WordPress is blocked by Turkey(s): a blogger’s revenge plan of action

Turkish Flag

And here is why (all links my own):

Dear Sir,

We have applied to you to remove the unlawful statements regarding my client Mr. Adnan Oktar (who is the author of the books written under the pen name Harun Yahya) in your blogs. The number of our attempts to inform and warn you regarding these defamation blogs must have been at least twenty, many times through your support page, a couple of times to your legal department and we even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were unanswered.

These defamation blogs contained slanders to some of my client’s friends as well. They also applied WordPress.com support with their official ID cards and a representative directed them to write to the legal department. So they did but again no response from legal.

So we have become obliged to apply to Turkish judicial courts to stop this defamation executed through your services. By the decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, number 2007/195, access to WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.

The organization, which is led by Edip Yuksel, responsible for these defamation blogs in question are currently up for crimes such as “building an organization to commit crime” in Turkey. The sites of Edip Yuksel, http://www.yahyaharun.com, http://www.19.org, http://www.calinmisgenclik.com and also the blog under your site with the user name http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com have been blocked by Turkish judicial courts in Turkey before(by Gaziosmanpasa Civil Court of First Instance, dated 06.04.2007 and decision number 2007/130 D. Is) . We have also sent you the official documents on this judicial decision in one of our applications to you.

Since Edip Yuksel and his crime organization could easily start new blogs in your site, they had even launched a campaign in opening defamation blogs regarding my client and had explicitly expressed this organized endeavor in his defamation blogs:

In order to make people hear our voice, let everyone start new blogs from websites such as http://blogcu.com or http://wordpress.com and let them copy the posts on those blogs and paste them to their own. You can start several at once, if possible. Please remember that the name you will give to the blogs, should be related to Adnan Oktar or Harun Yahya in order to find them quickly through Google search. If the names are already taken, you can solve this problem by using characters such as “_” (Adnan_Oktar) or numbers such as AdnanOktar100, Adnan_Oktar_50.

The aim of all of these blogs that he and his organization starts, was to insult my client. All of them were completely full of slanderous statements. There are still some sites left open -not accessible from Turkey, but still accessible abroad – :

http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://fitikado.wordpress.com

http://oktarbabuna.wordpress.com
http://adnancilar.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://whoisharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktargercekleri.wordpress.com/
http://quiestharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://harunyahyaarabic.wordpress.com/
http://safsataciharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://savsatalaracevap.wordpress.com/

The below are taken but still empty:

http://adnanzedeler.wordpress.com/
http://kodadiabi.wordpress.com/

As we have requested before:

WE DEMAND YOU TO REMOVE AND PROHIBIT ANY BLOGS IN YOUR SITE THAT CONTAIN MY CLIENT’S NAME ADNAN OKTAR OR HIS PEN NAME HARUN YAHYA OR VARIOUS COMBINATION OF THESE 4 NAMES.

Yours sincerely,

Attorneys of Mr. Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya)
Atty. Kerim Kalkan / Atty. Ceyhun Gökdog(an (Istanbul Barr register number:
27405)

Address: Darulaceze caddesi, Bilal Is Merkezi, A Blok, D:5. Okmeydani Sisli
Istanbul
Telephone: 90 212 220 31 20
Fax: 90 212 220 74 21
E-mail: rotahukuk@rotahukuk.com
ceyhungokdogan@istanbulbarosu.org.tr

Now, I made a suggestion. I rather hope it gets taken up by other bloggers around the world, preferably on NON-WORDPRESS.COM platforms. People using self-hosted WordPress, people on Blogger and Blogspot, people with LiveJournals, and people who reinvented the wheel and built it themselves.

It is this:

I put out a call for all bloggers, on all platforms, to make silly jokes and bad puns and hey, some defamatory statements about anal-retentitiveness while we’re at it about the apparently both well-connected and thin-skinned ADNAN OKTAR or his pen name HARUN YAHYA.

This will cause Turkey either to extend the ban to ALL blogging platforms, including mainstream newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times, or to drop their block against WordPress. Such legal actions have to be asserted in all cases, or they must be dropped.

What say you all?

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playgrounds of the Elder Gods

Cthulhu playground

Apparently, Cthulhu-themed playgrounds are all the rage in Japan recently. All I can think of to explain this phenomenon is that it’s a plan to precondition a generation of Japanese to happily enter the gaping maw of an enormous, tentacled being. An excellent strategy: most of the world is familiar with the convenience of having dinner delivered.

via Archie

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quiz: what’s your theme

This one, which I stole from Metro, wouldn’t normally be weird enough. But when I took it, it gave me my actual theme, and that’s pretty weird. That is blogworthy.


