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[RedKing]

So, Wisconsin votes out Republican incumbents in the governor’s office and the AG, but Republicans retain control of the state senate and assembly, despite Democrats winning a majority of votes in the state (“representative” democracy: the representatives pass laws so they can win seats with less votes)

Republican-controlled state legislature proceeds to pass legislation looking at curtailing the powers of these state offices in an effort to “keep the balance of power”, though senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald accidentally confirms it’s because governor elect Tony Evers is a (fucking!) liberal.

Tong Evers is looking at litigating the matter.

Link to the past faff.

Republicans be sore losers, y’all.

We were doing that in North Carolina before it was cool.

Similar thing happening in Michigan as well.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Defeat is not enough. The Republican Party must be annihilated and consigned to the dustbin of history along with the Whigs, the Prohibition Party, etc.

[smjjames]

You’d need a third viable party to arise in order to annaihlate the Republican Party, but with the way the two parties have it set up (in addition to the big tent phenomenon), they prevent (or otherwise make it hard) for third parties to really erode either one. And neither party wants to lose an advantage to the other, even if it means ceding some advantage to a third party.

If we had the multiparty Parliament style that most of Europe has, the Republican sheneinighans probably wouldn’t be happening. Wouldn’t be guaranteed not to happen though.

Also, the prohibition party seems to have died out right after prohibition, basically went ‘welp, no reason to exist anymore!’, which is different from what happened with the whigs.

[wobbly]

You could split the old democrat party in 2. I think that's happened twice over here? The liberal party's self destructed and in-fighting in the labor party caused it to split forming a new liberal party. Something like that anyway.

[Starver]

It's arguable how much that helped, though.

ETA: To expand...

In 1981, the Gang Of Four left the Labour Party (second to the Conservatives, at the time) to form the Social Democratic Party. The didn't like the official Labour direction being too Left Wing (c.f. Corbyn), espousing Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament (c.f. Corbyn) and exiting the European Economic Community (c.f. ...well).

They fought ?two? general elections in alliance with the Liberal Party (the original non-Conservative main party that became squeezed out into largely 'also ran' status between Labour's formation and circa the 1930s*) that made comparatively little headway into power in the Tory-dominated national levels of governance (Thatcher's era), before split-merging to become the Social & Liberal Democrats (now just Liberal Democrats), to be the mostly 'also rans' and - for a time - leaving the original SDP remnants to be 'also also rans'

The Conservatives kept hold of power, even (especially?) without Mrs T at the helm, until Blair turned Labour into an attractive leftish-but-middle-ground-facing party that doubtless took back much of the Liberalish middle** and left-leaning Tory voters.

Labour's not-so-left direction lost internal traction (Blair stepping down to Brown) and disaffection with both current-Brown and the Blairite recent past may have led to the situation where Labour lost, but Conservatives did not win.

Then the Liberal(Democrat)s had influence, but more than two decades after the Labour-split and all the rest, and they worked to support Cameron (as per the end of the * footnote), and in the process lost credibility.

Right now they're acting as the anti-Brexit party (not that either of the main two are pro-Brexit, they're just being both led as "not anti-Brexit at all, just anti-(OtherParty)-style-Brexit,, 'cos their Brexit won't work!"), and their failure to make headway in the last General Election (and also the decline of the Scottish National Party from their heady heights of Scottish dominance) has been taken as proof that "most people voted for a Brexit Party", though it's more like "most people voted for a Big Two party that they thought could best counter the other Big Two party that they didn't like more". As per usual.

But then UK politics (party/representation-wise, among other ways) is nothing like European politics with mass (and often Rainbow-)coalitions of expediency, or else doing as the Belgians did and not having a government for over 500 days in 2010-11, during which time things seemed to work out fairly well anyway (c.f. US Government Shutdowns for a few days at a time!).


* There had been "Lib-Lab Pacts" during the early part of the 20th century, helping Labour gain its foothold and then giving it its first two governments by pseudo-majority. A further LLP happened in the '70s to stave off the Conservatives (though that led directly to Mrs T, either causally or incidentally) and there maybe would have been one in 1997 if Blair hadn't been so successful. We saw what happened in 2010, and the otherwise possible LLP would have needed a few more allied seats from elsewhere (less than the DUP alone had to give the Tories, recently!) to make it work.

** For USians: in UK politics, since the rise of Labour (socialist or otherwise), "Liberal" has been considered the de facto centre-ground term, the barycentre around which all other greater party masses orbit, though the Blairite Labour party was at times and for some issues leap-frogging over the centre and almost Conservatively-rightwing.

[ChairmanPoo]

I'm meant for voting in the primaries.

Some folks are born,
Made to wave the flag
Oh, they're red, white and blue!

TL'DR, please specify which chauvinists are you mocking as flag colors alone is not specific enough. For the ones you mentioned: USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Russia... I'm probably missing a few?

[Kagus]

It's a song, you silly person!

And it's the US of A, as the next couple lines indicate. Unless there are multiple nations that play "hail to the chief" that I'm not recalling offhand.

[scriver]

I cant try to sing that part without automatically switching over to the start of "keep on rocking in the free world" afterwatds

[Kagus]

You're mixing up your eras of Americana. It's what we call an Americanachronism.

[smjjames]

@starver: Belgium has this complicated coalition government since it's basically two states in one (plus the city-state of Brussels), so, I guess it was either complicated enough to run just fine without the main government or the parts just acted independently of each other.

