Russia may extend ‘gay propaganda’ ban to include adults

Russian lawmakers have proposed extending a ban on “gay propaganda”, broadening a law that human rights activists say has put LGBTQ people at risk and led to increased discrimination and violence.

The ban on the promotion of “non-traditional” sexual relationships to minors could be broadened to include adults, a senior legislator said.

Russia’s existing “gay propaganda” law, passed in 2013, has been used to stop gay pride marches and detain LGBTQ rights activists.

Under the proposed changes, any event or act regarded as an attempt to promote homosexuality could incur a fine, Reuters reported.

The head of the State Duma’s information committee, Alexander Khinshtein, said on Telegram:

We propose to generally extend the ban on such propaganda regardless of the age of the audience (offline, in the media, on the internet, social networks and online cinemas).

The existing law envisages fines of up to 1m roubles (£13,400) or up to 15 days in jail for propagating “non-traditional sexual relations among minors”.

Source is Guardian

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Real debt trap: Sri Lanka owes vast majority to West, not China Multipolarista

Sri Lanka owes 81% of its external debt to US and European financial institutions and Western allies Japan and India. China owns just 10%. But Washington blames imaginary “Chinese debt traps” for the nation’s crisis, as it considers a 17th IMF structural adjustment program.

Some stories about how Ukrainian refugees are treated in Denmark told by the volunteer we dropped off some bags of children's clothes to.

• The municipal authorities who are tasked with helping refugees are not up for the task. If refugees are housed privately they don't consider it their job to help with anything else.
• The municipal authorities doesn't tell refugees of the possibilities to get help from either public services or private charities.
• Because of this many refugees lack basic clothing and household items. One family had lived in the same issue of clothes for a month.
• Just getting registered as a residents can take months and without a personal registration number it is almost impossible to interact with authorities, the healthcare system, opening a bank account or even getting a bus card.
• Childcare can be a huge problem and municipalities do a really shitty job providing it. A single mother was offered a kindergarten for her youngest child a 40 minutes bus ride from their home. The municipality told her that she could just let her six year old walk to school alone. A six year old walking to school alone in a foreign country where they don't speak the language.
• All in all the authorities do what they are best at: Being dicks to vulnerable people who they think won't be able to make a fuss about it.

Support refugees, Ukrainian or otherwise, in whatever way you can.

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The DPRK (North Korea) recognized today the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic

Italy's Prime Minister is resigning as his coalition collapsed. Cause? Disagreements over sending weapons to Ukraine.

Things are fraying all over Europe right now. Not long until big infighting kicks off.

News from Germany: Der Spiegel just reported that Gazprom stated that NordStream 1 maintenance might take much longer than planned, because details about the replacement turbine still are not settled (I don't even want to understand the technicalities here).

Madman Putin is really doing it - gas to Europe might actually be grind to a complete halt for like weeks. :putin-wink:

Funniest outcome would be if they just said,

"Heeey, uhm so Germany, this replacement might take like 6 months or so, why don't you switch on NordStream 2 instead if you want gas? It's almost ready to go! Sorry! See you around, suckers!" :troll:

The Abe assassination reminds us that individuals make history WaPo

Truly today's crown jewel of dipshittery. If you looked at the headline and immediately thought "Oh god, this is gonna fucking suck", then you're correct, but unfortunately, it sucks even more than you're thinking it will.

The assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe on July 8 shocked his country and the world. Beyond its obvious repugnance in moral terms, Abe’s murder challenges us to consider what implications his sudden loss might have for the political future, in Japan and globally.

As such, it tests competing views of history and what does, or does not, determine the course of public events.

According to a widely held perspective, the removal of even a major figure such as Abe, who was the longest-serving head of government in postwar Japan and still influential despite resigning due to ill health in late 2020, lacks ultimate consequence. What determined the past, and will determine the future, are broad, impersonal, social forces — religion, ideology, demography, economic development.

Yet a contrary intuition — that individual leadership matters — persists. Assassinations perversely tend to confirm it. By plucking leaders violently from atop society, these killings divide history between one period when life was unimaginable without these prominent personages and another, full of what-ifs, defined by their absence.

Surely the power to make such an impact is part of what tempts assassins. And we must admit the painful extent to which they do, in fact, shape our world, albeit through subtraction: We are experiencing history minus Abraham Lincoln, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Huey Long, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat.

I feel fairly confident that WW1 would have happened even if Franz Ferdinand wasn't killed. At a different time, perhaps, but BROAD HISTORICAL FORCES were aligned that way. To quote Matt Christman, it was overdetermined. Also, mentioning Martin Luther King as a victim of assassination given WHO ASSASSINATED HIM is threatening to give me an aneurysm. I'm not even gonna fucking think about the JFK or RFK mention because my brain might explode.

For that matter, we live in a world shaped by assassinations that failed, perhaps the most fateful of which was the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life by coup-minded officers and diplomats 78 years ago this July 20.

