Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
I love "backpacking". I have done many long trips to rather unusual parts of the world, almost always alone and "unguided". But lately I can't shake the feeling that it is becoming very difficult to find "real" information sources. With real I mean sources that will not shy away from saying it plainly when a city or area is shitty, ugly, not worth visiting, tourist trap etc but also will go out of its way to explore the unusual even when it is not always savory and entirely safe.
The typical guide books are just contend with giving a dispassionate list of every somewhat touristic part of the country, trying to be inoffensive as possible. I sometimes pirate the old Lonely Planets and the difference is day and night. If I buy a guide book it is because I want to be told the "insider" info which will be missing from the tourist office website. What use is it to produce a print version of everything I could find on google maps anyway?
Same goes for blogs. Perhaps this is more of an SEO issue but I used to be able to dig up plenty of amateur travel blogs or even forums full of people giving their unfiltered opinions and experiences. Now it is nigh impossible to sift through the "10 TOP EXPERIENCES" lists all regurgitating the same bullshit. Reddit is not a good replacement here, and Facebook backpacker groups are typically too inactive. I almost feel some nostalgia scrolling through some regional backpacker groups I used to be active in. They were great places to get up-to-date information and meet people. Now they are just dead. TripAdvisor and its forums are totally not a replacement here either. Why does every basic source about every random Colombian city keep going on about some graffiti street but not say a word about best clubs to dance with local girls? Is anyone actually going to these places for shitty graffiti?
But what is the culture war angle here? It is slight but I get the sense that the root cause of all this is the extreme global connectedness/homogeneity and disappearance of even the possibility of an adventure no matter how small. I can't escape the feeling that such "insider info" venues have disappeared because there is no demand for insider info anymore. Every remotely pretty place in the World has either already become dotted with a tourism infrastructure neatly exposed by airbnb/booking/tripadvisor/skyscanner/tinder or rapidly on its way. You can count on the locals drinking the same beverages, eating the same food, watching the same TV, dressing up in same fashion trends and living in same houses as you do. And if there is still a gritty or untamed side to it, it is considered almost rude to mention this. As if you are insulting the locals, as if you owe it to them to herd every foreigner to a couple carefully curated quarter away from anything interesting.
But then I have to wonder, what is even the point of traveling then? Were the decades between 1960s-2010s just a fluke or a transition period when most of the world became somewhat accessible through infrastructure development but did not assimilate into mundane sameness so completely yet? When you didn't need to be Lawrence of Arabia to see the world but it still took some self-selection of the risk taker personality? Should one consign oneself to using vacation time for skiing at resorts and hikes at well marked well frequented paths and just give up on the joy of discovering something genuinely foreign?
I realize fully that I am very incoherent. Perhaps I am just getting older and struggling to face up to the reality that I cannot just go to some forgotten part of the world with a return ticket two months later and "figure it out". I have responsibilities, vacation time is valuable, I can exchange money for convenience. I am writing this mostly to try to organize my thoughts and figure out if it is me that changed or the world.
P.S. please share with me if you know of any forums, bloggers, authors, publishers, youtubers honestly whatever that would prove me wrong and show adventure is alive and well at least somewhere. I really enjoy reading stuff like this
So yesterday Turkish Presidential and Parliamentary elections took place. I wanted to give an overview of the main characters and themes.
First of all some clarifications about the election system and candidates.
The presidential system is relatively new in Turkey. Presidents used to be largely ceremonial in Turkey and the cabinet/prime minister were in charge until constitutional changes Erdogan himself advocated in 2017. This was only the second election where the country directly voted for a powerful president. Also, a new system of parliamentary alliances were implemented which allowed multiple parties to pool their votes in electoral alliances. The political system is only recently coming to terms with the full implications of this and we basically ended up with two broad coalitions. It is all too eerily American.
