"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional."
Your takeaways:
1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court.
2) Turkey has a constitution.
3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out.
4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced."
Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.
He's destroying the other side completely, whether they are lawyers or government janitors. But in theory courts and military can stop him. He purged the military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in... so it's just the court now.
Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
The voters can also stop him. Instead, Turkish voters not only re-elected him multiple times, they even voted in one special election to give him even more power.
The Turkish people are getting the government they've voted for.
>Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
Yes, but what can you do when a nation of people democratically decide to give someone absolute power? If you try to prevent this, then you're working against democracy.
It's not that simple. Erdogan massively repressed his rivals, such as the parties representing the Kurdish part of the population and their sympathizers (HDP) and the whole Gülen movement, not to mention the young movement protesting in the Gezi Park a few years ago. So we cannot pretend that the elections held were fair and open, e.g. the results aren't representative of the entire population of Turkey.
Results of any election are never representative of the entire population. That's the nature of democracy. If you have 99.999% of the population voting for the same person (like in Saddam's Iraq), then it's obvious the election was a sham. Democracy is all about the majority getting to choose the leaders.
As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.
It's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016.
In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2].
> The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them
Ok, just so we're clear on this: that's ridiculous nonsense, conspiracy theories basically, but you're using it to justify the indefensible actions of a hard-line authoritarian ruler.
While I wouldn't call the Gulenist movement a cult, they certainly engaged in conspiracies. The irony was that their infiltration into the army and civil service was supported by Erdoğan earlier, as a counterweight to the Kemalist establishment.
Turkey is the country that the term "deep state" was coined to describe. I don't know what to believe about the so-called coup.
Gulenist movement was certainly a cult, I live in Turkey and been to one of their school. I have the first-hand experience of their brainwashing methods and Gulenist indoctrination.
To me it always seemed like Gulen is the most internationally interviewed Turk for criticisms on Erdogan, whilst his own ideology doesn't seem so "modern" as well.
Would really appreciate If you could explain what Gulenism is about and particular where it differs from the Erdoganian Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
Didn't the same thing happen in South Korea with the Prime Minister being a puppet of some cult or such? What he says doesn't sound far-fetched, just unsubstantiated at this point.
Claiming a coup attempt as staged looks more like a conspiracy theory to me. Luckily, that was dismissed by the head of German intelligence[0].
> “The coup attempt was not initiated by the government. Before July 15 the government had already started a big purge so parts of the military thought they should do a coup quickly before it hit them too,” Kahl said.
In [0], Kahl dismisses the possibility that the Gülen movement did the coup. However, he fails to mention which other group in the military "feared" the purge and was big enough to attempt a coup.
If you combine that with:
- the 2010-11 purge of nationalist-modernists from the army was directed by Gülen people[1][2] (and supported by Erdoğan[3])
- all 4 military schools were totally infiltrated by Gülenists[4]
you would see that the Gülen movement was certainly in the army, and after the purge of nationalist-modernists, there was no other group in the Turkish army big enough and pissed off with the govt enough to attempt a coup. The testimonies of suspected army officers[5] mentioning Gülen is no surprise at this point.
When I see the purge of Gülen supporters to be generalized to Erdoğan opponents, something goes off in my mind. People who are against both Erdoğan and Gülen weren't targeted for that purge. If anything, they were trusted more than before, because many pro-Erdoğan people could get into state positions using Gülen connections pre-2013.
A good guestion to ask here is why did Erdoğan facilitate Gülen's infiltration of the institutions in the first place. As I mentioned above, it was because he feared a Kemalist coup or party shutdown. So, if Turkey didn't have the habit of "fending off populists with coups", none of this would happen. Or maybe it would?
All in all, what I'm trying to say is that the whole issue is more complex than "autocrat bad punish opponents".
That "coup" was merely a staged action. Can't tell me a real coup is over in like three hours and nothing happened. Sounds an awful lot like the german "Reichtagsbrand" which led to political cleanings and more.
We've seen the same script play out over and over and over again every time someone wants to become a dictator. So, rational people don't buy the excuses.
More than 300,000 websites are still blocked in Turkey, just to put this in context.
Also it's quite naive to assume that lifting the ban wasn't the government's intention, just days before European Court of Human Right's deadline to oversee the case.
Compared to illegal mass surveillance programs that remain running to this day, and a witty intelligence head who remains free after lying under oath, this is a shinning success that should be celebrated.
Hopefully other nations follow their lead one day.
Turkish authorities don't have global tech giants to tap into, but worry not, they're monitoring the internet very closely. In fact, they arrest people over tweets criticizing their rule. [0] And of course they block Wikipedia country–wide, over what Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration). Not an example to be followed by any government on Earth.
I think grandparent was not about having surveillance programs or not, but about whether the government is being held accountable to it's own laws. A quality that is worryingly slipping in several nations. Hence the emphasis on 'illegal' and the shoddy investigation with little follow-up.
But court could have stayed the block till it finished arguing the case, but it didn't. It let the block be for 2.5 years, while it made up its mind. To my eye it is problematic that.
The primary difference lies in execution. Most countries would err on the side of permitting the site to continue to operate, as with an injunction in the U.S. Here, it was effectively treated "guilty until proven innocent".
Some things, such as freedom of speech, I believe are universal and a government should need a very good reason to restrict some aspects of it. Therefore, access to Wikipedia should have been allowed to continue while the case was being run through the courts, as a point to be on the side of assuming the best for freedom.
This is neither new nor first. Turkey has a court tradition that spans, at this point, more than seven hundred years (excluding Eastern Roman law with Corpus Iuris Civilis, which if included would bring it to 2500, an unbroken chain from whence it came, Rome) - to the point that it customarily allowed every sub-nation of the Ottoman Empire to have their own court and apply their own laws. For example, if you were Christian, you would get Christian judges, a Muslim would get the Muslim court and a Jewish person would likewise. It worked well for a long time, and when it didn’t, the modern, current court system was put in place.
