Jet Fighters are Awesome!!
This cracked me up.
Testing? Seriously? Fighting Falcons over the capitol?
As much as I love the dramatic image in that Tweet, c’mon. Did they blame the explosions the other night on swamp gas?
Of course, it’s really just a 6 paragraph sniglet of an article, where three paragraphs are whining about being kicked out of the F-35 program and the last paragraph is about the US threatening Turkey with sanctions.
So it’s almost like the whole thing is clickbait to get people excited by a cool free fighter jet air show over the city and then rile them up about Death to America(TM).
In fairness, a Falcon buzzed my house in New Jersey the morning of Sep 11, 2001 and, in all honesty, it was fucking amazing. But that said, I still think this article is pretty disingenuous about what this is all about, yeah?
The US made those fucking planes, by the way.
So yeah, Turkish news: Whatfuckingever.
Speaking of which…
They Found the Stupid Ark Again.
Experts claim they’ve snapped underground images of a mysterious ship-shaped object discovered half a century ago in eastern Turkey.
Creationists have long claimed that Noah’s legendary boat is buried beneath the rocky spot, known as the Durupınar site.
So yeah, that FOXNews story needed reTweeting out ASAP, right?
Because that’s what this story lacked—a zillion fundamentalist Christian tourists in eastern Turkey and a goddamn ark.
Bear in mind that I don’t have a problem with Christians visiting sacred sites. I do have a problem with Turkey intimidating other people. I mean…
What could go wrong, though? Mt. Ararat is fairly far from Syria, right?
Not that I think there would be, but is there anything else to be concerned about if any action in this area picked up?
Gah!!
Man, that looks pretty close. How close is it I wonder?
I probably should have seen that coming. Of course you can’t get there from there.
Now, do I think that Turkey is going to go back to stomping Armenians and somehow use the site for leverage by claiming American evangelicals are at risk to form some kind of pretext for taking an aggressive defense of the pilgrims?
No.
Well, that’s not accurate. What I really mean isn’t even that I don’t know, but I don’t know of any reason they would. But it doesn’t strike me as something that Erdogan wouldn’t do.
And now I finally realize why that’s such small comfort to, say, Armenians. Or the Yazidi. Or pretty much anyone who kinda doesn’t want to get arrested, tortured, and/or killed for wearing what is determined to be culturally inappropriate pants.
Given how the Turkish media often passive aggressively insinuates stuff that the government is “thinking” about or however you want to put it, what might be standard clickbait to us, I could totally see that setting off local populations.
Not knowing which are the true causes for concern will only make things worse.
01m55s if autotrack function doesn’t work right:
Fortunately, there’s reason to believe none of this will actually gain much traction. From the linked piece.
Not everyone is convinced though, with geologists claiming the mountainous lump is simply an unusual mountain formation.
Oh. So this might all just be bullshit. Quel surpris.
But you can get a sense of the paranoia this kind of regime instills in the combination of ruthlessness, arbitrariness of rule, and creepy manipulation of history and myth to define and distort ideas about friend and foe.
Thank God Batman has been sited in the vicinity.
Hint: Check the map.
Rojava to Rock 