Random political thought thread.

[Kephalos]

@ceecee
At any rate, Abernathy's views should serve as an indication of what awaits the January 6th Committee after the election.

As to what should happen to the Committee, that's another question. There is, I believe, legislation currently being considered that was proposed, in part, on the Commitee's recommendation. If Congress manages to pass it, or pass anything to the same effect, I will gladly say that the Commitee's proceedings, which have otherwise have been characterized by a particularly disappointing and quite frankly offensive combination of bombastic rhetoric, artificial showmanship, cheap melodrama, ineptitude, midterm electioneering, and sheer ineffectiveness, as a success.

"There is only the relentless march of evidence, all of it deeply incriminating to a certain former president who keeps insisting that he was robbed of his rightful election victory. The committee’s recent hearings — there have been two in the past week, with more planned — have been organized like carefully choreographed television productions, and I mean that as a compliment. The committee has been focused on doing what all good television productions, whether factual or fictional, do: telling a story that enthralls the viewer.”

Max Boot, Washington Post columnist and also this. O tempora! O mores!

 

[ceecee]

@ceecee
At any rate, Abernathy's views should serve as an indication of what awaits the January 6th Committee after the election.

As to what should happen to the Committee, that's another question. There is, I believe, legislation currently being considered that was proposed, in part, on the Commitee's recommendation. If Congress manages to pass it, or pass anything to the same effect, I will gladly say that the Commitee's proceedings, which have otherwise have been characterized by a particularly disappointing and quite frankly offensive combination of bombastic rhetoric, artificial showmanship, cheap melodrama, ineptitude, midterm electioneering, and sheer ineffectiveness, as a success.


Max Boot, Washington Post columnist and also this. O tempora! O mores!

Jesus Christ, Max Boot is a neocon warmonger that assisted in talking the American people into the Iraq war right along with Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz. You'll forgive me if I am dismissive of any "advice" he's doling out, especially on the committees rhetoric. Why would anyone be concerned with what awaits the committee after the election? Cheney and Kinzinger were not reelected.

Why does Congress need to pass new laws that pertain to every member of the US congress and judges as well as it appears much of the Secret Service? There is already a constitutional amendment that pertains to much of that, including civil and military, state and federal. Weird that Max Boot didn't elaborate on the legislation. He's quite the pearl clutcher.

Apparently, Trump now wants to testify live. lol Please, by all means go right ahead. He doesn't grasp the difference between the political and the legal.

 

[Kephalos]

S.4573: Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022.

Max Boot, the equally bombastic and perhaps even more unhinged Jennifer Rubin, and a numer of other people like Bill Kristol, are exactly what I mean when I say that the Committe is cavalier and careless about its credibility.

Nobody with even an ounce of moral character and self-respect would suffer being complimented, let alone allow themselves to be cheered on and supported by such individuals. And no institution, such as the January 6th Committe, should suffer to be so either.

The whole thing is presided by Liz Cheney, a cynical and opportunistic politician, who boasts a record of voting with the Trump administration more than 90% of the time when she had the chance meaningfully and honestly to oppose that administration, and who has now been ridiculously elevated to the status of some kind of self-sacrificing martyr for democracy (see? bombast) because of her own political ineptitude (she did lose her primary election) and, most importantly, because of her cynicism, ambition, and utter moral bankruptcy.

 

[The Cat]

 

[Red Herring]

Humans keep surprising me again and again when it comes to shere madness.

I just saw somebody on FB say that the evil West is trying to make Russia look bad (this was in the context of the hitherto still unsolved case of the attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2) but you just wait because Putin will soon "visit" them all.

Translation: It is mean to call Putin an aggressor and to prove you wrong he will attack and conquer the West!

That same person (a German rightwinger) has repeatedly posted in their profile that they hope Putin will soon invade Germany and "rid us" of the gays and queer people.

I still have trouble understanding how these people can be real. I know they are, but they bewilder me like a three-headed purple zebra would.

 

[Coriolis]

Humans keep surprising me again and again when it comes to shere madness.

