Serious The Politics Thread

[Oglemi]

The purpose of this thread is to provide an outlet for users to discuss, debate, and vent about current political issues affecting our everyday lives. In general, tread carefully when posting about sensitive topics. The scope of this thread is currently anything political worldwide. Before posting, please read the following.

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For the sake of transparency, these users’ access either are or were once removed from this thread temporarily or permanently:

• boo836 (7/21/24)
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• Platinum God n1n1 (10/07/2024)
• tada (10/21/2024)

 

[Local Dog]

pheew I hope that will hold itself well

Anyways, I'll start

EU elections are soon and once again, it's very difficult to find a proper candidate. All the parties are corrupt at best, democracy endangering at worst

I wanted to vote Green but the Austrian top candidate (Lena Schilling) has been outed by a report from major news outlet called Standard (who are very approving of Greens, it would be like Fox News reporting negatively on republicans, the report gains a lot of legitimacy through this) to have faked sexual assault allegations, to cover a domnestic abuser and to overall extremely toxic. It's not too surprising, she's very young and there's been history of young, successful political figures being unbeliavably corrupt and downright criminal in Austria

I would vote communist (because they do the work that the social democrats should be doing), but I cannot support their stance on Russia in any way. I may vote for them in parliament elections in autumn, but I don't want to strenghten a terrorist state through my vote

I'll have to see who to vote for. Maybe I will still vote Green but chose a different candidate. I really despise the Austrian Green party, but I appreciate the presence of the Greens in the EU-parliament

Overall, every election just shows the unbeliavable amount of corruption in my country. It's really not too different from Serbia or Hungary. It's a huge issue because we have no meritocracy, every high ranking politician is incompetent and some instituions like the ÖGB manage to keep the country together. I hope things will turn around, I see similarities between the current gov and Thatcher and I really don't want Austria to end up like the UK

 

[Celever]

I hope things will turn around, I see similarities between the current gov and Thatcher and I really don't want Austria to end up like the UK

As a Brit, I’m genuinely curious what aspects of the UK you don’t want to end up like. (I hate most aspects of UK politics this isn’t bait lol, just fun to hear perspectives where they’re alluded to :P ).

EU elections are something I don’t have that deep of thoughts on, since the UK never took them seriously. Most UK citizens felt that membership of the EU affected us very little, and what effects there were were viewed by them as negative (such as immigration, which obviously isn’t a flat negative but you know). I found this post discussing them seriously from an EU-impact lens interesting as a result, since Brits usually just voted based on domestic politics.

 

[faint]

For the first time in my life I will not be voting for the POTUS. I will vote down ballot but am otherwise leaving that section blank. To the liberals that think my vote matters, in the event Massachusetts flips red as a result, I'll take full credit for this historic protest vote.

Also, having seen the two previous posts that are now deleted, I truly don't understand the limitations of this thread. If the first was deleted for conservatism or transphobia, you have completely given up on changing the minds of anyone. If anything, you prove his "point." Likewise, if challenging or asking someone for clarity is not allowed here, this is truly the worst iteration of a "Politics" thread. It's like a shitty version of a blog where we're supposed to ignore every other post in here.

 

[cookie]

I don't know if anyone has said this yet, but for the first time in my life I will not be voting for the POTUS. I will vote down ballot but am otherwise leaving that section blank. To the liberals that think my vote matters, in the event Massachusetts flips red as a result, I'll take full credit for this historic protest vote.

 

[Local Dog]

As a Brit, I’m genuinely curious what aspects of the UK you don’t want to end up like. (I hate most aspects of UK politics this isn’t bait lol, just fun to hear perspectives where they’re alluded to :P ).

the biggest parallel I see is how a world class healthcare system is being hollowed out. Our healthcare is still very good, but it took some pretty massive hits last couple of years. It has become harder to find doctors that work under standard universal healthcare and private doctors have become more prevalent. This seems pretty similar to what happened to the NHS during the Thatcher years. I'd prefer not to have our hospitals fail during influenca waves

Otherwise, the UK just seems very messy to me. Shrinking economy and a divided society (even more so than most other European nations). Idk I just kinda hope for scottish independence, irish reunification, celtic revival of England as Britannia. No offense, my political views are largely based on what I'd think of as funny

 

