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Turkey Has Reportedly Banned Google
oxide7 and a number of other readers sent word (from mostly non-authoritative sources as yet) that Turkey had imposed an indefinite ban on some Google properties. "Turkey's Telecommunications Presidency said it has banned access to many of Google IP addresses without assigning clear reasons. The statement did not confirm if the ban is temporary or permanent. Google's translation and document sharing sites have also been banned indefinitely along with YouTube and Facebook in the country. Other services such as AppEngine, FeedBurner, Analytics, etc., have also been reportedly banned." Some real-time commentary (much of it in Turkish) can be found at Twitter hashtag #TurkeyCensoringGoogle. We have noted in past years the censorious ways of Turkish courts.
I think this quote applies here:
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
source
Shh.
The Turks don't want anyone to talk, write or even think about Armenians or Kurds. And they don't care for Jews all that much either.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
'Telecommunications and Communication Ministry' has placed a ban on various ips of google, ranging from google analytics to youtube.
despite the cause on the surface is shown deragotary videos of kemal ataturk on youtube, nothing could justify banning analytics ips. so, in the end one of the ministers slipped the real reason - google doesnt pay tax to turkey.
there is no reason why it should either. google is a corp that is centered in america, and according to treaty to prevent double taxation, it should not pay tax here, since it pays tax in usa. so there is no legal justification for trying to tax them.
but then again, you cant expect reasoning, or, abiding by laws, from an islamist government.
Read radical news here
This is very worrisome given that it is coming from what is supposed to be the crossroads country between the west and the middle east. If a country like Turkey is engaging in acts like this, what hope does the rest of the Middle East have?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
You lack the imagination to apply structure to our world? That entire page is taken from a carefully constructed and coherent extrapolation of human activity and knowledge. There are quite a few examples of quotes on the same page that are taken directly from our actual history as well. Apply your sensibility and winnow out the impossible, what is left are situations to consider. Think.
Shh.
there has been numerous court orders to ban youtube due to some laws, but telecommunications board was always banning the domain name, and leaving the ip untouched, therefore allowing everyone to use youtube by just a hosts file change or a dns change.
now, this board, which is under islamist govt's control, decided to try to tax youtube. therefore, they are trying to blackmail google by banning the ips too. the court orders are just an excuse.
Read radical news here
NATO doesn't care about dictators, look at how many right-wing military coups we've supported. Heck, look at how most of NATO supported just about everyone who was anti-Soviet. They don't care about human rights, just as long as they aren't communist or allied with Russia.
All NATO stands for is opposing Russia and its allies, if you think it stands for human rights or anything you should look at the conflicts in the cold war and which side the US supported.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
apparently he was some sort of political correct idiot or a muslim.
im in turkey. we have an islamist government which clearly stated they are islamist, on top of us. they are engaging in innumerable ways of censorship, of this google thing, is only one of them.
their main censorship tool is attacking the media outlets which do not publish in the manner they like, with the finance ministry, which is the ministry that governs taxes. if you are such a media company, suddenly finance ministry starts to review your previous tax payments, and, without fail, comes up with a lot of fines to fine you. so high that you cant pay, and they confiscate your company. approximately 2 major media groups consisting of 2-3 major newspapers and a television channel each, have been foreclosed in this way, and have been sold to their backers by zero interest loans from government banks.
google is an outside company. they were not able to do the same thing to google. therefore, they are trying the method of banning, to subdue google.
and, to the idiot - dont use your mod points in subjects you dont know about.
Read radical news here
Unfortunately this kind of thing happens all the time, and the government cannot do anything about it. Even the president has criticized the ban last week, but it's all up to the courts.
According to Turkish law, *any* PA can ask for a preliminary injunction to ban *any* web site. The web site has to comply within a month, otherwise TK (which is the telecomunnication authority) will have to block the web site in question. Nobody (including prime minister, or the president) cannot stop the ban (unless the website complies).
So if a person from a small town complains about a web site (for example Youtube, or Blogger), and the PA for that town finds the case worthy, he/she request a court order for the ban. This has actually happened (Blogger was banned since some bloggers published world cup matches, and the local TV stations which bought WC rights have complained).
