Laura Loomer is taking credit for it and trying to use it to target Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens. She seems to have info on it and may actually have some credibility in these claims, which would mean this is the unofficial director of purges for Trump:
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Eventually if you live just long enough you will see that history might actually indeed repeat itself.
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As the saying goes in Germany, this is NO BUENO
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Yeah I will follow the counting on TV the rest of the afternoon.
If the AfD does not gain a few more % to get their absolute majority or the BSW (populistic left) makes it above the 5% threshold and helps them to govern, it is up to what the CDU does. They declared to never govern with the AfD nor the Left party. If they stay true to that then there will be a minority government at most.
If they govern with the AfD, it will probably end Merz being Germany’s chancellor and will give the party a life-threatening hit in all polls.
If they govern with the Left, it may have effects in these directions too but less severe. But both would cause massive inner-party protests and leavings.
Another outcome that I heard of today is that apparently some CDU members in this state consider switching to AfD. It would take 3 people doing that who also secured a seat this evening to bring AfD to a majority. No idea how likely that scenario is but I doubt it.
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This is semi-related but why is Merz so unpopular now? I feel like the CDU just crashed in the polls so suddenly.
He never was popular to begin with. He was kept small by Merkel during her being chancellor. Then after the social democrats - led government he took the chance to become the leading person at the CDU. Apparently the party did not have any better candidate. He is now leading what was formerly called a “great coalition” of CDU and SPD. This coalition is disliked by… both the CDU and SPD and pretty much every citizen. But that was the only thing they could have done with such a bad election result. It speaks volumes that he is the first chancellor ever who did not win the first round of election. (We citizen do not vote for the chancellor directly, that is done by the parliament)
Since then the announced reforms take longer and longer to happen or even start. When the faction leader Spahn had to step down for surrogacy in the US (which Spahn actively hindered to be legalized in Germany), he took the chance to reorder large parts of the ministries again. He did that in a very clumsy manner, for example the until-that-point health-undersecretary Sorge was removed while telling the committees and media first before informing Sorge. That cause quite some ill feelings. Merz also wants to do cuts on the welfare state.
Though I suspect his bad popularity is mainly based on his personality which seems disconnected to the people and their problems. He did quite a few embarrassing statements in public TV, such as that Germans should not be lazy and work more again. This is aiming at increasing the per-week limit of working hours and raising retirement age. The youth in particular got irritated when he had a demonstrator’s sign saying “Merz lick balls” seized and had a criminal investigations launched against the person who was just a teenager protesting conscription coming back.
Maybe not really his fault is the rising inflation, oil prices and generally the rotting infrastructure and other issues left behind by Merkel. We also currently have a huge loss in industry jobs speeding up since this year which he did not really offer a solution for.
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You know it used to be a big meme among young people here like “Hardy har we have worse internet than Romania.” but now we are the first to realise the internet is a shithole.
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Will be interesting what opt-out really means. The most extreme interpretation would be having an empy box where the feed used to be because any content it could have shown there would have to pass an algorithm, even if it was just a simple “Latest by followed”.
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I strongly suspect this will be as easy as opting out of cookies. It’ll either:
A) Be possible only by jumping through 200 legally distinct hoops - but then lose access to 99% of the internet, because they reserve the right to only provide a service on the condition of algorithms
or
B) Be possible to opt-out of ‘non-essential’ algos, using a very vague definition
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Yes it will, I don’t think the government knows either. At this point it is draft legislation so they are still figuring things out. I am just hoping they don’t ban GTAVI last minute.
I would settle for that.
Honestly only 90 percent of the internet is actually useful.
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I’d hope it just means your feed goes back to how it was (I don’t know) 12 years ago? I remember when all of a sudden your feed wasn’t chronological based on your friends. At first you could find a hidden setting to go back to it. Then you couldn’t. Around this time I noticed advertisements changed too. I’m fine with social media companies having ads (they have to make money) but it should be like television. McDonald’s pays for an ad and every person who logs on that day sees it.
Anyway once it became impossible to get your feed back to how it was when FB first started I left the platform. I’d totally go back if they passed something like this in the US.
Based on other Australian legislation on the topic, it will likely be magnificently vague and thus primarily a source of amusement to big platforms (ie the ones who need a short leash) and anxiety inducing to smaller ones.
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At this stage it looks like Sweden will be returning to a left-wing government as its left-bloc coalition is ahead in the polls.
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OK so things have narrowed considerably. Sorry, it was my fault for having hope there for a second.
Good things don’t happen anymore.
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If they ever happened at all, we wouldn’t be in a world where we were waiting on stuff like this.
Just to finish off the Sweden Arc I had going on here, it looks like the left coalition has won.
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Merz literally only needs to do one of two things and he was too cowardly to do one of them and is too proudly stupid to do the other.
Preliminary results indicated Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) tallied just over the 5% threshold to enter the state parliament in the coastal region of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, its worst-ever state score, which he called a “disaster”.
Now under 5%, in that case the first time in the history of the party to miss a state parliament. The party was founded right after WWII.
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My God, when you isolated just that I realised I read that wrong. I thought they got under a five percent mark to lead M-P. No, they needed five percent of the voted to even get their foot in the state parliament at all and didn’t get that.
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