General Politics thread

Given that the Worker's Party has won the last four elections in Brazil, and that Rousseff hasn't been barred from running again in 2018, I'd imagine (without knowing much of the politics there), that she has a good chance of winning. Hated by the Right, she also lost support from the Left in recent years for making too much accomodation with capital after the economic downturn. I'd imagine her manifestly hypocritical removal and replacement with a deeply unpopular successor would serve to arouse more support for her reelection bid than might have otherwise been the case.

In the meantime, it seems reasonable to expect the Temer administration to be far less centrifugal from US imperium than the course set by the PT in the past fourteen years, which would incidentally be welcome to Clinton's friend Kissinger, a good friend to the Brazilian junta under which Rousseff was previously jailed and tortured.

Drawing attention to the heretofore unexamined plague of disrespect and misunderstanding of our national symbols that, but for the brief period after 9/11, has been endemic since the end of the Cold War!

Depends on who they are. I don't want the wrong people representing this issue. But that doesn't invalidate the issue either.

Islam Karimov is dead. This in itself should be a good thing, but I'm guessing that every foreign ministry in the world is shitting its pants.

The best we can probably hope for is a Turkmenistan where the national (incompetent, corrupt, repressive, clannish) elites nevertheless had the good sense to recognize that sinking the whole ship in a frenzied open struggle for control was a poor idea and as such carried out a relatively smooth transition/infighting period from one tremendous, incompetent megalomaniac to a slightly less tremendous and marginally less incompetent new one. In the worst case we get Tajikistan circa the 1990s.

Have fun!

I imagine at some point the internal insurgency in eastern Turkey will link up more fully with the autonomous Kurdish region.

www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-idUSKCN10Z07J
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world/europe/turkey-tanks-syria.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FSyria&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/02/turkey-syria-offensive-each-party-is-fighting-its-own-war-kurds-us-isis

I'm not going to get into the ethics of this, but there are a number of practical issues at heart here.

1. Unlike European countries, we do not have an open border. The boundary between the United States and Mexico is some 2000 miles long. Half of it is actually covered by a fence, and the other half is a rather dangerous river that is heavily policed in urban areas where crossings occur. I don't really understand the appeal of a wall vs. the existing fence.
2. The fear of Mexican immigration is laughably outdated. The majority of illegal immigration to the United States is from Asia, and the majority of illegal immigration from Latin America is from countries other than Mexico. For Asia, most of this is accomplished by overstaying tourist visas, and many of the Central Americans may be more properly classified as refugees.
3. The immigration issue in America has way more to do with race than it has to do with economics, so that's how it's framed by the left.
4. Most Americans are descended not from British colonists, but from immigrants from Europe and the Near East who enjoyed an unfettered open-door immigration policy which ended in the 1920s (Asians didn't). Many of them were escaping famine, political exile (from the Revolutions of 1848-9), or (in my ancestors' case) state-sponsored death squads. The ideal of America as a refuge and home for those who are unwelcome elsewhere weighs heavily in the American mind, even if people are uncomfortable with them being non-Anglophone and/or Catholic or Jewish (which is the real reason we banned alcohol for thirteen years), or today Muslim.

Basically, we're not Britain or Australia. We don't have a European Union, nor do we have a Flores Sea, and most of what we believe about illegal immigration is inaccurate and rooted in prejudice instead of policy.

Monty and Ganews explanations are eloquent and well argued, however, we must be truthful about all that not being the real rationale.

It really being that all of us want virile swarthy men to cuck us tbh. 

1. It's "illegal immigration" not "illegal immigrant". A person can't be illegal, and the term is a (successful) lexicographical hijacking that others human beings.
2. As Monty said, plenty of illegal immigration comes from China, India, Asia at large, and Canada. Aside from Canada, that's a tough bus ride.

