India and to a lesser extent Russia inherently want to have some kind of partnership as a hedge against China which they both border from opposite sides but are weaker than. Similar to how China has a decent relationship and some military partnerships with Pakistan as a hedge against India. Since the Russian economy is having some issues, also anything that can boost exports and bring in money for their military industry without cutting that much into what they want to use in Ukraine is highly desirable.

Russia has to be very disappointed about this. They really really don’t want another east-west trade/energy corridor to arise through the Caucasus to their Central Asian backyard after all the trouble of getting a thumb on Georgia.

What kind of busywork were they doing for almost a decade when they couldn’t even agree on a foundational issue like can we use it on a carrier or not?

The plant is native to like Bolivia but had already been spread by people throughout the Caribbean and North America even before Europeans got there which goes to show how beneficial it can be for a plant to be psychoactive to people.

Fun fact; being in the nightshade family, tobacco is also related somewhat closely to plants like tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplants.

?

There were way more civilian deaths from the war continuing than from the use of the atom bombs that helped convince the Japanese government to throw in the towel (aside from the parts of it that stubbornly attempted a failed coup to keep the war going, anyway). The Japanese occupation at the time of the atom bombing stretched from eastern China out to Indonesia and was quite brutal to say the least with many millions of civilians killed.

Buildings in the UK are designed to keep heat in to defeat the winter cold and up until recently A/C has generally been deemed an unnecessary luxury so it’s not terribly common.

At the industrial site I worked at in in MS, A/C was considered crucial in the offices and if it broke they would generally start sending all people normally stationed in them who were not working on something absolutely crucial that had to be done there home as the temperature drifted up past like the low 80s or something (even in the winter all the computers could heat the office up to the 90s without A/C and in summer going outside was like walking into a mouth so you can imagine how unpleasant that was). They had certain actions and relief that they had to provide by procedure to people with long stay times at high temperature to comply with company and federal rules and it was prohibitive to do that for literally everyone so it was better to call it a WFH day for most people while the A/C got fixed.

For some jobs in super toasty areas it was unavoidable though and they’d have countermeasures like ice vests, nearby break rooms with refrigerated water and fans that they were mandated to use with more breaks for hotter and/or longer stays, etc.

That would cut too far into the palaces and marble boat fund

The prolonged contraction of the Ottoman empire supercharged problems with minorities. As Christian states gained independence and/or new territories there was a tendency for many of these states to expel or kill Muslims from previously mixed areas since some influential persons regarded them as a potential fifth column who may want to help the Ottomans to come back due to shared religion. So for instance Serbia enacted a policy to remove Muslims from the region of Nis after gaining control over it. As Muslims would flee the contracting borders over to where Ottomans still held sway, though, these refugees would be quite angry and vengeful towards local Christians who they would often view as potential traitors who could take their homes just like at their earlier homes, and they would tell awful tales of what happened to them that would radicalize local Muslims. The presence of the refugees would also tilt the ethnic balance towards their favor. This combination of being locally outnumbered by people angry at them could lead to riots and massacres, not a safe situation, so the Christian minorities would often themselves pick up and flee across that same border going the other way… and guess what? These Christian refugees had a very similar chip on their shoulder and reacted in similar ways when settling in areas that still had mixed populations! Once the ball got rolling the process of ethnic polarization could autonomously sustain itself without the governments involved needing to keep on supporting it since it was based on the rage of local people. Sometimes governments would lean into it for reasons like to exert more control over distant restless areas and sometimes governments would pump the brakes for reasons like wanting the taxes of the people locals were wanting to expel. Kind of depended on who would be in charge, the problems they were dealing with and how they prioritized them. Going back to the Serbia and Nis example, Serbia got an ethnically ‘clean’ Serbian Orthodox Nis, but in doing so the Muslim Albanians they kicked out set up in previously mixed Ottoman Kosovo and that combined with the accompanying outflows of Serbians decisively shifted the demographics on the ground in Kosovo to majority Albanian Muslim.

A good chunk of people in what is modern day Turkey, something like a quarter or third, are descended from the millions of Muslim refugees who fled areas like the Balkans and the Caucasus (where Russia was slaughtering Circassians); these refugees are called Muhacirs from an Arabic word for immigrant/emigrant. With so many having these sorts of traumatic experiences or knowing someone who did (and the leadership in Istanbul being exposed to many many many of these people given that Thrace is the area many of the Balkan Muslims went to), the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey developed a very strong sense of paranoia and suspicion towards the remaining Christians in the empire.

