Ukrainian Elections 2019: Final Results

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 22, 2019

Zelensky [green] vs. Poroshenko [red] via @vybory_91

Raw results here.

With 99.74% of votes counted as of the time of writing, Zelensky is at 73.22% to 24.46% to Poroshenko. The sole region where Poroshenko won was in Lvov oblast.

Zelensky [green] vs. Poroshenko [red] abroad via @vybory_91.

Raw results here.

Poroshenko’s best performance: Canada, where Chrystia Freeland lives – 74%; USA – 72%, UK – 70%. Diaspora is even more svidomy than Lvov, but they are hardly representative. While they are good commenters, this is something to bear in mind wrt AP and Mr. Hack.

Even in Poland & Czechia more Ukrainian Gastarbeiters voted for Zelensky than for Poroshenko. I had an explanation as to why in my post on Ukraine’s (near) unique status as a place where better educated people lean more nationalist (after adjusting for geographic patterns, age structure, etc).

So successful American-Ukrainian professionals vote for Poroshenko through the same underlying mechanisms that Russian-Americans tend to favor liberal anti-Putin candidates, or why American year abroad students in Europe feel ashamed about Trump. While more redneck type Ukrainians toiling on construction sites in Poland don’t care as much.

Reactions To Sri Lanka Attacks

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 21, 2019

I looked at all the people with more than a 2% chance of becoming US President in 2020 according to PredictIt.

There are some patterns here.

Biden: Hasn’t Tweeted since April 19.

Not a credible contender, but honorary mention goes to:

HABBENING: The Ukraine Elections 2019 (2nd Round)

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 20, 2019

The second round of the Ukrainian elections are this Sunday.

  • Zelensky is almost certainly going to win (PredictIt has had him at ~95% for weeks now). It looks like he is going to blow Poroshenko out, probably something like Zelensky 67% vs. Poroshenko 30%.

  • Unless plans change I’ll be discussing the Ukrainian elections live on Prosvirnin’s stream on Sunday evening (Moscow time).

  • Two things that can save Poroshenko: (1) Last minute disqualification of Zelensky; (2) Еlectoral fraud on a scale that puts anything Putin/United Russia has done to shame.

The first will very likely lead to another Maidan, though in the eastern cities, not Kiev. There is currently a last minute court case to disquality Zelensky as a candidate based on alleged vote buying. It seems to be the private initiative of a svidomy lawyer and its unclear whether it would even have the appropriate jurisdictional strength.

The second will have the same result, but it is even more impractical, because Poroshenko looks like a loser, and the bureaucrats at the Central Electoral Commissions and the teachers/government workers manning the counting booths are not going to stick their necks out for someone who will almost certainly be gone soon.

  • DEBATE. I watched the Poroshenko vs. Zelensky debate in Kiev’s main football stadium on April 19.

Main takeaway from Ukrainian debates is the very low level of political culture there. Even US prez. debates look cerebral in comparison. It’s how I imagine such debates go in Third World tinpot democracies.

There was precisely zero discussion of policy.

Just insults and mudslinging over who stole more money and dumb theatrics like kneeling to display respect to Donbass veterans (for anyone interested in the details: Poroshenko knelt to the vets in his team on one knee, Zelensky knelt before the assembled crowd on both knees).

Since Poroshenko is an oligarch as opposed to just being sponsored by one, and was in power these past five years, fights over who stole more was not a “debate” that he could win.

For his part, Zelensky said he will continue Poroshenko’s program – he specifically praised the Army reforms, the abortive creation of the Ukrainian Church, the bezviz, etc. – but he would do it better and will less corruption.

He would also end the war, but also somehow return not just the Donbass but even Crimea. How he would accomplish any of that was not specified. These are germane questions, since just like Poroshenko, he has also said he will not abide by Minsk II.

I think these were pretty much the only soundbytes that actually touched on policy however tangentially. All the rest was slights and insults, grandstanding, and veiled (and not so veiled) threats to imprison the other guy.

