Some of my friends no doubt only know of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan through my frequent referrals to him as a traitor.

In Turkey, it’s the army’s responsibility to remove anyone who endangers or opposes secularism from public service.  This gives them one of the best political structures in the history of the world.  But things have been getting lax and Erdogan, a sometimes jailed religious guy, has been allowed to sit in power for a couple years now.

Horrific.

Then this fear started popping up that he’d become president.  I shit myself with disappointment when I heard about it.  But now I find myself unshitting myself a bit, (slightly, not the whole way, but a bit).

It now looks like he won’t be seeking the position, but that he’s going to back his Foreign Minister Gul for the position.  As far as I knew, this was great news.  Great. 
Gul isn’t into religion in politics, and likes the EU.  He’s done plenty of non-dickish things.  I don’t particularly like him, but I don’t think he’s a traitor who the army should take out.

But now I read that he’s maybe not what he seems. His wife wears religious garb for instance, which isn’t his fault, but it’s totally unthinkable that she’d be allowed into  the Presidential Palace in that shit.  People also think he might just be laying low with the religious sentiment, and anyway, at the core of it, he’s not an atheist and has no place in Turkish politics, or politics anywhere. 

Turkey has a lot of problems, just like shitty shitty France, but they’ve both been ahead of the rest of the world in their secularism.  Now we see them both drifting into shit.  I don’t generally get all depressed about the state of the world and how everything’s supposed to suck, but this is the sort of stuff that brings me down. 

This is pre-Enlightenment stuff.  Unless people are willing to lay it all on the line to protect the Enlightenment we’re fucked.  (I’m not sure what I’m asking peopel to do, it’s very early in the morning and I just found out something amazing that I’m putting in my next blog post, which maybe makes the whole problem of Enlightenment vs. Monsters irrelevant.)

A friend of mine and I were lamenting the lack of animal fights in Toronto after I read somewhere that the future of the Bullfight was “up in the air” in Spain.

We listed off some of the best animal sports we knew of, from tying a bear to a pole and letting dogs attack it (the one good thing to come out of Russia), to putting a duck in a box with a hole in it and poking it with a stick incessantly throughout a wedding (it’s a German thing). The sad truth of it all is that all these pleasures are illegal in Canada.

I think.

Which makes me more and more want to live on a giant yacht in international waters where I can addict kittens to cocaine and make them fight for it. It seems like international waters, Vegas, and Dubai are the only places left in the world where you can have both effective plumbing and the opportunity to do things that you enjoy. Also maybe Indian reserves. (Though I suspect they don’t want to get as identified with animal “cruelty” as they are with gambling and cheap cigarettes.)

I wish writing my MP would have some effect. I know all that talk of how they treat each letter as if it were worth 1000 people or something, but it just seems impossible, even if everyone I knew got together and wrote to our MP, that it would make any difference.

I suppose our only hope, as usual, is a military coup, which has been a long time coming anyway.

Technorati: animal cruelty, bear fight, kittens, vegas, international waters, canada, bullfighting, military coup