Translated: "According To Initial Estimates, The Left Comes First In The Second Round Of The Legislative

Help I want to do a different playthrough of Disco Elysium but I am afraid of disappointing Kim.

So, Gabriel Attal somehow took a clear-ish position against the far-right. Truly, we live in an age of miracles.

The Prime Minister said that not one vote should go to the RN. In circonscriptions where their candidate is third, they should quit in favor of "another candidate who, like us, defends the values ​​of the Republic".

This is, overall, good news. The government has managed to talk about the far-right without making any references to what they call the far-left. What worries me is that they haven't clearly said that any NFP candidate is a better choice than an RN candidate.

Candidates have until Tuesday to confirm their candidacy. I truly hope that everyone will keep it together for a week, eat crows and desist when necessary, and that on Sunday we will achieve the best result possible, which is mediocre.

Mediocre is better than far-right. Many can survive mediocre who couldn't survive far-right. Final verdict is next Sunday, and until then, everyone, good luck and goodnight.

So while we wait to see how low we've slid on this slippery slope, I thought I'd give a primer on how legislative elections work in France.

The first thing to know is that it's more like 577 local elections. In order to be elected, a candidate has to win in the circonscription in which they were campaigning.

The second thing to know is that in order to win on the first round of the election, a candidate must have at least 50% of the votes AND 25% of those registered. This means that if, as has happened in La Martinique, a candidate has 63% of the votes but the turn-out was low (estimated around 25%, which is low but higher than it was in the last election), they still get a second round.

Now, for the second round. Are qualified 1. The candidate who had the most votes and 2. Any candidate that had 12,5% of those registered to vote. Once again, this means that the turn-out is a factor in who gets to participate in the second round. It also means that it is possible for a second round to have a "triangulaire", that is to say 3 candidates in the second round (technically, it means that it's possible to have four candidates).

At time of writing, it is estimated that between 65 and 85 representatives have been elected on the first round, and that there will be between 285 and 315 triangulaires (based on the data given by Le Monde, which is based on Ipsos data). Out of 577 seats. This means that in a lot of circonscriptions, there will most probably be one RN candidate, one NFP candidate and one candidate from the presidential party.

On the left, several political leaders have already announced that if their candidates arrived third and a RN candidate was qualified for the second round, they would give up the election and encourage people to vote for whoever else was qualified.

And now the big question: will the presidential party do the same? Gabriel Attal, the Prime Minister, is expected to talk to the press tonight. I, personally, will be drinking and obsessively refreshing the news page.

according to time period, arthur lester and bertram wilberforce wooster could meet. they could very much interact.

i think the thing about intracommunity conflict over who can 'claim' certain queer figures from the ancient world (e.g., was sappho a lesbian or bisexual, was iphis a lesbian or a trans man) is that it basically never tells us anything interesting or new about the ancient material and only ever becomes an opportunity for ppl to show their worst, most vitriolic assumptions about the experiences of other queer people today.

i think this happens bc often these inquiries come from a place of wanting to see one's own identity and experience reflected exactly back in ancient material, which i don't think is harmful on it's own, although it's often a little boring because it limits our field of vision for seeing how ancient gender and sexuality could be queer in ways that don't immediately register to us -- when norms around gender and sexuality are different (which they unarguably were in many, many ways), the experiences that fall outside of those norms are also different. but this way of approaching queer history gets really nasty when it couples with a view of contemporary gender and sexuality that is, well, bogged down by any number of issues: an excessive attachment to identity as ontology ("this category terminology reflects perfectly who everybody is inherently inside"); a perception of privilege and oppression as zero-sum (aka the pokemon typing theory of structural violence); a watered down understanding of what intersectionality means (thinking only about individuals who occupy multiple marginalized positionalities rather than considering how multiple marginalizations overlap or are linked).

all of this has no effect on sappho (dead) or iphis (fictional), but it does have an effect on the queer people today who get caught in the crosshairs when ancient figures are used as cudgels and mouthpieces to lend historical authority to contemporary disputes. when really it seems like the most historiographically responsible answer to "was [ancient figure] a [queer interpretation a] or [queer interpretation b]" is "yes. and no. and original historical context matters. and the way that figure has been interpreted outside of their original historical context also matters. and that original historical context usually can't be completely reconstructed. and also we don't need the certainty of complete reconstruction to draw connections. and also ancient queerness looks a lot different than we expect. and also modern queerness looks a lot different than we expect."

I still can't believe that Gabriel and Beelzebub said "Gay rights but just for us".

There may come a day when I get tired of making these, but it is not this day

we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

Fresh memes, getcher fresh memes! Nice and hot!

If you are an avid Discworld reader, you remember that the premise of Jingo is the sudden appearance of an island in the middle of the sea.

Say hello to Graham Island, a real thing that happened in the 19th century. An island rose up in the Mediterranean, stayed there just long enough to be claimed by England, Spain, Sicily and France, then sank back. The whole thing lasted less than six months.

hey say something nice to me

I cannot stop imagining Formula 666 playing everytime Damien bursts into a scene.