Soriek
2yr ago
I didn't know that. What do you think would have actually happened if they had won the referendum?
Soriek
2yr ago
What are the odds you think McHenry will just eventually becoming a permanent speaker by default in absence of anyone being able to scrape up a real coalition? I've heard people float Stefanik as a compromise candidate but haven't heard anything out of her indicating she's interested.
I'll be honest, I think I lack the context to know what you mean. The latter is a Polish show?
Edit: nvm I think I've basically figured it out.
Soriek
2yr ago
No worries, just uploaded the new one!
Soriek
2yr ago
Poland
The Law and Justice Party PiS, in power since 2015, has finally been unseated in an election with a record turnout of almost 75% of the country. Technically PiS still won the most votes and is supposed to get the first chance to make a coalition, but they just have no viable path to majority. Donald Tusk has called for President Duda to allow Civic Coalition to form their own coalition, most likely with “the centre-right Third Way on 14.4% and the leftwing Lewica on 8.6%”. It’s a bit of an odd coalition (or seems like that from a distance), and there may be a few sore points as they band together:
Already on Tuesday, another Third Way leader, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said he would not guarantee supporting liberalising the law to allow for abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, one of Tusk’s campaign promises. “No ideological issues can be part of any coalition agreement,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said.
@Dean has a great writeup in the main thread if you’re interested in more background discussion on what specific issues might change or stay the same.
New Zealand
New Zealand held elections this Saturday that ousted the Labour Party after six years in power. This was perhaps somewhat expected after the party’s charismatic leader Jacinda Ardern resigned half a year ago. Her replacement, party creature Christopher Hipkins, immediately got hit with floods and cyclones upon taking the office. Hipkins made his main issue addressing the rising cost of living, which ended up being the highest polling issue in the election. Apparently voters didn’t think he did enough, because they gave 44.95% to the conservative National Party, 5% to the classical liberal ACT, 31.33% to Labour, 7.25% to the Green Party, 2.7% to the populist right wing party New Zealand First and 1.17% to the Maori party Te Pāti Māori.
The coalition hasn’t been finalized yet but to form a majority the National Party will need both ACT and possibly New Zealand First (you actually only need 48% support, but in terms of seats, not the overall vote, and exact seat numbers are still to be released). If that comes together it will almost certainly result in the National leader Christopher Luxon becoming the new prime minister of New Zealand. NZ under Ardern was known as a bit of a progressive icon so it’ll be interesting to see where the rightward shift takes the country. Here’s a runthrough of their short term goals:
Central to National’s 100-day plan is its promise for myriad tax cuts, including cutting a regional fuel tax. It also is pledging to change the Reserve Bank’s mandate to focus on inflation, remove what it calls red tape for businesses, extend free breast cancer screenings, crack down on crime and give police greater powers to search gang members, and roll back a raft of policies implemented by Labour over the past six years.
Labour’s policies include extending free dental care to under 30s, easing rising food prices by removing the goods and services tax from fruit and vegetables, teaching financial literacy in schools and expanding free early education, and extending financial support to working families.
Serbia
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has called for snap elections on December 17, the third in three years (did you know the Prime Minister of Serbia was a gay women?). The Serbian Progressive Party has been in power since 2012 but has been reeling from back to back mass shootings in May, which led the government to pursue a huge crack down on guns, despite having some of the highest per capita gun ownership in the world. Mass protests against the violence coupled with opposition pressure led SNS to assent to new elections. They are hoping to emphasize their role in supporting ethnic Serbs in the ongoing conflict in Kosovo.
It’s unclear how things will actually go. In the 2022 election Vučić won the Presidency (ostensibly a ceremonial position, less so under him) with 60% of the vote but his party went from holding a supermajority to being a slight minority, though they stayed in power via coalitioning with the right wing Serbian Patriotic Alliance.
Ecuador
Daniel Noboa, heir to the banana conglomerate Noboa Corporation, has narrowly won the election with 52% of the vote, beating out Rafeal Correa’s protege Luisa González. Note that while the left is not currently in power in Ecuador, González was still considered the establishment candidate and Noboa, with only two years in Congress, as the upstart, outsider candidate (his own father lost to Correa in one of his many ill fated attempts at the Presidency).
The main issues were the economy (“Ecuador is the only Andean nation to experience negative GDP-per-capita growth for the last five years.”) and security, especially cracking down on the cartels which have recently exploded in Ecuador (awkwardly, recent press took note of the fact that over half of searched banana exports are linked to drug trafficking, but it didn’t seem to hurt the banana candidate too much).
