Slashdot Mirror
Iran Shuts Down US Virtual Embassy
bonch writes "Less than 12 hours after the U.S. launched a virtual embassy for Iran, the Iranian government blocked access to the website, directing visitors to a government page proclaiming the site illegal. The White House condemned the move, calling Iran's internet policies 'an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.'"
Hehehe, typo filled ranting aside, I agree completely. It seems beyond the average US citizen's mental grasp that there are people who would like to live peacefully whilst still being diametrically opposed to everything that the US stands for.
Rather ironic considering that the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to censor its _own_ people on the Internet.
Oh give it a rest you anonymous coward. I'm not American and I don't live in the USA, but if you hate the place so much go live in a *real* police state. Then you'll know what censorship really is. I guarantee you if Iran were to host an "eEmbassy" not only would the US government not block it, they'd have no means to do so other than the courts, and the courts would tell the government to piss off.
The White House condemned the move, calling Iran's internet policies 'an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.
Really? REALLY? F*UCK YOU U.S. You are EVERYTHING that is wrong with the world. Go f*cking away and stop crying about people why just want to live their lifes peacefully. You worthless pieces of shit who attack other countries and everyone who doesn't like your limited religious views. You are the scumbag of earth. Go eat your shit. You want to know why we dont like you? BECAUSE YOU TRY TO TELL US WHAT TO DO TO, YOU STUPID SCUMBAGS.
Well, where to begin here?
1 - The US is "everything that's wrong with the world". Really? If the US dissapeared tomorrow, just what do you think would happen to the world? Honestly. Do you think the world would suddenly live in peace and harmony? Hint: The US has only been around under 300 years. Have a look at world history before that time. Let me know how great things were.
2 - "Go f*cking away and stop crying about people why just want to live their lifes peacefully." Right, the Islamic Republic of Iran just wants to live their lives peacefully. And they do nothing bad.... like, sponsor Hezbollah or ship weapons or participate in kidnappings. Nope, if the US went away, everything would be right as rain in Iran. Right?
3 - "You want to know why we dont like you?" Who is "we"? The entire rest of the planet? Your country? Your neighborhood? Some guy ranting on Slashdot?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
but if you hate the place so much go live in a *real* police state.
"If it could be worse, then the current situation is objectively good..."
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
What does any of that have to do with the Iranian government censoring a website? You actually believe that such an act of information control is in the best interests of the citizens of Iran?
No wonder you posted anonymously.
2 - "Go f*cking away and stop crying about people why just want to live their lifes peacefully." Right, the Islamic Republic of Iran just wants to live their lives peacefully. And they do nothing bad.... like, sponsor Hezbollah or ship weapons or participate in kidnappings.
Strange. Just replace "Islamic Republic of Iran" with "USA" and the sarcastic statement would still be applicable
So, uh...what does any of that insane ranting have to do with the Iranian government censoring websites?
So that's the newest "Blame Obama" thing? The president had nothing to do with it. Both versions (SOPA and PROTECTIP) were introduced by Republicans. Though both have co-sponsors from both parties. Pelosi and Biden have both said that the bills are a bad idea.
I guess everything that goes through Congress that conservatives don't like must have been pushed by Obama. Even though it's a Republican bill to begin with.
So it seems the angle for the comments to this story will be about trying to act super-enlightened by "turning the tables" and criticizing America. This is a very popular route to take on web forums, because the inherent contrarianism of bashing the country you live in is supposed to mean you are smarter than the lesser citizens around you. Since Slashdot is full of really smart people who know everything about the world--especially politics--I look forward to the insightful discussions to come (much of it posted anonymously by some strange coincidence).
it is not the place of the US to incite rebellion in Iran
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people." ... Kind of like what the government is doing here in the States? The Patriot Act just kicked it into overdrive. Bill of Rights? Think you have those natural rights? Your government has taken them away and will do terrible things to you if you exercise those rights.
How's that been working for you lately? Before answering, you should probably consult your Homeland Security Potential Terrorist Interaction Manual for the proper response, Citizen. Remember, the threats are amongst us.
