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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1299 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 10, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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So, election night in Sweden. Polling stations are closing like now, and the exit polls are dropping immediately afterwards. They are usually accurate and will give an early indication of which bloc won.

Who are the parties?

Left wing bloc:

  • Left
  • Social Democrats
  • Green

Kingmaker:

  • Centre

Right wing bloc (government):

  • Liberal
  • Moderate
  • Christian Democrats
  • Sweden Democrats

Unexpectedly to me the polls have been tightening significantly just in the last month or so, even if the left bloc + Centre still enjoy a small ~3% lead and will likely win a majority imo. Betting websites are currently offering odds corresponding to about a 65% likelihood for this to happen. Even if they do win though the road forward is all but clear, mostly due to severe contrasts in ideology between the Centre and Left parties. The Centre Party, which ideologically lies to the centre-right, has put a red line against the Left Party in government, while the Left Party promises to vote against any government formation that does not include them.

In the end I expect the final government to be either the Social Democrats and the Greens tolerated by the Left and Centre, or even the Centre in government too, and tolerated by the Left. It's not the first time the Left have made these threats and then caved, and it won't be the last either - eventually I expect they will have to choose between supporting a government only leaning to the left or face a snap election and campaign period where they will be viewed as the instigators.

There is also the long shot of the Christian Democrats breaking ranks to form a government consisting of themselves, the Social Democrats, Greens and Centre, which would have to be one of the least bad outcomes for any right minded Swedes if the sitting government are losing the majority.

Some scattered thoughts:

  • Compared to the at times chaotic period of 2014 - 2022 when the Social Democrats led the government, this term has been refreshingly stable. Government formation was quicker and no motions of no confidence
  • Perhaps this is what voters have been considering as the election neared and polls tightened
  • The Social Democrats, the dominant force in Swedish politics for over a century, are probably going to get their worst result since universal suffrage, or at least come close to it.
  • Intense tactical voting from the Sweden Democrats and the Moderate Party seems to have saved the Liberals from being ejected out of parliament. At the beginning of August they were polling around 2% (the threshold is 4%)
  • Outside of tactical voting though, polling suggests smaller parties are gaining support across the board at the expense of the three larger parties (Social Democrats, Sweden Democrats and the Moderate Party)
  • The relentless growth of the Sweden Democrats has probably been stopped, perhaps even reversed a little after like 24 years/6 consecutive elections of improving vote shares

I probably would have more things to add but the live results are about to start dropping so I'll end it here. Please correct any mistakes you see and add your thoughts below!

EDIT: Exit polls are indicating a 4-5% lead for the opposition.

EDIT2: Now that enough locations have reported results the national broadcaster SVT unveiled the results of a projection model forecasting the final vote share and distribution of parliamentary seats. It indicates the government and opposition are separated by only a single seat in favor of the opposition.

EDIT3: Coming up on 50% of votes counted and the SVT projection is holding firm on the 174-175 seat projection, still favoring the opposition by the narrowest margin.

EDIT4: 80% votes counted now and the projection is holding up surprisingly well, moving very little as results have trickled in. Currently estimating 49.2% support for the opposition and 49.1% support for the government with the seat projection unchanged from the very beginning.

EDIT5: At 90% counted, I am going to bed. SVT is claiming "with 90% certainty" that the final seat distribution will indeed be 174-175 with the opposition parties winning the election by the narrowest possible parliamentary margin. Votes from abroad will be tallied on Wednesday, and even though traditionally they're considered to lean somewhat to the right SVT thinks there's not enough volume to shift the final outcome. Government negotiations and formation will be interesting to follow, hoping they don't go on until January (or even longer) like they did back in 2018-2019.

My sources pre-election were saying that this would come down to whether or not the Liberals (right-liberal in theory and practice) crossed the 4% threshold to get seats. So an outcome where L comfortably exceeded the threshold, but the right-wing coalition still fell short is surprising.

