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Iranian Government Cuts Off Internet Access Again
AlbionTourgee writes "It is reported that Gmail and Yahoo mail at least have been blocked in Iran, along with many English-language sites. While news of demonstrations seems to be getting out of the country, the government appears to be trying to prevent people within Iran from communicating and from learning what's happening. It remains to be seen whether TOR and Freenets can be effective to combat this sort of effort to block communications, and whether the general circulation of information about the protests around the world will help."
Not Iran.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
Are you actually claiming Israel controls Gmail and Yahoo?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They have internet in Iran?!
Jews control everything, didn't you know?
All they have to do is block the known Tor entry points or set up their own hacked TOR routers.
There really isn't any technical reason why Iran couldn't stop covert communications over the Internet they could even go to a white list system if they really needed to.
The only thing preventing is their own population. I just don't think they would tolerate becoming prisoners in the their own nation.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I can not tell if you just have the world's worst sense of humor are are just a complete nut job.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Then blaming Iran. Part of the ramp up to get the US to do their dirty work.
Expect Americans to die by the gross, in Afghanistan, thereafter.
Citation, please, showing where Israel is directly upstream of them.
Get off my launchpad!
well.. It seems tor is showing is usefullness for us, these that love freedom.
maybe could be a good idea to start building a system better than tor, for.. you know, if theres something like a race arms, and tor is blocked / detected. :-I
-Woof woof woof!
They are the Government of that country, whether or not we happen to agree with their policies. If they want to ban automobiles and have everyone ride around on horses, it is their perogative. We can get our undies in a bunch as much as we want, and hem and haw and harrumph about the situation. They are a sovereign nation and may make their own laws as they please. If you don't like it, revolt. Oh that's right, you don't live there but would like to impose your views and laws on them.
Unfortunately, given the current socio-economic state that the US and it's allies are in, Iranian leaders -- very possibly not being the caricatures many americans would assume them to be -- may be making a large bluff in this and other moves it has made. The US can ill-afford a continued string of wars in smaller powers that do not offer a consumer incentive; i.e. any war that doesn't have us retooling our auto companies to make tanks, telling our people that if they ride alone they ride with the ayatollah. If we're to go to war, it needs to be a manufacturer's war, not a war of attrition fought by a people that have sufficient stores of it's most important tactical resource (people) to not care about when it "wins".
Iranian leaders, if they have any semblance of intelligence, knows that we cannot call their bluff unless a larger ally steps in and makes the war "interesting". For now, despite the horrible situation in Iran, the best thing that we can do is encourate the Iranian people, and let them know that their voices are being heard, that they have the power to revolt and change their own destinies. Most of all, that if they take the initiative, we will respect any free government they impliment in the aftermath.
But we cannot help them with guns. We cannot help them with bullets. We cannot help them with manpower. Any fight we make on their behalf, is fighting their cause. Every bullet we fire at an oppressive Iranian government, we fire at Democracy. If we have learned anything from Iraq-ganistan, it is that a policy of policing the world leads to later generations of peoples turned from ally to staunch enemy with the memory of american guns killing their people outweighing the memory of american guns killing their enemies.
May God and Allah see eye to eye in this conflict.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
Sadly, no. I was raised Jewish, but I was never let in on this supposed conspiracy.
But you did make my point for me -- to believe Israel is behind this pretty much requires you to believe Jews control everything.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's ok Google will just leak the contents of everyone's email to everyone else in Iran!
What's that you say? Gmail is blocked?
Missed it by that much....
The only people who do care, are gullible, interventionist Americans.
I'm fed up with the Middle East. The region is this planet's equivalent of a high school oval. It's the traditional venue that pretty much everyone goes to when they want to have a fight. There is conflict of some sort happening there constantly, on a literally second by second basis.
These endless conflicts also are not ours. The rest of the world very rarely has any real stake in them, for the most part. Oil is about the only legitimate interest anyone else has there. Semitic monotheism, and who owns a particular mosque or church or whatever, is utterly meaningless as a legitimate incentive for war.
If the Iranian government wants to completely exterminate its' constituency, let it. If the Arabs and Jews want to mutually remove each other from human memory, let them.
