bol
Novice Member
Posts: 69
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Post by bol on Sept 25, 2017 2:24:44 GMT 1
Those nationalist right-wingers now occupy the sweetest spot in the German political system, the third largest party, and will largely shape the German political discourse from now on no matter what. And they already did in the election discourses, also among its mainstream enemies. Social problems etc. nrly absent in the discourse... and in the tv shows the candidates mostly had to talk about afd-topics too, since that is seemingly all the moderators care about. Media hacks just love these abstract discourses that are so far away from the problems of most people. Sadly enough this whole thing can not be a surprise after the last years. Of course most hacks not intended it that exact way as outcome, but over and over repeated things like the Greece crisis frame (which was portrayed in media as "hard working Germans vs lazy Southerners") and the cheesy "everything is perfect in this country, see our economy exports"-mantra (whose fault are then the problems in that logic? of course of these foreigners) just got too dominant.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 25, 2017 15:17:20 GMT 1
Yeah, and that will be the semi-permanent state of affairs in German politics for a long time. Germany won't be in any shape to "lead" Europe effectively. And that was entirely predictable.
I was interested pre-election in where the exodus from SPD was going, as I thought they wouldn't switch to CDU no matter how disillusioned they were with SPD. And it seems that more of them voted for AfD and FDP than they voted for Grüne/Linke. That's pretty bad. I mean, I don't think I need to say much about AfD, but FDP too? It's like a Democrat voting for Paul Ryan, a Labour voting for George Osborne. FDP is a joke party who acts like the Tory without having actual political power, a party only for urban semi-rich neolib right-wing assholes who think they are too cool to vote for CDU, so it would take some real ignorance or ideological apathy for an SPD voter to vote for that party.
Social democracy has really lost its appeal to so many people, it seems. I know, it's silly of me to call whatever SPD has been doing "social democracy", but still.
And also, with AfD winning so many votes in the east, the government, in whatever form (I think the "Jamaika-Koalition" will happen eventually), wouldn't be able to represent the east. It's effectively disenfranchisement. This kind of a stark division, as if Germany weren't divided enough already, is very worrisome. It's not good to have an internal colony with so many pissed-off people who think they are deemed irrelevant. You can't even find many immigrants in the east, most of them go straight to the west, cities like Dresden and Potsdam existed only during WWII and are irrelevant now as far as they are concerned, yet even the upper-middle class Germans there who aren't having much financial difficulties voted for AfD en masse. There's some real distrust that exists there.
Leipzig doing well in the Bundesliga on foreign (Austrian, no less) Red Bull steroids makes me feel rather sad, to be honest. It's much sadder than Manchester City's case for sure.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 25, 2017 16:22:40 GMT 1
But then, we'd miss the point if we talk too much about the east when this is the reality:
Double-digit support for AfD in every gender, west, east, age group... except for the 70+ age group.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 25, 2017 20:50:01 GMT 1
This is, unfortunately, true.
In most of Europe, and other parts of the world for that matter, the US Republican Party would have to be disbanded in one election because they would win about as many votes as Sun Ripened Warm Tomato Party would.
You really should take that into account when you see me talk shit about European/Other political parties. It's just a fundamental premise that US Republicans are by and large beyond the pale especially when it comes to economic policies. There's little to no competition.
And you can calculate back how much wealth there actually is in America from the fact that the US hasn't been completely destroyed yet despite that. It's an incredibly rich country even though most Americans don't touch or feel that wealth. Any other country who tries the same would crash and burn into ashes in two hours.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 25, 2017 21:38:10 GMT 1
My general impression is that there isn't a single American who really understands who and what Angela Merkel actually is. There seems to be almost remarkable lack of motivation to learn more about her and German politics in general, even though so many Americans often play up the German chancellor as "the real leader of the free world" or whatever the fuck whenever Trump (or George W. Bush, for that matter) said something stupid.
I'm not German, but this sudden spike of shallow interest because of AfD, as if the party popped up out of nowhere yesterday, annoys the fuck out of me. They have no fucking clue, yet pretend to care only when they see a chance to call Germans Nazi again.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 26, 2017 8:19:10 GMT 1
Sure, ad hominem is not good. Being prejudiced is not good. Ideas should be discussed on their own merits. I get that principle.
But largely just in theory. It's a sort of a Kantian "regulative" concept to me: A nice platonic idea that usually doesn't quite manifest itself in the mortal world, and which nonetheless you certainly hope is true eventually, on some meta/higher level.
I mean, when I see names like Max Boot, James Clapper, Molly McKew, Sarah Kendzior, etc. leading a movement, it's very hard not to ad-hominem the crap out of them. It's very hard not to be prejudiced. It's very hard to discuss the shit "on its own merits". Hell, I'm absolutely not interested in what they say. I wouldn't feel even slightly bad about not even reading a word of it.