My perspective on this election is that it is a (rare) case of a coalition between the establishment right and right populists that didn't blow up harming both sides. (See for example my post about last year's Dutch elections). Instead the right-populists lost votes to the centre-right - even the Liberals will gain seats, despite tanking in the polls and a noisy minority of L supporters saying that forming a government relying on SD support was a betrayal of liberal principles. Although the narrative may well end up being "the voters punished the coalition" because they went from having just enough seats to govern to falling just short.

What happened? As a liberal elite, even a temporarily embarassed one, I obviously want this to be a case where the government was simply more competent than other right-populist coalitions because SD did not take cabinet seats. As far as I can see, this is roughly correct. You can make a lot of progress on crime and immigration by (a) wanting to and (b) being quietly competent without doing any of the flashy stuff that right-populist voters want to see, and the Swedish coalition did. This doesn't get you actual right-populist votes, but if you are able to take the credit it gets you the votes of people who were previously holding their nose and voting right-populist because the alternatives were so awful. (Even left-wing parties can do this, as we have seen in Denmark, and even in the UK although neither the right nor the left wants this widely known).

Final thought - this is probably going to come down to <0.25% of the vote between the left and right blocs. Nobody thinks that Sweden can't count an election to that level of accuracy, and an attempt by the losing side to attack the integrity of the election is not going to succeed.

The "Ulm 5" are a group of pro-Palestinian activists in Germany. A year ago, they broke into the offices of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, and filmed themselves spraying red paint and smashing office equipment. They then called the police on themselves and came quietly when they were arrested. Their trial for destruction of property (to the tune of €1m) and criminal conspiracy is ongoing. Lest you have any doubt about their political affiliations, they have used Hamas iconography in public appearances.

Along with a 25-year-old Brit calling themselves "Crow Tricks" (ugh), the Ulm 5 includes a 32-year-old Irishman, Daniel Tatlow-Devally, whom you can probably tell on the basis of his surname comes from an affluent south Dublin background. Unsurprisingly, back in his home country Tatlow-Devally is being treated as a celebrity and an unjust victim of political persecution. His father claims that the German police are treating him like Hannibal Lecter, while various Irish politicians (not just on the populist left, but even establishment politicians who ought to know better) have characterised the proceedings as a "show trial": a particularly strange characterisation, given that Tatlow-Devally does not deny the charges against him. The Spectator has more information. I have essentially zero – no, negative sympathy for him: he is a canonical example of someone who Fucked Around and is now in the process of Finding Out. Hearing about the supposedly awful conditions he is being kept in, my reaction to that information is the following. I sincerely hope that Germany throw the book at him.

The whole affair seems to have skipped over tragedy directly into farce, and became doubly so on Tuesday evening when Tatlow-Devally's sister Clara appeared on RTÉ News, Ireland's national broadcaster. I have never met this woman, and yet I have met her a thousand times: at a glance, I can tell that she loves Fontaines DC, owns multiple pairs of Doc Marten boots, and owns at least one novel by Sally Rooney (which she may or may not have read). In a group chat of which I'm a member, someone shared a clip from her appearance yesterday, asking us if we noticed anything odd about it (link, the relevant section begins at 36:31; alternative link in case RTÉ Player is geoblocked).

I didn't clock it, but the person who shared the clip pointed out that Clara only ever refers to her brother as "Daniel", avoiding personal pronouns entirely. Because of course this pro-Palestine activist from an affluent south Dublin background calls himself non-binary. Presumably his family thought that being too insistent about his "gender identity" would distract from the larger issue of his court case (read: would make him a laughingstock among the Irish people who support Palestine but think gender ideology is retarded) so sought to avoid drawing attention to it. Nonetheless, his sister obviously wanted to avoid directly "misgendering" him, so the end result was this ludicrously stilted performance.

Someone else in the group chat (who I'll call Alice) is an unabashed supporter of the Palestinian cause (and a literal self-identified communist besides), who has met Daniel Tatlow-Devally at least once prior to his emigration and subsequent arrest. Despite Alice professing her support for gender ideology, she was unimpressed by Tatlow-Devally, noting that, despite his complaining about people "misgendering" him, he persistently referred to Alice's friend "Brenda" as "Barbara" (not the real names used, obviously). I recall that, on a separate occasion, Alice told me about a male person she met at a political protest, who despite professing to be "non-binary", seemed to behave in a manner entirely consistent with various negative stereotypes about masculinity, in particular a tendency to "mansplain" to women more knowledgeable about a particular issue than he was. I don't know if the person she was talking about was Tatlow-Devally (he surely can't be the only Irish male pro-Palestine activist who calls himself non-binary), and yet it would certainly be amusing if this was the case.

