what is an "intellectual"? seems a very nebulus and vague concept.
perhaps someone who thinks like writers who contribute to nytimes? in that case ... .
The takeaway for those in the US: To detect nascent authoritarianism, look at who in particular is getting persecuted in academia. Another good heuristic: Look at who's over-serious and who is best wielding ridicule.
Right now there are people who have stated criticism of political bias (pro-conservative, conservative-leaning speakers, center-left, etc) that are being punished in the US academic world.
I have seen that assertion frequently made, and even have attended multiple seminars on the topic (I have some friends very worried about this issue) as well as some FIRE meetings and fundraisers.
Yet I typically see the same few examples repeated and amplified. FIRE loves to talk about the cases it has challenged under Title IX -- and it always wins, because the law considers this an important issue! (https://www.thefire.org/issues/title-ix/)
Look at the recent (past couple of days) kerfuffle about Prof Wax, whose statements I consider abhorrent. Based on past practice I am pretty sure she'll keep her job.
There are issues around groups peripheral to universes (non-sponsored student groups and the like) but they pretty much by definition aren't part of universities.
Note I'm not the best one to provide you with numerous examples because I don't know where the document is that has detailed all of the examples in the last few years. But hearing about this is fairly frequently.
1. There have been protests about conservative speakers at campuses and universities whom have pulled shady stuff on trying to prevent the speakers from coming. (there was a Dave Rubin one where he was magically moved from a theater to a hockey arena). Substantially high costs on security. (Also video cases of where the security isn't actually enforced [Milo at the Depaul thing.. ]
2. There have been punishments against professors who question the progressive/extreme-left movement. (losing tenure, being brought up that they're "violence-inciting", etc)
3. A Portland professor being brought up on disciplinary actions for doing a POC on how you can get a paper with outrageously false claims published without question. (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent... This was a team of three that was involved one in the UK)
4. "Diversity offices" - I don't know direct examples here, but from what I've heard they've created trouble.
I think this is his point. You keep hearing about "There have been punishments against professors who question the progressive/extreme-left movement. (losing tenure, being brought up that they're "violence-inciting", etc)" or "Diversity offices have created trouble" but these "examples" are basically non-existent when you actually look for them.
So a lot of the argument about how "right wing commenters" are unfairly, well, whatevered, is based on some very serious anecdotes. And you know what we say to those - not today.
A few things:
- Protests are valid free speech expressions.
- Holding an entire protest as invalid due to a small number of individual's actions is unfair.
- Many of those conservative speakers aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent). While perhaps being protected by the 1st amendment, that's academic dishonesty. And we should not accept prima facie the arguments they're being oppressed.
- The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics. We're going to need better evidence not to take the disciplinary board at face value.
Basically "I hear about this frequently" and "there have been..." is pretty weak evidence. It's mainly relying upon the recency bias, availability cascade, base rate neglect, and our inability to assess large events.
For example, the Berkeley campus protest is constantly referred to. The problem is this is a splashy example which distorts people's thinking. People rarely talk about the thousands and thousands of conservative speakers that hold events without a hitch. We cannot talk about a systematic risk by only referring to events that are so rare that we keep on referring to the same one for the last several years! That is _by definition_ the opposite of a systematic bias/risk.
Basically I call serious BS. Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again while appealing to the impression that there should be more events like this, when there are not, is garbage.
...aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent).
Playing off of outrage is heavily rewarded by our current societal systems. It happens at all points of the political spectrum, but happens more at the extremes.
The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics
It's a hoax. It's a time honored means of expression, particularly when the subject heavily deserves ridicule.
Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again
There's a list of well over 600 incidents of violence, vandalism, and threats, instigated by the far left. If you do some searching, you'll find over a hundred with just a bit of sincere effort, and in pretty short order. There's also the father and son republicans who were chased down by black block demonstrators. There's the time when a mob was calling for Tim Pool to be chased down and beaten. There's the Florida local news video crew attacked, his smartphone knocked out of his hand. The bike lock professor. That's all just off the top of my head. True, such things are also done by elements of the far right. All of it is bad.
In any case, it's certainly not the case that there are only a few cherry picked examples from the Far Left. There's an epidemic of political harassment and assault in 2019, and a majority of the incidents up to the level of vandalism and minor assault comes from the Left. If anything, there's a bias against talking about that in the media.
> So a lot of the argument about how "right wing commenters" are unfairly, well, whatevered, is based on some very serious anecdotes. And you know what we say to those - not today.
For what I meant by right-wing, I meant the popular definition that is used today: Anything right of extreme left.
> not today
Lol. Good luck with trying to suppress others based on their beliefs or opinions.
Read about the Evergreen State College protests that happened in 2017.
Also in 2017, read about all the property damage that Berkeley students did to the town because they couldn't stop a speaker who had different political beliefs from talking at the school.
Edit: And what a surprise, the downvotes come in from all the inveterate Bay Area cocksuckers that get offended from facts. I hope the next earthquake sends all of you and the entire Bay Area into the sea.
>and it always wins, because the law considers this an important issue!
Winning often comes at a cost and just merely having to defend oneself causes enough damage to be considered a form of punishment regardless of the lack of an official classification as one.
While it isn't nearly the same level as losing your job and being blacklisted, I also don't think it should be counted as the same as someone who does not have to go through a similar process.
Just come out and say what you mean instead of slimy implications. It's obvious you believe in the false narrative that conservatives are somehow being "persecuted" in academia. This is a disengenous lie spread by right wing propaganda networks like fox news from a few cherry-picked examples. And even if it were true, people disagreeing with your position and calling you out on it is not "persecution."
Just a quick fact-check, it would be more accurate to label Andy Ngo as a fascist propagandist and agitator than "independent journalist" and a having a milk shake thrown at you is not "almost losing your life".
It's not a lie. Liberals own academia. 39% of colleges have no Republican professors. In many majors, the ratio is between 15 and 20 to one Democrats per Republican.
There is no world where ratios like that exist and discrimination doesn't occur.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Nothing new will come of it, therefore nothing interesting, therefore nothing on-topic for HN.
Power corrupts. No one is immune, no matter how high the ideals the wielders of power would hew to. Since professors are those anointed to speak their mind about difficult issues, it's especially telling when they start to be persecuted. It doesn't matter from what political direction it comes from.
That's hardly the takeaway from this article. In Turkey the state took jobs and freedom of mobility away from those with ideologies that the regime did not favor.
This article says nothing about persecution from the academic establishment to which you refer.
The article talks about academics being persecuted.
In Turkey the state took jobs and freedom of mobility away from those with ideologies that the regime did not favor.
Good point. To look for authoritarianism, look for powerful organizations and people taking away jobs and economic security from "those with ideologies the regime did not favor." It works for more types of organizations than just the state.
> look for powerful organizations and people taking away jobs and economic security from "those with ideologies the regime did not favor."
That's going to make those people desperate and ready to fight the government. Next step for the government is going to be imprisoning lots of people and manufacturing consent and all that.
He's not criticizing 'the institutions' so much as their ideas and modernism itself which, funny enough, is one of the 14 handy 'heuristics' for identifing nascent facism that Eco listed in 1995 [1].
It's a good list. At the risk of courting Godwin I'd suggest that 'concentration camps' would be a good 15th point but I guess it's covered more generally.
The standard criticism of academia these days is that it has abandoned modernism for postmodernism, not that it's too modernist.
Fascism itself was also very modernist in many ways, such as the obsession with industry and technology, the aspiration to innovate "beyond" liberalism and Marxism, and even the artistic and architectural styles it adopted.
Another heuristic: Look out for people who would "argue" purely from resemblances. (And primarily by tarring.)
[citation needed]
I'm not out to marginalize academia in general. My wife is a former college professor, and a Stanford PhD. However, I would like to call out those in academia who would marginalize others in academia purely for their opinions. If anything, the threat to academic freedom is even more potent, when it comes from within.
Populist uprisings against educated people have happened many times throughout modern history from both left- and right-wing movements. Remember this when wannabe autocrats like Trump rail against educational institutions and "coastal elites": It could happen here, too.
Feel free to look to either side for autocrats. Just because Trump has some autocratic tendencies doesn't mean Obama wasn't also quite full of them. As a nation autocrats tend to be the ones that abuse power rather than limit their power to what has traditionally been acceptable.
You can also look to see which presidents support institutions which would seem to allow autocracy to more easily flourish.
The law changed to allow the government to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial under a republican administration. When its sunset came, the power was affirmed by a democrat.
The authoritarianism wheel hasn't been turned backwards in a long time.
More 'made using primate genes.' There are many perfectly good brains that could be made out of meat, they just need to have certain bits about social hierarchy from our primate past removed or tweaked.
and with those removals and tweaks, you erase the fundamental core of humanity - appreciation of beauty, fear of strength, and the journey of the hero to save the damsel.
To be fair Gove would say that. It's like BJ is unlikely to say that the people want a competent PM that makes well thought out decisions, and has tamed hair.
Many experts are just preachers in different attire. Honestly, should we really listen to scientist who gets labeled experts based non replicable studies? The problem is that all of them gets the same doctors titles but only some of them are doing honest research, and our current society has no good way to deal with this. As a result laymen notice that significant parts of science is pure bullshit, no wonder there are trust issues!
Really? The point michael gove was making, if you're not aware, was to try and shun any attempt at "expert"-ing.
Within the context of Brexit, the leavers had their own group of "experts" i.e. the ERG but any attempt at economic prediction was clearly shunned on the grounds of it being "Project Fear" despite no specific biases being demonstrated. Because that's the only way, along with blatant lies, to get people believe that leaving the largest trading block - possibly even with no replacement deal with anyone - could possibly be a good thing (At all costs being the current mantra i.e. No Deal)
It's not the lack of listening to certain experts that bothers me, it's them clearing playing the card. Gove, and most of the others on the leave side, is very well educated and damn well knows that careful thought ("expert"ism) is important.
As it looked for a foreigner, reading almost exclusively mainstream media, when I happened to come by, not only were not pro-staying experts shunned, rather I was stunned for the outcome, because I never heard anything pro-leaving, or any expectation it would end this way.
Surely Brexit guys mean it not like Erdogan (i.e. jail time), but more like "if media don't serve as a feedback channel, both voters and elites could as well turn tvs off"?
It's very interesting to me, cause I observe experts in expertise everywhere in Russian media, and have been feeling lately, that they'll close themselves in no time, if they proceed that way, or turn into buzzfeeds.
