Maybe We Should Bomb Turkey Next

I never spent any time thinking about the country of Turkey... until I noticed that Turkey represents the third-largest readership of The Minister of Common Sense blog. (By the way, I always feel like I have to say “the country of Turkey” instead of just “Turkey”, because in English, “Turkey” means the Thanksgiving Day bird. What a stupid name for a country – probably one of the most stupid. Couldn't they have translated it any differently?)

Anyway, my blog gets the most hits from readers in the United States, which is no surprise since it is my home country. The second greatest number of hits comes from Canada, which is also understandable given that they are (generally) English speaking and it is next door to the U.S., although I may have lost some Canadian readership if they took offense to my post from a few weeks ago. However (and this is where it gets surprising), after Canada, Turkey ranks as the third-highest hit count on my website, which narrowly beat out fourth-ranked Australia. I have had hits from 33 different countries around the world, and TURKEY is the 3rd most popular visitor??

Do you believe it? How random, right?! Actually, as it turns out, it’s not random at all... in fact, it’s pretty damn scary. I did some more digging and it turns out that every single hit that I have ever gotten from the country of Turkey has only gone to one page of my blog... my tongue-in-cheek rant on January 15 called “Stop the Baby Porn”. They have never clicked or gone to any other page – just that one page. Because of Turkey, the “Stop the Baby Porn” post is now the second-most viewed page on The Minister of Common Sense website, following the infamous “Hosting Weddings Sucks” post that caused all the drama with The Knot.com.

I was a little suspicious, so I did some more investigating and every visit to my blog by someone in Turkey came as a result of them Googling the phrase “babyporn”. As it turns out, my blog ranks as #8 on the Turkish version of Google when you enter the phrase “babyporn”. It is the ambition of every Internet site to climb high in the Google rankings, but this wasn't really what I had in mind.

What kind of pedophiles are they breeding over there in Turkey?! For the record, all these hits I received came from all over the country: Istanbul, Bursa, Antalya, Ankara, Izmir, Gebze, Kayseri, Denizli, Konya, Trabzon, Adapazari and Mugla.

And they are not even searching for “child porn”, but BABY porn. My god, does baby porn even really exist?? Jesus, I can’t even think about it. Is it possible that “baby” translated into Turkish is actually slang for “girl” or “woman” or “hot woman”? Sort of how we might say here in America “Hey, baby, how’s it going?” or how someone might call a woman a "chick". So if we Googled for "chick porn", we wouldn't be looking for CHICKEN porn (as someone might literally translate), but actually normal, legal porn with chicks (women). I’m just trying to hope that it’s not what the Turks are making it appear.

I am a liberal and in favor of civil rights, however, it does make me wonder whether the government of Turkey should go out and identify these people and raid their homes, looking for proof of child pornography or something. I know that it is a slippery legal slope, and we don’t want to recreate McCarthyism, but it’s unsettling to know that people are overtly searching for illegal and incredibly harmful material. I guess that searching for it isn't illegal, but it just sucks that law enforcement probably has to sit there and wait for an activity to officially turn illegal before they can do anything about it. And, who knows... Turkey isn't exactly a bastion of human rights, so it might not be illegal over there at all!

One person in Turkey found my website by searching for “bayb porno pohoto” (at least he knew how to spell the most important word properly), which just reminds us that English isn't their first language over there – it’s Turkish. So the people who found my website in Turkey were searching for baby porn in English and not in their native language. It makes me wonder if they do this because English-speaking people make and propagate the most child pornography, which is an awful thought. So maybe it’s really more of “our” problem and as much a Turkish problem. (For the record, my website does NOT come up when you search for “babyporn” in the U.S. or Canadian version of Google. I’m not naive enough to believe that this search term isn't Googled every single day here in North America, but you just hope that it returns with “zero matches”. At least I’m not cracking the Top Ten Google list when they search for it. However, I am #1 when you search for "stop the baby porn", but let's hope that I am not the only crusader. Hmm... now that I think about it... I just Googled for "baby porn" myself while writing this post. So, I guess under my McCarthyism regime that I suggested in the paragraph above, I would have to be investigated, too. Oops.)

The first time I figured out all this information, I started to freak out. I began to wonder whether the joke photos that I posted in the Stop The Baby Porn Blog were actually exciting these pedophiles. I even went back and increased the size of the black boxes covering the bits on the baby to make SURE that I wasn't accidentally helping out the Turkish web browsers. One statistic of relief is that 93% of my Turkish visitors spent less than one second on the website, so the photos weren't very engaging for them. However, while their quick departure from my web page may be a little encouraging, it also indicates that they weren't searching for how to stop or prevent baby porn either, otherwise the title of my blog would have captivated them for longer than one second. So, you have to assume that they were looking for the real thing, which is upsetting.

Based on The Minister of Common Sense website statistics, Turkey ranks as the #1 country for pedophiles. So since America has a history of indiscriminately attacking foreign countries, maybe Obama should go George Bush on their ass, too?