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Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
pigrabbitbear writes "The recent web pornography ban in Egypt has raised questions about the evils of censorship (and porn) and the changing tide of popular attitude of Egyptians. It perhaps reflects the emerging influence of more conservative Muslim elements in government, a shift. Apparently the same ban was passed 3 years ago but was not enforced because their filtering system was not effective. But porn bans are nothing new. Other countries with strict censorship laws like China and Saudi Arabia have successfully implemented bans that restrict pornography along with anything else they deem inappropriate for public viewing. In 2010 the UK discussed a ban that would require users to specifically request access to pornographic material from their internet service providers. And porn-banning rhetoric has even stomped through the U.S. news media over the last few months, thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws. (There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
.. OMG, the evils of having sex for recreation, entertainment!
Jonathanjk.com
After a year of bitching about it, Egypt realises they can still get it without too much hard work, and are getting a bunch more done these days. Plus, real naked people rock!
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Think of the consenting adults!
Violence plastered all over the media is okay, but God forbid little Hazem sees a tit.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages.
You might argue that the government shouldn't censor pornography. But there's a big leap from that libertarian viewpoint, to implying that porn is generally harmless. Which is the underlying sentiment I took away from the line, "(There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
All of it. People are just more commonly into certain things than others.
Not to do with the Egypt ban but the summary states that Santorum has as a policy pledge to Ban pornography. The proper context is that he was the Santorum: "Believes that federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforce" Refering of course to current laws already in the books. This is not a ban: http://www.snopes.com/politics/santorum/taliban.asp
"thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws."
But it's harmful to marriages, sinful to all and not what God wants for you. This isn't about civil liberties - if you must, go watch, I'm not looking to stop you, but I do want you to know that Jesus loves you and has better things in mind for you.
Honestly, if I wanted to do stuff like this, I wouldn't ban porn. I would just ban the anti-government stuff. So similar to China and such, but without blocking porn. Or gambling. Or other sites holding vices that society might not approve.
Keep the general public amused with crap like that and they won't bother looking up anti-government information because they'd be too busy with Facebook and YouTube to care.
Make it appear free and people won't test the boundaries. Sure make it illegal, but just turn a blind eye and you'll find the vast majority of the population won't be trying to bypass the filter because there isn't one. All the dissidents now stick out like a sore thumb to be dealt with.
At least, if I ran my own kingdom.,..
that link isn't working. Either it's a wrong link or I just discovered that mu pipe is censored somehow.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Egypt's population spikes to unprecedented levels
Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
Well, let's put it this way.
They can run the entire country on a few dial-up accounts now. Broadband no longer required.
I was told by the media that they overthrew their opressive government and were setting up a free democracy... How did we not see this coming? I'm shocked!
That's too bad that censorship of any portion of the internet is successful. We're supposed to able to work around it, to make censorship impossible. Why isn't that happening? The internet is supposed to help us stamp out all authority over information, and we have failed to make that happen. Where's the P2P that the internet is supposed to be?
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages
Porn showed me how to eat out my my wife.
How to masturbate her.
And that she has sexual feelings.
Catholic Sunday school taught me that she is evil.
I'm still married after dozens of years.
Porn showed me that my wife can be exiting after she gets old and fat.
Fuck you.
Much like hookers, you can outlaw porn all you want but it tends to happen anyway. Too much demand for both.
Right now, some illiterate goat farmer who's practices a medieval, backwards religion is looking at the remains of a nearby ancient Egyptian city and wondering what it must have felt like to be one of the world's most advanced civilizations and what went wrong.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
They don't look at regular porn, which is what is only banned.... but animal sex is just fine.
"Mr. President. The world's faced with rising oil costs and falling windpower costs, people in Africa are starving, 1/6 of our country has no access to health care and half don't have adequate access to it, our kids aren't keeping up with the rest of the world in math and science education, businesses are going Big Brother on their employees' facebook profiles, and our Defense Department is spending $700 billion a year with nothing to show for it"
"QUICK! BAN ALL THE PORN!"
Sweden was very successful in reducing the amount of prostitution by implementing a new strategy. They stopped arresting prostitutes, and started aggressively arresting their customers instead. Those found guilty of purchasing sex had their names published. I do not think such a strategy would work very well on consumers of porn.
Post-Internet, bestiality vanishes from 10% to almost nothing.
