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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Turkey and Greece exchanged each other’s ethnicities post WWI and War for Turkish independence, ethnic cleansing but not necessarily genocidal.

    Yet for some reason there are 0 greeks in Turkey atm and 200k muslims in Greece, most of which selfidentify as ethnic turks. I wonder what happened, i guess we will never know. Oh wait, we do.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom

    Also weirdly enough, sanctioned by international mediation because shit was weird back then

    It's not weird, greeks and turks have murdered shitload of each others civilians.

    After Greece's "Great Idea" plan(conquering Western Turkey) got crashed, Greece wanted to protect the surviving greeks in Turkey from further reprisals. So both sides decided to partially exchange populations while protecting the remaining minorities. Eventually(30 years later) Turkey decided they didnt want any greeks left in Turkey and violated the deal. Greece on the other hand just kept being shitty to ethnic turks living in Greece but at least they are mostly ok now.

    Most greeks are aware of civilian turks getting murdered. I am not so sure turks are aware of the civilian greeks slaughtered. This "exchange" ended 3000+ year of continuous presence(with majority or almost majority percentages) of ethnic greeks in Anatolia(Western Turkey).


  • They are not genociding, they are just removing palestinians from areas, they are ethnic cleansing those areas. This is a pretty standard nation building tactic, except most, european, nations did it in the past, while Israel is doing it now. Azerbaijan did it too with their armenian enclave in Nagorno Karabakh. The armenians "voluntarily" left the region and now there are basically 0 armenians there.

    Genocide focuses more on the destruction of people.




  • Turkey under the Kemalists is an example of a primarily Muslim nation at least attempting to build a liberal democracy.

    Yes, building a liberal democracy by using military dictatorships. When you are trying to force something on people that dont want it(at least the majority), thats when you get Erdogan. It might suck for turks living in Western Turkey and in cities like Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara but the other half of turks have a majority.

    And one of the fundamental principles of a democracy is that majority rules. You cant use the military to overthrow democratically elected governments just because you dont like their policy.

    However, i agree with your point, there are plenty of turks who selfidentity as muslim and are ok with lgbtq, etc, just like there are christians. Though i never understood how that works. Like how can the Church of Sweden participate in Pride parades. At what point something stops being christianity and becomes a social club? In the Bible is clearly says that homosexuality is bad.


  • Including serious and violent crime (prison), criminal proceeds (gang property), serious damage to a rental or social housing, restraining orders, sex offender registry, refusal to repay a home loan, and refusal to pay taxes

    Some of these are VERY different than others.

    We all have to pay tax so we can pay for social services

    Is a society that deprives people their primary residence, a society that worth paying taxes? Because let’s be real, 99.9% of the time that someone loses their home, it is because people cant afford to pay the bank. And almost always is because they are unemployed.

    And you are ok with this? I dont understand this “omg, you have to pay the bank no matter what, otherwise it is a moral failure, so you deserve to lose your home”. I wrote a relevant reply here

    https://kbin.social/m/news@lemmy.world/t/375186/Pittsburgh-active-shooter-What-we-know-about-the-suspect-William#entry-comment-1881269


  • Greece has high homeownership. Rent is obviously different but even with rent, it was harder to get evicted. The difference is that with mortgage, you probably already paid a big chunk of money and that bank can afford to get delayed payments, while rent might be paid to an individual who doesnt have the same flexibility.

    One of the main drives of the “reforms”, is that now banks can easily sell their lower performing mortgages to hedge funds, etc since it will be easier to evict people and auction their houses.

    Ultimately, all people have a need for shelter, it is a fundamental human right. So unless the state does something about this, people should have a place to stay. But would the bank do if they take over the house? Banks dont need houses, people do. Banks just love hoarding stuff.

    If the state offered free basic housing, maybe we could allow capitalism to be more brutal. But the main reason the state isnt offering free housing(at least not to the extend it used to), is because of capitalism.

    Now add the fact that the greek economy literally collapsed and everyone was unemployed, you can see why protecting the primary residence was so crucial in order to maintain social stability. But they dont care, now they are putting people’s houses out on auctions. But not without resistance and resistance is working. And the banks know this, so they are more “willing” to negotiate.

