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Bulletins and News Discussion from March 4th to March 10th, 2024 - The Coalition of Losers - COTW: Pakistan

Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.

What a clusterfuck of an election.

Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.

It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.

This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.

Your Monday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Thursday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Sundary briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Pakistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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1.1K comments

  • What would be substantially different about a Trump presidency? Biden has, to my knowledge refused federal action against LGBT discrimination in red states, signed on to every last bullet point of Trump's white nationalist border sadism, given unlimited greenlights to the rogue state of Israel to carry out a genocide, refused to codify Roe and essentially allowed the Supreme Court to remain an unchecked organ of hard right political power.

    Which elements of fascism would materialize under Trump that Biden hasn't either sleepwalked into or enthusiastically supported?

    • Yeah, I don't trust the democrats to run the fascism machine they've built any more responsibly than Trump. The dem leadership is thowing as much money as possible into trying to kick out the dozen or so congress people who aren't genocidal racists, and replace them with neoliberal pod people.

    • If we're talking about the larger system then a lot of the same stuff will be accomplished in the same time frame between the two of them policy wise. There will be important differences though.

      Biden and the democrats are the party of the adults in the room. They are the proper custodians of empire and of sound imperial management. They will procedurally implement a slower but properly understood path to whatever modern fascism would look like.

      Trump and the Republicans would be more openly and outwardly, viscous and petty. They would be more aggressive in setting up the systems that would accelerate internal decline like packing the courts and starving the government instead of letting it stagnate. The Trump white house was also a lot more factional than Bidens has been so we'll also get more entertaining court intrigue with their vain personalities. The news cycle will be dominated by whatever new Trump scandal there is for the week.

      I'm of the opinion that when it comes to real, actual policy, that in any 10 year period it just averages out to what the capitalists want and how the deep state wants to execute it. The president is only so important.

      • The next 4 years are fucked. What comes after is going to determine if it's possible to course correct, but I think we all need ro find some plan to eject. Sucks most of the worlds immigration laws basically state if you aren't rich fuck off.

    • I see this talking point that Trump and Biden are essentially equivalent, and I personally think it might be true but it's gonna be really hard to argue this to libs and if Trump ends up doing something awful you're stuck holding the bag of i told you sos. But you don't need to have Trump = Biden, because Trump is extremely and uniquely innocuous for a republican. Yeah this is also hard to swallow for libs but it's almost an indisputable fact and you need only remind them of the deeds of what the last 3 republican presidents did and ask them to produce examples that are worse.

      So if there was every a time to hold a Democrat president to account, now would be it because the next Republican will not only be worse than Trump but probably worse than a Bush or Reagan, they'll be just as evil but will have learned from Trump (and Biden lol) that they don't even have to pretend that hard, in fact not pretending makes them more powerful. And aside from punishing the Dems for completely ignoring their base, we're very likely to get a republican in either 2024 or 2028, but not both years, like 4 years of either Trump or Biden and people are gonna want a change. So likely choices are 1) Biden 2024 / Satan but worse 2028, 2) Trump 2024 / Probably at least not Satan 2028. See, utilitarianism is good actually.

      Biden MUST lose, hate to say it but if I lived in a swing state I would literally mark Trump on my ballot

      • I don't think voting for Trump is advisable in any circumstances, even to own the most insufferable and genocidal libs, because it only confirms their fantasies about leftists being secretly Republican. I think it's beet to just not vote or leave the top of the ticket blank.

        As for what's next for Republicans after Trump, I think the party as we know it will likely collapse. The prospect of a Haley or even DeSantis presidency is doomed because they have no charisma and are transparently nasty little teacher's pets regardless of how much they try to channel Trump.

        I actually can't think of a single reactionary figure actually qualified to rival Trump in any way, the man is the Messiah for racist middle class whites and boomers because of his mannerisms and gaudy branding, nobody else is like that and we don't live in a society that can produce more Trumps.

      • it's gonna be really hard to argue this to libs and if Trump ends up doing something awful you're stuck holding the bag of i told you sos.