Not that hard to understand - if you live in a small town and are not the handsome jock, you don't have much options for masturbation. The married shmucks outlaw porn, and if you are a teenager/poor you can't get around their laws. The animals start to look not bad.
But give them access to internet and suddenly they no longer want to screw animals.
THE INTERNET IS A HUGE FORCE FOR MORALITY.
The only thing is, moralistic shmucks never knew the disgusting things their neighbors liked before. Know they have become aware of what we do, and blame it on the internet.
No.
Mankind was always a bunch of horny perverts, it's just you were a blind fool before. The internet makes us better people, in part by showing moralistic fools that they are wrong about what most people do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So far not very succesfully:
% lynx http://google.com/
Google
Egyptian porn_____________________
[Google Search] [I'm Feeling Lucky] [Advanced search]
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 10,200,000 for Egyptian porn.
(0.53 seconds)
I once did a Google image search on the most common 1000 words in English and noted the index of the first porn image in that list.
I was interested to see if there was a way to measure how far any word would have to be taken to indicate porn. For example, I would expect "car" to be distant from porn, but "head" to be fairly close.
To my surprise, using Google images as a metric indicated that all common English words were within 15 images of porn.
This was before they switched to the Javascript image results page, and they may have cleaned up their act a bit, but the results were inescapable - much of the net is centered around porn.
Trekkie had it pegged about right.
If porn harms your marriage? Install local filters are your computer.
It's not the government's job to babysit your marriage.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Wow. That sounds as pointless and counterproductive as the war on drugs. What are these people thinking? They could be going after actual criminals. Rhetorical question.
Maybe you have different sources, but as far as I know all that is known is that as a result of the law street prostitution went down. There are no concrete numbers on internet-based prostitution and the conclusions of the recent investigation in how well the law works were known even before the author sat down to write it.
Still pretty awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I thought that Obama was the secret Muslim, with a Muslim agenda.
But - Muslims are banning porn.
Santorum wants to ban porn.
*gasp* Santorum is a secret Muslim!
Check your premises.
It sure is great we are liberating all of these MENA countries, spreading democracy, so they can democratically elect leaders to violate their rights.
I wonder if that's like here in Norway, they outlawed buying prostitutes here as well. It got rid of the real problem many people wanted to get rid of, street hookers bothering a lot of people and standing around in slutty outfits making the streets look trashy, people having sex in public parks nearby after dark and all sorts of public nuisance. The market simply moved out of the public eye into apartments and getting contact over the Internet. You can still find them very easy, in fact some say the market is back to where it was or even bigger. But out of sight, out of mind.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Search engines and social media sites basically do the same thing, except they call it a "filter" instead of a "ban".
I think the fundamental rights issue is:
Who is allowed to determine what filters apply to someone, and under what circumstances?
Arguably, the right to self-determine one's filters should be considered a fundamental human right, and probably a constitutional right (if one happens to be a citizen of the United States). This right should proscribe both the government and the people in some cases; the government is not allowed to filter consensual porn for adults, fundamentalist parents aren't allowed to filter medical information from their children, etc.
If you can see the internet but can't see porn, you are a statistical anomaly;
Proposed: "a successful ban on internet porn is within the noise threshhold of backhoe fade."
I call it Arab autumn.
no, I don't have a sig
PSA stands for...?
Private Cowboy: Tough break for Hand Job. He was all set to get shipped out on a medical.
Private Joker: What was the matter with him?
Private Cowboy: He was jerkin' off ten times a day.
Private Eightball: No shit. At least ten times a day.
Private Cowboy: Last week he was sent down to Da Nang to see the Navy head shrinker, and the crazy fucker starts jerking off in the waiting room. Instant Section Eight. He was just waiting for his papers to clear division.
Well, 10% at most of traffic anyway.
Source: Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report, Fall 2011.
I'm just going to use the North America numbers here. "Real-time Entertainment" made up 53.6% of traffic, of which 32.7 percentage points was Netflix. Take off the other 11.3 points that is YouTube, and there's only 9.6 pecentage points left for other video.
It's a feminist state: women are equal, so men must distribute their wealth equally to them.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "natural things". However, there was an amendment passed to ban alcohol, so that alone makes Prohibition perfectly Constitutional, and the reason a second Amendment was required to overturn it.
