PiS defeat confirmed.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-election-tusk-results-f687cf22fee9d395e92a08d2b6ab0f03
AfD otoh seems on the march. Horrible scary shit in Ecuador.
I'm particularly curious about New Zealand and how far right their right wing actually is.
Polish election map looks like the Russian/Prussian partition map:
https://x.com/Skalinskalin/status/1714161569557311609?s=20
I think this could also be a Jim Jordan thread.
We're allowed one comment per vote.
Jeffries says the Speaker election means he needs 5,000 donations by midnight.
The big thing I want to know for NZ is what happens to the Medium Density Residential Standards. At the time they were bipartisan, but I understand at least some of the National Party has been speaking against it in the election.
Hugely relieved about Poland, though it may still take a month or two to form the government.
5: Not really. https://x.com/bdstanley/status/1713909499700957403?s=46&t=TTHZEh-oxASwsdE1ff52sg
Hugely relieved about Poland, though it may still take a month or two to form the government.
5: Not really. https://x.com/bdstanley/status/1713909499700957403?s=46&t=TTHZEh-oxASwsdE1ff52sg
The Guardian's New Zealand coverage. I guess no one from New Zealand lurks or comments here anymore.
Or nosflow's college Latin teacher. But I've forgotten his name and he hasn't been around for well over a decade.
Close one in Liberia! Definitely going to a runoff.
http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/raffle_announcement_2023
Raffles for charity are like voting, right? Seriously, though, this is a fantastic cause, I'm good friends with the founder, and the prizes aren't too shabby.
I've been a (small-scale) recurring donor for something like 15 years now--serious do-gooding bang for your buck (...laydeez...)
Main points from discussion with a good friend in New Zealand who is somewhat tapped into NZ politics.
-- He is quite glum but noted that he thinks they will probably need to have NZ First in the coalition which will complicate some of their attempted agenda (I think the 2 can go alone with results as of now, but potentially not with overseas votes coming in.)
-- In his view a triumph for Real Estate interests, Big Ag and multi-nationals. The Real estate stuff has been a huge deal in NZ especially foreign investment. Peter Thiel, for instance. Musk sent congrats via a tweet.
-- Also thinks Labour sort of lost their way in last few years. Did not respond very adroitly to some Bannonesque type BS. Covid response became a big negative for instance after originally being lauded Notes Green's improved a bit.
-- Not immune to general worldwide trends.
Nothing not in the Guardian etc.
Found out that a newly won Green seat--Rongotai, mostly SE Wellington suburbs--includes the Chatham Islands* apparently because the Wellington airport. is within its boundaries.
Green won 3 outright; I think had only won one outright previously. end up with a dozen or so based on the MMP scheme.
*Of Moriori/Māori** infamy. (And featured in the outer nested story of The Cloud Atlas.)
**Interestingly per discussion of "indigenous" in the other thread:
Moriori are recognised as the original people of Rekohu. The Crown also recognised the Ngāti Mutunga Māori as having indigenous status in the Chathams by right of around 160 years of occupation.
Thanks! I have to admit that even though I shouldn't be, I'm surprised that Covid policies would still be a factor nearly two years after the end of Covid zero.
I got my new covid shot and my cell phone still doesn't get 5g near the park.
Maybe you need to adjust your tinfoil.
Maybe you forgot to get a shot for someone else?
19: Thanks for the NZ details. The Chathams thing is mindboggling, cheapening the concept of indigeneity, especially post-genocide. It'll probably be ignored because it's such a small place, but imagine if that were applied universally!
20: I don't know that it was that big in the campaign itself, but it was one of the factors several years back that helped take the bloom off the Labour rose. Arguably the 2022 New Zealand "truck convoy" was the most successful of those stupid things, leading to the "occupy parliament" protests in Wellington. The protests garnered somewhat more sympathy than might have been expected as it occurred as New Zealand was having an inevitable "surge" despite the very strict policies.
Did people know that in-state tuition at Pitt is up to $21,000/year?
NZ First is such a weird party, but in a way that feels like they were a preview of changes coming elsewhere. Maverick conservatives but with a heavily Maori constituency.
lol Jordan with fewer votes in the second round.
24: All these things are complicated, where I lived the Iroquois did a big genocide. Uyghurs live in part in areas cleared by the Dzungarian genocide. The Chathams is perhaps especially absurd, but it's not such an easy line to draw.
Yeah, right-wing populism combined with big government and cross-racial xenophobia and general paranoia does seem like the wave of the future. That's Trumpism without Trump and without all the weird policy preferences of the rump Republican elite.
28: Just had a great idea for a compromise candidate for speaker -- Nancy Pelosi!
What about Biden? There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president can't be Speaker of the House.
Fewer elections, more erections, I say.
31: Awesome! Do the Middle East next!
We hire a force of Nancy Pelosi mercenaries.
Fewer elections, more erections, I say.
If that's what the members want.
He posed for selfies in the afternoon sun, invited children to join him on the truck and waved a chainsaw, a symbol of his promise to cut a sprawling state down to size.
If I could count, I'd be speaker.
His beloved English Mastiff dogs, cloned from the DNA of a dead pet named Conan, carry the names of conservative economists: Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas.
40: imagine how terrible any of those would be as a dog. "If there was a stick, a representative agent exhibiting perfect rationality would already have fetched it..."
30: NZ First is especially interesting as New Zealand was the first country to adopt neoliberalism and really disproportionally important in defining it (the Reserve Bank of NZ invented the 2% inflation target, frex). Both NZ Labour and the National Party (=mainstream conservatives) had fully bought in by the mid-80s, but by 1991 they were already feeling the discontents and Winston Peters quit the Nationals to create NZ First specifically because he wasn't allowed to pursue the budget plans he wanted under their fiscal targets.
So NZF evolves into a position of being broadly socially conservative but offering a more generous state, sometimes much more, to the extent that after NZ Labour itself began to back away from its economic conservative phase, the two parties were quite happy to be in coalitions together. It also gives ethnic politics a distinct twist of its own - Peters and the core group of founders are all Maori, and its initial electoral success was in the dedicated Maori constituencies, and as such it breaks with the default assumption that whoever is the local stand-in for black Americans votes for the local stand-in for US Democrats and vice versa. Instead it's a crosscutting force that appeals to older Maori rather than younger and rural rather than urban, and it has a very specific line that goes back to Peters' early career in the 1970s in that it's critical of NZ's rather complicated Maori rights machinery* and argues for a colour-blind model of citizenship while also appealing to Maori traditions and aggressively banging the drum for clientele interests. This is popular enough that it's managed to stick around as a significant force in politics and a partner in both Labour- and National-led coalitions, despite having had some near things when it looked like it might be finished.
And you know a lot of countries now have a political party that looks something like that! Some of it is Kiwi idiosyncracy - e.g. if you're a NZ political party you pretty much have to court rural voters and the farm lobby or be irrelevant, and similarly you have to have something to say about the Treaty of Waitangi and its current implications or be irrelevant - but if you screw your eyes up right the Tories, Rassemblement National, FPO, Republicans have all developed some similar features for similar reasons. Of course NZ itself is different to nearly anywhere else because of its treaty-based foundation and is usually worth listening to for that reason, which may be why although NZF is usually categorized as a right-wing populist party it's nowhere near as nasty and vicious as its conspecifics.