In the legislative elections Noboa’s party performed pretty poorly, though so did several leftist parties that would be in the opposition:
Noboa’s Acción Democrática Nacional (ADN) party will only hold 13 seats of 137. The party Revolución Ciudadana, led by former President Rafael Correa, will boast the largest minority bloc with at least 50 seats and is likely to avoid direct collaboration with the new government to present itself as the anti-incumbent alternative in the 2025 elections.
At the same time, left-wing parties Pachakutik and Izquierda Democrática lost significant ground, obtaining only five and zero seats, respectively, and were replaced by centrist and right-leaning political forces, with Fernando Villavicencio’s [the candidate who was assassinated by the cartel] Construye and the Partido Social Cristiano becoming the second- and third-largest blocs with 28 and 14 seats, respectively. A more centrist National Assembly may be a unique opportunity for Noboa’s economic reforms and policies.
Note that combining the three parties listed above would still only make a coalition of 55 seats, still a good deal short of the 69 needed for a majority. Also, a reminder that Lasso disbanded the National Assembly so the legislative branch literally hasn’t been doing anything for a while anyway. Noboa will only hold the role for about a year and a half, because he’s finishing out prior President Guillermo’s term, though he can of course run again in the next election.
Venezuela
The Biden administration and the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have agreed to a deal in which the U.S. would ease sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry and the authoritarian state would allow a competitive, internationally monitored presidential election next year, according to two people familiar with the breakthrough talks….
The agreement comes days before Venezuela’s opposition parties plan to hold a primary vote to chose a single candidate to back against Maduro. The front-runner in the unofficial primary, María Corina Machado, is one of several opposition leaders the Maduro government has barred from running for office. The disqualification was sharply condemned by the U.S. government…
The deal emerged from direct talks between Biden administration officials and Maduro government representatives that began last year during the start of the war in Ukraine. The Biden administration began easing restrictions on Chevron, the main U.S. oil company with assets in Venezuela, in a gesture intended to support talks between the Maduro government and the opposition.
The U.S. also announced this month it would resume direct deportation flights to Venezuela, another sign of thawing relations between the two countries. The strained relationship had limited the United States’ ability to return undocumented Venezuelan migrants.
President Biden officially announced Wednesday that sanctions will be unfrozen. Unfortunately, at least this particular article doesn’t predict it will have a huge effect on global oil prices.
Mexican President AMLO has apparently confirmed that talks have resumed between the Venezuelan government and the opposition, though some members of the opposition are reportedly skeptical. Either way, the previously fractured opposition is starting to slowly unify, with several candidates dropping out to endorse Machado instead. Notably, this includes Henrique Capriles, the former opposition leader who ran against both Chavez and Maduro.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Maduro will lose an election. He has a vastly more built-up election / patronage infrastructure than any opposition, maintains a substantial support base still, and the opposition is still split between a number of candidates. Of course millions of those voters most opposed to Maduto have already fled the country. Certainly don’t imagine this represents Venezuela turning towards the western world either; they are still actively deepening ties with Russia and meeting to discuss collaboration on oil investments.
Soriek
2yr ago
Colombia
Gustavo Petro is now embarking on how most ambitiously left wing project thus far, Colombia’s first-ever large scale land redistribution.
Colombia's leftist government will spend $4.25 billion to buy some 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of land for poor farmers or displaced people, as part of a bid to increase agricultural output and boost peace efforts, an official said.
This is half the original amount but the left is in the minority so it’s still pretty impressive. The project will take up the remainder of his term basically and may come to define it. Colombia is unique in Latin America for never really having a populist period so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
Petro has also agreed to attend AMLO’s summit in Mexico about reducing migration to the US, another sign in America’s shifting position towards tightening up immigration.
Soriek
2yr ago
Liberia
The election in Liberia is still too close to call and will go to a runoff. The showdown features another clash between former soccer star George Weah and opposition leader Joseph Boakai. Weah handily beat Bokai in their last race in 2017 but has come under corruption accusations and generally presided over a deteriorating economy, so his popularity has waned quite a bit.
