Gorilladrums @ Gorilladrums @lemmy.world

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3

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288

Joined

2 yr. ago

I unironically agree with this, start with pickup trucks and move your way down.

Lemmy has always suffered from 2 major problems.

1. There is no diversity to the content. The vast majority of posts across all instances are either politics, memes, or tech... and even these are narrowed to very specific views and takes.
2. There isn't enough volume. The amount of users, posts, comments, and active communities is very low. There isn't enough content for someone to curate their feed to their liking.

This place isn't Reddit, but it pretends that it is. It's simply an inferior platform that is built on a better idea. The people telling to you to curate your feed are full of it. A lot of users on this site, myself included, have to go to All to see enough activity to make this site usable.

You're opinion is 100% correct, but it is unpopular on here so have an upvote

This opinion is extremely unpopular in islamic countries, cultures, and communities. They reject ALL criticism against islam no matter how valid, respectful, or well thought out. To them all criticism against islam is a direct attack on them because islamic scriptures instruct muslims to wage war and kill all who criticize or insult islam. This is not a case of a few bad apples, it's a core tenat of the religion. Considering how islam has 1.6 billion people, I would think that this opinion is unpopular on a global scale.

I never understood biphobia, a bi person choosing to be in a relationship with you means that they chose you out of everybody. It should be a feeling of flattery, not paranoia.

I mean it's obviously different from person to person, but the gay people I've met, especially lesbians, have a genuine irrational fear and hatred of bi people. They're terrified that bi people will cheat on them or will leave them for straight people. They see them as straight people who are pretending to be gay rather than actually being bi.

The most biphobic people I've ever seen are gay people. They hate bi people more than your average straight homophobe hates gay people. It's really weird.

Personally I would be very pleased if both Putin and Khamenei were beaten to death by crooked sticks by an angry mob of pissed of civilians. That being said, I'm still not a fan of war.

إذا كنت عايش في الشرق الأوسط لا عرفت الاردن دولة فقيرة و ما تريد مشاكل ويا اي دولة. لا إسرائيل ولا السعوديه ولا تركيا ولا إيران. ما يردون دولتهم تصير كارثة مثل سوريه لو العراق لو لبنان.

This isn't a measured response. They notified Qatar and the US of the attacks in advance, they only fired 14 missiles, and 13 of them were knocked down. Also these missles didn't carry any notable payloads. Iran did this before when Israel killed Haniyeh in Tehran and Trump killed Soleimani. This is Iran go to way of singling that they want to concede retaliation by intentionally putting out a weak response. They want to deescalate in a way where they can save face.

It was a total of 14 missles, and 13 were knocked down. Also apparently Iran told both Qatar and the US that they were going to do this so they did have advanced notice.

Iran is clearly signaling that they're willing to concede fighting back if the US accepts these performative strikes as deescalation. This is Iran's go to when they get pressed. They did something similar when Israel killed Haniyeh in Tehran and when Trump killed Soleimani.

Iran is likely indirectly accepting Trump's poor attempt at not fanning the flames further.

All the highways in Massachusetts are like this

That's nasty

Then you proceed to explain how Jordan IS involved and justify it.

How are they involved? They're not with Israel, Iran, or any power in the region. They're not a part of any conflict. They just react when they're directly involved. In this case, they shot down missiles that violated their airspace.

By downing Iranian missiles and letting the debris hit Jordan instead of letting them leave Jordanian airspace.

I lived in Iraq, I've seen Iranian missiles fly over where I lived before. They're extremely unpredictable. The technology they use for their weapons is unreliable, and because of this a lot of their missiles don't land where they're intended. This is why Iran sends massive waves of missiles one after the other even though it's very wasteful and expensive. They do it because they don't have the capability to conduct more efficient precision strikes. What this means is that Iranian missiles could hit anywhere, and they have hit Jordanian towns and cities many times before, which ended killing Jordanian civilians.