It's Max Boot, man. It's James Clapper, dude.
I remember "Russia expert" McKew as an "Iraq expert" back in the days. She then moved on to work for such stellar foreign entities as Moldova's PLDM and Georgia's UNMG as an "advisor". How else should I react to such a person?
And what the fuck does Kendzior know about Russia, if anything at all.
Of course I'd ad-hominem the crap out of these creeps. There's simply no other choice. I'm sorry that I just know whatever these cocksuckers say is crap.
Not mentioning the likes of Louise Mensch above is my utmost attempt to be remotely "fair".
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 27, 2017 13:31:59 GMT 1
BREAKTHROUGH! In the land of the Saud family, half(or quarter)-persons can drive now! Hooray!
Except that she has to be over 30 and only in the daytime, a kind of a tacit admission that it was about male insecurity. In other words, it's about sex, sex, sex.
It's indeed a breakthrough, though. Certainly the most significant PR move that they've made in years, and I think there is likely to be some ramifications in the future, although this will NOT lead to a secular Saudi Arabia. That just won't happen, and if it does, we will be talking about a different country, a different regime. "Secular Saudi Arabia" is an oxymoron, sort of like "Communist USA".
I imagine it went like this, more or less:
Liberal Prince: "Listen, we can't keep claiming credibly to those nosy Western assholes that we're on the right side of humanity against those Shia bastards when we've had this debate over women driving forever with nothing to show for it. We must show some results. 'You gotta show f**king results!' - that's what they always say to each other at Exxon-Mobile, you know. It's their motto, and we should respect that. I know you don't like what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway - frankly, I don't care. It's a stupid issue. You are all fine husbands and fathers, aren't you? Why are you so insecure about your wives and daughters? I know, I know, never trust our daughters, I know, but I think it's excessive. It's even pathetic. I'm not saying we should allow them to drive around at midnight and join those spoiled punks on the highway and in the parking lot, am I? Heck, no disrespect, but your wives would rather stay home and watch some stupid soap opera anyway. You should think for a moment. Clear your mind, and think. You should be able to understand that at the end of the day it's not such a big deal. And here's the thing, the best part: BUT IT IS FOR THOSE YANKS! It's actually very easy to please those weird people. I personally think it's a no-brainer, folks."
Now there's the pretense of "hot debate" still going on in Saudi Arabia, but in that country when something is happening, the only debate/discussion that counts has already been made, and it's final. Done. You've got MBC 1 shows where a "conservative" commentator and "liberal" one "debate" over the issue of the time, which has been this driving thing for a while now, in fact for years now every now and then, and the "liberal" one simply keeps saying that it's not against Quran for a woman to drive a car *unless it leads to another "temptation"* while the conservative one seems to be focusing on their Domino Theory, that is "Today driving, tomorrow no hijab, the day after... I don't even want to imagine! It's a secular plot!" You know, "a secular plot" in Saudi Arabia is considered even more sinister than "a communist plot" is in the US - or "a Kremlin plot" in today's context.
Now, you should think of what kind of a carrot the royal family gave the hardliners, which the majority of the Muftis are. And that's what I'm afraid of.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 27, 2017 18:26:35 GMT 1
Oh, BTW, this latest PR stunt "women driving" was just about to be allowed to happen a long time ago too, like it was really happening any minute with most of the influential guys in agreement, but didn't materialize in the end, with a spanner thrown into the wheel in the last minute. So this one also might not happen after all, or they might have to attach even more small prints that would render the whole thing merely symbolic, and practically almost meaningless. We'll see.
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Post by miscmisc on Sept 27, 2017 21:29:33 GMT 1
This is a good review: Vouchsafing Varoufakis: A Review of ‘Adults in the Room’medium.com/@thephilippics/vouchsafing-varoufakis-a-review-of-adults-in-the-room-85a2b63962a9By "good", I mean I would've written a very similar review (excluding the Brexit part of the review), so I'm just putting a little echo chamber here. But I do think it's objectively a good review. People on the left are divided on the trajectory of Varoufakis's career, with a majority of them pretty much ridiculing him now. I get why he's been ridiculed, even openly despised by so many leftists and left-learning intellectuals. I'm not really one of them, though. But I'm also ambivalent about his career trajectory and decisions, about the movement he's leading now. The spirit is good I think, but there's something fundamentally vain about trying to "democratize" the EU. I know I sound like a useless cynic, but it seems to me like a gigantic waste of time. The EU simply cannot be changed, let alone "democratized". It's impossible, not because it's run by Bad People or anything of that sort, but because that's simply not what it is about. If you actually managed to "democratize" the EU, that would be the end of the union, of any supranational union that is feasible for that matter, because it wouldn't be able to sustain itself under the weight of the "democratization". Democratic European Union is a flawed concept on so many different levels that you could even call it an oxymoron. In any event, it's true that there are few else who can tell a meaningful tale about how the EU works in practice, and all the critical contradictions that exist within the supranational entity. It's not that I learned anything truly new, but I'd recommend the book to anyone who is interested in thinking about what "Europe" in a practical sense actually means.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 2, 2017 7:12:24 GMT 1
- Yes, the Spanish government scored an own-goal, no doubt about that. It's "bad optics", as they call it. The law is clearly on the government's side, but this is politics. You can win all the legal arguments and lose the war. Much of the rest of Spain might see Catalan separatists as condescending rich assholes, but those video clips will only invoke the image of an oppressed minority for people outside Spain.