The general point here is that, no, Turkey is not, in fact, a banana republic, but ultimately a pretty normal enlightenment-ideas-based country which is dealing with a leader that tries to stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.
Modern Turkey is indeed built on sound "enlightenment-ideas-based". This doesn't mean it will continue to be so. The current regime works hard to change these principles.
The fact that these principles are challenged in democracies world over should bother us. This is not the same as it ever was, it's a real threat for the liberties and rights humanity managed to bootstrap for it's individuals.
We are watching the erosion of them in realtime. It's a slow process that's easy to miss or get used to. But, I believe we should be wary.
Do the "enlightenment-ideas" on which the modern Turkish nation is based include the necessity of ethnic cleansing of Christian and Greek-speaking populations in Asia Minor, that motivated the genocides of the Pontic and Anatolian Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, overseen and instigated by the Young Turks? Or does it refer to the continued denial of Turkey that these took place, despite their recognition as acts of genocide by the international community?
It's a rhetoric question. There is nothing "enlightened" about modern Turkey: it is a de facto military dictatorship, belligerent and militaristic, that relishes its self-chosen role as the regional bully in the Eastern Mediterrannean and the Near East. It was like this before Erdogan (with Turgut Ozal) and it will be like this after Erdogan, and for a long time still.
But perhaps I'm just blinded by prejudice having lived most of my life in Greece, which is right next door to Turkey. Perhaps you -presumably not living so close to Turkey- may have a broader perspective that I am missing.
In that case, can you name one time in the last 45 years when Turky has actively promoted peace and stability in the regions it borders? (I'm leaving out 1974, the year of the invasion of Cyprus, to make it easier).
While we’re talking history: I’ve heard that the system of laws codified under Justinian in the Byzantine empire ended up forming the basis for most Western law systems to this day. My math is probably off here, but is the current Turkish court system a continuous descendant from that system?
That's why I left it separate under an asterisk. Not an expert, but I think what happened is that Emperor Justinian's code remained the base for the Christian law within the Empire until the modernisation, which was pretty much a merge of that tradition with updates pulled from French third republic with the exception of civil law, which was merged in from Switzerland instead.
Up until 1851 the largest minority in the Empire were Muslims at 45% of the population, followed by Christians at 35%. You could argue that it's an unbroken lineage because 35% of the population still followed Roman law which was still valid and in full force, or you could argue that the most populous minority didn't, therefore a broken lineage.
In either case, the reality is more shades of grey, of course: all jurisdictions of accepted law evolved side by side with some crosstalk over time. Ultimately though, Turkey terminated the application of muslim law, removed it entirely from its code and completely switched to a western code after World War I, roughly coincident with the collapse of the Empire and the foundation of the current, modern Republic.
It's subject to both European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights as the ultimate courts of appeal, both of which, I believe, have some presiding Turkish judges.
(My knowledge in this field is very superficial — if someone knows better, please feel free to correct!)
Not sure about the current Turkish system but the precursor to Turkey; the Ottoman Empire was a Islamic caliphate so they probably didn't adopt the same laws as Western system but it'd be still pretty accurate to say that the Byzantine empire formed some basis of Western laws (at least as a lineage of the Roman empire). Also as you probably know, Istanbul used to be called Constantinople.
It's not very clear actually because there were no rules regarding that. (AFAIK) We only have records for official Kadis(Regional Judges) and Divan-i Humayun (higher court). There are cases seen at kadi or divan-i humayun where one side is Muslim and the other side non-Muslim.
They are both institutions of the state and since the Ottoman Empire was an Islam state, they were obviously Islamic. But, Divan-i Humayun's decisions were "Sultan's Word" so they had to be fair. The usual/accepted route is to go Kadi first and then you can appeal to Divan-i Humayun. But it's seen im records that sometimes non-Muslims directly went to Divan-i Humayun because they believed that they wouldn't be treated fair at Kadi.
The judicial system of this empire was quite accommodative for an Islamic system. It had Islamic courts which were the primary courts and they formed the cornerstone of administration in the empire. But there were also other courts that were not based on Sharia law and were meant for the interpretation of the law as understood by non-Muslims who were part of the empire. They included Jews and Christians who had been welcomed to the empire and lived in groupings called millets. But the Jews and Christians had the freedom to take their cases to the Islamic courts if they wanted to and many did as a way of giving judicial credence to their cases, given the immense unofficial respect that was given to the Islamic courts. It should be noted that this recognition was informal and any decision from the other courts were equally respected in the empire.
The third type of courts was the trade/commercial/industrial or business courts. In these courts, disputes emanating from business within the empire were solved. The parties involved determined the inclination and sometimes, both Islamic law experts and Christian and Jewish judicial officers would sit side by side and decide a case. They were more concerned with securing justice and fairness and religion was never a key consideration. New laws into the three types of courts came from the top leadership as well as the judicial experts of the three courts.
> stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.
Is this level of trolling even considered trying? Trump has done very little to expand the powers of the US presidency.
>Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such.
Beautiful strawman here. Let's let Turkey go on denying genocide, murdering Kurds, destabilizing the region, and arresting political opponents and holding them without charges, because gosh darn it, they let wikipedia in.
Turkey is an interesting country to deal with. For example let's say you are a hosting company in the US and one of your customers is rebroadcasting Turkey television. A turkey govt agency would reach out to you and ask that you terminate that customer. If you refused, they go to the domestic incumbent Telecom (Turk Telecom) and null route your entire company ip addr space. Basically all of turkey won't be able to hit any of your customers. Know a few small hosting shops this happened to and saw the emails.
