Election fever! I'm not really a political guy, but since Turkey's
magic elections are only a day away, I thought it would be a good idea to give this blog's foreign readers a brief photo-survey of the major parties involved. Welcome to the tangled world of Turkish politics, where the leftists act like rightists, the rightists act like rightists, and ersatz liberals defend ragheaded zealots...
Speaking of zealots, meet the AKP; the "Justice and Development Party". These guys are basically Machiavelian Islamists who use religion as a means to get more and more power, and in the last five years they have done everything in order to get more and more of it.
Many (but not most,) Turkish people hate them with a lust that cannot be written down in words, even though they have done some good things like stabilizing the economy, opening Turkey to foreign development and flirting with the E.U. This poster says "
Five years are not enough," but these jobless guys certainly seem to have had so.
CHP; the "Republican People's Party" is a strong centre-leftist party that is one of the AKP's biggest rivals. They see themselves as the vanguard of Turkey's secular/humanist ideals, which means that despite their inept leader, most people who don't lead lives as cattle will vote for them. Of course, such people may or may not be a majority in Turkey.
MHP; the "Nationalist Movement Party," is an even bigger challenger of the AKP since AKP's crazy populism, its pimp affair with the European Union, and the opening up of Turkish assets to foreign investment have ticked off many of Turkey's ultra-nationalists. There are real nazis among these guys, but I'd rather live under them than with the religious blightheads we have today. It's the lesser of two evils. Notice their slogan on the blue poster, which reads as "
One answer, against the whole world!"
A more low-key right wing party, the DP ("Democratic Party") used to be known as DYP ("The Right Way Party") until less than three months ago. They tried to make an alliance with a similar party called ANAP ("Motherland Party") that later spectacularly fell apart. Which is a pity since had it been realized, the Voltron-DP would have been a formidable opponent against the AKP. Here their poster challenges us with a question: "
To polarize? Or fraternize?" no doubt addressing the growing conflicts between the Kurds and the Turks, and the secular and religious masses.
Although the AKP are a bunch of zealots, they actually split off from an even more fanatical Islamist party back in 2001; the SP. ("The Felicity Party") In this election, however, they are actually a good element since their presence will cost votes to the AKP.
There was a time when leftism meant a reaction against nationalism, state dogmas and the like. But the leader of IP, Turkey's Workers' Party, breaks all stereotypes by acting like he's in the MHP (See above.) He's an ultra-rigid Kemalist, but also a socialist, but not like those godless commies because he also thinks that Mohammed was a socialist revolutionary. He's all for freedom of speech but he actively supports laws that make "insulting Turkishness" a crime. He also went to Switzerland to purposefully get charged by denying the Armenian genocide, and made a nationalist epic out of his trial.
More proper communists and angry college students can still vote for the TKP, the "Turkish Communist Party." Once persecuted by the government and enjoying the membership of intellectuals like Nazim Hikmet, now it exists as a political curiosity, more like a street poster art-gang than an actual party. Their leader once had grand plans like "not paying any of the country's debts to the imperialists" if they ever came to power.
This election will also be a big moment for independent regional candidates. There are many of them, ranging from Kurdish separatists in the east (who are not allowed to join parties,) to local business tycoons to odd leftist voices. One such candidate from the western half of Istanbul is Baskın Oran (his name literally means "dominant percentage" in Turkish,) a famous idealist who promises cherry-pink dreams such as "
Turks will love Kurds, Kurds will love Armenians, Armenians will love the Gypsies, the Gypsies the Circassians, the Circassians the Alevis, the Alevis the unemployed, the unemployed the homosexuals" as seen on this poster.
In theory this is fine, but in practice this twat will only waste away two-or-three thousand good votes that would be better off at the CHP, which defends roughly the same ideals. Too bad, since all the hot Cihangir and Bilgi University chicks will vote for him.
