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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!

This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html

He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."

For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.

Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!

https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637

Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.

It's the super bowl if only the people of soy and normies watched it. The kind of underclass trash that watched Big Brother and Jersey Shore. Eurovision is extremely gay and unrepresentative.

Please avoid this kind of snarling at the groups you don’t like.

For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.

From what I recall there was no notable booing during Israel's performance, but lots while the head of the EBU was on screen. I'm guessing they assumed there would be booing for the Israeli entry and planned accordingly, but didn't think that the audience would boo the inoffensive bureaucrat who's technically in charge.

We heard booing for both.

Representing Ireland is a (sigh) non-binary singer-songwriter calling herself* (sigh) Bambie Thug. Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values. I believe I read somewhere that she claimed she was originally planning to wear a dress with the word "ceasefire" or something to that effect emblazoned on it in ogham (am ancient Irish script) but the Eurovision people made her wear something else.

*Don't care.

Bambie Thug

acting in accordance with her values

Would that be spermjacking you at gunpoint?

I get the "gunpoint" part, but why "spermjacking"? Is there a "Bambie" among the various women who've impregnated themselves with stolen semen, or something?

Lol

Don't do this.

I mean, okay, but I was just laughing at that guy's joke. Is it against the rules to say "ha ha, your joke was funny"?

Yes. It's not because we hate humor. It's because threads full of people saying "Lol" and "This" are annoying, so we discourage it.

Understood.

She's said that she thought Isreal should be excluded if they're excluding Russia.

This made me suspicious about the sources of historical anti-witch propaganda.

Do we know how unified the witch communities position on Isreal / Zionism is?

Is it common for Eurovision to consistently have so many LGBT performers? I clicked on a few participating countries' performers and all but one seemed to be in that category. I get that the whole thing is pretty gay but even taking that into account it seemed a bit unusual.

Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values.

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel? I know Israel's not exactly popular these days but I feel over half of the public statements I see denouncing them come out of ROI. I definitely haven't heard of any other national contestant having to defend their choice to attend the competition based on Israel being there.

Is there a meaningful undercurrent of anti-semitism in Irish society (yes I know anti-semitism isn't definitionally the same as Israelophobia, but they tend to be pretty correlated)? It's not as if there are a lot of Muslims there. Or is it mostly performative political progressivism, like their cousins in Scotland?

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?

Brendan O'Neill has an interesting write-up today about Bambie Thug and the historical links between Ireland and Israel.

Maybe they're still salty over Isreal's use of fraudulent Irish passports / identities for their intelligence agencies wet work.

This is the first I've heard of it, do you have a source?

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/israeli-official-expelled-over-use-of-fake-passports-1.678818

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/israel-insists-it-has-no-case-to-answer-over-fake-passports/26634905.html

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20424935.html

I was living in Ireland for this. It was well reported but didn't really persist.

Dead link.

Fixed

Thanks a lot.

Is it common for Eurovision to consistently have so many LGBT performers?

When I was a kid, my memory is that the western European entrants tended to be knowingly, overwhelmingly camp (over-the-top dance-pop songs, garish stage production etc.), while the eastern European entrants tended to be more serious and subdued (mid-tempo ballads accentuated with traditional instrumentation). The audience for Eurovision has always been as gay as they come, but I think it's only within the last decade that many European countries have started consciously leaning into this by submitting performers with the intent of appealing to gay audiences i.e. performers who are themselves LGBT.

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?

