on the protest. If similar to where i am, large machinery such as tractors and combine harvesters are bought on credit and then they hire out to individual farmers. (plus tractors are often used for non-agricultural work). You would be surprised here by how many farmers drive 3-litre pick-ups because of the easy credit compared to when i first came here decades ago when a motorcycle was luxury.
And according to this story, many on show were not new but smartened up just for the protest.
Hmmmm???…the Labour Party employs an Israel ex-military intelligence officer to conduct its social media campaigns.
Former Israeli army spy recruited by Labour should feel right at home
I was going to post on the Facebook bans topic but have a couple recent posts there already.
Speculation is growing that the word “zionist” might be classed as hate speech by Facebook
A related article on social media and the Arab Spring
Big Tech companies continue to downplay their critical role in undermining democratic movements and free speech in the Arab world and ignore calls to implement urgent, long-term reforms.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/1/27/the-social-media-myth-about-the-arab-spring
During the early days of the Arab uprisings, when many activists were using Facebook and Twitter to organise and amplify their demands, the social media giants seized the opportunity to brand themselves as platforms for political activism and resistance. To this day, numerous media outlets run the claim that “social media made the Arab Spring” and that it was a “Facebook revolution”. But social scientists have repeatedly busted this myth.
…the “important story” about the Arab Spring is not the use of social media technology, but how revolutionary aspirations resonated across the Arab world… the policies of social media companies actually limited collective action in some ways and inhibited political activism… there is no significant correlation between internet or social media use and popular unrest…social media was just one channel of social and political networking among many others that contributed to the onset of the protest movements…
Despite posing as a force for progress and development, Big Tech was collaborating with repressive governments in the Middle East and North Africa…Wikileaks revealed that in 2006 Microsoft had agreed to train law enforcement officers in IT in exchange for President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s government going back on its decision to use open-source software…Instead of protecting free speech against government censorship efforts, social media platforms suspended and removed thousands of accounts of political dissidents in Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. They have also arbitrarily taken down content that advocated for free speech, justice, and basic human rights and have offered no explanation for doing so…more than 40 civil organisations, calling on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to stop silencing critical voices in the Middle East and North Africa…..
The near total-ban on abortion in Poland will come into effect imminently, the government has announced. Abortion will only be permitted in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger.
Background reading:
Facebook will halt algorithm-driven recommendations of political Facebook groups around the world and is looking into reducing political content in its News Feed, according to chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg.
“People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on the platform,” Zuckerberg told investors. “We’re going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/27/facebook-earnings-stocks-revenue-fourth-quarter
Not at all sure what this means in real life and what effect may have on political parties such as ours.
Facebook will halt algorithm-driven recommendations of political Facebook groups around the world and is looking into reducing political content in its News Feed, according to chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg.
“People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on the platform,” Zuckerberg told investors. “We’re going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/27/facebook-earnings-stocks-revenue-fourth-quarter
Not at all sure what this means in real life and what effect may have on political parties such as ours.
