International Politics Thread - Disease and Disaster

[benjipwns]

They should split it East/West this time, just to be different.

[Broseidon]

Looks like Abdullah finally actually died

[chronovore]

Japan is waiting to hear about the two hostages ISIS has stated they’ll kill unless they’re ransomed for US$200,000,000. That amount was derived by ISIS from the amount of humanitarian aid Japan has pledged.

I’m no fan of Prime Minister Abe, nor his hawkish plans to formalize Japan’s ability to participate in wars in a logistics capacity (Thanks, Bush Jr., for opening that fucking Pandora’s Box), but this is surely ridiculous and unattainable.

[thisismyusername]

Looks like Abdullah finally actually died

Can't wait till the new king dies 2 years from now. Considered the crown prince before him died 2 years ago and all people in line for the throne are in their 70's.

This country is so lucky to have oil, it would have crumbled ages ago.

Please tell some of us non-Arab's more.

[benjipwns]

He's also apparently got Alzheimers.

But he was quite the dapper young fellow:

[Broseidon]

He's also apparently got Alzheimers.

But he was quite the dapper young fellow:
(Image removed from quote.)

youngfalconerabdullah.jpg tho

[Phoenix Dark]

He's also apparently got Alzheimers.

But he was quite the dapper young fellow:
(Image removed from quote.)

That's an "I can't poop on this" face.

[chronovore]

http://time.com/3680492/japan-isis-hostages/

We're past the deadline ISIS gave, and there's no news. The article gives an expert's opinion that PM Abe won't pay the ransom, neither publicly nor behind-the-scenes, and that's my guess as well: if Abe wants to convince Japan that the rest of the world is dangerous, there's no better way than letting a couple Japanese die.

The unsettling part is the interpretation that most domestic Japanese people are unsympathetic to their plight. The Haruna guy seems clearly to have some mental problems, and journalists should be hands-off in general, doubly so if their country isn't involved actively in opposing the government.

[benjipwns]

Greek elections, SYRIZA fell two seats short of majority:
SYRIZA - 36.34% - 149 seats (+78)
New Democracy - 27.81% - 76 seats (-53)
Golden Dawn - 6.28% - 17 seats (-1)
To Potami - 6.04% - 17 seats (+17)
Communists - 5.47% - 15 seats (+3)
Independent Greeks - 4.75% - 13 seats (-7)
PASOK - 4.68% - 13 seats (-20)

Democratic Left fell to 0.49% and lost all 17 seats. To To Potami I assume.

[benjipwns]

Saw that iSideWith added UK and Canada for their 2015 elections:
https://canada.isidewith.com

62%    New Democratic
39%    Green
39%    Conservative
30%    Liberal
2%      Bloc Québécois

https://uk.isidewith.com

72%     UK Independence
60%    Conservatives
56%    Liberal Democrats
37%    Green
18%    Scottish Nationals
15%    British Nationals
11%    Labour
7%      Plaid Cymru

Though a British news site I took their version on the other day with like ten questions I got equal UKIP/Green/LD, with like 10% Tory, 10% Labour so lol anarchy in the UK!

Also INDIA! http://india.isidewith.com/

81%   Rahul Gandhi
62%   Narendra Modi

80%  Indian National Congress
69%  Aam Aadmi Party
62%  Bharatiya Janata Party

Guess my guy lost :'( (i have no idea actually)

And Aussies if you like that kind of thing, they aren't going again until 2017:
https://australia.isidewith.com

[Rufus]

Greek elections, SYRIZA fell two seats short of majority:
SYRIZA - 36.34% - 149 seats (+78)
New Democracy - 27.81% - 76 seats (-53)
Golden Dawn - 6.28% - 17 seats (-1)
To Potami - 6.04% - 17 seats (+17)
Communists - 5.47% - 15 seats (+3)
Independent Greeks - 4.75% - 13 seats (-7)
PASOK - 4.68% - 13 seats (-20)

Democratic Left fell to 0.49% and lost all 17 seats. To To Potami I assume.

Euro in 'freefall'. The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

[Joe Molotov]

Communists - 5.47% - 15 seats (+3)

Soon.

[benjipwns]

They got 24% and 60 seats back in 1958 and 8.5% and 26 seats back in 2012.

They've really gone downhill since that whole Civil War thing.