Media no longer try to represent the truth. Everyone lives in a bubble. People are being fed with carefully targeted bullshit.
Your Russian propaganda machine is showing epic fail of the UK despite warnings from experts, highlighting that Putin navigates Russia with the more steady hand than these elected clowns.
In the meantime in the US. Fox News is trying to persuade uneducated whites that Trump knows what he is doing. He clearly has no clue and just serves as a distraction.
I didn't really mean "Russian propaganda machine" as nobody use it as bona fide media. I mean all over the world, in Fox, Guardian, Figaro or NYT, and all non state-owned Russian media, opinion pieces are not worth opening for some time. And it gets worse, since while the quality of reporting is worlds apart, the essence of it is converging. E.g. it's amazing to what extent (imho) all this media are over-reporting Trump, Putin or Brexit anti-heroes. It's hard to imagine, that any real person, with a life and a job, can be so invested in those people.
An important distinction. I studied history and international relations to postgrad level at an "elite" institution. As much as anyone, I see value in this research (having done it myself). But it is also important to understand the propensity for humans to make bombastic claims about their own work (which ends up saying, justifiably, that is all total bullshit).
Btw, I think this is equally true of research outside the social sciences...but there is just far more scope to engage in puffery within the social sciences and, unfortunately, people are often far too lazy to counteract it.
It isn't even about data or the distinction between hard and soft...if you can make a solid argument that is justified and you have no data (which is sometimes the case) then fine. The issue is that, in most areas, the evidence doesn't justify any clear conclusion. Again, you see this in harder sciences where the title is eye-catching, the data less so (often in proportion to the nonsense in the title).
Areas like "peace building" and "conflict resolution", mentioned in the article, are deeply political areas. In my opinion, they rarely do much to advance human knowledge. For example, as the article inadvertently shows, peace building is explicitly based on the idea that democracies are best because they don't attack each other. Sounds great...but there is no data to support this conclusion.
Also, should we listen to scientists who are speaking outside of their area of expertise? "I'm a medical doctor, so let me tell you about meteorology." People import authority from an area where they have it to use in areas where they don't.
Note well: This does not excuse purging intellectuals, in Turkey or anywhere else. Intellectuals aren't gods, but they aren't vermin, either.
We shouldn't really listen to anyone. Consider them first, sure, but we have to judge on a per-argument basis (David Irving was - as far as I know - a reasonably respected if unorthodox Historian early in his career - now he is not... for obvious reasons).
Speaking of which, I recently saw a petition which was sold along the lines of "100s of scientists sign petition condemning 5G", where the vast majority of signatories were either scientists not working in a related field or physicians (Who are not scientists at all).
> As a result laymen notice that significant parts of science is pure bullshit
This doesn't really happen much. First off, only a tiny percentage of people are thinking about this critically and independently. So it's more like "People are told X is bullshit, and choose to believe it". That holds regardless of the truth value of X, and has more to do with the intentional undermining of science as a source of finding truth.
So yes, we should listen to the scientists. Not the people trying to spin what they say, but the scientists. And not individual scientists, but disciplines as a whole. We should be able to understand when there is meaningful consensus and when there is not. How confident the community is in quality of the work. What ways there would be to interrogate it better. We should be funding competent and trained scientific journalists to synthesize and present this things in as objective a way as they can, instead of listening to PR hacks and politicians spin a random paper they found to support the conclusion they want.
Absolutely there are problems in science, and to some degree we have caused them by creating poor incentive structures. So lets fix that. We should probably be focusing more on evidence-base policy, and creating oversight structures that keep it working well.
After all, for the questions that science is capable of addressing, it is far and away the most effective approach humans have ever come up with. And as recent history shows us yet again, if you throw out those voices they will most likely be replaced by blind true-believers and opportunistic mountebanks. You can't honestly believe this will improve things, can you?
Of course, we shouldn't only listen to the scientists. But these day's we've swung too far in the other direction.
I really dislike people bringing that quote up, because the full sentence was "People have had enough of experts (...) who are consistently getting it wrong". [1]
It's still not necessarily true, but by taking just part of that quote is misrepresenting what he said.
Just thought that'd be good to keep in mind next time you might consider digging it up.
I'll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt just for the sake of argument, but I have my doubt most people voting for folks decrying "experts" or "the establishment" have paid the least bit attention to what experts actually say.
The end results seems to be the same sort of "oh man those jokers" argument in favor of ... some folks who seem like bigger jokes / less knowledgeable.
"People have had enough of (experts, who are consistently getting it wrong)"
Or
"People have had enough of experts, (who are consistently getting it wrong)."
Regardless, his logic is completely wrong and unfounded but who cares anymore. Who are these experts? No idea. When are they right? Irrelevant. What constitutes being wrong? Doesn't matter.
They clearly decided on the nuclear option, i.e. Campaigning with an incredibly vacuous overly-simplistic divisive message that has broken the United Kingdom. Some of the more abrasive untruths would have made Goebbels proud: Particularly the idea that this was them against the "establishment" e.g. Their mates, or the £350 million affair - Not because of the figure but because of the tax income from doing trade with the EU.
In context, Gove was talking about expert political judgment applied to making short term predictions: experts predicting prompt, dire consequences from Brexit.
Such predictions have been the subject of academic study. One obtains gold-standard data on the accuracy of short term predictions merely by waiting. The classic book is Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11152.html
His findings sent shocks waves through the intelligence community. What is going to happen next? Answering that question is raison d'être of the intelligence community. They depend on expert political judgment and Tetlock had found that it was rubbish. This prompted the Good Judgment Project https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/newsroom/iarpa-in-the-news/2...
I used to just be repulsed by talk like this, but I've started to find it interesting. Its useful to tease out what is meant here.
Experts - when we think of them, we think of professionals with experience, people who've done research on the subjects, and in general just people who are better informed than the public.
What I think the people who say things like "enough with the experts", I find it to be entirely within a political/media context - many of whom are paid lobbyists, industry representatives, people with a lot of paper qualifications with their own agenda, etc. AKA, bullshit artists. A call against them is a call against systemic corruption, since they are a primary tool the powerful use to keep the public's consent.
The other side of that is a blanket callout against all experts obviously is just anti-intellectualism. This pessimistic worldview is that well since we can't tell which experts are telling the truth, I'm going to go with what I believe, and not listen to anything to the contrary. This is quite easy to criticize - however I think that those that criticize it aren't always taking into account that they do it as well, even if less often or on a less global scale.
While on the one hand, I can see the advantages to us of reducing competition from another country, the weight of the disadvantages in general is far too high.
The difference between propaganda and news is propaganda tells what happened AND dogmatically enforces what to think. This situation is similar to how its a holy obligation to snarkily tell blue collar workers to "learn to code" when their jobs become obsolete, but snarkily telling journalists "learn to code" when their legacy jobs go away is reported as a hate crime.
“It all depends on whose ox is being gored”
The argument in the propaganda seems to boil down to its a tragedy that people publicly trying to subvert a society won't be getting paid anymore by the society they're trying to subvert. As if an immune system response is somehow immoral.
Also this article is strongly biased anti-immigrant. If you don't want this kind of culture replacing the legacy in Scotland, Sweden, or France, you're just a racist. This is just kinda how the new culture of Europe does things and its beautiful.
It begins with experts being blamed by politicians for daring to know things incompatible with a particular world view. When opinion gets more important than fact, democracy becomes populism and in the limit, authoritarianism.
Intellectuals should stop sharing their knowledge/skills with obscurantists. They should allow obscurantists to fail or at least to make obscurantists to depend on intellectuals. The motto should be "first control then money gaining or sharing"
Well in places where the intellectuals are fleeing, that's basically what they're doing, no? They're not trying to control the money exactly, but they are ceasing to share their skills with the rest of the people in that country, and removing themselves from its economy.
I don’t think it is right. They harm their selves much more than its country. Dictator will easily buy their replacement from free world when needed. The problem is that intellectuals could be bought and sold because there are no contract commitments on how to use the knowledge. You are even free to use your knowledge against your teacher to make him to leave the country.
What? I have almost no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that intellectuals should be forced to stay in their countries with dictators? I guess you're a big fan of East Germany and North Korea, huh?
We had something like this in 1968 in Poland with communist propaganda condemning intelectuals and cosmpolitans and workers activists beating students on the streets (like they do in HK these days).
Sztoptanski called that Dictatorship of Dishrags. Generally the best weapon against such times is irony and a sense of humor and grotesque.
After reading that article, I'm happy for the polish to live in a better state now, and I immediately started to think where people are now oppressed by their government whenever they are deemed 'harmful to the nation', and China came to my mind, and not just for the Chinese state cooperating with the organized crimes triads to attack protesters in Hong Kong. The situation there is different for now, because China is economically developing, so that may stabilize the government, but eventually China will get rid of its oppressive regime. I wonder when and how.
We weren't really oppressed by our government. The March events, as they're know here, were mostly homegrown commies pushing out the Jewish wing of the party with decent people getting caught in the purge and following protests.
But it was all happening with two hundred thousand Soviet soldiers stationed in the country. The communist government wouldn't have lasted a month without the Soviet support. The situation is different because China is not being occupied by a foreign power. Neither is Turkey.
I don't know anyone who would support Russia in that conflict but Ukraine itself isn't very popular with many due to unresolved Volhynia massacres[1]. Mostly though people just don't care about a low intensity war that feels far away (even if it isn't).
Me, my relatives and some people I know were scared during the first weeks of the invasion, as we feared Russia will steamroll through Ukraine and we'll suddenly find ourselves facing tanks on the eastern border. Over time, we realized that the Russians aren't even trying to advance too far past Crimea, so as the whole thing fell off the media cycle, we all slowly forgot about it over the years.
Remarkable thing about satire is that it truly is the province of the underdog. The contempt people had for their communist rulers was funny ("kicking up"), but the humour would not work if they used the same caricatures downward at the same kind of coarse people ("kicking down"). The irony of the communists was that by being the revolutionary people, "kicking up" became an attack on their "down," identity.
Similar things happened in other Soviet occupied countries that would become part of the Eastern Block. Otherwise transplanting a political and ideological system from the USSR wouldn't have worked, not without replacing the then current intelligentsia with a new one, ideologically aligned with the USSR.
I'm always thankful to the Polish because they sparked the 1989 revolutions with Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność movement.
