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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Eh, its like how love of the US/“patriotism” is kinda culturally baked into the US… Turks are very similar. My partner and I only ever had one fight, caused by a friend of mine who brought up Armenia early in our relationship. My partner is more liberal than I am, like almost Fox News strawman liberal, but having left Turkey a couple years prior was still deeply entrenched in “Turkey has never done anything wrong”. Complete genocide denial, which caused a bit of a blowout hearing a very liberal, freedom-to-the-people person say “what were we supposed to do?”. North occupied Cyprus, occupied Syria, Kurdistan are all deeply sensitive topics, even for the most western/liberal Turks. Luckily she chose to educate herself on Armenia, etc. and it’s not a problem anymore, but it was a journey.

    The whole history of democracy essentially being gifted to Turks by Ataturk, the creation and assignment of last names, etc. really results in some interesting cultural quirks. Amazing people, great food, but man do they hold onto grudges and history!


  • Eh… my partner is Turkish and I gotta say, there’s some truth to the meme. From a psychological perspective it’s tough to critique your tribe with an outsider, so not exclusively Turkish, but outside of Americans, Brazilians and Turks I’ve never met someone so willing to wave their own flag. Considering many expat Turks continue to vote for the parties that are causing the inflation, corruption, etc. the post is somewhat accurate (especially given the explicit callout to German Turks).

    Not every critique of a demographic’s behavior comes from ignorant western superiority.




  • I honestly think it’s the internet as a whole that’s done that to us.

    You used to be able to not know things, but now I’m expected to have encyclopedic knowledge of every factor going into any individual choice I make as though I’ve gotta min/max my life. I think the expectation that everyone needs to have an opinion on everything because “the information is available, just Google it!”, combined with the fact that we have a limited rate of knowledge consumption and limited bandwidth has led to people just skimming information. Shortest path to having an “informed” opinion on every topic, because God forbid you don’t know something online.

    I think in order to increase our media literacy we must return to partial ignorance.






  • That’s not true. Tankies love to shit on the US for “meddling” in Africa when a lot of the time its providing funding and weapons for regimes where the opponents are funded by Russia/Wagner/China. Depending on which way the wind blows, the US is either “overthrowing a legitimate regime” or “restoring the democratic process”.

    It’s a no win. Africa is too weak to stabilize by itself after centuries of meddling, and if the US goes hands-off, Russia and China will just economically enslave them via predatory loans, like how neoliberal policies economically enslaved South/Central America to the US. I’d trust the US installed people for their own populace over Chinese/Russia installed people, given the respective human rights records of all involved.

    Anyways, while 2003 onwards was a huge fuck up and absolutely abhorrent, Desert Shield/Storm was incredibly justified defending an ally under armed occupation and still gets shit on by Tankies.

    One man’s humanitarian mission to shut down a warlord is another man’s mission to overthrow a regime and install US-friendly government.