Tuur Ruytjens

retweets usually mean I consider the point well made or at least interesting but not necessarily that I agree entirely.

[Pieter Bauwens ن @PieterBauwens]

Een spoeddecreet stemmen speciaal om Jinnih Beels aan de kant te kunnen schuiven? Zo ziek is de Vlaamse politiek. Hendrik Vuye https://t.co/QAqgyknsRh

[Rik Torfs @torfsrik]

Conner Rousseau wil met spoed een nieuw decreet om een motie van wantrouwen in de provincieraad mogelijk te maken waardoor Jinnih Beels als gedeputeerde kan worden afgezet. Een nieuwe wet maken om een persoon te treffen. Brutale machtspolitiek en een gevaar voor de rechtsstaat.

[Hadley Freeman @HadleyFreeman]

There’s been a lot of discourse about NHJ’s choice of school for her daughter. What I find a lot harder to understand is her decision to put her teenage daughter’s face, name and academic record all over the NYT and NPR tbqh

[Ukraine Control Map @UAControlMap]

They aren't really shooting at us.

[Tuur Ruytjens @Tuurtuur]

@helgavanleur Limburg en Kempen for the win 💪

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

Another never leaving this website moment.

[Tuur Ruytjens @Tuurtuur]

@CartoonsHateHer confused. english not being my native language:
is a wimpsuit the same as a wimplesuit? or are wimps the current topic now, right on the heels of wimples???

[Jamie Reed Whistleblower @JamieWhistle]

Yes, six major hospital systems — NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, UPMC, Texas Children's, Cleveland Clinic, Connecticut Children's — are closing.

We knew we were hiding behind the legitimacy of major respected hospitals— we had access to surgical suites, and the ability to calm a nervous parent or grandparent just because of where we were. We knew it.

There will always be adults willing to split their own tongues or tattoo their faces, and there will always be someone willing to sell it to them. But when institutions like these are forced out of that business, it tells you where it belonged all along.

The people furious about these closures aren't really mourning access to care- they will move to private clinics— they're mourning the loss of borrowed legitimacy, and they're being sent back to the sideshow, which is exactly where snake oil salesmen always belonged

[🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 @apocalypseos]

Jeffrey Sachs: a president stood at the UN and claimed the right to annihilate a civilization. Congress said nothing. That is the constitutional order collapsing in public.

“I shuddered then, and I shudder now that a president of the United States can stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly speaking to world leaders in a language of annihilation of other countries and of sending them to hell. It was ghastly, unprecedented, totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States. But I would also say a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is.

Trump basically said, like a madman, which I think arguably he is, that he and he alone will decide the survival of Iran. He said that he has a big, big choice to make. Maybe Iran will be a great country. Maybe Iran will be annihilated. Maybe Trump will send it to hell. And not only was the language vulgar in a way that I certainly could never in my lifetime have imagined coming from a president of the United States or anybody standing at the UN podium—because what Trump said was odious and completely in violation of every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world—it was also a measure of the brazen collapse of our Constitution.

Is there a political system where one man decides the fate of another civilization? Is that how the American system works? Of course the answer is no. The founding fathers who rebelled against a mad King George III were very explicit in the Declaration of Independence, celebrated this year 250 years after its issuance. We’re in the 250th anniversary, one that Trump says is about our freedom. It was explicitly that King George arrogated, took on the authority to put the military above civil rule. And when the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they assigned specifically the power to declare war not to the commander-in-chief, but solely and exclusively—and not by choice, not if they care about it or want to or want to delegate it or not, but solely—to the United States Congress.

And Trump said yesterday he doesn’t care what the public thinks. He doesn’t care what the vote is. He says it doesn’t even cross my mind. And he said earlier this year, when he was asked, well, are there any limits on your power? He thought about it. He said Yes, my morality, but it’s my will. It’s what I want to do. Otherwise, no, there are no other limits.

What did our Congress do on that occasion? I can tell you, as we know, that the majority party in both houses simply remained silent. That is a violation of their sacred oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution. Trump yesterday said he’s going to have the difficult choice of whether to annihilate, by the way, one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, 5,000 years old, twenty times older than the United States of America. And what did our Speaker of the House say? Well, he said nothing, of course. What did our Senate majority leader say? He said, of course, nothing. What did all of the party of the president of the United States say, the members of Congress? They said, of course, nothing. This is worse than the Roman Empire. There was a Senate that actually still said something. Our Senate says nothing.

