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Tsude

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Posts posted by Tsude

  1. Hello everybody

     

    So you think the 300 spartans were heroic to hold off the 1 million persians In thermopylae? Well, you may be right, but there are 21 men even more heroic than those 300 Spartans (aided by 1000 Greek hoplites). The 21 Sihks protecting the signalling  outpost between 2 fortresses in Pakistan. 21 men held off over 10.000 men, killing over a few hundred. I would write it down, but this video explains it much better than me, you'll hear the story of those 21 men in a short, but powerful 8 minute video.

     

  2. Hello everybody

     

    For the ones not knowing how the elections work in the USA, this is a SIMPLIFIED version. This was made using various audio-visual sources, written sources and my own knowledge of the American history and politics. I will be using the example of this election to explain this, so I will not consider that Trump is already president.



    a.     Introduction
    b.     Structure of the USA Congress + explanation of US president
    c.     House of representatives  <-> House of commons
    d.     The Senate <-> House of the Lords
    e.     Electoral College + Presidential elections
    f.      Summarisation
    g.     More than 2 presidential candidates???


    a.     Introduction :

    Election year, a very important year for the citizens and politicians of the US. They will get to decide who will become the next leader of the US. Now, this year it’s Hillary vs Trump or in other words, Corrupt vs Dumb. To explain how the elections work I can’t really just talk about the elections itself, I have to start with the US Congress.

    b.   Structure of the US Congress :
    The US congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States consisting of two houses. – The US government has 3 branches. The executive branch, the judicial branch and the Legisative branch. To become a president you need to  go from the legislative branch to the Executive branch -  Now I’m pretty sure you already don’t understand 50% of the sentence. To explain what that means I have to explain 2 words. Bicameral and Legislature. Bicameral means in two chambers or houses whilst Legislature is an assembly with the authority to make and pass on laws. The US congress exists out of two houses. The House of representatives(US) wich is relatable to the house of commons(UK) and The Senate (US) wich is also relatable to the House of the lords (UK). To understand the way presidential candidates are picked I’ll be explaining the elections of the House of the representatives and the senate.

    c.     The House of Representatives :
    The house of representatives like the house of commons was created to give the people of  every local voting region of America a voice. The elections or re-elections happen every 2 years. How do members get a seat in the house of representatives though? Well, every state has a district and those districts are determined by the population and the population density. So that means if the state has a high population it’ll have a high amount of districts and the same thing applies if it has a low population. So it’s also quite logical that every district votes for 1 representative. To give an example : the state of Georgia has 14 districts thus, 14 elected representatives. Which means the state of Georgia has 14 seats from the 435 seats in “The house of Representatives”. The house has 6 non-voting seats because they belong to a US territory and not a state, but to keep it simple I won’t go into detail about US territories.

    d.    The Senate :
    Now you know a bit more about the first house of the congress. Now I’ll explain the second house, The senate which looks a lot like the house of Lords. Each state has 2 senators In the Senate that represents that state. Those senators are chosen from a popular vote, which is basically a sate wide vote. So that means there are 100 senators in the Senate if you count them all up (50 states with 2 senators each). Now the elections within the Senate are a bit different than the one in the House of Representatives. The elections are called “a six year term staggered election”. What this means is that instead of having to vote for 100 senators every 6 six years they vote for 1/3 of the seats or senators every 2 years to ensure that one party doesn’t “take over” the Senate. For the ones that don’t know, the US has 2 parties. The democrats and the Republicans. To explain them both shortly the democrats are progressive whilst the Republicans are c conservative. The senators also have to qualify for a couple of things : 1) they must be 30+ 2) they must be a US citizen for over 9 years and 3) they must be inhabitants of the states they represent.

    e.     The electoral College and the Presidential Elections :
    Now that you know about the two houses of the US congress I can finally explain how the US presidential elections work. The most logical thing would be to count up all the votes and the one with the most votes would be president, right? Well… In good ol’ ‘murica that ain’t the case.  
    The way this works in the US is that every state votes for a certain presidential candidate and for a state to be able to vote for a specific presidential candidate it needs to have over 50% of the votes for that state to be able to vote for that candidate. Though this system is flawed. For example : California has 34 million people and Georgia 9.9 million people. For Georgia with 9.9 mln citizens to have the same amount of influence in the elections as California with 34 mln citizens is unfair. That’s where the electoral representatives come in play. The amount of electoral representatives per state are decided by the amount of districts they have + the 2 senators representing that state. To go on with my example the state of California would have 55 electoral representatives whilst the state of Georgia would only have a meagre 16. That is why presidential candidates focus on states with a bigger population than the ones with a smaller one. Though in America there is this thing where the winner gets it all. For example let’s say Trump and Clinton are competing over California. Trump gets 33 electoral votes and Clinton 22. This means that Trump won that state and will also get all the votes Clinton has gotten from that state. Now instead of 33 votes he has 55 votes. Do you see what’s going on here? By winning bigger states by just 1 electoral vote can give you your opponent’s votes as well.  In total there are 538 electoral representatives from the electoral college.
    Now you know this, we can carry on. To know how a president gets chosen you don’t just look atthe election day but to the whole election year. To start of with you have “The primaries” which spans from January to June to decide which candidate from each party will represent that party, like we’ve been seeing now. Clinton will be representing the democrats and Trump the Republicans. This has been made clear at the RNC (Republic National Convention) and DNC (Democratic National Convention) Now that the primaries are over the election campaigns begin. Each candidate will have a running mate or a vice-president with him which has a different set of skills to aid him in his/her campaign. After a long time campaigning election day has arrived. The people vote for electors or electoral representatives who then vote for the presidential candidates. If a candidate has over 270 votes, he wins the elections and then becomes the next president of the USA.