I just saw somebody on FB say that the evil West is trying to make Russia look bad (this was in the context of the hitherto still unsolved case of the attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2) but you just wait because Putin will soon "visit" them all.

Translation: It is mean to call Putin an aggressor and to prove you wrong he will attack and conquer the West!

That same person (a German rightwinger) has repeatedly posted in their profile that they hope Putin will soon invade Germany and "rid us" of the gays and queer people.

I still have trouble understanding how these people can be real. I know they are, but they bewilder me like a three-headed purple zebra would.

Indeed. If only they were as harmless.

 

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

Humans keep surprising me again and again when it comes to shere madness.

I just saw somebody on FB say that the evil West is trying to make Russia look bad (this was in the context of the hitherto still unsolved case of the attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2) but you just wait because Putin will soon "visit" them all.

Translation: It is mean to call Putin an aggressor and to prove you wrong he will attack and conquer the West!

That same person (a German rightwinger) has repeatedly posted in their profile that they hope Putin will soon invade Germany and "rid us" of the gays and queer people.

I still have trouble understanding how these people can be real. I know they are, but they bewilder me like a three-headed purple zebra would.

It's like they have no grasp of the last time Russians were in Germany.

 

[SurrealisticSlumbers]

Gubernatorial elections happening here in the States next month and I am so ready to have that shit over with already.. had enough of the propagandist mailings every. single. day.

This isn't really related to politics but I finally got around to watching the Chernobyl series on HBO Max... binge watched three episodes back to back. It's that good.

 

[The Cat]

So much this.​

 

[The Cat]

Neither party can put either djinni back into the bottle.
LGBTQ+ folks, vote like your life depends on it...Because...winter is coming.
​

 

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

Gubernatorial elections happening here in the States next month and I am so ready to have that shit over with already.. had enough of the propagandist mailings every. single. day.

This isn't really related to politics but I finally got around to watching the Chernobyl series on HBO Max... binge watched three episodes back to back. It's that good.

It was incredible. I had read the book about a month before the series started and both were terrifying but the acting was amazing.

I got 8 mailers out of the mailbox yesterday. One for the insane woman winning for Sec. of State, seven for various proposals and how they are "satanic". I already voted but I'm so so tired of all these crazy ass mfers.

 

[Kephalos]

On Constitutionalizing a Balanced Budget: Journal of Politics.

Abstract: Do constitutional rules that mandate a balanced budget promote fiscal discipline? Although such rules are at the heart of austerity debates across the world, we know surprisingly little about their consequences. We leverage original data on constitutional budget provisions and analyze their effect on governments’ primary budget balances. We find that constitutional rules that require balanced budgets are robustly associated with fiscal discipline. The constitutional effect remains even after controlling for statutory balanced-budget rules. Furthermore, the effect strengthens as constitutions become more difficult to amend and under conditions of borderline solvency—two implications consistent with a constitutional impact. The results will be surprising to those who appreciate both the strong pressures against fiscal discipline and the creativity of governments in devising strategies to evade spending limits. These findings provide a reference point for policy debates surrounding financial crises in many national contexts.

Amick, Joe, Terrence Chapman, and Zachary Elkins. "On constitutionalizing a balanced budget." The Journal of Politics 82, no. 3 (2020): 1078-1096

 

[Red Herring]

Brexit is not the root cause of Britain’s chaos

Great Britain: Brexit is not the root cause of Britain’s chaos​

Four changes of prime minister in six years: what happens when politics fragments, but political parties cannot.

Yet to understand what is going on, one really has to look much farther back than 2016 - not just to the events but also to the structures of British politics, and one in particular. Whereas most continental western European states elect their legislatures using one or another form of proportional representation, Britain (like America) uses the majoritarian system known as First Past The Post. This sounds like a mere technical distinction, but is in fact fundamental to the character of politics in those countries. Understand that, and you understand it all.

