Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11d ago
Perhaps the unexpected Zerg rush of HTS was all Biden’s doing to beat the curse
Pasha
Defend Kebab
12d ago
most of my favourite destinations have been quite out of the way and not on the average tourist's radar. The ability to make these discoveries is an integral part of travel for me.
How does this combine with lacking free time then? Do you just spend a lot of time researching
Pasha
Defend Kebab
12d ago
Are you aware of any reliable write-ups about pregnancy/childhood vaccinations?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
12d ago
I have done quite a lot of "discover the hidden things" type of traveling and I can tell from my experiences that most of those hidden things were quite crap. You need a lot of free time, bravery, tolerance for discomfort, language skills, executive function, social acumen etc etc to come up with the good things. Vast majority of people don't have almost any of these, and most backpacker types lose it mostly as they age from early 20s as well.
I have a job now, I can't just fuck off to Colombia for 3 months without a plan. Also my back hurts randomly even with regular workouts, nice bed, ergonomic chair etc. I can't imagine anymore spending 6 days sleeping in a hammock on an Amazon riverboat filled with chicken or probably even the cheap hostel beds.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
There is strong “bubble” energy in the crypto markets and aside from their bad-rep for collapsing, bubbles can actually be pretty good for driving change and innovation: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-boom-by-byrne-hobart-and-tobias
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
Turkish government has immediately made announcements to the effect but I have dim hopes of even Syrians in Turkey leaving. The ones in Europe look basically impossible without a very radical shift
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
Did anyone other than Erdoğan (and Netanyahu) politically survive Assad from his original set of enemies though?
Pasha
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13d ago
This is pretty accurate in general but I also want to note that Turkish foreign policy was controlled by different groups back when we got so deeply entangled in the civil war (ie former PM Ahmet Davutoğlu and very CIA-aligned Gülen movement). There was a strong expectation of West getting directly involved and Assad collapsing very soon. This pretty much only didn’t happen because Obama
I’m not sure the current Erdoğan government members would have acted the same way 10 years ago when the uprising started. But they inherited the situation and need to continue state policy.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
I will be very surprised if there are any non-Sunni groups left in parts where they aren’t a solid demographic majority. And even in those areas they will survive likely only due to the communities organising for self-defence and Turkey’s control over the new Syrian government.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
28d ago
Rust's default indentation that cargo fmt forces on everyone is pretty solid and I am super happy that literally everyone uses the same style everywhere.
Pasha
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1mo ago
I remember it being fantastic. Characters who really believed in a way that I can imagine a renaissance Italian aristocrat would believe. Also very good plot and acting
Pasha
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1mo ago
Watched the Conclave (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20215234/) at the cinema the other day. Visually well made (although it is just difficult to portray Catholicism without some impressive visuals), somewhat okay but uninteresting story with no clear point and an incredibly disappointing ending. Couldn't stop comparing it to another depiction of a Catholic conclave, from 2011's Borgia (the European made one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1736341/)
Which made me realize that I am not sure if I have ever watched a movie that depicted a modern religious institution well. Not about some humble believer of the religion, not a sob story about how the religion doesn't match up to modern liberal sensitivities etc.
I am looking for a well-made movie about modern-day Japanese monks, or Latin American/African evangelizers or Iranian Mullahs or whatever is out there. Does anyone have any recommendations for me?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
There are other places in the "West" than the USA. Education is essentially free in many of these places for example. Or free until the kid is 18+, at which point the parents presumably had a lot of time to financially become stable. Otherwise student loans and scholarships exist. And most people don't go to university anyway.
If you actually check the numbers, you might be surprised to find out the fertility numbers are nowadays actually lower in many parts of non-West even compared to the "West", or plummeting so fast that likely they will be lower in a couple years. Turkey has had lower fertility rates than Germany in the last couple years for example.
Westerners aren't (entirely) some weird rugged individuals. Many grandparents help their children quite a bit with child-rearing and overall financials in early adulthood. You seem to worried specifically about raising children in the West as an immigrant without family or savings.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I have volunteered in a bunch of elections in Turkey. I find it mind-boggling how it is to possible to NOT count and report almost everything in 1-2 hours max after the polls close. It was always really easy to do the counting and just wrap up the reporting after a long and sometimes annoying day of explaining to public again and again how to vote and what they can't do in the booth etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I can’t make much in the way of an economic argument but it’s extremely obvious that Chinese have intentionally been using state support and dumping to strip and move entire industries from western countries to China. This has created a parasitic class of rich people in the west whose entire wealth comes from middle manning either the 1)importation of this production to the west or the 2)sale of western financial assets to China which are needed to sustain western trade deficits.
There is nothing organic and laissez faire about any of this. It’s very intentional and it has been very destructive for almost everyone involved. Western working classes are extremely wage suppressed and largely lost the discipline required for industrial production. Middle classes are corrupted into believing their laptop jobs (which usually simply supervise one of the two legs of this trade I mentioned above, or extract profits from it in some indirect way). Cheap credit due to massive Chinese demand for western financial products has destroyed any integrity and competency left in western political classes. Free money plugs every hole anyway so they just keep making disastrous decisions non-stop with no apparent consequences.
