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[Reelya]

"giddy schoolgirl" and "favorite rockstar" haven't gone together since probably the 1980s

Remember; Kanye West is the greatest living rockstar in the world.

Also possibly the next president of the USA iirc right?

I don't think he's actually running.

He can still be the next president. Trump 2020 and then Kanye 2024*. Kanye likes Trump so he's not going to throw his metaphorical hat in the ring in 2020 as either Republican or Democrat.

*Although if Trump loses in 2020 then Kanye can't be the next president. But what Kanye will do is barge in during the swearing in ceremony and try and take over saying it was a stitch up and his homie should have won.

[dragdeler]

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[Reelya]

It's a joke, but it's a legitimate joke, not a random one.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/kanye-west-president-2024-white-house-donald-trump-kim-kardashian-a8518051.html

Kanye West has said he is serious about a run for the presidency, but that it will not happen until 2024.

“If I decide to do it, it will be done, I’m not going to try,” the rapper and fashion designer said in a radio interview with Power 92 Chicago’s DJ Pharris, adding: “Yes, 100 per cent it could happen… 2024.”

West first announced plans for a White House bid during an appearance at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards.

“I have decided in 2020 to run for president,” he declared at the time.

He's pals with Trump, and originally slated his run for 2020 but changed it to 2024. This part isn't the joke, this is seriously what he says he's going to do. My joke was to say that if Trump loses he'll jump up during the inauguration to claim it's a sham. The basis for that is that Kanye frequently does stuff like jump up on stage during those awards ceremonies to interrupt people's acceptance speeches, to say either that he should have gotten some award or a friend of his should have gotten an award. And BTW the relevant part is that eventually he get's an award. The thing is, just getting an award doesn't generate the media frenzy that losing and jump up to interrupt the winner does, so at the end of his award-acceptance speech, he announces he's running for president, which ensures he gets media buzz from it.

[dragdeler]

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[nenjin]

Also apparently Kim Kardashian has been quietly doing things of state, like negotiating the release of prisoners.

Nothing these days would surprise me when it comes to our political scene.

[Teneb]

Evo Morales was forced off the government of Bolivia. Most media I can find is glossing over the fact that he was going to call for new elections since the last one may have been tampered with (which is a very strange move for someone who supposedly tampered with votes...), but the army, police and right-wingers have instead forced him to leave his post as President.

Anti-Evo protesters also set on fire the residences of Evo's political supporters, but instead of screaming bloody murder... the media is just saying it nonchalantly.

Also, who claimed that the elections were rigged in the first place? Why, the OAS of course! Which are totally not a tool for the US to throw its weight around.

[Powder Miner]

I don't think the Bolivian protesters needed the OAS to tell them about election tampering, even with the allegations that the OAS is an American tool, which only seem to come up when a Latin American authoritarian who is on the left is being called out for election tampering and which never seem to have any elaboration. And the reason that the Bolivian protesters didn't need the OAS to tell them this is because it's about as clear as fucking day that the elections were tampered with even when you ignore the OAS. The live tallying of the votes abruptly stopped for 24 hours when 80% of the votes were tallied and the election was close enough to put Morales in for a runoff he quite possibly would lose, and then came back with 95% of the votes and Morales mysteriously JUST over that 10% margin he needed to avoid a runoff election.

Not to mention that this entire election only came to be because Morales exceeded his original constitutional term limits -- and not only that, but did so after having held a referendum in order to try and get exceeding his term limits approved, proceeding to lose that referendum, and then having the Supreme Tribunal (an organization which Morales created to replace the Supreme Court in 2012) grant him that term limit bypass despite the constitution for vague reasons.

The entire thing is marked from beginning to end with extraordinarily clear accounts of Morales trying his damnedest to hold onto power and bypassing democratic norms and institutions and even his own failed show votes time after time after time, and it doesn't honestly even take all THAT much time and effort to research and find all of these things out. Yet I see so many nuance-less, half-detailed arguments coming from the left when I look this up, because I frankly don't think that it's really about the facts of what actually happened in Bolivia for a lot of people on the left, but rather about whether or not one of the great figures of socialism in South America is losing power -- actually having to delve into the details potentially weakens the force of the arguments about America removing Yet Another Leftist President from power, and so doing so actively becomes something to be avoided.

Now, that said, there are some really fucked up things that have been done by some of the protesters that can be looked up, but you also can't dismiss the entire --and VERY large-- protests because of what has happened in some areas of Bolivia. Do you then dismiss protests in Hong Kong, in Iraq, in Indonesia on the grounds that there were violence? Are ALL of these protesters culpable? I don't think so, and I also don't think it lessens the reasons that they're protesting, even if justice does have to be brought to account when the dust settles.

(Now, if the military just takes power I'm going to be eating some of these words, but I would like to hope that Latin America is beyond at least that by now.)

[Reelya]

The modern Latin American pattern has moved on from "military assuming power". At least directly. Straight up Juntas just aren't expedient any more. It's more likely to be someone with who's a large landowner or has ties to the corporate sector now. That was the pattern that preceded the last wave of left-wing leaders: there were a ton of right-wing candidates with links to right wing para-miltaries and/or rapacious multinationals. It's not the army directly taking over any more, they just open up the nation for multinational corporate exploitation.

