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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1222 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 4, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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France's left coalition NPF appears to have won the election, with Macron's party in 2nd and the RN 3rd.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ck7gydwgvy8t

I haven't faintest clue about how the french electoral system works but perhaps Macron was correct to call an early election.

Eh, Macron could have kept a coalition going with his party dominant in it for another three years. Now he definitely won't have that; Ensemble is at best going to be an equal partner.

Who's won is complicated, because you need a majority to get a Prime Minister and NFP does not have anything close to a majority.

The most likely coalition to actually work, eyeballing it, is NFP minus LFI (the largest and most extreme party in NFP) plus assorted non-NFP leftists plus Ensemble plus Les Républicains (NFP minus LFI plus Ensemble plus assorted leftists does not have a majority, and LFI and Ensemble have promised not to work with each other). The problem is, Les Républicains have said they won't go along with that.

Another possibility would be simply NFP plus Ensemble, but that has the LFI vs. Ensemble issue - LFI's primary policy goal is to chuck out the Constitution and start over, which isn't really amenable to compromise and which Ensemble, as agents of the status quo, really don't want.

Another possibility would be enough members of Ensemble willing to break the cordon to form a coalition with RN and Les Républicains (and assorted rightists), although the numbers don't look promising for that as some in Macron's own party within Ensemble, the least favourable to breaking the cordon, would be needed for a majority.

The last, ever-present possibility, of course, is no deal and a deadlocked legislature until Macron can call another snap election in a year.

NB: I'm not an expert and may be wrong about some stuff here.

The NPF has promised to scrap the pension and immigration reforms passed by the current government, to set up a rescue agency for undocumented migrants and to facilitate visa applications.

It also wants to put caps on basic goods to combat the cost of living crisis and raise the minimum wage.

For all the "Europe surging to the right" scaremongering, it seems like the only outcome is always even more money for illegal migrants and leftists expanding their control over the state

As long as the cordon holds and the parties outside the cordon don't just win outright, parties outside the cordon gaining ground will force bigger and bigger coalitions to retain a majority, involving stranger bedfellows that are still inside the cordon (usually socialists and SJ radicals, because the cordon doesn't apply to them).

On what I imagine you see as the plus side, this tends to feed the parties outside the cordon, because conservative voters get pissed off about the within-cordon conservative parties obviously betraying them and start voting outside the cordon, which of course just feeds on itself. The obvious endpoints for this process look like "cordon is abandoned in order to stem the tide", "cordon is overwhelmed by absolute majority" or "all rightist parties consumed by outside-cordon, but this is less than a majority and socialists/SJers have power for a long while".

I mean, here's the issue for the far-right - there is majority support for their harsh treatment of immigrants (and I say that openly as a dirty soft hearted liberal), but even in Europe, the far-right is dominated by weirdoes and people with reactionary social views people don't want to vote for.

An actual successful anti-immigration party would be basically be moderate to center-left or center-right on most issues, while also being wildly far-right on immigration, but of course, most of the people who deeply care about immigration are also right-wing on other issues.

Polling seems to suggest the opposite. More conservative social views better align with the average voter, it's generally the economic views that they disagree with. The problem isn't the policies it's just the elites have exclusive access to all the npc programming devices via their choke hold on information. Far right is weird not because of it's policy, it's weird because the authorities say it's weird.

The median voter is to the right of the median college-educated center-left politician but to the left of the median far-right politician, and in general, people are more scared of people trying to ban things they see as basically harmless or not that important than people who will allow it, especially when they people opposed to something seem obsessed with it.

I'm not under the assumption that the median American voter is super pro-trans for example, but they largely don't care plus American's inherent libertarianism on a lot of issues (which hurts the Right & Left at times) means it seems weird when somebody seems obsessed with it and acts like it's one of the most important issues in America. Again, ironically, not talking about it and quietly passing a law that does 80% of what Florida did would go over fine in probably 30 out of 50 states, but when you start talking about it, people get freaked out.