As silly as this whole circus is, I find it hard to laugh, as I feel too angry. I hate the way people are talking about this case; I hate the way Tatlow-Devally is being lionized in the popular imagination; I hate the way Irish people talk about Gaza; I hate the way Irish people shamelessly recycle centuries-old antisemitic canards and blood libels (then immediately retreat to the motte of "we're just against genocide" when challenged); I hate the way people scoff at me when I point out that there was no famine in Gaza, and that civilian:combatant ratios in the Gaza war are entirely typical of modern conflicts in the Middle East; I hate the way people who call themselves anti-racist can get away with saying the most appalling things about Jews (and they increasingly no longer feel any need to use the "Zionist" euphemism); I hate the way woke Irish people can share memes openly denying the Holocaust on their Facebook pages and receive zero pushback; I hate the way Irish people believe in the most preposterous antisemitic conspiracy theories; I hate the way Irish people will never come out and admit that they support Hamas, and yet will never say anything to criticise the organisation and will go out of their way to amplify its propaganda at every turn; I hate the way people who criticise Israel's "dehumanising" treatment of Palestinians will immediately call me a "Zionist bot" the second I disagree with them or point out that they're misinformed about something; I hate the absurd double standard, in which Irish people who rightly point out that it's unfair to tar every Muslim with the same brush will hold every single Jew personally responsible for everything the Israeli government does.

Increasingly, I just hate this country. There's something very deeply sick about it.

And as strange as it may seem, it makes me feel – isolated. Some of my opinions are unpopular among the Irish intelligentsia, but it isn't that difficult to find Irish people who agree with me that Covid lockdowns were a bad idea; that immigrants from MENA and Eastern Europe commit a disproportionate share of violent crime (and that the Irish news media covers this up); that gender ideology and its associated policies are stupid and present safeguarding risks, and so on. But when it comes to my beliefs that Israel has a right to exist, a right to defend itself, and did not carry out a genocide in Gaza (nor attempt to do so) – I really do feel almost entirely alone. Young woke people won't agree with me on any of these points, nor old-school socialists, nor working-class republicans, nor market conservatives, nor anti-immigration activists, nor nineties liberals, nor even my expat friends from Brazil or Mexico. Hatred of Jews increasingly feels like the only thing that every person in Ireland (regardless of class or creed) can be assumed to agree upon.

Increasingly, I just hate this country. There's something very deeply sick about it.

This made me think of the video of the happiest man in Birmingham.

I'm not familiar?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jS94-_zy3Dg

FYI. Everything after the second question mark in your url - the ?is=... part, is tracking stuff that ties your IRL identity to every clickers IRL identity.

Bahaha, great stuff. That's honestly how I feel most of the time.

So Trump has hit back against Canadian counter-tariffs with more bans and tariffs on goods like alcohol, dairy products and so on. He's also talked about preventing Bombardier from selling in the US unless it builds there, despite Bombardier building engines there.

What's striking is that I've seen no theory of victory at all from the Canadian side. The closest I see is a sort of forlorn "midterms ?? profit". But I don't see much indication midterms will stop Trump. He's not actually going to run again. Probably.

He may legitimately TACO, but I think it doesn't seem wise to imagine that pulling back against China says much about what he'll do with Canada. A tit-for-tat tariff battle on 1% of trade likely doesn't do it, in which case Canada is being put very choppy economic waters (who wants to do business in this climate without a deal?) even before we get into potential escalations.

If Canada wants independence, they need their own nuclear weapons program and probably a command economy since North America is a natural and profitable economic unit. Mass immigration and an imperial style of citizenship so they can sidestep assimilation and just get resources from millets would help too. A nuclear powered command economy with 100 million people would definitely be independent.

