Germany is important. But I don't know much about Germany. I should probably look into it.

It's a land poised between tradition and modernity, I believe.

3: Traditionally, yes it is.

1: They have so much beer they have to sell a bunch of it. Would you like to come over and look into that?

oops, 3.1 to 2

Why Is Germany And Should It?

Can someone explain the whole Turkey/Kurd detente to me?

Why did the German chicken cross the road.

Why did the German chicken cross the road.

Who was the worst German ever?

7,8: Shit. Orange you glad I didn't say banana.

9: Jimmy Carter.

Can someone explain the whole Turkey/Kurd detente to me?

No. No one can explain anything about Turkish foreign policy in a way that makes sense to anyone who lives in a normal country. They seem to have found a sweet spot in which committing random atrocities in all directions makes everyone else too confused to criticise them.

6: It's all about the tungsten.

Don't live anywhere near natural resources.

I'm still trying to understand why intel sharing and aid for Ukraine were turned back on. Did not expect that.

15: In response to agreed to language (between US and Ukraine in ceasefire. But which my understanding is that Russia has signaled it will not agree to (but not formally rejected?)

I will note the relatively muted/non-existent response of the Admin to the latter versus what would surely be the case if Ukraine had balked.

Ukraine is a rare case where Trump and the relevant cabinet member (Rubio) seem to have genuine disagreement, and so we may see more of the administration ignoring Trump like they did in the first term, relative to other topics.

At the end of the day, Trump is still a child who has no idea how to handle a bureaucracy. He'll throw temper tantrums, but at the end of the day the people under him have a lot of latitude because he's too dumb to know what's actually happening. (Musk is a different matter, of course.)

Rubio is a nutless piece of shit though.

I think the threats to Canada and Greenland are the worst, morally and politically. It's just the fastest way to making Americans worse off without physically attacking Americans. But the threats to Panama and Mexico are the ones likely to blow up into open conflict first.

Lowest-effort comment imaginable that isn't just trolling: midmorning AP tabs.

"Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a secret diplomatic initiative, U.S. and Israeli officials confirmed the contacts with Somalia and Somaliland, while the Americans confirmed Sudan as well." I admit I don't have a ready response to this shit beyond the obvious.

In other possibly iffy/unserious ceasefire proposal news

Genuinely curious about the far-right political success of women in Europe, a thing I fundamentally don't understand

"Tigray relied heavily on U.S. funds."

The outgoing German parliament has signed off on a massive DEI initiative -- Defense, Environment and Infrastructure.

I think it's going to be in the range of €200 billion, though I am not sure of the time frame. The Greens seem to have gotten a lot of money promised for their initiatives in return for providing the votes for a 2/3 majority needed to take out the constitutional amendment that had limited the amount of bonds that Germany could sell to finance such things. (That amendment had only been added back in 2009, so it's not as if this is some fundamental change.)

It is of course gross hypocrisy by incoming chancellor Merz and the CDU because they had steadfastly resisted such a change when the SPD held the chancellor's office.

I don't know that having more financing available would have sped up German assistance to Ukraine enough to have improved their fortunes in 2023, but it couldn't have hurt.

"Genuinely curious about the far-right political success of women in Europe, a thing I fundamentally don't understand"

Well, you know Candace Owens, Ann Coulter, Melania Trump, Hope Hicks, Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Ashley Babbitt, Tara Reade, Phyllis Schlafly, Tulsi Gabbard and Michelle Malkin? Imagine, if you will, them... but foreign.

Sorry that was a bit flippant. Do you mean you don't understand why they're far right, or you don't understand why they're successful?

Speaking of foreign policy, tough day for Bhutan.

I'm not sure this projects strength or readiness on the part of DoD to any one paying attention: (DoD on court order on probationary firings.)

8. Department records indicate that it fired 16 total probationary employees on or about February 13 and 14, 2025.

9. The Court's order, requiring the Department to reinstate all probationary employees terminated on or about February 13 and 14, 2025, will impose substantial burdens on the Department, cause significant confusion, and potentially subject terminated employees to extreme whiplash.

10. Offers of reinstatement will impose significant administrative burdens on the Department. Among other things, all reinstated employees will require onboarding, including certain training, filling out human resources paperwork, obtaining new security badges, and re-enrolling in benefits programs.

Will note one think of the burden of security badge production, much less the whiplash.

