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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

We'll see. Turkey seems to be more stable. Do we have any reason to believe the Turkish government will certainly be overthrown, aside from the affront to our collective geek prides?

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The Turkish military sees itself as the guardian of the Kemalist constitution and is unhappy with Erdogan.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Rising conflicts between popular groups would, if they seriously undermined Erdogan's claim to be in command of the country, provide a pretext for a coup.

This understanding is outdated. AKP has gutted the old secular military establishment and instituted reforms that no longer make this a realistic scenario.

"Gutted" seems strong to me: the military has lost its influence over the judiciary, but they are a very strong, well-funded and influential arm of the state, and they seem to be gaining some measure of public respect that they lost. I could be wrong, but I think the ethos of being guardians of the constitution is still there. (And, for its own reasons, the AKP has been stressing the possibility of a coup as a reason for weakening the army).

How realistic a scenario a coup is depends on just how messy the months ahead get, I think.

Nope, the military isn't as strong in Turkey as it used to be. Jailing a bunch of top generals will do that.

Twitter, Youtube (and Facebook) are beyond the geeks now. One could argue that today the most passionate users are non-geeks.

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