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Iranian App Helps Users Avoid Morality Police (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Young people in Iran are using a new app called Gershad (a contraction of 'Gashte Ershad', or 'guidance patrol'), to avoid the 'morality police' by sharing the location of checkpoints with other users. At checkpoints strict Islamic dress and behavior codes are enforced, and their ad hoc nature can make them difficult to avoid. Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said of Gershad, "This is an innovative idea and I believe it will lead to many other creative apps which will address the gap between society and government in Iran."
What Iran really needs is a revolution to overthrow those theocratic motherfuckers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
With our wonderful influx of immigrants who don't wish to assimilate with our western culture, you can expect this here soon... just as Sharia law has already wormed it's way in Seattle and other liberal havens. And you can thank LIBERALS for this when it happens. The irony.
The head nutjobs are saying "This is an innovative idea and I believe it will lead to not only arrests for having the app on your phone, but by poisoning the data we can catch even more infidels".
yea, then they can be free like Iraq and Syria
I am sure that there are apps that use crowd sourcing to avoid police checkpoints already.
But just wait till the state,forces service providers to install a back door that can use this app to track down trouble makers, and hold them without trial for the good of the country. No country would do that right? Oh wait they do.
Weeeeeellllll... no, not really.
At least not yet. Let's wait where the next elections take us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wonder if it can be extended to avoid bad moderators? They are kin I think.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You're free to be a nut. I say go for it. I'll be amazed if you manage to avoid Sharia punishments. That question is, which one will you get first? Whipping? Amputation? Blinding? Stoning? I say go for it and let us know how it works out for you.
and their 'honeypot'
Kid, if you don't want people to vote for Sanders, just tell them why. This reverse-trolling bullshit isn't the clever subversion you (or the last 50,000 idiots like you who tried it) think it is.
more Michael Jackson. It's funny how the entire Arab Spring went bust after the public lost interest when M.J. died. Of course, it was obviously not much of a thing if all it took was one (albeit very famous) dead pop star to distract us all.
No, what Iran needs is for our Right Wing politicians to stop meddling in their politics. They were well on their way to modernizing until we decided they were just a little too 'commie' for our tastes and disposed their democratically elected gov't.
What Obama has done is nothing short of a Miracle. When a significant portion of the country was pushing for yet another pointless war so they could line their pockets and use fear to control America he calmed things down and averted a global crisis. Unless you're some kind of whack job then he's unquestionably the single greatest president alive today, and maybe in history. If you ever want to know how great a man is he look up his response to the question "Did you inhale?".
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Socialism is for the historically ignorant.
Spoken like someone who's never traveled beyond the county line.
Then pack your bags and get the fuck out. Love it out leave it, cocksucker!
Yeah, because this place will be so much better with Slashdot, Google, Facebook, Comcast, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, etc, running the government...
Fascism is for the historically ignorant.
TFTFY.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...would be setting up rapid ambushes on those checkpoints.
The Morality Police will give up quick on their bullshit if they start getting shot with no witnesses every time they set up a checkpoint.
Marg bar dictator - marg bar Khomenei.
It's like VPN's to go around the "great firewall" or satellite dishes, yes it's kind of illegal, but meehhh...
It's a nice to have add on if the government decide to arrest someone, and meanwhile it gives the reactionary class the feeling that "everything is ok", while letting the educated class breath just a tiny little bit and not completely freak out.
Tor: App that helps americans avoid morality police
Good people go to bed earlier.
Don't the Iranian powers that be have something to say about this? When people began writing apps to publicize checkpoints here in the U.S., our morality police threw a hissy fit.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
They're simply enforcing Iran's version of political correctness. As stalwart adherents of PC here in the west, we should welcome such diversity in the behavioral expectations forced on people for the sake of the insecure and easily offended.
You overlook the possibility that it isn't a troll. Scary, huh?
Next the poor Iranians will have to have an app to avoid the Thought Police.
I believe DUI and police locator apps were banned in the US by either authorities or app stores. Very useful app.
The US will take you. And put in the Gitmo. And bathe you upside down, with a rag over face and flood your face with cleansing water. You'll love it! Pay back is a mofo, they may say, but it's paradise. Really, go there and find out. Just don't stay at the Babylon Motel. They know about that place already.
The Shah was a monster and Khomeni was an unknown quantity with zero blood on his hands at the time so a lot of people were "fooled".
The revolution was almost bloodless. What happened next was not.
Ahmedinajad and the others have been figureheads and never allowed to decide anything important. That's why his rants about Israel were not much to worry about, sabre ratting for the sake of popular support with no way he could follow through. It should be taken no more seriously than if the Mayor of Springfield threatened to invade France.
You haven't had your balls squeezed by the TSA yet? They are a populist measure that is functionally equivalent.
An app where one can sell "morality free parking" information . Alternative names "Gaystack" because the moral police are so against heterosexual contact of any nature.