There were some deluded people on Twitter who thought that these Ukrainian debates would influence or “inspire” Russians, get them to start asking why they can’t also have such performances. First, there are plenty of circuses in Russia, so that’s a factually incorrect premise from the very start. Second, Russia even has political debates during elections. They are nothing to write home about either, but even so, the typical debate between the commie, LDPR, and liberal representative actually has significantly more substance than this Ukrainian zoo. Yes, Putin doesn’t participate in these debates. But he is not legally required to. And there is no point for an incumbent President with vastly higher approval ratings than any of his competitors to engage in debates. If Poroshenko’s and Zelensky’s approval ratings were reversed, it is extremely unlikely that Poroshenko would have debated him either. As it was, that was Poroshenko’s only chance – however far-fetched – of reversing the awning disparity in ratings between them, and he failed.

  • Real Junta When? Ukrainian military is not happy with Zelensky for calling LDNR separatists “rebels” during his debate with Poroshenko, as opposed to “terrorists.” This really triggered the svidomy, even though Internet sleuths have since uncovered plenty of occasions on which Poro has called them “rebels” himself. Anyhow,  I will be genuinely impressed with the Ukraine if they go ahead and do a military coup, but I’m sure they’ll disappoint as usual.

Anyhow, on a more serious note, with political capital in the form of 70% of the vote, I don’t see Zelensky getting seriously challenged in the near future.

Possibly Zelensky can prevent this by recomitting to Minsk II – autonomy within the Ukraine, and amnesty for rebel fighters – but I don’t think he’ll be able to do this even if he wanted to. Like Trump, he has been painted as a Russian stooge even though he is nothing of the sort, so there’s a chance that – if anything – he will have to take a harder line on the Donbass than Poroshenko, who has barked a lot but hasn’t bit much since 2015. Accepting Russian citizenship implies losing Ukrainian citizenship, paving the way for nominally legal mass deportations of Ukraine’s problematic Donbass citizens into Russia in the wake of any future Operation Storm. This is not something that Russia could politically accept. So – five years after the initial optimism and referenda on joining Russia in May 2014 – it looks like we might finally get a timeline for the Donbass’ journey home.

Chalenko’s Ukraine

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 20, 2019

Alexander Chalenko.

There are many forms of Ukrainian identity. The svidomy believe that the Ukraine is a purely autochthonous entity, whose “Russian” achievements were stolen by Muscovy (Richard Sakwa, more politely, calls them “monists”). There are “pluralists” who believe that they share a common cultural and genetic ancestry with Russia and Belorussia in the medieval Rus state, which partially translates into integrationist sentiments. But there are also those who believe that the Ukraine is simply one particular local expression of Russianism. The latter were never anywhere near the majority on the ground, and after 2014, they are probably in the low single digits (e.g. as proxied by the percentage of Ukrainian citizens who now say they support union with Russia: Once around 15%-20%, now down to 4%). However, these people do exist, and some of them are willing to make the case publicly.

One example is Alexander Chalenko, a journalist who fled the Ukraine in 2014 ahead of politicized charges after the Maidan. Having been reasonably influential at one point – he has apparently hobnobbed with Poroshenko and several other Ukrainian bigwigs on at least a few occasions – he now lives in Moscow and writes columns for the Ukraina.ru project. This is despite the fact that he is an ethnic Ukrainian himself; as he said, his grandparents had “Ukrainian” stamped onto their passports.

To the extent that he identifies with his Ukrainian roots, he prefers to use the term “South Russian.” Even so, he is not quite a classical Russian nationalist either – or at least, not what is often associated with Russian nationalism. More on that later.

