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How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

nytimes.com

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Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#111

Post by Bartweiss »

devmunchies wrote: post #52
thaumaturgy wrote: post #44

Turkey's GDP peaked at $950 billion in 2013, just before Erdogan became president. By 2017, it had slid to $850 billion, and after the intellectual purges, slid to just $766 billion in 2018. [1] People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country. [1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp

GDP is not a north star metric. GDP in the US is high and we have more suicides than ever. Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap. "growth for the sake of growth is the i…

This is true, but I think it's significant that Erdogan has been promising (along with many other things) economic growth in a fairly traditional sense. His voter base is largely rural and traditional, but to my knowledge he's been offering continued economic growth with rural areas seeing more benefit and less disruption, and has failed to deliver. Even if GDP is a bad thing to optimize, it's significant any time leadership fails on its own metrics.

More broadly, I think lots of nations today could maintain healthy economies with flat or shrinking national GDP, but those are countries which have little reason to expect 'natural' GDP increase without a growth ideology. Most obviously, post-industrial nations which can't rely on growing populations or rapid labor productivity boosts from urbanization and infrastructure investment: Sweden or the UK could plausibly operate at near-constant GDP, and Japan could even grow per capita GDP while shrinking national GDP. More subtly, nations which actively avoid pursuing the common arc of demographic transition, urbanization, and industrialization: Mongolia or Bhutan might try to take an entirely different path. And crucially, any of these nations would need to plan for the outcome: if Sweden 0% GDP growth without intending to, it would point to serious economic problems.

Given all of that, Turkey seems like a singularly bad candidate for falling total GDP. The population is still growing at 1.5% and labor productivity at 2%-3%, while experiencing urbanization and major infrastructure expansion. Crudely put, 1.015*1.025 ought to net Turkey 4% GDP growth without considering anything any other factors at all, so a substantial decline points to something going badly wrong.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#112

Post by ska »

username90 wrote: post #42
mhh__ wrote: post #7

"People have had enough of experts" - Michael Gove God help us

Many experts are just preachers in different attire. Honestly, should we really listen to scientist who gets labeled experts based non replicable studies? The problem is that all of them gets the same doctors titles but only some of them are doing honest research, and our current society has no good way to deal with this. As a result laymen notice that significant parts of science is pure bullshit, no wonder there ar…

> As a result laymen notice that significant parts of science is pure bullshit

This doesn't really happen much. First off, only a tiny percentage of people are thinking about this critically and independently. So it's more like "People are told X is bullshit, and choose to believe it". That holds regardless of the truth value of X, and has more to do with the intentional undermining of science as a source of finding truth.

So yes, we should listen to the scientists. Not the people trying to spin what they say, but the scientists. And not individual scientists, but disciplines as a whole. We should be able to understand when there is meaningful consensus and when there is not. How confident the community is in quality of the work. What ways there would be to interrogate it better. We should be funding competent and trained scientific journalists to synthesize and present this things in as objective a way as they can, instead of listening to PR hacks and politicians spin a random paper they found to support the conclusion they want.

Absolutely there are problems in science, and to some degree we have caused them by creating poor incentive structures. So lets fix that. We should probably be focusing more on evidence-base policy, and creating oversight structures that keep it working well.

After all, for the questions that science is capable of addressing, it is far and away the most effective approach humans have ever come up with. And as recent history shows us yet again, if you throw out those voices they will most likely be replaced by blind true-believers and opportunistic mountebanks. You can't honestly believe this will improve things, can you?