Besides them, there are also many other parties such as GP; the "Young Party", founded by Cem Uzan, (the Turkish equivalent of Rupert Murdoch) who managed to more than 7.5% of the votes vote in 90 days back in 2002,
the DTP; the "Democratic Society Party" that advocates Kurdish secession under the veil of "democracy,"
the BBP, the "Great Union Party" which is made up of ultra-nationalist thugs, some of whom were among the murderers of Hrant Dink, and so on.
Actually,
here is a more complete list. This photo shows the banner of a very obscure party called "The People's Rising Party." I don't have a clue on who their leaders, or what their plans are like.
Of course, you must never forget the Apoliticals, some of whom will not interrupt their precious summer vacations in order to vote. Yet other losers actually think it is cool not to vote because, like,
no one represents them. I wonder if such fuckwits realize how hard people have struggled in every country to be able to vote equally.
Here, Doritos ads mock the election by asking "
Where's the Party?" Yeah dudes, just keep on rocking and leave the voting to the un-cool.
Despite everything, Turkey is preparing for not only the most pivotal, but also the most colorful election in her recent history. With even the smallest stickers on street corners turning into a battleground for different ideologies, who knows what tomorrow will bring?
PS: This was obviously not a comprehensive nor an objective survey, but I hope it helps you get a grip on what's going on down here.
UPDATE!Tha AKP won this election with a crushing %47 of all votes, so
geçmiş olsun (get well soon) to everyone watching.
Boink! Even street-art critters in Turkey are tainted with a bit of nationalism.
You can still see this sticker at the notorious "street art corner" in Cihangir. Local viewers will doubtlessly be able to identify its exact location.
Speaking of street art, here is Mr. Blumbo! There are still many Blumbos left in Istanbul and Athens... Could you find them all, dear readers?
Two local millipedes I collected for Professor Zoltan Korsos from Hungary. Make no mistake, I don't enjoy killing animals and it was extremely painful to watch them struggle as the helpless creatures drowned in alcohol. I am only collecting them since there is a slight chance that some millipedes in my garden might represent undescribed species.
Beautiful Thessaloniki! Here is a small collection of random shots from my visit to this city last year. I stayed for one night at this cheap hotel, only to move out immediately after discovering that it was mostly used for prostitution.
A couple in traditional Pontiac costumes pose in a rally to remember the "Pontic Genocie", a collection of massacres and Christian-Moslem clashes at the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Was this an actual genocide like the Armenian one? Or was it a bloody, guerilla civil war between two different ethnicities inhabiting the same place? Perhaps historians can know better.
A gallant statue of Alexander the Great dominates the waterfront of Thessaloniki, a city which actually didn't exist when he was alive.
I took a walk out in my garden last night to look for millipedes. I couldn't find any, but instead I ran into a whole bunch of other critters...
I saw small slugs...
...as well as this polka-dotted monster that was as long as my index finger. Mr. Ümit Kebapçı has identified the first slug as a Deroceras, while the spotty giant is possibly a Limax maxiumus. Thank you so much!
I also saw this huge Helix Aspersa snail.
This tiny Cyrtopodion kotschyi gecko is very peculiar because unlike the majority of gecko species, it lacks ahedsive pads on its toes. (Compare it with pictures of other geckos I posted earlier.) Instead, it manages to hold on to walls with zig-zag kinks on its fingers. I wonder if they belong to a more "primitive" lineage than other geckos, or if they have secondarily lost their finger-pads.
You viewers are probably saturated with photos of all the green toads (Bufo viridis) I keep finding everywhere, but who could resist such cute things? I placed a small lacewing in front of this frog, and he ate it without thinking twice. It happened so fast that I couldn't take a picture.
Of course, frogs should better watch out for hedgehogs (Erinaceus concolor) like these. These spiny animals have been getting more and more common around where I live, possibly because they keep having sex all the time.
Drinking in the streets is an universal phenomenon, especially when the weather is suffocatingly hot. These examples are from Athens.
Election fever! After last week's huge post about political parties, here are some pictures from the fateful election that rocked the nation on the 22nd of July. Voting takes place in schools, here is the view from the one on our street.