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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Good old Erdoğan. Doesn't need much of an introduction at this point. Has been leading the country with wildly different formal and informal coalitions since 2002. He is just 69yo but he has been getting visibly very old and fragile lately. It is likely he has some underlying health problems. Nevertheless he retains a lot of his charisma and political acumen. He entered politics as the energetic young face of the up-and-coming Islamist movement 30 years ago, and at this point the party is simply his personal fiefdom with little autonomous energy or appeal. He gathered in his electoral alliance a strange mix including the ultra-nationalist paramilitary party, old school Islamists, old school social democrats, and the political arm of Kurdish Hezbollah movement(!!) who basically want a loose federation with full autonomy for Kurds, united under Sharia. It doesn't make any sense and it is all held together thanks to his personality and patronage networks.
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Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: Very uncharismatic leader of opposition since 2010. He leads CHP, which is founded by Ataturk himself and used to be the ruling party during our single party dictatorship period of 1923-1950. He was a high level but unremarkable civil servant until he made a bid for Ankara mayoral elections in 2009, looked competent on TV, lost anyway, but then got elected as the chairman of the party when it turned out former chairman was sleeping with lots of women high up in the party. He has since lost every single election with roughly the same percentage of the votes CHP always receives (around 20-25%). However the laws regulating political party administration in Turkey basically makes it impossible to remove the party chairman unless they really fuck up, so he has simply refused to leave. He is also from the small Shia religious minority of Eastern Turkey, and moved the party to a more left-liberal inclusive direction compared to the hardcore-nationalist-secularist-pro-army position it used to have. He leads an electoral alliance of a fuck-ton of parties, including many supporting it from outside. This group includes another branch of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary party, the main Kurdish socialist party (political wing of the guerrilla movement), another branch of old school Islamists, former Erdogan allies (his former economics/foreign ministers and prime minister, one of them a pro-EU neoliberal, one of them a hardcore neo-Ottomanist), and a bunch of smaller liberal or socialist or nationalist parties. It doesn't make any sense and it is all held together thanks to a hatred of Erdoğan's personality and patronage networks.
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Sinan Oğan: Another branch of ultra-nationalist paramilitary party (!!), organized as more of a protest candidate against the massive refugee waves Turkey has experienced in the last decade. We received around 5-10 million Syrian/Afghan/African and who knows what else refugees and migrants since 2010. This is very unprecedented and many larger cities became somewhat multicultural hotchpotches almost overnight. There is tremendous amount of resentment against this development so it was enough to fuel a third candidate. He is essentially a pro-Eurasianist academic who speaks fluent Russian and was very likely recruited by the intelligence services to liaison with Central Asian Turkic Republics in the 90s when Turkey had hegemonic ambitions in the region. Pretty much any high-up member of ultra-nationalist paramilitary party can be assumed to have shady ties with the intelligence services/deep state.
There is another candidate who was mostly just running over a personal grudge and withdrew before the elections so I will not mention him.
The important issues of the election were (with a vague order of importance):
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Erdoğan: Love him or hate him. There is not much of a middle ground at this point.
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Economy: Turkey got solidly caught in the middle income trap after a period of solid neo-liberal growth. Inflation is rampant, current is in shambles, and inequality is going through the roof as the government practices wage suppression to a keep trade balance discipline, and low interest rates are sky-rocketing the real estate prices. The opposition parties focused much of their effort convincing the people that they can salvage the situation.
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Immigration: Immigration is almost universally disliked. Massive majorities express that they want them gone ASAP in polls. Erdoğan's pro-refuge stance is the main factor keeping this issue under control. Almost all opposition figures made remarks about "solving" this crisis but there doesn't seem to be any good policy proposals, especially if Turkey wants to keep some cooperative relation with the EU.
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Geopolitics: Middle East has always been a dangerous place but the sense of instability and vulnerability is increasing substantially nowadays. Turkey's domestic defense industry has been growing rapidly in order to wean off the NATO dependence in foreign policy and this stuff is wildly popular with basically everyone. Erdoğa does well to take credit.
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Secularity/Western Identity: Always the underlying issue of every other issue in Turkey is this identity crisis. The state has ideologically become solidly moderate conservative under Erdoğan, however it is not capable of producing any real modern alternatives to secularist modernism and nationalist modernism, capable of going beyond politics of resentment against the Westernized elites and become a creative force for the future. This has led to the rapidly rising forces of the ultra-nationalist bloc as well as Kurdish identity politics and Western woke ideology as everyone is aware that the country is stuck, but cannot produce a home-bread alternative. This is all happening with the background of a century of rapid transition that made the country today almost entirely urban, capitalist and social media addicted with a TFR below replacement as of last year.
Business conglomerates friendly with Erdoğan's family took over almost all the private media enterprise in the country in the last decade, and the opposition parties created their own rather amateurish but widely watched alternatives. The public media also acts like an arm of the ruling party. Therefore watching the election coverage and zapping between channels gives you an impression of two parallel universes vaguely aware of each other.
The polling was suggesting prior to the election that Erdoğan would face a big loss, getting solidly defeated in the first round with a large margin even. Therefore the opposition was extremely hopeful, almost in a messianic mood for weeks at this point. However the results were solidly very disappointing if that was what you were hoping for. It looks like it ended roughly 49.5/45/5.5% between the candidates with a small number of ballot boxes still contested with re-counts. I don't expect any changes. There will be a second round but Erdogan's victory is basically guaranteed as nobody expects a principled block voting of Sinan Oğan's supporters in favor of Kılıçdaroğlu. The mood is extremely catastrophic in the Western facing part of the population (which is roughly everyone I know), and there are a fair number of bitter losers with fraud claims (I don't believe any widespread fraud has ever taken place in modern Turkish elections. I volunteered in the past and know the system well and it is quite solid).
This is the day we all woke up today. I moved abroad a while ago and purposefully lowered my emotional attachment with the country and looks like that was definitely the right decision. Still couldn't help but feel solid disappointment watching the results roll on TV yesterday, even though I was very hesitant to vote for such a shitty opposition bloc.
Edit: Forgot to mention, Erdogan's block won a parliamentary majority pretty easily. So even if the opposition wins the Presidency through a miracle there will be a split government situation which is something very unfamiliar to Turkish people. We used to have a lot of unstable coalition governments in the 90s and people absolutely hated them and generally prefer consistent alignments in the government.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
I have myself hitchhiked and volunteered extensively around Israeli territories around Gaza and also inside the West Bank. I know plenty of people who were in serious harms way today and also will likely be even more in the coming months. Both Jews who will be called up to the army and also Arabs who will have to endure Israeli operations which, while not totally indiscriminate, do not care that much about civilian casualties in all honesty. I am mentioning this so I can be forgiven for being a bit ranty and incoherent. I have been feeling very disturbed the whole day and doom scrolling increasingly grim videos.
Israeli military and zionists in general have an obvious incentive to always portrait Mossad and IDF as omnipotent forces who are aware and capable of everything. Israel's enemies also have such an incentive because they keep catastrophically failing to beat Israel and they need to explain this situation somehow without acknowledging their own absolute incompetence.
However in reality we are talking about a country of 6 million people, surrounded by hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs and constantly engaged in the very time/resource constraining task of subjugating a local Arab population about their own Jewish population. Israeli Jews have some very exploitable weaknesses such as an incredibly polarized society comprised of groups who can't even agree why the country exists, high dependance on their diaspora's (diminishing) influence over Western states, absolutely no strategic depth in case of a real invasion and averseness to casualties/POWs from the conscript army (literal 18 year old boys and girls). Most importantly, Israel only has to fail once at defending itself and it will no longer exist. Arabs have the luxury of constant new attempts (as long as they keep up the population pyramid).
I am going to dismiss the more conspiracy-minded explanations of how Israeli security apparatus could allow such a thing to happen. We are talking about a small country, ran by a very small group of people who have missed even worse signs of incoming attack in the past and also had been involved in a bitter internal conflict for most of the year. So if you expect Israel to turn on God mode and destroy its enemies, perhaps take into account that the same people couldn't prevent this from happening in the first place. They are clearly not that omnipotent. Hamas has likely captured a very high number of prisoners. Many of them are female and even children. In the past the pressure on the Israeli government has been immense in such situations. We might see some very nasty breakdowns in Israeli population and politics if Hamas starts exchanging the prisoners' lives and bodies for IDF's behavior.
