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Pakistani Lawyer Wants Mark Zuckerberg Executed
Earthquake Retrofit sends along a piece from The Register reporting on a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction on the Internet: a Pakistani lawyer has filed blasphemy charges, carrying the death penalty, against Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives (and the pseudonomous user who initiated the "Draw Muhammad" contest last month). Pakistani police have apparently opened an investigation, according to this Google translation of a BBC Urdu report."
If Pakistan were to actually uphold this absurd attempt, it wouldn't hurt Mark Zuckerberg (I'm pretty sure he's not planning on going to Pakistan anytime soon and no civilized country is even going to consider extradition). But it WOULD certainly hurt Pakistan (which already has a pretty bad rep to begin with). It's the equivalent of holding up a big sign to the world that reads "We're a backwards shithole, filled with intolerant Koran-thumping hicks. Don't even think about coming here or doing business here." It would be a valuable lesson on what religious fanaticism can do to your country, I suppose--especially for countries that don't have oil (the only reason any businessman from the civilized world would even be caught dead in Saudi Arabia).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Islam - a religion of peace. Are you serious?
And on a more serious note... what does the people who want the UK Hacker extradited and tried in the USA think of this?... after all the crime was commited in Pakistan (showing drawings of Teh Propeth) no?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I don't think the pages for "Draw Muhammad Day" is that big a deal. FarmTown, now THAT is a reason for execution.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
No, people are assholes pretty much anywhere.
What do you really expect for a religion literally meaning "submission" and where the very founder spread it at the point of a sword. As a society, we all want to have a very PC belief that all religions are created equal, have good intentions, at their core are always good messages and what not and it's only the bad people that pervert them.... but I think that's naive and I'm saying this as an agnostic. Treating unsubstantiated beliefs as sacred and taboo will always be a bad thing because you can't challenge a good or bad interpretation with logic and clearly any and all belief systems set up by man for various agendas will have downsides - some more than others.
Yet another example showing that the Islamic world is still in the Dark Ages that most of the rest of the world emerged from sometime in the 13th century.
I guess this is a development that no one really foresaw in the early stages of the Internet: instead of creating a global village with a global set of social mores, the Internet is creating a global court room where every jurisdiction can claim tort against anybody who does something over the Internet. Furthermore, it was always implicitly assumed (especially in the US) that the Internet users would adopt, or at least move to American moral standards. Instead, we're discovering that there are plenty of communities out there who are happy to apply their local standards to the world, and that these communities have enough power to at least make life uncomfortable for everyone.
There is a lesson here. Actually, there are two lessons here. One, Americans aren't the only ones willing to export their values, and they will have a difficult time arguing that others shouldn't. Two, we can lay to rest the notion that the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it: nations have enough power, and those in power have enough incentive, to use the other code base to control the Internet - the code of law.
I have a sneaking suspicion I know which one is going to win, and it's going to give geeks heartburn all over the world.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
And yet people get so upset and claim that the US "made" the terrorists. I guess they did. Just like Mark Z. did. It does not take much for a western to anger someone. In fact, most people on slashdot would be likely candidates for execution; most of them deny that Allah exists.
But what we really need to do is talk about this with them and come to an understanding...
And by the way, Israel is bad. Israel shouldn't have a blockade, Hamas isn't really a big threat. They just want to "execute" Israel...
Hm.
See, hacking government computers is illegal everywhere, recognized by a crime by two allies who have an extradition treaty with each other. "Blasphemy" isn't a crime in America, or most of the non-Muslim world. Pakistan is basically the world's Arkansas and no one takes them seriously. There is no moral or legal equivalent.
Even if you look at it from their perspective, that Mark Zuckerberg is somehow guilty because he's "enabling" these "offensive" actions on his website, doesn't that make their entire religion guilty because they're enabling the grisly murders of people like Daniel Pearl, or hell, all of 9/11?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Well, Facebook has customers in Pakistan, and that is probably enough, for FB to be considered a fugitive.