[Human Snorenado]

Tell us again how Putin is such a badass, American conservatives

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-26/russia-credit-rating-cut-to-junk-by-s-p-for-first-time-in-decade.html

[chronovore]

http://time.com/3680492/japan-isis-hostages/

We're past the deadline ISIS gave, and there's no news. The article gives an expert's opinion that PM Abe won't pay the ransom, neither publicly nor behind-the-scenes, and that's my guess as well: if Abe wants to convince Japan that the rest of the world is dangerous, there's no better way than letting a couple Japanese die.

The unsettling part is the interpretation that most domestic Japanese people are unsympathetic to their plight. The Haruna guy seems clearly to have some mental problems, and journalists should be hands-off in general, doubly so if their country isn't involved actively in opposing the government.

We’ve lost both hostages to ISIS now. A number of news specials last night aired, covering what kind of beast the ISIS group is.

I’d not known this, but apparently they’re kidnapping children to fight in their ranks now?

[Great Rumbler]

I’d not known this, but apparently they’re kidnapping children to fight in their ranks now?

I saw a report a few weeks ago about a video ISIS released where they showed a kid [maybe about 10-12] shooting two captives in the back of the head. Not sure if he was kidnapped by them or not, but they're not definitely not above drafting children into their ranks and training them to be killers.

[Kara]

Greek elections, SYRIZA fell two seats short of majority:
SYRIZA - 36.34% - 149 seats (+78)
New Democracy - 27.81% - 76 seats (-53)
Golden Dawn - 6.28% - 17 seats (-1)
To Potami - 6.04% - 17 seats (+17)
Communists - 5.47% - 15 seats (+3)
Independent Greeks - 4.75% - 13 seats (-7)
PASOK - 4.68% - 13 seats (-20)

Democratic Left fell to 0.49% and lost all 17 seats. To To Potami I assume.

I'm really excited to see a big tent leftist party of a nebulous degree of leftism with no practical political governing experience (unlike, say, Die Linke) crash and burn spectacularly when they're handed the keys to the boat with no gas in the middle of the Atlantic commonly referred to as Greece.

Tangent: I had a sensible chuckle when USA Today described SYRIZA as far-left in a headline. At least Der Spiegel is moderately on-point when they write "far-left Left Party" in their articles that are translated into English. (This also makes me sensibly chuckle when I read it.)

[benjipwns]

I was reading or listening to somebody who was just going off their name COALITION OF THE RADICAL LEFT and how it was basically Russia in 1917 all over again. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard these days to at least glance at a Wikipage on a subject before going off on it. They're to the left of say, the French Socialist Party but that's mainly because they're newer to politics and haven't been tempered more through solidification as a party and formalization of that big tent.

Pretty much every news source describes them as "far-left" in a country with a regularly elected and self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist Party. Who are they? Maximum-left?

Speaking of which :
http://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/SYRIZA-the-left-reserve-force-of-capitalism/

Brietbart facts:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/01/26/the-end-of-the-center-left-greeces-socialist-party-loses-to-both-hard-left-and-neo-nazis/

[fizzel]

Tell us again how Putin is such a badass, American conservatives

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-26/russia-credit-rating-cut-to-junk-by-s-p-for-first-time-in-decade.html

I'll never understand economics. Russia is junk for investors despite having a seemingly reasonable debt to GDP ratio, has cash reserves, has gold (for those that care about such things) and does have resources that the world jealously covets.

Yet Britain is AAA, despite everything i see in this country is screaming the opposite to me. 

[Rufus]

Pretty much every news source describes them as "far-left" in a country with a regularly elected and self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist Party. Who are they? Maximum-left?

Syriza is the left that got elected, so obviously the most heinous kind of left.

[Kara]

I was reading or listening to somebody who was just going off their name COALITION OF THE RADICAL LEFT and how it was basically Russia in 1917 all over again. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard these days to at least glance at a Wikipage on a subject before going off on it. They're to the left of say, the French Socialist Party but that's mainly because they're newer to politics and haven't been tempered more through solidification as a party and formalization of that big tent.

Pretty much every news source describes them as "far-left" in a country with a regularly elected and self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist Party. Who are they? Maximum-left?

They're TRUE LEFT. It's like TRUE NEUTRAL in D&D except you have to leave the house to pretend to be something you're not.

