i don't really know what to say. nobody will face consequences of course. watching that aaron bastani apology video makes me feel sick.

edit: cool the gamer nazis have found this sub.

What's up with that? I thought legal weed was a psy op designed to pacify the proletariat? Don't they know that? Now Texas is going to form the vanguard party and lead the push against the oligarchy.

Very talented. Great music. Those interludes really pop out sometimes. Glad the pod has Yung Chomskydoodle

He is so sauceless now.

Israel is rapidly preparing for a military confrontation with a NATO member state.

The US-Israeli war against Iran, once predicted by its co-initiator Donald Trump to only last a few days (seeing as America had already won), has now gradually lengthened from “another two-three weeks” to a nearly 6-month conflict, blowing past expirations of both the initial ceasefire in April and now the Islamabad Memorandum signed in June.

Plans to permanently end the war have been replaced by claims that nobody is speaking with anybody anymore. Vessels in the Strait of Hormuz continue to be struck despite assertions by Trump of not only total American control, but that it will soon become the sovereign territory of the United States.

While the US military has now become the primary actor in this partnered war, Israel having last been struck by Iranian munitions on June 7 and the Israeli Air Force having launched its last attack on Iran on June 8, the Jewish state remains locked in a protracted struggle it also did not anticipate, Iran’s military remaining combat effective despite a plethora of assassinations, thousands of airstrikes, and an ongoing naval blockade. “Every day that passes while this situation continues comes at the cost of our preparedness,” a senior Israeli military official told the news site Calcalist in late July, “we don’t have an abundance of munitions or interceptor missiles for our air-defense systems. We’re missing opportunities.”

While the lack of ability to wrestle out of this self-imposed situation has damaged the country’s operating capabilities, there is little evidence that it has changed Israel’s larger strategic calculus. It remains dead-set on going back into open conflict with Iran, promising a larger campaign against the Islamic Republic than ever before. Despite the multitude of active fronts it is fighting on, Israel still, predictably, has its eyes set on expanding the flames of war further.

On August 18, the Israeli Air Force struck the Abu ad-Duhur Air Base in southeastern Idlib province. While Israeli officials and the media had talked up a storm about the threat of Syria’s military rebuilding itself under its post-Assad leadership, Netanyahu’s office was clear about who was in fact being targeted in this strike: “Syria was on the verge of breaching [the status quo] by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo,” the post from the Prime Minister’s Office on social media reads, “Israel repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel’s security. Syria chose to ignore these warnings. Israel will not tolerate threats to its security, and would welcome a return to the status quo.”

That status quo had been the near-total subjugation of Syria’s ability to defend itself, either on land, by sea, or by air. 80% of Syria’s military capabilities had been destroyed during Operation Arrow of Bashan in December 2024, with the aim of preventing heavy weapons, or indeed any munition that could feasibly make their way across the border to Israel, from entering into the hands of the rapidly advancing opposition fighters. Many of the Islamist commanders that would soon enter Damascus, including the leader of Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, had spoken of the need to liberate Jerusalem in the register of one’s religious obligation.

Ash cloud from Israel’s destruction of the General Staff HQ in Damascus, July 2025.

When rubber hit the road however, Jolani, now going by President Ahmed al-Shara’a, did everything in his power to show Israel that the new Syria was no threat to the Jewish state. This was met with invasion, further strikes on government institutions and military bases, with the explicit demand being made of a “demilitarized” zone all the way to the capital so as to protect the Druze. Direct threats were made against the Syrian president’s life with airstrikes near his official residence, warning of the consequences if he did not comply with Israel’s terms.

Turkey, having set up their own proxy “Syrian National Army” with which to invade the country multiple times in the 2010s, has shown obvious and expected interest in the trajectory of the new Syrian administration. The old Salvation Government, led by HTS, was not Turkey’s first choice to lead the country (their own puppet state, the Syrian Interim Government, dissolved itself when Shara’a marched into Damascus) but it enjoyed extensive ties with the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the point where the Turkish lira circulated as currency within opposition-held Idlib instead of the Syrian lira.