However, it should probably be noted that Zuckerberg is NOT facebook.
Can you imagine what would happen if CEOs for companies were actually personally criminally responsible for any illegal action anyone at their company committed, or that their company enabled any customer to commit?
If that were true we might have companies actually following the law....
Ya I don't understand these blasphemy charges. If someone says something they disagree with, then should just ignore him and move on. I'm not religious so I guess the equivalent for me would be someone claiming that coconuts are fruits. I'll think he's an idiot but that's it, I won't want him executed.
Founder spreading it by the sword is different than the followers/descendants distorting its message to spread it by the sword. So no, not insightful. Similar yes, but when the ACTUAL original roots of a belief system involve violence, that's a lot different.
Of course, Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which while not exactly "spread" by the point of the sword, it was advanced by the point of the sword.
Judaism's history was a very violent one, though they were/are not particularly interested in spreading the religion, because it is a racial religion.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
and? Is that supposed to make it OK somehow?
Just earlier this month I WANTED to strangle Zuckerberg. How is it possible for these assholes to suck the fun out of everything?
Treating unsubstantiated beliefs as sacred and taboo will always be a bad thing because you can't challenge a good or bad interpretation with logic and clearly any and all belief systems set up by man for various agendas will have downsides - some more than others.
Not to mention, any time that a death penalty is suggested for anything less than homicide, there's something terribly wrong with the picture.
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Of course it does. In it's early days, mainstream Christian Church killed 10s of thousands of Gnostic Christians who were well known for their extreme religious tolerance but got the ire of the church for their unorthodox views like that the God of the old Testament was evil and writing the Gospel of Judas. Not too mention everything since then. It sounds the same because it's inherently the same type of social structure with the same basic aims.
Of course, Christianity has splintered since then just like Islam has. Splintering doesn't mean automatically being more progressive -- the Puritans and countless other Christian sects were even more strict and worse than the Catholic Church in many ways and as oppressive against women and other things as bad as the most radical Islamic groups.
In fact, the basic attitudes between the groups are the same, which is why embracing religion will never work out. The only two ways to overcome that is to teach a different interpration of the religion or to forgo all pretense and drop it completely in order to change majority's attitudes about religion -- and that usually means converting them young and waiting for the next generation to come into power. (It's said that controversial scientific theories were often the same way, there were adherents that you would never convert despite all the evidence in the world, you just wait for them to die off).
That is referring to his followers being persecuted and rejected by their own family members.
Which, I might add, is an exact description of what happens when a Muslim converts to Christianity. If the family doesn’t outright execute him or her, they at the very least are completely disowned.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
What are you talking about? The inquisition was still going on when this country was formed a little over 200 years ago...
Fuck Mohammed and the camel he rode in on!
Muslims consider the Christian and Jewish G-d to be Allah and Jesus to be a prophet. They are unlikely to make fun of them. Islam's crime is rather the denigration of all non-Muslims into non-humans.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion. You can claim that the behavior of the asshat characterizes the entire religion, but that doesn't make it so.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I know I may have fallen for a troll trap here, but I am not letting this one go: Hitler atheism is in doubt. The evidence point more toward him being a catholic. Beside wasn't the soldiers who committed these crimes?, are you telling me that Germany's army during ww2 was an atheist army ??None of these soldiers was a catholic one ? Stalin was dogmatic in his views about social composition, he was so dogmatic about these things, it was as religion. Same goes for Pol Pot. It was religion that started the Crusades, it was religion who started the inquisition, it was religion who brought down the Towers. What about slavery in US ? who were the south quoting on the right for slaves? Get you fact right! "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg
Actually, I'd be more likely to agree that all religions are, at the core, about power and influence. Frequently they're tools whereby a tiny elite try to influence and control a large flock of sheep.
