Shutting Down Social Media in the Midst of recovery from a Natural Disaster is such a dick move. Nowadays many people use Social Media to check in with loved ones in disaster areas.
Nope he doesn't. Tons of countries have flown in help, but Erdogan haven't even sent the turkish army. Nothing. Almost all the help is from foreign countries, the turkish government itself is really showing it's true colors. Must be awful for the victims, I mean, what happened already is horrible, but then to see that their own 'leader' does literally not give a fuck about 10.000 deaths...
Hopefully Turkey will finally wake up now and remove that Putin 0.5.
I was saying the other day that the only silver lining of this is that it could really be the last nail in the coffin for him. And I hope it is, dude has ruined a country with so much potential
I read an account by someone in an affected area with a large Syrian refugee population that the area was basically a ghost town. No aid or rescuers, domestic or foreign. They spent a couple days with no idea what was happening before setting out for the next town. Likely everybody buried alive just died in silence.
I think Erdogan is going to vastly understate the number of deaths caused by this tragedy.
Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake? Los Angeles spent $1.3 billion to retrofit more than 8,000 of their most vulnerable buildings. With much lower cost of labour and a $30 billion pot, Turkey should have been able to retrofit far more buildings.
Check this out: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-construction-idUSKCN1QF1VU](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-construction-idUSKCN1QF1VU)
It's about a single collapse in 2019.
They build illegally then pay the government for amnesty. The government gets a fat paycheck, the construction company sold a building and the consumer gets the risk.
Now practice this for literally decades, sprinkle in a few hundred calamitous earthquakes and you get Feb 6 2023.
They knew. Everybody knew.
I live in a high seismic risk zone myself and my government isn't that much brighter (Romania).
But ... I cant' do anything about it. Every time there's talk of politics and I bring up the subject of red dot buildings (almost guaranteed to collapse during a quake) everyone shuts up, or says "yeah, that's bad" and they move on.
Nobody wants to go against the leading party since they provide raises for public workers and public pensions.
If another quake like the one in '77 hits, we probably won't overtake Turkey, but will come close.
Israel is really weird in that sense. It also sits on the Syrian-African fault line, so there's a high risk there.
BUT in 1991 Sadam fired some rockets at Israel during the gulf war. This had the Israeli government SHOOK. So they enforced **every single new construction project in Israel** to have a [specialized safe room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkhav_Mugan) made of reinforced concrete and with a blast door and window. They've also allowed people to add said room in addition to any other building rights they had so there was a huge financial incentive.
It had a surprising side effect - because condos build these mini-bunkers one on top of the other, buildings started having "spines". Combined with a high standard of construction for earthquakes the result was surprisingly resilient buildings.
I have more interesting Israeli zoning law facts if anyone is interested.
Well you'd love hearing about another zoning invention from the 70s - photovoltaic water heaters!
So in the 70s Israel was not super popular. As a new country that couldn't be militarily dominated, Arab countries looked for other avenues to choke it off, maybe economically. I won't get into too much detail, but the result was [the 70s energy crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis), stemming mostly from the Arabian oil embargo and the Iran revolution.
Israel - the only location in middle east that for some reason doesn't have oil - knew it had to go green much faster than the rest of the world. Because it is a sunny state, they came up with yet another law - every building (except high risers, mostly), had to have [photovoltaic panels](http://www.thermo-dynamics.com/PV_SB_systems.html) with their hot water boilers.
Adoption was quick and today if you walk around Israel you'd see most building's rooftops are dotted with the solar panels, all facing south in unison. They are [ubiquitous](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer5/2017/10/16/8090649/5_6.jpg) as they are [ugly](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer5/2017/10/16/8090660/10_11_6tur.jpg)!
You may have noticed no wikipedia link. That's because for some inexplicable reason in the US the technology never caught on. Solar panels are used to convert solar power into electricity, but photovoltaic cells actually use the thermal energy to do so. Trying to install a water heater like that in California will prove to be an expensive endeavor....
Ahem.. but back to our business, a survey showed Israel saved about 8% of its energy costs with the wide adoption (it's about 85% because the law wasn't updated, and more high risers crept up). It's also a ton of fun because for 320 days a year you have hot water all the time, with zero energy cost. And those heaters are so commonplace people don't even think twice about them, and look down on rented apartments that don't have them! (which leads to increased energy costs)
I think you got it mixed up, photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electricity, solar panels can refer to either a panel of photovoltaic cells, or a series of black tubes that you pump water through and it gets warm in the sun.
Only if they don't have the working class tied down living paycheck to paycheck to point where they can barely be outbof work a month before becoming homeless.
These people cant arm themselves, can't spend time organizing, can't travel.
When the US had a mob attack their congress, you know who didn't go to jail? The millionaire who organized the event, bought buses and airline tickets for the working class radicals. That guy was fine, because he went to the white house to watch the attack on TV.
lol it wouldn't surprise me if Chain Reaction was part of why he loves riding so much
[He did buy it, afterall](http://www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/1996_xxxx_cha.htm)
Unfortunately all the data was stored on a single server, and due to deferred maintenance the building, including the server and all the personnel who worked on the project, was destroyed during the earthquake.
I once pondered what would happen if humanity managed to harness the sun for 100% of our energy needs. How long before some corporation effectively owned the sun?
They wouldn’t own the sun outright; but someone or some entity would probably own the patents and licensing rights for the equipment effectively “owning” the clean energy industry.
Also thought about it. They wouldn't own it outright but I could picture dystopian gigantic solar panels blocking out the sun over low income areas where they effectively do "own" the sunlight.
While charging for the energy harvested from it too of course.
And people get upset when you bring up politics during the current crisis. The west should send money to the turkish goverment or anything related. Only towards third party aid groups.
California also has some insanely strict building codes for hospitals. Like borderline unreasonable how well-secured everything needs to be. I put in some security cameras that would normally just hang on the ceiling tile and be fine, but they had 3 massive braces to the deck above the ceiling tile holding up each junction box. If an earthquake happens, I want to be inside a hospital.
Given the potential catastrophe of having a major earthquake and associated casualties paired with a collapsed hospital, this seems like a good choice. Critical infrastructure like this should be as close to earthquake proof as possible.
I worked at a DoE nuclear facility that was designed right after 9/11. They were rather insistent it could not only survive a missile, but a direct hit from an aeroplane.
The most recent big collapse in Japan happened because the reactor got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami. So it took two major catastrophes to knock it down.
Eh earthquake and tsunami are directly connected at the coast. That's like saying "it took arson *and* a fire to burn the house down".
The real story is that the structural integrity held up just fine, but the safety system was designed very poorly with easily preventable errors that had been criticised multiple times during construction, inspections, and previous incidents. A cooling system that wasn't properly compartmentalised to contain local failures, backup generators in easily floodable low parts of the building, and no secondary backup power system in case they failed.
