Drunkard's Walk Forums

So it's election time at last and the government that was never meant to last the year has rumbled on for nearly three.
But it's time to put pencil to paper once more.

The way things stand at the moment.
The Labour Party suffers from being the junior coalition partner too many times and making pledges it has to compromise away.
Soc-Dems are - vibrant among people I know. Never had the chance to fuckup in power.
Greens - may lack a sense of reality. (I'll argue against carbon taxes for one specific reason)
Sinn Fein are just that bit too sinister.
People Before Profit - not enough sanity. Too much screaming.
Fianna Fail - The Party of Landowners and Businessmen.
Fine Gael - The Party of Businessmen and Landowners.

Currently the state of the nation is as follows:
Insurance costs are spiralling out of control forcing many important local businesses such as creches, play centres, activity centres, community centres and the like to close their doors. It's taking the colour and happiness out of life and just adding more and more to the sense of being utterly leeched. Or, for that matter, the majority of the people who can't afford a home near suitable public transport and instead get fleeced for the privelege of owning a car.
Speeking of leeches, rents are through the roof because of an unwillingness to actively tackle shit like AirBnB, or to build social housing.
The Childrens hospital is massively overbudget thanks to the tender process being utterly fucking munged. Awarding a tender based solely on price gets you the contractor with a reputation of bidding 'below cost' and shafting you with every hole in the spec they can find. For billions.
The public health service is turning into an utter omnifuck - they can't even do a managed decline properly.
The government refuses to pay doctors, nurses and other critical public servants a worthy wage, while top-loading departments with useless suits in offices.
The government utterly refuses to pay the military, to the point where both morale, and actual effectiveness is utterly collapsing. This has already caused deaths.
They gloat about a 1 billion surplus for a rainy day - rather than investing it on one-time critical expenditures that might bring value in the future. Okay, I get the idea of rainy day fund given how heavy things are leverages with corporation tax receipts but at the same time it's not good saving money that *must* be spent on fixing critical failures. Those things just end up costing more in the long run.
They recognise the government is overeliant on one source of tax - and are still talking about cutting taxes anyway to make it even more reliant.
On the positives, employment is high and the statistics on paper look good - but that hides a lot of simmering discontent. People have work, but it's costing far more to go to work and wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living.

It's a government that knows the cost of fucking everything, but the value of nothing. Even people.

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On the other hand, the current Dail as a whole should at least be commended for not turning itself into an utter laughing stock like the neighbours did. A minority government managed to ride through Brexit with the support of the opposition because - inspite of the above - Brexit represented a far bigger danger to the State so they knuckled in and made it work, and got what is possibly the best outcome for the State given the circumstances.
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Speaking of the date.

An amusing consequence is that the Register of Electors updates on the 15th of February every year. The Election is scheduled for the 8th.

So people who've registered to vote in the last year may not be fully on it - not without re-applying to the draft register. A process which requires photo -ID and a visit to a cop-shop. to get a form signed. And which has to be posted and received by the 22nd of this month.

A cheeky way of excluding everyone who'se turned 18 in the last year?

If this happened in the States there'd be howls of disenfranchisement. It was widely reported on the news but cop-shops aren't that common outside of urban areas anymore.

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And of course, the first day of campaigning the City Council decides to use an excavator to clear out a homeless man's tent. Without waking him up in the process.
Suffice to say he's suffered 'Life-changing injuries'. News-speak for anything from Feeding Tube to Fuck-Ugly scars. the homeless crisis has dogged the government for the last three years and continues to worsen - not to mention the Taoiseach's attempt to spin the blame to the city mayor and politicise the issue going down like a 737


He's misfired every single day of the campaign so far.

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But step foreward Paddy Holohan - former MMA fighter and suspended Sinn Fein party member who's been saying naughty things on a podcast

About the Taoiseach not being a family many

And about underage girls.

He's gone into the party disciplinary process.They'll boot him for sure - even if I gurarantee he's only saying what the majority of their voters think, the rest of 'em are smart enough not to say it.

.

Just over three weeks to go and god knows what the fuck'll happen. A hung dail is a possibility - unfortunately not meaning what you might think it does - or some form of coalition between one of the bigger parties and a small party that thinks, this time it'll be different and they won't get fucked over like all the other small parties in coalition. A minority with a confidence and supply agreement is also possible but -  it's gotten really hard to call what'll happen.

