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Internation Events X - Why such a long break...?


TheLastWolf

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1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

And it’s over. Bolsonaro threw in the towel w/o conceding and predicting doom & gloom b/c ‘radical left!’. 

Good news.  It did look positive before hand, given some of his senior allies were admitting defeat.

2 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

While that article reflects the real frustration with Serbia, this article goes into more detail about what is causing the current anxiety.  License plates.  And the EU/US is more frustrated with Kosovo than Serbia when it comes to that issue.

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I do understand Kosovo's annoyance but as noted, this is just a symptom of the disease, not the disease.  At some stage, a solution needs to be found for the latter.  No clue how that is going to happen.

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6 hours ago, DMC said:

The reporting I've read strongly suggests that with his allies abandoning him it's very unlikely he will mount a credible challenge, but at the same time he will still refuse to concede or congratulate.  I'd take that with a grain of salt though as it just seems to be assumptions from outside observers.

  

2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

And it’s over. Bolsonaro threw in the towel w/o conceding and predicting doom & gloom b/c ‘radical left!’. 

Yes, while he hasn't publicly conceded yet, there's really no way forward with him with nearly all his supporters conceding, unlike what happened to Trump. Some of them weren't all that surprising- Tarcísio de Freitas, governor-elect of São Paulo, knows he can become a candidate in 2026 if he has high approval ratings, VP Mourão was elected comfortably to the Senate and gives zero fucks anymore, many of his allies in Congress have worked with Lula before and probably will again for the right price, etc- but even some of the nuttier, more extremist ones jumped ship almost immediately.

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2 minutes ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

  

Yes, while he hasn't publicly conceded yet, there's really no way forward with him with nearly all his supporters conceding, unlike what happened to Trump. Some of them weren't all that surprising- Tarcísio de Freitas, governor-elect of São Paulo, knows he can become a candidate in 2026 if he has high approval ratings, VP Mourão was elected comfortably to the Senate and gives zero fucks anymore, many of his allies in Congress have worked with Lula before and probably will again for the right price, etc- but even some of the nuttier, more extremist ones jumped ship almost immediately.

Yeah, that was interesting, especially b/c they did so very quickly. Good. 
And then he went to the SC after the mini address? Any idea why? I tuned out, there’s only so much I can take. 
One thing I thought about his address was that he is maybe going the same route as Trump. He’s going to play the victim, stolen election (perhaps a bit more subtly than Trump? One can hope), radical left, fake news, and on and on - that’s going to be the playbook; playbook he’s been using for a while already. Whispering (in a way that was audible) to the guy next to him, ‘they’re gonna miss us’. 
At the same time, given how quickly everyone and their aunts jumped ship, I don’t know how effective this tactic will be. He will still have a tight hold on his base though. 

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If Israel is trying to not look like an apartheid state this WAPO article suggests they are not doing a great job of it.

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After Israel’s election, it’s the Palestinians who need to vote

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor

November 2, 2022 at 12:01 a.m. EDT

Israelis voted in their fifth election in four years on Tuesday. Like its predecessors, this election was shaped by a tense contest between two motley camps — one opposed to former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another backing his bid to return to power. At the time of writing, exit polls showed that Netanyahu’s Likud party and his allies looked likely to muster 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, or Israeli parliament. That would be enough to oust a bloc led by centrist incumbent caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid. The actual vote count, though, is not over and Netanyahu’s projected winning margin could still get erased.

The most eye-catching projected result is the performance of far-right firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Jewish Power party, which, as part of a bloc of other right-wing parties, secured what may be the third biggest tranche of seats in the Knesset. No matter the steady rightward shift of Israeli politics over the last two decades, Ben-Gvir’s extremism was until not long ago seen as beyond the pale. As my colleagues detailed, he has his roots in the overtly racist Kach party, which was founded by radical American Rabbi Meir Kahane and banned by Israel for its racist and violent incitement. Ben-Gvir was once dubbed “the David Duke of Israel” and lionized Baruch Goldstein, the American Israeli terrorist who killed 29 Palestinian worshipers at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994.

But, in a future hypothetical Netanyahu government, a politician who openly embraces ethnic cleansing may be poised to become a power broker, even commanding key ministries and dictating national policy. Such an ascension was made possible by the controversial former prime minister’s search for allies as he seeks to reclaim power and evade the reach of an ongoing corruption trial. “Netanyahu opened the door for Ben-Gvir to participate in mainstream politics,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, to my colleagues. “Now he is becoming a force.”

OTOH if they are wanting to cultivate an apartheid image, they seem to be doing all the right things to get there.

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2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Care to elaborate?  Man I hope Netanyahu loses.

Doesn't look like it.

And I'm laughing at the fact that this serial criminal, this fucking monster, is about to become PM again instead of getting Mrs Bigged in prison on a daily basis.

 

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Care to elaborate?  Man I hope Netanyahu loses.

It looks like he'll easily put together a majority. It's not that he did substantially better than last election. But the way turnout shook out, it appears that a few of the smaller parties that aren't with him will just barely miss the 3.25% cut-off to enter the Knesset. Meaning rather than each of them getting 4 seats, they'll get 0 seats and those 4 get distributed among the larger parties. It's a complicated formula and nothing is certain yet, it's still possible I think (though unlikely) for those smaller parties to get in. But right now it seems like Netanyahu and his allies will have 65 seats; and 61 seats is needed for a majority.

The worst part is that this majority will rely on the extreme far right (as in, "was once designated a terrorist organization even by Israel") which seems to have gotten 13 seats. Netanyahu controls Likud with an iron fist, so none of them will revolt; and the only other coalition partners are the religious parties, which will allow anything to happen so long as their schools get funding, their students get exempt from military service, and their rabbis get to control religious doctrine in the country. Whatever the extremists demand, they'll get.

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I don't understand how people square the cognitive dissonance of telling themselves that they're conservative while repeatedly voting him back in, even after everything he's done. It's rationalisation and self delusion I know, but it still breaks my brain.

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3 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I don't understand how people square the cognitive dissonance of telling themselves that they're conservative while repeatedly voting him back in, even after everything he's done. It's rationalisation and self delusion I know, but it still breaks my brain.

It's not about being conservative, most of the anti-Netanyahu parties are conservative (or centrist at the most) themselves. The actual liberal parties combined to get all of 4 seats it seems; Labor only just made the cut-off and Meretz missed it. Likud voters simply seem to think that Netanyahu is the only one who can maintain Israel's security. Meanwhile the religious parties just get all the voters of their denominations, same as always. And the "Religious Zionism" party got the outright racists and fascists, who are now allowed to proudly be part of the mainstream thanks to Netanyahu.

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