thoughts come and go. here I keep some of them.
I've been using an old classic Casio watch since when I was kid. First I had the plastic one, later I switched to the metalic color. Once I lost it in the airport, then I got the same model for only 30 Lira (About $7.5). This Casio watch is superior than most of the technology we got in these days. Why did I say this? Here are the reasons;
- It's simple
- It's fast
- It can run for 20 years with same battery
- It won't distract you
- It can be repaired easily
- You don't have to upgrade to next model every year
Some of these items are hard to have in smartphones and computers. For example, we haven't invented a long lasting battery yet. What about the other ones in the list though? If we think about simplicity, speed and distraction, why the new technologies suck at these fundamental features?
In 2017, technology companies create habit teams to research and develop ways to make users more addicted to use their thrash apps, so a user who just wants to check the time ends up looking at his highschool friend's vacation photos 15 minutes after. We can't expect these growth vampires profiting from manipulating people to innovate new technology for the benefit of humanity.
Recently I've been thinking about freedom from the moral perspective. A question that I had to ask myself is, how should freedom be spent in a responsible way ?
If we look at the free creatures in the wild, they survive by organizing their whole life based on where they find the food. In the other words, every individual in the nature is free only if they find their own food. A monkey wakes up in the jungle, jumps to the river and swims little bit just for his own pleasure, then finds some food to eat. A horse runs with his friends with great joy to find food. A crowd of birds fly by dancing from Africa all the way to Turkey every spring to find food and chill. This is true freedom; surviving independently with the harmony of pleasure, suffer, uncertanity and risks.
I've been going through a self isolation. A sudden strong emotion state that makes you feel stranger to your environment. . I guess I needed to witness the madness of people filling the life with comfort and pleasure. I've been trying to gather my mind and sharpen my focus to find my path.
250 years old İshakpaşa Palace... One of the most beautiful places I've been in my life. It's in Iranian border, and unfortunately the armed conflict in the area keeps visitors away from here.
I feel happy and sad at same time. Happy because even a little corner of my country has such a fantastic architecture I've never seen before. Happy because the hospitality here is uncomparable, how they welcome foreigners or local tourists with that great positive vibe, inviting visitors to have tea with them... Sad because the economy in the region is affected by escelated war, a meaningless violence that noone here deserves. .
No matter what, I love here. One day we'll have peace and we'll solve our issues, and hopefully that time, our children or grandchildren will never have to leave their families to go abroad for work like this generation do. This land deserves peace, and is enough for all of us.
one day I gave two kids some small gifts because I liked them. their auntie saw us and invited to have tea. we met the whole family, had tea. I'm talking about may be 50 cups of tea. we don't even speak the same language but we tell eachother stories, we are connected.
We were in Alaska 1.5 year ago, knocked a random door in a native village, ended up meeting all the family, had lunch together, listened their stories, learnt a lot of stuff about how Mentasta indians dealt colonialist occupation; probably the biggest robbery in the world history. .
I got sick in Indonesia last summer, my body was fucked up. We kept walking, for hours. Then my body shut down, I slept for hours under a tree not being able to open my eyes. We found a village, Nova asked someone to help us. They invited me to their home and cooked food. I could walk more, we made it to Wae Rebo by walking, and a woman tourist from New Zeeland with medicine and basic tools helped me to recover that night.
One of the moments I felt closest to death was last october in Toubkal, second highest peak in Africa. We got caught weak and unprepared by stormy weather, strong enough to hit 4 adults on the ground. We made it to peak walking near cliffs. How we survived? By staying together with two other strangers and holding eachother's hands. .
The world is full of wonderful people who will welcome and share with you expecting nothing. We need to get out of the mindset of both fear and competition. We're neither fighting nor racing, we are surviving together. Someone made my notebook, another made my pencil. No matter I paid for both, it's only ethical if I use that pencil and notebook to write things that don't upset them. you're not superior because you got money, power or good education. You have that nice car and house but you didn't make both, people sacrificed from their lives and worked hard to make them for you. Is it fair if you think you're superior than someone made your clothes? Your money doesn't worth anything if other people don't sacrifice time. We survive together as one, and it's only ethical if when we do it fairly. 👋🏼
have you watched morning routine of birds ? they get together every sunrise time and hunt together above beautiful rocks on a sea or ocean coast. I loved watching their life in Point Reyes and Big Sur. Economy is good for the fishes because the sea is rich, even a broken bridge becomes food for them. Earth is magical.
