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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

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Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#201

Post by vinay427 »

kyriakos wrote: post #151
agumonkey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should stop communicating from the top. Many problems right now are because heads of state, not necessarily people. Erdogan, Putin ... We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

Erdogan was democratically elected. He's not a dictator (even if he does act as one at this point) and judging from the referendum results, at least half of Turks seem to like his direction. It's easy to say those voters are uneducated or misguided but the fact is that this is how democracy works. Where I am going with this is that we should not blame just the leader but also the people who put him there.

Blaming misguided voters only has merit when freedom of the press is available and people have access to news that does not have significant pro-government bias. Turkey was ranked #155 out of #180 evaluated countries on this year's RSF list [1]. If the government controls the information that the people have access to, it is a little difficult to expect a legitimate democracy, which requires more than simply valid elections.

[1]: https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#202

Post by Epokhe »

mino wrote: post #165
sorenjan wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real people rarely want war, they all want the same basic things: food and shelter, a good future for their kids, and to live in peace. This is universal over the whole world, unless they've had their minds poisoned by leaders with their own agendas, be it political or religious. However, most people also don't really care that much about other people, especially in other countries. So they elect people to handle tha…

> More than 63% voted yes in Germany for instance. I also was baffled about the results of the Turkish vote abroad. How is it possible that, in many EU states, they won which such a majority? I would have expected expats to be generally more liberal/globalist/progressive.

Just want to point out that majority of Turks in Germany(and some other EU states) are labourer immigrants that went there during 1960-1980. If you take United States instead where the Turks living there belong to a more elite class, you will see significantly more no vote. It seems expats are divided in terms of world view according to where they live.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#203

Post by cryptarch »

Totally agree. Have a look at some controversial pages if you've never encountered one, like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment

I'm triggered so here's my soapbox:

Wikipedia currently undermines the idea that human beings have a sex that is grounded in biological reality, and pushes the notion of "sex assigned at birth", the unreality of biological sex and the reality of transgenderism as non-mental-illness while it is a debilitating condition that often results in suicide, along with ideas like that gender reassignment surgery is not mutilation while it does for instance include (in the case of MTF surgeries) full castration and results in infertility.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#204

Post by fulafel »

ardaozkal wrote: post #189
fulafel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voters elected and support an autocratic leader, however wonderful people they may be. It's not just about Erdogan.

Reposting my comment from another place here, as it kinda applies to this too, especially the second sentence: > Every single billboard and half the TV ads before referendum were ads telling people to vote "yes". > People didn't even know what they were voting for.

But they voted him many times before, it was apparent where he was heading.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#205

Post by isostatic »

ardaozkal wrote: post #181
hollander wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it seems the majority is not that big. He won by a small margin, while controlling all the media. If it had been a true free election, I bet he would have lost this referendum. And if you look at the demographics, people in cities voted against, countryside pro. Turkish people living abroad voted pro Erdogan. I bet most of those people came from the countryside in Turkey.

> while controlling all the media It's much, much more than that. Every single billboard and half the TV ads before referendum were ads telling people to vote "yes". People didn't even know what they were voting for.

People trust him. He provides "Stong and Stable Leadership", he's built roads and delivered on his promises.

He then says "I need you to vote for this to give me extraordinary powers", and people trust him - especially as the opposition is in disarray

Hopefully people will see this for what it is and not vote Tory on June 8th.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#206

Post by Altay- »

denzil_correa wrote: post #120
beloch wrote: post #31

I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems…

> Turkey is nothing like the common stereotypes we have of it in the West From what I see, there are two Turkeys - the liberal Turkey which resides in cities like Izmir and the conservative ones which come from places like Bursa or Gaziantep. Currently, there are fewer liberal Turks than the conservative ones. > People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime On this point, I've alwa…

>From what I see, there are two Turkeys - the liberal Turkey which resides in cities like Izmir and the conservative ones which come from places like Bursa or Gaziantep. Currently, there are fewer liberal Turks than the conservative ones.

The people you think are liberal are anything but. They used military might to maintain control since the founding of the Republic. They have never won a single election. Every free election has gone to the conservative/Islamist parties. Until AKP in 2002, those parties were all removed by the military. Sometimes their leaders got executed in the process.

So if you want to know why the PEOPLE support Erdogan, its because the alternative to an Islamic Democrat isn't a Western Liberal Democrat. It's a secular Dictator like Assad/Saddam/Al-Sisi

If you think (half-halfheartedly) blocking random websites and a few dozen journalists in prison is bad, why don't you do some research on what life was like when the secular Turks ruled (CHP) Here's a few fun facts:

-Calling yourself a Kurd got you jailed.

-Speaking Kurdish was a crime.

-Having foreign currency in your pocket landed you in jail.

-Standard Old Socialist Econ Policies: Price Controls, High Tariffs, long lines for Butter, coupons for food, etc.

-Couldn't wear headscarf to school/court/etc.

-A female MP who wore her headscarf to parliament was arrested, stripped of her Turkish Citizenship, and exiled.