23/24: Yeah, sorry for the lack of clarity -- I meant specifically party leadership/candidacy. There isn't quite a U.S. equivalent because we just have the two parties, and MAGA isn't a separate party or even a formal caucus; MTG and Boebert might be most analogous. (Tulsi Gabbard's conservative era has pretty much had her playing courtier.) But it still might be true that there isn't anything to understand and, if you go case by case, it's a mixture of nepotism (Le Pen et al), a specific pathway out of regional success, other idiosyncratic qualities, and therefore no real pattern.

26: surely "If something is hard and annoying to do in the short term, it's probably not worth doing for the long term" is the motto of many victorious armies?

I mean, if Trump hadn't run the nominee would probably have been Nikki Haley, right?

That was my high school's motto.

28: I doubt it. I think she came in second because everyone knew it was Trump's and didn't run.

Yeah, I think 30 is right, and Haley also positioned herself as the non-MAGA candidate. (Given what the GOP is, she would have ended up near the far-right end of the global spectrum. But she really wasn't Trump.)

25: Meh. They're above it.

29 to 28.

30 and 31 are both reasonable interpretations, but I kinda think they cancel each other out. If Trump were dead (only scenario where he doesn't run), Haley would have run as more MAGA and would have won. The other candidates all just suck.

All the other candidates just suck so much. Doesn't matter.

I can't tell what you're arguing, though (if anything). Do you think there is any larger point to be made about women's success with right-wing parties in electoral politics, in Europe and beyond? I'm now mostly leaning towards "it's random."

Or is it just part of the general phenomenon of women being successful in European politics in general? It isn't just far right. Plenty of European centre right parties have had female leaders. And centre left parties for that matter. And not just leaders either - elected representatives in general. https://www.euronews.com/2024/08/22/european-leaders-in-europe-where-are-they-and-how-many-are-there
Congress is 28% female - almost all European countries do better than that.

I don't generally hold the theory that women are somehow less prone to evil or greed than men, but I do think that whatever the fuck leads to things like Vance and Ted Cruz is a largely male phenomena.

37 is most of it (probably). The question with the far right is always the tension between antifeminism/gender traditionalism and having female leaders -- it can be an interesting subject to explore from different angles, because you have the individual people involved, but also different cultural gender norms, different versions of power, different versions of the road to power, and patterns can somtimes emerge.

I don't know. I find myself thinking a lot about gender in politics, but I also don't feel like I have a firm handle on it at all. There's a lot of local variation and role-specific differences.

39.1 raises the interesting question of whether there's something about the US far right specifically that turns women away. There might be? European far right is much more anti immigrant and less obnoxiously religious.

Ted fucking Cruz is it.

And the couch fucker.

Impressionistically, PiS and Fidesz are Catholic reactionary and short on female leaders. There's also Vox in Spain which ISTR is a bro-libertarian type show.

Today I got roped into an organizational meeting for our local protest events - two hours of my life that could have been one hour - and it was noted that the movement is primarily made up of older women. "How can we get men to show up?" seemed like a question to which we don't have a good answer.

44: Did you see that in Pelosi's statement about the CR, she said "listen to the women?" Sometimes men suck when it comes to these things.

You need something active and dangerous to attract the younger men. Maybe light a Tesla dealership on fire?

Check local laws first. I think that's not legal in some states.

Isn't the canonical answer always "free greasy food"? Moby's right too, so maybe you can symbolically deep-fry a Tesla-shaped... help me out

I've been doing legal research since I posted my earlier comments and in turns out that you can't legally start someone else's property on fire unless you can make it look like an accident.

I don't generally hold the theory that women are somehow less prone to evil or greed than men, but I do think that whatever the fuck leads to things like Vance and Ted Cruz is a largely male phenomena.

I mean, I kinda think women are less prone to evil? Because babies derail women's lives more than men's and they're more likely to have a strength disadvantage.

Neither of those are absolutes, but they shape trends.

Being around babies can make people evil, just because of crankiness and not sleeping enough. It balances out exactly.

And women are around babies more than men, is the part of my argument that I forgot to make explicit.

Isn't the canonical answer always "free greasy food"?

Yeah, I was thinking a hot dog cart. Need to figure out if that's allowed in the space.

50: can I talk you out of this view, I wonder? I think you've hit on a nonsequitur, but that's in part because I don't think there's a meaningful definition of "evil" that has any gender division at all. Women can do a whole lot of small-scale evil to the babies who derailed their lives (so can men). There's maybe a difference in the likely scale and scope of action, but I'm not even sure that's significant in the aggregate. But I wonder if there's some other claim that you're making that would be easier to defend?