As a country which got its independence in the last century, the Irish carry around a residual postcolonial sentiment and (rightly or wrongly) see the struggle for Palestinian statehood as analogous to the battle for Irish independence. It may be "performative" in some sense, but the Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates the modern progressive/woke movement by decades e.g. when I was in primary school, every Easter we'd raise funds for the charity Trócaire, who even at the time were outspoken in their support for Palestine. Even many social conservatives are sympathetic to the cause: my mum often tells the story of her father (a devout Catholic who was opposed to the legalisation of divorce, never mind abortion) visiting Israel in the early 2000s and describing how appalled he was by the security checks Palestinians were made to go through on entrance to the state. The Provisional IRA (active in both north and south from the 60s to the late 90s) were in direct contact with the PLO, and even received training from them. I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts. A friend of mine joked that this makes Israel-Palestine one of the most effective shibboleths for gauging someone's religious background in Northern Ireland. Even prior to October 7th, it wasn't remotely uncommon to see Palestinian flags adorning the balconies of working-class council flats in Dublin (October 7th has "gentrified" the cause such that the middle-class houses who were displaying Ukrainian flags for the last two years have now added Palestinian flags, or even replaced them). I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I don't think the alleged parallels between Palestine-Israel and Ireland-Britain really hold water (e.g. to my mind, Hamas leaders have made it perfectly clear that their ultimate goal is the extermination of every Jew from the face of the earth; while I have nothing nice to say about the IRA, they did not have the stated goal of massacring every Briton), but that's neither here nor there.

I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country (the most famous novel to come out of the country has a sympathetic Jewish protagonist; there's been at least one prominent Jewish elected official in my lifetime; there was a Jewish guy in my class in secondary school who was far more popular than I was). If there had been scenes similar to London or Sydney over the last six months (e.g. rabbis getting harassed on the street, mass crowds chanting "gas the Jews"), I imagine I would have heard about it. There aren't many Muslims in Ireland, but thirty times as many Muslims as Jews according to the 2016 census, and the ratio is probably even more skewed now. Even the numerous pro-Palestine protests that I've seen seem to be principally attended by native white Irish people rather than first-generation Muslim immigrants.

I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts

In the more loyalist areas (I think more moderate Protestants are kind of embarrassed by all the flag-waving) you’ll also see Israeli flags being flown in response to this.

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound a whole lot more rational than straight-up Jew-hatred, but I appreciate your thoroughness in writing out the history of this mode of thought.

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound a whole lot more rational than straight-up Jew-hatred,

Really? Maybe rational isn't the right term, but I find it perfectly understandable that a nation formerly oppressed by a much larger one who had to fight for their independence through terrorist bombings would have a bit of empathy for a small nation in much the same situation. Hell, it was even the same people who both conquered Ireland and imposed Israel on the middle east.

Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.

would have a bit of empathy for a small nation in much the same situation

It doesn't seem understandable that anyone intelligent would empathise because it's not a remotely similar situation. Israel hasn't been in Gaza since 2005, so I'm not sure what sort of independence the Irish think Gaza/Hamas is fighting for. Unless the Irish feel that what they were struggling for during the 20th century is in some way analogous to the peculiar Palestinian notion of "independence" i.e. slaughtering all 9m inhabitants of Israel to "reclaim" a land no Gazan has any living memory of, in which case yeah I do think there's something quite wrong with the Irish national psyche.

Israel hasn't been in Gaza since 2005

Are you going to claim that Israel hasn't been exerting any kind of pressure or influence in Gaza since 2005? Even if you grant that absurd falsehood, the idea that their actions prior to 2005 couldn't have any kind of lingering impact is equally farcical.

slaughtering all 9m inhabitants of Israel to "reclaim" a land no Gazan has any living memory of,

If a people lacking a living memory of their land is enough to deny their claim to it, why should Israel exist at all given that none of the zionists and British people involved in creating it had any living memory of it either? Plenty of Irish people were born with no living memory of independence, but that doesn't actually justify anything the British did to them.

Are you going to claim that Israel hasn't been exerting any kind of pressure or influence in Gaza since 2005?

The influence they've exerted since 2005 has been driven primarily by Hamas who keep starting conflicts with them. Unless the Irish think that Israel should just sit there and not respond to rocket fire and massacres like 10/7?

Even if you grant that absurd falsehood, the idea that their actions prior to 2005 couldn't have any kind of lingering impact is equally farcical.

I'm also not sure what this is supposed to suggest. Would it be acceptable for the IRA to conduct acts of terrorism against the British due to the lingering impact of British colonialism in Ireland? Or for the Taliban to keep hijacking airplanes because of the lingering impact of the USA in Afghanistan? Why even grant any diplomatic concession to an adversary if your prior acts are apparantly justification for continued violence on their part?