On paper the economy is doing well and the numbers are good - but the actual results for people aren't materialising. The tide is rising but the boats are sinking. And the government seems more and more out of touch with reality with every passing day.

So, the election wagon rumbles along.

Fine Gael: We're not the party who blew up the economy in 2011
Fianna Fail: We're not the party who blew up the economy in 2011 anymore

One of the two will get in power. The other will be the opposition. It's kinda predictable that way. What colours it is who gets to be the junior partner. Both of the bigboys have ruled out Sinn Fein - and the State Broadcaster has conspicuously left them out of the two-way leader's debate to the point where people are posting GoT memes about cutting tongues out. But then none of the other parties were allowed.

Labour. They exist.

The two most common words on Irish radio are 'Rural Ireland' to the point where it's gone beyond semantic satiation and become a contest of who'se able to say Rural Ireland the most times in a sentence while still maintaining semantic sense. It's gone beyond a joke. That, and the Taoiseach's utter fucking classism and his rabbit in headlights answer to 'did you smoke cannabis'.

It's sort of dull, really.

Healtcare is proving the big issue. Second only to house prices, and jobs anywhere that isn't Dublin. And how the beef farmers are getting utterly fucked over by as cartel of processors keep prices low.

But looking at the other thread, I 'm sort of glad that way.

Put the numbers in the boxes. Let the wagon keep rolling.

We'll be in a recession in two years. Or that stocking of shite in the oval office will have gotten the Bad End in Balance of Power for us all.

https://twitter.com/oconnellhugh/status/...2909597698

Well. This is odd.

Sinn Fein on 25%
Fine Gael on 20%
Fianna Fail on 23%

There's been a lot of commentary on where the fuck this has come from. The economy seems to be doing well, but people are angry that this isn't translating into an improvement services, or a reduction in the cost of living.

More people are homless. More people work for nobody's benefit but the landlord.

The party itself is surprised. They only ran 42 candidates, out of 153 potential seats. Most parties are running multiple candidates in constituencies - and with hnumbers that low it's looking like the multiples might leech off each other and let some of the other parties in on the transfer.

There's no chance of them getting close to enough seats to get into power as the lead - but they might be junior in a coalition and that'll be a turn for the books.

It'll almost certainly mean a ballot on a United Ireland with all the clusterfuckery that involves.

Welp.

Time to go makes me mark.

Nothing will change but still I goes.

Enjoy putting numbers in boxes!

I have been reading this thread over time, but there's not much to comment on, your politics seems pretty normal and sane. (Except apparently how your underage girls are vixens out to take advantage of older men.)

Yeah.

The sanity is refreshing.

One of the candidates just got suspended from his party for breaking his fiance's phone and spitting on her after she wouldn't give him the password. . And for a micke-mouse twitter apology.

There were were some ructions in Tipperary where a candidate died, and the situation was such that the electoral rules required the election to be postponed in the constituency - which then conflicted with the constitutional requirement to have an election 30 days after the Dail was dissolved. It was resolved after about 2 day's duscussion by the wigpeople and some threats of legal action.

Otherwise, despite the Rugby, and the Storm and it being a Saturday. Turnout looks quite good. New Citizens have lept on the chance to vote for the first time. Even if PR-STV is a little bit more complicated.

There were two attempts to replaced it with a FPTP system in the 50's and 60's - championed by the party with the most to gain. The electorate shat on the idea.

The Procession of Democracy rolls on, and I took my chance to give a nice blank box to Peter Casey - who tried to get elected as president on a Trump-type ballot. 45 minutes to go before it's all over, followed by a couple of days of counting, recounting and redistribution.

All on paper. All by hand.

(02-08-2020, 04:16 PM)Dartz Wrote: [ -> ]There were two attempts to replaced it with a FPTP system in the 50's and 60's - championed by the party with the most to gain. The electorate shat on the idea.

All on paper. All by hand.

As is right and proper, on both counts.

Because seriously, FPTP is a terrible system, and the paper system may not be new and sexy, but everything that could be done to hack that system has already been tried and compensated for. And it's really, really hard to hack effectively, especially if you don't want to be noticed.

