Zompist Bboard Again

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 6:24 pm Modi's supporters are calling for war with Pakistan.

Is that standard background noise, or something more serious than that?

From what I understand, it wasn't a big thing back in the 2000s. Now it is a common talking point.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2019 10:12 am

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 6:24 pm Modi's supporters are calling for war with Pakistan.

Is that standard background noise, or something more serious than that?

FWIU it looks increasingly as if war is inevitable because the government is silencing all opposition to it.

Oh shit.

Meanwhile, the government is also going down the Hindi-is-our-national-language! path. As usual, a lot of people are pissed off.

Vijay wrote:Hindi-is-our-national-language! path

Ah, I see the Modi government finds a possibly nuclear war too tame, and wants to simultaneously fight a civil one at the same time.

In all seriousness, is there reason to believe tensions with Pakistan will actually come to blows? To me it seems to just be a new low in aggressive posturing.

I'm frankly a bit annoyed that no one I follow on the internet except for Vijay seems to be talking about this. Sure, there are a lot of other interesting things happening in the world right now, but none of them, not even the tense situation between the USA, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, look quite as important as a serious threat of war between two countries with nuclear weapons to me.

I follow it, albiet much less than Vijay (largely because I don't know what Indian sites to trust and many have very annoying layouts and choke my computer)

My sister-in-law's dad is a pretty enthusiastic BJP supporter who nevertheless seems to be non-confrontational around us. All of us attended my niece's fifth birthday party the day before yesterday. There, at some point, he said India was going to go to war with Pakistan. My dad said that was terrible, war is a horrible thing to pursue, so many innocent children would die, and he felt the problem was that too many ordinary Indians are pushing for war because they want India to control all of Kashmir and we should just give Kashmir to Pakistan. My sister-in-law's dad said yeah, war is bad, but the government won't listen to you.

Oh, and Spain will get the fourth election in four years.

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I don't think a compromise on Netanyahu being PM will happen. It's the raison d'etre of the Blue & White. If they break that promise Blue & White would shatter and so would support for leaders of all parties within it. The most likely outcome is either a minority government or a coalition including Likud but not Bibi. A Likud + Blue & White government wouln't really require Lieberman, who is annoying to work with. If only one party joins a unity government besides those two, I'd bet on Havodah, Gesher, Israel Democratic Party or Yamina.

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As bad as Karoui is he sounds like the lesser of two evils from what I understood from the Enlgish and French Wikipedias.

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But Blue & White campaigned on not allowing Bibi as head of the government at all. At best Bibi could get a different ministry or be allowed to lead Likud without a ministry. Maybe even be de facto PM, just so long as he isn't de jure. If this was a compromise Gantz was willing to make, they'd have made it instead of a second round of elections.

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Since I'm in Vienna, I may as well report what I've gleaned in the run-up to elections on the 29th.

Basically, the 2017 elections gave Austria a government run by the center-right People's Party of Austria in coalition with the far-right* FPÖ, headed by People's Party Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a 33-year-old wunderkind (he dropped out of law school, then somehow became foreign minister at 27) who looks vaguely as if an alien found a human on the side of the road and made a coat out of its skin. Then last May video surfaced of a few FPÖ figures in Ibiza talking about their plans to start an Orbánite-style state media to a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch, and Parliament was dissolved, with Kurz booted out as chancellor and a caretaker government temporarily installed.

Other major parties include the Greens, who have a lot of ads up; the Social Democrats, who also have a fair number of ads up; and NEOS, some sort of party for liberal Europhiles which doesn't have very many ads. At the time of this writing, the People's Party is polling in first place with around 35%; the far-right have sunk to about 20% from the 26% they got in 2017, and the Greens look set to almost triple their vote share.

*note that Austria has always been a bit less paranoid about the far-right than Germany has; I gather this is combination of less-intense denazification after the war--the Allies were more concerned about Germany--plus a sense that Austria, after all, got Anschluss'd and wasn't really responsible. The People's Party, like many center-right parties in the last ten to twenty years, has made the devil's bargain of trying to go after right-wing voters by co-opting their parties' positions on issues like immigration, with the predictable result that they're starting to get eaten from within. For what it's worth, posters for the FPÖ have a distinct "own the libs" vibe to them, while the center-right is advertising mild tax cuts and a milquetoast cult of personality around Kurz.

With 98% of the vote counted last time I checked, the left/centre has 44 seats, and the right has 55. The Joint List has 13 seats. If they give their mandates to Gantz, the head of the centrist electoral alliance, the left/centre has 57 mandates. Then Israel Beitenu has a genune choice between giving their 8 mandates to Gantz or Bibi. The issue is that the Joint List traditionally refuses to endorse anyone for prime minister; I heard Odeh saying he is considering it but who knows if he'll actually do it. If the Joint List refuses to give their mandates, Bibi is the only one with a path to 60+ mandates
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Why is NDP doing so badly in the polls in Canada?

I do not have any details, not knowing much about Canada in general, but the Green voting intention is rising in Canada, as in Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Scotland and England, and it's likely that NDP voters are often the ones switching to Green. This only accounts for part of their losses however.