One example is Alvaro Noboa, who was the candidate running against leftist Rafael Corea in Ecaudor. Alberto Naboa was a banana plantation billionaire, known by Amnesty International for his excessive use of child labor and/or sicking death squads on his own workers who tried to unionize.

Presdient Uribe in Colombia goes without saying, a much worse version of the same thing, basically his whole family being implicated or in prison for various links to paramilitary death squads and drug dealing.

The example in Bolivia was a guy nicknamed "el gringo" because he spoke almost no actual Spanish. He was the son of wealthy Bolivians, and grew up mostly in their mansions/estates in Florida and Washington. Evo Morales won election because the Right put up a guy who was basically a pampered American who quickly tried to privatize the entire nation (water air, natural gas etc) and sell it cheap to American corporations.

EDIT: also something that's on-point when talking about Evo Morales and term limits is that term limits were only instituted by the Morales government in 2009. If you do a date-limited search on Google for "bolivia term limits" limited to up to 2005, you get this link:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30025814?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
"Effects of Term Limits on Fiscal Performance: Evidence from Democratic Nations"

While the full text is paywalled, the excerpt in google search contains this phrase:
"Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, No term limits"

Point being, it was Evo Morales who imposed term limits in the first place. They came in in 2009, while he was elected in 2006. Sure, he ended up breaking that rule, sure, but it is clearly noteworthy that it's his government who put that rule in place in the first place, it wasn't a pre-existing law. So to paint him as a guy who's broken with pre-existing norms in Bolivia to run for office again, because of the term limits is kinda misleading. He effectively wrote that rule himself.

[Powder Miner]

And yet folks like Correa and Morales and, of course, Maduro have also got into the business of blowing past term limits and weakening governmental checks on them so that they can centralize and maintain power to themselves (awful lot of judicial and legislative branches wholly superseded) -- these guys really aren't the champions of democratic government so much as they are the champions of the left in the cases where they're not so incredibly corrupt as to basically nullify  in the case of Correa and Morales, however, it's ended up blowing up pretty badly on them. There are reasons why the socialists got largely rolled out of SA.

But that said, it's not really like the neoliberals have done all that much better at all. People like PPK and of course Temer turned out to be as hopelessly corrupt as the people they railed against, and now you do genuinely have folks like Pinera and Moreno facing mass protest and mass discontent. And then there's fucking Bolsonaro, who I'm not sure is quite as neoliberal as he is just hard right, but who certainly doesn't stand out as a beacon of virtue among the anti-leftists.

To tell the truth, I really have no idea what's going to happen in South America. I don't think we're going to see a massive and lasting wave back to the left -- the political turnover against the socialist governments of SA has been so incredibly, remarkably thorough that the Bolivarians just sweeping in like nothing happened seems... far-fetched, to say the least. But neoliberal government clearly is on the receiving end of another popular political wave pretty much everywhere except Peru, and I'm really not sure what to think of Vizcarra at this point. I don't think it will be a unified continent of either neoliberals or left, though, to whatever partial degree it might even have been before. Will it be mixed? Will it be a spread of Bolsonaros? I sure as shit hope it's not the latter but...

(And on the matter of the edit... I do like that you pointed that out, I didn't know that and it's a good piece of nuance, but frankly, does it matter? It's a potential point in the favor of Evo Morales' political career that he instituted term limits [and in a constitution backed by popular referendum] but what does it mean if he then ignores those term limits directly against the result of a referendum, like what put them in in the first place? Does it mean that he since backed down from the things that drove that to be included in the 2009 constitution, or does it mean that he never intended them to actually end up applying to him? Neither of these options are great.)

[Reelya]

The point about term limits also applies to Venezuela. Notably, the right-wing coup in Venezuela in 2002 made a note of abolishing the 1999 (post-Chavez) constitution, including the new term limits*.

* I should note, I looked into this and there is a nuance. Previously you could have more than two terms, but not consecutively, whereas from 1999 you could have two terms, max, consecutive or not.

[Powder Miner]

If politicians create term limits, and then promptly subvert them as soon as they would apply to the very people that created them, then they didn't really create term limits.

(Also, since I'm likely to sign off for tonight soon, I'd like to apologize -- I came off much more aggressively at Teneb than was warranted by his post, just because of frustrations with ways I had seen other people post. It's not right to take that sort of thing out on the first person I see taking a roughly related stance in a medium that I can actually respond in, and yet that's exactly what I did.)

[scriver]

I'd vote for a guy named Noboa, he's definitely not a snake.

[Teneb]

(Also, since I'm likely to sign off for tonight soon, I'd like to apologize -- I came off much more aggressively at Teneb than was warranted by his post, just because of frustrations with ways I had seen other people post. It's not right to take that sort of thing out on the first person I see taking a roughly related stance in a medium that I can actually respond in, and yet that's exactly what I did.)

It's fine. I am somewhat aggressive here because my country has been taken over by fascists and I'm angry that it seems like the same will happen to Bolivia.

[Doomblade187]

It sure looks like the military is about to take power, yeah. Unfortunately. Here's hoping they still hold those new elections, because the news was kind of unclear on that.

Edit: for the record, vote counting can organically have one candidate pull heavily forward suddenly. Happened in Seattle recently, actually. Not necessarily fraud, though I do agree the term limit dodge was shady.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, there'll be an "election" ran by masked death squads. I hope the Bolivian left has a backup plan or are at least fucking armed, because otherwise it'll be another Pinochet soon.