(I don't know of a single Turkish person NOT voting for him that thinks that his degree is authentic)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recep_Tayyip_Erdo%C4%9Fan_univ...
[1] Yes, I could translate them, but I'm not prepared to go down this particular rabbit hole.
On the other hand, Erdogan does not have a single photograph during his university years, no classmates to back his story. He started a two year degree, but there is no evidence he attended a four year program. A public notary issued a same as original certification on a disputed document. The original diploma of erdogan cannot be found. Looking at the date of the diploma, the university faculty didn't even exist yet.
>Aydın Ayaydın, a Member of Parliament from the opposition party CHP said that Erdoğan participated in the four-year degree education of Aksaray Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences, as Ayaydın himself was a teacher of Erdoğan. Expressing that he remembers Erdoğan and his classmates very well, Ayaydın said "one of his classmates is Mehmet Emin Arat, who currently is a professor at Marmara University
>Mehmet Emin Arat himself called the claims on Erdoğan not having a degree "unfair" and "baseless", stating that "the claims do not have any legal, official or historical basis".[14]
>Israeli Journalist Rafael Sadi, who was another classmate of Erdoğan,[15] said that he was irritated by "people that are telling baseless lies just to slander the man for the sake of opposition" and shared the names of professors that he and Erdoğan followed courses from.
Of course they can all be bribed and/or lying, but the Wikipedia article as written supports the version that his diploma is legitimate. Or at least that's my reading.
An entire generation of women from conservative backgrounds couldn't attend university in Turkiye until the 2000s because of the hijab ban.
Unsurprisingly, once conservative Turkish politicians like Erdogan took power, they came with vengeance. Didn't help that rural, working class, and certain ethnicities (Anatolian Turks, Kurds) were more conservative than others - go to Istanbul Airport sometime and count how many un-hijabed vs hijabed women work as the bathroom cleaning staff.
Of course, those same conservative politicians then do the exact same shenanigans of corruption, power politics, and authoritarianism, and so the cycle continues.
The intersectionality between class, religion, ideology, and ethnicity makes Turkish politics wonky.
They could have just removed their hijab. Nobody was forcing them to keep it on.
Out of curiosity, what is the ratio?
Istanbul Airport is right next to what used to be Istanbul's Dharavi (a megaslum). Most residents were migrants and ethnic minorities. This was also the neighborhood that Erdogan grew up in, and helped propel him to power.
A major reason he kept winning elections was because he enacted a massive urban housing program that helped convert those slums into normal neighborhoods with public services (and also helped siphon money to AKP aligned construction conglomerates).
And it's people from those backgrounds that were doing the menial work at IST (eg. cleaning staff)
The curious things was that early in Erdogan's reign, that is during the 2000s, Turkey seemed to be genuinely making progress, especially in terms of economic policy and outcomes. That's when he was still making fairly orthodox reforms more or less along the lines required by the EU for aspiring new members. (Yes, neoliberal reforms work!)
In the last few years we saw more 'interesting' economic ideas from Erdogan, like that high interest rates cause inflation.
I don't think keeping the same policies as the 2000s would have avoided the hyper-inflation spirals though it might have marginally helped. Turkey issue is that it can't move from being a poor economy (as in simple rent industries like tourism and packaging stuff) to a middle economy where they can manufacture some stuff. Istanbul is a very misleading city because it paints a different picture to the reality of the average turk once you are outside of the city bubble.
> Capital city bubble is present in some form in every single country, [...]
Some countries are remarkably multi-centric. See eg Germany or the US, where the political capital isn't really the centre of the economy.
I don't think that's good or bad, just interesting.
Tourism is a pretty good sector for the economy, especially because by its very nature you have to compete internationally with the rest (and best) of the world. There's no shelter behind tariffs or similar.
Basically a bailout for AKP aligned construction oligarchs like MAPA Group. Turkiye did the same thing in the 2000s that China did in the 2010s with real estate construction.
> Turkey seemed to be genuinely making progress, especially in terms of economic policy and outcomes. That's when he was still making fairly orthodox reforms more or less along the lines required by the EU for aspiring new members. (Yes, neoliberal reforms work!)
Yep, but moreso IMF, because Erdogan 1.0 still had to follow IMF terms and reforms from the 2001 bailout.
Have a look at the development of Greek unemployment numbers over the last decade or so. It has been a steady downward march, with Covid merely a minor blip.
(Having said that, unemployment is still at something like 10%. That's bad, but far from 'basket case' territory.)
Founder Fund aligned vendors like Palantir, Andruil, SpaceX, and Scale (they're making the pivot into defense tech because their losing their moat) are absolutely taking advantage of FF's closeness to the Trump admin to get preferential contracts.
That said, the best comparison is probably Israel under Netanyahu after he was indicted for loving ice cream too much. While there was a boom in startups and business creation, most of those startups ended up leaving after the Judicial Crisis upended stability.
Wiz's leadership themselves moved Wiz's accounts and ownership outside of Israel during that crisis and Yinon (and most other members of the Israel cybersecurity scene) were very vocally opposed to Netanyahu and Likud during the crisis. At the same time, Likud aligned businesses did very well so long as they remained aligned (eg. NSO Security collapsed when they decided to align against Netanyahu, after which he retaliated with a Likud lead inquiry into NSO Group in the Knesset).
Ehn, at this point it doesn't even matter. The damage has been done, and either way I'm still extremely well off and have backup options to move to. May as well be completely jaded, cynical, and mercenary - when elephants fight it's the grass that dies and the mosquitos that feast.
This should have been countered by "forcing" education for everyone. For university, you could do special high subsidies that enable the woman to break from their families. It'll be painful for a couple generations but it does work.
The suggestion was prohibiting the hijab in higher education and subsidizing it, as if the only barrier to conservative women attending an institution where they’re prohibited from dressing traditionally is their parents’ approval. That’s not the case.
But people who think it isn't forced are simply wrong.
Yikes
Progressivism started as a movement to empower technocrats to “better” society via social engineering — and as a continuation of US/EU colonialism. They invented the concept of “scientific racism”, forcibly sterilized undesirables, etc.
Now their followers destroy native culture, eg Japanese culture, promote a return to systemic racism, etc.
And make posts like this, where they argue that forcibly indoctrinating the youth with their ideology will enlighten society.
I think it's quite universal though. It's like our understanding of other people is an extrapolation of our understanding of ourselves. Perhaps people with high EQ can put themselves in the others' position, but many just default to the projection.
Since i learned about this a few years ago, it has explained a lot. For example the WFH vs RTO debate, people who work well from home assume that naturally others would too and vice versa. So to figure out what people are up to, just listen to what they accuse others of doing. Prominent US realiTV politician is a perfect example.
Using such arguments shows how critically thinking (and actually free) population given state has. They wouldnt use it if they would be scolded and mocked from majority.
here is the blooper a TV news channel that leans towards the opposition side had. you can see how their postures and gestures change immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20szE-7h4NA
extended interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhCfXFZgd0I
https://www.haber3.com/guncel/asker-trt-binasinda-iste-039da...
I used to think the younger generation were a bit different but I've seen them pretty much obsess over MAGA, Joe Rogan et al. So more of the same I guess?
Written from the perspective of someone who's started to get comfortable in life. Now I'm quite mild politically but I can go more right short term if I spend some time watching people get butchered by gangs/nutcases. Some of my friends still watch a lot of that and it definitely makes you very much like having a "capacity for violence". It's one of those things that's IMO good in moderation, since some paranoia is healthy but off the deep end it turns into "get them before they get me"esque genocidal ideas and scrolling the nazi army webm montages and gore threads on /gif/ / /b/ at 2AM.
Old people have learned that change always means worse. Corruption is so big that it isn't really matter who is in power, the system functions as intended. (All over the world)
The US hasn't had the same history of coups, insurgencies, pogroms, massacres, censorship, corruption, etc.