At least if that were to happen, the rest of us might finally get some peace and quiet.
It's the routine planned Monday outage.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Why is this tagged nukem? Lots of Iranians are extremely hot, like princess Princess Jasmine from Aladdin - they are largely Persian. We have one at our lab and she says about 70% of Iranians hate their government but are being oppressed (people disappearing in the middle of the night kind of thing). They need liberating more than Iraq did (though that's not too hard) and they probably would WELCOME a liberation instead of blowing up! In fact that's what they're scared of most - not being liberated by America but being blown up by America because their government is an asshole.
Apparently their "Gmail" app was duplicating the function of "Persian" script, and the government hasn't blocked it! They're just "researching" it
i) Stage color-coded 'revolution' ...
ii) Raise rumor of election fraud - (and ignore fraud-riddled elections in Afghanistan)
iii) Raise rumor of internet censorship
iv)
v) Profit - but for whom?
Their religion tells them to oppress and be oppressed...
Uh, I don't think that's true. At least not from what I've read in the Qur'an, there wasn't anything detailing what's going on in Iran right now and saying that that is how you must run your nation state. In fact, if you look at a lot of laws like the extreme forms of Sharia they are more founded on what leaders after Muhammad's death decided he meant. In my mind I liken it to the perversion that several Popes have put in place ... in the name of The Bible. Despite the Popes calling themselves Christians, they spent their lives very comfortably unlike Jesus Christ. Similarly certain leaders today call themselves Christians and Muslims yet do not live their lives like either Christ or Muhammad. Usually it's not safe to compare religions like this but I'm trying to illustrate that these historical religious figures suffer distortion today across the world in Iran and the United States. Perhaps one is worse than the other but your criticism of "mudslums" religion telling them to be oppressed is no more apt than me saying that Christianity tells Christians to be oppressed. Indeed, speaking for any religion that has hundreds of diverse sects is a ridiculous act in and of itself.
... much less most of "The Middle East." Because we weren't paying our media outlets to disperse that, we were only rewarding them on shock reporting mostly spurred by the Iranian hostage crisis. That's all we saw of Iran on the news and for a while that's all Iran was to us, a hostage crisis ... not a country with millions of citizens doing a lot of the same stuff we do here in the states.
I might also warn you that Western media (especially in the United States) concentrated on only the bad things from "The Middle East" from the 1980s to the 1990s. Although it's recently become much better, I read a book by Edward Said called Covering Islam that itemized a few publications and looked at the hilarious slant. Granted, he cherry picked those works and the book was not as even handed as I had hoped, he did point out to me that I do not know the average life of a regular citizen in Tehran
My work here is dung.
And this differs from any other religion how?
It's almost fun to watch Cristian sects get on their high horses about human rights violations ever since secular authority stopped them from torturing and burning people for disagreeing with them.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It could be the Iranian equivalent of the MPAA/RIAA is just forcing the Iranian ISPs to kick file sharers offline.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Jews control everything, didn't you know?
I thought it was the Scientologists?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Sorry, no. Moral relativism is complete bullshit. Some things are morally wrong ABSOLUTELY. One of them is supressing your populace's ability to communicate. I'm sick and tired of people justifying morally corrupt behavior just because it's state-sanctioned. Sorry, forcing women they have to wear a head-dress is absolutely not acceptable. Denying them basic human rights is absolutely not acceptable. Persecution of homosexuality is absolutely not acceptable. EVEN IF ALL THESE THINGS ARE STATE SANCTIONED. I'll take that one step further and say that it is even absolutely morally unacceptable for a radical state to possess nuclear weaponry, even more absolutely morally unacceptable for such a regime to have such unabashed hatred based on another people's religion.
The difference between a state and a mob is that one controls the military and one does not. Simply being a group does not magically grant anyone moral superiority or the ability to redefine basic human rights. Saying that its ok for ANYONE to do that is fucking retarded, and something that is continued by apologists. Your moral 'relativism' is the reason why atrocities like this are allowed to perpetrate.