Your Theme Song is Beautiful Day by U2


“Sky falls, you feel like

It’s a beautiful day

Don’t let it get away”

You see the beauty in life, especially in ordinary everyday moments.

And if you’re feeling down, even that seems a little beautiful too.

What’s Your Theme Song?

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Hired to blog: what it takes to get there

Job Hunter

It takes guts. It takes heart. It takes hard work. It takes a blog that knocks the socks (if any) or tiny ankle hairs (if any) right off the reader. It takes the ability to discard relics of meatspace like financial ambition. And it takes, apparently, a job application that looks like this (illustrations added for blog-illustrative purposes only; do not take internally or mix with other liquids):

The Romanov Family

Greetings to the illustrious Manolo, whose growing empire rivals those of the Ottomans and Romanovs, except better-dressed and without the bloody revolution part.

To say that I was excited by the blog job opening at Teeny Manolo would be to understate the case to a near-criminal degree. I am a longtime acolyte of the Manolo (and grateful recipient of the Manolo‘s linkie luv) as well as a highly experienced blogger, blogging instructor and consultant, and former nanny and retailer of clothes for teenies. During my time in the totwear trade, I was sometimes delighted by clever, practical, and attractive clothes, but more often (it must be confessed) I was appalled and shocked into bitter sarcasm by the vast tide of bogswill being passed off as proper clothing for youngsters, boys in particular.

 

What did little boys ever do to get stuck with SAILOR SUITS for Tinky Winky‘s sake? And cheap, shiny nylon sailor suits with scratchy seams that make the baby Jesus cry, or would, if he had to wear those instead of the lovely robes that Mary picked out for him on that trip to Jerusalem.

 

Please accept this application for the position of Teeny Manolo Blogger. Currently I have three active blogs: raincoaster, for my bitter ravings; running through rainthe Shebeen Club for students of my courses on blogging for personal growth; and , for my literary group (who would love to host the Manolo for an evening, should he pass through Vancouver). I average between four and twelve posts a day, and yes, I can modulate the snark at will.

 

I hope to hear from you soon: if you need an old-skool resume, just let me know. You can also check out my profile on LinkedIn.

 

Now, this application got me the job. That is all ye know, all ye need to know. But I’m going to take it around to a few of the job hunting agencies anyway and see what they have to say about it, A) because it will be payback for a lot of fascist, pointless make-work that they put me through for no other reason than that they had to do something with me and didn’t particularly care what it was (see the Operation Orwell tag) and B) it will probably give me something amusing with which to feed the blog. If you think I should feel guilty about wasting their time, I refer you back to A.

So far, the most perceptive comment comes from Mistress Cowfish, herself rather senior in the bureaucracy, who takes great delight in recognizing we are very, very 21st Century lately, in that a winning job application may now contain the expression “old-skool.

I’m not a blogger

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Operation Global Media Domination: the Technorati Situation

cross-posted to running through rain

TIAWell, after losing 2000 places on Technorati recently because apparently nothing I cover is link-worthy, not that I’m bitter and you people wonder why max got a whole biography, I have recently regained my former status in the 16,000s. And how, you may ask? Simple, I reply.

I have a big mouth.

It turns out, it doth, that comments made on WordPress.com blogs are counted as independent links to our own blogs from those other blogs when and if that blog displays the recent comments in the sidebar.

Implications: I’m not going to be resisting the impulse to shoot my mouth off anymore (Metro, don’t say it). There’s more of an incentive to comment on the top blogs, which will of course reinforce their popularity, because they have more authority, which means that links from them count more on search engines than links from obscure blogs (although T counts everyone, no matter what the authority). It will make WP.com blogs attractive destinations for commenters who are interested in subtle blog pimping (ie not AND CHECK OUT MY BLOG WWW.BOZONINCORPORATED.BIZ!!!). God knows I dropped Iain Dale like a hot turd once he restricted commenters to those willing to link only to Blogger blogs or forgo links entirely. I am certainly not the only one who thinks this way.

Questions: it remains to be seen if it works this way with other search engines like Google. It remains to be seen if this is a deliberate strategy on WP.com’s part or if they’re going to read my post in the forum and go oh shit! and “fix” it. It remains to be seen whether this applies equally to those who choose not to become Avatarded (WP already excludes them from Top Blogs, Featured Blogs, etc).

Anyway, comment away. My Fish Heads, Fish Heads post could use some sweet lovin’.

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