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What will happen in 2019?
Make some predictions about what will happen in 2019. They can be about anything, anyone, anywhere. Try to explain why you think something will occur.
Make some predictions about what will happen in 2019. They can be about anything, anyone, anywhere. Try to explain why you think something will occur.
I expect a recession driven by the inability of corporations to continue servicing their debt. Working people will get shafted, the rich will get bailouts, and the left will still be more concerned with brown people and queers than with overthrowing capitalism.
So it goes.
nice post, thx.
dems pretending to be leftists is part of the reason why the overton window in america is so fucked.
Equality and justice for brown people and "queers" is just as worthy a cause as overthrowing capitalism. The Trump administration continues to marginalize both groups and both face injustice from employers, landlords, and law enforcement among others. You make it sound like their concerns aren't important.
It very well might, but we can do both at the same time. People who say stuff like the comment I responded to make it sound a lot like the issues facing people of color and LGBT people aren't important.
May I suggest we take this discussion to its own topic? We've drifted out of the lane of "short-term predictions for fun and conversation", into how best to defeat capitalism. I'm sure we've all got things to say on the subject, but this isn't really where they belong.
Did anyone actually support Gina Haspel just because she was a woman? I keep seeing that come up (usually for Hillary Clinton) and I haven't seen any evidence that that's a thing any more than someone voting for someone just because they're white or Christian is.
"The left is more concerned with brown people and queers than overthrowing capitalism" doesn't sound tone deaf at all to you? It sounds to me like "we're both left-wing, you should support this thing I support and stop worrying about this thing you support" which is insulting.
How is support for women, PoCs, and LGBT+ people only applied to wealthy people? No, MeToo didn't help a lot of people, but it's a start. Just because it didn't help everyone doesn't mean it shouldn't have happened. I want economic justice too, but I also want social justice and you and the person I responded to are telling me that that's less important and I disagree.
I'm sorry, but overthrowing capitalism will always outweigh concepts like "racism" and "homophobia" imo
That stuff will pretty much cease to exist without capitalism anyway
How on earth did you come to that conclusion?
We're going to have to agree to disagree then. Racism and homophobia aren't just concepts. We can work towards making sure no LGBT kid gets kicked out of their house for example.
Agreed on the recession, but how the heck is the left going to build a coalition strong enough to take on capitalism without insisting on equity for brown people and queers (as well as the rest of the 99%)?
I somehow managed to pull this one off in 2018. I'm sure you'll get it.
Watch the Fediverse. It's slowly and steadily growing.
I feel like if it ever does get as big as facebook/twitter than it will be just as horrible. Maybe it might be more resistant to horrible companies milking it for money (maybe not though) but even with that its half the users of social media that make it horrible and the fediverse does not do much to stop bad human behaviour. There will still be shills, fake news, edited selfies and all the other stuff that makes social media terrible. I am of the opinion that the only way to have a functioning social media is to severely limit the size of groups, something that lets you communicate with your friends group but doesn't allow a shitty joke to blow up and be seen by millions of people and lose you your job.
I go back and forth on this. One of the problems with the major social media platforms is that their every design and UX decision is structured around shoving ads in your face. They're built from the ground up to do this. Right now, the Fediverse knockoffs are aping many of these same conventions (including how Tildes apes Reddit). It's good that the ad focus is gone as a business model, but the UX and interaction paradigms spawned by the logic of ad-driven business models haven't been addressed..
I would prefer it if we could go back and get modernized versions of the older, web-based internet communications platforms, which were already basically federated just because of the nature of the web. PHP Bulletin Board forums, IRC channels, java based chat rooms, etc. were how things worked back then. Interactions across the web were smaller scale. Social networking was more about groups of people talking amongst themselves, usually developing personas and reputations within small and managably sized communities with barriers between who belongs inside and who belongs outside.
The ad driven social networks, on the other hand, emphasize one-to-many communication. You're not chatting with a group of people, you're broadcasting to an audience which is a completely different paradigm. Even your conversations wind up being 1 on 1 rather than a group of people talking to each other because what you check are you notifications rather than keeping track of where a discussion is going.
What got in the way was poor discoverability, technical complexity, and the challenge of managing identity across all these various services. You would usually need to lurk for a while before you even figure out what a forum or chat room is like, so people wouldn't feel comfortable barging in. You would have to register separately for each and every forum which is enough inertia to block people from participating. It took technical knowhow to set one up, so lots of communities couldn't organize this way in the first place.
