Soriek
2yr ago
To be clear the crawling back thing was a facetious joke about the video of Newsom knocking down that kid; visitng tech leaders during an international conference of Asian countries seems like normal business. I'd be pretty surprised if anything super concrete came of any particular meetings, but hopefully having some normal diplomatic interface will keep our countries farther from conflict.
Soriek
2yr ago
This is certainly true at least with regards to Vox, whose existence is a reaction to the Catalonia referendum and whom most third parties have promised not to work with. Vox even promised shortly after the election that they'd support a coalition where they didn't get any ministerships in the government in a desperate attempt to get other parties to hold their nose and back the conservatives.
Soriek
2yr ago
You're 100% correct that Hezbollah is the only meaningful fighting force in Lebanon but they do actually retain a military still, which sounds funny to even say lol. It's hard to say what would happen (and hopefully cooler heads prevail) but yeah I would definitely say arming the actual armed forces is at the least a sign that Hezbollah should expect internal politics to not give them a blank check in the conflict. The last Christian President Aoun actually had a tacit alliance with Hezollah, but there's no President now and no alliance to paper over demographic divisions, and the Christian population of Lebanon has often looked to France as a possible protector.
Soriek
2yr ago
Thanks for the added details on the case, quite the loophole there with self-succession.
It's very hard to emphasize enough the point that Bukele is truly, genuinely popular in El Salvador. He is not going to need to cheat to win the election. This is not a case of 'unpopular minority incumbent corruptly rigs courts to steal votes,' or even 'incumbants use state of emergency to change voting laws to favor themselves by improving partisan constituent turnout.' Bukele is a wildly popular incumbant who is popular because he made major, discernable changes in people's quality of life through addressing real threats. The unpopular minority parties in this context are the ones trying to prevent the most popular candidate from running.
I think I pointed out as much:
The election will likely not be free or fair, but even if it was Bukele’s popularity remains high and it is unlikely he could be beaten.
Soriek
2yr ago
Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.
Portugal
The Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa has resigned as of Tuesday following a corruption investigation into lithium ion business deals (not his first scandal either).
The prosecutor's office said in a statement earlier on Tuesday that five people had been detained as part of the investigation, including Vitor Escaria, Costa's chief of staff, whose offices had been searched along with several government buildings.
It also said Infrastructure Minister Joao Galamba and the president of the environment agency APA, Nuno Lacasta, were formal suspects and will appear before a judge… Prosecutors are investigating alleged corruption and influence peddling in the Barroso and Monatelgre lithium exploration concessions in northern Portugal, a project for a hydrogen plant in the port of Sines and a mega data centre investment there. They said they had become aware that the suspects used Costa's name and authority to "unblock procedures" related to the deals and the Supreme Court would look into Costa's possible role in the deals.
Currently his (actually center left) Socialist Party still has a majority in Congress and apparently doesn’t have to call new elections, though it would probably be the democratic thing to do. There’s also apparently a major budget bill due next month that they may say would be irresponsible if the government was thrown into electoral chaos while it needed to be passed (and they may be right). If they do hold elections, parties to watch out for are their traditional center right ally the Social Democrats1 and the far right Chega, which has shot forward in popularity in recent years.
1You might remember a Scott post on how, apparently as a relic of their right wing dictatorship, basically every party in Portugal is named some variety of socialist/social, including the free market, conservative ones.
China
Chinese President Xi Jinping has spent the past month meeting delegates from the American government, including Governor Gavin Newsom and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. All this has been building towards his current visit to the United States, ostensibly for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group meeting, but during which he will also hopefully meet President Biden. In the meantime, Secretary Janet Yellen will fly out this week to San Francisco, where the Chinese delegation is currently residing, to meet with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, who roughly counts as her counterpart given that he is (among other things) the top economic official in the government. Ideally they want to mend relations and find points of common agreement, though this is of course challenging due to current tensions:
The Biden administration’s policy toward China is geared toward defending and securing national security while stressing that the US isn’t trying to hold China back economically — a message that Chinese officials have criticized, given US export controls enacted last year that are designed to deprive China of key technologies.
