Academic flees Turkey abt a decade ago (bc of political pressures), settles down in New School, and now advocates the firings of his colleagues www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/n...
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
Laurentian Associate Professor of History, St. Lawrence University. Non-resident scholar, Stockholm University, Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS) Focused on Turkey and the Middle East. Unlikely to argue on-line. Blocks dumb, annoying, or noisy.
This is just rank Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, based on the bigoted idea that there is something inherently scary about a president with the last name "El-Sayed." It is incumbent on all of us to call it out.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3h agoJD Vance: "We don't want the next administration, whoever -- god forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years ... "
I am talking to some very staunch CHP voters this past few weeks.... every single one is switching to New. The CHP looks like it'll be a shell soon My only real question is about rural Alevis. And fund raising
I'm going to be brutally honest: watching people speedrun conspiratorial revisionism regarding COVID just five years after the pandemic killed one million Americans makes me understand how Holocaust denial took root in living memory of the death camps. It is the same basic sick instinct.
The great Covid bait and switch - Lawyers, Guns & Money
I find it fascinating how the entire Covid epidemic has undergone some sort of almost Orwellian historical revisionism, and not merely among the right wing, although they are of course by far the wors...
lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
The close result is Michigan is perhaps less desirable from some perspectives but it has the benefit of demonstrating to some degree that the dem coalition is still a real coalition
One potential disadvantage of focusing on big name political prisoners - Demirtas, Kavala, Imamoglu - is that it may make their cases appear exceptional rather than exemplary.
Diken Gazetesi@diken.com.tr · yesterdayCHP'li Menderes Belediye Başkanı İlkay Çiçek gözaltına alındı
Maybe I'm missing something but shouldn't somebody have benn watching the Ukraine War and, you know, taken notes?
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday"The Army has used up 'virtually all' of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, raising concerns about the military's readiness for future conflicts"
Support on Substack to read a transcript of the interview - and all other Turkey Book Talk conversations 🍃🍃 turkeybooktalk.substack.com/p/onur-inal-...
Onur İnal on the rise of late Ottoman İzmir
Onur İnal of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Vienna on “Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir” (Cambridge University Press)
turkeybooktalk.substack.com
About those bases and what keeps them in place despite Assad’s removal, see: sceeus.se/en/publicati...
Five Wars and a Funeral: How the conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran broke Russia’s Middle East Policy - Sceeus
SCEEUS Guest Report | Five Wars and a Funeral | By Aron Lund
sceeus.se
Aron Lund@aronlund.bsky.social · yesterdayIf Syria’s lingering economic and political dependence on Russia—in the form of oil and wheat import, UN votes vs. Israeli encroachment, system repairs and technology, etc.—were to diminish, Russia would presumably find it harder to retain the Hmeymim and Tartous bases.
The fun bit is asking Turkish officials, "Against whom?"
(((Tendar)))@tendar.bsky.social · 2d agoTurkish forces deployed five F-16 fighter jets to Estonia, supporting the Baltic flank of NATO.
Trump's strategic idiocy has laid bare a deeper failure in US defence manufacturing and procurement policy for which each President since Clinton shares some responsibility.
Aron Lund@aronlund.bsky.social · yesterdayIran has now gobbled up nearly all U.S. ATACMS and PrSM ballistic missiles, plus half of Tomahawk cruise missiles and a very considerable share of the THAAD and Patriot interceptors, sources tell @reuters.com’s Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay, and Michael Stone. www.reuters.com/world/us-has...
i think the party of sick freaks who want to inspect kid's private parts should be branded as such
Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d agoAn initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play
One potential disadvantage of focusing on big name political prisoners - Demirtas, Kavala, Imamoglu - is that it may make their cases appear exceptional rather than exemplary.
Diken Gazetesi@diken.com.tr · yesterdayCHP'li Menderes Belediye Başkanı İlkay Çiçek gözaltına alındı
america is a face culture that pretends it is not a face culture; trump is a particularly reputation (mas macho) variant of that culture. iran gets that america is a face culture, and that trump's entire schtick is built on never "losing", and acts accordingly.
Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist@nameshiv.bsky.social · 2d agoI don't think the average American and certainly not the average MAGA even gets the extent to which "humiliate your foe" is a core ethos of the Iranian approach to conflict
Israel’s veteran security establishment is terrified that settler violence will spark a third intifada, and has now appealed to Donald Trump to pressure Netanyahu over the issue. My latest for @newlinesmag.bsky.social newlinesmag.com/running-note...
Former Israeli Security Leaders Ask Trump To Help Rein in West Bank Settlers
Israel’s veteran security establishment is terrified that settler violence will spark a third intifada, and has now appealed to Donald Trump to pressure Netanyahu over the issue.
newlinesmag.com
There is rising actual antisemitism and conspiracism surrounding the state of Israel and its place in global affairs. And the organizations that should exist to call that out are wasting all of their credibility refusing to distinguish conspiracies from accurate descriptions of Israeli war crimes.
Time to add another formerly respected institution to the garbage pile, this time @aau.edu, which just worked with the Trump admin to endorse resegregation in high education, embedding MAGA fraudsters as faculty, and banning student expression. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The fun bit is asking Turkish officials, "Against whom?"
(((Tendar)))@tendar.bsky.social · 2d agoTurkish forces deployed five F-16 fighter jets to Estonia, supporting the Baltic flank of NATO.
Still can’t over the fact that the president of the United States just told an entire state to pound sand after getting cyberattacked by a foreign adversary because they didn’t vote for him and it was treated like a Tuesday lol
well yeah. depending on the field it can be more like the sneering of a snobby record store clerk than hazing the plebes at a military academy, but it's the jousting of the micropenised, all the way down. it's amazing any scholarship gets done, given how Trumpy is the baseline behavior.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 4d agoI don't think there's ever been much of an intellectual justification for this kind of culture, to me the aggro Q&A is pretty transparently service to inert nerd masculinity and serves no other function
I find this very much field and country dependent. But all of my closest friends are *not* academics, just saying.
Anjali Dayal@anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 4d agoI don’t really want to get into this with people who feel this way, but i don’t think this is a good thing! We don’t need to behave this way! It’s not healthy to approach academic discourse as an exercise in harshness!
I finally got around to this @turkeybooktalk.bsky.social conversation with @sinemadar.bsky.social Very rich discussion and well worth your time turkeybooktalk.podbean.com/e/sinem-adar...
Sinem Adar on Turkey's role in a fracturing Western alliance | Turkey Book Talk
Sinem Adar, head of the Centre for Applied Turkey Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, on Turkey's international profile and domestic political trajectory after its ...
turkeybooktalk.podbean.com
and I’ve kinda settled on “rough readers” as the term, not out of any over-weening concern for someone’s feelings, because i think the internet has created something oddly worse than illiterate, it’s “slightly literate and very emotional, and armed with a few how-dare-you retorts to any critique.”
The question of Alevi loyalties is something that's being debated but really outside my field of expertise.
medyascope@medyascope.tv · 3d agoYENİ Parti lideri Özgür Özel Mamak’ta Cemevinin temelini attı: “Devlet adına Alevilerden rızalık alacağız, söz veriyorum”
As an experiment, I had Claude run a D&D campaign for a while. It took me a couple of days to realize it was narrating (making up) the dice rolls. There are work arounds to almost every problem, including this one. But keeping it from lying or just making shit up is really, really hard.