I could go on, but the point is: Zero freedom of expression or religion in Turkey when the 'liberal' Turks were in charge.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#207

Post by isostatic »

avaika wrote: post #139
tim333 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime I think people in the West who follow these things pretty much uniformly dislike Erdogan and his throwing the journalists in jail type activities but the Turks vote for him. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about it.

> but the Turks vote for him. "Vote". I'm not quite sure about Turks, but in Russia "vote" is a fake. As Stalin once said "It's not about who votes, it's all about who counts the votes". There were always way too many violations in the vote process. e.g. people who voted multiple times, militaries who were forced to vote in the right way. God damn it, even 146% of a votes sum translated on federal TV channels [1]. No…

Much of the urban population rose up in support of Erdogan during the attempted coup.

And I agree with the brainwashing, we have that in the uk right now

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#209

Post by mk89 »

agumonkey wrote: post #98
sorenjan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people care, but what are we supposed to do about it? Here in Europe Erdogan makes the headlines from time to time, right before the referendum he made several speeches where he called the politicians of multiple countries "descendants of nazis" and similar. Everybody knows that he cares more about suppressing the Kurds than ISIS. He holds Europe hostage by threatening to release large amounts of refugees i…

I think we should stop communicating from the top. Many problems right now are because heads of state, not necessarily people. Erdogan, Putin ... We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

I agree with you that we should stop communicating from the top - and this is what some politicians tried to do (at least what some European politicians did, like the Dutch ones before the elections, when things escalated).

However, for business interests, you simply can't ditch a country like Turkey[1]. Let's not forget that Bush's grandfather was also funding Nazi [2] (I would like to focus primarily on the years before Americans joined WW2, basically, before they "knew" that Nazis were not yet official enemies) and he earned a lot of money out of it.

Nowadays, a lot of companies do the same. And it will always be like this, unless such a country is recognized as an official "enemy" of the state, and you can't do business there.

So, we have already 1 reason that you simply can't stop communicating from the top.

Then, you have one more reason: immigrants.

Europe has a bunch of Turkish people which, it seems, helped a lot during the elections - in some cases (Holland, Austria, and Germany) the "YES" to the referendum got more than 60% (in some cases 68%). This opens up a whole new bunch of questions we should ask ourselves (and people actually do, at least in Europe):

- Why?

- Why did these people vote for YES?

- Don't these people value the freedom they have here (which they do have, unlike in the US - sorry guys, that's how we perceive it in Europe - where racism is much more common)?

Questions which raise another question:

- What did we as Europe (or West?) do wrong?

This is somehow connected to your sentence:

> We should try to get real people to talk, about who they are, what they want (peace ? surely .. war ? not so sure). So peoples in every nation start to avoid the national/patriot filter when thinking and voting.

In my opinion there are too many things we did wrong and failed to do.

One thing is to have expectations. In Europe, I can tell you that before the Turkish referendum there were a lot of people, mostly reporters and journalists, going out asking such "pro-YES" voters (they were grouping together for propaganda or for any other reason) whether they actually were aware of what Erdogan wanted to achieve with this referendum. Obviously, nobody actually knew all the points in it. The journalist was mentioning each point, and their faces were like "uh?", while, of course, some of them were bitten by the strong cognitive dissonance: "no, but this is what media here say...", or "no, but it's not as bad as it seems".

This issue dates back to the beginning of immigration. People with low education came, and many of them simply didn't get further - meaning, 2nd, 3rd generations still striving to make it, or criminals, or simply living off of social money. Where can this lead to? Entire neighborhoods not accessible to the police, criminality rate super high, etc. People who cannot even talk the national language - forced, therefore, to watch their own news.

Another issue: double citizenship. What is that? You live here, but you still have a voice in your country. Sorry, but no. After X years, as an immigrant you get citizenship from the country you live/pay taxes in. Further, you are born in this country, eventually (in some countries when you are 18) you get this country's citizenship. That's it. Either that, or the old one. Both? No.

There is a sentence from a German author, Max Frisch, "We wanted a labour force, but human beings came" [3], which kind of explains what had really happened. And now? That's what we have. A huge mess, people creating parallel societies, and Erdogan that comes to Europe as a good politician to the majority of his people.

Why good politician? Well, want it or not, it seems that during Erdogan's administration, Turkey's economy got better. [4]

Does this justify the fact that this politician needs a crown and absolute power?

[1]: http://aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-companies-investing-in-tur... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl... [3]: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/735/3/the-end-of-mu... [4]: https://www.quora.com/Turkey-country-What-is-the-story-behin...

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#210

Post by isostatic »

ivanbakel wrote: post #157
madeofpalk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Call me naive, but is this actually a problem? I'm fairly secular and don't know much about how 'Muslim states' operate, but if they're producing alcohol, for it's population who drinks and and doesn't care, what is the actual problem here? Shoul…

The point is that there's no problem at all. The standard for many Islamic countries to introduce parts of Islamic law as state law, such as the forbidding of alcohol or the veiling of women. By contrast, Turkey is much more secular in its government.

People who haven't travelled read Islamic and think Saudi Arabia. Go to Indonesia and you'll find cheap beer and the only reason women wouldn't drive is the traffic is really bad.
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