Anyhow, as part of my (strategically questionable?) project to acquaint Anglophones with actually-existing-Russian-nationalism beyond the Wikipedia entry on Foundations of Geopolitics, here is a detailed breakdown of Chalenko’s main theses/points:

  1. Difference between Russians and Ukrainians? He recounts having an argument with a svidomy, in which he challenged his interlocutor to name one concrete difference between Russians and Ukrainians. After pondering, the svidomy replied, “The Ukrainians fry their potatoes in salo.”

  2. The War in Donbass: Obviously, he said a lot about this, but it can be summarized thus:

  • Smol brain: Russian-Ukrainian war [standard Western/Kiev narrative]
  • Normal brain: Ukrainian civil war [after all, 80% of LDNR combatants even in 2014 were Ukrainian citizens]
  • Galaxy brain: Russian civil war

(Someone should make this into a meme).

  1. Little Russia is a peasant culture. But for that matter, so is Great Russia. In fact, he repeatedly stresses the viewpoint that the foundation of the Russian nation was only laid c.1800, above all by Alexander Pushkin. Moreover, Chalenko – despite his personal anti-Semitism – argues that this nation was only actualized under Stalin, as he defined a nation through urbanization, mass literacy, and mass culture, not ethnicity. Incidentally, he is obviously, he is a civic nationalist, not an ethnonationalist.

(While I don’t disagree with this 100%, I disagree more than I agree. I am very receptive to Azar Gat’s arguments that nations are not exclusively modern constructs, and consider the Russian nation to have emerged within the medieval Russian state. Certainly the people who wrote the chronicles wrote of the “Russian lands” as an ethnocultural whole, and there was at least the expectation that individual principalities owed some degree of loyalty to it. And while I am not into “hard” racialism, there do seem to be hard limits to the ethnic churn a nation can undergo before it phase transitions into something else. These are not fringe positions, and there was in fact plenty of both agreement and disagreement with Chalenko on that score from the other nationalists, conservatives, etc. assembled in the room. However, this does demonstrate the diversity of views that actually exist within the Russian nationalism.)

  1. Vyshivanka. He dislikes both the Ukrainian vyshivanka and the Russian kosovorotka (incidentally, these are basically the same thing). And indeed made light fun of Kholmogorov and Dugin for their habit of indulging them. But note that the vyshivanka has only become a national symbol in the Ukraine, not in Russia. This sort of cultural parochialism doesn’t happen in real European countries. While I do like the aesthetics of the vyshivanka/kosovorotka, and wouldn’t even mind wearing one myself – why should the entire world dress like 19th century Brits? – the people who strut about in them are regarded as a bit weird in Russia. Not so in the Ukraine.

  2. Galician separatism FTW! Russian nationalists used to have some counterintuitively nice relationships with Galician neo-Habsburgists, whose ambitions are largely limited to their own small shire. Not with Banderists, because Banderists want a unitary fascist Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Don – a project that became increasingly realistic after the Orange Revolution in 2004, and reached fruition a decade later. Neo-Habsburg larpers were good allies of convenience because they also want to dismantle the Ukrainian entity so as to not to have to associate with Donbass sovoks and assorted riffraff. I suspect that Chalenko would get along with our AP. Obviously that became irrelevant after 2014, since that was when getting the whole pie (or almost all of it, with the exception of Crimea and the Donbass) became possible and even probable.

  3. Russia is a European nation. This also translates into Europhilia: He considers Russian propaganda against Europe and European values (e.g. “eurogays”) to be stupid and embarassing; village behavior. However, by dint of that same fact, Russia should act as the equals of the other European nations, informing the “Western partners” that Russia will be reunited regardless of their opinions on the matter. So I suppose you can interpret this post as spreading the message. 🙂 Indeed, he frames modern Russian irredentism as a classically European phenomenon, often comparing it to the Risorgimento and other 19th century “springtimes of peoples.” Quote: “You Russians don’t have the right to abandon us South Russians.“

  4. You might like Europe, but Europe doesn’t much like you. This was my question/criticism addressed to him (1:48:30 on the video).

What to do about the ensuing total Western sanctions when he sends Russian tanks to Kiev?

