erkan

Archive for January, 2018|Monthly archive page

a few good and mostly bad news roundup from the judicial processes: “Amnesty International’s Turkey chair Taner Kılıç released today… “Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça end hunger strikes after 324 days…

In Uncategorized on January 31, 2018 at 21:03

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Turkish educators Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, who went on hunger strike after being dismissed from their jobs by a state of emergency decree, have announced the end of their hunger strike after 324 days.
 
An Istanbul court on Jan. 31 ordered the release of Taner Kılıç, the Turkey head of international rights group Amnesty International.
Turkey’s huge crackdown is destroying civil society | Kate Allen

My Amnesty colleagues face a sham trial for terrorist offences at the hands of a draconian government. Such scare tactics threaten Turkey’s futureTurkey’s military offensive in Afrin  looks set to dominate news coverage of the region for weeks to come.

Which is no surprise. The operation is taking place on the much bigger stage of the war in Syria, Russia and the US are both deeply involved, and the UN is anxiously assessing the scale of the impact on the already dire humanitarian situation, the number of displaced people running into the thousands.

 

The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) has banned German-Turkish player Deniz Naki from football for three years and six months on charges of “ideological propaganda” and “separatism.
Police have launched an operation against the Turkish Medical Association, which released a declaration entitled “War is a Matter of Health”. There are detention warrants for 11 doctors. Police search the association’s headquarter and doctor’s clinics.
World Medical Association has released a statement about doctors from the Turkish Medical Association against which an operation has been launched due to its declaration entitled “War is a Matter of Public Health”.
11 Turkish Medical Association Central Council members have been detained in seven different cities, they will all be taken to Ankara. Their lawyers are yet to be informed concerning the charges, there is sealing order on the file.
President Erdoğan has denounced the Turkish Medical Association, which has protested Afrin operation: “These gentlemen have never been local and national”.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Jan. 30 ordered Turkey to pay 10,000 euros in respect of non-pecuniary damage to a paraplegic university student following his application over the violation of the right to education in the eastern province of Elazığ.
Foreign Affairs – Jan 29, 5:13 AM

In October of last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke at a gathering of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) about the steps that have been taken so far to eliminate the Islamic movement of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen whom

 

Turkish EU Minister Ömer Çelik on Jan. 28 criticized the European Parliament’s Turkey Rapporteur Kati Piri over her recent remarks about the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) “not being a threat.”
The Interior Ministry stated on Jan. 29 that a total of 311 suspects have been detained so far over “making terror propaganda” on social media regarding Turkey’s operation into the northern Syrian district of Afrin.

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkish government took reprisals against hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have been involved in the failed coup of 2016, one of the criteria they used for whom to round up for indefinite detention as well as myriad human rights abuses (including torture) was whether people had a cookie on their computers set by a 1×1 tracking pixel served by Bylock, which the Erdogan regime says is evidence of support of exiled opposition leader Fethullah Gülen.

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New photo from Facebook January 31, 2018 at 04:06PM

In Uncategorized on January 31, 2018 at 16:15

“Akdeniz’de Ölüm” by Aris Messinis. via Reddit. via Facebook Pages http://ift.tt/1heKubC

From Lviv to Eskişehir and back to Istanbul….

In Uncategorized on January 31, 2018 at 13:33

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I had started writing this when I and my brother, Hakan was in Lviv, Ukraine on new year’s eve. Then added Eskişehir, Turkey as I went there for thesis jury membership. Still more days passed, and I could not continue, finish up and publish. I have realized that I have not been posting for several days-

Lviv, Ukraine has recently become a tourist attraction for many Turkey (Ukraine not asking for a visa may also be effective) but I feel like it is a little bit overrated. After passing a new year eve night at Prague, I guess you should try another town. However, it is peaceful. I and my brother, Hakan needed some rest and it is working well.

Hand-made chocolate and coffee are the best things we have found and we consumed a lot.

When I am in a modern hotel room with particular facilities like good wifi, clean and minimalist environment, close to city center, I feel more productive and cosmopolitan.

I have to admit. One of the reasons I am not posting might be that I have played too much of Civilization VI

I have been thinking of going back to original blogging style I had in the first years. And there are some major happenings in my life. I have to narrate them. I will do that as soon as possible. But right now I am under the normal stress of meeting deadlines for a co-authored article on Qatar crisis, a review of “collective intelligence studies and a revised introduction to new business models for journalism chapter.

In the meantime, there are so many things happening in Turkey. I feel guilty -but also some pain- not writing about them. Well, let me go back to my writings but hopefully, I will be back- and I wonder who still reads here. I have some guesses:)

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New photo from Facebook January 26, 2018 at 10:50AM

In Uncategorized on January 26, 2018 at 10:53

Japonya’dan bir ofis binası. via Reddit. via Facebook Pages http://ift.tt/1heKubC

#Europe agenda: “Davos explained: In 90 seconds

In Uncategorized on January 24, 2018 at 17:12

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Davos explained: In 90 seconds

The World Economic Forum kicks off its meeting in Davos, and this year Donald Trump will be among the attendees.

Sweden to issue leaflets on how to prepare for war

The publication of the booklets, first issued in World War Two, comes amid rising security concerns.
Residents of Oslo, Norway ski along streets

Residents of the Norwegian capital chose a novel way to get to work in heavy snow.

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#Cyberculture agenda: Wired special- “6 Tales of Censorship in the Golden Age of Free Speech

In Uncategorized on January 24, 2018 at 15:57

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6 Tales of Censorship in the Golden Age of Free Speech

Blocked by Trump, fired by Google, suspended by Facebook. The social internet gives everyone a voice, it also has countless ways of punishing us for speaking.
Special Issue: How technology is upending everything we thought we knew about public discourse.

Change My View: Why Our Best Hope for Civil Discourse Is on Reddit

What’s astounding about Kal Turnbull’s brainchild is that no single radioactive topic—not Trump, Brexit, sex, guns—has overrun the subreddit.

Most popular GIFs used to express emotion in different countries

People often use animated GIFs to digitally express caricatures of emotion or reaction. So when you look at the most distinct ones of various countries associated with specific emotions, you get sort of a caricature for each region. Amanda Hess and Quoctrung Bui for The Upshot looked.

Libertarian wisdom holds that “the answer to bad speech is more speech,” but if you’re a Peter Thiel libertarian (that is, the kind of “freedom lover” who doesn’t think women should vote, wants to spy on everyone in the world, and secretly wields power to censor the free press), then “the answer to bad speech is secretly backing lawsuits by washed-up pro-wrestlers in order to kill a media outlet whose reporting you don’t like.”

Facebook is making big, immediate changes to News Feed. The company will now prioritize content from friends, family, and groups over “public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post Thursday night. News publishers that have relied on Facebook for traffic will suffer: “Some news helps start conversations on important issues,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.”

Party described in Vanity Fair article and forthcoming book was at a home of Steve Jurvetson, a founding partner of venture-capital firm DFJ who left the firm in November.

Ten years ago, November 2007 to be precise, we published an articlefeaturing the four leading torrent site admins at the time.

Niek van der Maas of Mininova, Justin Bunnell of TorrentSpy, Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde and isoHunt’s Gary Fung were all kind enough to share their vision of BitTorrent’s future.

This future is the present today, and although the predictions were not all spot-on, there are a few interesting observations to make.

For one, these four men were all known by name, despite the uncertain legal situation they were in. How different is that today, when the operators of most of the world’s largest torrent sites are unknown to the broader public.

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#anthropology roundup: “The Dude Troll As Anthropologist…”The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets…

In Uncategorized on January 24, 2018 at 15:22

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anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Alexia Maddox, contributing the first post in the Private Messages from the Field series edited by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta.

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A Digital Bermuda Triangle: The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets
by Alexia Maddox

The first time I read Coming of Age in Samoa was in my Intro to Anthro course. My teacher — and future mentor — was a social anthropologist and a social conservative of the Mary Douglas stripe. As we read the book she carefully pointed out passages where Mead seemed to contradict herself. Her impatience with the books was obvious, and at the end of the class she said “There, now you can say you’ve read something by Margaret Mead”. The message clear: Margaret Mead was an anthropologist that only non-anthropologists took seriously.

RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)

Let’s say that there was a revolution in your field site and the “Feline Republic” is now the “Canine Republic.” This is an easy problem to solve. You just open up your word processor and use the find and replace command, replacing every instance of “Feline” with “Canine.” But what if the canine revolution also imposed new rules for personal names, reversing the order of first and last names throughout the republic? That becomes a bit more difficult. If your article includes hundreds of names, it would take at least an hour of manual labor to find and fix each name in your paper. In today’s post I want to show you how you can save some time by using tools possibly already available in your word processor1 to do a much more advanced search and replace operation.

 

Full coverage

anthro{dendum} welcomes guest bloggers Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta who will be editing a series of blogposts titled Private Messages from the Field. To kick off the series, today’s post features an introduction and backstory to this collection of essays.

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Private Messages from the Field: Confessions on Digital Ethnography and Its Discomforts
by Crystal Abidin & Gabriele de Seta

Anthropology has an unhealthy relationship to its past. Approaches range from highly fetishized, almost ritual reading of sacralized texts like The Gift and The Nuer to intense, context-free denunciations of past practitioners based on their race, gender, and emplacement in nineteenth century. In fact, perhaps the most common relationship anthropologists have to their history is ignorance. Anthropologists often have little sense of what the discipline has achieved (or not achieved) in the past, and famously reinvent the fundamental insights of their discipline, claiming novelty for their ‘innovation’.

The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro équipe in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, this period of French ethnology is rarely taught in American classrooms.
The Chinese History That Is Written in Bone

These “oracle bone” fragments, some of which show an ancient Chinese script, are housed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The pieces here are just a tiny fraction of the many thousands discovered thus far at a single site in China. Xinhua/Alamy Photos

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New photo from Facebook January 24, 2018 at 02:14PM

In Uncategorized on January 24, 2018 at 14:26

Suriye’de kim napıyor? Uzun araştırmalar sonucu Serkan Altuniğne özetlemiş şadfkaşdlkfa (@serkanaltunigne) via Facebook Pages http://ift.tt/1heKubC

At least 150 detained due to social media posts criticizing #Afrin operation… [EFD Rights Watch]

In Uncategorized on January 24, 2018 at 12:47

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News in Turkish here. Same news says 11 of them are already arrested. 
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Human Rights Watch – Jan 22, 10:00 AM

The Turkish government’s intolerance of criticism knows few bounds. Police detained writer and human rights activist Nurcan Baysal from her house in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, late Sunday. As I write this she remains in custody.

RSF – Jan 23, 4:29 AM

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the increase in censorship in Turkey – including “patriotic journalism” directives and a wave of arrests of critical journalists – that has accompanied the Turkish government’s

OSCE – Vienna – Jan 17

VIENNA, 17 January 2018 – The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Désir today, in a letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, called on the Turkish authorities to ensure that the

The content that caused trouble between Turkey and the information-sharing platform Wikipedia has been changed.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have “given a green light” to the right-wing nationalist Great Union Party (BBP) to join their alliance, and are waiting to see whether the small religious Felicity Party (SP) also joins them, according to anonymous sources.
The Istanbul 27th High Criminal Court has rejected journalist Mehmet Altan’s demand to be released from jail, resisting the Constitutional Court’s ruling that his imprisonment violated his constitutional rights.
Financial Times – Jan 12, 1:27 AM

Turkey ‘s justice system was plunged into confusion on Friday after a pair of criminal courts defied an order by Turkey’s highest court to release two jailed journalists. The constitutional court ruled on Thursday that the pre-trial detention of

 

The Council of Europe has said it is closely following the consequences of the Turkish Constitutional Court ruling that the jailing of journalists Şahin Alpay and Mehmet Altan during trial violates their constitutional rights

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Day 4 in the #Afrin operation. A roundup…

In Uncategorized on January 23, 2018 at 15:47

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An Ottoman-style military band performed in the border province of Hatay as a show of support for troops taking part in Turkey’s Olive Branch Operation in Syria’s Afrin on Jan. 22.
Two Turkish soldiers dead in offensive against Kurds in Syria

Ankara acknowledges combat deaths in Afrin, Kurdish enclave south of Turkish border

Two Turkish soldiers have died in a military offensive against the Kurdish-dominated enclave of Afrin in neighbouring Syria, officials have said.