    f.      More than 2 presidential candidates???
    There are 5 presidential candidates! Indeed. In the US the two leading parties are the Democrats and Republicans, then you have the independent parties. The reason you don’t hear more about these great parties that have better policies than the Democrats and Republicans is because they don’t own media chains and don’t have a lot of money.


    The competing candidates and their running mates:
    -Democrats:
    Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (New York)               -  Presidential Nominee
    US Senator Tim Kaine (Virginia)                                                            - Vice Presidential Nominee


    -Republicans:
    Businessman Donald J. Trump (New York)                                       - Presidential Nominee
    Governor Mike Pence (Indiana)                                                            - Vice Presidential Nominee


    - Constitution Party of the US: 
    Darrell Castle (Tennessee)                                                             - Presidential Nominee
    Scott Bradley (Utah)                                                                        - Vice Presidential Nominee


    -Green Party:
    Dr. Jill Stein (Massachusetts)                                                       - Presidential Nominee
    Ajamu Baraka (Virginia)                                                                - Vice Presidential Nominee


    -Liberterian Party:
    Former Governor Gary Johnson (New Mexico)                         - Presidential Nominee
    Former Governor Bill Weld (Massachusetts)                            - Vice Presidential Nominee

    And more presidential nominees but I can’t bother with the smeg people: http://www.politics1.com/p2016.htm
            

     
    g.     Summarisation
     
    1)     US congress = 2 houses, 535 representatives combined.
    2)     House of representatives : 435 members
    3)     The senate : 100 Members
    4)     Electoral college : to make sure the influences of states are equitable (wich means that it’s fair)
    5)     Primaries are held to decide the Party’s candidates
    6)     Candidates pick their running mate and go campaigning
    7)     Election day comes, candidate with over 270 electoral votes becomes president.


    Sources :
     
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRu_JcarCDY : basic – house – senate – electoral – president
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nts3a6pp6jU : tie between presidents
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-4Sfn_ti-U : Very thorough explanation of us elections
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt5K4ZK0ILY : handy stuff
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok_VQ8I7g6I : Electoral system explained
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdyCz6QpbOk : extra info
    http://www.politics1.com/p2016.htm : The presidential candidates

  3. Hello everybody

     

    It has come to my attention that most people don't know a coup happened in Turkey or they believe Erdogan planned the coup himself. Now, I will be quoting a post written by my brother (Former member of the MUN, not a fan of Erdogan and an advanced IT guy). He experienced the COUP himself first hand and so did I. He was in Istanbul, whilst I was in the largest military base based in Turkey, Eskisehir. I want to state that I am very happy my Uncle did not go to jail as he is a commander and would have partaken in the COUP, but he did not as he forgot his phone as he was driving up to his home village and couldn't answer to the calls he got from the military.

     

    "Friends,
    Having observed a lot of BS all over the news this week about the failed coup attempt here in Turkey and as a person who was in Istanbul last Friday I couldn't resist the urge anymore to write something about it.

    First of all, I want to say that everyone here in Turkey whether pro- or anti-Erdoğan is massively against a coup. Turks see this mainly as an attack to their homeland and their free will and not only to Erdoğan. Also, I only laugh at people who say that this was all orchestrated by Erdoğan himself only to get rid of his opponents and get executive presidency powers. One, he does not have to bomb his own parliament and kill hundreds of people to realize this. He can just use the state bureaucracy to achieve this goal. Two, for executive presidency he could have organised a snap election because the recent polls were showing that AKP would have enough seats in the parliament to change the constitution or at least to bring it for a referendum.

    First of all, I want to highlight some examples of Western hypocrisy which bothered me this week very much:

    - In the very beginning of the coup attempt, when everything was unclear, the Western media started to praise the coup attempt by saying that this coup is the only chance of Turkey to escape out of "Islamisation" and even tried to spread the disinformation that Erdoğan fled the country and asked asylum in Germany in order to crackdown the resistance of the Turkish people on the streets.
    https://www.stratfor.com/…/turkey-president-reportedly-seek…


    - Two days ago, the government announced three months of 'state of emergency' all over Turkey. Which is pretty normal in my opinion when your own parliament is bombed by your own fighter jets and helicopters (and many other horrible things). Again, this has received critics from the Western world, by saying that this is purely rolling back on democratic freedoms. 
    http://edition.cnn.com/…/07/21/europe/turkey-coup-emergency/


