However, most people also don't really care that much about other people, especially in other countries. So they elect people to handle that for them, and then believe what they're told. Mark Twain's quote "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" seems fitting. With modern tech you can communicate with people all over the world without traveling (I'm in my underwear in Sweden right now for instance), which helps widening the gap between the "liberal elite" and the rest who feel left behind or that their country is taken away from them.

One thing that contradicts that in a way is the fact that a majority of the expat Turks living in Europe voted for the new referendum giving Erdogan much more power. More than 63% voted yes in Germany for instance.

Nobody wants war, but in most context people don't feel the need to handle their lives either. Democracy re-emerges after wars because the people felt hard and had to suffer and wake up, so now it's obvious and easier to act for peace and democracy.

Seems like societies just have a MTBF of 50 years and after that war acts as a reset button.

ps: travel quote is neat

Unfortunately that's not quite true. It is true that very few people want war as an end in itself (though even then there are exceptions) but some people want something else (land, power, eliminating the infidels) for which they are willing to pay the price of war -- especially if they can coerce someone else to do the fighting on their behalf.

Exactly my thoughts. Now how could we replace overreliance on unrealistic uptime goals with scheduled maintenance?

I also was baffled about the results of the Turkish vote abroad. How is it possible that, in many EU states, they won which such a majority? I would have expected expats to be generally more liberal/globalist/progressive.

I'm not sure "expat" is the right term to designate the masses who responded to West Europe's call for more labor in the 70s. In the sense that they live outside of their native land, yes, they are expatriates. But, today, the term almost designates a wealthier group who are sent by their companies to work abroad now.

In any case, there's a big difference between the Turks in Europe (more than 60% of them voted for Erdogan) or, say, Turks who live in the US (only 15% of them voted for Erdogan). Their backgrounds are completely different. Most of the people who immigrated to Europe to satisfy the new labor needs came from rural areas, mostly from the central and eastern part of Turkey without even living in a sizable city in Turkey. That created a complete culture shock and great integration problems.

Turks in the US, on the other hand, came here mostly for college/university. They are highly educated and they've fully embraced the values of the nation because they had those values at heart even before they decided to live or study abroad.

I never completely understood this. I guess it's partly a kneejerk reaction to the nominally left-wing repressive regimes they left behind. Another component is probably a sudden immersion into a truly pluralistic society when coming from an intolerant and homogenous one. But still, I can't say I truly understand it.

I'm in my 30s and this is still a source of conflict between my family and me. They're lower-class "real people" who have a soft spot for despots on the Putin spectrum. Because while they're pro-democracy, they also think you need a "firm hand" to keep all "those people" in line, and by "those people" they mean people they can't or won't empathise with: poor black people, the stew of "educated degenerates" who refuse to have normal sexualities or lifestyles, muslims, and so on.

The reason they are against asylum seekers may be simpler as it seems: they know that the situation was going to create troubles and escalate, and therefore it will be blamed on the dark ones (the focus is on them). Can you distinguish a Turkish from a Syrian, for example? Furthermore, with this huge expenses for refugees, the social money is likely to be reduced, and I don't have the numbers, but many of them live off of the social security provided by the state. (without even considering the money they get for the kids)

I mean, I do understand their concerns, which is really sad...

Many dark foreigners have the same point of view. In such white countries, more dark foreigners mean more chance of troubles for them. Dark, slightly dark, black, etc, they all belong in one category: dark foreigners. Even Indians, who do not have absolutely anything in common with Africans, for example, still belong to the same category.

If an Indian does something bad, dark people will suffer from it.

Same for social security: they'll have less, considering that many (poor) foreigners will come, and they may have to share the resources.

It's all about survival...

Of course one explanation is:

"The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."

Average Turk from Istanbul is way more western than the average labor migrant from 60ies-70ies. Mainly they came from rural areas and without much education to do manual labor (which was great IMO).

So "same" people that are now voting for Erdogan in said rural areas today.

2nd-3rd generation who grew up in Europe (local education etc.) don't even necessarily have right to vote in Turkish election.

Why don't we simply face the ugly truth that most people who voted for YES are the alpha-males, unable to speak the country language, living in parallel societies, who want submissive women?

That's the kind of stereotype that Erdogan wants. I mean, Kurds are nice people, but for some reason they need to be wiped out. Boh!?

Also, there was an article about learned helplessness, how to craft depression into animals by confusing their brain when searching for way to stop suffering. Very similar root cause.

Internet used to be a tool that enabled people all over the world to communicate. I wouldn't have spoken a word in English if it wasn't for internet.

Commercialization of the Web killed the globalization spirit of the internet.

There's no commercial value in connecting people who are in different markets.

A Web enterprise does not benefit by showing its customers that they might be holding the wrong opinion.

Echo chambers bring loyal customers.

Globalization dies a little bit every time a curious teenager sees an error saying: "this content is not available in your country".

You are not an average internet user if you talk to the people on a different cohort, you are an elite and elites have always been communicating with the elites.

There's always going to be a candidate like that to vote for, and democracy can only survive as long as voters prefer candidates who uphold democracy.

