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#1

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 04:32:24 PM

The Air Canada CEO is stepping down.  The Board has said a search for a new CEO will include the ability to communicate in both French and English amongst the criteria for the successful candidate.

Dude...just take an hour every day learning French. How hard could it be?

He is 68 and it had already been announced he would be leaving in September.  This just accelerated his departure.

#2

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 03:34:40 PM

The Air Canada CEO is stepping down.  The Board has said a search for a new CEO will include the ability to communicate in both French and English amongst the criteria for the successful candidate.

Dude...just take an hour every day learning French. How hard could it be?

#3

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 03:26:04 PM

Yeah, looking it up the book seems far darker than the movie! I thought the movie managed to be weirdly sweet despite the toxicness of their relationship. And the ending was quite wholesome.

His dad is so absolutely adorable (the mom too, but alas).

I agree - I also think it is fantastically well-cast. I think it's a bit of high-wire walk in that I think especially if either of the main characters were wrong the whole thing would be very destabilised.

The author wrote a fun (and quite funny) piece about watching the premier at Cannes and was fairly phlegmatic about the changes. For example:

Harry and I had very little contact while the film was becoming more real. I had no input and wanted none. If you've given up a child for adoption it's bad manners to hang around the school gates – even worse manners if you sold the child in question.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/23/adam-mars-joness-cannes-diary-pillion-box-hill-cannes-diary

#4

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 03:17:24 PM

Denmark just had an election and the results are... muddled. Broadly speaking, the voters rejected the government across the centre, but neither the right block nor the left block can govern on their own; and the explicitly centrist Moderate party are the kingmakers. On top of the that, elements of the right block explicitly reject the Moderates framing them as enemies, and the Moderates for their part are unwilling to govern with the far right or far left.

So just on the results. I get that different electoral systems are there to do different things and sort of emphasis different elements or sources of democratic legitimacy.

But what you've described is exactly one of the reasons I am still not entirely won over by PR. The fact that the party that came fifth, that lost seats in the election is enjoying its moment in the sun because they hold the balance of power. So the larger parties will have to deal with them to work out which of their pre-election bloc members or pre-election policies that they took to the people will now be dumped. I get it is more representative but it's where I'm not sure that's the only thing that matters.

Similarly that, from that article, all the government parties lost votes and seats. They all had a bad night (though better than anticipated before Trump started threatening Greenland). Which is the other issue I always slightly have with PR - at one extreme I think of someone like Netanyahu, but at a more socially acceptable level there's Mark Rutte. He was PM of the Netherlands for 15 years - with governments ranging from one relying on Wilders for support to a grand coalition with Labour - and during that time he often had the lowest approval rating of any EU leader. But his party would consistently win around 20% of the vote and he's really, really good at coalition politics (we might be seeing some of his skills in his flattery of Trump). I always think of Tony Benn's five questions for anyone with power: what power have you got? where did you get it from? in whose interests do you exercise it? to whom are you accountable? and how can we get rid of you? And I find that PR systems can struggle with the last question an issue - again it's represpentative but I think it is less effective at communicating swing/rejection (or that power often also depends on a party leader's ability/willingness to do deals after and maintain power).

Why I think I'm probably a bit more AV than PR curious. A little more representative, still have the constituency link and, crucially, the decisive decision (even if it isn't always a majority) is with voters on election day not party leaders in negotiations afterwards.

@Sheilbh, I just read an interesting article where the writer argues there are three crises in Danish politics right now. I think it is similar to some of the things you've been talking about re: democracy in the UK and the West in general - though it manifests differently both because it's a different country (so different specifics) and due to Denmark's multiparty coalition political culture. I think the last part is particularly instructive, though, because it exposes more explicitly what tends to be the internal party political discussions of first-past-the-post political cultures.

The first crisis is the "bourgeois crisis" - it might be called "the crisis of the right" or "the conservartive crisis" in English speaking politics. In Denmark the parties to the right of centre are collectively referred to as "bourgois" (without the pejorative tone that it'd have in French or English) - it's essentially a collective term for the non-socialist parties - the Liberal, the National-Conservative, and the right Populist tendencies. And the crisis here is that they can't coalesce on a shared political project.