Is why encryption must be banned for anyone that isn't us!
Sincerely,
FBI
Islam is not the traditional religion of Persia. The ancestors of the modern Iranians were converted to the "religion of peace" at sword point. Now they live under the rule of a merry band of cultists who desperately want to bring about the end of the world, and who Obama has just provided with a path to nukes.
All revolutions tend to be run by a very motivated few in the presence of a mostly passive populace in opposition to an ineffective and disconnected elite. It worked well in the US where the revolutionaries were rooted in a good ideology. In Iran it was a disaster as the revolutionaries were radical Muslim nutjobs pining away for their exiled death cult leader, and they agitated the public with shrieks about the great evils of the Shah (a bad guy for certain, but not even of the same scale of evil as the guy they wanted to bring home to Iran to replace him). Under the Islamic Revolution, far more people have been oppressed and killed than under the despicable Shah, but there'll be no end to it until the Iranian people get sufficiently motivated to cast it off - permanently.
Fun fact: It was the NAZIs of the 1930's who caused the Persians to change the name of the place to "Iran" AKA "Aryan". Everything that has happened in that land has been evil since its leaders signed-up to the ideology of Jew hatred.
There's no point to such a revolution, and nothing really "wrong" with what's happening in Iran. It's also not worth anything to change it.
You see, I've been told that all religions are equal. Religions are just belief systems. If there is no God, then religions differ from other belief systems only in a quirky detail of an imaginary character, and given that the character is imaginary, it's really no different from a belief system without an imaginary friend. All systems of belief have some quirks. All belief systems are, by this reasoning, equal. After all, if God is just a human construct then a belief system without God is no different from one with God but perhaps lacking some other random irrational human construct. It does not matter that an imaginary God causes people in a particular system to do "bad" things; people in other belief systems still do bad things, just for other reasons..... and who gets to define "bad" anyway?
I've also been told that we're all just evolved animals, and when we each die we simply cease to exist. There's no "greater good" and no point to any of it.
As a result, why does any of it matter? I don't care about the cows that provide the meat for my fast food or their beliefs. Why should I care about the beliefs of any other animals? Who cares about the equal-to-any-other belief system of the animals populating Iran today? Who cares what the next generation of animals there will face? Who cares what the current or future generations of animals here face? Why should I spend any of my fleeting moments on Earth worrying about the welfare of some distant animals when I could be seeking personal pleasure? Once I'm gone, POOF! what I have left behind won't matter to me, and as a bonus it won't matter to me that it won't matter. I won't even exist anymore to be concerned about whether anybody remembers me or thinks about me, and since they'll eventually die and completely cease to exist too it is irrational for them to think about any of this too. Who cares about future generations? I won't, and neither will they as each generation dies off. Hell, even the genetic codes driving evolution don't care and they are not driving "us" to any particular destination.
Anyone care to join-in listening John Lennon's brain-dead but melodious "Imagine"? Simon and Garfunkel's "America"? Oh, that's right. None of you matter either. Wow. I'm starting to feel the Bern..... I'm convinced that I'm "good" and should be all concerned about social justice and equality while denying all the intellectual pillars the provide any justification for those things or any reason to care about them. Whoops! Darn! I've lost it!
It turns out that I just cannot maintain that bleak philosophy. If I could have, it would not have mattered enough to write about it. sorta meta? The truth of the matter is so very obvious, and the proof is right before our collective eyes every day all over the world: all religions are NOT equal. All philosophies are NOT the same nor are they equal in value. Regions ruled by Muslims and their laws are some of the worst hell holes on Earth, only ever exceeded in their evil and barbarity in human history by places run by Communists or National Socialist pagans. Oh, and YES, there is such a thing as "evil".
Multiple times, police have held checkpoints in the US where they try to enforce and attempt to convert people stopped into Christianity. This isn't unique to Islam.
As it seems we have quite a large US based morality police force starting to form.
I'm completely amazed that the Iranian government don't see the obvious problem with their society when they need a 'morality police' to make the population comply with some arbitrary standard that the population obviously don't agree with. Shouldn't the standard be defined by the people, not by some out-of-touch-with-reality council or similar?
Religion is once again beyond stupid.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
So now when they get caught, they're going to be in trouble for everything they would have been in trouble for before ... and on top of it for intentionally avoiding the checkpoints ... and the app they have on the phone.
Why do I think this isn't going to work out like expected and heads are literally going to roll because of it?
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cool, waze in the news again!
This is just another example of how the average Iranian feels... Don't assume that what you see in the Media about Iran is necessarily the 'whole' truth.
I'm no media conspiracy nut, but I do know from interactions and conversations I've had with what I would consider average Iranians that they are not all raving religious nutters.
There's a good proportion of Iranians who really do grate under the oppression of the morality patrols.