The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness. Both the far right and far left do it routinely to their advantage, they both seem to think the ends justify the means. Whoever has the loudest megaphone and can effectively stir up a sufficiently large outrage mob is the winner. Facts do not matter, evidence can be deemed "offensive" and is immediately discarded, there is no room for nuance, opinions must conform to group-think, and attempts at humor is often the worst offense of all. Anything can and will be taken out of context. Their intention is to harm, destroy, cleanse the culture and ideology into acceptable thought. Careers are ruined, achievements are discarded, lives are destroyed, names are slandered.
That this type of behavior has been recently normalized, encouraged, and incentivized by both the far right and far left in the USA is a very disturbing trend. Historically this has never worked out well, so let's hope it all stops sooner than later.
You're misunderstanding the story. He was made to step down from a particular post he held, and I'm not saying that's okay, but he's still a Harvard Law professor and there was never any prospect he wouldn't be.
To be absolutely clear, this professor did not lose his job, he lost his post as dean of a residential house.
This is a role whereby he lives in close proximity to students, acts as an mentor and helps students with all sorts of things, like for example if a student was sexually assaulted - their dean is supposed to be on their side.
Students are right to question if he takes sexual assault seriously if he represents Weinstein. There are many other fine lawyers, and this was a totally voluntary job he took on.
His real job, which it certainly appears like he shirked, is to be the best advocate for his students, to help them navigate college, which is often a difficult time.
It's easy to say that his voluntary role in the defense of Weinstein has no merit or conflict with his job. But is that really true? You can say "students should grow up" or toughen up or something, but is that the kind of advice you'd offer to your own child?
I think not.
The appearance of conflict of interest is enough. That his students express discomfort and feelings of unsafe _in their own home_ was easily dismissed by this professor is additional evidence that he doesn't treat his job of dean to a residence seriously enough. "You should reason yourself so my volunteer role and job are not in conflict" is not good enough - he's putting all the effort on the weak and less powerful. And that's not right.
Ultimately the story he spins in that article is that Harvard "capitulated to a mob", but my spin is this: Harvard did the right thing by protecting the less powerful from the more powerful. And there is no disputing a tenured Harvard law professor, with tons of connections, a guaranteed for life salary, etc, is the more powerful person.
The subservience of intellectualism to politics seems obvious to me. Typical public online discourse is shackled.
Goodhart's law is a big mechanic purging intellectual discussion.
If you're in a right leaning, 'non political' forum and you post about potential impacts of climate change, you'll almost certainly be put on blast.
If you're in a left leaning, 'non political' forum and someone posts 'climate change is going to turn Earth to Venus and we're all going to die choking' and you respond "that seems like unrealistic histrionics" you will almost certainly be put on blast.
There is verdant field of potential discussion between those two posts and it's very difficult to play there. You can, in certain sanctuaries.. but in public, 90% of the gradient causes someone to foam at the mouth if they suspect your political alignment is opposite theirs.
Sometimes your requests for rigor on a freeform discussion board don't carry the weight of law, sometimes people just respond with what they're thinking instead of doing what they're told.
I stand by my handwaving as relevant, common experience that indicates an erosion of intellectual discourse. It should be patently obvious that I didn't have any sources for what I said specifically. There's no parenthetical or APA formatted links anywhere!
Edit: Okay, I'll go run an experiment and come back with the data. Maybe that's a compromise.
>>Sometimes your requests for rigor on a freeform discussion board don't carry the weight of law, sometimes people just respond with what they're thinking instead of doing what they're told.
Well, you made a claim, and people asked you to prove that claim. I think it is quite reasonable to expect you to carry that burden regardless of medium. Otherwise, you should retract the original claim.
Incidentally, what you said about "people just [stating] what they are thinking" and then not backing that up with evidence is a huge problem in today's public discourse. If we don't hold those people accountable, then what we have is not a discourse, but a cacophony of random voices.
Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the weaponization of online mob activity, organized bullying, shaming, doxing, revenge porn, outrage culture, review spamming, mass harassment of peoples employers/schools, etc? I thought this stuff was all well known in the tech community.
In the intellectual field it's a far more of a left-wing based issue than right-wing. Universities in the US have skewed left for a longtime. Which has meant they are hit the hardest when it comes to the eat-your-own outrage culture engulfing the American left.
>The USA is purging intellectuals as well through outrage culture, online mobs, and the weaponization of political correctness.
While there is some silencing of people and view points, I don't think it is not fair to those in Turkey to consider it on the same level as their purge. Outside of a few areas dealing with the social sciences, the worst an expert in their field is going to have to deal with is government funding cuts.
I can point out some problems with the way we currently do science, including funding issues, replication issues, unfair amounts of criticism based on how socially agreeable a finding is, and in very rare cases people's employment being at risk for 'wrongthink', but even the worst cases of these barely even compare and no one is ending up being imprisoned over it.
I think this is a slight over exaggeration. Trump is an example where he seems to gain strength the more outrageous he is. Cops don’t have careers ruined by protests. Sarah Sanders lied repeatedly as does Kelly Anne Conway. Some celebrities have criminal complaints etc... the only real issue is that the left like to fall on their swords.. this is probably to set an example of doing the right thing but it’s probably short sighted.. so history will see how that plays out...
So firing 6,000 academics and restructuring and a single major university counts as a purge? I mean a great many places are laying off professors with Liberal Arts Degrees many more than 6,000. In modern day the focus is shifting away from those careers. Even if that is a bad thing it is still the truth of the matter. This just seems like its trying to push a ham-fisted narrative. I'm no fan of Erdogan but this seems like textbook attempt at Yellow Journalism.
At least 100 000 people lost their jobs. 6000 is only the number of academics. We are talking about Stanford/MIT grad, >40 h-index young academics (at least in science which is not the focus of the article)
Some of these high-achieving people couldn't even leave the country even though there were a lot of positions waiting for them. Some people tried to go to Greece on boats which many of them died on the way.
It sounds like someone needs to organize some good, seaworthy boats to come pick these people up and take them someplace better, and help them get set up. After all, if they're intellectuals, they should be a huge asset to any country that takes them in. There's a reason we have the term "brain drain": countries that get the brains usually benefit greatly, while the countries losing them suffer economically.
I know you didnt mean this, but perhaps these people don't want to leave?
Turkey is not a hellhole. Sure, it is a divided country, but it has a rich history and lots of beauty (I say that not being a Turk, nor being from Istanbul).
Let's remember that the current position as a developing nation is historically rather new. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and, until recently, there was some realistic hope that Turkey would claw its way back.
I'd personally argue there arent many comparable places where you can (or could) indeed live a good academic and intellectual life in a non-western, non-east-asian society.
I know people who were ousted from their jobs, and yes they can all move elsewhere. But that's not the personal tragedies lie.
If you grew up in a city full of thousands of years of history from East and West, it is entirely possible you will never be quite as happy living in sterile, uniform, blocky corporaty cities in the US or Canada.
Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
Yes, I absolutely did mean this. Just read the comment I responded to:
"Some people tried to go to Greece on boats which many of them died on the way."
Obviously, those people thought it was enough of a hellhole that they risked their lives to take boats to Greece, and died!
>Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
I'm not talking about anyone who's staying there. I'm talking about people who are actively trying to escape and are risking their lives to get out. Obviously, they're perfectly willing to abandon those cities "full of thousands of years of history". Besides, western Europe is chock full of other cities with thousands of years of history that don't have the problems Turkey has, and that's where these people were headed to, not the US or Canada.
Turkey's GDP peaked at $950 billion in 2013, just before Erdogan became president. By 2017, it had slid to $850 billion, and after the intellectual purges, slid to just $766 billion in 2018. [1]
People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country.
GDP is not a north star metric. GDP in the US is high and we have more suicides than ever.
Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap.
"growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" --edward abbey
(I don't know anything about what's happening in Turkey, I just don't believe in GDP as a metric to chase)
It is incredibly hard to shrink the GDP though. That's what Erdogan managed nonetheless - installed a kleptocratic oligarchy under the guise of religious conservatism. All outside investment vanished and national players became beholden to the gov rather than to meaningful investment. Unemployment is high, as are food prices, despite super cheap labour migration from Syria (essentially used as slaves) and massive cash infusions by the EU.
Would you say that you agree with GP's point though? It's not as if there are other things that are getting better in Turkey to counterbalance this particular measure.
I'd like some kind of standard metric that adjusts gdp to spending power on food, housing etc, and weights based on standard deviation amongst the populace (lower being better).
Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.
You're on the right track though, at minimum you need to use something like purschasing power parity (PPP) to account for some effects, and wealth distribution to account for others.
Doing these comparisons meaningfully isn't easy to get right.
I think we're in agreement here. I purposely didn't imply that GDP growth was a good indicator of smart social policies, just that GDP shrinkage (especially to that extent) was an inarguable indicator of bad social policies.
There may also be GDP growth in a country with bad social policies. I wouldn't expect there to be much GDP shrinkage in a country with smart social policies, though.
I wanst implying that they were correlated at all. Simply that a high GDP isn’t a useful metric since the people in the US are still unfulfilled in other ways.
This is true, but I think it's significant that Erdogan has been promising (along with many other things) economic growth in a fairly traditional sense. His voter base is largely rural and traditional, but to my knowledge he's been offering continued economic growth with rural areas seeing more benefit and less disruption, and has failed to deliver. Even if GDP is a bad thing to optimize, it's significant any time leadership fails on its own metrics.
More broadly, I think lots of nations today could maintain healthy economies with flat or shrinking national GDP, but those are countries which have little reason to expect 'natural' GDP increase without a growth ideology. Most obviously, post-industrial nations which can't rely on growing populations or rapid labor productivity boosts from urbanization and infrastructure investment: Sweden or the UK could plausibly operate at near-constant GDP, and Japan could even grow per capita GDP while shrinking national GDP. More subtly, nations which actively avoid pursuing the common arc of demographic transition, urbanization, and industrialization: Mongolia or Bhutan might try to take an entirely different path. And crucially, any of these nations would need to plan for the outcome: if Sweden 0% GDP growth without intending to, it would point to serious economic problems.
Given all of that, Turkey seems like a singularly bad candidate for falling total GDP. The population is still growing at 1.5% and labor productivity at 2%-3%, while experiencing urbanization and major infrastructure expansion. Crudely put, 1.015*1.025 ought to net Turkey 4% GDP growth without considering anything any other factors at all, so a substantial decline points to something going badly wrong.
It’s probably the closest thing we have to a North Star metric when evaluating a country. Everything that people desire is underpinned by GDP, and it isn’t particularly high anywhere on Earth.