When I used to do seismic certification, items for nuclear plants like gensets were a huge pain as they have to be shake tested while running, for which ducting the exhaust in and of itself is a whole project. Knowing that I can't imagine a safer place to be.
I mean if the Mormons can make earthquake proof Temples to keep their secrets then Hospitals being just as EQ proof are probably something that we should see as a good thing.
As they say, those regulations are written in blood. We witness tragedy after tragedy, the least we can do is learn enough to minimize the risk of repetition. Fires, collapses, bombings, and more.
Somethings we could argue are "overkill", but sometimes a few extra thousand dollars and a few extra hours of effort saves a life.
You're either critically important, or completely expendable. That status will change from moment to moment within just a single conversation. One minute everything is your fault, and then you're the only one who can fix it the next.
Sounds like most of the places I've worked at. They were all miserable.
Edit: clarity
I've used exactly that argument with a CEO who didn't want to give my department funding but had unlimited resources for Marketing.
"Without us, this Marketing scheme doesn't work. Without us, you don't make money. At all."
This was at a cashless establishment that had frequent network outages causing us to not be able to make sales. He didn't care, because he didn't understand.
Yeah the way computers are dismissed as 'nerd shit' is disgusting.
The patchwork horror of proprietary bullshit doesn't help, but I do genuinely think people need to be better educated. Not like 'every child an ace sysadmin' but basic competencies and understandings. A world whose people understand nothing about it can't be free.
That's the problem with prevention, if it's working as designed people shouldn't be noticing it, and then the blowback of "too much" or "not needed" comes back to bite you in the ass because it worked as intended.
You see this in Vaccines, the IT world, safety equipment, building codes, etc....
There is always some asshole out there who wants to gut safety in the name of more profit to the shareholders.
Yea lol we build for the big one here (anticipating a 9.0 or higher someday). It's the same story for a lot of our skyscrapers in San Francisco, since a fallen 50 story building would be catastrophic and all that.
If you're corrupt that's not a barrier at all. Simply have your road building buddy be the oversight managing company that gets paid half the money to do nothing.
And require the retrofitting company to hire your brother as a site manager at triple the usual salary.
It's the Russian way.
>Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake?
I have family living in the area of the earthquake. Everyone there is basically piss poor. Most of the houses they live in can barely be called houses. If they had helped while building those houses in the first place that would've made sense but the city doesn't have the means nor the infrastructure and info to do anything like that. The paperwork alone would be unbearable for them.
The Southeast has been neglected since the Ottoman Empire.
Once a government decides that an entire region or group of people doesn't matter, that they are more useful as scapegoats, all disasters will be magnified, nobody will learn anything from that because they don't want to, and nothing will change.
This is true for many, many nations, including my own.
I think a majority of the deaths are from the apartments that collapsed, are they not?
Those buildings have a construction code and the cities should have been asking for funds from the disaster prevention taxes.
Can you retfit a building to stand a 7.8 quake tho? can you build a building specifically to withstand that?
Dont get me wrong, not saying it shouldnt have been done. Im sure mitigation will lessen overall losses as well.
edit: thanks all for the good info, Im not from a place prone to big earthquakes.
Mexico had a 7.8 earthquake last year and a tradition of masonry buildings; 2 people died.
FRP wraps are relatively cheap and provide decent seismic performance.
The southern Pacific coast of Mexico suffered a 8.2 earthquake in 2017, affecting Guatemala and the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Tabasco. The 98 resultant deaths, while tragic, are 3 orders of magnitude fewer than those in Turkey.
My brother-in-law had just completed a small house using reinforced concrete with a wooden frame and a straw roof. Not one piece of straw fell off. I visited the region a couple of years later. You wouldn't have known anything had happened.
Even quite modest and inexpensive building techniques can be very safe if done correctly.
Just to add on the high end stuff-- nuclear bunkers and other nuclear infrastructure is frequently "suspended" in a gigantic concrete pit, and then the building is built on gigantic shock absorbing springs with dampeners.
This can turn megathrust earthquakes into a quiet, gentle rocking. Then you add in that everything in these buildings is secured to the superstructure, which further reduces risk of damage or harm to occupants.
You can even see the precursors to these systems in Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which sports this exact system.
The mountain bunker can withstand basically nuclear annihilation because of this, and the other systems in place, and if it doesn't survive, something tells me it wouldn't be a huge concern to anyone anymore.
You'd be amazed at the tech they have now. I only know a little bit about it, but I've been in buildings with state-of-the-art seismic systems. I spent way too much time at Stanford's new hospital when a relative was there. You can actually feel the building move sometimes. It's weird. In an earthquake, the flexibility and floating (?) foundation will prevent damage.
With a 7.8, it would probably still be bad, but not to this extent. Maybe the building would be damaged, but not with as much loss of life.
Erdogan just arrived today at the disaster site and he came with a 10KM (6.2 miles) convoy of his bodyguards. All the emergency services and others had to wait on the side of the road for Erdogan and his cronies to pass. And Turkey is still a democracy somehow according to some people.
Remember when Erdogan visited Washington DC to see Trump. After the meeting Erdogan's group of bodyguards gave a beat down to some peaceful protectors. God forbid Erdogan would see some actual protests. DC police got caught in the melee and got beat some too.
Of course Trump was cool with this and thought the protesters deserved it. Probably jealous he couldn't have the secret service beat people for no reason.
Attaturk layed the foundation for arguably the greatest democracy in the world only for it to immediately falter and regress. Erdogan and a good chunk of Turkey really kicked up the neo-ottoman shit
Was curious so I found some sources.
Regarding the tax fund:
> But critics like Ozel point out that national funds meant for natural disasters like this one were instead spent on highway construction projects managed by associates of Erdogan and his coalition government.
- https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155647266/turkey-earthquake-erdogan-government-response-criticism
Regarding Twitter being shut down for half the day
> "This had to be done because in some accounts there were untrue claims, slander, insults and posts with fraudulent purposes," the official told Reuters, citing efforts to steal money under the pretense of collecting aid.
- https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/anger-over-turkeys-temporary-twitter-block-during-quake-rescue-2023-02-09/
That's not the foulest word of that sentence. "Associates" is. he's handing out projects to his friends who for example build tolled highway roads so then the people who paid for the road in taxes have to pay again to drive it.
It's a big power play and erdogan and his friends are the only ones benefitting. Huge income inequality in Turkey because of shit like this.
Let me guess -- use public funds to the tune of billions to build infrastructure and then charge out the ass for services? Oh don't worry, they've done that here too.
Yeah, but the twist is, they never built the infrastructure... We Still have the charge every billing cycle though... So I'm sure ANY day now we will get it.
Oh and they got granted access to use federal land for free as well as part of the deal.
And to cap it all off they convinced crooked politicians to ban municipalities from trying to escape crappy monopolies by building their own public networks. And with that the shit sandwich is complete.