That's not the case anymore. They built an application level filter. For example, Wikipedia block was due to http header reading. https wasn't also a solution because of hand-shaking part. Even TOR can be blocked this way but it's reachable through obfs4proxy.
Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see.
I routed only Wikipedia through TOR with a browser extension. With this setup not all DNS queries goes through proxy. So I had to take advantage of CoreDNS' dns-over-tls support.
Because people who knows basic networking and also read English are less than a thousandth of the country, their method works very well enough.
“DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP”
Wait, so if I was in Turkey, a request for wikipedia.org to my ISP DNS server would not only have failed, but caused all my other queries to fail as well? For how long?
I think I couldn't explain well.
When we use ISP's DNS, we get a local IP address and a web-page at that address, explaining who blocked the site and why.
But if I use Google's or Cloudflare's public DNS, the query won't get an answer, falls to timeout.
A funny method to circumvent the block was to visit wikimedia. As long as your connection was kept alive, you could keep surfing wikipedia like it wasn't blocked at all!
This worked well in domestic telecommunications providers. Universities implemented the block themselves, and you were unable to use the workaround stated in those universities.
To be honest, that sounds like the reasonable and fair thing to do when a foreign company is violating your laws on the internet. First tell them to stop, then block them. Not every country has this "safe harbor" concept that the US does, so you may have to take responsibility for the content you host if you want access to those markets.
It'd be better if they were transparent about it and you could see these actions clearly instead of having to glean it from a looking glass or from in country probes.
I meant why doesn't the government publish a list of IPs blocked, when it started and the reason why.
Edit: I see I'm getting downvoted here but I want to explain why I am passionate about this topic. As someone who supports network infrastructure and it's operation I'm on the hook to find out why x can't talk to y. It's a challenge when dealing with ISP/country level blocks or packet manipulation. Proving that this is something deliberate versus a legitimate broken thing is a process to go through. Not being able to tell a customer why is not a great story. Different countries have different techniques for this and over time you learn them. Seeing your packets in a traceroute going to a hop that has a DNS PTR record that says "DPI" in the name is a nice heads up to an operator to give you that sort of indication of what you're dealing with. I am aware that basically no country publishes such blocks today and ISPs that are forced to implement such blocks are usually instructed to not tell you anything about it (sometimes off the record, if you're lucky).
I'm really disappointed when I see this sort of response. Somebody in a foreign country is hosting content on their own servers that offends you, or violates one of your local laws, so your best possible response is to null route an entire block of their IP space? Please tell us which ASNs you do network engineering for...
Twitter and Youtube occasionally blocked in Turkey for years. They have found their solution in region-locking the contents after court orders. This may not be feasible to small hosting companies though. For youtube and twitter, implementing that control system was the only option to access the Turkey's market.
I always wonder what the real effects of these kind of blocks.
For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. 0wikipedia.org is a clone of wikipedia and it was accessible.
WHOIS search shows 0wikipedia domain name was created on 4 May 2017, just five days after the block.
I am a Turkish grad student in the US. Whenever I visited Turkey, I would get surprised by the error page, remember that it was blocked and overcome it by just putting a "0" in the domain name.
The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.
I’m not sure I buy this. Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two.
That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.
>Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two.
The thing is, when you have access to both truth and misinformation, you still stand a non-zero chance of filtering out trash and getting to the truth. In that scenario, misinformation has to step up its game and compete with real information. It cannot be too wild and out there to capture the minds of the majority. Whoever spreads the misinformation has to carefully balance the strength of their misinformation vs. appearing legitimate.
On the other hand, when the truthful info is all blocked completely, the quality of misinformation and propaganda doesn't matter. If it is the only source of info, then that's what the population will consume. It can be as wild as possible, and it won't matter at all, people will eat it up. No need to balance the strength vs. legitimate appearance, you can put all your chips on strength.
One can argue about how much truth people are able to consume when it is mixed with tons of misinformation, but if truthful sources are blocked, the answer to "how much" becomes "almost none". And the situation is made even worse by how much more wild and more dishonest the misinformation can become if there is a vacuum of sources of truth due to them being completely blocked.
As an example, in countries that tend to block major sources of truth and where we tend to think that a lot of people are just mindless sheep eating up government propaganda, I personally don't think people there are just naturally too dumb to not figure out they are being lied to or they are predisposed naturally to be more susceptible to propaganda.
When you have a vacuum of info, it has to be filled by something. If all that's on the plate is wild misinformation, then that's all you will eat, it isn't like you have any other choice, aside from completely isolating yourself from society.
The world is also just learning how to deal with the damage. It reminds me of the time when the Flintstones were brought to you by some cigarette company.
You're charmingly naive if you think that the Turkish powers that be don't put out an equally staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction themselves, in addition to blocking access to the information that they think might be detrimental to maintaining their power.
Reading critically is hardly a solution to this; you evaluate “truth” based on sources and authorities with internalized misinformation themselves entirely rationally. I don’t have a prescription, and I am certainly against censorship.
That's why you don't need to block offending wiki but simply rewrite it as fit the narrative. Like Russia does - all their "ru" Wikipedia pages are occupied and rewritten by pro-putin forces and whole moderator structure also supports this. Mostly this happens in history and politics pages.
It doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.
That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress.
In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.
They stole some of it but that is what jacquesm is advocating: copying ideas. And in the space race they were also first with the unmanned Sputnik with no such safety concerns.
It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events.
The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2.
The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference.
Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.
They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won.
> The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting,
The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.
> They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal.
That’s a senseless analogy. There was no game with structured rules about number of rounds, etc.
