Google also operate in USA. USA has more people in prison than Turkey has. Recently journalist Max Blumenthal was jailed on false charges.
They're based there, in case you didn't notice.
> USA has more people in prison than Turkey has.
And is substantially larger, and tends to not lock up everybody that might be against dear leader. For now.
> Recently journalist Max Blumenthal was jailed on false charges.
Definitely not a very good moment in the history of the USA but there are plenty of worse examples and besides the case was dropped.
You really can not compare Turkey and the United States in this way.
And it still has the world's highest incarceration rate. I am not saying it "the same" but using size of the country is a non argument here.
Go to this page, sort by the number of incarcerations per 100,000 population and enjoy the interesting picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
It's not that different.
1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
https://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=...
> And is substantially larger, and tends to not lock up everybody that might be against dear leader. For now.
Just for the record, the incarceration rate is much higher in USA than in Turkey.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2... lists 737 vs. 97 per 100k population (though I can't find a date there), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... says 655 vs. 288.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/300986/incarceration-rat... has data from 2019 and says 655 vs. 318. Still more than twice as high in the USA than in Turkey.
In the United States it is large numbers of people that got caught up in the so-called war-on-drugs, in Turkey it is because Erdogan has used the failed coup (if there even was one) as a pretext to lock up just about everybody who he felt might be a threat to his regime.
The war on drugs was created by the Nixon regime as a way to neutralize threatening political movements like Black Power and the Hippie Peace movement.
This seems like one of those Illuminati/Knights Templar conspiracy theories. I don't buy it. I'm imagining Nixon's cabinet in a super secret meeting:
Nixon: "Those hippies and negroes. They are growing too powerful. Soon, democrats will dominate every level of government"
Secretary of State: "But what can we do?"
Nixon: smirks and peers over reading glasses directly at the camera
Nixon: "We hit them where it hurts. Tell me, what does the hippy and the negro have in common?"
Secretary of Agriculture: "High rates of homelessness?"
Nixon: "No, the Reefer. We can't outright declare war on US citizens. But we can attack the thing they hold most dear and get the religious right to love us for it."
Secretary of Defense: "Mother of God... a war... on drugs"
Nixon: "Precisely. The hippy and negro cannot resist the draw of the Reefer. Thus, we simply declare war on the Reefer. We can lock them up in prisons where they will harmlessly live out their days, unable to empower the democratic party."
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nixon-aide-war-dru...
Nixon: "You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general. These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they're trying to destroy us"
You might want to read up on some history:
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
>Ehrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account.
>"We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color," wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.
>Ehrlichman's comments did not surface until now after Baum remembered them while going back through old notes for the Harper's story.
>Baum interviewed Ehrlichman and others for his 1996 book "Smoke and Mirrors," but said he left out the Ehrlichman comment from the book because it did not fit the narrative style focused on putting the readers in the middle of the backroom discussions themselves, without input from the author.
How convenient. He was sitting on a massive admission because it "didn't fit the style".
Besides, that statement from some of his children seems surprisingly specific. Nothing about Nixon's policies or Ehrlichman's role in them required Ehrlichman to be derogatory to anyone. Not that it would have been a surprise: he was born in 1925! Lots of white Americans born in that year were all too happy both to discriminate in their private lives and to enact discriminatory policies in public. Ehrlichman's kids must not have been such great fans of his anyway. At the time of the interview, he lived in Atlanta and they were all in the Pacific timezone. Reading the Harper's article, I have more sympathy for him than for them. Let the old man say his piece.
I'm not denying there's a lot wrong in Turkey, but the US isn't all freedom and democracy either.
Same as business revenue, which is mostly fake for the outside world.
And released when the accusers were found the be lying. How does this incident put the US in the same league as Turkey?
Guantanamo - detention and physiological torture without trial. Hounding of whistler blowers of illegal activity - Snowdon, Manning, Assange etc.
Destabilizing countries around the world - many with democratically elected governments. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...)
Now, of course, this is largely directed at other countries citizens rather than US citizens - so that makes it ok.....
In terms of internal US politics - how do you explain George W Bush as president if the US is a meritocracy and not a oligarchy?
Let's be clear - I'd prefer to live in the US over turkey, but it's not all rosy.
I just explained why they aren't. Are you going to explain why you think they are or just include me in your wild conspiracy theories?
Unrelated to the topic of discussion, what massive overreach do you think these organizations are daily perpetrating?
Or are you counting all the documents he downloaded and looked at but didn't publish??? Maybe you are including every book he ever read as well?
Remember the leak as a whole was essentially that the US ( and it's allies ) were hoovering everything up it could - phone and data, via any means necessary - often illegal means, just in case it was useful, with no respect for either national or international law.
Whether you think it was necessary or not, common knowledge or not - it was illegal at the time and people like the director of national intelligence lied directly to congress about it happening.
Yep it's not as bad a Turkey or North Korea - but that doesn't make it ok...
No international law covers state data collection, and none of the leaks said the US hoovered up everything it could. The only illegal US program in the leaks was phone metadata collection. It seems you are remembering documents that don't exist.
> so you are saying about 9-10 docs contained illegal stuff?
I said fewer.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/24/usaid-funds-salaries-of-v...