No, not really. They aren't moot.
agrammatic
joined 2 years ago
Cost or supply are one thing, but Germany definitely has strong tenancy rights.
Cyprus likes to pride itself as having strong tenancy rights too, but it's not even half of what I enjoy in Germany. I didn't even have to get permission to hang a picture on the wall.
Leftist parties should talk a bit more about the same stuff that the right-wingers do. Would rather have a left-wing party bait people into voting for them with immigration rhetoric, instead of the fash.
What is then going to happen is that leftist values-voters will abandon those parties, so the parties deflate and still can't govern. And if the new voters who were "baited" stay for a second electoral cycle, they then take control of the party and turn it into what we didn't want to exist in the first place.
You win voters by convincing them that you have the best answers to their problems and the expertise to implement them.
It honestly feels like a very high price to pay for the sake of rapid expansion. It doesn't feel appropriate to remove the unanimity rule before the EU becomes a true union of federated states. The usual Polish existential populist rhetoric notwithstanding, it is the wrong approach to European integration (broken clocks occasionally being right, etc). At this point, for me it's enough to reject this report.
For fairness: It is positive that the report suggests giving the right of initiative to the Parliament. The plan for the Commission is also an improvement although it sounds a bit confused.
Hurra für Gadgetbahn!
Betteridge's law of headlines, right?
It can definitely be understandable, but problematic nevertheless. I think the editorial is on-point.
It is rather problematic that such a matter of technical nature has been codified into the constitution as a universal value.
Weird how it's the liberals who support such an overreaching law.
And while I apparently should read up in the Cyprus problem, I cannot know about every territorial dispute everywhere
Precisely: you do not need to have an opinion on every territorial dispute everywhere. In this case, if your goal is to mount a (well-warranted) criticism of Erdogan's rule in Turkey, you can focus on those aspects of Erdogan's rule in Turkey that you are actually familiar with, and leave Cyprus out of it.
If you are going to have an opinion on Cyprus though, yes, indeed, you should inform yourself about the historical background as a prerequisite for construction your opinion. Our history, politics, and war legacy deserve to be taken more seriously than just be used as rhetorical crutches for an argument that isn't about us.
The second half of your post precisely shows how the Cyprus Problem is just demoted to a rhetorical device for people who want a weapon to fight a different battle.
Someone who is actually interested in Cyprus would know that Erdogan is a latecomer to the whole story and that Turkey's interests in Cyprus have been the same even in the hight of pro-western, -secular, -NATO sentiment. To frame it as an Erdogan problem betrays that someone only started "caring" about Cyprus in the last decade.
There's 75 years of history in that conflict. Very few Cypriots nowadays deny that it is more complicated than that, and this does not have to excuse the invader.
There's no reason to lose all nuance over the Cyprus problem, it's doing no-one in Cyprus a favour - and if someone wants to use the Cyprus Problem entirely as a rhetorical tool to fight a different conflict, then that's in extremely bad taste.
All that being said, the unilateral declaration of independence was the biggest mistake of the Turkish Cypriot political class, since it doomed any efforts to collaborate across the green line due to the fear of "accidental recognition" - and at the same time any recognition of that declaration is not forthcoming because of how profoundly and transparently illegal it was.
Where German rental contracts say "any alterations need to be reverted for handover", rental contracts where I originally come from say "any alternations are forbidden without the express permission of the lessor".