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.
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