True, but they can realise those desires more easily if they’re available at the market. In fact it’s hard to imagine an area of human interest or endeavour that is not supported by the activities measured by GDP in some way. I’m not saying it’s the only metric we should attend to, or even that it’s a perfect economic metric, but rather that it’s a reasonable headline metric to use. It is only one number, so it cannot express the whole reality of life within a country; but it can convey some sense of the relative opportunities for that country. There is a meaningful and quantifiable difference between living in an economy with a GDP of $45 million (GDP per capita $3,566) and $20 trillion (GDP per capita $64,767).
> Turkey's GDP peaked at $950 billion in 2013, just before Erdogan became president. By 2017, it had slid to $850 billion
Do you realise that Erdogan has been in power since 2001? So if economic downturn is his achievement, then the economic growth is his achievement, too.
He had significant checks and balances when he was the prime minister. Many of them are removed, nearly half of the executive powers lie upon the president, without any balance, currently. This is thanks to "presidential order"s (Cumhurbaşkanı Kararı), which is separate from "presidential decree"s (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kararnamesi), which can be struck by the constitutional court.
> Many of them are removed, nearly half of the executive powers lie upon the president,
That I know, too. And that happened (as in many authoritarian states) so that he could maintain the illusion of legitimacy: "hey look, I'm not a prime-minister forever, I am now president".
But do give Erdogan some credit. He is not stupid. And it's disingenuous and deeply simplistic to paint what happened in Turkey as "Erdogan became President in 2013, look Turkey immediately slid into recession because of that". "Checks and balances" alone cannot explain Turkey's growth prior to 2013.
Meh, I'm no fan of Erdogan, but statistics like that should be used with caution. This precipitous decline does not show what you imply it shows. This is what happens when your currency tanks, numbers like "GDP in USD" get all out of whack. Compare and contrast with GDP per capita PPP[1]
Also, quick clarification note related to the GDP numbers. Erdogan has been Turkey's Prime Minister since 2003 (head of the executive branch).
In 2014, Erdogan was elected as President. In 2017, Turkey went through a constitutional referendum that made the President head of the executive branch.
I'm noting this because much of Erdogan's popularity is rooted in Turkey's GDP growth between 2003-2013.
Erdogan also "said he opposes high rates because they stoke inflation - a view that contradicts economic theory" [1]. It seems the exodus of intellectuals had a secondary effect in de-intellectualising his policy.
You cannot have freedom of speech without freedom of association. When it comes to deplatforming it does matter who's doing it, because there is a fundamental difference between a private entity (corporate or living person) and a government (only one has a monopoly on violence).
The government shutting down your youtube channel; that's a problematic infringement on speech; Google shutting down your channel, that's within their rights.
> because there is a fundamental difference between a private entity (corporate or living person) and a government (only one has a monopoly on violence).
Only works for private entities in markets with a lot of competition and no dominance. Otherwise there is no difference whether a government does it or a private entity under pressure.
Not a great example. Backpage was facilitating prostitution and trafficking for years, naturally that is going to attract some negative attention from the authorities.
Russia buying few ads which could have some effect on election results is considered serious issue. Google influencing elections by shadow-banning channels is a much more serious issue.
Currently google is treated as a platform, and does not take responsibility for the content users post to it, but that means that google also must have fair rules by which it treats everyones content. If google wants to decide which channel to shut down and which one to keep, it should not be treated as a platform, but as a publisher.
IIRC, it used to be the case that shopping malls were, in some situations, treated as public squares and couldn't just expel people. For example, if someone like Steven Crowder hypothetically set up his infamous "change my mind" table in the middle of the mall, the mall actually didn't have the legal power to expel him. This was in the era when a lot of towns didn't actually have a real public square, they just had shopping malls, and the landowners of the shopping malls had an effective commercial monopoly on the city square.
YouTube is in a very similar situation. And frankly, it's not even just the outwardly political channels like Crowder that are getting the short end of the stick.
> Deplatforming is just bad. If you can't win your argument without getting rid of anyone who disagrees with you, what does that say?
You're wrong about this. If you think that the best ideas naturally win out you're either ignorant (think of how fast bad ideas can spread), or purposefully pushing this "both sides"/horseshoe theory/false equivalence to further impede those who are actually trying to stop fascism.
The "deplatformers" you're referencing here wield entirely different magnitudes of power:
Erdogan: literally an authoritarian dictator
Carlos Maza: journalist who brought attention to the fact that hateful speech has real violent effects on people (it's important that Crowder's videos were only demonetized, not removed, or his channel suspended, and that this action was taken by Youtube).
Antifa: organization with no leadership structure, composed of citizens who are dedicated to preventing fascism from spreading, using means that are historically proven to work.
See, you're overcomplicating things. If you just had the correct opinions to begin with, you wouldn't have to bother with wondering whether other people might know something that you didn't, or that you might be wrong. You would just realize that, by having the right opinions in the first place, you were totally in the right to violently suppress anyone who might disagree with you.
> Antifa: organization with no leadership structure, composed of citizens who are dedicated to preventing fascism from spreading, using means that are historically proven to work.
"Historically proven to work"? Since when have leftist street gangs ever stopped a fascist movement from rising to power? It was the fear of leftist street violence that won whatever small degree of public support the SA had, bolstered the official narrative about the Reichstag fire that led to the passage of the Enabling Act, and the Nazi anthem "Horst Wessel Song" capitalized on the killing of the aforementioned Horst Wessel by the "antifa" of the day.
Setting that aside, what the fuck is the point of making excuses for political street violence anyway? "Sure, we act like a bunch of brownshirts, but at least we're not fascists!"
Immediately after WW2 all fascists worldwide disappeared in a poof of smoke. Also their rise to power has always been abrupt and without warning via an on/off switch.
Wow, you really think British fascism was a serious political threat after six years of war against various fascist powers. That’s a truly McCarthyesque level of paranoia.
Carlos Maza is not a journalist. He's an activist posing as a journalist who advocates deplatforming people, covers for antifa, and is ok with violence being used to silence people.
Antifa is a group who thinks it is OK to use violence against people they disagree with. They end up actually being a fascist organization.
My favorite concept right now is the “meritocracy of ideas” - a fancy way of saying that the best ideas win. Somehow I feel that this is a core driver for success, in an organization, small or big. So by excluding smart people and their ideas you may significantly limit yourself and the futures your organization.
They don't necessarily. But historically, allowing ideas to spread like wildfire seems like it's been a lot more effective at reaching the truth than having the authorities decide what's true and only let true things spread.
Meritocracy requires some sort of result that holds an idea up against reality. The scientific community uses experimentation and replication of successful results. The economy uses "creative destruction" to a similar end.
People believing an idea doesn't add to its merit.
I don't really know what is so special about the school which they decided to base the entire article on. This is just a small sample of the ongoing intellectual purge in Turkey. Every university rector is appointed by Erdogan, most professors in STEM, if they haven't fled, avoid any kind of political stance to continue teaching with the hopes of raising intellectuals who will help save the country. This is the university side of the situation, most of the successful students leave the country as soon as they graduate. This migration is on a scale that is record high in countries history, according to some unofficial numbers more than 300.000 young and smart individuals leave the country every year.
And I have a problem with this story about its portrayal of Turk-Kurd relation. Turkey is an extension of a multi-national empire. For most people living there, Turkish is not an ethnicity. Most of Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and more identify themselves as Turks. Portraying Demirtas as a charismatic Kurdish rights activist that wants to unite everyone with peace is despicable journalism. Demirtas is a proud terrorist supporter, he has stated his love and respect for Abdullah Ocalan repeatedly. Abdullah Ocalan is/was the leader of P.K.K., a group that is seen as a terrorist organization by every major intelligence agency of world, he is responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, children.
It's interesting to note that the NYT publishes this damning piece mere weeks after Erdogan green-lighted Turkey's purchase of Russian S-400 missile systems despite the U.S threatening to kick them out of the F-35 program if they did so. The story appears at a time when an important NATO ally is straying from the pack and leaning instead towards Russia's sphere of influence.
My prediction is that we will be seeing more and more mainstream-media pieces like this in the near future, with a healthy sprinkling of words such as "regime", "dictatorship" and “fascism”, and featuring characters like Demirtas as protagonists of the story. They will undoubtedly be portrayed as freedom-fighters leading the fight against oppression.
or... damning articles about the situation in Turkey have been popping up regularly for 5ish years now. IMO they need to keep popping up frankly.
Likewise, Turkey's increasing moves away from NATO towards Russia were always going to reach a threshold where some steplike point was crossed (the F-35 vs S-400 thing) and some public consequences happened.
I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
I'm basically of the opinion that it is pretty clear Turkey is heading in the wrong direction, and the powers that be in the west have no reason to manufacture that story.
I can respect your point of view as I think that it's based on some historical realities that cannot be so easily dismissed.
However if you look at the history of NYT articles on Turkey and Erdogan going back years [1], there are scant few articles that are critical of Turkey or Erdogan in the way this and other articles in the past weeks and months have been (beginning from the time Turkey began to drift away from its traditional allies). Recent articles have directly called into question the legitimacy of the AKP and Erdogan himself who was elected through a democratic process.
> I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
From my point of view, this article and others like it could be interpreted as a very early precursor to forced regime change in Turkey. Time will tell if I am correct. Turkey switching sides presents an existential threat to NATO and the balance of power in region, especially considering the power of Turkey's military and Erdogan's stance on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
To me, they could be seen as examples of the mainstream media laying the groundwork -building popular support- for some kind of future, punitive military or economic action. They look suspiciously like the articles printed in the lead-up to the disasters of Libya, Iraq, Syria. Of course, this is all just speculation, based on how the informal American propaganda apparatus (described by Chomsky) has operated in the past.
There are many, many problems with Turkey and Erdogan and there is much to answer for, but I'm of the opinion that U.S style regime change is not the solution. I think it behooves us to be extremely critical and even suspicious of any source of information that was designed for mass dissemination and consumption.
> From my point of view, this article and others like it could be interpreted as a very early precursor to forced regime change in Turkey.
Maybe, but it seems a bit much for them to even entertain that one - they (whoever they actually is) haven't had any luck with Iran or North Korea where whipping up some sort of frenzy or story about a direct threat would seem much easier.
Getting Turkey to that position of threat seems like pushing shit uphill.
My point is that once you're aware of Manufactured Consent being a thing that has happened, it can be easy to see it everywhere even when it isn't necessarily there. Overdoing it can be a little hard to distinguish from deepstate/illuminati conspiracy theorists. Edit - definitely not implying this here.
