Politics & Stuff

[Thor 2,392]

Why does  Harris talk about fixing all these problems - when they've been in power for 3 of the last 4 terms? 

Who is advising her with her language? She has gotten caught out so many times. One party has been in power for 75% of the time, talking about a new time is coming, proper change and leadership, when that party has been in power for so long and it is where it is. 

 

She needs a better team - not that I care who wins, but dear lord the whole campaign is poorly run. The more she is out and about, the weaker her case gets. 

[Pizy 18,368]

9 minutes ago, Thor said:

Why does  Harris talk about fixing all these problems - when they've been in power for 3 of the last 4 terms? 

Who is advising her with her language? She has gotten caught out so many times. One party has been in power for 75% of the time, talking about a new time is coming, proper change and leadership, when that party has been in power for so long and it is where it is. 

 

She needs a better team - not that I care who wins, but dear lord the whole campaign is poorly run. The more she is out and about, the weaker her case gets. 

You do realize that in order to enact big changes you need control of both the Senate and the House, right? And not only do you need control of both but you need solid majorities. Which in this day age is nearly impossible. 

A President here in the States isn’t a king or an authoritarian (as much as Trump wishes he could be) like Putin or Xi who can just snap their fingers and do as they please. 

A Democrat president can propose these very big, popular things like she is but the likely Republican controlled Senate will block and prevent her from doing most of it. Which is precisely what they’ve done to Biden these past 4 years. Big, hugely popular legislation gets proposed, it polls at 70% approval, and then the Republicans block it.

And as for her running a poor campaign, that’s simply nonsense. She has been fantastic having had to spin up a whole campaign operation at lightning speed with mere months to go. Hence why she has shot up the polls and is ahead of Trump in many places that Biden trailed.

[Thor 2,392]

1 hour ago, Pizy said:

You do realize that in order to enact big changes you need control of both the Senate and the House, right? And not only do you need control of both but you need solid majorities. Which in this day age is nearly impossible. 

A President here in the States isn’t a king or an authoritarian (as much as Trump wishes he could be) like Putin or Xi who can just snap their fingers and do as they please. 

A Democrat president can propose these very big, popular things like she is but the likely Republican controlled Senate will block and prevent her from doing most of it. Which is precisely what they’ve done to Biden these past 4 years. Big, hugely popular legislation gets proposed, it polls at 70% approval, and then the Republicans block it.

And as for her running a poor campaign, that’s simply nonsense. She has been fantastic having had to spin up a whole campaign operation at lightning speed with mere months to go. Hence why she has shot up the polls and is ahead of Trump in many places that Biden trailed.

I know how it works - but to suggest the inability to enact any significant change despite the tenure over the last 4 terms is disingenuous. Just don't have the election at all then...

I'd hope she would poll better than the most polarizing figure in political history in the USA. The fact its close with all the advantages she has is testament to a lacklustre campaign.

[cosmicway 1,323]

FIND A WIFE FROM VOLOS CITY
--------------------------------------
Those of you who are in search of a wife, forget the French girls. the English girls and the Eskimo girls you are looking for.
Find one from the city of Volos.
Riches guaranteed plus wife.
What is then about the famous Achilleas Beos, the mayor of Volos ?
These days we have a freak emergency in the town.
Some of the nearby dams failed to hold the water from the lakes and the lake water which was contaminated with pollutants reached the sea.
As a result millions of fish died and the sea is full of dead, decomposing fish.
The mayor blames other authorities but naturally the citizens of Volos blame everybody for this.

But let's go back 20 years ago.
Beos was the president of Panionios FC of Athens and there was a series of peculiar, almost bizarre results.
The UEFA investigators accused Beos as well as another for match fixing.
Beos was punished for this, resigned from Panionios but amnestied after a while.
Then makes his comeback.
This time he travels to the city of Volos and becomes the president of the local club, Olympiakos Volos.
Asked about his gambling habit he said "it is legal to bet on football, so it's none of your business".

These days I 'm not sure he can do it openly.
I think but I 'm not sure people who are under the rules of a sports federation are not allowed to gamble on betting events of the same federation. Or maybe they are allowed, I am quite uncertain this has become law or not and I know only that it was being discussed. In any case it is not much of a deterrent.

