Wikipedia To Fight Turkey Ban in European Human Rights Court (cityam.com) 93
Wikmedia, the foundation that runs Wikipedia said Thursday it had filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights to lift Turkey's two-year block on the online encyclopedia. From a report: Wikipedia said the ban violates fundamental freedoms, including the right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under the European Convention. The application, which was announced today during a press call, comes after Wikipedia's "continued and exhaustive" attempts to overturn the ban in Turkish courts failed to bear fruit. "Wikipedia is a global resource that everyone can be actively part of shaping," said Katherine Maher, Wikimedia executive director. "It is through this collective process of writing and rewriting and debate that Wikipedia becomes more useful, more comprehensive, and more representative. It is also through this process that we, a global society, establish a more comprehensive consensus on how we see the world." Turkey rolled out a blanket ban on Wikipedia citing national security concerns, in a move that has been widely condemned as a crackdown on free speech.
Turkey does not belong in the EU. (Score:1)
And Turkey does not belong in NATO. Turkey is basically a depotism, like Russia or Phillipines. I say this with no enmity or axe to grind. The only reason Turkey would allow Wiki would be to spam pro-regime propaganda.
You cannot open a closed government with a website.
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And please check your own general knowledge. None of the countries you mentioned are a part of either NATO or the EU.
You might need to check yours. Turkey is indeed a NATO country, and a decade ago was pushing pretty hard for EU membership as well. GP's point was that Turkey shouldn't be in either group (I don't happen to agree with their thesis, but their "general knowledge" in this case is spot-on).
Yaz
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...and I take it all back. I thought you were replying directly to the "Turkey doesn't belong in NATO" message, and not the hidden AC that was talking about Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Dubai. My bad.
Yaz
Israel & EU (Score:2)
Arab countries and EU (Score:2)
Re: Turkey does not belong in the EU. (Score:5, Informative)
The ECHR is not an EU construct. It was created by the Council of Europe and Turkey is a signatory to the ECHR.
Re:Turkey does not belong in the EU. (Score:4, Interesting)
And Turkey does not belong in NATO. Turkey is basically a depotism, like Russia or Phillipines. I say this with no enmity or axe to grind. The only reason Turkey would allow Wiki would be to spam pro-regime propaganda.
You cannot open a closed government with a website.
Well, NATO itself is an anachronism, much like the League of Nations would have been in 1950, but I digress
Bigger point is - Erdogan's Turkey is not Kemal's Turkey. Kemal Mustafa had a vision similar to Tsar Peter the Great: he wanted to make Turkey a more European country, and set about doing that across society: abolishing the caliphate and putting the skids on Islam, banning the veil, changing the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Roman, and a whole lot of other things that re-oriented Turkey.
Unfortunately, he replaced the cult of Islam w/ his own cult, but didn't popularize critical thinking in Turkey the way it had already happened in the West, so that Turks never got to embrace free thought in the way it exists in the EU, which every Turkish leader until Erdogan desperately wanted to join. As a result, a military junta in Ankara had to make sure that the Turkish population was repressed, which at the same time violated the EU's conventions on democracy.
Also, while Turks living on the coasts of Turkey did embrace Kemalism, the Turks living in the interior - the remnants of the old Seljuq and Rum sultanates - never did. While those Kemalist Turks embraced Western ideas about population and experienced dropping birth rates - much like the rest of Europe - the more Islamic Turks of the interior never did, and their population kept growing.
As a result, today, those Erdogan Turks outnumber the Kemalist Turks several fold, and the Turkey of Kemal is gone forever. What we have now is a regime nostalgic about its Islamic past. Turkey leads an organization called the Turkic Council [wikipedia.org], which includes 3 of the 5 stans. And it also honors Turkic empires that existed across Asia throughout history - from the Khwarezmid empires of the 12th century to the Ottomans and Mughals in its 16 Great Turkic Empires [wikipedia.org] celebration. And w/ its alliances w/ Qatar, and its taking the lead on confronting the US over Jerusalem, it's unmistakably trying to regain its Ottoman era caliphate leadership in the world. That, and also Erdogan instigating Turkish immigrants in Europe to oppose the governments of the countries they're in, makes it clear that this is not the Turkey of the last century.
In short, not only is Turkey not European (the Eastern Thrace occupation notwithstanding), it's not remotely interested in being a part of Europe. Its past - and its future - are the Muslim countries in general, and Turkic countries in particular
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Eastern Thrace occupation? Please. Turks have been there for almost one millennium. If that's still an occupation, then everyone is living in occupied lands everywhere across the globe.
Doesn't negate my original point - that the Turks are not a European people. They are Asian - originating in Central Asia, and then spreading around, like other people around them. Nothing wrong w/ that, but it makes them incompatible w/ Europe. They are more at home in the OIC or the Turkic council.
A military junta in Ankara had to make sure that the Turkish population was repressed? Please. If that "junta" hadn't intervened, Turkey would be ruled by a Khomeini styled US-exported freak now, and the secular republic would be no more.
You just made my point. No junta needed or needs to intervene in France, Germany, Britain, et al to keep the population from turning those countries into theocracies. But it was needed in Turkey. And Turk
Turkey (Score:5, Funny)
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It's original name is Türkiye.
You you call it wrong.
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Why they changed it I can't say.
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People just liked it better that way.
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In Lithuanian it's "kalakutas"; in Polish "kal"="shit", "kutas"="dick". And Poland+Lithuania used to be one country for a long time...
(Yay Slashdot's handling of Unicode.)
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It's original name is Türkiye.
You you call it wrong.
That's like calling Germany Deutscland, or Italy Italia, or Japan Nippon. Nobody does that: when communicating in English, we call them by whatever their name is in English. Yeah, some countries have gone bonkers and renamed themselves according to their own languages (like Burma calling itself Myanmar), but there's no reason that that should be the overriding rule.
Next you'll want to rename China to Zhnghuá to avoid confusing the country w/ porcelain
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Ottomans then?
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You really needs to change your language. We Spaniards have not that problem: Turquia (Turkey) and "pavo" (turkey). See?
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I hope they make Wikipedia repeal notability (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Wikipedia articles are tweaked by a clique of editors who promote a political viewpoint, and that viewpoint goes against other countries and certain political parties. There's a term for that, propaganda, and Wikipedia has a problem with being neutral. Some editors are abusing their powers.
It's no more different than banning someone for "community standards", just to remove people to ban a topic. Wiki editors do the same thing, delete articles and claim the "notable" excuse.
Its a common problem going o
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European court ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Turkey isn't a part of Europe. Neither of the EU nor geographically (well, it's on the border) and most importantly not culturally. Especially these days, it's turning into a warmongering islamic fundamentalist dictatorship.
So what, exactly, do you expect they'll do with a judgement from the European court of nobody cares? Wipe their asses?
Re:European court ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it IS part of Europe, geographically, and it IS part of the Council of Europe and it IS a signatory to the European Charter of Human Right (req by CoE), and it IS subject to the European Court of Human Rights (req by Charter).
But thanks for playing.
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it is worse than that.
I grew up in Germany, which today has a large turkish minority population. At several events that I attended as a child I clearly remember how representatives of turkish organisations proudly celebrated the historic friendship between Turkey and Germany, the alliance during the world wars, though they avoided the exact word "alliance" in case of WW2. As a child, I didn't think much about those phrases, I hadn't yet learned about the Nazi atrocities.
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And when, exactly, would you say was the last time that Turkey behaved itself as if it had even heard about human rights?
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There used to be a time when trolls had an IQ at least above the room temperature.
How's things going on in your abortion-is-forbidden-even-in-the-case-of-rape state?
Which state exactly would that be?
How much money are you willing to bet on that guess?
You could, of course, admit that you're and idiot who just throwed that out there.
That sounds pretty christian-fundamentalist-dictatory to me.
A short look at my social media activity would reveal that I'm a militant atheist. But then again, I wouldn't expect that you spent a single moment checking if your preconceptions actually have a leg to stand on.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Traditionally it's always been considered a part of it.
Turkey, historically, is an ancient enemy of Europe. There have been literally hundreds of years of warfare between Europe and Turkey. That the Turks lost the siege of Vienna saved Europe from becoming one more part of the world pressed under the boot of Islam.
I mean, have you compared Finland and Spain lately?
I have, in fact, travelled to both of them. And while they are certainly very different from each other, they are unmistably European. Now if you compare Spain and Japan, or Finland and Egypt - that are clearly different places.
The country was the center of the Roman Empire until five centuries ago, starting in 324AD.
The East Roman Empire,
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"Europe" is a category term. The word is 2500 years old, earliest use as a geographic term is from ancient Greece. It is very recent that it has a political meaning, which quite obviously re-uses the geographic term in the same way that the A in "USA" refers to the geographic (North) America and uses it to create a new term for a political entity.
Most of Europe was threatened by the Turks during one of the Turkish Wars [wikipedia.org]. Almost the entire area today called Eastern Europe, from Poland to Croatia, from Greece
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The Ottomans couldn't go to war with 'Europe', they could only go to war with the countries of Europe
Semantics.
They invaded Europe, not a particular country. It's not that they went intentionally around Hungary and signed a pass-through treaty with Austria to attack their political enemy Bavaria. They simply went to conquer Europe and warred whatever country happened to be in the way.
But, you know who else has centuries of history of war with the countries of Europe? The countries of Europe.
Yes, and with some long-lasting hostilities as well. Your point?
If you really want to use war as some kind of measure of a country's Europeanness, th
No, just as one of many reasons. My original posting also listed geography, culture and religion.
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Your statement that "Turkey invaded Europe" is predicated on the assumption that Turkey is not already in Europe, but that assumption is the very thing you're trying to prove. If Turkey is already in Europe, then all the Ottomans did is invade other countries of Europe.
Indiscriminently, with the intent to replace its culture and even history with something else.
Turkish colonies were established all over the balkans immediately following every conquest. The "not-a-muslim" tax was established as well, which lead to considerable amounts of conversion to Islam. Which was the entire point of it all.
Nothing comparable happened between the states of Europe in that time period or even well outside of it.
The boundary of Europe has been placed in the Turkish Straits for millennia.
Yes, I agreed that Turkey lies on the edge of Europe. One leg inside my front
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Turkey, historically, is an ancient enemy of Europe.
You're arbitrarily grouping a bunch of countries together and calling them Europe. By you definition Europe was an enemy of Europe. Hell they even built a wall down the middle of a city at one point separating a country into two in the very middle of Europe.
Brutally Hypocritical (Score:1)
They're brutally hypocritical.
Major companies who do double-digit million dollar revenues have their Wikipedia pages deleted on them, saying they're not notable.
Yet you can easily find articles on absolutely trivial companies with no revenue to speak of.
When confronted with this, Wikipedia editors will simply acknowledge they have tons of cleanup to do, and conveniently leave it at that :)
Wikipedia's attitudes disgust me.
Perhaps a worthwhile donation (Score:3)
While nothing of significance may come of this lawsuit, it's being done for all the right ethical reasons. Any sense of ethics seems to be sorely lacking in so much that companies do, but not this time.
For this reason, I'm happy to continue donating to Wikipedia.