[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[tussock]

NZ just had a by-election (while the cricketers were still winning), where our crazy right government dropped from a 1-seat majority to a 1-seat minority (but still +3 on confidence and supply), by losing one of the safest seats in the country by 4,000 votes, what we call a landslide in our tiny electorates.

They promised a good load of pork too, over a thousand dollars a head, genuinely unheard of in NZ politics for a very long time. Lots of random bridges. Just made things worse for them. They actually blamed media bias against them, which is factually incorrect, but if history is anything to go by when the politicians start blaming the media here they are pretty well fucked by their own delusional state of mind.

To whit, the main stations here are run by government appointees, we have state TV watched by 2/3 of the population for their news, and it is always pro whoever is in government and everything they do. Commercial, so also pro-corporate, but still.

Anyway, they've now got two and a half years to go as a minority government where all their surprise new flagship policies just lost a majority, and a bunch of opposition policies just got a majority. So it all just got less scary and more interesting again.


The thing is it's a semi-remote rural seat, their base not so long ago, and they've gone from 52% there to 39%, in just six months, because after two terms they finally got their majority and bought out the real policies, and ... many happy returns.

If only it wasn't the leader of the racist party who won, though there really wasn't an alternative up there. At least he's been mostly sticking to the nationalism lately, and does generally believe in science, which is nice.

[darkmaster]

Nigel Farage attacked by protestors while eating with his wife and children. You know what protestors, good job. Definately not the wrong way to go about voicing politcal complaints, this couldn't possibly backfire at all, I'm sure.

[Josh_Kablack]

Mario Draghi gets confetti-bombed the Bloomberg coverage is nauseating, but includes some great photos and hilarious twitter commentary.

[tussock]

NZ Prime Minister has Tricophilia, but only for schoolgirls, young waitresses, and presumably other vulnerable young women. Country fully creeped out by story of statesman grinning and stupefied as he repeatedly chased down waitress to pull her ponytail, with wife and full-time bodyguard crew in tow all telling him to stop it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichophilia

Dude can't even have a proper scandal. He didn't sleep with a waitress on the quiet, he pulled her hair, over and over again. Now everyone's digging up photos and film of him pulling girls' hair, usually at official school visits, but also just at random walking down the street.



Hard-right media elements close the the PM launched into victim blaming, as did the Minister for Women's Affairs, who suggested people should learn to take a compliment. Nation moves from creeped out to just slightly outraged.

[PhoneLobster]

Soon I will have spent nearly a week underwater without electricity cutting up fallen trees on the farm. Why? Because a "once in a decade" storm event... that actually is the worst one in living memory breaking most relevant records since at least the 1950s (but don't you dare call it anything but once in a decade).

Before sydney even got its power back on they got hit with crazy unseasonable hail. But don't you dare call that unusual either.

And now forecasts suggest we might be getting another similar storm at the end of the week. But don't worry, I'm sure it will also be a "just once in a decade" storm too. Like the one we had last week, and five years ago, and five years before that and...

But never ever depart from the "rare but normal event" narrative, not under this government.

Whatever no one should worry. All the droughts and record setting bushfire seasons we have during all the time in between those events makes it all ballance out to normal anyway.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Anyone got a feel for the UK elections? It looks like Labour will just barely squeeze out a win over the Tories Conservatives. Which makes me happy in a cosmic sense.

[Omegonthesane]

Current predictions are that there won't be a majority at all and that Labour, by virtue of being a *different* band of shitweasels to the shitweasels leading the last coalition (and by having had a change of the guard since Gordon Brown) will be the big party in a coalition government possibly made up of multiple other smaller backers.

[Username17]

There are actually a bunch of regional parties because each seat is voted on in a first past the post bullshit like the US House of Representatives. So a number of seats will go to the Scottish National Party or the Democratic Unionist Party. The Irish separatists are probably going to get a few seats in Northern Ireland which they will presumably ceremonially refuse to actually take. So there are 650 seats outstanding, but probably only 645 will have butts in them.

Note: Sinn Fein has been making noises about being less crazy in the future, so it's possible that this time they'll surprise everyone by actually entering parliament - a possibility that will become a lot more possible if the vote tallies are close enough that five votes could swing it.

Anyway, the most likely result is that Labour will get about 10-20 less seats than the Conservatives, but that the "Left Bloc" of parties like the SNP and SDLP will get about 15-25 more seats than the "Right Bloc" of parties like the DUP and UKIP. And that's even if the Liberal Democrats continue with their leader Clegg's personal vision of being part of the Right Bloc - which many of the rank and file of the party do not want to do. Current polls indicate that Labour plus the Left Bloc is going to have about 325 seats, which is about 2 more than they need. But since there are ten parties expected to win seats and polling is pretty shitty in a bunch of ridings, there is a huge margin of error here.

