Update: I'm Censored

As long as I'm a leftist rabble-rouser, I should probably make some comment about what's going on in Wisconsin right now. Honestly I don't know much about it besides what I read here, but it seems totally despicable what's going on right now in that state. Blaming middle class people for the economic downturn is just plain silly. I'm amazed intelligent people seriously think this, especially as the gap between rich and poor continually spirals out of control. Do we really think the rich worked harder than everyone else to earn that money?

Maybe now I'll get banned from China, too. Hell, I can barely tell what I'm saying, I'm so out of touch with current events out here in Turkey.

And as I learned today, that's not a coincidence.

As long as I'm banned in the entire country of Turkey, I might as well pull out all my guns: recently there has been a huge crackdown on journalists here in Turkey. While the harsh treatment of foreign journalists in China has been getting a lot of press lately, the internal imprisonment of many Turkish journalists has been hard to find in the American news (perhaps they waited for China so they wouldn't be covered in International news and lose US favor?). Turks writing negatively about the Erdoğan government have been finding themselves in jail lately in a horrible expression of censorship.

As you might know, about 6 months ago I provided the link for what I called a good source for Turkish news, a blog call The Istanbulian, that was very critical of the current right-wing government; after I linked his blog we had a short email exchange - he was very kind. Sure enough, that site has been blocked as well - I don't even know if the link I provided works. The writer, who worked for the Hürriyet (trans: "freedom, liberty, or independence), has been performing his military service since late November so I haven't seen any updates from him for a long time. Perhaps he's in jail right now. We'll never know for sure until May when his term ends and we see if he gets back to blogging. You Americans will have to keep tabs on that for me until I get back!

So that must be the reason my blog has been blocked in Turkey. The Internet robots saw that I had linked this flagged website and then automatically flagged me. As I am not currently in jail because of my blog (maybe the government figured private school is worse), there's hope for my journalist acquaintance, though his being a full-fledged journalist probably doesn't help his case. I'm tempted to email him and find out if he's okay, but maybe that would give authorities an excuse to arrest him. I don't know. What I do know is something very scary is going on with this very right wing government that the USA doesn't understand at all, thinking that its anti-military and mildly secular government makes it a beacon for democracy in the Middle East. We have no idea what's really going on here.

Now block my site, Erdoğan! Oh, wait - you can't! It's already blocked!

Now I can write some of the more flippant opinions I've kept safe since moving here. Though now that I know the back story the whole thing's a little less cool than I originally thought.