Kuwait Issues Order To Block YouTube 180
Bashar Abdullah writes "Kuwait Ministry of Communications have issued orders to all ISPs to block YouTube, after some offensive videos to Quran and prophet were posted there. YouTube is 15% of Kuwaiti traffic, ranked #3 on Alexa for Kuwait. Funny thing is, those videos they refer to have been removed and I can't reach them anymore."
Profit! (Score:5, Funny)
1. Submit post about Kuwait blocking youtube. ..
2. Misspell prophet
3.
4. Profit!
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The mods work in mysterious ways...
Re:Profit! (Score:4, Interesting)
All governments have the same reason to censor, be it US, UK, or any other country. From their perspective, when is control of information ever a bad thing?
What varies is the thing they wave around to make people swoon. Terrorism, child porn, offense to Islam, Holocaust denial, etc.
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Well censoring offense to Islam is more of a religious thing than a government thing. When Middle Eastern governments do that they're basically doing it in order to prevent the religious elements from really running amuck (and I mean running amuck worse than the governments have already permitted in order to give the people something to distract attention from the government's policies.) When Western governments try do the same thing they claim it is to be "culturally sensitive" but it is really because t
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Er, no. It happens in countries with weak freedom of speech laws and where sionists have subverted key element of society.
Like in Canada, which being the red-coats, never had "needed" a first-amendment...
"Antisemite" is the catch-all trump-card brandished by jews to shut-down critics, no matter how
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> "Antisemite" is the catch-all trump-card brandished by jews to shut-down critics, no matter how well-founded the critic is. Trouble is, it has been misused so much that it is starting to lose it's efficiency...
Not exactly. It's a catch-all trump-card used by Zionists to try to claim that all Jews agree with their political views. Many Jews are against Israel's government's heavy-handed actions much as many of us in the US aren't too happy about the War on Terra.
Please don't confuse the two. Anti-zionis
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Oh, I don't... It's the sionists who do... :)
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Those that deny the holocaust also start to get believed more often if it's illegal to do so.
If we allow open debate their lies get exposed and it works out the same way. But you can't debate someone if it's illegal to say it.
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You should try going against the consensus in slashdot. You might mention the fact that the founder of the islamic "religion" comitted multiple religious massacres.
You could even suggest that this probably means that islam itself is, to say the least, "not opposed" to the idea of religious massacres. You might even say that "jihad" seems to include the practice of religious massacres, both historically and contemporary (e.g. Sudan).
And of course, by any objective standard, you'd be right.
But the consensus o
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The best part of your first paragraph is that the A.C. was rated flamebait:-)
The inconsistencies in the Holocaust can generally be explained away when your country offers honest debate. Of course, if discussion is censored, it being faked starts to look a lot more plausible.
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Catholicism / Christianity
Not sure why you picked Catholicism in particular. Protestantism also caused a number of atrocities. Remember the Salem Which Trials?
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Isn't that a bit like 'grouping Germans and Europeans', or 'grouping nouns and words'?
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Perhaps you are not a native speaker of English. The word "massacre" is generally reserved for cases where one side has no ability to resist the other; the word for what occured at Khaibar, where a 1,400 to 1,800-men army of Muslims attacked a fortress occupied by about 10,000, would be "battle" or "siege". HTH.
And what justification did they have for attacking that fortress, regardless of their numerical disadvantage?
That the early Muslims fought a lot of people, no one disputes. We may argue about the jus
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Sure, except when it isn't a massacre. Grandparent is correct: this atrocity is not of the scale to warrant the melodramatically overused term "massacre". The dead don't even outnumber my highschool. Be serious. Also, whether or not religion was the reason the battle started isn't really that important; when you say "religious battle" people think civilians being kill
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No, no and no. That's the kind of logic George Bush uses. By that logic, the peaceful Muslims in Indonesia are responsible for 9/11.
Sorry, but if their religious beliefs include killing people of other beliefs, then yes, they bear some blame. But of course, it's not just Muslims who are guilty of this, it's almost all religions.
If you want to be blameless, you need to cast off your religion.
The people who committed the atrocities are evil. The religions they used as justification are not. Shame on you.
