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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey
- hhh000 9y agoNot surprising at all. When some dictator puts 40,000 in jail and 200,000 others out of work and nobody stands up against him under the pretext of the failed "coup" which was committed by a couple of hundreds young officers without even trying to capture the dictator, then blocking the entire internet should be ordinary.
- ChairmanPao 9y agoSuch freedom! They are a terrorist nation that treats their own citizens terribly.
- someguu 9y agoGovernments yield too much power, meanwhile citizens keep funding said governments with ridiculously high taxes. Trying to fix governments is counterproductive, just need to decentralize things imho.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoWhat do you mean by "decentralise"? Smaller-scope government at a local level? Anarcho-syndicalism? I suspect many of the same issues would appear.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cies 9y ago> 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/village level. Then go up from there with committees filled with delegates from the local-democracies that are for a specific topic (hospitals in the region, roads, schools -- anything local-democracies want to collaborate with others upon). All taxation and voting should happen on the lowest level.
- someguu 9y agoBut, eventually those "leaders" you seem to trust will find an enemy and unite to "fight" it. I personally don't see why people even vote, I think the solution is to make sure the internet is protected from "leaders", not by voting and making temporary "rules" with the government, but by making sure it's global and decentralized. Also, keep in mind that your idea of government won't protect the internet forever.
- cies 9y ago> But, eventually those "leaders" you seem to trust will find an enemy and unite to "fight" it. Hopefully the enemy within. > Also, keep in mind that your idea of government won't protect the internet forever. First, do most Turks want free or protected access? Lets assume they want free access. If they cannot have it it shows the system of gov't is not democratic enough (or they have "traded" their request in some way, but that's not the case now).
- gkya 9y ago> 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] that needs to be excavated, processed, produced, moved, bought and sold. 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. Also, as today the term worker has so less to do with the worker of the past two centuries, most of the theories become more and more irrelevant. If we want a better today, we need newer theories. That's exactly what the totalitarians are doing, they're using new methods and theories of marketing to succeed their way to domination of economical systems. Many utopias are possible, but at the end of the day, if it's not utopia everywhere, it's utopia nowhere. A country cannot isolate itself from the outer world in their excess of happines because that last one depends on global welfare today. It's not the ages that you could stay safe when there's conflict thousands of kilometres away anymore. [1] a nice illustration of this is the famous I, pencil: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoIf the architecture of society is distributed, then these issues won't appear.
- agumonkey 9y agoAnybody reading this, I'd take any suggestion about such social organisation / (a)political structures.
- gkya 9y agoStructures are political, politics rise naturally where human interactions (especially indirect interactions) exist. The question is how to make sure that politics are based upon and executed according to facts and principals like plurality, equal rights to human dignity and mutual respect. It's sort of obvious today that democracy as we have it is not workin like that, and that big structures like countries are hard to keep clean.
- agumonkey 9y agoExactly. On HN I expect people to guess that the current structures aren't "scalable" (sorry). So maybe a nice deep tweak to trim the fat, reduce height, simplify energy currents to avoid corruption, bureaucracy, endless bipolar swings .. We have the technology we can rebuild it. (actually I think the solution is lo-tech.. basically prolonged discussions, hard, but not impossible)
- wav-part 9y agoIn 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.
- tmalsburg2 9y ago> just need to decentralize things imho. Just -- you say this as if it was easy but no one knows how to do this and whether it is possible at all. Just see how long decentralization lasted in the case of Bitcoin.
- someguu 9y agoWhere did I say it was an easy problem to solve? Lookup the definition of just.
- nebabyte 9y agoIt's not possible. There will always be organization and hierarchy, whether or not it's under an egalitarian effort (gov't) or a libertarian one ("my gang has more guns than yours, give us money/food/your land") People who call for dissolution of power do so because they feel powerless against a unified whole. They forget that powerlessness exists in a much stronger form without organization. I suppose they're welcome to not learn their lesson and try and become the next Jim Jones, but the rest of us will just shrug and say "sad for them" as we continue the pursuit of better democracies and representative governments.
