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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Hm... but still buy iPhones and other cheap Chinese stuff? Seems like a very intellectually dishonest proposition (edit: to clarify: as China is no more free than Turkey)...

In addition, if we've learned anything from the past decade, it's that economic problems breed political instability. So maybe Turkish population is better off (in the long run) if we support them economically.

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> Hm... but still buy iPhones and other cheap Chinese stuff? Seems like a very intellectually dishonest proposition...

I honestly don't think that boycotting a country or company for reason x can be called "dishonest". Where did you read that I encouraged people to by iPhones and "other cheap Chinese stuff". Hint: I haven't.

"Economic problems breed political instability..." - yes, but popular/populist political systems seem to also breed these economic problems. A strategy for leadership is to stop trying to align with any economic theory ( such as it is ) and appeal to popular discontent based on one or more fallacies in economics, or abandon any pretensions to that and use something else to gain power.

Isn't this essentially the Arab Spring come to Turkey? In that case, the democratizing influence of the Web and smartphones seems a critical element.

We, the oh-so-enlightened in the US face a 2% growth target and can't maintain that. Kemalism in Turkey was stable for a long time, but is now at risk.

Perhaps your parent feels like they owe more to Turkey, or that their choices have more influence in Turkey, which is a far smaller country than China?

The US Too.

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