Is the hashtag #FightForWesternCivilization the worst thing on Twitter today?

@Joekster: the Mongols were very extreme. Immediate surrender meant just borrowing some craftsmen to build siege-works for them and taxes now went to them. Resistance meant the city being totally leveled and a detachment rolling through a few days later to kill anyone they had missed.

… And three dead cop at Baton Rouge. That won’t end well.

@Sinkable John
That’s unnerving. I’m so glad that you and your friend are safe. Stay well.

@skybison

But on the other hand it doesn’t seem like the best move to me to oppose the police as an institution making a show of supporting progressive causes because of problems in other areas.

Why not? That’s the very essence of solidarity. On top of that, the police are not a progressive institution (and intrinsically can’t be, pretty much), and it ill-behooves progressive organizations and movements to give them a fig leaf.

A matter of burning bridges where there might have been buildable.

Even if they’re not raiding the drag bars anymore, the police are far from being friends of the TBLG community, especially the T portion of that, not even those of us who are white. PoCs get it worse, of course. In a lot of places, being a trans woman of colour is in and of itself enough to be arrested on prostitution charges. No police department is any ally of ours, nor is any movement that builds bridges with them a movement that represents me.

Having the police and Government institutions publicly supporting Pride seems like a good thing, trying to say “We don’t want to be LGBT people’s enemies anymore, we want to be on your side. We want to protect and serve you too now and for the sight of a Cop to no longer be a source of fear for you.” But on the other other hand It’s not my place to say if that message succeeds or is accurate for any non-white gay or trans person.

That’s nice. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say something completely different. I don’t give a flying fuck what PR bullshit they spout, and never will.

@Pitshade

American cheese is too cheese! What else would it be!? An alien life form which has yet to figure out how to either stop replicating itself endlessly, how to stop people from eating those replications, or a combination of those?!

Someone get that wild haired scientist guy, the one who always says “That? Oh, totally Aliens.” kinds of stuff. The pyramids, electronic devices, probably American cheese…:P

SinkableJohn: if it’s any solace, you have to be pretty unlucky to get actually physically hurt by a random attack like this one. Of the tens of thousands of people on the promenade, “only” a couple hundred were actually hit. If you had been jolly drunk on the beach singing about watering your garden with blood (as one does) you’d almost certainly have been physically OK. Probably you wouldn’t have even seen anything.

Example: it seems my parents watched the fireworks a whole two blocks from where the truck stopped. They survived completely unhurt, though they’re a bit shook-up (and not answering their phone, though they are emailing and texting me).

@EJ (The Other One)
It’s just that Turkey has a history of successful military coups, so this one seems a little odd in comparison to the rest to me. Though once this is all figured out I might be able to see exactly what different circumstances would cause this one to fail comparative to the other 4 military coups, and the one soft coup.

T@ ooglyboggles & EJ

It’s quite hard these days to plot even a small coup and keep it secret; and Erdogan does have a reasonably good internal intelligence service. I think it’s plausible (although I’m not suggesting it’s actually the case) that he did know about the coup in advance and allowed it to happen knowing he could nip it in the bud. That strengthens his position, identifies the major threats to his regime and allows him to purge those threats.

He may even have used a few agent provocateurs to ensure the coup went off early at a time of his choosing and before too many people expressed a willingness to take part.

Of course allowing such a thing is risky; he could underestimate the amount of support and it could gain a momentum he couldn’t control. But you don’t get to run a place like Turkey for 13 years without a bit of self confidence.

It would be interesting to analyse whether there had been any preparation for a counter coup. Were for instance police rotas changed in the days before? Were there preparations to control the media and comms such as Internet?

Of course it’s more likely it was just as it seems; an all or nothing attempt by elements of an increasingly frustrated military.

ETA: I like Dalillama’s theory.

@Phryne

We could make it a meme. ? “Poodle don’t like you” = ???

Poodle don’t like you . . . because you’re a fascist?

(Not you, obviously, but the ones that Poodle don’t like. Which means that Katie and Fluttershy don’t like you either. But I don’t mean you. You’re cool with Poodle, Katie, and Fluttershy.)

The secular guard, as the Turkish military likes to think of itself was already purged back in the early-mid noughties. The current stand is actually surprising a lot of people, since they thought that the military’s spine was already crippled to the point that it wouldn’t be able to do anything resembling an actual coup after the 2007?-ish failure. For a few decades though the Turkish military was quite similar in appearance and action to the old Varangian guard.

What you’re witnessing now is more likely a poorly planned thrashing of an already dead animal. The 80s weren’t that long ago, a great many people still remember those years and the coup then was much more bloody. You’ll note how they called for thrushing out people into the streets and plazas and general public assembly areas; Erdogan was playing a game of chicken and just like before the factions involved within the military aren’t going to come out and actually roll. There just isn’t enough of it left to do so, not without a really bloody go of it.

This is just a power grab for him now, and he’ll definitely act accordingly. He might have helped set the wheels in motion but it was more of a forest-level political scenario and not so much a tree-level one.

Off topic a bit – the really scary thing to me is how… accurate certain predictions are becoming. Prior to joining the military I was in some PS400 level classes that went over details such as China / Formosa Straights / Middle East action and reaction. And a lot of it is coming true. Okay, not exactly the Formosa Straights but… waaay too close for comfort. I can remember my instructors harping on “15 years from now” over and over again. Well, that was 2001. And the world is looking waaaaaay too similar to those scenarios, and that is daaaaaammmnnn scary. I wonder if the model about the de-escalation of world wars / conflicts that was thrown around to describe the ‘lay of the land’ in and following the Cold War will hold true or not.

@skybison: i can understand how you feel. I know that i, as a cis-white queer girl, have never had any problems with the police. I always have problems not trusting people to do the right thing! I was terrible watching for shoplifters at blockbuster, waaay back in the day. It never made sense to me for someone to steal a game or dvd?

(I am trying to be aware of the privilege that i have that has let me live in this world still this naive. Everyone should feel like this. It’s bullshit that they don’t.)

On the other hand though… Carding is only going to stop come the new year. As a cis white girl, i have never been carded. Strange how that happens?

I would love to build bridges to the people who are supposed to be protecting us. But they need to actually be protecting all of us, and while i’m sad that my roommate’s first visit to the parade was mostly during the time they stopped, i can’t blame BLM for their actions.

It’s like when you have to deal with a problematic relative. Do you smile and pretend everything is fine, because they are currently making an effort with you? What if they are horrible to your partner? Do you let the event continue, because they are being awful to only one person?

Sometimes you need to draw attention to the bad behaviour. You probably wkn’t change the relative’s mind, but you have a chance of shaping someone else’s opinions, hopefully for the better.

Nothing ever seems to get done or change until people are loud in some way.

@ dalillama

The Carnegie Emdowment for International Peace (who are usually pretty good at this sort of thing) are going with your theory that the coup was a last minute attempt to forestall a purge. They suggest that it was an ad hoc affair with no planning; hence the rather haphazard approach and the failure to take obvious steps such as trying to seize control of all media outlets and ensuring rapid mobilisation and deployment of their forces to key areas.

I watched a video on BBCiPlayer last night about Trump and hate, very disturbing, it made me angry, and they have only scratched the surface. This hate is out of control. In my country, all the Nazis crawled out of the woodwork over Brexit. We’re seeing more and more clashes between brown shirts and antifas on the streets. We’re seeing nazis vandalise graves of dead Labour leaders. We’re seeing actual, real murder of MPs. I had to make my point clear to a friend last week that centrist politics is dead. He is a fence sitter, a Liberal Democrat. He does not agree with my Marxism. He thinks he’s in the right place, being neither fish nor fowl. I told him how quickly the U.S. Europe and Britain is sliding into fascism. He is slow to belive that, no matter how much evidence of hate crime, trolling and obnoxious behavior he can see. The Liberals are right wing, not centrist. They have no option but to be pulled into the prevailing political sphere. When we have a situation like the USA, only Torys and Whigs and no workers party, who will oppose Fascism?