Pakistan Bans Wikipedia for 'blasphemous content' | Hacker News Reader

Pakistan Bans Wikipedia for 'blasphemous content'

bbc.com

33 pointsyangikan27 comments

The beauty about blasphemy in Islam is that it may be forbidden to narrate exactly what the blasphemous statement is before a court as that may be blasphemy in itself.

It takes a 'credible' witness to state that a blasphemous statement was made and that is it.

Chew on that.

I really think Western media outlets should not give publicity to these demonstrations which can even turn violent because they are simply feeding the beast with the publicity it thrives on.

If the governments of "Islamic" states want to cut off their citizens access to the wider knowledge of the world for fear that they might be exposed to blasphemous statements they are entirely free to.

No one is bothered here.

We have similar tendencies in the secular world as well, see the case of a former NYT reporter who was fired for repeating the N-word when clarifying a kid's question that used the N-word itself.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/01/media/donald-mcneil-speak...

While Islamic religious law is certainly backward, the hysteria that underlies blasphemy/taboos isn't limited to medieval legal systems.

Reminds me of this classic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jEBh1VtdT0

There is plenty of legal music / media using it though. And it’s not illegal to consume it either.

As much as I disagree with the actions of the Times here, there’s a massive difference between a single private entity deciding to let go of an employee based on a ridiculous justification and having a legal system based on similar ridiculous justifications.

I wasn't claiming any equality between those two, only a similar thought pattern behind them.

That said, I wouldn't like to see how a hypothetical country run by the New York Times staff, and thus by proxy by the Twitter mob, would look like. It might be pretty ghastly. For all its faults, the current political system has quite a lot of checks and balances that limit arbitrary decisions and capriciousness of important players, and those limits would likely go out of the window in the new Outrage Republic.

I don’t know why more people aren’t worried about Pakistan. The country is becoming increasingly destabilized with a severe economic crisis underway already. A nuclear power with such instability is a risk to everyone.

You should not focus only on one country.

Nukes are not a problem, the religiously charged lynch mobs on the other hand... That I fear greatly.

No one know where the nukes are, so mobs can't use them, but millions of desperate people, even without improvised explosives... deadlier than any nuke.

I live here and I don't see what the options are. We have gotten addicted to rent seeking behavior and the world has had enough, we just don't produce anything on a scale to maintain an economy fit enough to feed and clothe 230 million people.

so how will the country do if foreign loans/cash transfers stop? will it break into smaller states? will the people run towards better countries (Iran & India or Europe) ? will the country turn into a open prison dictactorship to keep order through collapse?

Expect Afghanistan, with nukes obv. Pakistan is composed of many different ethnic groups, some of whom have nothing in common except for a Mughal-British Indian past and Islam.

I am an armchair analyst, but honestly no one knows.

To add, Pakistan's population is growing at a much faster rate than others. Bangladesh and India have both got their fertility rate at or under replacement level but Pakistan's is still above 3.

Those 230M people are only going to go up in numbers.

Bound and determined to live in the Dark Ages. Okay then.

Any further details as to which pages in particular were found objectionable?

Nope.

Recounting or publishing the blasphemous statements is blasphemy in itself.

Did they ban pornhub for excited female content?

This priviledge is reserved for western nations.

Doesn't have to be

Certainly glad the US would never do anything so backwards and silly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/01/31/florida-...

To religious zealots, reality is blasphemous.

Sometimes I wonder why those savage countries are not being eliminated by natural selection...rather they are more thriving than the normal countries

Other websites banned in Pakistan include Tumblr, TMZ, Deustche Welle, Fanfiction.net, GreasyFork, OpenUserJS, UrbanDictionary and many other "normal" websites banned to the entire country for no good damn reason.

Some babu decides he doesn't like a website and now 230 million can't ever access that website ever again, and there is no recourse, just a "surf safely" label that will taunt you.

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But what's hilarious is when websites ban entire countries, I cannot access the ihop.com website because they have banned us!

    > Error 1009

    > The owner of this website (www.ihop.com) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (PK) from accessing this website.

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