We are so broken that not only do we have a madman in power, but there is no respect for our constitutional order. And the president can make statements as he made yesterday, unprecedented in the chamber of the General Assembly in front of the world leaders, speaking like the worst tyrant or gangster imaginable, and not a murmur from the Republican Party which dominates the House and the Senate. You know, I am not partisan. And a Democratic president who dared to be as absolutely mad and deranged as this president would probably find subservience in that party too. So I’m not even making a partisan point. I’m making a point about the collapse of our constitutional order.

Have we come to a point where one man, who I happen to think is utterly incompetent, utterly sociopathic, actually—when people are killed under his order, not a moment of reflection or remorse when 150 schoolgirls are murdered, and he knows the truth. He says, yeah, the Iranians probably did it. We’ll find out. No, not any control at all in our system of government.

So for me, you asked how I feel. I shudder at the last 24 hours, both at what the president said. It made my skin crawl. I was sitting there in the chamber listening to this madness. I mean it really, psychopathic madness, speaking in this way, with a vulgarity that is unimaginable. But then I’ve shuddered since then at the lack of response by the leaders, the majority leader of the US Senate, the Speaker of the House, Supreme Court justices, anybody to say no. In our system of government, it’s not one person who decides on the fate of another civilization.

We are a country, we say, first of all, of representation, and the American people are aghast at this. They oppose it overwhelmingly. They do not support this war of Netanyahu and Trump, which is a two-person war of murder and destruction and assassination of leaders of another country. They do not support it. And the constitutional order is that we are a representative government, and our representatives have an oath of office that only they can declare war. So where are they standing up to say No, you don’t have a penny to spend on this? We control the power of the purse. The tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that Trump has wasted of American income in this flagrant war of whim. Where is Congress to say you have no authority whatsoever to spend that because only we can decide on the spending and only we can declare war.

So this is the grim fact. It wasn’t just the awful statements. That was my first reaction. But then I thought, what have we come to when one person can make a statement like this and then remain essentially unchallenged in the United States system of government?”

Annihilation is not diplomacy. Congressional silence is not restraint. A constitutional republic cannot survive if one man claims the power to decide whether another civilization lives or dies.

[Sally J 🟢⚪🟣 @NotTheTisWasOne]

Ah, so now we know why she felt able to say what she did about JK Rowling!

https://t.co/RJPqGs51ji

[Erwin Vanmol (Hij/Ger) @Vanmoltoons]

#decommentaarsectie #Anders #Lachaert

[Terzake @terzaketv]

"Een fenomeen dat elke keer terugkeert."

Egbert Lachaert verlaat liberalen, en hij is niet de eerste. Een historisch overzicht in #terzaketv

[Tuur Ruytjens @Tuurtuur]

Tom Gauld’s Jane Austen-inspired algorithm for gentlemen in want of a wife – cartoon https://t.co/YteVWQSla2

[Tuur Ruytjens @Tuurtuur]

@BartGonnissen @ManuelSintubin @de_NVA (zucht)
@BartGonnissen:
* expliciet: verstikkend, provincialistisch, onder de kerktoren, klein
* impliciet: (niet) wereldburger (~bekrompen?), (geen) open geest (~met oogkleppen?)
het exacte aantal is natuurlijk volstrekt irrelevant. punt is: schelden zonder enig argument.

[Philosophy Matters @PhilosophyMttrs]

the modern condition

[milo edwards @Milo_Edwards]

you can get trump to admit by almost anything by accusing him of not being the number one in the world at something

[Tuur Ruytjens @Tuurtuur]

@caryatis our eldest is like that. she's grown and flown but occupies another partment in the same building as us (parents+ youngest), using our machine.
she does at least 3* what we 3 do.
ironically hers is a very smelly cat while ours is basically odourless so it's her place that reeks.

[Manuel Sintubin 🌎⛏️💚🇺🇦🇬🇱🇪🇺 @ManuelSintubin]

#UGent 👇🤣

[BellaLucyBee 💚🤍💜 @BellaLucyBee]

Isn't it interesting that women experience gender dysphoria when going through puberty but men experience it when going through the criminal justice system?