On this day in 2013, Turkish protesters began occupying Gezi Park to oppose its demolition, an act with led to widespread protests and strikes with approximately 3,500,000 participants, 22 deaths, and more than 8,000 injuries.
The wave of civil unrest across Turkey began after the park occupation was violently evicted by police, who used to tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons to try and break up the protests, injuring more than one hundred people and hospitalizing a journalist.
The protest quickly grew in size - by May 31st, 10,000 gathered in Istiklal Avenue. In June, the protests became national in scope and transcended any particular demographic or political ideology. Among the wide range of concerns brought by protesters were issues of freedom of the press, expression, and assembly, as well as the alleged political Islamist government's erosion of Turkey's secularism.
Millions of Turkish football fans, normally divided by intense sports rivalry, marched in unity against the government. Protesters displayed symbols the environmentalist movement, rainbow banners, depictions of Che Guevara, different trade unions, and the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan.
On June 4th, Taksim Dayanışması (Taksim Solidarity) issued a set of demands that included the preservation of Gezi Park, an end to police violence, the right to freedom of assembly, and an end to the privatization of public spaces. Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç met the group on June 5th and rejected these demands.
Erdoğan blamed the protests on "internal traitors and external collaborators", demonizing his political opposition as the former. Despite the popular mobilization, Erdoğan remained in power and no major concessions were won from the government.
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I think I've posted about this before, but the Knives Out movies fit within this paradigm of movies that I think exists where the movies are decently fun on the first watch but are largely insubstantial and there's nothing to really think about, movies that if they'd been made 15 or 20 years ago would've been entirely forgotten about after the end of their theatrical run, even if you'd seen them you wouldn't chance to think about them again unless you happened to catch them on cable, but now, because movies seem to be on the whole worse and unhealthy somehow compared to where we were (I assume because of streaming or the slow decline of movie theaters) these sorts of little-to-offer films sit at the center of a permanent discourse as if they are the great films of our time.
Then again, maybe if we'd had Twitter in 2005 we'd still be talking about fucking Wedding Crashers.
Wait, people are still talking about these movies? I enjoyed them, I'll watch any more that get made (Daniel Craig's accent is so, so funny), but you're extremely right that they're shallow. They're fun, amusing slop, but that's it, really. They're neat little whodunnit's with fairly satisfying conclusions. They're Hercule Poirot for people who will never read Agatha Christie. They're good at what they do, but I can't imagine giving either of them a rewatch, really. Not now that I know the twists.
I rewatched cuz i forgor