when it comes to politics, there is a difference between opposition and indifference, and i think this is sometimes lost or exaggerated in the discourse.

personally, i would be opposed to climate change, but indifferent to "religious freedom". i would be opposed to poverty, but indifferent to inequality. so, i can vote for a party that is pro-muslim (to a point), so long as it rigorously opposes climate change. and, i can vote for a party that is broadly bourgeois, so long as it puts some redistributive policies in place to address the worst kinds of poverty. conversely, i wouldn't be interested in voting for a party or candidate that demonizes the rich, but doesn't believe in wealth redistribution.

i am not an american, but i do not find myself particularly opposed to a border wall. rather, i find myself largely indifferent to it. and, i might suspect that this is the case for most voters.

it is true that there's not much of an argument in favour of the thing, but it is also true that there's not much of an argument against it, either. give it a try. try and argue against the wall, convincingly. the best thing you're going to come up with is the cost of the thing, but that's a bad argument: infrastructure projects have high multiplier effects and are good for the economy.

as there is really little reason to oppose the wall to any great extent, i don't expect that the democrats are going to be able to hold support much longer, if it isn't already starting to crumble. the initial kneejerk reaction may be to blame trump. but, the longer this goes on for, the more it hurts the democrats.

trump's base is large nihilistic and doesn't care about the government, anyways. he's not going to lose support over this. but, the democrats are risking a dangerous backlash if they wait too long to cave.

i'm not going to say to build the wall. i'm indifferent to it.

but, i am going to remind people that they need to pick their battles.

while it is not clear how the tribes in the interior of bc are going to react to the enforcement of the court's injunction around the pipeline being built through their sovereign territory, my legal opinion of the situation is that any movement by the police into this territory amounts to an invasion force, and subsequent illegal occupation of the region, which legally and morally justifies the use of force in reaction.

and, i would stand in solidarity with the indigenous groups against any such illegal occupation.

turkey is a bizarre country, because it is a historical power that is universally viewed as an occupier. it has historical power over this broad swath of land, but no historical connection to any of it. none of these areas ever really became turkish, but the turks never really assimilated to the area, either. and, all of these fragmented states around the old byzantine empire, including those that converted to islam, are united only in their opposition to turkish imperialism.

i've written this essay a few times, now. as these economic blocks build up around them, the turks are kind of at the end of their history - they can neither enter into a block, nor can they take control of one, as their geography and history would demand of them. the turks seem destined for some kind of catastrophe, one way or another.

there is an argument that the turks ought to join the eu, as the region has a deep history in europe. this would be a reunification of the empire, in some sense. but, the europeans do not seem to want them in europe, not any more than they did five hundred years ago. there is no doubt some subconscious feeling that the turks will eventually fall, that constantinople will be liberated, but the way that works itself out in actual policy is a kind of distant tolerance that never reaches acceptance. yes, the turks exist. c'est la vie.

there is likewise an argument that the turks ought to join the arab world, but the history here is truly no less hostile - the arabs never conquered the city, but were rather conquered by it in what was really a muslim phase of roman imperialism. whatever role that christian theology played in the egyptian and levantine revolts of late antiquity, it is clear enough that the arabs were eventually welcomed as liberators to end what was a long roman-persian war that had been fought on semitic lands for a thousand years. turkish expansion via the sultanate of rum (after the mongol destruction) was in a real sense the return of the romans from the inside out; in the end, it was more like a long civil war that ended with the muslim faith dominant, and the old regime back in place. and, if it weren't for the inability to convert the greeks, that turnover may have been historically total. as it is, the collapse of the ottoman state was also the most recent liberation of arabs from roman hegemony. whatever historical process exists around this in the long run, one should expect the arabs to give the turks the cold shoulder into perpetuity.

i would suggest there is a far better argument to unite istanbul with moscow, and resurrect the byzantine state. but, the peculiarity of the turkish state asserts itself once again, here: while greeks and slavs are forever historically intertwined, the fact that the turks are muslims is a difficult cultural block in reunifying the east. that said, the future of the region is no doubt in secularism, rather than in islam or christianity. and, for that reason, a new eastern empire rooted in universal secular values is perhaps the most historically correct home for turkey, in the end.

the other option is for turkey to look directly east and try and project some kind of dominance over the turkish areas of central asia. while this may seem rational to a naive observer, there is no history of a unified turkish state, and certainly no history of a turkish state centred in the bosphorus. rather, the idea being projected is of iran - this is the iranian cultural sphere, the iranian empire. and, while the geographic space we call turkey has historically existed within iranian empires, it has never been assimilated within one. there is a line through the peninsula, on the western side of which the idea ceases to make any sense.

the war in syria has maybe made the problem of turkish isolation more obvious, but it hasn't presented any meaningful solution. europe is as hostile as ever, as they carry out a proxy war against the arabs and continue this awkward frenemy dance with the iranians. but, that russo-turkish alliance is potentially the basis for a deep friendship and potential economic integration - whether the current turkish leadership realizes it or not.

for right now, the russians need to be careful not to let them occupy syria, as that's just going to set the whole thing back in motion again.

i admit that there's a lot of historical sense in the turks taking over, and they are certainly well positioned to counter saudi attempts to destabilize the region. i've pointed out repeatedly that the turkish-arab conflict is in many ways the more real conflict, compared to the arab-iranian one. this is a long war of history...

but, there is a recipe for catastrophe in allowing the turks and russians to compete for influence in the region like this, because i'm not sure that the various people that live in syria really want them there. the danger is that if the turks get too aggressive, it could actually produce a response in arab nationalism, which would no doubt be islamicist in nature due to the condition the region finds itself in. there's this idea in the west that turkish soldiers are preferable to western ones because they're muslim, but this is just another example of westerners not understanding the complexity of the history in the region. while there is historical justification for pan-arabism, the idea of some kind of muslim megastate has always been a colonial fantasy; the conflicts in this region have always been less religious and more ethnic. remember: the british were nominally initially brought in to protect the arabs from the turks in the first place.

america's geopolitical strategy is of course to divide and conquer, so these bugs are easily misunderstood as features in washington.

i would like to see the turks pull back.

but, so long as the americans are sitting in the middle of the playground, this is all just abstract discussion, anyways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/erdogan-turkey-syria.html