Now all someone needs to do is use that app to set up a burkha rental booth in front of that checkpoint when its discovered. You give a large deposit for your rental burkha, don't get pinched by the pigs, then drop your burkha off at the deposit booth on the other side of the morality police checkpoint, where you get most of your deposit back.
THIS!!! A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS
Iran was converted to Islam by the Samanid rulers in the 8th and 9th centuries, who encouraged aggressive trolling by Islamic fanatics, demolished Zoroastrian shrines wherever they could, and encouraged discrimination in favor of Islam and against all non-Islamic religions - Zoroastrianism, Christianity & Judaism - which resulted in that country going Islamic.
Contrary to popular view, Shia Islam is NOT any more an Iranian religion than Sunni Islam. The Samanid dynasty - which converted Iran to Islam - was Sunni, as was every Iranian dynasty until the Safavid, while the first Shia dynasty was the Mamluq sultanate in Egypt. The start of Shia Islam was their belief that Mohammed's legit successor was Ali, rather than Abu Baqr. None of them Iranian.
Now it was the Safavid dynasty forcibly converted all of Iran from Sunni to Shia - the second time in its history that that country underwent a religious conversion. None of the succeeding dynasties - Nadir Shah or the Pahlavis - chose to turn back that clock, so end result was that Iran remained Shia.
Today, while there are a number of Iranians sick of their regime, there is a spectrum of opinion when it comes to Islam. That ranges from those who want to remain Islamic to some who want to go completely Atheist/Agnostic to some who want to revert to Zoroastrianism - their original religion. How many want what is something that cannot be known as long as this regime remains in power in Iran. But if they ever become free, it would be interesting to see whether they do throw off Islam.
One historic precedent does exist - when Iran was under the Mongol Ilkhanate of Hulegu Khan - who was Buddhist, non Muslims had the same rights in Iran as Muslims. The Iranians didn't convert from Islam to Buddhism or Shamanism or Christianity. Centuries into their reign, when the Ilkhanate embraced Islam, that opportunity was lost, and w/ it, the non Muslims of Iran lost their religious freedoms again.
What does a handful of misguided Christians centuries ago acting completely contrary the plain text of the Bible's New Testament (the core text of Christianity) have to do with a religion that explicitly commands its followers to subjugate and oppress, or kill, all "others"???? The Koran explicitly teaches that Jews, atheists, and polytheists are to be murdered, anywhere they are found. The exceptions are generally when Muslims are present in such small numbers that it's more practical to conquer the non-Muslims by other means.
The reason the western world was never aflame with witch burners and that the United States has not been completely dominated by witch burners throughout its history, while being overwhelmingly Christian, is that witch burning was NOT compatible with core Christian teachings or principles. If you think witch burning is a normal Christian activity, then explain why it never happens even in the most-religious places in the nation. Just how many witches are they burning at rallies in South Carolina this week?
Oh, and are you now excusing all the violence and oppression and poverty and backwardness of Muslim-run nations by asserting that they are all quasi-prisons? If so, then you have made my point without even realizing it. The thing western elites, including both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, are unwilling to face is that no true Muslim nation will ever be capable of being a democracy; in a democracy, PEOPLE make the laws (which is contrary to Islam). Furthermore, Islam demands that its prophet, Mohammed, was "the perfect man" and therefore everything he did is "good" and cannot be banned; which means polygamy, child brides, and all the rest are "good" and any government that tries to stop these things is evil and must be destroyed.
It's amusing that people who insist that all religions are equal (thereby asserting that the specifics of a person's beliefs do not matter) will then get very upset that people believe differently from THEM. If the details of what a person believes do not matter, then why does it matter if some people do not believe in evolution, or in man-made global warming, or gay marriage, or social justice, etc? For that matter, if the specifics of a set of beliefs do not matter, then why are so many people in the west so willing to hate Christians or hate Jews but unwilling to say anything half as harsh about Muslims?
The specific things people believe are VERY important; they influence how those people behave, and that in-turn indicates how safe it is to be around them (among many other things). As a result, it is completely mindless to say that all religions are equal, or that all of any category of ideology/philosophy is the same as any other. It's very important that people engage their brains before uttering such rubbish.
White hetero males are the ONLY group not protected by political correctness and the SJW maniacs.
And THAT offends me.
And THAT makes me feel oppressed
Therefore political correctness and social justice warriors must be banned to protect me from their microaggressions...
Think the PC police and SJWs will go away? Nope. Of course not, because their cause has never been honest and never been what they claimed it was. Their cause was never about making sure everyone felt "safe" and free from "oppression" or bigotry or hatred. They specialize in hating people who disagree with them, harrassing people who disagree with them, oppressing people who disagree with them (getting them fired from jobs etc) and more. Their cause was tearing down the western civilization which they despise. They do not seek equality, they seek revenge for past perceived slights, even to the point of behaving like the mentally ill who think "everybody is out to get me" and therefore interpret everything around them as an attack on them.