Pidesco

Regarding party names in Portugal: Foreign journalist trying to understand the Portuguese elections

Check the last page for some elaboration.

It is a very standard parliamentary democracy so I do not know what you are on about. People vote for parties, depending on demographics and geography those votes are translated into seats in parliament, whichever party/coalition gets the most votes gets to form a government with a bunch of ministers, lead by a prime minister. There is also a president, a head of state with limited executive power elected by popular vote, and a local election system where people are elected to county and parish office.

So Portuguese politics time! Portugal is a small European country right next by to Spain. We like to call ourselves the third world country of western Europe. We are your standard western Europe economy but with really, really low wages. We have a social safety net of sorts, a national health service that is terrible but still saves a lot of people that would otherwise die. We are permanently in debt and in some economic crisis. We were a fascist dictatorship until 1974, and since then we've been a fairly stable democracy with more or less always the same parties with seats in our parliament. There used to be four parties. The center left PS (Socialist Party), the center right PSD (Social Democratic Party), the left PCP (Portuguese Communist Party, more for workers' rights, especially manual laborers), and the right CDS (Democratic and Social Center, more Catholic). Anyway, as a reference for Americans all the parties to the left of CDS, are leftie pinko parties to you. Now those two more moderate parties, PS and PSD, have always been the parties of power with much larger voter bases, but they have slowly been losing their majorities, as the spectrum has become more fragmented. Now this fragmentation has been the story in the 21st Century. The first new party to show up was BE( the Left Bloc), a party about as left as PCP but more tailored for middle class office workers, and more focused on social issues(abortion, drug legalization, euthanasia, LGBTQ+ rights) than worker rights. They were a big success in the 00s, and overtook PCP as the more left force of note in parliament. There are now more left parties in contention(like PAN, the Animals and Nature Party, or Livre (Free, like a new upstart BE). However, in more recent years it was the right that got more fragmented. The more important party of that change was Chega(Enough), a party( actually essentially a single confidence man, playing the con of his life) trying and succeeding to leverage "economic" concerns, where "economic" means taking away the social safety net, complaining about the Roma,and stealthily longing for the Fascist days. It's the Portuguese version of the extreme right party that now exists in about every Western country. You know, Neo-Nazis pretending they are not because they have better haircuts and suits. One other right party that has now become of note is IL (Liberal Initiative). Basically upper middle class twits of the year. They studiously avoid the more terrible topics of Chega, but still have idiotic proposals that screw over the poor like a flat income tax(15% for everyone). I'm not sure if they earnestly believe in it or if they are just using it as talking point for the gullible. Now for the current situation. So the last Legislative elections had given a limp minority mandate to PS, as seemed increasingly inevitable. In order to have a proper majority in parliament and the ability to govern, PS struck an unwieldy left leaning deal with PCP, BE and PAN. This generally meant that, for the government not to lose its mandate, PS has to convince the 3 smaller parties to go along with their budget, which is approved in parliament. if not the government would consider to have lost its mandate, and the President would have to call new elections. This is exactly what happened in December. Specifically PCP and BE felt betrayed by PS's budget proposal, and voted against it. So we got these elections yesterday. PS said they wanted an absolute majority(very low likelihood), PSD just wanted to beat PS(very low likelihood), Chega and BE wanted to beat each other, while CDS and PCP were simply trying to survive. Every other party just wanted to take as many seats as they could, however few. So, what happened yesterday, exactly? Well, going into election day yesterday, polling predicted a small minority for PS, and a dead heat between BE, Chega, IL, and PCP(maybe). Small margins meant anything could happen! Well, not quite, it turns out. PS got their wished for absolute majority, PSD was pummeled across the country, Chega won handily against their rivals, becoming the third political force in Portugal(xenophobes gonna xenophobe, of course), IL became the fourth political force(huge surprise), BE came fifth in votes, sixth in actual seats (enormous defeat( lost like half of their seats), PCP got 6 seats. PAN and Livre got single seats. CDS lost every single seat so they are deader than a door nail(someone literally left a wreath at their HQ last night, lol). So the real winner was PS of course. They were the only ones who got everything they wanted, and got like the first absolute majority of the past 15 years. António Costa, their leader and PM is very competent and a leader who leads, but also a snake oil salesman, who still abides corruption as is standard in Portugal. But at least we don't have an also rampantly corrupt, "fascist delusions" PSD/Chega/IL government. Chega won the battle of the also rans. It just caters really well to terrible people. IL really knew how to target their niche too, apparently. TLDR: Moderate left PS won the election, retaining their mandate but now with a juicy absolute majority. Everything else is going to the dogs.

That joke was made by Marvel itself, like 40 years ago. Specifically, a nice elderly couple joins Hydra in order to get health insurance.

Or you can be Buster Keaton, do everything for real and still die of old age.

First person Arcanum with a dialogue wheel and sexy elf romance. And VATS.

Selective reading is indeed quite a bother.

The point is that those past deeds and policies are still clearly and definitely negatively affecting people today. To ignore that not only does it not make the problems go away, but rather it keeps them around in perpetuity.

First, read the Hawkeye series by Matt Fraction and David Aja from 2012. That's where Kate Bishop comes into her own and it is also the main inspiration for the TV show. Regarding Young Avengers, you might want to try the 2013 series by Kieron Gillen(yes, the PC game journalist is now an acclaimed comic book writer) and Jamie McKelvie. It is really quite good and Kate Bishop features extensively in it. Regarding Moon Knight, the run by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz from the early 80s is probably the only one really worth reading. As you say the writing is not always great, but Sienkiewicz's work is always great, even if this came before New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin where he really knocked it out of the park. Anyway, I also really enjoyed that trailer, and it made me really hopeful for the series, when I was figuring it would be totally ignorable.

What in the world are you talking about?

If the bread you eat can be described by elementary solid geometry, you can only be classed as evil. Case in point, my step daughter. Also, if the bread is previously sliced, it's just criminal.

A deadpan "What a maniac" is certainly something I wouldn't usually expect to hear from a news anchor live on TV.

It's not the hand sign that makes a flag pledge by school children a bit on the fascist side.

No

No

That's supposedly a very christian Italian lady called Lucia, worshiped in Sweden, and totally coincidentally quite blonde.

I thought they already taught that in the US, in between the allegiance to the flag lessons.

Short Round! Hah!

As I heard it "right to work" actually means "right to die while working". Generally speaking labor law in the US appears to be a joke played on American workers, but a significant percentage of them appear to be fine with it. But that's what you get with basically 100 years of stoking anti union sentiment. Now, it's not like labor laws in Europe are a wonderful panacea to all of the workers' problems, but at least they are not a trash fire being revered on an altar by a bunch of people who are being slowly poisoned and killed by the fumes.

Actually, fairies are like that everywhere, but in other countries they got makeovers for the sake of the children.

I have to wonder what exactly Meijer had going through his head in the four years leading up to his getting elected. Was he utterly unaware of what the GOP is, somehow?

It seems like Roe v Wade is dead in the water.

Programmers criticizing one another's languages is a war between glass houses where the only weapons allowed are trebuchets.

Poor taste buds seems like it would be a good subtitle for this thread. Americans discussing food.