Possibly American women are not successful in far right politics because they say things like "upper body strength is correlated with evil" and this is too much even for the male far right to take seriously

I think there is a sense in which American far-right nationalism is more androcentric than the European equivalents, because of the whole Frontier myth and the emphasis on conquest and subjugation. European nationalism feels more oriented toward defense of the Volk and its Land from its enemies, which includes a role for women in reproduction even if their personal status is low.

50, 54: The more common claim is that in aggregate men are more likely to harm others and women more likely to harm themselves.

(but that claim also focuses on physical violence only)

I was just trying to insult Ted Cruz. I didn't read up first.

I guess what I'm thinking is that women are less likely to get the positions of power that allow for super destruction, and a little more likely to be forced into positions where they're aware of the realities of food provision. So on the whole, a little more awareness and a little less unchecked power.

Women can still be little shits, though!

And by "the realities of food provision" I mean proximity to the young and elderly who will go hungry if someone isn't immediately nearby.

21.3: I agree, not serious. SADC got punched in the mouth and doesn't have the logistics to punch back. The Luanda process is exactly what led late last year to a draft RW/DRC agreement* which the Rwandans just blew up. A luta continua.
*Though they called it, interestingly, a "CONOP".

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/dalai-lama-says-his-successor-be-born-outside-china-2025-03-11/

I think Squirrel Hill would be a good place. Nice schools, lots of restaurants, quiet streets that invite contemplation.

The whole pavilion in the park is full today. I got under cover just before the hail. There's lots of younger men here, but not like university age.

There are 423 people here, more or less. People won't stop moving.

This is more of a "Keep the Department of Education" crowd than a burning things crowd. Give it another month.

The guy in front of me has a hat that went to law school at Harvard.

The speaker is trying to take a middle road on Columbia and getting yelled at.

She did a thing and made the crowd listen more better.

But the guy next to me was typing something into Bluesky and he looked perturbed.

60, 62: I'm excited about the theory that being infertile or otherwise childless makes women more likely to be evil, and I really want to see where heebie takes it.

That would be silly.

Babies have evolved no visible defenses against predators, so I assume they are poisonous.

", I kinda think women are less prone to evil? Because babies derail women's lives more than men's"

So, women with no children, whose lives have therefore not been derailed...

Mothers of children might have better upper body strength, though, from carrying babies around. And that makes you more evil, apparently, so it might all cancel out.

76: I'm going to go out on a limb and say there could be mild differences in the mean between the normal distribution of biological men and the normal distribution of biological women, such that any one particular instance of infertility or other variation isn't dispositive. That would be silly.

Oh, no, no one's saying that infertile women are always evil, or even always more evil. But the average is going to be different. Get a big enough sample, they'll be the more evil ones. Right?

I guess you're making a good point! You're always helping me learn.

Wait, new squeaky toy! The New York Times wants its American readers to consider a Scottish island idyll.

In 2025, the idea of settling anyplace other than Mars might seem anachronistic, but the people on Ulva are pioneers of a different kind. They are giving new life to places left behind by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, imagining a 21st-century settlement built not on extraction but on connection -- to nature, vegetable gardens, art, community and a life away from screens.

I came to Ulva wondering if, by establishing something new by resurrecting something old -- small, self-governing communities -- we might find an antidote to the atomization, disempowerment and environmental degradation of modern life. What I found was messy, incomplete and inspiring. If places like Ulva succeed, they could offer a model for reversing rural flight, re-establishing local democracy and revitalizing local economies not just in Scotland but anywhere.

It's an amazingly unpersuasive pitch, like he actually wrote it to argue against using Ulva as a model for anything in the U.S., then took out a few "not"s and "won't"s. Or maybe this is just my cynicism? But there's also this:

Mr. George relishes Ulva's solitude and its history. His cottage walls were lined with rows of history books. "There's a lot of weird on this island," he said. "Not modern-day weird, but Norse weird." Ulva means "wolf" in Norse, and Ulva, like many islands in the Inner Hebrides, may have been raided and settled by Vikings. Mr. George, who said he had Nordic heritage, feels a mystic connection to the land. He told me of finding bipedal hoof prints in his garden, and of feeling a ghostly hand pressing between his shoulder blades as a warning to leave a meadow.

He's grumpy about the new settlement, perhaps because he was hoping for "Midsommar II: Midsommarar"

To be clear, I have nothing against the island resettlements per se. I just think the NYT editorial about them is mockable, and what I imagine from future developments in the rural U.S. is more Midsommarar than not, and not in a good way, you know?

