Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Ed Darrell forwarded me this outrageous story. Adnan Oktar, the Turkish nut who goes by the pen name Harun Yahya to pen (or have others pen) his voluminous creationist tracts, has gotten a Turkish court to block all blogs that use Wordpress, probably the second most popular standalone blog software in the world. Why? Because some blogs that use Wordpress published mean things about this lunatic and, being the totalitarian wingnut that he is, he wants them silenced.
The Wordpress blog has details on the harassing letter from Oktar's attorneys. First of all, the idiot seems to be blissfully unaware of the difference between a blog and the software used to create it. Banning Wordpress is like banning the company that makes the paper someone printed something nasty about you on. Spread the word far and wide, let's put some pressure on the Turkish government to restore some sanity and stop blocking the rest of the world from their country.
Comments
The Turks originally blocked one or two specific blogs so the writer of that blog apparently went and started created multiple blogs with the same content all over the place, including Wordpress. I think it is brilliant. If the trend was extrapolated out far enough Turkey could end up cutting themselves off from the Internet completely. Hmmm, I wonder if something like that could be done with China as well...
Posted by: Ed T | August 21, 2007 2:23 PM
Haha. I hope someone in their gov sees how foolish this is. Isn't that what China's already doing?
Posted by: Julian | August 21, 2007 3:30 PM
Thanks for spreading the word.
Yeah, China blocks most (if not all) WordPress blogs -- so I'm banned in Beijing and Ankara. Now if I can just get the bluenoses in Boston and Peoria to ban me, I can make some money off the thing, yes?
On a more serious note, living in Texas as I do, with a stiff-necked creationist as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education and biology books coming up for review soon, this is just one more chunk of stupidity I could live without.
If creationists couldn't censor at least part of the time, they'd have absolutely nothing to do all of the time.
Posted by: Ed Darrell | August 21, 2007 10:59 PM
I just noticed a report that the ban is also affecting CNN's Political Ticker blog.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 30, 2007 2:25 PM