Like, obviously I wish Hitler WAS assassinated, but I don't think it would have made a really significant difference to WW2 or the Holocaust. I agree that there's something to be said about "great men", who were put in place through broad historical trends, leaving their own little unique personal stamp on history, but it would have been a tremendous tragedy of about the same order of magnitude if Hitler's second or third in command took power after he was asssassinated.

Postwar Japan, a restored but aging economic power facing the rise of its ancient rival — China — might have tried to jump-start its productive capability and reassert itself in global affairs, including militarily, no matter who served as prime minister between 2012 and 2020.

Even within the constraints of a culture that prizes consensus and collective action, however, Abe pursued those objectives in his own particular way, casting Japanese reassertion as both a legitimate national interest and a contribution to the democratic world’s security. He won over Japanese voters and U.S. presidents as different as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Those extremely different people. Donald Trump is a self-obsessed golf-playing moron who only cares about himself and will throw people to the wolves the second it becomes beneficial to him, unlike Obama - the man who was also all those things and is, what, on his 13th fucking autobiography by now?

Japan’s surviving political leadership now seems motivated to build a monument to Abe in the form of amendments, long sought by him, that will change the country’s pacifist postwar constitution clearly to authorize military self-defense.

"Individuals make history, not broad historical trends, which explains why, after Abe was assassinated... checks notes... Japan continued on its broad historical trend towards increasing fascism [with the absence of a strong working class left-wing movement to oppose it]." What the fuck are you talking about???

Though the contexts are totally different, the process could resemble President Lyndon B. Johnson’s pursuit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a tribute to his slain predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Another precedent: Congress passed civil service reform in 1883, in response to the assassination two years earlier of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, a frustrated federal job seeker.

These examples only illustrate that assassination can have paradoxical side-effects — they do not redeem it. Political murder is inherently destabilizing to any political system and especially antithetical to democracy. Nothing could be more contrary to popular rule than the violent decapitation of a government, party or social movement by one self-appointed executioner.

I'm going insane looking at that last sentence. Oh my fucking god. All I can do is stare blankly at it and try and maintain a hold on my consciousness.

This is why the United States is wise to invest in Secret Service protection and other measures to keep public officials safe. The impact of a major assassination on the already feverishly divided U.S. body politic today would be too awful to consider. Alas, it is also all too imaginable, as shown by the recent arrest of an armed man who, according to law enforcement, had second thoughts about killing Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and surrendered to police outside the justice’s house.

This man is not going to valhalla.

If we are honest about it, the need to field a small army of official bodyguards constitutes a deeply troubling, though tacit, admission of insufficient domestic tranquility in the United States.

Happier and, in an important sense, more democratic, is the country where weapons possession is appropriately limited, the public’s attitudes are temperate — and politicians, judges and candidates feel free to walk the streets with minimal or no security.

The United States came closer to that ideal before Nov. 22, 1963, than it has since. Sweden lost a great deal of innocence in 1986, when a gunman killed former prime minister Olof Palme as he left a movie theater with his family, having previously given his security detail the night off.

As of July 8, Japan, too, was the kind of place where public officials often felt safe mingling with the voters they proposed to represent.

Now it faces the grim task of striking a new, sustainable balance, bearing in mind always that, in a democracy, no individual has the right to change history through violence — and all individuals must feel safe to try to change it peacefully.

This guy was put on this earth to drive me insane, and he's succeeding.

Summary

News

The EU is working on improving compliance among European countries with the sanctions on Russia, lamenting that they don't have the same sanctions enforcement mechanisms as the US (Strange that the US has such well-developed sanction mechanisms, eh? Anyway, the Putler invented global blackmail). At the same time, the EU is worried that it's losing, or has lost, the battle of narratives with the wider world on the Ukraine war, with many countries, including in the G20, don't want to rock the boat too much with Russia. A French minister says that Putin will cut off the Russian gas supply to Europe because he's an evil totaliauthoritarian, which makes previous discussions about Europe cutting off their own gas supplies to own Russia pretty hilarious in hindsight. Russia will receive its pipeline gas turbine after July 14th. Zelensky has fired his ambassadors to Germany, India, Czechia, Norway, and Hungary, with no specific reason given. The UK is trying to ramp up its nuclear power capacity, which I feel like they should have started a decade or more ago. Gazprom is reducing its gas supplies to Italy due to 10 days of routine maintenance. Lithuania is desperately trying to put itself out of its misery by increasing the restrictions on goods that can be sent to Kaliningrad.

China will apparently soon announce that it's allowing local governments to sell $220 billion-worth of special local bonds to help strengthen the economy. Macau is being put on lockdown for the first time in over two years until July 18th. Wang Yi says that Asian nations should avoid be used as chess pieces in a major power rivalry. Kiribati is quitting the Pacific island bloc over internal disputes, with Australia trying desperately to stop them from leaving. Sri Lanka's President and Prime Minister are leaving their posts (and Bloomberg advises the country to set up an "all-party cabinet that includes technocrats with deep economic experience", hilariously). Geothermal power in Laos is generating $600 million annually for them.

Pakistan's mango harvest is being ruined by drought. The US is still trying to destabilize Uzbekistan.

