There’s a claim that has been repeated a lot on social media by former Hilary Clinton supporters (the graphic on the right posted to Twitter by Victoria Brownworth being an example) that Trump won only because of the electoral college; Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump and had there been a fair voting system where every vote counted the same, rather than an electoral college that dates from the time of slavery and over-represents small and predominantly white states at the expense of urbanised states with large minority populations, Clinton would have won. On the face of it, this appears to be true. However, this overlooks the 6 or so million Americans that voted for neither Clinton nor Trump, and particularly those who voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.
Possibly Related Posts:
- The electronics ban: malice or stupidity? Protectionism or security?
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- Trump has no business in any parliament
- Trump’s election is no ‘rejection of elites’
- So, about those Democrat infiltrators …
There was an article on the Independent last week 
I was listening to the BBC’s You and Yours programme and heard 
It’s no secret that the bulk of the support for the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union last year came from the Right — UKIP and large sections of the Tory party — but it has been part of the hard Left’s campaign for decades as well, was Labour policy in the early 1980s and has the support of a number of Labour MPs; Jeremy Corbyn’s support for remaining in was thought to be lukewarm. The other day I saw a conversation between two online friends after one of them asked if anyone she knew who had voted for Brexit could tell her why. The other responded that the EU was “neoliberal, ruled by people lacking both public support and expertise, vindictive, selfish and tyrannical”, examples being the treatment of Greece and migrants. As true as these things might be, they are all at least as much British diseases as European ones.
The Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in a New England taken over by a fundamentalist Christian theocratic police state that styles itself the Republic of Gilead, concluded on Channel 4 last Sunday night. The series (like the novel) follows the story of Offred, AKA June, who has been conscripted as a ‘handmaid’ to provide children to wealthy élite families in a society beset by a so-called plague of infertility which seems to be affecting other countries (such as Mexico) as well. The series has been described as not fiction but “a warning” by an Australian feminist columnist, and it seems many people are watching it despite finding it distressing, most likely because everyone is talking about it so everyone else needs to understand it. I found it a very weak and unbelievable piece of TV and its biggest weaknesses are its back-story and its handling of race, which are connected.
Today, social media has been abuzz about a column by Kevin Myers, about whom I last wrote on this blog in 2009 in response to a 
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has drawn to a close; his family spent their final moments with him in a children’s hospice today and he died this evening. The American neurologist who had claimed to have treatment to offer that could have helped him turns out never to have examined Charlie and to have had a financial interest in the treatment which, at this stage, could not in fact have helped. Melanie Phillips has written a 
Over the weekend I saw 
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was 
Earlier a Facebook friend (an African-American Muslim woman) posted a status that Black Muslim men should just accept that most Black Muslim women hate polygamy and that “no amount of guilting and shaming is going to change that”. This provoked a big debate about why this is and what it says about Black Muslim women and their attitudes, but there were a number of men insisting that it meant they did not accept what God had made lawful in Islam, and accused them of shirk (idolatry/polytheism, in the sense of thinking you know better than God). The sister who posted the status said there were particular “circumstances that make polygyny worthy of consideration” for African-American Muslim women, but didn’t spell out what these were.
The case of Charlie Gard, the baby boy with a mitochondrial disease and allegedly irreparable brain damage whose life support doctors have been trying to turn off as they believe there is no hope of his recovering, has been in the news for the past several weeks as it has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled against him, and now back to the British High Court where lawyers are representing his family pro bono. I’ve not followed that case particularly closely but I have been following the case of Emily Bauer, a young woman from Texas who suffered brain damage in 2012 after taking ‘Kush’ (also known as ‘spice’ and ‘K2’), a kind of synthetic marijuana which is available from some corner shops and filling stations and sold as “legal highs” or “pot pourri”. After she suffered a series of strokes, scans showed large areas of her brain affected by “liquefactive necrosis”, i.e. which were dead, and it was believed that if her life support were switched off, she would die.
Martin Luther King junior famously wrote a 
Last Sunday I saw a 
This week sees the third Seven Days of Action event to raise awareness of the people with learning disabilities who are trapped in psychiatric units, usually so-called Assessment and Treatment Units, sometimes for lack of more suitable provision and sometimes because the units’ management refuses to accept that release is possible. Yesterday and today, the BBC featured the issue (though not the campaign, by name) on their Breakfast programme; yesterday the story of one man and one young boy being held in units a long way from home; today they featured the case of Stephanie Bincliffe, a young woman with autism who died in a unit run by the Huntercombe group after seven years living in a windowless cell; for 18 months of that, she ate and toileted in that room and was ‘washed’ only with wet wipes. This appalling excuse for ‘care’ cost the public purse roughly £4.5m, or £1,761 per day. (The profiteering of these companies — Priory Group being the other major party involved — is found in more general adolescent mental health care, and the same problems exist there: extended stays, being forced a long way from home, punitive and degrading treatment especially of girls, lack of understanding on the part of professionals, leading to people being ill over very long periods, requiring repeat admissions, and some serious self-harm and even suicides.)