Of course, we shouldn't only listen to the scientists. But these day's we've swung too far in the other direction.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#113

Post by motohagiography »

chewz wrote: post #36

We had something like this in 1968 in Poland with communist propaganda condemning intelectuals and cosmpolitans and workers activists beating students on the streets (like they do in HK these days). Sztoptanski called that Dictatorship of Dishrags. Generally the best weapon against such times is irony and a sense of humor and grotesque. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Szpota%C5%84ski

Remarkable thing about satire is that it truly is the province of the underdog. The contempt people had for their communist rulers was funny ("kicking up"), but the humour would not work if they used the same caricatures downward at the same kind of coarse people ("kicking down"). The irony of the communists was that by being the revolutionary people, "kicking up" became an attack on their "down," identity.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#114

Post by root_axis »

ryacko wrote: post #100
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot have freedom of speech without freedom of association. When it comes to deplatforming it does matter who's doing it, because there is a fundamental difference between a private entity (corporate or living person) and a government (only one has a monopoly on violence). The government shutting down your youtube channel; that's a problematic infringement on speech; Google shutting down your channel, that's wi…

The EFF defends Backpage when credit card companies are pressured to withdraw services to Backpage. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/sheriffs-threats-again... The EFF does not defend Wikileaks when pressure was placed for hosting companies to withdraw services to them. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/how-lieberman-got-ama...

Not a great example. Backpage was facilitating prostitution and trafficking for years, naturally that is going to attract some negative attention from the authorities.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#115

Post by devmunchies »

capkutay wrote: post #104
devmunchies wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is not a north star metric. GDP in the US is high and we have more suicides than ever. Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap. "growth for the sake of growth is the i…

I mean why use any metrics at all of you're going to try to correlate them with something seemingly unrelated with no context like # of suicides?

I was saying that US has high suicides despite a high GDP. Not that there is a correlation.

Actually # of suicides would be a good metric for a country’s health.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#116

Post by chr1 »

tuvan wrote: post #60

I don't really know what is so special about the school which they decided to base the entire article on. This is just a small sample of the ongoing intellectual purge in Turkey. Every university rector is appointed by Erdogan, most professors in STEM, if they haven't fled, avoid any kind of political stance to continue teaching with the hopes of raising intellectuals who will help save the country. This is the unive…

Turkey is an extension of a multi-national empire which had extreme levels of animosity between its nations, people who identified as non-turks were severely penalized in the past, and to this day allegations of having a non Turk grandparent is something that can be used against politicians. Armenian is still considered an offensive word in Turkey, (as is Turk in Armenia), so portraying Turkey as an idyllic multi-national country is self-deception. Everyone can agree that killing people should be condemned, but it is important to remember that the terrorism of P.K.K. is more similar to American revolution against Britain than to the Al-qaeda terrorism, and it have arised not because some Kurds are despicable people but because there are real unsolved problems still present in Turkey.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#118

Post by sgnelson »

abakker wrote: post #80
p1necone wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like some kind of standard metric that adjusts gdp to spending power on food, housing etc, and weights based on standard deviation amongst the populace (lower being better). Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.

The metric you are looking for is Purchasing Power Parity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

And also the Big Mac Index.

https://www.economist.com/news/2019/07/10/the-big-mac-index

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#119

Post by magduf »

meshr wrote: post #28

Intellectuals should stop sharing their knowledge/skills with obscurantists. They should allow obscurantists to fail or at least to make obscurantists to depend on intellectuals. The motto should be "first control then money gaining or sharing"

Well in places where the intellectuals are fleeing, that's basically what they're doing, no? They're not trying to control the money exactly, but they are ceasing to share their skills with the rest of the people in that country, and removing themselves from its economy.

Re: How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

#120

Post by Bartweiss »

TomMckenny wrote: post #71

It's disturbing this produced a sort of flame war. In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad. Somehow it's now twisted around to claim that critics of _supporters_ of a regime are actually the real "oppressors". Interesting times.

> In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.

Honestly, I'm not so sure that's true. That's still a consensus view for people without a stake in what's happening, and it never has been clear and universal for those close to the topic. (Who, as here, generally accept the principle but reject the accuracy of both 'dictator' and 'purge'.)

It's not hard to find people, even in the US, who in their own time excused (or praised) each of fascist crackdowns on historians, Soviet enforcement of Lysenkoism, Pinochet's 'disappearing' of artists, Maoist 'reeducation', or even the Khmer Rouge's outright mass murder of educated people. Mostly, those purges have only been near-universally reviled in hindsight.

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