grandepequeno [he/him]

HURRAY!!!

They’re good, I like Danny and think he’s pretty reasonable IR guy, though I wish he’d formalize someday what he believes, I think he’s in the marxist school of IR. I also think he’s right on the modern fascism debate, on the side of “No it’s not fascism”.

Derek I can’t put my finger on, he’s eloquent and can sum up world events in a “pro-democracy but not pro-american” way pretty well, what I mean is that if he’s giving a ukraine war updates his info will be alright but he might make an obligatory comment that putin’s bad.

That’s the one, their article on camus was great

Honestly this is fine. Sometimes I just want a quick look up on why something is good or bad. I just did it for why I should dislike Camus, so I read most of a jacobin article, but I would’ve been ok with an llm answer that reads all of jacobin and just tells me how much of a pied-noir he was

because of the suppression of communists there

Or anywhere if you say you straight up want to overthrow the state

I genuinely don’t see what the upsides are for zohran to pressure his comrades to not spread the milquetoast socialist revolution? Like, is he afraid the dem estabilishment will oppose him even more? They likely will anyway

One of the weirdest things about european securocrats using this “you will die in war” language is that it’s just as off-putting to normal people as leftists who go on about “revolution”, like, most people are way too comfortable for that shit and they’re not willing to die for something they still see as avoidable, unless they’ve already bought into your whole project which, aside from rabid russophobes in eastern europe, is not the case with most western europeans

Well the difference is that they actually have the power to steer us towards their future anyway even if it’s not what people want

General strike set for December 11th in Portugal.

The right-wing government is taking advantage of its dominance of the country’s elected institutions to pass a labour package, a set of “reforms” to “modernize” labour law and offer “security and flexibility”, pretty much all of them are about taking labour rights away.

There are a few major changes, such as the right of refusal for companies to allow union representatives to set meetings in companies where there aren’t registered unionized workers there, but also a lot of detail changes that just make things worse, like how previously if you got fired the employer had to wait a year before replacing you with an outsourced worker or through a temporary work service, now they’d be able to do it immediatly.

The right currently have an unprecedented majority in parliament (center-right+liberals+far-right), the government of the 2 autonomous regions of Azores and Madeira, the largest number of municipal governments AND the presidency (the current president is a center-right old guy and there are presidential elections next year but one of the front-runners is also a center-right old guy).

What’s of note isn’t that unions oppose the labour law, but that the regime-aligned union confederation UGT agreed to the general strike, the communist influenced CGTP would always agree to it, but it says a lot that the changes are so bad that even the UGT which is filled with workers affiliated with the centrist parties and also prides itself on it record of “negotiation” also agreed to the strike and is outright rejecting the labour reforma.

Will it work? Idk, we haven’t had one of these for a while and it’s unknown whether the unions can still paralyze the country.

I don’t think it makes any difference whether mamdani arrests him immediatly on day 1 or on day 500, the consequences and costs are going to be exactly the same so he might as well do it as soon as possible

Yeah that’s how ukraine will win the war, by running it like a start-up

yeeeeeeeeeeeah I hope there’s more of this NABU vs Z-man squabbles

Was he saying this to someone called Israel? Why say it like that?

Now I’m imagining him as an anime character that ends every phrase with “Israel” like Naruto’s “Believe It”

I don’t know much about polish history, but they definitely seem annoying as a nation, I understand why they’ve been partitioned-checked so many times. Any good books on polish history that don’t glorify it?

It does both. US media can also make people more socially progressive. Younger people in general here vote for the right IIRC from polls and stuff.

The thing is, in countries like this without a lot of domestic production, we import the WHOLE culture war, sometimes with the same terms, in english, which sort of gives the game away.

Aaaaaaand Burqa ban just passed in Portugal. Pretty clean Left-Right cleavage here with the whole right voting in favour, the whole left against and the 2 “syncretic” parties, each with 1 MP, abstaining.

Nothing really noteworthy to say, the debate was the same as everywhere else it took place, the reasons for the right to push this now the same, the actual visibility of women in burqas in portuguese society being 0.01% (I don’t think I EVER saw one, and even if someone does it’d only be in a handful of places in Lisbon) just as everywhere else where burqas where banned.

It only got me thinking how because of the dominance of the socialist party for almost 10 years after 2015 we basically dodged, or weren’t greatly affected by, some moral panics that other countries went through in that period, so we’re getting them in full force now, with anti-migrant sentiment being the most prominent. Dunno which one is next, if I had to take a bet I’d say the far-right could try to push some anti-trans legislation

Isn’t this a big deal or something? I remember hearing on rwn how big these guys were. And even in Portugal I think I’ve heard that word a few times some years ago

I only heard him talk about it idk how it’s progressing along materially, I also heard him say explicitly that EVERYONE should join in his effort, from the DSA to the ACP, and he’s alright with that because he hopes that the experience (talking to people probably) would bring them around to his perspective anyway

Yes that’s what they’re doing now, but I know that in the DSA and outside it (christ cutrone’s group) there are efforts to have a real party, and presumably run in elections, and if successful initially hand a lot of races to republicans by taking votes from democrats, best case scenario would be if they take from both parties. And presumably they’d have to get support from people who are ok with that yeah

Vote scolding is a great term lol

refuse to play their game of playing defense as if you share the same goals as liberals

Thing is, often times, you do share some of the same goals, a varying percentage depending on how the liberals are, and the people who support you share those goals and want them fulfilled and they mostly support you as a means to those goals even if they can also get them from the liberals, so when they see that you opted to NOT pursue those goals by not allying entirely with the liberals they might get second thoughts about whether you’re really the best bet to fulfill those goals. Or they might not

I think there are cases where you negotiate policy concessions with the liberals in exchange for an endorsement.

This is very complicated in practice, in this case, the things that you are more likely to ask for concessions on, to a degree where it’s even worth asking for, as well as the things you are likely to ask to NOT be implemented by the liberals in government, are for them usually non-starters. That was the case back in the “contraption” when the communists where supporting a socialist government by negotiations during government budget approvals days and it was also the case in this lisbon election. It worked when things were going well, but when you can predict that things are likely to get worse for working people and therefore you demand more (before you get unpopular for supporting the government), the government shuts the whole thing down and then runs on you being irresponsible at a time when things were going well.

could play just fine if the party can communicate it (tough with the nature of bourgeois owned media)

Yep you nailed it, it completely depends on how people get their punditry, and if they get it from bourgeois media, as the overwhelming amount of people do in portugal you quickly lose control of the narrative