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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."
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".
A revolution? Fuck, a revolution is what got them into that shit, you really think you can motivate them to try again?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If we've learned anything from the Arab Spring it's that most of the people living there favor these types of religiously oppressive governments, so any overthrow of the existing power structure is more likely than not to end up with something worse taking its place. If Iran were destabilized right now, they'd end up being partially controlled by ISIS. As bad as Hussein or Assad might be, at least they kept a lid on that shit.
I think a good chunk of the Middle East might be sliding towards some hopeless cycle for the foreseeable future because anyone intelligent enough to see why that kind of system is bad is likely to leave for other, less oppressive countries. The people who could be a catalyst for reform aren't there any longer to make improvements and it's no surprise that they don't want to stick around when it's relatively easy to move elsewhere and end up in a country where you won't be killed for your religious beliefs or stoned to death for your sexual preferences.
> The problem for the Iranians wasn't the revolution, but the hijacking of the revolution by the Islamists.
Revolutions are almost always hijacked, usually by the most fanatical of the revolutionaries. It's _amazing_ that US politics were so thoughtful and cautious in the first 30 years after the American Revolution.