Why do you reject the possibility that he's simply an attention-starved troll?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Only old people use Twitter in Iran
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
ver since secular authority stopped them from torturing and burning people for disagreeing with them.
Yes, only the secular authorities are allowed to do that nowadays.
My handful of quarters as an atheist who studied these two religions:
You're wrong. I've studied both the bible (several versions of it) as well as the Qur'an. Islam differs from christianity in a very important and fundamental way; it literally and bluntly, with no room for reasoning, divides humanity into two camps: the good (the muslims) and the bad (the 'kafir'; the non-muslims); and literally, page after page, calls for the shedding of the blood of the kafir in the form of "conversion, 'by free will' or 'by sword'". Christianity differs here in the fact that nowhere in its holy scriptures does it divide humanity into camps, and nowhere in its holy scripture does it call for bloodshed of non-christians. What it does, however, is call for the bloodshed of those who DISGRACE and VIOLATE christianity - which is a very important difference to make note of - whereas the Qur'an calls for bloodshed of ANYONE simply not being muslim, regardless the person. (and, no, the christian crusades were not called upon by the bible or the religion itself; the crusades were ages of abuse of the religion, in its own name.)
End rant.
It could be that the USA's cyber-warfare department is doing its best to disrupt Iranian networks. Or it could be that government shills are "reporting" fake news so as to create antagonism towards Iran in order to reduce the number of protests that the USA government would face during its future war against Iran.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
how is it related to Michael Jackson?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
to be excluded from the very definition of judaism.
Well, nor were my parents, grandparents, nor anyone at the synagogue I went to...
At some point, you'll have to accept that your paranoid delusions are just that -- delusions. That is, unless you have some evidence for me to consider...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well the idea that one would make an effort to get attention on slashdot makes my head hurt.
But you may be right so I will add that to the list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
tell me again, how is this different than the bill to allow the president of the united states to "shut down the Internet" in case of emergency? or is this simply a case of different intentions?
Iran? The fundamentalist run Islamic republic has banned Yahoo and Google?
Try this, a NATO member, EU member designate, secular (still!) neighbor of Europe and having actual part in Europe country, Turkey has banned Myspace in addition to Youtube today. Yes, Myspace, that "personal blog" or more like "music demo" site.
Keep watching Iran and China though...
why these countries have leaders that vehemently insist they have the best hackers and the best computer cultured cyberpunks in the known world, however actively block collaboration tools and sites that are used by practically all of them.
im not sure the censorship is a huge deal, or not as huge as im being led to believe..i think its a self correcting problem. have internet, or restrict it, you will reap the consequences either way. If your iranian computer wizards hate your censorship enough, they will leave. If you censor your internet enough, you'll find your relevance and influence on the network as a whole to be rather paltry. Censored internet is a countries most apparent resignation to continue living in the stone age, pounding the drum to dictatorial policy that will never be considered compatible with the information age.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Well the idea that one would make an effort to get attention on slashdot makes my head hurt.
But you may be right so I will add that to the list.
validation from peers is more than just CRCs at the MAEs.
Get off my launchpad!
Darn right; ideology is evil no matter what authority enforces it.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
/signed
Jesus killed Mohammed:
The crusade for a Christian military
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488
He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley's armor, in giant red Arabic script.
"What's it mean?" asked Humphrey.
"Jesus killed Mohammed," one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night. ...
The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. ...
"Jesus kill Mohammed!" chanted the interpreter. "Jesus kill Mohammed!"
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I guess but I don't think of people on Slashdot as my peers. Maybe I need to take a look at the effort I spend posting on Slashdot. Maybe I am just as silly thinking that my posts are worth the effort.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sadly, no. I was raised Jewish, but I was never let in on this supposed conspiracy.
You just need to write to Chief Bloomenbergansteinenthal of the Jewish Justice League in NYC. That or make aliyah to Israel. Everyone here just gets welfare checks from the proceeds of the Zionist media conspiracy (remember, it's "Zionist" now instead of "Jewish") to make a living! After all, what else can be done with nothing powering the economy but agriculture, tourism, and hi-tech?
