Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 24, 2016

Criticizing Erdoğan

Filed under: Free Speech,Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 8:31 pm

Dutch journalist arrested in Turkey for criticising Erdoğan.

From the post:

A Dutch journalist was arrested early on Sunday at her home in Turkey for tweets deemed critical of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to her Twitter account.

“Police at the door. No joke,” wrote Ebru Umar, a well-known atheist and feminist journalist of Turkish origin.

If the story wasn’t disturbing enough, it concludes:


Trials in Turkey for insulting Erdoğan have multiplied since his election to the presidency in August 2014, with nearly 2,000 such cases currently open.

I started this post to ask for suggested criticisms of or insults for Erdoğan in Turkish.

But my criticisms and/or insults, in English and/or Turkish, aren’t going to burden Erdoğan or those using big data to track all the criticisms/insults. What’s one more?

Saying that I support those who criticize and/or insult Erdoğan is true, but again, that’s no skin off of Erdoğan and his overworked criticism/insult trackers. They must have NSA-sized cloud space just to keep up with the ones in Turkish.

Whatever the Turkish equivalent of “asshole” is, every occurrence in print or speech is likely a direct and/or indirect reference to Erdoğan. That is by definition a big data problem.

With his sensitivity to criticism and insults, how would Erdoğan react to all the banks in Turkey going dark? All of them. Turkish and foreign.

The banking/business community would take that to reflect unfavorably on Erdoğan. Yes?

Therefore, avoiding that sort of problem, would be good planning on the part of Erdoğan. Which would include ending and apologizing for all the past and present insult/criticism charges.

It isn’t the case that “…business as usual…” is an absolute, “…business as usual…” is an indulgence of those who control the switches and hubs of modern communication and networking.

Erdoğan has voluntarily departed from the norms expected for “…business as usual….” Let’s all hope that he quickly and voluntarily returns to expected norms of civilized behavior. For the banks sake if no one else’s.

PS: It would require more planning and expertise than defacing a KKK website (or Denver’s) but where’s the challenge in twitting racists?

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