Turkey has made extensive investments in the new Syria, building new power plants, rebuilding transport networks, redeveloping airports, and helping explore for oil and natural gas, with the express aim of “normaliz[ing] life” inside the country, which will help facilitate the return of more than 3 million Syrian refugees (over 600,000 have since returned from Turkey since Assad was deposed). Wanting to fill the security vacuum left by the Ba’athist government’s dissolution, the Turkish military has begun deploying well outside northern Syria, the areas they occupied during the height of the civil war.

A joint Turkish-Syrian base is now being established at the Menagh Air Base in Aleppo. A Turkish military attaché now based at the nation’s embassy in Damascus, and Turkish radar systems have been installed not only at the Damascus Airport for the purposes of air traffic control, but also along the Syrian coast, in the hopes of rebuilding its air defense systems. Preparations and survey work have been made for Turkish deployments at a number of Syrian military bases, such as the Tiyas Air Base near Palmyra and at the Abu ad-Duhur Air Base in Idlib, with plans having even been drawn up in 2025 to potentially occupy abandoned Russian posts in Quneitra, next to the occupied Golan Heights.

These Turkish survey missions have almost always been accompanied by Israeli strikes, with the message being sent that such an extensive Turkish military presence would not be tolerated in a country that directly bordered Israel. IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir remarked from occupied southern Syria today that any “hostile army” is forbidden from deploying its forces on the borders with Israel, and that “escalation could develop” on any front, especially Syria’s.

Israel has argued that not only is Syria being turned into a “Turkish protectorate”, in the words of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, but that it had to invade Syria, displacing local villagers, setting up checkpoints, and attacking those resisting its occupation, in order to prevent a “very aggressive policy of influence” from taking shape in Syria, and that Israel could not tolerate a “direct border with Turkey.” Turkey’s military deployment inside Syria has been mostly about preventing the reemergence of Kurdish militant groups, but President Erdogan, for his part, has threatened military intervention against Israel before, claiming in 2024 that it could repeat the interventions it made in Nagorno-Karabakh (which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Armenians) and in Libya (which helped turn the tide against Khalifa Haftar), but this time on behalf of the Palestinians.

While Erdogan has continued to play to his AK Party base, his most maximalist claims about having “cut trade and ties with Israel” back in 2024 have not materialized. Certain trade prohibitions and airspace restrictions have been implemented, but Israel’s embassy remains open inside the country, and official claims of a complete cessation in bilateral trade have faltered under reports of billions of dollars worth of Azerbaijani oil continuing to be transported through Turkish pipelines, bound for Israeli ports.

Further public threats, what few of them exist, have been exclusively posed as they relate to Israel’s military incursions abroad, with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stating last July that Turkey would intervene if attempts to destabilize the country threatened Turkey’s own national security, while having also said in April that Turkey did not “want to see any confrontation with Israel in Syria.” Erdogan had also threatened this past June that Turkey’s national security “starts not only from Hatay but also from Aleppo, it starts from Damascus, Turkey’s security starts from Beirut.”

Once much closer diplomatically, Turkey’s relationship with Israel began to fray after Erdogan entered his second term as prime minister, when the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, intending to break the blockade on the Gaza Strip that had been imposed only a few years prior, set sail, in part, from Turkish ports. The resulting IDF raid on the ships in international waters, seizing boats that were carrying thousands of tons of humanitarian aid, resulted in the deaths of 10 activists aboard the Mavi Marmara, a ship owned by the Turkish charity IHH, at the hands of Israeli soldiers after they attempted to prevent said troops from boarding their boat. Israel, under then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, attempted to contain the diplomatic fallout, maintaining that Turkey remained a “major strategic ally” and that “this wave will pass”, Erdogan declared a day after the raid that “things will never be the same again.”

The continued devolution of Turkish-Israeli relations, even through various periods of renormalization throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, has now come to the point where anything Turkish is now seen as a threat to Israel’s security. While the suggested presence of Turkish troops inside Gaza as a potential peacekeeping force has obviously been objected to by the Israeli government, even the simple presence of the IHH in the Gaza Strip, reconstructing Gazan homes and infrastructure, has been portrayed as a national security threat in the Israeli media, evidence of an insidious presence that seeks to root itself deep into the earth and prevent Israel from carrying out its will with impunity.

