Heh. 3000 years of history says no.
There are various causes for the migrant crisis, the U.S. and Britain completely destabilizing the Middle East being a major one. Merkel let close to a million refugees into Germany, not into Europe as a whole. Just have a look at how many refugees the likes of Poland and England have taken in.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Canadian proverbs. “If crocodiles eat their own eggs, what would they do to the flesh of a frog?” I really like that one. I’ve liked it for a very long time. Longer than anyone, really.
I know it is tempting to blame everything on the West but the root cause of the Middle East crisis. Is the fucked up leaders in the region, clashing with a fucked up religion?
When you have ruthless genocidal leaders like Hussein, Qaddafi, Assad, and Khamenei the people at some point are going to rise up and rebel. While the rest of the region’s leaders are merely asshole dictators. Unfortunately, the most effective leaders of the rebellion turned out to be members of radical Islam sects, who are every bit as bloodthirsty and crazy as the dictators.
The Middle East hasn’t been stable for a thousand years. It was just like putting a pot of water with a well-sealed lid on a stove and turn the heat on high. The steam is going to go somewhere.
At this point, any sane person should be trying to leave the region. So I can’t blame Merkel for letting the refugee in, especially since Germany like most of Europe is suffering from decline birthrates and getting older.
One can temporarily delay the inevitable by building bigger and more elaborate pots, but as long as the heat is on high, it is just a matter of time before it explodes.
How many of those guys have we given weapons to at some point?
I thought it was pretty stable under the Ottoman Empire, no? (You could say it was the false stability of an order imposed from above, but I imagine that dynamic has occurred in a lot of places over the centuries…)
For the most part so far, the ideologues are winning. One revealing episode came as Trump weighed where he would travel this past Wednesday following an auto industry event in Michigan.
Would he jet to New York at the invitation of Canada’s progressive hero, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to attend a Broadway performance of “Come From Away,” a musical that showcases the generosity of foreigners?
Or would he fly to Nashville to dip his head in reverence at the gravesite of Andrew Jackson and yoke himself to the nationalist legacy of America’s seventh president?
Some of his New York-linked aides urged him to go to the play with Trudeau and Ivanka Trump, according to four senior Trump advisers. But Trump opted instead to follow his gut and heed Bannon’s counsel.
“Absolutely not,” the president said later of going to the play, according to one of the advisers.
Instead, Trump journeyed to Tennessee, where he laid a wreath at Jackson’s tomb to celebrate what would have been the former president’s 250th birthday and delivered a fiery speech.
Trump aides pointed to his deliberation over what was a banal scheduling matter as an example of the Bannon-Priebus axis prevailing, as it has on many policy fronts — from national security to the budget to climate.
Oh come on, he would never do this even if the alternative was virtually anything.
At least Pence had the balls to see Hamilton!
I’m really not in the “blame it all on the West” camp and of course most if not all of the regimes in the region can be characterised as oppressive. But the situation in Iraq and neighboring Syria is directly related to America’s latest and completely unneccessary Middle East adventure that cracked the pot in that particular area.
Very much so. Before that it was also stable until the Monguls kind of messed it all up.
The real disruption in the area happened after the First World War when the colonial powers started drawing random lines over everything and needing oil.
Is it all the fault of the West? Not really. The West definitely played a big part though. I mean we were fiddling around with shit until the 80’s and the Iran-Iraq War.
Arguably during the First World War. The Ottoman Empire may well have survived were it not for WW1.
The Ottoman fall was no doubt catalyzed by the war, but IMO it was inevitable with or without war because the Ottoman Empire had grown ever more corrupt and weak over its last hundred years. Even if Victoria had still been alive to enforce her “no fighting, kids” rule on Europe, I think the Ottomans would have fallen apart on their own soon enough.
Man, it’s almost like he’s not very bright and really easy to manipulate or something.
So here’s the thing. I do think that Trump, or at the very least a bunch of people in his campaign, were recorded. But they weren’t recorded because they were being surveilled, but because they were repeatedly talking to foreign entities that were under surveillance. The claims by Team Trump and the intelligence community only seem to be at odds because of this not-so-minor detail. All the screaming about how they were surveilled is just digging a deeper hole for them to get buried in if this turns out to be true.
Hopefully we start to get some answers tomorrow at the hearing tomorrow morning.
That’s exactly what happened.
What is this referencing?
It’s about this: https://storify.com/max_read/roger-stone-is-though-thoroughly-burned-by-spookpe?utm_source=embed_header
which was a commentary on this pic of Stone: https://twitter.com/stoneonstyle/status/823676971389427713
I dunno, dressing as a Great Depression-era rich man is probably the most appropriate thing one could wear to Trump’s inauguration.