Looks like a significant majority of Chileans has rejected the proposed new constitution that is crazy woke. Why it was necessary to spend three years coming up with a happy wokester manifesto posing as a constitution is unclear. What the people of Chile had to vote on today was less a constitution than a wish list cobbled together by a bunch of uninformed hippy-dippy children.
Smart in Chile
Clarissa's Blog 
It was rejected with 62% percent voting against it. That is huge. Don’t know much about Chilean politics, but it does seem like they put forth a very unpopular new constitution.
In terms of latin American progressive politics, I’m looking more closely at Colombia. Their new left-wing president seems more reasonable and willing to work within the system to improve it. Should be interesting.
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Very unpopular. Everybody agrees that the constitution needs to be changed but it makes no sense to create one putting climate change at the center of the document and mandating gender “equity” in government and business. Also, abortion as a constitutional right and a parallel justice system for the indigenous. And these are the more moderate things in the document. Crazy stuff.
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The whole forced and artificial gender equality thing really rubbed me the wrong way. Once they get that in, you already know the stuff that comes next is much worse.
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“spend three years coming up with a happy wokester manifesto ”
It’s my understanding that those elected to draft the constitution were overwhelmingly leftists… so…. I’m wondering what they were expecting? Maybe old timey soft-socialism welfare state type stuff?
Still, good for them to reject it… to be horribly honest, the results of elections in Latin America rarely seem like good news.
I’d been listening to Chilean TV recently (hoping to improve overall comprehension by listening to the weirdest Spanish going) and I knew about the referendum and heard lots of back and forth but hardly anything about the actual contents of the proposed constitution…
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I can’t stand the Chilean accent. Totally gets on my nerves. But I’m glad the people voted against. Chile as a plurinational state?? Because it has a small indigenous population? That’s crazy in every way.
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“can’t stand the Chilean accent”
I like it just cause it’s so unique… “should we drop consonants like Cuba or vowels like Mexico…. yes!!!! but let’s do it in a weird way that can’t be predicted!”
Years ago I had a very good friend from northern Chile but with me he toned down the Chilean accent… a lot, if he reverted to form I couldn’t understand at all…
“a small indigenous population”
I am totally in favor of some form of indigenous autonomy/self-rule for indigenous peoples and bilingual education though I’m willing to assume that the model in this constitution was really dumb.
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Ah, so I am not crazy. I understand most Spanish, learning through reading and my husband and his family (Peruvian), but the one Chilean I met I just remember staring blankly at him every time he spoke. Couldn’t understand him. I thought it was because my Spanish was still lacking (which it is, somewhat), but the only time I’ve had this problem is with the Chilean.
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Haha! When we made the border crossing to renew our visas, we took a little holiday weekend in Arica. Just crossing the border, we went from being able to get by OK in Spanish and mostly understand people, to Spanish being completely incomprehensible. Since then, we’ve been curious whether that was a local Arica phenomenon, or if it was just how Spanish is spoken in Chile!
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Until then, we had kind of rolled our eyes when Peruanos would say, constantly, that they speak the best Spanish outside of Spain. After that trip… we thought there might be something to that claim.
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“weekend in Arica”
My friend was from Arica and indigenous (didn’t learn Spanish until he went to school -though as an adult he was far more fluent in Spanish than his ‘native tongue’).
I think that early experience explained why he was able to shift in accent from something not too far from Peru/Bolivia (yes, both pretty easy to understand) to the weird jumbled Chilean blur….
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Everyone we met there, it was like they were talking something vaguely remeniscent of Spanish, but with far fewer consonants, and maybe a couple of dice in the mouth. We felt awful for continually having to ask people to say stuff again… and again… and then slower.
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Ah, so I am not crazy. I understand most Spanish, learning through reading and my husband and his family (Peruvian), but the one Chilean I met I just remember staring blankly at him every time he spoke. Couldn’t understand him. I thought it was because my Spanish was still lacking (which it is, somewhat), but the only time I’ve had this problem is with the Chilean.
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Nice samples of Chilean. A youtube series (government funded) on rural supernatural legends. Even with subtitles in Spanish it’s hard at times to match what they’re saying with what’s written…
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I will bookmark this and come back to it when we finally get real internet this week (hopefully). When I was a kid, it was fascinating to hear the vast difference between the Spanish spoken by local Cubans, and the crisp Mexican radio Spanish you could pick up on the shortwave. But it never even occurred to me that there could be so many more different Spanish sounds! Still… Chilenos. We did more than one double-take trying to figure out of taxi drivers in Arica were even speaking Spanish at all, or if it was something else.
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Someone said the draft constitution was “too millennial”. Does anyone know how the Chilean youth actually voted?
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The highest support was among the under thirties group but it’s still less than a half. Then it collapses in over thirty years of age and diminishes for every age group. So if only people under thirty voted, it would still barely break the 40% mark.
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