domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
Rov_Scam
2m ago
I'd preface this by saying that since these "powers" were so poorly defined by the OP, speculating about who they'd find acceptable seems kind of pointless, since any discussion can elicit a response of "no, the powers aren't like that". Anyway, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that these mysterious overlords are left-leaning but not too far left, avatars for the man they're actually trying to keep in the White House. Which I guess makes me one of them, though I'm opposed to assassination and, in any event wouldn't know where to start, but I'll nonetheless use this as license to consider myself somewhat of an expert, especially since most of the people in my social circle are of roughly the same opinion.
Desantis was a credible Bogeyman two years ago but his absolute inability to outmaneuver Trump has rendered him impotent in the eyes of the Powers. And in the eyes of Trump supporters he's totally disloyal and probably a cuck, too for taking abuse from Trump and not bothering to fight back. Desantis's main advantages over Trump were that he was supposedly more competent and that he was actually willing to fight rather than get involved in messy political disputes. His campaign showed that he was totally uncharismatic and couldn't run a national campaign to save his own life, allowing also-rans like Nikki Haley to run circles around him. And he his profound unwillingness to attack Trump, even in the face of his abuse, didn't exactly project the image of a fighter. He's a guy most lefty Democrats would reflexively dislike and bitch about for his policy positions, but he isn't the kind of guy whom anyone would be concerned about the country over. If Trump, as charismatic as he is, was unable to cow the governmental apparatus into bending to his will, then Desantis sure as hell isn't a threat. He's also too much of a traditional Republican at heart to make any serious changes. He'll talk about ending woke but when he realizes that there isn't much he can do about it he'll just shift to enacting more tax cuts. PLus, the guy does have actual executive experience running a large state.
As for Youngkin, I've never met a Democrat who has strong feelings about the guy. I don't live in Virginia, but outside of there the man comes across to most Democrats as as somewhat moderate, the kind of Republican who can actually win a statewide election in Virginia. While he wouldn't be as acceptable as a guy like Phil Scott, he's not exactly the MAGA menace Republicans would need to nominate to really scare the lefties. For Trump to be assassination-proof his putative successor would have to be someone like MTG or Boebert, and there's no way in hell that's happening. And if it somehow did happen, there's no way someone like that is defeating an incumbent. And even if someone like that did beat Biden in the general, it would pose no real threat to any powers that be because these people are totally incompetent and more interested in soundbites than government.
This is totally anecdotal but it proves my point. A friend of mine has a winter house in Boebert's district in Colorado. Being in the West, there's some local water authority, basically a citizens group, that relies on the local rep to get Federal funding for their operating budget. This isn't exactly controversial politically, but they have to meet with the rep every year to go over the budget and whatnot so the rep knows how much to ask for and can justify the number if pressed. First, instead of attending the board meeting, Boebert wanted to do it over the phone for no plausible reason other than that she was too lazy to attend. Okay, whatever, but when she's on the phone it's clear to everyone involved that she wasn't actually listening. When she asks for clarification of something that she should have understood had she been paying attention, it's clear to them that she's either a complete moron or has such a short attention span that she can't even listen to the answers to questions she asked (Which weren't pointed clarifications of someone involved but simply asking them to repeat what they just said). Then she terminated the meeting early by actually telling them it was boring. These aren't the kind of people who are going to make any significant change if in the White House.
RegularlyExpressed
5m ago
Nothing particularly heavy or impressive: the Sabriel series (written by Garth Nix), which I first read in my early adolescence and for some reason felt a compulsion to re-read recently. Young adult fantasy is probably the best way to describe it; there are references to sexual themes and occasionally somewhat graphic moments of violence but it's all relatively tame. I really enjoy the world-building and the magic and death systems, the latter of which is really what the core of the franchise is based on. I'd also forgotten how nice it is for literary escapism to actually be relatively optimistic in tone and cheerful for once - I'm as much a fan of grimdark as the next fantasy reader but it can get depressing after a while.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
I mean I did say we had a relative increase; I've been here since before we left reddit.
hydroacetylene
15m ago
We don't have any socialists that I know of, but we've got some techo-optimist progressives. I think this is an expression of the IQ here; internet socialism seems like a phenomenon of just not understanding markets or capitalism, and techno-optimist progressivism has some of the same impulses towards utopianism and unlimited future progress, without the basic obvious factual errors and delusions.