The Ivory Coast is trying to clean up after flooding, caused a little by climate change but a lot by a lack of proper drainage infrastructure and a lot of concrete and bitumen through which water cannot drain.

The western US continues to experience water scarcity, with increasingly desperate measures being tried. Most Americans find the major issue with electric vehicles is the logistics of how and where to charge them.

An important street in Bolivia is being named after Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general and hero to who the US assassinated in early 2020, and a sisterhood agreement between Tehran and a city in Bolivia is being established.

Conflict and Climate

Russia continues to destroy Western-supplied ammo. Ukraine says that new US guided rockets have "passed the test", but the attrition rate on the front lines means that Ukraine needs a lot more.

Billions of people rely on 50,000 wild species for survival and their livelihoods, stressing the importance of biodiversity. NASA will release the first high-resolution color images from the James Webb telescope tomorrow.

Dipshittery, Good Takes, and Hope

A ghoul tries to argue that trying to rein in climate change is bad, actually, for working class people, by citing the protests in the Netherlands and the crisis in Sri Lanka, the latter which has a "virtue-signalling" ESG rating of 98.1 out of 100. Zelensky cites Ukrainian forces moving onto Snake Island after Russia retreated as a symbol that Ukraine "will not be broken", ignoring that it already has been, and will be for decades. It's actually your fault - yes, you - that this recession is happening, because recessions are powered by belief, and if you believed that there wasn't going to be a recession, it wouldn't have happened. The Supreme Court is damaging the international image of America, which is otherwise a shining beacon of democracy which is responsible for only good things. Bloomberg argues that Biden can in fact unite Israel and Saudi Arabia to face down Iran, whose containment and subjugation would, apparently... bring down terrorism in the region? ...uhh... have they checked who's supplying the terrorists over there and who Iran is fighting? ...no?... okay... moving on... the Western media reports that China has developed mind-reading AI that can measure your loyalty to the party, which is almost certainly not true but if it is: I bet I would score the highest, like S+ tier. Boris Johnson is, as literally everybody knows, bad because he's a raving populist who is so deeply concerned about the people in his country, especially the homeless, that he brought the country down, and we need more aristocr-- I mean, meritocrats and technocrats to rule the UK, like Liz Truss.

Responsible Statecraft has some decent analysis about how the Iran hawks are delusional. Popular Resistance interviews Elnora Gavin, a resident of Benton Harbor who is organizing with her local area to fight problems there. MEPs in the EU expect the European Council to revise the EU Treaties to include the right to an abortion as a fundamental human right.

The Euros blinked:

🇪🇺🇷🇺 The EU and Russia agreed on the transit of goods to the Kaliningrad region, Brussels provided a document that "fully satisfied" Moscow, Izvestia reports, citing high-ranking sources in the Russian Federation

• Intel Slava Z

idk how DSA posts manage to attract so many raging angry liberals but damn lol i fucking hate americans, these mfs getting mad at the slightest push back against billions in military spending

https://twitter.com/DSA_Intl_Comm/status/1547217937039253505

Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place Naked Capitalism

Wake up babe, new Michael Hudson speech just dropped.

This is a transcript for a speech he performed yesterday for China's Global University. It's way too long to reasonably quote it all here, and all of it's good so it's difficult to take parts out of it, but here's a couple paragraphs:

The Orwellian Doublethink of calling oligarchies “democracies” is followed by defining a free market as one that is free for financial rent-seeking. U.S.-backed diplomacy has indebted countries, forcing them to sell control of their public infrastructure and turn their economy’s “commanding heights” into opportunities to extract monopoly rent.

...

If we ask just who today is enacting and enforcing policies that seek to check oligarchy in order to protect the livelihood of citizens, the answer is that this is done by socialist states. Only a strong state has the power to check a financial and rent-seeking oligarchy. The Chinese embassy in America demonsrated this in its reply to President Biden’s description of China as an autocracy: "Clinging to a Cold War mentality and the hegemon’s logic, the US pursues bloc politics, concocts the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative … and ramps up bilateral military alliances, in a clear attempt at countering China."

Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded … the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people, and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights.

...

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves.

...

The only possible way for history really to end would be for the American military to destroy every nation seeking an alternative to neoliberal privatization and financialization. U.S. diplomacy insists that history must not take any path that would not culminate in its own financial empire ruling through client oligarchies. American diplomats hope that their military threats and support of proxy armies will force other countries to submit to neoliberal demands – to avoid being bombed, or suffering “color revolutions,” political assassinations and army takeovers, Pinochet-style. But the only real way to bring history to an end is by atomic war to end human life on this planet.

Pakistan rapidly shaping up to be the next domino after Sri Lanka

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Soaring-Energy-Prices-Spell-Disaster-For-Pakistan.html

Also Pakistan has a love-hate with the US, mostly hate. The USA has love-hate-mostly-hate for Pakistan. Pakistan is now geopolitically isolated.

Next flashpoint isn’t Taiwan it’s Pakistan.

Here's a long Twitter thread of mercenaries in Ukraine getting owned: https://twitter.com/TaranQ/status/1533140645698605056