Soriek
5mo ago
Many thanks, it can definitely be time consuming prepping these so it's good to here people are enjoying them. I would definitely be interested in the Russian program; in general I feel like this place could benefit from regular updates on Russia (and China for that matter) from people more knowledgable than me.
Soriek
5mo ago
Thanks for the update into the budget process. Do you have any insight into how the snap election will go?
Soriek
5mo ago
Spain
I’ve covered the seemingly stillwater results of the Spanish election that happened all the way back in July. With both the left and right deadlocked and competing for third parties, things looked dangerously close to going to yet another election. However, incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has finally managed to secure another term. He did it by finally relenting to the demands of the Catalan separatist party Junts to grant amnesty for people who participated in the referendum, including the Junts leader in exile, Carles Puigdemont. This is a significantly unpopular move, even within Sanchez’ own party. Reportedly about 70% of Spanish citizens oppose amnesty and if another election was held the left would likely do much worse. However, it was the only way Sanchez stood a chance at staying in power. Jacobin adds more detail on what to expect:
this will be a minority government formed by the PSOE (121 seats) and Sumar (31 seats), the radical-left coalition led by Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz. Yet this executive will also depend for its survival on the votes of so-called peripheral Spain, i.e., the various regionalist and nationalist parties from Catalonia (Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), who hold seven seats each), the Basque Country (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, five seats, and EH Bildu, six), Galicia (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, one seat) and the Canary Islands (Coalición Canaria, one seat)...
the road ahead is not easy. With such a broad and composite majority, every vote in parliament may turn into a quagmire, with a real risk that Sánchez’s new cabinet may not last. The parties that backed Sánchez know that letting this government fail would mean handing Spain over to the Right. Yet goodwill often isn’t enough. How will it be possible to reconcile radical-left Sumar’s agenda on social policies, progressive taxation, or housing, with right-wingers in the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, Junts per Catalunya, or Coalición Canaria?
Soriek
5mo ago
How many Marxists do you think are in the Democrat party? This is an extremely tiny group of people who consider the Democrats just as right wing as Republicans.
Soriek
5mo ago
Republicans are usually much less supportive of intervening into other countries - even tyrannical ones - when they don't mess with us.
This is a highly dubious claim to begin with, and largely belies your broader point about Democrats being the ones soft on foreign tyrants.
If you look from proclamations to actual actions, though, you see that the policy towards tyrannical regimes is always softened - that happened with Obama, and that is also happening with whoever pulls Biden's strings, which some say is the same Obama. Be it Iran, be it Cuba, be it China - beyond some perfunctory words, it's never any serious action. In fact, it's plenty of the actions in the opposite directions.
This is not true. Both parties have launched waves of targeted sanctions on ML countries, overseen covert and cyop warfare agaimst them, and found ways to support their opposition (Obama backed Capriles against Chavez before anyone had heard of Guaidó). Likewise, both parties have considered softening their stance for progress on things we care about: Obama considered rapproachment with a neutered, non-threat Cuba; Trump considered rapproachment with a nuclear armed North Korea regularly threatening us and our allies.
I don't know what these NGOs have in their files, deep in their computer drives, but if you look on their public stance, the impression one gets is that there's about two countries that ever commit human rights crimes worth discussing - one of them is the US, and you can easily guess the second one.
Human Rights Watch, Amnsety International, etc, write about human rights abuses in Marxist countries regularly on their public websites.
Well, if we talk about the whole century, the Democrat party wasn't as thoroughly infiltrated by the Marxists as they are now.
Soriek
5mo ago
Honestly you may well be right - it sounds like you’ve see much more of the show than I have!
Soriek
5mo ago
Haha what a resume padder. I would definitely be interested in reading more.
Soriek
5mo ago
Sorry I should have been more specific I'm talking about Greece. At least my impression is that when far right folks invoke the Bronze Age, they are also mostly talking about Greece and using the Iliad vs Odyssey as primary material instead of Gilgamesh or the the Story of Sinuhe
Soriek
5mo ago
But these are totally different places and eras. I'm talking about the society depicted in the Iliad, Greece around the 1100s. Maybe we could get hints at it from more contemporary literature from other places, but Gilgamesh is about a society 1000 years earlier.
Soriek
6mo ago
Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.
Soriek
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo ago
I’m terribly sorry to hear everything you’ve been through and I hope very much your luck turns around.
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
6mo ago
No worries, just uploaded the new one!
Soriek
6mo 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.
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
6mo 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.
Soriek
6mo ago
Well, let's look at a [not even slightly] concrete example.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
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