Sites like Facebook handle all this for you. Everyone is on it, you can flit from any group you want all in one place without any friction of registering for anything. They basically work like an internet driver's license and identify you wherever you go if you let them, which is really quite handy if you can trust the one doing it to not be a creep.
It would be nice to have a version of the social internet, the one that existed before Facebook and Reddit ate it all, where a lot of those perks were taken care of but we got to retain the small-scale community focus rather than the broadcasting focus.
I've also been thinking that a new, Youtube-like platform is needed. If the creators could learn from the mistakes of Vimeo and Dailymotion, a new video platform could be quite successful.
Ever hear of Peertube?
I think I've read about it a long time ago, and managed to forget. Just checked out the page. The "trending" page for some reason is full of videos older than 10 months. Searched for "news", and the search spit out exactly 0 results. Sad to see an unsuccessful project.
All of this may be true, but it's irrelevant. The Fediverse is going to happen, with or without normies and "content creators", because it is already happening. Every time there's a data sharing scandal on a corporate silo, or a censorship scandal like the recent purge of adult material on Tumblr, people look to the Fediverse as an alternative. They don't all stay, but a few people stick around every time.
The Fediverse's growth is purely organic precisely because there's no way to turn a profit off of it.
PS: Self-styled "content creators" can go fuck themselves. If they aren't willing to call themselves artists, writers, musicians, or directors, then they're worthless and so is their work.
Please contain your angst. You only get to define worth for yourself.
Entertainment has value. It might not have any for you. But it has for me, and for many others. I follow channels that arent neither of "artists, writers, musicians, or directors", like AvE, like some news podcasters, like the Crazy Framer, the Primitive Technology, many recipes channels, and many others that bear no artistic expression whatsoever, but are joyful or useful to watch. But purely "content" oriented productions, they have value too. That you or I in particular don't appreciate it has no value tho.
I labelled this as noise, but then it was unfair to do so just for the last paragraph. But that last paragraph is an annoying attack on people that are sharing some stuff and / or trying to make a living.
Incorrect. If they were "worthless" youtube wouldn't be making them millionaires.
I think you're mistaking lucrative for valuable. YouTube's ability to profit from the crap PewDiePie uploads doesn't prove that PewDiePie creates anything genuinely worthwhile.
Maybe you should be more specific when making sweeping generalizations about people. Being able to profit from something is what I would call the definition of "worth something".
Thirding what others are saying. I'm not adding much to the conversation here but I wanted to drive the point that:
You're under the impression that just because people arrive somewhere, they stay forever. The "fediverse" may be gaining new users, that doesn't mean its usage is growing.
God, we've had it so long though. It would be really unfortunate if this long into a sound being around it got even bigger and that space got even more oversaturated than it already is. I would say that I also think it won't blow up more because it's already old and stale, but I don't know...I probably would've guessed the trap sound would've moved back to being a niche southern thing for the past several years but it clearly has legs far beyond what I would've expected. Maybe the genre is just content with moving slowly right now.
I think I'm willing to say "something big and new will happen in hip hop to shake things up," but maybe I'm just making the same mistake I have the past few years.
US politics.
High certainty:
In 2015 I predicted Warren would win the 2020 elections. I'm still riding that bet, but the arrival of O'Rourke on the scene makes her chances much slimmer. We'll see how Beto handles himself during his campaign but, given his latest one, I fully expect him to be able to get the democratic nomination for 2020.
Lower certainty:
Tech:
...and then shut it down in favour of Play Music (which will be rebranded to Google Music) within two years...
… then start five more different competing music streaming services: one for family, one for businesses, one specifically for music videos, one that's only ever released in brazil, and one that integrates directly in the Google Assistant; then promptly remove any other music integration in the Google Assistant; then shut that last one down because it's not popular enough, leading them to have to do a "spring cleaning" three years down the line, shutting everything down and merging it all into YouTube.
… wait, sorry, that's their instant messaging strategy.
They're already shutting down Play Music and replacing it with YouTube Music.
Soon to be shut down and replaced by Youtube One Google Red Music
You'd be surprised! Sanders-Warren see eye to eye on many things, but their supporters are pretty rabid (Sanders supporters especially) and want their candidate, not the other one. O'Rourke is far less of a socio-liberal, and more of a european centrist (closer to Macron), which makes him an easy target for many people.
I get and feel you on Hillary though. If I had been American in 2016, I would have been livid when voting.
I agree with this. The "pocahontas" shit diaqualifies her from being able to run a serious campaign. It's all her opponent will talk about and it is impossible for her to overcome. We need a candidate that doesn't come with their own set of baggage from day 1.
