I don't know much about UK politics but I'm certainly a bit worried that the terrorist attack in Paris today just before the election will be enough for Marine Le Pen to pull a Trump.

Wow. This does not look good. :-/

It is almost assured that they will elect the Nazi.

The French don't use FPTP so I'm guessing they actually won't.

I mean, other than using runoff voting I really know nothing about French politics. I'm guessing she won't win because alt-right candidates never have the kind of sweeping popular support that lets them win without splitting the "well-adjusted adult" vote.

I didn't think we'd ever find such a topic.

I don't know anything about French politics but I do know that world politics seems to be sloshing somewhat to the unfortunate kind of right (starboard, if you will) and I'm hoping we can just get it over with so we can get cracking on the final war. Or admitting that we are fighting the final war. Or something. Isn't the UK planning a policy move away from focusing on that climate change hoax?

Wow. It's pretty rough to be a Brit. A thread about your general election instantly turns into one about France's and I saw a commercial last night that tells you not to let your dogs have British teeth.

It's not really a thread about the election I just wanted to make a joke none of you will get.

Speaking of France it looks like Macron might have come first in the first round if the exit polls are correct.

I got it! Then I was sad that it doesn't seem to exist.

I don't think I can realistically vote this time which is ****. I was happy with my Edinburgh MP and I hope he's still around when I come back.

Thats why we broke up with them

American here, what's a "centralist"

I don't know the context in which you heard/read that word. It's probably someone mangling talk about political centrism. Alternatively it's someone ragging on Jeremy Corbyn and his dire leadership style and making comparisons to Leninist "democratic centralism".

I'll see what I can do.



Ian Murray then? There's a decent chance he might lose his seat this time since Scottish Labour are in the middle of collapsing.

Sound familiar?

****ing lmao, it's just improbable enough to happen in a post 2012 world.

I mean, in some sense it's not wrong to say "vote for us to block racism" is basically a blackmail, because, you know, far right populism appeals well to people because it doesn't just shrug and say "oh well lol, your suffering is inevitable because .. and economics and ..."

Imagine a funny white guy on television encouraging young privileged urbanites to mock rural people as stupid, ignorant and deserving of their suffering.

Don't have to imagine!

Tommy Shepherd actually, and I suspect he's completely safe.

I still think the SNP will lose some MPs this time around. Gaining 90-something percent of the seats with an average of just over 50% of the vote in the last election strikes me as a very fortunate spread of voters across constituencies and wouldn't need much of a change to result in a bunch of seat changes.

Most of the people that I know, who are voting for Le Pen, live in the suburbs, & they've all witnessed their version of White Flight over the past two decades, as their neighborhoods have become majority Muslim (or at least appear to be because the white folks no longer walk around), & as their bakers, & butchers hit the road, & were replaced by coiffeurs for Africans, & Halal butchers, & a plethora of low quality markets where artisan shops used to stand. They see that their children are no longer served pork in school, that they can't find non-Halal meat in their markets, that their roads & sidewalks are lined with trash, & with riots & car-burnings outside & in the news (not to mention actual terrorism), they don't feel as safe walking around at night as they used to (not that many of the pubs haven't closed because their new clients only drink espresso with water but insist on keeping the tables for hours). I spent a lot of time walking in, & around Paris (including St. Denis), & though I wasn't in the "old France", I've heard these people tell stories about how different their neighborhoods were before, & how the immigrants that are replacing them are usurping their culture & literally destroying their neighborhoods. I used to smile & smirk at these people with my liberal moral high ground, because in my own country, I heard similar complaints about Mexicans for much of my life. However, France is far more generous with their social welfare than we are in the US, & Mexican history is American history. We can sit around, & pretend that the conclusions that many of these people have come to are just due to racism, but I think it's much more than that, & I don't think that the left is making an attempt to empathize, & if they are, they're failing miserably, & if this trend continues, if we don't see Marine Le Pen in office, we may very well see her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. If the left can't acknowledge both the reality & perception of this clash of cultures, the right will gain strength.

I fully expect them to lose about a dozen seats. I got a Tory campaign leaflet through my door yesterday that was just an attack ad on the SNP plastered with pictures of Ruth Davidson. It didn't list any policies, who my local candidate is or even if it was for the May council election or the general election.

