Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
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
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts
I suppose except their entire shoreline from where they can always freely be supplied by the most powerful country in human history which unconditionally supports them diplomatically economically and militarily often to the detriment of its own geopolitical standing.
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
As a side/meta note: something really changed around 2016
I think many people have long felt this. Thanks to Elon Musk open sourcing Twitter's internal correspondence with American government agencies it became clear that it wasn't just "Eternal September" type nostalgia but a very real and coordinated change.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
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:
- Endlessly idealistic and intelligent Ashkenazi founders who knew to out-think and out-work their opponents at very turn, and most importantly to not lose the sight of their goal even when they had to take very nasty decisions at times: to create a people. Not to destroy one. These people are not only losing out in demography but also they are losing the soul of the nation. Their spirit will not survive a Gazan genocide.
- Zionist influence in the Western world. Through a combination of dedication, money, human quality, well-crafted propaganda, historical guilt and Cold War positioning, Zionists has always had a very unique power position in Western institutions, especially the US ones. This is quickly disappearing. Western Jews are assimilating into the PMC deracinated blob at a breathtaking pace. They are losing the set of assumptions that motivated them to identify with their kin in Israel, and they are losing the power that comes from ethnic favoritism. A Gazan genocide is very likely going to be the final nail in the coffin here.
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.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4mo ago
I have been suspecting for a while that the governments have been so tolerant of crypto currency stuff because it’s actually a great way for intelligence agencies to move serious black money around without getting into Iran contra style problems.
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
Israel has been restrained because it is indeed fighting for the subjugation of a population with a size equivalent to its own. The alternative to restraint is not killing "at least a substantial number of violent young men", it is genocide. The definition of "violent young men who might take up arms against Israel if provoked enough" is "99% of Palestinian men". In a society like Palestinians intentionally or unintentionally killing someone is enough to convince a dozen of their male relatives to swear an eternal oath of revenge against you and genuinely pursue this.
I generally sympathize with Israel much more than Arabs instinctively because I perceive them as civilized people dealing with barbarians (a specific type of Islamic barbarity that I personally have reasons to specifically hate). If Israelis become another tribe of barbarians engaged in genocidal clan war then I simply do not care.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
I get the impression that regular holocaust narrative, where it’s the most heinous crime in human history bestowing endless moral authority to the god’s chosen people ultimate victim, is on its way out. It cannot survive pop intersectionalism. There are too many victim groups with a stake in the pie and they don’t have the baggage of having to defend Israel’s right to take over a land by treating its inhabitants as untermenschen and concentrating them in ghettos.
In the near future any slander against the holocaust narrative from the wrong people will still be a big taboo but it will be the “allies” with their own holocaust claims and grievances who will dilute the moral authority of the holocaust.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Not even 100% sure why but he feels like a natural ally
I suspect because you don't know much about the topic and just project your own prejudices on him.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9d ago
Just finished Feynman’s autobiography. What a guy! You know a guy is being honest in his autobiography when half the book is filled with memories of blond babes and tits, and the other half is about him solving this or that very difficult physics problem.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8mo ago
Conscription in Turkey used to be universal and quite tough. This spawned about a million ways anyone with connections or money could get their sons an easy deployment or even an exemption. Meanwhile the average peasant would have to endure near slavery conditions in the hands of commanders. Also certain deployments in the Kurdish areas could be genuinely dangerous with serious casualty rates.
Nowadays anyone can legally pay some amount (not low, not crazy high) to do only a one month training course and be exempt from the rest of the service. The actual fighting army is a professional force and it pays a pretty decent salary for a stable job requiring no education.
The conditions in the training and service are much much better nowadays. Some of this is because Turkey is a wealthier and more middle class country now so overall conditions are better anywhere. But I suspect a big part is due to the need to recruit contract soldiers from the conscripts.
My lesson from this change is that without a very established civic culture and a homogenous society (not necessarily in terms of race but broadly in terms of group identity) it doesn’t work to try to take elites hostage in the system to force skin in the game. People with means almost always find ways to work around the system, and they cause enormous inefficiencies and dysfunction while doing so.
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
The reason a "one-state" solution is impossible is that the current arrangement can only be maintained as long as that ratio doesn't go above 20%-ish (which includes various groups more sympathetic to Israel like Christian Arabs and Druzes). If there was a real one-state, it would not be a functional democracy and certainly not a Jewish one, which is the point of Zionism in the first place. There has never been any doubt that Zionists will not give Arabs political rights unless if they are small enough to not be threatening. Israel purposefully crafted its citizenship laws to exclude vast majority of Arabs, and only expanded the citizenship status slowly and to small groups once Jewish immigration meant that this would not alter the voting population much. It is extremely hypocritical to pretend this is not true and somehow non-Israel passport holder Arabs could get equal political rights if only they wanted. Even in best case scenario (where peace and friendship between the peoples are established by magic tomorrow), this would never be accepted by Israel as there are not enough Jews left in the world to immigrate and keep up the population ratio in Jews' favor.
