Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Coalitions in the EP tend to be a bit more shifting and informal than in "real" parliaments, but the standard coalition is EPP, S&D and (recently) Renew, Macron's group. Greens, Left and the less euroskeptic right have at least some influence, the more euroskeptic right tends to shut itself out of power.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Probably about the same. The biggest current category of receng immigrants being the Ukrainians might have moderated it a bit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
That's probably a large reason.
In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Probably the main reasons are:
-
They're in a government that's doing (by Finnish scale) hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like, and anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration but consider them too redneck and embarrassing to return back to the center-right.
-
They ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening - mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but hardly the sort of an issue that would get the masses really moving and made them look piddling. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind - moving to the centre pisses of the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing the sort of "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting and stay home.
The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, but this is probably mostly due to the vast personal popularity of the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly probably a protest vote against the government.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Huh, still empty?
The European Parliaments elections happened. The European Parliaments elect 720 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the member countries to represent the legislative assembly (one of the three main institutions) of the European Union. While the European Parliament is often castigated for weakness compared to the executives - the European Council and the European Commission - it still has a fair bit of power when it comes to, for instance, the various regulations of the European Union. The elections also act as an ideological barometer for political developments in Europe, though since the turnout is low, this factor is by necessity diminished.
Anyway, the theme for this election was the feared/desired rise of nationalist groups and the possibility that EPP, the center-right of the European Parliament (consisting of various center-right parties from member states - people still vote for their old domestic parties in the European elections, not the Europarties like EPP or the center-left S&D, its main partner), would start cooperating with the nationalists, like center-right parties do in many member countries. The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.
There's still a high chance their influence will grow in the coming parliament, at least for the "moderate" ones (ie. the ones that do not challenge the basic idea of the European Union or the general Western thrust of foreign and security policy, like support for the war in Ukraine.) Some of the results (Irish ones, since the Irish election happen through STV and counting them takes a long time) are still waited for and there's a fair bit that depends on how the groupings inside the parliament get reformed. There's little chance that the new parliament will be much improvement compared to the previous ones in terms of getting Europe out of its deepset economic funk.
One particular result of interest, perhaps more consequential than the European Parliament elections, was the onslaught of Marine le Pen's RN and some other nationalist parties in France leading to Macron calling for new parliamentary elections. While they wouldn't lead to Macron himself getting thrown out, if RN and the other groups do well or even get a majority, France might get gridlocked for at least three years.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
The problem with the comic is that the author obviously sympathizes with the wolf, not that the wolf is ipso facto incorrect.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
More generally, when it comes to arguing about the Sins Of The Jews, creating Superman seems to be... among the lesser ones, to put it mildly? The Jews created a cartoon character who advances prosocial values, like not doing crimes, helping your fellow man and so on! Score one for the Jews!
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
But much of what you discuss refers to developments taking place before WW2, and before the true ascendance of American culture in Western Europe, too (ie. after the 60s). And it's not exactly like most of Europe needed the American media to tell them that Nazis were bad, the part where Nazis occupied most of Europe at one part of the war or another, imposed a very restrictive regime even by the most generous revisionist standards, and then failed miserably in ways that led to the ruination of their original country managed that quite well by itself.
But what I'm talking about is that when I read Finnish history, Finland seems to have not only managed to have huge, even revolutionary, socialist and communist movements with barely any Jewish participation, but also hit the milestones for most of the things right-wingers complain about - feminism, gay rights etc. in roughly the same schedule as the United States.
The locals advancing these ideals in Finnish (or in Swedish - an extraordinary part of early social-progressive activists of the 60s seem to have been Finland-Swedes, and one local conservative even basically said that there's no need for antisemitism here because Swedes played the same role) would have, in great majority, been gentiles of a Protestant background, since that's what everyone here was.