Canada has no realistic path to doubling it's population and transitioning to a command economy. Might as well say 'Britain should acquire colonies, that would solve the downsides of Brexit'.

Hey, I'm game.

I don't think Canada wants independence. Carney may, he talks that way at least. As if he's the head of some European democracy. Some of the government paid class may also want to be European. Most people are fine doing business across the border. That's the revealed preference.

Canada seems to want to stand up to Trump. Maybe punch him in the face and make him acknowledge Canada and then settle into some honorable peace where all this annexation talk and the unreliability on deals stops, even if we get our asses kicked a bit.

The problem is nobody has actually explained how it'll be contained to the "a bit" part. Or the explanations have a curious contradiction between how vicious Trump is supposed to be (so you can't give an inch) and how constrained a war with said vicious person is going to be.

As for the 100 million people thing...yes, that was a thing people used to bandy about, the northern version of Yglesian thinking. Trudeau killed it.

As for resources, it's hard to explain but Canada fears and distrusts them. Which is why they prefer to sell it to America. As I said, revealed preference.

EDIT: On the matter of the desire to fight, should have added the Build Canada poll.

Holding firm has broad support, but personal costs meet resistance. Seventy-five percent favour holding firm despite prolonged economic costs; approximately 68% find increased household job-loss risk unacceptable.

Higher taxes and retirement losses face majority rejection at every level tested. Approximately 56%–60% reject tax increases, while 58%–68% reject retirement losses.

Willingness differs by employment status. Fifty-four percent of retirees would accept higher costs indefinitely, versus 36% of full-time workers. Forty-four percent of blue-collar respondents would accept no higher costs, compared with 20% of white-collar respondents.

A much more brittle mandate than it appears.

As for the 100 million people thing...yes, that was a thing people used to bandy about, the northern version of Yglesian thinking. Trudeau killed it.

Carney just appointed the guy who invented it to CEO of our business development Crown corp -- the other co-founder is sitting on the advisory comittee for US relations!

Carney is deeply embedded in this world and I'd be very surprised if he is not personally supportive of the idea -- he can't say so because the actual consequences of mass immigration have become obvious over the Trudeau years, and voters don't like it at all. I wouldn't really say that Trudeau killed it, it was always sort of a shadow policy. Very beneficial for rich globalists, which is kind of Carney's whole deal...

Carney may, he talks that way at least. As if he's the head of some European democracy.

Obviously- he's more Brit than Canadian (one notes a foreign king on the throne- anything but the domestic option, clearly). And the people who voted for him all remember a time when Britain, and not America, was how Canada defined itself (politically and morally)- this is the Conservative view in the country (the party calls itself something else).

Everyone who was born after that (which goes double for the people outside the Canadian Imperial capital- Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal) voted for the Reform party (the party calls itself something else).

Canada seems to want to stand up to Trump.

Everyone who doesn't work for a living wants this.

Or the explanations have a curious contradiction between how vicious Trump is supposed to be (so you can't give an inch) and how constrained a war with said vicious person is going to be.

It's jingoism, plain and simple. The old always take the young for granted and provoke stupid wars on purpose- after all, they aren't going to be fighting, now are they? The young will fight and die to preserve the political prerogatives of the old (except this time the old has nothing to pay them with).

A long time ago that point was stressed, repeatedly, by those who actually fought in Great European Civil War WW1/2- by the same people who vote for Carney now. Public education was wasted on them, clearly.

the northern version of Yglesian thinking. Trudeau killed it.

Trudeau championed it, Carney would continue it if he could afford it. The country has shifted its moral capital into fighting the trade war and away from "accept infinity migrants".

Front-page news on Reddit: The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution recommending the Equal Earth projection (pseudocylindrical, equal-area) over the Mercator projection (cylindrical, conformal). This is the culmination of a campaign that has been backed by the African Union for the past year.