Tangent: One of the parties in SYRIZA is a successor to KKE Interior, but I'm absolutely certain 0.00% of the staff at USA Today are that familiar with the family trees of Hellenic communist parties. Hell, I bet no one there can even appreciate a good joke about British Trot parties.

[Great Rumbler]

Fearing that actors could be mistaken for police — and chase scenes confused for the real thing — Paris is sharply restricting filming of action movies in the city that been the stage for some of film's most memorable high-octane sequences.

Filming outside scenes with police, army or security services was quietly banned after the attacks in the French capital that left 20 dead, including three gunmen.

"There's a problem with these action-type scenes, as the actors in uniform could be targets for terrorists. Also, the actors could pose confusion for the general public — during this highly sensitive period," Sylvie Barnaud, the police official who grants outside filming permission in Paris, told The Associated Press.

[Kara]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/alexis-tsipras-interview-syriza/

[benjipwns]

king rambo abdullah of jordan

[benjipwns]

lol at the scene:

[Am_I_Anonymous]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/08/americas/brazil-prison-break-seduction/index.html

[Joe Molotov]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/08/americas/brazil-prison-break-seduction/index.html

 

[Am_I_Anonymous]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/08/americas/brazil-prison-break-seduction/index.html

 

yeah no shit, did they not watch any american TV circa the 80's or what man?

[Kara]

[Giannis] Varoufakis went on to say that Germans and Greeks are linked by their experiences of suffering. Just like the Germans, who were yoked with the burdensome Versailles Treaty after losing World War I, his country too has been humiliated by agreements forced onto it from the outside. Both countries, he said, suffered from deflation and economic depression, the Germans in the 1930s and the Greeks today. "The Germans understand best how the Greeks are doing," Varoufakis said.

[Great Rumbler]

 

[Kara]

I'd make a post about how he's unintentionally true (to a point), but it would involve citing Imperial German tax policy and other arcane lore only benji would probably know.

Golden Dawn and the death of PASOK is kinda like a Weimar election too.

[Kara]

The Economist (yeah, I know...) put up a piece today about Putin's fifth column in Europe and it described SYRIZA as "radical far-left"... does this mean that they accept that there isn't a radical far-left as well, or is it just doubling down?

The piece is hilarious, btw, they basically cop to the fact that aside from the Front National the rest of their speculation is fanfiction.

I especially liked how Putin also apparently has XA in his pocket too. Dude is playing Go or something.

[benjipwns]

It really shows the hilarious state of foreign policy/study/etc. that Putin making two or three relatively minor moves in the style of most of human history has completely upset the balance and sent the foreign policy world into crisis.

Yet, the U.S., NATO and the U.N. overthrowing (or assisting in the change of) regimes and involving itself in outside elections continuously since the Wall came down didn't even really make a blip on their radar.

It's similar to the obsessiveness over North Korea, a non-threat of a state that exists almost purely because China doesn't want the refugee swarm that would follow its collapse.

I think there's a longing for the old days of The Great Game lurking somewhere in there. When diplomats mattered and so on.

[Kara]

This conversation went all wrong because now I'm going to drop a maxim you should be the one saying: when states lose reasons for their existence, they're left with no recourse but to extend the parameters of that existence.

[Great Rumbler]

Police in Denmark say one man has been killed and two police officers wounded in an attack on a Jewish synagogue in central Copenhagen, just hours after a deadly shooting at a free speech event in the capital.

Danish police said early on Sunday they were treating the two incidents as "terror" attacks, but said they could not confirm if they were linked.

 

[Rufus]

Sigh. Wonder if they, too were on a watchlist already.

[Kara]

Unsub looks pretty goy in CCTV pics. Can't wait for another cac terrorist in Scandinavia getting low coverage a la Breivik or that dipshit in North Carolina.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Im supposed to attend a high risk black tie event next week, this might be reason to cancel

[Great Rumbler]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for "massive immigration" of European Jews to Israel following the shooting attack outside a Copenhagen synagogue that killed a Danish Jew.

Netanyahu said the government on Sunday will discuss a $46M plan to encourage Jewish immigration from France, Belgium and Ukraine.

"This wave of attacks is expected to continue," Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting. "Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home."

[Kara]

I think the technical term is Aliyah, Bibi.