No,
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Luckily, every religion listed in the example is explicitly pacifist. Doesn't it make you feel like a jerk to judge religions without even knowing what they say?
Horseshit. I'm not religious, but even if I was, I would share no blame for the actions of others hundreds of years ago.
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Luckily, every religion listed in the example is explicitly pacifist. Doesn't it make you feel like a jerk to judge religions without even knowing what they say?
Sorry, but the only pacifist religion I know of is Buddhism. Christianity and Islam are both violent, warlike religions.
As for knowing what they say, it's written in plain text in their holy books. Both the Bible and the Koran are filled with evil deeds, put forth as "the will of god".
Horseshit. I'm not religious, but even if I was, I would share
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Deeds in the book. Yes. Deeds of its followers, no.
This is a general point, I agree it's the same thing in this case.
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Here's some examples from evilbible.com. The Bible clearly advocates murder and rape; it doesn't just describe them.
1) Murder, rape and pillage of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18 NLT)
They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men. All five of the Midianite kings - Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba - died in the battle. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children
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Then you don't know jack shit about Christianity. Don't confuse the actions of the Catholic Church with what the Bible says; they are fundamentally unrelated.
You've just made it clear that your argument holds no basis in knowledge. Conversation terminated.
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Don't confuse the actions of the Catholic Church with what the Bible says; they are fundamentally unrelated.
Sorry, but that doesn't wash. The Catholic Church wrote the Bible (or at least, compiled it, deciding which books to include and not include). If you believe the Bible is "holy" (unless you're picking and choosing which parts to believe, which almost no Christians do), then you must also believe the Catholic Church (at least the one circa 300-400CE) is also "holy" and sacrosanct. It wasn't that lon
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Of the religions I mentioned, only Catholicism has a leader who could speak for its entirety.
Not exactly, though. Even if the Pope tries to apologize for the Crusades, he's lying. According to Catholic dogma, the Pope is infallible, so all decisions made by prior popes are by definition correct. So according to the Catholic religion, the Crusades were a good thing. So the only way for modern-day Catholics to not share in the blame for the Crusades is for them to abandon Catholicism.
But having a single l
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> According to Catholic dogma, the Pope is infallible, so all decisions made by prior popes are by definition correct.
A common misconception.
The pope is only infallible when he speaks /ex cathedra/. (ex cathedra is the cheat code for his infallible mode)
Otherwise the Church would have been dragged down forever ago by such conflicts between different Papal statements.
You are of course right about following books, though it is possible to view Gnostic interpretations of the Bible as nonviolent (since the G
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I think you can pretty safely lump someone with the nuts if they believe in a space ghost. The only question is if they're the violent group-W type.
Dangerous videos (Score:4, Insightful)
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I smell totalitarianism... or are those cinnamon buns? Either way, I'm on it, chief! :D
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Off topic, but your sig is truncated and so makes little sense:
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a r [mewshi.com]
No such thing (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no such thing as dangerous ideas, only dangerous people.
The descendants of six million dead Jews disagree with you. The descendants of 20-60 million dead Russians and East Europeans disagree with you. So do millions of people in China, Cambodia, and Rwanda.
Some ideas stink to the core, and always end with death. Was National Socialism ever going to end any other way than it did?
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Most "evil" dictators kill nobody by their own hand.
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The democratic British Empire managed to kill about 50 million people in under 100 years.
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Also : "Was National Socialism ever going to end any other way than it did?" Was National Socialism ever going anywhere without Hitler? If Hitler had died anywhere in his early years, despite the ideology being out there and all, nothing would have happened. It's not like an idea was out the box that made people want to kill other people. It always takes a leader, a great man, hence why people and not ideas are dangerous.
Yup, that's why the communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union failed with the d
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Yup, that's why the communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union failed with the deaths of Mao and Lenin after all
No, you're missing the point. When the regime is in place, it's too late, you can take off the originator. Once your disciples are in power it's too late, but before that happens, before some point when a movement gains too much momentum and power, the people who started it are the only thing that keep the thing going. Not ideas. People. Leaders.