[Celever]

the biggest parallel I see is how a world class healthcare system is being hollowed out. Our healthcare is still very good, but it took some pretty massive hits last couple of years. It has become harder to find doctors that work under standard universal healthcare and private doctors have become more prevalent. This seems pretty similar to what happened to the NHS during the Thatcher years. I'd prefer not to have our hospitals fail during influenca waves

Otherwise, the UK just seems very messy to me. Shrinking economy and a divided society (even more so than most other European nations). Idk I just kinda hope for scottish independence, irish reunification, celtic revival of England as Britannia. No offense, my political views are largely based on what I'd think of as funny

TBF a red line that Thatcher (who sucks, all my homies hate Thatcher) had was the NHS. She gutted every other national service or provision in the country, but mostly left the NHS untouched. This doesn’t mean that the NHS isn’t in a dire state right now, but that’s mostly the doing of Blair and since. Blair was the first to privatise a part of the NHS, and sure it was hospital carparks (before then doing PFIs which privatised much more), but it was the beginning of the end.

Sorry to hear that the Austrian healthcare system is also getting cut in its quality and provision, though. It’s crazy that states are getting away with no longer prioritising it.

And I fully support Irish reunification, myself. The issue with Northern Ireland is violence will break out again on reunification by the monarchists, but whenever the time is right, that island should get back together. It’s a strange bit of leftover colonialism that is ultimately bad for the Northern Irish residents, since they receive pretty much no investment from the state they pay taxes to.

Scotland is just a matter of their determination, as someone who’s not a Scot I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but certainly don’t disagree with yours. Scotland’s better politics is counterbalanced by its weak economy, and the UK gov hardcore breached devolution powers last year to stop Scotland enacting a social reform they had the power to do. So probably they should just leave, I’d say, to have full determination at least.

I do disagree that we have an extraordinarily divided society though. Our politics has reconverged to barely providing any democratic choice (just like during the Blair years) so on a macro level we’re less divided. Whether anyone’s happy about it is another matter, but generally it’s hatred of politicians than other UK residents, with a couple exceptions (living on TERF island is depressing).

 

[lilyhollow]

For the first time in my life I will not be voting for the POTUS. I will vote down ballot but am otherwise leaving that section blank. To the liberals that think my vote matters, in the event Massachusetts flips red as a result, I'll take full credit for this historic protest vote.

I feel like the only good thing about Biden winning in 2020 is that it revealed the hypocrisy of the most enthusiastic sections of the democratic voter base, as well as 'progressive' democratic politicians. in an alternate reality where won and did the *exact* same things as biden, you would have had total outrage from almost all of those people. they also would have said things like "biden would have stopped this," etc. so it is at least good to see that hypocrisy made more obvious to us!

 

[faint]

I feel like the only good thing about Biden winning in 2020 is that it revealed the hypocrisy of the most enthusiastic sections of the democratic voter base, as well as 'progressive' democratic politicians. in an alternate reality where won and did the *exact* same things as biden, you would have had total outrage from almost all of those people. they also would have said things like "biden would have stopped this," etc. so it is at least good to see that hypocrisy made more obvious to us!

Na, Biden passed some legitimately good legislation in his first two years in office that would even have MSNBC struggling to admit were bad if Trump passed them. They could argue Biden would have done better like you said, though. But I genuinely don't understand what happened beginning in 2023 that caused the Democrats to just give up. Maybe they felt they were being too progressive by investing in our own infrastructure and supply chains.

Next thing you know you have a sitting Democrat president using terms like "illegals" when discussing the border crisis, openly spreading propaganda about beheaded Israeli babies that he totally, definitely saw, and is now aiming his messages at anti-war college students telling them to stop being anti-Semitic. No worries though, now that the cops have arrested all of them, he can say he met us somewhere in the middle because he told Netanyahu not to go into Rafah and Israel would never defy Biden. Oh wait.

 

[Divine Retribution]

Biden is generally pretty based when it comes to pro-labor legislation, and has allowed the NLRB to score some incredible unprecedented wins for unions and labor rights. The rail strike-breaking incident still sticks in my craw a bit, but credit where credit is due, the Biden administration has seen worker's rights advanced more than any other recent administration, whereas Trump just openly wants to defund the NLRB and repeal protections for striking workers.

