#General Election 2019

[convertgrapeling]

That isn't what happened though.

The North West and the North East both continued to vote for Labour more than other parties, but Labour's vote share decreased and that allowed the Tories to win a number of seats.

That doesn't mean that huge numbers of Northern voters switched to Tory. This is what actually happened in the North West:

Almost half the votes lost went to anti-Brexit parties.

And this is what happened in the North East:

Around a third of the votes lost there went to anti-Brexit parties.

Yorkshire was the only Northern region that had more Tory voters than Labour voters, and even there Labour only lost 9 seats. 40% of lost voters switched to anti-Brexit parties.

These charts don't show the depressingly large number of people who voted for the Brexit Party, but the results still show it wasn't just pro-Brexit voters that prevented Labour from winning. It was also anti-Brexit voters who decided that the slim (actually non-existent) chance of stopping Brexit was more important than stopping austerity, saving the NHS, getting rid of the Tories, etc.

The media made a lot of fuss about "the collapse of the Red Wall" and we were frequently told that lots of the North had gone Tory, but that's not the case. Labour found their vote split between multiple other parties, probably because the media had spent 4 years obsessing over Brexit to the exclusion of all other political issues. People were wrongly led to believe that this was the only real issue of our times and I think a lot of people just wanted it "done" - not in the sense they wanted Brexit but they were sick of hearing about Brexit.

And yet despite those losses from Labour (only 29 seats in total), the North still voted for Labour more than any other party. So why is the North more culpable than Southerners who spent years voting Tory? Why aren't working class Southerners expected to know better?

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of racist and xenophobic pro-Brexit dickheads in the North, and I can't stand it when people pretend the North is inherently more progressive than the South, but the people who switched to Lib Dem or Green - knowing they were throwing away their vote - certainly didn't help. I think at least a share of the blame has to go to people who pretended that Brexit could be avoided, and it doesn't help that Labour eventually changed their position to be in favour of a second referendum. As much as Brexit is a ridiculous concept, I can understand why a bunch of people said "fuck that" to a second referendum because you can't just ignore 2016.

It is horribly frustrating that we lost the chance of a social democratic government because of Brexit (not the genuine revolution we need, but it would've saved a lot of lives), but to put that particularly on Northern voters makes no sense. Labour listened too much to the centrists who demanded a second referendum policy. The media talked shit about Labour for 4 years and focused almost exclusively on Brexit. Labour was being sabotaged from within by its own MPs.

Labour lost 60 seats overall and only 29 of those are from the North, so blaming this on the Red Wall or pro-Brexit voters alone doesn't work. Besides, plenty of those anti-Brexit centrists have shown themselves to be white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ assholes and much of what is happening now is happening with their approval.

Do you know why I still have such a rage over the UK's 2019 election?

It's because so much of the supposedly left-wing poor "working class" North (among others) just threw aside decades of anti-Toryism to vote for the Tories or the Brexit Party (very openly just more Tories) because of Brexit.

These god damned mindless f*cking people just threw away the only chance in years for responsible, beneficial left-wing government because of Brexit and the racist xenophobic scapegoating that goes along with it. People who should have known better just swallowed a mountain of lies because it's easier to blame people who don't look like you, than the (mostly) white wealthy parasites that are bleeding people dry.

I'm tired of it all.

I'm tired of trying to excuse people for their mindless hate.

Racism and anti-lgbtq actions are greatly rising, and it sickens me that there are poor people both white and not, both straight or LGBTQ who've helped enable this because of comfortable ignorance and despicable greed.

[pierregaslays]

girls be like “i miss him” and it’s just jeremy corbyn

[sacharowan]

only a 60% turnout is moronic

[celebswearingghost]

Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr

[atlasdoe]

HAPPY TORY UNEMPLOYMENT DAY EVERYONE!!!!!! REMEMBER TO VOTE!!!!!!!!

[morganaspendragonss]

anyone else going slightly 😵‍💫 while waiting for the exit poll

[innitmarvellous]

Once summer/any kind of warm weather is over for real I definitely have to do some kind of regular fitness workout again....

[signode-blog]

The Indian Stock Markets and General Elections: Analyzing the Reactions in 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019

The Indian stock markets, like their counterparts around the globe, are significantly influenced by political events, with elections being one of the most critical. The general elections in India not only determine the political leadership but also set the tone for economic policies and reforms that can impact investor sentiment and market performance. This article delves into the reactions of…

[angelholme]

As biased and shameful reporting goes, this really is quite impressive.....