Art only becomes idolatry when one feels that it has some special representation. Pledging to kill the creator of an image is in fact proof of worshiping it.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I don't think that's right. I think about the only people who think all religions are equal are:
As a fellow agnostic, what I want is just for people to give me enough space to figure this stuff out, without threatening to kill me if I don't buy into their religion.
The Reformation gets very little credit for the relative moderation(or at least contemporary impotence) of Christianity, outside of some real shitholes. Calvin's Geneva was a Protestant theocracy, and there were numerous examples at least as unpleasant.
Also, while Islam didn't have a "reformation", it also has the "two-substantially-dissimilar-and-mutually-displeased-with-one-another-sects-operating-under-one-heading" thing going, with the Sunni and Shia branches(plus some smaller oddball variants), and that hasn't exactly exposed its warm and fuzzy side.
Most of the credit for the West not being a ghastly theocratic hellhole, torn by endless wars between the terrorized papistical minions of Rome and the terrorized heretical minions of various protestant factions, with the occasional witch burning or crusade to bring people together, is due to the Enlightenment.
"Mankind will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last Priest"(and the last advertising shill is buried alive alongside them)...
So just because some of our remote ancestors behaved like giant douchebags it's okay to let people repeat it, especially if it's in the name of religion.
What happened to learning from history to avoid repeating its mistake? Or did i miss some clause detailing exceptions to this?
I'm curious, which 21st century Christian figures are calling for and filing motions for government-sponsored murder?
Wrong question.
The interesting question is what countries enable you to file a religion-based motion for government-sponsored murder.
You have nutters all over the place, of every colour and (proclaimed) stripe/culture/religion - the problems is having those nutters in powers. Screw the reformation - the seperation of church and state, constitutions and bills of right are what makes a difference!
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
There was a man traveling through the land, casting out demons. When the apostles saw it, they told him to stop because he was not one of them. When they told Jesus what they'd done, Jesus told them that they shouldn't have made him stop because whoever is not against us is with us. What then, do you suppose he would say about your claim that "Its meaningless to say you are a Christian or a member of a particular church unless you share its essential beliefs." I'll tell, you, he wouldn't have cared about your precious "essential beliefs".
Yes. Have you read it? It says that.
That you should give away all your money. That you should accept and love all people. That you should hate your father and your mother. That you should not abide in laws and rules, but rather focus on love. That you shouldn't lord over each other. Pretty much the whole of the gospel message has been thoroughly rejected and rationalized away by the "church".
Oh like Islam is any better.
Child brides, pederasty, repression of women, homosexuality as a crime with the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Yemen.
I'd bet that more young males are molested in countries like Morocco a year due to the repressed sexuality Islam imposes than have been molested by all the Catholic priests in the last thirty years.
The son of one of Hamas's founders admits that the social restrictions on dating and sex in Islam and the Middle Eastern tribal society is one of the leading causes of militarism in Islam.
Being disowned in a Muslim culture is a bit more serious than being disowned in the US. In the Muslim culture, your identity – the fact that you are a person, and have civil rights – is based on your Muslim heritage. If your parents retract it, you’re George Bailey. You weren’t born. You don’t exist.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Treating unsubstantiated beliefs as sacred and taboo will always be a bad thing because you can't challenge a good or bad interpretation with logic and clearly any and all belief systems set up by man for various agendas will have downsides - some more than others.
Not to mention, any time that a death penalty is suggested for anything less than homicide, there's something terribly wrong with the picture.
Anytime the death penalty is suggested at all, there's something terribly wrong with the picture. Nobody can logically explain why it's okay to kill someone when it isn't okay to kill someone.
Strictly speaking, Jesus never command you to do any of those things (nor to believe anything). He did command a couple things (love God, love one and other, make disciples of all nations) and he was pretty clear that doing those things was of paramount importance. He never (as far as I'm noticed in all my readings) placed any emphasis in belief, though some people misread faith as belief.
