Freedom of Speech and All That

gollum

It looks like NATO ally and Defender of Western ValuesTM Turkey is not all the on board with all of our so-called Western values after all.

Recently, President Teggip Erdogan arrested a journalist who compared him to Gollum, the horribly deformed Hobbit from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I bring this up because our Neoliberal Establishment continues to club President Vladimir Putin of Russia over the head because of his alleged persecution of journalists.

For what it’s worth, Erdogan does resemble Gollum, doesn’t he?

We’ll see now how this is all going to play out now that Putin has stabilized the Assad regime and given the green light to the Syrian Kurds to go ahead and declare an autonomous state. From a realpolitik standpoint, this is a brilliant move. It probably won’t please Assad too much but it will definitely infuriate the Turks.

Comments

  1. Michael Warren says

    Turkey has artificially survived over 200 years due to Western patronage. It acts as a bulwark to sabotage unity of an Eastern Christian political state with Islamic satellites. It has long been in hospice on life support. The plug may be pulled in our lifetime. Let’s just be sure we are prepared to live in a world which could lead to the Battle of Armageddon.

  2. Mark E. Fisus says

    What are you on about, George? I don’t hear anyone in the West coming to Erdogan’s defense. Mostly been the sound of popcorn chewing.

  3. M. Stankovich says

    Mr. Michalopulos,

    As a paid observer, I noticed immediately that had you utilized the HTML number for the character ™, you would have rendered “Defender of Western Values™…” This presumes your editor accepts ASCII (Dec/Hex)/HTML to begin. The entire set of such characters can be found starting here. As I did not know if your client-side editor accepted the entry of HTML code, I made a fiddle to demonstrate.

    As you will see in the fiddle, another option would have been to use the superscript tag, although you then need to compensate in your CSS, or it will screw up your line height. Conversely, when you need it, the subscript tag is equally helpful. Cheap theatrics, I know, but I’m always happy to help!