Sorry, I'm going to be blunt here. This attitude sucks. I get that none of the candidates were your preferred choice (they weren't mine either), but they were what we were stuck with. So you have to suck it up and pick one. You voted for every other position, so obviously care about how your life is governed. It makes no sense whatsoever why you would leave that box blank.
Hillary Clinton did not steal the election from Bernie Sanders. He lost by 3 million votes. Did she and the DNC play dirty? Absolutely. But that didn't change the outcome of the election. Bernie didn't even try to beat her. All he wanted to do was get his message out and push Hillary to adopt his policies, which she did.
You failed to explain to me how those actions accounted for 3 MILLION VOTES for her.
I am real.
Bernie sabotaged his own campaign. He didn't bother showing up until 2016, didn't show up on super Tuesday, failed to understand the primary rules, and did absolutely nothing to court minority voters. All of that can easily be explained by the fact that he didn't want to win.
No way Warren can beat Trump, he already beat her on the Native American ancestry issue. Taking a DNA test was the stupidest thing she could have done, then claiming that the minuscule match from a completely different tribe proved her right made it even worse. He played her and she fell for it.
Bernie is the only way to beat Trump.
This type of mindset is exactly what I mean by infighting.
Trump, by 2020, will in all likelihood be ridiculously easy to displace. The whole idea of the GOP letting impeachment happen would be to have Pence in charge and make it easier on them to retain presidency in 2020-2024.
If Trump is running in 2020, Bernie, Warren and O'Rourke all have excellent chances to beat him. Is Gore still interested? He probably would too!
Even if O'Rourke or Gore (or pretty much any corporate dem) could win, they are really bad ideas, and will just lead to someone worse to Trump popping up down the line, the same way Obama led to Trump.
We need to move left, at the very least pass Medicare for All. Warren is better than most, but after 2016 I really don't trust her to actually be progressive in office.
You are way overestimating the effect of anything on Trump. Since his campaign announcement it's basically been non-stop "beginning of the end" for Trump. It's never going to happen, Trump will always have a strong base. The only way to get rid of him is to have a good candidate against him. Not any dem will do, and that includes Warren.
Infighting is needed because the neoliberal consensus in the party is what led to Trump, and it's only going to get worse if it isn't dropped. Warren is a compromise between Bernie style progressivism and Obama style neoliberalism, and that's just not good enough.
Trump certainly has proven himself to defy the laws of … well, defy laws in general actually. But, don't mistake "his base" for "a majority voterbase". Trump lost the popular vote in a year of extreme voter apathy. He won the election because of rabid support on one side, apathy on the other. One of these variables has very much changed.
It doesn't matter how strongly his fanbase believes in him, it will not be enough for 2020, unless he retains the full backing of the entire GOP.
Obama himself railed at length about this style of "perfect or nothing" mindset. Politics is a game of small gains, everywhere, all the time. It's a game of progress. You make some small progress, somewhere. It's never gonna be perfect especially in a country with over half a billion people. But it's something.
It's not enough. The lack of real progress under Obama is what caused Trump, and a continued lack of progress will cause someone worse.
Bernie isn't even perfect, he's like the bare minimum. Anything less it detrimental.
No… no, absolutely not. There's an absurd amount of variables that went into what caused Trump. Decades of pent-up racism, a broken electoral college system, a broken first-past-the-post system, absurdly right-shifted politics, a culture of celebrity worship, profit-driven media, many highly corrupt people in positions of power, citizens united, …. This is without getting into the russian influence and what not.
And there was a lot of progress under Obama, it's just that not all of it was necessarily agreeable by everyone, or even visible.
I'm curious what progress you think was made. At best we recovered from the recession and are right back where we were before. Obamacare was a horrible compromise mainly intended to stop actual progress on healthcare. We did progress in number of drone strikes and deportations I guess.
You can thank Bill Clinton's embrace of neoliberalism for that, and Obama just continued it.
But it is. How many people stayed home or voted Green because Obama didn't help them and Clinton was promising to be more of the same? Enough to cost Clinton Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. When the left fails the people, the right prevails.
It's not the only reason, but it's a pretty big reason. When people are struggling to get by and you have one side saying everything is fine and we don't need to change anything (and actively opposing change by opposing Bernie) and the other side saying they are going to "make things great again", who do you think the people are going to choose?
Man, if this were any other day I'd engage the conversation a bit more than this, but I'm pretty tired with the family festivities :)
I believe there's an issue in your line of thought which will make argumenting this very difficult. Namely, you're far too willing to make sweeping statements about something incredibly complex (8 years of presidency). That you ask "what progress" was made is telling. If you asked what visible progress was made that'd be something else, but it's in reply to my assertion that not all of it is visible/agreeable.
You need to understand something: Before the 2016 elections, Obama had a 90% Approval rating amongst democrats. After the election, he was up another 5% to 95% approval rating. This is absurdly high and completely blows this idea out of the water that "people stayed home because of obama".
On both sides of the aisle, people stayed home because of Hillary. On both sides, people voted because of Trump. This is not a situation you want to be in, especially with Trump in a country which has a lot of pent-up racism.
I'm not here to argue about whether anyone's politics are good or bad, but please reflect on this: I predicted infighting amongst democrats/liberals. And here you are, fighting it out with someone who's probably more liberal than you, trying to argue for your pet candidate over another, to someone who can't even vote in the US elections. Noteworthy.
I think what it really came down to in that election was establishment vs anti-establishment. Hillary is as hardcore 'establishment' as it is possible to be, a twenty-plus year legacy candidate who campaigned like it was still 1994 and wore her ties to wall street and the beltway like a badge. Trump appeared to be the opposite, though we all know better now. People wanted to vote against the establishment, simple as that. They still do, probably even more now.
Protip for any political party. If one of your dark horse candidates is regularly filling football stadiums, and the anointed one can barely fill up a gymnasium, take a cue from the crowd and pay attention to where the real enthusiasm is.
If the democrats run anyone with a whiff of 'establishment' about them, we'll see a repeat of 2016, simple as that. Frankly, I doubt they'll learn from their past mistakes.
Aye that's part of what I mean by "Democrats stayed home because of Hillary". She's a great politician but boy does she not know how to inspire a room let alone a crowd.
I do believe Sanders would have won against Trump. At the same time, something I wrote at the time of the election which I also still believe is that Trump, much as it's going to suck during his tenure, is something America needs to experience in order to get past it. Had Sanders been elected there would have been a Trump or Trump-like in 2024, or 2028.
The Obama administration was crippled by the extreme partisanship that developed during it, and a Sanders presidency would have fared even worse at the time. Trump, in the long run, is (politically) awful for Republican and good for Democrats.
My personal view of the coming decades: I envision a reversal of roles between Democrats and Republicans, much like what happened a century ago. I wrote at length in another medium about this; my theory is that the GOP will become fringe and be the new alt-right; many republicans will switch to the Democratic party, shifting it more right-wing; and we'll see a split in the Democratic party with a new "Liberal" party which, with any luck (and maybe some voting reform…), will see enough democrats switching to it to make it a strong contender.
A shift like this would shift american politics to be overall more left-wing and bring them closer to "the norm"; as any european knows, US politics are absurdly right-shifted.
I'm not liberal, I'm a leftist. Liberals suck. Fighting a liberal isn't even infighting, it's necessary for actual progress.
Given the ten different definitions of both those words, is that really a hill you want to be climbing...
Bernie couldn't even beat Clinton. And no, it wasn't rigged. He lost by 3 million votes. The DNC played dirty, but didn't change the outcome.
Even ignoring what the DNC did, Bernie was basically unknown before 2015 and still managed to do well. Now he is very well known and the most well liked politician in the country, as well as the standard for anyone on the left. Even centrists are copying his rhetoric because they know it's what's needed to win, even though they'll drop it like Obama did.
Right now he's polling behind only Joe Biden, who's numbers are entirely based on Obama. As soon as actual campaigning starts it will become obvious that Joe Biden isn't Obama. Between that, him being creepy uncle touchy, and the huge centrist field, Bernie has a pretty good chance. But someone like Warren trying to get Bernie voters is worrying.
When it comes to Trump, you just have to look at 2016. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania the gap between Trump and Clinton was less than the number of Green voters. The Green party got a huge boost from 2008 and 2012, Bernie voters who didn't vote Clinton. Combine that with people who stayed home because neoliberalism has failed them and Bernie has a pretty good chance against Trump.
While I agree with much of that, I don't see impeachment happening. We're already two years in, with no urgent need for impeachment hearings that will never get past a trial in the Senate, leaving him in office and his base extremely motivated. His approval numbers would likely soar, at least among Republicans, who will see it as a moral victory and a minor mandate. Mueller's report may change all of that, but with a Supreme court now stacked against indictment (which is exactly what an impeachment passing the House means, but we might as well disregard that), I don't see it happening.
