My perspective is the European periphery (Greece) and Canada. I don’t know in particular what the Brazilian parliament is doing. I suspect (feel free to correct me) that within a presidential system, where parliament can be weaponized against a personalist presidency, sure it can become a vehicle for irresponsible brinksmanship, just like in the US. But the moment a parliament becomes itself responsible for governing, when things cannot be blamed on some singular President, when governments can lose the confidence of the parliament and elections can be triggered things change and parliaments have to start taking shit seriously.

That said, Parliamentarianism is not the perfect democratic system, it’s just better than Presidentialism. It is also not a guarantee against fascism (cf Hungary, Italy), it is just harder to subvert them. It is no coincidence that democracies that slide to authoritarianism tend to reform themselves into presidential systems, like Turkey. And of course, the real question is what is even better than both, how do we perfect democracy beyond 19th century political technologies, but that’s a different discussion.

Presidentialism is a dead-end strand of democracy. Progressives living in such systems everywhere should be pushing to reform it to parliamentarianism. No one election should have such cosmic level effects.

FCK
CDU

These two shitstains deserve each other.

Heartbreaking.

The concept of “toxic empathy” should be purged from Christianity like one of the highest forms of heresy. I’m talking Deus Vult levels of purging.

The article also discusses Greek and Finnish rapprochement with Apartheid Israel. This really is a story about European disunity, but the BBC editors chose a headline that makes it about China.

For the EU to have a common foreign policy, it has to take into account all states’ needs. Greece a d Cyprus cannot be asked to sacrifice their national security any less than Finland or Poland. And the Germans, French and Dutch don’t get to finger wag and lecture and fuck over the PIIGS when it suits them and then bitch about bespoke economic solutions afterwards.

So pick: do Northerners feel like they have a patriotic stake in the Aegean or Nicosia? Do Southerners feel like they have a stake in German auto factories? Do Westerners feel like they have a stake in keeping chinese drones away from Polish towns? Do Easterners feel like they have a stake in social safety nets in Portuguese villages? Do all of them care about rule of law, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the treaties and conventions that we have all signed on as Europeans? If so, European solutions become possible. If not, let’s just go back to the EEC and stop pretending this Europe thing ever actually meant anything.

You know how the left correctly blames the center Democrats for picking bad corpo candidates, eg against Trump (Clinton, Harris) that end up losing? The American left should also do a bit of introspection and self-criticism for picking a bad candidate in Maine. The whole saga of how he ended up stepping down was very demobilizing. This magat should not have it this easy…

Propaganda with high speed rail and electric vehicles.

Why do you hate democracy?

Liberal zionists finding the trimming around the ceiling very interesting to look at right now.

Holy upside-down analysis Batman. Let me clue you in to something: feminism and socialism were together from the start.

Yea that’s fair.

Hmm, I’m not one to give leftists a pass for antisemic statements, but having looked up a bit the context, I think you’re misrepresenting Mélenchon’s actual words, putting them in the worst possible light, where a good faith reading of his statements would place them in the “unfortunate wording of a somewhat valid point” that Mélenchon actually apologized for afterwards.

The “Jews killed Jesus” incident apparently was him trying to make a point about Macron being attacked internally and that sometimes members of your own group turn on you. So it wasn’t about calling Jews christ-killers, it was a bad use of a trope that he should have known to not use, and for which he apologized.

He also didn’t say that antisemitism isn’t a problem, he said it’s residual in France, which, you know, means it’s still there. He did minimize the issue, that’s true, but we do live in an environment like the one described in the OP article where antisemitism is used very irresponsibility.

The Zemour thing is also kind of weird? He was trying to defend Zemour, who’s a Jewish french nationalist, against an accusation of antisemitism by saying that his conservatism is part of how Judaism has survived over the centuries. He then also apparently subsequently admitted he expressed himself poorly.

So, overall, this all looks to me less like an antisemite and more like someone who runs his mouth a bit more than he should. It is perfectly reasonable however to criticize him for his own irresponsibility and for the hurtful nature of his comments.

That said, my argument is not that he’s really good at “handling antisemitism” (these cases obviously prove he sucks at it). My point was that he’s good at calling out centrist irresponsibility and lack seriousness in general, eg when it comes to the economy. He’s an example of how I think the left should attack the centre, not an example of how the left should talk about antisemitism. Je me suis mal exprimé comme Mélenchon évidemment.

The real issue here is how BYD will react to this. Technical failure is not something to be ashamed of. Not acting on it to address it is.

It is so extremely irresponsible to conflate Jews and Israel, in the name of fighting antisemism no less. In my opinion this should be the biggest hammer to bash centrists on the head with every time they do shit like this: their lack of seriousness and their irresponsible political conduct. Mélenchon has been particularly good at doing this, regardless his other flaws.

Greece-Turkey-Cyrpus-Israel

German politics stuff.

The FDP is the right libertarian German party.

As far as I know (maybe I’m wrong), even if each of these fucks was a war crimina in his own right, they didn’t go around threatening to use a nuclear first strike to annihilate a civilization. There is something particularly evil about the brandishing of unclear weapons.