- jgaa 9y ago> Governments yield too much power, meanwhile citizens keep funding said governments with ridiculously high taxes. Good point. In my opinion, paying taxes is the most immoral thing a person can do.
- nebabyte 9y agoDecentralization just leads to non-agreed-upon authorities taking power. There will always be a monkey or monkeys with bigger or more sticks than you, and you'll always have something they can use more of. Until such a time that you have nothing left and are just a blight on the land they could be using for something else. There's a reason unorganized societies always collapse into trying to organize themselves.
- rumcajz 9y agoYou are conflating term "decentralized" with term "unorganized". Switzerland is both highly decentralized and highly organized.
- itburnslikeice 9y agoTurkey feels like an "North Korea" movie and we watch the "making of" part -- lmao
- kyriakos 9y agoIt's tragic I don't think it's funny.
- forvelin 9y agoIs this reddit or what, how come you find such thing entertaining which literally kills people?
- unixhero 9y agoWell he's not wrong.
- itburnslikeice 9y agomore drama please, til people can die without access to Wikipedia
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoI 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 the attention "fake news" and "no platform" have been getting. We are going away from the free and open interchange and discussion of ideas (even horrible ideas) to the coercive suppression of ideas (at this point bad ideas, but may not be true in the future). Add to this that a large portion of the web content is controlled by fewer entities (if Facebook or Google bans your site, you are not going to get very much exposure). Also, we are moving from user controlled general purpose computers to secured, walked garden devices. The government by applying pressure on maybe a dozen companies, can control what type of information the average person is exposed to. And the whole dodge that the first amendment only applies to the government is dangerous. Freedom of speech is as much a principle as a law. If we get used to large powerful non-government entities suppressing speech we do not like, it will be a brief step to accepting government doing the same or at least pressuring the non-government entities to so it.
- jerheinze 9y agoYup, 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/ 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_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_censorship_of_Wikip...
- ykler 9y agoI 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.
- kyriakos 9y agoWhat triggered this? Usually Turkish government blocks sites right after a terrorist attack or in the case of the coup attempt. Is something about to happen?
- cies 9y agoMaybe someone visited a page on him/her self, did not like it, and decided to to something about it. Good thing: many people use this service so they now know even better what kind of govt they live under.
- forvelin 9y agoI'd say it is just some random court order, maybe somebody edited page of Erdoğan to add some insults, which gave ideas to some judge to get government reputation.
- adtac 9y agohttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W... A data dump of all English Wikipedia articles as a torrent. In case you are not able to access that, here's the direct link: https://itorrents.org/torrent/6434C646E33D02F3CDCB9C15F9DF11A6C2064624.torrent https://itorrents.org/torrent/6434C646E33D02F3CDCB9C15F9DF11... On a side note, I think it's fantastic that we have the entire Wikipedia, possibly the greatest effort towards organizing the world's information, at our fingertips.
- chinathrow 9y ago> On a side note, I think it's fantastic that we have the entire Wikipedia, possibly the greatest effort towards organizing the world's information, at our fingertips. While I totally agree with this, on another side note, I think it's terrible that we have web censorship at our fingertips.
- briandear 9y agoI might argue that Wikipedia is rather dangerous when viewed as objective. Wikipedia editors and the associated political infighting results in defacto censorship if your interpretation of facts doesn't follow the crowd. I am not saying Wikipedia is bad -- but it is definitely not an unbiased source.
- a3_nm 9y agoFurther, there are good open-source solutions to read these dumps offline. For instance Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org/ http://www.kiwix.org/ which has a dedicated reader application but also an HTTP server (very useful if you want to run a local mirror), and Aard Dict on Android http://aarddict.org/ http://aarddict.org/
- ThinkingGuy 9y agoThanks for those suggestions. I wasn't aware of Kiwix. It sounds similar to XOWA, which has worked well for me: http://xowa.org/ http://xowa.org/
- sethbannon 9y agoMeanwhile, in the U.S., the administration is taking down government websites in an effort to bury climate data and scientific information. Useful to remember it's not just countries like China and Turkey that try to limit citizens' access to information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/28/epa-website-removes-climate-science-site-from-public-view-after-two-decades/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- candiodari 9y agoImportant caveat: the US government is reducing it's own efforts to combat climate change. That's not censorship.
