Merhaba Steemit - I am Kemal, Turkish political scientist, online marketer, blogger, basketball coach and poker player

While I dont really like talking a lot about myself, I understand how in a growing community it is important to get to know one another. Since I dont want to bore the f out of you, I wont start by telling how I was born in Munich, Germany 34 years ago to Turkish immigrants, but rather start with how I got to know Steemit.  

15th of July 2016 I was out with a friend in the English Garden of Munich playing PokemonGo. The early adapter that I am, I downloaded it on July 7th with the intent of checking it out before it was officially released in Germany. I immediately saw its high potential of getting people addicted to it, but brushed the killing of time aside with the anti-obesity argument. I was complaining about Germans lack of gathering in public spaces all my life anyway! After a week of checking it out and picking up Pidgeys to level up, I got my close friend J. hooked and we established a routine of going out for a walk in the English Garden after sunset. Just as we had found a nice spawning point for Squirtles, a breaking news push notification of the German news outlet "Spiegel Online" popped onto my screen: "Putsch in der Türkei"

After immediately calling my mother and several aunts in Turkey to check if they were OK and to get confirmation on the coup against the government, I urged my friend to abort our hunt and head back to his place so I could watch the news. That night I livecasted every development that I heard of from the various sources (Turkish television, reports of relatives, tweets of renown Turkish journalists) to my Facebook followers, and assessed them on the go. I had been active posting political articles about Turkey before the coup and was known for my criticism of the Erdogan and AKP regime. When President Erdogan landed on Ataturk Airport in Istanbul and gave a conference, I got the feeling that something in the way how calm he was while he answered the journalists questions smelled fishy. At that moment I felt, as if there was more to it, than what was being told, and I started to accuse him of having staged the coup, so that he could distract from all the domestic problems and regain support from the Turkish people. After all, he had an agenda of changing the constitution of Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system, and the putschists really didnt act as if they seriously wanted to overthrow the government. There were enough hints for me to conclude, that this whole thing was staged. But it turned out that I was wrong.

I felt ashamed, but also ambitious to understand what really went down that night. So when I was a news junkie before, I turned into a full-time news reading monster, also taking other than the standard mainstream media outlets in to account for input. In my research I came across a woman named Sibel Edmonds - an ex-FBI interpreter for Turkish and Farsi - who was discussing Turkey and its politics with a guy named James Corbett (https://steemit.com/@corbettreport) in a Youtube video from December 2015. It became clear from the way they were dropping serious knowledge about the different players in the Turkish game of politics, that they knew, what they were talking about. But then Sibel Edmonds did something in this video, that doesnt cease to amaze me up to this day: she called the coup! More than six months before it happened! And she did not just guess it - she had connected the dots in an excellent way and called it- BAM - that the Turkish exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen with the help of the CIA would incite a coup in Turkey, using his deep and broad network of followers in the Turkish state apparatus. From that day forward I havent missed a video of neither Sibel Edmonds and her independent Newsbud outlet, nor of James Corbett and his Corbett Report. 

It was in a video of the latter that Corbett introduced Steemit to his subscribers and I very thankfully followed his recommendation to check it out. I must say, it took me quite some nerve and countless hours of browsing and reading to get a grasp of how it works. But since Im not totally unfamiliar with cryptocurrency and social media, I slowly but surely understand how big of a thing this could become: nothing short of a digital revolution. 

So here I am, advocating Steemit to my friends, followers on Facebook, readers of my Wordpress http://www.ideasarelikeflames.com, sharing it on Twitter and loving, how it is blockchain-based and therefore censorship resistant, as well as incentivized by the underlying cryptocurrency. Genius. I wonder, why I didnt think of it. Time to get ambitious again, I suppose.

Thats me and the basketball team I coach: 

and thats me having won a big pot at poker, happy :)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I will be glad to answer. Cheers, Kemal