...Steve
No, the poster is reacting to the idiocy of the post. In a world with Putin grabbing power in Russia, North Korea investing in nukes while its people starve, Iran's theocracy feverishly working on bombs, Syria slaughtering its citizens, etc, calling the US "everything that's wrong with the world" is so moronic that it evokes outrage.
Yeah, given that the situation in the USA is that I have free speech, freedom of movement, freedom to vote for whoever I want, freedom to cruise the Internet, freedom to read foreign press, freedom to observe my government at work, yes
I don't care for the whole pedophile and terrorist hysteria. The TSA, the Patriot act, the (in my opinion) ridiculous copyright laws, etc. I'd say many of our freedoms are under constant assault.
As for free speech, just look to free speech zones (and, although generally not regarded as a bad thing, certain speech such as slander is punishable).
objectively good
That was supposed to be sarcastic. I don't see how something could possibly be "objectively" good.
Or to put it another way, point me to a spot on this planet where the situation is significantly better.
Well, since "better" is subjective, I could point you to practically any country on the planet.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Like it wasn't obvious even to some silly AC.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Exactly. Because in the United States, if a jerk like you or me posts a critical comment on a site like Slashdot, the government will block the site entirely, and might even arrest and imprison us and our families! Truly we are, like, totally oppressed.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Basically, forever.
Or do you really think we block al-Jazeera? Or any other Iranian site? Just checked, by the by, and the Iranian government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website is available online from where I'm sitting (though I don't read Persian, much less speak it, so I have to depend on Google Translate).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The funny thing about all of this is that Iran is just a place name to most people in the U.S. and about as real as Neverland or Hy-Brasil. They have a concept of Iran, but that's about it. If you're Iranian, you don't exist, in their heads, and so what happens to you *doesn't matter*.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Yeah except you're incapable of wrapping your head around the idea that we DON'T think that was a good idea! It's like arguing with a religious zealot.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
No, just like the guy who can't grasp that the idea was bad, you've STILL got this idea that they have a right to an opinion on Iran because they live in the US.
And somebody, I *think* it was one of those naughty middle east countries, I can't quite remember which, has to pay for those twin towers! Right?
Over, and over, and over, and over again...
And now it's to the point where they think they can blatantly push their propaganda and nobody will call them on it. They just stand and crank the war-machine in plain view and we are supposed to go "hmm yeah, democracy and shit, we're awesome"?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
calling the US "everything that's wrong with the world" is so moronic that it evokes outrage.
During WWII, we invested an awful lot of money to develop our own nukes; Money that no doubt could have been used to put food on people's tables. We still work "feverishly" on bombs, except now we've gone from trying to create the biggest bombs to the most precise ones, and we're arming our police departments with drones capable of launching missiles that can fire through your window while you're eating dinner, kill you, and leave everyone else at the table undisturbed. As a bonus, we've oblitherated the right to a trial, to face your accuser, and to have the facts presented against you, as well as to have it all made public. Our police and military can now do pretty much whatever they want, and if you so much as make a peep of protest, we'll send 1400 officers armed with tanks, assault rifles, and full military battle gear... to deal with 50 peaceful protesters, on public property, demonstrating because they are homeless. We're slaughtering our citizens too, having the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Just because their acts of inhumanity are public and ours are private doesn't mean they're any less cruel. We rail on and on about China's Firewall and their tightly controlled media, while we're busy deleting domains off the internet on every server we can get our hands on that disagrees with our political agenda and paying homage to news sources like Fox News. Our news sources only come from a small handful of corporations, and everything seen on our television carefully created to give the appearance of controversy and openness, when in fact there is very little of either given the amounts of money involved.
No sir, it doesn't evoke outrage... the amount of crap our country gets away with is inspirational to the countries you mention; They hope to wield as much wealth and influence as we do, they're just less transparent about it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Gitmo. Corporate p0wnership of your election process. Countrywide/BofA and the bank and wall street bailouts. Not one bailout bankster in jail. The clamp-down on the OWS movement, which is a fundamental free-speech issue.