I'm thinking we need a new Amendment that states that no Amendment can contradict or repeal an older Amendment, or contradict anything else in the Constitution, no matter what.
that if a constitutional amendment such as this was passed, you'd repeal the repeals of Prohibition, Women's suffrage, slavery, direct election of senators, and basically every constitutional amendment back to the original Bill of Rights, thus automatically turning everyone who isn't white into a slave, women into second-class citizens, AND prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol? We'd be ruled by sober, white land-owning twits!
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Ted Bundy said "If you want to get rid of serial killers get rid of porn..." Porn is a little like alcohol, most folks can drink without getting stupid, but there are a few folks who can't even have that first one, or it will ruin their lives and the lives of innocent bystanders. There is a fair argument that porn in moderation for those who have rich social lives and healthy fulfilling relationships is not a problem. There are a tiny few, maybe one in 10,000 who are born with serious problems regarding violence, rage, and ability to empathize, in short sociopathic tendencies. Show these folks porn and you've just loaded a gun and cocked the trigger. The sex drive is POWERFUL and hardwired to our pleasure centers. That's why its arguable that virtually every breakthrough in computer graphics has been developed and paid for first by porn aficionados then gamers.
That said, porn has some pretty profound down sides. Its most likely that it makes the antisocial even more so (porn doesn't exactly teach folks constructive social skills.) It reinforces a lot of pretty negative behavior, and raises expectations in relationships to unrealistic levels. It objectifies its sexual targets, and leads to human trafficking, child abuse and a whole raft of crimes both singular and organized. In short, when you live in a society that doesn't have a very healthy relationship to sex in the first place (Puritans were messed up beyond all description) all that repression bubbles up in sick and twisted expressions and porn can become a the unintended spark in a room for of gasoline.
Perhaps there should be a new sexual revolution. One that shifts our society's relationship to sex as a natural, appropriate and normal part of human development and let our children know that their fascination with each others body is not only acceptable but an essential part of becoming an adult. Contrary to Rick Santorum and his profoundly messed up view surrounding sex, but separate sex from love and teach both. Remove the "dirty" from the picture and create "Graphical Sexual Art" which teaches men and women how to celebrate their own bodies and cherish the bodies of those with whom the congress. Teach our children that sex has a time and place, and that it should be a "small" but important part of all our lives. At the same time teach them the importance of responsibility, communication, honesty, and fidelity... not to please some mysterious deity, but to lead a happy, healthy and wholesome life.
Porn is just an outward manifestation of a society that hasn't dealt with its emotional or cultural baggage. Just like the rest of our failing infrastructure, its time for ADULTS to make important choices about the future and ask those without the wit or wisdom to make a difference to please stop making this process even more difficult than it already is.
In 48 BC the library was burned due to a war, the Siege of Alexandria. Later, when the Romans controlled Egypt, they destroyed the Serapeum for religious reasons (was a Christian Emperor). This was in 391 AD. The Muslims seized control of the library in 642 AD and again, brunination went on.
Ok so a few destruction periods, one by pagan Romans (and not for religious reasons, just as a part of a war), one by Christian Romans, and one by Muslims.
Fine but then we have, oh, 1370 years during which it could have been rebuilt. Even if you want to say nothing could have happened until after all the crusades, those ended about 1400 AD (the Alexandrian Crusade, which would be the most reliant here, was 1365 AD). So again a good 600+ years to rebuild.
Muslims cannot lay any of their anti-education stances on the feet of Christians. Dr. Tyson has an excellent talk on the topic, The God of the Gaps, which generally talks about religion and science, but one of the topics is the Muslim fall to theocracy, and the failure to ever recover from it.
It is not a case of "Oh the Christians burned a library, we can never be educated again."
heh, sorry, and that *was* a funny retort.
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If you want to be a strict, "only the precise wording," kind of person for rights you may well find that you lose rights you wanted. For free speech to truly be free, it has to protect the really unpopular stuff. Trying to protect just the things people agree with is no problem, you have to protect the things they don't. Also trying to narrowly construe the wording is silly. If it means only speech, then the government is free to censor you, arrest you, etc for posts on the Internet. That's not speech, speech is "the vocalized form of human communication." So if only speech is protected then writing can be cracked down on.
It really does get real stupid real fast, and makes the Constitution unworkable. It survives because it is a framework, not a set of rigid commandments.
