Pakistan Seeks To Block Facebook Again 98
Mightee writes "Pakistan, which was in the news last year for blocking Facebook over a 'Draw Mohammad Day' competition, is seeking to ban the social network again due to the second round of the same competition, reports Pakistan Today. Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed, presiding over the Lahore High Court, ordered the Ministry of Information and Technology to block access to Facebook nationwide on the charge of 'spreading religious hatred on the Internet.' The court also directed the ministry to police the Internet and block all other websites that were found guilty of the same charge, but it spared search engines like Google (which it is targeting for other reasons)."
Oh just block pakistan already (Score:3)
Seriously. If their government don't want to use the internet, then they can fuck off.
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But then we might be deprived of all those great posts about how women shouldn't be allowed to learn to read. And what would the world be without their shitty "God is great! Now check out these pics of me beheading someone for not wearing a beard!" blogs?
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aaargh! you found my twitter feed!
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Yeah, thanks for shitting all over the people in Pakistan fighting and dying for liberty.
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Its another mechanism to control the social uprising and it wont last long....hopefully!
But then we might be deprived of all those great posts about how women shouldn't be allowed to learn to read. And what would the world be without their shitty "God is great! Now check out these pics of me beheading someone for not wearing a beard!" blogs?
Interestingly, Karachi University has 75% female population and so that many other universities and schools across. Although there are problems abound, but talk about 'blowing' things out of proportion..the sick taliban mentality does not respect any boundary, religious or political or even sanity.....
- A Pakistani national, born in Nigeria, raised up in Saudi Arabia and lived in Germany! BooHoo!
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Free or GTFO! Aw crap, we just lost access to Blurmany and TOSralia!
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Most ruddy jolly goodness gracious, with all your first posting clever dickie goings on isn't it here in Newcastels, way aye.
Have you tried the switching it off and back on, good day. [bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]
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Yeah, moral posturing from Pakistan (Score:2)
spreading religious hatred on the Internet
As opposed to hiding it out on a compound in Abbottabad?
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spreading religious hatred on the Internet
Perhaps they just don't want any more competition in that area, however feeble the competition is. It seems that there are already far too many countries with despicable laws enforcing religious fanaticism (Pakistan: death penalty for changing your religion. Malaysia: religion determined by ethnicity, etc.).
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How DARE you, sir!
*slaps Anonymous Coward with white glove*
The iPhone5 will be magical and revolutionary! Pistols at dawn!
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Hurting feelings? (Score:2)
Is that REALLY the ruling? Seriously? I'm sorry but Pakistan, for being a nation that owns and operates nuclear weapons, needs some tougher skin.
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Don't over think religion. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually the "graven images" prohibition was formulated by the Israelite tribes as they shifted into monotheism. And theoretically the Christians inherited it, but between icons, crosses and pictures of the Virgin Mary being venerated, a good portion of Christianity doesn't take that very seriously, unless of course the image in question is of Thor or Vishnu or some nasty non-Christian deity.
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You do realize the name of the logical fallacy you're invoking, right?
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Well, why don't you point out the part of his argument that is fallacious?
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The part where he goes "No True Christian...." I think his claim is one of the poster boys for the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman [rationalwiki.org]
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It's not a fallacy when it's true by definition.
Can a true pacifist use lethal force? Can a true vegetarian knowingly eat meat? Can a true Christian willfully disobey parts of the Bible?
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True by the invoker's own definition, and not by the wider one. It's a fallacy, as all but a pretty small number of Protestants still claim Catholicism and Orthodoxy are not Christian churches, and more to the point the members of those churches certainly self-identify as Christians and on a pure numbers game they have as good a claim as any to considering themselves Christians.
And considering that the older traditions do not advocate Sola Scriptura or insist that only the Bible can be a source of revelati
Re:Don't over think religion. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Bible has been translated (from various ancient texts) and interpreted and rewritten in ways that explain things as how they were interpreted. This is why you have so many different factions in modern theology.
