381–390 of 476 posts
>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?
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Just to give you one answer, at least in the United States, a not insignificant number of people read or watch RT.com, and -- this is really terrible, but it's true -- they aren't aware that "RT" stands for "Russia Today" and is basically a pro-Russian news outlet. I'm not sure how you folks view Russia Today, but at least in the United States, people that know that "RT" == "Russia Today" consider it very pro-Russian…
I must confess that I too watch RT sometimes. I was initially drawn to them by the total openness of their broadcasting — I could go to their website and either watch RT America live or watch recordings of any of their major programs. I have never seen other networks do so (perhaps with the exception of Bloomberg) — and I looked at CNN, Fox, and BBC at least. So at least for this RT deserves some credit. Now, having…
Two recent examples of BBC 'impartiality'
https://twitter.com/maitlis/status/854308223838371840
https://twitter.com/bbcnickrobinson/status/85500451929767936...
With an election in just a few weeks time, two major BBC 'journalists' who support the right-wing, pro-Establishment British Conservative Party, brazenly attacking the left-wing (anti-Establishment) Labour Party candidate.
The BBC is a state broadcaster that has always been pro (British/Western) Establishment, but always in the past with a veneer of impartiality (more delusional right-wingers even absurdly accuse it of being left-wing).
Now, with the possibility of the first moderately left-wing British Prime Minister in decades, and public faith in established media at an all time low anyway, top BBC staff aren't even trying to hide their right-wing political bias any more.
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> the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous As a supporter of that "dodge", allow me to defend it (though I don't really disagree with your comment in general). Freedom of speech as a principle has a fundamental tension. One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the abilit…
Just how far are you willing to go with this? If people having opinion X, are banned on social media and no private registrar will register their website, no private search engine will index their website, no private employer will hire them, no private bank will do business with them or lend them money, no conference will invite them even for unrelated talks, no open source project will accept their contribution, no…
I'm not in favor of people being banned, but of ideas being flagged - not censored. For example, I don't want to do any kind of business with anyone who is advocating policies that I have a strict moral disagreement with. The nature of that moral disagreement could vary. Popular sentiment should be employed not to determine whether a given piece of media is acceptable or not, but to categorize it; and the strength of those categorial associations can then in turn inform the decisions of advertises, researchers, and so on.
Before then, the Kemalist or secular people were very relaxed, they knew from history if some how they lost the government, military coup will restore power. Again, Erdogan changed this.
Even by anti-erdogan majority, Erdogan is seen as the only true politician in Turkey, he knows how to convince or play people/groups. Just ask Gulen Movement!
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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 b…
It seems you are talking about Germany. Please name one neighbourhood in Germany "not accessible to the police".
People react in fear and absolutes, but things are fixable.
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Yup, censorship is now a global trend. We shouldn't forget that it also happens in many Western countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, ... https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/ And if we look in particular at government censorship of Wikipedia or some articles in it we find quiet a few Western countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_censorship_of_Wikip...
I don't understand what the "anomalies" this site detects in Denmark, Finland, and France represent, but the site itself says that they don't necessarily represent censorship and that it has only confirmed censorship in the following 12 countries: Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Greece, Sudan, Belgium, Cyprus and Korea.
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Some further explanation: In the Weimar Republic (the German state between the two worlds wars) the Reichskanzler (head of government) was not elected directly by the people. Instead, people voted for parties. The head of state was the President, and it was him who appointed the Reichskanzler. In January 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reichskanzler of Germany.
And that post had very little power. Hitler more or less became an absolute dictator with the passage of the Enabling Act a few months later. Getting that act through parliament involved arresting a bunch of opposition members and intimidating the rest using armed men, so it really wasn't a democratic process.
- https://news.vice.com/story/erdogan-is-still-arresting-his-o...
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-refere...
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> the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous As a supporter of that "dodge", allow me to defend it (though I don't really disagree with your comment in general). Freedom of speech as a principle has a fundamental tension. One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the abilit…
>One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the ability to go places where they can ignore the people they've chosen to ignore is an important part of why free speech works at all. That's not how it works. The "public square" is supposed to be open to all opinions. If you want protection, you have to retreat into th…
I think 2016 will go down as the high water mark for a global Internet. I see a lot of countries looking at the success of China in keeping political control, and the failure of Egypt, Tunisia, etc where the open Internet was used to overthrow the regime and deciding that allowing an open, free internet is not in their best interests. If you think that Western, liberal democracies are exempt from this, just look at t…
> the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous As a supporter of that "dodge", allow me to defend it (though I don't really disagree with your comment in general). Freedom of speech as a principle has a fundamental tension. One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the abilit…
Except we can, and we did, and society was better for it. So as it turns out, the "right to exclude" is more of a guideline than a rule, riddled with dozens of exceptions. And "the current regime has existed for a long time" is not very predictive of long-term societal shifts.
So it is here. You are right that there is fundamental tension between the right of free speech and the right of exclusion.
But one of those is a right so fundamental that it appears first when you ask people to list freedoms. The other is something we regularly cede in large and small ways when we live with other humans in a society. Where the two oppose, there is only one way the arc of history can go.
Our grandchildren will be just as puzzled by the "right to exclude" argument as we are when it is made by the generations before us.
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Yes, I can understand your wondering (I'm a Russian too). When I hear about the waves of Russian propaganda all around the globe I can't stop to ask myself a question: "how we become so powerful?". I'm afraid that nowadays some people tend to call any opposite opinion in their countries as a Russian propaganda. And I can understand that with a lack of good opposition/alternative media people start to read Russia Toda…
> When I hear about the waves of Russian propaganda all around the globe I can't stop to ask myself a question: "how we become so powerful?" Thank you! These are my thoughts exactly. I mean, I remember the Soviet times, when the Russian intellectuals, having zero confidence in the official news, used to listen to foreign radio stations over AM radio – Voice of America and BBC World Service (and perhaps Deutsche Welle…
RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.
As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.