We got into one of the classes to see hastily-constructed "voting chambers" made out of desks and chairs. Behind the "chamber" you can see one of the "Life of Kemal Ataturk" posters that are a staple fixture in every Turkish school.
The huge vote sheet was made even larger with the participation of hundreds of independent candidates. Each one of those unmarked circles you see represents one of those hopeful participants. Besides them, there are eleven proper parties. You have only one choice.
After making your choice, you fold up the huge voting sheet and put it in the dirt-yellow envelope. The envelope then goes into one of these boxes. Counting all the votes used to take days, but this time it was all over in a matter of hours, thanks to a newly computerized vote-counting system.
This group of friendly volunteers helped with the voting process...
...and later on, marked our fingers with permanent ink to make sure we didn't cast another vote.
Although the practice of finger-marking is sometimes condemned as being de-humanizing and paranoid, I see it more like a sign of prestige. I didn't slack off at a beach and voted, and I have the markings to prove it!
In the end, however, none of this mattered. I voted for the center-leftist CHP, but the conservatives at AKP won a staggering victory by getting 48 percent of the votes, mostly due to their success at stabilizing the economy and reforms in health care, free housing and so on. Life goes on...
A cute little chapel in Ampelokipos, Athens. It now stands next to a gigantic supermarket.
This strange green spider and a mysterious "larva" fell out of a bag of nuts I was eating with my sister.
Here is green-spider-friend, with a haze of spike-like hairs. I cannot identify exactly what he is, aside from placing him in the crab spider family, Thomisidae. Mr. Ümit Kurt says that it is a Heriaeus hirtus. Thanks again!
And here is "the larva." Perhaps it will grow up to be some sort of beetle, but I am clueless about his origins too. I think he might be feeding on the nuts somehow. Can anyone help?
I changed the light tubes on Igor's terrarium today so his pad is all nice and shiny, bathed in beneficial UV light. He only goes there to sleep of course, I usually keep him loose in my room during the hot summer.
An old building in Cihangir is burning down in a horrifying blaze, as seen from the other side of the Golden Horn. Another beautiful structure, gone forever.
When I was in Athens, I saw these huge protests against the ineptitude of the local government, who watched some of the city's last forests burn for six days without taking action. I can say these were the most peaceful and tear-gas-free demonstrations I've seen in the Greek capital for a long time.
Poor guy, he was delirious on drugs and possibly homeless... Behind him you can see one of the ubiquitous mini-buses native to Istanbul.
Would you rather stay at Hotel Sudan, in Athens?...
...or at the glorious Hotel Libya, in Istanbul? These two fine establishments once again prove that hotels named after messed-up countries... always charge by the hour.
I saw this strange millipede the previous night on my porch. It didn't look or act at all like the blunt, thick, darker ones I see everyday, so I took it inside for a quick photo-shoot.
Here, he is walking on the biblical landscape of my bed. Notice how its body tapers like a cone towards his head, and how he holds the first 5-6 pairs of his legs off the ground when walking.
Suddenly, he stopped as if something was wrong. Then, in a moment that will haunt me as long as I live, that thing turned his head completely backwards and started licking himself. I didn't know millipedes could do that!
Here is a close up of its eerily insect-like head as it cleans itself. (This reminds me of the Arthropod head problem.)
Blumbomen! Blumbomen! Blumbomen! After more than a month of non-stop work, the copies of my first album are ready for distribution! Click here to hear some of the songs!
Happy customers. Who are they? Meet Nektarios and Constantinos of the Vinyl Microstore in Athens!
We made these Blumbomen plushies to market my album. If you go to the store, Green Blumbomen can show you an exciting secret thing he hides in his pants!
Remember, Vinyl Microstore is at number 34 Didotou street, near Exarcheia, Athens! Grab your copy of the fabulous "Kamon Blumbomen" before they run out! The CD's have two songs and a special-edition poster you won't see on myspace!