Unless their support is very concentrated in certain seats where than can win (like that of the pro-independence Scottish National Party), small parties in the British system are therefore doomed to irrelevance. So almost all of what is important happens within the Conservatives and Labour. New or breakaway parties are doomed, so change tends to take place within the two major ones. Each is itself a coalition of different perspectives and traditions. But because these are internal, there are no fixed structures - no Koalitionsausschuss - to hold negotiations and find compromise. There is no process of agreeing a coalition deal. There is no way of measuring the size of each tendency, as they are fluid and MPs and members can belong to more than one tendency within the party at once, and move between them.

But since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the 2008 economic crisis, a different sort of political shift has spread throughout most of the democratic West: fragmentation. Economic identities and experiences can no longer be understood through simple categories of class, due to the liberalisation of trade and work as well as technological change. Cultural and identity politics has become increasingly salient in more diverse societies. And voters are less deferential to monolithic institutions, whether Volksparteien, religions, trade unions, the military or established institutions more generally. They expect greater choice and individuality. They move in multiple different directions.

In a proportional system this movement might have formed a new party capturing perhaps 10 percent of the vote, something like the AfD in Germany. But under Britain’s First-Past-The-Post system Cameron tried to contain it within the Conservative Party by committing in early 2013 to hold a referendum on leaving the EU and even suggesting he might support Brexit. This was all about maintaining the delicate balance of the party’s unmanageable internal coalition. The economic and cultural fragmentation also destabilised the internal coalition in the Labour Party, which in 2015 plunged into civil war when the old-fashioned socialist Jeremy Corbyn won the party leadership. In a proportional system the Corbyn project would have formed a new party, something like Die Linke in Germany. But instead it had to be absorbed into the internal coalition of a bigger party with which it was not compatible.

tldr: A "first past the post" system tends to enforce a two party system which in turn leads to political radicalization/polarization and instability.

There are alternatives but that would require admiting that it is possible to learn from other liberal democracies.

 

[Kephalos]

@Red Herring
Proportional representation encourages political fragmentation and political instability. Spain, Germany (both Weimar and now), Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel are examples of how chaotic politics can become under such an impolitical system. A unitary, proportional-representation, parliamentary democracy is the absolute worst kind of representative democratic constitution anyone has ever come up with. Such a system has no redeeming features (c.f. the Israeli Constitution and Israeli politics).

The British parliamentary system is tempered by having single-member, first-past-the-post districts, an independent Civil Service, and a House of Lords (and it's still chaotic). Germany's parliamentary system is tempered by federalism, independent administrative and judiciary systems, high thresholds for representation in Parliament, a Constitutional Court, constitutionally protected Fundamental Rights, unamendable clauses in the Constitution, and a failsafe in emergency power but it was chaotic in the 1920s and it is becoming chaotic once again. Spain also has a robust judiciary and a semi-federal system, but it suffers from one of the worst pathologies of proportional-representation parliamentarism, namely, that the political fragmentation promoted by such a system forces moderate right- and left-wing political parties to form governments with extremist parties. Case in point, the current Spanish Prime Minister (Pedro Sanchez, PSOE) came to power with a razor-thin majority of a coalition of his own left-wing PSOE, left-wing populists, former Communists and republicans (anti-monarchists), Basque separatist terrorists, and Catalonian secessionists.

 

[The Cat]

 

[Kephalos]

"Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jacka**es." H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). A Little Book in C-Major (1916).

@Siúil a Rúin: Same thing applies to the whole of the entertainment industry (in every single country and every single historical period) and most of the Internet.

 

[ceecee]

Congratulations Brazil!

Brazil's Bolsonaro silent on Lula victory, transition talks begin

President Jair Bolsonaro will not publicly address his defeat in Brazil's presidential election until Tuesday, a minister said, amid doubts over whether the far-right nationalist will accept the victory of his leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

www.reuters.com

 

[Burning Paradigm]

Congratulations Brazil!

Brazil's Bolsonaro silent on Lula victory, transition talks begin

President Jair Bolsonaro will not publicly address his defeat in Brazil's presidential election until Tuesday, a minister said, amid doubts over whether the far-right nationalist will accept the victory of his leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

www.reuters.com

DOWN goes Bolsonaro.

Sad that celebration will turn to caution, given that Jair is almost >90% likely to deny and fight the results. Hopefully, Brazil doesn't have its own J6 or worse.