[RedKing]

So...since it hasn't come up yet, the Dow Jones has crashed over 1200 points in the last two days, today's slump triggered in part by the arrest in Canada of Huawei CEO Meng Wanzhou on charges of circumventing Iranian sanctions. The 800-point drop yesterday came after Trump's tweet that "I am a Tariff Man" (the hero we don't need or deserve).

Before it rebounded, earlier today the 2-day loss stood at 1500+ points.

[Kagus]

As with the above, the futures market took a major hit yesterday.

"I'm sorry gentlemen, but we have no future... We cannot afford it."

"But what will we do if there's no future? How will we survive?"

"As we have always done; by living in the past."

[SalmonGod]

If there's a recession and the upper classes shove all of the burden onto the lower classes like they did before, we might see some serious rage manifest.  Considering how many still feel like the 2008 recession only ever ended for the rich, and how common poverty-related deaths are (price of insulin, for example).

[McTraveller]

It always bugs me about things like the stock market and the fact that "wisdom of the crowd" cuts both ways and is also "foolishness of the crowd."  That is, the economy does well so long as enough people think it's doing well, but it does poorly if enough people think it's doing poorly.

What impresses me most is that recessions and depressions are almost always a result of the financial system (including regulations), rather than a result of actual changes in the ability of society to produce goods and services.  After all, economic strength is really based on the ability to produce, not consume. I think this fact is where the last generation or two has lost the boat - we have this strange sentiment that it's consumption that makes the economy strong, so as soon as consumption falters then the economy is weak.  But in reality what makes a strong economy is the ability to produce, the ability to be flexible in what is produced, and the ability to produce as much as possible with the least inputs.

I mean, look at the financial crash of 2008: the day after the crash there were the same number of factories, workers, and the like. The only thing that changed was numbers in spreadsheets, so we just stopped using our production equipment. Why? If we would have just kept people working, producing widgets, and paying them, things would have just kept going.  Yeah I know it's not quite that simple, but it's largely applicable.

It's just stupefying.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm convinced more and more that the root of the problem is the way money is created. Money represents a debt - if someone gives you a good or a service, you give them money instead of exchanging goods or services right away (barter).  Later that person redeems the money for other goods and services.

The problem with our system is that instead of the person who is indebted "creating" the money, a third party creates money and uses it to give the debtor "permission" to let the provider of goods and services claim redemption later.  When you work, your employer is actually in debt to you - by working you should just generate money in your account, with no need for your employer to have the money.

Say you work in a factory to make widgets.  You work, your company has widgets, you have.... nothing.  By working, you should immediately just be granted in your account money equivalent to the value of the widgets.  If you were to buy the widget - you get the widget and the money should be destroyed - the debt is paid.  Our system fails there too - when goods are purchased with money, the debt is not cancelled, it's just "transferred" which is conceptually odd.  Our system is out of whack - it allows creation of money without any goods or services having been produced - furthermore it doesn't even depend on the promise of future goods or services being produced*.  The debt is wholly financial debt, not goods-or-services debt.

Note that I'm not saying money is bad - money as debt is a good thing, and avoids all kinds of problems with barter-only, but money has to be created and destroyed sensibly.

I could go on about more details of the "producer creates money" system, and how to ensure you don't have money just getting out of control, but that would be a digression...

*What I mean is that when you take out a loan, you repay it with more money.  Perhaps you got more money by making goods and selling them, but maybe you just got it by offering loans to someone else, or paying with money you already had sitting in a bank. There is no link between money and actual production of goods and services, which is why our system can have whiplash.

Post-Preview addition:

Regarding Millenials "just being broke" - why is that?  What is preventing those people from providing goods and services that would allow them to not be broke?  I'm not being facetious here - I mean really, what is preventing it? Is it that there is just no demand? Is it that the landowners can just sit fat and happy on their property and not have to care about the impoverished? Is it that barriers to entry to markets are too high (e.g., if nobody is hiring you, why not start your own business)?  All of the above?

[Trekkin]

Regarding Millenials "just being broke" - why is that?  What is preventing those people from providing goods and services that would allow them to not be broke?  I'm not being facetious here - I mean really, what is preventing it? Is it that there is just no demand? Is it that the landowners can just sit fat and happy on their property and not have to care about the impoverished? Is it that barriers to entry to markets are too high (e.g., if nobody is hiring you, why not start your own business)?  All of the above?

Like Ispil said: nothing's stopping them providing goods and services, but there's a great deal stopping them being paid for them at a rate commensurate with the increase in costs of living and student debt burden.

[Telgin]

I think it's a combination of work being hard to find, work paying too little to live on without an advanced degree, advanced degrees being increasingly ruinously expensive for increasingly marginal value, and a massive barrier to entry to starting your own business through costs and competition.

Probably lots of factors going into that, like automation reducing the demand for labor and thus driving down its value.  For example, in the last 5 years I've seen jobs eliminated through self checkout systems.  Those were previously mind numbing, but still paying jobs for people with little or no work experience or education.  They're gone now, so those people have to compete with even more and that reduces the incentive for any company to offer more money to people they hire.  Instead, they get pressure to cut their work forces to maximize profits and cut costs.

I'm kind of curious what will happen when the demographics shift more and more to less wealthy younger generations.  What will companies do if people can no longer afford to buy anything?

Just to add an anecdote, out of all of the people I know in my age range (~30), I'm the only one who isn't massively in debt, out of work or both.  And that's only because I was lucky enough to go into a highly technical field where there is still demand for people and where an advanced degree is worth something.