I don't see Mueller's report going much past summer. Congressional investigations may turn up things in the meantime that will change that, but he's reported to already be wrapping things up, unless that's a bad report, which it might well be because there have been basically zero leaks out of his office.
Yeha that's why I'm saying I doubt they would end in 2019. I don't think it's as unlikely as you claim though. I do expect GOP support to go no other way but down as they get faced with how toxic the Trump name is.
Mueller's team has been pretty much certified leak-free as you said. Anyone who claims they know what he's doing is lying.
FFS Liz you couldn't wait one more day to announce?
Turkey, March 31st 2019, late evening. The elections of mayors for provinces and towns/cities, and of muhtars for neighbourhoods and villages will be over. We'll see if the huge and spontaneaous economical crisis will affect the votes of Turkey's idiocracy. Last elections, AKP, Erdoğan's party, allied with MHP, the nationalist fascists, and the (rather unexpected) 11% that party obtained got him the victory. MHP was one of the fiercest groups in opposition. Then in 2015 something happened, and they've been BFFs with the ruling party since then.
The economical crisis is completely politically-induced. The extreme corruption, nepotism, menefreghismo, and groupthink lead us here. Reasonable people are flocking away from Turkey. Prices are going up by multiples, not fractions (Lamy ink used to cost TRY15, now it's ~75, for example). The murder of farming and animal products industry made us dependent on imports for all foodstuffs. The construction boom helped with that, and also is messing up lots of our nature reserves. The greed of the majority is eating the country away.
So we'll see if AKP+MHP will manage to get as much municipalities as they used to, and if they'll be able to cross the 50% threshold in votes. Voters who ask for peace, democracy and honesty are left out in the cold, becaure neither the rulers nor the opposition represent any virtues ATM. I expect the ruling coalition to lose a significant amount of votes nevertheless. AKP is so big because it's the melting pot of the right in Turkey, whereas left is irremediably fragmented. Apparently right-wingers can trade more off just for their hunger for power.
I hate having to care about this stuff. But welp, these folks don't just do their crime behind the curtains, they get into our lives, all our personal spaces, and invade every centimetre squared of it. They don't want a share of the pie, they want all of it, and then to enslave the cook that made the pie for themselves, and also to seize the possession of the house in the kitchen of which that cook baked the pie, and then also the shops from where the ingredients came from.
Buckle your seatbelts - it's going to be a bumpy ride.
That would be delightful news, but I'd be very surprised. I think it more likely that Wendelstein beats every durational and temperature record for sustaining plasma and finds a real path forward on our confinement issues - fulfilling the goals of that experiment late in the year by achieving the first real steady-state operation of a plasma confinement system. That means it can handle plasmas indefinitely until being turned off, rather than losing containment as all prior experiments have done. If that happens, it's finally time to talk commercial reactors and take fusion seriously. W7x won't be able to break even, since it's not a real reactor. It's just a prototype core, one piece of the final puzzle. The first test reactor made based on W7x's discoveries, that'll be the one to break even, and then some. :)
Fuuuck. Can I have euthanasia as a healthy 25yo, or do I need to take a cab to that cliff close to where I'm living? That's dark, mate.
Personally, I don't expect that. The March elections are a distraction big enough at the moment. If, as I expect, the AKP+MHP votes remain below 50%, and maybe if AKP loses Istanbul and Ankara (CHP's Ankara mayoral candidate is a strong one, plus the previous AKP mayor was... no good, times 100), then internal tensions will make everybody forget about anyone else. The ruling coalition will surely try to seize mayoral positions after the election through the abuse of law. Then, the best outcome would be early parliamentary & presidential elections, the worst, well, I'd rather not think about it. Also, we don't have poor economic performance, our economy is straight out collapsing, so I don't think we have significant resources to wage war on Kurds outside Turkey or anybody else in that regard. Even if the ruling coalition wins the mayoral elections, I then don't expect them to culminate tensions, because they can't survive bad economy any longer. They're fearing a new right wing party. Their media outlets are continuously talking about that and defamating that before it starts.
Thanks for taking the time to describe a more likely scenario.
I really, really shouldn't have written this list in the first place - it's just existing trends with a selection of outcomes, generally biased for the worse because that's the way I was seeing things. Don't try to predict the future with a migraine.
Hey, hope that you're feeling better now!
