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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

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Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#311

Post by PythonicAlpha »

sremani wrote: post #304
PythonicAlpha wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turkey is going through transformation, and it will come out of it stronger and mostly becoming pillar of Middle East. Like Nazi Germany grew stronger and stronger and grew to be the leader of Europe (+)? ((+) until it was vanquished of course by democratic countries -- but where do you find democratic countries, when you need one?)

Every strongman is not a hitler, mao or stalin. Especially, when they come through with largely "free" elections. Abuse of power as President is different from putting 6 million people in gas chambers and marching around and being responsible for deaths to 10s of millions of people. Lets have some perspective here, Please!

Hitler came out of largely "free" elections.

I don't think, that every despot is similar to Hitler, but still it is a despot.

BTW: How do you recognize a despot: He behaves like one. Just open your eyes!

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#312

Post by xg15 »

wav-part wrote: post #282
xg15 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advan…

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

Technology is a tool. There are always humans behind it. (If nothing else, the people designing the algorithms for the AI overlords)

Technology may help us to reach our goals, but in my opinion, it's rather useless if we're not even clear what our goals are.

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

And then what? It's obvious today how important clean drinking water is. Still people use access to water as a bargaining power and you might not have access to it if you live in a shitty part of the world and have nothing to offer. I don't see why it would be different here.

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

Then I honestly don't understand the logic of anarcho-capitalists.

So our current system is broken because, even though it has some checks, it still leads to too much accumulation of power.

Therefore we should replace it with a completely unchecked system which will lead to even more accumulation of power - but that's ok because suddenly accumulation of power is actually fine and there is absolutely nothing we could do about it anyway.

How does that make any sense?

> Why is that a problem ? Use of force is only injustice in my book.

In mine, it isn't. But even if it were, who is keeping the communities from using force?

> 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.

Yes, dominant powers change over time. For most of human history, that timespan was roughly "every few centuries". If you're talking about human life spans, it's absolutely possible that some groups are winning all the time and everyone else is losing all the time. (Oh, and those events where power actually shifted? They usually weren't very pleasant to live in either)

The whole idea of our current system is to prevent that by imposing restrictions on power.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#313

Post by exabrial »

I love the Turkish people and the rich cultural heritage of the country, but everything I hear about Erdogan is pretty scary. My only beef with the people of Turkey is I wish they'd take a leadership role into making peace with the Kurds.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#314

Post by beagle3 »

djonil wrote: post #309
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 its easy to make the mistake that replacing the guy at the top solves the problem. Isn't there enough history to suggest that is not how things work? Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow but his fan club is still going to be around. They will just prop someone else up. Same goes for Ergodan. This is not a problem that gets solved by dropping a bomb or making a kill list or a wikileak or a tahrir square or…

Yes and no. There were wannabe dictators in turkey before erdogan, but the army had removed them, which is why erdogan essentially neutered the army (in multiple ways and through quite a few years) to allow him his current level of control.

Turkey didn't change as much as they guy in charge was persistent, smart and popular enough to do things his predecessors didn't.

It is possible a different ruler would have done the same, but it is also possible that without Erdogan, turkey would still be democratic.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#315

Post by taway_1212 »

esun wrote: post #253
cryptarch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have ideas on how to fix that? I recently heard "land-ownership tax/renting land from the state instead of owning it" and "100% tax on death/abolish inheritance", I think they're interesting but not without problems.

One of the reasons I work hard is so that my children have a good future ahead of them. Why should my family give that all back to the state when I die? The state didn't earn that money... I did.

> One of the reasons I work hard is so that my children have a good future ahead of them. Why should my family give that all back to the state when I die? The state didn't earn that money... I did.

One could argue that your kids did not earn that money either. As a reasonable middle ground, I think that we there could be a "good future for the children" exemption (at say $20m per child), while the rest is taxed at 100%. This prevents the natural process of concentration of all wealth in the hands of the few.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#316

Post by louithethrid »

nebabyte wrote: post #150
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you're on to something, and there is a technical solution here. (Mainly I believe that because it's something I've been saying for years ) Here in the states, the NSA was allowed to view data on telephone calls 3 or 4 levels out from a terrorist. So, for instance, if a terrorist called A, and A called B, and B called C, and so on? The NSA could track C or D. The argument against that is that it would cover…

There is never a technical solution, because technical solutions can be regulated, illegallized, require licensures, or so on. People will not mind requiring a license for "thing X" (esp. when airwaves are involved), and will not run software that can get them thrown in jail. Sociopolitical problems do not have a naiive tech solution. [0] People do not cease being people if you retreat further into technology. [0] ht…

I upvoted your opinion, because i think it discuss worthy. You argue, that sociopolitical constructs can not be made that contain corrossive elements. I think, some of the democratic institutions proof the opposit. As in biology containment vessels can be constructed to withstand quite extraordinary corrossive circumstances. The strategys against the corrossion are constant renewel (disposing of counter-measures), counter agents to corrossion (keep the secret services busy with infinite clutter), rerouting of corossive elements (avoid giving them a attack surface- for example by distributing the hidden app via a virus/non visible release group). Finally, and thats the beauty of it- the Centralizers may be the undoing of there own system- after all its usually monocultured (very few os-systems), has a very centralized single point of failure- and the greed involved usually corrodes even there tools. Thus if a NSA backdoor guns down the internt, and this app would still be up, i think on that day, my suggestion could pick up the pieces.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#317

Post by taway_1212 »

ptaipale wrote: post #233
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?

> Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? In this case, West being West Europe: Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside. What happens in Turkey is directly impacting the security, safety and economy of all Europeans (except the British, who were lectured on their…

> Because European Union decided to build a federal union which has freedom of movement inside, and no border controls on the outside

No border controls on the outside? Are you being hyperbolic or just misinformed? Of course there are border controls (their adequacy/efficiency is another matter).

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#318

Post by sanderjd »

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…

I don't understand why Altay's comment is dead. I found it interestingly and informative. Unpopular opinions reasonably expressed should not be killed.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#319

Post by sanderjd »

ardaozkal wrote: post #184
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?

We do not ask you to declare war, but politically censuring (not censoring) people who abuse their power would have a great effect. Even if you don't do that, just don't support them: For example, it'd be great if trump didn't call erdogan after referendum to congratulate him.

I haven't seen a poll, but I suspect a large majority of folks here would say they think the congratulatory call was absurd, inappropriate, and worrisome. The entire rest of the national security establishment within the administration itself would agree. This is the kind of thing that even the President's supporters largely wish he wouldn't do. My point being, we (the people) don't support Erdogan, even if the person who is supposed to speak for us seems to.

Also, until very recently, strong censure of the Erdogan administration's creeping authoritarianism was our policy. It does not seem to have accomplished much.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#320

Post by mschuster91 »

mythrwy wrote: post #153
mschuster91 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 that exactly same attitude, especially by the UK and US led to the rise of Hitler and eventually the Holocaust. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

"Because Hitler" can become the excuse for all kinds of nonsense though. Witness the Iraq war.

The Iraq war was not done "because Hitler". It was as clear as gold that it wasn't just about chemical weapons, but much rather about oil and funneling money into the US weapons industry.

What the Iraq war (just as the Afghanistan war) has lacked and still lacks, unfortunately, is a post-war strategy similar to the Marshall plan...

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