There wasn’t, unfortunately, a clear answer to that question. Or how to resolve the contradiction between these geopolitical ambitions and maintaining a firm European orientation. (Like many liberal Russian nationalists, he is dismissive of China).

  1. Complaints:

(a) Russia doesn’t do enough to fund/promote soft power, so things like the Ukraine debacle keep happening over and over again. This is something I have written much about myself and I see no need to repeat them again.

(b) The “authoritarian-bureaucratic system” that rules Russia (his words – but pretty accurate) isn’t responsive. Many Ukrainian political refugees have had difficulties getting Russian passports, and a few were even deported (e.g. Marina Menshikova; Olena Boyko would be a more recent example).

  1. Russian passports in Donbass? One revelation for me was that there was some limited support within the Presidential Administration for handing out Russian passports en masse to LDNR residents in 2015, but it was vetoed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as it would violate Minsk II.

However, this idea is apparently getting resurrected. People close to Donbass affairs have been semi-publicly hinting at it for a few months, but with Chalenko also mentioning it, and now the Ukrainian media crawling all over it in the past days, my strong suspicion that this is for real. Now there were some fears in these circles that the kremlins may have wanted to postpone it again, in order to attempt a “reset” once Zelensky takes over from Poroshenko. However, a couple of days ago, Zelensky went on record against providing any special status to the LDNR or amnesty for the rebel leaders. This is completely incompatible with Minsk II, so there’s an excellent change that mass Russian passportization – the model used in Transnitria – really will go ahead this summer.

Did Crimeans Support Joining Russia?

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 20, 2019

I looked at this question in depth in 2016 (see “Trump Is Factually Right on Crimea“).

TLDR: Yes, the did, and overwhelmingly so.

Opinion Polls

I am not going to go over this again, since I’d mostly just be repeating the older post. Suffice to say that since 2016, nothing has changed.

In a VCIOM poll this March marking the 5 year anniversary, some 93% of Crimeans said they have a positive view on joining Russia, and 89% said they would vote to join Russia if the referendum was to be run again.

The sole post-unification/annexation [cross out as per ideological preferences] “poll” to show ambiguity on the question is from the Russian President’s Human Rights Council. However, this was not a poll, as I pointed out at the time, but the personal opinion of a single member of the Council, Yevgeny Bobrov, who based his assessment on conversations with a couple dozen unnamed “activists.”

Incidentally, I was amused to see that Yevgeny Bobrov was put on Ukraine’s Myrotvorets blacklist either way, as commenter E commented – despite the minor propaganda he generated for them.

Ukrainian Leaders

Speaking of commenter E, he also had a much lengthier treatment of internal political discussions between top Maidan politicians during the Crimean Crisis, in which they acknowledged the vast majority of Crimeans backed the transfer:

http://www.rnbo.gov.ua/files/2016/stenogr.pdf
The host site of that document, rnbo.gov.ua, is the homepage of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, currently led by the same Turchinov who was Acting President of Ukraine back then. That’s pretty convincing as proof that it’s legitimate.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a fully transcribed version, much less a translation into English. I’m not great at reading Ukrainian myself. I did find that most (but not quite all) of the text in the PDF can be copied+pasted into Google Translate.

Anyway, here are some of my own translations of relevant sections concerning the Ukraine elite’s beliefs about public opinion in Crimea (I mostly translated the Ukrainian into Russian, then that into English, manually fixing any mistakes along the way):

The 2nd paragraph of pg. 6 is where Valentin Nalivaychenko admits that the idea of joining Russia enjoys mass support in Crimea:

The fourth point concerning the situation in the Crimea is the mass support of the population for the actions of the Russian Federation.