Well, the scenario you put about Turkey is quite likely too. I don't think the Kurds will be the ones to spark violence, neither HDP nor PKK nor YPG, because that'd serve the needs of the Turkish ruling coalition in Turkey, and would be a bloodshed outside, because it's a proper army vs. some organised rebellion at the end. Hopefully all these people will come to their senses, but, well...
I don't contest the truth or possibility of what you've written BTW, sadly for some of them, they're all likely. I really like 8, 9, 15, and maybe 2 so that EU will become a bit more stronger (I think if no deal goes through, the UK will split into two, and both halves will end up applying to become EU members again; and maybe Northern Ireland joins the Republic of Ireland).
I'm doing fine now, thanks, but the whole list was considerably darker than it would have been otherwise. I'd have included more exciting science/tech/medicine items, and a few sunny (literally) predictions about renewable energy penetration, pollution reductions, and networking technologies (1 Tb/s circuits, anyone?). The flying cars are already available, though this one seems a likely prospect for wider use.
No, I don't think the Kurds will do anything, but it's only too easy to fabricate a provocation. "Terrorism" is now a time-honored excuse to create a distraction, particularly since the Russian "managed democracy" tactics have proven effective for other authoritarians.
Wow, that car is indeed interesting, thanks for linking it.
WRT Kurds, we lived through it during the 2015 elections actually. The months of violence was started on a very dubious incident of murder, all escalated in a matter of days into streaks of bombings of supposed PKK places beyond the south border and rebellion in Turkey. AKP got ~40% in June, then tricked the resulting parliament, with the help of MHP, to a new election in November, and got way more votes. Their PM candidate could not form a govt, but Erdogan did not allow the opposition to try (a process which was based on convention rather than law, unfortunately). Just as we recovered from that and the streak of ISIS attacks, the 2016 coup attempt happened and the mess of today came about... Sad things.
I guess if you're a fan of alternate histories, the real turning point was the missed opportunity for Turkey to join the EU. It was the cusp of alignment either with "modernity" (i.e. secular economic liberalism), or the Islamic world. I don't know that it was ever realistic for this to happen, but the ongoing war between Turkey and the Kurdish independence movement has always been an obstacle.
I've got a generalized curiosity about how people of Turkish nationality feel about their global status, role in the Umaah, prospects for the nation in the future, and so on.
That's something I have given quite a bit of thought, and I find that it has two sides to it. As I lived my teens throughout '00s, we'd watch this ambivalent, schizophrenic process of EU membership, with a vague understanding of its history since decades before. We'd have hope for it, but we'd also struggle to see how Turkey would be compatible with it, in the mean time Doublethinking that Turkey was a natural candidate for the EU.
Turkey joining the EU could've, and probably would've been very useful to both sides if it took place before the current government. Could've helped stop Turkey's corruption grow to unmanageable levels, sort out the situation of Kurds, tame the right, allow democracy to really take root. The ever-dragging and humiliating process of accession allowed the disapproval and even hate of the West take root instead. People were frustrated. Visas caused (and still cause) inequality. A potential economical boom in Turkey could've helped € and the EU itself, while setting a precedent for the Middle East and Asian Muslim countries. Turkey would've been way more closer to the west, and way more stable, and more powerful economically. But fascism and corruption on Turkey's side and racism and nationalism on the EU's stalled the process, and it ended up being a loss for everyone on both sides.
Kurdish independence movement was always rigged to blow. It started out in the days of extreme fascism here, and what it claims is always vague and complex. There are Kurds that want independence, then those who want a federal Turkey, and those who only want rights regarding their culture and language. The votes HDP gets includes all of these. Not all Kurds support PKK, which is different from HDP. Furthermore, the claimed area's population is a homogenous blend of Turks, Kurds (which are divided into secular and religious, the latter being further divided into Shia and Sunna), Arabs, and other smaller entities, which all have their diverging interests. PKK is a violent organisation, and their conduct obstructed discussion for decades. OTOH, 80s and 90s Turkey was determined to fabricate Turks out of any person out there, after the political violence of the 70s and the trauma of the coup, which installed a fascist constitution to ensure such conduct. Nevertheless, an independent Kurdistan will have a population composition that's the inverse of Turkey's current situation, and will have to deal with the issues that plagued Turkey for decades.
I'm from Turkey and would happily respond to all your quesitons. Personally, though, I don't identify with religions, nations, nationalities or ethnicites, but I can still inform you about my observations and my past feelings when I did consider myself a Turk and a Muslim.
I'm grateful for your thoughtful and in-depth reply!