I really hate that the NYT and other publications don't let you see bylines before popping up the subscriber walls. I like to know whether I recognize an author before deciding whether to look up the article via a library's subscription. Or using searches to find if someone posted a gift link.

I've been to the Ulva ferry landing! Not for the Ulva ferry, for a Puffin tour boat with a sign that said "not the ferry." About 700 feet away from Ulva.

Right now the big controversy in Mull (the big island that Ulva is right next to) is that the high school is falling apart, and they've decided to build the new high school still in the main town, which means people on the southern half of the island go to high school on the mainland in Oban and live in a hostel and come back for weekends on the ferry. And those people were hoping for a more centrally located high school as the replacement.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/24758151.complicated-reality-one-high-school-mull/

Anyway, as an expert on Ulva, the article is stupid:

"The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and "No Trespassing" signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they're not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland's Highlands and islands."

The whole point here is the picturesqueness! That's why people want to retire there. That's why there's a busy hotel! This isn't about whether you can have small self-sustaining communities, it's whether empowering local communities can lead to a more sustainable tourism model that doesn't just push out the locals. There's advantages to this community owned approach, and it's a model you might want to be looking at in say Hawaii, but the idea that it's a model for non-picturesque locations is a little silly. You can't just return to crofting, no one today wants the living standards that the crofters had.

Lots of people have really stupid ideas about what living off the grid would be like.

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying?

Also, if you're interested in community-ownership and Scottish isles, you're much better off looking at larger places with more than 15 people. Especially in the Western Isles where there's a lot of community-owned land:

https://www.stornowaygazette.co.uk/news/people/why-i-hope-bays-of-harris-estate-will-say-yes-3811778

85 reminds me of my proposal for naming Catholic schools in suburbs. The Catholic school in the cut l city is usually "Central Catholic". Obviously, the suburban school should be Peripheral Catholic.

Stupid phone.

I should write a NYTimes oped about how what West Virginia needs is simply to start its own world-famous brand of handwoven tweed.

More seriously though, maybe Appalachian Kentucky should be starting some craft Bourbon distilleries. There's basically nothing east of Lexington.

West Virginia tried to get people to remote work from there. They offered cheap housing and a tax break. But they don't have many environmental protections and they are destroying the education system to make more Republicans.

Turkey is curious. I'm guessing, not necessarily in this order,
1. Erdogan was rattled by last year's elections;
2. Erdogan wants to amend the constitution to extend his rule beyond 2028;
3. This demarche is supported and fronted* by the MHP, which is to Erdogan's right on Turkish chauvinism;
4. The Assad implosion and Turkish leverage with HTS** gave him reason to believe Kurds would lose freedom of military action in Syria.
*IDK where the initiative originated. IDK Turkish politics enough to guess how plausible it is MHP would make such a move without Erdogan's approval.
**Whether it makes sense to talk about Syria, rather than HTS, as a state isn't clear to me, so, conservatively, I'll assume it's really HTS.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/26/turkey-pkk-mhp-ocalan-devlet-bahceli-fw-de-klerk/

The Kurdish political movement has a broad base among Turkey's Kurds. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the Peoples' Democracy Party (HDP)--the DEM Party's predecessor-- received just over 46 percent of the votes in the predominantly Kurdish provinces. However, like its earlier incarnations, the pro-Kurdish party largely remains in the shadow of the PKK.
[...]
When the AKP government engaged in peace negotiations with Ocalan between 2013 and 2015, Bahceli [, MHP, hard Turkish supremacist] denounced the peace process, saying that "there is no difference left between the AKP and the PKK."
[...]
Bahceli called on Erdogan to make a transition to a presidential system, and in 2018, the AKP and the MHP entered into a formal alliance that was crucial for the AKP.
[...]
The war and chaos in the Middle East have made the Turkish elite attentive to the need, in the words of Erdogan, to "fortify the home front" by defusing domestic ethnic tensions. But Erdogan could not risk antagonizing Bahceli and nationalist opinion.

While Ocalan's proposal has sparked debate on a potential resolution of the conflict, Turkey's ruling AK Party made clear on Friday it expects all Kurdish militant groups in Iraq and Syria, including U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish forces, to disarm.Kocyigit [DEM] said this "rigid" initial government response signalled that achieving peace would be an uphill battle.
[...]
"From the messages [PKK] have given to the public so far, I honestly get the impression they are behind the will of Ocalan and support the process Ocalan will develop," she said. "But here, the question should not just be about how the PKK responds. One of the biggest questions today is how the state will respond to this call. That is at least as critical as the PKK response."