The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true
What is that evidence exactly? West Bank is defanged and as a result it is rapidly being invaded by Jewish settlements inflicting death by thousand cuts to the already tiny Arab ghettoes. And this happens even while Arabs are very much sticking to their guns. Not to mention that the far-right is rapidly taking over Israeli politics. These people are the future.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
I believe this sentiment is actually very common with online Hindu nationalist types. My best guess is that they see Israel as a country of hyper-competent Brahmins (without the 1.5 billion riffraff bringing them down) and associate its enemies of "Muslim hordes" with Pakistan.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
As in every society everywhere, the fact that they are "establishment" counts much more than the ideology they coalesce around. Humans are very open to changing their minds about philosophical trivia or their lifestyle when maintaining or gaining power and wealth is the expected outcome.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
I hear Africa is still pretty wild
Yeah a friend lived in Madagaskar for a couple months and the stories were wild. Perhaps I should give it a try. I am personally not a big fan of places where there is a real threat to your personal safety or health. Forces you to be a lot more cautious and timid, and stick to the well beaten path. Definitely learned my lesson in this regard after some nights out in Brazilian cities that I tried to act as if I am still in Istanbul.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
First of all, I don't have any advise other than the very obvious: don't be an idiot, marry this girl, if you break up with her you will immensely regret it and any casual sex you can have will probably not be better than with her.
But a question: Were you experienced with hook-ups when you started dating this girl? When you have these longings are they associated with images of what you had done in the past or just internet porn?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
Uighurs simply don't have a large group of people in other countries who see them as genuine kin the way Palestinians do. Their radicalization was a brief episode that had to do with limited monetary/weapon/ideological support by US/UK/Turkish intelligence services. In contrast there are about 500 million Arabs (situated in a way that absolutely surrounds Israel, and in command of armies and money and influence). Vast majority see Palestine as the pinnacle of their people's humiliation. The darkest spot on their battered honor which they highly value.
The comparison to Uighurs is quite useless because of this. China was subjugating a people who were barely militant, had little real friends, with zero real threats against its own national security as a consequence of these actions.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
What is Hamas plan here? They had to know they can’t militarily match Israel and Israel is going to hit very hard back
So what? Israel is already hitting hard constantly. What is the average life expectancy of Hamas militants or even anyone high up in the hierarchy? These people very much already know that they and their whole family will be obliterated with a precision guided bomb at some point with a very high probability. They do what they do because they believe the moral dignity and the eventual triumph of their people are more important than their personal well-being. How many of the gunmen who participated in the raid yesterday really expected to survive the day?
Palestinians have good reason to believe they will be destroyed as a people if they give up but there is also no immediate action that can bring them victory in the foreseeable future. They have developed institutions and traditions to deal with this grim reality. It is more akin to a death cult than a normal society as we would understand it, but it is what it is.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
For Ukraine, while air defence against drones and cruise misiles is important, keeping Russian bombers away from the frontlines is absolutely crucial. It’s quite clear that Russia can’t mass produce the first in numbers big enough to really win the war. But they have a world class air force and basically infinite supply of bombs to be retrofitted as glide bombs if there is no concern for planes getting shut down.
If the Russian air force gets free rein over the frontline then the war is over. Due to a mix of inherited Soviet air defense (which was quite substantial as Soviet western armies had enormous stockpiles from what I understand), gifts systems from the west and manpads the Russian planes were essentially missing.
This is changing rapidly right now and there is big panic on the Ukrainian side. It should be visible to the leadership that the loss ratios are becoming untenable and the fortifications just can’t stand.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
What if those contracts are not worthless by expiration? Indeed what if they are worth more than what you sold them for? Do you think this possibility is not taken into account while pricing them?
I work at a small options trading firm at a non trading role. I interact with the guys working on modelling and pricing options every day. One thing I know is that these guys are really fucking smart and spend most of their day and night hours thinking about how to very efficiently take your money and getting very well compensated for this. I would advise anyone away from competing with these guys unless you really know what you are doing. Derivative trading is meant for institutional investors to hedge certain risks. Options are to be bought as well calculated insurance policies and not as a way to gamble with leverage. It’s a pity that they became a very efficient tool in the crypto world to part fools with their money.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
This is very common in Turkish. Language substrate of old Turkic, blended with a lot of Persian (anything literary), Arabic (anything religious), French (anything modern pre-1960s), English (anything modern post-1960s). There are usually multiple ways to say the same thing from each language and it gives the sentence a different vibe.
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.
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