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-UE
General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)
Comments
Of recent I have read a bunch of - by which I mean, at least two separate - articles invoking Fukuyama. The gist was that when you read him all these years later, it sounds less triumphal than it did back then, that this end of history meant there is no longer a viable, universal ideological alternative to liberal democracy. Marxism-Leninism fell on its ugly face, nationalisms are at most a matter of national interests, and religious fundamentalism lacks appeal towards those who aren't co-religionists already.
(He claimed nationalism counts as a competitor to liberal democracy only if it's as developed and ambitious as fascism or Nazism were, national interest or statism alone don't.)
At the end of the essay, Fukuyama expresses vague hope that history will begin to "move" again... well, feels like it did. (Oh Harambe, had you not...)
I don't know of Fukuyama's any recent thoughts on the matter, but he said something along the lines of conflicts will happen, so I don't know if stuff like Russia-Ukraine war counts as a shock to this concept or not. But assuming it counts - I'd say it cound be interpreted as one of the first rousings of a new contending idea. The alt-righties are certainly trying hard to convince people their decentralized para-fascisms are the new in-thing, so far only Putin seems to have ever got anywhere near that point, but he had it easy with Russia to work upon. Perhaps armchair leftism of the Internet will cohere into a rejuvenation of socialism in some form, but we'll yet to see that.
*checks wikipedia*
Huh. Turns out it's not about the part of the legal code dealing with murder. TIL.
Welp, there goes the right-wing opposition down here. Maybe the Liberals can finally drag themselves back to the centre without the Nationals dragging them even further to the right...
"86" is foodservice slang for removing something, such as cancelling an order or indicating that a menu item is unavailable. From there it became slang for ejecting unruly customers. And from there it became slang for getting rid of assholes, in general.
I remember seeing "86 43" to indicate displeasure with George W. Bush ("43" since he was the 43rd president of the U.S.). I haven't personally seen these usages in the wild yet lately but presumably by analogy the 47 refers to Donald Trump. (Why 46, I don't know.)
Wiktionary entry: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/86#English
Sigh, Vanilla still can't properly include parentheses when parsing URLs.
Only in Australia, lol.
(The rest of you guys can join in if you really want to recommend something, too.)