Also, you might note there's another one that the strict interpretation people seem to forget about "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." As in "Just because we don't spell it out in detail here, doesn't mean it still isn't a right."
Soooo... problem solved, right?
The Hindus didn't write the Kama Sutra just for the fun of it
Not that I'm disagreeing with any of the rest of your post, but...are you sure about that?
Similar to drug dealers in new your.
New York had the problem of drug dealers fighting over a corner, and shooting each other, bystanders and making NY look like a horrible place to go.
SO they cracked down on street dealers. The did not have a zero tolerance against drugs, just selling on the street.
All the dealers started dealing from their homes. Which stopped the shooting, cleaned up the street. Drug use remains about the same.
I wonder why they just didn't make prostitution illegal outside a brothel and regulate the brothels?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, obviously sex is fun; I guess I could have worded that a little better. My point is they recorded this stuff in a book for posterity precisely because the information is not totally obvious. Unlike the AC above who obviously believes there's nothing more to sex than the missionary position, the writers of the KS wanted to illustrate all the different positions they could think of, many of which must have taken some real imagination.
Some interesting stats behind one of the larger sites.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites
Banning porn/hookers is basically pandering to women. Much of Woman's social influence and power derives from the sexual hold She has on Man. Pornography and hookers directly threaten that hold.
This is not very different from the govt trying to get the ACTA through to satisfy the movie industry.
Egypt Banned Internet
WHAT? There is PORN on the INTERNETS?
I demand PROOF!!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
That is exactly what happened here in Sweden. And the social workers who works with prostitutes are worried since they now no longer have contact with the prostitutes since they are hidden, there is great fears that this also means that they are worse threated by their pimps since the whole operation has gone way more underground.
The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Christian conservatives in the west isn't really that big,
Sure it isn't where does anyone get that ...
idea.
I'm sure you have a good response to this. I'm sure it will explain how slightly inconveniencing you is much worse than mass murder. How every religion is really the same, whether it started by the self-sacrifice of someone who wouldn't raise a sword against his own executioner or it started with a paedophilic thief, warmonger and slave. Whether it built the best, freeest and by far the most moral, most scientific, least poverty-stricken and most advanced society in the world or whether it's the religion that built the islamic hellholes where there's currently a wave of women choosing death over their islamic "freedom" ("strangely" this does not make headlines in western papers), the one country that still openly practices slavery, and >95% of wars and massacres worldwide for the last century.
I don't really even want to hear it. Shut the fuck up.
First, I would like to say to anyone who looks for moral judgement in the following story is deluded. I would just like to call attention to the bigger picture and the bigger political situation that surrounded the Iranian revolution. No 2 situations are alike, but the Iranian and Egyptian "revolutions" are close than you give them credit for.
The Iranian revolution was very similar, just a slightly different promise made by "progressive" Iranians. They main promise was a better justice system, a less corrupt government, a more progressive form of government, tolerant of all, preferring no-one (muslim theocrats massacrers promising and demanding tolerance and fairness, sound strange ? It shouldn't). The one thing that united revolutionaries in 1972 in Iran was outing the shah.
The mullahs simply convinced the international community and most of the rest of the revolutionaries they wanted to introduce "a moderate form of" communism (anyone with half a brain knows the history between islam and communism and would never have fallen for this but that didn't include the communists. And as we've seen these guys do not know anything about moderation at all). Without the support this garnered, the revolution would never have succeeded. They were a minority in the revolution, after the fall of the shah, but they would attack anyone who even slightly opposed them like rabid dogs. They would kill off entire demonstrations for less than good reasons. Needless to say, when confronted with actual street violence, as opposed to an organised corrupt justice system (which still gave everyone they possibly could a hearing - just not a fair one). It turned out all those chic revolutionary socialists didn't think revolution would actually involve pain, or God forbid ... death, and they gave in.
Why do you think the mullahs, including the lovely ahmadinnerjacket, attacked the American embassy ? If anything at that time they were thankful for America driving back the communists. They attacked the American embassy because they wanted to convince Russia and socialists worldwide they were pushing communism so they'd keep getting bankrolled. They couldn't get direct American support so they turned around and attacked like rabid dogs resulting in the famous hostage crisis that carter so expertly handled. Most of all, they wanted to impress Moscow sufficiently to prevent those armies that just happened to gather at Iran's border just before the revolution from advancing. And they succeeded. Strategically they had enormous luck, the luck that Russia was threatening and that the Shah's government fell for it, while they attacked without any regard as to what would happen to Iranians. They just wanted to attack like lunatic rabid dogs and as it turned out the Russian threats was a bluf. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the mullahs somehow knew this. They knew perfectly well that if Russia was to attack they'd likely have massacred large numbers of Iranians, they just didn't care. The socialists were more moral in that they at least knew that if they won, no attack would be forthcoming.