There's 5 to get you started. The shutdown of the "virtual embassy" is small potatoes in comparison. It was also a really, REALLY dumb idea to begin with. After all, it would be easy enough for the Iranian authorities to track who accesses it, make a list, check it twice, find out who's been naughty ... same as the US has been doing for a couple of decades with Echelon..
Um....the CIA and British operatives worked together to make the coup happen. The British government was extremely unhappy that Iran had nationalized their oil production (nullifying the contracts they had). The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) is a decent jumping off point on this one. A lot of what we see in the region is a legacy of British Imperialism and attempts by the CIA to control the political landscape. It's not very dissimilar to the CIA training and funding of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to change the politics of that region (French Indochina) as well. We saw how that turned out...
This is not to say that we can excuse all actions by a people, but we would do well, I think, to consider the legacy of Old World Imperialists and the Super Powers when viewing the geopolitical landscape. Further, it is perhaps as unwise to consider a people synonymously with the actions of their government as it is to consider our own way of doing things--whichever way that is--as being necessarily superior to any others. Patriotism is a laudable trait. Nationalism is a fetish that the world could do without.
The "Electronic Embassy" was "gamed" to begin with.
If you want goodwill on the path to normalizing, you don't do it by sidelining diplomatic channels and messaging unilaterally. That's hostility - not diplomacy.
If the US State Dept wanted full relations with Iran, they could open up shop tomorrow. But everyone there knows that Israel would cut off their lobby-enslaved testicles. The barriers to entry are US and Israeli.
The "Electronic Embassy" was created TO BE BLOCKED
Now, the "evil Iranian government" can be used to generate a thousand obfuscating talking points - and to frame Iran for "blocking dialogue" - when in fact, it is the US which has PERPETUALLY refused relations and negotiation.
This is a ruse. Iran is not some Western Asian version of North Korea, propagandized with some false lampoon of the US that dominates popular imagination.
As I indicated in the earlier story, there is little or nothing that Iranians need to know about the US, that they don't already know, either by watching satellite TV (which every Iranian has) or by calling their cousin in LA, which half of all Iranians have.
Iranians tend to be the most Amerophilic people you will encounter - but the US has been able to do extensive damage to that impression in the past few years. They seem to be on the path of eliminating all good graces.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Your rant might be a bit more meaningful if you weren't an AC. Every country does shit that looks bad depending on how you look at it. The EU loves to sit back and let the USA do all the dirty work and then bitch about it.
I won't say the U.S. is perfect, far from it. I wish we would pull all our troops and influence and aid out of the rest of the world and let them fend for themselves. But as soon as we did we would have dozens of Countries asking or begging for our support. So get the fuck off your high horse and quit insulting others from the safety of your anonymous hole.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Americans are clueless. Iran has plenty of reason to hate the USA and it is justified. It will take time and a lot of old people dying off (oddly, it may take the USA longer to grow out of it than the victims.)
BTW, I'm one of the few informed Americans and I have no ties to Iran but that shouldn't need to be said to somebody who knows the history of the situation.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Utopia |<---------- CONTINUUM ---------->| Dystopia
Idiot.
("Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." Well, yeah. I am yelling.)
And I don't blame Iran either. Iranian politics may range from backward through stupid to evil, but their jingoism is carefully stoked and fueled by the US, and this move is just the latest of that.
This wasn't diplomacy, and it wasn't an embassy, virtual or otherwise. An embassy's job is to interact and negotiate with the Iranian government on behalf of the US, not "inform" Iranian citizens of what the US government thinks about the Iranian government. Calling it an embassy is an insult.
Real diplomacy would require an actual conversation between US and Iranian leadership, with both sides coming to a table ready to make concessions and compromises. And setting up a real embassy would require sending a real ambassador to Iran. Doing either of these would require balls, both for the US and Iran. That'd be a courageous foreign policy. If the US were to propose this to Iran, it would likely be rejected (especially now), but making the offer at all would be radical progress.
Hear hear!