I guess but I don't think of people on Slashdot as my peers. Maybe I need to take a look at the effort I spend posting on Slashdot. Maybe I am just as silly thinking that my posts are worth the effort.
The point is, it's not what you think they are, it's what trolls... oh. Clever.
Get off my launchpad!
And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.
What part of "inalienable rights" is so hard to understand?
It is very interesting that we would choose to talk about the American ideal of "inalienable rights" in reference to our dealings with Iran -- just look into the CIA's involvement in Iran. Overthrowing a popular leader for greedy economic interests? Check. Installing a brutal, tyrannical dictator in his place? Check. I mean, the CIA trained SAVAK, the secret police force responsible for repressing political dissent! The United States government saying ANYTHING about Iran silencing dissent is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Maybe I'm an optimist, but uh...pretty sure we've been here before and censorship didn't really cut it for Iran's government. The Neda video, Twitter, Facebook, Tor usage, cell phones. There's just too many ways for information to flow from Iran (or Burma or wherever) for any censorship to really be effective. The best ideas would be cutting off ALL access, or white-lists, both of which create serious issues for Iran in terms of being connected to the world.
A communications disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion!
...just joined the Axis of No Internet Access. Other members include my parents and that homeless guy down the street.
Tor is not working. Attempting to use it probably is drawing the wrong kind of attention.
Technicalities aren't going to get us around these #{@#[@^@# islamic idiots. Only violence will.
Please point to the passages where you see that. Please link to whole passages, not quotes 3 or 4 words long picked from the middle of sentences, I've seen absurd attempts to turn the lines like "It is lawful to kill unbelievers if they attack you first." into "It is lawful to kill unbelievers."
Oh, and even if a non-believer violates Islam or any of its holy images, it is still not lawful in Islam to kill them.
Your misinformation attempt is absurd in its factual incorrectness. You either a) had a very, very bad teacher on this subject or b) are totally fabricating to suit your own personal agenda.
Proper references, or STFU.
As a Muslim, I can tell you that the justification for killing a non-Muslim is the same as killing a Muslim; in self-defense. This is an unequivocal rule, with no exception. Yes, there are people who break this rule, but I don't know what whatever ideology drives the US allows for massacring a country for it's natural resources.
It is very short sighted to think they could "mutually remove each other from human memory" without taking a few of us with them.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Too bad, though. It'd be nice to have a plan.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
In fact, if you look at a lot of laws like the extreme forms of Sharia [wikipedia.org] they are more founded on what leaders after Muhammad's death decided he meant. In my mind I liken it to the perversion that several Popes have put in place...
I definitely see where you're coming from and make a good point. I would mention, however, that the Qur'an does seem to place a lot more emphasis on letting yourself be guided by the religious leaders and clerics and obeying them, as compared to the relative dearth of this theme in the christian bible. From my best understanding of the history, this was an intentional inclusion in the Qur'an, whereas the bible was composed of disparate books that may have been cherry picked with a view towards establishing authority over others, but were not specifically written with that end in mind, but were more focused on recruiting efforts.
Similarly certain leaders today call themselves Christians and Muslims...
I see where you're going with this and it is a valid point, but it is also perilously close to the "no true scotsman" fallacy. When people declare themselves to be adherent of a religion and recruit in the name of that religion, I'm not sure it is useful to try to judge who is truly a member and who is a member of a new religion based on the old but too different to be considered the same. For myself, I'm willing to refer to televangelists and the pope and gnostics and baptists as christians and consider the religion as a whole, from moderates to extremists. I think it makes for a more useful discussion with less weasel room. In discussion I'd propose a religion be considered the core works and beliefs of that religion along with the common interpretations among the breadth of adherents.
I must say, having read the Qu'ran, I was actually encouraged by the actions of many muslim clerics in dealing with adverse situations. I remember during the whole "cartoon images" crisis a significant number of clerics putting themselves in harm's way to advocate peace, literally placing themselves between a scared and outraged mob wielding stones and a foreign embassy. I'd like to think christian priests in the US in dealing with frightened and outraged followers of christianity under threat of being killed or conquered would have the courage to likewise try to avert violence, but I must admit I'm not at all certain it would happen.
