the bankers in france have somehow managed to get self-identified leftists to ignore their material conditions and vote for the status quo, by creating a boogeyman of racism that isn't substantively different than the status quo. the bankers are not afraid of marine le pen for her social policies, they are afraid of her for her economic policies.

the narrative is that the parliament is unworkable, but i don't see why the socialists in france wouldn't support austerity now, as they have for decades. french voters apparently have short memories and got distracted. it was the neo-liberal policies of the previous socialist government that created this situation in the first place.

macron will likely still retain control over parliament, and there is very little that melanchon can actually do about it. the only workable coalition is the one that macron wants, which is a grand coalition that includes his centrist parties, the republicans and the socialists, which are the old bankers parties, the status quo.

you can argue that this isn't the parliament's mandate, but it actually is. there's nothing illegitimate about what happened, but it negates any messaging from the voters. what mandate did the voters hand to parliament? when leftists voted for the centrist bloc, they voted to maintain the status quo; when the centrists voted for the leftist bloc, they also voted to maintain the status quo. ergo, the message french voters sent was clearly that they did not want social or economic change and that is therefore the parliament's clear mandate.

that might not be the message they intended to send, but it is the message they actually sent. clearly. unambiguously.

i think that macron should resign and that there should be new parliamentary elections, but i don't expect that to happen. rather, i expect a grand coalition to develop out of the old bankers parties - the socialists and the republicans - and for it to implement vicious austerity. the french people got a little uppity here and will need to be punished for it with vicious cuts to social spending. this will in turn merely generate further support for what is being called the far right, but is being strenuously opposed by the status quo because it is actually a real left.

french voters need to learn the lesson, which is to never trust a banker. unfortunately, they're going to have to learn the hard way. worse, they appear to be slow learners.

the other possible outcome is that the parliament is unworkable and a new election is coming soon, but i don't think that the socialists, who won seats, will allow for that outcome. the socialists will work with macron, and that will be enough to hold the government.

i also want to point out that, while exit polls are very reliable, they are essentially a survey of the population, with a margin of error. this particular election will have a lot of very close results. there is a caveat that the projections may be substantively wrong, and if that happens it will not be because the exit polling was wrong but because the error wasn't properly accounted for. if ~40% of the seats are within 3%, as i believe is the case, the exit polling is of limited predictive value. note that this caveat works in both directions.

there was a concerning ruling in the united states about presidential immunity. the american bourgeois fake left is arguing it proves that the supreme court is a threat to democracy. rather, i think it's a demonstration of why you shouldn't politicize trivial issues and blow them out of proportion to score political points, and a reason for the democrats to take a good hard look at themselves for blowing the capitol hill fiasco out of proportion, and trying to politicize a non-issue and turn it into a specious, polarizing ballot question.

a couple of justices are arguing that the president of the united states is now above the law, and they might be correct, purely logically. if justices were doing math when they worked out their rulings, they'd have no choice but to deduce the clear outcome that the president is now indeed above the law. at some level, we expect our justices to behave in this way, as well. however, anybody who has looked at the issue in any depth at all knows that our court system is not this euclidean, archimedean system of kantian purity, but that, rather, it is the case that justices constantly contradict themselves, frequently in their own rulings. the legal philosophy in opposition to the idea that justices are perfect arbiters of truth and logic is called legal realism and is the same school of thought that produced critical legal studies, from which we got critical race theory. i would argue that, while any pure philosophy requires a dialectic to approximate reality, and that you will be led astray by uncritically following any philosophy, legal realism and critical legal studies are the approach to analysis that best approximates reality.

does the president have the right to assassinate an opponent, then? well, let's see what happens if one tries. i wouldn't expect the court to uphold that idea.

that doesn't mean i like the ruling, although i broadly agree with it.

 

for the issue at hand, what is trump charged with, exactly? i can't figure out what law he was supposed to have broken, or why this was sent to the supreme court at all. i have said almost nothing about this, because i'm not remotely interested in it, because i don't see a legitimate news story underlying it, but rather see a democratic party desperate to tar it's opponents any way it can and that's willing to sensationalize a story using warped narratives, flawed logic and poor media analysis in order to confuse voters. the only story here is that the democrats tried to blow the situation out of proportion to confuse voters for their own self-interest, and that it spectacularly backfired.

the supreme court should have simply argued that trump didn't actually break any laws, but it instead took advantage of the attempt to generate a politicized ruling by counter-politicizing the situation instead, after the democrats gave it to them as a gift. i can criticize them for that, as it is not archimedean and i wish they were. i don't blame them for it, and it's not a surprising outcome.

(i'm reminded of the part of the debate where biden attempted to criticize trump for firing his general, which was christmas in july for donald trump, who got to remind everybody how much he loves firing people)

the democrats need to actually understand that they no longer control the courts, and they need to take the case as a wake-up call. the democrats have previously been able to rely on the courts to take their side in politicized rulings, of which roe v. wade was actually an example of. that expectation is no longer realistic. if you drop a bullshit case on the lap of this court, it's going to make you pay for it.

biden can always try to test the theory by ordering trump assassinated and see what happens. it's not like he's going to live long enough to go to trial.