The ideas for communism were out of the bag l
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Let me start by stressing that in illustrating to you the fallacy of the GreatMan view of History (which enjoyed some historiographical credibility in the wake of Napoleon, but went out of serious History with gas lights), I do not mean to argue for an idealist notion of historical motion. Instead I think of History in terms of the reciprocal relationship between complex material conditions and ideology. Nor am I trying to write human actors out of History, that would be a position even more ridiculous th
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So we merely need to kill every communist sympathizer before they achieve any kind of power ? Great.
No, don't you read? You just have to kill the leader.
By that standard, we'd probably have to shoot Obama AND McCain, you know, just in case they're "originators". Such EVIL !
Not really, they're merely iterations, the 44th to be precise.
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Sounds like dangerous people to me, man.
What ever happened to "the pen is mightier than the sword", and "an idea who's time has come is unstoppable"?
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What I'm saying is, ignorant and credulous people are prerequisites for the worst ideas to take hold, and that they're the root of the problem, not the ideas themselves. An idea without someone willing to act upon it is nothing but a curiousity, like the whole Nazi thing is now.
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It could have ended up like Stalin, who died in his bed, dubbed "the little father of peoples", and "benefactor of humanity", despite the 16 million people he killed in his concentration camps, which makes the nazis look like amateurs, especially that the nazis were more systematically organized to exterminate people they didn't like (not just jews, by the way).
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There are hundreds of millions of Christians who disagree with us about natural selection, too. What's your point?
Incidentally, neither the pogroms nor the holocaust would have happened without people. There are no dangerous ideas.
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There's no such thing as dangerous ideas, only dangerous people.
If ideas and speech really are this impotent, then is freedom of speech or conscience such a big deal? Tell you what the next time someone brings up some egregious example of censorship, I won't get upset anymore, I'll just relax, take a leaf out of your book and tell myself, "Oh well, it doesn't really matter, after all ideas can't do much can they?"
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The danger isn't where you think it is. Only dangerous people want to control ideas. Ideas within this context are anti-dangers, i.e. they help destroy dangers. Note that for the sake of generalisation and simplification we'll assume a moral absolutism.
Which is why in most of the western world there is little censorship, because dangerous (evil) people aren't in charge of us (that's a generalisation) and thus why every idea is freely available to us, without anything bad happening as a result, i.e. our free
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The danger isn't where you think it is. Only dangerous people want to control ideas.
If ideas pose no danger to them, why would they want to do that.
Ideas within this context are anti-dangers
Dangers are dangerous to particular subjects. What is dangerous to liberal democracy (eg. the control of the state by the church) might not be dangerous to a theocracy and vv. The only sense I can make of your "anti-dangers" is that they are dangers to things you happen not to agree with.
Note that for the sake of
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Um... (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Um... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, to be fair, Kuwait is more about the profits than the prophet.
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Well, to be fair, Kuwait is more about the profits than the prophet.
Thank God we fought so hard to keep like minded people from under the yoke of tyranny!
USA! USA! USA!
Islamic Censorship strikes again (Score:2, Informative)
Somehow I'm not shocked by this.
Joe Lieberman isn't Muslim! (Score:5, Informative)
Joe Lieberman [go.com] and his staff have been actively censoring youtube under the guise of Senate Bill 1959: [govtrack.us] Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 since May. The bill hasn't passed the Senate yet, but it hasn't stopped Lieberman from pressuring google to delete any video and accounts he wants.
This video [youtube.com] describes what is going on pretty well.
This veteran [youtube.com] gives Lieberman a piece of his mind on the issue.
MIT has been trying to track down what videos are being taken down and why.
http://youtomb.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
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I never said Christians and other religions didn't censor stuff too. Trust me, all religions are going to censor stuff they don't like.
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I never said Christians and other religions didn't censor stuff too. Trust me, all religions are going to censor stuff they don't like.
Joe Liebermann is Jewish.
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Social networking sites are not an ancillary thing to some, but increasingly a part of people's social lives, by which they share experiences with their friends, keep up to date, arrange events and make new friends.Why should work suppress someones social life outside of working hours, or even before they even apply for the job as you say?
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Fox and all the other media outlets have all been purging clips from youtube. Go through the last year of videos on digg from the top down and nearly half of them have been purged. I feel like there are some fairly powerful anti-subversion forces at work.
Funny how a lot of the video takedowns are selective.
