{"id":4079,"date":"2014-02-06T09:52:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T14:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2014-02-06T09:52:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T14:52:49","slug":"what-if-i-said-you-could-learn-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-turkey-in-under-30-minutes-for-free-is-this-offer-too-good-to-be-true-you-tell-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2014\/02\/06\/what-if-i-said-you-could-learn-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-turkey-in-under-30-minutes-for-free-is-this-offer-too-good-to-be-true-you-tell-me\/","title":{"rendered":"What If I Said You Could Learn Everything You Wanted To Know About Turkey In Under 30 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 For Free? Is This Offer Too Good To Be True? You Tell Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> by <a title=\"Posts by Choire Sicha\" href=\"http:\/\/ift.tt\/16qK5uO\">Choire Sicha<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote align=\"center\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>Joke on Turkish social media is that PM Erdogan wants to raze this Twitter thing to build a replica of an Ottoman Barracks in its place.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) <a href=\"http:\/\/ift.tt\/1kZn9My\">February 5, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Taksim, in the center of the city\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s European side, is considered the heart of Istanbul. The square itself surrounds tiny Gezi Park and is covered with concrete and filled with traffic, but the absence of buildings offers at least a sense of free space. Erdogan wanted to close the square to cars, build tunnels for them beneath it and replace Gezi Park and its rows of sycamore trees with a giant shopping center designed to look like Ottoman-era military barracks. Putting anything Ottoman-like in Taksim, a symbol of the secular republic, felt like an assertion of Erdogan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neo-Islamic identity. In terms of scale and presumption, it would be as if Michael Bloomberg, New York\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s former mayor, tried to erect a five-story shopping mall in Bryant Park with facades like blinking Bloomberg terminals.<\/p>\n<p>Except Erdogan wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the mayor of Istanbul. And he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t consulting his constituents there. Far from it: When a local committee composed of academics, historians and municipal appointees unanimously voted against the plan, he simply had another committee made up of his own bureaucratic appointments override the vote. This, to Turks, was what his rule had come to mean.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>\u00e2\u20ac\u201dIf, like me, you are a barely educated American who has a hard time grasping foreign affairs because you went to an American high school where they didn&#8217;t never teach you nothing, I have good news! <a href=\"http:\/\/ift.tt\/N86KKo\">This piece on Turkey from this coming Sunday&#8217;s <i>Times<\/i> magazine on the country since the election of Recep Tayyip Erdo\u00c4\u0178an as prime minister in 2003<\/a> is fascinating, incredibly readable and crazily informative! I learned things <i>and<\/i> I enjoyed it! It&#8217;s a small miracle. Someone should monetize this service of information-giving.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ift.tt\/1kZnbUA\">1 Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"http:\/\/ift.tt\/N86I5e\">What If I Said You Could Learn Everything You Wanted To Know About Turkey In Under 30 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 For Free? Is This Offer Too Good To Be True? You Tell Me<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theawl.com\">The Awl<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>via The Awl http:\/\/ift.tt\/N86I5e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Choire Sicha Joke on Turkish social media is that PM Erdogan wants to raze this Twitter thing to build a replica of an Ottoman Barracks in its place. \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 5, 2014 Taksim, in the center of the city\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s European side, is considered the heart of Istanbul. The square itself surrounds &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2014\/02\/06\/what-if-i-said-you-could-learn-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-turkey-in-under-30-minutes-for-free-is-this-offer-too-good-to-be-true-you-tell-me\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What If I Said You Could Learn Everything You Wanted To Know About Turkey In Under 30 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 For Free? Is This Offer Too Good To Be True? You Tell Me&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1031,6,1032,1033],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-feedly","tag-ifttt","tag-recently-read","tag-saved-for-later"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2skW4-13N","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}