Analysts are sceptical about Ankara's intentions, suggesting that Erdogan will likely use Ocalan's call as a way to persuade Kurdish voters to support a constitutional overhaul that would allow him to bypass term limits and seek re-election in 2028.

Analysts have said Erdogan, who has made repeated efforts in the past to end the conflict, is focused on the domestic political dividends that peace could bring as he looks to extend his two-decade rule beyond 2028 when his term expires. Ending the insurgency would remove a constant flashpoint in Kurdish-run, oil-rich northern Iraq, while facilitating efforts by Syria's new administration to assert greater sway over areas in northern Syria controlled by Kurdish forces.
[...]
On Saturday, Bahceli said he welcomed the PKK's statement to heed Ocalan's call, saying there can be no negotiating with the PKK and that its disarmament and disbandment, along with all its extensions, would be beneficial for everyone.

[SDF/YPG] had wanted the SDF to join the defence ministry as a bloc rather than individuals - an idea the interim government rejected.

The Turkish official said talks at the weekend between Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Jordan in Amman regarding security cooperation between the four countries, including establishing an operations centre, sharing intelligence and handing over prison camps where Islamic States fighters are held by the SDF, were influential in the SDF-Damascus deal being agreed as well. The official said the Amman talks had conveyed the message that the presence of the YPG in Syria would not be tolerated.

Three other sources - U.S. officials - said the United States had encouraged the SDF to move towards an agreement to resolve its status in the new Syria - the focus of multi-track talks which began after Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December and which Reuters reported on in January.

That sounds more likely to work than what West Virginia is doing.

West Virginia had a governor named "Jim Justice", which was obviously just his professional wrestling name.

West Virginia has a Kurdish policy?

Peace in the Caucasus?
https://www.reuters.com/world/armenia-says-it-is-ready-sign-peace-agreement-with-azerbaijan-2025-03-13/
https://www.ft.com/content/ca92b871-dd65-4980-af01-aaf0f3e38650

Of these, the most challenging is Azerbaijan's demand that Armenia change its constitution to remove any references to Nagorno-Karabakh. "[Prime Minister Nikol] Pashinyan wants a new constitution but does not want to be seen to be adopting one under public pressure from Baku," de Waal said. "And he faces elections in 2026. So this issue might not be solved until 2027."

Russkiy Kaspiyskiy mir.

https://caspiannews.com/news-detail/azerbaijan-turkiye-inaugurate-natural-gas-pipeline-to-supply-nakhchivan-2025-3-6-30/

If Baku is still talking about "Western Azerbaijan," then it isn't peace, it's just a pause in the attempts at conquest. More pessimistically, given that the Baku government has ever seriously talked about "Western Azerbaijan," segments of the Azerbaijani public (and possibly military) will have taken that to heart and now there is a constituency for further war.

I haven't been to Ulva, but, interesting fact, if you've heard of Macquarie University in Australia, that's where the Macquarie it was named after came from!

Can't read the NYT article. Not sure I want to. But Upetgi is wise and correct in all his comments except possibly the one about starting an Appalachian Tweed industry.

||

'Even the Welshman gave up his forest hunting, the Scot his familiar fleas, the Dane his continual drinking, and the Norwegian his raw fish,'

Ulva means "wolf" in Norse, and Ulva, like many islands in the Inner Hebrides, may have been raided and settled by Vikings.

No, it doesn't. "Ulfr" means wolf in Norse. "Ulva" is probably a corruption of "Ulvoy" which means either "wolf's island" or "Ulfr's island" in Norse. As in, the island of a person with the common Norse name "Ulfr" which means "wolf".
Scotland has a huge number of islands whose names end either "-a" or "-ay" because their names derive from Norse words meaning "[something] island" - Barra, Grimsay, Berneray, Pabbay, Eriskay, Jura, Staffa, Islay, Ronaldsay, Westray, Mingulay, Hirta, Foula, Colonsay, Oronsay, Rona and so on.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/arrest-philippines-duterte-offers-glimmer-hope-troubled-icc-2025-03-13/
That I did not see coming.

https://www.theafricareport.com/378644/tigray-cannot-be-the-battleground-for-ethiopia-and-eritrea/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/12/ethiopia-eritrea-tigray-abiy-isaias-tdf-tplf-war-red-sea

Shorter:
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/why-are-ethiopia-eritrea-brink-possible-war-2025-03-14/

@MattD, how do the prairie oil patch and Ukraine patch interact? Do you think the Trump effect could produce any meaningful splits there?

I think we can add Australia to the thinking-about-nukes-now list.