That’s like claiming someone only won a war because they kept fighting until the other side gave up and didn’t want to fight anymore.
> The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties.
None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied.
Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.
Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939):
Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war.
The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war.
The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives.
It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies.
Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels.
So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.
> and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.
This sentence is nonsense. They publicly (not privately) thanked the US for their aid.
Besides, your framing of the war is obviously false. The allies had lost the war up until about ~1943, where they started gaining momentum. A turning point I'd like to point out is the Battle of Kursk, in which the Germans for the first time cancelled a major operation. Sure, the invasion of Sicily played a role in their decision, but the battles weren't even on the same scale (14k casualties vs 370k in Kursk).
Also the lend-lease is a false equivalence. Yes, the "industrial might" played a role, but the US hadn't lost 25 million men to the war. Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death. The US even saw population growth during the war. The Soviet Union only saw their loses replaced during the mid-50s.
The US played their part, but make no mistake in the difference between 11 billion USD and 25 million men.
> Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death.
Well of course that's why. I don't thing anyone is arguing otherwise. OP was simply saying, without the US, the allies would likely have lost.
Why the US was able to supply most of the Ally's supplies doesn't take away from the fact that they did. Your not even arguing against anything OP was saying here, other than the "openly private" contradiction, which was right on. Now of course it wasn't just the US that won the war, without the USSR the Allies would almost assuredly have lost.
Now certain people may argue that one was more responsible for winning the war than the other. I think that's pretty pointless and we can leave it at them both being critical to winning the war.
Yes, they produced a great many tanks. Of the 270,041 tanks and self-propelled guns made by the Allies, 120,000 of them were made by the Soviets. That's a very impressive number, Russian tanks were pretty good, and tanks in general are impressive machines, so this makes for a very good example if you want to boast about Soviet productivity.
What about other vehicles though? The Soviets got 400,000 good trucks and jeeps from America. Tanks alone won't win a war, you need to move men and supplies too otherwise those tanks won't get very far. Take a look at the "Other Vehicles" column on the land vehicles table.
Take a look at the aircraft table on that same page. The British alone made way more aircraft than the Soviets, and frankly the British aircraft were much better. Particularly the Lancaster, which was superb. The British gave thousands of combat aircraft to the Soviet Union, and trained many Soviet pilots as well.
If you look at the table for production of coal, iron, and oil, you'll find that the Soviet Union was lagging far behind Britain and America. And Canada deserves a special mention for producing most of the aluminum. Of course I don't say any of this to demean the contribution of the Soviet Union to the war effort. It's undeniable that the Soviet Union shed the most blood, paying for the war with tens of millions of lives. How many more would have died had Soviet resources been stretched even thinner? That's not a pleasant thing to consider.
>There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.
Without the USSR involved in the war, US supplies would be unable to help stop the Germans and the German forces would not be spread thin enough for an invasion to be feasible. Both were necessary, but the Soviets gave up much more to secure the victory.
I fully agree that the Soviets were instrumental in helping to cripple the German war machine, eroding its supplies and manpower. That's not the premise floated by the more recent, popular, anti-US WW2 propaganda however that proclaims the Soviets won WW2 while intentionally ignoring all actual historical facts from WW2.
Normandy was June 1944. The US had nukes by August 1945. The Germans signed their surrender in May of 1945. The Germans were done. Period. The war in Europe was over one way or another and soon.
Within one year of the US invading at Normandy, all that Nazi territory in the prior map I posted was gone, whereas none of it had been reclaimed in the prior five years before the US invasion. It's not a coincidence. Churchill recognized that once the US joined on to invade Europe, the war was won.
There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942. Most likely, with or without the Soviet effort between January 1942 and May 1945, the US was going to bring Nazi Germany to capitulation with nuclear weapons.
There is a big difference in the stakes however: the US didn't need to win the war in Europe to survive. It could have stepped back, relatively safe with its nuclear position. And the Soviets would have treated Western Europe very differently without the US there to safeguard territorial lines from further Soviet expansion and influence west.
>That's not the premise floated by the more recent, popular, anti-US WW2 propaganda however that proclaims the Soviets won WW2 while intentionally ignoring all actual historical facts from WW2.
The premise floated is that the Soviets paid the most to guarantee victory in WWII, hence "won" the war. US entry in the war may have been a significant turning point, but the Soviet involvement dwarfs the US involvement.
>There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942.
Without the incredibly taxing years of war with the USSR, Germany would have had the resources to all sorts of other things. Not only could they have furthered their own advances, they would have been able to disrupt the UK's assistance and limit US access to necessary resources. You can't simply say the US would have still been able to win that race without the Soviets war.
I know it's somewhat fashionable to say it was all really just a Russian/German war. You rightly point out the contributions of Canada and the UK relative to population. But I have one defense of the naive "but but the US mattered!" view...
Khrushchev and Stalin readily admitted that they would have been quickly overrun by the Germans without the US basically flooding the Eastern front with fuel, trucks, munitions and other support. US readymade military support to Russia amounted to something like a seventh of Russia's GDP.
Between 1943 and 1945, the United States built more ships than had existed in the world before 1939. The US built and crewed more aircraft than the rest of the world combined. The US provided a third of the raw materials, tools, and transport the Soviet Army used. It was the industrial backbone of all of the Allied armies. It brought the Allied to Axis GDP ratio to 5/1 by the end of the war.
Which is just a mere footnote, if your model of warfare completely discounts the importance of logistics and materiel. Or if you believe that the industrial warmaking capacity of your opponent is irrelevant to whether or not you sue for peace.
I know it's tempting to say that contributions don't "count" unless they involve deaths, but, as one notable WWII participant once said, "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country."
Stalin put it this way: the British bought time, the Americans brought gold, and Russians provided blood.