It's entirely possible that things could get really exciting and stupid with shit like the Liberal Democrats splitting in acrimony about who to back or Sinn Fein making a triumphant return to British parliament to cast a deciding confidence vote. Like, we could seriously see Cameron announce that he's forming a government only to have members of parliament show up in Guy Fawkes masks for a surprise failure of the initial vote of confidence. But the most likely result is that Labour is the second largest party but there are enough Bernie Sanders independents that their "minority government" is actually a slim majority.

Regardless, the real big election story of the moment is Alberta, where the Conservatives not only lost to their own Wildrose teabaggers, but gave up sixty seats such that the NDP now has an absolute majority. A New Democratic Party majority. In Alberta.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Wow. WTF happened in Alberta that caused the conservative coalition to be so utterly routed? Did revenue from the falling oil prices drop that hard? Did the Conservatives enact some unpopular poll tax? What?

[Elfman]

Hi, long time lurker here. Full time albertan.

As to the election, there are a few factors and I apologize ahead of time because I'm writing this on my phone.

It started with a very unpopular budget that Jim prentice laid out that taxed everyone but the large corporations (namely oil and gas). It also started squeezing our public services out worse than they already are. One example is that we seriously have public schools being taught out of moldy Atco trailers. That alone we probably would have shrugged about because... Reasons. There is a lot of 'well, they didn't touch my shit so fuck it, I got to get to work'. As a special note, the budget did not include a rollback of the nice wage increase the MLAs gave themselves not too long ago. So there's that.

The election was supposed to happen next year as scheduled, but Prentice wanted a mandate for his tough budget; which I suppose seemed like a good idea on the surface. Except that the projected cost was $28 million dollars, which really could have been better spent on, you know, the public services that were getting gutted.

Thirdly, he told us to "look in the mirror" as to why our Heritage Fund was depleted and that budgets were deep in the red. He did so in a manner that implied that the PCs were entirely blameless in the matter, that we the people had dropped royalty rates and corporate taxes to hilariously low levels. That didn't go over well, at all. That, IMO, was the beginning of the end.

As to the election itself, the Leaders Debate really cemented things. Liberals don't stand a chance out here due to the constant PC demonizing. I'm generally in agreement with Liberal policy and even I have an instinctive hate for Justin Trudeau. So that leaves the PCs, Wild Rose, and NDP. Brian Jean bombed the debate by sounding like a broken record and repeating 'no new taxes' the whole night. So basically an NDP v, PC battle. Prentice spent the whole night attacking Notley instead of doing something useful and Notley's popularity soared because she sounded reasoned and like she had a plan. Even my stepfather, a hardcore PC supporter, gave serious thought to got I g for her. He didn't of course.

The campaigning was pretty typical for the right. Attack ads and fear for the socialists ruining the economy. That oil and gas would pack up and leave if we let the NDP poke them. NDP just did their thing and rode the wave of popularity from the leaders debate.

With two right wing parties, it split the vote; letting the NDP ride up the middle. There are basically three zones in Alberta that tend to vote as blocks. Edmonton, Calgary, and everywhere else. The election was basically over once the NDP swept Edmonton and most of Calgary. Wild Rose took most of the rural areas and that should surprise no one at all.

This is just how I saw it. I'm not a poli-sci major, but I'll try and answer any other questions as best I can if you have any.

[Grek]

I am from Texas and do not know much about Canada's political parties. Who are they and what are they like?

[Elfman]

I am from Texas and do not know much about Canada's political parties. Who are they and what are they like?

1. Progressive Conservatives: Colour: Blue. Occasionally called Tories. The current party in charge. Very much like the Republican Party, but with less batshit insanity said where people can record it. The PCs currently have an extremely controversial bill C-51 up for a vote and I should really go look into it more. There is a federal election coming this fall and with the NDP sweeping alberta, there may be a good chance that Stephen Harper loses his position.

2. The Liberals: Colour: Red. Current Leader is Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. These guys were a huge party before the last federal election. Then leader, Michael Ignatieff, managed to bungle the election so badly that the NDP basically wiped them out federally. They've been caught in huge corruption scandals. More in common with your Democrats.

3. New Democratic Party: Colour Orange. Current Leader is Thomas Mulcair. He isn't as personable as the late Jack Layton. This is the socialist party that have been making huge waves across the country in the last decade. They are further left than the Liberals. They have a bad reputation, provincially at least, of leading provinces with massive debt and out of control spending. How much of that is their fault and how much is them picking up the pieces of the party before them is debatable.

