Tonight I upgraded the Word­press install on the site to ver­sion 2.8, res­ul­ted in about half-an-hour’s down­time while I untangled some merge con­flicts the svn update to 2.8 com­bined with a move to the new Word­press core svn server cre­ated. Inter­est­ingly the pro­cess went fine on my test server, but not on live; I’ll have to look into that. Any­way, apo­lo­gies for any incon­veni­ence the down­time may have caused you.

The 2.8 upgrade itself is almost entirely back-​​end, admin stuff, and shouldn’t have any impact on the vis­ible site at all.

The obser­v­ant amongst you will have noticed that I went for option 3. MT was just not doing what I needed it to, and when I installed Word­press in par­al­lel to trial it, it did everything I need more or less without fail.

It’s taken me a couple of days to trans­ition (which, com­bined with a new job, is why the blog has been quiet,) but I’m there now, and shouldn’t be chan­ging again¹. Expect the blog to be back to normal(ish) levels of posting.

1. Until the next big thing comes along. [↩]

Word­press, the pop­u­lar blog­ging site, has been blocked by the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, fol­low­ing alleg­a­tions of defam­a­tion by one Adnan Oktar, who is a well-​​known Islam­ist cre­ation­ist, who’s recently been in the blog spot­light (blog­light?) for a mass-​​mailing cam­paign of tens of thou­sands of cop­ies of his latest book, The Atlas of Cre­ation to uni­ver­sit­ies, schools and research insti­tutes through­out the west­ern world.

While he was just another cre­ation­ist crank mail­ing out books and try­ing to con­vert people, I wasn’t that inter­ested; it’s not that dif­fer­ent from The Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute or their UK equi­val­ent, Truth in Sci­ence. But this latest devel­op­ment gave me cause to look into him a bit more thor­oughly, and it’s much worse than I thought. This is someone with enough sway in his home coun­try to get an entire site banned based on a couple of art­icles, who’s so cer­tain of his deluded ideas that he’s pre­pared to orches­trate a cam­paign of mis­in­form­a­tion, har­ass­ment and threats against any­one with oppos­ing views. From Wikipedia:

In early 1998, Adnan Oktar and the BAV launched a cam­paign against Dar­win­ism. Thou­sands of free cop­ies of Adnan Oktar’s book, The Evol­u­tion Deceit, and the book­lets based on this book were dis­trib­uted within Turkey.

BAV [Found­a­tion for Sci­entific Research — Oktar’s mouth­piece organ­isa­tion] also spear­headed an effort to attack Turk­ish aca­dem­ics who taught evol­u­tion­ary the­ory. A num­ber of aca­dem­ics were har­assed, threatened and slandered in fli­ers that labelled them “com­mun­ists, sep­ar­at­ists and Maoists” for teach­ing evolution.[19][20] In 1999, six of the pro­fess­ors won a civil court case against BAV for defam­a­tion and were awar­ded $6,000 each.

The court decided that “a severe and unjust attack was per­pet­rated on the plaintiffs’ per­sonal rights, by list­ing the names of the sci­ent­ists defend­ing the the­ory of evol­u­tion and describ­ing them as com­mun­ists and sep­ar­at­ists on the fly­ers dis­trib­uted by the found­a­tion.” [20] Pro­fessor Ümit Sayın summed up the effect of BAV’s cam­paign when, in 2005, he said: In 1998, I was able to motiv­ate six mem­bers of the Turk­ish Academy of Sci­ences to speak out against the cre­ation­ist move­ment. Today, it’s impossible to motiv­ate any­one. They’re afraid they’ll be attacked by the rad­ical Islam­ists and the BAV.

In just seven years he’s gone from being pre­ven­ted from per­se­cut­ing people, to being able to shut down web­sites that host pages crit­ical of him, he’s mailed out thou­sands of cop­ies of a book of lies, and in his own coun­try people are too afraid of him to speak out in favour of evol­u­tion; how is it that hardly any­one in the west has heard of this man?