Just want to point out that the situation in NK is different than Turkey because, as we all know, it's a nuclear power in close proximity to a treaty ally.
With Iran... well, we can see the ridiculous predicament that we are in today because of the unilateral actions of one party over a treaty agreed to by 7 signatories. I would not rule out direct military intervention and regime change in the near future there just yet (at massive cost of human life). The world has seen one too many times what happens when nations disobey the global hegemon.
It may indeed seem silly and tin-foil hat-ish, but there are many ways of forcing regime change without overtly declaring war. Coup d'états, spontaneously occurring uprisings, etc.
Not to indulge in the paranoia of world leaders too much, but Erdogan famously survived his 2016 coup which he claims to have been backed by the CIA [1]. The Philippines' Duterte has mentioned in several interviews (in a non-sarcastic way) his fear of being assassinated by the CIA after his pivot towards China [2]. The truth is that geopolitics is probably simultaneously more boring and more full of intrigue than we can imagine.
tuvan says> "Every university rector is appointed by Erdogan, most professors in STEM, if they haven't fled, avoid any kind of political stance to continue teaching with the hopes of raising intellectuals who will help save the country. "
Reminds me of pre-war Germany's educational system once the nazis took over. Curiously enough, Erdogan may agree -
"Erdoğan cites Hitler's Germany as example of effective government":
Turkey is an extension of a multi-national empire which had extreme levels of animosity between its nations, people who identified as non-turks were severely penalized in the past, and to this day allegations of having a non Turk grandparent is something that can be used against politicians. Armenian is still considered an offensive word in Turkey, (as is Turk in Armenia), so portraying Turkey as an idyllic multi-national country is self-deception. Everyone can agree that killing people should be condemned, but it is important to remember that the terrorism of P.K.K. is more similar to American revolution against Britain than to the Al-qaeda terrorism, and it have arised not because some Kurds are despicable people but because there are real unsolved problems still present in Turkey.
Yes, racism exists. Armenian, Greek etc are used as insults by racist people. This doesn’t mean that it is the general state of public.
People like Trump use Mexican as an insult, that doesn’t change the fact that there are tons of people with Mexican roots that identify as American and are well respected by the non-racist majority of the nation.
I don’t see how PKK is anything like American revolution. PKK isn’t representing any form of official group, they aren’t acting in favor of any specific agenda. There is no ‘real unsolved problem still present in Turkey’ that can justify suicide bombing civilians. They are indirectly funded by USA through military aids to PKKs extension PYD. If you asked what does PKK want to Turkish people, there would be no clear answer, as all PKK ever accomplished was stirring the political climate every single time there was a possibility of political stability in the area.
Do you know of any cases where anyone in America called someone "Mexican" as an insult? Could someone file a lawsuit because he was called "Mexican"? I don't think so, and i don't think USA and Turkey are comparable.
PKK and Kurds want to have their own country, that's natural, every nation wants that, and if history have taken a bit different path Turks could be in the same situation. If there was free speech in Turkey and non-racists were really the overwhelming majority, then the people who go into PKK would simply try to hold a referendum for independence (like people in Scotland), and most likely would not get the majority vote (again like Scotland), but unfortunately Turkey still has a long way to go to get there.
In this day and age, seperatist referandums are just dreams. Kurdistan Kurds had a referandum to declare complete independence from Iraq with 90%+ in favor of independance but they couldn’t make that recognized by international parties, even with Iraq having no practical government. And we saw what happened when Catalans attempted the same thing.
Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
Kurds have independent country only on part of their historic territory. Turkey being independent didn't hinder turks to take half of Cyprus where Turks were not even majority, unlike the territory claimed by Kurds, where Kurds are majority because Turkey was too effective in getting rid of Armenians and Assyrians.
You are correct that existing states are very reluctant to recognize new countries, but my point is that a mere glimmer of hope is enough so significantly reduce terrorism like it with Basque country for instance.
> Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
I dont really understand why people are making concrete assumptions about a terrorist organization without living in the country. Terrorism of PKK cannot be comparable to American revolution. You never lived in Turkey and you dont know the culture there. Turkey and US have completely different cultural basis and you cant just show up and making assumptions like these. I mean of course you can, from my point of view it is just funny.
If you want examples closer to Turkey take Greek War of Independence, or forces fighting for liberation of Bulgaria, or northern Ireland. I have not lived in Turkey but my grandparents did, and i know some people who do live in Turkey. Of course i do not support terrorism, but PKK exists largely because unfair laws, untold stories, and
ethnic hatred existing in Turkey. The only way to really win the fight with PKK is not force, but free speech and human rights.
If you could tell your perspective on the issue, of why what i say is baseless and funny, I would be grateful.
PKK killed a Turkish Diplomat in Northern Iraq last week [0]. You can't really explain this by lack of free speech or human rights. There are many cases like this in Turkey's history where innocent people get assassinated by some cowards.
That is horrible, but a supporter of PKK would reply that Turkish army have killed and displaced Kurds in Afrin. War is an ugly thing, and everyone involved loses from it. The way free speech and human rights can help, is the same way it helped with conflicts in Europe. The country where speaking in kurdish can get an MP sentenced to 15 years for "separatist speech", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people..., where there is a law for "insulting Turkishness" used against people like Taner Akçam, is deeply ill, and that illness is the cause of PKK.
Turkish mythology refers to the tribes of Central Asia, children in elementary schools are taught about their tribal ancestors' history and how they eventually settled in what is today called Turkey. Being Turkish means having ancestors coming from one of those tribes, so how do Kurds and Greeks fit into this picture? Turkish is most definitely an ethnicity and all Turks are taught about it from an early age.
> In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.
Honestly, I'm not so sure that's true. That's still a consensus view for people without a stake in what's happening, and it never has been clear and universal for those close to the topic. (Who, as here, generally accept the principle but reject the accuracy of both 'dictator' and 'purge'.)
It's not hard to find people, even in the US, who in their own time excused (or praised) each of fascist crackdowns on historians, Soviet enforcement of Lysenkoism, Pinochet's 'disappearing' of artists, Maoist 'reeducation', or even the Khmer Rouge's outright mass murder of educated people. Mostly, those purges have only been near-universally reviled in hindsight.
You are correct, unfortunately. There must always be a contingent that supports the autocrat or else he would not be in power. "universal" is indeed too broad a term.
And indeed, in the US there were things like the Madison Square pro-nazi rally in 1939. And just as there were pro-democracy denunciations of Pinochet that Nixon et co ignored, so too today there is denunciation of appalling autocratic behavior that will be ignored and will need to be watered down to justify to the public. Perhaps in the past too there were arguments of the form "thousands of political firings do not constitute a purge because the New York Times is X"
I am accustomed to solution oriented discussions on these topics. So while interesting from an anthropological point of view, defense and praise of autocratic behavior is a breaking distraction from finding solutions.
Amazing how a billionaire funding an institution with a self-admitted propaganda purpose is 'democracy', while elected officials trying to limit the influence of foreign capital is 'authoritarian'.
The very article linked in the post I replied to: "Soros had conceived the school during the dying days of communism to train a generation of technocrats who would write new constitutions, privatize state enterprises, and lead the post-Soviet world into a cosmopolitan future."
Over the past few years, it seems to me, that HN is suffering a bit from the eternal september effect. It seems (again, to me) that many HN commentators are very technically knowledgeable, but are sorely lacking in understanding politics, social sciences, liberal arts, etc.
It also seems (again, to me) that there has been a lot more authoritarian beliefs expressed by the comments. Take my opinion and observations for what you will.
In my experience, it's usually the people who've been here for long that tend to express views differing from what we're all supposed to believe. So maybe it's a reverse eternal September? Maybe it's a reflection of a growing disillusionment with geopolitics and its reporting in western media?
I mean, the story looks pretty damning on the face of it, but you have to consider that the last time the same media called a ruler a "bad guy" and people acted on it, it ended up completely wrecking a perfectly fine nation (Libya). Some time before that, the US wrecked another nation (Iraq), justifying it by fabricated stories people bought into at the time. I think you can excuse people for their lack of trust.
There is zero possibility that anything like that will happened to Turkey just as there is zero possibility of that happening to Saudi Arabia for their journalist murdering. The current rulership of the US (and Poland for that mater) actively dislike academia and the free press.
Also, the US will need to use Turkey for whatever it plans to do to Iran. So if anything, revealing Erdogan's atrocities is annoying to the current leadership not helping.
> what we're all supposed to believe...growing disillusionment with geopolitics and its reporting in western media
Since we're talking about the NYT, I must say that at this time the US is overwhelmingly controlled by a party that condemns the media and its own free press as a lying enemy of the people. This is why the hated there grew enormously in the last few years. I understand there are similar forces in several other nations.
Oppressive regimes usually /employ/ people to do the propaganda. HN could be just large or influential enough that it gets on the radar at some tiny office, and there might be people whose task is to watch it and kick in with comments/upvotes/downvotes when necessary.
It does not have to be many people, and it can be only a tiny part of their daily watch on larger media.
Moderators would know better about whether this is true on this particular site, but this happens regularly on mainstream channels.
The community here is divided wherever society at large is divided. Don't forget that it's international as well. That has a much larger impact than I think most readers realize.
As somebody who grew up in a central european province governed by popularist right wingers and then left, this was a question that always bugged me: If I am leaving, am I not making it worse there? But should I really go through unbearable suffering in an environment that is so corrupt, so completely devoid of rationality that the only few semi-okay people you know start acting like trauma victims, never just able to cope with the environment they live in.
I can't blame anybody who fled in such a climate, especially in a nation which has it's unprocessed genocides not to far in the past. The border between what we call civilization and pure, stupid, evil fascism is extremely thin and given the right conditions the transition can be so incredibly fast, when the public starts to realize, it will be too late.
Depends on your philosophy. You could effect greater change outside the country for example. Or you could stay inside and create a revolution. I think the creative difference would be your resources and network.
what has happened is a shift in who is being suppressed, rather than the ab-initio creation of suppression. This is hinted at but not actually elucidated in the article:
This measure was both practical and symbolic:
The decaying Ottoman Empire had given way to a
rebellious new nation that required statesmen (like
himself) who were dedicated to secularism, modernity
and nationalism.
AKA required actually means required here, not just 'required in some sort of abstract sense of fitting in with the zeitgeist'
the omission is unsurprising, since previous suppression fits secularist editorial bias of NYT, whereas current suppression does not.
this is neither to say that I am in favor of either, nor that there was/was not intellectual freedom under ottoman times.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI have seen that assertion frequently made, and even have attended multiple seminars on the topic (I have some friends very worried about this issue) as well as some FIRE meetings and fundraisers.
