Does France do graduated brackets like the US?
Is there any place that does taxes without brackets, just flat “pass this number and suddenly lose half of everything”? Does that even exist outside the imagination of Americans who have never understood or looked at taxes? Brackets should be the definition of income taxes, is it not? It’s not an economic tariff applied regardless the volume of merchandise passing a frontier.
The link quotes him calling the Kiev regime a putsch, but that was back in 2014, and that was in fact a revolution. It’s not about Zelensky, but he does give all the current talking points (neonazis in Kiev, NATO provocations, Russia can’t have NATO at their doorstep…). BTW no one did anything about Russia stealing Crimea, either, everyone was still trying to justify not doing anything.
That was 10 years ago and he has been (very) slowly toning it down: when making the left alliance a few weeks ago, he finally relented on allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine because the rest of the left made him, there’s still hope he’ll give up the anti-NATO talk… eventually. If he makes it to the government, when someone asks him about Russia bombing children’s hospitals, at some point he’ll have nowhere to run because he doesn’t actually support that. He shouts and curses quite violently at journalists who help out the far right, but on serious subjects in serious interviews, he actually has to be reasonable (and he is). On the last presidential elections, when he showed up to the round 1 left parties debates, he was all proper and serious and making his points properly and sensibly - and then he lost on round 1 and the next day in the street, he screamed his head off at the first journalist who put a microphone in his face.
Oh, and over this side of the world, no one claims Russia is socialist. But leftists do get mad at the EU and NATO for crushing the farmer class and playing the capitalist hand, that’s what that is about.
Yup. I don’t even get what “populism” is when mentioned in media. Isn’t that-- democracy?
Populism is demagogy, it’s repeating people’s complaints back to them, to amplify them and place yourself as an apparent leader, but without actually bringing any solution - and when it does, it’s immediately far right “beat everyone out”. Democracy is actually creating policy and voting on it, which by definition implies people disagreeing in that vote. Populism is rounding up everyone with the same mind, excluding everyone else (not voting on anything) and trying to crush opposition with numbers and no policy. It’s the antithesis to democracy.
Edit - it might depend on the region of the world, I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of left wingers be called populists. Originally it just means the opposition between the people and the elite, so that would match what you say, and apparently some left parties are trying to return to that definition for some reason, but it seems the Pope is taking the other version that has become much more common.
Don’t watch far right propaganda. Even the communist party removed the hammer and sickle over a decade ago.
? ? ? Sir this is Europe, you’re in the wrong part of the world, you don’t know what socialists are.
imagery of red flags, hammers and sickles, photos of Marx and Che Guevara
Name one French politician who uses that?
The center left hasn’t been listening much for a few decades, which is why the far right has been steadily rising from a 20% ceiling to this 35% ceiling just now. But the alliance that won today is not center left - it has some legit left. You can tell because the center and the media have been working overtime to prop up the most divisive figure as Literaly Worse Than Hitler that needs to be stopped at all cost, even by electing literal Nazis.
But this new left is also an alliance, and the current fear is that some of them will jump ship to side with the center right when we all realize that we really can’t form a government, because no one has an absolute majority. Even with those potential defections, the center will likely still not get a majority back. Worst case scenario is the left breaks, no one can govern, and Macron uses an obscure law to take over 100%, best case scenario the left holds and Macron can’t even do that and we have a chance of getting at least SOME improvement.
President is elected, assembly is elected, president picks a prime minister among the majority party in the assembly (hopefully the same as his own, since the assembly gets to confirm the pick), prime minister picks a government (picks the ministers in their own party) with the president’s blessings. In case the majority party is opposite the president, the president doesn’t get much of a choice, as we know the majority party will only accept ministers on their side.
When the assembly is reelected, the prime minister typically offers their resignation regardless of the results (we are here), and the president can accept it or refuse it (we expect Macron to refuse, or at least delay it until the end of the Olympics, which makes the most sense, but Attal will almost certainly be gone after the Olympics). Then a new government is formed. A prime minister usually gets a couple governments under their belt until the president gets a new prime minister. Attal got shafted by the early dissolution since he was only here for a few months.
1st round projections aren’t the same as winning projections. Those 240+ seats projections were illustrating the actual results of round 1, where the far right was ahead in a lot of places, not from guessing how round 2 would end, because… we don’t do it that way, I guess? But since round 2 only brings the candidates who scored above 20%, which usually means either 2 or 3, rarely 4 candidates, instead of 10+, that means everyone who voted on round 1 for the parties that lost would then vote for one of the remaining 2~3 candidates. And that’s anybody’s guess.
So you can have 30% of voters bringing the far right to the top among 10 candidates, but those 30% don’t win when there’s only 2 or 3 candidates left, because it turns out 70 always beats 30 - especially with the mutual agreement that a 3rd place center or left candidate would drop out in favor of the other to stop the far right. This doesn’t work in rural places where the far right was over 40% (some “centrists” still chose the far right over the left alliance, getting over 60%), but it works everywhere else - and that’s what happened here. Think of 2 round voting with >10 parties as a little bit more like one round ranked choice voting than first past the post with 3 candidates.
