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

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Its hard to blame a specific single factor for an entire election loss.

But it IS easy to observe in this case that at the very least it killed Blair's career as a politician forever.

And the taint from that killed UK new labour as a viable political movement in the eyes of electorate.

Now the media are going to Rick Roll new labour (and Blair) all day long every day forever.

But they aren't labour's base. The base HATES Blair and all Blairites for many good reasons, but when you do the massive war crimes lying to the face of the public enthusiastically people tend to remember that as the stand out thing they hate about you and its how history remembers you.

Almost like its a cautionary tale, not just for Starmer but also Biden.

Oh well. Nevermind. I'm sure history isn't repeating itself, this time for sure hey neo liberal/cons!

[Kaelik]

While I think people shouldn't do war crimes, and that war criming helped contribute somewhat to Blair's and Bush's party's losses. I think, in fact, that it was mostly about the massive economic recession from a bunch of Thatcher/Blair/Reagan/Clinton/Bush/Bush policies.

[Kaelik]

France's EU elections happened and the far right smoked Macron's right wing party. So Macron responded by calling snap elections. The calculus is that nothing he does between now and 2027 would do anything but make the Far Right stronger, so better to have the elections now and hope that the divided left can't figure out anyone to unite behind and he can siphon enough of their votes in the runoff system to win the election.

At which point he will have 5 more years to make the Far Right more powerful for the next elections.

The people of France would do good to realize that the only reason they are having elections right now at all is because Macron knows that nothing he does will disempower the far right at any time over the next several years. A vote for Macron is a vote for the Far Right to be in power.

[phlapjackage]

https://earthrights.org/media_release/c ... th-squads/

On the other hand, Chiquita created great value for the shareholders

[PseudoStupidity]

A UN commission published their report on Oct 7 and Israel. They stop short of saying genocide, but boy do the crimes listed here sound like genocide (we're just waiting for the ICJ for that). They do say Israel has committed crimes against humanity. For those who are interested you can find it at https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/u ... 26-auv.pdf.

[Kaelik]

In fact they specifically say it is committing the crime of "extermination" which is where you kill all the people, but it's not clear if the intent was to destroy.

Obviously the intent is to exterminate. But "genocide but we didn't mean to" is in pretty much all respects equally as bad as genocide.

So yeah. If someone said "hey should you stop arming a genocide, but the genocide is by accident" your answer shouldn't be different.

[PseudoStupidity]

It is almost comical how they avoid saying genocide given their own language, but I guess it's not their place to declare genocide because that's a legal thing? Even though they do have a legal analysis section (which is the section that basically repeats "this is a genocide" over and over again in different language each time).

Can't wait for the Biden administration to declare the UN HRC is antisemitic, needs to be defunded, and that everything they wrote (and provided evidence for, even some YouTube links!) is just Hamas lies.

[Kaelik]

It is almost comical how they avoid saying genocide given their own language, but I guess it's not their place to declare genocide because that's a legal thing? Even though they do have a legal analysis section (which is the section that basically repeats "this is a genocide" over and over again in different language each time).

Well it's basically they refuse to investigate the intent because they know they would get in trouble for being accurate and the conclusion is obvious.

Basically, they say "Israel is dropping bombs and starving people. The bombs and starving are killing all Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is AWARE that they are killing all Palestinians in Gaza. I have no opinion on if they WANT to kill all Palestinians in Gaza or if they just really hate dirt and want to bomb as much dirt as possible, and the Palestinians are just in the way."

And like, lmao, obviously, the IDF generals and war minister, and president all keep saying "out goal is explicitly to genocide them all" but if you just pretend you've never seen a single public communication you can say "ah yes, this man definitely pulled the trigger on the gun, and the bullet did kill someone, but we have no idea if he intended to kill him or if he just really wanted to shoot the lamppost behind the person he killed, so it could be murder OR manslaughter!"

Just that but for Extermination vs Genocide.

Can't wait for the Biden administration to declare the UN HRC is antisemitic, needs to be defunded, and that everything they wrote (and provided evidence for, even some YouTube links!) is just Hamas lies.

Joe Biden saw some photos of UN HRC people beheading babies that are definitely very real and also if you put them in Israeli torture dungeons for a month they will confess to being Hamas and Joe Biden will watch the video of someone screaming a confession while their fingers are broken and let you know the US is extremely confident in their analysis.

[Kaelik]

French elections going weird.

Turns out people are tired of voting for centrists who promise to cut benefits and blame immigrants to keep the far right out of power who will cut benefits and blame immigrants.

So the current projections are an absolute evisceration of Macrons party.

They have adopted two different tactics:

1) because macron voters will vote for le pen over the left in runoffs, leftists should concede all races to the center because only the center can beat the far right (because centrists prefer fascism to even just boring social democracy).

