Taliban Seizes and Burns PCs, Cell Phones To Stop Obscenity

retroworks writes "As translated from Central Asia Online, Cellular News reports that militants from South Waziristan set ablaze about 300 cellular phones and a number of computers in Wana because the devices were allegedly used to spread obscene materials. Prior to taking the action, they gave everyone fair warning with 'leaflets.' 300 cell phones down, 5 or 6 billion to go.

Re:The thing is...

[bmo]

Excuse me?

In case you haven't noticed, the MPAA and RIAA have been nothing but terrorist thugs when it comes to the Internet. It fucks with their distribution system, cuts out middle men, and is generally a pain in the ass to them. They would like nothing better than to go back to the bad old days of no Internet where they held the distribution channels in their grip.

SOPA, a bill which they wrote, is tantamount to burning down the Internet.

--
BMO

Re:Lesser of many evils

[bmo]

I had to google that last quote because I liked it so much.

For everyone's edification:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."

  "That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also."

  Heinrich Heine, in the play "Almansor" - 1821

--
BMO

Re:Okay, let's examine that decision

[Cyberax]

"a) the Soviets, a communist government that ran extermination camps that killed about 10 times more people than the holocaust,"

WTF?!? Nazis have killed around 20 million people in the USSR during the WWII. There's simply no way Stalin could have killed 10 times more people.

Re:Objective Hide their actual Activities

[number11]

Considering the Taliban manual specifically prohibits any Taliban from being alone in a room with an unbearded man (boy), I bet it is so that nobody can record that evidence as well. Which is incredibly ironic that they are trying to prevent obscenity when they are predominately pedophiles. Before anybody mods this troll..... if it was false why would it have to be in the manual for the Taliban specifically?

Because it's a popular entertainment in Afghanistan that the Taliban want to ban?

What makes you think it's not a problem with non-Taliban? Didn't American contractors with DynCorp pimp young boys for a party for Afghan cops (cite [houstonpress.com]?

Re:Ah, just like the Americans

[bmo]

Americans?

Following your own link and reading it contradicts your assertion.

Eskander also reported that the destruction was performed by "a mix of poor people looking for a quick profit, along with regime loyalists intent on destroying evidence of atrocities"

And...

âoeAccording to Eskander, Saddam loyalists burned the entirety of the Republican Archive, which contained the records of the Ba'athist regime between the years 1958 and 1979. Also completely destroyed were the Ba'athist court proceedings detailing the charges against and trials of party opponents. Records of Iraq's relations with its neighbors, including Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are missing. Iraq has accused neighbouring countries of stealing sections of its national archives.[6]

"Neigboring countries" are not Americans.

Flamebait
Troll
Douchebag

Fuck. Off.

--
BMO

Re:Okay, let's examine that decision

[cold fjord]

Communism killed around 100,000,000 people in the last century.

The Black Book of Communism [harvard.edu]

The Black Book of Communism (Translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer) (Review) / (book review) [harvard.edu]
Author: Daniel J. Mahoney

The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied Communism everywhere and that seemed to define its "genetic code." The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. But The Black Book also contains absorbing accounts of Communist repression in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World. . . . .

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class...

Re:Okay, let's examine that decision

[myowntrueself]

How many people did capitalism kill 'directly or indirectly'?

....

If we're talking about a country that is capitalist in the full sense (an industrialized market economy, i.e. one that has accumulated much capital), what are the episodes during which many died from following a capitalist policy rather than some superior "socialist" (or other) alternative? I'm prepared to accept that there may be such an example, but I doubt it approaches anything close to the massive and tragic waste of life that resulted in the last century's pursuit of communism.

The Nazis were capitalists.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

How was it not 'capitalist'?