The reactions I've seen to the results of the first round of the election have been surprisingly naive and misguided. American pundits are celebrating that Le Pen "only" came in second. They're ignoring that neither of the mainstream parties managed to make it to the final round. They've become irrelevant! Doesn't that indicate a severe disenchantment with the French political system amongst a vast majority of the French electorate? It's surprising how many fail to appreciate that her rise is symptomatic of a much greater, deep sense of disillusion and alienation among a wide part of the French population. It won't be erased if Le Pen loses.

If HRC won, even narrowly, I suspect most on the center-left would have denied that the fact Trump made it so far meant American society and politics are deeply flawed. They would have insisted that the electoral outcome indicated that "America is already great".

I remember back from last summer when my arch-liberal friends were rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of the "permanent destruction of the Republican party".

Too bad they didn't realize the extent that something fundamentally broken

1. can't be further destroyed, and
2. is perfectly capable of trying to force its "unworkable" ideas on the governed until something... interesting happens

Yeah, people have been extremely denialistic about how rapidly the political landscape is changing. And they will refuse to internalize the problem. Regardless of Russia's involvement, Trump still did fantastically well, Russia could not have done what they did without sickness already being pervasive in the American political system. But instead of facing that, the "enemy" is externalized, now the problem is just racist KKK members and Russia, or more generally ignorant hicks, but people even today will still deny that there was anything bad about HRC's campaign.

I've had a person tell me that Hillary only lost because of the slanderous, decades-long right-wing campaign against her. Which actually may be true, but then, why would you place as your frontrunner a person who is deeply unpopular and has decades of slanderous attacks against her in the public consciousness?

We'll all be serfs soon anyways though, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

Yeah, I kind of forgot about that. In the early days of the election it really seemed to people that the Republicans were finished, and HRC would sweep the election.

You wish.

Yeah, I guess landowners had an obligation to protect serfs. We'll have to rent ourselves out as serfs, and there won't be rental insurance.

The rightward swing isn't born out by demographics. Americans, for example, are becoming much more socially progressive and open to economic heterodoxy by large. But in 2016, the American political system forced them to choose between "social moderate / radical neoliberalism" vs. "vicious racist / **** corporations", and they chose the option which is frankly a good bit more rational for them in a lot of ways.

None of this would be an issue if the left provided a reasonable economic platform.

Reid, have you gotten to the part in your microeconomics book that talks about how monopolies offload almost all of a tariff onto their customers?

Not to spoil the ending for you or anything.

Certainly, the whole "racist hick" narrative should be losing its teeth. Even honestly speaking, Trump supporters are significantly less racist than my own grandfather was. As far as economic heterodoxy, yeah, today people can openly talk about Marxist ideas and very few people speak against it. Which is pretty substantially different.

Of course when HRC gets paid 10 year's wages for a single speech to a bank, she's going to look horrible, given people still are bitter about the housing crisis and banks, large corporations have only grown fatter and worse.

As much as I hate to be "that guy", I still feel Bernie Sanders was the best choice. Of course, it's fairly unknown to what degree his campaign was trolled by Russians and fake news.

By the way, has anyone else ever commented that Russian trolling the election with fake news was probably more influential than any of the hacking?

Not yet, just finished the part about supply and demand curves, but will keep you posted.

But, I'm not suprised that's the punchline. When will Google and Facebook merge?

I don't see this happening ever.

/s

I meant that literally, but then again I am only looking a decade out.

Whoa, hold your horses, buck-o. They earned that appellation. They could have voted green; they could have voted libertarian; they could have abstained. They didn't. Instead, they voted for the white supremacist candidate with white supremacist promises and a white supremacist cabinet. If your vote put him in power, and he does something he told you he was gonna do, his sins are yours. Don't like it? Be a better citizen next time.

I legit wonder how many Marxist accelerationists are in office today.

Does anybody even pretend that Clinton isn't a pro-corporate extremist, though?

Supposedly Trump's opp research was going to be damning. But anyway, it shows there's real potential for an actual moderate SocDem candidate. (I mean moderate in the worldwide sense, not in the US sense. A moderate in the US sense would be a mincing corporatist who only wants to kill half the gay people, after all.)



yes

How would their executives benefit from a merger?

They are ignorant and hateful, and downplaying that was I think a mistake..

In any case, I have no sympathy for the views of the right, they *should* know better.


Are any running?


Yes. But maybe I interact with a few too many partisans.


I doubt that was real. No puppet, no puppet, you're the puppet. But yes it is a good sign.


Good.

I guess they wouldn't, as long as they're able to sell data there's no motivation to.