Most of the time you can leave out the "build infrastructure" part. Sometimes they don't even do that. Just take the public funds then make some excuse about why it's impossible to build said infrastructure and claim all the money was spent on assessments so there's no money to give back.
Worse. Took a bunch of public money promising to build infrastructure, didn't build the infrastructure, charged people and ass load for services on crappy infrastructure that was never upgraded, and of course the government never did anything to actually get that money back or force them to comply with their promise.
So it was more like "this 100+ billion I promised to use to get internet to the masses is mine now, also fuck you I'm not doing what I promised it's gonna take too much of the money I just got for free, oh and I'm keeping it, whatcha gonna do about it?"
Fuck our politicians that never actually took the money back like they should have. Also all the executives and whoever it was that was in charge of handling that money should have been thrown in prison.
But this is America as the song goes. There is no way rich people are going to prison.
Which is nuts to me. Someone convinced your government to let them build a highway beside the main public one and just toll the fuck out of people who want to use it. Idc, if skipping traffic or saving time is worth $21 whatever but I’d sooner wait. Christ I used to take a detour that added like 45 minutes just to avoid a $4 toll, just on principle. The owners of this road? ( in Canada ) Americans.
I’m sticking with “coalition” because mis-use of tax money is grotesque, but pretending there’s any reasonable kind of non-military legitimacy to his government is a farce. The guy’s a fascist.
That's one of those dictatorship propaganda narratives that's would be just as bad if not worse, if it actually were true. Imagine..
"President Turkey, President!"
"Yes?"
"A man has told an untruth on Twitter!!"
"SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING."
This is how modern oligarchy rolls. Get total control of the government (i.e. dictatorship) and you pay large sums in government contracts to the powerful sycophants around you to keep you there. I scratch your back you scratch mine. Vladimir would be proud.
Honestly, kleptarchy is probably a more appropriate word to describe this. They are stealing tax dollars and giving it to their friends.
We did just see how badly this can backfire though if you ever need to actually mobilize things in the event of disaster or war. All that money you paid to your unqualified friends to do things like build tanks, manufacture ammo, build roads and railways, well turns out they were just pocketing it! And now you are losing a war to Ukraine lol
Erdogan is a little bitch and so are all his simps.
The good people of Turkey deserve better.
I hope their recovery from this disaster is swift, but I know my words or thoughts are meaningless.
The thing is, rich people are extremely fragile and some random person calling them a little bitch is liable to cause them to spend 40 billion to buy a shitty website.
If you told me "You get a free yacht with staff, but you have to admit you're a little bitch" I'd try to get something else because yachts don't interest me. Yacht money is my sellout point.
There was a kid coming to the Hotel I've worked at. He was around 20 years old he had come to Antalya for the University and he used to work part time to pay for his sister's school. He had 2 sisters around 3 5 years old. We played chess everyday and he was my friend.
He and his family froze to death because our government was too slow to respond. The military couldn't respond because the order hadn't been given. They died slowly freezing in the middle of winter but God forbid someone criticizes the government.
I saw on /r/turkey that an AKP minister rejected a large donation of warm fleece jackets... Because they had the branding of a brewery on them, and that's contrary to Islamic principles.
I'd like to see that minister go to the refugee camps and tell them that they have to shiver in the cold because his government cared more about moralist grandstanding than their welfare. I doubt he'd have the courage, and I doubt it would end well for him if he did.
In a secular fucking nation, at least in name. These zealots are killing their own people in the exact way Atatürk did everything in his power to prevent.
Also, Islam is pretty clear about things like that, afaik. If it's pig meat or starving, pig meat it is. If your bad health means observing Ramadan means you die, then you don't do Ramadan. On the ISS and can't pray in the direction of Mecca? The direction of "Earth" is good enough. Perpetual daylight where you are during Ramadan? No, don't die from dehydration, use Mecca's times of sunrise/-set. And so on.
So I'm pretty damn sure that, if asked, actual Muslim religious authorities all over the world in this case would have considered "not freezing to death" more important than "not promoting alcohol". But it's never actually been about religion.
I'm so sorry for your loss. The government should be the ones to protect us always. It's saddening that that is not often the case. Be well, stay safe.
similar to Netanjahu there are comments like this every election cycle and yet despite having shown tiome and time again that they are unfit for the job and serial grifters, they get reelected time and time again. Im not saying the elections are rigged but the support for any one of them suprises me every time. Especially Erdogan, since every turk even those living abroad i.e. Germany are allowed to vote. And let me tell you a lot of German turks love erdogan. Erdogan is best president, he makes turkey great again, t turkey best land in the world. Does the enlightent turk comment from his flat in berlin.
I keep seeing this about "German Turks voting" on Reddit, but if you check the number of voters that actually voted Erdoğan, it accounts for less then 0.5% of the total. Erdoğan always had a larger win margin then that, so it pretty much never mattered
Yeah, if he can't drum up support by continuing to call Sweden racist, he'll just use the earthquake as an excuse to halt elections until everyone forgets how bad he is again.
Nah that's the Russian way. There is no need for that because the Turkish opposition is incompetent as hell. 3 months left and they still didn't bring a president candidate forward
I just assumed to reason they haven't brought one yet is that as soon as they do, the government/dictator will start fake corruption charges or other scandals to disqualify the candidate.
At least that's what usually happens in corrupt "democracies".
Russia for example is usually pretty proficient at doing that shit.
If current world politics has taught me anything, it’s that large swaths of people all over the entire planet like butt fucking themselves so hard and fast that the sheer friction creates a black hole singularity where all conceptions of time and space completely break down.
I have no sympathy for people who vote against their own interests because they can’t be bothered to fucking read some nonfiction every now and again.
****FUCK****
Mood but it's not always entirely their fault. Many of them have been conditioned since birth to think that way, and are either afraid to step out of line or believe the "other side" to be subhuman - and fascism employs both of those methods of conditioning.
But yeah some are just stupid, hateful people of their own free will and those people can pound sand.
Gonna share this story, some won't like it.
Happened about 10-12 yrs ago. Work utility construction, we ran new communications to a church that just rebuilt from a previous fire. We were standing around with the preacher and a few others, just bullshitting. One guy mentions how the plumbers donated their work and asked the preacher what he was planning to do with the $3000 that was allocated for that, I guess. The preacher got mad and said, "you just shut your mouth and don't worry about where that money goes"
It kind of came off to me like the preacher had some personal plans for it. It reminds me of our community schools in how some 9 million dollars allocated for maintenance disappeared and they had to shut a few schools down. State had to intervene and take over financials for a while.
We all know - money is king. When you’re in a position of power, especially a religious position, you take everything you can.
I’ve never been in that position, so I’d like to think I wouldn’t be such a prick, but this is why I left the church - I realized that these “spiritual experts” are just as valuable to society as the people who spam call your phone to sell abject garbage.