- sverhagen 9y agoI've read through a few definitions of the word "censorship", just now, and I don't think any of them make this particular distinction.
- briandear 9y agoThere is a distinction between open government and censorship. Not releasing information is different than banning people from sharing information. It's related, but definitely not the same as censorship.
- mjburgess 9y agoThe problem is this treats the government as a single entity with a uniform will: yes, if you do that, then the government is merely failing to act rather than deliberately censoring anything. However the government isnt a single entity, it is many smaller kingdoms. And The King is censoring one of his princes internally: preventing the EPA from releasing data it would like to.
- nebabyte 9y ago
- kakamba 9y agoAs suggested by others, it's a court order. Turkish officials demanded a few things from wikipedia. The main item was to remove all content where Turkey is shown supporting ISIS, but they didn't receive a response, and the repercussion was blocking access nationwide.
- candiodari 9y agoIn case anyone doesn't know, Erdogan is enriching himself and his family by having Daesh/ISIS/Islamic state deliver oil to him at bargain prices and selling it, mostly within Turkey: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/wikileaks-turkey-isis-oil-minister-email-cache-leaks-claims-a7460736.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/wikileak... (and Google for it, there is a lot of proof of this) So let's stop pretending that this is done due to justice or even legal "right". This is being done to hide the crimes of the people in power. In this case, yes, crimes, specifically the government selectively applying the laws, corruption, and the like. It is not being done for justice, to protect anyone's reputation from falsehoods, or ... it's just being done to hide crimes by the government.
- kakamba 9y agoI wasn't defending what happened, was rather reporting their reasoning for the curious. In Turkey justice has become synonymous with Erdogan's and his party's interests unfortunately. They prey on the less educated, and banning a major source of knowledge seems like a very smart move by them.
- mythrwy 9y agoTurkey isn't the only implicit supporter of ISIS though. ISIS exists at the pleasure and to serve the aims of a whole host of "Western friendly" nation states. As a bonus, their terrible doings remind Americans of the need to stay engaged in a region that by some strange coincidence produces a lot of the worlds gas and oil.
- StavrosK 9y agoI'm assuming Tor circumvents the ban, correct? I'm going to tell all my Turkish friends to install Tor and signal, and be sad that Turkey has reached this point.
- tmalsburg2 9y agoBad idea. Using Tor is probably the best way to attract extra scrutiny.
- maze-le 9y agoNot if a significant proportion of the population uses it.
- tmalsburg2 9y agoBut that's not the case and it's going to happen. In the real world, I think it very reckless to tell your friends to use Tor in Turkey.
- mseebach 9y agoThe regime (which is what they are now) have shown that they are not deterred by having to persecute people in bulk.
- jerheinze 9y agoNot if one uses bridges with pluggable transports which helps making the Tor traffic look less like it's Tor (for example meek-amazon uses domain fronting https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek )
- erdi 9y agoTor is blocked in Turkey, as well as some VPNs. https://turkeyblocks.org/2016/12/18/tor-blocked-in-turkey-vpn-ban/ https://turkeyblocks.org/2016/12/18/tor-blocked-in-turkey-vp... There are some ways to circumvent the ban, for now. https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/13432 https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/13432
- yak0 9y agoTurks which knows wikipedia, already know how to use a vpn. It's a ridiculous decision. Our ruling should find better solutions for such problems
- epmaybe 9y agoWhat problems?
