Politics Thread!

[tufty]

Meanwhile, in "things that will annoy the living fuck out of Donald Trump" news, Venezuela's opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was given the Nobel peace prize. And after all that time Trump spent solving the conflict between azerboojun and albania, too.

It's just not fair.

[KlaxonCow]

The Nobel Prize committee should have, for one year only, introduced a new one-off prize - "Saddest narcissistic cunt in all of human history" - and awarded it to Trump.

Come and collect your prize. We've prepared video footage of the lowlights of your life and careers - with a special 15 minute section, emphasising all the footage we have of you with your bestest ever paedophile friend, Epstein - to embarrass the fuck out of you before handing over the specially minted medal that has "CUNT" in massive letters on it.

Come along, as our very special - and that's "special" in the sense of "special needs" - guest, you sad, sad man.

He's super thinned skinned, by his own admission. I feel the world doesn't roast the fuck out of him enough.

[KlaxonCow]

Nah, on second thought, all we need is for President Obama to upload a video of himself pissing himself laughing at the news.

Because the only reason - the ONLY reason - Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize is because a black man got it before him, and his tiny little racist mind can't cope with a black man being held in higher international regard than his sad orange arse, crying "wah, no fair" in a corner.

Better yet, when questioned about his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel committee should simply be honest: "I'm afraid that while there are doubts hanging over President Trump's intimate involvement with a paedophile sex trafficking ring, ran by his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein, then we couldn't, in good conscience, consider him for the prize.

"But if these doubts were cleared up by Trump RELEASING THE EPSTEIN FILES that we can begin the process of exonerating him from the massive suspicion that the well-known pervert was not Epstein's #1 customer, with his own special loyalty card, for the sheer amount of underage pussy he grabbed, in-between instances of him hosting beauty pageants, just to gain access to the changing rooms, and telling daytime TV programmes of his desire to have incestuous sex with his own daughter, then he could potentially be considered for the prize in future. Should an orgy of evidence revealing the pervert to be the biggest customer of Epstein's underage sex slave business not emerge in the meantime."

Like, let's not mince words and just say it how it is. He cannot possibly be considered for this prize - no matter if he really did bring about eternal world peace - because there's a tremendous chance that future evidence is going to reveal him to have been a far worse pervert than even fucking Jimmy Saville.

[zip accident]

I Duck-duck_goed modal income vs inflation, and I didn't get much.

Does anyone know what that graph looks like since, say, 1910?

I had been assuming that since about 1950 the trend has been for inflation to rise faster, but I realised I don't actually have any evidence either way.

[venusian]

Why income and not disposable income? Between 1910 and now there are going to be some massive structural changes that affect what income means. For instance: per-person, per-family, or per-home; the changing nature of personal relationships has changed over the period.

[snaff]

I Duck-duck_goed modal income vs inflation, and I didn't get much.

Does anyone know what that graph looks like since, say, 1910?

I had been assuming that since about 1950 the trend has been for inflation to rise faster, but I realised I don't actually have any evidence either way.

Real income flat since 1971 when Nixon ended dollar/gold convertibility, allowing the benefit of productivity gains to be directed elsewhere.

[PFVA]

Around here, the good news is that the results of the regional elections are still going to either the center left to the center right. Lots of people were expecting or worrying that the very noisy right wing party would win in several municipalities but that is not happening. So far not even in their beloved Algarve. Actually they seem to have gone down in people's preferences since the national elections for the assembly. At that time they managed to get around 15% of the votes and now they seem to stay around 10%.

[zip accident]

Why income and not disposable income? Between 1910 and now there are going to be some massive structural changes that affect what income means. For instance: per-person, per-family, or per-home; the changing nature of personal relationships has changed over the period.

The main why not is because I don't understand the difference. I mean, PAYE started in 1945? I'm sort of vaguely thinking of income net of PAYE, but I don't know enough about PAYE to be sure that's what I mean.

I read "The Trading Game", I'm not sure that isn't fiction, but he seems to be saying that the money earned by the poor is in decline, it's obviously a lot less than the rich receive, but if it's keeping up with inflation, that's a very different thing than if it's not.

[gilesgoat]

Maybe late to the party but I keep asking myself "what EXACTLY palestinians got from this 'cessfire agreement' and hostages apart what else they had to give in return" ?

It's not clear to me "what they all got" .. because it doesn't look like "a win" for palestinians to me ??

[PFVA]

Local trivia:

Fro anyone who likes right wing people screaming and shouting about immigration the best place to move is Albufeira in Algarve. It was one of 2 municipalities where said party won the municipality and with more than 40% of the votes. The other is a place in the Tagus Valley area named Entrocamento. There is a nice railroads museum in there. there is also bullfights nearby.

Not around here. The promise of freeing us from our mayor and all the boards all over the place saying that didn't work.
Our independent center right mayor got re-elected for is last term with 62% of the votes. The noisy right wing got around 8-10% of the votes.

[tufty]

Maybe late to the party but I keep asking myself "what EXACTLY palestinians got from this 'cessfire agreement' and hostages apart what else they had to give in return" ?

It's not clear to me "what they all got" .. because it doesn't look like "a win" for palestinians to me ??

Well, you have to split it up into "Palestinians" and "Hamas".