Also, Israel hasn't really been that successful in the recent memory at actually occupying aggressive militant controlled areas (Lebanon and Gaza, in the West Bank they have mutual interests with the PA elites so pacification is easier). A ground incursion into Gaza will be an extremely bloody affair for both sides. It has a high chance of serious failure.
Another factor Netanyahu will have to consider is his goal of rapprochement between Israel and a bunch of more despotic and American aligned Arab countries. A bloody ground war and occupation would kill such goals for many years to come. Even the most insulated Arab leaders have to somewhat consider the fact that their populations absolutely HATE Israel and Jews in general. Even in the best invasion scenarios, for IDF there will be endless atrocious videos of Arab civilians massacred.
If the escalation continues, I think the Israeli politics will change beyond recognition in the near future. For some decades now the OG-European-Labour-Zionist-Secular elite of the country totally lost its grasp on democratic majorities but have been holding on to power through risky political shenanigans. Their preferred approach to the Arab problem has clearly failed. While they were in no way bastions of humanism towards Arabs, these people still represented much more Western instincts about what is acceptable to do against your enemy. At least they were careful that when they felt atrocities were necessary, they worked well on the Western PR. Things might get much uglier very fast in the near term.
Rant out.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Is it healthy to dwell so much over it everytime some city degenerate dies and the media decides to make it a “thing”? What would you or anyone else gain from this knowledge?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
How did birth control really work before condoms/pills/spirals? If I google for this I get all sorts of weird factoids (sheep skin condoms, animal dung vagina blocking something etc) that makes me think that people probably had other less weird/disgusting methods. After all there were societies with fertility rates around 2 and even below before these technologies
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4mo ago
Commitments time for the next year. New desk job and long commute messed up my habits and now I weight about 10-15kg more than I would like to. Also my lifts (very decent but not overly high number) haven’t increased during this time at all. So it’s almost entirely fat that I put on. Any suggestions? Is it sensible to try to get an ozempic prescription for a relatively little amount of weight like this? I am not doing so far with losing weight via simple self discipline.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
19d ago
It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.
Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
Sometimes when I am really tired and want something entirely mindless I just switch on speed running videos and marvel at how much time and effort these seemingly intelligent determined capable men are spending on clipping a wall at a game released in 2003 to save off 750 milliseconds or something. Is there anything else that is such a massive waste of human talent than speed running communities??
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
Can someone invent a Curtis Yarvin reading LLM so that I can finally make sense of this guy's massive wall of rambling texts full of unfinished sentences
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
But I really hope that's not the only thing they are trained to do
Why are you exactly hoping for this?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
Without having much of a stake in this discussion, I can confidently tell you that you can go to any bar in Europe or Turkey tonight and signal some affluence as a man and check for yourself if the rumours about Ukrainian women are correct.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
You have an interesting argument and then try to support it with an awful comparison. Life in Russia/China absolutely sucks for factors but not in Cuba. A country with absolutely the same factors, and not even the upsides of Russia/China being mid-high income countries by global standards. What’s even the logic here? China has cool beaches as well
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Going for a tour of Greece this month. Any recommendations? Route is Corfu-Zagori-Athens. Trying to avoid tourist crowds as much as possible
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2d ago
Any tips for Singapore? First time in Asia. Here for some weeks but mostly busy with work
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5mo ago
Housing market predictions anyone?
As a couple we are at a point where we would be given a mortgage of a small size house in the city or a somewhat larger one in a suburb (this is a very expensive Western European capital and collectively we earn upper middle class salary). But the prices are so crazy that whatever we buy would definitely not be enough to raise a decent size family as long as we stay in range for our jobs.
