With National Rally having stormed to victory in the first round of France’s legislative election, commentators are once again asking: why do ‘far Right’ parties keep winning votes in Europe? (I put ‘far Right’ in quotation marks, as I realise the designation is contested.)
Left-wing academics view the ‘far Right’ the same way early European explorers viewed the native people they encountered – as primitive, dangerous and in need of ‘civilising’. They have come up with all manner of convoluted and implausible answers to the question above. It must be austerity. Or income inequality. Or ‘disinformation’.
Notice how ideologically convenient these answers are: they’re essentially the Left’s favourite hobby horses. Leftists already want action on austerity, income inequality and disinformation, so they just kind of assume those things are behind the rise of the ‘far Right’. Why is the ‘far Right’ on the rise, you ask? Turns out it’s because we haven’t been doing everything the Left wanted to do anyway.
The preceding answers don’t make much sense either. Why would people concerned about austerity and income inequality vote for the ‘far Right’ when they could just vote for the Left, which is much more focused on those issues? And why would people be more susceptible to ‘disinformation’ than to the supposedly correct information that’s constantly broadcast through all mainstream media?
The real reason the ‘far Right’ is on the rise is very simple: immigration – particularly Muslim immigration. Of course, Left-wing commentators refuse to believe this because it would mean their own preferred policies are the root cause of something they claim is an existential threat to democracy.
The fact that immigration – and not austerity, income inequality or ‘disinformation’ – is behind the rise of the ‘far Right’ can be seen very clearly in the case of Denmark.
Like most of Western Europe, the small Scandinavian country had seen large-scale immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, which prompted the formation of several ‘far Right’ parties. At the 2015 election, one such party (the Danish People’s Party) came second with 21% of the vote. At the next election in 2019, the Social Democrats (the country’s main Left-wing party) ran on a platform of immigration restrictionism and support for the welfare state. It won the most votes and was able to form a government with the other Left-wing parties. At the most recent election in 2022, the two ‘far Right’ parties got only 6% of the vote.
This example shows that the ‘far Right’ ceases to be an important political force when centrist parties adopt immigration restrictionism.
All those parties have to do is not pursue a policy that radically changes the country’s demographic composition and makes housing increasingly unaffordable. But they can’t help themselves: for some inexplicable reason, they just have to keep letting people in.
If the Left really wanted to neutralise the ‘far Right’, they would pursue the same strategy as the Danish Social Democrats. Since they choose not to, it’s hard to take their hand-wringing over ‘threats to democracy’ seriously.
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Google are much worse in terms of privacy but at least you can side-load apps on Android.
Having had high end phones from both OS makers I think I prefer Apple’s privacy controls over Google’s less restrictive app controls. I doubt whether any competitor will be able to breach the phone OS market unless we get some serious anti-trust legislation.
I wish I could get a direct line to Elon Musk, because, having a software background, I have come up with the ideal solution for how he can do battle with Apple.
One solution is for twitter to go Browser based. However historically web browser based apps have faired badly because they they don’t have the super responsive performance users love when using apps (though people forget that in early iOS there was short period of time when Apple encouraged third parties to develop browser based apps over native apps)
However due to previous anti trust findings, Apple are bound by law to accept other Browsers on the platform. So Musk can develop a browser (or rather buy in and adapt) and ensure it has specific hooks in it for delivering and accelerating UI widgets Twitter uses. Google already do this with Amp, but Amp is a generalised user experience for developed for news story browsing. If the same approach is taken but where the accelerations suit Twitter’s precise UI widgets, with the right local caching strategy and on today’s phones, the performance can be increased so it feels like a native app. the widgets can also be designed such that the front and foremost experience is Twitter centric. Though there would need to be somewhere the ability to enter URL’s to access other sites so it still qualifies as a browser and to put more pressure on Apple the accelerated UI widgets though specific to Twitter’s design, should be available (brand elements separated of course) for use by other websites. .
I hope his team have thought of this. They could well come up with this solution independently. But if they haven’t – anyone reading this that is friends with Musk?
Current user interfaces of so-called web apps are entirely implemented in Javascript running on the client (browser). They only incur network latencies insofar they have to talk to some server on the internet. Consequently, there’s little room for widget optimization here. I also think there’s a very much different reason why users prefer install once applications over download per run ones: They keep the same UI and remain working regardless of fashions which come and go quickly in the web devslopper community. Anything server-based keeps being changed for the sake of changing it, frequently breaking stuff in the process, and requires regular browser updates as older browser versions become unsupported and stuff then starts to break.
This is highly inaccurate and shows a a very large dollop of confusion about the constraints. Answer, there are none. It’s software, and the best thing about software is you can make it run however you like. They can write their own own alternative scripting language if they like. But there is no need, there are already higher performance alternative languages like Google backed Kotlin that can be run as a browser scripting language. But there’s not even any need for that. Because they can write the widgets in native code.The widgets efficiently present data conforming to the Twitter’s data design. They can be made very specific to displaying data confirming to Twitters information architecture. And they expand the DOM to provide a proprietary interface to the the widgets from Javascript. JavaScript is then a very light data interface layer doing no app logic work and is used just for little more the async JSON data fetches and posting and it is already very highly optimised for that and will have virtually zero effect on performance. Proprietary extensions to the DOM have been an ever present fact throughout the history of browser development and Apple have done plenty of that themselves in the past, so there is no precedent for banning a browser because it implements some non standards based code. The widgets are all locally cached so app startup time is just as fast as for native code, but with the slight additional overhead of the browser engine. The time it takes to open a browser is hardly a deal breaker though.
That you really believe this is true and makes technical sense doesn’t mean it is true and makes technical sense.
I’m a systems architect mate, I have implemented multi-country large scale software services for Digital television systems. I have run software teams working from and across 6 countries. I’ve even run projects adapting browsers for deployment on STB’s. I know it makes sense
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My basic phone is smart enough to have WhatsApp on it an no more. It uses Simplified Android, which is the basic open source Android code without the layers of Google crap. People should bin the smartphones full stop unless they really need them.
Basic, dumb phones but with simple abilities like playing MP3s are making a comeback.
When all the information about CoVid, lockdowns, masks, vaccination from official sources have been lies, what exactly is the point of reference against which CoVid ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ was adjudicated other than anything exposing the lies must be so classified?
And climate change too.
Apple have been caught helping the CCP to quell the riots in China. Advantage, Musk.