not to mention, imagine learning to setup a VPN (Beacuse your life depends on it) while you're buried under rubble..
It would be better for battery life for people to just text a friend or family member and say "crushed under tons of stone at home, please send help". Nobody is going to do an AMA on Twitter while buried using up the precious battery life for retweets and likes.
It would certainly make for one hell of an AMA.
“I’m trapped and slowly getting crushed under tons of rubble, AMA.”
use critical thinking for like 2 seconds
How I miss n gate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...
Maybe the referendum was rigged, I don’t know. But centralizing more power in the executive, if that’s what the people want, isn’t necessarily anti democratic.
Speak for yourself; as someone who understands what (note: what, not who) POTUS represents and why the Electoral College even exists, I hope our system does not change for vapid reasons.
Direct election of POTUS across state lines is going to reduce democracy, not increase it.
Erdogan famously remarked: "Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination"
Or you could pick up a ballot pre-filled-in with the straight communist ticket to save time and just put it straight in the urn. Naturally anyone in the room could see which you chose.
Perhaps more amusingly: he was an exchange student at the time (late 60s?). Because communism was a universal movement anyone could vote, so he thought, “well why not while I have the chance?”
Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.
Here are a few other biased sources offering their subjective judgements:
- https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/turkeys-local-elections-wer...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_and_violence...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
- https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/report/turkey/december...
This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election. However, the upcoming election will not be free and fair as those terms are commonly understood.
This is kind of skewed though, if people can't go on TV or Twitter and say "Erdogan doesn't know what he's doing and his policies are foolish".
This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon: have reasonably(-ish) fair(-ish) elections, but also rig things in such a way that people only hear one side of the story. It's not a surprise people support Erdogan if they only hear how brilliant he is with tepid criticism at best. Control the narrative → control the vote. Ergodan, Putin, Xi all play by this book.
Having a free press and free investigative journalism is critical; without it you don't really have fair elections, even if the actual business of casting and counting ballots is sound and free of fraud.
Hardly: Mussolini also had some sort of elections. It just happened that parliamentarians who were too much of a nuisance had unfortunate encounters with groups of hard batons, or were required to live on remote islands. In Putin's Russia they fall from balconies.
It's just not funny anymore. Some people in Turkey might enjoy living under a dictator (after all, many did in Italy and Germany, and many do in a lot of other countries today), but let's not pretend that water is not wet.
Exactly! I'm from another global south country. Usually when someone on these sites say "${their_country} here" I prepare myself for the worst takes because I know this happens in my country, usually it's some liberal who read/work in western leaning media and repeat what they hear. It's an echo chamber so huge that you can't touch it's walls so it's hard to know you actually live in an echo chamber.
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022
All of these restrictions on freedom might have been introduced for good reason according to some people, but they very much have been introduced, and very much restricted freedom, so if those don’t count according to freedom house, I can scarcely consider this “quantitative nonpartisan analysis” to be worth much.
"Democracy," in the sense that refers to the democratic systems of government in existence, is a bundle. Elections without free press, expression, freedom to organize and such... That's no longer "democracy" in that sense of the term.
There's a man who gets warning that his village is about to be flooded and he gets a warning he needs to evacuate immediately. He says he places his trust in god and decides to wait for god's help. A while later a tractor comes by and asks him if wants a ride out of the village, he tells them he places his trust his god to rescue them and tells them goodbye. A while later a bunch of cow herders and asks if wants a walk out of the village, he tells them .. trust.. god. Now water begins to come into the village. He climbs to the top of a hillock. A while later a few people arrive in a boat and ask him if we wants a ride out of the village, he tells them .. trust .. god. A while later he dies and then complains to god about help not arriving. God asks what else but help was the warning, tractor, cow herders and boat were?
There's a joke in here that Twitter is how God wants to help.
Unfortunately, this is a tragic situation.
Germany, Alemania, Deutschland.
Mexico, Messico, Méjico.
Japan, Nippon, 日本.
China, Zhōngguó, 中国.
Every country gets by getting called different things in different languages. But Turkey insisting on the spelling just because they don't want to be associated to türkiye birds, where the birds are literally named after the country, is a silly move designed to stir nationalistic pride for their near totalitarian government.
The bird is named after a series of misconceptions, with different results in different places.
The country is named after the Turks; you expect it to be the same everywhere.
I'm from a language where you'll never get it right, and most people are pragmatic and don't care about names being the way our mothers do. That's a very Western thing.
Forcing us to try to teach you our language, or half-way butcherings, are considered obnoxious. Go with the English pronunciation. Do anything half-reasonable-sounding, and it's okay too. Don't visibly struggle each time you try to say my name.
For my name specifically, there's also an uncanny valley phenomenon. My name pronounced obviously wrong by an American doesn't raise flags. Americans mispronouncing my native name sounds horribly wrong.
NATO head Jens Stoltenberg started saying Turkey but then changed to Türkiye before the big NATO summit in Madrid last summer.
"Note: The official conventional long-form and short-form names remain “Republic of Turkey” and “Turkey”, respectively. “Republic of Türkiye” should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside “Türkiye” in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public."