2) look far right! The socialists are rising! You have to vote for us, because only we can beat the socialists! Don't vote for tye fascists who will lose to the socialists in the runoff. Vote for us!

Are these mutually contradictory claims? Of course. But it's still revealing that liberals cannot help but admit they fear immigration and tax hikes as much as they do fascism.

Macron called the left alliance "immigrationiste" which is what le pen calls everyone, and is apparently an accusation of wanting to bring in immigrants to destroy France. White replacement ass rhetoric is the inevitable centrist position.

Macron also went on an anti trans rant and has called the possible election results apocalyptic, which is real fucking rich because he called these elections!

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

People are saying France is in a crazy insane chaotic unpredictable melt down with all the zany stuff that is happening.

I however have two points to make on how "Chaotic" this is.

1)Far right parties having stupid public in fighting personal meltdowns among their leaders IS NORMAL and happens ALL THE TIME.

2) Macron's liberal centrist meltdown and fall to the far right is EXACTLY what anyone to the left of Thatcher predicted he would eventually do, on pretty much this timetable, from before he was even first elected.

I think it was at most 5% of the electorate that could have prevented all this years ago, but centrist liberal voters just will not listen to and cannot learn from anyone left enough to dislike the senile cowboy US president, no the other one, no the other other one, of FFS I mean Reagan.

[Omegonthesane]

UK election results are in, we now get up to five years of Sir Keith refusing to actually fix anything.

Based on the extremely low voter turnout, and the fact one J. Corbyn retained his seat without his former party's backing, there's a couple overlapping explanations.

One, whereas most of Europe has had a far right surge from centrists refusing to make anything better if their lives depend on it, in the UK the far right were already holding the hot potato and the further right wasn't well organised enough to capitalise on that. Two, at some point in 2022 the media decided to notice, not that we've been ruled by killer clowns for fourteen consecutive years, but only that the Johnson/Truss/Sunak cabinets were all killer clowns, leading to a surge of anti-Tory sentiment that was in no way pro-Labour.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

J. Corbyn retained his seat without his former party's backing, there's a couple overlapping explanations.

Labor's genius winning strategy was to only make Corbyn's deselection (and the sacking of basically the entire grass roots branch) official at the last second, then to parachute a new guy DIRECTLY into deep hiding until the election and hope Corbyn voters got confused and didn't know what happened and just voted labor thinking they were voting for Corbyn.

Polling, including polling of whether voters knew Corbyn was not running for labor initially suggested a solid win for labor on that totally honorable and awesome strategy.

Turns out right, this Corbyn guy for some reason has some sort of popular grass roots following, from all over the UK but also a mysterious well organized group of political operatives right there in his electorate as if they had until right that moment been working there for some party or other for years and years but were now detached and looking for (mostly volunteer) work.

These people, who are almost certainly antisemitic Russian spies from China because they couldn't possible have come from somewhere else managed to get the word out enough to pretty much flip the only polling data that had time to come out.

But anyway. Prepare for Starmer to be English Macron.

[Kaelik]

Fun fact:

Kier Starmer's Labour in this election got half a million fewer votes then Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in 2019.

[MGuy]

Looks like the left won out in France. Don't know much of anything about the political state of France but it seems like it is being received well.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

It looks promising but will take a while to results to settle and for the coalition to prove itself.

And that coalition probably still has a dangerous minority of liberal saboteurs in it...

So do you think, having been reduced from ruling party to a rump parasite clinging on to what they themselves until moments ago defined as the unacceptable left, those liberal saboteurs will I don't know, show humility and respect the mandate of the left?

[Koumei]

So, the macaroon's party did better than expected - that's the "centrist liberal" (right wing but not outright fascist but absolutely enabling fascists).
The Blue Pen and her fascists did worse than expected, and that's good.
The socialist party that isn't really socialist or leftist any more but is better than the alleged centrists so we'll call them left-leaning did great and won a bunch of seats. It is likely they will support macaroon in a heartbeat, but they might force some actual good actions over the next few years. Maybe.

But honestly it's a better overall result than the UK (where the real story isn't "Kid Starver won the election with his bold ideas and strong message", it's "The Tories are just THAT fucking incompetent that even against the wet lettuce of new new new labour, they still lost the government by dint of being terrible". The fact that "whatever Nigel Farrij's latest turbo-racist and self-serving party is called" did worse than anticipated, and Greens did better, and obviously Corbyn remains more liked than Labour, is background to "Conservatives lost the election, Labour were then given government by dint of being the other party in a two party system, and will probably claim this gives them a mandate to be useless." just like in Australia when our conservatives lost and then Labor were handed government and claimed they had a mandate to let us down.) This looks a little bit more hopeful. Honestly, the major European countries should just have leftists form "Fuck Britain" parties form, where there is a general message of "Fuck Britain and fuck the British, they've caused us nothing but trouble. Putting aside all of our other (leftist) ideas, we promise to spite the UK". They could get a strong following and win seats just based on that.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Do a quick read on Kier Starmer and the Trilateral Commission some day.