    - Temporary derogation of some rights of European Convention on Human Rights received a huge amount of criticism in the Western world, while France was never criticised on invoking exactly the same article after Paris attacks last November.
    http://www.coe.int/…/france-informs-secretary-general-of-ar…


    - "I hope there will be ‘stability, peace, continuity' within Turkey" was the initial comment of John Kerry when nothing was clear. Whereafter he "emphasised US's support for the elected government" when it was clear that the putschists lost the day after.
    http://www.politico.com/…/…/07/john-kerry-turkey-coup-225632
    https://twitter.com/JohnKerry/status/754141724193284096


    - John Kerry warned that Turkey should respect the rule of law **cough Guantanamo cough** when conducting crackdown operations on Gülenists and insinuated that Turkey's NATO membership could be in jeopardy. 
    http://www.independent.co.uk/…/turkey-coup-could-threaten-c…


    - I am not saying that Turkey is perfect but hey, it isn't Sudan either. The thing that irritates me the most is that people that don't know the Turkish culture, never visited Turkey, don't know the facts on the ground, nor understand the history of Turkey and the Turks, are acting like they're experts based on the biased information they get.
    Secondly, I will list some reasons why the Turks keep voting for Erdoğan every election since 2002.

    --- IMPORTANT NOTE ---
    I never voted for Erdoğan and probably will never vote for him. Here I will only explain what the train of thought is of a typical AKP voter.
    --- IMPORTANT NOTE ---


    - The main reason why people voted in 2002 for him was because to get rid of serious economic crisis in Turkey and political instability. This economic crisis was so serious that several banks were bankrupt in one night, so that many people lost their savings. There was also hyperinflation, here we speak of interest rates above 100%+. People had enough of old faces and unstable coalitions hence elected in 2002 AKP as the only governing party. After a while things started normalise in Turkey. The inflation fell quickly (now it's around 8-9%), government dept to GDP fell from ±70% to ±30% in 2015, industrial exports skyrocketed, etc... To wrap things up, the main reason why the majority of people still vote for AKP is because of economy and not because of religion.

    - People that think AKP voters are definitely Islamists and most of them want some sort of Islam to govern Turkey are wrong. There is a big portion in AKP voters that are just central right voters and not islamists. Their main argument to vote for AKP is "stronk leadership", "stronk Turkey", "economic growth", "building bridges", "building roads", "improved healthcare system" etc... Not because AKP is a conservative party. I know people that are dedicated AKP voters, but drink a lot and are very secular. Also, the secular lifestyle is too deep rooted now in the Turkish society. Even the conservative people don't favour sharia rule in Turkey. Here is a research on it: http://www.pewforum.org/…/the-worlds-muslims-religion-poli…/

    - Some things that improved dramatically during Tayyip's period:
    - Health care
    - Improvement of infrastructure
    - Roads
    - High speed trains
    - Airports popping up everywhere in the country
    - Privatization of Industry
    - Economy in general
    - ...


    Those things are immediately tangible in the daily live of Mehmet. People don't care much if journalists are in prison as long as they are not suffering from economic crisis and keep getting services from the state.

    - Moreover, there is this weakness in the opposition that should be addressed. There isn't any leader at this moment that can surpass Erdoğan's public speaking skills. Why is this important? Turkish people like a strong leader image, just like Russians like Putin. Whether I like him or not, I have to admit he is a master in addressing large crowds and manipulating them according his own interests.

    Lastly, I salute the brave people who gave their lives  Friday (15th of July). Hopefully, we can get rid of Erdoğan by ballots and not bullets."

     

    I hope you learned something new by reading this little topic about Turkey and it's failed coup.

     

    Have a great day

    Berkan/Tsude

     

     

  4. Hey everybody

     

    As I am a person who deepens himself in geopolitics and history I thought I'd post crash course posts in the general discussion. Before I put the effort into this, are you guys interested? I was thinking on starting with Roman history (From Kingdom to Empire (in 3 parts), The cursus honorum (1 part), the evolution of the roman army (1 part), it's civilian life and economy (2 parts) and the fall of rome (2 parts)). In total this would be a crash course of 7 parts talking about Roman history. 

     

    I thought that Roman history would be a good basis as it is the basis of life as we know it. If you guys want other things, you can post it down below. For instance, 1750-2017 is a timeperiod I have knowledge about besides the 753-1452 Era. Or would you rather want to hear about the sengoku Jidai? The Korean wars? Japan's evolution to imperialism? The colonial wars? Political issues now? How Western berlin survived? The creation of the European Union? And many more subjects that you would suggest!

     

    I hope this'll interest a few people

     

    Berkan/Tsude

  5. 10 hours ago, PurpleExod said:

    If this is an introduction I want to see an admin application by this guy :roy:

    Anyways welcome to GFL, enjoy your stay

    Trust me, my application usually consists of over 2000 words. Used to have a template for my experience part of the application, but I lost all those names so I'll have to think back real hard if I do apply haha!

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