I looked at Wikipedia (as I agree the facts are important), and I'm wondering if there's a confluence of stories here.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Iqbal#Facts:
The Washington Post story I quoted said,
How close is Hicksville to Brooklyn? Here's what I found ( http://www.findlocalweather.com/forecast.php?forecast=pass&pass=distances&dpp=0&pands1x=Hicksville%2C+NY&pands2x=brooklyn%2C+ny&Find+distance=How+far+is+it%3F ):
It appears that Javed Iqbal is a rather common Pakistani name, so maybe the Wikipedia entry incorrectly conflates the two guys, only one being the satellite TV installer?
Fair enough, original post was incorrect, rotted in prison perhaps. However, original post was correct in the charges against some guy by that name. The guy hurling accusation of anti-American propaganda was wrong on that, and gave an example apparently of a different case.
Cheers
"Blue Dog" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition. Reality is in US politics you should ignore the political party, which is just a marketing and public relations creation and focus on the individuals involved. The US elections are won or lost to corporate puppets in the primaries, once the primaries are over, so in reality the US elections are over and you either have representatives of the people or corporate stooges. As for the US President, when it comes to laws, try to understand the difference between the executive and the legislative. What better laws then start paying attention during the primaries.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
From http://iran.usembassy.gov/
"In democracies, respecting rights isn't a choice leaders make day-by-day, it is the reason they govern."
"When a government hides its work from public view, hands out jobs and money to political cronies, administers unequal justice, looks away as corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen enrich themselves at the people's expense, that government is failing its citizens," stated U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the opening of the multi-country Open Government Partnership (OGP) Forum last week.
-- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
I would argue that the U.S. has already failed its citizens.
How about you don't lump us all together as imperialist, culture-bound yahoos?
I have lived in the US and I would never lump Americans together as imperialists. Actually, I wouldn't dream of lumping them together as *anything*. Not a clever thing to do with Americans.
OTOH, the US as a country - meaning the elected government - has imperialist policies and attitude, and has had them for a while now. It is up to US citizens to decide whether they care. In recent decades, the response has been underwhelming.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
I personally think the whole thing with Iran stinks and smells like a CIA plant. look at Libya one of the first things the "rebels' did was set up a central bank, what kind of fucking rag tag bunch of freedom fighters rush to set up a central fricking bank before the firing is even halfway over? Not to mention watch the video of MoMo getting killed and nearly all his captors are wearing Qatar military uniforms and hey, guess who has a large base in Qatar? That would be the US military. Now there are 20,000 plus Russian stinger knockoff that old MoMo had bought in the hands of who the fuck knows, all because old MoMo threatened to sell his oil for gold instead of supporting the petro-dollar. Not saying MoMo wasn't a douche, but the whole thing smells like astroturf by the CIA using the Arab Springs as cover.
Sadly the USA has been the puppet of AIPAC and Israel for many years now thanks to what I call the "Jesus won't come back! Come back Jesus come back!" brigade that wouldn't care if we had to slaughter every brown person in the middle east to make Israel happy as long as there is a Jew in Zion.
So i'm sure we'll get lots more "teh evil Iranians want to kill us ZOMFG!" propaganda in the coming months, just as we saw that to this day something like 40% of US citizens think we attacked Iraq because of 9/11. The Jews don't like the idea of anyone else in the region having the bomb even thought they have dozens if not hundreds of them, but frankly after Iraq any country in that area that didn't kiss the US bankster and military ass would be nuts NOT to want a bomb, as its the only way to keep the warmongers in the halls of power from running you down.
final prediction? Now that we are pulling out if Iraq so we have the troops it'll be a toss up as to whether we go after Iran or Syria, neither country should be feeling too safe right now. Sadly the MSM has gotten so damned good at propaganda the POTUS could come out and say Iran caused 9/11 and many of the people would buy it without a second thought.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That reasoning of "they're not really Democrats" opens the way for counterargument in the same vein -- "Bush wasn't fiscally conservative, thus he's not a real Republican, so the party can't be tarnished by his actions." I doubt anyone on /. would accept that line of reasoning for the Bush example, so why pursue it here?
Anyway, I thought it prudent to point out the complicity of both sides, especially in response to a parent post that was factually inaccurate.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll