Sir this is a meme.
Jokes aside, I’m Indian. Sri Lanka has a much better education system than we do.
Sir this is a meme.
Jokes aside, I’m Indian. Sri Lanka has a much better education system than we do.
The best course of action for India is to remain neutral and trade with everyone. Whatever mistakes the current government is making, they have fortunately understood this principle.
But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc.
It would be useful if you tried to understand Sri Lanka’s political system before you made such comments. The SLFP / SLPP was historically supported by working class Sinhala people. The UNP was supported by Tamils, Muslims and richer / more urban Sinhalas. In 2022, the SLPP collapsed due to an economic crisis and widespread corruption. The SJB was an attempt by a section of the UNP to win over former SLPP voters by adopting centre-left economic policies and Sinhala nationalist rhetoric. The UNP base - largely Tamil and Muslim - are not going to vote for them! This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.
Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.
The reason being that, for many people, there is only one choice that is acceptable.
Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.
That’s a viable path to getting your face in the public consciousness, so you can win next time. As you said, losing a prior election isn’t a pre-requisite. But the posters you printed, the speeches you made, and the fact that one in thirty people took you seriously enough to vote for you, are a pretty strong boost when you run again.
Anyone who voted for only him, “last election,” was a fool.
Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.
If you can’t rally a shitload of people behind your guy… you lose.
Yes, but you show that so-and-so’s platform has x amount of support, putting them in a better position next time around.
The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.
It’s incredible how one can see some piece of evidence that contradicts their pet theory with their own eyes and say, no, the reality is wrong and my theory is right. I mean, it makes sense sometimes - the discovery of Neptune is a famous example - but in general, it is better to adjust theory to fit the facts, rather than the other way around.
Given the system you’re voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning.
The problem is that who ‘has a chance of winning’ is decided by who people vote for.
Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.
Uh, that’s what the Sri Lankan voters just did? The winner this time had 3% of the vote-share in the last election.
Sri Lanka has ranked ballots! What the fuck? They’re not even using Plurality, they’re doing RCV!
In theory, yes, but so few (~2%) people use it that in practice it is first past the post.
Duverger’s law is about how there tend to be two parties.
Emphasis on the ‘tends’. It’s a probabilistic observation, not a law of nature. Treating it as the latter leads to people acting against their best interests.
Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It’s not a Plurality voting system.
You are right, in theory, but please check how many additional votes the winner (or the runner-up) got as second-prefrence votes. It was around 2% of their totals. This is because in practice, most voyers didn’t bother putting second and third preferences.
The new guy won despite winning <5% of votes in the last election. If people vote for the candidate they like instead of trying to game the system by calculating who they’d rather not win the most, then maybe we can kick out corrupt incumbents and get in fresh faces (they’ll get corrupted over time too, at which point you rinse and repeat).
I’m guessing the destroyers are doing something beyond just than praying they don’t get hit.
In this context, I guess the self-employed would be an intermediate ‘middle class’. A doctor or accountant with her own practice, a master tradesman who can pick and choose his clients, a programmer who does contract work for companies - none of them are propertied enough to have their own workers, but neither are they employed by a boss who takes a cut of their pay. But I agree that a lot of people who call themselves middle class are actually either upper class or working class.
In India, you might throw gazillion-dollar weddings for your children.
If throwing lavish parties was all our oligarchs did, I’d be happy. I know Indira Gandhi did a lot of horrible things, but sometimes I wish we elect someone like her again, to once again put the fear of nationalisation into these leeches.
That already exists. It’s called arXiv, and is used by mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists. Everyone else has to pay up.
better yet how about they take enough for donation and decanter a portion out an do blood testing both to make sure the blood is clean but alsoso the individual is aware of they are free of X
This is already how they do it here (India). They’ll test all donations for a number of infections, and you can give them your mobile number / e-mail / postal address to inform you if they find something.
I think it was Charlie Chaplin who said that the best jokes make you first laugh and then cry.
It could be a different stratum of society. Maybe like politicians and businessmen. They say ~5% of Indians have iPhones, but I only know two people with iPhones (and one was second-hand).
I don’t think SMIC refuses to sell to non-Chinese companies. Nokia mostly uses Unisoc chips, which are made in China (not sure if by SMIC).
But if they did, it would be a pretty serious problem, since I don’t think SMIC even has a viable competitor in the entry-level smartphone chip market.
They have microSD, audio jack, okay chip (Snapdragon 4 Gen 2) and RAM (4-8 GB), replaceable batteries and screens, and HMD has pledged spare parts for seven years. That’s a good start, but it’s a bit overpriced for its specs and currently only available in Europe, so it probably won’t sell very well.
Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.
Govt jobs in India have 30-40 days, which is 6-8 weeks. But the private sector will riot if you try mandating anything close to that.
Ah, you’re talking about SLFP voters second-preferencing the JVP. (I thought you meant UNP voters supporting the SJB.) That is more plausible, except the SLPP leaders and hardliners would attack it tooth and nail, fearmonger that it would split the vote and help the UNP win, and so on. No one wants to let go of power.
Hard to predict. Depending on how many seats his coalition gets in Parliament, Dissanayake might have to get support from one of the other blocs to get bills passed. But if he can get a majority, he has a great chance to destroy both the established parties simply by appointing an honest auditor and letting them loose on the previous government’s files.
What the new party did was to challenge the old poor Sinhala vs Tamil+Muslim+rich divide, and turn it into more of a common people vs political / business class divide. Obviously, there aren’t enough businessmen or politicians to form a party by themselves, so we’ll have to see what they do. Maybe they’ll negotiate with the new powers, or maybe they’ll run smear campaigns, or maybe they’ll wait for it to get corrupt and unpopular.
The other possibility is a de-facto one-party state, like Mexico or Japan. I really don’t see hardline Sinhala nationalists and hardline Tamil separatists co-operating.