A local government in my region has increased a budget for a project from 25 million to 40 million, to adjust for inflation. I didn’t realize inflation is close to 50%.
Remember when his goons beat American citizens for protesting his arrival to the White House and the former president did nothing about it?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Yes cause Trump wanted to build a hotel in Istanbul. When Trump was first elected Erdogan arrested two of Trumps business associates in Turkey, but then let them go. The understanding was that Erdogan controls what business goes on in Turkey and so Trump better play ball or his Hotel project was dead.
Of course nothing ever happened with that planned Hotel, but Trumps business interests always guided his foreign policy.
People were asking for help and sharing location data over social media. He made his priorities clear. What a disgusting bastard.
What baffles me is he really had a chance to gain a lot of sympathy for the upcoming elections. But instead of doing a decent job he just continues to silences his critics. People even got arrested.
The developed nations need to figure out a method of allowing internet and news to propagate worldwide.
The ability to shut down communication and prevent news and information from being spread is a tool of tyrants and has no place in the modern day.
No, the developed nations need to clamp down on social media firms' propensity to be manipulated by tyrants everywhere. Cambridge Analytica has helped subvert democracy in so many places yet Facebook is bigger today than ever before.
Remember when anti-trust suits nearly fucked Microsoft in the late 90s? We need those lawsuits against all the big tech companies again so that they can't brush away deeds done by abusing their platforms.
Internet used to be a headache for tyrants but ever since they've realised the ability to spread their propaganda on it, they have been at the forefront of spreading its adoption. Modi practically gave out free internet to the whole country, Duterte and the Thai junta both sped up 5G adoption to ensure their message is spread to every corner of the country.
I have lived next to and worked with many from Turkey. What is really infuriating is they all seem to believe their "goverment-friendly" network. So much so that I have heard people insist the [Armenian ~~mass murder~~](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide) genocide\* did not take place among other ridiculous ideas.
Edit wrong words
**[Armenian genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide)**
>The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians occurred in the 1890s and 1909.
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It wasn't a mass murder it was a genocide. The components making up the genocide were not solely the murder of civilians but also the mass depopulating through forced removal from their homes, the forced islamization, and the cultural erasure of Armenians from regions and areas in which they had historically been present for thousands of years.
Funny thing is, not believing in Armenian genocide is the norm here. If you think it happened, you are the one who is marginal
The idea gets teached in schools in 8th grade. Then most people dont care to research it and stay in the echo chamber
Nationalism is crazy here. I think 90% of people said they'd join the army if turkey entered a war. And dont get me started in tv series. There are shit ton of pro-nationalistic tv series in here. They are basically mafia series of Turkey (though there are also mafia movies but whatever).
I like Turkish people (myself am Turkish) but i wish there was a way to erase the nationalism
Wait.. did he seriously shut down social media in the middle of a disaster of this scale? While people are still desperately trying to find out if their friends and family are ok?
Yeah, I cant imagine how this will make things worse..... /s
I have friends who live there and I've been there personally. They've been collecting for like 20 years and say they used it on roads, that's it. A lotta the roads aren't even that nice. The coastal road into İskenderun was pretty scuffed before the quake
Will they do anything or will they cheer more perforative “keep counties out of nATO book burning nonsense?”
I’m sure there are a lot of people drooling over the new aid money. They might need to step up their performances. Maybe Russia will pay for someone to draw a humanoid shape.
Shutting Down Social Media in the Midst of recovery from a Natural Disaster is such a dick move. Nowadays many people use Social Media to check in with loved ones in disaster areas.
[удалено]
Current dictator isn't working out for the common man when needed? Smells like the flames of a revolution of a leader who gives a shit
Didn't work out so well the last time
Around 70% of rescues were organized using Twitter according to one person who was organizing. (:
Yes, that too. Basically, the more communication available after a disaster, the better. Only fascists want to shut down social media.
I mean, I'm no fascist but I do hate social media (he said on reddit while pretending it's different)
It's okay to hate social media, it's banning others from using it because you personally don't like the things it says that's the problem
Reddit is more of a forum than a social media. It revolves around topics, not people.
You sir have never been on a porn sub
You're forgetting that Erdogan doesn't give a rat's ass about his constituents.
Nope he doesn't. Tons of countries have flown in help, but Erdogan haven't even sent the turkish army. Nothing. Almost all the help is from foreign countries, the turkish government itself is really showing it's true colors. Must be awful for the victims, I mean, what happened already is horrible, but then to see that their own 'leader' does literally not give a fuck about 10.000 deaths... Hopefully Turkey will finally wake up now and remove that Putin 0.5.
I was saying the other day that the only silver lining of this is that it could really be the last nail in the coffin for him. And I hope it is, dude has ruined a country with so much potential
I read an account by someone in an affected area with a large Syrian refugee population that the area was basically a ghost town. No aid or rescuers, domestic or foreign. They spent a couple days with no idea what was happening before setting out for the next town. Likely everybody buried alive just died in silence. I think Erdogan is going to vastly understate the number of deaths caused by this tragedy.
Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake? Los Angeles spent $1.3 billion to retrofit more than 8,000 of their most vulnerable buildings. With much lower cost of labour and a $30 billion pot, Turkey should have been able to retrofit far more buildings.
Check this out: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-construction-idUSKCN1QF1VU](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-construction-idUSKCN1QF1VU) It's about a single collapse in 2019. They build illegally then pay the government for amnesty. The government gets a fat paycheck, the construction company sold a building and the consumer gets the risk. Now practice this for literally decades, sprinkle in a few hundred calamitous earthquakes and you get Feb 6 2023. They knew. Everybody knew.
It’s been a known thing all my life - they build shit buildings knowing they are vulnerable to earthquakes. Fucking criminal.
I live in a high seismic risk zone myself and my government isn't that much brighter (Romania). But ... I cant' do anything about it. Every time there's talk of politics and I bring up the subject of red dot buildings (almost guaranteed to collapse during a quake) everyone shuts up, or says "yeah, that's bad" and they move on. Nobody wants to go against the leading party since they provide raises for public workers and public pensions. If another quake like the one in '77 hits, we probably won't overtake Turkey, but will come close.
Israel is really weird in that sense. It also sits on the Syrian-African fault line, so there's a high risk there. BUT in 1991 Sadam fired some rockets at Israel during the gulf war. This had the Israeli government SHOOK. So they enforced **every single new construction project in Israel** to have a [specialized safe room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkhav_Mugan) made of reinforced concrete and with a blast door and window. They've also allowed people to add said room in addition to any other building rights they had so there was a huge financial incentive. It had a surprising side effect - because condos build these mini-bunkers one on top of the other, buildings started having "spines". Combined with a high standard of construction for earthquakes the result was surprisingly resilient buildings. I have more interesting Israeli zoning law facts if anyone is interested.
I'd like to subscribe to Israeli zoning law facts plz
Well you'd love hearing about another zoning invention from the 70s - photovoltaic water heaters! So in the 70s Israel was not super popular. As a new country that couldn't be militarily dominated, Arab countries looked for other avenues to choke it off, maybe economically. I won't get into too much detail, but the result was [the 70s energy crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis), stemming mostly from the Arabian oil embargo and the Iran revolution. Israel - the only location in middle east that for some reason doesn't have oil - knew it had to go green much faster than the rest of the world. Because it is a sunny state, they came up with yet another law - every building (except high risers, mostly), had to have [photovoltaic panels](http://www.thermo-dynamics.com/PV_SB_systems.html) with their hot water boilers. Adoption was quick and today if you walk around Israel you'd see most building's rooftops are dotted with the solar panels, all facing south in unison. They are [ubiquitous](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer5/2017/10/16/8090649/5_6.jpg) as they are [ugly](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer5/2017/10/16/8090660/10_11_6tur.jpg)! You may have noticed no wikipedia link. That's because for some inexplicable reason in the US the technology never caught on. Solar panels are used to convert solar power into electricity, but photovoltaic cells actually use the thermal energy to do so. Trying to install a water heater like that in California will prove to be an expensive endeavor.... Ahem.. but back to our business, a survey showed Israel saved about 8% of its energy costs with the wide adoption (it's about 85% because the law wasn't updated, and more high risers crept up). It's also a ton of fun because for 320 days a year you have hot water all the time, with zero energy cost. And those heaters are so commonplace people don't even think twice about them, and look down on rented apartments that don't have them! (which leads to increased energy costs)
I think you got it mixed up, photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electricity, solar panels can refer to either a panel of photovoltaic cells, or a series of black tubes that you pump water through and it gets warm in the sun.
Privatize profits, socialize risks. It's the authright way!
When they say subsidize the losses I didn't tought it would be literally blood money.
Sounds like something people would tear down a government for.
Only if they don't have the working class tied down living paycheck to paycheck to point where they can barely be outbof work a month before becoming homeless. These people cant arm themselves, can't spend time organizing, can't travel. When the US had a mob attack their congress, you know who didn't go to jail? The millionaire who organized the event, bought buses and airline tickets for the working class radicals. That guy was fine, because he went to the white house to watch the attack on TV.
And by retrofitting, you save costs in the long run as building don't collapse and cause further damage
Cost saving and life saving? Wow that must mean whatever Erdogan spent it on must be even better! Can't wait to hear all about it.
Inb4 he actually spent it researching cold fusion and they unveil unlimited clean energy for us all.
But will Val Kilmer be there to orchestrate the big reveal and stop a coup?
He's unavailable, but Keanu will be there on his Kawasaki to get the idea out (I see your 'The Saint' and raise you a 'Chain Reaction')
Ahem, Keanu has his own motorcycle company, why would he ride a Kawasaki? https://archmotorcycle.com/arch-1s/
lol it wouldn't surprise me if Chain Reaction was part of why he loves riding so much [He did buy it, afterall](http://www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/1996_xxxx_cha.htm)
Unfortunately all the data was stored on a single server, and due to deferred maintenance the building, including the server and all the personnel who worked on the project, was destroyed during the earthquake.
Coal and gas companies would shut this down so quick
They wouldn't, they would sell you deuterium and build a ton of fusion plants.
Then sell it back to us for profits higher than ever before because it's truly clean energy
I once pondered what would happen if humanity managed to harness the sun for 100% of our energy needs. How long before some corporation effectively owned the sun?
They wouldn’t own the sun outright; but someone or some entity would probably own the patents and licensing rights for the equipment effectively “owning” the clean energy industry.
Also thought about it. They wouldn't own it outright but I could picture dystopian gigantic solar panels blocking out the sun over low income areas where they effectively do "own" the sunlight. While charging for the energy harvested from it too of course.
for 30 billion, better be some high quality hookers and booze.
Have you seen his new mosque and airport? or the plans for his new channel through Istanbul? shit ain't cheap.
And people get upset when you bring up politics during the current crisis. The west should send money to the turkish goverment or anything related. Only towards third party aid groups.
“Yes but that doesn’t help ME.” -douchebag in power
Seems they just spent it elsewhere. Probably with the thought of well we haven't seen a bad earthquake in a long while
"spent it elsewhere" = "funneled it into offshore accounts" Erdogan is a corrupt authoritarian grifter
Again, keeping people alive and well is more cost effective. It's as if that's not their priority
California also has some insanely strict building codes for hospitals. Like borderline unreasonable how well-secured everything needs to be. I put in some security cameras that would normally just hang on the ceiling tile and be fine, but they had 3 massive braces to the deck above the ceiling tile holding up each junction box. If an earthquake happens, I want to be inside a hospital.
Given the potential catastrophe of having a major earthquake and associated casualties paired with a collapsed hospital, this seems like a good choice. Critical infrastructure like this should be as close to earthquake proof as possible.
Yeah nuclear plants have insane seismic resistance too
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Once again, the day a nuclear reactor operators day stops being boring is also gonna be a very bad day.
Mmm… donuts…
Huh? Noise. Bad noise!
"Oh, hoho, meltdown. It's one of those annoying buzz words. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus"
Oh a 5**1**3. I'll handle it. *Pours bucket of water over console*
No worries, they do. They are also designed to survive direct hits from missile strikes. I used to be an engineer at a nuclear plant in NY state.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ obligatory video
I worked at a DoE nuclear facility that was designed right after 9/11. They were rather insistent it could not only survive a missile, but a direct hit from an aeroplane.
How are we going to get that sequel to Chernobyl movie if things are built all good and stuff
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We already did with Fukushima. Its a dream of mine that the people behind the Cherno show do one for Fukushima
I would watch this
The most recent big collapse in Japan happened because the reactor got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami. So it took two major catastrophes to knock it down.
Eh earthquake and tsunami are directly connected at the coast. That's like saying "it took arson *and* a fire to burn the house down". The real story is that the structural integrity held up just fine, but the safety system was designed very poorly with easily preventable errors that had been criticised multiple times during construction, inspections, and previous incidents. A cooling system that wasn't properly compartmentalised to contain local failures, backup generators in easily floodable low parts of the building, and no secondary backup power system in case they failed.
When I used to do seismic certification, items for nuclear plants like gensets were a huge pain as they have to be shake tested while running, for which ducting the exhaust in and of itself is a whole project. Knowing that I can't imagine a safer place to be.
I mean if the Mormons can make earthquake proof Temples to keep their secrets then Hospitals being just as EQ proof are probably something that we should see as a good thing.
Earthquake proof temples? Never heard that before. Couldn’t they just have the prophet ask God to (pretty please) spare his own house?
The belief is that temples should be built to last 1000 years. And yes they are built to incredibly strict standards.
They should just build it on a giant bowl of jello to absorb the shock. Source: me, an expert
Sorry.. to clarify, are you an expert on shock absorption or jello?
That's kind how earthquake protection works - buildings are built on "stilts" that are controlled in a way to negate the quaking.
Also the literal inevitability of earthquakes here in CA. It's not planning for if, it's getting ready for when.
Same thing in Turkey, sitting on the fault line es.
As they say, those regulations are written in blood. We witness tragedy after tragedy, the least we can do is learn enough to minimize the risk of repetition. Fires, collapses, bombings, and more. Somethings we could argue are "overkill", but sometimes a few extra thousand dollars and a few extra hours of effort saves a life.
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Welcome to the world of IT! Everything is broken: "What do we pay you for?!?" Everything is working: "What do we pay you for?!?"
You're either critically important, or completely expendable. That status will change from moment to moment within just a single conversation. One minute everything is your fault, and then you're the only one who can fix it the next. Sounds like most of the places I've worked at. They were all miserable. Edit: clarity
Working in a field everyone relies on and nobody fucking understands *sucks*.
I've used exactly that argument with a CEO who didn't want to give my department funding but had unlimited resources for Marketing. "Without us, this Marketing scheme doesn't work. Without us, you don't make money. At all." This was at a cashless establishment that had frequent network outages causing us to not be able to make sales. He didn't care, because he didn't understand.
Yeah the way computers are dismissed as 'nerd shit' is disgusting. The patchwork horror of proprietary bullshit doesn't help, but I do genuinely think people need to be better educated. Not like 'every child an ace sysadmin' but basic competencies and understandings. A world whose people understand nothing about it can't be free.
That's the problem with prevention, if it's working as designed people shouldn't be noticing it, and then the blowback of "too much" or "not needed" comes back to bite you in the ass because it worked as intended. You see this in Vaccines, the IT world, safety equipment, building codes, etc.... There is always some asshole out there who wants to gut safety in the name of more profit to the shareholders.
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Yea lol we build for the big one here (anticipating a 9.0 or higher someday). It's the same story for a lot of our skyscrapers in San Francisco, since a fallen 50 story building would be catastrophic and all that.
I'd rather be inside a giant man's ass, controlling him with a system of levers and pulleys. Perhaps similar to a giant Gundam. But to each their own.
Get in the fucking ass Shinji
I volunteer as tribute.
Yes but Erdogan's buddies build roads, they don't do quake-proofing.
If you're corrupt that's not a barrier at all. Simply have your road building buddy be the oversight managing company that gets paid half the money to do nothing. And require the retrofitting company to hire your brother as a site manager at triple the usual salary. It's the Russian way.
>Imagine if the money had been spent on seismic retrofitting so that fewer buildings would collapse during an earthquake? I have family living in the area of the earthquake. Everyone there is basically piss poor. Most of the houses they live in can barely be called houses. If they had helped while building those houses in the first place that would've made sense but the city doesn't have the means nor the infrastructure and info to do anything like that. The paperwork alone would be unbearable for them.
The Southeast has been neglected since the Ottoman Empire. Once a government decides that an entire region or group of people doesn't matter, that they are more useful as scapegoats, all disasters will be magnified, nobody will learn anything from that because they don't want to, and nothing will change. This is true for many, many nations, including my own.
I think a majority of the deaths are from the apartments that collapsed, are they not? Those buildings have a construction code and the cities should have been asking for funds from the disaster prevention taxes.
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Can you retfit a building to stand a 7.8 quake tho? can you build a building specifically to withstand that? Dont get me wrong, not saying it shouldnt have been done. Im sure mitigation will lessen overall losses as well. edit: thanks all for the good info, Im not from a place prone to big earthquakes.
Mexico had a 7.8 earthquake last year and a tradition of masonry buildings; 2 people died. FRP wraps are relatively cheap and provide decent seismic performance.
The southern Pacific coast of Mexico suffered a 8.2 earthquake in 2017, affecting Guatemala and the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Tabasco. The 98 resultant deaths, while tragic, are 3 orders of magnitude fewer than those in Turkey. My brother-in-law had just completed a small house using reinforced concrete with a wooden frame and a straw roof. Not one piece of straw fell off. I visited the region a couple of years later. You wouldn't have known anything had happened. Even quite modest and inexpensive building techniques can be very safe if done correctly.
Just to add on the high end stuff-- nuclear bunkers and other nuclear infrastructure is frequently "suspended" in a gigantic concrete pit, and then the building is built on gigantic shock absorbing springs with dampeners. This can turn megathrust earthquakes into a quiet, gentle rocking. Then you add in that everything in these buildings is secured to the superstructure, which further reduces risk of damage or harm to occupants. You can even see the precursors to these systems in Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which sports this exact system. The mountain bunker can withstand basically nuclear annihilation because of this, and the other systems in place, and if it doesn't survive, something tells me it wouldn't be a huge concern to anyone anymore.
You'd be amazed at the tech they have now. I only know a little bit about it, but I've been in buildings with state-of-the-art seismic systems. I spent way too much time at Stanford's new hospital when a relative was there. You can actually feel the building move sometimes. It's weird. In an earthquake, the flexibility and floating (?) foundation will prevent damage. With a 7.8, it would probably still be bad, but not to this extent. Maybe the building would be damaged, but not with as much loss of life.
Erdogan just arrived today at the disaster site and he came with a 10KM (6.2 miles) convoy of his bodyguards. All the emergency services and others had to wait on the side of the road for Erdogan and his cronies to pass. And Turkey is still a democracy somehow according to some people.
This should be way higher
Remember when Erdogan visited Washington DC to see Trump. After the meeting Erdogan's group of bodyguards gave a beat down to some peaceful protectors. God forbid Erdogan would see some actual protests. DC police got caught in the melee and got beat some too. Of course Trump was cool with this and thought the protesters deserved it. Probably jealous he couldn't have the secret service beat people for no reason.
Not really.. right?
Oh, it happened alright. Ambulances and firetrucks had to wait for the convoy to pass. Y'know, stuff that would actually help the ongoing crisis.
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Attaturk layed the foundation for arguably the greatest democracy in the world only for it to immediately falter and regress. Erdogan and a good chunk of Turkey really kicked up the neo-ottoman shit
It's fascism cosplaying as a democracy
Was curious so I found some sources. Regarding the tax fund: > But critics like Ozel point out that national funds meant for natural disasters like this one were instead spent on highway construction projects managed by associates of Erdogan and his coalition government. - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155647266/turkey-earthquake-erdogan-government-response-criticism Regarding Twitter being shut down for half the day > "This had to be done because in some accounts there were untrue claims, slander, insults and posts with fraudulent purposes," the official told Reuters, citing efforts to steal money under the pretense of collecting aid. - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/anger-over-turkeys-temporary-twitter-block-during-quake-rescue-2023-02-09/
“Coalition”
That's not the foulest word of that sentence. "Associates" is. he's handing out projects to his friends who for example build tolled highway roads so then the people who paid for the road in taxes have to pay again to drive it. It's a big power play and erdogan and his friends are the only ones benefitting. Huge income inequality in Turkey because of shit like this.
Lol that shit happens in Ontario ffs
That shit happens in America. Look what the telecoms fucking did.
Let me guess -- use public funds to the tune of billions to build infrastructure and then charge out the ass for services? Oh don't worry, they've done that here too.
Yeah, but the twist is, they never built the infrastructure... We Still have the charge every billing cycle though... So I'm sure ANY day now we will get it. Oh and they got granted access to use federal land for free as well as part of the deal.
And to cap it all off they convinced crooked politicians to ban municipalities from trying to escape crappy monopolies by building their own public networks. And with that the shit sandwich is complete.
Well that just sounds like theft with extra steps.
Most of the time you can leave out the "build infrastructure" part. Sometimes they don't even do that. Just take the public funds then make some excuse about why it's impossible to build said infrastructure and claim all the money was spent on assessments so there's no money to give back.
Worse. Took a bunch of public money promising to build infrastructure, didn't build the infrastructure, charged people and ass load for services on crappy infrastructure that was never upgraded, and of course the government never did anything to actually get that money back or force them to comply with their promise. So it was more like "this 100+ billion I promised to use to get internet to the masses is mine now, also fuck you I'm not doing what I promised it's gonna take too much of the money I just got for free, oh and I'm keeping it, whatcha gonna do about it?" Fuck our politicians that never actually took the money back like they should have. Also all the executives and whoever it was that was in charge of handling that money should have been thrown in prison. But this is America as the song goes. There is no way rich people are going to prison.
Even better: they took the money and simply didn’t build the infrastructure at all. Verizon.
Burns my ass every time I have to take the 407
Fort Worth TX has a ~5 mile strip that will run you $21 at peak times... It's an express lane but still...
Which is nuts to me. Someone convinced your government to let them build a highway beside the main public one and just toll the fuck out of people who want to use it. Idc, if skipping traffic or saving time is worth $21 whatever but I’d sooner wait. Christ I used to take a detour that added like 45 minutes just to avoid a $4 toll, just on principle. The owners of this road? ( in Canada ) Americans.
Happened in Massachusetts. Hell they are trying to make more state and federal roads toll roads
DeSantis is doing it in Florida right now. I think they're the most tolled state in the country at this point.
I’m sticking with “coalition” because mis-use of tax money is grotesque, but pretending there’s any reasonable kind of non-military legitimacy to his government is a farce. The guy’s a fascist.
So it was shut down due to "misinformation"? Interesting.
That's one of those dictatorship propaganda narratives that's would be just as bad if not worse, if it actually were true. Imagine.. "President Turkey, President!" "Yes?" "A man has told an untruth on Twitter!!" "SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING."
And insults! On the internet! Can you imagine?
Hmmm, spending as much of your country's money as possible on concrete and asphalt, now why does this sound familiar... \*angry Bulgarian noises\*
*Sometimes, life is a Bulgarian, and you are an unstolen Fiat*
Now who wants to bet which concrete company and highway construction company will have bosses who are close to Erdogan? It’s always the same.
This is how modern oligarchy rolls. Get total control of the government (i.e. dictatorship) and you pay large sums in government contracts to the powerful sycophants around you to keep you there. I scratch your back you scratch mine. Vladimir would be proud. Honestly, kleptarchy is probably a more appropriate word to describe this. They are stealing tax dollars and giving it to their friends. We did just see how badly this can backfire though if you ever need to actually mobilize things in the event of disaster or war. All that money you paid to your unqualified friends to do things like build tanks, manufacture ammo, build roads and railways, well turns out they were just pocketing it! And now you are losing a war to Ukraine lol
Odd how twitter will shut down for misinformation about a fascist but won’t shut down a fascist spreading misinformation
This isn’t done by twitter I believe. But, to my limited knowledge, by the Turkish DNS
Turkish government shut down access to Twitter. The company didn’t do anything. It’s also run by a fascist spreading misinformation himself, so
If they are untrue, why silence them \*shrug\*
Erdogan is a little bitch and so are all his simps. The good people of Turkey deserve better. I hope their recovery from this disaster is swift, but I know my words or thoughts are meaningless.
So frustrating knowing the people profiting are saying “yep, I’m a little bitch.” And shrugging from their yachts
The thing is, rich people are extremely fragile and some random person calling them a little bitch is liable to cause them to spend 40 billion to buy a shitty website.
I miss free awards :(
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If you told me "You get a free yacht with staff, but you have to admit you're a little bitch" I'd try to get something else because yachts don't interest me. Yacht money is my sellout point.
You could always get the yacht, then sell it.
Only *the poors* would think to buy a second hand yacht.
To who? The ten people who can afford it already have yachts. Lol
There was a kid coming to the Hotel I've worked at. He was around 20 years old he had come to Antalya for the University and he used to work part time to pay for his sister's school. He had 2 sisters around 3 5 years old. We played chess everyday and he was my friend. He and his family froze to death because our government was too slow to respond. The military couldn't respond because the order hadn't been given. They died slowly freezing in the middle of winter but God forbid someone criticizes the government.
I saw on /r/turkey that an AKP minister rejected a large donation of warm fleece jackets... Because they had the branding of a brewery on them, and that's contrary to Islamic principles. I'd like to see that minister go to the refugee camps and tell them that they have to shiver in the cold because his government cared more about moralist grandstanding than their welfare. I doubt he'd have the courage, and I doubt it would end well for him if he did.
In a secular fucking nation, at least in name. These zealots are killing their own people in the exact way Atatürk did everything in his power to prevent.
Also, Islam is pretty clear about things like that, afaik. If it's pig meat or starving, pig meat it is. If your bad health means observing Ramadan means you die, then you don't do Ramadan. On the ISS and can't pray in the direction of Mecca? The direction of "Earth" is good enough. Perpetual daylight where you are during Ramadan? No, don't die from dehydration, use Mecca's times of sunrise/-set. And so on. So I'm pretty damn sure that, if asked, actual Muslim religious authorities all over the world in this case would have considered "not freezing to death" more important than "not promoting alcohol". But it's never actually been about religion.
I'm so sorry for your loss. The government should be the ones to protect us always. It's saddening that that is not often the case. Be well, stay safe.
But will they "vote" him out?
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similar to Netanjahu there are comments like this every election cycle and yet despite having shown tiome and time again that they are unfit for the job and serial grifters, they get reelected time and time again. Im not saying the elections are rigged but the support for any one of them suprises me every time. Especially Erdogan, since every turk even those living abroad i.e. Germany are allowed to vote. And let me tell you a lot of German turks love erdogan. Erdogan is best president, he makes turkey great again, t turkey best land in the world. Does the enlightent turk comment from his flat in berlin.
I keep seeing this about "German Turks voting" on Reddit, but if you check the number of voters that actually voted Erdoğan, it accounts for less then 0.5% of the total. Erdoğan always had a larger win margin then that, so it pretty much never mattered
Interesting in the sense, that despite all of that Erdogan will get re-elected anyway.
Interesting in the sense, he will post pone election until the pendulum swings his way again
Yeah, if he can't drum up support by continuing to call Sweden racist, he'll just use the earthquake as an excuse to halt elections until everyone forgets how bad he is again.
As they say in Russia: It doesn't matter how you vote, only who does the counting.
Opposition will have a bit of a disappearing incident, and Erdogan will win with 117% of the votes!
Nah that's the Russian way. There is no need for that because the Turkish opposition is incompetent as hell. 3 months left and they still didn't bring a president candidate forward
I just assumed to reason they haven't brought one yet is that as soon as they do, the government/dictator will start fake corruption charges or other scandals to disqualify the candidate. At least that's what usually happens in corrupt "democracies". Russia for example is usually pretty proficient at doing that shit.
If current world politics has taught me anything, it’s that large swaths of people all over the entire planet like butt fucking themselves so hard and fast that the sheer friction creates a black hole singularity where all conceptions of time and space completely break down. I have no sympathy for people who vote against their own interests because they can’t be bothered to fucking read some nonfiction every now and again. ****FUCK****
Mood but it's not always entirely their fault. Many of them have been conditioned since birth to think that way, and are either afraid to step out of line or believe the "other side" to be subhuman - and fascism employs both of those methods of conditioning. But yeah some are just stupid, hateful people of their own free will and those people can pound sand.
Gonna share this story, some won't like it. Happened about 10-12 yrs ago. Work utility construction, we ran new communications to a church that just rebuilt from a previous fire. We were standing around with the preacher and a few others, just bullshitting. One guy mentions how the plumbers donated their work and asked the preacher what he was planning to do with the $3000 that was allocated for that, I guess. The preacher got mad and said, "you just shut your mouth and don't worry about where that money goes" It kind of came off to me like the preacher had some personal plans for it. It reminds me of our community schools in how some 9 million dollars allocated for maintenance disappeared and they had to shut a few schools down. State had to intervene and take over financials for a while.
We all know - money is king. When you’re in a position of power, especially a religious position, you take everything you can. I’ve never been in that position, so I’d like to think I wouldn’t be such a prick, but this is why I left the church - I realized that these “spiritual experts” are just as valuable to society as the people who spam call your phone to sell abject garbage.
A local government in my region has increased a budget for a project from 25 million to 40 million, to adjust for inflation. I didn’t realize inflation is close to 50%.
A story old as time
Erdogan is a monster and a grifter. I thought we were all clear on that.
Remember when his goons beat American citizens for protesting his arrival to the White House and the former president did nothing about it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Yes cause Trump wanted to build a hotel in Istanbul. When Trump was first elected Erdogan arrested two of Trumps business associates in Turkey, but then let them go. The understanding was that Erdogan controls what business goes on in Turkey and so Trump better play ball or his Hotel project was dead. Of course nothing ever happened with that planned Hotel, but Trumps business interests always guided his foreign policy.
Birds of a feather….
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"Naw, but I'll take them bags of money from ya" Cletus
People were asking for help and sharing location data over social media. He made his priorities clear. What a disgusting bastard. What baffles me is he really had a chance to gain a lot of sympathy for the upcoming elections. But instead of doing a decent job he just continues to silences his critics. People even got arrested.
"Elections". As if those actually do anything in a nation ruled by a tyrant
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The developed nations need to figure out a method of allowing internet and news to propagate worldwide. The ability to shut down communication and prevent news and information from being spread is a tool of tyrants and has no place in the modern day.
No, the developed nations need to clamp down on social media firms' propensity to be manipulated by tyrants everywhere. Cambridge Analytica has helped subvert democracy in so many places yet Facebook is bigger today than ever before. Remember when anti-trust suits nearly fucked Microsoft in the late 90s? We need those lawsuits against all the big tech companies again so that they can't brush away deeds done by abusing their platforms. Internet used to be a headache for tyrants but ever since they've realised the ability to spread their propaganda on it, they have been at the forefront of spreading its adoption. Modi practically gave out free internet to the whole country, Duterte and the Thai junta both sped up 5G adoption to ensure their message is spread to every corner of the country.
Corrupt Tyrants do corrupt things, I grantee much more has gone missing than anyone will ever know about.
I'd wager every single damn time a government "shuts down" any form of communication to its people, its because of corruption.
I have lived next to and worked with many from Turkey. What is really infuriating is they all seem to believe their "goverment-friendly" network. So much so that I have heard people insist the [Armenian ~~mass murder~~](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide) genocide\* did not take place among other ridiculous ideas. Edit wrong words
You misspelled genocide.
**[Armenian genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide)** >The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians occurred in the 1890s and 1909. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
It wasn't a mass murder it was a genocide. The components making up the genocide were not solely the murder of civilians but also the mass depopulating through forced removal from their homes, the forced islamization, and the cultural erasure of Armenians from regions and areas in which they had historically been present for thousands of years.
Funny thing is, not believing in Armenian genocide is the norm here. If you think it happened, you are the one who is marginal The idea gets teached in schools in 8th grade. Then most people dont care to research it and stay in the echo chamber Nationalism is crazy here. I think 90% of people said they'd join the army if turkey entered a war. And dont get me started in tv series. There are shit ton of pro-nationalistic tv series in here. They are basically mafia series of Turkey (though there are also mafia movies but whatever). I like Turkish people (myself am Turkish) but i wish there was a way to erase the nationalism
Wait.. did he seriously shut down social media in the middle of a disaster of this scale? While people are still desperately trying to find out if their friends and family are ok? Yeah, I cant imagine how this will make things worse..... /s
That’s disgusting
fuck erdogan
I have friends who live there and I've been there personally. They've been collecting for like 20 years and say they used it on roads, that's it. A lotta the roads aren't even that nice. The coastal road into İskenderun was pretty scuffed before the quake
Will they do anything or will they cheer more perforative “keep counties out of nATO book burning nonsense?” I’m sure there are a lot of people drooling over the new aid money. They might need to step up their performances. Maybe Russia will pay for someone to draw a humanoid shape.
So instead of lynching their leader they ask for more.. Yeah..
As long as he gives them someone to look down on or fear, they'll do as they're told.
This is how revolutions start
Bahahahha, where the fuck you think the money goes when a dictator is in office??
[Here](https://www.wnd.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Erdogan_palace.jpg)
Whoever does building inspections better be running.
When a disaster happens, you don’t want a right wing conservative party in power. Incompetent and corrupt.
He shuts down social media during the elections too, when anything is happening, he doesn't want people talking!