    Only in the land of the free, where everyone has guns(in order to oppose a TyRAniCaL gOvERmEnT), noone resists somehow. Individualism has brainrotted the americans to an extreme level. What would happen if your entire neighborhood came to your help? What would the cops do? Shoot everyone?

    Well, maybe in the US they would. But in normal countries, a cop shooting anyone is almost certainly going to lead to the collapse of the government.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greek_riots

    A society that refuses to provide everyone with shelter and food, while it can afford it, is not a society that needs to continue existing.


  • Noone should lose their primary residence, it should be protected(unless it is a mansion or something). Everyone should have a place to live. In Greece, primary residences used to have a lot of protections, so even if you were in debt, it would be very hard to lose your house. But thankfully, thanks to 15 years of austerity and “reforms” imposed by Troika and right wing governments, now you can easily lose your house, just like in the US.

    What is the point of society, if people dont have a place to live.


  • 500GB. I wanted to get more storage but then i realized that with 1gbit internet connection, i dont need it, i can download whatever i want in a few minutes. Fast internet is a game changer, it allows me to try and test games without thinking about it.

    I also have a 2tB hdd for media but i dont use that to store games.


  • Noone is using windows because it is cool and hip and i doubt microsoft advertises windows. People use windows because they work and do what they want. Maybe they could use ubuntu, but why would they do that? What does ubuntu offer that windows dont?

    I’ll tell you why they(including me) dont use linux, because maybe their wifi wont work(or they will have to compile the universe to make it work) or their favourite app or game wont work. And even if you could make a piece of hardware or software work in linux, the performance might be inferior because it will be using generic drivers, instead of the proprietary windows only drivers that the manufacturer has made.

    Ultimately, people dont care about open source or privacy enough, to sacrifice their convenience.


  • It’s not semantics. True, you can overthrow a government without a military invasion but doing a military invasion is much more serious and more “bad”. My point is that the US hasnt recently done the “more bad” thing(except for Libya but not even Russia gave a fuck about that), while Russia is actively doing the “more bad” thing.

    The expanding of NATO depends on democratically elected governments of sovereign countries choosing to join an alliance. NATO didnt roll tanks over those countries forcing them to join NATO. If NATO did that, i would agree that it would be a very bad thing.

    There are a lot of degrees of interactions between countries. Soft power, hard power, hybrid warfare, etc. Not all of them are equal or destructive. Just because Russia is currently doing the worst kind of interaction(invasion), you cant equate all negative interactions between countries to rationalize “but all countries are doing bad stuff”.

    Russia had very little soft power and with this invasion, they wasted large chunks of it. They proved to everyone that ultimately, they are willing to use military force to achieve their objectives. The fact that the US did/does it, doesnt justify it. Both sides can be bad and in this specific situation, one side is clearly in the wrong while the other side is supporting the “good” side(for their own reasons).

    Do you not think that we should respect country borders and their governments, especially when they are democratically elected? The whole “it was a coup, thats how Zelensky got elected” is bullshit that was started by Russia AFTER the invasion.

    I went back and checked the russian statements after the latest ukranian elections, where the actual antirussian candidate(Poroshenko) had lost. The Kremlin was tendative but hopeful since their main “bad guy” had lost. Kremlin didnt say anything about staged elections, didnt say anything about CIA conspiracy to elect Zelensky or anything like that. Kremlin was “well, at least that asshole(Poroshenko) lost, maybe we can find some common ground with Zelensky”.

    But Russia lacked the soft power to do that. So they overplayed their hand and used hard power to achieve it.

    the USA deployed troops for a “joint training” with Brazilian troops during (far-right USA backed) Bolsonaro’s government.

    I mean the US is training people from other countries and when it comes to Latin America, those people are usually far right. Is this a good thing? No. But this isnt as bad as invading a country. Again, it is a spectrum. There is a difference between Russia training for example people from Donbas(bad), or giving them Buk missiles(more bad) or straight up invading(most bad) or straight up going after Ukraine’s capital instead of just liberating/securing the separatist regions(you have gone full disney bad guy).

