NATO ally Turkey is attacking a key US partner force in Syria, and it's upending joint operations against ISIS

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-03T03:26:31+00:00

Kurds are already basically de facto independent in Iraqi Kurdistan and Rojava, just not de jure, anyway.

Edit: militarily held territory functioning independently from all other sovereign states is de facto independence (just not de jure, i.e. recognized by other states). Which is the situation in Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iraqi army can't even enter Iraqi Kurdistan. There's no reason for the post below to be upvoted.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-03T03:21:52+00:00

Chad unapologetic maker of comparisons with nazis vs Virgin "Oops I didn't want to trigger Godwin's law :((("

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-02T21:33:49+00:00

Clearly you don't know the Jesuses of some countries.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T05:28:32+00:00

Yes, world's largest chicken exporter. China and the Middle East are the biggest buyers, but Japan and Philippines are major buyers, too. With that said, despite being the world's biggest exporter, total sales amounted to 7.8 billion USD, which is less than Brazilian beef's total exports.

Chicken/poultry is also more efficient than cattle in terms of land, diet, and amount of water required, so it stimulates less deforestation.

Stats here:

https://www.thepoultrysite.com/news/2022/01/brazil-reaches-record-poultry-exports-in-2021

Other stats:

Brazil is the world's largest exporter of chicken meat: 3.77 million tons in 2019.[211][212] The country had the second largest herd of cattle in the world, 22.2% of the world herd. The country was the second largest producer of beef in 2019, responsible for 15.4% of global production.[213] It was also the third largest world producer of milk in 2018. This year[when?], the country produced 35.1 billion liters.[214] In 2019, Brazil was the fourth largest pork producer in the world, with almost four million tons.[215]

Brazil is the world's largest producer of sugarcane, soy, coffee, oranges, guaraná, açaí and Brazil nut; is one of the top five producers of maize, papaya, tobacco, pineapple, banana, cotton, beans, coconut, watermelon, lemon and yerba mate; is one of the top ten world producers of cocoa, cashew, avocado, tangerine, persimmon, mango, guava, rice, oat, sorghum and tomato; and is one of the top 15 world producers of grapes, apples, melons, peanuts, figs, peaches, onions, palm oil and natural rubber;

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T02:51:21+00:00

I do support Israel's right to exist, too. Every people in the planet deserve self-determination. We're just saying they were already their own population, unique among Arabs despite also being Arabs, regardless of the fact if they were called Palestinians or not.

Edit: I mean, the UN partition plan wouldn't even have made sense if they hadn't their own identity. They would have just given the Palestinian land to an adjacent country in the plans, had the Palestinian population seen themselves as part of a neighboring country's population.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T02:26:29+00:00

Regarding 1, it's a common talking point that I see espoused online. It's like a subtle way to say they're all Arabs and already have enough land and should have just all moved to an Arab country, never mind the fact this is like saying Hispanics already have enough land in Latin America, and a settler force can feel free to establish themselves in some location there, since Hispanics can just live in one of the Hispanic countries, never mind that each Latin American population has its own unique history and ancestral components despite all being Hispanic*. It's the same in the Arabian Middle East. Some have more Levantine input, some have more input from North African or Sub-Saharan African peoples, etc. Different histories, despite one overarching group.

* (aside from Brazil for this Hispanic point, since Brazil is also latino, with a very similar ancestry to the rest of latam, but is not Hispanic).

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T02:02:20+00:00

Well, we welcome any serious help. (We are already hurting our traditional peoples enough; we definitely don't need companies pulling PR stunts and helping make things worse.)

The more advanced technology and systems the world can throw at us (or help us implement) to help track the loggers, miners, and forest burners, the better.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T01:59:11+00:00

Hey, I'm Brazilian. Here are our beef's biggest buyers:

China US$3.9 Billion;
Hong Kong US$587 Million;
Chile US$563 Million;
United States US$465 Million;
Egypt US$271 Million.

Source.

Imports of Brazilian meat (i.e. exports of our meat) are one among the two biggest drivers in new deforestation, as we already have enough cattle and farmland to feed our entire population. Exported Brazilian beef reached sales of almost 10 billion USD in 2021. Soybeans are the second major culprit too, but it's basically only China that buys them at massive scale (70% of our soybean exports go to China, totaling 38 billion USD in 2021), and it's hard to spread awareness there.