4. Bloc Quebecois: Colour Grey. Current Leader is Mario Beaulieu. They are a separatist party and don't hold any power outside of Quebec and they lost most of it in the last federal election to the NDP. They campaign on French sovereignty and protecting French culture while doing their level best to criminalize English. Nobody really gives a fuck about them anymore.

5. Green Party: Colour Green. Current Leader is Elizibeth May. The people looking out for the environment. They barely have any popular support and don't even have seats to gather federal funding. They have representatives across Canada though in all the provincial and territorial elections, so they get a mention even if they rarely win.

We have other smaller parties, but those are the ones people tend to talk about. The Communist Party comes up as a joke occasionally, though they don't consider themselves a joke party; unlike the Pirate Party and the Rhinoceros Party.

The Provinces all have their own little political parties that will likely never see federal election; such as Alberta's own Wild Rose. I can only hope we do our level best to keep our Canadian Tea Party contained to this region.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So would you say that, ultimately, the election was more of an unusual black swan that gave the non-conservatives an in rather than heralding a definite political shift? Sort of like how Ross Perot's candidacy made the 1992-2000 U.S. electorate look less right-wing than it really was.

[Elfman]

There is definitely some of that Lago. Had the election been called on time instead of a year early, the PCs likely would have continued with their dynasty. That said, there has been a general feeling of resentment towards the PCs that has building up since Ralph Klein left office. It was only a matter of time.

The NDP have had some power in Edmonton for a while now, but it was about 6 seats. That said, they did do well in the lasts election; just not well enough to get seats if my memory serves. They definitely got in on the anger against the PCs. There is no doubt in my mind about that. The Wild Rose almost did the same thing 3 years ago, but everyone got cold feet on election day; thankfully.

Calgary has historically been a Conservative hotbed, so it was surprising to see the shift there. Edmonton was a gimme. It's the rural areas that hold onto the right wing ideology; largely because of the ease of getting a high paying job without years of schooling and education.

Honestly, if they manage to keep the economy afloat without riling the 'cowboy' sensibilities of the rural areas, they may be starting their own dynasty. That isn't a bad thing.

The energy sector is leery of the NDP; stock went down today because of their election. I also caught a segment on tv of Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank talking shit about the NDP and how energy companies should just avoid Alberta and go to BC and Saskatchewan. Basically try and starve us out until we accept them as our masters again. There is a cbc story and I'll try and track it down if you like, where the a spokesman for the CAPP (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers) said that if the NDP they won't have enough to give to charity and that we should not vote for NDP based on that. As hilariously awful as that is, for the small towns that cater to Oil and Gas that is huge. A shit ton of money goes into parks, bursaries, scholarships, recreational facilities, and whatnot in small towns from the local Big Oil. In the town where I live, you don't even need to finish grade 10 to get into a vac truck and make $80K a year. You can go operating with a Grade 12 and make similar money easily. The best money is to go operate at a plant and get hired on after they determine if they like you and you get a minimum of a Level 4 Power Engineering ticket; not a diploma, a ticket.

[ishy]

Anyone got a feel for the UK elections? It looks like Labour will just barely squeeze out a win over the Tories Conservatives. Which makes me happy in a cosmic sense.

I'm sorry about this, but I couldn't pass it up.

[ckafrica]

3. New Democratic Party: Colour Orange. Current Leader is Thomas Mulcair. He isn't as personable as the late Jack Layton. This is the socialist party that have been making huge waves across the country in the last decade. They are further left than the Liberals. They have a bad reputation, provincially at least, of leading provinces with massive debt and out of control spending. How much of that is their fault and how much is them picking up the pieces of the party before them is debatable.

This is not at all true in fact though it is the popular rhetoric of the other parties. At the provincial levels the NDP has fared far better than either other party on fiscal responsibility. When people point fingers at the NDP record. They basically are talking about Rae's Ontario government in the 90s which came into power right before a recession that would have led any party out of power.

http://www.progressive-economics.ca/201 ... l-parties/

[MisterDee]

4. Bloc Quebecois: Colour Grey. Current Leader is Mario Beaulieu. They are a separatist party and don't hold any power outside of Quebec and they lost most of it in the last federal election to the NDP. They campaign on French sovereignty and protecting French culture while doing their level best to criminalize English. Nobody really gives a fuck about them anymore.

That is also inaccurate.

Elfman is conflating the provincial Parti Québécois and the federal Bloc Québécois, and they're just not the same.

