Turkey is Typing…

This week's post will be shorter than normal, please bare with me….

Turkish Torque celebrates his 1000th post this week, congratulations! Ugur has translated an excellent article about how the media and entertainment world is destroying Turkish culture and comments on rumors of Muslim reformation. He also writes about the new political chess game being played by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and how it is reacting to the election of HAMAS in Palestine.

Talk Turkey writes about a future United States of Eurasia that has created quite an interesting conversation and comments about the new Kurdish judge to replace the other Kurdish judge to try Saddam Hussein.

A quite funny post from The Need to Know asks for the world to leave Iran alone, she wants a big bonus.

Zen in the Kitchen writes about onion and garlic helping you to remember your left from your right.

Mavi Boncuk returns with a post about Ataturk's adopted children. Snow is the subject of a post from Metroblogging:Istanbul and well as one from Erkan's Field Diary, well actually not just one post, but two and three.

Amerikan Turk wrote about the big snowstorm in Istanbul as well, but he also covered other items such as bedbug infestations, Turkish hostages in Iran-a story missed by the main stream media coverage, and (my personal favorite of the week) a piece about buzzword word games in office meetings.

Find of the week: We Are the TURKS, a new blog dedicated to interviewing and writing about prominent Turks in American business and culture.

4 comments

  • Shorter than normal? Hardly! You’ve simply accomplished more with less. That’s just being succinct and efficient. Thanks for the good work.

  • Regarding the excellent article translated and posted by ‘Turkish Torque’ about ‘media and entertainment world is destroying Turkish culture,’ I don’t believe it’s fair to blame it on American or other western influencers as the reason for such ‘demise.’

    It is borne out of necessity of the Turkish (and other non-western) people’s yearning for emulating the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous,’ as well as the inferiority brought on by the ‘success’ of economic and political structure supposedly enjoyed by the superpowers as compared to those that once had it.

    Due to the lack of quality, as well as substantive content, along with the absence of creativity, and even if those all existed, lack of big budgets or viewer choices and support, and maybe both, usually leads to looking elsewhere for similar content of ‘crap,’ that at least is packaged in a glitzy and an appealing way and then digested as the displaying of the deficiencies in the western culture.

    At least, here in the U.S., we have a choice between being served delicious crap versus nutricious but yet not as tasty programming. We are also a nation of readers, and common sense researchers and applicators, whereas in countries like Turkey, the general populace seems to be resigned to the opinion that their voices are not heard anyway and feel helpless by way of the ‘If you can’t beat’em, join’em attitude.’

    Secretly, the ones who are critical, are probably the ones displaying their infatuation with the same programming they consider as destroying the Turkish culture. What about the attitude of copying the same non-cultural or non-family values methods and generating ratings within the movie and music industry of Turkey being short of unique and dependent on cultural background.

    We need to look within ourselves first and understand our needs before we declare others guilty of force feeding us the pleasures of cultural submission!

    Maybe we can stop the cultural assimilation by taking the matter into our own hands, instead of hoping that one day those damn Americans will finally understand more of our culture and what makes us great, so they can repackage it and send it to us for our viewing or listening pleasure.

  • Metin we have DFH network satellite TV, and I can tell you that I watch it about 1-2 times per month. The typical “eylence” or “paparazzi” shows are complete and total tripe. They repeat the same story 40 times, showing the same video clips over and over and over- usually of someone caught playing topless beach volleyball or trying to drive their new Humvee. Shows such as this are such a complete and utter insult to a person’s intelligence and the shallowness of the reporting is so astonishing that the train wreck syndrome sets in: you want to look away but you can’t. I must give credit to the soap operas though- very high quality programs- regrettably all with the same theme more or less: wealthy family troubled with vexing issues, petty rivalries, love triangles etc etc etc. Great film I recommend to ALL: Head On directed by Fatih Akin. It an award winner: Here’s my personal mini review: http://americanturk.blogspot.com/2005/11/movie-review-head-on-directed-by-fatih.html

Join the conversation

Authors, please log in »

Guidelines

  • All comments are reviewed by a moderator. Do not submit your comment more than once or it may be identified as spam.
  • Please treat others with respect. Comments containing hate speech, obscenity, and personal attacks will not be approved.