First there is the repeated use the phrase “SHAMED MP Margaret Ferrier” — as if they are trying to drive home the idea that what she did was terrible and wrong.

Language that, from what I remember, they have never used about Rishi Sunak (who broke the law), Carrie Symonds (who broke the law) and Boris Johnson (who broke the law, lied to Parliament, and is being investigated for breaking the law)

And language they have rarely used over other MPs.

But they use it repeatedly and persistently to attack this MP — this female MP I might add.

Secondly — the graph to show the swing from the SNP to Labour is very badly done.

The votes are colours red/yellow/blue etc (as you would expect — party colours) and yet the swing for Labour is blue — a colour most people associate with the Tories.

If you were to just glance at that, you might (if you were not paying attention) take it to read that the swing was to the Tory party, not Labour.

I would argue that is more than a little misleading.

Third — the turnout was just about half of the general election.

So the “winning candidate” who got “such a commanding victory” that “everyone is hailing as a glorious triumph” got 17,845 votes. Which is fewer votes than the Labour candidate got during the 2019 election (18, 545).

Which, to me, suggests that no one in this constituency gave a shit about this election — if you can win with fewer votes than it takes to get second place in the previous vote then really what does that say about the people who are voting and more to the point the people who are not voting?

The combined total of first and second place was only a shade over the number of votes Ms Ferrier got in total in the 2019 election.

Which again suggests that no one gave a shit about this election.

x-x-x

The constituents know it is less than a year until the General Election.

They know that whichever fuckwhit gets into the seat is a caretaker — a seatwarmer. They are going to be there for eight, maybe nine months.

They are the substitute teacher of politics, and they damn well know it.

And yet the article is reporting it as if this is a GLORIOUS DAY FOR ENGLISH POLITICS — those DAMNED INDEPENDENTISTS HAVE BEEN CRUSHED BENEATH THE HEAL OF THE GOOD DECENT ENGLISH PARTY.

It’s fucking ridiculous, and the bias throughout the article is not something you expect from an allegedly independent news source.

[reasonsforhope]

"Vice President Kamala Harris is proposing to provide federal funding to cover home care costs for older Americans, aiming to help the “ sandwich generation " of adults caring for aging parents while raising their children at the same time.

Appearing Tuesday on ABC’s “The View,” Harris talked about taking care of her mother when she was dying and personally experiencing the challenges many families face when seeking affordable in-home care for their aging loved ones.

She promised that if, elected in November, she will seek to expand Medicare, the federal health insurance program for older Americans, so that it covers long-term care and includes services like in-home aides. Harris said aides could help seniors do things as simple as preparing meals or putting on sweaters because it is “about dignity for that individual. It’s about independence for that individual.”

Her proposal is a new one just a month out from Election Day but the issue is one that President Joe Biden's administration has been working on for years.

In an effort to soften the effects of inflation, the White House promoted as part of Build Back Better, its legislative agenda that stalled on Capitol Hill years ago, steeply increased federal spending for child care as well as for seniors. After Build Back Better collapsed, the Biden administration continued to promote increasing spending for what it calls “the care economy,” a cause Harris has continued to mention after replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“These plans are common sense. They can help family caregivers work and save both families and the federal government money by allowing seniors to stay in their homes instead of being sent to nursing homes,” the Harris campaign said in a fact sheet detailing her proposal. “Medicare at Home will also reduce hospitalizations.”

As part of a blitz of media interviews she’s been doing in recent days, Harris sat down after her appearance on “The View” with radio personality Howard Stern, who said that his mother is 97. Taking care of an elderly parent, he said, “will bankrupt you.”

Such costs have increased pressure on adults caring for their parents and kids simultaneously. In 2019, roughly 30% of family caregivers of older Americans lived in households that included children or grandchildren, according to AARP.

Harris would likely have to work with Congress to achieve key parts of her proposal. Harris’ campaign points to past, similar proposals projected to cost $40 billion annually, but says much of that can be offset by savings achieved through efforts begun by the Biden administration to expand Medicare’s ability to negotiation prices with major drug manufacturers.

Harris is also promising to further expand Medicare to include hearing and vision coverage, while changing existing rules that can allow federal authorities to seize a deceased beneficiary’s home to recuperate costs. [Note: I'm sorry the current rules fucking what] The campaign fact sheet says that practice “means that those homes are not passed on to the seniors’ children, which particularly harms rural and minority families.”"