Some of the ideas might have come from people originating from Jewish ethnicity, but there still seems to have been a great fallow ground for those ideas to take root and many activists willing to apply the ideas to a local context in ways that actually made them effective - which makes one question whether it really took the devious Jew to actually come up with the ideas, or if there were material/cultural/technological/historical reasons that would have led to someone coming up with them anyway.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7d ago
I'm not sure if I've asked this before, but how, exactly, do you explain the same cultural developments happening in a host of other countries with scant or practically no Jewish presence? All simply due to downstream effects of American culture, even back in the days before the omnipresence of the said American culture?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
Unless you're a Marxist-Leninist, which would presumably make you the first on this forum, this rather depends on the assumption that CPC's formal commitment to Marxism-Leninism, an ideology which historically has had a great deal of ideas what to do worldwide, is completely an empty letter and will remain so indefinitely.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
One of the precise arguments for conscription locally is that the option is, indeed, "military as a job for the state". In Finnish that's referred to as "palkka-armeija" ("wage army"), with a strong undertone of a "mercenary army".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
The Finnish non-military civil service option is pretty rare (about 7 % of males in each age-class choose it, another 20 % get deferments or are released from service due to health issues) and not particularly oriented towards the children of the rich, if anything there's probably fair amount of pressure in traditional bourg families to go to the military and not be an unmanly hippie. Then again, due to history, conscription is a part of Finnish culture in ways that would be unlikely to be achieved in UK even if there were decades of conscription.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
H. Ross Perot should have really found a way to get involved.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
Well, to put it more specifically, the Frankfurt School - insofar as I've understood - was indeed heavily affected in their endeavors by the idea that the American society they had migrated to shared the same underlying problems and processes as Nazi Germany, and this also affected their work, i.e. they felt that they needed to abort these problems and processes from the get-go. This was, for instance, the reason for Adorno's work on the authoritarian personality. Presumably when you later had things like the McCarthy hearings this would only go to strengthen this mission
Of course, the problem is that they were hardly neutral arbiters but heavy ideologues themselves, which not only clouded their view on what the perceived commonalities of the American and German societies were (including what they missed, like the considerably stronger democratic underpinnings in US) and what the solutions would be. Their immigrant status did not really guarantee their expertise or the correctness of their views; in many ways it made them worse observers than those that did not have any personal experience of Nazi Germany at all.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
Dreher's anecdotes about the wisdom of Communist East Europeans always reminds me of another group of Eastern Europeans moving to the US from the sphere of a totalitarian regime and suddenly finding themselves fearful about the signs of the same totalitarianism developing in the United States.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
In Sweden, in 1990, I doubt crime was a political issue. Now it is.
1991 was actually the first time when Sweden elected a right-wing populist party to the Riksdag, and at least according to Wikipedia, they "wanted to invest heavily in the fight against drug abuse and street violence, and impose severe penalties for what it called related "gangster activity." It wanted to implement harder punishments for violent crime, and life imprisonment for the most dangerous criminals", so there must have been something there.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
There have been countless national hatreds that have cooled down, at least to a manageable level, quite fast after a peace has been achieved. I've never understood the contention that Palestinians would be such a special case that this is unimaginable.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
At least in lefty circles, there has been a trend of saying that local hip-hop is "the new worker's music", but yeah.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
I wasn't thinking about the forums only, also more generally. Punk used to be considered an actual threat to society, evidence of civilizational decay. It is interesting that it has become a moniker for "fighting for what's right" and so on, even among the more conservative section. Likewise, being "countercultural" by itself would indicate being satisfied with a certain niche status instead of taking over the actual general culture - sure, countercultural movements have gone mainstream, many times, but this has also meant a loss of status inside the self-considered "counterculture" itself.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
What's interesting in this thread is how esteemed the concepts like 'counterculture', 'rebellion', 'new punk' and so on are. There should presumably, especially to conservtives, be nothing particularly special about being counterculture, insofar as 'counterculture' ever existed.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Remigration von Bundesbuergern
Presumably it's less easy to chant that to a Gigi D'Augustino tune.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
From stories my sister and brother (older than me by ~15 years) have told me of the 80s local punk scenes, it has always been thus.
The big tent coalitions haven't formally included the Greens thus far.
Nevertheless, it's looking like now that the great coalition - EPP, S&D, Renew, will continue. It's familiar to them, and it still bears remembering how much most the EPP considers the maintenance and expansion of the European integration project to override all other concepts, barring cooperation with more hardline euroskeptics and making it uncomfortable with even the more moderate ones.
More options
Context Copy link