First, the Bloc doesn't campaign on sovereignty - while the members of the Bloc are avowed separatists, they believe the proper way for Quebec to become a sovereign state is to proceed by a decision at the provincial level. The official purpose of the Bloc is to represent Quebec's interests at the federal level. De facto, when they were politically relevant, they were kickass MPs for all of Canada, specifically because their leader didn't want to fall to the "they're here to sabotage Canada" attack.

As to the "criminalizing English" bit, that's good old ROC paranoid newscaster bullshit. The Bloc has not proposed any language laws in their, what, twenty years in Ottawa? The PQ does have language laws (whose purpose at this point is debatable), but they're seriously not that stringent (that's a subject for another discussion.) It's nowhere near "criminalizing English".

Finally, their Colour is light blue, not gray. I mean, that doesn't really matter, but I figured I'd mention it.

On their future prospects... Quebec is very much a tossup at this point. It could go Trudeaumania Red. It could remain mostly orange with dots of Conservative blue. It's even possible it could return to uniform Light Blue Not Gray, but that's the dark horse. It will really depend on the next electoral campaign.

[Elfman]

3. New Democratic Party: Colour Orange. Current Leader is Thomas Mulcair. He isn't as personable as the late Jack Layton. This is the socialist party that have been making huge waves across the country in the last decade. They are further left than the Liberals. They have a bad reputation, provincially at least, of leading provinces with massive debt and out of control spending. How much of that is their fault and how much is them picking up the pieces of the party before them is debatable.

This is not at all true in fact though it is the popular rhetoric of the other parties. At the provincial levels the NDP has fared far better than either other party on fiscal responsibility. When people point fingers at the NDP record. They basically are talking about Rae's Ontario government in the 90s which came into power right before a recession that would have led any party out of power.

http://www.progressive-economics.ca/201 ... l-parties/

Interesting. This is information I did not have. Thanks.

Thanks to the corrections above as well.

[tussock]

Oh dear, the Tories won (well, exactly half the seats) in Britain on a big right-wing turnout, and all the other party leaders immediately quit. Not that Murdoch's cries of impending doom had anything to do with that I'm sure, there's only a few million people read that shit every day. Huge swing, but.

---

Speaking of terrible shit, the chair of the Business Advisory Council to the Australian Government, a taxpayer funded civil servant who tells the state the things they urgently need to know, has said ...

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... gwuzt.html

Climate change is a hoax led by the United Nations so that it can end democracy and impose authoritarian rule, according to Prime Minister Tony Abbott's chief business adviser.

Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Prime Minister's business advisory council, has written in The Australian that scientific modelling showing the link between humans and climate change is wrong and the real agenda is a world takeover for the UN.

Not for the first time, either, it's his hobby horse. Also that the future is all coal and prices will go up if they just mine a whole lot more, and so on, and so on. Because evidence and stuff, some people take it as a reason to just dig their heels in and be even more sure of their crazy.


But I guess Murdoch's papers and TV will applaud him, and that's what most people are reading in Oz too, so we have always been at war with whoever the fuck it is this week and the real danger is people who disagree with official statements on the matter.


I really wish I could laugh at that. Only Abbot's just got done taking that advice and terminating the Australian contribution to the science in favour of officially funded climate truthiness. It's like I'm living in the 1890's and the local MP has killed the plans for these new-fangled steam train networks cutting through his pristine stage coach business, because obviously the future is horses and oh, wait, that actually happened here.

Funnily enough, the stage coach was not the way of the future. Established industry and their political pull, eh.

[PhoneLobster]

the real agenda is a world takeover for the UN.

The...
A...
One of many ... stupid things about the whole UN takeover by climate change hoax.

Ok so it isn't real, clearly, but one of the few things that COULD make a UN takeover (of sorts) a real thing?

A massive out of control global disaster that we failed to prevent as individual countries in the present.

Seriously, people saying the UN is using fake climate change to take us over, could very well be personally basically the only people currently stupidly working towards a chain of events that would eventually FORCE "the UN" to take over because of actual run away climate change.

[tussock]

But the UN doesn't have a military, or any other form of power. Everyone and their dog has a veto. The only thing you can do without a veto hitting it is say mean things about countries, which is never actually heard by the people of those countries.

The United States doesn't even pay the membership costs it agreed to pay. Because there's nothing anyone can do about that so LOL, the UN. The layers of crazy that go into believing that because the UN organised an independent panel of experts to forcibly downplay all the known risks of climate change once every five years, while being a venue for non-binding do-nothing "aspirations" about what each country will do if every other country does even more first, maybe, which are not even passively enforced by pointing out the liars ... where countries are supposed volunteer to limit a bullshit equation full of bullshit by buying more bullshit at zero cost to fill the gaps.