The second crisis is the "crisis of the middle" - the government across the centre lost support, the parties further to the left and right all grew. As a whole, the population is looking for answers to the challenges of today further out on the political wings.

The third crisis is the "crisis of the mass parties" - the old established parties built on mass participation are all receding (and therefore looking to collaborate more, potentially accelerating the decline), and a number of personality and or geographically defined parties are growing as the mass-engagement parties are losing strength.

I think this is an expression of political tendencies we are seeing all across the democratic (and post-democratic?) West. It echoes what Sheilbh has been saying about the UK. I think it also echoes what we're seeing in France and Germany to some extent (though I don't understand the politics there particularly clearly). I also thinks it's what we've seen play out in the US to some extent, though it's played out very differently there - inside the Republican and Democratic parties - due to the very different political cultures there.

The article is here and reads okay using automatic translation (with the one clarification that the party translated as "the Left" is a key constituent of the "Bourgeois" block, being the old farmer / Liberal mass party).

Thanks - it is very interesting and I think you're right. I'd carve out the US because I think it's a very different system from anything in Europe, but I think these are general trends - which is why I think they have structural causes and "British" or "French" politics merely affects the way the symptoms present rather than the underlying issues.

FWIW I've mentioned it before but I think Peter Mair's Ruling the Void is fantastic on this. It's a very broad argument so difficult to summarise but I found this summary from one of the memorial lectures in his name which is really good - but his theory was that a really important factor was changes in political parties. Again this argument was basically only European because Europe had mass membership parties who organised our democracies in a way that just isn't analogous to the US (though there's some points of comparison on some points). But I think this is really key particularly across the third crisis and it goes back to the 80s when the incipient signs of this direction of travel emerge:

Ruling the void: the failings of party democracy

Let me start by briefly rehearsing the central arguments of Ruling The Void.

In an article first published in New Left Review in 2006, and later (and posthumously) developed into an unfinished book of the same name (Mair, Citation2013) Mair (Citation2006, 25) argued that a notion of democracy is emerging that is 'stripped of its popular component – democracy without a demos'. This turns on what he regarded as 'the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics with particular focus on the transformation of political parties'. This happens as parties' key representative functions waste away: specifically, their role in integrating social groups and sub-cultures into the political system is undermined as class and religion lose their hold in contemporary European societies. At the same time, however, parties continue to retain their major 'procedural' (which is to say, governing) functions in that they are central to the recruitment of political elites, and the organization of legislative work and executives. But the scope of governmental ambition is reduced, in part because of the constraints of globalization and in part because of the self-limiting responses of politicians who seek to free themselves from certain responsibilities by hiving-off tasks to private firms or non-governmental agencies, a theme which has been expounded by others (see, for instance, Hay, Citation2007). The process of European integration is, in effect, an expression of this writ large, with the EU limiting the space of national governmental – which is to say, party governmental – autonomy.

However, while this 'de-politicization' of decision-making might limit the scope of political responsibility, it also serves to engender a sense of hopelessness about what representative politics is for: if it can't achieve anything important, then why bother with it? Not surprisingly, Mair claims that this resulted in a variety of reactions on the part of citizens – including the erosion of partisan identification, the loss of party membership, the decline of electoral turnout, the rise of electoral volatility, the emergence of anti-establishment parties, and a preference for single-issue group political participation.

'In sum, parties are failing as a result of a mutual withdrawal, whereby citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being evacuated' (Citation2006, 33).

For Mair, this constituted the erosion of parties' representative functions, as they increasingly became focused instead on their governing roles. But he warned that 'it is not enough to be just a good governor; without some degree of representative legitimacy neither the parties themselves, nor their leaders, nor even the electoral process that allows them to be chosen, will be seen to carry sufficient weight or authority. The result will be to encourage distrust and scepticism' (Citation2006, 50).