If you had to chalk it up to a foreign power I would say Russia was both the main reason for Ottoman control slipping in the Balkans and through its internal policies of expulsion and extermination was the source of over a million Muhacirs which was a big contribution to that process of ethnic polarization. But the French and the British were certainly happy to pile on with divide and rule strategies to inspire revolts when they found themselves on the opposite side of a war with the Ottomans, and to maintain such policies for ruling what they gained.

edit: while the above explains while relations between the Ottomans and Christians became fraught, I should also mention ones that frayed ties with groups that generally shared religion with the government also. As the Ottomans were attempting to reform they were trying to ape the modern nation state models of the time of the leading empire of the day. Those models really did not allow for the kind of linguistic diversity that the Ottoman Empire had, which led to the government trying to impose Turkish language generally. This is not that much of a problem for small groups of muhajirs spread diffusely in Anatolia where many of their neighbors were speaking Turkish anyway to accept; however, in areas that as a block were speaking Arabic and Kurdish and so on that was much more difficult pill to swallow that led to big problems. Plus these groups generally had much more respect for the Caliph than they did for the modernizing government with the Turkish nationalist CUP. As WWI carried on the British were able to convince many local Arab leaders to revolt with pretty grand promises of a huge Arabia (that they would not follow up on) and Turkey lost control of much of the Arabian areas. But there were still some decently strong Kurdish ties even in into the earliest history of the modern Turkish government since the Ottomans had cultivated those ties for hundreds of years as their first line of defense against the Qizilbash and Azeri Turks I guess you could say who were generally considered aligned with the Shia dynasties of Iran. But when Ataturk’s Turkey overcame the Ottoman government, there were problems that came because of the secularizing nature of the government. The old sultan had political power removed, went into exile and his successor was just left with the religious title of caliph. He asked for a raise in his stipend and some foreign scholars asked for him to have more power in the government. Ataturk being a very aggressively secular guy who did not at all value the caliphate seized on this as a chance to say the institution was a channel for foreign influence into Turkish politics and abolished the caliphate and expelled the caliph. This and other encroachments on religious institutions and culture was taken by many prominent Sunni Kurdish leaders including Sheikh Said as severing the last religious ties that they held in common and the Sheikh Said rebellion kicked off. It was intended that Muslims in general revolt but mostly only Kurds joined in and it took on kind of a nationalist character. Nevertheless they sieged Diyarbakir and it was very expensive to put down so Turkey did a report on it and the recommendations of that “Report for Reform in the East” introduced many policies aimed at cracking down on Kurdish society that caused many problems between them and the Turkish government.

That’s one of the many claims they make, yes.

For reference the main groups left standing at this point are the Iranian-backed Ansar Allah rebels AKA the Houthis and the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government of Yemen. Up until recently there had also been UAE-backed separatists who in a major offensive almost steamrolled over the recognized government in their quest to get an independent South Yemen again. Those guys got wiped out when the Saudis moved against them and heavily pressured the UAE into cutting support though, so now the south is more or less unified under the recognized government. The thing is, while the area that Ansar Allah controls looks small on a map, that mountainous area is and has historically been basically the wettest and most fertile area of the whole country (much of which is desert) so despite the small land controlled they have a clear majority of the population… I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%ish. So there’s a strange sort of balance as the recognized government is in no way strong enough to take on Ansar Allah by its own power, but the recognized government has more powerful friends right on the border that can do a lot more to save their bacon than Iran is capable of for their counterpart.

It was ultimately stopped with world war in the way it turned out, but that could have been headed off far less bloodily earlier on. If the powers that be had not gifted the Sudetenland to Germany then Czechoslovakia actually had a pretty decent set-up to defend with many fortifications at the rugged borders, far more defensible than the flat north European plain Poland had to defend against a Germany with millions more people, vast amounts of looted gold reserves and extra years of deficit spending to build a far more massive army. It could have held on while the west mobilized and attacked and wrecked Germany’s military via multiple fronts on a much smaller regional scale.

Going back earlier with the remilitarization of the Rhineland the German troops had orders to immediately retreat and if they saw any armed resistance or so much as a single French uniform. The demilitarized Rhineland was key to the cordon sanitaire of French alliances that ringed Germany.

Expansionist states don’t become easier to deal with as they grow bigger so unless you already have and expect to keep amazing relations you should probably not them keep growing unchecked. And even if you do have amazing relations you have to keep in mind that politics can change on a dime and throw that in peril.

So color revolutions for thee but not for me are fine?

Glad to see you’ve graduated on from Russia posing no threat to EU to positing that it’s only fair for them to be threatening. And against big threats you prepare countermeasures, such as not letting them swallow up your neighbors.

Which power was that?