If a people lacking a living memory of their land is enough to deny their claim to it, why should Israel exist at all given that none of the zionists and British people involved in creating it had any living memory of it either?

Israel should exist for the same reason any country should exist - the vast majority of people living there are born there and have no where else to live, and as such it's their home. The founding myth or original claim or whatever you want to call it is irrelevant. It wasn't justifiable for the original European settlers in the US to displace the native population, but no one sane is suggesting that descendents of the natives should be allowed to carry out mass rape and murder of Americans with European ancestry. Same argument applies to Australia, Canada, the Saxons displacing the Brits, the Vikings displacing lots of Saxons etc. etc.

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Eurovision is basically always two steps gayer than the rest of the society, so it's gayer than in the 90s, but it was already gay in the 90s by the 90s society standards. The gayness has never really been a huge hindrance to it being a huge popular spectacle, even many European conservatives are willing to tolerate gay and gender nonconforming stuff as long as the context is artistic expression.

The Irish are incredibly pro-palestine because they metaphorize it to their treatment by the British.

I’m not Irish, so take this with a grain of salt. But as I understand it, the Irish have always analogized their situation with respect to the British to the Palestinians’ with respect to the Israelis.

I did consider that but wanted to give the Irish the benefit of the doubt. I can only assume their education system is significantly more challenged than I thought.

It was a big part of IRA propaganda wrt Catholics in northern Ireland, not a surprise that it's a pervasive brainworm.

she is acting in accordance with her values

Considering I have a strong prior that the values of someone choosing to go by 'Bambie Thug' are to garner as much attention as possible at all times...

I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.

The one American who I think would legitimately love Eurovision if he was, for some reason, visiting the event by himself, would be Donald Trump. I won't elaborate further.

Trump hosting or commenting on the Eurovision would be hysterically funny.

We've had terrible poofters folks, really terrible, Bidden's gay musicians can't even suck a cock properly, but my gay vocalists can. Really we have HUGE gays, the gayest.

Couldn't resist.

I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?

I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.

We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.

We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...

We have a perfectly cromulent outlet for regionalist jingoism, college football. At least until the TV money got large enough to drive the bus with conference consolidation and transfers becoming a whole lot closer to free agency.

Even before it wasn't quite the same. Eurovision contestants are typically born and raised in that country. Sure they've often done some travelling but they have lifelong links.

College football players often didn't have any link to the college or state before they got the scholarship.

The transfer system is garbage. Really undermines college sports.

The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it.

I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points touchdown / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.

I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.

I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?

You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?

I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?

Sorry, "pick up" is slang for "to gain", "to acquire".

Yes, American football is essentially a hybrid turn-based/real-time game where each turn is a burst of real-time activity,.

In each turn, one team is on offense and starts with the ball. It is trying to either get the ball into the other team's endzone for 7 points or kick the ball through the other team's uprights for 3 points. The other team is on defense and is trying to stop that. If either the team on offense scores points or the team on defense manages to grab the ball away from the offense, the team on offense "loses possession" and then has to be the team on defense, and the other team that was on defense before becomes the team on offense.

A given team's offense and defense are usually made up of completely different players, but this is not enforced by the rules. It's just that in practice, no player is good enough at both offensive and defensive skills and has enough endurance to be worth playing both on offense and on defense.

The team on offense can throw the ball or run the ball as much as it wants, but with the extremely important caveat that it can only throw the ball forward once at most in any given turn ("down"). It can throw the ball backward as much as it wants, though teams almost never do this because statistically it is usually a bad idea.

When a team goes on offense, it generally starts at the part of the field where the other team lost possession when it was on offense. The team on offense then has four turns ("down"s) to move the ball, by throwing or running, at least ten yards closer to the other team's endzone than where it started. Each time it tries to move the ball, no matter what happens, then the next time it tries to move the ball, it starts at wherever the ball was stopped the last time it tried to move the ball. So let's say on the first down, the team on offense manages to move the ball 3 yards forward. Then on its second down, it starts 3 yards closer to that imaginary 10-yard line that it has to cross, the line that is 10 yards forward from where it first started the current set of 4 downs.

