[thinknot]

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy.

Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225760 and marked it off-topic.

[ardaozkal]

We do not ask you to declare war, but politically censuring (not censoring) people who abuse their power would have a great effect.

Even if you don't do that, just don't support them: For example, it'd be great if trump didn't call erdogan after referendum to congratulate him.

[sanderjd]

I haven't seen a poll, but I suspect a large majority of folks here would say they think the congratulatory call was absurd, inappropriate, and worrisome. The entire rest of the national security establishment within the administration itself would agree. This is the kind of thing that even the President's supporters largely wish he wouldn't do. My point being, we (the people) don't support Erdogan, even if the person who is supposed to speak for us seems to.

Also, until very recently, strong censure of the Erdogan administration's creeping authoritarianism was our policy. It does not seem to have accomplished much.

[nebabyte]

"The West" is not exclusively the US. Plenty of countries pay attention to global politics without "spending billions of dollars fighting wars, shedding lots of their own blood", it's not fair to lump them in with us.

It is possible to care and act WITHOUT overcommitting. Or at least, it is for countries who do not have a schizophrenic model wherein both sides are pushing against each other as hard as they can and so overcommit to everything including an astronomical defense budget.

[cryptarch]

In the case of western Europe, we should care because we don't have internal OR external border controls, and Turkey is a neighboring country with a lot of refugees to dump on us.

I wish I understood why there isn't a move to reinstate border checks in the Schengen area.

It seems ludicrous to me to keep internal borders open when it is clear that the external borders have failed.

[icebraining]

I wish I understood why there isn't a move to reinstate border checks in the Schengen area.

But there is a move. In fact, multiple countries have done so, although temporarily: https://euobserver.com/migration/130260

Thing is, border control isn't free; it may not be visible for many of us, but there are a lot of people reliant on the openness of our borders for their daily lives. Imagine having to pass a border check on your way to work - that'd be the reality for many EU citizens nowadays if you were to reintroduce country borders.

And would it really solve the problem? What if those migrants just came by boat anyway? What are we going to do, let'em drown?

[cryptarch]

I have nothing.

I sometimes miss having more black-and-white opinions. Real life is hard.

[taway_1212]

> What if those migrants just came by boat anyway? What are we going to do, let'em drown?

What's wrong with rescuing them and then shipping them back to the coast they sailed off from? If they're on international waters, there are no legal obligations to treat them as asylum seekers.

[icebraining]

Is it practical? As far as I know, unless they're citizens, the countries of such coasts aren't obligated to accept them. And it's often not clear where they're actually from. Plus, what if they're from a war zone?

[taway_1212]

In the case I have in mind (people trying to get from Lybia to Italy), there's no country to speak of in Lybia currently. Even if there were and it wouldn't agree to the EU ship entering their waters, you can always get very near to the water border, inflate another raft for the people and board them on it. They'd have to sail to Lybia by themselves.

The bigger picture is that these situations would very quickly stop happening if the word spread that it's not longer viable as a way to get into the EU.

[icebraining]

I wonder if returning them to Libya is actually better than letting them drown.

[cryptarch]

How will you tell where to ship them if they've discarded their passports?

[taway_1212]

Ship them to the shore they came from, not their home country. The whole operation could take a couple hours, not weeks/months/years of paper-pushing.

[cryptarch]

How do you find out where they came from? And is it at all plausible to survey enough of the sea to catch even half of refugees coming in by boat?

[girvo]

Letting them drown is exactly what my (Australian) government did, disgustingly...

[jstanley]

All borders should be abolished. No human being has the right to tell any other human being where he can or can't go (with the exception of trespassing on private property, of course).

[cryptarch]

I don't agree at all, I think it's important to integrate immigrants in a country's culture as well as possible, because not doing so will result in damaging conflict between the existing population and the immigrants who bring conflicting value systems with them. I think the lack of an endless supply of resources for integrating immigrants is a good reason to limit immigration.

I think borders can be very valuable to separate groups with conflicting ideologies and worldviews, but I wish you the best luck in advocating that policy in your local political sphere.

[thinknot]

As someone who lives next to a border: no thank you.

[ardaozkal]

The parent post also defends your right of moving away from a border, you know.

[ue_]

>(with the exception of trespassing on private property, of course).

This ought to be removed too, along with the whole concept of property.

[vidarh]

I regularly point people to this:

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

Especially in the Nordic countries. Having grown up in Norway, the idea of people e.g. fencing in fields or forests and keeping people off their land seems ludicrous and to an extent offensive. It's a massive restriction of liberty of the many for the benefit of the few.

(it's worth noting that the freedom to roam is generally restricted to non-urban areas, so e.g. not gardens in residential areas and the like)

[cryptarch]

Be the change you want to see!

Go ahead and abolish all your own property, you're free to do so.

Or was it more about you wanting to be entitled to product of your fellow man's labor?

[czep]

It's more like not wanting rent-seekers, whose property was given to them at birth, to be entitled to other people's labor. All property is theft, because in the grand scheme of things, we are all renters. We are here on borrowed time, why do we make a system in which some have more rights than others?

[cryptarch]

Do you have ideas on how to fix that?

I recently heard "land-ownership tax/renting land from the state instead of owning it" and "100% tax on death/abolish inheritance", I think they're interesting but not without problems.

[ue_]

>Go ahead and abolish all your own property, you're free to do so.

I do not own any private property.

>Or was it more about you wanting to be entitled to product of your fellow man's labor?

No; in fact, the exact opposite. It is about the worker owning the product of his own labour, rather than having it appropriated when production has finished. To each according to his labour.

[cryptarch]

I guess we agree on more than I thought we did.

