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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

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Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#331

Post by andybak »

yawz wrote: post #272
oxide wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the Turkish coup was organized and executed properly and they succeeded. Who takes power? Does it create a vacuum? A civil war? I often ponder these "alternate history timelines" and try to imagine what the world might be like.

Well... It was properly executed and it has succeeded in giving Erdogan more power.

I asked a Turkish friend if she thought the coup being a false flag operation was an outlandish conspiracy theory and she strongly disagreed.

Of course that means nothing other than "one specific liberal ex-pat Turk believe X was plausible" but it's one more data point.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#332

Post by andybak »

barry-cotter wrote: post #303
toomanybeersies wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkey has had several coups. So I'd look at what happened after the previous ones.

None of them bore any resemblance to Erdogan. All the previous ones were the army emerging from its barracks, deposing democratically elected and popular governments they thought too Islamic/not secular enough and returning to their barracks. The current political situation is a result of the increasing democratisation that the EU encouraged. Erdogan would never have been tolerated before.

In this case it's especially ironic. The Army regarded themselves as the guardians of Turkey's secular democracy - even if that meant acting anti-democratically. This is of course a problematic position.

Now Erdogan - as a result of genuine democratic support- has gained enough power to make his move and has resolved to dismantle democracy and weaken certain factions in the Army to protect himself against any similar future coups.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#333

Post by shouldbworking »

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 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

I don't think this is something to be proud of. The US is majority Christian and they tolerate satanism

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#334

Post by sanderjd »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

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 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. For instance, we don't need laws against Holocaust deniers, we can simply choose to frequent places where they are excluded.

Freedom of speech as a law is the release valve for this tension. If every private individual and organization in the country has chosen to ignore a person's views, that person is still free to make themselves heard with the government. They can write letters and go to meetings with no fear of punishment for the unpopularity of their beliefs. They can't be legally kept from starting their own private organization where they are not ignored and advertising it to attract others.

Personally, I just find this all to be a very good solution to a difficult problem, so I'm skeptical when I see suggestions that it should be done differently. In this case, the suggestion is that the freedom to exclude (as a principle - there is no law in this direction) should be more tightly regulated. Maybe that's a good idea because of the unique circumstances of the internet, but I'm not yet convinced that it's better than the current regime, which has existed for a long time, and which I think works pretty well.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#335

Post by cies »

gkya wrote: post #24
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…

> All taxation and voting should happen on the lowest level. While I too am tinkering with these ideas, the trouble with this is that we need massive infrastucture work even outside the context of totalitarian self-promotion; and this is not achievable with small-scale local governments. Nowadays nobody is self-sufficient, as even the most simple things we use require material and labour from all over the world [1] t…

> the trouble with this is that we need massive infrastucture work

Sure. :)

But there are two options. Small steps in the right direction (need a lot of work), or revolution (needs even more work).

> I think that if we were to limit all governments to city-state like beings, economical macro-structures that will be more powerful than those states would form in no time.

Ok. In some cases these structures maybe beneficient, even started on behalf of the small-scale super autonomous self-governments. If not those small-scale govts can just ban (or not give them money anymore) them; they are autonomous.

> Also, as today the term worker has so less to do with the worker of the past two centuries

True in the west. Workers here are now "priviledged workers", our economies in the west in need of cheap labor in other places. There the "worker" still exists in its classical form. Here we have a new form, but if you look closely you still see many. To me it is simple, I see capitalists (defined as never "have to" work to survive a fancy life time), and non-capitalists (used to have been referred to as "workers").

> Many utopias are possible, but at the end of the day, if it's not utopia everywhere, it's utopia nowhere.

That raises the bar very high. I look more at it as a one village/neighbourhood at the time kind of thing.

Do you know "I pencil" from Corbett? He's an agorist I believe, dunno. I'm more towards mutualism/anarchism/market-socialism; as I think private property should have limits (otherwise those ideologies are quite similar).

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#336

Post by efuquen »

I'm pretty disappointed by some of the comments here. Because Turks voted him in that makes Erdogan's autocratic rule OK? There is no free press, hundreds of thousands that have had any association with opposition groups have been jailed, the referendum vote has been widely discredited as fraudulent. Hitler was voted into office too, I guess that just ended up being the German's problem? Democracy doesn't die without a majority of the population allowing it to, that doesn't make it right and that doesn't excuse some of the blase attitude I see here. You know you can care about something without wanting to go to war over it.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#337

Post by markvdb »

slowmotiony wrote: post #276
vinay427 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 el…

Do the Turks in Germany also enjoy no freedoms? Because they actually support Erdogan more than Turks in Turkey.

* Many of them identify with their (parents' or grandparents') conservative countryside roots. * A community so much oriented towards Turkey consumes a lot of Turkish (the country) and Turkish (the language) media. * Turkish country media are in Erdogan's pocket. There is not even a semblance of free press anymore in Turkey. * Turkish language media in the EU with an editorial line not pro-Erdogan have been threatened in every possible way, either directly from Turkey or indirectly. Many have ceased to exist. The best example: Zaman in .be and .nl. * Kurdish language media have always been under threat from the Turkish authorities. * The Turkish government has directly ordered the network of Turkish mosques ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Religious_Affair... ) abroad to create lists of Gülen supporters. Evidence of these practices has led to a diplomatic incident with at least Belgium. * You may also want to read about media repression inside Turkey like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today's_Zaman . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_movement#2013_corru... .

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#338

Post by timthelion »

thenomad wrote: post #259
timthelion wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very unlikely to go to jail for left wing speech. This isn't a matter of placement on a political spectrum though. The law is as follow: 1) No Nazi symbolism outside of a historic context. 2) No inciting racial hatred. 3) No expression of hatred against a protected minority (the wealthy are not a protected minority). These are very easy to prove, but none of them apply to normal left wingers. There are Islami…

One note on this: some elements of the extreme left-wing have in the past had tendencies toward antisemitism, which obviously fits into 2) and potentially 1). So that's one issue.

Yeah, but I don't think that anything of value is said by people who incite racial hatred or use Nazi symbols...

Denial of crimes against humanity, though, I see as a big mistake. I know, I know, we've all beaten the Holocaust to death... But when it comes to anti-capitalist and anti-comunist thinkers there is a great deal to talk about.

For example, anti-communists will tell you that Mao commit genocide during the great leap forward. Reasonable people disagree.

I, as an anti-capitalist, will tell you, that the quality of food sold in primarily black neighborhoods in the US is much lower than elsewhere in the country, that millions of blacks die as a result, and that this is an act of genocide against blacks. Obviously, a lot of white Americans would disagrees with me, and I think it would not be a good thing if they all went to jail for doing so...

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#339

Post by dmitrygr »

fapjacks wrote: post #105
azangru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a Russian, I am naturally very curious about this idea of the Russian propaganda getting a stronger and stronger influence over the minds of people in other countries. Could you kindly elaborate on the following issues that mystify me: - Where do people get the Russian news and why do they care about what Russia has to say? I mean, I don't follow Polish news (or French news, or German news, etc.); so why would…

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 read Russian, French, and English language news from as many sources as I can find to try and get a relatively good idea of what actually happens in the world, and if you want to call out bias, try nbc before you talk about rt. Rt's reporting is closer to the reality almost every time and they much less commonly bury stories unfavourable to a certain united States party specifically.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#340

Post by markvdb »

isostatic wrote: post #207
avaika wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The urban population rose up in support of democracy, not Erdogan.
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