That interpretation is a bit silly, don't you think? The government [of the time and place] got involved in Christianity in the first place only because members of differing Christian sects were killing each other in the street over the nature of God before the bible was even a thing.
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"Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool." --Mark Twain
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Can a true pacifist use lethal force? Can a true vegetarian knowingly eat meat? Can a true Christian willfully disobey parts of the Bible?
Dude, in the second friggin paragraph of the article he linked to: "Broadly speaking, the fallacy does not apply if there is a clear and well-understood definition of what membership in a group requires and it is that definition which is broken (e.g., "no honest man would lie like that!", "no Christian would worship Satan!" and so on). "
Which, of course, is exactly what you just demonstrated. Only problem is, saying "No Christian would worship an idol!" doesn't apply because you're talking your personal de
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Can a true Christian willfully disobey parts of the Bible?
Yes, of course. It's called sinning, and the Catholics have complicated rituals and protocols for obtaining forgiveness: sinner confesses to priest/bishop/whatever, priest/bishop/whatever tells sinner to recite some number of various prayers as penance. Probably quite a lot of prayers would be needed to atone for murder and suchlike, but forgiveness is available. Next, you'll be telling us that Catholics aren't true Christians...
Of course, anyone (whether true Atheist or not) should be allowed to have a
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You may also wish to contemplate my sig... but I suspect you would rather not.
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Very few Christians keep kosher, so, yes.
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As others pointed out, you need more than the words "no true..." for it to be a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Can you actually explain where the fallacy is, rather than just namedrop it?
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And that's why real humans don't believe in the bearded man in the sky.
There, fixed that for you.
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I'm married to a practicing Catholic, and she doesn't look upon the veneration of Mary or the Saints as treating that veneration as the same as if it was a god. In fact, the whole notion of veneration makes it rather clear that veneration is not the same as worship.
Of course, I think the whole lot, Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox alike, are full of crap, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
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It's one of those odd things. And it's actually covered at least in the various writings that you should treat your neighbor as yourself and all that. Remember that Christianity and Judaism(much like in other world religions) have both had reformations. And in those cases, during the reformations there was a lot of infighting, doctrinal wars, and all that. With and without blood being shed, and in the end. You had your hangers on to the old ways, you had your splits, and you had those that said 'screw
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Works the other way too - go back a little, and you'll find a time when Christians were happily going around torturing and burning heretics, launching holy wars and burning books. Religions change. Sometimes they get more aggressive, sometimes less.
Sure and I pointed this out, in the post. Here's the difference. The people stood up and cast out the orthodoxy, and religious figureheads in christianity relegating them to the dustbin because they were too extreme for their age. In Islam, there's currently no chance of this because one there's active theocracies, two there's active theocracies spreading and these theocracies actively support the most archaic forms of laws. Three, in those both cases the governments recognize that there *is* no higher
Little overboard perhaps? (Score:1)
I know a lot of people that dont like the new changes that Facebook threw out there but banning the site? A little overboard perhaps?
Hatred for the new interface too? (Score:3)
Ironic given the level of unrest in the USA today... about the new FB interface, that is.
"People in most countries use Facebook to protest their government. People in the USA use Facebook to protest Facebook."
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So wait, Facebook it the government in the USA now?
Mycroft
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This is an awful mess. I can't find anything. Stories are all out of order. I like to log-on and scroll back until I see a story I recognize and catch up and check out anything interesting. Now things are all over the place, we're forced into top stories (which I've always considered useless and never used) and there doesn't seem to be any way to change it or opt out. Taking away choice is never a good thing.
Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed (Score:3)
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I think we do disservice to Pakistan by pretending it's a country. This is a place with at least two parallel governments, one civilian, one covert, and it's impossible to say who actually runs the place. This is a place that has tribal groups who fell more loyalty to the contents of the nearest outhouse than they do to other tribal groups or to the nation state as a whole.
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Can't blame them..... (Score:3)
No problem (Score:2)
Given FB's latest round of changes (Facebook in Facebook), I imagine it won't be long before everyone pisses off and Pakistan will have to start blocking Google+ instead.