Making everything about the US is just rude.
The comparison is pretty apt, and extremely current. More or less the whole world is watching with horror (or glee, depending on political values), as the US is on a fast track to repressive autocracy.
Do you think Americans haven't worked hard to build democratic institutions?
It's okay to talk about stuff that isn't contemporary American politics or even sit the conversation out and observe others talking about non American subjects.
Not everything has to be about America.
I think people should talk not only about the history or events in one country, but also talk about how other places are following in their footsteps and how we can prevent it from going forward where we can.
Also, interestingly, when folks talk about how the USA is sliding into authoritarianism on HN, it’s often downvoted, while for other countries it’s treated as serious and obvious, so it’s hard for Americans to see people agree that Turkey is doing bad stuff but they deny the same for America.
Lessons need to be shared so we can all do better together, I think.
It's a phenomenon that I think many users from outside of the US will agree is a pernicious problem on all social media platforms.
Americans should be more aware of this and aspire to not be so self-absorbed.
I don’t really want to derail this thread any further though, and I’m not Turkish so I can’t comment on the actual topic other than to say I wish them luck.
For some fun times, have a look at the requirements to become president in Singapore. Basically, you either have to have been a senior civil servant before or the CEO of a large and profitable company.
https://www.eld.gov.sg/candidate_presidential_qualify.html
Singapore's president is a figurehead, so it doesn't matter too much.
With that restriction, it has taken quite some time for a foreign adversary to have a puppet elected vs just shipping in some carpet bagger.
Having a minimum age also allows for some decent life experience. After all, 35 years old is not that old.
Whether it is silly or not, I'm not sure, but it certainly doesn't seem very democratic.
IMO Arnold Schwarzenegger, to pick a random foreign born politician, should be able to stand for President. People can choose not to vote for him if they've bothered by him being foreign born.
FWIW, in Australia, no member of Federal Parliament (so Congress equivalent) can be a dual citizen (and they must be Australian citizens), so an equivalent to Arnie in Australia would need to renounce their foreign citizenship before standing for election. This seems like a better middle ground than "must be born in the country" to me.
I'm really glad we all live in a world where nobody lies to gain position, or no foreign enemy has ever tried to infiltrate their operatives into key positions by becoming double agents and renouncing anything
I mean, it might be meant as a defensive, sure. But is it any better than excluding women or left-handers?
As a modern compromise, I think the US should allow people who moved to the US before a certain again (maybe 10 or 12) or have lived in the US for 20+ years. If you want to go a little further, you could require them to renounce any other foreign citizenships upon successful election.
The Australia law caused a bunch of trouble in the last 10 years because a bunch of MPs accidentally had US citizenship by birth to Oz parents living in US or one parent was a US citizen, but they never lived in US. (US citizenship is a bit viral in that sense!) I don't remember all of the details exactly, but it did make me think more deeply about a nationality policy for MPs. I think it is a reasonable requirement.
It has, although the case you mention isn't really my main worry.
In theory some random rogue state (Hello North Korea!), can just grant all of the Australian parliament citizenship. Suddenly they're all ineligible under the constitution.
That said, I assume modern scholars would make the definition more robust than the 19th C definitions used in Australia (which was an attempt to take the best of the UK and USA models, particularly following the US with regards to being a Federation of States, while still maintaining a proper Westminster system without a "King"/Executive branch like in the USA).
It's funny how Russia, of all the countries, had this problem - there are a lot of immigrants from ex-USSR countries, and some of these countries make it very hard to relinquish citizenship. For example in Ukraine this is done only by a presidential order, after a long bureaucratic procedure, and the last such order was signed in 2021. So Russia had to invent a mechanism which allows to write an affidavit certifying you would not exercise any rights given to you by foreign citizenship, and with such an affidavit your citizenship is considered "effectively relinquished" by Russian authorities.
Your compromise would probably work well as a compromise, but honestly, it feels a bit superfluous to have all those restrictions, when you have voters who can apply any criterion they like anyway.
Voters can already resolve by themselves to vote only for people who are native born, or who are of a certain age, or under a certain age, or who like the right football team, or have the right haircolour.
The reservoir of potential candidates is vast. The risk this mitigates seems important enough to give up on additional potential candidates.
It's not like other countries aren't protective. Have you looked at trying to even just immigrate to Japan?
Regardless of how you feel, a country should be able to set its own policies.
> Have you looked at trying to even just immigrate to Japan?
Ignoring that the Japanese economy is currently weaker than the US economy (which affects your chances of getting an offer in both places as a foreigner), in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, Japan is much easier to get (and keep) a skilled work visa compared to the US. If you are not looking for a skilled work visa, there is a long term tourist visa (6mo+6mo) that is also easy to get, but you need to have about 200K EUR in liquid assets. Again, the US doesn't have anything as low friction.
I've recently grown to value this idea of "No single person is special or necessary for the government to function." According to the Census Bureau, there are over 150,000,000 native US citizens aged 35 and older. We could have a new president every month and still have a massive number of people to choose from. The only problem would be disruptions from rapid hand offs. The pool is not the issue. Taken to the extreme, this means political assassinations are only meaningful in dissuading replacements from taking the same views and causing temporary disruptions. The lives of politicians aren't inherently worth more than any other person.
Quite a big deal when JFK was the first. Look it up.
And in a democracy that means that voters should be able to set the policies.
Voters can already resolve by themselves to vote only for people who are native born, or who are of a certain age, or under a certain age, or who like the right football team, or have the right haircolour.
We don't need to further restrict who voters can and can not vote for.
Unless you don't trust voters. But then, why have a democracy in the first place?
America was founded as a colony fleeing its imperial oppressor. The fact that the rules are so strong here is a testament to the bloody and deep scars we gained from overthrowing our foreign oppressors.
It's a direct consequence of our nation's founding. There was a lot of pain felt at the hands of foreign powers, so we encoded it into the DNA of our governing rules.
Haha, no. That's nice propaganda, but the Brits weren't oppressing the colonists. In fact, they ran just about the most liberal regime in existence at the time (with perhaps the Dutch being the main competition for top spot).
North American colonists were also paying less taxes than people back in England.
See also Canada for what happened to the colonists who stayed 'oppressed'.
Btw, did you know that only a minority of people in the 13 colonies were even in favour of insubordination against the Rightful Authority of the Crown?
This is like assuming that your birth status makes the person. Think minarchy, castes, ...
You can be a naturalized citizen in live with your country, or a born citizen plain stupid and with worst interests in mind.
I'm one that questions the whole pledge of allegiance forced to be recited by children that have no wherewithal to understand what allegiance even means or the ramifications of that pledge. Yet, I'm okay with born in country and of a minimum age.
Not in the modern world it doesn't.
Now the king, that guy can't even be catholic! And until recently, couldn't even be female with living brothers.
I hope it stays that way.
The US had pretty strong traditions in politics, too, but they are increasingly being eroded.
To give an example that's hopefully far enough in the past to be non-controversial: when they banned alcohol in the early 1920s, they felt that their constitution did not already explicitly give their federal government the power to do so. So they passed the 18th amendment to give the feds that power to specifically ban alcohol.
Decades later, in the context of the war on drugs, everybody seems to take it for granted that the federal government can obviously ban arbitrary substances.
When you look at people who were "almost born" (came to the country as toddlers) or naturalized because of the love of their new country, purple claiming that they are second category citizens are hard to listen to.
And I say, if the American people want Putin to be president (and Putin is willing to take the job), they deserve him.
At least, if you believe in democracy.
If you don't believe in Democracy, I suggest putting some obscure German house of nobles on the throne.
If you are a supporter of, say, Trump you therefore say that Biden or Harris are much better than any other, naturalized citizen, as presidents?