To be fair, it would be distortative to diminish any of those contributions.
Everything else aside, the German industry must have been incredibly strong to withstand the rest of the world against it for so long. Such a double tragedy it was wasted on a horrible war effort in instead of furthering humanity.
It wasn't that strong, though. That's precisely why there's a popular opinion that Germany was done by 1943, pretty much regardless of anything else - they've spent their own industry while failing to sufficiently cripple the Soviet one. The question then wasn't about who'd win the war, but how long it would take, how many more casualties, and what the map of Europe would be after.
Exactly, which is why this argument is so stupid. The evil posed by the Axis was of such a magnitude that it took everyone else working together, all over the world, to end it.
Arguing over who did the most good in WWII is as pointless as arguing over whether Hiroshima or Dresden or Bataan or Unit 731 was the greater atrocity. The only lesson that endures is that humanity shouldn't do any of this stuff again, ever.
Some things aren't a matter of opinion. Look at Buran, for instance [1]. (This is why it's so frustrating as an American to acknowledge that we can't even put humans in space anymore.)
I was taught in the Russian school system, and while it's true that main emphasis is on the eastern front, but the rest of the world is broadly represented.
I have never meant a person that was not aware of the other fronts, and did not know at least the broad strokes of France/normandy/etc.
There was almost 10 year gap I think from the last SkyLab mission to the first flight of the shuttle,when Americans had no capsule available for manned missions.
It has been nearly nine years since the US lost the capacity for manned space flight so there's a kernel of truth, /s or not.
This is an interesting time to be following along, as SpaceX just completed an in-flight abort test last weekend which was - by all appearances - a success.
According to spaceflightnow.com, the manned follow-up mission which will launch astronauts to the ISS on a Crew Dragon capsule, DM2, could happen within the next 50-100 days[1]:
> The schedule for the Demo-2 launch with Hurley and Behnken will partly be determined by a NASA decision in the coming weeks on whether to extend the length of their mission at the space station from a short-duration stay of about a week to an expedition that might last as long as several months.
> Bridenstine said the Demo-2 crew will have to undergo additional training to perform duties on the space station if NASA extends Hurley and Behnken’s mission.
> Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, suggested Friday that the Demo-2 mission might be ready for launch as soon as the first half of March.
> But it’s more likely to happen in April — at the soonest — when the space station’s crew is downsized to three people through October, assuming no U.S. crew launches in that period.
For those who missed it, the in-flight abort test itself was interesting[2].
This one is not. Computers were clones (IBM?), cameras were clones made on equipment brought from Germany, cars were clones of FIAT.
(I grew up in USSR, for what it matters).
It's not like you could just walk up to some preserved soviet microelectronics and compare their technical sophostication (e.g. metal layers, feature sizes, power density) to contemporary Western technology.
Not in this case, from personal experience living in the last years of the USSR. I remember just how "magic" the microwave ovens were to us, and how much better non-Soviet-made tape players and recorders were.
On the other hand Soviets were at par with the West in Mathematics, Control Theory, etc. I kind of feel there is a tendency to downplay their achievements, fuel by cold war era sentiments.
Well, witness North Korea in the present day, and many other dictatorships besides, they usually lose their ability to innovate about as fast as they bury their dissidents.
Chinese came up with many inventions (gun powder, printing press, ocean faring ships) we consider civilization-defining and didn't do much with them. Meanwhile Europeans took them to new heights and conquered the world.
A level of individualism is probably the most important factor and fairly incompatible with totalitarian regimes but wide access to information isn't nearly as crucial as infovores assume.
I can’t help but wonder how much it really matters, if you have cutting edge technology that nobody gets to use, because your economy can’t get it into enough hands.
Not convinced that much, I'm sure they have encyclopedia or even local copies of wikipedia. Most of the valuable data is not from 2010s (some maybe) so an out of date pedia is already a lot
> The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information
Considering the censorship that goes on in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc, I'm not so sure about your claim.
> Regimes that block access to the truth
Lets not kid ourselves and pretend wikipedia is the "truth". Jimmy Wales has come out as being partisan and agenda-driven like much of tech. Wales/Wikipedia represents "truth" no more than Google or Facebook does. Not only that we know that there are unsavory actors ( including government, ngos and especially PR groups ) who are manipulating wikipedia articles.
Sure, no single person is completely objective, but Wikipedia is not a news outlet with Jimmy Wales as editor-in-chief. It's an encyclopedia crowd-sourced from an immense number of volunteers, all with different knowledge. So popular articles can generally be trusted to be informative, as they were overseen by many people with overlapping knowledge. Surely this is a more objective source of information than most state–run or commercial media where the voices are far fewer and often kept on a short leash of agenda by management (TRT's agenda, for example, being presenting the current Turkish government as the best possible one).
Imagine the near future when governments become more technically adept and those holes get plugged. These stories are scariest because they utterly prove how eager governments are to control access to information and communications.
Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work
> Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work.
If corps really needed DRM to work well, it would work well already. The reason that it doesn't is that there is no business case:
1. The music industry has mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") woken up to the fact that DRM does not stop piracy. Only a good user experience stops privacy. Hence why piracy stopped being a big problem once streaming services like Spotify became available.
2. The movie and game industry only rely on DRM protecting the initial wave of sales right after the initial release. When the DRM of a AAA game gets cracked 90 days after release (as is usual for Denuvo afaik), it doesn't matter much because 95% of sales are already done at this point. Same for movies. The long tail is impacted a bit by the movie or game being available on piracy sites, but most customers still go through the official sales/streaming channels unless they're absolutely atrocious.