Virtually all of Jordan's cities and towns are located in the very west on the border with Israel/Palestine, and they're heavily concentrated in the the northwest. Here's an example population density map to show you how concentrated the country's population is. As you can see, virtually nobody lives in the eastern two thirds of the country, The Jordanian desert is basically inhabitable. It makes sense for Jordan to shoot down these missiles over the desert where nobody lives instead of shooting them down near population centers or taking the risk of having the missiles of fly over and praying that none hit their cities.

Stay out of it and don’t invite the US military in (hence making yourself a target), don’t let US military use your airspace, don’t protect Israel, don’t intervene. This isn’t hard. Whether you choose to accept it or not is up to you.

This is just a piss poor understanding of middle eastern geopolitics in general. The middle east doesn't work like Europe, countries aren't afforded a lot of options. It is an unstable region filled with war, religious extremism, tyrannical dictators, bad borders, and scarce resources.

Jordan is an inherently unstable country. Its borders don't make sense, around half of its population are refugees, they're boxed in by imperialist powers in all directions (Israel, Saudi Arabia/UAE, Iran, and Turkey) who all see the country as a part of their playground, and most of the surrounding countries in their position are doing way worse.

Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq have all done what exactly what you said, and look what that has brought them? They're all war torn failed states that are ravaged by proxy terrorist groups, ruthless dictators, civil wars, and foreign invasions. Jordan would be brain dead to go down the same path as them.

The smartest thing they could do is what they're doing now, which is basically being the Switzerland of their region. They have peaceful relations with all their neighbors, and they won't partake in any conflict that doesn't directly involve them in any way outside of diplomacy. This neutrality can only last if it's guaranteed by a powerful external power, and this happens to be the US in this case. Jordan is unique in it's neighborhood, but it's not alone globally. Countries like Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Japan, Oman, and so on all get to enjoy being neutral countries because they have US protection.

Also I like how my prediction of you here...

You seem like the type of person who will never concede anything no matter how wrong you are,

...ended up being a prophecy.

You seem like the type of person who will never concede anything no matter how wrong you are, but what I am telling you is the reality. Whether you choose to accept it or not is up to you.

Countries in general only look out for themselves. There's no "brotherhood" between countries. This is a cute idea that's used to push ideological narratives and diplomacy, but it's entirely superficial. Even the most loyal of alliances are based entirely in self-interest. No country anywhere, regardless of regime or ideology, is going to put itself in danger on the behalf of another country without gaining anything itself. That just doesn't happen.

In this case, Israel and Iran are bombing each other. Jordan is not involved. However, they happen to be located in the middle of the two. Israel is bombing targets in Iran by flying military aircraft over Syria and refueling there. They're not going through Jordan. Iran, on the other hand, doesn't have such capabilities, so they have been firing missiles directly from Iran towards Israel. The issue is that in order for the missiles to reach Israel, they have to fly over Jordan.

Iran and Jordan are not allies. Iran attacks are not coordinated with the Jordanian government, and they do not have permission to access Jordan's airspace. Iran fired missiles without warning or permission anyway. If Jordan was a more powerful country, this would be an act of war because it's a huge breach of the country's sovereignty and security. Iran can claim whatever it wants, it really doesn't matter what the intended targets for those missiles are, the reality is that any of those missiles could hit inside Jordan's borders. That is something that Jordan, like any other functional country, cannot ever allow to happen. It cannot let foreign missiles kill Jordanian citizens or destroy Jordanian infrastructure.

However, Jordan is a weak country, and they cannot go to war with a country more powerful than them nor do they have the capability to take down the missiles themselves. Jordan is aware of this, and they, like most other Arab countries in the middle east, have struck an alliance with the US as it's the only country that can protect them and is willing to do so. In exchange for allowing the US military to operate bases inside the country, the US will use it's resources to protect the country.