But the other think he did was to get himself elected as mayor of Volos.
It's his third term now and wins by landslides !
He is not New Democracy, socialist, left or extreme right, pro European or anti European !
He calls all of them "clowns" !
But wins by huge majorities and this story with the fish now I 'm sure won't even touch him.
Tell me how ?

Latest results of Volos FC.
First week of the Super League against Olympiakos Piraeus they lose 2-0. Nothing out of the ordinary. Piraeus are back in strength to win the title.
Second week. Away to Asteras Tripolis. Asteras finished well above Volos last year but in the first week they had performed the giant killing act of defeating Panathinaikos inside their castle in Athens by 1-0. Result this time Volos wins by 1-0 ! From last season it appears Volos and Asteras are frequently doing this thing.
Yesterday, third week, Volos at home against OFI Crete who are weaklings. Volos lost 1-3 !

So forget the rotten fish if you live in Volos.
Back in 2005 with him again at Panionios that time there was the famous match against Dinamo Tbilisi.
Half time away win, full time home win they were shouting from the terraces is the rumour and indeed Tbilisi were 2-1 ahead at half time but in the end lost 5-2.
What is important about that match is that I live fairly close to Panionios football ground but on the day of the match I was in bed with a really bad dose of flu.
The next day having recovered I meet some locals in the pubs and they say to me "where were you yesterday ? we were going to make you rich". They are liars but that's what they said.

I do believe however those huge majorities in the municipal elections of Volos. Definitely bigger than Papandreou could do in his days of glory.


n.b. Beos is famously anti-gay so if you are LBGTQ do whatever you do in secret

Edited September 2 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,767]

On 01/09/2024 at 02:36, Thor said:

I'd hope she would poll better than the most polarizing figure in political history in the USA. The fact its close with all the advantages she has is testament to a lacklustre campaign.

Biden has trailing Trump nationally by 4 to 6 points on average in most polls

look at Harris now:

(and Biden was doing even worse in most of the swing states, and Harris has completely flipped most all)

[Vesper 28,767]

Success of far-right AfD shows east and west Germany are drifting further apart

Likely win in Thuringia and second place in Saxony highlight how eastern voters are asserting their own political identity

• German far-right party AfD poised for state election victory in east

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/success-far-right-afd-shows-east-west-germany-drifting-further-apart

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together”.

How optimistic that image of organic healing sounds 35 years on. Tonight’s historic election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further apart.

The far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a populist wave across Europe’s largest economy. If federal elections were held tomorrow, recent polls suggest the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag.

But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after emerging top in a state election for the first time ever, on at least 30% of the vote.

And in none of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the latter slightly ahead in exit polls.

In Brandenburg, the state that surrounds the capital, Berlin, the AfD is also expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month.

As long as the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far right and prevent it from gaining a majority, its dreams of seizing power will probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD’s establishment as a dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s political identity and how it contain the rise of such forces in the future.

For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.

But economics and demographics only go so far to explain the outcome of Sunday’s votes. The population of the east is older than that in the west, but it is no longer demographically “bleeding out” as it was during the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed. In fact, every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.

Unemployment is higher, but only by a fraction – the real contrast here is between northern and southern Germany. For the last two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern lands. Levels of immigration in the eastern states that went to the polls on Sunday night are among the lowest in the whole of Germany.

According to a survey published by Olaf Scholz’s government at the start of this year, about 19% of east Germans say they feel left behind. That is twice as many as in the west (8%), but would still suggest that 80% of the population of the five eastern states do not feel they are losing out. Yet a sizeable number of them cast their votes for a party that, in its Thuringian branch, has been certified as rightwing extremist.

The eastern-born sociologist Steffen Mau has coined the term ossifikation for this trend – a play on the slang term for former GDR citizens and the biological process by which tissue hardens into bone. Far from still “catching up”, Mau writes in his recent book Ungleich Vereint (Unequally Unified), east Germany is voting differently from the west precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.