The retreat into a world of governing institutions implied that party-voter distances had grown while inter-party distances had weakened. This amounted to an erosion – one might almost say a betrayal – of the representative function, as distinctive party identities became blurred. This is most apparent when we think of the classic mass parties which are no longer strongly rooted in social sub-cultures founded on labour movements or churches. This in turn has either led to, or been facilitated by, the growing financial dependence of parties on the state, and their regulation by national laws – reflecting their transformation into quasi-state institutions. The major parties effectively collude as informal cartels in this behaviour.

Finally, such transformation has been attended by shifts in the internal organizations of political parties, such that the parties on the ground – the memberships – have been downgraded, while the parties in elective office and government – including the leaderships – have become more powerful.

And breathe! Clearly, there is much to unpick here. I think that we can start by taking as read that the empirical evidence of popular disaffection and 'retreat from politics' is largely uncontestable. Rates of partisan identification – especially strong partisan affinity – remain far lower across the established democracies than a generation or two ago; partly as a result of this, electoral volatility has generally risen, especially since the turn of the twenty-first century; at the same time, electoral turnout has generally fallen; and party membership has been in even longer-term decline in most places. As Martin Wattenberg (Citation2000, p. 76) once put it, 'there is less of a market for the parties' product'. So, we can take these things as read, and they form the context in which I want to discuss two particular – and important – claims set out in Ruling The Void: the erosion of inter-party distances and the downgrading of party memberships.

I'd just add on Mair that I think it is interesting that he was an Irish scholar - because I think Ireland is the only European country that doesn't have at core a left-right/bourgeois-labour divide in politics. It had mass membership parties there were class elements (particularly around signifiers of class or cultural capital), but the big divide in Irish politics was the civil war and on policy issues the two parties were pretty similar, one slightly more populist, the other slightly more elitist. But I think coming from that framework and from a country where left-right divide is not the default gave him a perspective on parties and democratic politics that is more difficult in the rest of Europe.

Edit: Also thought the comments on the Moderates specifically was really interesting because I think a lot of that applies to the Lib Dems. Reform like to attack Labour, Tories and Lib Dems as "the uniparty" - I've not seen the Greens go there yet, but I think they might. And I think especially with the Lib Dems there is something to it. I've been struck by how poorly they're doing in the polls when historically they were the "none of the above" party and I think that part of it is that on most issues they basically back what Keir Starmer is doing. There are rhetorical criticisms - he should be more disobliging about Trump, or slight differences of emphasis, but fundamentally they agree (in a really striking piece of polling the group who least thought Keir Starmer should resign were Lib Dem voters ). Their main position is to be anti-Farage and increasingly anti-Green as opposing the "extremes" rather than staking out their own position very clearly.

#5

Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 03:02:13 PM

The Air Canada CEO is stepping down.  The Board has said a search for a new CEO will include the ability to communicate in both French and English amongst the criteria for the successful candidate.

#6

Gaming HQ / Re: Crusader Kings III

Last post by HVC - Today at 02:20:35 PM

Also, one of my body guards. Before (no, he was not gluttonous!), and after Typhus.

The ozempic of the Middle Ages.

#7

Gaming HQ / Re: Crusader Kings III

Last post by Syt - Today at 02:16:59 PM

And this is me running the HRE in 1260. A lot of the expansion (esp. in the Balkans and Greece) was peaceful vassalization.

#8

Off the Record / Re: US - Greenland Crisis Thre...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 11:54:08 AM

Pete Hegseth mentioned Greater North America, which spans from Ecuador to Greenland in a speech.

As I German, I have a bit of a deja vu (or rather entendu) here.

Yeah. It's this dumb shit again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

#9

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Valmy - Today at 11:50:28 AM

The US seems to've been captured by foreign oligarchs who purchased citizenship.

Thiel, Musk et. al. are basically Bond villains.

Yes...only really lame ones.

#10

Off the Record / Re: US - Greenland Crisis Thre...

Last post by Zanza - Today at 11:49:17 AM

Pete Hegseth mentioned Greater North America, which spans from Ecuador to Greenland in a speech.

As I German, I have a bit of a deja vu (or rather entendu) here.