#2024. The year of elections

[poliphoon]

A year of elections, emotions and eruptions

Many of our stories in 2024 were about wars, conflicts and clashes. The year began with Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine that was already in its 23rd month. As the year moved on, the other two wars – in Sudan and Gaza – too turned intense. The year is drawing to a close and the three wars do not look like ending anytime soon. Surely, 2024 was a year of wanton wars. Viewed through the prism of…

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[blackflash9]

Even when Republicans win, they’re still spiteful, threatening violence, harassing women, stirring up conflict, and acting like sore winners—still the same losers at heart.

[wastedandbasted]

2024 really was like, "yeah, it's been absolutely awful this whole year. Here's a little vigilante justice before I go, as a treat"

[helpmeimblorboing]

It’s Gorgug. Keep going

[lunar-years]

I think. It is enormously enormously frustrating to endure the leftist rhetoric about voting third party, single issue voting, “both candidates are just as bad,” “Kamala is a cop,” “it’s not worth voting,” etc. all over social media for months and months and knowing that the trump cultists, meanwhile, will turn up in swarms to vote red down the ballot regardless of anything Trump says or does.

One of the commentators on msnbc was talking about a shift in this election where one party candidate could basically do or say anything and may not gain votes, but certainly won’t lose votes (trump) whilst the other party (Kamala and by extension Joe) lost votes with even the smallest misspoken or wrong or forgotten words. And that rings so true and it’s so beyond horrifying.

[reparrishcomics]

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[mioakem]

i have cut contact with like 3 ppl atp cause of their political views. no i don’t think im being childish. my mother is latina immigrant who has lived here for 20 years and still doesn’t have her citizenship. my grandparents are undocumented. my sister is a lesbian. my father is a muslim refugee. my family owns a small business. i’m a girl who has been told that i most likely cannot survive childbirth. mine and my families rights are on the line in this election, and if trump gets elected into office again then our lives could forever be changed. so when people tell me that they like trump better because they for some reason think he’s gonna lower fucking gas prices then i have absolutely no issue with cutting them out of my life

[lotus-pear]

FUCK this country

[beeclops]

the entire 2024 US Presidential Elections in a nutshell

[nova-rogue]

hi everyone you're still voting in november, got it? you're still going out and voting. you're still voting. no matter what. idc if biden dropped out. we don't not vote bc of that. you're going and you're voting.

[jugheadthelesbian]

hi um idk what i need to tell u to get u to vote blue this year but im gonna just say this: im a young lesbian who isn’t old enough to vote and i am really really scared of the future. i live in the bible belt where the norm is homophobia and harassment but dream of getting out of here, please help to make it where people like me r safe. all my love

[xiaq]

I'm seeing a lot of folks online and IRL who are (understandably!) excited about Kamala's momentum after the debate (and T Swift's endorsement) last night. But I want to caution people against holding her up as some infallible, ideal candidate. Read the fact-checking transcripts from BBC and NPR. Understand what her position is on subjects that are important to you. Her platform is significantly more moderate than it used to be because she's trying to appeal to Republicans that are disillusioned with their candidate (it's working!).

But that means that if you care about things like the genocide which continues in Gaza, the expansion of fracking and other environmental concerns, decriminalizing border crossings, student loans, disability, and healthcare policies, you need to be attentive to the platform she's running on and the new promises she's making, not what she may have said or promised in the past

If she wins this, it will certainly be a win. Kamala is far and away the best candidate. But a Kamala win won't signal the end of the work we need to do. I don't want to dampen anyone's excitement, but holding any human being up as a faultless icon is a recipe for disappointment.

[rabid-transcendentalist]

[tomorrowusa]

At least right now, I'd have to say that weird is the favorite for Word of the Year for 2024.