Erdogan has won the election with 52% of the vote, with a voter turnout of 85%, winning five more years as president.
Naked Capitalism’s diagnosis of Kilicdaroglu’s failure is that he had to somehow simultaneously keep pro-KPDP voters on board and also attract voters of nationalist candidates from the first round, and was unable to square that circle.
Erdogan’s party has lost seats in the parliament as nationalist parties have outflanked him on refugee issues - and even Kilicdaroglu couldn’t seem to move against that tide, as he called for the urgent expulsion of 10 million refugees. The Nationalist Movement Party is now at 10.4% in the parliament, a party with ties to the Grey Wolves. Far right parties got more than 30% of the parliamentary vote. The left was unable to capture enough voters who have suffered in the economic crisis, with inflation rates have sharply risen far above even Europe’s, and these voters instead went down the “blame my problems on refugees” path.
As a silver lining to this shitstain, this does at least mean that any hopes by NATO that Turkey will move towards the West more are probably dashed. This isn’t to say that Erdogan will scorn the West - far from it, in fact, he let Finland in to NATO and will probably let Sweden in - but the :both-sides: strategy will continue, for better and worse, and if you aren’t with the West, then you are against them.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we’ve collected.
This week’s first update is here in the comments.
This week’s second update is here in the comments.
This week’s third update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources. Beware of chuddery.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the warzone.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Another big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia’s army.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
thats the thing right. ‘we are keeping china from strategic minerals edit: and gases’ sounds believable. mcfucking water, really.
Editing again because this came off as way too reddit bazinga brained and I apologize.
~~Uh, you do know that water doesn’t have to be a liquid, right? It has been hypothesized (very believably, scientifically) for a while that there could be massive amounts of water ice on the moon, particularly in the bottoms of craters that never get sunlight. Not only has it now been confirmed there is some there, but even in sunlit areas clinging to dust. Hell, there’s good evidence of water ice deposits on Mercury. ~~
That doesn’t mean that mining anything on the moon is anything but a pipe dream that might only come true with the concerted effort of a communist superpower.
Edit 1: If I misunderstood and you mean we have plenty of water on Earth, so it’s not a rare resource we need to bring back… Well, sure. But if we are going to get anything else from the moon, even in a pipe dream scenario, or if we’re going to use it as a launching platform to explore the rest of the solar system, we’re going to need there to be large amounts of water already there. The bazinga part is the idea that we’re anywhere near being able to do that, not the presence or importance of water on the moon.
Well I am definitely ignorant on the issue of extraterrestrial mining but I’m not saying there isn’t water of some kind on the moon. I’m questioning that there are strategic water resourcs on the moon that are worth a rocket trip back and forth. I can at least imagine, if only intuitively and not intellectually, that it would be interesting to look for mineral resources outside of Earth. For both economic and environmental reasons. But water? On that front the focus should be on keeping our water cycles from breaking down too hard from Climate Change.
I’d imagine that the strategic value of water on the moon would only come into play when you’re actually colonizing it, which feeds back to how nobody is keeping anyone from seizing the moon because nobody is doing that still. China’s moon base 5 year plan not withstanding.
That’s a media meme. It’s so diluted you’re better off scooping up a gas giant…