Realistically, we knew that the results of the first round was never going to hold, because it’s been like that for a few decades - like someone else said, 2002 saw the far right fail to get more on the presidential round 2 than the 20% of their score of round 1 (but that ceiling has been rising since because of Macron); of course there’s the concern of the growing number of regions that feel abandoned and turn to the far right, but beyond that, the real question was how well the left alliance would do, and how badly the “center” would drop. That’s the big deal, the left is back on top - now we just hope that union is strong enough and they don’t collapse again because of the constant demonizing that Macron and the media have been spewing non-stop (they really no joke honestly want the far right over the boogeyman “extreme left” that doesn’t exist), with the center left abandoning ship to side with Macron again.
Has no one seen the Assassin’s Fist series or what?
2016 and Eternal are still in my backlog, but I remember discussions about Eternal showing the hallucination of a bunny, and it was a hint that it was in fact the same doomguy: OG ends with the reveal that doomguy’s pet bunny on Earth was murdered and beheaded during the invasion by the demons (that ending screen with a bunny’s head on a spike). It’s the whole reason doomguy is mad at the demons, and he’s still pissed in 2016 and Eternal.
It might be mostly player deduction and there’s no official lore about it, but the bunny is definitely a hint or at least an easter egg. The wiki says the pet bunny was called Daisy.
So you’re saying to start a new system where you only hire non white/ non males.
I say balance and that’s your take?
poor white people who never had any opportunities and currently don’t but, fuck them right, they are white.
Man. I spoke about hiring based on skills the whole time. This imbalance in poor, less skilled white men was already there before you started talking about diversity hire, but you chose to blame diversity hire, because you think unskilled women or minorities get hired over skilled but poor white men. I spoke about improving housing, education, childcare, and all other basic needs, I didn’t say that only applies if you’re not a white man. It goes for everyone. But those poor white men aren’t getting help from the current situation either way, and you seem to think that the only solution is to hire them over minorities. You’re not talking about helping all the people in this situation, you just want the poor white men to get hired and not get passed over for less skilled women - you’re fine with leaving everyone else behind. You’re not even considering that everyone might deserve a spot somewhere, you think there’s only one spot and it should go to the skilled white man.
Minorities get passed over and screwed over for basic needs like housing, education, childcare, etc. As a result, when someone says “we only hire competent people, the best people for the job, it’s not our fault if these minorities we interviewed happen to be incompetent” that’s already setting things up to reduce their presence in society, which loops into making them poorer, with less access to basic needs and so on. Refusing to hire a woman for one job and hiring a man instead because you think she’s less competent is tunnel vision, you’re focusing on a single job and trying to scale that to the whole of society; the most direct answer is just to hire more people and train everyone. It’s corporate thinking to assume you will only hire a single perfect worker for all of your jobs, but all you’re doing is only reducing your work force, which only ever works for the corporate bottom line until you run out of people to fire. And when the imbalance is so bad, there is a point where, on a large sale, you need to hire a higher number of women / Black people / handicapped people to catch up, because you’ve shut them down the whole time; and that basically makes it your own fault if you think they’re less competent than educated competent men, because they didn’t get the opportunity, because they didn’t get the training, because… they didn’t get the opportunity.
The “hire only competent people = only white men” is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it creates the entire situation of everyone else being less competent, being lower on the decision totem pole (like the decision to help minorities get out of that loop), having lower incomes. If you help only your own because they have the skills you want, you are creating the situation where you perceive everyone else to be lower by your own standards. Someone’s gotta make the first step to bring everyone up to the same level, and you know it’s not going to start in education and housing. Because those people are not up there making the decision to help with that. The people who can make the decision choose not to help, because those minorities don’t have the same skills as this other guy here.
The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.
I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.
None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.
Notice how it says people agree but doesn’t say there is any evidence.
The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it’s only people saying “these guys say there was a dude a while back” , second hand comments, no living first hand account.
beings from other planets,
Not that one, no.
in the end the entire series was about a battle never fought
Yes, that’s the book the show comes from. It’s been a long time but as I recall it, the book treats that battle as even more of an afterthought, something like “of course it ended in a big battle, but the conclusion was already foretold by everything we just talked about, we don’t even need to talk about the battle to know how it went.” The series actually gives even more detail about it than the book when Toranaga clarifies that Mariko’s role was decisive in making the mother of the heir drop her support of his enemy, and that’s it.
The book is not about the battle, the book is about how the battle was won even before it started and how Tokugawa / toranaga made that happen, the battle is irrelevant.
Well that’s kinda where the book ends. I find it odd they want to continue…
It looks like a lot of people are whining that they expected more battles, because it doesn’t matter that it comes from a book that is about political intrigue and smart people, not historical bloodbaths. So I’m gonna assume that they’ll give the people what they want, and I won’t expect any of the plotting around that the book did - they’ll probably pretend to care about it, but they’ll just pivot to a simple retelling of historical events. I don’t know who Michaela Clavell is, but I don’t know how much she can help sticking to the Clavell writing style. We have Sekigahara, Shimabara, and Osaka to look forward to.
A bomb that could destroy Earth’s core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!