I don't think that's the core implication; more like "most Americans can get away without having to be exploited like this". A poor American can get government assistance the way an undocumented immigrant can't. Of course, a conservative would call that "lazy and entitled".

Supporting amnesty is hardly the same thing as being in favor of domestic outsourcing. It's about giving legal status and all the benefits that come with it. Just by turning that key you get all sorts of rights for people otherwise set up to be victims, like higher wages, rights, and political representation. (A more practical reason to oppose immigration and amnesty is to fight the demographic shift that changes districts and loses elections.) Society benefits from immigration too, as has been well-documented.

Perhaps there's something to your "liberals...support what is essentially domestic outsourcing" if you take away context. For example, some cities have set themselves up as sanctuaries from deportation. That's not done to the goal of keeping a slave population picking fruit; it's a political rebellion against a racist government policy, and it's directly helping people in need at the same time. Yeah, exploitation isn't exactly a liberal position.


No one exactly said it was. But as Refugee is a complicated an political thing, there are plenty of extenuating circumstances around deportation. We have courts for that.

ComradePig If swarthy men (or "swart," to use the insistent terminology of Time magazine) are part of the problem, we'll have to deport me too.

Colin Kaepernick, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Simone Biles (who wasn't even protesting anything) were and are all perfectly justified in doing or not doing anything "patriotic" as a political symbol, on purpose or accidentally. They are in good company.

François Hollande is so despised that if he isn't successfully primaried as the Parti socialiste candidate next year, he'd garner 11-15% of the vote according to polls.  That would produce a second-ballot outcome similar to that of the 2002 presidential election, in which Socialist premier Lionel Jospin finished in third place behind le père Le Pen in the first round, and the malfeasant Chirac went on to secure over 80% of the vote on the back of a popular rallying cry of "Vote for the Crook, not the Fascist".  Now the malfeasant Sarkozy or the former premier under Chirac, Alain Juppé, could potentially defeat la fille Le Pen with left-of-centre lesser-evil votes. 

Hollande's attempts to evoke the memory of Jaurès notwithstanding, France has a Socialist president who's gone further implementing austerity and anti-union measures, in 'slavish' and 'dogmatic' fashion to neoliberal doctrine according to his former industry minister, via emergency Article 49 powers bypassing the National Assembly, than was attempted by his rightist predecessor.  His subsequent industry minister and protégé, investment banker Emmanuel Macron, describes himself as 'neither of the right nor of the left', which is, of course, a cute way of saying of the right, and Hollande himself is particularly reviled by the student-labour segment of which a socialist party might be expected to be the prow.

This isn't a novel disappointment for them, however, in that François Mitterand, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, who began his term by laying a rose at the Parthénon tomb of Jaurès, could announce, 'The French are starting to understand that it is business that creates wealth', and about the end of whose tenure socialist historian Donald Sassoon wrote, 'the French Left appeared more devoid of ideas, hopes and support than it has been in its entire history'.

It wasn't surprising to hear Corbyn reply when--I believe Cameron at PMQs, encouarged by poor economic news from there--chided that his ideas were being implemented in France, he dryly, diplomatically replied that he wasn't actually sure they were.  (Interestingly, a French academic identified Corbyn less with dirigisme and more with the authentic libertarian socialism of the First International.  And indeed, John McDonnell has proposed some very innovative methods to expand worker cooperatives through right-of-first-refusal which have won praise from workplace demoracy proponents like Richard Wolff.)

Sighs, takes off pants.













Anyway, another factor is that the American naturalization system is so baroque that basically anyone who goes through all the proper steps nowadays is “illegal” for a short period of time, and people coming here informally and then only going through legal steps later has not been unusual since, well, the beginning of European colonization (Melania Trump’s story, for instance, is a pretty typical path for “legal” immigrants). It’s far different than, say, someplace like the Netherlands and Germany, where all I need is a job offer and an MSc and I’m basically in.

they get a literal dog and pony show and all we get is some stupid red hats and twitter