The Google ban comes from Youtube ban. Previously they only removed youtube.com from DNS servers, but people have installed alternate DNS servers, and all was fine. Now they decided to block based on server IP, which is probably shared with other Google services as well.
Anyways they are trying to amend the law, so that this kinds of bans will be restricted (not just any random PA in any random town), but the best would be abolishing the law altogether.
Ah Turkey. When they're poking their finger in Israel's eye, they're the darling of Leftists far and wide. When they censor, ban, and oppress themselves suddenly we're up in arms. Fuck 'em. It's Turkey!
Google retaliates by banning turkeys.
Can I be blamed for others lack of critical thought? The quote begins:
;)
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century...
Anyone who is thinking as they read instead of blindly ploughing through the words would have realized that Earth has not reached it's final century yet?
And it was fully sourced too..
Shh.
"Turkeys reportedly banned Gobble"?
If you want to look back at history, to the time NATO was formed, around WW2, most of the world was still in some form of monarchy or dictatorship. At that time, lots of people in Europe still favored monarchy/dictatorship/fascism. It wasn't entirely clear at the time that democracy and capitalism were best. Some people even favored communism. It is understandable that NATO supported dictatorships, at a time when the moral superiority of democracy wasn't established.
One thing was clear though, even at that point, and that was Soviet communism was bad. You speak of Russia's allies, but many of Russia's allies didn't have a choice, they were only puppet governments for Russia. As far as dictators who kill their people go, only Hitler came close to the numbers that Stalin reached. Stalinism/Leninism was worth opposing, it was far worse than your average dictatorship. It is also understandable that NATO's main policy was to oppose the Soviets.
Qxe4
> I dunno, but it seems to me that dogmatic, xenophobic, recidivist behaviour is on the rise
> worldwide -- Islam certainly has no corner on the market for running amok, not now, and not
> historically, and the term "Christian" probably carries as much negative baggage through
> the years as "Muslim" does.
This quote is a good example of an all too common species of politically correct fool. So much wrong with it. It assumes time is immaterial. That events in the dark past are indisinguishable from current events and carry the exact same moral weight. That persons, events and movements must be judged with the exact same modern politically correct intolerant eye.
We are still crawling up from the muck, people and events must be viewed from the perspective of the time they occured in. For example the US Founders lived in a time when slavery was accepted as normal and had been since recorded history began. Individual liberty of any sort was a REVOLUTIONARY idea. After exhausting peaceful means they became violent revolutionaries. And most of them understood the inherent conflict between slavery and "All Men are created equal..." but also realized the new nation wasn't ready to follow where that line of thought lead. But notice that less than a century later the only places still practicing slavery were parts of Africa and the Middle East outside the range of the British Navy. Christianity did some nasty things but went through the Enlightenment, pretending that didn't happen and judging it as if that didn't happen and that the religion of the Inquisition still exists unchanged is daft.
Islam didn't experience the Enlightenment and rejects it today. The past is just that, past; we have a problem in the here and now as a result. Islam's rejection of the foundational principles of modern civilization is a problem NOW. Coexistance isn't even possible because of their expansionist and supremisist ideas. We in the West either abandon our civilization and accept Sharia or sooner or later (and with Nukes spreading it better be sooner) we are going to be forced to end Islam as it is currently known and practiced. That means Ann Coulter's solution of "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." It will be the worst human rights atrocity in recorded history but I'm damned if I see a better solution. We just don't have the time left to embark on a psyops action to slowly pervert their religion so as to remove the nastier bits.
So if it comes down to them or me I'm picking me and mine. Politically incorrect selfish bastard that I am. Future generations can flagelate themselves like the modern campus set do now about the American Indians, the Monroe Doctrine, ending WWII with the Bomb, the Cold War or any of that other stuff. So long as it IS civilization having that discussion in the future and not some starving primitives worshiping an insane child molester in a radioactive wasteland. And they will be sort of 'right' in that by the more advanced civilization our hard choices will allow them to build what we will do in our day will BE wrong... but still making the same mistake modern scholars keep making of judging us by their standards. So be it.