 

[lilyhollow]

I think if you zoom in and look at individual policies, you can find areas where the democrats are 'better' than the republicans for sure. The problem is when you zoom out and recognize that this is just an expression of their strategy for maintaining rule of the rich: make small concessions in order to placate their population, playing the 'good cop' while doing nothing to actually significantly curtail the republicans because they actually share the same goal, just with different strategies.

We can see this clearly right now because of the genocide the democrats are currently facilitating. They are searching for some kind of token concession they can make that will stop their population from rising up in rejection of their mass slaughter of Palestinians. So we see antony blinken periodically expressing 'concerns,' biden doing some sort of temporary pause on arms shipments in order to make it look like he's not fully committed to this genocide, weird calls for 'temporary ceasefires,' and so on.

We can also see the limitations to the strategy and how the democrats will abandon this strategy when needed. What the people are demanding is something that the elites are unwilling to give; if token concessions don't work, okay, just have the cops beat the shit out of college students and professors if that's what it takes. And this when the demand is 'stop murdering children'!!

A lot of people are now learning that the mild-mannered, 'a bit ineffectual but ultimately well-meaning' image of the democrats (including their 'progressive' wing) is a total lie. I'm really happy to see this be exposed so clearly for so many people.

 

[Luck O' the Irish]

Na, Biden passed some legitimately good legislation in his first two years in office that would even have MSNBC struggling to admit were bad if Trump passed them. They could argue Biden would have done better like you said, though. But I genuinely don't understand what happened beginning in 2023 that caused the Democrats to just give up. Maybe they felt they were being too progressive by investing in our own infrastructure and supply chains.

Next thing you know you have a sitting Democrat president using terms like "illegals" when discussing the border crisis, openly spreading propaganda about beheaded Israeli babies that he totally, definitely saw, and is now aiming his messages at anti-war college students telling them to stop being anti-Semitic. No worries though, now that the cops have arrested all of them, he can say he met us somewhere in the middle because he told Netanyahu not to go into Rafah and Israel would never defy Biden. Oh wait.

Obviously the progressive stance on the Biden admin's handling of Israel/Palestine is pretty well documented. Faint brings up another point tho re: the failures of the Biden admin as of late-- discourse and policy on immigration. One of the most baffling bag fumbles by Biden/democrats of the past few years has been to completely cede immigration talking points over to our countries most insane foaming at the mouth right wingers who are doing nothing to hide they're operating in bad faith. 8 years ago the idea for the border wall was deeply unpopular amongst the entire population, liberals had a pretty simple and effective messaging on immigration (at least amongst dems, think "the dreamers") and now it's somehow favored??

Like what happened? It's not like the wall as a concept got any less stupid. Fox News has been airing footage of like, armored school buses driving single file in the desert since the 90's. Trump himself gained prominence as a politician by being the first actual candidate to campaign on what Rush Limbaugh would say call immigrants. Red state Republican governors have spent the past few years using taxpayer money to traffic migrants into blue state cities so they could get their names in The News. And the Biden admin has spent the first 3 years not making noise on this only to then go "yea these dudes were right".

Like really??? The dudes who're going hoarse squealing about how """those people""" have been invading america? Even if ignore the garish morality and cynicality of it, it's frankly embarrassing and unserious politics. Going with "the great border invasion hoax is real, and also we're taking that more seriously than the folks whose entire politics is Those People Want You Dead, is insanely poor strategy. A year ago I would have said without irony that Biden is probably the best president of my lifetime. The Biden white house in the last 8ish months have, in addition to making Hillary's campaign feel politically savvy, produced some truly repulsive stuff.

 

[BIG ASHLEY]

So probably they should just leave, I’d say, to have full determination at least.

not going to happen any time soon unfortunately; even if the polls were more promising, westminster isn't going to allow another referendum for a long time (cynically i would say never tbh but one never knows). if brexit (a central concern of pro-indy campaining for a long time) or the quashing of the gra bill etc. can't sway public opinion then i'm not sure what will. & that's to say nothing of the snp's apparent love of shitting the bed in various ways which doesn't rly do the cause any good... anyway stan lorna slater xox

 

[GatoDelFuego]

Israel has bombarded a refugee camp in order to kill a grand total of one Hamas commander. I don't envy the people who made this decision.