The obvious plan would be to get a mid sized place now and then sell and upgrade to a larger house in 5-10 years.
I am very paranoid that the current prices are a massive bubble and if we get a loan today we will be left holding a massive bag when the prices crash and we won’t be able to meaningfully upgrade to a larger house. But on the other hand throwing a large fraction of our income down the toilet with the rent feels ridiculous when we can afford not to.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Very open ended question: What do you think is going to happen with pension systems in the next 50 years? Where I live, investing the maximum tax deductible amount into pension contributions is a no brainer if the government won’t change the rules of the game down the road. But I have a hard time believing this.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
I have always been taught that this is not an actually effective method. Was this wrong?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
As you suggest, this has been tried in the past. It led to incredible amounts of chaos in Jordan and Lebanon. In the Lebanese case Israel then had to try to go and invade the country they chased the Palestinians to and get bogged down in a massive fiasco. Jordan came very close to turning into a radical Arab republic due to the Palestinian groups, similar to Syria/Iraq/Egypt at the time and this would be a catastrophe for Israeli security.
All of these expulsions you mention were carried out by absolute victorious states of massive bloody wars which had almost omnipotent control over the expulsed populations. This is not the case here and likely never will. Arab states played a very bloody and cynical gambit after 1948 by not allowing Palestinian populations to be resettled in a proper manner inside their countries. But in the long term it has paid off and Israel now has to deal with an insurmountable problem that constantly threatens to break the country. Why would Egypt/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon now give up and just accept a population of infinitely more radicalized Palestinians?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_insurgency_in_South_Lebanon
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
How do you discover new music when not surrounded by people who are into discovering new music?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
20d ago
I feel like I have to join any online discussion about bikes and helmets. But I live in the Netherlands and see about a million kids a day on bikes themselves or towed by their parents. Helmet ratio is probably a couple percentage points tops. And it’s almost always neurotic American expats. Is it really worth ruining the whole experience and habit of biking over a minuscule safety improvement? (Assuming you aren’t cycling through infrastructure unsafe for biking)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
I have also come across a bit of speculation that IDF leadership knows that this will turn into a massive bloodbath and fiasco and they are delaying against the wishes of the politicians and trying to work out alternatives to an invasion. Sounds like a sensible scenario to me.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
I am tagged so I feel like adding something. I think most Western-oriented people (including me) has had the experience of an incredibly visceral reaction yesterday to the images of gunned men of another culture violating the family homes, taking away women and leaving death and destruction behind them. We all felt this because they could be our houses and they could be our women. Israeli politicians are talking about basically genocide and the Air Force has been dropping a bomb per minute ever since. This is how the Palestinians have felt at least once a month for 4 generations at this point. Their entire culture is a coping mechanism to deal with this extreme constant humiliation. I can't begin to fathom how childish someone has to be to suggest that THIS MAN just surrender to the killers of his child in exchange for becoming their low-wage servant.
https://x.com/Ike_Saul/status/1711780282725011520
It is a bit lame to post a twitter link and say I agree with it, but this piece resonates with me so much that I wanted to share it here. I still believe this place is majority composed of reasonable people, notwithstanding the couple of accounts that has spent the last couple of weeks plotting genocide scenarios and reliving their war on terror "they hate us for our freedoms" high one last time.
To delve deeper into the uncomfortable topic of the looming genocide, I also increasingly get the feeling that contrary to the expectations of some whose view of geopolitics is eerily similar to RTS mechanics, the genocidal military power IDF is displaying right now is ultimately going to harm Israel a lot more than it helps. I think it mainly has to do with political/military leadership trying to cover their ass and muffle their enormous failures with the sound of bombs. If IDF really goes through with their plan which seems likely to cost civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think the nation of Israel will ever recover from this.
It is a country that is already losing two of its most powerful weapons:
I fully agree that the situation with Gaza is entirely unsustainable. But if Israelis go through with what they are plotting right now, they will slowly but surely find out that they are 7 million souls surviving in an ocean of half a billion through miracles, and they are pissing in the miracle potion.
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