These far right terrorists murdered 49 innocent people in New Zealand.[1] Following the gruesome murder of innocent civilians the President of the United States decided to tweet a link to a far right site that absolutely loathes immigrants.[2] President Trump likely tweeted Breitbart as they had just conducted an interview where the President warned his political opponents of retribution from his supporters in the military, police, and biker gangs.^[3]
One of the New Zealand terror suspects openly praised President Trump in his manifesto. He hailed President Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose," but he disagreed with him over his policy decisions and leadership.[4] The terror suspect livestreamed his massacre and uploaded a manifesto rife with what members of the far right internet community he posted on would refer to as "ironic jokes" and memes. The terror suspect may have been inspired by a French writer who fears replacement by immigrants.[5] The terror suspect visited Europe and espoused white nationalist views that he claims were derived from his visit. This New York Times piece is quite illuminating;[6]
Based on the video, the manifesto and social media posts, a picture has begun to emerge of a man primarily driven by white nationalism and a desire to drive cultural, political and racial wedges between people across the globe. That, he hoped, would stoke discord and, eventually, more violence between races.
...The gunman appeared to pair the shooting with the typical trolling tactics of the internet’s most far-right instigators, playing to a community of like-minded supporters online who cheered him on in real time as they watched bodies pile up. And the manifesto states plainly what usually goes unstated by internet trolls: By design, its author wanted to get everyone upset and arguing with each other.
One of the goals of his bloodshed, he wrote, was to “agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result.” He said he wanted to “incite violence, retaliation and further divide.”
The manifesto, the harrowing video and what appear to be the gunman’s social media posts feature typical white nationalist rhetoric with layers upon layers of irony and meta jokes, making it difficult to parse what is genuine and what he just thought was funny.
The gunman seems to have a significant interest in history — at least, t
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My goal in life is to improve as many people's lives as I can in the most efficient manner possible. For most of my life, I've viewed voting and participating in my country's electoral process as a duty and a responsibility, but now I'm starting to see it as a bad investment. I'm not sure playing the political game is helping anybody in the long term, and I'm wondering if I should give it up entirely and focus on helping people through religious means.
My biggest issue is that both factions have ceased to be political parties and become warring tribes. I think the astonishing demographic split of the last election is proof that things have grown way past simple disagreements about fiscal policy or social governance. The parties are now stand-ins for two completely separate cultures with different life experiences, beliefs, values, outlooks, races, religions, occupations, histories, entertainment, and every other thing that can differentiate groups of people. Our two-party system encourages the parties to be diametrically opposed, but even given that, they seem to go out of their way to disagree with each other on every single thing, seemingly out of sheer spite. To make it clear that I am talking about more than just politics, I will be referring to each side as "the Blues" and "the Reds" from here on.
Since Reddit is a liberal bastion, I don't feel the need to state my issues with the Reds, though I can if a conservative wants to drop by. I consider myself a liberal, but 2016 was my first presidential election, and I have grown increasingly disenchanted with the Blues since the campaigns really got going. During the election, I resisted the equivocation that became so common because I emphatically believed that the two candidates were not the same and to take that position was abdicating responsibility under a thin veil of cynicism. But now, I'm not so sure. I don't have a bulletproof argument, but I will list some things that have really been bothering me, in no particular order.
- Hillary Clinton's post-election conduct. I defended her all throughout the campaign, but now she's making me regret it. She's going around blaming everybody in the world and accepting no responsibility for her own failure. The inspiring leadership this country needs. I feel like I was drinking the Kool-Aid that entire time, and my Red friends were much righter about her than I'd like to admit. If this is the best the Blues can offer, maybe we need to take a hard look at j
Hi! I originally posted this in r/worldpolitics about a week ago, but got no response. Then I learned about this subreddit and figured I’d try here.
So as an American, I heard about this news without having much real context beforehand. I gather that a guy in Italy named Fabio Del Bergiolo had a cache of weapons, including an unarmed (but fully operational) French-made Qatari air-to-air missile (which was at an airport hanger) and a ton of guns and ammunition. The Italian police launched an investigation into him and others because of “the activities of some Italian fighters with extremist backgrounds who had taken part in the armed conflict in the Ukrainian region of Donbass”. They eventually raided his house, arrested him, and seized the weapons along with a bunch of Nazi propaganda (His lawyer said that he also had USSR and fascist paraphernalia, and that he was a collector, but the police only took the Nazi items). They also arrested two other men, Swiss Alessandro Monti and Italian Fabio Bernardi, who were helping Del Bergiolo sell the missile (apparently they were trying to use WhatsApp). Most of what I know is from these sources, listed in order I accessed them:
Al Jazeera
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BSKegZxWcKw
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/italy-seizes-missile-guns-raids-neo-nazis-190715232214911.html
CNN
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/07/15/europe/italy-nazi-weapons-missile-seizure-intl/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/15/italy-seizes-combat-ready-missile-automatic-weapon-stash-raids/
Fox
https://www.foxnews.com/world/italy-police-missile-weapons-nazi-memorabilia
Now, in most of the articles and the video, it’s mentioned that Del Bergiolo ran for Italian Senate in 2001 for a party called Forza Nuova (“New Force”), although he was unsuccessful. Of course, Forza Nuova denied having anything to do with the cache or with Del Bergiolo recently. In the video, however, they mention that Italy’s current ruling party is “far-right” (or something close to that, maybe just “right-wing”. Either way, I don’t understand because Sergio Mattarella, the current president of Italy, is a member of the Democratic Party of Italy). I wanted to ask if anybody more knowledgeable than myself on Italian politics and social climate could help me understand the intricacies of the situation and of the Italian government in generals. Below are some more specific questions I have:
1
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I am currently working on a oral presentation for my International Relations class about Croatias membership in the EU. So I am wondering if there is any topics in Croatias current political debate that has any connection to the EU. I figured who better to ask than the people of Croatia. I also wonder what the main arguments of Croatias EU-critics are since there seems to be quite a lot of people that are not too happy with their membership from what I've read so far.
Sorry if these kinds of threads are not appreciated on here.
Edit: Thank you everyone for being so helpful
In other countries, I observe that a political party is defined by where they are in this spectrum, whether they are right-leaning or left-leaning. If the majority of the legislature is on the right side of the spectrum, then more conservative laws will be passed. But here in the Philippines, right and left seem to have different meanings (and it's really hard to distinguish party from party in terms of their stand on certain policies).
So in Congress, when we hear news, reporters would say, makakaliwang grupo to identify communist-ish groups. I wonder if there are any country that is like this.
Just a refresher on the features:
Enhancements to political factions, particularly conservative, neoliberal, and reactionary
A number of new ideological alignments were patched in, including:
-Trumpist: Protectionist, laissez-faire, moralist or pluralist, residency, jingoist
-Dark enlightenment: Free trade, laissez faire, atheist or secularized (occasionally moralist, but rarely pluralist), full citizenship, pro-military
-Neo-feudal (Arab, Japanese, and Malay culture group only): Free trade or protectionist, laissez-faire or interventionist, moralist or pluralist, residency, pro-military or jingoist
-Identitarian: Protectionist, interventionist or state capitalist, moralist or atheist (rarely in between), residency, pro-military or anti-military
-Neoliberal: Free trade, laissez faire, pluralist or secularized, full citizenship, pro-military or anti-military
-Separatist: Favor one ethnic group in a diverse country. Diverse on trade and economics, but uniformly moralist and opposed to full citizenship.
There is a random chance that a party will be "infiltrated", meaning that it will change its ideology but not reveal it to the player. Most often this party takes on aspects of one further to the right, but it is possible for Identitarian or Fascist parties to hop over to Communism.
Countries that have an ideology that is prominent in the world enjoy a bonus in trade and relations versus those that are in the minority.
New 'Homogeneity' modifier
Each nation gets a Homogeneity score of zero to one, based on the number and proportion of culture groups within its provinces. Low Homogeneity nations have higher internal instability and are more likely to have Separatist or Neoliberal political movements, while high Homogeneity countries will have worse relations with their neighbors and are more likely to have Identitarian or Fascist parties.
A number of events that were previously limited to the American culture group can happen anywhere, at low frequency
Here's an example from a Sweden playthrough.
New STEM focus
From animatronics to zero waste, there are now over 40 different STEM specializations that take you from the innards of an atom to outer spa
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