Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

People absolutely would not be sent out to open sea in little rafts, if the traffickers and their cargo wouldn't know that if they just manage to float the cargo out of Libyan territorial waters, a large percentage will be picked up and therefore guaranteed entry to EU by bringing them to shore in Italy. This enables them to sell the trips. Those who drown are simply deadweight loss but as long as the proportion is not so large that it would diminish the sale of trips, it won't matter.

Whatever is the operation on sea, it won't help because the business is based on the EU asylum mechanism: once someone is picked up at sea, they cannot be returned to the nearby shore (Libya or whatever) from where they left. And once on EU ground, they'll be free to stay by applying for asylum. Italy is not hugely interested because the people know that there are no jobs in Italy, so they move on towards Germany, Sweden or trying to enter Britain through Calais or such.

It's a hard problem to solve. Most ideas seem to be about coming up with a new Gaddafi, to make a deal with him similarly to the Erdogan deal. This is not very nice either.

In certain ways, what I find so disturbing about what's been happening in Turkey is how readily everyone seems to accept the official account of major events. The vote that initially established him, the "coup," the most recent vote... Things seem to be accepted at face value by the west without questioning it, even when major red flags are everywhere.

Erdogan isn't just a despot, he's a liar. And the West, especially Western journalism, seems to turn a blind eye.

Even if a large proportion of Turkey supports Erdogan, it doesn't mean a majority do. Even if Erdogan's government says a majority does, doesn't mean it actually does. And when a government establishes itself by subverting democratic or constitutional processes, it's not a democratic government anymore.

But from a technological perspective, even if 2016 is the high water mark of the "centralized" internet, a new internet is forming. That which you lament is the natural result of a centralized system. It's something that the early creators of the internet have warned about since its inception. But now as the incumbents centralize control, a new generation of technologists (helped by many of those early creators) are constructing the underpinnings of "Web 3.0", a decentralized internet built on Ethereum, IPFS, WebTorrent, BigchainDB, SOLID et al.

There is plenty left to do, it is still a newborn child... nobody knows where this goes. But come 2030, I agree we'll look back on 2016 as the high water mark of the centralized internet. But instead of longing for how things were in the 1990s and 2000s, we'll say "good riddance".

All that said, the battle needs to happen on the political front at the same time, which makes EFF, FFTF, and ACLU so important.

The central flaw of libertarianism is that it depend on property rights to essentially be worthless to work in the real world, as any scarcity allows for a libertarian dictatorship based solely on the idea that property rights are sacred, and need to be protected by the state.

With moves like this from Turkey, what will happen to the NATO membership?