231–240 of 298 posts
To add color, here Turks boo moment of silence for French victims: - http://tinyurl.com/zdht2aq
And so what if they shout allu-akbah? Isn't it allowed at football to inspire winning the great match? Terrorists surely don't own the usage rights of allahu akbar. It's not audible anyway on videos.
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The people have always been supporters of this path. That is why the reset button had to keep on being pushed by the military.
I would be interested to hear from people who are down voting this why they are doing that? On the surface this seems like a reasonable assumption given the role of the Turkish military.
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I would like to comment how biased this view is. Yes the president is religious and cares about islam, his religion. - Turkey gdp has increased unparalleled in the whole of europe under Erdogan. - Erdogan has resettled 2.2 million syrian refugees in new cities (much more than whole of europe combined) with monthly food and money .. although 2.3 million are yet to settle. - He was elected with 60% votes and current st…
I'm not sure why you think my view is bigoted. I'm not saying he is evil, I don't agree with death penalties anywhere in Turkey our not, I don't think he "degraded morals" (what does that even mean?) and I don't think he has harmed the Turkish economy. I'm saying he is objectively harming the ideals the Turkish Republic was founded on by Atatürk. I'm not saying this because I think those ideals would allow holding Tu…
Curious, what mess does Germany find itself in with respect to Ataturk's principles?
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> People of Turkey seem to be supporters of this path. A doubt all of them are. Just as with Brexit, popular opinion might be divided.
Of course not all. But he seems to have the democratic support. As most people prefer it.
Oh nice. The white European blaming is already starting. Let's forget that the majority of Turks elected a half-mad men that bases his discourse in the superiority of Islam and in the ethnical cleansing of Kurdistan. Let's forget that Erdogan supported the Islamic state. Let's forget that the Turks re-elected him after all this. Let's forget all these pro-Erdogan demonstrations going on in the streets of Ankara and I…
With a bit of reading comprehension, you'd notice that I don't disagree – Erdogan is one of the reasons I'm glad there's a "biological term limit" that should hit him in the next 10 years. The people are equally to blame (though it becomes harder when the disappearance of democratic institutions makes ignorance more understandable). Also I guess that Mr. Trump is a good example of what can happen even in the most sta…
But I think that is showing some misunderstanding about the role and purpose of the EU: it simply is not and was never intended to be an imperialist engine. It is a trading bloc that primarily operates to harmonize markets, not governments.
The entire reason why Turkey had to jump through so many hoops to join the EU is because the EU isn't there to regulate governments: it requires a stable and open government to guarantee market access. Europe already has huge issues dealing with Poland and Hungary voting in parties with strong isolationist tendencies, do you really think the EU could have done anything to stop Erdogan's current direction?
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I do not agree with the rest. I do not see how his support of ISIS is necessarily harmful. ISIS is a grassroots movement with a goal of Islamic solidarity. ISIS is opposed to US intervention in the region because it views such intervention as harming Islamic solidarity. I do not think that (aside from some demand for Erdogan's loyalty to the US) that being supportive of such a movement in the region is necessarily a…
>I do not see how his support of ISIS is necessarily harmful Wow. You dont see how video taping beheadings, raping tens of thousands of women, killing millions, selling stolen oil, and suicide bombings are 'necessarily harmful' I dont know that ive ever encountered someone with such a mispointed moral compass, absolutely amazing what people can justify in their heads.
What criteria would you impose upon a grassroots political movement in the middle east? Is it allowed to use force? Should it invest in smart bombs before proceeding to get involved in conflict?
There is a tremendous asymmetry of force between the US and ISIS. Both sides use propaganda, both sides try to scare and intimidate civilians into supporting their cause.
To claim that a suicide bombing of civilians is morally worse than a drone attack on civilians is to be completely deluded. That one side can afford to send in drones that are controlled by pilots thousands of miles away does not matter to the victims of the attack, nor do the details of the decisions that led a suicide bomber to volunteer.
The point is, attacks on civilians are always intended to break the will of the civilians to support their side... the goal is for people to be drifting off to sleep at night and to be startled and fearful at every noise, lest it is an attack (suicide bomber or drone).
It's completely unreasonable to expect ISIS to hold itself to first world standards (drones, smart bombs) when fighting in such an asymmetrical battle. The US itself throws out its moral standards when victory is uncertain.
So unless you think ISIS ought to just surrender and give up, there isn't really any other way for asymmetrical conflict to occur without one side using tactics that the other side's population deems morally reprehensible.
The absence of this obvious realization comes from the propaganda nature of all the news about ISIS. We are supposed to oppose ISIS because ISIS opposes US intervention in the region, and ISIS poses a threat to the US hawkish vision for how it wants to reshape the middle east.
As an American, I'm not sold on the idea that the US should be meddling in the middle east, and so I choose not to buy into the propaganda about ISIS. I do not support ISIS, but I think that all political organizations start out looking like groups of thugs and gradually become less violent and help with the basic needs of their constituents.
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I do not agree with the rest. I do not see how his support of ISIS is necessarily harmful. ISIS is a grassroots movement with a goal of Islamic solidarity. ISIS is opposed to US intervention in the region because it views such intervention as harming Islamic solidarity. I do not think that (aside from some demand for Erdogan's loyalty to the US) that being supportive of such a movement in the region is necessarily a…
> I do not see how his support of ISIS is necessarily harmful. // How about because they are unlawfully killing, raping, torturing, people and using violence to impose their form of Islamic Caliphate on unwilling people - doesn't that make it harmful in your opinion?
Isn't the US using violence (bombs, drones, etc.) to impose its version of things on the region too? I'm not sure how the two are different, other than that the US has a LOT more resources and can spend money on things like "smart bombs" that help convince Americans that we are carefully avoiding civilian casualties -- when in fact the goal is to scare the civilians shitless so they push back against local leaders, etc.
"half-mad" does not imply "mentally ill". I understand it's popular in the US, but please stop redefining terms to suit your narrative.
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All systems at that scale are flawed, and even the founders knew this. Thus they biased decisions toward conservatism (in the classic sense--resisting change) but actually _did_ amend the Constitution, right away, with a Bill of Rights to make it even clear the construction of the document was to protect people from their government. The process is difficult, but it's happened _27 times_ (the first 10 times in bulk).
27 times out of 11,000 proposed amendments, and as you point out, the first ten happened in bulk. I doubt that the founders planned for 2% of the population (as conservative Antonin Scalia pointed out) being able to block an amendment.
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I mean, you could argue that maybe the military would be better, but a military coup of an elected leader doesn't just "seem" undemocratic; it is undemocratic by any reasonable standard.
What does an elected leader have to do to warrant a coup? Dismantle the democracy? Randomly start killing people? Start death camps? Where do you draw the line or do you have non? Edit: typos