This is by far the most bizarre inclusion in this post. I can't see what it has to do with anything else you're including but I'm glad you did because it shows your colors pretty well

 

[Divine Retribution]

This is by far the most bizarre inclusion in this post. I can't see what it has to do with anything else you're including but I'm glad you did because it shows your colors pretty well

I disagree, this is:

* The main indicator of whether Israel is engaging in genocide or defense of pluralistic democratic values should not be how many Palestinians they actually kill in war (this number is amazingly low at ~20,000-30,000 considering the Gaza Strip is the most densely-populated area in the world) but whether they make it possible for Palestinian civil life and autonomy in the Gaza Strip to improve after the war.

Sorry but this is just unhinged, and by this logic we can only identify genocides after they've happened and not while they're actively happening. This seems like a really dangerous rhetorical game to be playing, considering we could have applied it to literally any genocide in history to obfuscate the fact that they're happening until we have the benefit of hindsight to decide whether or not it was actually a genocide.

It's also telling how 2-30,000 civilian deaths is "amazingly low" when by Israel's own numbers, they've killed twice as many civilians as HAMAS fighters, and by the numbers coming out of Gaza, that number could be anywhere from 10-15 civilians per militant. Both sources are biased and I'm hesitant to call either reliable, and the number is likely somewhere in the middle, but even the Israeli's conservative estimates are fucking atrocious and should not be tolerated from "the most moral army in history".

 

[gvmgvm40]

* Israel has historically been guilty of the displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinians (the "Nakba"), in the same way that Poland after WW2 is guilty of displacing Germans (if that hadn't happened, I would not have been born). The Islamic world, meanwhile, has expelled 900,000 Jews since the beginning of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Not gonna touch the rest of the points, but this is plainly bizarre. Is a Palestinian in East Jerusalem or Hebron responsible for what happened in Morocco or Iraq? Would you imply the Armenian genocide is no big deal because Turks were driven from the Balkans, for example? How does the existence of atrocities happening hundreds to thousands of miles away provide rhetorical cover for atrocities on a completely different group of people who had nothing to do with it?

 

[Earthflax]

Never change, politics thread.

And I fully support Irish reunification, myself. The issue with Northern Ireland is violence will break out again on reunification by the monarchists, but whenever the time is right, that island should get back together. It’s a strange bit of leftover colonialism that is ultimately bad for the Northern Irish residents, since they receive pretty much no investment from the state they pay taxes to.

From my perspective it seems Northern Ireland should be pretty happy with the position that they are in, no? Even though they don't really receive a lot of internal investment they are uniquely blessed with the economic reach of both the UK and the EU (regardless of how Unionists feel about an Irish sea border). I'm not too knowledgeable on that side of the Irish Sea though so I'd love to be proven wrong. From an ideological viewpoint I'd agree that the concept of Northern Ireland is very odd and it seems that with Sinn Fein becoming more mainstream, and popular support for more "independent" initiatives such as the Irish sea border (pretty sure a majority of the NI Parliament support it as of now) as well, the writing is being written on the wall. From an outside perspective it seems Unionist politics are largely based around strengthening ties with the mainland (that bridge proposal was one of the funniest things I've ever heard) which I'm sure isn't very productive compared to the platforms of the modern Sinn Fein and Alliance.

 

[Platinum God n1n1]

I disagree, this is:



Sorry but this is just unhinged, and by this logic we can only identify genocides after they've happened and not while they're actively happening. This seems like a really dangerous rhetorical game to be playing, considering we could have applied it to literally any genocide in history to obfuscate the fact that they're happening until we have the benefit of hindsight to decide whether or not it was actually a genocide.

It's also telling how 2-30,000 civilian deaths is "amazingly low" when by Israel's own numbers, they've killed twice as many civilians as HAMAS fighters, and by the numbers coming out of Gaza, that number could be anywhere from 10-15 civilians per militant. Both sources are biased and I'm hesitant to call either reliable, and the number is likely somewhere in the middle, but even the Israeli's conservative estimates are fucking atrocious and should not be tolerated from "the most moral army in history".

Isreal has estimated that 14,000 deaths are Hamas fighters and 16,000 are civilians.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...inians-has-israels-campaign-killed-2024-05-14
Where do you get 10 to 15 : 1? Hamas run health ministery does not break out civilian death from their count.