We tried voting machines too - once. They 'worked', but then the economy fell over and they sat in storage for a decade and now everyone thinks it's a stupid idea.

FPTP is defective by design. There's no more to it than that. Incidentally, the reason Ireland uses PR-STV is because the British government thought FPTP would give Sinn Fein too much of an advantage a century ago. Oops.

It's just sort of been kept at it since then.

Anyway, the final exit polls are suggesting a three-way tie - which will make for some interesting horsetrading wqhen it comes to forming a Government.

And what actually influenced people's votes


Interesting how low immigration was there now. The far-right really doesn't prosper here.

(02-09-2020, 08:52 AM)Dartz Wrote: [ -> ]Interesting how low immigration was there now. The far-right really doesn't prosper here.

Is it possible that the concern was there isn't enough of it?

(02-09-2020, 09:28 AM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-09-2020, 08:52 AM)Dartz Wrote: [ -> ]Interesting how low immigration was there now. The far-right really doesn't prosper here.

Is it possible that the concern was there isn't enough of it?

That would solve a lot of problems.

There's a massive labour shortage in some industries - construction and trades, medicine, etc. A lot of companies are complaning that they can't get good people anymore.

It doesn't help that construction and trades are utterly crushed by price - do it as cheap and fast as possible, and by the general incompetence endemic in the industry. The apprenticship system is a bit of a joke. You've a few shithot people who are catastrophically overworked and a lot of people who can join pipes and pull cables but don't understand an iota of what they're doing.

Medicine has gotten so bad that foreign doctors are warning their colleagues not to come here.

The results from my constituency

You can actually track the process through the individual counts.

This is a four-seat constituency, so the quota to be elected is about a quarter of the total polls. Most foreigners watching the process don't grok that part - they're assuming Leo's already lost his seat when, chances are he's so close to the quota he'll dribble across it in the next transfer. Still, a sitting Taoiseach who doesn't top the poll is unheard of. Getting to four counts without getting elected definitely so.

Currie's redistribution should finally kick him across the line - and then it's sort of a shootout between Roderick O'Gorman and Ruth Coppinger for the last seat. When it's down to five runners, the lowest will be sent home even if none of the others have crossed the quota line

EDIT: And on saying that, he's finally drooled across the line on Count 5. The sixth will be the last - but unlikely to change too much.

EDIT the Second: And I was wrong. There goes my Third Preference vote, with the last seat decided on quantity of votes rather than quota.

Elsewhere, we've already had Shane Ross get the chop - deservedly so. The man was about as about as useful as a football bat as minister for transport.

I was reading the analysis for your constituency, and it seemed pretty reasonable, identifying the five candidates mostly likely to win the four seats, and identifying the fifth as their marginal choice for the last seat.  What they missed was the big turnout for Sinn Fein this election, which I'll get back to.  But the main point to me is that STV elections are predictable.  It's the best part of it.

When we used to run student council elections with the same system, I made predictions, and always got five of six, or all six correct -- and if I was one off, it was always someone I guessed as being eliminated in the last round.  We didn't use paper ballots -- we had software maintained by university staff, and had the ballot file released.  But you never actually doubted the election results because they were so predictable.  (Also because hacking a student election is pretty high risk/low reward for any party involved.)  Weird things happen in FPTP elections that just don't with STV.

On the other hand, I can't imagine doing a hand count of paper ballots for STV.  It sounds painful, especially when you have fractional transfer.  Ugh.  Good luck with that.

I am a little sad to hear you left one blank box.  I always rated down to the end.  We invented a new award, Most Hated Person on Campus, for the person with the most last place votes.  Of course, last place votes can never be counted, unless they do something really weird like add them after the candidate has been elected.  This was a fun statistic, because you find out the people who are most polarizing.  I'm on that list too, but only on the Mock Election software test -- as a grad student, I wasn't eligible to run for real office!

Oh right, back to Sinn Fein.  I was thinking of relating that to something in US Politics (gomen ne): socialism.  Bernie Sanders styles himself a democratic socialist, and that freaks the fuck out of some people.  Even some long-time Democrats.  But they're all older people.  They tend to go on about Fidel Castro and how many people starved under socialism as a failed system.  And all of the young people are like, so what?  Denmark is doing fine.  Anyway, I'm wondering if a similar dynamic is at play here.  Dartz mentioned earlier on, "Sinn Fein are just that bit too sinister."  Do younger people not really care about the past involvement of the party?  They were involved with the IRA but that was like thirty years ago or three hundred or something.

