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.
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.
The money for these "sales" is aid from the US government.
Israel is unique in that they are the only country that gets its aid from the US government on January 1st, with interest, in cash. They have to use a part of it on American weapons and the rest they just get in cash.
I'm sure Sanders also has a bill or intentions to stop that, but that would be a separate bill.
I think they meant the economy, not population, but still, quality comment right here.
People who don't do math are doomed to talk nonsense. And you just used math to showcase the stupidity. Bravo, sir.
One of my pet peeves is all the people concerned about the birth rate.
We are at a time in the history of the planet where there have never existed as many homo sapiens as there are today, and that record will get broken every day for the next 20-50 years.
Of all the times to want a higher birth rate since we have existed as a species, this just ain't the time where it makes any kind of logical sense.
And quite frankly, among (young) progressive people, getting attacked head-on by Trump is somewhat more predictable and less emotionally taxing than getting backstabbed and gaslighted by liberals.
Which is why a lot of them didn't vote for Kamala.
I don't yet know where the American political realignment will end, but the liberal/progressive coalition that elected Clinton, Obama and Biden seems to be irreparably damaged.
Honestly, I expect this AI bubble to implode with much more devastation than the dot-com bubble.
And it's not even that AI is useless. Like the internet (during dot-com) it will definitely have good uses.
But (a) those uses will take many years to crystallize and mature and (b) the early capital-intensive movers have a big disadvantage and most of them don't have a feasible path to recoup the money invested into them.
This is why the AI club is licking Trump's boot. They will get the federal government to bail them out by buying overpriced AI products and services and taking over worthless investments "in the interest of national security".
American taxpayers are going to foot this bill and they will not like it when they start seeing the effects.
It's not about fewer parties in elections, it's about fewer parties in Parliament and quickly having a stable government.
Your link is written by an idiot.
In Germany you can still vote for a small party. If enough people do, the party gets 5%, or about 32 seats, which are enough MP's to actually participate in the process without getting burned out.
We could also start in the Netherlands with 2%, which is 3 MP's.
It's not about cancelling anyone. It's about not having to wait 200-300 days to get a new government after every election.
I have often voted for very small parties and they never make it into the coalition. I really wouldn't mind if they didn't make it into Parliament either.
It's not like the BSW or FDP voters really lost that much - their parties would be doomed to be opposition anyway. Their voters knew that was a likely outcome based on the polls. And next election they might reach the threshold.
I kinda wondered about BSW though. They are left, they are anti-immigration and they are capable of pulling votes from AfD and Die Linke - the two parties that compete most with CDU/CSU and SPD, respectively.
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.