Some Jews feel threatened by the presence of Islamists in France, who carried out several terror attacks last year, as well as by a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents.

That has led some to consider a vote for the far right — a move once seen as unthinkable, given that the party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”.

Serge Klarsfeld, a French Holocaust survivor and famed Nazi hunter, shocked many by saying last month he would vote for the RN if they were in run-offs with LFI candidates.

"I would not hesitate, I would vote for the RN . . . I am faced with a far left in thrall to La France Insoumise and its stench of antisemitism and a violent anti-Zionism, and the RN that has evolved,” he said.

Imagine being a Holocaust survivor and voting for fascists. Insanity in France. Note the LFI is France Unbowed, Mélenchon's left party and the largest member of the NFP, the left alliance. From here: https://www.ft.com/content/55740b08-dd73-4ac5-a8be-9a20b5dfeb56

Also I'm continuing my campaign of reading as little about TERF island as possible. The FT this weekend has a whole feature on the election that I refuse to engage with outside of the Scottish and Irish bits. I always skip the UK section on the Economist. I do not care about England, it does not matter on the global stage in any serious sense, and I hate that Anglophone media devotes so much time to a deranged backwater.

Sinn Féin actually increased its vote share in Northern Ireland, and Paisley lost his DUP seat. Meanwhile in France, looks like the RN isn't going to get a majority after all. The left and the centre's strategy of dropping candidates to consolidate the anti-fascist vote is working. We're on track for a hung parliament with the left alliance in a solid second place, per here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-05/le-pen-projected-to-win-175-205-seats-in-french-vote-ipsos-says

Cowards! Backstabbers! Ingrates! Traitors! Snakes! Biden’s performance at that debate was magnificent. No one is better placed or richlier qualified to lead his county through the rest of this decade. Before the debate I still wasn’t sure, but now I’m absolutely committed; I’m ridin’ with Biden, even if I know exactly where this road leads. Make him president for life! It could be longer than you think. Hook him up to machines, flood his veins with crank. Long live Joe! Long live the king!

This is your heritage as an American. So yes, fine: your democratic process has been reduced to an Old Man Contest, two leathery codgers competing over who has more of his brain still functioning. Odds are pretty good that both candidates were wearing some kind of adult incontinence nappy for the debate. A good night for either of them meant not visibly drooling or falling over on stage. So what? This upsets you? You think your country ought to be better than this? Are you really worried about Joe Biden? Joe Biden is still alive! He talks! You can ask him what day of the week it is, and he’ll answer you! The answer might even be accurate! What are you complaining about? For thousands of years, your continent was ruled by the silent mountains and the blood-hungry sun, and they spoke a language only measurable in graves. Next to them, Joe Biden is a model of lucidity.

What the backstabbers don’t understand is that Joe Biden is president for a reason. You will not unseat him, because he is the man for his age. Napoleon might have been the world-spirit on horseback, but the world-spirit no longer needs horses. Joe Biden is the world-spirit dribbling ice cream down its chin.

From King Joe Forever

Yeah I think Horne does a phenomenal job at showing that while the "traditional" reasons for the revolution may be valid for the north, the south broadly joined not because of taxes but over fears of abolition. Still cannot believe that Florida was actually a British possession during the revolution and specifically did not join the United States because it was filled with runaway slaves who would kill the colonial government if they tried to join. Blew my mind that I did not realise Florida was a British possession at the time.

Because he's not a person, he's merely the living personification of capital itself.

Exactly why I try to read news from publications like this and The Economist. They're right wing ghouls who are very explicit in their ghoulishness, and you can pinpoint the propaganda because they'll just tell you most of the time. Ultimately the people who read this kind of news, unlike say the NY Times, are mostly people plugged into the circuits of capital and power. You can't make money if you don't actually know what's going on.

Yeah this was the status quo, Presidents acting as presidents are never held accountable for their crimes. We're just in the "say the quiet part out loud" phase in the West.

Spy x Family is extremely popular and is centered on adults, and all the children that are in the series aren't sexualised in any capacity. Refreshing tbh

Note this is only the first round. The fascists are probably going to win, but I expect most races to go into a run-off where it'll be the RN vs the NPF (the left coalition) as the centrists come in third and have to drop out. Then things get really interesting, because the French will vote between fascists and the left. The left could come out on top, depending on how much voters can stomach Le Pen.

Best part of this is that Russians have three names (a first name, surname, and a patronymic) and they love using nicknames. So the main character is Rodion (first name) Romanovitch (patronymic) Raskolnikov (surname), but can (and is) called by any of those three names. He's also got nicknames like Rodya, Rodenka, and Rodka. So this deranged individual (who decided to call Raskolnikov "Pete" I guess) is going to be hopelessly confused when somebody starts referring to Rodya, and he'll think the book is filled with like five times as many characters as it actually is.

I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A "real universe" does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he's saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.