It's hard to see the logic here, probably because I am an idiot, but if where you were birn defines the man for you then fine - everyone has their opinion.
it's not a good better best situation like you seem to think. at this point, i really think the unwilling to see how attempting to limit the new nation from being led by a foreign operative would be so important to the survival of the new nation. only, new is now 200+ years old (yet still a babe in the woods to other national histories) so the "threat" seems lessened by people like you.
i also started the entire thread by stating we have a foreign operative in place now, so if you can't read between those lines in who i didn't vote for then you're really just being deliberately obtuse about the situation is the only logical explanation i can see.
Apparently, as of last year, the constitution also says that the president is actually above the law. Given that they've written it after having just gotten rid of a king, I'm assuming they also put that part in deliberately. Truly, their wisdom and foresight was boundless.
It's an interesting document, but as time passes, its practical uses seem to become more and more limited. We're now at the 'people are getting disappeared into a gulag in El Salvador because the president decided they are criminals' stage, by the way. No judge, no jury, just an executive order that makes a person go away, and no mechanism to stop it from happening.
(I don't actually have strong opinions about that provision. It's certainly saving us from, heaven forbid, a Musk presidency, but only by an utterly uninteresting accident of his birth. People like him aren't foreign adversaries, trying to subvert the country, they are domestic adversaries, who bear no allegiance but to themselves.)
Voters can take these things into consideration when casting their ballots. No need to make these choices for them.
Elect a dynasty to rule forever
Limit voting rights of group X,Y and Z to get "better" votes
Remain with the rule of the majority system
Elect ChatGPT to rule forever with a "be nice pls" prompt
Or you could try sortition, which you haven't even considered at all.
So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled? Do you then set a minimum amount of time to keep the polling below that threshold. 0s? 24hrs? 1 week? You've now also limited the number of eligible voters to those with cards that work in ATMs, so people with some form of wealth which is probably in line with how the framers intended
The solution to the mood based polling is the "should the vote not be corrected over Y time". Y can be determined depending on what gov can handle but is it really mood voting if you get voted in, a year later you've not been in the lead position for over Y time (say 3 months) and you get replaced by the new favorite?
Calling them ATM cards was probably just a short cut in describing how the system would work. Not a suggestion to connect with the banking system.
In any case, it might actually be an interesting idea to perhaps give everyone a base vote for free and then let them have some bonus votes in proportion to actual net taxes paid. Gotta give those billionaires an incentive to not dodge their taxes so hard after all.
> So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled?
That's a relatively simple flaw to fix, if you'd actually want to fix it. You already made some suggestions, and there are other ways.
In general, I would suggest trying these kinds of innovations out more locally before you go for the federal government.
That could either be in states or counties, or even for running local clubs and cooperatives and companies.
There's some standard ways for shareholders to vote on the board of directors etc. But it's relatively easy for willing companies (especially new startups) to experiment with alternative forms of governance.
Have a look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" for more background.
To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings. Maybe education but then you'd have to make reeducation camps for those of incorrect opinions and understandings since educating the entire populace will mostly just move the average bar higher.
I'm not talking about doing referendums on every single issue direct democracy style and I am aware that to correctly implement something like this you'd need to do it gradually so that the populace has time to adjust to their increased political power which will hopefully increase their interest in politics in general.
Not necessarily. You could also punish liars several after the fact, ie after their term, and hope that incentives will do the trick.
Though my favourite idea is to make voting with your feet easier. If you have more issues decided at more local levels, then it's easier to up sticks and move to the next town over, if you disagree with a policy.
I call that the "McDonald's flavour of democracy": McDonald's doesn't let you vote on their menu, but if you don't like it, you can always just head over to Pizza Hut.
You can either (A) do that inside an existing system by aggressively pushing responsibility down. That's what subsidiarity is meant to capture. And also how the US was supposedly meant to be structured; but over time centralisation won out.
Or (B) you can ensure that by having smaller independent countries. Ideally city states.
That's one of the reasons why Singapore is my adopted home.
Moving with your feet is about the most direct democracy you can get, but you also don't have to worry about the usual downsides of direct democracy.
I like local governance but you have the same issue on a different scale. Whether the president or the governor runs the show I'd want them to be replaceable in a timely manner and to have a little fire under their ass.
Moving your feet is something I also do but I'm not sure is sustainable. What you get is people going to more social places in the beginning of their adult life to get as much support as possible and then move to the most capitalistic places possible once they start earning big money to pay less taxes/have more buying power. How many people do that, I don't know. In my circles it's a lot and I'm one of them.
It's one of those perfect is the opposite of good things though since centralised politics isn't really better either..
my alternative proposal to simple sortition is election by jury. https://www.electionbyjury.org/
Though I would just directly fill up parliament with a few hundred MPs picked at random from among volunteers.
Parliament can then make laws and pick leaders for the executive (like in Germany or the UK).
As a slight complication, I would allow people to pre-declare proxies that would sit in parliament for them. Proxy declaration season would be akin to traditional election season.
---
In the UK or Germany, this way you could keep most of the existing political architecture intact. You'd just change how MPs get selected. Compared to your proposal, you also get the benefit of the law of large numbers, and you don't have to have a judge etc.
I would argue against picking a singular leader at random, just because the variation is too high. But in the US, you could re-use much of the existing system: fill up the electoral college at random.
You could take inspiration from the 'National Popular Vote Interstate Compact' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... for how to accomplish that gradually.
The US house of representatives and senate probably have enough members that you could bank on the law of large numbers.
fight for election by jury tomorrow. https://www.electionbyjury.org/
In that case, I suggest finding some obscure German house of nobles and putting them on the throne. Works reasonably ok for the UK.
This may have held true sometime in the 17th century, but it really doesn't in the 21st.
Though probably not: by German law Hitler could already not have been in power, because he wasn't properly a German citizen at the time. (It's all very murky.)
Hitler was already in power illegally. The law we are discussing here would have just made it 'even more illegal'.
(I'm using the weasel wording 'in power' here, because I forgot whether he needed to be a citizen to be a member of the Reichstag at all, or only to become chancellor.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_of_Adolf_Hitler
You are right however, that he wasn't a puppet.
I have no issues with foreigners. I think voters should be free to vote for any willing candidate, and people should also be free to move and work wherever they feel like, as long as they find a willing landlord (or house seller) and as long as they find a willing employer. I myself am a foreigner in my adopted home.
Now to your question:
In this subthread we were looking at the question of any actual examples of foreign born leaders causing trouble for their host country.
In the interest of intellectual honest, I have to admit that a US-style banning foreign born leaders might have conceivable stymied Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
Especially because by the time Hitler entered government in the Weimar Republic, the economy had already started to recover, unemployment was going down. So any roadblocks and delays might have conceivably gotten us over the limited time window where inviting the extremist to share power was even seen as a good idea to try.
Now obviously I could argue against this point; or argue that Hitler would have just put a local-born puppet to be his front man in government, etc.
But that's a more nuanced and fragile argument than the one I would have liked to make: that the US-style ban on foreign leaders is silly and never ever hindered any would-be bad guy.
Is that explicit enough for you?
No, we were looking for foreign born leaders who caused trouble because they were puppets for their birth country
As for being born in the country, I'm sure with the challenge to birthright citizenship that will get changed in short order to both being born in the country and having your parents and ancestors also be citizens.
Maybe it will change to more of a hereditary system where people had records to prove their ancestry was noble.
Shouldn't that be for voters to decide?
Yes and it looks especially silly for a country which used to pride itself on being composed primarily of immigrants. In fact the current president is one of the people who was pushing conspiracy theories about a previous president not being eligible - the "birther" movement around Barack Obama. At the time that movement was small enough and the far right was distant enough from the levers of power that people could laugh it off. But it would not surprise me whatsoever if in the future the US right pulled something similar to what Turkey did here, stripping a rival candidate or a portion of the electorate of their status to strengthen their own bid.