- beloch 9y agoI'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 to care. Turkey is nothing like the common stereotypes we have of it in the West, but Erdogan is a guy who, I think, wants to change that. A wonderful human being who I've had the privilege of knowing is currently in prison in Turkey on absolutely baseless accusations[1]. Nobody in Canada gives a damn because he was an "Imam", and that's a scary word apparently. 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. [1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/davud-hanci-turkey-coup-charge-judge-1.4015590 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/davud-hanci-turkey-cou...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoI think a major issue with Turkey is that there is a large non-secular voting bloc. Historically, that has been kept in check by periodic coupes by the Kemalist military. However, Erdogan has succeeded in taming the military (as demonstrated vividly by the failed coupe). Thus, the non-secular voting bloc has escaped the historic check. I am afraid, Turkey will become less secular in the next few years. In addition, there is not much we can do externally, as evidenced by the latest referendum, Erdogan has the support of a majority of voters.
- denzil_correa 9y agoBingo! It also seems that the quantity of secular bloc is lesser than that of the non-secular bloc. Apart from the military, Erdogan has also tamed the judicial system.
- hollander 9y agoWell it seems the majority is not that big. He won by a small margin, while controlling all the media. If it had been a true free election, I bet he would have lost this referendum. And if you look at the demographics, people in cities voted against, countryside pro. Turkish people living abroad voted pro Erdogan. I bet most of those people came from the countryside in Turkey.
- maehwasu 9y agoTo what degree is Erdogan's regime a problem of not enough democracy, as opposed to a fundamental problem with democracy itself? (Where democracy = 51% wins)
- sorenjan 9y agoThat definition of democracy, where the winner takes all, is from what I've heard a big problem in Turkey. I think a strong opposition and having several political parties in the parliament is the best way to avoid the tyranny of the masses, but the recent referendum in Turkey takes them in the exact opposite direction.
- mkempe 9y agoDemocracy is not a method of protection for individual rights, on the contrary. Limited government is. Madison discusses the issue in The Federalist Papers No. 10 [1]. [1] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
- rdslw 9y agoFirst they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
- thinknot 9y ago>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?
- rectang 9y agoWe can "care" yet not "shed lots of our own blood". Military-intervention-yes-or-no is a completely inappropriate model for the relationship between any given western country and Turkey.
- cryptarch 9y agoIn the case of western Europe, we should care because we don't have internal OR external border controls, and Turkey is a neighboring country with a lot of refugees to dump on us. I wish I understood why there isn't a move to reinstate border checks in the Schengen area. It seems ludicrous to me to keep internal borders open when it is clear that the external borders have failed.
- jstanley 9y agoAll borders should be abolished. No human being has the right to tell any other human being where he can or can't go (with the exception of trespassing on private property, of course).
- ue_ 9y ago>(with the exception of trespassing on private property, of course). This ought to be removed too, along with the whole concept of property.
- cryptarch 9y agoBe the change you want to see! Go ahead and abolish all your own property, you're free to do so. Or was it more about you wanting to be entitled to product of your fellow man's labor?
- louithethrid 9y agoConsider if you will - a diffrent approach to infrastructure altogether. There are no cables, no centralized Servers - just wifi capable devices. How does it route, i hear you asking? It routes by likelihood of connection to social plankton. Social plankton is every group your device ever connects to- and is constituted by those members of the group, which who can gather the most "Yes"-votes about theire prediction, of the behaviour of the group. Take a bus filled with people driving to work. They always constitute from slightly diffrent devices, but the time is always the same, the amount of devices is always the same- and there is always that one deciding device - belonging to the social plankton "transportation-company" without the plankton would never come together. Now lets take the greatest possible counter example: A convention of bus drivers, riding on a bus to the first convention of its kind. They would debate alot, and agree upon it beeing a bus- but neither could secure a majority - which bus it is. None of the driving by social plankton - called houses and cars, is able to identify the bus of busses, thus a new social plankton class is created. How does a adress in this add-hoc net look like? It consists of a Unique identifier, wrapped into layers of social plankton, sorted by likelihood. The social organism city is likely to know the social organism university within. The key ingredient is, that inner-plankton, can be encrypted and decrypted only after arrival at the outter plankton. So this allows for -extremely slow, in extremely big burst- communication to happen. Without any IP-Provider or Infrastructure Controll authority having a hand on it. Even better, it allows for Meta-Organisms to host services. Lets say, i have a shard of Wikipedia on my cellphone, and im part of the opt-in plankton "FreeSociety", any request to a wikipedia server, that bounces with no return off the web, could bounce back through the social organisms internal, until it reaches me, gets a package returned, and the web is down but the gate is up.