Like, in the US, abortion restriction referendums are losing by 10 to 15 points in states Trump won by 20. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with social liberalism, but find what actual social conservatives want to do far more scary when they try to put it in practice.

This is all doubly true in Europe, where there really is no socially conservative movement, so when far-righters end up saying out there things like women's basic rights and such, people decide to swallow their anger and vote for the boring centrist parties.

Geert Wilders is now PM of the Netherlands.

Except Wilders isn't the PM and had to actually step back from wanting to be PM despite his party doing well, because of his wackiness on a variety of issues, and compared to other right-wing parties, he at least attempts to portray himself as anti-Islam/immigration for culturally liberal reasons, just not bigotry.

No he is not.

Dick Schoof is the prime minister of the Netherlands

News from Ukraine: continued bombing is destroying the electricity grid, forcing rolling blackouts

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0dmwjnmp4mo

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-is-winning-the-energy-war-and-plunging-ukraine-into-darkness/

I don't fully understand why it's taken so long for the Ukrainian electricity grid to collapse. I understand there was some excess capacity (Soviet Ukraine was much more heavily industrialized than modern Ukraine). Presumably the Russians had to grind through the Patriots and other air defences before they could destroy the electricity grid. Ukraine seems to be reliant upon imports from Europe and small-scale production, gas and renewables. It's still summer right now and so the situation is only dire not catastrophic. Metallurgical companies downsizing, not people freezing.

It seems that Ukraine is getting pushed out of towns nobody has ever heard of like Vovchansk and Chasiv Yar. On pro-Ukrainian twitter, Julian Ropcke seems to be dooming while War Monitor and Ilia Ponomarenko are still going strong. Pro-Russian twitter is pretty reliably pro-Russian.

The NYT is posting about Ukrainian war crimes, possibly indicating that enthusiasm is cooling. Then again, there are different factions within the elite, it's not monolithic as Biden shows us: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-killings-us.html

It was less about the Russian's ability to hit targets and more about what they were targeting.

https://www.ft.com/content/4d583259-7565-4cbc-972e-ea77f4a76175

Russia’s first aerial bombardment campaign in the winter of 2022-23 targeted the country’s electrical distribution grid — which could be repaired relatively easily, according to officials and experts. But the latest barrages are zeroing in on thermal and hydroelectric power plants which will be much harder and more expensive to fix, rebuild or replace, they said.

Went for distribution early which could be repaired relatively quickly, now they are targeting generation itself which will take years to fix.

Power plants are surprisingly hard to destroy and for all the early smugness about vulnerabilities in Ukrainian rolling stock and transformers leading to total collapse early on, the internal logistics for Ukraine are simply robust enough to withstand missile strikes. Saturation attacks to overwhelm air defense still must hit something valuable, and the hardening of soviet legacy infrastructure built to communist standards (cheap, hardy, not reliable) means the energy grid does not suffer that much.

It really has to be emphasized that aerial bombardments of built up environs is really difficult. The US has made it look easy, but standoff weapons have terrible Circular Error of Probability and can never reliably hit a single specific target, and scoring only five to twelve hits per target is pretty poor.

As for specific towns falling, this is to be expected and will happen more going forward. Chasiv Yar was expected to fall back in April following Adviivka, and the Ukrainian defense is shockingly bad for such an obvious attack vector. The Russians should aim to capture Kramatorsk to achieve their highwater mark in the 2014 war, but resources wasted at Vovchansk are surprisingly high. After Ukraine fumbled their much vaunted 2023 counteroffensive, enthusiasm has definitely fallen. NYT has covered Ukrainian failures before, and will continue to do so because the Ukrainians are only victims of Russian aggression, not a protected class which can do no wrong. White on white violence holds no value for journos, even if the whites are slavs.

How about that the NYT is a paper of record and generally maintains at least some journalistic standards? This isn’t HuffPost here. Ukrainians being white, and factually whiter than Russians, isn’t the reason for their bad behavior being covered. It’s that NYT is a high-quality paper.