If the team on offense manages to move the ball past 10 yards from where it started on offense in those 4 turns ("down"s) it has, it then gets another 4 turns to move the ball 10 yards further from wherever the ball was last stopped. And if in those next chances it moves the ball more than 10 yards, then it gets yet another 4 turns... and so on... as long as the team on offense keeps managing to get at least 10 yards in 4 turns, it always gets 4 more turns, and in this way it can "march down the field" as they say and eventually get in the defending team's endzone. But if at any point the team on offense uses up 4 turns and fails to move the ball 10 yards forward in total between all the 4 turns, it gives us possession to the other team and then the other team goes on offense starting from where the offensive team had the ball.

At any point in a 4-turn cycle, the team on offense has the option of kicking the ball far towards the other team's endzone, hoping to run in the direction of the other team's endzone and stop whoever on the defending team catches the ball. Once the other team catches the ball, they become the team on offense. So the only reason for the team on offense to do this is if they feel that there is very little chance that they would be able to get 4 more downs by moving the ball past 10 yards and so it would be better to make sure that the team on defense gets the ball (and thus becomes the team on offense) close to their own endzone rather than at the place where the two teams are currently facing each other.

This is a lot of words but it can all start to make sense pretty quickly once one watches a game.

It is gaining in popularity in Germany. Also, the CFL does exist. It is also hard to overstate the popularity of football in the States.

Also in Finland.

Interesting—didn’t realize that. Thanks!

I had a flatmate in Scotland who was really into it. No idea if it's gaining wider popularity there, but that's my anecdote, fwiw.

Well yes, college ball is too much like the pros these days. Need something lighthearted and trashy, for to let the chainsmoking wives of America fly their regional prejudices proudly over the most trivial excuses.

Eurovision is like soccer: Americans don't care, Americans don't need to care, and that's all to the good.

Eurovision is one of the things I'm definitely going to edit out of my perception once doing so is possible. I'd like to wholly forget it exists.

As a "favorite sport", soccer is almost as popular as basketball or baseball among Americans now.

Yet another reason to eliminate immigration. Liking soccer is moral degeneracy. I say this only slightly in jest!

I'm curious, do you dislike it because you see it as a particularly un-American cultural import or is there some other reason you're not keen on it (and assuming I'm not taking your comment entirely too seriously)?

It is said mostly in jest. But I think soccer is an inferior sport to say football or Hockey. It is less physical, less specialization, and less tools. And I think the reason people in the states love it isn’t intrinsic to the sport but because it is popular. I hate that.

Also there is something sad to the homogenization of all culture. Sports are part of culture

That's interesting because again I would say those are points in soccer's favour. Particularly when it comes to it being less physical, surely it's more entertaining to watch people compete based on skill rather than brute size/strength? I can't imagine there'd be much of a market for watching someone who weighs 150kg beat up an opponent half his size in boxing or MMA. Whereas in soccer someone like Messi can run rings around players much larger than him thanks to his co-ordination and ball control.

In American sports, you do have the ultra skill guys who can compete against the physical brutes. But skill is not enough and athleticism is not enough. Either one will only make you good. Greatness requires both.

And again I can’t stress the point of physicality enough. Physicality isn’t primarily about athleticism but it is hitting. Aggression.

Lots of Americans don't like being asked to care about soccer because they consider a sport which doesn't score that frequently boring.

Living in one of the rare other countries where soccer isn't the main sport, there really seems to be a something ostentatious about the way anti-soccer Americans go out of their way to talk unprompted about just how much they don't care about soccer and how un-American it is etc. that you don't really find here.

I suppose it's a culture war thing but even then, a self-aware person would at least consider that it really is then the culture war that's at fault, moreso than the game itself.

That's fair. IMO the low-scoring nature of soccer/football is what makes the game tense and exciting - that feeling of not even wanting to go to the bathroom because you risk missing a dramatic game-changing moment isn't something I can imagine experiencing watching something as high-scoring as basketball. Differing tastes.

This seems like the inverse of reality. With football or basketball, so much is happening so often that the odds of me missing something very cool (an athletic dunk, a field-flipping interception, a clutch three-point shot from a mile away, a nifty trick play) is astronomically higher per minute I’m away than with soccer.

Even if something exciting does happen in a soccer game, it often takes several minutes to develop (i.e. even after intercepting a pass, a player has to actually make it all the way upfield and usually wait for some team support before attempting to score, giving me plenty of time to get out of the bathroom before missing the best part) and frankly isn’t usually all that visually appealing even when it does finally happen. I would say the average soccer match includes maybe five or six interesting moments. An average basketball game includes like twenty.

Looks like no

Maybe yes

I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.

I suspect the dominant soccer audience are immigrants and progressives dying to be European

and progressives dying to be European

I remember this as one of Scott Alexander's initial descriptors for blue tribe members.

That’s not surprising. Games are on streaming services and rarely on network TV. Going to a ballgame is expensive for families— somewhere between 150-200 dollars to attend a game and get a snack and a drink. Even youth baseball is harder to access, it’s mostly select teams after first or second grade. All of this means kids aren’t watching as much baseball as they used to.

No, the country music audience likes baseball. Flyover whites and assimilated hispanics go to baseball games all the time.

Baseball is declining, and that's partly because there's too many games for anyone to watch all of them, except for the most hardcore fans ever or those who have some professional reasons(eg local entertainment newscasters). This leads to few people even trying, which makes baseball less lucrative. But ticket sales remain strong so that teams are able to stay above water.

No, the country music audience likes baseball

More than football? Hispanics I agree of course. But I do think there has been a big decline amongst Ellis Island Americans. Every suburban white male New Yorker (be he Jewish, Irish or Italian) over fifty seems to like baseball, almost no young ones do.

No, not more than football, but definitely more than basketball or soccer.

I legitimately know very little about the habits of Ellis island Americans; I live in the south and see northerners with hyphenated ethnicities as essentially foreigners.

There was American Song Contest on NBC in 2022 and hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson, but mixed reception meant it had no 2023 and beyond editions.

Coordinated minority>Disorganized majority

You can vote more than once from the same number. Up to 20 times or something. Any geopolitically motivated adult can outdo a kid who votes once with the permission of mom and dad.

You could say the same for opponents of Israel, they all get 20 votes. But the difference is that they have no singular target to back. And they are still only changing the points on a ladder of 1-12. So even if they all vote for the same country, giving it 12 points, Israel can just run up behind them and claim 11.

Aside from all of that, I don't think winning will do Israel any propaganda favors, although it would be funny. So whilst a 'respectable' middle of the pack outcome might be on the cards for Israel, you never know with how unhinged and rabid philosemites/zionists are and how honest or not the Eurovision voting is counted and which way the minds of the jurors sway. The jurors might hope for a politically neutral result, but too many 6-7 pointers for Israel could make things interesting.

That being said, Eurovision is a purely news cycle driven thing. It doesn't matter in any sense outside of that.

Or the televotes result is a disorganized majority that is tired of the agenda that shove politics in their face by what is en vogue for the terminally online, they just come for the entertainment and music. Because if you look at the UK televote votes. They received 0 points for almost a gay live show. And Israel received more televote points than the LGBTQIA+ winner. So in my mind, people simply didn't give a fuck and voted for the act they liked the best.

That could all be true at the same time as every philosemite and zionist vote for Israel 20 times. Since there are very obviously a lot of philosemites and zionists clawing for every straw they can to bundle up in support of Israel in any manner they can. They are not tired of politics.

On top of that, Croatia won the popular vote with a not so gay song. If people were really tired of all the politics then they wouldn't vote for Israel, a country embroiled in a whole lot of politics. In fact, they wouldn't watch a whole lot of Eurovision to begin with. But if they did, they would probably vote for Croatia.

not so gay song

Not gay at all. He's engaged to a woman, Padre Pio and the Apostle Paul are his spiritual role models.