You mention corruption - that, fragile democracy, "weak" human rights, and "excessive" government debt were among the ostensible reasons Turkey didn't easily qualify for EU membership.
I'd come to the same conclusion about the racism and nationalism, though - that after 9/11 and other attacks, no Western polity was going to welcome a majority-Muslim country with open arms. [Actually, that's just one of the ways in which Osama bin Laden succeeded in his stated goals.]
To some extent, the European Union was a technocrat's dream of federation, mainly about open trade and economic integration, without much thought for (or an intentional attempt to obliterate) traditional nationalities and ethnic identities. Turkey's rejection and special scrutiny is also unsurprising when most of the current EU members share strongly Western Christian (whether Catholic or Protestant) histories and identities. [Hungary, Poland, and other former Communist countries are a special case with fault lines which Russia is working to exploit.]
The EU hasn't done much to moderate corruption, economic instability, human rights violations, or perform many of the other governance functions of a satisfactory administrative state... It had some well-functioning economies and political frameworks. Through wishful thinking, the technocrats assumed that the strong EU partners would uplift the weak ones by open exchange of people and money. It's still more of a free-trade and currency union than an unified framework of rights-based governance, and that's going to be its downfall.
I don't know much about Kurdish history and current political/religious alignments, but I'm aware Kurdish people have majority presence and territorial claims in parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Armenia. They've been brutally repressed in just about all of those places, which drives further separatist extremism. It's another of the little quirks of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a colonial gift of territorial boundaries which keeps on giving. :-/
In all honesty, my understandings of all this stuff are pretty shallow and driven by the kind of idle curiosity that leads me into strange places like Tildes.
...and, I'm thinking this deserves it's own thread. Would you care to do the honors, or shall I?
You're very welcome!
I try to avoid politics and harshly limit my social media consumtion (I've found a gestapo to help me with procrastination, and trying it out these days), but I'd be glad to participate in such a topic if you created one.
That's all brought about by corruption. Turkey in 1940s could become a very good place, but the corruption of the landlords disallowed that. See "köy enstitüleri", it's one epic and tragedic tale of good versus evil, and the linked article barely scratches the surface. The greed of the rich and powerful, and the ignorance of the poor brough about the days we're living. All the human rights issues and whatnot are for covering up corruption and holding on to power most of the time, if not all the time.
It's Ottomans, actually. The land in what we can call the Middle Eastern Highlands was, and AFAIK still mostly is, not made up of contiguous territories that belong to ethnic entities. It was/is a heterogenous mish mash of villages. There aren't many Armenians and Syriacs left there today, but back in the day, it was all like a package of M&Ms. Still today, no matter what the side of a hypothetical state in the area, it'd involve significant and widely spread out minorities. AFAIU, it the Ottoman times, people were moved often, internal migrations came in huge waves, and land would be assigned with war veteran landlords to people based on their stereotypical occupations and their religions. Kurds were mostly nomadic, and would generally deal with livestock and inhabit higher lands (IDK how much preferential or forced). In the lower lands Turkish speaking Sunnah Muslims would do agriculture. Armenians and other Christians, and also the Shia had to take what was left, the latter (IIUC) were more involved in farming, and the former would take up commerce and artisanship (which appears to me that it was generally looked down upon by the Muslims or Muslim rulers). Sevan Nişanyan has spent many years studying this historically and etymologically, and his blog has lots of insight into the situation. Unfortunately, though, it's all in Turkish only. I'm not aware if he has a place where he writes in English, but even just looking at the maps he provides there, you can notice the interspersedness of the population.
Kurds would go along way better with the Ottomans, because they were Muslims, and they'd help providing irregulars to the Ottoman forces and enforce their rule in the "Region". They'd often be granted many concessions. Some time in the 19th century tho, they came to be stripped of such concessions, and as nationalism and westernisation took hold, they became less and less relevant to the empire, causing fury. There was a wave of Ottomanisation and the Ottoman nation project (the name Ottoman comes from the emperor Osman I, and is nothing but the name of the dynasty, like Hapsburgs), which failed, and then the Turkish nationalism came about. The Ottoman/Turkish nationalism failed violently (1890s, 1915), but a new wave of nationalism, the Republican one took hold, and Turkey was formed. This new nationalism involved an identity above ethnicity, a bit like the American identity, and that still remains today to form a dichotomy of racist, ethnic nationalism and one that's based on secular, statal identity. In all of its forms, though, such nationalism wanted "one nation, one people, one language", and that's what brought about the new more-ethnic-than-religious opression on minorities. Sykes-Picot was "the salt and pepper" on top of this, as we say in Turkish. My maternal origins in fact involve Aleppo and Baghdad, among others, both outside current day Turkey.
