am i alive?

this morning i hopelessly clicked on my tüpbebek shortcut and actually found my block. (glory be!) then i read the news. blogger has been temporarily unbanned, waiting for "missing evidence." to temporarily celebrate, i'm going to post some missing content: pictures from fall in Erzurum. but i also want to write a bit more about the ban and my thoughts, especially as it relates to Cumhuriyet Bayramı- Republic Day in Turkey, October 29th.

We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and our legal institutions from the bonds which, even though they are incompatible with the needs of our century, still hold a tight grip on us. -Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

digi-turk, a large Turkish cable provider, sued over blogger sites linking to free football games and a local court in Diyarbakir province (South-Eastern Turkey) made the ruling, which banned access to all blogger sites in Turkey. there are a few issues for the legal system to iron out here, like why a provincial court can make a ruling that bans access to internet for the whole country, and why the entire blog hosting service is banned instead of the specific sites breaching intellectual property rights (something that could be done with just a bit more work). but because of these anomalies, the bans can't represent the majority of the Turkish people or the Turkish courts.

in discussion boards about the banning of blogspot, i saw a lot of Turkish people very upset. but i asked my students about the banning and they seemed indifferent or apathetic. most answered by saying that they know how to get around banned sites with proxy servers, and they all know that youtube was banned because of attacks/criticism/satire on/of/about the founder of the modern Turkish Republic: Kemal Atatürk. but i was thinking, especially now that it is the Republic Holiday, of the countries the founder of modern Turkey was looking to as models of his Republic. for better or worse, he looked at Europe and The West when structuring the Turkish Republic (France especially influenced the political system and language). the list of countries that censor internet include Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. and i wonder what Atatürk would think about censorship and to find his Republic in this company on this issue today, even when the censorship is done in attempts to preserve his own legacy from defamation.

to be clear, i'm not trying to write for anyone, although i am trying to make an argument towards the release of censorship on certain grounds. and i'm finding myself more vocal on this topic since it has affected me personally. not only do i host this site on blogger, but i host 2 other sites for my students, one on American Cultural Studies and the other on Introductory Phonetics. much content like this gets caught up in the bans and inhibit the population from information and perspective.

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by the way, i found an interesting Turkish group doing some action on this issue and others: meet the Young Civilians.