- It seems that for 99% people outside Spain, Catalonia = FC Barcelona, and a Catalan is basically Gerard Piqué. Another example of the absolutely outsized influence of football/soccer on laymen's perception. That's why Americans in general seem to have no clue what's going on there, but whether a "clue" based on multi-millionaire footballers is a good one to have is another matter (and the answer is probably "Not really").
- British journalists'/MP's reaction to the Spanish state violence, particularly on rubber bullets - "Utterly shocking, unusual, in a Western European democracy!" "Never thought I'd see this kind of scenes in a European democracy!" etc. - shows that the Irish grievances are completely justified. Seriously. It seems that Northern Ireland is something worse than a blind spot for those people.
- I have no idea what's going to happen now, but the Spanish government is lucky that no one has died. It could've happened. Even some guy who gets tripped by a cop, even if only accidentally, hits the pavement on the sweet spot on the head and dies would've had a song made out of him for The Cause, and Catalonia would've been lost forever.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 3, 2017 21:46:04 GMT 1
In the current climate, which shows no sign of waning, there's nothing you can't blame on Russia. Literally all the recent bad/inconvenient events/incidents in the world, including Catalan independence referendum and Las Vegas massacre, have been linked to Russia one way or another. It's a fantastic magic wand.
Of course this is not completely new. There was the Cold War paranoia. They also saw an invisible Soviet hand in many things. They called liberal media publications like the New York Times "Russian/Soviet sympathizers" for exposing the crimes of the US intel agencies. They called left-wing Democrats "traitors". They even called the Civil Rights movement a Soviet plot. And there was a certain amount of sleaze/greed involved on top of the paranoia.
Those Cold Warriors were absolutely nuts, or cynical, beyond redemption, but it was a cold war where the Soviet Union was actually a superpower with enormous capabilities. There was the understanding that both sides were playing the same game, and that neither of them were a "victim". They were just trying to beat each other. They were trying to win, and would do whatever it takes to win.
Today, the Soviet Union is no more. Russia is no Soviet Union. Of the former Soviet states, the Baltic countries are firmly in the hands of the US. Ukraine is pretty much an enemy state to Russia now. Georgia has spent most of its post-Soviet time trying to distance itself from Russia. The Central Asian countries often use the "Well, then we'll talk to America too..." card to get as much as possible from Russia. And Russia itself has seen its former adversary slash tango partner USA meddle in its own politics on a massive, massive scale, spectacularly crushing its economy in the process.
Calling this pathetic Russia the successor to the Soviet Union would be disrespect even to that sorry deceased dinosaur, especially since Russia in its current state is almost an antithesis of what the Soviet Union was supposed to represent. Even the most corrupt old Soviet nomenklatura would be appalled by the massive inequality and crony-capitalism that plagues Russia today if they were alive.
Yet, this hysteria, this victimology, this incredible thin-skinness, in the roided-up superpower America. There's still no convincing evidence whatsoever for the Kremlin's hacking into the DNC server and handing the data to Wikileaks, probably because that's not how that happened at all in reality. There are so many stories, week in week out, about Russia this Russia that, almost always with either the thinnest or no evidence to back up the narrative, with known hacks like Clint Watts and James Clapper as sources. And we see those shoddy stories not only on the Washington Post, but also on the New York Times, the paper which used to be continuously labeled as "traitorous" by the Cold Warriors back in the days.
Yes, you'd be nuts if you think Russia hasn't been doing anything. Russia Today has always been anti-US government. It rejoices in reporting things that are inconvenient for the US government. It tries to buy as much ad space as possible. No shit. There are many Russian bots out there who spread Kremlin propaganda and talk shit about America. And the Russian national security apparatus does try to hack into the system of the state who is hostile to them in order to get as much information as possible.