Both Putin and Erdogan (many others as well, Orban, Gruevski, to name a few), were elected under promises to bring prosperity through democracy.

Carefully targeting vulnerable groups with PR and economic engineering has proven itself a great tactic for achieving their autocratic vision.

edit: spelling.

[1]: https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table

No, that's a common misconception.

Democracy isn't characterised only by the vote, but also by liberal values. We call it liberal democracy.

I'm from Romania btw and until 1989 we've had communism / stalinism. Guess what - we had votes then too. It was all arranged of course, party members didn't dare going against the dictators, everybody was dancing on the same music, etc.

In other words, everything is up for vote except for the liberal values that make democracy work. Without those liberal values, you don't have a democracy.

And to put this in perspective: you cannot claim that a popular vote is legit without freedom of speech, because in that case people can be coerced or manipulated by those in power, without the opposition being able to fight back at all. How many people has Erdogan imprisoned? You also cannot attest the legitimacy of the vote when you don't have separation of power in the state, because you no longer have a functioning judicial branch.

All famous autocrats in history achieved power through popular support.

But here's where it actually hurts: it's easy to vote an autocrat into power, it's hard to vote him out.

Turkey's economy will suffer, tourism is already going down the drain, other countries will slow down trade with Turkey due to political instability. Erdogan, like all populists before him, will end up pushing more and more nationalistic messages, blaming the Occident for his own fuckups, threatening with conflict because that's what populists do when they lose support.

Either way, I'm fairly confident at this point to say that Turkey is no longer a democracy.

Who takes power? Does it create a vacuum? A civil war? I often ponder these "alternate history timelines" and try to imagine what the world might be like.

Now Erdogan - as a result of genuine democratic support- has gained enough power to make his move and has resolved to dismantle democracy and weaken certain factions in the Army to protect himself against any similar future coups.

Of course that means nothing other than "one specific liberal ex-pat Turk believe X was plausible" but it's one more data point.

However, for business interests, you simply can't ditch a country like Turkey[1]. Let's not forget that Bush's grandfather was also funding Nazi [2] (I would like to focus primarily on the years before Americans joined WW2, basically, before they "knew" that Nazis were not yet official enemies) and he earned a lot of money out of it.

Nowadays, a lot of companies do the same. And it will always be like this, unless such a country is recognized as an official "enemy" of the state, and you can't do business there.

So, we have already 1 reason that you simply can't stop communicating from the top.

Then, you have one more reason: immigrants.

Europe has a bunch of Turkish people which, it seems, helped a lot during the elections - in some cases (Holland, Austria, and Germany) the "YES" to the referendum got more than 60% (in some cases 68%). This opens up a whole new bunch of questions we should ask ourselves (and people actually do, at least in Europe):

- Why?

- Why did these people vote for YES?

- Don't these people value the freedom they have here (which they do have, unlike in the US - sorry guys, that's how we perceive it in Europe - where racism is much more common)?

Questions which raise another question:

- What did we as Europe (or West?) do wrong?

This is somehow connected to your sentence:

> We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

In my opinion there are too many things we did wrong and failed to do.

One thing is to have expectations. In Europe, I can tell you that before the Turkish referendum there were a lot of people, mostly reporters and journalists, going out asking such "pro-YES" voters (they were grouping together for propaganda or for any other reason) whether they actually were aware of what Erdogan wanted to achieve with this referendum. Obviously, nobody actually knew all the points in it. The journalist was mentioning each point, and their faces were like "uh?", while, of course, some of them were bitten by the strong cognitive dissonance: "no, but this is what media here say...", or "no, but it's not as bad as it seems".

This issue dates back to the beginning of immigration. People with low education came, and many of them simply didn't get further - meaning, 2nd, 3rd generations still striving to make it, or criminals, or simply living off of social money. Where can this lead to? Entire neighborhoods not accessible to the police, criminality rate super high, etc. People who cannot even talk the national language - forced, therefore, to watch their own news.

Another issue: double citizenship. What is that? You live here, but you still have a voice in your country. Sorry, but no. After X years, as an immigrant you get citizenship from the country you live/pay taxes in. Further, you are born in this country, eventually (in some countries when you are 18) you get this country's citizenship. That's it. Either that, or the old one. Both? No.

There is a sentence from a German author, Max Frisch, "We wanted a labour force, but human beings came" [3], which kind of explains what had really happened. And now? That's what we have. A huge mess, people creating parallel societies, and Erdogan that comes to Europe as a good politician to the majority of his people.

Why good politician? Well, want it or not, it seems that during Erdogan's administration, Turkey's economy got better. [4]

Does this justify the fact that this politician needs a crown and absolute power?

[1]: http://aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-companies-investing-in-tur... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl... [3]: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/735/3/the-end-of-mu... [4]: https://www.quora.com/Turkey-country-What-is-the-story-behin...

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/nordrhein-westfalen-po...

https://www.derwesten.de/politik/in-problemvierteln-fuerchte...

All these are areas where policemen are afraid to work because they may get suddenly surrounded by 40-50 people. It's true, you can still access them, but then it doesn't mean you get out easily, hence they are not accessible.

People react in fear and absolutes, but things are fixable.