Yet I typically see the same few examples repeated and amplified. FIRE loves to talk about the cases it has challenged under Title IX -- and it always wins, because the law considers this an important issue! (https://www.thefire.org/issues/title-ix/)
Look at the recent (past couple of days) kerfuffle about Prof Wax, whose statements I consider abhorrent. Based on past practice I am pretty sure she'll keep her job.
There are issues around groups peripheral to universes (non-sponsored student groups and the like) but they pretty much by definition aren't part of universities.
1. There have been protests about conservative speakers at campuses and universities whom have pulled shady stuff on trying to prevent the speakers from coming. (there was a Dave Rubin one where he was magically moved from a theater to a hockey arena). Substantially high costs on security. (Also video cases of where the security isn't actually enforced [Milo at the Depaul thing.. ]
2. There have been punishments against professors who question the progressive/extreme-left movement. (losing tenure, being brought up that they're "violence-inciting", etc)
3. A Portland professor being brought up on disciplinary actions for doing a POC on how you can get a paper with outrageously false claims published without question. (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent... This was a team of three that was involved one in the UK)
4. "Diversity offices" - I don't know direct examples here, but from what I've heard they've created trouble.
A few things:
- Protests are valid free speech expressions.
- Holding an entire protest as invalid due to a small number of individual's actions is unfair.
- Many of those conservative speakers aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent). While perhaps being protected by the 1st amendment, that's academic dishonesty. And we should not accept prima facie the arguments they're being oppressed.
- The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics. We're going to need better evidence not to take the disciplinary board at face value.
Basically "I hear about this frequently" and "there have been..." is pretty weak evidence. It's mainly relying upon the recency bias, availability cascade, base rate neglect, and our inability to assess large events.
For example, the Berkeley campus protest is constantly referred to. The problem is this is a splashy example which distorts people's thinking. People rarely talk about the thousands and thousands of conservative speakers that hold events without a hitch. We cannot talk about a systematic risk by only referring to events that are so rare that we keep on referring to the same one for the last several years! That is _by definition_ the opposite of a systematic bias/risk.
Basically I call serious BS. Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again while appealing to the impression that there should be more events like this, when there are not, is garbage.
Playing off of outrage is heavily rewarded by our current societal systems. It happens at all points of the political spectrum, but happens more at the extremes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics
It's a hoax. It's a time honored means of expression, particularly when the subject heavily deserves ridicule.
Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again
There's a list of well over 600 incidents of violence, vandalism, and threats, instigated by the far left. If you do some searching, you'll find over a hundred with just a bit of sincere effort, and in pretty short order. There's also the father and son republicans who were chased down by black block demonstrators. There's the time when a mob was calling for Tim Pool to be chased down and beaten. There's the Florida local news video crew attacked, his smartphone knocked out of his hand. The bike lock professor. That's all just off the top of my head. True, such things are also done by elements of the far right. All of it is bad.
In any case, it's certainly not the case that there are only a few cherry picked examples from the Far Left. There's an epidemic of political harassment and assault in 2019, and a majority of the incidents up to the level of vandalism and minor assault comes from the Left. If anything, there's a bias against talking about that in the media.
For what I meant by right-wing, I meant the popular definition that is used today: Anything right of extreme left.
> not today
Lol. Good luck with trying to suppress others based on their beliefs or opinions.
Also in 2017, read about all the property damage that Berkeley students did to the town because they couldn't stop a speaker who had different political beliefs from talking at the school.
Edit: And what a surprise, the downvotes come in from all the inveterate Bay Area cocksuckers that get offended from facts. I hope the next earthquake sends all of you and the entire Bay Area into the sea.
2nd line: Good. Same as the 1st line.
The Edit line: Manages to undo a lot of the progress made by the 1st two lines.
It pays to keep your cool and let facts speak for themselves. If it's worth speaking out about, it's worth losing some imaginary internet points over.
Winning often comes at a cost and just merely having to defend oneself causes enough damage to be considered a form of punishment regardless of the lack of an official classification as one.
While it isn't nearly the same level as losing your job and being blacklisted, I also don't think it should be counted as the same as someone who does not have to go through a similar process.
It's not a lie. Liberals own academia. 39% of colleges have no Republican professors. In many majors, the ratio is between 15 and 20 to one Democrats per Republican.
There is no world where ratios like that exist and discrimination doesn't occur.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article says nothing about persecution from the academic establishment to which you refer.
The article talks about academics being persecuted.
In Turkey the state took jobs and freedom of mobility away from those with ideologies that the regime did not favor.
Good point. To look for authoritarianism, look for powerful organizations and people taking away jobs and economic security from "those with ideologies the regime did not favor." It works for more types of organizations than just the state.
That's going to make those people desperate and ready to fight the government. Next step for the government is going to be imprisoning lots of people and manufacturing consent and all that.
That's another good heuristic. Look for those who manufacture consent, and try to suppress dissent.
It's a good list. At the risk of courting Godwin I'd suggest that 'concentration camps' would be a good 15th point but I guess it's covered more generally.
[1] https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism
Fascism itself was also very modernist in many ways, such as the obsession with industry and technology, the aspiration to innovate "beyond" liberalism and Marxism, and even the artistic and architectural styles it adopted.
Another heuristic: Look out for people who would "argue" purely from resemblances. (And primarily by tarring.)
[citation needed]
I'm not out to marginalize academia in general. My wife is a former college professor, and a Stanford PhD. However, I would like to call out those in academia who would marginalize others in academia purely for their opinions. If anything, the threat to academic freedom is even more potent, when it comes from within.
You can also look to see which presidents support institutions which would seem to allow autocracy to more easily flourish.
The law changed to allow the government to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial under a republican administration. When its sunset came, the power was affirmed by a democrat.
The authoritarianism wheel hasn't been turned backwards in a long time.
God help us
Within the context of Brexit, the leavers had their own group of "experts" i.e. the ERG but any attempt at economic prediction was clearly shunned on the grounds of it being "Project Fear" despite no specific biases being demonstrated. Because that's the only way, along with blatant lies, to get people believe that leaving the largest trading block - possibly even with no replacement deal with anyone - could possibly be a good thing (At all costs being the current mantra i.e. No Deal)
It's not the lack of listening to certain experts that bothers me, it's them clearing playing the card. Gove, and most of the others on the leave side, is very well educated and damn well knows that careful thought ("expert"ism) is important.
It's very interesting to me, cause I observe experts in expertise everywhere in Russian media, and have been feeling lately, that they'll close themselves in no time, if they proceed that way, or turn into buzzfeeds.
Your Russian propaganda machine is showing epic fail of the UK despite warnings from experts, highlighting that Putin navigates Russia with the more steady hand than these elected clowns.
In the meantime in the US. Fox News is trying to persuade uneducated whites that Trump knows what he is doing. He clearly has no clue and just serves as a distraction.
Btw, I think this is equally true of research outside the social sciences...but there is just far more scope to engage in puffery within the social sciences and, unfortunately, people are often far too lazy to counteract it.
It isn't even about data or the distinction between hard and soft...if you can make a solid argument that is justified and you have no data (which is sometimes the case) then fine. The issue is that, in most areas, the evidence doesn't justify any clear conclusion. Again, you see this in harder sciences where the title is eye-catching, the data less so (often in proportion to the nonsense in the title).
Areas like "peace building" and "conflict resolution", mentioned in the article, are deeply political areas. In my opinion, they rarely do much to advance human knowledge. For example, as the article inadvertently shows, peace building is explicitly based on the idea that democracies are best because they don't attack each other. Sounds great...but there is no data to support this conclusion.
Note well: This does not excuse purging intellectuals, in Turkey or anywhere else. Intellectuals aren't gods, but they aren't vermin, either.
Speaking of which, I recently saw a petition which was sold along the lines of "100s of scientists sign petition condemning 5G", where the vast majority of signatories were either scientists not working in a related field or physicians (Who are not scientists at all).
This doesn't really happen much. First off, only a tiny percentage of people are thinking about this critically and independently. So it's more like "People are told X is bullshit, and choose to believe it". That holds regardless of the truth value of X, and has more to do with the intentional undermining of science as a source of finding truth.
So yes, we should listen to the scientists. Not the people trying to spin what they say, but the scientists. And not individual scientists, but disciplines as a whole. We should be able to understand when there is meaningful consensus and when there is not. How confident the community is in quality of the work. What ways there would be to interrogate it better. We should be funding competent and trained scientific journalists to synthesize and present this things in as objective a way as they can, instead of listening to PR hacks and politicians spin a random paper they found to support the conclusion they want.
Absolutely there are problems in science, and to some degree we have caused them by creating poor incentive structures. So lets fix that. We should probably be focusing more on evidence-base policy, and creating oversight structures that keep it working well.
After all, for the questions that science is capable of addressing, it is far and away the most effective approach humans have ever come up with. And as recent history shows us yet again, if you throw out those voices they will most likely be replaced by blind true-believers and opportunistic mountebanks. You can't honestly believe this will improve things, can you?
Of course, we shouldn't only listen to the scientists. But these day's we've swung too far in the other direction.
It's still not necessarily true, but by taking just part of that quote is misrepresenting what he said.
Just thought that'd be good to keep in mind next time you might consider digging it up.
[1] https://youtu.be/GGgiGtJk7MA?t=71
I'll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt just for the sake of argument, but I have my doubt most people voting for folks decrying "experts" or "the establishment" have paid the least bit attention to what experts actually say.
The end results seems to be the same sort of "oh man those jokers" argument in favor of ... some folks who seem like bigger jokes / less knowledgeable.
Or
"People have had enough of experts, (who are consistently getting it wrong)."
Regardless, his logic is completely wrong and unfounded but who cares anymore. Who are these experts? No idea. When are they right? Irrelevant. What constitutes being wrong? Doesn't matter.
They clearly decided on the nuclear option, i.e. Campaigning with an incredibly vacuous overly-simplistic divisive message that has broken the United Kingdom. Some of the more abrasive untruths would have made Goebbels proud: Particularly the idea that this was them against the "establishment" e.g. Their mates, or the £350 million affair - Not because of the figure but because of the tax income from doing trade with the EU.
Such predictions have been the subject of academic study. One obtains gold-standard data on the accuracy of short term predictions merely by waiting. The classic book is Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11152.html
His findings sent shocks waves through the intelligence community. What is going to happen next? Answering that question is raison d'être of the intelligence community. They depend on expert political judgment and Tetlock had found that it was rubbish. This prompted the Good Judgment Project https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/newsroom/iarpa-in-the-news/2...
Experts - when we think of them, we think of professionals with experience, people who've done research on the subjects, and in general just people who are better informed than the public.
What I think the people who say things like "enough with the experts", I find it to be entirely within a political/media context - many of whom are paid lobbyists, industry representatives, people with a lot of paper qualifications with their own agenda, etc. AKA, bullshit artists. A call against them is a call against systemic corruption, since they are a primary tool the powerful use to keep the public's consent.
The other side of that is a blanket callout against all experts obviously is just anti-intellectualism. This pessimistic worldview is that well since we can't tell which experts are telling the truth, I'm going to go with what I believe, and not listen to anything to the contrary. This is quite easy to criticize - however I think that those that criticize it aren't always taking into account that they do it as well, even if less often or on a less global scale.
“It all depends on whose ox is being gored”
The argument in the propaganda seems to boil down to its a tragedy that people publicly trying to subvert a society won't be getting paid anymore by the society they're trying to subvert. As if an immune system response is somehow immoral.
Also this article is strongly biased anti-immigrant. If you don't want this kind of culture replacing the legacy in Scotland, Sweden, or France, you're just a racist. This is just kinda how the new culture of Europe does things and its beautiful.
What does this mean?
What does that mean?
Please do follow the site guidelines. They include "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sztoptanski called that Dictatorship of Dishrags. Generally the best weapon against such times is irony and a sense of humor and grotesque.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Szpota%C5%84ski
But it was all happening with two hundred thousand Soviet soldiers stationed in the country. The communist government wouldn't have lasted a month without the Soviet support. The situation is different because China is not being occupied by a foreign power. Neither is Turkey.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia...
I'm always thankful to the Polish because they sparked the 1989 revolutions with Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność movement.
That this type of behavior has been recently normalized, encouraged, and incentivized by both the far right and far left in the USA is a very disturbing trend. Historically this has never worked out well, so let's hope it all stops sooner than later.
This is a role whereby he lives in close proximity to students, acts as an mentor and helps students with all sorts of things, like for example if a student was sexually assaulted - their dean is supposed to be on their side.
Students are right to question if he takes sexual assault seriously if he represents Weinstein. There are many other fine lawyers, and this was a totally voluntary job he took on.
His real job, which it certainly appears like he shirked, is to be the best advocate for his students, to help them navigate college, which is often a difficult time.
It's easy to say that his voluntary role in the defense of Weinstein has no merit or conflict with his job. But is that really true? You can say "students should grow up" or toughen up or something, but is that the kind of advice you'd offer to your own child?
I think not.
The appearance of conflict of interest is enough. That his students express discomfort and feelings of unsafe _in their own home_ was easily dismissed by this professor is additional evidence that he doesn't treat his job of dean to a residence seriously enough. "You should reason yourself so my volunteer role and job are not in conflict" is not good enough - he's putting all the effort on the weak and less powerful. And that's not right.
Ultimately the story he spins in that article is that Harvard "capitulated to a mob", but my spin is this: Harvard did the right thing by protecting the less powerful from the more powerful. And there is no disputing a tenured Harvard law professor, with tons of connections, a guaranteed for life salary, etc, is the more powerful person.
Goodhart's law is a big mechanic purging intellectual discussion.
If you're in a right leaning, 'non political' forum and you post about potential impacts of climate change, you'll almost certainly be put on blast.
If you're in a left leaning, 'non political' forum and someone posts 'climate change is going to turn Earth to Venus and we're all going to die choking' and you respond "that seems like unrealistic histrionics" you will almost certainly be put on blast.
There is verdant field of potential discussion between those two posts and it's very difficult to play there. You can, in certain sanctuaries.. but in public, 90% of the gradient causes someone to foam at the mouth if they suspect your political alignment is opposite theirs.
You should just come right out and say it, I think.
I stand by my handwaving as relevant, common experience that indicates an erosion of intellectual discourse. It should be patently obvious that I didn't have any sources for what I said specifically. There's no parenthetical or APA formatted links anywhere!
Edit: Okay, I'll go run an experiment and come back with the data. Maybe that's a compromise.
Well, you made a claim, and people asked you to prove that claim. I think it is quite reasonable to expect you to carry that burden regardless of medium. Otherwise, you should retract the original claim.
Incidentally, what you said about "people just [stating] what they are thinking" and then not backing that up with evidence is a huge problem in today's public discourse. If we don't hold those people accountable, then what we have is not a discourse, but a cacophony of random voices.
While there is some silencing of people and view points, I don't think it is not fair to those in Turkey to consider it on the same level as their purge. Outside of a few areas dealing with the social sciences, the worst an expert in their field is going to have to deal with is government funding cuts.
I can point out some problems with the way we currently do science, including funding issues, replication issues, unfair amounts of criticism based on how socially agreeable a finding is, and in very rare cases people's employment being at risk for 'wrongthink', but even the worst cases of these barely even compare and no one is ending up being imprisoned over it.
Some of these high-achieving people couldn't even leave the country even though there were a lot of positions waiting for them. Some people tried to go to Greece on boats which many of them died on the way.
Turkey is not a hellhole. Sure, it is a divided country, but it has a rich history and lots of beauty (I say that not being a Turk, nor being from Istanbul).
Let's remember that the current position as a developing nation is historically rather new. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and, until recently, there was some realistic hope that Turkey would claw its way back.
I'd personally argue there arent many comparable places where you can (or could) indeed live a good academic and intellectual life in a non-western, non-east-asian society.
I know people who were ousted from their jobs, and yes they can all move elsewhere. But that's not the personal tragedies lie.
If you grew up in a city full of thousands of years of history from East and West, it is entirely possible you will never be quite as happy living in sterile, uniform, blocky corporaty cities in the US or Canada.
Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
Obviously, those people thought it was enough of a hellhole that they risked their lives to take boats to Greece, and died!
>Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
I'm not talking about anyone who's staying there. I'm talking about people who are actively trying to escape and are risking their lives to get out. Obviously, they're perfectly willing to abandon those cities "full of thousands of years of history". Besides, western Europe is chock full of other cities with thousands of years of history that don't have the problems Turkey has, and that's where these people were headed to, not the US or Canada.
People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country.
[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp
Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap.
"growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" --edward abbey
(I don't know anything about what's happening in Turkey, I just don't believe in GDP as a metric to chase)
Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.
https://www.economist.com/news/2019/07/10/the-big-mac-index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
You're on the right track though, at minimum you need to use something like purschasing power parity (PPP) to account for some effects, and wealth distribution to account for others.
Doing these comparisons meaningfully isn't easy to get right.
There may also be GDP growth in a country with bad social policies. I wouldn't expect there to be much GDP shrinkage in a country with smart social policies, though.
Actually # of suicides would be a good metric for a country’s health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Greenland
I think this is my favorite new "correlation does not equal causation" example.
More broadly, I think lots of nations today could maintain healthy economies with flat or shrinking national GDP, but those are countries which have little reason to expect 'natural' GDP increase without a growth ideology. Most obviously, post-industrial nations which can't rely on growing populations or rapid labor productivity boosts from urbanization and infrastructure investment: Sweden or the UK could plausibly operate at near-constant GDP, and Japan could even grow per capita GDP while shrinking national GDP. More subtly, nations which actively avoid pursuing the common arc of demographic transition, urbanization, and industrialization: Mongolia or Bhutan might try to take an entirely different path. And crucially, any of these nations would need to plan for the outcome: if Sweden 0% GDP growth without intending to, it would point to serious economic problems.
Given all of that, Turkey seems like a singularly bad candidate for falling total GDP. The population is still growing at 1.5% and labor productivity at 2%-3%, while experiencing urbanization and major infrastructure expansion. Crudely put, 1.015*1.025 ought to net Turkey 4% GDP growth without considering anything any other factors at all, so a substantial decline points to something going badly wrong.
That's a very extreme position. People desire more than what can be bought at the market.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
Do you realise that Erdogan has been in power since 2001? So if economic downturn is his achievement, then the economic growth is his achievement, too.
That I know, too. And that happened (as in many authoritarian states) so that he could maintain the illusion of legitimacy: "hey look, I'm not a prime-minister forever, I am now president".
But do give Erdogan some credit. He is not stupid. And it's disingenuous and deeply simplistic to paint what happened in Turkey as "Erdogan became President in 2013, look Turkey immediately slid into recession because of that". "Checks and balances" alone cannot explain Turkey's growth prior to 2013.
His son-in-law has become the finance minister and furthered the disruption.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp
In 2014, Erdogan was elected as President. In 2017, Turkey went through a constitutional referendum that made the President head of the executive branch.
I'm noting this because much of Erdogan's popularity is rooted in Turkey's GDP growth between 2003-2013.
Your currency tanking is worse than having the GDP going down.
edit: I mean that as a genuine, serious question, how is that worse?
- greek debt crisis
- brexit
- recent market turmoil
- syrian conflict
all of which have huge impact to Turkish economy as well.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/20/reuters-america-update-1-erd...
Evicting professors and others from universities. Blocking access to social media. Closing down newspapers and other new outlets.
And it doesn't matter who's doing it. Erdogan. Carlos Maza. Antifa. None of them are doing anything constructive.
The government shutting down your youtube channel; that's a problematic infringement on speech; Google shutting down your channel, that's within their rights.
Only works for private entities in markets with a lot of competition and no dominance. Otherwise there is no difference whether a government does it or a private entity under pressure.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/sheriffs-threats-again...
The EFF does not defend Wikileaks when pressure was placed for hosting companies to withdraw services to them.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/how-lieberman-got-ama...
Currently google is treated as a platform, and does not take responsibility for the content users post to it, but that means that google also must have fair rules by which it treats everyones content. If google wants to decide which channel to shut down and which one to keep, it should not be treated as a platform, but as a publisher.
IIRC, it used to be the case that shopping malls were, in some situations, treated as public squares and couldn't just expel people. For example, if someone like Steven Crowder hypothetically set up his infamous "change my mind" table in the middle of the mall, the mall actually didn't have the legal power to expel him. This was in the era when a lot of towns didn't actually have a real public square, they just had shopping malls, and the landowners of the shopping malls had an effective commercial monopoly on the city square.
YouTube is in a very similar situation. And frankly, it's not even just the outwardly political channels like Crowder that are getting the short end of the stick.