The General Assembly

[Two pages of preamble]

(1) Affirms that cartographic distortions of continental sizes inherited from history have cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic impacts and constitute historical biases, the correction of which will promote recognition, justice and development, particularly with regard to the African continent;

(2) Recognizes that the Mercator projection, widely used around the world, particularly distorts, from the perspective of area representation, continental masses located far from the equator, resulting in a proportional shrinkage of Africa and other regions;

(3) Declares that the Equal Earth cartographic projection offers a more accurate representation of the sizes of continental landmasses and to this end is a relevant option for improving the accuracy of the cartographic representation of the world;

[Two pages of "emphasizing", "encouraging", "inviting", and "urging"]

The resolution does not actually require the Equal Earth Projection to be used, even internally at the UN.

Vote summary:

VoteCount
Yes164
No1 (USA)
Abstain6
(Not present)22

Comparison between cylindrical equal-area projection (Behrmann variant) and Equal Earth projection:

OutputCylindrical equal-areaEqual Earth
Notes—θ = asin(√(3)/2⋅sin(φ))
A1 = 1.340264
A2 = −0.081106
A3 = 0.000893
A4 = 0.003796
x√(3)/2⋅λ2√(3)λcos(θ)/(27A4θ8 + 21A3θ6 + 9A2θ2 + 3A1)
y2/√(3)⋅sin(φ)A4θ9 + A3θ7 + A2θ3 + A1θ
ShapeFamiliar rectangleWeird dirigible
Verdict♥️🤮

Previous discussion of map projections

(If you hate all map projections and want to pretend that you're looking at a physical globe, use the orthographic projection—or, if you're really deviant, the general perspective projection.)

Are there memes already - Africa if Mercator projection was not used - a view of vast futuristic landscape? This one just begs for it.

I haven't seen any, so I made one just for you.

That's some good art, AI? If so, what kind of prompt did you use?

The base image is a common meme. (I manually darkened the skin of the human a little, since this particular instance is supposed to represent Africa.) For the text, I just used Arial Black in white with a black outline.

Unrelated, but I really enjoy that you maintain a personal site and use it liberally. I'm considering starting one of my own. Would you speak highly of NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a network host?

Personally I decided to host my personal projects, which are across a few different domain names, on a Hetzner server. I'm paying about 5 euros per month for it and I like the freedom I have to run whatever I want on it. I can't link the sites without doxxing myself though

I've run clockworkthought.com/blog and a number of other personal or project websites on NFS. They're the most trustworthy provider I can find from an ethos-of-free-speech perspective, but that's damning with faint praise, and I wouldn't put money on it, nevermind data.

(I also trust them to stay around longer than I trust Google Sites, which is the closest 'free' option. Google Sites is a lot more useful friendly for very simple document-style websites, though.)

The big selling point is that, for tiny websites or at low volume, they're dirt-cheap. For really optimized websites, you can end up paying less for hosting than you would for your domain name, but even at standard rates, sub-30 USD / year is pretty much the default.

The downside is that it's cheap, rather than inexpensive. You're not getting first-in-class performance, or user interfaces, or support staff. Even the built-in outbound email functionality is pretty limited. If you need a lot of storage (>10GB), plan on doing anything latency-sensitive, or need a lot of database functionality, they're not a great choice. There is a built-in control panel, and you can just use SFTP or SCP to upload files, but don't expect any WYSIWYG editor. Costs are based primarily on site storage count and don't have a real throttling capability, so if you allow user uploads, this could potentially be moderately expensive.

There aren't problems for my use case: I went with Grav as a content management system knowing that its design would be less responsive than NFS's hardware, and having to boot up a SCP client is second nature from my day job. Whether they'd be an issue for you is a bigger and probably harder question.

I do not have the technical knowledge that would qualify me to answer that question.

Denizens of this website who are more knowledgeable than I am have pointed out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net's increasingly-authleft political views have started to throw the validity of its name into some doubt (1 2 3), but they have not leveled any technical criticisms at it.

the general perspective projection

Anyone who adopts anything else thinks they can map the surface of the earth to a Euclidean plane: they're literally flat-Earthers! Although if you have concerns about perspective distortion I can be sympathetic: no maps -- everyone can only use globes!