Like, the UN cannot do anything about anything and never has done anything about anything other than give the odd army some blue hats because no one important was bothered about who they invaded, or sometimes provided some Fijians to watch some demilitarised zones because that was all either side would agree to.


It's a fucking voluntary organisation. If people with blue hats invade someone, it's because no one on the entire planet could be bothered asking them not to, including the country they invaded. And countries with no government at all, the UN fucking leaves them alone. They can only actually come in with the permission of the local governments. You have to ask, and you have to have peace at the time or they just say no. Because the UN troops belong to other countries and they don't want to fight your civil wars for you.












I want to make a joke about that showing just how sneaky they are. But it's giving me giggling fits trying to compose it. It is a superb demonstration of how completely fucking crazy the people are who reject all of science in favour of ... well, anything else, really. "God promised us he wouldn't send another flood" was pretty good for that too.

[Username17]

The Tories managed to eek out a narrow victory by demanding that Scottish votes be disenfranchised. The Scottish National Party meanwhile swept almost the entirety of Scotland. The heads of all the major parties except the Tories and the SNP resigned in disgrace. Nicola Sturgeon and Cameron did not resign of course, because that election result makes it enormously likely that they are both going to be prime ministers. At least, once the Queen dies.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Tories managed to eek out a narrow victory by demanding that Scottish votes be disenfranchised.

Wut.

[Fwib]

The Tories managed to eek out a narrow victory by demanding that Scottish votes be disenfranchised.

Wut.

The Conservative party (Tories) attacked Labour by declaring that if you voted for the SNP, then they and the Labour party would form a coalition and <Bad Things> would happen. So in Scotland, because they hate the Tories, they voted for the SNP and Labour lost all but on of their seats there. ...and south of the border, people did not vote for Labour enough to make up for that, so an unexpected Conservative majority occurred.

I can't swear to those motivations, but that's pretty much what happened.

[Username17]

The Tories managed to eek out a narrow victory by demanding that Scottish votes be disenfranchised.

Wut.

This is what the Conservative line was in their own newspaper endorsements:

For all his talk of no deals with the SNP, Miliband is bound to rely on that party to get his legislative programme through. This would be a disaster for the country, unleashing justified fury in England at the decisive influence of MPs who – unlike this title – do not wish the Union to exist. If that were to be the case while Labour were the second biggest party either in terms of vote share, or seats – or both – how could Labour govern with authority? They could not. Any partnership between Labour and the SNP will harm Britain’s fragile democracy. For all its faults, another Lib-Con Coalition would both prolong recovery and give our kingdom a better chance of continued existence.

They were quite specific and explicit that Scots having a voice in parliament was a threat to the nation. That you should vote for the Tories because otherwise Scottish people would have a voice in how the nation was run.

While they were at it, the Conservatives also ran a big campaign of English Votes For English Laws. Which basically was the idea that the largest single area in the United Kingdom should be able to hold referendums important to the direction of the country with no input from the smaller segments (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) at all. That people should not only vote tactically to spite the will of Scottish people, but that the electoral procedures of the nation should be redefined such that Scottish votes weren't counted in the first place.

Scotland voted against independence last year by 10 points. But rather than attempt to heal the very real wounds between North and South, Cameron fanned the flames of nationalist resentment for short term political gain. He very narrowly pulled a victory out of that. But it's difficult to see these brazen insults and high handed betrayals of his last minute pre-secession vote promises as being a thing that would make division any less popular on either side. Nicola Sturgeon is probably going to see an independent Scotland in her lifetime because of this. I'm guessing it happens shortly after the death of the Queen. There are a number of Scots who like the idea of keeping the Queen on their money, I don't think there are near as many who would be in favor of using new Pounds with King Charles III on them.

Remember, the new Conservative government has a much smaller majority than the coalition government had. Even having basically eaten the entire Lib-Dem party, their majority is tiny. The various Tory backbenchers are going to make it nearly impossible to pass much of anything once the heady smell of victory has wafted out of the room. The savage cuts and insane tax cuts that the Conservatives campaigned on are going to put finances in shambles and issue in a new recession probably next year. And once things start to unwind, parliament is going to be pretty much paralyzed. The new confidence rules that the last coalition put together make it almost impossible to actually dissolve parliament and call new elections, so the government is just going to stagger on in parliamentary chaos after having caused economic and social chaos and having told all the ambivalently secessionist provinces to not let the door hit them on the way out.

I can imagine scenarios where the United Kingdom still exists in 10 years, but I can imagine a whole lot more where it doesn't.

-Username17