Just in case you want to get extra angry at him and start sounding paranoid to people when you talk about his crimes.

[PseudoStupidity]

I was very excited to hear about France pulling off the old switcheroo and giving the left more seats than anyone else in Macron's bid to get fascists elected sooner than they were expected to. Fucking no idea how it'll play out, but that was some genuinely good news.

[Omegonthesane]

Maduro has officially won the Venezuelan election with 51.2% of votes cast and 59% turnout, the kind of margin you see in "normal" western "democracies" where the rigging is achieved at a structural level by trying to only allow corporate stooges on the ballot and monstering anyone who has a serious support base who either isn't a corporate stooge (Corbyn) or isn't enough of a corporate stooge (Sanders).

Naturally the opposition are claiming that actually it was totes a landslide of 70% in their favour honest guvna just like they did back when we were all expected to care about Juan Guaido.

This is not particularly a defense of Maduro's policies or choices in general, it's just that in light of the whole Bolivia thing there is always reason to be sceptical when the US claims one of the designated bad guy countries did electoral fraud, and last I heard they weren't actually able to find electoral fraud in the previous Venezuelan elections after extensive investigations.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Macron hasn't picked a PM yet.

See the left was taking too long. Apparently a week or two to reach a complex compromise was too much. So it was their fault of course an would be for months. Only suddenly they actually pretty promptly settled on a name for PM.

Macron is like, hm, no not before the Olympics is over. Continuity of (Acting) PM is important for the games to uh, probably prevent trans athletes or something.

Well actually Macron will not make the appointment until at least mid August.

See now the left picked a name, its not about letting the winning party with the most votes and the most seats govern, its about "what sort of majority they can form" and a claim that the left cannot form a majority.

So. This narrows it down to three things. Total tantrum lock down. An attempt by Macron to strong arm the LARGER left party to simply being the back bench for his own smaller party remaining in power.

Or what those comments suggest a little too strongly to me. Macron is in negotiations to form a majority without the left.

If I can recall the numbers that means only one party is a real option for a coalition partner. He is negotiating with the fascists.

But they probably also don't want their ALSO larger number of seats to end up the back bench of Macron still running things, so who knows.

I'd like to see more on this but between Western media being deeply uninterested in elections that left wing parties win and the Olympics, its only trickling out to my regular news sources, if that.

[deaddmwalking]

You can read LeMonde mostly for free, in English. That's the newspaper of record for France, so it's a bit like the New York Times. Many of the articles are reserved for subscribers (but not all) and those that are will often let you read the first few paragraphs.

The French Left Coalition has proposed Lucie Castets as the Prime Minister.

Castets, 37, a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration for top civil servants, who describes herself as left-wing, is not affiliated with any political party, although she was a member of the Parti Socialiste between 2008 and 2011. For the time being, at least, she is not interested in the 2027 presidential election, which means she doesn't pose a threat to any of the NFP's key components. "She's a free woman," analyzed Olivier Faure, the leader of the Socialists.

The Paris City Hall's finance director has called on the president to 'take responsibility' by appointing her without delay. She also dismissed 'a coalition with the presidential camp' due to 'deep disagreements.'

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

The French Left Coalition has proposed Lucie Castets as the Prime Minister.

Oh they settled on a specific name did they?

Seriously you just provided me with slightly LESS information than I already discussed other than that you just did a google search for the French NYT. FFS.

Do you fucking read only the first and last lines of every post before replying?

[deaddmwalking]

Do you fucking read only the first and last lines of every post before replying?

No. I read LeMonde every day (in French) in addition to reading the New York Times (in English). I wasn't trying to provide you a detailed analysis of French Parliamentary politics, just point out that it is a resource that is extremely focused on explaining what is happening in French Politics and conveniently, you don't need to speak French to benefit. Alternatively, you could look at the French Language section of the website and with tools like Google Translate get a decent understanding of what's available. If you're not interested in resources for more information you don't have to use them.

I only reply to the parts of posts that I have an interest in replying to. For your post, I was interested in sharing LeMonde as a resource. I always have a tab open to their Live Coverage of La Guerre en Ukraine. While it is a mainstream French newspaper, I think it's helpful to get a non-US centric perspective on some events.

[PseudoStupidity]

Man ddm you fucking suck at finding alternative viewpoints if you think LeMonde, which describes itself as "Pro-European" and is one of the top papers in France, is getting you a significantly different perspective than the NYT gives you. I know it's got Qatar's government funding it, but Al Jazeera is at least a non-European news source if you wanted to get a viewpoint from outside literally just mainstream media in the US and France.

[deaddmwalking]

I do read Al-Jazeera, too, and definitely because sometimes it's useful to have another perspective. I don't read it every day.

But for information on French electoral politics, French newspapers are probably the best source.