Since then, for 40 years the people who fought for coummunism have been completely abanded by their "comrades" to this by their socialist friends in Russia, Europe and America alike. Likewise, everyone else abandoned them, at best providing for a few refugees. And let's not pretend that Iraq was attempting to help matters, it was not. Those who could, fled (since the first thing the mullahs did was massacre anyone they feared might topple a government, guess who was at the top of their minds ?).
(And yes, Europeans actually preferred theocracy to communism so they helped the mullahs by providing ways for them to unite, but imho this was not the deciding factor)
At least today there aren't 2 sides for them to play against the middle. We should keep in mind that this is their attempt to establish a first base of operations. Compa
Egypt is not a country anymore, who cares ?
These sort of questions are exactly what religions answer. Let's provide a few answers :
1) killing
Chrisitianity : killing is wrong, no matter how or where or when or why. Killing MAY be the best of a number of bad options, like say a police sniper killing a criminal about to murder a child, but it is never okay. Every death becomes a case, and the killer is to ask forgiveness for any death.
Islam : first the law is discriminatory. Non muslim women can be killed freely, with only one exception : if she's a slave or a wife, you need permission from her "owner" (sometimes called "guardian" in the case of a wife or daughter, and yes, parents can kill their children with impunity until they marry), or you'll have to pay to reimburse him. Non muslim men or muslim women can be killed if they're not "people from the book", which can only be killed if they're at war with muslims. Violating these rules results in a fine, nothing more. A muslim man can be killed for 3 reasons : 1) he's an apostate, left islam or insulted the prophet and does not repent immediately (you can insult allah all you want), 2) he disobeys the state (as determined by the caliph or his representative) 3) he killed another muslim man and cannot convince the family to accept blood money
For both faiths euthanasia is wrong (in islam, excepting slaves who cannot work anymore, a practice still in use). Revenge killing is a big no-no in Christianity and a duty in islam.
2) Sex "in general" :
Christianity : there can be no sex, except within the confines of marriage, and even then with agreement from both the man and the woman. Any sex outside of this is forbidden (like gay sex) and carries penalties, the worst of which is banishment.
islam : sex does not require consent of the woman in any scenario, although in a marriage between a muslim man and a muslim woman consent is considered desirable. For a man (muslim or not) sex (rape) with a slave woman is ok. Renting out slave women, even if they're kidnapped into slavery, is perfectly ok. In the case of Shi'a islam, there is a big exception to the consent of women thing : a free woman who's alone, or has been married with the consent of her father once, is free to remarry or not. When remarrying she can put a time limit on the marriage. So effectively in Shi'a islam a muslim woman that's divorced cannot (legally) be forced to have sex.
What about paedophilia:
Christianity: is partially allowed, in that sex between legally married minors is legal (if they don't differ too much in age, and get permission from the church, and their parents. When they become adults, they don't need permission from their parents anymore)
Islam: doesn't mention it. Sunni islam generally considers any legal sex (slave or marriage) legal at age 6. Shi'a islam doesn't place any age limit at all. Ayatollah Khomeini specifically states that you can rape babies in sharia, as long as the baby is female.
Companies : very simple
Christianity: don't exist. People are responsible for what they do, both financially and (what we'd call) criminally. There is no transfer of responsibility just because you were ordered to do something. The church is the only company.
Islam : don't exist. People are personally responsible for what they do, both financially and criminally (e.g. a pilot is responsible for the plane, even in the case of an accident. Insurance is illegal : it's a form of intrest). And so on and so forth. With the exception of the caliph who can do whatever he wants without consequences in the name of the prophet (I mean the state is a sort of company).
Democracy:
Christianity: the ideal form of state is a kingdom, although the king certainly should take the wishes of his subjects to heart, and does not have special rights as a result of this position (a king is not free to kill, and has to respect the exact same law as any of his subjects. Needless to say, this has been found less than practical). Christianity came at the time when it just became clear the Roman democracy com