NBC jumped right on their most recent Palin sketch where the reporter was asking about incest in the family. Video is no longer available due to copyright reasons.
Whereas the first Palin sketch "I can see Russia from my house" is still available as are a multitude of other SNL clips.
Funny how they're really concerned about copyright when they start taking flak.
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So... why on earth would you post about it on the very medium subject to censorship? I mean, it's not like it won't get taken down in short order...
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But Joe Lieberman is a Democrat
This is sarcasm, right? You do know Lieberman isn't a Democrat, right? It's hard to tell [wired.com].
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Respectfully yours,
- Ethanol-fueled
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See, there it is though. You consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because you believe information can be owned. In Kuwait they consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because they believe the Prophet should not be criticised. Both to me seem rather artificial. But I suppose Americans believe it worth restricting free speech in that way in ord
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But I suppose Americans believe it worth restricting free speech in that way in order to encourage a profitable media industry, and Kuwaitis believe it worth restricting free speech in that way to avoid infuriating God.
One small difference, of course - the media industry (the companies that comprise it, and the people who run and work for those companies) has real, provable existence. You'll forgive me for not placing too much stock in laws that exist to prevent an imaginary fairytale from becoming "infuriated".
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It's not islamic. Kuwait is a dictatorship. Other more Islamic countries haven't blocked youtube.
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Someone should invade them and introduce democracy. Oh yeah I remember, we already kicked out one invader in return for Kuwait becoming democratic, how that working out? hmm not too well I guess.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcjUG99tu24 [youtube.com]
Play "spot the woman"
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At least they won't poison the BGP tables like Pakistan did.
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Do you by any chance live in Kuwait?
Quran and profit? (Score:1)
I hope that's not anything like Abercrombie and Fitch...
This just in (Score:2)
Kuwait Discovers Pat Condell? (Score:1)
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I'm a fan of both Pat Condell and Thunderf00t.
Muhammad with a big nose (Score:1, Informative)
T
A
AlhamduliLlah (Score:2, Funny)
Positive decision.
Ministry of Communications???? (Score:2, Funny)
> Kuwait Ministry of Communications have issued orders to all ISPs to block YouTube
Anyone disobeying this order will be imprisoned by the Ministry of Freedom.
That what you get in a theocracy (Score:3, Insightful)
what ignorance you demonstrate (Score:3, Insightful)
there is no threat of a theocracy in the US from the current candidates. Considering the church that the one candidate went to I would think the biggest threat would be on the left this year. Go figure, it is also the group desperately trying to prove their religious enough for the moderates. The only times I hear about the candidates on the right's religious views is when people mock them on message boards on from the press.
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Palin's already tried to ban books from the library in the small town where she was mayor. Imagine what she might get up to if she became president...
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But Barack Obama's a Muslim, and he'll probably want to impose Sharia on all of us.
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Which is why... (Score:2)
I won't vote for a ticket that uses Catholic Social Doctrine [wsj.com] to justify its tax policies and who proclaims himself to be in "totally consistent" on this point. I'm not Catholic - I don't want a Catholic doctrine to be used to go after my checkbook.
Just say no to Biden/Obama and their theocratic tax scheme!
Sorry, was that not what you were expecting?
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Sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
Muhammad sucks, Christ Sucks, Richard Dawkins Sucks, Flying Spaghetti Monster sucks
Anyone else?
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isorox sucks?
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Raël???
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Blasphomy! May you be buried in week-old meatballs for your words against the FSM!
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Monica Lewinsky?
Screw them. (Score:2)
Screw them.
They want to live in the middle-ages? Fine, it's their choice. They're the ones who are cutting themselves from the world. They're the ones who cling to their stupid religion. They're the ones who want to put their heads in the sand.
Let's all put "mohammed was a pedophile" on our websites and in our .sigs, and let them all blow themseleves up in the ensuing war against the rest of the world.
Darwin allways wins at the end.
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They would be speaking Iraqi today...
With "we" I assume you're a US-inhabitant?
Just making sure you're not speaking for all Slashdotians.
Read up on history moron (Score:2)
It was an international force in that war, troops from all over the world took part.
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Remember, that was the end of the cold war - even the Europeans were itchy to drop those unused cold war bombs.
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editors... the one thing that /. doesn't have...