The second highest mountain in Africa is called Toubkal, and is in Morocco. We went there last month and hiked to the summit in a bad stormy weather. It was my first time to see such a powerful wind that suddenly hits you and you find your body on the ground. As you get close, your foot gets quite close to the cliff sometimes, and all you can do is just wishing it's a lucky day.
We met two Moroccan students on the way because we were the only 4 humans left in the whole mountain, and the nature never jokes when it catches you weak, it can beat you up to the death. We all felt getting close to the death and this made us be friends instantly. We literally walked holding eachothers hands, motivating eachother like we're wrestlers. One of the Moroccan guys were having issues with his health because of smoking, so stopped in the middle. Rest of us made to the peak, and didn't mind to eat the canned food left by someone else. Who cares about hygene when your body needs to fight for survival.
We made it back to the basecamp, and the storm was still going there, our tent was already taken out by the wind, fortunately it didn't fly away. There were more young Moroccan people preparing to make it to the summit next day in the base camp, we started trying to make fire together but it was so hard under the storm. If you go there, you'll see the whole basecamp is surrounded by walls and you have to pay if you wanna put your tent inside. And there was a hotel inside the wall, full of white europeans in vacation. They built the walls surrounding all the dry area, so for people who doesn't want to pay, there was just wet ground left for camping, and not much luck for hiding from the wind. We desperately tried to make campfire, tried to fix our tent but finding a not wet ground with an angle protecting us from wind was so hard, and our tent was not strong enough to resist the wind. So we started hiking back to the nearest town same day with our backpacks weighing about 15kg.
After hours of walking and camping on the way, we made it to the nearest town next morning. I remember looking at the town from distance and loving its colorful houses built so similar and closely to eachother. In Asia, middle east and Africa, houses are built closely to eachother and all houses are about same size. One day after surviving, I remembered that our ancestors settled down for a reason; surviving. There was no other chance. They would not be able to make even a fire otherwise. And they were financially equal because they built these towns in solidarity to survive. We can see how the law of the nature works in clearly in this example; humans can't survive without being a community who live in solidarity.
Groceries nowadays have perfect looking apples because the farmers started using medicine to keep the birds away from biting their apples. No matter how much they bite, we don't want them to touch "our" apples. Why ? The nature has such a meaningful balance; birds take small bites, humans come and grab the rest. It's the same taste, except apples with bird bites look different. They don't fit the beauty standard set by popular movies. People want their ikea table to have plasic looking untouched apples. To me though, an apple with some bird bites on it look a lot more beautiful honestly. When we take it from the tree, we see the art of the nature on it. All those random patterns... That's the beauty of the nature.
Time is the energy of the universe. You give it some energy, it gets some stuff done. For example, Give the earth half a year, it can grow a tree. Give two humans 9 months, they can make another human.
Our journey begins with time. The earth turns around the sun for itself and for us, giving every single of us a new day. When we observe then nature, we see their rituals of celebrating a new morning, a new season, similar to humans. We all appreciate and celebrate the time. Because it's given to all of us equally, and it's completely free by its nature.
I was in Joshua Tree a month ago and thought “these cactus plants don’t need a lot of water, but they grow and they’re persistent”. Creating a way of living that depends on little amount of “water” (money, or funding) is actually equal to having a lot of “water”. In the other words, if we actually liberate the society from needing a lot of “water” by improving the minimum living standard, it’ll be the same thing with having millions of dollars invested on community projects. Sorry if my english is limiting me. What I wanna say is we need a land that gives us much less water but enough to be free, so we can build our projects…
A part of the society demand an economic system that doesn’t need a lot of “water” (money) but it’s distributed in such a way that is enough for letting a lot of plants (people) grow and be persistent.
I'm raised as Muslim and spent a lot of time thinking about it during my life. My relationship with Islam has been an adventure, sometimes hated and abandoned it, sometimes loved it. Traveling in Asia and Africa, learning about other cultures which influenced Islamic culture, now I realized that I shouldn't rush to come to conclusions about it. Thinking is joyful when you don't rush for conclusions.
Because it's more complex than we think. Take sunnah for example, one of the core concepts of islam. It says, we are required to follow Muhammad. When you tell this to people, they take it as "repeating". Whatever he did, we need to repeat. He did extra pray on evenings, ok we should also do that, he liked cats, ok we also like cats (true example, notice how street cats are treated in Islamic countries).
But there is one thing Muhammad did; he refused the heritage of his time's society and made a revolution. He didn't repeat anything. So should we also follow him on refusing the heritage completely ? If we little bit do, we could open room for a lot of changes on Islam.
Relationship with a dog is very simple and annoying because the dog never see you as friend. It'll love you the whole time no matter if you're treating it good or bad. Unfortunately, dogs see humans superior than them, and they even let humans control their whole life.
In contrast, cats won't love you unconditionally. It'll be a complicated relationship depending on both sides attitude and mood. They won't let you control their life because they don't see humans superior than them.
This was a response to a thread where I responded to a European friend claiming how Europe has a lot of freedoms and how bad Turkey is for jailing journalists
West is where Neo nazis can march, sometimes set mosques, homes, refugee camps on fire and that's exactly the freedom west has been so proud of. The measurement of western democracy is not the freedom of minorities being oppressed, such as muslims. Just recently Germany shut down a Muslim media group for radicalizing people, raiding their homes, offices. Turkish people in Germany and Netherlands were not let to gather for election meetings, Dutch newspapers' response to the cops beating up Turkish citizens peacefully gathered on the street was to fill their papers with big puntos telling Turkish immigrants to go back to Turkey. Tolerance and democracy is not measured with how you tolerate the fascists in your country. Tolerance and democracy are measured by how you treat minorities, immigrants.
I got friends and relatives in prison currently. I fought the police on the street taking risks when Time magazine was choosing Erdoğan as their cover in the times they shared power. That time there was a lot of journalists in jail, for example, making a research about Gülen. Where was the western media ? Where was all these demonizations, all these innocent journalists ? Some shit happened and Erdoğan gave middle finger to his ex partners, suddenly we began seeing demonizations of him. Same thing currently happens in Philippines, Europe's 50 year tax-free mining contracts are about to end, somehow CIA moves its cartels from Mexico to Philippines to destabilize the country until it gives up again, and the opponent China gets a gangster elected to fight back. On one side, there is a western colonization gang with all innocent hero journalists racing for demonizing the opponent, on the other side, there is a simple gangster hired by chinese business man trying to secure their investments. The world is done with the colonizers ripping countries off in return to exporting democracy. No surprise why Europe is declining power.
With all my respect to who actually do research and take risks, I find many journalists thrash. Like this Gülenist worked for a ideological group who arrested anyone critising their operation, and they published a ideological magazine which manipulates the public with fake documents and planted evidences on cases like bombings, shootings, and once they lost all that power, they become democrat journalists! Yeah but, they have never done any journalism before ?
I recently met a black journalist from NY who worked for liberal media, and she worked on a case about how NYC cops arrest muslim cab drivers to help the prison companies make more profit. She collected true evidences such as phone records, but couldn't publish it anywhere! Then left US, kept doing journalism this time in Asia, about the western minings. People tried to kil her :) She show me the website she reported to, I guess indie site with no marketing and no finance behind, would never make it to even first 10 pages of any Google search. They are the real journalists who do research and don't care about what their boss wanna see and what people wanna read.
What we see in the western media is all western propaganda. Yeah, you can say Fuck Trump and draw Merkel kissing Obama but when it comes to a topic that matters such as democracy in middle east, all the ideas you'd hear there would be already out of date, some ancient democracy noone in middle east believes anymore. Western media loves to see underaged kids holding AK47 for democracy or christianity but if it's muslims fighting, they demonize the hell out of them. A Vice journalist made a documentary about underaged Kurdish youth arming up to start a civil war for independence. In middle east and Africa, western media, governments and intelligence agencies never missed any opportunity to create little adhoc nations from beautiful democracy dreams and they even forgot the war they supplied weapons to after a year. Like Syria! The western media demonized Assad, reported some Syrian youth asking for democracy, innocent people were being killed or put in jails by demon dictator, so there has to be a french revolution in Syria then, right ?
The truth is, a lot of people including myself, would prefer a middle eastern king or dictator whatever, over any sort of system brought from Europe. Specifically democracy because for west, democracy is a weapon that they own. A military coup (funded by US) happens in Honduras, Clinton calls it restoring democracy. A military coup happens in Egypt, Obama calls it restoring democracy. A military coup is happening in Turkey, all western media backs it calling "Turkish military is restoring secular democracy" until it fails, then after the failure, they began calling the coup was fake and innocent people are being arrested. The most funny part of that is, if the coup actually worked out, military would execute actual journalists in the name of democracy, and western media wouldn't even mention it. Western hypocracy is quite often heard for a reason.