George Packer's Blog, page 190

Atatürk versus Erdogan: Turkey’s Long Struggle

Turkey has weathered five successful military coups since the founding of the Republic, in 1923, and what happened on Friday, with soldiers surging against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., marks an attempt at the sixth. Turkey is a constitutionally secular state, though one that is over ninety-five-per-cent Muslim and which was once the seat of an Islamic empire. The Turkish military has often served as the nation’s firewall against encroachments on secularism and the constitution, guarding the aspirations of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The tension between secularism and religious fundamentalism is as essential to understanding today’s Turkish political life as is the tension between federalism and states’ rights in America.

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Related:
The Purge Begins In Turkey
Who Bombed the Istanbul Airport?
The Eleventh Hour for Turkish Democracy

The Purge Begins in Turkey

The coup in Turkey is over, and now the purge begins.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The H-Bombs in Turkey
Atatürk Versus Erdoğan: Turkey’s Long Struggle
An Afflicted Nation Grieves over Nice

The Purge Begins In Turkey

The coup in Turkey is over, and now the purge begins.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Atatürk versus Erdogan: Turkey’s Long Struggle
An Afflicted Nation Grieves over Nice
Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Is Pokémon Go’s Success Sustainable?

Welcome to the Week in Business, a look at some of the biggest stories in business and economics.

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My Pokémon Go Diary
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, July 13th
Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality

Racism, Stress, and Black Death

Last week, I used my aunt’s car to make my way across New Orleans. I am back in Louisiana, where I was born and raised, for a few weeks, and she has lent me her car so that I’m able to run all the errands my mother inevitably assigns to me each time I return home. When I am done, I drive the car back to my aunt’s house, which is only a few blocks from my parents’. On that day, I pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, got out of the car, and turned around to see a police car pulling up behind me.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama and the Collapse of Our Common American Language
Police Shootings, Race, and the Fear Defense
After Dallas, The Future of Black Lives Matter

Seven Reasons It Made Sense for Donald Trump to Pick Mike Pence

Over the past couple of months, Donald Trump hasn’t done much right, but in picking Mike Pence, the staunchly conservative governor of Indiana, as his running mate, he probably made a wise choice. History suggests that Vice-Presidential candidates don’t make much, if any, difference to the outcome of Presidential elections, but here are some reasons why, from Trump’s perspective, Pence was the best bet:

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Related:
Trumpian Tactics After Nice
Furious Christie Refuses to Pick Up Trump’s Dry Cleaning
Being Honest About Trump

The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice

What happened in Nice was shocking, but it wasn’t a surprise, not anymore. Mass murder of ordinary people enjoying a holiday—parents and children, couples, teen-agers, assorted revellers—is almost commonplace. It happened to European tourists on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia, last summer, and to Pakistani Christians at an amusement park in Lahore in March, and to Iraqi Shia families celebrating the end of Ramadan in Baghdad two weeks ago. Nor is the diabolical calculation of maximum damage surprising. The killers in Paris last November, and in San Bernardino in December, and in Orlando last month chose crowded spaces from which escape was difficult—so did the truck driver in Nice.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice
On Bastille Day, a Grieving and Afflicted Nation
Another Attack Hits France

What We Know About the Attacker in Nice

The white truck appeared on the coastal boulevard not long after Thursday night’s Bastille Day fireworks had let out their final burst over the French Riviera. At first, many of the bystanders thought it was a horrible mistake, and so they waved their hands and yelled at the man behind the wheel. The driver had run down several people, including a middle-aged Muslim woman, and the shouting witnesses wondered whether he was somehow oblivious to the growing trail of broken bodies behind him. He was not. He pressed the gas pedal and careered farther down the Promenade des Anglais, zigzagging into crowds at high speeds and sporadically firing a pistol. Some distant revellers mistook the gunshots for the sounds of extra fireworks, until they heard the screams. A daring motorcyclist caught up with the truck and tried to break into the cabin, but he slipped off and fell beneath the wheels. The truck weighed nineteen tons. The rampage ended only when police fired dozens of rounds through the windshield, killing the driver. Eighty-four people lay dead in his wake.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice
Trumpian Tactics After Nice
On Bastille Day, a Grieving and Afflicted Nation

Trumpian Tactics After Nice

“Let’s do tactics tonight,” Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, said to Donald Trump, a few hours after a truck driver plowed into a crowd in Nice. “Because you could be President in five months, and another two to be sworn in.” Trump, who was on the phone, had already agreed to O’Reilly’s assertion that if the attack, which killed more than eighty people, many of them small children, was an act of terrorism, as it appeared, then we were in “a world-war scenario.” He added, “I’ve been saying it for a long time.” The attack seemed, to Trump, to be proof of a lot of things he had said for a long time. The plight of France, our NATO ally, was a reminder that we ought to be getting our money’s worth from the alliance (“We should use NATO for a purpose”); that immigrants and refugees might be “the ultimate Trojan horse”; that there was something strange about President Barack Obama (“You never know with him . . . why he refuses to use the term ‘radical Islamic terror’ ”) and, by extension, about Hillary Clinton (“She’s another one. She’s very weak”). Most of all, Trump believed that there was a war on, against an enemy whose face he believed he saw in America, and, when O’Reilly wanted to know if he’d ask Congress to formally declare it, Trump sounded surprised that he’d even ask: “I would! I would!” (Hillary Clinton, who also called in to the show, was careful enough to say that this was “a different kind of war,” and spoke about strengthening alliances and launching an “intelligence surge.”)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Seven Reasons It Made Sense for Donald Trump to Pick Mike Pence
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice
Furious Christie Refuses to Pick Up Trump’s Dry Cleaning

An Afflicted Nation Grieves over Nice

The primary sense of the French adjective “affligé ” is “grieving,” or “in distress,” which is undoubtedly the meaning intended by President François Hollande when he addressed his nation, just before four this morning, after rushing from the theatre festival in Avignon to meet with his Cabinet in the capital. “France est affligée,” he said. For the third time in a year and a half, France is grieving a major terrorist attack. This time, the means was a truck; the place was Nice; but the grief, the horror, the fear are the same as before. Eighty-four people, ten of them children, who had gathered with hundreds of others on the Promenade des Anglais to celebrate Bastille Day with a fireworks show over the Mediterranean, have been killed. Two attacks made a pair. Three make a series. Just yesterday, Hollande announced that the state of emergency put in place after November’s attacks in Paris would finally come to an end on July 26th. It has now been extended once again. “France is going to have to live with terrorism,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the Cabinet meeting. “Affligé ” can also be translated as “afflicted,” and, if the word carries with it a sense of cursed inevitability, both its senses have begun to seem equally, horribly valid in France.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Purge Begins In Turkey
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice