Huffy Flounce

Holy shit balls!!!!

The Bosporus has been closed, which means the Russian Black Sea fleet can't get to the Med. if Russia tries to force the issue, Turkey is a NATO ally.

Jive-ass Turkey.

Say what?

It appears to have ended badly for the coup-ers.

Might be the wrong answer in the long term. Erdogan is a terrible man masquerading as a democratically elected leader. Then again, what's new with that down there??

Erdogan's worst crime by far was following an independent foreign policy, as opposed to one which aligned with Washington's interests. I wouldn't be surprised to learn of some covert US backing for this coup attempt.

Erdogan's worst crime is taking an advanced, secular democracy and dragging it backwards while removing opposition. Dictator tactics.

His name sounds like it's straight outta Tolkien.

Right down to the funky pronunciation of (and accent on) the G.

Dalty wrote:Erdogan's worst crime is taking an advanced, secular democracy and dragging it backwards while removing opposition. Dictator tactics.

I was being somewhat facetious.

But honestly, Turkey, for all it's secularism, was never a true democracy. Government was always dominated by the military and other elites. As long as they were "our" thugs, we were content to look the other way. Much as with Egypt.

NEXT!!

My beautiful and glamorous Turkish senior PM here in the office says it was basically Erdogan himself, completely staged from beginning to end as an excuse to carry out a military purge and further restrict freedoms.

Intrigue upon intrigue. We may never know.

You don't start a coup with 3 planes, a helicopter and a couple of thousand troops in a country the size of Turkey. And look, now he says he is bringing back the death sentence after removing 6000 people from the judiciary, the opposition, the military and the bureaucracy. It's a purge!

Dalty wrote:You don't start a coup with 3 planes, a helicopter and a couple of thousand troops in a country the size of Turkey.

It's been known to happen. Remember that idiotic coup in the last days of the Soviet Union? About as effective.

In any event, I still don't buy Erdogan being behind this, it smacks of conspiracism. CIA or other such involvement, much more feasible. It is an old story.

Of course, the CIA!

Now he's going after the teachers.....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36838347

Would you feel the same way if the coup had succeeded and the military government rounded up and persecuted Islamists?

Depends what you mean by Islamists. If they were rounding up people who like to take their shoes off when they go to church and have a healthy suspicion of bacon sandwiches then yes. If it was removing suspected ISIL insurgents from the populace and MB agitators from the establishment then no loss.

Aren't they all suspected by a certain segment of the population, though? Don't all Islam adherents "fit the description" for this segment?

Terrorist attack underway across Munich right now, separate locations etc.

This could be a far-right attack.

We've shopped at that shopping center before. We also travelled to that shopping center one Thursday to find it closed because of some random Catholic holiday neither of us knew about. It's very likely that we ate at the McDonald's where it all started, too (we are lucky Jubboiter was not born a giant french fry).

I've heard back from most of the people I know in Munich. Followed the Sueddeutsche Zeitung all afternoon. Insane imagining the city on total lockdown, with no traffic, no one allowed to leave their locations, for hours. Munich was my home for two years, so I was pretty upset as the news started being reported.

The German news is back to calling it a run-amok rather than a terror attack.