P.S. for anyone questioning my personal stance or beliefs, I'm an agnostic who still recognizes the good works done by many religious groups and who has worked with members of a variety of religious groups (christian, muslim, jewish, new age pagan, and unitarians to name a few) to organize charitable projects. I also enjoy a knowledgeable discussion of religion, history, and philosophy with adherents to most any religion.
Do you really, honestly, believe that Islam (which has no state, organization or supporting political structure to maintain it) has forcibly converted 1.5 billion people around the world?
The idea that Islam spread by the sword flies in the face of the fact that it is still spreading despite the fact that at the moment, it has no sword. Perhaps, just perhaps, the image that you get force fed by Fox News doesn't properly represent what Islam offers to those who seek it?
I am a Muslim, and I can tell you, there is no law in Islam with regards to killing people that makes any distinction between believers and non-believers. You are only allowed to kill *anyone* if they attack you first. There is no room here for movement. There are no "preemptive strikes" or "preventative wars". And don't be pointing the finger at current leaders in the Middle East. We want them there less than you; tell your government to stop supporting the regimes by funneling funds to them through Saudi Arabia and I *promise* you, we'll do the rest to get them to stop bugging you.
Just be glad that is all we are cutting off...
-Imadinnerjacket OUT!
We all know about the injustice in Iran and many many other parts of the world, but we really want to make a case like in Iraq and then go to a War?
Please more tech news, thanks!! and peace!!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Sure, I agree that all that stuff is bad. But all this crap about "moral relativsm" just confuses the issue. Practically no one in the western world thinks it's OK to stone people for being gay, or for the government to cut off people's means of communication, or to force women into submission, or any of that. What people disagree about is what to do about this. I, for one, do not believe that because the government in country X is misbehaving, that the US is automatically required to go to war with country X to fix this situation. We need to balance the needs of people in other countries for freedom, with our capability to do something about it. Realistically speaking, the government of Iran is not going to change their ways because we ask them to, or because we impose sanctions on them, or any other action we take short of outright toppling their government. And our experience with the aftermath of that sort of thing has never been very good - the population of Iran would certainly not be thanking us. And it would be ruinously expensive in terms of money expended and lives lost.
It's all very well to get on your high horse about misbehavior of other governments. But 1) we don't have any realistic capability to do anything about it, and 2) before we worry about the mote in Iran's eye, shouldn't we attend to the beam in our own? The US government hasn't exactly been a paragon of virtue over the past few years, either.
Now I feel terrible. So depressed. Everyone assured me that the Jews were in charge. Now what? Anarchy? Hell, that's no better than what we have today, is it? DAMMIT MAN! DEVELOP A GOOD JEWISH CONSPIRACY NAOW!!! Reassure me, please!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.
The GP is suggesting that free communication in the birth-right of every human being, irrespective of spiritual belief. Are you really suggesting that this point has no bearing on the people of Iran? That, for some reason, totalitarianism is acceptable if painted in terms of cultural norms?
Jingoism is jingoism, no matter where you're from and what your culture is. Same goes for censorship. They are separate issues. Jingoism in the USA has cost the USA a lot of moral credibility around the world. But that does not negate the fact that censorship is bad thing. You can't impugn the moral veracity of aspects of the constitution simply because USA politics involves extremists and jingoist voices.
The notions of good and bad are culturally constructed, however, a cross-cultural analysis reveals a tremendous amount of overlap. Censorship is bad - period, whether the USA is Iran, Iran is the USA, the USA is the USA or Iran is Iran.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Well, did they learn about I2P, TOR, and Stealthnet while the web was working? I don't think that even the Jews can block all of that stuff yet. Not unless they've recovered the Ark of the Covenant, but I thought Indiana Jones had that all wrapped up.
"Slow Down Cowboy!"
