Iran so far away
|
For anyone who has been in a coma over the last few weeks, there is some political upset in Iran.
Some Muslims pretended to set up a democratic government. Some Muslims objected to the farce and started to protest in the streets. Some other Muslims didn’t like the protests, and so started shooting them. Or maybe it was the first bunch. Or something.
This of course is markedly different to every other upset in the Middle East. And before you all say “of course it’s different – this is one is a struggle between freedom and oppresion, between good and evil”, well think again.
Actually it’s just different because of cell phones. Iran is a wealthy country (compared to most of the other poverty stricken Islamic cess-pits in the world), and protestors and passers-by have cheapo cell phones, which do two interesting things which conventional phones don’t.
Firstly, they do texting, so written reports of bloodshed and oppression can be thumbed out in glorious 160 character sound-bytes (er .. I mean text bytes). Secondly, and more importantly, they have cheapo video cameras in them. Video cameras which can actually record the bloodshed in even more glorious (if low resolution) color.
Humanitarians all over the world were outraged by the youtube video of the murder of a pretty young girl called ‘Neda’, shot through the chest by government forces, and bleeding out of her mouth and nose as she died on the street.
Then we learned that the Iranian government was using technology supplied by Nokia and Siemens to detect ‘subversive activity’ on the internet, and the cell phone network. And they used it to censor data and shut down the protests. Naughty Nokia and Siemens.
Now Slashdot reports that two US senators (Schumer and Graham) want to punish Nokia and Siemens for providing that technology. Apparently supplying governments with the technology to restrict internet access is an evil thing to do.
Funny thing is, there are many governments with that this kind of technology. Including the US, and including Australia.
In fact Uncle Kevin is part way through an internet filtering trial which would stop us mere citizens from accessing ‘unwanted’ material (so ‘unwanted’, apparently that we wouldn’t want to access it anyway).
Are they willing to punish multinationals for selling that technology to Australia as well – or just to Axes of Evil?
Selling internet censorship technology must be only evil if it it is sold to bad governments, not to good governments. Because we all know that the likes of Uncle Kev would never abuse their power.
Remember: Other governments are evil, but YOUR government only wants what’s good for you.
How Loud Sex Can Land You in Gaol
Occasionally, there are news stories that at first sight seem so ridiculous, that on first impressions you just laugh. But then, on closer inspection, they send chills down your spine and really make you wonder, just how far can the state now go. What, if anything, is left sacred.
At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex.” The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her “shouting and groaning” and her “bed banging against the wall of her home.” Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: “I can’t stop making noise during sex. It’s unnatural to not make any noises and I don’t think that I am particularly loud.”
So how did Cartwright’s expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?
Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people’s behaviour—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.
That’s right, going even further than Orwell’s imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright’s noisy shenanigans. If she wanted to howl with abandon, she would have to nip over the border to Scotland or maybe catch a ferry to France. It was because she breached the conditions of her Anti-Social Behaviour Order, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.
Welcome to 1984.
Read the full article at Reason Magazine.
Update: I should also probably add the following quote, in case you weren’t horrified enough: “The ASBO system has turned much of Britain into a curtain-twitching, neighbor-watching, noise-policing gang of spies. The relative ease with which one can apply to the authorities for an ASBO positively invites people to use the system to punish their foes or the irritants who live in their neighborhoods. ASBOs have been used to prevent young people in certain areas from wearing hoods or hats (they look “threatening”), to ban a middle-aged couple from playing gangsta rap (the expletives offended workers and children at a nearby kindergarten), and to prevent a 10-year-old boy from having contact with matches until he turns 16, after he was found to have started a fire.”
-
Recent Comments
Catallaxy Files- Read and weep statists February 4, 2012More government spending will not bring back the days when supposedly triple-A-rated mortgage securities could be fashioned out of dodgy loans to unqualified borrowers. Arnold KlingSinclair Davidson
- Farewell Chris Huhne February 4, 2012Chris Huhne, the UK climate change and energy minister who did more than any other minister to bankrupt his country by pursuing the folly of wind power, has resigned. Huhne is a wealthy member of the elite who did not practice what he preached. In other words, Huhne is a hypocrite.Samuel J
- Julia Gillard’s policy to prop up inefficient firms will be counterproductive February 3, 2012In The Australian today (subscription required): “According to Julia Gillard, things are difficult for Australian manufacturing as the resource boom threatens “to hollow out other sections of the economy”.Henry Ergas
- Read and weep statists February 4, 2012
- inCISe
- Hardly fair to vulnerable children February 3, 2012For the last three years, I have been arguing that Australia’s failing child protection system is being run in the interests of social service providers and not ‘at risk’ children. In the name of ‘family preservation,’ state community service departments are leaving children for far too long with highly dysfunctional families and only remove them as a last r […]Jeremy Sammut
- RIP democracy says Brendan O’Neill February 3, 2012They say Athens was the birthplace of modern democracy. Well now it is the graveyard of democracy. In the name of saving the euro, Brussels bigwigs have proposed a system of external interference into Greece’s economic affairs and national sovereignty that is so far-reaching it would make Victorian colonialists beam with pride. The EU dream that libera […]Brendan ONeil
- Constitution folly February 2, 2012Australia is once again revisiting the core problems of the failed Indigenous policies championed by the Labor Party. The expert panel for constitutional reform to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution gave their recommendations to the federal government on 19 January. The Gillard government has pledged to hold a constit […]Editor
- Hardly fair to vulnerable children February 3, 2012
- IPA news
- Who'll drag us free of our heavy debt burden? February 2, 2012While most Australians were tanning themselves at the beach during their summer breaks, the federal opposition and the...
- Renewable energy rules lose traction January 31, 2012Energy policy in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries is spurred by concerns that gas...
- Danger of new thickets of gas regulation January 30, 2012Peter Roberts' "Globalised gas pricing has local costs" (Talking Point, January 30) applauds the commonwealth's National...
- Who'll drag us free of our heavy debt burden? February 2, 2012