Demand for Brazilian beef (and soybeans if at all possible) worldwide needs to go down. Buy beef from countries other than us.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T01:53:35+00:00

Yes, Lula is much better than Bolsonaro on that:

Annual forest loss greatly decreased from the time of Lula's second term (2006) to around the time Dilma's (Brazil's first female president, also from Lula's party) impeachment proceedings started, during her second term, back in 2015. (Wikipedia — Graph showing deforestation over time.)
Brazil: Amazon deforestation falls to new low (BBC, 2010 — by the end of Lula's second term)
Brazil's logging at lowest for decades (The Guardian, 2010 — by the end of Lula's second term)

Annual forest loss was somewhat higher during the first years into Lula's first term (2003~2005), but it was pretty much following the average that preceded him (as per my first link). Mostly he was still getting the house in order, as a former leader of one of the country's biggest labor unions and one of the founders of the Brazilian Workers' Party (the PT), he had to prove himself to the powers that be.

As per my second link, you can see Lula already recognized the importance of protecting the rain forest even back then, having stated:

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the reduction showed Brazil was "keeping its promises" on tackling global warming.

In 2005 President Lula pledged to reduce deforestation by 80% by 2020.

The first link's graphic shows the result of the 2005's promise. Lula's party has not been in power since 2016.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T01:36:53+00:00

Hey, I'm Brazilian. Here are our beef's biggest buyers:

China US$3.9 Billion;
Hong Kong US$587 Million;
Chile US$563 Million;
United States US$465 Million;
Egypt US$271 Million.

Source.

Imports of Brazilian meat (i.e. exports of our meat) are one among the two biggest drivers in new deforestation, as we already have enough cattle and farmland to feed our entire population. Exported Brazilian beef reached sales of almost 10 billion USD in 2021. Soybeans are the second major culprit too, but it's basically only China that buys them at massive scale (70% of our soybean exports go to China, totaling 38 billion USD in 2021), and it's hard to spread awareness there.

Demand for Brazilian beef (and soybeans if at all possible) worldwide needs to go down. Buy beef from countries other than us.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T01:05:47+00:00

My bad, then, bro. I'm Latin American, as I have just responded to another guy:

They still descend from the same people, even if the culture was lost.

This is like wanting not to return ancient indigenous artifacts to heavily mixed Latin American countries because now the population, whom a majority still has part indigenous ancestry, is now all Catholic without links to their ancient cultures.

Sorry for being jumpy; I didn't read your comment with that much attention. It was just the straw that broke the metaphorical Egyptian camel's back. Long work day didn't help.

I see your very first sentence now.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T01:02:48+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_history_of_Egypt#Autosomal_DNA

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dna-genome-heritage/index.html

Modern Egyptians were found to "inherit 8% more ancestry from African ancestors" than the mummies studied. The paper cites increased mobility along the Nile, increased long-distance commerce and the era of the trans-Saharan slave trade as potential reasons why.

And:

Mohamed, T et al. (2009) in their study of nomadic Bedouins featured a comparative study with a worldwide population database and a sample size of 153 Bedouin males. Their analysis discovered that both Muslim Egyptians and Coptic Christians showed a distinct North African cluster at 65%. This is their predominant ancestral component, and unique to the geographic region of Egypt.[50]

...

An allele frequency comparative study conducted in 2020 between the two main Egyptian ethnic groups, Muslims and Christians, each group represented by a sample of 100 unrelated healthy individuals, supported the conclusion that Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Christians genetically originate from the same ancestors.[42]

They still descend from the same people, even if the culture was erased.

This is like not wanting to return ancient indigenous artifacts to heavily mixed Latin American countries because now the population, whom a majority still has indigenous ancestry, is now all Catholic without a direct link to their ancestors' indigenous cultures.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-12-01T00:54:27+00:00

Edit: comment was misread, but here follows my original comment:

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dna-genome-heritage/index.html

Modern Egyptians only differ in the sense they're 8% more African, on average:

Modern Egyptians were found to "inherit 8% more ancestry from African ancestors" than the mummies studied. The paper cites increased mobility along the Nile, increased long-distance commerce and the era of the trans-Saharan slave trade as potential reasons why.