My apologies to all your girlfriends - I was trying to get to all of them, didn't really mean to leave any of them hanging.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
you know israel and the US will do anything to take over iran, if the idiots inside keep protesting, it'll be another welcome into their country and then yay, israel will own that one too.. everything is propaganda anyway, so they cut off access to gmail and yahoo, i'd surely like to know their reason but i wouldn't trust a source out of twitter in iran, the israeli controlled media in america will do or say anything to take iran, their consistent complaints about nukes and what not, israel doesn't even have the right to have nukes -- they haven't even signed the nuclear non proliferation act, IRAN has.. iaea has been going in and out of iran if i recall and has found nothing. i think the iranian government should shove it up america and israel's ass by scrapping the nuke project and doing what most sane americans would want is taking advantage of the sun and doing solar... that way it'd take a conspiracy by israel and the US to go to war with them.. kind of like 9/11. no good will and could ever come from war. the mid east is happy enough we took that dictator out of the white house. i was listening to i think the senate minority leader and he was calling russia and iran's regime evil or something! wow! no weapons system will stop anyone from an all out war. second of all, bush's regime was evil, took out a million people oversea's "for the death of 3500 americans." spent hundreds of billions and they say 45k people per year are going to die from lack of insurance, WEE AMERICA! go attack the mid-east while your own people die from being sick, gotta love sarah palin and her dumb-as-shit followers. jesus this is such a rant and run on sentence post! weeeeeeeeeeeee, now i'm an 'anti-semite' because that's all people can say when someone is critical of israel! now, go and be a great patriot and ask for war with iran.. because it's the patriot thing to do!
That'll be us once this cyber"security" act passes.
Close. It's the Jewish Scientologists. We're everywhere.
How very, very ... Christian of you. Now take 3 guesses why it doesn't work in Iran.
Of course while Christian ideology is all in favor of personal decision making (certainly since Saint Thomas of Acquinas), AND the associated responsability, guilt and freely offered reparations and forgiveness, there are few other ideologies that have similar basises. "Recent Judaism" is similar (meaning what Jews practice these days, as opposed to the descriptions in the torah), as is the far eastern confucianism. On the "non-religious" front only capitalism is an ideology that permits individual freedoms.
Note that the obvious needs to be added these days. For everyone to have maximum freedom, freedom must be curtailed. To take one obvious example : theft must be prevented using superior force. There can be no "unnatural" rights, rights that aren't natural. There is, for example, no right to spend more than you have. And, more controversially : there can never be a right for a gay couple to have children.
Individualized decision making, responsability and forgiveness is most definitely not a property the "law-based" religions exhibit. Neither toraic judaism (google "beth din"), islam (google sharia), buddhism (just read some history or google dalai lama controversy) or ... are in favor of that. Given a random religion it's a VERY good bet it's against individuality. It's just that one of the very, very few different religions is so very very large, and people forget that there are others. To remind people : there are people who are not Christians. That means that they have DIFFERENT definitions of things like "fair", "good" (e.g. stoning women is good in orthodox judaism and islam "under certain conditions" as everybody knows and noone wants to admit)
Neither are most "non-religious" ideologies pro-freedom, starting with the obvious : "living gods" (ie a person = god) ideologies (like buddhism), dictatorships, and socialism in all it's forms, ... in general ALL forms of centralized control are anti-freedom for obvious reasons.
And yes, taken to it's logical extreme that means that e.g. the AGW accords are anti-freedom.
Well, there is a third category detailed in the Quar'an, the People of the Book (Christians and Jews, primarily). These people are not enemies of the Muslims and should not be persecuted nor should conversion be sought (though it is welcomed). According to that writing the safest place in the world for a Israeli Jew to be would be the streets of downtown Tehran. I think Iran's secular authority might disagree, though.
Ultimately the followers of a religion dictate the perception of a religion. Sharia laws and the oppression of women are two things practiced in many Muslim countries that lead to a negative perception of Islam by the West, though if you meet a practicing Muslim in New York or London they would be unlikely to follow Sharia law at all...
To be fair, the bible isn't all sunshine and roses, either. While the moral lessons that Jesus Christ sought to teach are excellent regardless of your religious background or beliefs, very few people truly practice them. Instead we are regaled day after day with Old Testament scripture that persecutes sexual preference or would have us kill a woman for adultery. Apparently not punishing them makes me "wicked". If you are outraged that I would write that, and feel it is unfair that I characterize an entire religion based on what is clearly a minority viewpoint then I congratulate you, for you have gotten my point.