We definitely have some prominent racists. And I'd definitely lean towards them being disaffected blue tribers- indeed, our white nationalist effort poster is explicitly so- but I'd dispute that far right wingers generally are opposed to being associated with guns, Jesus, casual homophobia, and beer-and-forklift-jousting blue collar America.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
51m ago
The actual instability in many continental (ie. usually PR-using) countries is less due to the small parties (they're often easy to ignore - they're small!) and more because there are major parties that are politically toxic (due to being extreme right or extreme left, or separatists) and thus basically almost automatically out of the government, which thus forces the rest of the parties into ideologically amorphous, unstable coalitions, or alternatively leads o the creation of large ideologically amorphous, unstable "system parties" (like the Italian Christian Democrats, the hegemonic party due to the main opposition being the Communists who were kept out of the government) where political barons bring down governments and cut each other down due to byzantine political machinations or simply due to spite.
The reason why those parties exist is because there are or were deeper systemic factors in those countries leading to large portions of population choosing such extreme or separatist parties. The Weimar Republic was not unstable because of its electoral system but simply because huge portions of the German population distrusted democracy and supported antidemocratic parties like the Communist, Nazis and the DNVP. If unstable countries were using FPTP, the same factors would just express themselves otherwise; the extreme left and right would eventually affect and radicalize the mainstream parties, and separatist/ethnic parties are usually concentrated enough to elect MPs even in FPTP systems.
The main FPTP-using countries, ie. Anglo countries, have been stable because they have been wealthy and have had longlasting liberal democratic cultures with powerful mechanisms encouraging stability. Nevertheless, even they've seen increasing destabilization lately, and that destabilization has then channeled itself in different ways, so you have the Trump presidency, Corbyn leadership in Labour and the Brexit.
2rafa
1hr ago
True, and that's what proponents of PR argue, that, say, the German system allows for the 'right' to consist of a center-right party (CDU/CSU), a libertarian party (FDP) and a nativist party (AfD) that reflect nuanced positions in the electorate. Another example is Israel where there are various minor flavors of secular vs. religious vs. very religious nationalist parties, centrist religious nationalist parties, ethnic parties and so on. But the downside is that many of the same voters feel betrayed when 'their' politicians compromise, which means that they quickly support and abandon certain parties, which makes dealmaking very difficult because everyone is afraid of being destroyed at the next election, which means nobody is willing to compromise to the extent necessary, which results in gridlock.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance feels pretty big by RTS standards (it invented strategic zoom), you routinely field armies with hundreds of individual units and a bunch of superweapons. It is basically a full-scale war - land, air and sea. Micro is still important but macro is much more important.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.
Wrong on both counts. Putin does worse things. And you say this like Trump is some innocent victim and not a complete lying scumbag who tried to end your democracy.
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
Coordinated minority>Disorganized majority
You can vote more than once from the same number. Up to 20 times or something. Any geopolitically motivated adult can outdo a kid who votes once with the permission of mom and dad.
You could say the same for opponents of Israel, they all get 20 votes. But the difference is that they have no singular target to back. And they are still only changing the points on a ladder of 1-12. So even if they all vote for the same country, giving it 12 points, Israel can just run up behind them and claim 11.
Aside from all of that, I don't think winning will do Israel any propaganda favors, although it would be funny. So whilst a 'respectable' middle of the pack outcome might be on the cards for Israel, you never know with how unhinged and rabid philosemites/zionists are and how honest or not the Eurovision voting is counted and which way the minds of the jurors sway. The jurors might hope for a politically neutral result, but too many 6-7 pointers for Israel could make things interesting.