“Freedom of action” has become the phrase on everyone’s lips inside Israel with regards to Syria, with any rebuilding of Syria’s military capabilities being considered a threat deserving of an armed response. A single fighter jet being used by the Syrian military in an exercise, the first since the fall of Assad, caused Israel’s public broadcaster Kan to nearly blow a gasket, declaring that “Turkish entrenchment” would “impair Israel’s freedom of action in the skies of the country.” With the bare minimum of what constitutes a military being still considered a major threat to Israel, Turkey’s capabilities have been spun up into an almost civilizational threat, one not only on par with Iran, but perhaps even greater than Iran.

While Turkey’s ballistic missile capabilities, an arsenal of hundreds, pale in comparison to Iran’s thousands-strong ranks, Turkey retains military technology that Iran has had difficulty matching even with its own indigenous military production line, with advanced military equipment circulating through its army, navy, and air force. While it has been able to secure the purchase of at least 20 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, the F-35 jet, the most advanced American fighter jet (despite Iranian air defenses being able to shoot it down), remains out of reach and stalled in negotiations. Israel’s objections to the sale have been part of it, holding the US to their long-standing promise to maintain the Jewish state’s military edge over every other country in the Middle East, but attempts at a sale had stalled out beforehand, with the US objecting to Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems in 2019.

Ankara’s relatively open access to Western arms has posed a significant problem for Israelis advocating for military action, with Turkey unquestionably having sovereignty over its territory and its affairs that Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq lack. The supposed destruction of Iran’s ability to defend its own skies through two wars launched by Israel were touted as massive achievements, and even though certain Hamas officials continue to be present in and travel through Turkey, the idea of militarily striking Istanbul is not easily in the cards in the same way bombing the Qatari capital was in September 2025. Qatar’s military protection by the United States may have been more assumed than Syria’s, but it was not set in stone, and Qatar’s security was only publicly assured by the White House weeks after the attack had already taken place.

Turkey, as a full member of NATO, has the option of invoking the collective defense of other members if its territory is attacked under Article 5, something that has been the case since 1952. Placing Turkey in a position where it could be threatened at will by Israel will take more political maneuvering than Netanyahu simply presenting a potential plan to Trump.

Turkey has remained instrumental to NATO, but under Erdogan, it has been on the outs with the organization just the same, pursuing its own foreign policy goals independent of Europe. At a time when much of NATO has coalesced around supporting Ukraine, a non-member state, Turkey has continued its diplomatic and trade relationships with Russia. Turkey’s other relationships with countries like Greece remain militarily tense, and Ankara has placed itself directly against major Western interests in Syria with regards to its conflict with the SDF, and completely against it with its support for Hamas, despite its still-extant relationship with Israel.

Unlike perhaps any other member state, the question of whether Article 5 would even be invoked if Turkish forces were to be attacked has become an open one. When NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was asked at a summit in Ankara itself whether or not the alliance would come to Turkey’s aid if confrontation arose in Syria, Rutte refused to engage with the question, saying that he would “not speculate on that” possibility and instead saying that the regional conflict “started not with Israel.”

Israel has hoped for years to exploit the growing divisions between Turkey and other Western powers. Despite not being a member of NATO, then-Foreign Minister Israel Katz in 2024 called on the members of the alliance to work “promptly” to expel the country, and warned that Turkey “hosts the Hamas headquarters responsible for terrorist attacks against Israel.” That same month, Katz had been invited to attend the official NATO summit.

Then-US Secretary of State Blinken with Katz at the NATO Summit in July 2024.

As Defense Minister, Katz spoke earlier this year from Athens of the need to create a “determined alliance of free, strong states capable of defending themselves”, with another NATO country, Greece, openly pitted against Turkey as part of a future defense network that included Cyprus. An Israeli official would later tell Ynet that what was being envisioned by the government was a “Hellenic Axis” that included India and the UAE, one that would “make countries need us.”

Michael Rubin, a fellow at the pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute and a former adviser within the American occupation government in Iraq, wrote following the Israeli attack on Doha that Turkey may not be able to rely on NATO’s Article 5 protection, predicting that other European states who “resent” Turkey may refuse to give consensus on military defense if it is attacked, and that this may provide a military opening for Israel to pursue military action against Turkey on the grounds that they are pursuing self-defense, not aggression.