/s

You want to show someone far away something, you take a photo of a globe and you send that. Some people send Google Earth screenshots but those are controversial.

Kavrayskiy VII is the best compromise projection:

x = (3λ/2)⋅√(1/3-(φ/π)2)
y = φ

I'll accept Wagner VI too, which is simply a slightly wider version of K7:

x = λ⋅√(1-3(φ/π)2)
y = φ

In the end, of course the Soviet guy still proposes one that just so happens to inflate the Soviet Union (I suppose Canada and Scandinavia are acceptable stowaways in this "uplift"). I would like to see a tabular comparison of all the projections by how they scale each region/power bloc, along with the origins of their proponents.

All compromise projections inflate the higher latitudes, because they want to maintain the shapes of the countries as well.

Kavrayskiy VII is the best compromise projection

Yes, Comrade Kavrayskiy VII is clearly the most principled compromise projection. Winkel tripel and the National Geographic Society are bourgeois nonsense.

I was going to come in here and make a nostalgia argument for a Winkel tripel, but Kavrayskiy VII is clearly more aesthetic, which, re: the original discussion, is the most important property for all these maps. It doesn't make sense to me why area should be the key ontological factor for deciding which map is best. In the modern era, no one is cutting out sections of map to weigh them, or measuring border lengths with a string, or trying to find the rhumb line with a ruler; at least not for serious work and not from a random UN report. If you want to compare areas, clearly a bar chart or a table would be better.

It doesn't make sense to me why area should be the key ontological factor for deciding which map is best.

The General Assembly says:

Emphasizing that cartographic representations constitute an essential component of geospatial information and have a lasting influence on the perception and understanding of territorial realities on a global scale,

Considering that maps constitute a fundamental educational, scientific and cultural tool that shapes the perception of the world and the collective imagination of peoples,

Recalling the Charter for African Cultural Renaissance, in particular article 3 relating to the rehabilitation and enhancement of African heritage,

Recognizing that certain cartographic distortions of sizes of continents, inherited from history, have contributed to their incorrect perceptions, leading in particular to a symbolic minimization of Africa in collective imaginations and knowledge systems,

leading in particular to a symbolic minimization of Africa in collective imaginations and knowledge systems

Yes, because placing Africa centrally in the most common default maps was a conspiracy to minimize the importance of Africa.

Edit: I realize I should probably have made a clearer point. I am aware of the general argument for why the African Union is arguing for an equal-area projection to be "encouraged." I do not find it convincing that area is the only factor in visual prominence, or that area alone should be the only factor for determining if a map introduces undesirable bias or will promote justice. I seriously think the map being aesthetic is more important, and that quantitative comparisons have better forms. I also think developed-country elementary school classrooms can afford and should have a globe available. Preferably a planimetric globe that can be dismounted from its stand and rotated freely to examine.

I have seen maps that split across the Atlantic rather than the Pacific. IIRC China prefers that choice. Seems like you'd be less likely to lose New Zealand (a common map error), too.

In the interest of justice, we should really be lobbying for Auckland to be centered on the map.

It's not about measuring areas, it's about being able to look at a map and see how big (and consequently important) Africa is.

You know what's really big? The ocean -- not super interesting on a map though!

Make Pangea great again!

I see no reason why how big something looks should be more important to visually understanding a map than border and coastline length, relative position, shape, direction, or visual centrality.

Neither do I, but the Africans do. I believe they think that if children look at the map and see

america AFRICA asia

then they will be more attentive to Africa and less likely to consider it the arse-end of the globe.

Beaides children, I think many adults might also consider continental size = importance. Many African adults, possibly. In that sense its a self-confidence boosting plan, to distract from Africa's many other problems.

I’ll be interested to see the reactions when white nationalists start using the new map to point out the relative sizes of Africa and Europe, before asking why the tiny continent should accept any immigrants from the massive continent.

I saw someone post a map of the world showing country size as a function of economic output:

https://x.com/randomnikanona/status/2096669789590811083

It’s a bit suspicious that the poster is Russian and Russia is very long but very very thin…

The technical term is "cartogram".

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