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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On December 05 2016 02:09 LegalLord wrote: Why not just use pens?
I asked that myself too - if I remember correctly, the reason was that pencils are not subject to mechanical failure such as you are tracing the sign and the pen stops
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On December 05 2016 02:11 SoSexy wrote:I asked that myself too - if I remember correctly, the reason was that pencils are not subject to mechanical failure such as you are tracing the sign and the pen stops But what if the tip breaks?
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On December 05 2016 02:26 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 02:11 SoSexy wrote:On December 05 2016 02:09 LegalLord wrote: Why not just use pens? I asked that myself too - if I remember correctly, the reason was that pencils are not subject to mechanical failure such as you are tracing the sign and the pen stops But what if the tip breaks?
Yeah, I know. The thing is quite stupid. I just did a quick research and it seems that they do not use pen because before the 1960s ink could be deleted by a rubber (now there are pens with indelible ink but noone cared about modernizing this)
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
I've noticed over the past 2-3 years or so that the populist trend comes in oscillating waves. Disappointing losses, then surprise victories, and so on. The populist sentiment is certainly growing in recent years, but it's definitely not a very monotonic trend. After Brexit the anti-EU sentiment cooled somewhat, then Trump and the Bulgarian/Moldovan Eurosceptics won, then Hofer lost ground from last time and lost.
Whether 2017 turns out to be a highly pro-populist year or a trough is hard to predict at this point. I'm going to say that 2017 is probably going to be somewhat calmer but some more of the issues that give support to Eurosceptics are largely set to take place in 2018 (among other things, the Greek credit crisis). May's Article 50 deadline is March 2017 but I would be very surprised if it doesn't get pushed back.
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On December 05 2016 02:07 LegalLord wrote: Honestly I'm not exactly sure why half the people were predicting a Hofer win within the past two months or so, with the rest saying it's 50-50. Maybe just hedging their bets and/or being prepared for the worst? I can understand it considering how it's been going recently. Look at Brexit and Trump and how many people thought they either had no chance or were behind. At some point you just naturally adjust and give those things more credit than you'd usually go if you've been wrong in the past.
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polls were 50-50 all the time since the last election, which was very close
here's a summary of the polls: https://neuwal.com/wahlumfragen/
btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
woohoo! :D
also this election for president was probably not as important as the upcoming one for parliament will be, and there the fpö is far ahead in the polls
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So, to our Austrian friends, how exactly did a candidate who, from my limited knowledge, seems to be a soft leftist, an ecologist and an intellectual (things that usually aren't a strength these days in Europe when you're a politician) manage to beat the far-right ?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals."
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On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote:polls were 50-50 all the time since the last election, which was very close here's a summary of the polls: https://neuwal.com/wahlumfragen/btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think. woohoo! :D also this election for president was probably not as important as the upcoming one for parliament will be, and there the fpö is far ahead in the polls Good news for you but it's still surprising to me that Austria don't share the German approach towards far right given their relatively close experience from WW2.
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On December 05 2016 03:52 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals."
What kind of liberals are you talking about? The European kind which is right wing, or the American kind which is left wing? Serious question.
Will have to see what the green party does though
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 05 2016 03:56 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:52 LegalLord wrote:On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals." What kind of liberals are you talking about? The European kind which is right wing, or the American kind which is left wing? Serious question. Will have to see what the green party does though Strangely enough, both. They're not same yet they manage to both strike me as faulty in the same way.
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Hm, interesting question, first of all VdB has always been a well respected figure in austrian politics, and since he was with the green party he didn't have to shoulder the mistakes of the political centre i think, so it was hard to put the "establishment"-tag on him, although Hofer and the Fpö tried their best.
second, centre-left and centre-right candidates flew out in the first round of the election in a blamable showing.
After that it was a question of getting the trust of the bigger part of the political middle and the people on the countryside i suppose. (both candidates tried a lot to appeal to the centre during their campaigns, which seemed almost a bit comical sometimes)
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our greens are very grounded i think, they have been in some regional governments and are having a positive effect on ecology, city development, and they put a lot of emphasis on highlighting corruption, sadly their votes have been stagnating, because people associate them with evil communists who wanna ban smoking and car driving or whatever, especially on the countryside, but maybe that's changing more and more, hard to say.
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On December 05 2016 04:01 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:56 Incognoto wrote:On December 05 2016 03:52 LegalLord wrote:On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals." What kind of liberals are you talking about? The European kind which is right wing, or the American kind which is left wing? Serious question. Will have to see what the green party does though Strangely enough, both. They're not same yet they manage to both strike me as faulty in the same way. In what way are Greens European Liberal?
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On December 05 2016 04:13 Noizhende wrote: our greens are very grounded i think, they have been in some regional governments and are having a positive effect on ecology, city development, and they put a lot of emphasis on highlighting corruption, sadly their votes have been stagnating, because people associate them with evil communists who wanna ban smoking and car driving or whatever, especially on the countryside, but maybe that's changing more and more, hard to say.
Greens were rising with VdB in charge, mainly because he was killing the liberals. Afterwards, the NEOS (a new liberal party) have taken a junk out of them and Greens couldn't emphasize on the socialists failing with SJW-Glawischnig in power. My guess is that the party will go through a rough next election, with new chancellor Christian Kern being a dream candidate for the liberal to socialist left and NEOS probably growing a little. If Irmgard Griss - very popular independent candidate for presidency and only losing out by 2 percent in the first vote to VdB - joins NEOS for the election they will probably lose a big junk of female and social-conservative voters. And hopefully some conservatives and maybe even some of FPÖ's protest voters. Which would be the dream scenario for the first majority in parliament against the right-winged blockade politics with Socialist-Green-Neos in charge.
One can only hope that SPÖ manages to provoke ÖVP to kill the current coalition, so that they come out as the good ones. And all of that far enough from that election so that FPÖ can't carry anything from this campaign over but early enough that FPÖ is still broke due to the excessive length of it.
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On December 05 2016 03:56 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:52 LegalLord wrote:On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals." What kind of liberals are you talking about? The European kind which is right wing, or the American kind which is left wing? Serious question.
Honestly, I see "liberal" as becoming more and more of a defined concept shared across the Atlantic. In the US, you increasingly have a threefold division: reactionaries (Tea Party, alt-Right, whatever you want to call that), liberals (everything from Mitt Romney to Cory Booker), and "Progressives" (Warren, Sanders, etc.) Europe has basically the same categories, though their term "Socialist" is equivalent to the American "Progressive" (which actually makes good historical sense) and calling the reactionaries "Far Right" or something like that.
Not that this clarity is a good thing exactly... last time the West was divided up in this way, we fought a series of bloody wars--and one Cold One--to resolve the matter. Though not well enough, I'm afraid.
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On December 05 2016 03:56 nojok wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote:polls were 50-50 all the time since the last election, which was very close here's a summary of the polls: https://neuwal.com/wahlumfragen/btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think. woohoo! :D also this election for president was probably not as important as the upcoming one for parliament will be, and there the fpö is far ahead in the polls Good news for you but it's still surprising to me that Austria don't share the German approach towards far right given their relatively close experience from WW2.
Austria is a strange case of a nation. We used to rule over Germany as a germanic state until Napoleon and Bismarck divided Germany and until the Austrian Empire failed in WW1. So the country was left with no real identity and wanted to join Germany which it did when the Nazis rose to power. After WW2 Austria had to rebuild its own identity which led to neutrality, the lie that we were the first victim of Hitler and therefore also a vastly different cultural approach to dealing with the Nazi past, although real Nazism with its symbols is forbidden just like in Germany. After a few tries to form a Naziesque party ultimately FPÖ suceeded in just being not openly Nazi enough to be forbidden, which at that time was an economic-liberal, germannational miniparty.
End of the story is that a clever politician named Jörg Haider took over the right-winged, liberal FPÖ and transformed it into a people's party through right-winged populism. When he couldn't get rid of the Nazi parts of the party he formed a new right-winged party, but died soon after and his new party with him, leaving the field, the established brand FPÖ as "the thrid power" and his techniques of right-winged provocation to exactly those ultraright people he wanted to get rid of.
So it is basically a story of making people get used to far-right ideas over a long time. Germany is probably going to take the same road over the longrun, although they have the advantage that AfD didn't take over an established label like FDP (germanys iberals), they have an existing left-wing protest voice (which Austria doesn't, which is why FPÖ is reaching far into the working classes whenever there is no good socialist alternative) and Bavarian conservatives CSU with a much more hardline profile to take on AfD's core topics, assuming there comes a time when this becomes necessary.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
East/Central Europe never truly came to terms with the fascist chapters of their history in a way that provides closure and allows them to close those pages and move on. Though the way in which they deal with that history is different for every country. Some of them try to control the narrative of the past, spinning their collaboration into victimhood (on the part of the USSR or Nazi Germany). Others seek to bury it and take a virulent "anti-fascist" approach that often buries some of the genuine issues that people care about, that perhaps gave rise to the support that populists currently enjoy. Few have managed to truly come to terms with it in a way that acknowledges that they may not have acted heroically, but that they should not compromise who the people of their nation are because of it.
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On December 05 2016 05:21 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2016 03:56 Incognoto wrote:On December 05 2016 03:52 LegalLord wrote:On December 05 2016 03:31 Noizhende wrote: btw we have the first green party president in the world now i think.
Not sure that's a good thing. Given their general semi-fringe status they aren't very standardized but in general, the Greens in every country always strike me as the epitome of the things that people dislike about leftists. In a way they are "the bad kind of liberals." What kind of liberals are you talking about? The European kind which is right wing, or the American kind which is left wing? Serious question. Honestly, I see "liberal" as becoming more and more of a defined concept shared across the Atlantic. In the US, you increasingly have a threefold division: reactionaries (Tea Party, alt-Right, whatever you want to call that), liberals (everything from Mitt Romney to Cory Booker), and "Progressives" (Warren, Sanders, etc.) Europe has basically the same categories, though their term "Socialist" is equivalent to the American "Progressive" (which actually makes good historical sense) and calling the reactionaries "Far Right" or something like that. Not that this clarity is a good thing exactly... last time the West was divided up in this way, we fought a series of bloody wars--and one Cold One--to resolve the matter. Though not well enough, I'm afraid. Not at all. While liberals on both sides of the Atlantic share some things in common there are too many things where they're on opposite sides of the spectrum. The difference is especially large in what is considered the appropriate role of government (government is a force for good vs a necessary evil). Someone like Hillary Clinton would never be considerd a liberal (although no socialist either).
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