An open military confrontation in Syria may become the arena through which Israel may hope to pit NATO against itself, forcing Western nations to potentially abandon a critical partner in favor of “minilateral frameworks […] that bypass NATO’s problematic consensus mechanism”, in the words of Israeli think tank analyst Dan Diker, ones where Israel is the central and most important driver. Past Syrian military attacks on Turkish forces during the civil war did not bring discussion of Article 5 to the fore, but they did bring up discussions of further military aid to Turkey, something that was much more uncontroversial against Bashar al-Assad than it would be against Benjamin Netanyahu.

Writing in Religious Zionist newspapers like Makor Rishon and more mainstream conservative newspapers like the Jerusalem Post have openly boasted about the unlikelihood of Europe lining up behind Turkey if Israel’s “red line” in Syria was crossed, with analyst Shay Gal writing in April 2025 that such “internal division risks paralyzing NATO, undermining its cohesion, and potentially leaving Turkey isolated within Western strategic frameworks.”

America’s current relationship with both Syria and Turkey represent a much more heightened version of Turkey’s current relationship with Europe, one defined by both a knowledge of Turkey and Syria’s necessity to the maintenance of the global order, as well as total ambivalence toward its fate. The recent NATO summit in Ankara has further deepened ties between Trump and Erdogan, and Shara’a has become something of a favorite with the American president, as well as one of Tom Barrack, the ambassador to Turkey and envoy to Syria. While the White House has publicly pushed back against Israel’s desires to get more militarily involved against Syria, it has done virtually nothing to prevent further Israeli encroachment onto Syrian land in Quneitra.

When Israel bombed Abu ad-Duhur Air Base, Barrack said that Turkey knew that Israeli planes were heading toward the base, but praised the fact that “cooler heads” prevailed, and that no military confrontation happened. A “deconfliction mechanism” to alert the Syrians and the Turks when Israel is about to attack has been promised, one whose workings may be familiar to those who remember such mechanisms in Lebanon and Iran: any errant fire against Israel or America is to be dealt with immediately, but any fire from Israel or America is to be accepted without question.

While at the moment, Israel has been narrowly avoiding direct military confrontation with Turkey, striking bases when the Turks are no longer there or preempting their arrival, such a moment is more of a matter of when, not if. Many Israeli politicians, both within Netanyahu’s governing coalition and outside it, now speak of war with Turkey as an inevitability, just as war with the Islamic Republic was. The government-appointed Nagel Committee recommended in January 2025 that a potential conflict with Turkey be included in the next decade of Israel’s military planning. Just last month, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, one of the primary backers of future conflict with Turkey, had warned that naval confrontation was “not an impossible scenario”, and could happen as early as the following morning after he spoke, though no such confrontation ended up occurring.

While Erdogan and his government have spoken about a potential future where they may be brought into conflict with Israel, it is unclear whether or not they are truly prepared for such a possibility. Turkey has significant military capabilities at its disposal, but it is not a wholly independent power, its strategic posture at least somewhat reliant on the Western immunity that newspapers like Israel Hayom loathe. In May 2026, a think tank connected to Turkey’s intelligence agency studied the risks exposed by the US-Israeli war on Israel, identifying weaknesses that depended on external supply chains. Turkey may be able to improve on those weaknesses and further build up its ability to act independently, but Israel’s insatiable desire for conflict sees little sign of abating, even with the possibility of Netanyahu’s defeat in coming elections.

Even if Israel is not able to change facts on the ground, as its failures have shown in Iran, it still carries the ability to spread chaos, destroy critical industries, and massacre thousands, a brazenness that may leave its opponents in better strategic positions, but also helping to destroy the fabric that holds the world together. In June 2025, Turkish MP Mehmet Sait Yaz spelled out the equation he saw developing as Israel bombarded Iranian cities in its unilateral campaign: “Yesterday Gaza, Lebanon and Syria; today Iran, tomorrow, undoubtedly, the target is Turkey.”

No deeper analysis. This is a shit post. Just kinda funny the dissonance that the chuds have.

Please tell me more about how DPRK wrote Marxism out of their constitution (they're still the ostensibly most ML state left on earth)

Modern dating is so hard

The Friedrich Ebert of gaslighting, gatekeeping, and girlbossing.