That being said, Eurovision is a purely news cycle driven thing. It doesn't matter in any sense outside of that.
theory
1hr ago
If voters are required to compromise, if the amount of information they can give with their ballot is reduced, discovering their true preferences becomes harder. It adds another layer of obfuscation on top of the already indirect (representative) democracy.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
Did the Brits never get the "Nimrod = idiot" meaning switch? Does that mean they never got Bugs Bunny? The 20th Century truly was cruel to the Empire.
2rafa
1hr ago
The cutoffs and bonuses are necessary in proportionally elected parliaments, otherwise the incentive would be for every niche interest to get a party unless there was no way it could achieve even 1 seat (which in a say 300 seat parliament would be 0.33% of the vote). You’d have dozens of parties and wrangling them together into coalition would be impossible. Israel is an arguable failure state; it has a low threshold of 3% and no majority bonus system which is really what it needs.
The more you look into non-FPTP traditional constituency systems the more problems come up. The UK/US two-party systems have major problems but force the public to make compromises instead of (just) politicians, which I think is theoretically preferable.
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win.
In what way is this current situation different from 2020? Or 2016 for that matter?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
2hr ago
Never had heard of it, but it's on my reading list now. Thanks.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
as people running his administration
I agree, but who are these people? Makes me wish Trump was a bit Hitler or Franco.
Is the Title IX reform team the same as the war in the Ukraine team?
2rafa
2hr ago
It’s been an occasionally dredged up topic in literature circles since about 2009, in part thanks to a general sense of impending doom that a lot of mainstream libs have had since then and because there are plenty of ways for them (as noted) to twist Zweig’s words into applying to the present culture war, even if this is relatively poor practice. There are also many literary comparisons (often unfavorable ones) to Joseph Roth. I don’t think there’s any reason why this year in particular would make it a thing, though, I bought my copy in Vienna while looking for books about Austria I could read in German.
johnfabian
2hr ago
In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.
Has there been some recent fascination with the book? I looked it up in the Toronto library system and all 8 copies are signed out, with multiple holds past that. Unusual popularity for a book from the 1940s.
Ethan
Quality assurance
3hr ago
That's the price for entry in reading Dostoyevsky. It requires a suspension of disbelief when characters go on impossibly long monologues while other characters listen with impossible patience.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
I'm sure some of that is just "what decade did you grow up in" but yeah, 2000s had some great advantages for the artistic potential of video games:
- advanced enough to handle 3d graphics easily
- still small enough to be done with a reasonably small team
- broadband internet available, but not required
- enough time to learn from past video games, but not locked in on DLC and other marketing addiction crap
- big-budget games were still willing to experiment and try new stuff
- mostly not concerned about wokeness
BahRamYou
3hr ago
I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3hr ago
Confusingly.
Basically, Eurovision has two separate votes: televote (ie. conducted among viewers) and jury vote. Both are organized country by country, with both the televotes and the juries awarding a maximum of twelve points to the top-voted country, 10 points to the second most voted, and then 8, 7, 6, 5 etc. to the next ones.
The implicit purpose of the jury vote can often specifically negate the televote when there's a feeling a "non-preferred" song (typically one that seems too much like a comedy entry and not like a traditional Eurovision winner ballad) might win (like last year...), so it's possible that Israel might, for instance, win the televote and not the jury vote. Then again it might also do quite well in the jury vote, Israel has not been a particularly bad performer there either in the previous contests, from what I've understood.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3hr ago
162 million people The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union, reached 162 million people over the 3 live shows across 38 public service media markets.
Well, it is now looking like Trump may have been right. We know Wisconsin election was illegally ran in a way that probably tilt the balance from Trump to a Biden. The recent Georgia inquiry likewise shows different shenanigans in favor of Biden.
Add to it the hunter Biden false prebunking annd the interesting J6 revelations …are we sure Trump wasn’t the legit winner and Bisen is the one who ended democracy?
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