2nd paragraph, pg. 8: Nalivaychenko:

Our military and security forces are demoralized. many of them do not recognize the new government and are not ready to carry out orders, or have already betrayed their oath. The situation in the Navy of Ukraine is especially difficult. There are signed letters of resignation, including by the Commander of the Naval Forces of Ukraine. The moral and psychological climate of the leadership is extremely low, if not entirely treasonous.

p.9 paragraphs 2&3, Avakov (Minister of Internal Affairs):

Separately, I’ll say that the majority of the population of Crimea takes a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian position. This is the risk we need to take into account. We are establishing communications with employees who have not betrayed us, but among the police these are very few.

p.12, Tenyukh (Ukraine’s Minister of Defense) replying to Turchinov (acting President of Ukraine), who is asking how many of Ukraine’s 15,000 nominal forces in the region would be willing to fight:

Difficult to answer. Most of the military are local contract soldiers. For them, service is money. You know the mood of the population in Crimea. There are also young people, conscripts who are unlikely to fight. Those who are ready to execute the order to use weapons will be 1.5-2 thousand maximum.

p. 16, Nalivaychenko:

Dear colleagues, I propose to invite to Kiev the leaders of Crimea’s Prosecutor’s Office, SBU and Police, because the vast majority of them are traitors. We need to know who is on our side now and who is not!

p.16-17, Vitaliy Yarema (General Prosecutor of Ukraine):

During the preparation of these preliminary steps, we discovered the dominant opinion of the civilian population. Since the premises of state institutions begin to be seized, they say, “If it’s fine to do it in Kiev, why we can’t we capture them in Crimea?”. Therefore, today I would like to address the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council Andriy Parubiy to vacate today the premises seized by the Samooborona [Self-defence forces of Maidan], as much as possible, in order to show that we have law and order…

(this suggestion was not discussed any further in the meeting, and no resolution was taken to implement it)

The only sort-of dissenting voice at the meeting was Acting President Turchinov (he also seems to admit that the Crimean public and elites are against Ukraine, but believes that their opinion is not very deeply-held and can be changed. He also, unlike the others, does not accept that the opinions of the Crimean “street” played a crucial role in the Maidan government’s quick loss of power in Crimea in the days preceding the referendum, believing that it was 100% due to the Russian troops. Turchinov’s view became the mainstream one among Western analysts), p.23-24:

The emphasis on the mass media is correct.
It’s very important that we appeal to the residents of the Crimean peninsula. They must understand that the Ukrainian government is not their enemy, that we are ready to solve their local problems. We need to dispel this myth that the Crimeans raised a rebellion against Ukraine. These are not Crimeans. It’s solely a military operation against a sovereign country. That’s why we need to inform them that these are not activists of any party or public structures, but the Russian military who are not even hiding their identity any more. It is very important to recite and to propagate this objective view of these events to Ukraine and all the world.
Andrei Vilenovich [Senchenko, head of Batkivshchyna party in Crimea], let’s have a few words concerning working with the Crimean elites. How can we drag the Crimean elite onto the side of Ukraine, and not the separatists?

I think this is the first time that any of this text has been translated into English… if anybody wants to use it, be my guest.

The Logic of Western Sanctions

One interesting aspect about the Western sanctions on Russia is that they affected Crimeans more so than Russians. Siemens has been fined for selling gas turbines that ended up in Crimea, gamers were barred from Steam, etc.

But if the Crimean referendum was rigged and illegitimate, as Kiev and the West have repeatedly argued, on what grounds are ordinary Crimeans getting punished for what is in fact Russian aggression?

Alternatively:

The Crimean referendum accurately reflected the will of the Crimean people. In that case, the US and EU sanctions on Crimea – already getting expressed in the forms of Crimean residents losing access to the services of Western companies and even getting their money confiscated[1] – are, in effect, to punish them for voting the wrong way. In other words, it is economic blackmail by any other name.

Consequently, the only logical, self-consistent explanation is that these sanctions – the ones above those imposed on Russia as a whole – are a way to punish Crimeans for voting to join Russia. Whose main point is a warning.