That's not even a prediction - that's happening right now! :P
The landing hasn't happened yet, and given the failure rate for launches, is by no means a certainty - therefore, a prediction for 2019. 🤗
I'll throw out two of my own predictions.
There will be a successful no confidence vote in the UK government early in the new year. After a hung general election where parties won't cooperate we get the terrible 'No Deal' Brexit.
There will be a huge breakthrough in battery technology.
You say this kind of offhandedly, but this is important. It would change everything. Every year I'm hopeful this will be the year and every year I am disappointed. Anything behind your prediction other than wishful thinking?
The way I read it was as a riff on the fact that there are typically multiple such "breakthroughs" reported in the media every year, exactly zero of which have thus far resulted in an improvement to consumer devices.
The batteries we have today are way better than those from 10 years ago. There might not be an over night revolutionary change but there has been improvement.
The thing about media breakthroughs is they report it like someone has invented something and its ready to use right now when in reality its just that someone found some interesting test results and calculated that in theory if developed further could have good results but there is still 5 years of research left before it will end up in anyones device.
Aren't we getting constant gradual improvements on batteries?
Yeah I know how important it would be for society as a whole, would fix so many problems at a stroke.
It's mostly a feeling though. I look at the timeline of battery development and we seem due for a breakthrough. We'll keep getting incremental gains in current lithium-ion (and a few other types) but really the next step is lithium-air/sulfur or something brand new.
With all the time, money and brainpower being poured into research I'm confident we'll get there soon.
I will get significantly fatter. Starting now.
But will you switch to a mrbigger username?
Hahaha... maybe! That's because of the TV show Friends, you know? From when Rachel catches Monica calling Chandler by "Mr Big" when they where having a secret affair.
Why?
Cause food good
First stage of whatsapp ads will demonstrate facebook's ability to keep on trucking worldwide inspite their problems in the US and GDPR violations in the EU. Any viable competition will continue to be crushed or assimilated.
Apple will continue to close down their ecosystem even further with new hardware that's even less hackable, more restrictions in the app store and greater profits from licensing and services. Basically milking this paradigm where you have to pay Apple if you want to be where the money is.
Also shouldn't this topic be tagged with
spoiler? :)The Jan. 5 meme aside; I do think the Queen is gonna pop this year for sure. The longer into the year she makes it, the more I'll be convinced she's either a body double (with aging makeup, to save the country from hysteria after finding out the Queen is dead), or that she's not actually human.
2019 will be the year of answers it seems.
Got to disagree with you there, I think she'll keep on going. However Prince Philip's health doesn't look too good.
A mainstream youtuber will have a go at stand-up.
We will all finally agree that Tilderinos is the best demonym.
Gonna go ahead and disprove that one right now, because I will never budge from Tildos being my pick.
standup specials will decline in quality until the format dies completely.
Here's an easy one: The Coalition is going to get walloped at the Australian federal election in the first half of the year. It'll be as bad as the walloping they just got in the Victorian election in November (where they now have less than a quarter of the seats in the lower house), and almost as bad as the walloping they're about to get in the NSW state election in March. They'll be wiped out so badly it will take them another two electoral cycles to even consider being able to win another election.
Here's a slightly less likely one: As a result of the Coalition's electoral walloping, the Liberal Party (the senior party in the Coalition) will finally admit what everyone else already knows - it's two parties under one banner. The small-"l" liberals and the conservatives will blame each other for the loss. They'll stop pretending they can get along, and there'll be a split, with one or the other faction breaking away to form their own party.
Elsewhere: President Trump will be impeached. He's going to surround himself with "yes" men and women to the point that there'll be no brakes on his behaviour. And, like a certain former Australian Prime Minister, he'll get cocky and cross the line so outrageously that there will be no way for reasonable Republicans to even pretend to support it. In that former PM's case, it was something as trivial as restoring the obsolete system of Knights and Dames - and then giving a knighthood to Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Phillip. That demonstrated such a level of bad judgement and out-of-touchness that noone could defend it. He staggered on as PM for another 6 months, but that was the beginning of the end for him.
Trump has sacked or pissed off so many reasonable people on his staff that the only people left who'll work for him are people who think like him, or absolute toadies - neither of whom is going to criticise anything he does. He'll get cocky, and do something so outrageous and stupid that there'll be no coming back from it.