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoI 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 <g>) 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 something like 80 or 90% of the population. Well, there you go. Assume one trillion connected devices and each device is accessible through a "path" of connected devices over 4 or 5 hops, with a percentage_success and average_network_lag time tracked for each path. Add in a few GB of buffering and the requirement that every connected device use up 10-20% of its bandwidth on public, anonymous access, and you've got a mesh system that's decentralized. The only other limit I'd add is probably some kind of rules to prevent DDOSing, say a 64Kb message size and a few other things like that. It's just a math problem.
- known 9y agoAnother North Korea?
- andybak 9y agoThere's a long long path before a country becomes "another North Korea". Turkey is currently at risk of becoming on par with some of the Gulf states or maybe a Central Asian republic.
- agumonkey 9y agoAny alternative ? mirrors ? slimmed torrent distribution ?
- ardaozkal 9y agohttp://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content/tr http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content/tr Kiwix is one. I'm currently torrenting Turkish and English wikis (https://s.ave.zone/d5a.png https://s.ave.zone/d5a.png) and will be seeding for as much as I can. I kindly as any person who currently resides in Turkey to do the same.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jumpkickhit 9y agoAre torrents being blocked? What about Kwix and a torrent of Wikipedia? http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
- darkhorn 9y agoThis is idiocracy!
- PleaseHelpMe 9y agoOh, poor the students there.
- cryptarch 9y agoTotally agree. Have a look at some controversial pages if you've never encountered one, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment I'm triggered so here's my soapbox: Wikipedia currently undermines the idea that human beings have a sex that is grounded in biological reality, and pushes the notion of "sex assigned at birth", the unreality of biological sex and the reality of transgenderism as non-mental-illness while it is a debilitating condition that often results in suicide, along with ideas like that gender reassignment surgery is not mutilation while it does for instance include (in the case of MTF surgeries) full castration and results in infertility.
- goodplay 9y agoAgreed with your statement in general. I once added a [citation needed] to a non-controversial technical statement that was false by definition only to have the edit reverted. When I asked for an explanation, the editor replied that the tag "has no place on a highly visible page". I never participated after that point. People who have a lot of time or have been incentivised to edit wikipedia will always have the final say in what changes persist, regardless of the rules that governs the site.
- epmaybe 9y agoCouldn't you have gone above the editor? Like a moderator, or an administrator, regarding the edit? Not saying that what happened to you is fine, but if it does happen then you have to go further.
- goodplay 9y agoThat's the problem, I wad through enough bureaucracy when dealing with government institutions in my day job. I just don't have the time, patience, nor desire to read through pages-worth of rules and policies and correspond with a string of people who may or may not be willing to help, just to have my edit persist. I gain nothing either way.
- epmaybe 9y ago
- mk89 9y agoHow come that all dictators have one thing in common? They don't understand that the more you forbid certain things, the more people are willing to fight for it. They should do exactly like in the West: give us the feeling we are free, while a few companies decide what we have to do, what we have to wear, what we have to eat :) This way, your economy flourishes, you are not perceived as a dictator, and neighbor countries don't want to invade you because of human rights :D
- RichardHeart 9y agoMuch of this problem comes not from the top, but from the bottom. It's a terrible idea that people can actually suck, and suck en masse, but it truly is the case. The bad leader is an emergent consequent of the bad people crying for him. Shitty leaders aren't the sole purview of Islamic states, but they seem to be better at generating them than anyone else in recent history. How do you fix millions of people, so they stop desiring terrible things? Well, by having a culture that pays better, and marketing it well. And it's delicate, because their "better" detector isn't working properly already.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoThere is some irony in Erdogan's desire for EU membership, last decade, creating such a primacy of elected leaders (at the EU's behest and guidance) that the previous guardians of Turkey's secular heritage, the military, is no longer able to stage a coup against the emerging despot.
