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Wellness Wednesday for June 5, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Might not be the best place top post this, but is anyone going to do an effort post on the Indian election ? The most electrifying 'nothing happened' that I've seen in a long time.

For those who are from the outside looking in, I strongly recommend checking out Shekhar Gupta's segments on ThePrint - 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=7wdKaM3ePz8' . He sits squarely in the center (American Center, would be considered Libertarian/ lib-right in India), but is old enough to stop giving fucks. I have been reading his work since about 10 years old, and I can vouch for his credibility.

The most interesting tl,drs for me are :

  • The Congress commands incredible default votes, and had been losing millions of votes each time Rahul Gandhi spoke. This time he shut up, and the Congress recovered
  • The Indian elections are intact. We've called it the world's biggest and fairest elections. And the results have maintained the sanctity of that claim
  • Modi wins but is weaker = dependent on coalition partners
  • Modi sidelined Yogi and lost huge ground in UP - Modi/Shah narcissism hurt them. We might see some ugly internal Shah vs Yogi dogfighting in the last few years.
  • Modi destroyed the party structure in Maharashtra, and lost huge ground there - Modi/Shah narcisissm hurt them
  • Chandra babu Naidu will have insane leverage. Similar to the NDP in Canada.
  • Indian voters cannot be permanently polarized. Caste, Regionalism, Religion & Economics will continue to be active threads and Modi's attempts to use Religion as the main exclusive polarizer ran out of steam this time.

Might be worth discussing in the transnational thursday thread. I am mostly completely unaware of Indian politics. I have a vague sense that Caste and Religion are big issues, and that Modi is some kind of traditionalist. Aside from that I'm totally in the dark. What do they even argue about?

Modi is pro-Hinduism and NOT pro-Islam or Christianity. I'm given to understand that in practice he's much more Islamophobic than anti-Christian due to eminently practical conditions on the ground related reasons. He's relatively more socially conservative than his main opponents, the Indian National Congress, which were the dominant party running India as a dictatorship under socialism and are still controlled by the same family- the Gandhi family(no relation to Mahatma). The INC is, as might be implied from their history, quite a bit less committed to democracy and democratic norms despite being the relatively socially liberal opposition party. I think the BJP is generally a bit more willing to bite bullets on necessary economic reforms, but that might be specific to Modi.