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Translation (Score:2)
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Generally, none of the people participating in any "draw Mohammed day" are forbidden from doing so. Thus, they are not actually doing anything to promote any kind of freedom.
What they are doing is acting like brats and angering a lot of people. That is not a productive way to spread your views, it will just cause people to backlash.
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If your faith is so brittle that some non-believer mocking it causes you to go into a frenzy, then I posit that you are little better than the people you're angry at.
It was a pathetic infantile set of responses to a pathetic infantile set of inflammatory acts. Both sides are equally pathetic and stupid. But when push comes to shove, I'll have to throw in my lot with the pathetic infants drawing nasty pictures over those demanding such actions be banned, because, well, the latter are well and truly enemies
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1. Go into a town with black people, start calling them niggers.
2. Get beat up.
3. Show the world that you can't have niggers in this goddamn country because they are violent and brutal, so we have to throw them out.
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And drawing Mohammed is also something designed to inflate tempers.
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I don't have a problem with them banning Facebook at all. That is liberty. If the people of Pakistan truly did not like it, they could change their government through revolution, within the framework of their country's legal system, or just leave.
As another poster pointed out, Pakistan is hardly represented by those in power. There is a fairly large non-trivial number of Pakistani people that are more moderate and have no interest in killing another person based on their beliefs at all. Yet, at the same
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If the people of Pakistan truly did not like it, they could change their government through revolution, within the framework of their country's legal system, or just leave.
Or just not send HTTP requests to facebook.com?
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So what you're saying is Muslims get violently angry when people who haven't been forbidden from doing things do the things they haven't been forbidden from doing.
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...and it's not the Muslims' fault, because the people who were never forbidden from doing those things shouldn't be doing those things anyway because it makes Muslims angry.
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So no one should ever do anything that might ever make anyone angry? Good luck with that.
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Did I forget the <sarcasm> tag? Oh darn.
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Hmmm in retrospect, had I paid enough attention to the fact that you wrote both of those posts, I might have caught the implied . My apologies.
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No, I am saying that people get angry at you when you insult their values and beliefs.
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It sounds to me like you are trying to forbid me from doing it.
Facebook is Facebooks worst enemy... (Score:2)
Clearly (Score:2)
Pakistan doesn't like the new Interface either.
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They're just looking for a way to push to the top of your feed.
Children, PLEASE! (Score:1)
Now, I know most of you are thinking "why can't every day be 'Draw Mohammed Day'?", but just KNOCK IT OFF. This is why Pakistan can't have nice things.
Stupidty knows no bounds (Score:3)
People have been drawing pictures of Mohammad throughout the ages but for some (stupid and illogical) reason it was a page of cartoons in the danish newspaper Jyllandsposten that really got them worked up.
Now, Denmark is a small country (pop. 5 mill) and the newspaper in question is only written in danish, and is extremely unlikely to be found in shops outside the western hemisphere. Nobody in the Muslim world would have known about those cartoons if it was for an expedition of imams from Denmark that travelled around the middle east with a collection of drawings and other artworks, of which several had no connection with Muhammad, like a photo from a french farmers festival featuring a man with a pig snout. The intension was to create headlines and incite a response. It worked and ever since certain regions have been way overly sensitive about drawing Muhammad. The only way to combat that is to keep on drawing Muhammad again and again and again until they figure out that a drawing is just that - a drawing. Nothing to be worked up about.
For a rather complete collection of Muhammad images through the ages, including the infamous Muhammad Cartoons, go here: http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/ [zombietime.com]
Reading the comments on the website (Score:2)
gives a great insight; I was expecting all of them to cheered up by this, but a lot of people are against this, they realise the futility of banning facebook, and the hypocrisy of banning facebook while porn sites go unchecked.
Also, it seems a lot of them earn money via facebook, interesting, I never knew you could do that.
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2011/09/facebook-to-be-blocked/ [pakistantoday.com.pk]