Thousands Marched Against Censorship 131
funfail writes "Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship. New regulations from Turkey's Internet Technologies and Communications Authority set to come into effect on Aug. 22 will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options: family, child, domestic or standard. Many websites are expected to be blocked as a result of the filtering measures."
Re:Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
I'm not willing to try to solve those problems with explosives when there are far better ways available. Compare, for instance, the conditions in Iraq (where heavy explosives were employed to oust a despot) to the conditions in Egypt (where a popular uprising ousted a despot): Things aren't perfect in Egypt, but you don't have thousands of people getting shot regularly. Similarly, if you want to go after female circumcision and honor killings, the best way to do that is to empower women to organize themselves and stand up against the men of their culture.
The basic method here is:
1. Give the people the knowledge that they're oppressed. That means getting Al Jazeera in there (because they regularly do investigative pieces on the leadership in that area), it means giving them the best Internet access you can, it means creating Radio Free Middle East, and it means Wikileaks.
2. Give the people a viable alternative to tolerating the oppression. There are lots of ways of doing that, but so far the most successful ones seem to be mass protests. It's far from a 100% success rate, but if they succeed they have the advantage of reducing the chance that the evil despot is replaced by another evil despot.