        I have not had any success whatsoever in budging libs on anything related to the current administration. Trump justifies everything. They don't know about the genocide in Yemen. They're very concerned about Russia and China. They cannot imagine any political action other than voting and at this point it's purely a comfort blanket to save them from Trump.

        • I know it doesn't seem like it but not all of them are the same, society isn't as polarized as it claims to be, it's an illusion! Okay cards on the table I've only convinced one lib to not vote Joe and they were family and they were already using the g word about gaza.. still I fancy myself a lib whisperer and am therefore hyper qualified to give advice so, what you need to do is become them a bit first, rotate your talent for disagreeableness into finely honed debate skills, squint your eyes and imagine the eggs benedict and mimosas they shove to you at the crack of 11am is harmless pizza and whiskey, now you're catching on good job

        • They cannot imagine any political action other than voting and at this point it's purely a comfort blanket to save them from Trump.

          you see this a lot on the more socdem or even vaguely socialist subreddits that I visit once every week or two to gauge reactions to ongoing events. there's a ton of genuine panic about things and basically every day there's a post like "okay, but even if you thought voting didn't do anything you'd STILL be wrong because... insert five paragraphs here" because I think people are starting to sink beneath the waves, either economically or socially, and are frantically grabbing onto anything within reach. It's a natural reaction to the threat of drowning that I can't deeply fault them for but it's very difficult to convey to people who are in that state that the levers that they're trying to pull at to change things simply aren't connected to anything anymore, and haven't been for... I mean, at least since Reagan.

          If anybody's ever played or watched the Stanley Parable, it's like the ending where the protagonist is just stuck inside a facility that's about to blow up and they're trying to push buttons in a panic because some combination has to stop the sequence, and the narrator is mocking them for even trying, and it inevitably doesn't work and the facility explodes. the buttons work about as much as voting does; it makes you feel like you're doing something rather than nothing as you careen towards oblivion, because you can see no other possible method of escape. it is actually pretty remarkable how deeply the anti-communist instinct is programmed that even when these utterly desperate situations come along, many (but not all, of which many of us here are proof!) still go "no, that's impossible, actually it would be even worse than if this entire building blew up with me inside it, I'm just gonna go back to frantically pressing buttons that I am perfectly aware do nothing whatsoever." learned helplessness, I suppose.

          • When the libs say "The leftists are telling everyone not to vote because they believe that the revolution is magically going to happen because to them it's the rapture because they're unrealistic children", while they're trying to vote their way out of inescapable fascism while denouncing any other action as ridiculous, childish, impossible, or worse than fascism. It's really pathetic, and it hurts seeing people you would want to be able to actually reason and think and make plans falling back on, more or less, religious fanaticism to save them instead of human agency. They don't think any action is possible so they're offering up blood sacrifices to the American Civil Religion because surely the institutions will save them?

    • I was thinking about this the other day, I think the biggest difference is relating to the everyday operation of the federal government. Shit like privatizing the post office or dismantling the EPA is stuff that probably only Trump would go for. Democrats don't actually improve those institutions, or even undo damage done by Republicans, but they don't destroy them either.

    • The difference is that the (donkey-brained) libs will be in the streets with us again. Heck, maybe they'll even help us do shit like shut down airports again.

      The difference is that there'll once again be measurable, popular resistance to the fascism.

      • The difference is that there'll once again be measurable, popular resistance to the fascism.

        "Measurable" in the same way that the width of a needle is technically measurable with a tape measure. All Trump has to do is the same kind of fascism that Biden is doing rather than the more explicitly sadistic kinds and most important Democrats will kowtow to him. And even if Trump doesn't do the "presidential" things like bombing hundreds of children and we merely return to the 2016-2020 derangement syndrome, the best we'll get is a repeat of the 2020 protests; a couple more violent events, maybe even a police station burned down, but then a thousand peaceful candlelit vigils for the 382nd person of colour murdered by an acorn-fearing pig that week where every person marching gives $100 to a police officer and literally licks their bootleather of dog shit and still gets teargassed. Again, that's the best case scenario. In reality, by then we'll have a version of Black Lives Matter owned by white libertarian billionaires where they've created their own cryptocurrency and to resist, you should peacefully protest in the metaverse.

1093 comments