In this case, Iran announced ahead of time that they will launch missiles towards Israel, and so Jordan was warned that their airspace will be breached. Knowing this, the Jordanian government invoked their alliance with the US to cooperate on taking down any foreign projectiles illegally breaching their airspace... and so they did. Did they take down all the missiles? No, but they have to do something to at least to mitigate the risks that Jordan is facing to protect Jordanian cities and assets.

This isn't a part of some conspiracy, this is some common sense. Literally any country that is not a failed state would do the same thing. If Syria and Iraq were functional countries, they would've also shot down Iranian and Israeli aircraft and missiles breaching their airspace. I seriously don't understand what people like you think should happen, do actually think that countries like Jordan should sit back and have hundreds of missiles fly over their head without doing anything? That's the type of shit that would start revolutions and coups. No cause is noble enough for a country to sacrifice itself or put itself in real danger.

(Except Türkiye, I just think you’re wrong there, but intrigued to see your logic.)

Turkey traces it's modern identity to the late Ottoman Empire. The Turks aren't native to the region, they're originally from central Asia. Before the formation of the empire in the 15th century by about 400 years, the Turks came into the area uninvited and started colonized Anatolia. They formed little principalities and implemented islam as their law, and the locals, who were mostly Christian at the time, weren't too happy about it.

You see, islam is a very brutal ideology. It instructs it's followers to conquer all non muslims, force them to either convert or live as oppressed second class citizens under islam, and if they resist massacre them. In case of the latter, islam instructs that the men be beheaded, the women and girls taken as sex slaves, their property looted and distributed to muslims soldiers as spoils of war, and to destroy their culture entirely. It was so bad that Christians actually organized multiple crusades against them. The point of me telling you this, is that these were the predecessors to the Ottoman Empire, and when the Empire formed to unite the Turks, they used the same methods to rule and conquer.

Everywhere the Ottoman Empire went, they committed atrocities. From the fall of Constantinople to the end of the empire around WWI, they committed massacres, ethnic cleansing, genocides, cultural erasure, wide scale slavery, and oppression. It was so bad that virtually all of the countries surrounding modern day Turkey have their identities formed from how they survived the Ottoman onslaught.

While the Turks slowly expanded over time in Anatolia and they ruled areas far beyond it, they mostly inhabited central Anatolia. The areas around the Black sea and Mediterranean sea were mostly Greek, the areas to west in and around the Armenian highlands were inhabited by Armenians, the areas around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were Assyrian, and the areas to the south east were Kurdish, who were a part of Persia at the time. That means Anatolia was a very diverse places compared to today. So what happened?

Well, before WWI, the Ottoman Empire knew it was on it's last legs, and all the oppressed minorities in the empire wanted freedom and independence so they started making deals with foreign powers and started separatist movements. The Ottoman Empire's response was to straight up genocide them all. Between 1910 and 1925, the Ottoman empire started the Armenian genocide, the Greek genocide, and the Assyrian genocide. These were some of the worst atrocities in human history. They are so bad that they literally inspired Hitler. The Armenian genocide in particular was so bad that it was one of the two events that inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word "genocide" (the Holocaust was the other).

Notice, how I said the Ottoman empire "started" the genocides instead of just "committed"? This is because while these genocides were happening, the empire collapsed and was replaced a Turkish nationalist movement called The Young Turks. This movement was secular, liberal, democratic, and very genocidal because they continued the genocides with a passion. The reason for this was that the same people who ruled in the Ottoman Empire migrated over to The Young Turks.

The end results? The Greeks were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of Thrace and western Anatolia. The Armenians were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of eastern Anatolia, the Assyrians were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of southern Anatolia, and as a bonus, Turkey started oppressing and genociding the Kurds. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed in things like the Dersim and Zilan massacres. Not only that, but they also tried, and are still trying to culturally erase the Kurds.