In her book Tausend Aufbrüche (A Thousand Starts), which won this year’s top German nonfiction prize, the GDR-born historian Christina Morina says the AfD is winning in the east because it has managed to tap into a distinctive understanding of what democracy entails, which was shaped by 40 years under communist rule and remains different from that in the west.

This might sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.

“East Germany too claimed for itself to have found a democratic response to national socialism,” Morina told the Guardian in a recent interview. “It’s just that the communists’ story of how democracy worked was a deeply populist one, which claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and representing the interests of capitalism.”

The historic experience of that kind of pseudo-democracy, she argued, was one explanation for why the AfD was managing to mobilise so many more previous non-voters in the east than other parties.

Unlike the established centrist parties, the AfD has not only held rallies on the campaign trail, but organised spaziergänge, “strolls” through town centres, which are designed to evoke the peaceful Monday protests that accompanied the unravelling of socialist East Germany. It is the only party in Germany that calls for the president to be directly elected by citizens rather than through a federal convention, and has advocated for a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular referendums.

“In its election campaigns, the AfD very effectively tapped into an experience that is widely shared among east Germans,” said Morina. “That you don’t make yourself heard through voting, by engaging yourself in political parties, civic groups or unions, but by mobilising the masses for street protests.”

There is every reason to distrust the AfD’s claim to merely represent a different democratic tradition. Underlying its story of empowerment lies a deeply racist strand of thinking, which casts easterners as more pure Germans because they resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered the West German discourse after the student revolutions of 1968.

But both Mau and Morina suggest that winning back voters from the far right can only work by engaging them directly through unconventional and creative means, such as local citizens’ assemblies. To halt and eventually reverse the drifting apart of Germany’s east and west, the political centre needs to start thinking outside the box.

[Vesper 28,767]

Israel-Gaza war live: Nationwide general strike in Israel amid public anger over hostage deaths and failed ceasefire talks

Strike set to affect main airport as well as government offices, schools and business

• See all our Israel-Gaza coverage

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/02/israel-gaza-war-live-israel-faces-nationwide-general-strike-amid-public-anger-over-hostage-deaths-and-failed-ceasefire-talks

Edited September 2 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,767]

 

[Vesper 28,767]

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

6 hours ago, Vesper said:

Success of far-right AfD shows east and west Germany are drifting further apart

Likely win in Thuringia and second place in Saxony highlight how eastern voters are asserting their own political identity

• German far-right party AfD poised for state election victory in east

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/success-far-right-afd-shows-east-west-germany-drifting-further-apart

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together”.

How optimistic that image of organic healing sounds 35 years on. Tonight’s historic election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further apart.

The far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a populist wave across Europe’s largest economy. If federal elections were held tomorrow, recent polls suggest the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag.

But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after emerging top in a state election for the first time ever, on at least 30% of the vote.

And in none of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the latter slightly ahead in exit polls.

In Brandenburg, the state that surrounds the capital, Berlin, the AfD is also expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month.

As long as the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far right and prevent it from gaining a majority, its dreams of seizing power will probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD’s establishment as a dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s political identity and how it contain the rise of such forces in the future.

For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.

But economics and demographics only go so far to explain the outcome of Sunday’s votes. The population of the east is older than that in the west, but it is no longer demographically “bleeding out” as it was during the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed. In fact, every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.

Unemployment is higher, but only by a fraction – the real contrast here is between northern and southern Germany. For the last two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern lands. Levels of immigration in the eastern states that went to the polls on Sunday night are among the lowest in the whole of Germany.

According to a survey published by Olaf Scholz’s government at the start of this year, about 19% of east Germans say they feel left behind. That is twice as many as in the west (8%), but would still suggest that 80% of the population of the five eastern states do not feel they are losing out. Yet a sizeable number of them cast their votes for a party that, in its Thuringian branch, has been certified as rightwing extremist.

The eastern-born sociologist Steffen Mau has coined the term ossifikation for this trend – a play on the slang term for former GDR citizens and the biological process by which tissue hardens into bone. Far from still “catching up”, Mau writes in his recent book Ungleich Vereint (Unequally Unified), east Germany is voting differently from the west precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.

