The Good Post Gallery

[Zanas]

In many ways the Social Democratic model is up against the wall. You cant keep up high taxes combined with capitalist ownership because capital just moves away. So either you turn left and introduce some kind of economic democracy, where workers/cooperatives/unions etc. control production or go right and become softcore liberals. Since the 70s/early 80s no-one has no-one has dared turning left and therefore SocDems are in a perpetual defensive position.
Social democracy in the old sense with big welfare states financed by milking the capitalist economy will never really return as a viable option. But the movement keeps pretending that it can and keeps moving to the right ceding more and more territory to the neo-liberals. So basically they have to either accept the fact that they are social liberals or come up with an idea on how to make a market based socialism work in the real world and on a national/continental level and no-one has really been able to do that. So yeah, I don't see them pulling trough. 

[Zanas]

Well, it's official: speaking as a casual MLP fan, I have officially found the worst brony in the entire fandom.

That is saying a lot.

I actually know a guy who's attracted to it.

As in, he's even drawn pornography of it.

That's about 20% of the fanbase, from what I've read.

And, you know, while weird that is perfectly fine. Just as watching that thing is fine (or as near to fine as watching anything on commercial tv regularly is fine, which is to say not really, not entirely.) Mentioning your like for some silly show occasionally, putting it in your sig - fine.

Time to draw a line:


There she is.

Pretending this sh!t is relevant, or serious, or that other people's dislike is not fine: sick.

One of the few reasonable posts in the raging insane-brony-vs-hateful-everyone-else war going on in the Deluge. Thanks for that Lewis.

[Zanas]

I'm glad to see Morsi out, but now we wait and see. We know how politicians are with promises.

That doesn't belong here. At all. It's not a good post. In any sense.

[Zanas]

You really don't have Oldies on ignore y'all ? How can you bear it ?

[Zanas]

No, the anarchist communes in Catalunya during the SCW were some of the best things in European/world history; and the CNT-FAI was pretty clearly one of the best actors on the Republican side.

[Zanas]

Let's talk elections for a change.

Our Bundeswahlleiter has similar tables on his website:
http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/de/bundestagswahlen/BTW_BUND_13/veroeffentlichungen/ergebnisse/
Sadly I found these tables only after I made the maps. His numbers are slightly different mainly because he calculates
[2013 absolute number of LINKE pr votes]/[2009 absolute number of LINKE pr votes]
while I have calculated
[2013 relative share of LINKE pr votes]/[2009 relative share of LINKE pr votes]
The basic pattern remains the same.

I made these quotient maps (for both FDP and LINKE) because I thought that a difference map would not be able to highlight all aspects I wanted to show.

Observations:

- Normally when a party loses votes it loses more in absolute numbers in its strongholds, but relatively more in its weak areas. For example the LINKE has gone down 5.8 points in the East, which is a fifth of their 2009 vote share, and it has gone down 2.7 points in the West, which is almost a third of their 2009 vote share. Similarly for the FDP. The interesting cases are when constituencies deviate from this basic rule (*).

- As Franknburger has pointed out earlier the FDP has hold up relatively good in its urban/metropolitan stronghold, but lost heavily in more rural/small town country, particularly in Catholic areas (e.g. Oberschwaben).
- In the East (except Potsdam), particularly in Saxony, the FDP has lost much more than in their Western weak areas (e.g. Ruhr, Braunschweig)
- The Linke has held up better in Saxony than in the rest of the East despite the basic rule*.
- In Saarland their is some kind of reverse Lafontaine effect.
- For some reason the Linke has remained relatively stable in NRW, in many rural areas (Paderborn?!) better than for example in the Northern Ruhr area, violating the basic rule*.
- In (Eastern) Bavaria and (Northwestern) Lower Saxony the Linke has lost heavily, sometimes (Aurich-Emden, some villages in the Bavarian forest) violating the Basic rule.
- The most striking pattern for the Linke is that they have held up much better in university cities (Münster, Freiburg, Aachen, Tübingen, Heidelberg and so on) in particular and Green strongholds in general. To a great extent this is probably not Green voters switching to the Linke, but sign of an academically educated "alternative" Linke core vote sharing the same milieu with the Greens.

And his maps a few posts above were glorious.