I'm from Turkey and this situation is just pathetic.
It's just "if visitor.country = 'turkey' then post.visibility = false".
Every person in the world except people from Turkey can see everyting. We are putting our head in the sand and screaming "trolololo we can't hear you".
A whistleblower account on twitter? disable it to users from turkey. A youtube video with phone call transcripts about corruption between prime minister and some corporation offical? disable it to users from turkey. Same conversation uploaded to soundcloud? meh, just disable it to users from turkey. What about a paper about some government corruption? disable slideshare.
Everyone knows what a corrupt country we are. except us.
You should revolt, period. It may mean risking your life, but if people like you don't and instead choose to run away, then your country is going to fall for an unknown period into a medieval age.
Read everything you can about the french resistance, start creating networks, go underground, and organize ties with foreign countries ready to help you. But don't run away.
> You should revolt, period. It may mean risking your life, but if people like you don't and instead choose to run away, then your country is going to fall for an unknown period into a medieval age.
Such an arrogant view of the world. The chosen route of Turkey is to preserve the serenity and innocence of it's population, by prohibiting pictures of the prophet much like wardrobe malfunctions are prohibited in the USA. This is not medieval at all , but rather a more refined approach to civilisation than your american upbringing has taught you to appreciate.
To my knowledge, this guy is still running shows and you can still go see him freely. But i don't quite see the relation between the two i must say (unless you're confusing race and history with philosophical opinions or religions).
As for the expression "evolved", i think it's perfectly suited. It takes a lot of time and "evolution" for a civilisation to accept to not respond to different opinions with physical constraints. It's what we call a "modern" or "evolved" society.
It's funny that light hearted humor depicting Muslims looks strangely close to the way Europe used to depict Jews: The maniac facial expression and ugly face, the crazy hair and beard, the huge nose).
If people are so shocked that people are so shocked by a cartoon, why aren't the people who are shocked shocked when people are shocked by a cartoon making fun of Jews.
If anyone drew such a thing, it would be "obvious" that you "must" be shocked. If not, you're anti-Jew and a Nazi.
The cartoonist would lose his career, would be called antisemite (which is a stupid word, since Arabs are semites, too)... The cartoonist would have to appologize and say how stupid he feels, and then take it upon himself to prove he's not by overcompensating (the usual "I have Jewish friends" which, by the way, I have too).
Just search on Google, most of what you'll find will be newspapers appologizing for running a caricature that I don't even think Jews deemed "antisemite". You know the saying: "Plus royaliste que le Roi". More royalist than the King.
Where's the light-hearted fun and freedom of expression, now? I thought they were just cartoons, no?
And about France's freedom.. It is funny that the religious symbols debate about ostentatory religious symbols doesn't include Jews.
And the usual disclaimer: I'm not criticizing Jews, I'm criticizing a double standard. Anyone thinks we live in a fair world where racism/sexism/etc doesn't exist?
You don't get to organize a minute of silence in the name of freedom of expression, and then fire and prosecute people who don't stand.
You don't get to talk about freedom of expression when anyone humoring anyone is fine, until they're humoring Jews.. Isn't it just light hearted laughter? What changes?
You don't get to say every human life counts the same when not long ago, more than 150 people died in a Peshawar school. More than 130 where children. Did it stop the world as did Charlie Hebdo? Did heads of states gather in unison and march for the right of a child to live?
I live in a country that was torn apart by terrorism. I survived many bombs, many gunfights... It amuses me when the U.S. and Europe think they're being targeted by Terrorism: You've seen nothing compared, and you don't get it. Islamist terrorists kill mostly Muslims.
And that country was colonized by France, for a 132 years. My father was a political prisoner. My grand-parents were tortured and murdered. We became independant just 53 years ago. I mean, 1962 wasn't that long ago, right? It wasn't like a barbaric age or something... And yet..
You seem very confused, but i'll just respond to the double standard thing because it may give the occasion to clarify why the french laws about freedom of speech are as they are :
Religion is an idea, it is a belief, an opinion. It doesn't constitute you, you are not born like this. You learned it. And as every opinion it can evolve through debate and critics.
So, the law assumes that critisizing and making fun of the idea is something different than making fun or attacking the person believing it.
The same can not be told about racist or antisemitic statements (which both are regularely condemned), which attack people. Any cartoonist can make fun of the jewish religion, and jews themselves do so regularely.
It is a fine line, but it has historical reasons and it worked fairly well for the last century.
Know that you are talking with me, a person who's a real fervent of freedom of speech, to the point I accept people having racist/xenophobic views and like to chat them up.
Of my good friends is a dude from the U.S. who held views on a demographic that's supposed to include me, that would shock people. I found them funny, while most people would've accused him of racism.
Anyway, back to the topic:
Confusion is not a part of it. I'm more irritated by sophism and syllogism behind/(to justify) the actions and the hypocrisy behind it all, than by the actions themselves.
In other words, I understand that someone acts a certain way, even if nasty. As long as they don't try to justify it, once they try...
What do I mean? I'll give three examples:
1- Censorship: Censorship assumes that some piece of information shouldn't be available to a certain demographic because (in most cases) the censor thinks it would "corrupt" the people he's trying to "protect". So he insulates them.
If that were true (that a piece of information can do that), then the Censor would be the most corrupt person, since he's exposed to all the pieces that cause someone to become corrupt.
- "But he's a censor, it's his job and he's not being corrupted".
- "So someone can be exposed to these pieces of information and not be corrupted!".
- "No, just him. The people can't look at it, it's dangerous".
- "But the censor comes from the people."
- "Yeah, but it's different."
2 - Kings and members of the Clergy in Europe back in the day. "Mandatad by God" to rule and defend Christian religion. Kill and torture people for fornication and adultery. Engage in orgies and anchored the word "incest" with "royalty" in the collective mind.
3 - Islamist terrorists who, again, reproach to people "not being religious" and then do the very contrary of what they "stand for" -killing, raping, having sex with each other ("but.. but.. You kill people who're gay!" - "No.. It's different"), being ignorant (knowing that the first verse that came in Quran was this: "Read").
Where does all this lead us?
>So, the law assumes that critisizing and making fun of the idea is something different than making fun or attacking the person believing it.
Well, that's the official rhetoric to make it look as if freedom of speech is a reality. The making fun and the attacking isn't equally distributed for reasons people prefer to avoid because it makes them uncomfortable.
The law states that it's okay to make fun of everyone, but the law is just a text on paper.. What about the application of the law in real life?
The law also states that people are accountable, etc. What if you have a problem with a really high-ranking official, or someone powerful? Do you believe it'd be treated as "just the same as if you had a problem with your plumber". The law says yes. Reality says no.
You're talking about the law, I'm talking about the way a law is applied in real life.
Look at stories about Government surveillance. What about the CEO of a Telco company who didn't want to give his customers' data to the Government? Prison for 4 years, if I recall correctly. Look at journalists busting these stories.. Held up in airports, harrassed, etc..
This isn't happening in a "third world" country. This is happening in countries that criticize other countries as not having free speech, while tormenting their their own citizens for exerting that right.
In other words, they make a distinction between "other backward totalitarian" countries who say "This is what you can't say", and themselves who say "You can say anything you want * (but we'll smak your teeth if you say the wrong thing)".
>The same can not be told about racist or antisemitic statements (which both are regularely condemned)
Why? They're so much fun. The thing my Texan friend said was a joke: "You know, Muslims invented the condom from animal intestines.. But the English improved it by removing the intestines from the animal before using them".
I don't know about you, but I found it hilarious. And I was raised Muslim. The funny thing is that other people were shocked.
I'm probably the guy who'll go to hell and suffer Eternal Damnation by any religion's standards, so I told the joke to my observant friends, and they all busted laughing.
I found that we live in an era where everyone is so susceptible and hush hush. Nobody can speak freely in these illusory freedom of expression times.
>Any cartoonist can make fun of the jewish religion, and jews themselves do so regularely.
Yeah, well everyone has something that make them tick. For Muslims, they pretty much don't care about anything(there are even jokes about misinterpreting religious concepts, usually salacious jokes or jokes to make fun of hypocrit religious people, etc), unless it's a Prophet.
And here's the thing: People think that Muslims don't like people making fun of their Prophet, which is wrong.. They don't like people making fun of / or depicting any Prophet in a bad light, (One of the pillars is that you can't be "religious/observant/faithful" in Islam if you don't believe in all of them. The other pillars are that you have to believe in the other Books, the Angels, God, Judgement Day, and Fate (good or bad)).
>It is a fine line, but it has historical reasons and it worked fairly well for the last century.
As in most things, it depends who you ask. Some might wonder a country who murdered millions in the last century (not even needing a "war") might care about freedom of speech. For those who might see gratuitous jabs on things of the past, suffice to say that France not only didn't want to appologize for what it did, it recently had a bill proposal for the "Positive effects of Colonialism". Because almost exterminating a people, and throwing a country that had thousands of baths before Christ, home to Fibonacci who exported the right numerals to Europe to replace Roman numerals, go back a few thousand years back is cool.
As I said, I'm more irritated by the bullshit to get away with something, than the actual thing.
I understand "Realism" in the Machiavellian/International Relations sense, but don't stand a rhetoric weak enough that a layman such as myself can pick it up, from people supposed to be fine diplomats. It's sort of insulting.. But again, you're free to express your mind.
I think you should read occidental philosophers a bit more, starting with socrate and aristotle, as well as history books written by objective historians, because many of your points either reduct to logical fallacies or gross exagerations...
You seem to have a personnality attracted by absolute / binary things and a great sense of drama, so reading a bit of greek discussions will probably help you see that things aren't black and white and cool down a bit.
As for french culture specifically, a bit of Voltaire and Rousseau will be a good start, because what you look as "prextexts and hypocrisies" are probably the kind of subtle reasoning that would let your country be in not such a miserable state.
Hmmm, Let's see... Because French is a mother tongue for me. I was raised with de Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Molière, Verne, Voltaire, etc. (My Petit Larousse 89 saved me).
I read Pascal's "Pensées" and Descartes "Discours de la Méthode" as a teenager. (blows the mind)
Reading in high-school ranged from Freud and Adler, to Nietzsche, Hume, Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. To Dostoïevsky and Ostrovski. To Bandler/Grinder/Dilts/Erickson...
I speak 5 languages fluently (on a daily basis), read a book or two, and I'm never sick at sea.
How many 'occidental philosophers' have you read? Don't take that patronizing route. I may seem to have a great sense of drama, but the art of disguising a slap as an advice is being lost.
If there was someone who loves French culture and art, it'd be me.. And this has nothing to do with France specifically.
This is about Governments (any, including ours) giving lame, unconvincing justifications. In other words: "You can try to screw me, but when you say it's for my own good, at least make it convincing"..
>I think you should read occidental philosophers a bit more, starting with socrate and aristotle, as well as history books written by objective historians, because many of your points either reduct to logical fallacies or gross exagerations...
>You seem to have a personnality attracted by absolute / binary things and a great sense of drama, so reading a bit of greek discussions will probably help you see that things aren't black and white and cool down a bit. As for french culture specifically, a bit of Voltaire and Rousseau will be a good start, because what you look as "prextexts and hypocrisies" are probably the kind of subtle reasoning that would let your country be in not such a miserable state.
Yeap, that's the great mistake every radical make : try to convince other people against themselves, with physical means (although some people were really happy to see european culture come to North Africa, but that's another story).
That's why we've made sure every time that we went somewhere militarily, that it was in cooperation with at least some local people wanting it (and i think the US are now doing this as well).
That's why i think Facebook should only help the Turkish people that want to access different opinions do so (as opposed to forcing everyone to have a look at mahomet's cartoons for example).
I know microsoft bashing is all the rage but something has been lost in translation here. What Satya Nadella meant was Microsoft will ship windows on different form factors (tablets, phones, PCs, servers etc) from the same code-base.
The OS kernel will more or less be the same. However the UI experience will be vastly different as you can image.
That makes some sense; that's what Apple has been doing as well. Both OSX and iOS use the Darwin kernel and base, along with some shared user libraries, but then each has considerably different UI on top.
But it will only be the same code base to a manager or bean-counter. There will so much conditional code and special casing that maintenance will be a nightmare. Fix things for system, break the others. (Or "same code base" just means all stored with in the same repository.)
I don't know if you know the answer, but I'm curious:
There's a ppa for arm-gcc that I want to use (https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded) , but so far it's still on Ubuntu 13.04. How is it possible to try to make the ppa work on Ubuntu 14.04? What are the steps involved? Is there some way to find out how the ppa was made for Ubuntu 13.04 and recreate those steps on 14.04?
Schools in Turkey teaches in geography classes that Turkey is a bridge between Asia and Europe. But this is also true for our social structure: We sometimes turn our face to europe, ass to asia and sometimes we turn our ass to europe and face to middle east. Our last 12 years was a sample for second statement.
If you feel the need to append this statement, that's a good sign that you don't need to. Your English is fine (should be "schools teach", not "schools teaches", and I wouldn't have used "sample for" there, but who cares -- it's clear and unambiguous). It's the morons who don't care that end up being painful to read.
Continuing further down your OT pet peeve: how would you distinguish between people who know their English isn't perfect and are sorry about it (without saying so, per your advice) and those "morons" who are unapologetic about the same?
I have noticed that people tend to jump on others language skills in an indirect attack on the person when its the idea they disagree with. For some it is easier to dismiss an idea they do not agree with by attacking the person than refuting the argument.
Working with many foreigners I have run into the apology style more than once, they have good standing and do not wish to be dismissed for merely bad language skills. I live here and my use of the language is atrocious.
I've noticed three classes of bad English. The apologetic folk, who will often try to explain things in multiple ways, or be extra-verbose, in an effort to get their point across clearly. Second, the unapologetically bad folk, who write a semi-incoherent sentence and respond poorly to requests for clarification (often simply repeating the same sentence). Third, the lazy native (or fluent) speaker. This is an entirely new class of errors, which is easy enough to read through (being native and lazy myself), but sends a strong signal that I shouldn't place too much importance on what I'm reading.
Well, for those of us who fine at English, we can tell. The hard part is for you to determine if you yourself are correct.
It's more useful to invite constructive feedback than to apologize preemptively; that's what I'd recommend people do. Add onto this that, culturally, Americans tend to appreciate such invitations more than they appreciate apologies. (I can't speak to other cultures; I'm about 99% certain there are some major world-spanning ones where this is not true.)
I wish there was an easy and unobtrusive way to invite people to correct my English. Would it be okay to state that every once in a while in my comments? My opinion is that people don't like it, not because it's rude but because it carries the conversation off topic. I also wish there was a way to send a private message here to remedy that but maybe that's me over-complicating things.
If you're particularly worried about a specific post (for instance, you're uncertain of the right word when there are several words with similar pronunciations/spellings, or it's just longer than a normal post), I'd say just ask in that post. And regarding off-topic conversations, I say "meh". Most threads get derailed by far less productive side-discussions. I usually like to tuck corrections into actual conversation anyways. Respond normally, and then as an aside (may be first or at the end) comment on the correct spelling or usage of a word.
Certainly you could mention it as an offhand every so often, but the important thing IMHO is to make clear that you're looking to improve your English skills, as opposed to apologizing for whatever flaws you might have in your English.
The latter is usually needless, and can even imply that not knowing English well enough should be a source of shame, which is why it often draws calls saying not to apologize. It'd be like a 2m tall person apologizing for not being tall enough – you're already taller than most people, there's nothing to apologize for. ;)
You've managed to take this thread exactly in the direction the author was hopefully planning to avoid :) disclaimer or no, there is always someone ready to comment on the english either way
Which is why it's better to just avoid mentioning it and just always communicate to the best of your ability (unless say, you can't the word you are thinking of and want to reach out for help).
I tend to put sentences into google in order to verify that the structure / grammar / spelling of my writing has been used before. This makes writing longs posts very tedious and annoying, but I'm way to afraid to make any mistakes. Most of the time I end up deleting the whole post, just to be done with it. I wish there were more people like you who don't look down on people with poor english skills.
Anyhow, can anyone recommend a book or some articles on how to improve writing skills, especially of technical nature ?
Check out the posts by Gayle Lakkmann on quora[0] related to common English mistakes (you might have to register, but it sounds like almost exactly what you are looking for). It is focused a bit more on mistakes common to those from India, but it is worth checking out. Your English is very good, and I have no trouble following your sentences. Through your use of commas, your writing actually "flows" better than many native writers whose work I read.
Also, I apologize profusely for some of our ridiculous grammatical rules. I'm a native speaker, so I don't think much of it, but I'm amazed at how poor some of the "rules" are.
İstanbul is where I call "home" but I still don't think it is European at all. Not when compared to Athens or anywhere I've visited outside Turkey. İstanbul is... İstanbul. Everyone living there has a strong love/hate relationship with it.
What could have happened to Athens in the last five years that I haven't been there that makes you say that? You mean in terms of freedom of speech? If so, I seriously doubt that.
I've spent time both in Athens and in Istanbul. Neither of them are European nowadays. Unorganized dirty jungles... Istanbul has a difference though, it's an unorganized mega jungle.
Didn't downvote, but if you write something like that, provide examples. It doesn't really address the parent comment, either. If they're both dirty jungles, what does that say about whether Istanbul is more or less European than Athens? Wouldn't the culture have something to do with that, also?
You made a racist statement. "Unorganized dirty jungles" of Asia in contrast to, presumably, tip-top, spotlessly clean, perfectly organized European cities...
Government (and their partisan supporters such as some journalists, representatives) support their decision with the same old "think about children" argument.
For example this man in the video is the Minister of Transport, Maritime and Communication. He is the reponsible minister for internet in Turkey. Today some journalists asked him his opinions about Twitter ban and he responded "i will answer your question with another question. tell me what would you feel if someone opens a news twitter account with your wife's full name and shared photoshopped pics?".
Well, for your question: A lot of people saw that the ship is sinking and leaved it. The only people still supports erdogan are some business men who has some contracts with government, erdogan's inner circle and their base supporters who are mostly not well educated and don't have internet connection.
So, at least 40% of our country is against his censorship.
Bingo. This. Most people who are not mad about the twitter ban are those who are like "what is he supposed to do, let people perpetuate lies?" and "it's libel therefore it's okay to censor". But when they are limited in the same way, they get extremely angry (for example, when bloggers delete their comments, a practice I disagree with for the most part).
He has got 15 million registered members for his party. mostly men not having any higher-education, minimum-wage government contract based workers. This way they feel like they are a part of a some bigger movement.