- dalbasal 9y agoDoes anyone know which article in particular triggered this?
- kunaltyagi 9y agoThis person seems to have more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225719
- jaddood 9y agoIt seems it is forbidden for the Turks to get cultivated like other people in the world... We live in an era of lack of information (which is probably like all other eras)
- macawfish 9y agoI'm seeing a lot of comments about this structure vs. that structure, but to paraphrase an old Sufi proverb someone told me, it doesn't matter what the cup is made of (gold? wood?), it matters what's in the cup (good water?). It doesn't matter what your government or family structures look like if they aren't able to facilitate healthy individuals and groups. If they are facilitating the health of some and the detriment of others, well then they are wittingly or unwittingly engaging in selection. It doesn't matter if she's your wife or your girlfriend. Is it toxic or growing?
- exabrial 9y agoI 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.
- efuquen 9y agoI'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.
- arekkas 9y agoOn a side note, Hitler was not elected into office but came in second in the election for "Reichskanzler". The NSDAP came out strongest party with 33,1%. Politicians at that time thought they could tame him if he becomes part of a coalition. They guessed wrong and he assumed full power. If you play the Hitler card at least get it right.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nisa 9y ago> If you play the Hitler card at least get it right. NPD is a German right wing party that was founded 1964 and is nothing like the NSDAP that you meant. Fun fact: NPD was not forbidden in Germany due to too much involvement of the Verfassungsschutz (German secret service for everything inside Germany) - they paid so much money to informants on the extreme right that they managed to build solid structures in large parts of the country.
- arekkas 9y agoOh, sorry, mixed that up. Same breed :D Almost typed AfD
- kleiba 9y agoSome 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.
- yeukhon 9y agoI would understand blocking WikiLeaks but blocking Wikipedia is a whole level of cenorship. Turkish people should reconsider their freedom. I don't live there and I am not Turk so I can't make more comments not knowing what's really going on there. God bless.
- nepotism2016 9y agoBefore Erdogan, Turkey had no middle class. You either lived in remote villages and lacked education OR you were "rich" thanks to high level of nepotism. Well, Erdogan changed all this, he moved people to into cities and these people didn't forget and started to vote for him. 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!
- gcb0 9y agohn gets useless in threads like this. we badly need a collapse comment tree feature. so much off topic flame wars when everyone should be setting up tor nodes.
- krapp 9y ago>we badly need a collapse comment tree feature It's been implemented for a while now. Do you have js disabled?
- zupa-hu 9y agoor maybe s/he just didn't notice the [-]
- gcb0 9y agolol. changed my noscript addon and forgot to whitelist HN. thanks for reminding me
- tripzilch 9y agoit's true though, the self-absorbed Americans dominating the top thread with an argument about (the USA legal definition of) free speech and how it relates to US specific racial tensions... because they'd rather loudly proclaim their position in a known argument they've had before than sit back, shut up and maybe learn something new about a country they don't know about, with a big problem that can't be explained as "just like in US except for XYZ so they should just PQR" (if only, in reality three comments down in the top thread everyone's forgotten Turkey as the main topic of discussion)
- quickben 9y agoIsn't one of the requirements of being in NATO a democracy? With moves like this from Turkey, what will happen to the NATO membership?
- davidf18 9y agoWhy can't there be some sort of peer-2-peer Wikipedia or in fact any database that keeps people from blocking it?
- baxtr 9y agoSo, the question is: What can we do as a community? Come on guys. We have probably many of the smartest people on this planet reading this shit here right now. What can we do? What could be a cool tool, solution, initiative? Ideas anybody?!
- ausjke 9y agonot quite sure about world politics, but it seems Turkey is backpedaling fast these days? Maybe one day they can license China's greatwall-firewall IP?