Vox Sentences: There’s a coup underway in Turkey

What the hell is going on in Turkey, explained.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

(Attempted) Coup!

Sinan Yiter/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• A coup attempt is currently underway in Turkey.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• According to a statement read over the air of Turkey's state-run TV station (before it was shut down), the coup is being undertaken in the name of the "Council for Peace in the Homeland." It's not known which, or how many, leaders and members of the military the "Council" represents.

  [FT / Mehul Srivastava, Laura Pitel, David O’Byrne, Funja Guler, and Demetri Sevastopulo ]

• Turkey has had a handful of coups before. The military sees itself as upholding a tradition bestowed on it by Kemal Ataturk (founder of modern Turkey) himself: to protect democracy (the military often cedes power to a democratic leader) and fend off Islamism.

  [WSJ / Dion Nissenbaum]

• In this case, the coup was likely a strike against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who's become an increasingly authoritarian figure in recent years.

  [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

• As of this writing, Erdogan's location is unknown. There are reports that he is on a plane looking for a safe harbor, after having been rejected for asylum in Germany. Ironically, Turkey and Germany have been in a fight over the past several months over what to do with Syrian refugees.

  [James Smart via Twitter]

• There are 2.5 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, and most of them are living in camps that probably need a functioning central government to thrive.

  [FT / Kerin Hope]

• Erdogan made a statement to the people of Turkey via FaceTime, which is either a statement to the power of technology or a bitter irony (since Erdogan himself was known for cracking down on social media access after emergencies).

  [The Independent (UK)]

• He attributed the coup to "Gulenists" — a faction within the Turkish "deep state" with ties to a former leader currently living in the Poconos. (Then again, Erdogan is not a reliable source of information about the origins of the coup attempting to depose him.)

  [New Yorker / Dexter Filkins]

• The US has issued a statement urging "restraint" on all sides. But if the coup succeeds, it's entirely possible that the US won't risk much to protect Erdogan — especially because he's been such an irascible ally.

  [AEI / Michael Rubin]

• Some analysts, however, are predicting that without support from key sectors of government, the coup attempt will fail on its own.

  [Max Fisher via Twitter]

Oh, goody, Mike Pence!

Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

• Donald Trump officially picked Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. Who is Mike Pence? Glad you asked.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The short answer is that he's a generic Republican. He made a name for himself early in his career as a conservative bomb thrower but has since settled into something of an elder statesman, calm-hand-on-the-rudder persona.

  [Newsweek / Matthew Cooper]

• Another way to put that is that he's a total rejection of Trumpism. He hews to Republican orthodoxy in all the places Trump rejects it, particularly on social issues (unsurprisingly, he backed Ted Cruz in the primary).

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• He doesn't even believe in winning! (I (Dara) am not kidding. Pence in 1991: "Third, and very much last, campaigns should be about winning.")

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• This is great news for Hillary Clinton, who now gets to unleash all her boilerplate on Republican "extremism" that she couldn't already use on Trump.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• It might be terrible news for Donald Trump, not least because it's easy to see Pence straight-up boring his new running mate. (Rumors swirled Friday that Trump called his advisers at midnight Thursday and asked if it was too late to renege on Pence.)

  [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]

• Judging by the official campaign logo released Friday, though, Trump and Pence are certainly ... entwined. Yeah, we'll go with "entwined" there.

  [NPR / Sam Sanders]

Nice starts to bounce back

David Ramos/Getty Images

• France is coping with the aftermath of yesterday's truck attack in Nice, which left 84 dead.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson, Zack Beauchamp, and Tara Golshan]

• The perpetrator (who was killed during the attack) has been identified as Tunisian national Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

  [BBC]

• Bouhlel was unknown to French intelligence before the attack. Indeed, while French President François Hollande emphasized the "terroristic character" of Bouhlel's attack, what's known about him suggests more of a delinquent criminal than an ideological martyr.

  [Daily Mail / Nick Fagge]

• The attack in Nice, after attacks in Paris and Brussels within the past year, has some European leaders talking about terrorism as a "new normal" — a situation more similar to Israel than to the Europe of the past.

  [Reuters / Alastair Macdonald]

• But getting used to terrorism isn't as bad an idea as it sounds. "Resilience" — the ability to resist changing one's life and society as a response to terrorist attacks — is usually a pretty good way to keep the terrorists, as it were, from winning.

  [Brookings Institution / Daniel L. Byman]

MISCELLANEOUS

Ducklings: smarter than we thought. [NYT / Steph Yin]

• This delightful short film highlights the behind-the-scenes gear necessary to make stop-motion animation work.

  [Sploid / Andrew Liszewski]

• Waze, but for cars that don't have drivers.

  [Washington Post / Brian Fung]

• A modest proposal: Why not reduce deaths from deer-on-car collisions by unleashing cougars to kill the deer? Then when the cougars become a problem, unleash Chinese needle snakes…

  [EurekAlert!]

• States with legal medical marijuana see drastically fewer prescriptions for painkillers and other prescription drugs. That's one reason the pharmaceutical industry is not excited about marijuana legalization at all.

  [Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

VERBATIM

"Because of proprietary reasons, we are unable to elaborate on the size of Peanut Butter M&M's." [Mars Chocolate North America to NPR / David Kestenbaum]

• "I’m not a nationalist, and I don’t agree that my moral obligation to the least fortunate is greater if that person happens to live just inside rather than outside my country’s border. To me, just because humanity has failed to make a global social contract doesn’t give the local contract more moral weight."

  [Chris Blattman]

• "The New Ghostbusters Didn't Ruin My Childhood Because That's Not How the Progression of Time Works."

  [Gizmodo / Matt Novak]

• "Mona is such a cold-blooded boss queen that she inserted herself into someone else's homicide for, like, recreational and mystery-solving reasons only she will ever understand. She's like someone with OCD who has to straighten a crooked picture frame on the wall, but for murder."

  [NY Mag / Jessica Goldstein]

• "Only 80 or so years ago, The New York Times published an article that, to make a point about how radically Americans’ eating habits were changing, imagined a 'hodge-podge' of 'strange dishes' that a family at the time could plausibly plop on the dinner table next to each other, no matter how objectionable such a spread may have seemed. Those strange dishes? Spaghetti, meatballs, corn on the cob, sauerkraut, fruit salad, and apple pie. Yesterday’s strange hodgepodge is today’s boring dinner."

  [The Atlantic / Joe Pinsker]

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Eadweard Muybridge