Sorry to break it to you but we're well past the "scary because it might (theoretically in a far away future) work" phase. Today IP blocks are practised by all or at least most nations, and even western "democratic" governments are salivating at China's advances in mass surveillance. Some of the worst offenders are Britain and Germany, but France is not much better. Countries with a "free" internet are becoming few and far between (thanks to the "free speech craze" the US is still amongst them, but on the other hand punishments are draconian if you "misbehave").
> For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name.
I disagree. Blocks like this work.
China started this way. The Firewall was weak and easy to circumvent, but people just didn't go around it.
If you Google something and get multiple results will you chose the one you can read straight up or the one that takes work. One click beats two. And one click kicks ass on typing.
Android chrome is removing editing URLS as a general idea for instance. Google considers URLs as redundant. They are not right, but also not wrong.
Don't expect it to last for long. As soon as something negative about Erdogan gets posted a loophole will be found and will be banned again. Unfortunately the situation in Turkey is not simple, there's potentially innocent people still in prison since the failed coup attempt, Wikipedia is a small inconvenience compared to prosecution of innocents.
Somehow most western supported military coups and regimes persist, in South America, Africa, middle East and East Asia. And most of these coups have wide spread support in a wider political panorama. So military coups or uprisings seem to destabilize and stabilize third world.
Yet ongoing demonstrations in France and England are usually ignored and violently suppressed without support from elites. I'm curious why
It's incorrect. The block was began because of Turkey was in the list of State-sponsored Terrorism article [1]. Turkish authorities asked to remove the content from Wikipedia, otherwise they will be blocked. [2]
That's misrepresentation of the root cause. The block was there, because it's easy to block. Uber is blocked in Turkey, you can't even access uber.com. Pastebin.com is blocked due to a data leak was posted in there a couple of years ago. Imgur is banned due to pro-terrorism post, AFAIK but I'm not sure. There's no damat (son-in-law) in those cases. Damat is a multiplier but not a reason.
For those that didn't pick up on the nuance, this article is about President Erdogan's son in law, and it discusses how he was a big player in selling/smuggling oil from ISIS, so he basically funded terrorism.
It's kind of a bad look for the leader of a country that supposedly was fighting ISIS to have a close relative that is supporting them. So he blocked Wikipedia in his country instead of doing something honest, like acknowledging the bad press, investigating the issue, and stopping his relatives and his country's oil companies from funding terrorism.
It seems that for Erdogan's government blocking websites has become a hammer. And when you have such a convenient hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I wonder what will happen (politically) in countries that engage in mass Internet censorship when SpaceX's Starlink constellation goes GA. I've always believed (perhaps naively) that the Internet is a great equalizer for information. Free (as in freedom) and unfettered Internet access seems like one of the few things that could make it incredible difficult for bad and oppressive regimes to operate anywhere in the world.
If I were a billionaire philanthropist I would try and find ways to get as much Internet connectivity into the hands of impoverished people.
As a billionaire philanthropist you will still have to align to your home country’s foreign policy, because your billions only have value so far as the State enforces your property rights.
So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.
Billionaires still need the protection of a nation state. Their wealth would go away quickly if they had to finance an army. Maybe trillionaires can pull that off.
Maybe some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's unlike to be Bitcoin. When people get paid, they want the value of their payment to not massively go up/down each week.
You can be paid usd amount at the fx at the time of transfer in bitcoin and you can convert it right away if you want. Or use stablecoin for transfers. It's actually relatively trivial to have dozens of options of payment options depending on employee preference (I mean once you have cryptocurrency payroll setup it's not difficult to have all available options... available and customizable by receiver).
How far are we really from private armies really? Sometimes I feel like the US is descending back to feudalism. The billionaire tycoons of today are just lacking homage of some PMCs to be modern day barons of their own domain.
You think China could make the US government make a private citizen censor the Internet in a different country?
1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.
2. The US government is not really a fan the Great Firewall or of the Chinese government. It's unlikely it'd just be cowed into submission, especially with Trump in office.
3. Even if the government wanted to not upset China, I don't see how it could stop Starlink legally. You think a law would pass that would make it criminal to distribute uncensored information in China? There would be so much public outrage at that. I can't imagine either party supporting it at all. Plus, I can easily imagine that being struck down as unconstitutional. It would spend forever in the courts at the least.
4. Even if it did pass, Starlink would just move to Canada or South Africa or somewhere before it services China. In no scenario can Musk lose his billions. The US loses half its space economy, but there's no mechanism to take his money or to actually stop Starlink.
> 1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.
No, US is really only 10-15% of China's export if you consider that a lot of USA trade on paper is not actually going to USA
China has the technology to shoot down satellites. If SpaceX tries to circumvent China's laws they'll just take out their constellation, so SpaceX has no leverage there.
Smaller, third-world countries, maybe there are more chances there. Citizens would likely need to import and manufacture their own antennas illegally that connect to the constellation.
A large part of the advantage of Starlink is that (thanks to SpaceX launch costs) it might genuinely cost more money to destroy than it did to launch. This makes it far harder to deny its use to the US military in times of conflict.
(SpaceX has claimed the cost to build and launch a single Starlink satellite is already under $500,000)
SpaceX has already said that Starlink hardware will be offered by partners for countries outside the United States, in order to abide by local laws (i.e., in China, the hardware will have to route through the gfw)[0]. It won't be a magic bullet for censorship, unfortunately (unless you could smuggle a US router into another country, but there may be some kind of DRM or something to prevent you from doing that).
It is ridiculously easy to geo-fence these solutions, because the position of the ground stations must be known for the system to work (and spoofing won't be possible because then your signal will get steered to the wrong spot), so SpaceX could still block/reroute people's access even if you're using a region-unlocked ground station from another country. And if smuggling foreign equipment into China becomes common you can bet that location-based censoring will happen instead of equipment ID-based censoring.
It is nearly guaranteed that SpaceX will ask the US government what their official stance is and comply with that. They have a lot of space launch contracts that they don't want to lose.
Most satellite systems allow countries to block access. The first tier is refusing to sell to locals/local billing addresses (which is ALSO imposed by sanctions, e.g. due to USA, satcom vendors with any US connection don't sell to Iran/NK); the second tier is allowing countries to ban operation within their borders. There are tricks (what actually matters to the satellite is your exact delay, so there's a range of spots which look the "same", and you can spoof GPS or fake it in the firmware...), but that's more applicable to fixed C/Ku VSAT than it is to portable systems like Starlink.
I'd love it if the US gave Musk the diplomatic/military cover to make Starlink available globally, but we might end up with issues (ITU or jamming/military) if that happened. Might still be worth it though.
> what actually matters to the satellite is your exact delay, so there's a range of spots which look the "same"
That's potentially true for GEO systems. It's not at all true for LEO/MEO systems, where ⓐ that "range of spots" is rapidly moving over the surface of Earth as the satellite does, ⓑ you have AOS/LOS when the satellite crosses the horizon, and ⓒ you can get enormously improved bandwidth for a given power budget by using highly directional antennas on the satellite as well as the groundstation. Starlink is LEO.
> I've always believed (perhaps naively) that the Internet is a great equalizer for information
Except people can't see the entire internet every day, which leave the information that people actually see in the hands of the curators, just like it always has been.
Just a few days ago there was an article on the front page about a commodity phased array that has unfortunately been discontinued (60ghz for wireless TV): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109708
Is there even a need for this when existing technological measures work? There's alternate DNS servers, VPN services, TOR bridges, obfsproxy, and shadowsocks. I've even heard that you could get pass the gfw by using a roaming sim card from hong kong.
You're obviously right when it comes to Turkey, or at least their past efforts to block, which were somewhat half-hearted.
But there are now countries that are willing to shut down the internet completely, at least for short terms. Cashmere still has no internet if I'm not mistaken, and Iran also had several shutdowns of about a week each in the past months.
Unfortunately, the track record of technology isn't that great when it comes to technology. A functioning court system, independent press, and strong civil society are far more useful than tor, encryption, bitcoin, or any other attempt in that direction.
These solutions take technical know-how to implement. And often times instructional sites, VPNs, and such solutions are also blocked because they help people engage in "cyber-crime."
So the censorship is effective for >99% of the population, and if you've got one friend that knows how to get around the censorship and starts blabbing about coverups going on in your country, then they sound a lot like a nutjob. And there are also the people that just don't care about the censorship as long as their daily life isn't directly affected.
They can simply outlaw possession of the equipment for connecting to it. Kind of like how guns don't make it incredibly difficult for oppressive regimes because they simply don't allow everyone have them.
Make no mistake, new oppressive regimes will arise which make use of the internet as a tool of oppression. It is not without its costs and they are currently unmeasured as we have not seen the effect of children being exposed to this at such young ages as they currently are. What the internet is also doing is dissolving all culture that does not adhere to a central political set of goals. We also have no idea of the long term effects on our bodies so much concentrated RF radiation will have. 4G 5G WiFi ect. In medicine there are years of trials before a new substance or technology is deemed safe and that is only for use in hospital facilities. No one has been able to run long term tests to see what the effect of being constantly living in RF fields will be and children do not choose to be exposed to this RF radiation.
This latest development follows a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional. Earlier today, the Turkish Constitutional Court made the full text of that ruling available to the public, and shortly after, we received reports that access was restored to Wikipedia.
This is awesome. I think that edrogan really made a mistake, but I'm glad that they're going back and making things better.When I went to turkey, I was really sad that I couldn't wiki all the cool artifacts that I was seeing. So, I installed a vpn on kubernetes so that really likes VPN. Also, that enabled me to read about the stoic philosopher the roman guy emperorr. It was really cool!
Interestingly, they actually briefly mention something on the topic in the article:
> In the time that the block was in effect, we heard from students, teachers, professionals and more in Turkey about how the block had impacted their daily lives. For many students, the block had occurred just days before their final exams.
Universities in Turkey have different internet infrastructure network called ULAKBIM (National Academic Network and Information Center). Therefore Wikipedia was never blocked for universities.
yes, the three worlds concept was actually invented by mao and has more to do with bloc alignment and less with economics. it is outdated and new terms are needed.
>yes, the three worlds concept was actually invented by mao
seems like there's actually two "three worlds" labelings, one by mao, and one by a french demographer.
>As political science, the Three Worlds Theory is a Maoist interpretation and geopolitical reformulation of international relations, which is different from the Three-World Model, created by the demographer Alfred Sauvy, wherein the First World comprises the US, Great Britain, and their allies; the Second World comprises the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and their allies; and the Third World comprises the economically underdeveloped countries and the countries, including the 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[3]
There are free VPNs, although most are probably spyware. If you need one both free of charge and free of malware, btw, you should get Psiphon ( https://psiphon.ca/ ), which came out of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
Free VPNs are not always spyware. Some just going to use your PC as proxy server for someone else instead like Hola / Luminati which is extremely shady, but on other side dont need to spy on you since their commercial customers pay them well for residential proxy servers.
i am told by expats that you can use VPNs in china to get access to blocked sites; i am also told that the government generally turns a blind eye, especially to foreigners using VPNs. how they deal with chinese users, in terms of social credit score, is something that is opaque. it seems like an inherently "antisocial" activity by the standards of their governance.
this is all assuming that with nation state resources they can identify use of VPNs at the user level.
there are ways of circumventing them - China has very sophisticated traffic analysis options but they are not too hard to get around as long as you're not using one of the big popular VPNs.