Gee the country that is regularly described as the least islamic country with a muslim majority allows an exception to islam ? In fact you will find that in Morocco, like in Turkey, large parts of islam are effectively outlawed.
So I dare say your "counterexamples" do not reflect, at all, on islam.
It is merely another idiotic defense of moral relativism. Taking your "remark" into account paralyzes any moral actor, preventing any action for change due to "uncertainty".
Or to put it another way. Hitler didn't decide to kill Jews until, at the earliest 1941 (long after the start of WWII). Does that mean he was innocent on 31/6/1941, and any and all action against nazi germany was immoral ? Until at least that date they merely let people die to save on national health care costs ...
I hope the police does NOT think the same way if it ever sees someone attempting to kill you. After all, they're not sure until you're dead, and even then it could have been an accident.
Can you say, "Takia"?
You act like any other muslim defending his/her religion blindly. There is a difference between "moderate islam" which (hopefully) is practiced the most today, and what's literally written in the Qur'an. When someone details the literal parts, don't start b******g about what the moderate side of things have to say about it.
Some of the solutions proposed seem overly complicated, microwave links, CIA dropping wi-fi equpment behind the lines, wtf? A primitive HAM trancivier and morse code should be enough to get information out of the country.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
No, I don't believe that. I also don't believe I'm a police officer with the legal right and duty to do something about it. Similarly, I don't believe the US has the responsibility to police all the world's bad states.
there is no law in Islam with regards to killing people that makes any distinction between believers and non-believers
ah yeah. im going to just stand corrected on this point.
Ob. Princess Bride quote goes here. You know the drill.
[The Qur'an] calls for the shedding of the blood of the kafir
And how exactly that that differ from the Bible?
At least, nowhere in the Qur'an will you find the suggestion that it is a good idea to murder the Gentiles when they are recovering from circumcision (Exodus, if memory serves), and nowhere in the Qur'an will you find the notion that you should repudiate your wife because she refused to perform a strip-tease for your drunken friends (Book of Esther).
On the other hand, nowhere is the Qur'an as colourful as the Bible, when it raves about the joys of collective sex (Genesis) or homosexual love between consenting adults (the Gospel according to John). Or promote the drinking of wine (Saint Paul's epistle to Timothy).
You might want to look at/listen to this video, it's called silent volcano, and yes it is more for "occidental" viewer, but it is interesting.
As in "may you live interesting lives..."
Unlesss.... the Jews are conspiring against the Jews!
While Freenet could be used in this situation, there are a few problems that make it not very useful for Iran. First, it can be difficult to get up and running efficiently, especially so if you're trying to set up a darknet. This difficulty means that even if you could do this, you probably don't know anyone else who can and would, so you have no one else to connect to. For example, here in the US I don't know anyone, in person, who runs Freenet. You could hop on opennet if you are willing to take that risk (much more detectable), and that's probably the only option.
The useful applications for Freenet are just that: applications that run separately on top of Freenet, and these have to be configured, and set up. The spam-free forum system, FMS, is particularly tricky, is only available through Freenet (the author is anonymous), has no official documentation, and would have to be modified to work on a disjoint darknet. There's some sparse documentation on opennet, but you have to be able to get to it.
Even though any arbitrary data could be inserted into Freenet, all the documentation, Freenet itself, and all the plug-ins and apps are written in English. A non-English speaker would probably have a lot of trouble getting started. There are> lots of German and French speakers on Freenet, but I suspect they all speak English as well.
Hollywood seems much more controlled by Scientologists than Jews.
Sorry, try again.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Those bombs driven up to military checkpoints, police checkpoints, civilian political and governmental offices, markets, and schools kill far more of the citizens than anything else. That goes for the military checkpoints and structures as well.
You know this.
Yet you pretend you don't.
That makes you scum.
You're the enemy, the same enemy as always. Don't think you can fool everybody all the time. Don't think you will avoid the consequences (you've already said enough to merit being on all the lists).
no more apt than me saying that Christianity tells Christians to be oppressed.