The video is fun too https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmg8EAD-Kjw?si=igvoPTcj2GAdBn9i

Eurovision has always been a mix of political and song enjoyment. It is highly unlikely that politics had nothing to do with this considering how the Israeli-Palestinian war is the current big issue. Ukraine won in 2022, and it makes sense that the war is going to affect a decent share of votes.

The whole point I'm trying to make is that the given that it is very public protest against the Israeli-Palestinian situation and Israel getting the second place in the popular vote. So if that vote is political then calls on cracking pro-Palestine protests would have been bigger than it is now. People are sitting at home and basically "fuck your virtue signaling" to the protestors and voting Israel. I see that as an apolitical act. One of the reasons we have a culture war is that we allow people to make everything political.

A lot of acts with queer themes did well. The UK act did badly because that guy just couldn't sing.

That is the point. It wasn't the queer theme or the politics that matter it is if people enjoy the show or act, my comment is in response that the "usual suspects" are "organizing a ballot stuffing". Well the usual suspects should have also been stuffing with UK votes. Ukraine winning because they are being invaded is an exception.

The gossip is that the usual suspects are coordinating in the usual channels to vote for Croatia.

Who are the usual suspects in this case?

The people who all share the same name by a coincidence, and that name is 😷✊🏿🇺🇦🇵🇸

Speak plainly.

Terminally online on the left side, if you insist.

I think progressives? I browsed the eurovision subreddit and saw some Croatia memes and didn't really get it, although it makes sense in the context that they're being chosen as a semi-random country to make sure Israel doesn't win

Probably an international conspiracy of people who share my musical taste; Croatia was my clear favorite.

Baby Lasagna was robbed.

What's the actual viewership?

Last year:

162 million people The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union, reached 162 million people over the 3 live shows across 38 public service media markets.

Is it real viewership, as on youtube where people seeing 3% aren't counted, iirc you have to view most of it, or fake viewership as on Twitter where a view means someone scrolled past a post or video ?

Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!

How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.

Confusingly.

Basically, Eurovision has two separate votes: televote (ie. conducted among viewers) and jury vote. Both are organized country by country, with both the televotes and the juries awarding a maximum of twelve points to the top-voted country, 10 points to the second most voted, and then 8, 7, 6, 5 etc. to the next ones.

The implicit purpose of the jury vote can often specifically negate the televote when there's a feeling a "non-preferred" song (typically one that seems too much like a comedy entry and not like a traditional Eurovision winner ballad) might win (like last year...), so it's possible that Israel might, for instance, win the televote and not the jury vote. Then again it might also do quite well in the jury vote, Israel has not been a particularly bad performer there either in the previous contests, from what I've understood.

I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...

The cutoffs and bonuses are necessary in proportionally elected parliaments, otherwise the incentive would be for every niche interest to get a party unless there was no way it could achieve even 1 seat (which in a say 300 seat parliament would be 0.33% of the vote). You’d have dozens of parties and wrangling them together into coalition would be impossible. Israel is an arguable failure state; it has a low threshold of 3% and no majority bonus system which is really what it needs.

The more you look into non-FPTP traditional constituency systems the more problems come up. The UK/US two-party systems have major problems but force the public to make compromises instead of (just) politicians, which I think is theoretically preferable.

The actual instability in many continental (ie. usually PR-using) countries is less due to the small parties (they're often easy to ignore - they're small!) and more because there are major parties that are politically toxic (due to being extreme right or extreme left, or separatists) and thus basically almost automatically out of the government, which thus forces the rest of the parties into ideologically amorphous, unstable coalitions, or alternatively leads o the creation of large ideologically amorphous, unstable "system parties" (like the Italian Christian Democrats, the hegemonic party due to the main opposition being the Communists who were kept out of the government) where political barons bring down governments and cut each other down due to byzantine political machinations or simply due to spite.