-via AP News, October 8, 2024

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Hi, I’m sorry to bother you. I’ve been attempting to unlearn what I’ve been taught about the DPRK from western outlets, but I’ve gotten stuck on a facet that you can, perhaps, speak to. As is often harped on here in the west, there seems to be a dynastic quality to the leadership, namely the Kim family. Now the fixation that the people have on their leaders I can understand, we can observe the same kind of obsessive fervor in many countries in the west (especially the US). I guess I don’t fully understand the political structure of the DPRK, nor the people’s relations to it. I apologize for the vagueness of this question, and thank you very much for your time.

It is understandable that most people will have no idea about the political structure of the DPRK, and the title of "Supreme Leader" can be confusing if you don't understand how the DPRK's government works.

The political structure of the DPRK is based around democratic centralism, similar to the USSR. Kim Jong-un was elected to the positions of general secretary of the Worker's Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs Commission, which grants him the honorific title of "Supreme Leader" and makes him the representative of the state. However, he is not the head of government. That would be the premier, Kim Tok-hun (unrelated to Kim Jong-un, Kim is simply a very common surname in Korea.) Kim Tok-hun also serves as the vice president of the State Affairs Commission.

The highest organ of the DPRK, meanwhile, is the Supreme People's Assembly, which is a multi-party legislature that votes on laws and constitutional amendments and is responsible for electing both the Premier and the President of State Affairs, among other positions. While there are multiple political parties in the DPRK, the Worker's Party holds a privileged position under the constitution. So while the position of General Secretary does not confer any formal governmental powers, it is still a powerful political position in the country.

The Premier is the head of the Cabinet, which is the administrative and executive body of the DPRK. While the SPA creates laws, amends the constitution, and decides the budget, the Cabinet administers the implementation of them.

The SAC directs the orientation of state policy in the DPRK. While they do not write laws directly, they can issue directives to guide the SPA in determining which laws to write. However, the SAC is ultimately accountable to the SPA and not above it. The SPA is responsible for electing the SAC in the first place and has the authority to recall its members. So while the SAC is not directly elected by the people, it does not hold greater power than the SPA whose members are directly elected.

Members of the SPA are elected by all citizens 17 and older alongside members of local assemblies (compare governors vs senators in the US.) Elections are conducted via secret ballot. Anyone has the right to run for election regardless of party affiliation, which is why there are multiple parties represented in the SPA as well as independent members.

You can read more about the DPRK governmental structure in the DPRK constitution here:

[sayruq]

Meta identifies networks pushing deceptive content likely generated by AI

Meta (META.O) said on Wednesday it had found "likely AI-generated" content used deceptively on its Facebook and Instagram platforms, including comments praising Israel's handling of the war in Gaza published below posts from global news organizations and U.S. lawmakers. The social media company, in a quarterly security report, said the accounts posed as Jewish students, African Americans and other concerned citizens, targeting audiences in the United States and Canada. It attributed the campaign to Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm STOIC. While Meta has found basic profile photos generated by artificial intelligence in influence operations since 2019, the report is the first to disclose the use of text-based generative AI technology since it emerged in late 2022. Researchers have fretted that generative AI, which can quickly and cheaply produce human-like text, imagery and audio, could lead to more effective disinformation campaigns and sway elections. In a press call, Meta security executives said they removed the Israeli campaign early and did not think novel AI technologies had impeded their ability to disrupt influence networks, which are coordinated attempts to push messages.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[itwoodbeprefect]

voting closed a little bit ago (in the netherlands. most other eu countries vote over the next three days) and the first exit polls leave me with extremely mixed feelings. still worth navigating a maze for though

i did my duty as a european citizen (went on a scavenger hunt to find the voting place which they moved from a nearly impossible to miss spot at the outer edge of a huge outdoor sport complex to a little building all the way at the back end of the complex which, near as i could tell while cycling winding deserted little roads that direction, is not accessible without navigating through a barely-signaged maze)!

[scavengedluxury]

Just taking a moment to reflect on how the Tories ran one of their dirtiest, most ruthless and effective election campaigns ever in 2019, and now in 2024 Rishi’s team books him on a show that makes him look like he’s in the cuck chair, on the day before the general election.

[ayeforscotland]

What do you think is the reason the SNP lost ao many seats?

A combination of things to be honest. General fatigue is setting in, there tends to be a point where a country votes for ‘change’ just to stir things up.

SNP have ran Scotland for a long time, and while I’d consider it a massive success with tough constraints, people still get fatigued.

I think the SNP have been too cautious with their policies and their general attitude lately. I think people much preferred the fighting attitude that inspired them to vote in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections.

Also can’t really underestimate weeks of media front covers pushing Starmer. People aren’t immune to propaganda and the British press have overwhelmingly supported Starmer.