 

[TheMantyke]

Coeur7, your post is a gross gish-gallop of so many flawed points thrown together at once. One nation doing an atrocity does not justify another nation doing an atrocity. The current round of protests are not revolving around a stance of general anti-war sentiment, they are because people are horrified their tax dollars are being funneled into bombing occupied hospitals. Casually leapfrogging over the five digits in civilian casualties of a nation against an unarmed civilian population is disgusting. Multiple allusions to the people of Palestine being like the WW2 German populous is insane. This is awful.

 

[Divine Retribution]

Isreal has estimated that 14,000 deaths are Hamas fighters and 16,000 are civilians.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...inians-has-israels-campaign-killed-2024-05-14
Where do you get 10 to 15 : 1? Hamas run health ministery does not break out civilian death from their count.

Yeah, my bad, the 10-15:1 number (11:1 to be exact) actually comes from Euro-Med Monitor, not HAMAS.

Also, in the article you posted is this:

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children under 18. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

And also also, the 8:7 ratio that the single most biased human being on Earth on this particular issue gave is still not acceptable from a modern military using highly sophisticated targeted weapons against a weaker and disorganized force.

 

[Oglemi]

There was a LOT to unpack from Coeur's post, which has since been deleted, the most striking being that it was teetering over the edge into hate speech through its usage of "barbarism" throughout to describe one group of people, while calling the other's actions as "necessary."

Suffice to say, while the opinions held are not unique nor necessarily presented in a way that breaks any rules of this thread or forum outright, it WAS problematic, not the least of which being the poster's seemingly unwillingness to grapple with the atrocities currently being committed, and the posts calling out as much will be kept.

 

[Platinum God n1n1]

There was a LOT to unpack from Coeur's post, which has since been deleted, the most striking being that it was teetering over the edge into hate speech through its usage of "barbarism" throughout to describe one group of people, while calling the other's actions as "necessary."

Suffice to say, while the opinions held are not unique nor necessarily presented in a way that breaks any rules of this thread or forum outright, it WAS problematic, not the least of which being the poster's seemingly unwillingness to grapple with the atrocities currently being committed, and the posts calling out as much will be kept.

Insane. That guy put a tremendous amount of work into that post and it was nit picked apart by a group of people who all think the same. At least you could have edited his post and privately explained why.
Nothing there was problematic at all to real world people.

 

[Oglemi]

Insane. That guy put a tremendous amount of work into that post and it was nit picked apart by a group of people who all think the same. At least you could have edited his post and privately explained why.
Nothing there was problematic at all to real world people.

Notice how your reasoning for keeping the post fails to address the reasons given for deleting it in the first place? The guy could have spent 3 pages making illogical comparisons, it doesn't change the fact that it was riddled with word choice that dehumanizes an entire population. I'm not here to edit your posts into an acceptable presentation, that lies on you to do so.

 

[juoean]

teetering over the edge? u make it sound like promoting genocide would be fine if they just used better wording........... promoting genocide is in itself hate speech.

and i dont think whether xyz opinions are "widely held" is a good way of determining whether a post's content or rhetoric is acceptable. european discourse viewed colonialism and slavery favorably for hundreds of years, nazi ideology was popular across europe and the so called u.s. in the 1930s, the mainstream media was consistently denying the nazi holocaust and claiming that reports were either fabricated or exaggerated through 1944, and so on u can give hundreds of examples. propoganda exists and just bc a large section of people believe something doesnt mean the belief should be normalized or accepted.
(also not sure if theres rly a significant number of apologists for zionist terror against palestinians on a global scale, certainly in the US zionist ideology remains somewhat popular but at least historically that was never the case in most of the world, for similar reasons to why US imperialism has some popular support here but is detested in most of the rest of the world.)

 

[gvmgvm40]

Insane. That guy put a tremendous amount of work into that post and it was nit picked apart by a group of people who all think the same. At least you could have edited his post and privately explained why.
Nothing there was problematic at all to real world people.

you don't even know what I (or anyone else who responded to him) think, so save yourself the condescension. fwiw I would oppose the deletion of his post, and I do disagree with some of the discourse/ways of thinking of the american left, especially wrt indigeneity and decolonization, but that's neither here nor there.

that being said, I don't see why "nit picking apart" his post is portrayed as some sin? I don't have the time or willingness to write a 5000-word essay on each point he makes, so I responded to one specific point that is imo particularly flawed.