Election fever! I'm not really a political guy, but since Turkey's magic elections are only a day away, I thought it would be a good idea to give this blog's foreign readers a brief photo-survey of the major parties involved. Welcome to the tangled world of Turkish politics, where the leftists act like rightists, the rightists act like rightists, and ersatz liberals defend ragheaded zealots...
Speaking of zealots, meet the AKP; the "Justice and Development Party". These guys are basically Machiavelian Islamists who use religion as a means to get more and more power, and in the last five years they have done everything in order to get more and more of it.
CHP; the "Republican People's Party" is a strong centre-leftist party that is one of the AKP's biggest rivals. They see themselves as the vanguard of Turkey's secular/humanist ideals, which means that despite their inept leader, most people who don't lead lives as cattle will vote for them. Of course, such people may or may not be a majority in Turkey.
MHP; the "Nationalist Movement Party," is an even bigger challenger of the AKP since AKP's crazy populism, its pimp affair with the European Union, and the opening up of Turkish assets to foreign investment have ticked off many of Turkey's ultra-nationalists. There are real nazis among these guys, but I'd rather live under them than with the religious blightheads we have today. It's the lesser of two evils. Notice their slogan on the blue poster, which reads as "One answer, against the whole world!"
A more low-key right wing party, the DP ("Democratic Party") used to be known as DYP ("The Right Way Party") until less than three months ago. They tried to make an alliance with a similar party called ANAP ("Motherland Party") that later spectacularly fell apart. Which is a pity since had it been realized, the Voltron-DP would have been a formidable opponent against the AKP. Here their poster challenges us with a question: "To polarize? Or fraternize?" no doubt addressing the growing conflicts between the Kurds and the Turks, and the secular and religious masses.
Although the AKP are a bunch of zealots, they actually split off from an even more fanatical Islamist party back in 2001; the SP. ("The Felicity Party") In this election, however, they are actually a good element since their presence will cost votes to the AKP.
There was a time when leftism meant a reaction against nationalism, state dogmas and the like. But the leader of IP, Turkey's Workers' Party, breaks all stereotypes by acting like he's in the MHP (See above.) He's an ultra-rigid Kemalist, but also a socialist, but not like those godless commies because he also thinks that Mohammed was a socialist revolutionary. He's all for freedom of speech but he actively supports laws that make "insulting Turkishness" a crime. He also went to Switzerland to purposefully get charged by denying the Armenian genocide, and made a nationalist epic out of his trial.
More proper communists and angry college students can still vote for the TKP, the "Turkish Communist Party." Once persecuted by the government and enjoying the membership of intellectuals like Nazim Hikmet, now it exists as a political curiosity, more like a street poster art-gang than an actual party. Their leader once had grand plans like "not paying any of the country's debts to the imperialists" if they ever came to power.
This election will also be a big moment for independent regional candidates. There are many of them, ranging from Kurdish separatists in the east (who are not allowed to join parties,) to local business tycoons to odd leftist voices. One such candidate from the western half of Istanbul is Baskın Oran (his name literally means "dominant percentage" in Turkish,) a famous idealist who promises cherry-pink dreams such as "Turks will love Kurds, Kurds will love Armenians, Armenians will love the Gypsies, the Gypsies the Circassians, the Circassians the Alevis, the Alevis the unemployed, the unemployed the homosexuals" as seen on this poster.
Besides them, there are also many other parties such as GP; the "Young Party", founded by Cem Uzan, (the Turkish equivalent of Rupert Murdoch) who managed to more than 7.5% of the votes vote in 90 days back in 2002,
Of course, you must never forget the Apoliticals, some of whom will not interrupt their precious summer vacations in order to vote. Yet other losers actually think it is cool not to vote because, like, no one represents them. I wonder if such fuckwits realize how hard people have struggled in every country to be able to vote equally.
Despite everything, Turkey is preparing for not only the most pivotal, but also the most colorful election in her recent history. With even the smallest stickers on street corners turning into a battleground for different ideologies, who knows what tomorrow will bring?
