I consider myself someone who is always in search of truth.
When I realized evangelical Christianity has some hardcore lies and hypocrisy, I left it.
I did eventually find my way back to a more traditional version of Christianity that is interested in truth and love.
I read up on it. I think the main thing was the many Kurds, especially Turkish Kurds, don’t want to fight Turkey anymore. The PKK had a lot of trouble recruiting people. And many Kurdish leaders are actually allied with Erdogan. I believe Erdogan has two Kurdish ministers.
But with their autonomy in Syria and Iraq, the hardliners were still holding out and hopeful.
However, in Syria, Turkey dealt them quite some hard blows these past years and got the US under Trump to abandon them. The final piece is that the new Syrian regime is allied with Turkey and Trump is back in office.
So they basically have a choice, stop fighting or look forward to years of fighting against bayraktar drones.
Of course, I am sure Erdogan put in a lot of deal sweeteners that we don’t know about. At the end of the day, Turkey and Syria both need peace with the Kurds for their own stability and growth. And the Kurds have significant leverage, even if independence is not in the cards.
I do agree, but it does take 3-5 years, unless the EU is willing to turn into a wartime economy. But the political will for that is just not there.
We (Europe) already did most of the heavy lifting for Ukraine. The US mostly gave old stockpiles of weapons that they would’ve needed to destroy anyway. We are the ones actually paying cash to keep them afloat.
The problem is, in the post-WW2 order, our defense and our defense industry was made dependent on the USA by design. And even up until last November, Europe didn’t want to challenge this arrangement and just went full steam ahead with this arrangement, ordering US made weapons. I think Europe was in denial that Biden could lose or that NATO could ever end.
Only France, and to a limited extent, Sweden and Turkey, have independent defense industries.
In the future, we will have it again. And Ukraine will actually be a key player.
But in the short term, there is no magical button to press that can produce the arms.
Undoing decades of integration isn’t going to be easy.
No it would not be even close to being equivalent to gov+dd, because the government and fund would be totally separate power structures.
You could modify the scheme so that dividends and profits only go to retirees, which would make it a giant retirement fund.
Some people argue China is capitalist and others argue it is socialist or communist.
Truth is, these are all 19th century debates on archaic terms. Every developed country today has a mixed-mode economy with some form of capitalism combined with some form of communism.
It’s more fruitful to discuss how we harness the power of each system in a way that benefited humanity.
It depends on what you consider capitalism.
Suppose you would take the system we have today, put all the stock of every company in a big fund and give everyone equal voting rights in, and profits from, the fund.
That would be a very anarcho-communist world. All economic power would be with the people, not the state, evenly divided, so no one would be richer than anyone else.
But others would call it capitalism because it would be the exact same system we have today.
I always think, capitalism is like fire.
Left unchecked, it will burn everything down.
But properly harnessed, it can feed, heat and transport people.
The BRICS are already trading without dollars. They might price things in USD, but the actual trades don’t use USD.
But is he really gonna tariff 55% of the global population?
The world economy will just adjust to operate without the USA. It will be painful and take a few years, but it will also be irreversible.
To be frank, we don’t need a global reserve currency in this digital age. Businesses and consumers can cheaply trade any currency pairs with minimal costs.
The dollar’s status is a leftover from the past.
My (great)-grandparents were part of the Dutch resistance during WW2. Along with a full 1.5% of the population.
Most people will not do anything, even if they are literally rounding up people for a genocide.
On the more positive side, a lot of people will support the resistance in small ways.
The number of people who actually, whole heartedly collaborated with the Nazi’s was quite small.
Even some of the German soldiers stationed in their village would turn a blind eye. Some of them realized they were on the wrong side and they just did the bare minimum of what they needed to do to not get in trouble and not get killed.
As I understand, he was part of a brigade that killed people in the context of a civil war where his brigade was fighting against ISIS
Quite an important footnote.
You are talking about people who voted loyal to Democrats for decades, donated and campaigned.
The democratic party took their votes for granted and wasn’t even willing to talk to them.
So what’s your point?
Was this election so unimportant to the Democrats that they couldn’t pressure Israel into a ceasefire in October?
Biden had all the power for the past 15 months. Failing to deliver anything and claiming they are “working tirelessly” can only mean incompetence or deception on the part of Democrats.
Blaming Palestinian-Americsns for staying home when American bombs were killing their families is just such a weak take.
The only country that can be blamed for destroying Iraqi industry is the USA. Two decades of war, one decade of sanctions and another decade of war (by Saddam against Iran) sponsored by the USA in the 1980s.
Obviously, Iranian industry will outcompete Iraqi industry at this point in history.
Iraq needs to rebuild and they need outside help.
I’m not gonna defend Iranian war mongering. And neither will I defend Turkish war mongering, or IS, USA or Israeli war mongering.
But the only path forward for Iraq is by making peace with the two power brokers in the region: Turkey and Iran.
And that’s what the current government is trying to achieve. The Turkey-Iraq corridor and the new port they are building are going to lay the foundation for their future prosperity.
As for Iran, Iran is desperate for allies. It won’t be that difficult to find some mutually beneficial relationship with them.
It’s more-or-less geographic destiny that Iran and Turkey will become the dominant powers in Western Asia.
They both basically ruled the area for most of history.
The best we (the West) could do is nudge them towards human rights and peace and friendship. For Turkey, that’s mostly a done deal.
For Iran, that was exactly what Obama tried to do. And it’s also what Iran has been trying to get for the past 25 years.
Iran is inherently on a path towards secularisation and more dovish policies. It’s the threat of war by the US and Israel that keeps the defense hawks in power.
Iran, especially, will never fully trust the USA - and for good reason. But they do want better relations with the USA. They just don’t want to get burned or bombed.
They could have had all the hostages back in October. Hamas just wanted back the hostages that Israel holds.
And again, they could have had all the hostages back in May.
Netanyahu seems committed to genocide and the hostages are collateral damage.
It’s deranged and I am ashamed our western leaders are cheerleading this.
It always surprised me that the country that pioneered Lean production techniques has always had such an enormous waste of labour resources in their office culture.
They have one of the lowest GDP per hour worked of all Industrial nations.
Italy, Spain and Germany have way higher labour productivity, while even Turkey edges out Japan.
One thing I don’t understand is, how can polio resurface after 24 years?
I am tempted to think that it was intentionally released, but perhaps someone has a less evil explanation?
I agree, but I saw you had some down votes.
/s
Just gonna put that there, since it seems some people are missing the meaning of your comment.
I agree.
Ideally, there are two types of profiles:
Archivalists who have a lot of storage and need pretty good uptime, but no need for high bandwidth. They should be rewarded for archiving, because they don’t really get a lot of upload credit.
Distributors who need low storage, high bandwidth, robust connections when online, but not necessarily high uptime. They just distribute the new and popular stuff.
I think the better private trackers recognize this and have systems in place to provide credit to people who seed rare torrents.