Large sections of the Chinese society seem to have benefited but overall it’s not good for humanity that economic “growth” comes from shifting labour and environment externalities around to world instead of technology. We only get richer if we have more robots. Substitution of one European worker and his advanced machinery earning 20x with 10 third worlders with no machinery earning 1x, is bad for humanity.
So I don’t know if tariffs are the right policy to stop this decay but it’s absurd to oppose them as an obvious wrong policy simply because they don’t fit in with some notion of free trade and markets invisible hand. None of this process is classic economics at all. It’s state policy and distortion all the way.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Discovered a good source of audiobooks so suddenly my book consumption skyrocketed. Listening to Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth at the moment. It’s a hell of a book.
Also slowly progressing through a physical copy of God Emperor of Dune. Things became pretty weird at the end of the last book and has no sign of slowing down.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Assuming this is your real sentiment and not just trolling, have you ever been in a team attempting something truly difficult? Not just something that needs lots of structured man-hours and money, but something you don't even know if possible, and other people shy away from?
Leadership really REALLY matters then. It is not the only thing that matters, but you can have every other ingredient aplenty and it will never work without someone truly exceptional leading it.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
if you’re the kind of Ghanaian wealthy enough to go through 10+ years of tertiary education in the US
Yes a lot of such cases are already local elites, but not at all. Scholarships can do wonders in this category if you were a bit savvy as a teenager (or your parents were)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I have similar experiences with European healthcare. People don't care much about "average life expectancy" type of stats when they judge healthcare quality typically but simply how easy it is for them to get attention when they feel they need it. Also European healthcare is typically heavily drained by old people and tries to salvage costs by gatekeeping young people which doesn't help perceptions either.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
That is correct. The unvoiced assumption of my post was that Taiwan is not self-sufficient and cannot survive without open shipping lanes and so any technology that makes it easy to sink ships is very bad news for it
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Hey that is me sometimes.
Well sort of. I don't know what those Indians are smoking but as a Turkish guy living in Western Europe for a while at this point, I do sometimes get into discussions with friends of similar background to the tune of "here things aren't actually better sometimes huh?".
A lot of it comes down to all of us being potential upper-class candidates back home, way above average in education and social stature and earning good money etc. Very few things can really substitute for relative social standing. It is difficult to get any above-mediocre social standing in Europe as a first-gen immigrant. So some of what you are observing is snarky comments from bitter people, but they have good personal reasons for being bitter.
GDP is a fine indicator but it will hide a lot from you in terms of living standards if you are ignoring costs, housing and taxes. For example Turkish PPP is at 44k, while German PPP is 62k from quick googling (Greece 41k lol). That is not such a massive difference. Pretty much all Anglo countries and Western Europe is suffering from gigantic housing problems, especially in major cities, especially effecting people who by definition could not have gotten into the mortgage market 10 years ago (i.e. young immigrants you are most likely to come across in white-collar and university settings). High progressive taxation systems are crippling for people who feel they deserve an upper class lifestyle and are trying to build it up with high-value professional labour income. You are basically slaving away for funding the boomer retirees of your host country. These boomers aren't even your own family so you won't benefit from this even in the form of inheritances. This creates massive resentment.
Often the first-tier cities of decent third world countries are actually quite decent places to be. They tend not to have "progressive" policing structures so ambient crime can be less of an issue (big variance here). They often have ample housing, and recently built. The infrastructure is often much newer.
And lastly, don't underestimate how much cheap low-class labour can improve one's life quality and how difficult it is to get accustomed to living without it.
So the comparisons come from a mix of real and perceived advantages of the home country, as well as people expecting an upper-class lifestyle not finding it in their host country. Also India is definitely not it, but a lot of "emerging" countries "emerged" quite a lot in the last decades and sometimes the perceptions didn't quite catch up in the West (and GDP is just not very good for comparisons between service and industry based economies)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Surely blockading an island is much easier thanks to these drones, rather than the other way around? Chinese can swarm any ship going towards the island with the said drones. Cherry on top is that vast majority of the quad drones used in Ukraine by both sides is made in China.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it.
The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).
While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.
This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.
As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.
Incidentally, divorce/family laws of similar vein (i.e. practically written by feminist activists and applied very unfairly by a judiciary motivated to protect women at any cost) caused the most major fracture in Islamist politics in Turkey since Erdogan's rise 20+ years ago, with a promising new party (led by Erdogan's old mentor's son) spawning around it.
I don't think almost anyone in his cabinet personally would agree with these laws or their applications personally, but even after achieving near-dictatorship level control of the country, Erdogan and his Islamists have been seemingly powerless to stop this drift.
Non/anti-Western politics are often really brain-dead and are starved of human capital. They are really bad at actually articulating and planning for a society that escapes the slow but steady drift towards the latest Western fashions.
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