While the Biden approach is less combative than the Trump administration’s trade wars, it nevertheless marks a stark departure from the prior two decades of more-open economic relations. In fact, the Biden administration has kept President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and there’s no indication they’re easing anytime soon.
The US has said it doesn’t seek to decouple from China, though it has been looking to “de-risk” and diversify, partly through strengthening economic ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific region, a strategy that will be a key theme for the Biden administration during the upcoming APEC summit.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has also asked to meet with the top Chinese defense official but right now there, well, isn’t one, since the last guy got ousted. Issues of focus would likely include China’s recent moves towards opening a military base in Oman, historically neutral but also partnered militarily with the US.
Xi is also visiting some tech executives in SF, crawling pathetically back to the Californian trough after Governor Gavin Newsom restored American prestige by handily dispatching his Chinese competitor in a game of basketball.
El Salvador
President Nayim Bukele announced a few months ago that he will run again for President, despite this being against the constitutional single term limits. In unsurprising news, every lever of institutional power in the country ruled that this is actually totally chill:
Members of the electoral tribunal are elected by Congress, which is controlled by the president's New Ideas party. Of the five members of the tribunal, four ruled in favor of Bukele's re-election bid, while one abstained.
While critics question Bukele's ability to seek a second term, citing a constitutional prohibition, the country's top court ruled he could run in 2021. The judges on that court were also appointed by Congress.
In January of this year, Congress approved a reform that punished those who prevented the registration of candidates for elections with up to 15 years in prison.
Remember this is also the guy who brought soldiers into Congress the last time they had some funny ideas about not supporting his bills. Independent media is also increasingly not a thing, so not much counterbalance there.
El Salvador’s traditional establishment parties and longstanding rivals, the right wing Arena and the left wing FMLN (political descendant of the former rebel group), have thus far held together their extremely awkward Never-Bukele coalition, though it’s anyone’s guess what a power sharing agreement between them would look like. The election will likely not be free or fair, but even if it was Bukele’s popularity remains high and it is unlikely he could be beaten.
Lebanon
There has been scattered fighting between the Israelis and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, but so far a serious general war has been avoided. Hezbollah leader Hassa Nasrallah last Friday gave a much awaited and heavily attended speech endorsing the Palestinian side of the conflict, reiterated that they had nothing to do with it and giving a bellicose but indirect response to the question of whether he planned to escalate: “Some claim that we are about to engage in the war. I am telling you, we have been engaged in this battle since October 8”.
Following a recent Israeli missile strike that killed several Lebanese civilians, tensions are high, with one Hezbollah lawmaker threatening to respond “double over” against any Israeli attacks.
The violence along the Lebanese border has killed more than 60 Hezbollah fighters and 10 civilians, Lebanese security officials say. At least seven Israeli soldiers and one civilian have been killed.
France, which has been so pro-Israel they banned anti-Israeli marches, has still found themselves calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and has now offered to send armored vehicles to the Lebanese army to “beef up the Lebanese national army so that it could coordinate well with the United Nations peacekeeping force as tensions mount between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon”.
Hamas has also now claimed that it too is operating within Southern Lebanon and “had launched 16 rockets targeting the northern Israeli city of Nahariya and the southern outskirts of the city of Haifa.”
Spain
“Spain’s Sánchez waits for Puigdemont”
The Spanish election is a gift that keeps on giving, both the left and right incapable of mounting a majority and forced to beg for third party votes. The Catalan independence party Junts hasn’t budged on their demand that if left wing PM Pedro Sannchez wants their support, amnesty is needed for their leader Carles Puigdemont, a wanted man due to the illegal Catalan independence referendum. For a long time Sanchez held equally strong on this not being a possibility, but lately has seemingly relented. Politico assures us that a deal is nearly in the making…
The talks appeared to be going well last week, so much so that Socialist lawmakers told the press that a deal was “imminent,” especially after they sealed a pact with Catalonia’s other separatist party, the Republican Left of Catalonia. That group agreed to back Sánchez in exchange for the cancellation of €15 billion in regional debt and the control of the Catalan railway network.
