YouTube is back.
(And there was much rejoicing.)
WordPress.com is not.
(The rant goes on.)
Archive for January, 2008
Today, The New Anatolian is carrying this story, and Hurriyet is carrying this (in Turkish). The YouTube block has been in place for at least 60 hours yet there is nothing about it at Turkish Daily News or Today’s Zaman. Does this mean that this kind of thing is no longer news?
Last night I was not able to connect to YouTube through my Internet regular connection. This morning it became clear why: “Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace.” Way to go.
This is not the first time that YouTube has been blocked here. I don’t know what the reasoning behind blocking YouTube this time around is, but I can say in no uncertain terms that this is getting really old.
A gob of years ago, I was on a school bus on my way to another day of 3rd grade. I was thinking about some song or another that I really liked–“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul and Linda McCartney possibly–and I wondered what kind of music I would be reacting to in the same way that people of my parents’ generation reacted so negatively against but that I loved so much. I took it for granted that in spite of my best efforts to stay “with it,” the generation gap would slowly slide so that I became the old fogey, complained that all this new music sounds the same, and would you please turn it down.
That day didn’t happen for many, many years.
That was then.
I like a lot of David Bowie’s repertoire, but I don’t think he is/was a musical genius. In spite of this, there is at least one spot in Nicholas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” where someones genius was showing. The spot I have in mind starts with Thomas Newton (Bowie’s character) nuzzled up against a spheroid device listening to some really inane music. We are lead to think that he’s listening to the very linear, scalar, repetitive, oscillator-driven stuff because it reminds him of home–at least until he removes the sphere from the device (stopping the music) and says something like, “I hate this shit that Farnsworth sends me.” It’s genius because of the way it plays on a number of the viewer’s expectations–both about Newton’s character and about what we are “supposed to” think space music/music-of-the-future sounds like.
It’s also genius because that very linear, scalar, repetitive, oscillator-driven, inane shit is what I am now hearing in a lot of places. Case in point: the music in the supermarket I was in yesterday. God, I wanted to run screaming from the place by the time I was done with my shopping. The same moronic thing, over and over and over and over again for 10 or more minutes. In this case it was a disquieting hybrid of a Latin beat and some Germanic melody. It was like salty chocolate, rammed into your mouth over and over again for ten agonizing minutes. Not want.
I really wanted to stop ranting, but I just can’t.
The WordPress blockage here is having an impact on many other sites. The sites in question have non-WordPress URLs, but these URLs are actually cloaks for WordPress-hosted blogs. Yup. They get sucked up into the farce as well.
Topping the list of effected sites is the ever dear http://icanhascheezburger.com/. If you have not visited this manifestation of the best that the Internet can be, I suggest you click in due haste and have a taste. Unless you are in Turkey, in which case you are just poo out of luck.
Another effected site is http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com. Yup, that CNN. You’d think they would host their own blogs on their own servers, but then again I suspect they never suspected that something as silly as the kind of blockage we’re seeing here would ever happen.
This led me to wonder what other sites might be blocked in Turkey, and after a thoughoghly unscientific and non-thorough bit of Googling, I was able to find a handful that were blocked and yet had no relationship with WordPress. The sites in question are pipicik.com (Turkish porn), thepiratebay.org (torrent-based filesharing), turkish-delights.com (amateur porn), and zevce.com (Turksih celebrity porn).
Now you might feel that the loss of none of the above sites is a major loss to humanity, however I think it’s important to recognize that from the list above it seems that the courts here are actively targeting certain kinds of sites: namely ones that don’t comply with a certain concept of “family values.” Someone might try to convince you that that the sites in question are blocked and/or were shut down for publishing or facillitating the trade without permission of copyrighted materials, but it’s really hard to imagine that this is the case with a site like turkish-delights.com.
You may not care at all about the loss of a handful of porno and porno-trading sites. However, the important thing to recognize is that if the courts get into the business of legislating “family values,” with essentially invisible due process to boot, and are legitimized in doing so, then the total loss of democracy is only a few rulings away. And it worries me no end that no one is talking about this here.
It’s the first day of the new year. I wish it began on a cheerier note.