The Ukrainians have done shitty things, thats not the point being disputed. The point is that highlighting the NYtimes coverage of the war crimes does not signify a cultural change, for the NYtimes has always covered Ukrainian atrocities in observably consistent measure.

This coverage only happens though because whites, even slavs, are not a protected class. NYT consistently downplays islamist and black violence and fully supports every progressive cause uncritically. To call it a paper of record is to give credence to its framing of the current cultural mileau, and THAT is the objectionable aspect of trying to use NYT for consensus building.

The NYT was pretty willing to talk about Palestinian violence. As I recall they were critical of CHAZ(which honestly sounds like a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and ill advised toupee at an RV show, but I digress).

I don't think talking about protected classes is the right framing for the NYT specifically. The NYT maintains a certain level of journalistic standards which causes them to engage in a certain amount of warranted both-sidesism that flies in the face of their biases.

The inconvenience of material reality is something the NYT is forced to report on against their will. Wherever possible the NYT will ignore their progressive pets and try to shift blame away from the protected classes. In every article where muslim migrants commit crime there is an addendum about how migrants in aggregate are net beneficiaries, or how in black crime there also exist white criminals. Calling it the paper of record gives succour to the false pretence of evenhandedness that the journos are maintaining against their will. Look at their coverage of anything involving muslims, migrants or blacks and it is filled with exculpatory statements meant to deflect attention away from perpetrators and signify the problem ultimately lies with the enemy of the day.

With international attention now focused on Biden and the UK election, Israel has announced the seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the West Bank, their largest land grab since the 1993 Oslo accords and their third such seizure this year. Although the decision to seize the land was made last month, it was not publicized until yesterday. Israeli settlers have committed more than 1,000 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank since October.

Can I ask what is your source for the last sentence more than 1,000 settler attacks against Palestinians? Given the Israeli military responses since October how do they define 'settler attacks', is this lynchings?

My source was the Associated Press, which cited the UN. Looking into it, they appear to be relying on the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which reports that

Between 7 October and 1 July, OCHA recorded 1,050 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, of which 107 led to Palestinian fatalities and injuries, 828 led to damage to Palestinian property and 115 led to both casualties and damage to property. In this period, over 45,600 Palestinian-owned trees and saplings were destroyed by people known or believed to be Israeli settlers.

The UN unofficially considers the dissolution of Israel to be one of its core missions. The above may have actually happened in some form, but there's no reason to consider UN reporting on anything related to Israel any more reliable than the white house's statement's on Biden's mental state.

When you consider that Israel has a huge military superiority, vastly superior resources and a large pool of committed ultranationalists that really doesn’t seem so damning. Pooling fatalities and injuries is also questionable. Generally speaking there is not much evidence that most or indeed any substantial proportion of Israeli Jews have significant violent racial animus towards Arabs/Muslims. If anything, given the death toll and atrocities of October 7th and the fact that Israel controls de facto the West Bank, the reprisal attacks (on the civilian side) were arguably pretty limited.

I might agree, were it not for the Israeli government’s continued refusal to put a stop to the attacks. Until the Israeli settlers are punished for their actions and the Israeli army begins to deal with them as harshly as they do the West Bank Palestinians, I’d consider the attacks a serious black mark against the country. Israel’s recent decision to keep annexing Palestinian territory just makes things worse.

The IDF has used administrative detention on extremist settlers, and settlers who actually murdered Palestinians have gotten life sentences (eg 2 of the 3 settlers convicted for murdering Mohammed Abu Khdeir got life and the third got 21 years). But most WB Palestinian fatalities were killed while attacking Israelis. It’s trivial to depict Israelis as the bad guys by cropping out Palestinian violence.

Last year’s Huwara pogrom, “the worst attack stemming from Israeli settler violence in the northern West Bank in decades” per Wikipedia, killed one Palestinian, hours after Palestinians had killed two settlers nearby. The IDF arrested 16 settlers, two of whom are still in administrative detention.

“Settlers kill Palestinians with impunity” is a forest which turns out to have no trees when you look for them.