It does. Have you ever read any christian works? Everyone is worthless - a damned sinner - at birth because of sins of the father. The only way they acknowledge to bypass this is eternal servitude to god's rules.
Indeed, speaking for any religion that has hundreds of diverse sects is a ridiculous act in and of itself.
Not at all. Belief in a god is ridiculous and pathetic. Knowing someone is religious is no indicator of which style of pizza they like but it does indicate they're almost totally incapable of self-directed logical thought.
Any answer derived in any way from broken thought has to be treated at broken. A religious person might ask god which bus to take, and might guess right, but you still wouldn't want to take their advice.
he did point out to me that I do not know the average life of a regular citizen in Tehran
So? Do we have to sit through slide-shows of Timothy McVeigh's life, seeing what brand of TV dinner he ate, if he loved his mom, etc, or can we just call him a murderer because he killed a bunch of people?
The USA (Canada, Britain, etc) are judged on the things they do in extreme circumstances. Nobody cares what it's like on the good days, they only care if you'll be thrown in Guantanamo and water-boarded for no reason on the bad days.
That you can (and will) be hung for simply disagreeing with the people in power is the only comment one needs to know to declare Iran (the political entity) a shithole.
The Ayatollah doesn't care one bit about the rich persian history etc, etc, except to use it to make himself look more legitimate. To him it's all about hanging people who disagree with him (and with god of course).
Of course, if people were more able to see their own countries as shitholes maybe we could change them... GWB didn't seem much different than a religious leader, what with his widely publicized belief in god and religious guidance, and his authorizing of kidnapping people and throwing them into dungeons, spying programs, etc.
But Iran is not some beautiful and misunderstood relic of history, it's a prison, as are all the other places you can't leave without the permission of the rulers. North Korea, etc.
You failed to mention celebrating genocide (keywords: Egyptian, firstborn, sea), destroying various pagan peoples and taking their land, incest, snuffing all life on the planet (props to Jahve), and so on (and it does go on and on and on). The Old Testament is much more action-driven, but the melodrama/comedy that is the New Testament does have its moments - removing your eye/hand for making you sin (yes, that manga porn really is reason enough for an eternity of torture...poor taste shall not be tolerated) or fiery hell for calling your brother a fool.
Nice strawman there. Amongst other things, sections of the Bible are a historical document (including your examples). The stories of the people of Israel and the early Christians merely describe what happened are presented warts and all. In the historical sections its up to the reader to decide if the behaviour was good or evil when no judgment is made for you.
No true Muslim should believe that Allah will abuse Jews or Christians via Muhammad (PBH) via Quran.
I had a friend that came from Syria, he said they did the same there, controlled everything (but for money , not for crowd control) ...so I devised a
He could not even chat with his wife on msn, because they monitored the ports that msn used for that.
small chat program myself that could link to any port, even port 80, and this allowed the flow of traffic unhindered.
He still uses it today, there could have also been many more things he could have used, ssh tunnels, vpn, and many more, but the
small chat program i gave him was perfect for his needs. Most countries that have such limitations are only hurting themselves in the end, the population will figure out a way to bypass it, especially the kids...and they will end up hating their own country because of it.
Monitoring for a specific activity is one thing, blocking altogether is another.
If that's really news to you, try reading sites that have multiple sources instead of Fox.
Try http://www.informationclearinghouse.info for example.
This was meant as a joke, why is it a Troll?
My handful of quarters as an atheist who studied these two religions:...
You're wrong. I've studied both the bible (several versions of it) as well as the Qur'an.
What it does, however, is call for the bloodshed of those who DISGRACE and VIOLATE christianity -
Say What??? Any call for bloodshed, whether to be taken literally or metaphorically, ended with Micah; the which foretold of the "Great and Dreadful Day" when "he (Elijah) shall turn the heart of the fathers ....", & etc. No mention of bloodshed. The NT in no wise mentions taking the blood (life) of anyone for blasphemy or doctrinal transgressions. No where in the NT is such license given. The ministry of the principal character of the NT is that of "reconciliation"; reconciling unbelievers to God.
WADR, your exegesis is terrible and the stuff of zealots.