Did you know it was illegal for Kurds to speak Kurdish, wear Kurdish clothes, have Kurdish names, or express Kurdish folklore until the 1980s? It was even illegal for them to call themselves Kurds, Turkey forced the name "mountain Turks" upon them. Even to this day, Kurdish is still illegal to be taught in schools and universities, it is still illegal to be spoken or used in the Turkish government, Kurdish celebrations and holidays are still banned, Kurdish political parties are still firmly banned. You think things got better since the 80s? Think again, because Turkey from the 90s to the current day has destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, displaced millions of Kurds, imposed "food embargoes" (read: engineered famines) on Kurdish areas, and they're going out of their way to occupy, destabilize, and destroy the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Syria to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state.

But we're not done yet, because there's another remnant of the Ottoman Empire that's relevant today. During Ottoman times, the island of Cyprus was occupied, colonized, and ruled by the Turks. When the Ottoman empire fell, the island was occupied by the British. The British decided to grand the island its independence, and along with Greece and Turkey, they signed an agreement saying that all 3 countries will be protectors of Cyprus that will help preserve it's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The reason why Greece was included was because most of the island's population was Greek and the island was Greek for most of history.

Regardless, during the 1970s, there was a fascist takeover that sought to get rid of Turkish influence on the island. As a response, Turkey invoked the agreement that they singed before and got rid of the fascists... but they never left. Instead, they illegal created a puppet state, that nobody but Turkey recognizes, that occupies around 40% of the island in clear violation of the treaty. The Turkish speaking Cypriots were against this and wanted reunification, and so Turkey decides to send Turks from Turkey to colonize the island. They've been increasing in numbers over the years, and now Turkey has basically annexed a part of another country.

We're still not done because Turkey isn't done with the Armenians because they officially deny the genocide, and they're still actively seeking to destroy Armenia as a country. They're THE biggest backer of the Azerbaijani dictator and his quest to complete the Armenian genocide. Ilham Aliyev has invaded Armenia multiple times, literally built racist anti-Armenian parks for children in the country, and has very recently ethnically cleansed 100k Armenians out of their lands. Azerbaijan, like Turkey, also denies the Armenian genocide but they are also proud of it.

People nowadays love complaining about Israel or China or whatever, but Turkey is far worse than all of them but nobody seems to care, but I digress. Why am I telling you all of this? It's because what I just told you IS the Turkish identity. All these atrocities that I told you? That's the core part of the Turkish identity. Turks are very proud of the conquests that the Ottoman Empire did and a big portion of the population want to see it restored. They are proud of the occupations, they are proud of the oppression, and they are VERY proud of the genocides they committed. If you talk to a Turk about the Armenian genocide or any other genocide they'll either flip out and either victim blame about those people brought genocide upon themselves or they'll just straight up say they're glad it happened.

This is obviously an oversimplification of Turkish history, but this is how Turkey came to be. The bloody and dark history is a part of the Turkish identity, and it is how the country came to be. It's still on going, and Turks are proud of it. But its not just them, this is how a lot of countries came to be and they all have similar nationalist mentalities. Atrocities just happen to be a big part of nation building.

Part of that due to the Spanish settlers marrying and having kids with indigenous peoples, and the metizos being a large part of the population, rather than US focused pure European ancestry without one drop of black/native blood. Meaning the US has a lack of tie to pre-settler culture and history that these nations don’t to the same degree.

This highly depends on the country. The Spanish Empire had an entire racial caste system that put races into a hierarchy of superiority. Just because it didn't work the same way as the American system, that doesn't mean it wasn't there. Latin America has a lot of racism going on and it isn't talked about enough. But that's besides the point, we're not talking about the cultural continuity or racial purity of new world countries, but rather how they came to be. All these countries exist as a result of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. They were all formed by the same 3-4 European empires during the same time.

Russia has had a long history of culture as well as imperial expansion. Yes, the people of Siberia and Central Asia have suffered a lot, but there’s a Russian identity that goes back over 1000 years anchored to (albiet mostly western Russia places and events).