Ukraine’s Uniqueness

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 19, 2019

It seems to be the one major country where the more intelligent – on average, and adjusting for the east/west gradient – vote for the “nationalist” candidate, Poroshenko.

And just to be clear, he has for all intents and purposes captured the nationalist niche, however unlikely. His slogan: “Army, Language, Faith.” Meanwhile, Zelensky talks of cutting down the time to start up a business to half an hour.

Apart from a few minor exceptions – the blogger Kireev noted Moldova, Latvia, and Lithuania – this would seem to make it unique amongst the bigger countries.

  • Lower IQ whites vote for Republicans, and especially for Trump (even if this effect is significantly confounded at the national level by greater minority support for Democrats).
  • Lower IQ French vote for Marine Le Pen.
  • Lower IQ Germans vote for the AfD, higher IQ ones vote for the Greens.
  • Lower IQ Britons vote for UKIP and Brexit.
  • Lower IQ Czechs vote for Zeman.
  • Lower IQ Russians vote for Putin and Zhirinovsky, while higher IQ ones vote for liberals.
  • Even Brazil is not an exception, despite even greater racial confounding than in the US (e.g. 64% of atheists supported Haddad).

Now let’s look at the Ukraine, or rather Kiev in particular, to adjust for regional patterns (e.g. country bumpkins from Ivano-Frankovsk are not going to be particularly intelligent, despite voting for Poroshenko; though for that matter, they support him less than do Galicians, and especially Lvov).

In Kiev, Zelensky got 27%, vs. 26% for Poroshenko, 13% for Tymoshenko, and 6% for Boyko.

Here is a map of Poroshenko [blue] vs. Zelensky [green] in first round of 2019 elections via Ukrainian data blogger @polottenchegg.

As one can see, it includes the central areas, more expensive areas.

This can also be confirmed at looking at results from particular polling stations, as Alexander Kireev did.

Poroshenko won outright in Kiev’s most central district, which includes the Maidan of Independence. Only 15% for Zelensky vs. 30% for Poroshenko.

In one prison, Zelensky led with 45%, with Tymoshenko at 31% and Poroshenko at just 3%. (Indeed, Tymoshenko is very popular with cons, like Zhirinovsky is in Russia).

Universities are popular with young people, and Zelensky is MUCH more popular with young people (e.g. one poll: 57% support amongst 18-20 y/o’s, just 22% amongst 50-59 y/o’s). So we should expect to see him dominate in university districts, even in Kiev (where he won overall, if narrowly). But we don’t: In the polling stations serving the (less prestigious) Kiev National University, he only got around ~35% in those districts, relative to Poroshenko’s ~30%. Zelensky did do rather better in the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute: Around 48% to Poroshenko’s 20%.

Finally, just as French expats vote overwhelmingly against the National Front, like Russian expats vote against Putin, like American expats vote against Trump – so Ukrainian expats overwhelmingly supported Poroshenko.

Map of worldwide Ukrainian voting in 2019 elections (first round) via Seva Bashirov. Poroshenko >50% [dark red], Poroshenko wins with <50% [red], Zelensky wins [green], Boyko wins [blue].

The two countries where the pro-Russian Boyko won (in the traditional Party of Regions way of being pro-Russian such as asking for lower gas prices) are Moldova and Estonia. He’d have probably won had Ukrainians in Russia been allowed to vote as well. This can be ascribed to ethno-cultural preferences for Russia. However, there is a clear contrast between Ukrainians in places such as Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia (young, lower educated Gastarbeiters), who voted for Zelensky, and Ukrainians in places such as Germany, the UK, or China (older, better educated expats and professionals).

Hilariously, it looks like the one type of nationalism that intelligent whites will support is Ukrainian svidomism.

Open Thread 74

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 19, 2019

This week’s Open Thread.

@ak

More notable posts since the last Open Thread in case you missed any of them.

