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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Turkey elections edition [1]

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Date: 2023-05-14

Here’s a handy visual guide courtesy of AlJazeera illustrating how voting works in Turkey’s elections.

Joshua Rudolph and Nate Kohlenberg of Just Security takes a look at the stakes and not the odds (to paraphrase NYU professor Jay Rosen) with regard to the Turkish elections.

Erdogan has been in power for 20 years, during which time he has increasingly relied on repression — Turkey ranks among the countries with the greatest numbers of imprisoned politicians, journalists, activists, and other civic actors — and autocratic control over state organs to ensure that elections are highly unfair, even though voters remain free to cast ballots that matter. He uses an autocratic playbook that includes abusing states of emergency to expand his executive power, capturing regulatory bodies to ensure party control over public airwaves, enacting draconian new laws to monitor and regulate speech on the internet, steering public expenditures into the hands of cronies who pour it back into his reelection campaigns, and manipulating polling locations to make voting more difficult and intimidating in heavily-opposition areas. As an example of the latter, in the Kurdish southeast, voters have been forced to pass through security checkpoints where soldiers brandishing machine guns are instructed to check voter IDs, looking for anyone wanted for arrest. The result has been that each successive Turkish election since 2011 has been more unfairthan the last, and the country is now on the brink of descending into fully unfree authoritarianism. Whether or not the election this Sunday is free at all, if Erdogan wins, it is likely to be the last free Turkish election of his lifetime. He would probably continue the trend of the past dozen years by doubling down on his dictatorial direction. He may dispense with free elections, on the theory that they have taken him as far as possible — he once likened democracy to a train, a vehicle to reach a destination and then disembark. And if Erdogan wins despite his unpopularity – he currently is weighed down by his abysmaleconomic policies and failures related to the February earthquake — and despite an uncharacteristically unified opposition, a critical mass of Turks would stop regarding elections as free and meaningful.

Steven Erlanger and Anatoly Kurmanaev of The New York Times looks at the implications of the Turkish elections for Europe, NATO, Russia, and the war in Ukraine.

Officially, people on the Western side won’t talk about their preferences, to avoid being accused of interfering in Turkey’s domestic politics. But it is an open secret that European leaders, not to speak of the Biden administration, would be delighted if Mr. Erdogan were to lose. [...] Throughout his 20 years in power, Mr. Erdogan has pursued a nonaligned foreign policy that has frequently frustrated his putative Western allies and provided a welcome diplomatic opening for Moscow — perhaps never more so than after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By refusing to enforce Western sanctions on Moscow, Mr. Erdogan has helped undermine efforts to isolate the Kremlin and starve it of funds to underwrite the war. At the same time, the stumbling Turkish economy has feasted recently on heavily discounted Russian oil, helping Mr. Erdogan in his quest for a third, five-year term. Mr. Erdogan has further irritated his allies by blocking Sweden’s bid for membership in NATO, insisting that Stockholm first turn over scores of Kurdish refugees in the country, especially from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which both Ankara and Washington consider a terrorist organization.

Güven Sak of the London-based Middle East Eye describes Turkey’s economic crisis as one of the primary issues in today’s Turkish elections.

A number of issues will factor into the outcome. Firstly, Turkey is in the midst of an economic crisis. Compared with the 2001 financial crash, banks and companies are in better shape today. Public debt is around 27 percent of GDP, ample fiscal room to finance the cost of earthquake with debt. Note that the EU limit for the share of public debt in GDP is 60 percent. Secondly, there has been a rapid rise in the rate of inflation, which is now around 50 percent. The country is in a severe cost-of-living crisis, felt most acutely in large metropolitan areas. Usually, public sector employees such as doctors, nurses, police and soldiers angle for appointments in larger provinces; in today's economy, appointments in smaller towns are preferable. In terms of public services, the quality is declining most rapidly in places where the per-square-metre cost of real estate is highest - not only in Istanbul, but also in places such as Bodrum and Antalya. [...] Everyone is now wondering what will happen the day after the elections. Suffering from a massive credibility gap, a victorious Erdogan would not be able to lead Turkey towards a rapid economic recovery. On the other hand, the leader of the opposition alliance, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has a highly visible and experienced team that could quickly stabilise the economy. Having prepared a 240-page and 2,300-issue long joint policy memorandum, Kılıcdaroglu's six-party economic policy team of academics and former bureaucrats have been working together over a year now.

Elçin Poyrazlar and Christian Oliver of POLITICO Europe write that Erdoğan has been using Turkey’s LGBTQ community as a scapegoat in his reelection bid.

To President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s LGBTQ+ community represents “deviant structures” and a “virus of heresy.” In the run-up to Sunday’s too-close-to-call election, he has ramped up his poisonous invective against homosexuality, as he seeks to shore up his conservative Islamist base. Almost every other speech from the campaign trail accuses the opposition of undermining family values and of being in the thrall of improbably powerful LGBTQ+ networks — sometimes with hints they are run by paymasters abroad. “The AK Party has never been an LGBT supporter,” Erdoğan roared at a recent Istanbul rally, referring to his governing party. “We believe in the sanctity of the family. Family is sacred.”[...] Life is already tough, and could get significantly worse. LGBTQ+ flags are banned, gatherings are arbitrarily blocked by the government and participants in pride parades are regularly attacked or detained by police. The fear is that their organizations could now be made illegal, and — in the worst case scenario — that laws to protect families could be extended to outlaw homosexuality itself.