You misunderstand Russian history. The modern Russian identity doesn't extend back 1000 years. The Kievan Rus isn't the start of the modern Russian identity, it's the start of the Eastern Slavic identity as a whole. Ukraine and Belarus also trace their roots back to the Kievan Rus. The modern Russian identity started with the formation of the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the 13th century, which on to occupy the northern half of what we today consider to be the Russian heartland.

Russia didn't began it's expansion until became the Russian Tsardom in the 16th century, which is interestingly around the same time as the age of exploration kicked off in Western Europe. From the 1500s to the 1700s, Russia expanded to it's borders to more or less match the current borders of the Russian federation. The places it conquered weren't Russian. Russia enacted campaigns of Russification where they would suppress, ban, and marginalize the native cultures and impose the Russian language, laws, version of Christianity, and customs on the people they conquered. They would then put Russians in charge of administration and have them oversee a settler colonialism campaign to shift the demographics to make it majority Russian. If a group is too big or too resistant they would genocide them through "deportations". This method was inherited by the next iterations of the Russian state such as the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation.

Russia has done conquered, massacred, genocided, deported, and oppressed the following groups of people since the creation of the Russian Tsardom:

• Circassians (one of the worst genocides in history)
• Chechens
• Ingush
• Crimean Tatars
• Volga Germans
• Kalmyks
• Balkars
• Karachays
• Meskhetian Turks
• Poles
• Lithuanians
• Latvians
• Estonians
• Finns
• Koreans
• Chinese
• Ukrainians
• Georgians
• Buryats
• Yakuts
• Evenks
• Nenets
• Chukchi
• Koryaks
• Aleuts
• Tuvans
• Kazakhs

Do you even begin to comprehend how comically long this list is? The absurd thing is that this isn't even the full list. You don't even hear about most of these people because Russia has mostly wiped them out or is still trying to. Also these atrocities didn't take place 1000 years ago, most of them happened within the past 200 years.

For Türkiye, Morroco, Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, I’m gonna need your notes to begin to comprehend what your point is with them - probably due to my own ignorance on their history.

Countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) had a very similar history to South Africa. They were all colonized by the British and had other European settlers in them who implemented a system of apartheid, displaced the natives, and implemented a certain degree of slavery. These eras ended similarly in all these countries, and they're even suffering from similar problems today.

Morocco is an interesting example. You see Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were not originally Arab, they were Berber/Amazigh. These people had their own language, religion, culture, and everything. The Arabs came in, started massacring them, enslaving them, erasing their culture, pushing them off their lands, and forcing islam and Arabic on to them. This process started long ago, but it is still on going to this day. These people are still persecuted. When the French came in to colonize the region, these people ended up being double colonized. The modern Arab states in the Maghreb region are built on the oppression, enslavement, colonization, and genocide of these people.

(Except Türkiye, I just think you’re wrong there, but intrigued to see your logic.

This deserves it's own comment, so I'll write my explanation there.

The answer is no. That's why militaries exist. Peaceful countries cannot exist without them having a strong military or a strong power with a strong military backing them. We live in a reality where people have infinite desires and needs but the world only has a finite amount of resources. There will always be competition for power because of it.

This is such a comically ignorant view. Most countries in the world have a similar history as the US. It's like you dingleberries think the US is the only country in history with slavery or conquest. This view shows that you have a myopic view of history.

Every single country in the New World is a product of European colonization, slavery, and erasure of Indigenous people. This is true from Canada all the down to Chile. In fact, this is actually more true in other countries because the US was a small part of the Atlantic slave trade and the Spanish and Portuguese empires made killing natives their favorite past time.

It's not just the new world, but this also applies to the old world. Countries like Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Australia, New Zealand, and the list goes on and on were had similar histories.

The reality is that this just how nation building is. Nations don't spring up out nowhere and magically gain land and sovereignty. Nations are built through conquest, hardships, exclusive sense of pride, and cultural homogeneity over time.

People on this site are seriously out of touch

Lmao imagine thinking that Iran under the regime of the mullahs has ever had any sort of media freedom