You know, just like what the US does to many other countries, on a larger scale as a whole and usually more directly. If you want to talk about "cyber", the internet is not a neutral space. It was born in the US, as a military-academia joint project, and still largely American in terms of technological/infrastructural advantage, and a vast majority of the internationally popular platforms/websites, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, cannot operate totally independent of the US government.
Yet we are "at war with Russia", "Russia declared war on us," according to those clowns. The level of thin-skinness and self-unawareness alone makes me feel ill, on top of the sheer absurdity of the whole concept. It only reflects how insecure and weak the American mind is, even though much of it is the sleazefucks in the defense/cyber security industry trying to make more money, the same old racket. And the likes of Google and Facebook are making sure that indie media outlets are largely filtered out and thus struggle financially, so as to massively boost the mainstream ones, because, because, that's how we protect ourselves from those nefarious Cyrillic-using Slavic mongoloids and their "fake news". You're a "useful idiot for Putin" if you sympathize deeply with Occupy and anti-fracking, if you don't think Ahrar al-Sham are "moderate", if you read consortiumnews.com instead of washingtonpost.com, right.
Not to justify all that Cold War insanity, but back then the US did have objectively understandable reasons to feel insecure and be paranoid, and both sides constantly overrated each other in that largely binary construct. But this one we have is not a real cold war. This is a farce, a dangerous one at that. If a TV network that no one watches and Twitter trolls can shape the popular opinion in one direction, if those hackers can totally outmaneuver their American counterparts with a fraction of the financial and infrastructural resources, perhaps the US does not deserve to be a superpower - it is perhaps a joke of a superpower.
But it's not.
Just give me a fucking break, will you.
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Post by h on Oct 4, 2017 1:16:33 GMT 1
thought for sure id see your thoughts on las vegas in here.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 4, 2017 12:34:52 GMT 1
thought for sure id see your thoughts on las vegas in here. I just don't have any hot take on that. I don't even know how many mass shootings there have been in the US in the last few years, easily more than 15, I think. There're just too many to truly care, to be blunt. And I don't see anything different this time. Sure, that man was literally an army, armed up to his eyeballs, and the death toll is the new record. But I don't know how this would do it when even Sandy Hook and scores of dead children didn't. People, mostly liberals, bring up the issue of gun control, totally rightly, and then those conservative cocksuckers go, "Now is not the time to politicize a tragedy", the same old fucking evil nonsense, the "second amendment" bullshit, and people will forget and move on, to the next one down the road destined to happen soon. Lather, rinse, repeat, and it became tiresome a long time ago already. On top of that, not having been born and raised in the US, I don't truly get the American gun fetish. I mean, I do get it, but only on a very abstract level. It's all just so fucking bizarre anyway, and not something I could discuss rationally. I mean, no matter how many times I tell Mr. America with 20 guns in his house - "I will protect my family if things go anarchy out there!" - that he and his family would either have to surrender or be annihilated in due course even against a group of very lightly armed Bad Guys, that he could add 20 more guns/grenades/etc. to his collection and that still wouldn't make any goddamn difference, that he would be nothing but a nice free weapon supplier for the group - Hell, they would come to get him and his family precisely and specifically for all the guns - and that the sort of heroic individualism is absolutely useless in a real Mad Max world, where those who can organize best win, he would never, ever listen to me.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 4, 2017 14:12:02 GMT 1
Brilliantly sums up the idiocy of Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, representing America to the whole world. Nice ownage.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 4, 2017 22:45:31 GMT 1
Roger Cohen @ NYT is going impressionist again: Damage to Cataloniawww.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/opinion/catalonia-spain-referendum.html"a degree of prosperity and democratic stability unimaginable at Franco’s death." Cohen must specify what prosperity. Relative to the US GDP per capita, the average Spaniard wasn't richer in 2016 than in 1975 (the year Franco died). The whole world on average "grew" over the last four decades for sure, but unless Cohen believes that Americans also have gone through "a degree of prosperity" "unimaginable" in 1975 during the same 40-year period - an utterly ridiculous idea unless you only talk to hedge fund managers - the quoted part above is off the mark. This myth about enormous "prosperity" thanks to the EU and all the other nice things is so pervasive. It can be debunked in 10 minutes with actual data. Well, there was the massive financial bubble, but surely they aren't talking about that when they wax lyrical about the success of grand European project, are they? It's mostly neoliberal/EU propaganda, and of course Cohen and NYT liberalism is reliably part of it. There's one thing that that "liberal order in Europe" certainly brought to us, though: Inequality. Spain is much more economically unequal than it was in 1975. I guess people like Cohen only meet that lucky bunch who indeed "grew" and now live in that "prosperity".
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