Credit Where Credit Is Due

Can't catch me!

Before I wrote the post a few days back about polygamy, I did a bunch of reading. Like every issue in Turkey, or perhaps like every issue everywhere, things turn out be very multi-faceted and complex once you get past the part that pisses you off. It's just that the multi-facetedness of every issue in Turkey is slipperier and way more fun.

Having a think.

I had to mull things over for quite a long time before I could come up with a way to write about polygamy, and the implications thereof, without repeating what everyone else has been on about for a long time.

So I've decided to give credit where credit is due. This way you can see how nothing I think of is particularly original. Mostly I just use swear words in surprising places.

First, I read Nomad's piece on the same article. He got to it before I did because he generally tends to do that:

Legalizing Polygamy In Turkey

The comments in there lead me to Jenny White over at Kamil Pasha...

Disturbing Trends

... which was written almost a year ago. This is to show you I pretty much have my head up my ass as far as current events go.


As is often the case, the comments prove to be as interesting as/more interesting than the posts themselves, so for sure read the comments on the Kamil Pasha post. When it comes to stuff that happens in Turkey, especially where context is needed, Bülent Murtezaoğlu magically appears out of nowhere full of links and useful information.

Rexella has learned how to say big numbers

On a seemingly unrelated note which I assure you will turn out to be related, my dad and I were once watching scary televangelist Jack Van Impe on TV, and I was like, "He has to be making up those Bible quotes he throws in every 2 seconds Ezekiel 2:15 Matthew 21:7 verse 5," and my dad was all, "You know, there are just some people who have that skill and can cite from the Bible accurately like that, " and I was like, "Oh, yeah, there was an episode of Little House On the Prairie when Mary went to go teach in some po-dunk town with that bad lady all going on about the cipherin' who turned out to be illiterate, plus that show Carnival that sadly only lasted one season..." and he was all, "You see?"

The reason I'm relating this touching story of my dad and I watching creepy Christians on TV is because Bülent can cite useful things from the Internet with the swiftness and ease of a televangelist who memorized the Bible. Seriously, it's like he memorized the Internet and then somehow remained one of the world's only reasonable and polite Internetters who leaves comments. I just didn't want to mention Bülent and the the televangelists in one sentence without some sort of context.

Lastly, one of Bülent's links on Kamil Pasha led me to this article by Claire Berlinski...

Ban the Burqa

... which I really enjoyed because it's so tortured and almost gets to why I feel so tortured over the headscarf thing, and the other shitty things Islam does to women when religion and legislation meet over tea and decide to fuck the women over while appearing like they're being all democratic and human rights-ish about it. Oh and also the poor people and minorities get fucked over too when these tea dates happen but it's the women that are most visible, probably because a lot of them are neither poor nor minorities so the media actually give a shit.

Happy reading!