This is why I insist on working as a contractor and not as an employee: I want to own my intellectual property until I choose to sell it, and I want to create and sell a product that's useful, not be paid for my time.

[andai]

You've figured out something very important, which is that as an employee, you never get to see most (ie. all, beyond the limit of your wage) of the value you create.

[vixen99]

So you want to abolish the freedom for a group of people to decide how many and what kind of people should be able to take up permanent residence within their community? Good luck with that one. Is there a country anywhere that does that? I wonder that you stop at the family level! I suppose you do. If so, why?

[jstanley]

I live in Bristol. The people of Manchester have no right to tell me I can't come and live in Manchester.

I live in England. Why can "the people" (although it is surely not the people: it is the government) of Australia decide that I can't come and live there?

[rectang]

We can "care" yet not "shed lots of our own blood".

Military-intervention-yes-or-no is a completely inappropriate model for the relationship between any given western country and Turkey.

[kirillzubovsky]

Human behavior isn't exclusive to one country or one point in time, so if you want to improve where we are going to be tomorrow, it helps to look at the past at one's own history, and all around, and to use this information to make better decisions.

You might see trends or evidence of causality, which may not necessarily happen, but might. Being aware of it can help you, and me, and all of us, to reason and to make the right choices.

For example, you may not believe that your president will become a dictator, but then you look at other countries, and realize that neither did their people, until they got a dictator. There's a lesson in there somewhere. It helps to be aware.

[ptaipale]

> Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world?

In this case, West being West Europe:

Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside. What happens in Turkey is directly impacting the security, safety and economy of all Europeans (except the British, who were lectured on their selfishness for not joining the Schengen area).

EU's border control was outsourced to Turkey. So, thank Jean-Claude Juncker, Barroso, Prodi, Santer.

[taway_1212]

> Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside

No border controls on the outside? Are you being hyperbolic or just misinformed? Of course there are border controls (their adequacy/efficiency is another matter).

[ptaipale]

The adequacy and efficiency, yes.

There are good border controls towards regions where they are not that necessary. For flight passengers from the United States, for instance. Schengen borders towards Russia are fairly solid in Norway and Finland, slightly less so but improving in Estonia, etc.

There is no effective control of entry across the Mediterranean; in fact, there is an ongoing operation which effectively works as a free taxi service for human traffickers who collect the money from passengers who are treated like cargo. The traffickers tow a rubber boat a few miles off the shore of Libya or Turkey, and leave the cargo to wait for a rescue ship with instructions to puncture the raft and expect to be picked up and taken to Europe.

Sometimes the rescue ship is out of capacity, so the people cannot be picked up, the punctured raft will sink and people drown, but this is no loss for the traffickers. We are told that we must go on with this because anything else would be "unhuman".

Upon entry, everyone has mysteriously lost their papers and everyone is admitted without any idea who they are, as long as they utter some code words.

From Turkey, people used to come across using flotation toys. Because EU couldn't get together an act of controlling the maritime border towards Turkey, the union negotiated a deal with Erdogan where Turkey acts as Europe's border control. Now EU is a hostage of Turkey because of this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/turkey-recep...

[taway_1212]

I agree, EU dropped the ball on this in a major way. From what I've read, Italy (which has been flooded with illegal African immigrants for at least 10 years now) has been calling for addressing the problem, but the EU response was far from enough.

[ptaipale]

Any response will not help if the response is just working along with the human traffickers by providing the major part of the trip they sell. In fact the response is currently worsening the issue.

People absolutely would not be sent out to open sea in little rafts, if the traffickers and their cargo wouldn't know that if they just manage to float the cargo out of Libyan territorial waters, a large percentage will be picked up and therefore guaranteed entry to EU by bringing them to shore in Italy. This enables them to sell the trips. Those who drown are simply deadweight loss but as long as the proportion is not so large that it would diminish the sale of trips, it won't matter.

Whatever is the operation on sea, it won't help because the business is based on the EU asylum mechanism: once someone is picked up at sea, they cannot be returned to the nearby shore (Libya or whatever) from where they left. And once on EU ground, they'll be free to stay by applying for asylum. Italy is not hugely interested because the people know that there are no jobs in Italy, so they move on towards Germany, Sweden or trying to enter Britain through Calais or such.

It's a hard problem to solve. Most ideas seem to be about coming up with a new Gaddafi, to make a deal with him similarly to the Erdogan deal. This is not very nice either.

[ginko]

Because there's a country with 70 million people on the brink of a civil war right on our doorstep?

[ozmbie]

Because "The West" includes Europe, which is rather close to Turkey geographically.

Until last year Turkey was in slow but ongoing negotiations to be a member of the European Union.

[mschuster91]

> Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

Because that exactly same attitude, especially by the UK and US led to the rise of Hitler and eventually the Holocaust.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

[mythrwy]

"Because Hitler" can become the excuse for all kinds of nonsense though.

Witness the Iraq war.

[mschuster91]

The Iraq war was not done "because Hitler". It was as clear as gold that it wasn't just about chemical weapons, but much rather about oil and funneling money into the US weapons industry.

What the Iraq war (just as the Afghanistan war) has lacked and still lacks, unfortunately, is a post-war strategy similar to the Marshall plan...

[mythrwy]

While that's factually true I have to guess you may not be in the US or else possibly weren't listening to George Bush's speeches and reading the all the media hype leading up to the event.

There were no shortage of "Because Like Hitler" and "Neville Chamberlain" type arguments being bandied about and the situation was not even remotely similar.

Point being, this kind of rhetoric (in addition to not being a solid argument) is dangerous and easily slips into justification territory. (As we've seen). Cases should evaluated on an individual basis.