Immigration is good.  California is on the keeping a steady state population because of foreign immigrants; meanwhile domestic emigration is getting people really mad about Californians coming to their town in Texas.  In Boise, Idaho, they want to trash their own city so Californians stop coming.  I was once refused service at a Wyoming restaurant because I was Californian.  And yet in California itself, only the shrinking right wing seems to mind immigration.

They've always been historically a left-wing party - Nationalism in Ireland has always been left-wing, since the days of Connolly and Larkin. Sinn Fein in a lot of ways is the party from which all other parties decended, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail began is the pro- and anti-treaty sides of the Civil War-era Sinn Fein, with the Party itself sort of lurching along in the North as part of the Civil Rights movement, which then led to the Troubles.

Anyway, parties coming in from the cold is a bit of an odd tradition of Ireland. 9 years after the Civil War ended, Fianna Fail - who'd just effectively lost the war against the State - were then subsequently elected to power and power was handed over peacefully. And DeValera fucked us for decades, the arrogant prick.

The problem with Sinn Fein, I found, was that some of the posts and memes floating around had a very 'Trumpist' air to them. The same sort of people were voting for them as were voting for Trump in a lot of ways. There was that same 'Fuck the Establishment' anger.

There's still a bit of the rattle of the Armalite about them - with a hum of links to the remnants of the IRA. Even if that element of the party is steadily dying off, it's not quite gone away. I've always voted Leftwards, but never them.

Labour is the other 'old ' Left-Wing party and have had a torrid time lately - mostly due to being the junior party in coalitions and 'betraying' their values. Usually due to the compromises of coalition government.

Anyway, I've never voted all the way down the ballot. It's rare for there to be more than 6 or 7 counts as it is and, really, on the off-chance that that 10th 'Alright, if someone has to get it we'll do him' position gets counted I didn't want to risk it. There has to be a 'Fuck no, never this twat' option.

*sticks nose in this topic for the first time in forever*

wow. and you consider this quiet compared to us americans?

Your politics has a much larger blast radius.

Fair Cop, MD

Would've preferred more from the SD's, tbh. Dissapointed that Aengus didn't get his seat. I voted leftwards, but I really don't like Sinn Fein.

Live listening to RTE radio one driving up from the South today. A few old women going at it cat's and dogs with each other, one for Fine Gael and one for Sinn Fein - interrupted by a naturaluralised US citizen explaining that he voted for Trump and didn't care how people voted because he was old- with basically 50/50 split on whether either party should deal with SF or not.

It was utter pandemonium and no-one could get a word in.

The next few months of coalition negotiations will probably be the same.

So, three parties in a near tie for the top, with Sinn Féin getting the most first round votes, followed by Fianna Fáil and the current leaders Fine Gael.  And any two of those top parties is not quite enough to form a government... eeenteresting.

Dartz Wrote:Labour. They exist.

Do they though?  They've gone from 37 to 7 (last election) to 6 seats.  Oh, and let's hear it for the Greens, who jumped from 2 seats to 12.

So coalitions could be FF/FG again with half the independents... which sounds terribly weak.  FF+FG+Labour is one measly vote short, so maybe the Greens get to be in the coalition?  It's hard to see the Greens not being in the coalition, because that means you either have an unmanageable four party coalition or a government depending on independents for support.

Or maybe someone gives Sinn Fein a chance?  They did "win".  SF+FF+Labour anyone?  Anyone?

Dartz Wrote:A few old women going at it cat's and dogs with each other, one for Fine Gael and one for Sinn Fein - interrupted by a naturaluralised US citizen explaining that he voted for Trump and didn't care how people voted because he was old

I'm kinda sad about that, tbh. I've always voted Labour - and I've had a Labour TD be the only one who ever responded to my messages and asked question in the Dail for me. I voted Social Democrat, Labour, Green and then on down the line.