Here's my beef with belief. People will say they believe something, and intellectually that may be true, but if they don't practice it they don't believe it in their heart. That is worthless
But it is not just one guy. I don't care what people want to say Islam is supposed to be, you have to take what it in. In particular, look at the countries that are Islamic countries. They are almost to a one fundamentalist dictatorships of one form or another. You have Iran that has sham elections but is run by a "Supreme Leader" that is a cleric and an "Assembly of Experts" also clerics. You have Saudi Arabia, a long standing monarchy where they don't use lawyers but clerics in court and so on. The actual implementation of Islam is stuck back in the crusades and no amount of explaining away can change that. I don't care if that's not what it is "supposed" to be, that's what it is. I'm not going to say that Christian behavior in the actual crusades was ok because it was "Actually Christian". Sorry, it was what the vast majority of the follower of that faith did at the time. Doesn't matter if the book said they shouldn't, they did and justified it with their faith.
This is the same kind of crap from the people who cry that every single communist state "Isn't a real communism," and therefore communism is still a fine idea. Well strictly speaking that may be the case but practically speaking when communism is implemented, you get the USSR or Vietnam or Cuba and so on.
It's all the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Oh those guys aren't TRUE Muslims. Yes, they are. They identify as Muslim, they follow the basics, they are Muslim. They may not be what you think a Muslim should be, but they still are.
Easy solution: store entrails of the last king/priest (whichever comes first) in liquid nitrogen and thaw them before use.
From a practical point of view, it's a terrible idea. The justice system is not able to correctly mete out these punishments. People who commit these crimes go free. People who are innocent are convicted of them. Also, the threat of a death penalty causes mismatch in threatened penalties compared with the evidence against them, so they plead guilty to a lesser charge rather than lose their life for a crime they did not commit. The police lie under oath and fake evidence, with the truth coming out years or decades later. Witnesses are horribly unreliable, and they can be pressured to perjure themselves.
Add up the expenses and hoops involved in death penalty cases and it's a cheaper proposition to put someone in prison for the rest of their lives.
So, yes, I agree with you that they _ought_ to die, but don't think that we should be doing it.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
If you kill someone...you have no place in a civilized society.
So, executioners and military have no place in civilized society. I can agree with that.
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So just because some of our remote ancestors behaved like giant douchebags it's okay to let people repeat it, especially if it's in the name of religion.
What happened to learning from history to avoid repeating its mistake? Or did i miss some clause detailing exceptions to this?
That is precisely why it is okay. Consider science: repeatable results makes for good theories. These so-called "mistakes" have resulted in repeated success of the victors. It's probably more important to understand who benefits rather than looking at the methods.
There are a lot of groups out there who have done just fine with war, conquest and oppression as their means. Although certainly the dead and oppressed people out there didn't like it, we need to understand that this stuff happens because it makes your state/sect/corporation more successful. If history is really a teacher, we may realize that wars, oppression and things like that are only mistakes if you don't like war and oppression. If your major concerns are more power, spreading your ideology/religion, getting rich and having a higher standard of living for yourself, then it would be a "mistake" to make peace and to cease being militarily powerful and allowing more people to have a say in things.
For you to have any hope of ending these negative aspect for good, you need to change cultures and thought processes to put emphasis on different things. And that isn't going to happen by attacking the symptoms, as nice as it sounds to attack military spending, oil companies and intolerant religions. If you want to stop those abuses for good, you need the people to start thinking in a different way about their existence and goals as a species.
What??? How was this modded informative?
You must be new around here. Anti-Christian posts are always modded up Informative or Insightful. The more outlandishly silly, the more so. They are the slashdot equivalent of trash-talk on the basketball court. And don't imagine that most modders take the moderation rules seriously. Modding is an expression of solidarity with the trash-talkers.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The books as a whole are mythology. Even the Greek myths incorporated bits of historical elements into the narratives. The fact that there may be kernels of historical truth don't make the whole anything other than myth. A bad, morally disturbing myth.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.