Some 51 suspects were detained across Turkey on Jan. 21 for allegedly promoting the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on social media, according to a security official.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was updated on Jan. 22 on the progress of Operation Olive Branch by military commanders during a video conference, according to a source at the presidency.
Conflicts have intensified in the east of Aziz in the military operation launched by the TAF into Afrin. As the FSA and YPG militants come face to face, a delegation from the US came to Ankara to discuss the operation.
Turkey’s preoccupation with Syrian Kurds could spell disaster for US | Patrick Wintour

The west cannot afford to lose Ankara’s role as a countervailing force to a Russian-imposed peace

The US, Britain and France have all strongly criticised the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, but the three countries have so far been unwilling to instruct their Nato partner to pull back.

Turkey says the US must end support for the YPG militia, which it is fighting in northern Syria.
Saturday saw the first airstrikes and on Sunday the first Turkish troops marched into the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. Ankara has opened up a new front line in the Syria war by taking direct action against the Kurdish PYD, which is allied with Nato partner the US. Commentators examine the different interests and strategies of the warring parties.
A large number of people including politicians, artists, rights defenders and journalists have been detained in six cities including İstanbul and İzmir due to their social media posts about the offensive launched into Afrin.
The military offensive puts Turkey on a collision course with the United States, a NATO ally.
As Turkey Attacks Kurds in Syria, U.S. Is on the Sideline

Turkish forces continued their attack on the Kurds, America’s closest ally in the war on Islamic State, with the apparent blessing of Moscow.
Turkey has legitimate security concerns in northern Syria, where it has sent troops, Washington says.
The Turkish military continued to shell positions of the Syrian Kurdish militia the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria’s Afrin on Jan. 22, the third day of Operation Olive Branch.
T24 news site writer Baysal has been detained; writer Tunç’s home has been raided as part of the operation launched by Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office into posts on the social media about Afrin operation.
The National Intelligence Organization (MİT) is playing an active role in Turkey’s “Olive Branch” military operation into the Syrian province of Afrin, according to security sources.
Special “conquest” prayers were held across all of Turkey’s 90,000 mosques on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 for the victory of the country’s military, which launched a cross border operation in Syria’s northwestern Afrin region on Jan. 20 against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Concerning France calling the UN for an emergency meeting, Minister of Foreign Affairs Çavuşoğlu has said, “If France or any other country takes the matter to the UN, then it means that country sides with a terrorist organization in our eyes”.
Four missiles launched from Syria hit Reyhanlı district in Hatay, killing one person and wounding 32 others. Another missile was fired on Kilis last night.
TAF and FSA crossed 7.5 kilometers into the border. Clashes erupted between the FSA and YPG in the first morning hours in Azaz.
Why Turkey is poised to attack enclave in Syria

Turkey says an operation against Afrin is imminent.
An internal solution to the problems in Syria “would be much better,” the head of the United Nations said on Jan. 16.

 

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The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and the recently formed İYİ (Good) Party have all lent full support to the military operation against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militants in Syria’s Afrin province.

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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s risky gamble could quickly turn sour | Simon Tisdall

Turkish president defies Russia, the US and Bashar al-Assad with assault on Kurds in Syria

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Kurdish vendetta has taken a dramatic new twist with the cross-border ground assault on the Afrin enclave in north-west Syria.

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Nationalist TV shows tweet support for the Afrin intervention:

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The actor who paid not to serve mandatory military service was eager to act in a soldier uniform to promote a pro-war message:

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There are a few anti-war demonstrations mostly organized by pro-Kurdish HDP but security forces do not allow them to happen:

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Syria: Turkish ground troops enter Afrin enclave

US-backed Kurdish militants say they have beaten back Turkish troops in northern Syria.
The Prime Ministry’s Office of Public Diplomacy has cited the reasons for Turkey’s military operation against Syria’s northern Afrin province in a 12-article note.
Surprising many opponents of the campaign, still active Syrian air defense and air forces did not intercept the Turkish military operation on the Afrin region, which officially started at 5 p.m. (14:00 GMT) on Jan. 20.

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