What if a twin is born in Canadian airspace and the other on American soil?
How big of a difference is it if an infant is born on Monday and their parents immigrate to the US legally on Friday?
Irrelevant.
I don't think your parents even have to be legally in the US for you to become an American. You just have to be born in the US, legally or illegally.
We have long rejected the idea that blood should dictate your social position in the tribe; but somehow we cling to the idea that it should dictate whether you belong to the tribe at all. Why? It's not with this mindset that we will reach the stars.
Well, as far as I can tell, it's only in your constitution sort-of by accident.
They didn't put this 'advance' in original, it was just the simplest and most face saving way to free the slaves without directly mentioning slaves in the text. (Compare the 3/5 compromise for 'other persons', which also avoids mentioning slaves by that term.)
I say, let them all run, and let the voters sort it out.
At least, if you believe in democracy.
The democratic paradox is real, and finding ways to minimize its worst outcomes can be legitimate.
It's instructive to compare the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany with the Weimar Republic. For example, while modern Germany still uses proportional representation, you need 5% of the votes to get any seats at all. (I'm simplifying a bit.) And you can no longer have a pure 'vote of no confidence' in parliament to bring down the government, you need to simultaneously put a new one in power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_confid...
As for the US president: I think the requirement for a minimum age and for citizenship are fair enough, because these are fairly easy to verify once and for all. But I think that the requirement for citizenship at birth is, if anything, bad for stability: remember the birthers?
Now imagine that in Obama's 6th year in office, some random birther had actually found some reasonably compelling evidence (but not compelling enough to make even Obama supporters agree). Can you imagine the chaos?
The same is true of the role of Leader of the UK Labour Party–but I wonder how many people would suggest that the UK Labour Party has an "unwritten rule" that its leader must be male?
The US does have this problem to a greater extent - don't get me wrong - but the UK doesn't really have a party which is open to the idea that maybe the objectionable thing isn't the use of the words Arbeit Macht Frei over those German camps, the problem is that they're not true.
What's worse is that somehow plenty of Turk are fine with it. Inflation above 100% for long time, crappy salaries, people can't even afford rents but the leader's party still get about 30% of the votes.
This is also a lesson for fellow Americans: don't think that just because Trump won't be able to lower the price of the eggs, will make rural voters miserable and make America a worse place means that at the next election you get rid of him. Once the environment is set up properly, anything can be justified, and with the right mindset the voter will accept any bullshit. Remember, "we always have been at war with Eastasia"
I have seen the culture on HN change in the ten years I have been a member. The people who defend Trump and his policies now would never have done so 10 years ago. It goes to show that the USA we remember doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
Simply ignoring the constitution and cancelling the vote? There's no way he will be able to shift the Overton window that far in ~3 years.
How about ignoring the Constitution and just running anyway?
> There's no way he will be able to shift the Overton window that far in ~3 years.
Yeah, even totalitarians these days hold elections for show. I absolutely expect that there will formally be an election in 2028.
What does that even mean? He can certainly mount a campaign, and the RNC delegates could even all pick him at the convention, but elections are run by the states, and they are under no obligation to violate the constitution by allowing his name on the ballot or counting write-in votes for him.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the shittiest red states in the US would put him on anyway, but I sincerely hope it wouldn't be enough for him to win.
Even if somehow he did win a 2028 election, Congress has to certify the results, and, depending on the partisan makeup at the time of certification, that could be a non-starter.
And even if that doesn't stop him, even with the current composition of SCOTUS, I find it hard to believe they'd allow him to remain in office for a third term. Of course, courts can be ignored; then it's up to the military, and then we've truly lost.
There are so many ways pushing Trump as the 2028 candidate could blow up in their faces, I don't think even the GOP is stupid enough to allow that to happen, regardless of what Trump's base wants.
> I absolutely expect that there will formally be an election in 2028.
There isn't "an" election. There are 51 elections, run by each state and by DC. I think this is one of the few strengths of our electoral system when it comes to federal elections: making elections into a totalitarian sham means subversion on a difficult level. Blue states will never bow to that, red states don't have to (as they'll already vote red), and there's so much scrutiny on the swing states that it would be incredibly difficult to pull off.
The majority of states are GOP governed, and are unlikely to disqualify their parties nominee even if they are Constitutionally ineligible. As for other states, the federal courts already stopped them from removing Trump from the primary ballot in 2024 over state determination of constitutional ineligibility, why wouldn't an even-more-Trump-appointee-dominated federal judiciary do the same in 2028, leaving ineligibility determinations to the Congress when it judges the electoral vote?
Given how far it's shifted in two months, how far it shifts every day, and given that there are 46 more months to go, I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
> Constitutional Amendment: The U.S. Constitution can be amended by an act of Congress. Republicans must publicly get behind the third-term project.
> Running as Vice President: President Trump can run as Vice President with a space filler as President in 2028. Perhaps Donald Trump Jr. could run on a Trump/Trump ticket before gracefully resigning on Jan. 21, 2028 after securing victory. This plan while unorthodox would show that MAGA cannot be stopped by any procedural rule.
> Supreme Court Ruling: The 22nd Amendment bans anyone from serving two terms in office, but it is not completely clear if that refers to two presidential terms under any circumstances or two consecutive presidential terms. There are legal challenges in the works to clear up the ambiguity regarding the 22nd Amendment. The conservative rule-of-law justices on the Supreme Court would be able to settle this once and for all, making it clear that the 22nd Amendment would allow Trump a third term as it would only be his second consecutive term.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
How about simply refusing to accept a loss, calling the election rigged and fake..
Or simply putting a puppet as the candidate. Believe Putin did this some years ago.
Elections would be held, but there's no reason to assume their outcome will be respected.
Or just declare that one already exists because of a foreign invasion or attack. Which he has already done once in the past week (as a pretext for invoking the Alien Enemies Act), and has given pretty clear signals (via his "fentanyl is a WMD" order) that he intends to do again, more broadly.
The states run the elections, not the federal government, so any state that actually is faithful to the constitution will not put him on the ballot in 2028 (and will not count votes where he's written in), regardless of what he tries to do. Hopefully that's more than 270 electoral votes worth of states.
The SC said that didn’t matter, it would take an act of congress to disqualify him.
The same mechanism prevents (or doesn’t, rather) him from running for a third term as prevented him from running as an insurrectionist.
That's not how it works. 22A says:
"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
Terms do not need to be consecutive to count toward the two-election limit.
There is, I believe a loophole: he can be elected vice president in 2028, and the president (whoever it may be) can resign, elevating Trump to the presidency again. Not sure if the courts would allow that, but who knows if the courts will be particularly relevant by 2028. Even if they wouldn't, they could elect a puppet president that just signs off on anything Trump wants to do.
Ultimately, though, I think all of this is kinda irrelevant. Trump is a huge problem, certainly, but the playbook for his administration this time was written by other people. JD Vance, for example, could be the one executing that playbook, and do more or less just as much damage to the country. The GOP doesn't need Trump in the future to continue to dismantle our democracy and funnel wealth more and more into the new American oligarchs. They just need to continue to dupe gullible, disaffected voters into supporting destructive politics.
The question is still who is going to stop him.
Trump's made no secret about the fact that he doesn't intend to leave office, his enablers have disdain for democracy and want a king. They very well may pull it off, as they've done whatever they liked regardless so far.
I want to be wrong about this but my hopes are tempered.
And even with purges at the FBI, US Marshals Service, and Secret Service, I have to believe there are still enough people in those organizations that would not stand for Trump illegally remaining in office.
Just because someone is a Republican, it doesn't mean they'd support a lifetime dictator in office.