Labour's big mistake was going into coalition at the worst possible time. They were voted in on a tide of people looking for a defense against the recession and some help from the State - but got very little done in the seats of Power and generally took the blame for everything. Being the junior partner generally means getting fucked - it's taken the Greens ten years to recover from their last time in Government - they were utterly wiped out at one stage for being part of the Government that Collapsed the Economy.

FF + FG in any form will be suicide for both. It'll be very much seen as 'against the will of the people', leading to a stronger SF vote the next time.

SF + FF, or SF + FG will be a struggle - and risks splitting either partner. Some members of those parties really don't want anything to do with Sinn Fein. And when you've members of SF gloating about 'breaking the Free State' and shouting 'Up the Ra' you can kind of understand it.

SF + Anyone the fuck else, means everyone else. That might be the only government that can come close to forming. But a whole cluster of Independants means a whole cluster of single-issue Kingmakers who can hold the state to ransom - including the fucking Healey-Raes who're Kerry's answer to Boss Fucking Hogg.

Anyway. I've a strong supicion there'll be another election this year. Raindow coalitions like that don't really last. That'll likely mean an even larger SF vote - they'll run enough candidates this time - and that will be new territory.

And the only kinds of people who ever Call Joe Duffy's Liveline are the sort of cranks who don't have anything better to do during the day. It's an afternoon talk-show when everyone's at work.

Labster, the issue that some of us are having with the California Exodus here in Texas (outside of the 'conservatives' here acting like they're a buncho of pinko-commies) is how they're blowing up the housing market.

Case in point, I gave a ride to someone that had moved over from California. They said they couldn't live there anymore because the property taxes were getting to be too much due to the value of their home being driven up. They claimed to have sold theirs for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 Million.

And yet, despite this, they had no issue at all with driving up the cost of housing here in Texas. They claimed that this is supposed to be a means of making money.

The hypocrisy is astounding.

Speculation should be taxed to fuck. It brings no benefit to society - there's no added value - nothing is created or made better. It's just owning shit and making shit more expensive for everyone else - it's a leech. That's why Capital Gains tax is a thing.

Otherwise, we've reached that point in coalitions where neither of the three parties want to go into coalition with each other. It's rapidly looking like a hung Dail.

Taxing the profit someone gets out of flipping their house? Now THAT is an idea.

If only the Texas Congress would go for such a thing. Maybe if we dress it up as a "Don't Calify my Texas" tax. :V

(The best I could come up with on my own was to have a state-operated real estate agency to help moderate housing prices, but that smacks too much of "socialism".)

And after a hundred and forty days and a pandemic, we now have a government.

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The Party of farmers and landlords and the party of landlords and farmers. Oh, with the Green Party. The position of Taoiseach will rotate year by year. It's now being portrayed as the 'end' of Civil War politics. That's basically the real difference between the parties.

As it is, Sinn Fein have already brought out their Will of the People machine. Their supporters are mewling about it on the Facebook shitting out the sort of 'emoji' filled memes that they eminintly lack the creativity to create.

I don't know. It's sort of how the system's supposed to work. A government that the greatest number of people will 'tolerate', rather than the government a plurality of people want.

So, the most likely coalition happened.  No big surprise there.

Dartz Wrote:The public health service is turning into an utter omnifuck - they can't even do a managed decline properly.
The government refuses to pay doctors, nurses and other critical public servants a worthy wage, while top-loading departments with useless suits in offices.
The government utterly refuses to pay the military, to the point where both morale, and actual effectiveness is utterly collapsing. This has already caused deaths.
They gloat about a 1 billion surplus for a rainy day - rather than investing it on one-time critical expenditures that might bring value in the future. Okay, I get the idea of rainy day fund given how heavy things are leverages with corporation tax receipts but at the same time it's not good saving money that *must* be spent on fixing critical failures. Those things just end up costing more in the long run.

I kind of wonder about how things have changed on these points in the last few months.

In my world, California had a rainy day fund of 21 billion, which conservatives constantly attacked as evidence that taxes were too high.  We're going to spend $16 billion of that next year, and probably the remainder the following year.  It's hard to see how a single billion euros is enough surplus for a government to do anything with.  I'm a big supporter of the governments spending anticyclically, taxing to slow down the good times, then buying things when everything is cheap in the bad times.