They don't have a goal of blocking iPads or poor people, they have a goal of blocking old TLS versions.
But yes, I would like to see their reasoning for this decision. How many people were using <= TLS1.1? If it was near-0 then it should be fine, but if a lot of people were using it (probably yes), then they should have a strong reason to block them. This page[1] seems to say the reason is for PCI-DSS compliance. I dislike compliance-based decisions. We should base decisions on real user impact, not on compliance.
Can you explain why blocking old TLS versions is even necessary? Didn't all the browser vendors announced that they're disabling old TLS versions in their browsers in a few months now?
Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia. It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions, instead of calling Wikipedia out for widening the digital gap, and quite literally expiring your right to read.
But there are certain risks from supporting the old versions. Take a look at this table[1]. In the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 columns not a single cipher is listed as secure. Some can be secure with mitigations, but I'm not familiar with the difficulty of those mitigations, and whether the mitigations would have to be serverside or clientside. If clientside, then by blocking old versions, they might actually be closing vulnerabilities.
Supporting more stuff means more surface area for new attacks. Also the older stuff was designed with less knowledge of current attack strategies, so there might be a higher likelihood of vulnerabilities being found there.
Just because new browsers disable old TLS versions doesn't mean everyone is safe. As you've already pointed out, some people use old browsers, so to protect those people there might need to be serverside changes.
> Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia.
That seems like an exaggeration. One thing they accomplished was PCI-DSS compliance. I don't value that, but some people probably do.
> It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions
That's all fine and dandy, but why does it matter? This is not some sort of personal messaging, banking or financial transactions that we're talking about; this is literally an online resource where any anonymous user can come and edit anything they please without any sort of authentication or peer review whatsoever — on English Wikipedia, all edits are immediately shown to all subsequent visitors/readers, even the vandalism made by anonymous users, which on some articles goes undetected for months or even years at a time, especially in cases where the vandalism is subtle-enough.
Put it simply, it's literally a big dump of unverified information, even if some of it appears to be relatively reliable and of good quality most of the time; how is preventing me from accessing it from my iPad or Android magically makes it so great and "secure"? Don't they have any bigger problems to worry about?
And what does PCI-DSS compliance has to do with an encyclopaedia? How does it benefit Wikipedia from being PCI-DSS compliant? What's next — is Wikipedia going to adopt EDD-KYC, too?
The most sensitive thing on Wikipedia I would think is the passwords. People often reuse passwords, so a password stolen from Wikipedia could maybe be reused against the victim's email or bank account.
Another possible sensitive item is the mapping of a username to an email. If there's an edit or account that a government doesn't like, that government might want to find what email is associated with the account, and then use information on that email to arrest the person. (Email accounts often contain phone numbers.) This reminds me of this comment[1], in which a vulnerability in Twitter allowed the Chinese government to map a username to a phone number, and then use that phone number to arrest the person.
It’s not clear. The elections were widely reported to be fraudulent and voter intimidation and violence were widely reported. A meaningful portion of the world’s imprisoned reporters are in Turkey. It is trivial to find articles and reports on this.
What you're trying to claim is ludicrous. He won the presidential elections by a far margin of 22 percent points however in local elections his party lost by only about 0.16 percent points (48.77% vs 48.61%).
And the violence and voter intimidation? I don’t understand what you are saying I’m wrong about. I’m stating that fraud, violence and intimidation maintain Erdogan’s power.
Edit: My link was to the 2018 presidential election, yours is to the more recent 2019 elections.
Edit 2: I’m not sure what you find reassuring about the 2019 elections - is that the link you intended to post? The bit titled “Controversies and issues” is completely terrible.
Didn’t the opposition candidate concede that Erdogan won the election fair and square last time around? Why would the Turkish opposition lie if it’s not to their advantage?
Well… There's this one example from the 1930s where the people got who they voted for and it turned out horribly… In an unprecedented way, really. So being elected does not automatically mean being a righteous ruler. Although of course in that case there's no other way as to campaign for righteousness. Coups sponsored from abroad rarely turn out well for the people.
Edit: In case it is not clear, this is a (poor taste) joke. The track record for beating those who dissent even when outside of Turkey is well established.
One way to make elections less free and fair is to cut off access to information from the opposition, and one way of doing this is to cut off access to Wikipedia.
Is it your opinion that the government was right to do this?
Except lately the economy has been getting much worse.
This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments. When they get into power they institute a set of economic policies that lead to wide-spread prosperity in the short term, but in the long-term are a disaster.
As far as elections go, the government pretends to be in favor of free and fair elections, but its political philosophy is a set of arguments as to why they are a terrible idea and ought to be eliminated. Which is just what the Ergogan goverment has been attempting to do in a step-by-step fashion.
> This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments.
Left-wing populist governments have been known to do that, too.
And left-wing populist governments have also been known to place a thumb on the scales of elections, in order to make sure that they come out "correctly".
I agree, these are also often problems with left-wing populist governments. The reason I was talking about right-wing populist governments is that is what Turkey has.
Like many things in the area of political philosophy, the distinction is an inexact one. But roughly speaking, right-wing political philosophies stress ethnicity, traditional culture and usually religion, whereas left-wing political philosophies are universalist and based on Enlightement philosphy. Also left-wing philosophy is socialist, whereas right-wing tends to be crony capitalism.
Ignoring widespread belief that the Turkish elections were less than fair, this kind of sentiment about politicians always surprises me. If I vote for a candidate why am I required to forever support every thing they do? I can vote for someone and still disagree (even strongly) with some of their decisions.
Your takeaways:
1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court.
2) Turkey has a constitution.
3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out.
4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced."
Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.