Its not Palestinian territory and never has been. The legal rights of Palestinians on Area A and B is dependant on the legal owners regarding land use rights as under the Ottomans and later the British. A bunch of squatters are free to stay on any piece of dirt until someone comes about with the right piece of paper and the guns to enforce the words on the paper. The Palestinians should direct their ire towards Jordan which disclaimed all claim to the West Bank and left the Palestinians truly stateless.

Given the vileness of how Palestinians treat each other, much less Israelis, the burden of proof for innocence lies on the Palestinians. If the PA does not record crimes committed by Palestinians until it comes time to pay the bounties of the martyr fund, then Palestinians are innocent eternally. Given the strong support for Oct 7 in the West Bank

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514

I seriously doubt the 'victims' of settler violence are innocent lambs free of sin.

Not to say the settlers are themselves necessarily justified. But the Israelis are actually willing to hold their criminals accountable. The Palestinians throw parades and demand the criminals be free to commit more crimes... like Haniyeh.

Britain is going to the polls today. All signs point to Labour's Keir Starmer getting Britain's largest ever landslide on one of the smallest vote shares. I'm hesitant to change the system of voting we've had for centuries on the basis of one election but it's very awkward that Labour is likely to get approx. 450 seats on 40% of the vote while Reform UK is expected to get approx. 10 seats on slightly under half that.

Poll of polls is here: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

A couple of interesting phenomena:

  1. Reform UK suddenly doubled its vote share in the last month, drawing even more strongly from (the left-wing) Labour party than from the right wing Conservatives. This can be pretty much purely attributed to Nigel Farage entering the race and shows how important a single charismatic figure can be IMHO. The great forces theory of history has much to recommend it, but it's also true that Right Man in the Right Place historical contingencies have more effect than I think is commonly credited to them.
  2. Reform UK suddenly dropped in the last week, and all the freed voters go to the Conservatives. I would bet good money that this resulted directly from Farage saying* that eastward expansion of Nato had provoked Putin and given him an excuse to invade Ukraine - something he had predicted ten years ago. Not sure whether he would have done better to lie like Marine Le Pen, but he seems to have paid a price for honesty.

*Quote:

"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war,"

I think he could've doubled down and reminded people why their energy bills are so high. The oil and gas sanctions on Russia have caused trillions in economic damage to Europe. German manufacturing is declining, Britain's last steel mills are closing... All this has a lot to do with energy prices. Net Zero is also to blame, which Farage has railed against.

The UK has certainly at no point in history stood against an aggressor at the expense of its own economic interests, and the UK does not hold defiant resistance against European warmongers as a central aspect of its national character. Appeasement famously is extremely popular in the UK and the proponents of appeasement are feted in the history books as wise pacifists whose counsel averted further war.

Sarcasm aside, Reform is firstly an antimigrant party, and it captures the right wing cranks just like the Greens capture the left wing cranks. The difference is that Reform can accept anti Russian elements in their ranks, while the Greens have to be in perfect lockstep with Gaza, Energy and Trans stuff. It is likely that being anti-Russia is part of the anti-EU stance, which is common to much of the Right, but that still doesn't mean being pro-Russia is a vote winning position. The only thing Farage needs to do is promise to deport all muslims, and he will probably be allowed to fly the hammer and sickle in Clapton.

I've tried this with my parents, it doesn't work. They just think I'm making excuses for Brexit (in a well-meaning way). I think this strategy would also run the risk of activating the 'Blitz Spirit' gene. There's nothing Brits are more proud of than suffering for the sake of a good cause.

I know what you mean, there's a certain cohort that will blame everything on Brexit. Britain has all kinds of problems with planning, energy prices, immigration, taxation, bureaucracy and national strategy generally. But some people seem to think that everything was fine until populism happened in 2016 and that caused all the problems, now growing increasingly dire.

He's probably used to people not taking what the media says about him at face value and so isn't too worried about negative media portrayal. That appears to have been a miscalculation when it came to comments about Russia/Ukraine. Or it could be that he's simply a very honest person.

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