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Comment count is 11
Jet Bin Fever - 2013-06-02

Hopefully he picked up the spare.


Old_Zircon - 2013-06-02

Why did Constantinople get the works?


jangbones - 2013-06-02

that is of no concern to you, unless you are of Turkish descent


Ursa_minor - 2013-06-02

Oh, you guys


Riskbreaker - 2013-06-02

Can somebody give me the cliff notes of what's going on over there?


Nominal - 2013-06-02

Cats are revered as a national treasure yet there is no control program. So you have a city overrun with admired strays.


jangbones - 2013-06-02

Erdogan's Islamist government has been converting public spaces into private businesses, and another protest about the conversion of a popular park started the ball rolling

but a demonstration about a park only turns into a nationwide antigovernment movement when the usual problems are rampant, 1) recession, 2) unemployment, 3) unpopular government, and 4) violent crackdowns on protest


fermun - 2013-06-02

Erdogan's party is very religious. He recently ended protection for LGBT, stopped sale of alcohol after 10pm, made birth control very difficult to access, and has fast-tracked destruction of Taksim square to have contractors he is friends with build a shopping mall. Taksim square is more or less equivalent of Central Park, as a public space. The city/rural cultural divide is far more severe than it is in the US or most of Europe, with the people in the cities usually being believers of a staunch secularist government and they have more in common with other residents of Southern European cities than with their own rural countrymen.

Turkey has a long history of secular governments, but they were often military dictatorships that committed some awful crimes. Since the inception of modern Turkey though, they were always a very secular government. Erdogan has made Turkey a true democracy, and has weakened the military to the point they won't be able to coup the government whenever they don't like it. Erdogan has been using his power more freely since that though, and judges were replaced with people more loyal to him. The last few years, journalists have been jailed for reporting anything critical of the government, and sometimes just reporting news that makes the government look bad. One recent example was that 200+ people died a month ago in a terrorist attack, but the official number isn't known since it hasn't been legal to report on it. It will likely be quietly released while this is all going on.


chumbucket - 2013-06-02

Sounds like a great place to live.


Mister Yuck - 2013-06-03

Five stars to professor fermun's insightful commentary. With this and the bitcoin thing, I learned two things from you today.


Gmork - 2013-06-02

Nobody's business but the Turks...


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