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Turkey's ruling party is passing constitutional reforms to consolidate power:
Turkey's parliament approved the first seven articles in a second round of voting overnight on a constitutional bill that will extend President Tayyip Erdogan's powers, keeping the reform on course for a spring referendum.
The two largest opposition parties in parliament say the 18-article bill, which could enable Erdogan to rule until 2029, will fuel authoritarianism in the NATO member and European Union candidate country. The ruling AK Party, backed by the nationalist MHP, says it will bring the strong executive leadership needed to prevent a return to the fragile coalition governments of the past.
The seven articles approved overnight include increasing the number of MPs to 600 from 550, lowering the minimum age to be a lawmaker to 18 from 25, and holding parliamentary and presidential elections together every five years.
Also at CNN, Time, Al Jazeera, and The Guardian. You might also be interested in this take from the Daily Sabah.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 19 2017, @10:29PM
However I still hold to the idea that creating divisions is a bad idea.
Why? We already have separate nations. There's a division between the US and Canada. Are you proposing that the US and the Canada merge into a single nation? What about the US and Mexico? The US and Canada, in particular, seem to have no trouble coexisting without needing to unify into a single nation, and there's no sign that the US and Mexico are going to have a shooting war anytime soon. (There's some bad politics going on right now, but there's no signs that anyone wants to invade the other and try to steal land or resources.)
As for the US, Trump won not because the midwest/south has taken over but because US politics has finally been exposed for the corrupt crony system it is.
True, but I contend that's a necessary byproduct of having a nation where there's too much diversity and division between incompatible cultures (namely the mostly-Christian conservatives and everyone else). The nations which enjoy the lowest corruption rate worldwide are invariably nations which are smaller and are not diverse at all. When you're not fighting with your neighbors about whether some moral issue or whatever should be legal or not, it's a lot easier to pay attention to your elected leaders and make sure they're doing what they're supposed to. Over here, we just get distracted about whether gay people should get married, whether abortions should be legal (it's not a settle question, it's been a fight for more than my whole life and it isn't stopping), whether the government should endorse Christianity, etc.
but I will opt to keep our country together because it takes diversity to make us strong.
In an economic sense, sure. The same was true for the Roman Empire. Things didn't turn out well for them. Right now, the nations with the lowest corruption and highest standards of living are not very diverse: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Switzerland. (Yes, that last one has 4 official languages, but is there really that much difference between a German-speaking Swiss and a French-speaking one? Plus, their nation is organized into cantons with far more regional autonomy than we have, plus they have a lot more direct democracy, plus they're a very small country.)
As time marches on our society evolves, and the trend is toward a more secular and liberal viewpoint.
That's not what I'm seeing: there's more and more religion in Europe (thanks to the Islamic immigrants), there's more conservatism in the middle east (see ISIS), there's more religion and less secularism in Turkey (Erdogan is an Islamist), there's more religion in Russia (the Russian Orthodox church is very powerful, unlike 30 years ago), Afghanistan used to be a place where women went to school and enjoyed a lot of secularism 50+ years ago, and even here in the US megachurches are more popular and powerful than ever.
TL:DR Ignoring your problems is not a solid solution...
They're not "my" problems if I can divorce myself from the people with those problems. If I have a wife who's causing me a lot of problems, I can either try to convince/brainwash her to fix those problems (good luck), or I can get a divorce and live happily apart from her. Which one is easier and more sensible? The latter of course. Leave the dumb religious nuts to their own devices, in their own countries. I don't know about you, but I want to live my life in peace, not fighting with people to convince them that they're wrong. I can't do that when they're on top of me, and voting for laws to oppress me.