Of course, if it comes down to the military to ensure the proper and legal transfer of power, we're well and truly screwed.
https://x.com/netblocks/status/1902230361968427206
>Turkey detains Istanbul mayor Imamoglu in corruption probe
https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-detains-istanbul-mayor-imamoglu...
discord is also blocked since last year. not sure the reason. some lgbtq stuff i think.
and when there's an event that could cause uproar, certain areas just get blocked with fences and hundreds of police officers.
it can be quite annoying for me, since i live in the center of istanbul. during women's day two weeks ago for example, i almost couldn't get home since i forgot to take my passport and had to argue with 5 different police to let me through without proof of address. took an hour or so extra.
this happens about 3-4 times a year.
it's a shame, because turkey is actually a really nice place to live, and the people in general are very modern and nice. but every now and then, you get reminded of how good we have it in terms of freedom in most western countries.
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yren8mxp8o
> Authorities also closed several roads around Istanbul and banned demonstrations in the city for four days in an apparent effort to prevent protests following Imamoglu’s arrest.
* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/19/turkiye-police-deta...
It also works on people who don't believe in an objective reality, people who can't tell two shades of gray apart, and on people who are just looking for some thread of motivated reasoning to excuse your behavior.
If Pete is the Democratic candidate, it's a freebie to the Republicans.
I think that Democrats that believe a Pete win is possible live in a bubble. Their views are invalid until they travel the States more to increase their exposure to the rest of the electorate.
I hope he runs, at the very least to keep LGBT people visible in all types of politics, but doesn't get past the primary. As much as I hate hate hate hate this, the Democratic party needs to find a charismatic straight white man, preferably one who has served in the military, probably in his late 40s or 50s. Not someone boring (hence the "charismatic" bit), but someone who "fits the mold", has clear policy proposals on things that average voters actually care about, and doesn't present as radical or "different" in any way.
This unfortunately means someone who won't push social/racial justice issues too hard (alienates white/religious/older people), won't be too science-focused (alienates voters without college degrees) and who will mainly focus on the economy and health care (what people actually claim to care about when making voting decisions), and at least make the right kinds of noises about crime and immigration (even though their impact on those things is somewhat limited as president).
Maybe someone like Mark Kelly would fit the bill, I dunno.
Democrats just need someone, anyone, who actually has the support of their own party. The last two times they ran someone like that, they won. The last two times they ran someone who either didn't win a primary, or who won a rigged one, they lost.
This feels like Politics 101 yet the party would rather make it about race and gender (not hard to see why - because it helps distract from the party leadership's mistakes and need for replacement...)
i think you're wrong and i certainly don't live in a bubble. but the reason i think you're wrong is not that america is progressive enough accept a gay man but because he's basically not gay; he's absolutely the least gay presenting man in the history of gay presenting men (exaggerating a little). he has no lisp, not an ounce of flamboyancy, nothing, zilch, nada. I'm aware he's fully out and there are photos of him with his husband and child and etc.
he's also young, handsome, ivy-league educated, was an officer in the military and deployed, intelligent, extremely well-spoken, and charismatic (not to mention experienced but who cares about such trivial things). he has all of the qualities that made obama successful in 2008 just swap black->gay. most importantly, and i'm not flaunting this: he's a man.
so i do hope he runs because he i think he has a better chance than bernie or kamala or walz or newsom or hakeem or aoc. but hey we all know there won't be an election in 2028 anyway so what are we even talking about here lol.
The amount and shamelessness of sycophancy that modern American politicians cultivate is staggering (Trump being the chief example, of course - but seeing this with someone as relatively obscure as Pete is also spectacular).
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/pete-buttigieg-interview-god-bee...
I think its much more likely that America would elect a gay man than any member of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Which, I mean, still means Pete is out, but for a different reason.
> I think that Democrats that believe a Pete win is possible live in a bubble. Their views are invalid until they travel the States more to increase their exposure to the rest of the electorate.
No one is going to win that doesn't understand that campaigns are about moving the electorate, not finding whether they are already are (from which a competent opponent will move them while you are chasing them.)
The Turkish law doesn’t seem to require an education, it requires a degree. Minor difference. (And the text of the law wouldn’t matter in the end.) But an interesting difference nevertheless.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-2/
No. That’s a technical solution to a political problem.
But, we’re on HN! Does anyone have a good English translation of the relevant statute? The loopholes to a certificate problem are with the certification authority—how is a compliant degree defined?
Violating a law versus violating a norm. Big difference.
No matter what kind of voter you particularly would like to target, the people administering the poll tests will (ab)use them to disenfranchise whomever they please.
Even if you believe the people in power who administer your elections would do this the "right" way, if you give them power, then the next people who come along -- who you may not agree with -- will also have that power.
Keep in mind that the word "dumb" gets thrown around in all sorts of situations and has no objective, easily-verifiable test for "dumbness". It's entirely plausible that merely "making a decision I disagree with" could be construed as "dumb". Imagine if, say, Biden and Fauci had decided to disenfranchise anyone who refused the COVID vaccine as "dumb", or, worse, Trump and RFK decided that taking those vaccines made you "dumb". See how easily this can be abused?
Even with that aside, the natural consequence of disenfranchising "dumb" people is that you want to fuck them over somehow. No thanks.
A literacy/civics/logic/knowledge/etc. requirement would at best discriminate against people who are uninformed, unintelligent, uneducated, unable or unwilling to take a written test, etc. But they are people whom the laws affect and who should be able to vote. I don't think that they are a comparable category to the exceptions mentioned above, but that's debatable.
Most importantly, the test would be optimized to exclude whoever the test designers and proctors consider, knowingly or not, unworthy.
I understand the desire to exclude the dummies. I know thoughtful and educated people who espouse the same wish, but it's just too dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_elections_in_Sing...
Mysteriously, the requirements are tightened up and/or new ones are invented every time a credible-looking opposition candidate pops up. Most famously, before the 2017 election the requirement was imposed that the president has to be selected from a rotating selection of races, in this case Malay, which by complete coincidence disqualified the otherwise-qualified Chinese opposition candidate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Singaporean_presidential_...
Would that make him compliant again to run for office?
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/columbia-university-pro...
The perpetrator should be sued for damages which is the normal thing to happen. Withdrawing properly received credentials opens the door to yet another extra-judicial punishment and we already have too many of those.
(EDIT) I've since googled around a bit and am surprised that there does seem to be a degree of discretion available to the university to revoke degrees that I was unaware of. I had always considered degrees to be like an affidavit, a statement of a fact as the institution understands it. There are plenty of horrible people who have done heinous things and I've never heard of their degrees being taken away. Perhaps one difference here is that the behavior under question was during their undergrad.
I don’t understand why this is even an option? So the degree is never truly owned by the recipient then if it can be withdrawn/ revoked? Just another reason not to invest time and money into it.
No it’s not. Not unless you plan on taking over campus buildings and vandalizing them, I guess.
The degree isn’t some unrevocable item that you own. It’s an endorsement from the university. There are contractual agreements involved and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of how taking over a campus building and vandalizing it (while encouraging current students to join you) is grounds for them to cancel the degree.
This is what I find so surprising. Having contractual stipulations I would need to abide by AFTER getting my degree for fear of revocation is nonsense to me, gross even. I don’t care if you’re the Unabomber. It’s silly for a university to be policing that. I guess I’m naive.
To be clear, so there’s no temptation to move the goal posts, I’m talking about a degree “already earned and received”.
The conduct in question happened pre-degree even if the punishment was after. I think that is a pretty important distinction.
most contracts cover conduct during the contract even if it only comes to light after the end of the contract, so that wouldn't be so unusual.
What annoys me is that revocation is even an option at all. I think this scenario is such an edge case that it really doesn't need an exception, and if supporting it means having the power to revoke a degree, then in my mind it's a lever for abuse and not something we'd want to normalize. It seems, to me at least, like a petty abuse of power that they shouldn't even have.
You can come up with whatever justification you want, but this action is unprecedented and clearly a politically motivated punishment.