You're wrong about this. If you think that the best ideas naturally win out you're either ignorant (think of how fast bad ideas can spread), or purposefully pushing this "both sides"/horseshoe theory/false equivalence to further impede those who are actually trying to stop fascism.
The "deplatformers" you're referencing here wield entirely different magnitudes of power:
Erdogan: literally an authoritarian dictator
Carlos Maza: journalist who brought attention to the fact that hateful speech has real violent effects on people (it's important that Crowder's videos were only demonetized, not removed, or his channel suspended, and that this action was taken by Youtube).
Antifa: organization with no leadership structure, composed of citizens who are dedicated to preventing fascism from spreading, using means that are historically proven to work.
So who gets to decide which ideas are the ones that deserve to win and which ones get snuffed out?
"Historically proven to work"? Since when have leftist street gangs ever stopped a fascist movement from rising to power? It was the fear of leftist street violence that won whatever small degree of public support the SA had, bolstered the official narrative about the Reichstag fire that led to the passage of the Enabling Act, and the Nazi anthem "Horst Wessel Song" capitalized on the killing of the aforementioned Horst Wessel by the "antifa" of the day.
Setting that aside, what the fuck is the point of making excuses for political street violence anyway? "Sure, we act like a bunch of brownshirts, but at least we're not fascists!"
Antifa is a group who thinks it is OK to use violence against people they disagree with. They end up actually being a fascist organization.
"These ideas won, because, clearly, they are the best."
"These people are successful, because, clearly, they are the best."
People believing an idea doesn't add to its merit.
And I have a problem with this story about its portrayal of Turk-Kurd relation. Turkey is an extension of a multi-national empire. For most people living there, Turkish is not an ethnicity. Most of Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and more identify themselves as Turks. Portraying Demirtas as a charismatic Kurdish rights activist that wants to unite everyone with peace is despicable journalism. Demirtas is a proud terrorist supporter, he has stated his love and respect for Abdullah Ocalan repeatedly. Abdullah Ocalan is/was the leader of P.K.K., a group that is seen as a terrorist organization by every major intelligence agency of world, he is responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, children.
My prediction is that we will be seeing more and more mainstream-media pieces like this in the near future, with a healthy sprinkling of words such as "regime", "dictatorship" and “fascism”, and featuring characters like Demirtas as protagonists of the story. They will undoubtedly be portrayed as freedom-fighters leading the fight against oppression.
Manufacturing Consent was truly prophetic.
Likewise, Turkey's increasing moves away from NATO towards Russia were always going to reach a threshold where some steplike point was crossed (the F-35 vs S-400 thing) and some public consequences happened.
I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
I'm basically of the opinion that it is pretty clear Turkey is heading in the wrong direction, and the powers that be in the west have no reason to manufacture that story.
However if you look at the history of NYT articles on Turkey and Erdogan going back years [1], there are scant few articles that are critical of Turkey or Erdogan in the way this and other articles in the past weeks and months have been (beginning from the time Turkey began to drift away from its traditional allies). Recent articles have directly called into question the legitimacy of the AKP and Erdogan himself who was elected through a democratic process.
> I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
From my point of view, this article and others like it could be interpreted as a very early precursor to forced regime change in Turkey. Time will tell if I am correct. Turkey switching sides presents an existential threat to NATO and the balance of power in region, especially considering the power of Turkey's military and Erdogan's stance on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
To me, they could be seen as examples of the mainstream media laying the groundwork -building popular support- for some kind of future, punitive military or economic action. They look suspiciously like the articles printed in the lead-up to the disasters of Libya, Iraq, Syria. Of course, this is all just speculation, based on how the informal American propaganda apparatus (described by Chomsky) has operated in the past.
There are many, many problems with Turkey and Erdogan and there is much to answer for, but I'm of the opinion that U.S style regime change is not the solution. I think it behooves us to be extremely critical and even suspicious of any source of information that was designed for mass dissemination and consumption.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=erdogan&sort=newest
Maybe, but it seems a bit much for them to even entertain that one - they (whoever they actually is) haven't had any luck with Iran or North Korea where whipping up some sort of frenzy or story about a direct threat would seem much easier.
Getting Turkey to that position of threat seems like pushing shit uphill.
My point is that once you're aware of Manufactured Consent being a thing that has happened, it can be easy to see it everywhere even when it isn't necessarily there. Overdoing it can be a little hard to distinguish from deepstate/illuminati conspiracy theorists. Edit - definitely not implying this here.
Just want to point out that the situation in NK is different than Turkey because, as we all know, it's a nuclear power in close proximity to a treaty ally.
With Iran... well, we can see the ridiculous predicament that we are in today because of the unilateral actions of one party over a treaty agreed to by 7 signatories. I would not rule out direct military intervention and regime change in the near future there just yet (at massive cost of human life). The world has seen one too many times what happens when nations disobey the global hegemon.
It may indeed seem silly and tin-foil hat-ish, but there are many ways of forcing regime change without overtly declaring war. Coup d'états, spontaneously occurring uprisings, etc.
Not to indulge in the paranoia of world leaders too much, but Erdogan famously survived his 2016 coup which he claims to have been backed by the CIA [1]. The Philippines' Duterte has mentioned in several interviews (in a non-sarcastic way) his fear of being assassinated by the CIA after his pivot towards China [2]. The truth is that geopolitics is probably simultaneously more boring and more full of intrigue than we can imagine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
[2] https://youtu.be/rHjlCmdyesY?t=645
Reminds me of pre-war Germany's educational system once the nazis took over. Curiously enough, Erdogan may agree -
"Erdoğan cites Hitler's Germany as example of effective government":
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/01/turkish-presid...
People like Trump use Mexican as an insult, that doesn’t change the fact that there are tons of people with Mexican roots that identify as American and are well respected by the non-racist majority of the nation.
I don’t see how PKK is anything like American revolution. PKK isn’t representing any form of official group, they aren’t acting in favor of any specific agenda. There is no ‘real unsolved problem still present in Turkey’ that can justify suicide bombing civilians. They are indirectly funded by USA through military aids to PKKs extension PYD. If you asked what does PKK want to Turkish people, there would be no clear answer, as all PKK ever accomplished was stirring the political climate every single time there was a possibility of political stability in the area.
PKK and Kurds want to have their own country, that's natural, every nation wants that, and if history have taken a bit different path Turks could be in the same situation. If there was free speech in Turkey and non-racists were really the overwhelming majority, then the people who go into PKK would simply try to hold a referendum for independence (like people in Scotland), and most likely would not get the majority vote (again like Scotland), but unfortunately Turkey still has a long way to go to get there.
In this day and age, seperatist referandums are just dreams. Kurdistan Kurds had a referandum to declare complete independence from Iraq with 90%+ in favor of independance but they couldn’t make that recognized by international parties, even with Iraq having no practical government. And we saw what happened when Catalans attempted the same thing.
Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
You are correct that existing states are very reluctant to recognize new countries, but my point is that a mere glimmer of hope is enough so significantly reduce terrorism like it with Basque country for instance.
> Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
That or maybe people with guns supporting Erdoghans party were effective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Turkish_local_elections#V...
The word you are looking for is murdered.
If you could tell your perspective on the issue, of why what i say is baseless and funny, I would be grateful.
[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-sh...
In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.
Somehow it's now twisted around to claim that critics of _supporters_ of a regime are actually the real "oppressors".
Interesting times.
Honestly, I'm not so sure that's true. That's still a consensus view for people without a stake in what's happening, and it never has been clear and universal for those close to the topic. (Who, as here, generally accept the principle but reject the accuracy of both 'dictator' and 'purge'.)
It's not hard to find people, even in the US, who in their own time excused (or praised) each of fascist crackdowns on historians, Soviet enforcement of Lysenkoism, Pinochet's 'disappearing' of artists, Maoist 'reeducation', or even the Khmer Rouge's outright mass murder of educated people. Mostly, those purges have only been near-universally reviled in hindsight.
And indeed, in the US there were things like the Madison Square pro-nazi rally in 1939. And just as there were pro-democracy denunciations of Pinochet that Nixon et co ignored, so too today there is denunciation of appalling autocratic behavior that will be ignored and will need to be watered down to justify to the public. Perhaps in the past too there were arguments of the form "thousands of political firings do not constitute a purge because the New York Times is X"
I am accustomed to solution oriented discussions on these topics. So while interesting from an anthropological point of view, defense and praise of autocratic behavior is a breaking distraction from finding solutions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/george-...
By that logic, limiting the influence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute is also anti-democratic.
Source?
And its wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_University) states: "A central tenet of the university's philosophy is the promotion of open societies."
It cites https://www.ceu.edu/rethinking-open-society, which supports that statement.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/25/trump-...
It also seems (again, to me) that there has been a lot more authoritarian beliefs expressed by the comments. Take my opinion and observations for what you will.
I mean, the story looks pretty damning on the face of it, but you have to consider that the last time the same media called a ruler a "bad guy" and people acted on it, it ended up completely wrecking a perfectly fine nation (Libya). Some time before that, the US wrecked another nation (Iraq), justifying it by fabricated stories people bought into at the time. I think you can excuse people for their lack of trust.
Also, the US will need to use Turkey for whatever it plans to do to Iran. So if anything, revealing Erdogan's atrocities is annoying to the current leadership not helping.
> what we're all supposed to believe...growing disillusionment with geopolitics and its reporting in western media
Since we're talking about the NYT, I must say that at this time the US is overwhelmingly controlled by a party that condemns the media and its own free press as a lying enemy of the people. This is why the hated there grew enormously in the last few years. I understand there are similar forces in several other nations.
It does not have to be many people, and it can be only a tiny part of their daily watch on larger media.
Moderators would know better about whether this is true on this particular site, but this happens regularly on mainstream channels.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518872.
Not saying that every pseudo-dictator is going to end up like pol pot, but it's good to see the warning flags.
I can't blame anybody who fled in such a climate, especially in a nation which has it's unprocessed genocides not to far in the past. The border between what we call civilization and pure, stupid, evil fascism is extremely thin and given the right conditions the transition can be so incredibly fast, when the public starts to realize, it will be too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_Turkey
what has happened is a shift in who is being suppressed, rather than the ab-initio creation of suppression. This is hinted at but not actually elucidated in the article:
AKA required actually means required here, not just 'required in some sort of abstract sense of fitting in with the zeitgeist'the omission is unsurprising, since previous suppression fits secularist editorial bias of NYT, whereas current suppression does not.
this is neither to say that I am in favor of either, nor that there was/was not intellectual freedom under ottoman times.