Turkish Ministry Recommends Banning Minecraft -- Over Violence

An anonymous reader writes: Minecraft is known for a lot of things. It's a fantastic creative outlet and the digital sandbox of youngsters' dreams, for instance. The game has also been known to raise the ire of unrelated companies who somehow think all that creativity by gamers is something that can be sued over. It's known for amazing user-generated content, including games within games and replicas of entire cities. The nation of Turkey is known for very different things. It's a country that absolutely loves to censor stuff, for instance. And, thanks to recent developments, Turkey is also known as a great place to get a front-row look at the incredible violence done by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the Turkish government has a plan to keep its youngsters from witnessing too much violence: it is calling to ban Minecraft.

Comments

Re:a "COUNTRY that absolutely loves to censor stuf

[Kiuas]

Are you sure, it's the COUNTRY that absolutely loves to censor stuff - and not its (elected) government?

The elected government is a result of the people. Turkey is a mostly functioning democracy and they have voted Erdogan into power twice now (well, he wasn't voted for rpime minister but his party was, and later he was elected presisent despite his actions as prime minister). Now, as someone who used to date a secular liberal Turkish woman (who at the time lived in Turkey) a few years back, trust me, I'm more than aware that not all of Turkey or its people support such policies, but unfortunately at this point it seems that most, even the majority does (although in fairness sake, he won the presidential elections with a very narrow margin, just over 51 % if the votes, so the country was/is split on the middle

Erdogan has gained popularity because he has done some good to the Turkish economy and improved general infrastructure etc. This is all fine and well. Unfortunately the man is also religious bigot and a conservative who's doing his best to slowly dismantle the secular basis which Turkey has maintained ever since Ataturk. There was recently a case of a woman being jailed for having the audacity to stand on a quran. A guy was jailed and is facing charges for (literally) "insulting the president".... Not to mention he handled the riots, the attempted banning of youtube etc etc.... He's an authoritarian through and through when it comes to social issues and rights.

So either the majority of Turks living in their native country do not realize this, do not care about this, or are actively in favor of it (and outside the larger cities there are still large areas were this sort of conservative islamic rhetoric is popular as hell). Either way the populace is not entirely to blame for his actions, but when you have over half the people voting in favor of a guy who has a track record of favoring banning things he does not agree with, well the country is not exactly blameless either.