Either that or colonization. :trollbron

[Rufus]

Lo and behold.

The gunman shot dead by police after a double terror attack on a cafe and a synagogue in Copenhagen that claimed two lives was known to Danish intelligence, the head of the country’s security service has said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/14/copenhagen-cartoonist-charlie-hebdo-style-attack

Maybe he would have stuck out if the various lists were twice as long.

[Kara]

Der Spiegel interviewed SYRIZA's finance minister.

http://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-1015956.html

Minister is so radical that I no longer have to mourn the death of my favorite Hoxhaist newspaper.

[Kara]

Panos Kammenos, a right-wing politician who is the new defense minister, made headlines when he recently claimed that Jews in Greece pay no taxes.

[Kara]

Scuttlebutt is that Greece is going to ask for a stay of execution of around 6 months.

SYRZIA

[Kara]

Germany already rejected it.

Also Bibi is in a spending scandal. Elect crooks after you know they're crooks y'all.

[Rufus]

Germany already rejected it.

Hearing Schäuble talk about this whole thing has become really, really annoying. I'm beginning to hate his accent.

[Brehvolution]

http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-beheading-video-21-egyptian-christians-fake-film-experts-argue-yes-1824034

 

[Fifstar]

Germany already rejected it.

Hearing Schäuble talk about this whole thing has become really, really annoying. I'm beginning to hate his accent.

Combination of swabian accent and altklug talk = the worst (and I'm from the Bodensee region)

[Brehvolution]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/leaked-spy-cables-netanyahu-iran-bomb-mossad

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

[Madrun Badrun]

So basically Israel is like any other modern democracy. 

[Kara]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/eurogroup-jeroen-dijsellbloem-dutch-finance/

The promise of the Syriza government represents everything that postwar social democracy no longer is, and cannot return to. Underlying Dijsselbloem’s career is the perspective that at best, contemporary progressive politics can only be a variant of conservative politics with slightly more scruples.

As long as he remains defiant, and despite the limitations of his government’s agenda, Varoufakis represents an alternative to this position. The European right will detest this with unvarnished brutality. But it is mainstream social democracy that will feel the electoral repercussions most directly, and therefore is most bitter in its response.

For Dijsselbloem, extinguishing Syriza’s promise is imperative. It is a precondition for restoring the stability of the EU that he, his party, and economic elites so desire. But it is as necessary for the continuation of the dreamless, managerial, suit-and-tie progressivism from which he has never strayed.

dis like that was worth wading through Jacobin SYRIZA porn.

[Kara]

Cheez, when did The Morning Star adopt the slogan "The People's Daily"?

[Great Rumbler]

These ISIS guys, man. I can't even.

[Madrun Badrun]

I'm for sex slaves but these guys lost me at statue vandalism. 

Also is France still underfire or can we update the title?  I only get my news for this threads title. 

[Great Rumbler]

I feel like the thread title needs some kind of reference to Israeli politics.

[Madrun Badrun]

Why, what's going on in Israeli? 

[Great Rumbler]

Netanyahu is in a tough reelection and the Speak of the US House went behind Obama's back to invite him to speak to Congress about Iran's nuclear program, effectively undercutting US negotiations with Iran over ending its nuclear program.

[Kara]

person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation Union is a house of cards. More Likud, more bullshit in the near future.

[benjipwns]

Typical, we're talking about the Jews when Lesotho is holding an election on Saturday.

I know what you're thinking that Tom Thabane and the All Basotho Convention has this one all but wrapped up, but I say we can't sleep on Mothetjoa Metsings' Lesotho Congress for Democracy. He's got more army support compared to Thabane who needed South African and Nambibian support. I think an outside party that could make some noise is the Marematlou Freedom Party, their name being literally Elephant Choppers Freedom Party. That's going to be tough to compete with.

One big question is whether Pakalitha Mosisili's Democratic Congress will do as well in 2012, I just think people are tired of him after his 14 years in power from 1998-2012. They want a fresh face. Despite Thabane being 75, you have to wonder if he is that face. I think if anyone is Lesotho's Barack Obama it's more like King Letsie III. I've long wondered if he'll ditch the ceremonial monarchy to utilize his Cambridge education in making a bid for elected office.

[Rufus]

I've already posted it in the Outside Link thread, but what the hell: