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    det-devil-ailsKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:26pm

    WWIII should be interesting. At least it’s going to be something to do that doesn’t involve people photographing their fucking lunch.

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      BlaccentsSoundRetardeddet-devil-ails
      7/15/16 10:28pm

      You said it. We need a massive cleansing.

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      Boxkickerdet-devil-ails
      7/15/16 10:29pm

      I’d append a picture of my lunch to your post, but it looks suspiciously like a vagina

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    gramercypoliceKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:39pm

    In case you were wondering whose fault this coup really is...

    Though, to be honest, I don’t know if we’re to blame for the coup or the failure of the coup, or both.

    Fox News: The Blame America First Network

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      SetteOttogramercypolice
      7/15/16 10:46pm

      Oh, ffs

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      Fred Garvin Male Prostitutegramercypolice
      7/15/16 10:48pm

      The Central Scrutinizer is already on scene in Istanbul !!!

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    TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Kevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:42pm

    Fortunately, in this battle between worse and worser, there is a whole Internet’s worth of people with uninformed opinions ready to tell you what you’re supposed to think about this clusterfuck. And I’m one of them!

    Erdogan crippled the military’s power to act as a constitutional check on the popular government years ago. This coup was doomed from the beginning. In their foolishness, they will only aid Erdogan in his efforts to consolidate power.

    The West, meanwhile, was absolutely prudent to play it safe with Erdogan. Any country with a half-decent intelligence service could observe within the first two hours that the coup had failed to secure enough strategic sites to maintain any sort of control. At that point, supporting the coup would mean undermining a NATO ally to no end. It seems Obama learned at least that much from the Arab Spring and its follies.

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      PoodletimeTRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
      7/15/16 10:58pm

      Whoa. That’s an amazing analysis. I don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but it sounds true... Damn.

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      TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Poodletime
      7/15/16 11:24pm

      We’re really in a bind. We’re stuck with Turkey, because we need Turkish bases and logistical support (or at least cooperation) to effectively fight ISIS. Before that, we needed them for operations in Iraq. At the same time, Turkey was a major cause of ISIS’s rise in the first place, and have been the biggest roadblock (in my eyes) in trying to create some kind of agreement between Assad and the Western coalition to unite, at least long enough to crush ISIS.

      If it weren’t for Iraq and ISIS, we could have done the sensible thing and threatened Erdogan with suspension or expulsion from NATO for his undemocratic statements and actions, for example:

      Jordan’s King Abdullah recounted telling details of a conversation: “Erdogan once said that democracy, for him, is a bus ride … ‘once I get to my stop, I’m getting off’ ”.

      At the same time, however, Turkey is a country that is democratically moving toward Islamist government. We’ve spent more than two hundred years preaching democracy and self-determination, but we’ve also spent the last hundred punishing nations that used those ideals to move their countries in directions of which we did not approve. That fundamental arrogance and hypocrisy, more than anything, is what people around the world despise about the United States. Freedom, yes, but only freedom on our terms. It’s arguably cultural colonialism, disguised as enlightened concern.

      The right, unsurprisingly, is angry with Obama in that he has tried to limit this hypocrisy (though he has not remotely eliminated it, nor does he seem interested in doing so completely.) When you see right-wingers blaming him for Iraq, or ISIS, or Syria, or Putin, or whatever, this is what they are fundamentally alluding to: the notion that we should be able to throw our weight around without regret or consequence, that other countries should have to give way to us, because ours is the most virtuous nation.

      So there is a lot tied up in today’s events, just in our collective response to those events.

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    2DollarzKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:28pm

    I’m guessing the new guys won’t rename it Constantinople (but then, it’s nobody’s business but the Turks).

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      moonyock2Dollarz
      7/15/16 10:33pm

      Istanbul was Constantinople.

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      Here It Is2Dollarz
      7/15/16 10:35pm

      They can name it anything they like. I call it Constantinople. Naming rights are something that exist in our heads. They can’t be stolen, or taken away. If they’d sacked it in the 15th Century with less than a ten to one advantage, without European assistance, and not spent three days raping its inhabitants then I’d have been a hell of a lot more sympathetic. Wars happen. But I’m not going to refer to a city which had a thousand years of enlightened history by the name given to it by the barbarians who sacked it. Nobody is forcing you to do so, either.

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    UngratefulDeadKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:42pm

    Coups are like worms in your apple: only half is even worse. If Erdogan wasn’t a dictator yesterday (and he was getting close) he sure will be tomorrow.

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      Justice Rains From My ButtUngratefulDead
      7/15/16 10:49pm

      Bingo. This is the perfect excuse to get his autocracy on.

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      dinglemckringleJustice Rains From My Butt
      7/15/16 11:07pm

      yup= prepare now. this is the perfect chance to further crack down on freedom.

      looks like Israel will be the only mideast country with a gay rights parade which will be quite awkward for the gawker cognosenti who love gay rights and hate israel. dilemma time.

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    BiturbowagonKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:33pm

    This is the start of the Erdoğan dictatorship.

    I feel very bad for the Turkish citizenry.

    (I’m still gray?)

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      ╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeBiturbowagon
      7/15/16 10:41pm

      And the soon-to-be extinct Kurdashians.

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      DubayaTeeEff╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and Boke
      7/15/16 11:11pm

      That is some fucked up genocide humor right there.

      Braveau

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    DiscoInfernoSupressionSystemKevin Draper
    7/15/16 11:03pm

    Turkey is a country that desperately, desperately needs a successful secular coup.

    The legacy of Ataturk is fading into history, as the military loses the strength to serve its traditional role as an insurance policy against Islamist theocracy.

    Turkey is slowly giving into the pressure of violently autocratic, reactionary, mysognist, homophobic ideology, as dreams of secular, democratic rule dissolve.

    Erdoğan needs to go. Now. But for now, it looks like Turkey’s fate is sealed. It’ll continue its decline into a theocratic autocracy, ruled by a despot intent on dismantling the nation and bringing it piece-by-piece back to the 12th century. I pity the Turks.

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      DiarrheahelixDiscoInfernoSupressionSystem
      7/16/16 12:09am

      Lol. A coup would probably need to have a bunch of people massacred for it to work. It probably wouldn’t work and the country would plunge potentially plunge the country in to civil war. The ensuing instability would probably move towards Greece and throw that country in to civil war because the refugee crisis is really pissing the Greeks off and they don’t like Turks. ISIS would probably also get control of some parts of Turkey.

      Let us also talk about the idea that Turkey would be more democratic if the military overthrew the current government. That is Orwellian double talk right there. These shithead fucker coup perpetrators were firing on civilians and planted a bomb at the parliament building and killed a bunch of police officers, 2 of these acts were acts of terrorism. If you think a liberal democracy would have came out of that, you are wrong.

      You would think that after the clusterfuck that was Iraq that people would think twice about regime change. I mean, the Middle East is already a shitstorm of instability and people are cheerleading for more instability. Turkey needs no coups.

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      DiscoInfernoSupressionSystemDiarrheahelix
      7/16/16 12:14am

      Increasingly, people have no sense of history before 9/11/2001.

      Every discussion about the Middle East defaults back to “But Bush... but Iraq...” We are led to believe that nothing happened before that, and no one in the region has any agency whatsoever.

      Ataturk founded the modern secular Turkish state on the principle that the military would be an insurance policy against Islamic theocracy. There have been about a half dozen coups since then to ensure that the nation doesn’t collapse into a theocratic shithole.

      Making comparisons to Iraq is nonsensical and betrays a lack of understanding of Turkish history.

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    Carmelo YelloKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:56pm

    Germany’s immigration situation just became very interesting and potentially more fraught. If this goes sideways I would imagine a lot of people trying to reunite with families that already are long established in Germany.

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      ╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeCarmelo Yello
      7/15/16 11:00pm

      We should grant them asylum in the US, so long as they first pass a test to see if they can cook a good doner kebab.

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      Carmelo Yello╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and Boke
      7/15/16 11:07pm

      Alternatively, if they can dribble a soccer ball we need to welcome them with open arms. The next Özil is out there somewhere.

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    Mortal DictataKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:29pm

    “gift from god to us, because this will help us clean our military from the members of this gang.”

    So the tolerant, multicultural Turkey Mustafa Kemal fought for almost a century ago is now dead and instead of trying to stop it NATO, the EU, and other ‘democracies’ are describing the military trying to stop Erdogan creating an autocracy as the bad guys.

    http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/…

    https://twitter.com/StateDept/stat…

    If anything comes out of this internationally please let it be the final destruction of this shitty and egotistical idea that the West is somehow better than everyone else.

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      Endless Supply of CynicismMortal Dictata
      7/15/16 10:43pm

      It is because we don’t install theocracies...thought that was self-evident.

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    Endless Supply of CynicismKevin Draper
    7/15/16 10:37pm

    Feels kinda like that time Poland ‘attacked’ that radio station in Germany and Hitler ‘defended’ Germany by invading Poland?

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