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Bulletins and News Discussion from May 29th to June 4th, 2023 - Not Erdogone Yet

Erdogan has won the election with 52% of the vote, with a voter turnout of 85%, winning five more years as president.

Naked Capitalism's diagnosis of Kilicdaroglu's failure is that he had to somehow simultaneously keep pro-KPDP voters on board and also attract voters of nationalist candidates from the first round, and was unable to square that circle.

Erdogan's party has lost seats in the parliament as nationalist parties have outflanked him on refugee issues - and even Kilicdaroglu couldn't seem to move against that tide, as he called for the urgent expulsion of 10 million refugees. The Nationalist Movement Party is now at 10.4% in the parliament, a party with ties to the Grey Wolves. Far right parties got more than 30% of the parliamentary vote. The left was unable to capture enough voters who have suffered in the economic crisis, with inflation rates have sharply risen far above even Europe's, and these voters instead went down the "blame my problems on refugees" path.

As a silver lining to this shitstain, this does at least mean that any hopes by NATO that Turkey will move towards the West more are probably dashed. This isn't to say that Erdogan will scorn the West - far from it, in fact, he let Finland in to NATO and will probably let Sweden in - but the :both-sides: strategy will continue, for better and worse, and if you aren't with the West, then you are against them.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.

This week's first update is here in the comments.

This week's second update is here in the comments.

This week's third update is here in the comments.

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  • Editing again because this came off as way too reddit bazinga brained and I apologize.

    ~~Uh, you do know that water doesn't have to be a liquid, right? It has been hypothesized (very believably, scientifically) for a while that there could be massive amounts of water ice on the moon, particularly in the bottoms of craters that never get sunlight. Not only has it now been confirmed there is some there, but even in sunlit areas clinging to dust. Hell, there's good evidence of water ice deposits on Mercury. ~~

    That doesn't mean that mining anything on the moon is anything but a pipe dream that might only come true with the concerted effort of a communist superpower.

    Edit 1: If I misunderstood and you mean we have plenty of water on Earth, so it's not a rare resource we need to bring back... Well, sure. But if we are going to get anything else from the moon, even in a pipe dream scenario, or if we're going to use it as a launching platform to explore the rest of the solar system, we're going to need there to be large amounts of water already there. The bazinga part is the idea that we're anywhere near being able to do that, not the presence or importance of water on the moon.

    • Well I am definitely ignorant on the issue of extraterrestrial mining but I'm not saying there isn't water of some kind on the moon. I'm questioning that there are strategic water resourcs on the moon that are worth a rocket trip back and forth. I can at least imagine, if only intuitively and not intellectually, that it would be interesting to look for mineral resources outside of Earth. For both economic and environmental reasons. But water? On that front the focus should be on keeping our water cycles from breaking down too hard from Climate Change.

      I'd imagine that the strategic value of water on the moon would only come into play when you're actually colonizing it, which feeds back to how nobody is keeping anyone from seizing the moon because nobody is doing that still. China's moon base 5 year plan not withstanding.

      • I did misunderstand you and edited my above comment (I tried to do it preemptively but literally saw your reply come through as I hit 'save' lol).

        On that front the focus should be on keeping our water cycles from breaking down too hard from Climate Change.

        Totally agree. But like I said in the edit, if (still a big if) we're going to get anything worthwhile and longterm done on the moon such as mining, colonization, or a base for further exploration, the water there is almost certainly going to be the primary resource that will allow that to happen.

        • sorry yeah i'm kinda bored and doing nothing atm

          now i'm thinking of the image pollution of the moon when we create the everlasting mineral processing sea. hopefully the sino-american consortium that does it will be nice and make a happy face with it.

          • Nothing to apologize for. You were pretty much right on, I just misunderstood.

            Future lunar face: :desolate:

            It really is a strange double edged sword for me, having thought of people going "beyond Earth" for so long as this grand and beautiful expression of the drive to explore and being truly aspirational for humanity. But then learning about actual history and the current trajectory and purpose of it just being more exploitation. Endless fucking exploitation. It poisons it. (I hope not literally in the future).

            Reminds me of the "joke" about Navajo giving the lunar landing missions a message to leave on the moon in their language but not being willing to translate it until after it was left there. "Don't believe these white men. They come only to take your land."

          • Assuming of course we don't Fermi-paradox ourselves, I'm betting that the asteroid 16 Psyche is going to be the mining capital of the solar system in a hundred years or so, rather than the Moon. All the evidence so far indicates that the asteroid belt is the remains of a planet that started to form but broke apart, and that Psyche is the exposed metal core of that protoplanet. Not made of standard metal ores, but actual metals refined naturally by the core formation process, and rich in the densest ones. NASA is planning a robotic mission to orbit it, due to arrive in 2029.

            • and that Psyche is the exposed metal core of that protoplanet

              that sounds to me, a dumbass, already more resources than we would know what to do with. potentially anyway. this makes me feel that I had certain underlying assumptions about the solar system that underestimate it. maybe it's something to do with media taking us to interstellar scale with no care for the implications. but if stuff like this exists in the neighborhood, well, just the wealth of our star system seems absurd beyond belief.

              • You ain't no dumbass, you're absolutely right. Assuming the current science is correct, it's a ridiculously huge amount of resources. And it's all the best stuff that is a pain to launch from Earth into orbit. I think asteroid mining is a pretty dumb idea for supplying Earth industries, but it's a fantastic way to supply space industries without need to launch ridiculous amounts of bulk metals in rockets. Psyche is also in a sweet spot in the solar system. It's got an almost circular orbit around the Sun, which for a lot of reasons makes it relatively easy to get to and from (by interplanetary-travel standards, anyway). It's close enough to the Sun for solar power to still be practical. And it's surface gravity is only about 1.5% of Earth.

                There's another theory that it's a regular rocky asteroid that had liquid iron volcanoes which created the very radar-reflective surface when the molten iron cooled, but there's just plain old rock underneath. But until the probe mission gets there we just won't know.

                And yeah, there's a bonkers amount of resources out there. For example it's looking more and more like finding water on Mars, in the form of ice, is just a matter of picking a random location and digging down a few metres. There's a subsurface glacier in Utopia Planitia (which is a real part of Mars, not just a Star Trek thing) that has more water than Lake Superior here on Earth.

                • I think asteroid mining is a pretty dumb idea for supplying Earth industries, but it’s a fantastic way to supply space industries without need to launch ridiculous amounts of bulk metals in rockets.

                  I get that the focus of space exploitation would be to make space exploration in itself viable. Ie industries based on asteroid mining that can keep these missions working on their own. But would there truly be no means to supply Earth with materials from space?

                  Of course nobody is gonna mine iron or aluminum from an asteroid and move it to Shenzhen. But what if the industrial complexes themselves are in orbit? We'd supply those with resources exploited from space, and then send them down. The idea being a Garden Earth where we don't need to exploit the seas and the ground for minerals, only maintaining our agricultural outputs. I'd imagine we'll still be dealing with the problems of chemical pollution past the 2100s. Off-orbitting industry could be a thing.

                  I guess what I'm really asking is wether a space elevator is a dumb idea or not.

615 comments