Democrat delenda est
I thought I'd share an account of what hapened to me a couple of years ago, in Istanbul, arguably the most westernized of all of Turkey: my friend and I decided to stay at this hotel outside the center of the city, and had to take separate rooms, since we were not married. In the evening, I went to her room for a chat. After about half an hour she gets a phonecall: some guy tells her that she is not to have male visitors in her room! That's right. They have cameras in each room. Even more sadly, my turkish friend told me this as a matter of fact, "nothing to see here".
I'm not saying every hotel in Turkey is like that, but I will say this: Turkey is bad news, very fucking bad news.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Mistermeaner than you?
Is it Slashdot bad spelling day today?
I just Googled it, and didn't find any information.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Historical allegory aside, my intent was actually more to point out the fallacy of couchslug's professing to have a handle on the "true Muslim character". What is the "true Muslim character"? What is the "true Christian character"? My friend is a devout Muslim, and one of the kindest, gentlest, most sincere people you could hope to meet. I'd much rather spend time in his company than with some of the self-identified Christians I've had the misfortune to know, who claim some personal connection with Jesus at one moment, and happily spout bigoted hateful venom the next.
Islam has its own foundational principles of modern civilization. That these foundational principles don't happen to match your own is an issue of cultural discourse, not absolutist violence. For that matter, some of the vaunted Enlightenment is actually predicated on learning imported from the Muslim world.
Swap "their" here for "our" -- for can we not say exactly the same thing about the US? The United States, for all its fanfare and mythologizing, has been one of the biggest thugs on the planet for the better part of a century.
Given that the core tenet Christianity is essentially "love thy neighbor", it sounds like you've hit the nail on the head here -- I'd hazard that neither Ann Coulter nor yourself are all that familiar with the underlying ideals you both seem to be espousing. Never mind the general ignorance of what Islam is. Yes, there are wacko bad apples, and yes, some of these elements happen to run countries. These do not define Islam, any more than Pat Robertson speaks for all Christianity, though they do appear to define the face of Islam as perceived by many here in the US.
Moreover, any look at the cultural friction between the many countries and political groups identifying themselves as Islamic must look as well at how the various governments of the West are fully implicated in helping to polarize and poison the dynamics at work. For instance, the situation with Iran and militant Shiism owes much to the hamfisted bungling of MI5, the CIA, and our friend in the Gulf, BP. Being ignorant of the West's role in defining the anger and resentment expressed by many of the more vocal elements of the Muslim world is fixable and excusable; ignoring it is hypocritical. The West helped create this problem, and the West must also help solve it, constructively. Sadly, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Gaza, among other present issues, aren't helping.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Can only mean one thing, Invasion!
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Turkey was a world leading country by 15th century in mathematics, medicine, architecture, etc.
But while Europe experienced the movable type printing revolution in 15th - 16th centuries, in Muslim countries the movable type print was banned for 200 years for "moral" reason.
Certainly, as any human invention, printing was also used for producing "adult" materials. But it was also used to produce maps, textbooks, literature, etc.
So as a result the Europe moved into a modernity, but the countries, where printing was banned, stayed behind. The "moral" reasons were rather an attempt of the patriarchal leaders of society to guard their power.
In the long run this ban did not benefit the society. Nowadays many Turks have to move to Germany, Austria, etc. to find a job. This is a result of the error, which was made by the Islamic countries' society five hundred years ago.
Many medieval churches in Europe were build by architects, who learned architecture from Islam mosques' builders. We still use Arabic numerals for mathematics. But now the Islam world is well behind in technology and science, including human science.
Unfortunately they step on the same rake again, because it is not possible for culture to develop without free discussions, without free access to information.
Quite true. But since the invention of Copyright, Europe and most of the West have started banning the free copying and sharing of information as well.. And with the successive extensions of Copyright terms (how long until we have Perpetual Copyright?), we're caught in the same downward spiral than those countries.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.