It is unusual, but the situation is unusual. I think calling it unprecedented is a bit much. Its plausible it could be politically motivated, but it seems equally plausible that the school is pissed that they now have to find thousands in the budget to repair the damage done. Causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages is a plausible reason for the school to be mad.
I agree 100% that people like Ekrem İmamoğlu is a totally different situation. That was the thing i was trying to argue.
In any case Columbia had ample time to address it's students before granting them diplomas - no facts have changed between them and now, nor have any new facts been made public. It's only turning heel because of political pressure by the President of the United States.
This one has a significant complication of parallel legal action. They seized and vandalized a building. They’ve been reviewing evidence and building cases for a long time.
These things take time.
Columbia did none of the things in category (2). I know it’s 2025 and we have to pretend that this apparently corrupt thing is innocent, even while the folks involved make no effort to defend it. But it isn’t innocent, and everyone involved knows what’s going on.
There is no point in giving into threats if the other party is still going to follow through regardless. I think the best argument against this being due to political pressure from trump is it doesn't seem effective in getting rid of that pressure. If trump is the thing they care about here, why would they bother if trump is going to do trump things regardless.
The Trump administration is withholding funding and simultaneously making a series of explicit (and completely inappropriate) demands that it wishes Columbia to comply with. I assume what we're watching is a kind of "negotiation" period in which Columbia either does or does not do various things, and then over time the Trump administration decides whether to relent or punish them further. There is no real pressure on the administration to just stop.
One of the explicit demands the administration made was for Columbia to disband the University Judicial Board (the exact group that handed down these decisions) presumably because they felt that it would not sufficiently punish the protesters. Coincidentally, around the same time this happened, the board "independently" decided to punish the protesters quite severely.
The article says Columbia “temporarily revoked the diplomas of some students.” I imagine this is what’s going on.
That’s certainly a very different situation than simply being a protestor. I understand that everyone has different definitions of what protest means, but regardless it’s not a free pass to escape the consequences of your actions.
If any current or former students had taken over a campus building, locked others out of using it, and damaged it they’d probably end up in jail with a long list of charges. Having their degrees “temporarily revoked” seems like a massive slap on the wrist for the situation, not some dystopian unfair outcome.
Nope. It is the same. Twisting arms to remove opposing political views. If they've committed crimes then there are laws to deal with it.
In some places, potential employers call the university to verify that you have the degree you claimed to prevent fraud. If so, the university can simply tell them the degree had been revoked thus blocking you from a job offer if it requires it.
The people answering that phone or email are low-level admin staff far removed from those who decided to revoke the degree – I don’t know whether they have access to the reasoning or justification behind the revocation.
> Without justification, couldn't the degree holder sue the institution for some sort of defamation?
I honestly hope so – I’m quite against being able to revoke a degree due to other reasons than plain fraud (like plagiarism or fabrication). But I don’t know the laws well enough to answer.
When a future employer has degree requirements, the university will say "no, he has no degree from here" when someone calls to check, closing off all sorts of jobs.
If someone is doing a background check, the "claims a fancy degree but the school denies it" line is not going to look good.
Etc.
Sure the person still has the education, but they haven't got the right credentials in a verifiable way.
It's not the paper.
The degree is simply the formal proof. If a degree is revoked, that’s a secondary signal that the studies were marked as completed at one time but something later happened that was so egregious that the university felt the need to rescind any endorsements.
Discovery of rampant cheating to achieve graduation would do it. Taking over a campus building and vandalizing it seems like a reasonable thing to cause the university to want to rescind their endorsement of you.
I take it you are unfamiliar with what happened at Columbia University in 1968, and in particular how the university feels about it now.
If I murder someone during my diploma, get the diploma, and then get caught, will the diploma be taken away? How does that make sense?
Lots of felons keep their degree.
In this case, no one was murdered. The crime is more like trespassing. Should we take degrees of people who get caught dealing drugs? Insider trading? Pirating movies?
Do you think this punishment represents a consistent policy of the university, or was it applied under government pressure?
Murdering a professor doesn't change that fact, so from a strict logical standpoint it should not be affected.
That said, I don't really have a problem if they do.
In that sense this is not revoking a diploma, it's just applying the punishment for what they did before they graduated.
And while obviously Columbia's actions are politically motivated, I still don't think it's remotely comparable with what's happening in Turkey. The New York protestors really are being punished for what they did, and not to prevent them from running for election (which most of them couldn't do anyway, as you cannot do that on a visa, I don't think even a green card lets you hold public office)
Ok, but why should it?
The diploma doesn't certify that you're a pleasant person, have good morals or follow the law. It means that you passed some exams and are expected to have some competency in your subject. The only reason to doubt that this is the case after already giving someone a diploma is cheating, which means they didn't actually pass the exams. Other misconduct during working on the diploma has nothing to do with the qualifications for the diploma.
For that purpose it makes 100% sense that good behavior is a requirement of getting a diploma.
That's the reason the Turkey situation is what it is (of course Erdogan has already destroyed public institutions in Turkey, during the Erdogan-orchestrated "coup" against Erdogan). There, it's being used as an electoral weapon, and that's not what's happening in the US.
The American situation is different, but some parts remain. A diploma is not meant to just prove knowledge, it is meant to prove that you can be trusted to (help) organize a particular part of society, and that includes things like behavior standards. A lot of this, such as loyalty oaths (as in multiple, most famously the hippocratic oath, but certainly not just that one), the requirement to be accepted by currently important public servants (e.g. there was a time in Europe that to pass lawyers needed to present themselves to a judge from the supreme court and survive whatever test he wanted). There were globally mandated subjects, as in for every university degree (philosophy, state structure, religion, law, rhetoric). Those were not just mandated courses you had to take, you had to pass. 100% on everything, but fail religion? Tough, no diploma (one famous example of that was Einstein, who made it a sport to fail religion class, and was as an exception granted a diploma anyway)
What if you murder someone off campus? Is the moral issue the location the murder occurred?
1. Why now (for Columbia)?
2. Why now (for Turkey)?
The fact that it's in the realm of possibility that the answer is the same for both (political expedience) is a stain on America/Columbia U.
The article says there were over 40 people involved and they’ve been building cases against each of them.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy here. These things are a lot of work, involve a lot of lawyers, and take a lot of time. It’s only been a few months.
Not so long ago it wasn't enough for justice to be done, but it has to be seen to be done.
Allright, I'll bite the hook.
1. Precisely what categories of crimes do you think degrees should be revoked for?
2. Should it be automatic, or up to the whims of a political appointee?
2.1 If it's the latter, is that really the society you want to live in? Why?
It's easy to find a reason to shit on people you dislike. It's a lot harder to find a principled reason to do so, that can stand up to basic scrutiny.
(Of course, the current solution to this quandary is to gleefully abandon any principles.)
To be precise, it sounds like they’ve been revoked until damages are paid back. This is no different from a diploma being revoked because your last tuition cheque bounced.
It's interesting that Columbia protesters get their degrees revoked but J6 protesters get pardons. How do you explain the difference?
The people at Columbia were not mere "protestors". They were physically abusive bigots who trampled the freedoms of people around them. If they were Jews chanting islamophobic slurs, destroying property, and preventing anyone with a keffiyeh from attending class, they should suffer the same consequences.
I get that "peaceful protest" can be seen as an oxymoron. But what happened at Columbia should have been stopped the moment it started. It is bigotry. It is hypocrisy. But even if you ignore the moral and ethical failings, it was against the rules.
If true, ok, charge them with a crime. That's why we have courts. Implementing a punishment, under pressure from the president, without due process or a chance to defend themselves, is contrary to American law and values.
Edit: clarity about the basis
Also, I don't need people digging into my identity and using that to deconstruct what I say.
I mean, the world is not much better for the other side I guess, but at least there there is sense of international solidarity, fighting for a common struggle; that the bad guys are specific and nuance in everything is structurally required. It just seems like you need to literally sign on to having gang stalker mentality about the whole world, all because there is one big thing you can't possibly question.