    This is what i am talking about Russia overplaying their hand. You cant really talk about “protecting the people of Donbas”, when you are literally speed marching(literally airlifting and dropping) to Kiev. You dont give a fuck about Donbas, you just want a regime change(through violence, against the democratic results) in Ukraine.





  • When did the last military coup in Latin America, orchestrated by CIA ,happen? I am not saying that the US is great but at some point, we need to talk about the present. And at the present(and recent past), the US is not trying to overthrow a government, at least not by using military force in Latin America.

    As far as the war in Ukraine in concerned, the US is doing the right thing, even if they are doing it because it benefits them. This is the only time since WW2 that the US is doing the right thing. Have you ever wondered why historically neutral countries like Sweden want to join NATO now? What caused that change?

    Mexico has every right to join the Warsaw Pact and i would be on Mexico’s and Russia’s side if the US invaded Mexico for wanting to join an alliance.

    Now let’s talk about how NATO is threatening Russia. How would that happen? If Ukraine joined NATO, do you think NATO would invade Russia? You do realize that Russia has nukes, right? NATO is not about invading Russia, it’s about preventing Russia, a big country with nukes, from invading smaller countries with no nukes.


  • But if banks would only be allowed to lend out half of what they are currently lending out, wouldn’t the supply of money simply go down, and thus the value of money up, effectively leaving banks with the same lending power?

    Well that leads to deflation and it’s bad.

    While money is often a representation of wealth, ultimately, money is just a medium of exchange. Think of it as the blood of the economy. Pooling the blood in 1 location isnt beneficial for anything, you want money flowing all over as much as possible and this is facilitated through fractional reserve. The only time you dont want money flowing everywhere, is if you have high inflation, in which case you take measures that restrict the availability/flowing of money.

    Even if you could slowly and carefully raise the ratio, why do you want a higher reserve ratio? What does that achieve? Ideally, you want 0 money being unused, though for practical reasons(people being able to withdraw money when they want to), you want to keep some money in the vault.

    To think of it in a more conventional terms, imagine if a company had really deep stock of shoes. You dont want to store 1 million pairs of shoes in case 1 million people suddenly decide to buy shoes in 1 day. You only want to keep in storage as many shoes you sell on average, + a percentage. Sometimes this will lead to supply chain issues, like with covid, but 99.9% of the time, it works great.

    In the words of the ancient greek philosopher Chrome “unused memory is wasted memory”. The same principle applies to money.



  • Take robot or AI childporn as another example if cannibalism isn’t bringing home the intuition. It’s not harming children (at least directly) but it could reasonably be argued that it’s perpetuating and normalizing a violent and problematic practice.

    It could be argued but i am not so sure about that. You could start arguing about how “i fucked my stepmother” porn normalizes abuse but would you? I think these are philosophical or psychological subjects that ultimately have no real studies behind them.

    I’d like to believe that people are aware of the fundamental differences. These products are trying to appeal to non vegans who dont want to eat meat for health reasons. These people arent vegan in the first place. Is the existence of vegan meat equivalents make it harder or easier to convert these people into veganism? I think it makes it easier.

    It doesnt “normalize” abuse, abuse is already normalized. It is trying to change people and change takes time. In your AI childporn example, childporn isnt normalized and i could see AI childporn normalizing it and increasing real life child abuse.

    In the end, the animals dont care why they arent being killed. Me being vegan and not eating meat is as impactful as someone who isnt vegan and is eating a vegan meat equivalent. And this is the goal of veganism. Veganism isnt a religion, it isnt about purity, it isnt about you or your concepts of righteousness. It’s about reducing death and suffering.


  • Most vegans are against causing death and suffering to animals, not against how things taste. The abhorrent part is the killing, not the taste(for most vegans).

    Also i think your definitions are self limiting without a reason. Seitan tastes like “meat”, yet it is not. You cant just assign exclusivity on specific tastes. Those tastes can exist outside the realm of meat. But it is easier to talk about those things by referencing something that most people are familiar with(meat or sausage or burger).

    Would you be ok if we assigned 16 digit numbers to specific tastes and then used that number to describe products that have that taste? Is the use of the word “meat” that is problematic to you?