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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

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Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#281

Post by [deleted] »

sorenjan wrote: post #67
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#282

Post by wav-part »

xg15 wrote: post #199
cies wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by "decentralise"? Smaller-scope government at a local level? Anarcho-syndicalism? Yes. > I suspect many of the same issues would appear. Nope. When democracy is small enough, the leaders are very close to their voters. This changes everything. See small democratic countries, they do much better at being democratic! I think we can make it smaller, and have the democratic process at neighbourhood/vi…

That sounds susceptible to a lot of "tragedy of the commons" problems. It's hard enough to make the top-10 nations collaborate against climate change - good luck with hundreds or thousands of small communities. Similarly, this looks like a world in which few rights or standards could be taken for granted, because everything is decided in local committees or "multilateral" deals between some groups of communities: Whe…

(Warning: opinions without citation)

Collective will has never solved anything. As always it will be technology.

Whether you'll be allowed to trade with or travel into another community will depend on the specific rules and agreements your and the other community decided to take part in.

At smaller scale it will be much more obvious how important these things are.

In those negotiations, communities with natural advantages will likely be able to make better deals and increase their advantage, which may lead to a growing inequality between communities.

Like now ? Inequality is natural state. War against inequality is just waste of resource.

If history is any indication, some gib private actors or a small number of powerful communities.

Why is that a problem ? Use of force is only injustice in my book. Other than that everything is fair game. Many will be losers and few will be winners. But _everyone_ will fail most of the time. That is, there is no such thing as a private actor or community winning all of the time.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#283

Post by Bombthecat »

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…

In germany, we Germans know.

But as Merkel put it : erdogan is a democrat in a democracy.

Nothing we can do here.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#284

Post by wav-part »

agumonkey wrote: post #21
matthewmacleod wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "decentralise"? Smaller-scope government at a local level? Anarcho-syndicalism? I suspect many of the same issues would appear.

Anybody reading this, I'd take any suggestion about such social organisation / (a)political structures.

In such discussions, its usually forgotten that how smooth modern travel and migration is. Just make it more smooth/quick then concept of libertarianism/socialism/etc becomes increasengly moot.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#285

Post by usrusr »

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.

It's not uncommon for dictators to be elected. That's how the transition from democracy to dictatorship works. But I agree with your assessment of the problem: there isn't really anything outsiders can do when an electorate tries to hurt itself. Any appeals to reason will just be catalyzed into even more votes by "them against us" rhetorics.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#286

Post by ozmbie »

thinknot wrote: post #49

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy. Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

Because "The West" includes Europe, which is rather close to Turkey geographically.

Until last year Turkey was in slow but ongoing negotiations to be a member of the European Union.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#287

Post by aluhut »

sorokod wrote: post #243
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…

Aren't you oversimplifying things? Wasn't Erdogan democratically​ elected and later democratically increased?

There is nothing democratic about a election in a country where the ruling party has demonized the opposition in such a way that people are afraid to vote for them...

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#288

Post by vojnovski »

fulafel wrote: post #222
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.

This is putting your head in the sand. The problem is the people, the voters, who put Putin and Erdogan in office and kept voting for more autocracy instead of democracy. Those presidents are just manifestations, symptoms. There's always going to be a candidate like that to vote for, and democracy can only survive as long as voters prefer candidates who uphold democracy.

Not necessarily.

Both Putin and Erdogan (many others as well, Orban, Gruevski, to name a few), were elected under promises to bring prosperity through democracy.

Carefully targeting vulnerable groups with PR and economic engineering has proven itself a great tactic for achieving their autocratic vision.

edit: spelling.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#289

Post by lisper »

agumonkey wrote: post #130
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…

I have a lot to say to and ask you, but right now I'll say you're right. Nobody wants war, but in most context people don't feel the need to handle their lives either. Democracy re-emerges after wars because the people felt hard and had to suffer and wake up, so now it's obvious and easier to act for peace and democracy. Seems like societies just have a MTBF of 50 years and after that war acts as a reset button. ps:…

> Nobody wants war

Unfortunately that's not quite true. It is true that very few people want war as an end in itself (though even then there are exceptions) but some people want something else (land, power, eliminating the infidels) for which they are willing to pay the price of war -- especially if they can coerce someone else to do the fighting on their behalf.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#290

Post by [deleted] »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #267
_Adam wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for starters they didn't decide for themselves. It was decided for them: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/europe/turkey-refer... The greater issue though, is that it seems the "majority" is now imposing their religious ideals on a "minority". That is an unacceptable violation of the basic right to religious freedom. Sadly Turkey is far from the first country in the Middle East to do this. There's a guy…

>The greater issue though, is that it seems the "majority" is now imposing their religious ideals on a "minority". That is an unacceptable violation of the basic right to religious freedom. // But that violent subjugation of non-Muslims is a central part of Islam (as practiced and preached by Mohammed). Become a Muslim, if you're "people of the book" pay jizra, or die. That's the only way for an Islamic majority to s…

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