What is Kim K’s area of knowledge, though? I know she can afford a castle.
So your vote would go to the builder then :0)
A rotten institution
https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1679270921763188736?s=20
GOP leading candidate:
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His entire view of the world is simply based around getting rich and who gives him the most compliments.
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Also , not Kim. But people like Trump , Modi , Erdogan etc (the right wing populist leaders) are those who come to power because the status quo for quite a large chunk of the citizens isn’t acceptable. I don’t want to get into the reasons as to why the demagogues get elected. But the world has shown that there is a genuine space.
As to whether the likes of them are game changers , I believe they are. Modi and Erdogan have pushed the narrative so far to the right that even well thought centrist policies are now deemed as against national interest , left wing politics etc. And to some extent , that change is now irrevocable.
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Knowledge Money is power?
Historically others have pushed the bar much higher so these are not in that league - and likely never will be. Even now, the Republicans in the US continue to set a high bar and movement to the right is aso not confined to those examples as it seems to be a broader movement sweeping the world.
Much as the Beeb likes to blurt out “the Far right (/politician X) is coming into power in Greece / France / Norway / wherever” it rarely(/never?) mentions that about the country that pays for it…
It is a cycle. People are going to get tired of the likes of modi/Erdogan eventually and go to other parties. But some of their policies would have shifted the goalposts irrevocably.
They, along with Putin, will die eventually - unless they download their conscious or have an AI as a avatar…
I can remember when it seemed irrevocable that a third of the world lived in communist states.
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Even if those states aren’t communist now. There’s a lot of the legacy rules etc still running the place now
It is interesting that you emphasize the right/left aspect of Modi and Erdogan, which is not what really how I would characterize either (notwithstanding the fact that both are indeed right wing). To me, both have likely finished off any remnants of the respective founding secular visions (Nehru and Ataturk), which is the genuinely irrevocable element. In that sense, they may end up having a great deal in common with the Trump ‘project’, which is similarly directed at established US democratic institutions - and has indeed badly weakened the secular wall by way of control of the Supreme Court
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Both are right wing politicians taking the worst excesses of left wing ideology i.e populism.
Both have been disastrous for their respective economies. It’s another thing that the Indian economy is resilient enough to withstand the modi economic policies for now.
I’m clearly not a fan of modi. But I’m more worried about who comes after Modi.
The only aspects of Modi that I would somewhat agree is his abrogation of the special status for Kashmir and his complete disengagement of any relationship with Pakistan. Thats something that should have been done a lot earlier. Although I suspect that’s more to do with Jaishankar and not Modi per se.
Supposedly serious conservative intellectual writes about a party that doesnt exist by imagining a faction that is not part of the Trump-DeSantis wing.
https://twitter.com/JoshKraushaar/status/1679812943293161473?s=20
Oh, Biden is in real trouble if the 7 self-identifying Republicans who wont vote for either of those guys finds a way to get someone else nominated.
Any number of threads this could go into but i’ll put it here…a long but well stated series of observations about the growth of the MAGA movement tracing it to times long before Trump.
https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1679817901350567936?s=20
The bit that was interesting to me was his observation of the use of such childish labels to refer to his “enemies”, which was something I noticed as an oddity of people in these circles at around the same time. Without fail, every single adult who started using this incredibly childish language around 2008 all went on to become deeply MAGA, even if they refused to identify as such. The one forum where I first encountered was a weight lifting forum that had an incredibly diverse range of backgrounds and education. Within about 4 years that forum turned into a place that was just unbearable unless you down the hole with them. It later went on to be cited by MSNBS host as the textbook example of the strength/masculinity to facism crossover
This comment though is I think the most pertinent
More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.
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When I came across this story a couple of days a go I read it as people responding to a program advertised as a disaster relief / community help endeavour finding out it was something else…
If this (the spirit of the “actual” plan) is actually finding traction then I try not to think about the type of people that are drinking the koolade. However, when I do I am left asking how did their view of life, with the myriad of possibilities before them, narrow to the conclusion that that would be a good fit.
Playing it out forward make zero sense. Playing it backwards, how did they get here, well, there are two options that stand out - complete naivety or a group that, wittingly or otherwise, have been left behind as society has moved on.
Nothing is irrevocable in politics. It might however take a bloody revolution.