Coronavirus

[orathaic]

While Trump's failures mount, he looks to blame China, but of course it doesn't matter if the virus resulted from a failure of lab security (when you are supposed to have labs researching this kind of virus to protect people) or an animal market, Trump is still only responcible for his own failures, (cf: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539)

[flash2015]

It just keeps getting worse. There have been a few protests in some states about the ongoing lockdowns. You can understand everyone is upset about the current situation, I am too. What would have been great if the president could come out and make a speech to help quell the concerns, perhaps work with the governors to suggest tweaking the restrictions.

Who am I kidding though? This is Trump. He doesn't give a damn about the country, so instead of quelling these protests, he decides to take it up a notch because he sees a political benefit in it:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/t ... s-n1186561

I really can't see an action more irresponsible than what Trump is doing.

[taylor4]

@orathaic:
Oil is at US$18.12 a barrel as of close of business April 17th.
Russia/Saudi OPEC triple whammy economy in this Great Depression deja vu

[Randomizer]

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-culture-wa ... 21209.html

Republicans, especially Trump with his LIBERATE tweet, are pushing to reopen without adequate testing and medical supplies. What isn't being mentioned with this rush for consumer spending to save businesses is that it will quickly drop as consumers are hospitalized and die off. But this will help the government as the death tax will increase revenue to pay for government spending.

Trump is also hoping that more Democrats than Republican voters will die off to help his reelection. Also without mail in ballots because the US Postal Service is running out of money, Republicans can harvest absentee ballots and alter them like has been documented in 2018.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nc ... story.html

[taylor4]

1. Democrats won the lower house of Congress, the House of Representatives in 2018
2. Postal police inspectors will monitor mail handlers and window tellers, so if 22cents is stolen, it's a federal case
3. The death tax had of late been for multimillinaires; the Republicans swept it away
4. Business: WHY are the equity advisers saying go to Cash? Because it's now a financial crisis/recession/depression that will take years to dig out from under.
5. Liberate fanaticism and COVID-19: These protestors are standing close to each other, without masks and more of them will die to more than make up for the few diehard stay-at-home Bernie supporters.
6. An election in Wisconsin this Spring: Trumpo endorsed the losing judicial candidate; long lines of voters showed up in person despite the Virus peril.

[taylor4]

@orathaic:
The price of crude oil - barrels, May futures market:

"Owing largely to a quirk in the way that oil prices are set, the May benchmark actually fell into negative territory, suggesting people who had oil to sell were willing to pay people to take it off their hands.
"The problem is that the United States is running out of places to store its oil. UNQUOTES

[orathaic]

Short term, Russia (or any country) can afford to not balance their budget. Long term, we will see what happens.

[Octavious]

Bit of a change of pace, but I'm curious about the stories that would have been in the news if we hadn't been talking about the virus. The massacre in North America by a crazed gunman (Canadian this time), the decimation of the Italian olive harvest, that sort of thing.

So let's start off with one we've talked about before. Ages ago Ireland had an election and started trying to form a government. Did anything happen with that?

[kaner406]

What about Israel finally forming a government?

[kaner406]

Or what is going on in the South China sea at the moment?

[orathaic]

Ireland is still being run by a caretaker govt, they have agreed to go into coalition with their civil war enemies, which (while it has been coming for the last 4 years where they provided confidence and supply) will end ~100 years of division between the two otherwise centre-right republican parties which I've never been able to distinguish...

Alas they do not have enough seats to form a majority govt (also a first for these two parties combined seats/vote count, who previously have both commanded a majority in their own, and been the only governments in the Republic).

Other parties are largely side-lined. With media pressure mostly on the 4th largest party (the greens) to prop them up.

[Octavious]

If you had a first past the post system I suspect that such a distribution would have been impossible. Either one of your republican duo would have died, or been forced to evolve leftwards.

[orathaic]

If you had a first past the post system I suspect that such a distribution would have been impossible. Either one of your republican duo would have died, or been forced to evolve leftwards.

Tey acted like a two party system (which first past the post encourages) and dominated politics when it was tribal and based more on which side of the civil war your family picked than on policy. Having First past the post would have done nothing but hurt the Labour Party, and now Sinn Féin, the Greens and other minor groups.

Also, who gave us PR-STV?

Also also, what the frak is going on in Hungary?

[Octavious]

I disagree. They've acted like a one party system. FPTP does indeed usually favour two dominant parties, but it does impose conditions that make those parties different. Labour may well have died, but in its death its members would have joined whichever of the big two was perceived to be most left leaning at the time, and that weight of genuine left wing membership would have led to it turning into a centre left party.

Alternatively Labour would have achieved what they did in the UK and displaced one of the traditional big two.

No idea who gave you PR-STV. What's going on in Hungary?

[orathaic]

I disagree. They've acted like a one party system. FPTP does indeed usually favour two dominant parties, but it does impose conditions that make those parties different. Labour may well have died, but in its death its members would have joined whichever of the big two was perceived to be most left leaning at the time, and that weight of genuine left wing membership would have led to it turning into a centre left party.

I call BS on this

The Green party in the UK hasn't joined whichever party is seen as more environmentally friendly and pulled it over. UKIP arguably did pull the conservatives towards Brexit and Racism/English nationalism but only due to David Cameron's bungling - not by disbanding and joining the Conservative party.

And that is just recent history. Irish politics is driven more by specific culture and history than the left right divide which has defined the UK or France. Because the typical feudalism->merchantilisn->capitalism transition didn't happen in Ireland in the same way. The wealthy elite in Ireland were for a few hundred years the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly imported from Britain (and granted land by the Crown) or converted in order benefit from association with the Protestant elite.

So instead of economic Left-right based on Aristocracy vs Labour, we had Irish vs English. While English peasants were struggling to get voting rights for poor men, in Ireland it was for Catholics (regardless of wealth, something which continued in some parts of Northern Ireland until the 60s). So in the 20s, when the two parties of our (former) two party system were created it was as a result of the supreme dominance of one group (the formerly downtrodden Catholic Irish) over the other (the now ejected Protestant Ruling class).

To be sure, James Connolly's working class party (which became the modern day Irish Labour Party) did exist, but they never held the influence to establish the Socialist Republic Connolly May have dreamed of.

And in that moment of creation, this single party could have ruled as just that, except the British foreign office split a wedge between those willing to let the North go and those willing to fight the British army and Ulster Unionists til the last.

The Irish civil war defined them more than class or religion. And there is no reason to assume leftist leaning members would have pulled the majority away, as the green and UKIP haven't done in English politics.

[Octavious]

The Green party in the UK hasn't joined whichever party is seen as more environmentally friendly and pulled it over

Of course it has. Do you really have any doubt that, if the UK adopted a PR system of voting, that the Green Party wouldn't be at least 2 or 3 times its current size? And where are these people now? Most of them are in Labour, because under FPTP the Labour Party (like the Tories) is really a coalition of several distinct smaller parties who compromise purity of policy for power. And the impact of all these ideological Greens within the Labour Party is that it is Greener (and a little more left wing) than would otherwise be the case.

[orathaic]

The Green party in the UK hasn't joined whichever party is seen as more environmentally friendly and pulled it over

Of course it has. Do you really have any doubt that, if the UK adopted a PR system of voting, that the Green Party wouldn't be at least 2 or 3 times its current size? And where are these people now? Most of them are in Labour, because under FPTP the Labour Party (like the Tories) is really a coalition of several distinct smaller parties who compromise purity of policy for power. And the impact of all these ideological Greens within the Labour Party is that it is Greener (and a little more left wing) than would otherwise be the case.

So under FPTP the green movement lives and dies with the Labour Party, while under PR-STV the green party can form a coalition with a variety of people (and will be punish in transfers by the left if they do go into coalition with FF/FG).

Also, when you say in the UK the Labour Party took over from the 'two traditional' parties, how long did that take? In Ireland FG and FF are the two traditional parties, and SF looks to be taking over the position of opposition. It has been 1only 100 years. I think FPTP would have taken longer, but I don't have data on that. So honestly asking.

[Octavious]

Not long at all. Labour was founded in 1900, spent a decade or so as a minor party (5% of the vote in 1906, 7% in 1910 etc), became the 2nd largest party in 1918, and we had the first Labour PM in 1924. So using their minor party size as a sensible starting point, we're talking a progression from also rans to dominant big two status in around a decade.

And no, the green movement does not live and die in the Labour Party. There are strong and growing green movements within all the major parties. But the Green Party, which is a hard left environmentalist party, very much competes with Labour to provide a natural home for its members. This was especially true when Corbyn was in charge.

[Jamiet99uk]

But the Green Party, which is a hard left environmentalist party, very much competes with Labour to provide a natural home for its members. This was especially true when Corbyn was in charge.

As a member of the Green Party since 2014, and previously a member of the Labour Party from 2008 to 2013, I can 100% confirm the accuracy of Octavious's comments in this regard.

[Randomizer]

Why you shouldn't take advice from clueless, old, rich, white, Republican presidents that never had to shop for or use household cleaning products. It can kill you or at least send you to the emergency room in desperate need of medical attention for ingesting a product with a warning label not to do it.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-floats-tre ... 02468.html

People are already getting sick because they missed the use in adequate ventilation part of the warning.