But Puigdemont appears determined to make Sánchez sweat for a bit longer before handing over his votes. Despite repeated meetings with the Spanish Socialists’ organizational head, Santos Cerdán, and what is rumored to be a definitive agreement on a blanket amnesty for everyone involved in the failed 2017 Catalan independence referendum, a deal remains elusive…
The potential amnesty remains controversial in Spain. Throughout the weekend spontaneous protests against the measure took place in cities like Madrid and Burgos, and historic Socialist leaders like former Prime Minister Felipe González have slammed the amnesty. But Sánchez’s militants are backing their leader, and on Saturday nearly 90 percent of Socialist Party members ratified their support for his deals in an inner-party consultation.
If the fail to make a coalition then there will be another election, in which the socialists will do worse, ironically because of the very politicking they’re doing right now to win the last election.
Soriek
2yr ago
Colombia
Ostensibly the revolutionary group ELN is in a ceasefire with the government and in negotiations for a peace treaty. However, last month put some doubt as to the progress of the talks:
At least 40% of fighters from Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels could reject a potential peace deal being negotiated with the government, three high-level security sources told Reuters, citing reluctance to surrender profits from drug smuggling and illegal mining.
Recently their attacks have flared back up, most noticeably by kidnapping the father of Liverpool footballer Luis Díaz, creating a hideous PR situation for President Gustavo Petro.
Unfortunately, in the same week the leftist revolutionary group EMC, a splinter of the more famous FARC, has now ended its peace talks with the Petro Administration. The reasons why are a little unclear:
The negotiation, which began on October 16 in the city of Tibu in the country's northeast, was suspended because, according to the guerrillas, "the State has totally failed to comply" with its commitments. However, the holdouts did not specify what these pledges were.
All this is a shame because negotiating an end to the conflicts with revolutionary groups has been one of the few areas Petro has been having significant success in. The EMC have at least said they will honor the standing ceasefire until it ends in the new year.
Soriek
2yr ago
Netherlands
The Netherlands will hold elections on November 22nd. Prime Minister Mark Rutte, of the center right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), resigned in July after his party was unable to agree on immigration reforms. He’s been governing in a caretaker role since, but his party is running without him under the Minister of Justice and Safety Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius (say that five times fast). Their main opposition is establishment politician Pieter Omtzigt of the Christian Democrats under his newly formed New Social Contract (NSC). Currently they are still neck and neck in the polls, and trailed by a bazillion smaller parties. The possibilities for coalitions are complicated to this distant observer:
Omtzigt has publicly rejected any cooperation with Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV and the “Nexit” propagating Forum for Democracy (FvD). This lowers the previous prospect of a center-right government tolerated by some of these more rightist forces and/or the anti-green Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) who have also been losing ground in the polls. Instead, the likely strength of NSC moves the center of gravity to the middle. Whether with Omtzigt as PM or as kingmaker, this may open the door for cooperation with the newly combined list of the Social Democrats and the Green Left, led by former European Commission executive vice president Frans Timmermans, currently third in the polls…this overall political camp is currently expected to win around 90 out of a total of 150 seats.
This is one of those elections where hopefully our locals will come in to shed some more light for me.
Soriek
2yr ago
Brazil
Brazil has now joined the ranks of Latin American countries using the military to crack down upon organized crime.
Thousands of troops have taken up position in the ports and airports of Rio and São Paulo and along Brazil’s western border as part of efforts to “asphyxiate” organized crime amid an upsurge in bloodshed and violence.
The military intervention – ordered last Friday by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – will last until next May and is reportedly designed to cut off the drug and gun smuggling routes on which trafficking and mafia groups depend…
This is a major operation and one done in response to extreme public outcry over deteriorating public safety conditions. This is unfortunate, as Brazilian homicide rates had been trending down for much of the previous decade but, like Ecuador, organized gangs seem to have gained a significant amount of ground in a very short window of time.