I am truly sorry for how this has affected you, nothing bad deserves to happen to you either way, truly.
There is no justification for mobs chanting for the death of me and mine. Their coded slogans are not very coded. "Anti-genocide" protests who call for genocide are not honest nor legitimate.
There is not justification why several decades after Brown v Board of Education, there needs to be any gray area around equal access. A durable mob preventing people from feeling safe going to classes they paid for is no different from the KKK. No matter whose politics they espouse.
You're not _truly_ sorry if you're concern trolling. The Israel/Palestine conflict is my lived experience of nearly half a century. My opinions are opinions, but they are very far from uninformed. I have no way to prove this to you.
Like is there anyway you could even appreciate the Occam's razor here that at the very least, the protestors in this case may actually minimally think they are doing the right thing? You can believe people to be trying to be virtuous even if they are misguided or deluded or somehow led astray. Is that too worthy of such punishment and ire?
Is it really the case you can see only prejudice and hate from the other side here? That this many just ordinary people (read annoying liberal arts kids) are just pure evil? There is no room or evidence at all to see that we are all just fumbling around, reacting to the terror and pain we are all disproportionally exposed to? What sickness, what trauma could be so universally applied to all of us to create such a universal and bewildering hate? This is not rhetorical, I am truly curious.
Your arbitrary borders include whole eastern europe, most of the balkans, sweden, finland, estonia, latvia, around half of africa, greece, middle east, basically whole asia, indonesia, india, china, russia, and half of australia. There may be countries equally as bad in that list, but saying everyone does it with "some tiny exceptions" is egregious.
President Yoon of South Korea has been suspended since December, as a result of the martial law incident and the following impeachment. (Actually, Yoon's prime minister, who first became acting President, was also impeached and suspended. It's someone else now.)
Talking about India, Lex Fridman interviewed Modi [1] recently, worth a listen or read.
Lets consider the fact that after 10 years of Modi and the BJP having overwhelming majorities in Parliament, with Modi’s personally popularity close to all time highs, over a period where many external watchdogs essentially claimed democracy was dead in India, in an election where the BJP was expected to completely whitewash the opposition, not only did the BJP do worse than the previous election, they lost their standalone majority in parliament and had to form a government in coalition with other parties, and were a handful of seat losses away from losing to the opposition coalition.
In general the parliamentary system with a figurehead president as well as India’s extremely culturally diverse nature and weak federal government system, and strong judicial system, seems to have kept Indian democracy almost unreasonably effective relative to India’s poverty, education, and development levels.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/no-hard-proof-canadas...
It does not have a right to use extrajudicial assassins in a foreign country to kill someone who does not actively pose a threat. In a democracy you have a right to a trial, to see the evidence against you, etc. you don’t just kill people.
By the same logic, India would be fine if Canada sent covert assassins to India to go after the assassins and the people that ordered it? Should Canada send assassins into India to go after the people that have been illegally influencing Canadian elections? After all, they pose a threat to the country, and a country has a right to defend itself…
There is a process for extradition, and international prosecution. India chose to not pursue that process, and assassinate a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
It's not that Canada has never sent assassins to foreign nations. Canada participated in Afghanistan war and people including children, in Pakistan were killed by NATO airstrikes. Where was the due process for those kids playing soccer who were killed?
I do not condone any killing by anyone. But people in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones.
That's horrible. It should not happen. I was very clear that extrajudicial killings of civilians are wrong.
> I do not condone any killing by anyone. But people in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones.
Agreed. If NATO did something that you find comparable and you condemn it, then by your own standards, what India did is also a violation and never should have been done.
What India did is arguably even worse, since the killing of kids in a war zone at least had no intent or malice, just incompetence. Whereas the killing in Canada was a purposeful and intentional violent and public assassination, performed by hired civilians outside of internationally agreed military command and justice structures, it should be seen as an even more egregious violation of international standards.
They were not doing that when they committed an assassination and violated a nations sovereignty to do so.
That is the basis on which practically everything I have purchased from American companies (or their subsidiary in a tax haven) exists.
edit: Wikipedia actually has a list[1]. Did you know you need to have a bank account to be eligible to become president of France?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidential_qualifica...
In combination with Europe’s PSD2 directive [0], that effectively means you need to have a Google or Apple account to become President of France.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
In Europe, you are living in increasingly difficult times if you want to do banking unless you happen to own a smartphone running an OS made by Google or Apple, and to be a customer on their respective app store.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Authentication_Program
University education is a privilege that some people won’t be able to experience (financial constraints, having to care for relatives, …), and I don’t think it’s a unique qualifier for being a good president.
I think if people want to elect someone who didn’t go to university, they should be able to.
Would you mind your money in the bank managed by illeterate person? Or would you mind going to a doctor without any degree? Why you are going to trust somone who does not have legal degree?
In my opinion university degree is not enough. He should have at least masters degree.
In the post-TV era, I believe this is true in all countries.
When USA was formed and for the first couple hundred years of its existence, most people in it didn't have a high school or college degree. In fact many of the founders of the United States had no degree, including Benjamin Franklin, who was a newspaper editor, scientist, statesman and inventor.
Literacy can be learned by the 5th grade by most people. It can continue to be improved by self-study. Other skills can be learned by life experience.
Modern schooling can mostly be faked. It's pretty easy to breeze your way through a four year degree these days. Professors are even incentivized to make the courses easy. Hell, you can even have LLMs do your homework for you these days.
Frankly, requiring basic qualifications for a very complex job is actually a solid thing. Especially when any trade school/university degree would work. I don't agree with revoking of the degrees part, but that's just government trying to shut down the opposition. If it wasn't for the degree, they would've done something else, just like it happens during every election.
However, there are no arbitrary qualifications or certifications worth imposing on a country's leadership. They are blatantly gameable and trivially corruptible, as seen in the example.
Leadership qualities are apparent in their own right and can be earned from a diverse path of life achievements. Those might include founding a successful business, acting as a general, major, or captain in the military, inventing new products or technologies, running a charity, heading a police or fire department, running a church, working up the corporate ladder from entry level, etc etc. There are thousands of career paths that don't require degrees and there are phenomenal leaders within those domains. It's incredibly ignorant to deny those unique and valuable people from being eligible for arbitrary reasons.
This sort of primitive elitism ain't the healthiest approach.
Also, because a person doesn't have an education doesn't mean they are stupid or can't think critically. Further, there are plenty of educated people who vote for their favorite team.
Made-up reason: Imamoglu transfered to Istanbul University from a foreign university (Cyprus) in 1990. They claimed that university was not accredited by Turkish Higher Education Council. That was not really a requirement for the transfer at the time and the universities used to have more autonomy. Today they also annuled the degrees of 28 more people who did the same thing in 1990, just for the optics. I think one of them is a college professor.
I saw an argument about this latter decision which (rightfully) claimed that, if what happened is lawful, then they should also revoke the diplomas of all students of that college professor.
> In a statement, the university said 38 people had transferred to its management faculty's English-language programme in 1990 in an irregular way.
> The graduations and degrees of 28 of them, including Imamoglu, were annulled as being "void" and due to "clear errors" regarding the regulations of the Higher Education Board (YOK), the school said.
It's like no one thought even a single step ahead about the consequences of a degree requirement. It just moves power to the people that give out degrees. Some people are clearly only pretending not to understand this, but a significant amount seem to really not understand it.
This extends to other areas of economics and politics too, where most proposed systems only move or concentrate power and don't have the desired effect at all. I'm not sure where the educational failure here is. It seems like the only people that engage with these problems honestly and seriously are cryptocurrency developers and cryptographers. I would imagine mainstream economists are only pretending not to understand. Meanwhile some large fraction of the population really does think you can just declare by fiat that presidents have to be more educated and it will just work.