In her book Tausend Aufbrüche (A Thousand Starts), which won this year’s top German nonfiction prize, the GDR-born historian Christina Morina says the AfD is winning in the east because it has managed to tap into a distinctive understanding of what democracy entails, which was shaped by 40 years under communist rule and remains different from that in the west.

This might sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.

“East Germany too claimed for itself to have found a democratic response to national socialism,” Morina told the Guardian in a recent interview. “It’s just that the communists’ story of how democracy worked was a deeply populist one, which claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and representing the interests of capitalism.”

The historic experience of that kind of pseudo-democracy, she argued, was one explanation for why the AfD was managing to mobilise so many more previous non-voters in the east than other parties.

Unlike the established centrist parties, the AfD has not only held rallies on the campaign trail, but organised spaziergänge, “strolls” through town centres, which are designed to evoke the peaceful Monday protests that accompanied the unravelling of socialist East Germany. It is the only party in Germany that calls for the president to be directly elected by citizens rather than through a federal convention, and has advocated for a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular referendums.

“In its election campaigns, the AfD very effectively tapped into an experience that is widely shared among east Germans,” said Morina. “That you don’t make yourself heard through voting, by engaging yourself in political parties, civic groups or unions, but by mobilising the masses for street protests.”

There is every reason to distrust the AfD’s claim to merely represent a different democratic tradition. Underlying its story of empowerment lies a deeply racist strand of thinking, which casts easterners as more pure Germans because they resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered the West German discourse after the student revolutions of 1968.

But both Mau and Morina suggest that winning back voters from the far right can only work by engaging them directly through unconventional and creative means, such as local citizens’ assemblies. To halt and eventually reverse the drifting apart of Germany’s east and west, the political centre needs to start thinking outside the box.

 

All these politicaal ideologies existed since anyone can remember.
Perhaps the landscape as we know it now was created around the year 1920, one century ago.

I can speak for Greece.
We have from right to left:

- the blackies
- ok1 (New Democracy)
- ok2 (socialists)
- ok3 (left)
- the commies

50-60 years ago there were some marked differances but no fundamental ones if you look at it closely.

In the old world however, before the nineties, it was the socialists who were slowly gaining momentum.
They were doing various socialist things, such as accepting false tax returns in return for a small bribe, but life was easier. Along the seaside all the beach clubs
were lit, in Kolonaki square people were going about in kimonos and girls were selling flowers.

What's the difference now and people are drifting towards the juntist camp ?
I will tell you what the real difference is:

It's sex.
Sexual life has been eroded.
Metoo and other strange movements have become the order of the day.
Even pinup girls in magazines look drab.

Back in time even Billy Carter tried to have a go at Anouar Sadat's wife, to be scolded by the White House of course but it was the age of innocence.
So now without sex life, the old zombie ghosts are coming back to life.

Edited September 2 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,767]

1 minute ago, cosmicway said:

What's the difference now and people are drifting towards the juntist camp ?
I will tell you what the real difference is:

It's sex.
Sexual life has been eroded.
Metoo and other strange movements have become the order of the day.
Even pinup girls in magazines look drab.

[cosmicway 1,323]

Just now, Vesper said:

 

But true.

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

 

[Vesper 28,767]

40 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

 

But true.

Social media and now AI.

from 40 years ago.................

World Destruction

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

4 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Social media and now AI.

from 40 years ago.................

World Destruction

 

Look  it's simple like Columbus's egg.
When you want to make sex with somebody it means you become friends.
Never heard of people having sex and being enemies.
You even pass to her/him useful stock exchange information.
Now all this is gone.
So we have the French against the Belgians, the Germans against the Poles, the Italians against the Swiss and so on and so forth.
 

[Vesper 28,767]

10 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

'they claim a divine right to commit horrific acts'

pretty much sums it up

[Vesper 28,767]

Just now, cosmicway said:

Never heard of people having sex and being enemies.

you need to go look at married couples who are on the downslope to divorce, lololol

[Vesper 28,767]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Columbus's egg

Columbi ägg (1924) by the Swedish artist Nils von Dardel

Edited September 2 by Vesper