Shane Harris, Samuel Oakford, and Chris Dehghanpoor report an exclusive for The Washington Post that Discord leaker Jack Teixeira was literally a Dylann Roof waiting to happen.

Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded. [...] On Discord, an account with the handle “Jack the Dripper,” one of Teixeira’s known monikers, shared an image titled “payback,” showing a large passenger jet careening toward the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.

Just a regular ol’ “Trump Republican” according to Alabama U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville.

(Well...at least Tuberville is willing to face the media nowadays unlike when he was fired as football coach of the Auburn Tigers, couldn’t be found, and a reporter who knows a little bit about the South got Tuberville’s mom to spill the tea.)

Lev Facher of STATnews reports that white people are far more likely to receive medication for opioid addiction than Black people or Latinos.

The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, used insurance claims data from 2016 to 2019 to analyze over 23,000 Medicare beneficiaries who were eligible for the safety-net program due to a disability. The analysis highlights a dual crisis in American addiction medicine: Few people with opioid addiction can access the highly effective drugs used to treat the condition, and those who receive the medications are disproportionately white. Opioid overdose rates among Black people have also skyrocketed in recent years, and in 2020 surpassed the per capita death rate among white people for the first time in over two decades. Beyond receiving buprenorphine at a higher rate, white patients were also far more likely than Black patients to live near a provider of the medication and to remain in treatment months after first being prescribed it, according to the study. The paper’s authors cited “racial segregation of health care, discrepant incarceration rates, disproportionate enrollment in Medicaid, and increases in fentanyl use in urban areas, which tend to have larger Black and Hispanic populations” as among the factors contributing to the racial disparity in access to addiction care.

For someone like me who was raised to believe that the Bible is the inerrant and perfect word of god, this tweet from Ron DeSantis is incredibly blasphemous (and I’m a religious agnostic).

x We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left's pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine... America’s got his back.

https://t.co/uQXZuT19Mo — Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantisFL) May 13, 2023

Luke 10:33-36 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him/And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him/And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Nothing in those red-lettered words about choking somebody to death.

Tweets identifying Daniel Penny as a “good Samaritan” upset me quite a bit more than the over one million dollars raised for Penny’s legal defense.

Paresh Dave of Wired says that new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has quite the job ahead of her.

The new Twitter CEO once joked publicly that families don't gather around a newsfeed like they do around a big screen for Super Bowls and primetime shows. She chastised services like Facebook for “grading their own homework,” forcing ad buyers to trust a platform’s data on ad views instead of being able to go to independent auditors like those available for TV. And she has pointed out how internet companies have sometimes struggled to match the high-quality content produced by TV networks. At Twitter, Yaccarino will have to spin her knowledge of social media’s weaknesses into an asset and start competing with the traditional media industry that she has championed since long before online social networks were even a thing. Elon Musk announced on Friday that Yaccarino will oversee business operations while he focuses on Twitter’s technology and design as executive chair and CTO. Together, Yaccarino and Musk will try to stop the drain of users and advertisers of the past several months and start to formulate his vision of turning Twitter into an “everything app,” with digital payments tools and other features Musk has yet to clearly articulate. All that will make Yaccarino’s to-do list more wide-ranging than she ever had in TV, and she must do it at a company still reeling from Musk’s sometimes chaotic revamp and his laying off of most of its employees...

Finally today, Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker gives us a review of the Twitter alternative Bluesky.

Bluesky looks like what you’d get if a tornado hit Twitter and the only people left posting were tech workers, extremely online shitposters with anime avatars and vaguely socialist politics, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, as far as I can tell, is the most famous person on the platform. It also must be said that A.O.C. is one of a handful of minorities who makes a regular appearance on the “What’s Hot” feed. This almost certainly isn’t intentional: Bluesky has become a place for Black tech workers, in particular, to congregate. But the vibe mostly resembles that of a Portland coffee shop: there are dogs, beards, earnest self-expression about the finely curated superiority of it all, and a whole lot of white people. This matters because other, more successful social-media sites such as Twitter and TikTok are powered, in large part, by the posts of Black users who choreograph viral dances, set the topics of conversation, and utilize the platforms as a megaphone for social-justice issues. As Twitter user @ChampagneNoona succinctly put it, “If black people not on there being funny it’s a flop.” Content moderation has been mostly handled—at least as far as one can tell from Bluesky’s messaging—by the site’s employees, who have had to make a lot of difficult decisions on the fly. When the journalist Matt Yglesias signed onto Bluesky, a number of users banded together to drive him off, which then became the central topic of conversation on the site for a couple of days. Some of the harassment directed at Yglesias included direct threats of violence; this prompted the Bluesky team to quickly patch together a block function. “Nobody has a right to access an invite-only closed beta, and if they are creating an account exclusively to jump in and harass people in replies they will be removed,” Graber posted a few days after Yglesias was driven off. She also expressed what could charitably be called a sense of annoyance with having to deal with the controversy, which, according to her posts, came at a time when she and her team were working on the task of getting Bluesky onto its promised federated servers.

Have the best possible day, everyone, and Happy Mother’s Day!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/14/2169088/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Turkey-elections-edition

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