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World Politics Thread


mtutiger

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6 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

Great victory speech by the winner Helen Morgan.

 

I'll have to ask my nominally Tory relatives over there if Boris has their support.  I know they were virulently against brexit because they own property on a lake in Burgundy region of France and were basically ok with Teresa May as a best alternative in the situation.    These relatives were with me 1000% on Trump being human garbage.  

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Zemmour's popularity in France is troubling, but not unexpected.  in the end, his presence probably splits the far right vote and sends macron back to the presidency.

however, a sensible republican candidate could result in a real four way split in the vote leading to a potentially interesting run off.  

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5 hours ago, buddha said:

Zemmour's popularity in France is troubling, but not unexpected.  in the end, his presence probably splits the far right vote and sends macron back to the presidency.

however, a sensible republican candidate could result in a real four way split in the vote leading to a potentially interesting run off.  

Concerns about our own domestic situation notwithstanding, the past couple of years haven't exactly been great for far right parties.... blocked out of power in Israel by a grand coalition, divided in France, little gain in Germany, set to lose tonight in Chile. And even Orban is facing a united opposition coming up.

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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, chasfh said:

I find way the Trump communications team capitalizes seemingly random words in its missives to be unsettling, because I don’t know whether it means something or nothing. All I know for sure is that it is done for a purpose.

I think there is a German language rule that capitalizes all nouns.  I wonder if that exists in Russian as well. Likely, that is who is doing the writing for all these.

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1 hour ago, chasfh said:

I find way the Trump communications team capitalizes seemingly random words in its missives to be unsettling, because I don’t know whether it means something or nothing. All I know for sure is that it is done for a purpose.

It's also possible that they are not very smart and that their purpose is not well executed.  Trump doesn't exactly surround himself with a lot of intellectual talent.  

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It appears that in COVID, Bejing has found the perfect vehicle to strangle Hong Kong.....

Quote

With China exercising ever-tighter control over Hong Kong, the city is hewing to the country’s strict “zero covid” policy extolled by Beijing as evidence of a superior political system. Yet the approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world — a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities’ refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong’s viability as an international city, according to almost two dozen diplomats, chambers of commerce, recruiters, pilots and other expatriates.

The resultant brain drain is altering the face of the financial hub, which some Western companies now consider a hardship post, as fewer people are willing to take the places of those leaving. The number of overseas professionals and investors admitted to Hong Kong under its general employment program dropped from about 41,000 in 2019 to 15,000 last year and 10,000 through the third quarter of 2021, immigration data shows. With quarantine rules unlikely to be lifted within the next year, departures of foreign businesspeople and other expatriates are set to accelerate.

“The long-term damage has already been done to Hong Kong’s viability,” said one senior Western diplomat. “There is an absolute lack of predictability that businesses don’t like.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/27/covid-hong-kong-quarantine-omicron/

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32 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

Why doesn't Boris have the strident fan base that MAGA man has? Is it because the UK lacks a Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino equivalent? Don't these people view the BBC as fake news?

I don't see how that can not be a factor. That and that election expenditures are capped so money/=speech to a much lesser degree in England.

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Task force 9 tried to kill Syria

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html

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The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”

“The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.

In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians....

....

two former officials, who were directly involved in the air war at the time, and Syrian witnesses interviewed by The Times, said the situation was far more dire than the U.S. military publicly claimed.

Critical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely. The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam, which engineers said would have been catastrophic. The situation grew so desperate that authorities at dams upstream in Turkey cut water flow into Syria to buy time, and sworn enemies in the yearslong conflict — the Islamic State, the Syrian government, Syrian Defense Forces and the United States — called a rare emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster.

Engineers who worked at the dam, who did not want to be identified because they feared reprisal, said it was only through quick work, much of it made at gunpoint as opposing forces looked on, that the dam and the people living downstream of it were saved.

“The destruction would have been unimaginable,” a former director at the dam said. “The number of casualties would have exceeded the number of Syrians who have died throughout the war.”

Lie, deny, minimize. Nothing has changed at USDOD since 1965.

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