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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.)"
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.)"
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
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.,..
Ban Porn, but it's OK to beat your wife!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
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?
"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!"
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
But the people watching internet porn aren't having any sex at all.
May the Maths Be with you!
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?
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!
The Muslim Brotherhood won't be able to completely eliminate it, but they'll succeed to a greater extent than you think. The Taliban had things pretty well nailed down in Afghanistan, after all. It stinks for the minorities of Egypt... the Coptic Christian Church might well be extinct in Egpyt in our lifetime the way things are going over there... but ultimately, their fate is their own, made by their own choice. If Egyptians pick rulers that are going to do things like ban Internet access, let them live by their own choices.
Egyptians clearly wanted Islamism. They clearly wanted Sharia law. Let them have it. Maybe naive Americans that kept hyping the "Arab Spring" will finally realize that it was nothing of the sort, it was an Islamist Spring. What's going on in North Africa is Iran in 1979 all over again. "Freedom" for these people means "No one can stop us from becoming an Islamist state now". This is why I have little sympathy for the Iranians. They're protesting now, but you have to ask "What did you think you were getting when you demanded rule by Ayatollah?"
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Masturbation: It's sex with someone you love!
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."
Shouldn't that be insightful? Especially with the muslim brotherhood now running for the top office, and believed to have 43% of the vote in the bag already.
The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Christian conservatives in the west isn't really that big, both are pretty conservative, very religions and willing to crack down on any wrong thinking liberals that they see as being a threat to their cherished beliefs, values and traditions. You can think of the Muslim Brotherhood as being Egyptian Republicans or Tea-Partyists. That being said I'd quite frankly be more worried if Rick Santorum or god forbid, Sarah Palin, became president of the US than I would be if the Muslim Brotherhood won an election with 43% of the vote and formed a coalition government in Egypt with some center right party. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood does not have thermonuclear weapons.
I think your viewpoint is a bit narrow. The "Arab Spring" was indeed about freedom from tyrannies, not about religious revolutions. But opportunistic religious groups have used the power vacuums to insert themselves.
Sorry, I think this is naivete. I think a relatively small group of people wanted what in the west is considered freedom, and that the majority did want religious rule. One of these days we'll learn that "freedom" doesn't mean the same thing to different people.
There's no doubt that many Egyptians are conservative, but there is more of a split between the conservative (and less educated) rural areas and the cities like Cairo that generally have more progressive populaces.
That may be so, but.... so what? The former still outnumber the later considerably. And as for the "less educated" thing, that's a falsehood. The most radical, and most committed Islamists in both Arab nations and the West tend to be the best educated. It's the least educated types that tend to be the most moderate, the guys that just want to earn a living. The 9/11 hijackers were all well educated, and the London bombers were British citizens, the children of immigrants that grew up in Britain and had all the advantages of a liberal Western education. They choose Jihad, not had it imposed on them. The old "if we just get more of them in school, they'll be less radical" is an old saw that simply isn't true.
On top of that, you have the two religious Islamist groups, the fairly moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and the Sharia Law-loving Salafists, who are in discussions behind-the-scenes as to how radical to go.
Do you really think the Muslim Brotherhood is "moderate"? Seriously? By what standard?
I find it ridiculous when Americans act superior about Islamist states though;
I think you misunderstand me here. I'm not acting superior. If Islamism is what they want, then I really mean that they should have it. I'm not condemning them for it. I'm saying we should stop expecting that they're going to be a western democracy when they clearly aren't.
look at all the religion-motivated laws being passed in America lately that are taking women's rights back to the Mad Men days.
Religion-motivated laws, as you put it, are and always have been, part and parcel of American law. It's not like this is anything new. Religious influence in a law is not necessarily the same thing as a law being a religious law.
We're just as much in the hands of a conservative Christian cabal as Egypt is with Islam
Really? We can ban religions other than Christianity? We can jail people for apostasy? I bet that's news to the Christian Cabal that just watched the ban on homosexuals serving in the military to get lifted. Having a religious people, and certain laws influenced by religious tradition, is not the same thing as a theocratic state.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You seriously want to make that argument? Mass murders? Slavery?
How many are dead in Iraq? I think that little mass murder escapade outnumbers all other terrorist actions combined. And don't try to claim that wasn't a war started by right-wing xians, all you have to do is listen to some of the rhetoric from the man responsible, G. W. Bush.
Oh, you want state judicial murders? Yeah, we've got those too. Over 1200 of them just since 1977.
Pure terrorism? McVeigh wasn't exactly muslim, was he? How about Eric Rudolph? No?
Go back a few hundred years - witch burnings. Go back a bit farther - crusades. islam is about 700 years younger than xianity, which makes a difference in scale of fanaticism, religions calm down somewhat as they age.
And we're not exactly short on slavery either. The US imprisons more of its population than any other country, and most of those people are forced into virtually unpaid work for someone else's profit. Things which hurt no one can lead to a very long prison term, which becomes enslavement.
islam and christianity are both evil, and very much alike. In many ways, they're just different branches of the same religion, both claiming to have the truth while being very, very wrong. The xian bible is full of exactly the same kind of instructions from "god" to kill, maim, and enslave that are in the koran. They're just fortunately ignored by more of its followers.