The reason why those parties exist is because there are or were deeper systemic factors in those countries leading to large portions of population choosing such extreme or separatist parties. The Weimar Republic was not unstable because of its electoral system but simply because huge portions of the German population distrusted democracy and supported antidemocratic parties like the Communist, Nazis and the DNVP. If unstable countries were using FPTP, the same factors would just express themselves otherwise; the extreme left and right would eventually affect and radicalize the mainstream parties, and separatist/ethnic parties are usually concentrated enough to elect MPs even in FPTP systems.

The main FPTP-using countries, ie. Anglo countries, have been stable because they have been wealthy and have had longlasting liberal democratic cultures with powerful mechanisms encouraging stability. Nevertheless, even they've seen increasing destabilization lately, and that destabilization has then channeled itself in different ways, so you have the Trump presidency, Corbyn leadership in Labour and the Brexit.

A large number of parties making coalitions more difficult in Weimar was at least the excuse the Grundgesetz used to impose a 5% limit on votes. And I think that argument has a bit of a point. I mean, in the 1928 elections in Germany.

Percentage of Reichstag seats:

  • Far-Left:
    • KPD (Communists): 11%
  • Democratic:
    • SPD (Social democrats): 31.2%
    • Zentrum (Catholics): 12.4%
    • DVP (Right liberal): 9.1%
    • DDP (Left liberal): 5.1% (but below 5% of the popular vote!)
    • BVP (Bavarians): 3.4%
  • Far Right:
    • DNVP (Monarchists): 14.8%
    • NSDAP (Nazis): 2.4%
  • Others (some probably also democratic):
    • WP (middle class Saxons?): 4.6%
    • Smaller parties: 5.7%

Here, the five parties under the heading democratic formed a coalition with had a whopping 61.2% majority. I am not sure why they did it that way. They obviously needed SPD and Zentrum. Perhaps a coalition with the DVP only would have resulted in the them being more vulnerable to threats of the DVP to walk out. Instead with the five party coalition, none of the three junior partners could threaten to break the government by walking out. Or they wanted to share power among the democratic parties to ensure that none of them would profit more by defecting to the anti-democrats. From a modern German perspective, this seems weird. Top politicians generally want to become ministers. Anyone suggesting that a coalition should give up 19% of the minister posts to parties which they don't require to form a majority to be more inclusive towards fellow democratic-minded parties would be laughed out of the room.

Did I have a point to make? Hm... if the Reichstag had a 5% barrier to entry, then 21.2% of the seats would not have gone to smaller parties. But 8.5% of them would just have been shuffled around among the coalition (BVP going to Zentrum, DDP perhaps forming a general liberal party with DVP). At the the ~10% of seats of the Others might have bolstered the ranks of the bigger democratic parties.

For democracy to thrive, you need both a viable coalition of democratic parties and a credible opposition of democratic parties offering another option. If 11% of the seats are taken by people who want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and some 17% are by people who want to restore the monarchy or establish a Fuehrerstaat, then you are in trouble perhaps not immediately but in the next elections, as people disillusioned with the previous government end decide to vote them out, and will likely turn to the extremist parties.

It is a bit of a catch-22: if the democrats don't form coalitions with the toxic extremist parties, the extremist parties won't get blamed for bad outcomes while the democrats will, and if they form coalitions with them they might just enable a Machtergreifung.

Having ten or percent of the seats occupied by sub-5% small parties which can not form stable coalitions due to scaling issues is making the problem a bit worse, but the main problem is the extremist parties.

If voters are required to compromise, if the amount of information they can give with their ballot is reduced, discovering their true preferences becomes harder. It adds another layer of obfuscation on top of the already indirect (representative) democracy.

True, and that's what proponents of PR argue, that, say, the German system allows for the 'right' to consist of a center-right party (CDU/CSU), a libertarian party (FDP) and a nativist party (AfD) that reflect nuanced positions in the electorate. Another example is Israel where there are various minor flavors of secular vs. religious vs. very religious nationalist parties, centrist religious nationalist parties, ethnic parties and so on. But the downside is that many of the same voters feel betrayed when 'their' politicians compromise, which means that they quickly support and abandon certain parties, which makes dealmaking very difficult because everyone is afraid of being destroyed at the next election, which means nobody is willing to compromise to the extent necessary, which results in gridlock.

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