Based on some the stellar care for nuclear weapon safety we’ve read about in the past, part of me wonders if protocol isn’t to just lock them all in one vault with a guy armed with a handgun. Named Greg. I’m sure that’s in the regs somewhere.
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Military ordering Sky News to stop broadcasting right now.
But apparently CNN has been retaken by the police. It is all a bit complicated.
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Bring beer. Turks are notorious for being friendly lushes. More likely than not a keg in full view will disarm most angry mobs.
At this point it seems a coup, but that doesn’t mean that Turkey’s domestic political uproar is the denouement (big old word, thank you), Turkey is a member of NATO, and that seems to me to be a far more pressing issue. This either happened with the approval of the most powerful NATO members, which looks destabilizing long and short term, or it happened without the approval of the most powerful NATO members, which looks destabilizing long and short term, and will/is cause (ing) a reaction within NATO.
Overall, I deem this bad juju for global stability.
Still, gasoline is cheap, water still flows, and LED light bulbs keep on burning for 42 years or less! Yay!
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Whatever this whole affair turns out to be, it certainly is one big sausage party. In all TV images, there is not one woman in 100 people.
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Over here in the German-speaking world, usually respected observers already put out the possibility of a “fake coup”. They base it mosty on the huge incompetence of the would-be insurgents, and the complete lack of support from any relevant political players, even Gülen himself. Erdogan, however, can now crack down even harder on the remaining civil liberties. Also, fake coups have apparently a bit of a tradition in Turkey, so it would be nothing new.
I really don’t mean to sound like a truther, but I’d buy it in regards of Erdogans increasingly erratic authoritarion behaviour.
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It’s interesting how politicized terms like this (and of course Islamic terrorist) has become over the past decade and a half… Pretty much everyone who wants to crack down on anyone who’s a Muslim does so under the framework of the war on terror… Here we have dueling accusations of such!
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Tell us the truth! You really want to Ottomans back in power, don’t you, that’s why you said Istanbul!? 
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So… failed coup.
I’d guess a major reorganization of the military is next. It seems like the people were behind the government and didn’t support the coup…
From what I have read about the Gülen Movement, I wouldn’t call them Islamists. They seem to be trying to find a balance between religion and secularism, and hold interfaith dialogues. Fethullah Gülen has met with Pope John Paul II, which really makes me doubt any attempt to label them as Islamists.
They were allies with Erdogan and the AKP, until they uncovered corruption in the party.
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I suspect it’s time to reread this.
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Economist-Turns-Sleuth/233802
Rodrik and Dogan reported each inconsistency on a blog about the case. It all added up to a clear conclusion: “Operation Sledgehammer is a fiction,” they wrote in September 2010. “Its authors are not the defendants in the case but unknown malfeasants who fabricated the documents sometime after 2008.”
To his bafflement, Rodrik found himself in a battle with Turkey’s intellectual establishment. Rodrik and Dogan had discovered the underbelly of Erdogan’s Turkey. The prime minister had established a reputation as a moderate Muslim democratizer. But Sledgehammer reflected a growing crackdown on dissent. It marked the second in a series of major trials that were rooted in an alliance of convenience between the prime minister and followers of Turkey’s most famous Islamic preacher, Fethullah Gulen. In exchange for their support, Erdogan let the Gulenists “establish a substantial presence in the police and the judiciary, which was then used to target their shared enemies, opponents and rivals,” according to a report on the case by Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based political analyst associated with the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. The targets ranged from “hardline secularists to military personnel, charity workers, journalists, lawyers, trade union officials, opposition politicians, Turkish nationalists and Kurdish nationalists,” Jenkins writes. Thousands would be charged and jailed. Many more were “intimidated into silence.”
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From what I have read It looks like they were more pro-democracy and anti-military rule. There are people saying that they weren’t on the streets for Erdogan.
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Someone on Libcom is saying that fascists and Islamists were also out in support of the government. Note that Libcom is a libertarian communist site so they don’t support either side. They are critical about the PKK as well, as they are a nationalist movement.
More importantly, it looks like the Turkish regulars on their forums are safe 
. Lets hope it stays that way.
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Oh, I have no doubt you’re right. But when a government wants to legitimize their actions, and Muslims are in anyway involved, it quickly turns into a problem with Islamists, whether or not that’s actually the case. That’s more what I was referring to.
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Sure, but how is Erdogan going to interpret it? Again, it’s the reality vs. how the state is going to spin it for their own ends. I do think that now that the coup has failed, this will further empower him to do as he pleases.
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Why did Constantinople get the works?
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That’s nobody’s business but the Turks…
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How on Earth did that song become obligatory to reference whenever Istanbul comes up? Whenever Istanbul comes up on the English-speaking web, you can count on someone bringing it up. Perhaps that seems so bizarre to me because I live in a country with a substantial Turkish minority where Istanbul comes up too often for such a compulsion to be practical. How did that happen? It is worse than the worst Python quotes.