Soriek
2yr ago
After their internal ballot, 55 people people voted against him in what was supposed to be a secret vote. Freedom Caucus folks then published their numbers and encouraged people to call in and harass them, and most of them fell in line. According to a few sourcs, including Tim Burchett, Jordan allies were even threatening to support primaries against holdouts. So idk what's really at his disposal, but he's certainly not afraid to fight for it.
Soriek
2yr ago
At least a handful of reps said Jordan could count on their vote only for the first round, so we might see decreasing support. Then again, they're in recess so he can horse trade, cajole, threaten, whatever, so I've got no idea which direction it'll go.
Soriek
2yr ago
Glad to hear it, I almost didn't include that one because I wasn't sure if it was already well known.
Drawing Connections between Distant Events
One of the things I find most exciting about history is when I can find some underemphasized connection between seemingly unrelated things happening in far flung places. Here’s a few examples, widely ranging in how specific/general they are:
1: The Battle of the Shimonoseki Straits:
During the late Tokugawa Shogunate the rogue Chōshū clan started opening fire on western ships. This was after we had declared Japan officially open, so the US promptly sent a warship to battle the Chōshū and ultimately beat them into submission. What makes this interesting? It happened on July 16th, 1863, almost immediately after the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, meaning that Lincoln didn’t learn of two pivotal victories that July but rather three. The scope of the Civil War was simply so huge that we entirely forget America was even both fighting and winning against foreign powers at the exact same time.
2: Spanish Silver in Beijing:
A lot of people know the story of how Spain mined so much gold and silver in Mexico and Peru that it caused them to deal with inflation, and played a role in their repeated bankruptcies in the sixteenth century.
Less talked about is the impact of the Potosí mines on China. After setting up their colony in the Philippines, the Spanish started buying up Chinese goods in exchange for their limitless supply of Bolivian silver, which soon flooded into China and came to replace their own paper currency. This created a critical dependency on problems happening on the other side of the world; during the 30 years war Spain halted the distribution of silver so they could ensure they had enough to wage the war. China, which continued to buy imports with silver, rapidly found its money base dwindle, as well as their ability to pay the military to keep order. Unfortunately, at the same time they got hit with droughts, famines, and various other calamities. How serious was the fallout?
taxes and foreign trade were paid in silver. In ten years the peasants who constituted the largest tax base for the country became four times poorer than before.
There were peasant uprisings. Li Zicheng raided Beijing, the last Ming Emperor hanged himself in the Beihai Park and the Manchu were called in to support the Ming and crack down on the rebels. They did put down the rebels, but didn’t relinquish the power and established themselves as the new Qing empire.
3: Stalin’s Two Fronts:
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 in a secret agreement with the Soviet Union, but the USSR itself didn’t invade until September 17th. Why the wait? The USSR was fighting a totally different war over with Japan. The Soviet military leadership was in disarray and Stalin made the remarkable choice of replacing the commander with a little known peasant officer named Georgy Zhukov whose career had shot up mostly as a result of the purges taking out other officers. Zhukov ended up being a military genuis and turned the conflict around at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. A ceasefire was settled on the 16th and the USSR invaded Poland the very next day. Stalin was obsessed with avoiding a two front war and the question remains, if they hadn’t won such a commanding upset in Khalkin Gol, can we be certain the USSR would have proceeded with the invasion in Poland?
On the other side, the ceasefire meant that the North Strike faction in the Japanese military finally lost out to the Spread South faction, who pushed for Japan to rapidly proceed into Southeast Asia, where conflict inevitably waited with British Malaya and American Philippines.
4: Ghana, Sumatra, and Salem:
Back in the day the Dutch controlled part of Ghana and was allied with the Ashanti Empire, while the British controlled another part of the country and was allied with the Fante Confederacy. Eventually, in a well meaning effort to standardize custom duties and create space between the two countries forts so as to avoid conflict, the Dutch and English swapped some land around. Suddenly the Dutch found themselves controlling land with Fante, who did not like being their subjects, or having to deal with the Ashanti, who had been their enemy forever. With conflict flaring up, what previously had been one of the most productive colonies in the Dutch Empire suddenly became a huge pain, leading to the Dutch ceding it to the English only a few years later.
This skirmish between two tribes of under a million people each led to a treaty with ripples from West Africa to Indonesia all the way to North America. In Ghana it led to three more Anglo-Ashanti Wars, finally resulting in the full English conquest of the Gold Coast, which would remain under British control until 1957, with Ghanian troops fighting for the British Empire in places as far flung as Ethiopia and Myanmar.