Late last month, paramilitary gangs known as “milícias” (militias) brought much of west Rio to a standstill, setting fire to dozens of buses and a train in order to stop one of the city’s most wanted mafia bosses being arrested. In early October, three doctors were shot dead outside a five-star beach hotel after assassins seemingly confused one of the group with a crime boss they wanted to kill….
More than 1,000 members of the navy will operate in the container ports of Rio and Itaguaí in Rio state and Santos in São Paulo state from which Brazilian prosecutors say huge quantities of South American cocaine are shipped to Europe each month.
Two thousand army troops, meanwhile, will step up their activities along Brazil’s western borders with Paraguay and Bolivia, across which much of the marijuana, cocaine and weaponry that illegally enters Brazil flows.
They’re also cracking down on the rising issue of, uh, neo-nazis? I guess those confederate enclaves finally got some gumption.
Data on the size of Brazil’s neo-Nazi movement is sparse, but most researchers agree that it has been growing. One researcher tracking neo-Nazi groups, Adriana Dias, an anthropologist at the State University of Campinas, estimated that the number of groups increased from the hundreds in 2019 to more than 1,000 last year.
Guatemala
Followers here have heard the evolving story of how Bernardo Arévalo, son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected President, rose up as an underdog candidate to commandingly win an upset against an establishment opponent. Guatemala’s traditional powerbrokers has tried every dirty trick in the book to keep him from coming to power, including raiding their offices and suing to invalidate his candidacy. This week they have finally officially suspended his party, Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement). However, the Supreme Court has said they cannot stop Arevalo from actually becoming President, or reverse the 23 seats his party won, which leaves the legal status of…everything, basically, a little unclear. Protests have been going on for weeks against this crackdown and now look poised to increase significantly.
The legal actions of Porras and Orellana have triggered mass protests and road blockades, with demonstrators demanding their resignation and a clean-up of the justice system. Indigenous movements have been leading the popular mobilizations and the national strike. On Wednesday, Indigenous leaders said that they will continue to “resist” the Prosecutor’s Office.
The organizations announced that they will hold several marches on November 3 and 4 in the center of Guatemala City, while maintaining the sit-in that they have been carrying out since October 2 in front of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Soriek
2yr ago
Uganda
In response to Uganda’s draconian anti-gay legislation, international consequences has finally come to appear:
President Joe Biden last week ended Uganda’s preferential access to American markets under an accord that benefits more than 30 African nations. As far as US foreign policy is concerned, Uganda is now in the same basket as Niger, Gabon and the Central African Republic — pariah states that have either suffered military coups or invited in Russia’s Wagner mercenaries.
This week, a much-anticipated initial public offering of Airtel Uganda flopped, with investors taking up just 55% of the shares offered. The World Bank froze new loans to the country in August and the finance ministry has estimated that international budget support may plummet 99% next year…
The country had total trade of $432 million with the US last year, and the cocoa, coffee and base metals it exports can easily be found elsewhere.
Soriek
2yr ago
I have nothing super insightful to add, just thought this was a great post. Adaptations and repurposing cultural narratives are as told as time and as trad as Rome.
Soriek
2yr ago
When was the last time you saw ordinary Republicans protesting for those things? You can see protests for elections in Cuba, Iran, wherever, all the time, but they're pretty much always driven by diaspora from those countries.
But that's a weird way to assess the Democrat position on democracy in communist dictatorships, which has always been very public. Biden has issued statements calling for democracy in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc, against their Marxist-Leninist regimes, and maintains sanctions against all of these countries explicitly because of their lack of democracy. You might have noticed the Biden Administration this past month has been undergoing a major negotiation with Venezuela precisely for them to hold free elections.
You mentioned Islamists as well, but Obama of course lost credibility with Islamist dictators precisely because of his support for the democratic protests during Arab Spring. The think tanks and NGOs that catalogue the human rights crimes of these various countries and demand democracy are also pretty much always staffed by progressive democrats.
