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.
sorry yeah i’m kinda bored and doing nothing atm
now i’m thinking of the image pollution of the moon when we create the everlasting mineral processing sea. hopefully the sino-american consortium that does it will be nice and make a happy face with it.
Nothing to apologize for. You were pretty much right on, I just misunderstood.
Future lunar face: :desolate:
It really is a strange double edged sword for me, having thought of people going “beyond Earth” for so long as this grand and beautiful expression of the drive to explore and being truly aspirational for humanity. But then learning about actual history and the current trajectory and purpose of it just being more exploitation. Endless fucking exploitation. It poisons it. (I hope not literally in the future).
Reminds me of the “joke” about Navajo giving the lunar landing missions a message to leave on the moon in their language but not being willing to translate it until after it was left there. “Don’t believe these white men. They come only to take your land.”
Assuming of course we don’t Fermi-paradox ourselves, I’m betting that the asteroid 16 Psyche is going to be the mining capital of the solar system in a hundred years or so, rather than the Moon. All the evidence so far indicates that the asteroid belt is the remains of a planet that started to form but broke apart, and that Psyche is the exposed metal core of that protoplanet. Not made of standard metal ores, but actual metals refined naturally by the core formation process, and rich in the densest ones. NASA is planning a robotic mission to orbit it, due to arrive in 2029.
and that Psyche is the exposed metal core of that protoplanet
that sounds to me, a dumbass, already more resources than we would know what to do with. potentially anyway. this makes me feel that I had certain underlying assumptions about the solar system that underestimate it. maybe it’s something to do with media taking us to interstellar scale with no care for the implications. but if stuff like this exists in the neighborhood, well, just the wealth of our star system seems absurd beyond belief.
You ain’t no dumbass, you’re absolutely right. Assuming the current science is correct, it’s a ridiculously huge amount of resources. And it’s all the best stuff that is a pain to launch from Earth into orbit. I think asteroid mining is a pretty dumb idea for supplying Earth industries, but it’s a fantastic way to supply space industries without need to launch ridiculous amounts of bulk metals in rockets. Psyche is also in a sweet spot in the solar system. It’s got an almost circular orbit around the Sun, which for a lot of reasons makes it relatively easy to get to and from (by interplanetary-travel standards, anyway). It’s close enough to the Sun for solar power to still be practical. And it’s surface gravity is only about 1.5% of Earth.
There’s another theory that it’s a regular rocky asteroid that had liquid iron volcanoes which created the very radar-reflective surface when the molten iron cooled, but there’s just plain old rock underneath. But until the probe mission gets there we just won’t know.
And yeah, there’s a bonkers amount of resources out there. For example it’s looking more and more like finding water on Mars, in the form of ice, is just a matter of picking a random location and digging down a few metres. There’s a subsurface glacier in Utopia Planitia (which is a real part of Mars, not just a Star Trek thing) that has more water than Lake Superior here on Earth.