As someone who was in that country for a year all over the place with a rifle attached to my chest, Americans always ask me about my exciting vacation there. As an American convervative myself, people's heads are blown whether the are left or right leaning when I pronounce it as "Ih-rahk." At this point I find the reactions fairly comical and get a kick out of experimenting on people, much to the dismay of my wife, who thinks I should just go with "Eye-rack" to stop embarrassing her.
By the way, I pronounce Turkey as like a Thanksgiving "Turkey."
Anecdotally I was told once upon a time by a first generation immigrant from Oman that you should pronounce a countries name as they pronounce it, as a respect thing. I thought more about it, and if I heard someone say United States as "Ooonited States," I wouldn't care one bit, but there really is only one way to pronounce the United States it so it's not really a fair comparison.
1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye...
Whenever I've been on the receiving end of a name change like that, I (and everyone I knew) found it obnoxious.
However, cultures differ. Turkey has a long history with name changes, and has been rather aggressive about them. When it became "Turkey," the post office wouldn't deliver mail unless the new name was used. Likewise, the capital has gone through two names since "Byzantium."
I was genuinely curious about local reaction. I have no idea, from the other end of the world, whether this was imposed by Erdogan as a crazy policy to everyone's annoyance, or whether it is wildly popular. I assume somewhere in between.
> There was an official name change [1] to Türkiye.
That absolutely does not answer the question, and you know that.
I wonder how that works. Does Eredrogan expect every country to write and say "Türkiye? Does it work the other way around - can Germany change their official name in Turkey/Türkiye to "Deutschland"?
Probably not in the same way, as Turkish is not a UN official language. They could request their name be changed in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Arabic though.
Which might not actually be that long.
As minor as it might sound, if 199/200 countries work in your system, capitalism dictates that below a certain business size, the logical thing is often to just ignore the one country and move on.
These things have odd cascading effects.
You can try that now - my browser highlights Türkiye when I search for Turkiye.
It's a problem with well-known solutions. That's not the same as a solved problem.
It will be a solved problem when processing a log file in /var/log with Python (or any other tool of choice), it works automatically.
So this is not a keyboard (hardware) problem, just a keyboard layout (software) problem.
Standard US English keyboards don't have AltGr. But you may mean ctrl+alt on windows or the 'option' button on macs.
Which the parent was pointing out is nonstandard. There is no alt-gr key on a standard US keyboard. You can certainly remap alt-right to alt-gr but that is nonstandard and doing so does not mean that the key exists on the physical keyboard.
For example my caps lock key is mapped to ctrl-left. That is nonstandard.
* Pick any European keymap under Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac with your US keyboard * Hold right-alt and press a key
You'll get something like ń or ą.
Bonus: Under Ubuntu, you might also have other keys remapped to let you type things like x²≠¼.
Bonus hack: Add a Greek keymap, and you can even get to things like Δx = π·y with an alt-space in between.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyNaymeIs
The funny thing is that through a bunch of funny historical accidents, the bird is literally named after the country, so we could just spell the birds türkiyes too.
Turks call India "Hindi-stan". Which in Turkish is "Turkey-the-bird-stan". Including the Persian etymology would literally make it "Land of the Turkeys." If Modi wanted to pick a fight with Turkey it would have made for an entertaining UN session.
It's just another step in the trend of undoing Atatürk's reforms that has defined the current regime. To summarize a lot of history, the foundation of modern Turkey was a pretty massive upheaval. Atatürk (the first president of Turkey, and is viewed pretty similarly to the US's founding fathers) worked pretty damn hard to drag the country away from its Ottoman roots and towards being a Western, secular, country. Under the Ottomans, the head of church and head of state were the same person, under Atatürk, church and state were separated. Atatürk's government outright banned the wear of most religious garb in public, such as fez's and headscarves. Women were given full rights. The entire alphabet was changed from an Arabic script to a Latin one. And these are just the big ones I can pull off the top of my head.
Basically, imagine if George Washington had banned crucifixes from being displayed in public and switched the US's alphabet to Cyrillic.
It is impossible to overstate how radical these reforms were, and most were intended to bring Turkey closer to Europe both economically and culturally. The following 85 years of Turkey's history, up to the modern day, has been marked by tensions between those that generally like the reforms, and would like to see Turkey continue towards being a well-respected member of the West, and the conservative faction who want Turkey to backslide into an Islamic theocracy.
The name change is one of many postures Erdoğan has taken to distance himself from the former group, and amounts to a dog-whistle for the second.
TL;DR: It's whole fucking can of worms.
And people are supposed to just figure that out while under rubble?
> Europe it's basically Androidlandia.
Only Eastern Europe. Western Europe (incl Germany) and the Nordics have between 30-60% iPhones. [0] Also Albania, for some reason.
That's also pretty much the browser distribution you get when looking at analytics data from various European countries, and it matches what I see people use here (Germany).
0: https://mezha.media/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/iPhone_Europe...
This is unbelievable, but totally expected from the current "democractic" government. Social media usage is very high in Türkiye and people are coordinating using social media (mainly Twitter) for rescue operations in near realtime.
I'm pretty much sure some people will literally die under wreckage because of communication interruptions as the result of this block.
(For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks which also happened in the past, but not everyone is tech savvy and it's not reliable for life-or-death situations.