Germany and the USSR were carving off regions and conquering small states left and right in the lead-up to WWII, both in independent adventures and their team-up via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Munich Agreement is pretty egregious with Hitler claiming it was the last territorial demand he had in Europe and Chamberlain coming back claiming he had achieved peace for our time. Only for it to turn out that Germany would use all the fortifications, industry, manpower and resources it had gained at the expense of its neighbor to roll over the rest of Czechoslovakia. So Germany became a much more imposing force than it had started out as because folks were content to just watch it snowball and not help Czechoslovakia defend itself.

What evidence is that?

Because, again, the logic from you chicken hawks seems only to be that Europe must support Ukraine fighting Russia, because it is obvious Russia is an enemy, based on the fact that they are fighting Ukraine.

Notice the issue there? Nowhere is there any threat to Europe listed.

wait, so rhetoric is a casus belli now?

In that case, isn’t this NAFO style crap direct aggression? They’re very loud about how they’re willing to fight to the last Ukrainian - of course, not when they’d be in danger themselves - but how it’s good that Russians are dying.

Russia has made no threat I’m aware of to attack any EU member. If you have evidence of such, present it. Otherwise, your weasel words are just that.

The rhetoric does matter when Russian politicians are threatening the EU all the time by saying they’ll nuke them, that ex. Baltic independence isn’t legal, that they’re states at war, etc. But there’s concrete action too. A Russian drone strike just hit an apartment in Romania and Medvedev is saying it won’t be the last one. They’ve set off parcel bombs in EU countries. Blown up ammunition depots. Violate their airspace, send assassins into their countries, cyberattacks, influence operations to boost separatists and groups like Brexit… and even if it weren’t doing all of that, a country that conquers smaller neighbors is plenty concerning on its own.

Previously the European states learned that letting some major power go around willy-nilly annexing strips of land and entire states from their neighbors does not end well. They’re on Russia’s list of unfriendly countries, are subject to Russian influence operations that are not especially appreciated and there is some evidence to suggest that Russia would seek to reclaim lands from eastern EU states if given the opportunity. Plus the occasional bombing and constant rhetoric against them. So obviously they will prefer to back Ukraine rather than letting Russia absorb it, become stronger and start eyeing the next country.

They also bombed Syria and Azerbaijan which have zero American bases

At the core of the defense paradigm. Since Ukraine has a gigantic military (currently more personnel than even France), pretty cutting edge work on drone and anti-drone warfare and has been fighting for years against the EU’s biggest land threat. They’re not saying Ukraine is at the core of Europe the continent…

It’s a very thin data set. One entry for 2000. Nothing beforehand. Then nothing for 12 years that just happen to occur during the height of invasion and mass displacement of the population.

I’m happy to see any data you have, that’s why I looked because 99% seemed incredibly high and the drop to 50% horrible and I wanted to check out that data. I agree this is sparse though it does ultimately come from UNESCO. There is a point on the 15-24 year old female youth graph for 2006 which is in the middle of that and another on 2011, which were the 72-73% I acknowledged. A decline of 8% for the youth until it started recovering in 2012 onward is what this particular source gives.

Wikipedia would suggest the literacy rate was high prior to 2000. After the invasion, there’s very mixed data, with high enrollment rates conbined with high dropout and grade repeat rates. But it’s an article plagued with dead links, so…

Where that Wikipedia article says “literacy levels were high” you can see that it also links to links to World Bank Open Data - the same source I used - except unsuccessfully. I would disagree that it was high based on World Bank Open Data though. If you look up global 15+ year old women’s literacy rates, the global average in 2000 was 76% so 64% in Iraq looks kind of bad comparatively.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say the war and mass displacement resulted in declining standards for education

I agree and that matches up with the drop in literacy rates for young women (whose ongoing education you would expect to be more affected by war in eight years of their childhood than for the adults). I was commenting just with respect to the stats because I was surprised.

Interesting situation where on the one hand Ethiopia is having one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but on the other hand there are vast swathes of rural areas controlled by discontented rebels like the Fano and OLA. Though I guess the former stands out because Ethiopia has less experience with that than rebellions and unrest.

From a foreign policy perspective if he wins (which seems practically guaranteed) I’d expect him to keep on shoring up relations with Israel, the UAE and India as he has been doing already, and to keep doing whatever can be done to weaken Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. It’s a top priority of landlocked Ethiopia to get access to a decent port aside from their expensive deal with Djibouti and this administration hasn’t been above threatening war with Eritrea, attempting to do a port-for-recognition pact with the Somaliland breakaway, or the recent reporting indicating that Ethiopia has been training RSF rebels and launching some drone attacks on their behalf against targets in Sudan. Naturally this has made Ethiopia’s relations grow colder with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan.

I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).