On the other side of the world, in exchange for taking the rest of the Gold Coast, England recognized the Netherlands’ full conquest of Sumatra in Indonesia, which led to a brutal three decade war of conquest, and finalized Dutch control over the entire Indonesian archipelago, which did not become independent until 1949. This particular conquest also had further repercussions for the global spice trade because Aceh was the world’s largest supplier of pepper.
In fact, there had been a multi-million dollar pepper trade between Aceh and, of all places, Salem, Massachusetts. This was such a relevant market that Andrew Jackson sent gunships not once but twice to Aceh to take vengeance on pirates raiding the pepper traders. With the Dutch asserting full control over the industry and continuously raising trade barriers, the experience of being at the whims of European trade restrictions in overseas markets helped build towards American policy makers’ promotion of the Open Door Policy and even overseas colonization.
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
In a weird way this really is about communism vs capitalism, radical vs liberal, left vs center.
My understanding is the recent ancestors of the present Israelis bought the land from willing sellers fair and square
Contemporary Palestinian land ownership and sales were much closer to feudalism than capitalism (and early Israel much closer to socialism, fwiw). The landlords who were selling Palestinian land, often living in places as far flung as Beirut or Damascus, had themselves only the feeblest of legitimate claims to the property, having only recently acquired it through a crappy Land Reform bill that disenfranchised the peasantry.
The registration process itself was open to manipulation. Land collectively owned by village residents was registered in the name of a single landowner, with merchants and local Ottoman administrators registering large stretches of land in their own name. The result was land that became the legal property of people who may have never lived there, while locals, even those who had lived on the land for generations, became tenants of absentee owners.
The Palestinian peasantry themselves never recognized those claims and in many cases were entirely unaware of who exactly had even claimed their land:
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 "brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers"....
In the 1930s, most of the land was bought from landowners. Of the land that the Jews bought, 52.6% were bought from non-Palestinian landowners, 24.6% from Palestinian landowners, 13.4% from government, churches, and foreign companies, and only 9.4% from fellaheen (farmers).
Of course, direct sales were but a small part of the Palestinian land that was ultimately acquired by Israel anyway.
Soriek
2yr ago
Both of these comments were fine, well above the standards of posting here. The second one I thought was just plain good, well written and makes a cogent argument that bigotry is natural rather than invented (by insert-your-political-enemies), and points out the hypocrisy of the most pro-assimilationist people here themselves being contrarians who vociferously resist assimilation.
Plenty of people would disagree strongly with his conclusions and maybe they'd be right. Good. This place should have actual differences in opinion, rather than different flavors of right wing arguing endlessly about the best way to fight wokeness. The fact that people think these are trolls are a sign of how unused to genuine disagreement and debate the userbase has grown.
Accusing him of dismissing the views of people he disagrees with is weak and holds him to a standard no one here is held to; dismissing and mocking progressive views is the single most consistent thing this sub does.
Soriek
2yr ago
It's a bit weird then, that people don't seem to have issues with any of the other progressives currently posting here.
The progressives here (more of them than I think people realize) largely learned not to directly engage in hot button culture war debates, because no one’s trying to fight a hostile mob in an internet debate.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the source of confusion is. We both think making bad posts is bad, but I think his posts were good, so it doesn’t apply.
His input was a genuine loss imo. He made some of the only well argued pieces from points of view we never get here, and people would dogpile him, personally insult him, and bring up everything he ever said that they ideologically disagreed with. If people were regularly as shitty to me as they were to him I’m sure I would get in more verbal scuffles as well. Part of why I don’t have conversations about American culture war issues is because people have been shitty to me the times I tried, here and in DMs, and I have limited patience for that.
Soriek
2yr ago
because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again
Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
Soriek
2yr ago
I go back and forth with starting and stopping journaling, and I've always found it rewarding when I start up again, if only because it makes me record and reflect on little things I would forget about.
Soriek
2yr ago
Idk, I'm not sure whether or not you do a lot of proslytezing is more important than the factual claim of whether you're willing to accept converts from outside of your ethnic group. The sect of Christianity I was raised in didn't have missionaries but was still welcoming of people from wherever.
They're still a relevant producer though definitely a fraction of their former self:
At least from the above article, "several analysts" predict:
That seems surprisingly quick to me as well, though I don't really know the details of their capacity. I guess if they used to pump way more then they may still have a fair amount of drilled but un-utilized wells or DUCs.
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