Featured

Russia

World

  • US declares IRGC is a terrorist organization, Iran reciprocates designating CENTCOM as same. More rhetoric, or are we again trending towards wars for freedumb (and flagging approval ratings)?
  • Andrew Yang’s op-ed on CNN
  • Audacious Epigone: Support for Eugenics, by Race
  • Peter Frost: They really are smart … and other surprises
    • Expects large scale African migration into demographically weakening China later this century. I can see this happening. As spandrell says, Chinese HBD realism is folksy, not “scientific”. Flimsy foundations against the Poz storm.

Science & Culture

Humor & Powerful Takes

Yang Hasn’t Gone Anywhere

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 16, 2019

It’s been a month since I predicted that Andrew Yang would be more than just a meme.

I wanted to check to see if this still holds true and that does seem to be the case.

  1. He is on a steady 10% chance to take the Dem nomination at PredictIt.

  2. He is getting ~3% in polls.

That might be well shy of the real “meme” candidate of the day (Buttigieg) and people with existing political capital and associated name recognition, but this is perfectly okay at this early stage of the game.

  1. Much stronger support amongst younth people, e.g. 14% amongst 18-29 year olds in Nevada!

Unsurprisingly, young people want $1,000 more than older people, and spend more time on the Internet. This is part of why Yang now has the most powerful meme community after Bernie Sanders. (I am not even sure anybody will be memeing for Trump this time round).

  1. Only Sanders and Buttigieg are consistently ahead of Yang in search intensity on Google Trends.

Biden surged ahead, but since that was people Googling him for his creepy videos, that’s hardly something to write home about. Beto is not even on the radar by now.

  1. Subscriber counts on candidate subreddits:

Bernie Sanders, predictably, dominates. However, he has a massive head start by virtue of having been the second strongest candidate in the previous elections, having inherited his subscriber base.

Yang is the only other candidate competing head to head with Buttigieg, both having exploded out of nowhere very recently.

It would be pointless to make comparisons with Biden, who had four years of exposure as Obama’s VP. That said, I think his biggest sub, /r/BidenBro, only has just a bit more than 100,000 subscribers, which isn’t that impressive.

As a gray Establishment figurehead who doesn’t seem to do anything but utter the correct “woke” slogans (I  have followed her on Twitter for a couple of months now), nobody could care less about Kamala.

  1. Website visits (March 2019, SimilarWeb):
  • Yang 2020: 2.68 million
  • Bernie Sanders: 2.48 million
  • Pete for America: 750,000

Website visits (latest USA rank, Alexa):

  • Yang 2020: 3,012
  • Bernie Sanders: 3,945
  • Pete for America: 4,296

So he is also getting more people coming to his website than any other person, even Bernie. This is presumably explained by his extremely detailed set of policies.

I predicted in my original post that the real competition will be a threeway race between Sanders, Yang, and Harris.

Assuming Buttigieg is a temporary phenomenon, that seems to be coming along nicely.

HBD Bloggers Are Autists Who Can’t Win Any Culture and Civilization Wars

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 16, 2019

Meanwhile Jaakko Raipala comments about political developments in Finland:

You figured it out. The Finns party has been recovering from the party collapsing and splitting into two. They betrayed all their promises on immigration during the Merkel migrant crisis, the party rebelled against its sellout leaders and Halla-aho was chosen as the new party chairman.

All the old leaders of the Finns party quit in 2017 to protest the evil racist Halla-aho and started a new cuckservative party called Sininen Tulevaisuus (Blue Reform). This is the first election for the two parties and the sellout Blue Reform was wiped out to zero seats. The Finns party recovered its old vote so now we have one debate settled in this country – there is absolutely no voter base for virtue signaling over how opposition to immigration must be done with “clean”, “palatable” arguments that don’t use real ethnic crime statistics or race and IQ charts like Halla-aho does.

PS. … while Halla-aho is extremely based and redpilled, he wouldn’t be very popular on this blog as he is super Ukrainophile and pro-NATO. He’s a PhD level expert on East Slavic languages and he is the only Finn I’ve ever met that’s fluent in Ukrainian. He used to live in Kiev.