Could Havard annull a degree retrospectively e.g. due to pressure from donors or the president ?
The rule of law appears to be disappearing, and its turning into a Lukashenko/Putin situation.
For example, the Trump administration has told Columbia to dissolve specific academic departments. See this earlier discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43358925
The US and Turkish governments are operating under the same authoritarian rules of engagement, it's just that the Turks are further along the trajectory.
The most egregious is the General Service Administration requiring that Columbia place one department under academic receivership (which is nothing like dissolve) for 5 years, in order to continue receiving federal funding. Columbia notably is also a private Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions of dollars whereas at stake is apparently up to ~$0.4 billion of Federal funding. If Columbia feels the demands are unjust and wanted to legally challenge them or even take a stand on values, they could do so extremely comfortably.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/nyregion/columbia-univers...
A direct quote from the letter the Feds sent Columbia reads:
MESAAS Department – Academic Receivership. Begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years. The University must provide a full plan, with date certain deliverables, by the March 20, 2025, deadline.
The NY Times article provides a directed link to the PDF of the letter.
Awaiting your retractions doubters...
That article you reference says nothing about dissolving academic departments. Perhaps you are referring to academic receivership.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/pence-national-guard...
https://dc.ng.mil/Join-the-DC-National-Guard/DC-Army-Nationa...
What i observed was that the more and bigger the red flags and Attaturk monuments there are, the better maintained (=funded) the town looked like. The most flashier sported a flag hanging from (near) every balcony, few 10 meter ones hanging from various towers, and several 3-5 meter high statues here or there. Those without any, looked like forgotten shacks.
One night, in Bandirma, there was a ruling-party-preelection event. (Busses bringing) jolly manifesting supporters, jolly horseriders, jolly motorbikers, jolly 4wds and monstertrucks, whatever. Usual rock-concerto after the speeches.
And, there are lots of construction works. Roads (doubling some). Factories. Buildings. Everything. And somewhat visible military presence. On unrelated places.
Some of these things smell familiar. It wasn't that different in my country 40y ago when it was named "People's Republic of"
Maybe a foreign university can, but I believe he would still need to get a state institution (YÖK - Higher Education Council) to approve the foreign diploma.
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Both cases involve actions that directly impact democratic processes—effectively ensuring that those in power remain in power. Yet, the reactions to these events seem to differ significantly.
Does this reveal an inherent tribalism in our thinking? If HN represents a community of intellectuals, are we truly guided by reason and intellectual honesty, or are our responses shaped more by instinct and bias?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42339819
Also, in general I find that people who weigh in with this kind of comment trying to draw parallels and implying that there was some kind of consensus in favor of X which is inconsistent with the opposition to Y both misremember the earlier conversation and forget that these conversations feature totally different people. Judging an extremely heterogenous community for the consistency of its political views is an exercise in futility.
However, there’s a noticeable lack of discourse regarding Turkish President Erdoğan’s actions to maintain power. Nobody is arguing he is right.
Anyway both scenarios involve incumbent authorities taking measures that consolidate their hold on power, yet the disparity in our community’s reactions is striking. This raises questions about potential biases within our intellectual circles. Are we, as a community that prides itself on rational discourse, sometimes swayed by tribal instincts rather than objective analysis? It’s crucial to reflect on this to ensure our discussions remain balanced and rooted in intellectual honesty.
There is difference, Romanian constitution and laws do not allow unfair elections and the Constitutional Court has the final say. Since the election cancelling a lot more evidence was released to the public , and the Kremlinescu guy with his fascist mercenary friends attempted a violent protest, searches were done , illegal weapons were found, illegal money and finally Kremlinescu after confronted with video evidence admitted he lied all the time when he said he does not know the fascist and mercenary who gave him cache money, cars, protection and threaten the journalist and opponents like a good fascist tradition christian does.
Yes, it does. We are humans too, not some upper cast of society that is permanently immune to prejudice, emotions and media influence reinforcing the former two. Unfortunately, it is not only Romania that is straying away from democracy. Bulgaria, another EU member state, and by coincidence (or not) a neighbor to Romania, has also been degrading significantly in this regard. To quote a couple of examples:
- A referendum on the topic of delaying Bulgaria's entry into the Euro zone (replacing national currency with EUR) was not allowed to take place by the parliament and subsequently the constitutional court (with really hard to understand and controversial argumentation).
- There were lots of violations during the last elections that were investigated selectively and following a questionable and non-transparent process
- Protesters being detained for a month for throwing eggs on a building - a highly disproportional measure, given the severity of the violation.
Does this make sense to you?
Let’s check history…
Many academics, including professors and students, endorsed Nazi ideology. For instance, in 1933, approximately 900 professors signed the “Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State,” publicly expressing their support for the Nazi government.
So yeah … intellectuals can be very very wrong.
But let me inform you that MAGAs and president Elon did not like what the constitutional court decided (if only they knew the guy they supported is a conspirationist that thinks Trump is a joke and faked his shooting in the ear and 911 was an inside job)
The “constitutional court” is a joke. They made a decision under pressure form the EU. They made a completely unprincipled decision to deny the people of Romania their right to vote. They realized at the last minute that a redo of the election would result in the same outcome according to polls, which is why they kept making up new excuses and ended up banning the candidate. This is obviously a situation where the outcome is artificially manipulated and there’s no real democracy left there. It’s too bad because for about 10-15 years, it really looked like Romania was headed in the right direction, towards democracy and freedom and away from its past.
The constitution demands fair elections declaring ZERO campaign money while in secret getting cacs from a mercenary, getting cars and protection from the same mercenary invalidates the marketing claim he used ZERO money.
Other undeclared funds were spend to pay TikTok influencers to produce content for Kremlinescu , content that was not labeled as sponsored but the inflencers pretended to do it for free
Then TikTok bot farms were used to share the paid TikTok content , there is enough evidence and TikTok also admitted that there were bots and that political content as still pushed in the days where it is illegal to do this.
He was also disqualified because he and his fascist mercenary friend attempted a violent coup.
If you are a MAGA I need to remind you that he shit a lot on Trump, and USA so either Elon is stupid to push so hard for Kremlinescu or is because Ptin is demanding it.
There are more facts to show this guys character of a traitor slut, like admiring Putin, sucking on Trump after he shit on him, dening video proof for months until he had to admit it
Where was the bot army defending the fascist woman that was desqualified?
Now, if you look at this matter with straightforward logic, you see that Erdoğan unfairly invalidated İmamoğlu’s diploma and that this is against the law. However, I can only explain the reality of the situation as follows: For nearly 20 years, newspapers, the media, news channels, and even certain famous figures have speculated about Erdoğan’s missing diploma. Whether Erdoğan has a university diploma or not remains uncertain. This is something the left in Turkey has always known but often mocked.
I want to emphasize this: The left in Turkey is ineffective because you cannot change the paradigms inherited from the past. Now, the discussion revolves around İmamoğlu’s diploma. But why? Because, quite simply, those who once criticized Erdoğan for allegedly not having a diploma have now been given a president without a diploma in return.
Was this action illegal? Absolutely not. But is justice in the country applied equally to everyone? Of course not. Do not perceive me as right-wing, left-wing, or an Erdoğan supporter. I am analyzing the situation from a historical perspective.
As for the invalidation of the diploma, if there is an absolutely void and legally null action, how can “acquired rights” (müktesep hak) be established? In the case of an “obvious mistake” the decision can always be reversed. Therefore, the diploma is invalid. Even if most Turks here do not accept this, states operate collectively, and only those chosen by the game masters(USA) remain in play. İmamoğlu is neither one of those people nor even on the bench. That is why, even if he won admission to the university, unfortunately, he has no real chance of being elected.
Can you expand on this? Changing the rules or subversive tactics such as getting a degree rescinded seems like that to me.