All eyes shift to Europe

I was supposed to be out of town for about six weeks. It's been nearly three months. I miss my home and my stuff.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get to global politics. We've got a number of European elections coming up in 2017, including heavy-weights France and Germany. In Frogville, it's looking like the race is going to be between a right-wing candidate and a far right-wing candidate. Same goes for the Netherlands. I can't find a lot of info on what's going on in Albania, Norway & Czechland—but as for Krautown, it looks like they might have their first right-wing party elected to federal parliament since WWII. Oh, and Merkel is well and truly up shit creek.

And speaking of Krauts, I think I'm developing a bit of an infatuation with this one:

Something About This Really Spoke To Me

Anonymous lefty Kraut with charming speech impediment gives powerful spiel about Yank election and the state of left-wing politics in the Western world—see video below.

The Red Pill, pt 3

So, now there's a crowd-funding campaign trying to raise twelve grand so the maker of the film can come out to Australia for the Sydney screening. Wow, it's lucky that supporters of the film are so fired up over that petition to get her refused entry into the country.

… Even though—I guess—she never intended to come out, because she couldn't afford to without being crowd-funded?

… And were there any plans to even screen in Sydney before this whole censorship kerfuffle?

Wow, I guess they're actually really lucky that there's been such a concerted effort to suppress the film.

*rolls eyes*

Post Mortem

Stephen Long—whose work I quite enjoyed when he was the financial correspondent for the ABC—posted this piece of analysis this morning. It's too short to have any depth to it, but I think it sums up nicely why so many women and brown people voted for Trump, despite his image as a racist, sexist, etc-ist.

Basically, economic interest Trumps everything else.

In 2008, Obama rode into power by promising change, and then proceeded to give his supporters the finger by following the same general path as Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan. This time around, it was Trump promising change, with Clinton promising a steady hand on the rudder and no significant deviation from the present course.

It's entirely possible that Trump's supporters will also be getting the middle finger, but one thing is for absolute certain—a lot of people are not happy with the present course.

Yankland Election Coverage 2016

Voting should start around 9:00pm on Tuesday night, QLD time. I might hit the sack early Tuesday, then get up early Wednesday morning to begin coverage. Obviously, I can't guarantee it'll be comprehensive or consistent—hell, I can't even guarantee my internet connection's gonna be consistent—but we'll see how we go, ay?

Also, drawing with a mouse is hard.

TALLY

SCORES lowest wins		predictions

Steve Dillon

The milestone 2000th issue of 2000AD came out a few weeks ago. Depressingly, I won't be reading it until after I get home. Even more depressingly, I just found out that one of my favourite 2000AD artists died recently. Most depressingly, he was only in his early 50s and died from a simple burst appendix.

… sigh … I didn't even realise people still died from that these days.

I don't really know anything about Steve Dillon, apart from the fact that he drew art which I really admired. It was his work that made me realise how much more important it is (usually) for a drawing to effectively convey information than it is for the drawing to be "beautiful". Dillon's work was rarely beautiful, but the stories he illustrated were a pleasure to read, because you always knew exactly what was going on; you never had to think about it—the instant you looked at the page, you just knew. I've never seen another comics illustrator come close to him on depicting the subtleties of mixed emotion through facial expressions and body language.

Sadly, in the ten minutes I spent looking on the internet, I couldn't find any examples of his work that I can hold up and say, "This was Dillon at his best". The following examples will just have to do. To see the images full-sized, right-click and select "open in new tab". I have to remember to do something about that stupid "light-box" overlay shit when I get home.

The Red Pill Saga Continues

So, after an online petition of two and a half thousand "signatures" managed to convince Palace Cinemas to drop the film, a counter-petition with four thousand "signatures" has led to a crowd-funding campaign to secure a new venue—which has successfully raised eight and a half grand.

And now there's dueling petitions on the subject of whether or not the film-maker should be denied entry to the country on hate-speech grounds.

This whole thing just gets fishier and fishier.

The Election Cup

How did everyone do with the Melbourne Cup this year? Personally, I forgot it was on.

Anyway, since there's (less than?) a week left until the Yankland elections, I thought I might hit you lot up for your predictions. I don't really wanna get into the nitty-gritty of how the election system works over there, but suffice to say, the country is divided up into 538 electoral college seats, of which you have to win a majority.

So, who do you think will win, and by what margin ( X/538 ) ? Personally, I don't have a fucking clue, but if I have to guess, I'm going to say Clinton with 300. Whoever's guess is closest wins a prize. And also gets to help me decide on what that prize should be.

The Essence Of Trump

These are two videos that I think help to make clear why an intelligent, measured, and experienced politician isn't trouncing a fat orange dickhead who brags about grabbing pussies and uses words like "bigly".

The first one is a video within a video within a video. What I like about it is that it shows you what is basically the same feelings being expressed by a well-known film-maker, a C-grade comedian, and some random dickhead off YouTube. There are huge differences in the degrees of eloquence on display—hell, the random dickhead is only two steps away from rambling incoherence—but they're all giving voice to exactly the same thing.

And this one is from a left-leaning independent news broadcaster who also gets it.