Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

Edit: my point is: starting in the late 70's, authoritarian regimes failed miserably before all over the world, therefore there's no reason to believe they'll succeed thist time. Remember Marx explaining Charles Bonaparte: history happens twice, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.

The fundamental fact is that, in the long run, autocrats are very incompetent and make a lot of mistakes, mostly by hubris and because they're surrounded by yes-men that hide them the truth. They become detached from facts, they think they can control facts until facts control them.

Erdogan's strong rule is a drug that Turkey will have to pay very dearly to get rid off.

My interpretation is as following -- please correct me if I'm wrong. Note: I am not endorsing (nor criticising) Russian policies here, just trying to understand and learn. In order to learn, I try and give as clearcut an explanation as possible of my current understanding, so as to make it as easy as possible for others with more expertise to point to where I am wrong (if indeed I am wrong). My take is this: contemporary Russian policy is a variation on "spheres of influence" [1], and Russia treats its neighbours as being in its "sphere of influence", and does not accept them becoming part of NATO. I think the implicit deal with "sphere of influence" neighbours is: as long as you don't join NATO, you can do whatever you like but as soon as you try to join NATO we will stop this, including with force. Currently, Russia has borders with the following NATO countries: Norway, Estonia and Latvia. The latter two joined NATO in 2004, when Russia felt too weak to do anything about it, especially since they are not land-locked, so could be easily be defended by western Navies.

A clear example of this was the Russian-Georgian War in 2008. Russia withdrew after a couple of days (but left some "Frozen Conflicts" [2] in place that it can 'turn on' at will, as a power-lever: South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Who would have defended Georgia if Russia had decided to stay, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey? Probably not. Likewise, Russia could easily invade an keep the 'stans. Take land-locked Kazakhstan: huge, rich in resources, nearly empty, and, thanks to Stalin's policy of mixing ethnic groups, about 1/4 of the population is ethic Russian anyway (in 1989 it was nearly 40%). Who would defend Kazakhstan? Mongolia, Uzbekistan , Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan? Probably not. Ukraine is an interesting special case, and the annexation of Crimea can be interpreted in this way: Ukraine came too close to NATO, and Crimea is important for the ability of the Russian navy to project power in the Mediterranean Sea. Crimea is > 2/3 Russian from the POV of ethnic groups and Russia has a higher standard of living than Ukraine, so the majority of the Crimean population would probably have been ok with the policy anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_conflict

As for Germany they have been in bed with Russia for a long time, and Austria is basically one of the main conduits for laundering money coming from "bad" Russian people (who steal from the majority of the Russian population).

- "Individuals of one race are better or worse than individuals of another."

- "One gender is clearly better or worse than another."

- Anything about Republicans or Democrats

The origin of this list is not that the mods are biased, it's that they have a 100% correlation with foaming at the mouth.

As far as I can tell that's the whole list. Anyone care to add to it? Do not repeat the actual arguments, that will start a flame war.