Of course, if you take the longer view you will Democrat Presidents taking military action against Marxist-Leninist movements quite regularly throughout the past century.
Soriek
2yr ago
Tbh even if Milei was elected I can't imagine him being able to make major systemic changes. They won't be able to afford dollarization without a substantial loan no one wants to give them, and he won't have a significant mandate in the legislature to push the reforms he really wants. I think others here have mentioned that they would also need to modify the constitution to put restraints on the provinces' abilitiies to borrow from the government.
Soriek
2yr ago
Democrats have proposed several bills for allowing immigrants to work in the healthcare space: the International Medical Graduate Assistance Act of 2022, the Immigrants in Nursing and Allied Health Act of 2022, and the Professional’s Access To Health Workforce Integration Act of 2022. The Republicans control the House though and don't support having more immigrant workers so none of these bills got a vote.
On the Senate side Bernie Sanders proposed the Bipartisan Primary Care and Health Workforce Act of 2023 last month, working together with Republican Roger Marshall from Kansas who is NOT the ranking member on the HELP Committee. The actual ranking member is Bill Cassidy who was opposed to the (admittedly really high) price tag and will definitely oppose it since they basically circumvented his authority.
Still, overall the Senate is overall less polarized on this issue than the House. Actually just yesterday Durbin of Illinois (a Democrat) and Cramer of North Dakota (a Republican) proposed a bill precisely for this, with a bunch of co-sponsors across both parties. I don't think the text of the bill has been released yet but here's an excerpt from the press release:
• Allows for the “recapture” of green cards that were authorized by Congress but unused in previous years, allotting up to 25,000 immigrant visas for nurses and up to 15,000 immigrant visas for physicians, as well as recaptured visas for immediate family members of such individuals;
• Requires employers to attest that immigrants from overseas who receive these visas will not displace an American worker;
• Requires eligible immigrant medical professionals to meet licensing requirements, pay filing fees, and clear rigorous national security and criminal history background checks before they can receive recaptured green cards.
Almost certainly DOA in the House though.
Soriek
2yr ago
Thanks for linking this, that was useful to know the exact way the law could apply to state licensing regimes.
Soriek
2yr ago
Yeah, the hearing the OP was from focused on a shortage of workers in nursing homes. There were a few people who ran nursing home systems as witnesses, no one suggested they or anyone else were evil or uncooperative.
Soriek
2yr ago
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
I know there's no great solution to this problem in general, and no one in my family has lived long enough for it to be an issue, but the idea of putting my mother in a nursing home fills me with a cold dread.
How do you stop yourself from just doing stuff constantly?
I'm pretty much always doing something, every minute of the day. This has helped give me a structured and productive life but it also feels unhealthy / manic and at times I'm basically self-inflicting exhaustion.
If I don't have work I'll invent new work for myself to do, even if it's just typing up essays for here. Once I've come up with something new it soon becomes a pretty rigid part of my life. For instance, I used to workout once a day but if I had some extra time I would do a second workout just to be as productive as possible. After enough of this nowadays the second workout feels non-negotiable even though objectively it's pretty unecessary and often I don't have the time. Or if I have a spare moment I'll start cooking meals for the future. Or I used to read fiction when I was younger but now it feels irresponsible to read anything but non-fiction where I can learn something. Not that I seem to have much time to read anymore anyway, but if I'm hanging out with someone and they step out to the bathroom I'll pull out my phone and start studying something on Wikipedia or a think tank or whatever. The idea of not filling idle moments with something ostensibly productive is alien to me. If someone asks me to participate in something at work or in a social outing I will essentially always say yes regardless of whether I have bandwidth or interest and this results in me having basically no time to myself. I used to try meditation to balance it out but then I turned that into another non-negotiable chore.
The plus side of this is that I'm a productive person, I do well at work, have an active social life, and I guess also have a lot of output on an obscure forum. The downsides are...not devastating or anything, but I generally feel tired and stressed and stretched thin. It seems like an unnatural way to live, but I find the idea of not feeling productive to be almost more exhausting.
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