Well, as we just saw in my country, the HBD blogger turned politician who has been universally vilified in the media as the leading evil Nazi racist bigot white supremacist for two decades is now the most popular politician in Finnish history. Cucks who thought they should please the media more than their voters have been wiped out.

Just keep going. All the potential voters hate the media. The recipe for success is very simple:

  1. Don’t be a Nazi. Really, just don’t be. It was a stupid ideology.
  2. Watch as the media calls you a Nazi anyway
  3. Harvest public sympathies from people who are tired of being called Nazis when they’re not

It worked very well for Trump, though of course Trump had the advantage that he was already a famous man so baseless Nazi accusations worked massively in his favor.

What are you talking about? 17.5 % is a strong result in these elections. The largest party are the Social Democrats with 17.7 % of the vote and the second largest is the Finns party with 17.5 % of the vote.

https://www.iltalehti.fi/eduskuntavaalit-2019/tulospalvelu#/

SDP = Social Democrats, PS = Finns party, KOK = cuckservative, KESK = cuckcentrist, VIHR = Greens, VAS = “former” communists, RKP = ethnic Swedes, KD = tiny Christian party

By personal vote totals, the biggest winner is Jussi Halla-aho with 30527 votes in his district – the highest parliamentary vote total in Finnish history for any candidate. This is the HBD blogger turned politician that I mentioned. (This comparison is not entirely fair of course since some districts have less population. They do try to equalize them but it’s impossible with the north that has no people.)

In Finland, you vote for a person and the total of personal votes gets calculated for the party. Seats are given to the parties based on that total and then personal vote totals within the party decide who goes in. Halla-aho is pulling the Finns party behind him as they sadly have no other stars.

This entire election was effectively a test of whether race realism, HBD blog posts and “hate speech” convictions are political disqualifiers for voters as Halla-aho has all that. Since he became the new leader of the Finns party after the party split in two, the strategy of all the other parties was reminding voters about how racist and evil Halla-aho is and how much more acceptable the other party that split off from the Finns is. This has been a total failure as the story of the election is that the Finns gathered back their vote share that had collapsed due to the party fracture and the other split off party was utterly destroyed down to zero seats.

Of course, the other parties will likely isolate the Finns and they won’t get into the government but this is a conclusive result that open race realism, “hate speech” convictions and blunt real talk is no vote loser at all for a nationalist party.

I should also add that Halla-aho scored the highest personal vote total in the election district of Helsinki, the purely urban district. Helsinki is the shitlib center of Finland, yet the most popular politician in Helsinki is a nationalist and a general believer in the exact opposite things of the urban SJW.

The second most popular candidate in Helsinki is the leader of the “former” communist, now multiculti LBGT “Left” party (and an ethnic Swede, fucking Swedes behind multiculturalism as usual). What we’re seeing is a new political alignment in the capital around a multiculti-SJW pole and a race realist, immigration focused nationalism pole. The youth is especially polarized so it will grow even more strict in the future.

The Finns party was built on the ruins of a party called the Finnish Rural Party. They used to score 0 % in Helsinki until immigration became an issue and people like Halla-aho showed up with their HBDish talking points.

So About That Latest Stalin Poll…

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on April 16, 2019

Which showed a new record in Stalinophia, with positive views of the mustachioed Georgian BDSM master now approaching 70%.

Here is a more interesting/original poll.

https://twitter.com/MoskRussia/status/1118078387036327936

40% said they wanted the pensions they had under Stalin vs. 26% said they wanted the pensions they have under Putin.

Under Stalin, only bureaucrats and urban workers enjoyed pensions – kolkhoz workers only got them in 1956 – and they were extremely low relative to wages.

Anyhow, I wrote more indepth about modern Stalinophilia here: http://akarlin.com/tribal-stalinism/