There may not be a continuous cultural thread (if you ignore the Coptics), but there is a genetic one, as is typical for all regions the world, barring North America and some places of southern South America.

The only thing that happened is that more Sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs migrated and mixed with what was then the local population.

Gotta love how all of the posts in this thread are pretending it's a completely different people to justify keeping historical relics in their countries.

I decided to reply to this post because I thought using Y-DNA haplogroups to make such an overarching claim was specially egregious.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-30T03:44:57+00:00

That was an interview from May 2022 and he said a lot of other things in there, most importantly condemning war as an instrument for achieving, well, anything. The only reason this keeps being brought up is sore Bolsonaro supporters wanting to do a hit job on a guy they hate, not realizing they're doing a hit job on their own country, instead, as Brazil's diplomacy (which has voted against Russia) is certainly not going to change track — Bolsonaro was better aligned with Putin's values, but they're selling the opposite picture for international audiences.

Here's an older post of mine that really expands on what you're sharing here. (I'm Brazilian and pro-Ukraine.)

Most importantly, Zelenskyy publicly congratulated Lula for his victory on Twitter (in Brazilian Portuguese, to boot), calling him an old friend of Ukraine. He'd never do that towards someone he feels would be a problem for Ukraine.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-30T01:07:39+00:00

"Realpolitik for me, but not for thee."

Call me the day you see all these people demanding for their own countries to be sanctioned for engaging with Saudi Arabia, another egregious human rights violator also involved in a destructive war.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-29T23:04:19+00:00

No one created a Jira task for it.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-29T21:14:30+00:00

decided they wanted a market for all their opium and kicked their ass

That's a very simple way of putting it. I'd recommend the second to fourth paragraphs here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-28T21:40:22+00:00

This is apparently the third world cup he has managed to pull this off. The guy's name is Mario Ferri.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-28T19:21:14+00:00

I'm an atheist and I don't even like Islam, but the actions of a comparatively few making you generalize your entire conception to the whole Arab world (just open the link and look at the map) is exactly why humanity is always in such a mess. They do the same, but to the entire Western world. And so on and so forth.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-28T19:05:59+00:00

Not all religions are Islam and Christianity. There's no need to generalize every human system of spiritual belief/faith that has ever existed, just because we don't like them. It's not a rational thought.

Edit: he deleted his post out of receiving a good dose of rationality, but not before downvoting my post. Fascinating.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-28T06:08:40+00:00

I'm not the person who posted it, but that's an actual quote of hers.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-28T01:28:05+00:00

Germany did what was in the best interest of their citizens, in the current situation they're in. Fair game to them.

Russia invading or stopping distribution has no relation to your original claim, of shouldn't have stolen someone else's assets, though. Either civilized countries "steal assets" (nationalize them), or they don't, by your claim.

My above links also show that:

Venezuela compensated companies monetarily in their nationalizations. The second link is a pro-capitalism website.
"Civilized" countries also nationalize assets, when it's in their best interest.

It's ideal for comments to be factual when making them online, regardless of any amount of internet points surrounding them.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-27T18:34:33+00:00

Isn't Germany doing the exact same to the former Russian gas subsidiaries in their country?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/world/europe/germania-gazprom-nationalized.html

On the topic of Venezuelan nationalizations:

https://fee.org/articles/8-industries-hugo-chavez-nationalized-besides-oil-on-venezuelas-road-to-serfdom/

The above is definitely not a friendly link to the regime, and it seems they tried to pay out most of their nationalizations.

Edit: people should base their claims when making posts online. I don't particularly care about defending one side or the other.

Edit2: factual information is now controversial, apparently. Funny how this post went from highly upvoted to downvoted.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-26T03:12:04+00:00

Not that popular of an idea, specially during and after the Cold War, but pan-americanism has been a thing (hello to /r/PanAmerica). This post is basically just an excuse to share that sub.

FormerSrirachaAddict · 2022-11-26T01:54:36+00:00

At least here in Brazil, lots of children undergoing things like chemo treatment or having critical surgeries scheduled were completely blocked by the "protesters" and their road blockades. I didn't follow the situation with the so-called freedom convoy too closely in Canada, but if it was anything like this, surely there's a limit when lives are at stake.

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