Hamas went into this willing to sacrifice Palestinian lives in order to get Palestinian prisoners back from Israel. That's worked for them in the past, with a return rate of somewhere between 10 and 100 Palestinians returned for each Israeli hostage they've taken, and in my opinion it's why so many Israelis were taken hostage on Oct 7. Obviously you have to ignore the innocent Palestinians killed by the Israelis during rescue missions and just general vengeance strikes. It's a deeply cynical and transactional view, but it's a deeply fucked up situation.

What Hamas have done here is sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and make most the inhabitants of Gaza generationally homeless, for the return of a few hundred prisoners. Sure, most of those were kids arrested for ineffectually throwing rocks at the tanks that rolled through their homes, but - well, it's a very high price to pay. They did also get, as a result of Israel's very heavy handed reprisals, some half-hearted international support for a Palestinian state, and some half hearted political condemnation of Israel. They probably could have got better results by releasing the hostages earlier. They've also further ingrained the hatred on both sides. Way to go.

What did the Palestinians get from this? Mostly, they got shot at, starved, and kicked out of what was left of their homes. The release of the hostages has put a temporary stop to that, but the shooting and expropriation will presumably carry on as soon as the cameras are looking elsewhere.

[PFVA]

Now that's a first:
450 employees of the American base in Azores haven't received their salary because of the shut down in the USA.
Those 450 are local Azoreans working for them.

[KlaxonCow]

[zip accident]

The problem is noone can prove any of that video isn't fake.

[KlaxonCow]

The problem is noone can prove any of that video isn't fake.

No, the real problem is that Trump's saying it's a burning hellhole.

Yet when I search on "footage of Portland on fire", I can't find a single instance of what Trump's talking about.

I mean, I can find pictures of things being on fire in Portland from many years ago. But it's a major city and this is over a number of years and none of it is attributed to protesters or anything. This is not unusual for a big city.

In fact, as a "control", I searched for "footage of Manchester on fire" and, yeah, as a city, Manchester has had things like fires at a hotel, a historic mill went on fire (this happens, unfortunately, to old abandoned buildings) and, to be honest, I found more separate individual incidents on that search than I did with Portland.

(I did initially try "footage of London on fire" but, of course, the big problem there is that both the historical Great Fire of London and the Grenfell Tower fires dominate search results, so London is not a good control.)

The only thing remotely close to what Trump's talking about that I could find was this:



But this is from 5 years ago. It's from the "Black Lives Matter" protests of 2020.

And it is effectively a "friendly fire" incident - someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but only two protesters - not police - got caught in it and set on fire (the second protester who was on fire ran towards the police line, if you look). And it shows the crowd trying to put out the fire.

Until, eventually, police officers come over with a fire extinguisher to properly put out the fire.

But that's not recent. That's a completely different protest - BLM from 2020 - and it's a person, not the city, being on fire.

So I can't find anything to back up Trump's claims. And I'm looking on YouTube - which means I'm getting both mainstream media reporting and potentially just "someone with a mobile phone who uploads it to YouTube" as well.

Whereas, what I can find is multiple videos of masked ICE agents grossly overreacting - riot gear, non-lethal rounds, tear gas, etc. - to peaceful protesters, often dressed in costume, who are disputing the extra-legal authority of Trump's "secret police" that are literally going around "disappearing" people, very openly based on racial profiling.





I mean, sure, you could argue that all of this video footage is fake AI. But there's a lot of it from different perspectives and not an inch of it is demonstrating any AI glitches. But I'm also looking for its negation too - where is the footage Trump's talking about? I've searched for footage from both sides and there is ONLY footage of ICE agents being heavy-handed, and there is no counter footage of any "burning hellhole".

It's not just the evidence you've got. It's the evidence that absolutely 100% should be there, but can't be found. If Trump is telling the truth (and he is urging us to "watch the footage" but I fear he's watching footage from 5 years ago, 8 years ago, etc. as I could find on YouTube and is erroneously not just connecting them together, but connecting any fire that occurs in the city to protesters - but, no, there was an apartment on fire in Portland about 8 years ago, but that's because apartments sometimes go on fire in major cities), then we should have an orgy of evidence to support his position.

So, the options boil down to:

Trump is telling the truth, but there is a "liberal media conspiracy" to hide all footage of what's going wrong in Portland, and to AI generate "peaceful protest" videos, and to algorithmically remove the other footage that proves his point from all social media platforms, in a coordinated conspiracy to hide the truth.

Or the fascists are lying about the protesters who're trying to expose the activities of Trump's "secret police", who are known to be "disappearing" people as their primary mission, because they're being a thorn in the side of the racists deporting all the "brown people" to make "Lebensraum" for the white supremacists... and this requires no conspiracy and no AI, because that's exactly what the available evidence lines up as demonstrating.

But, sure, in the interests of being "non-partisan", let's pretend that these two options are equally likely, even though they are blatantly not.


And that's before we include the evidence that Trump has lied repeatedly about everything else, is in the frame as being the Paedophile-in-Chief in the Epstein files - as the known pervert was best friends with a vile sex trafficker and we're to think he knew nothing about any of it and wasn't Epstein's #1 repeated customer? - and the only known and confirmed AI-generated video in this has come from Trump, where he fantasises - whilst wearing a crown - about carpet-bombing protesters with shit:



So, yeah, we also have to accept that Trump has, just this once, suddenly has become a different person to the massive liar he's always been his entire life and is, in this one instance, telling the truth, while 99.9999% of everything else we've ever seen from him are lies and racism.