REVEALED: The sites blocked by Great Firewall of Iraq The Register has obtained a list of the websites which are still blocked by the Iraqi government despite its decision to lift partial and total internet blockades around the country. Although the Ministry of Communications appears to have gone back on its decision to restrict access to Facebook and Twitter, ISPs have been told …
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When has Domain level blocking actually stopped anyone? Even if you were to block all DNS traffic except to controlled DNS servers, then people will just distribute hosts files (And that is not even addressing the issue of VPNs, TOR included). I was getting around domain-level blocking in elementary school, and I didn't have much motivation to do so, how do you think it would fare against a bunch of militants trying to get people to fight in their holy war?
I wonder when governments are going to realize that censorship of the internet, or any other media, will never work and doing so only fuels uprisings and dissent.
*joke* I am presuming they tried that after inventing the computer? :)
You are attributing a nations achievements, to a singular reference point.
I am stating that most terrorists are fucking idiots. To have the mindset to attack innocent people requires a certain lack of intelligence.
Argue if you like it empathy that's missing, but an intelligent person would see the advantage to have the moral high ground, as a way to gather support.
>I am stating that most terrorists are fucking idiots
So are most of the people who were prepared to storm machine guns to determine which of Victoria's grandchildren gets to be king of Belgium
>. To have the mindset to attack innocent people requires a certain lack of intelligence.
Tell that to the Manhattan project
> I am stating that most terrorists are fucking idiots.
It's a common mistake to underestimate one's enemy.
They clearly have a repugnant set of ethics, but if they are truly "fucking idiots", then why aren't we catching them and prosecuting them properly?
Terrorists might[1] be total cunts, but there's a strong chance that many of them are at least as intelligent as the rest of us...
Vic.
[1] It has to be a "might" because many of the people in history that we look up to were technically terrorists at the time...
crisis-hit nation
> 2014
> Calling Iraq a "nation"
It's a bloody stump of a colonial area (sort-of a "country"). It may have a sort-kinda authoritarian state apparatus under under Maliki, but there is no nation anywhere to be seen. The Kurds (under a quasi-mafiosi but lesser-of-two-evil kind of leadership) are giving the finger to the freakshow (AFAIK Turkey has already okayed the move, amazingly). Sunni obscurantists are creating a new region around the Syrian-Iraqi border area - good times for rope dealers. Soon you will see ethnic cleansing fanning out from the Shia sectors and the pre-2007-surge cleaning of Sunni enclaves will be scaled out... Meanwhile car bombs and hellfire missiles are going off everywhere.
No nation here. Nope, sir.
"Pull up the drawbridge, let them get on with it."
Don't forget the first step, Invade and make sure they have nothing resembling a competent government left (whilst making sure your buddies' companies get rich off of it).
Then you can sit back and watch the slaughter.
"Don't forget the first step, Invade and make sure they have nothing resembling a competent government left"
Come off it, they didn't have a competent government to start with. The deservedly dead Gadaffi killed about a million in his hobby war with Iran, and was caught red handed gassing the Kurds, before starting the first Gulf War, killing another 40,000 people. Iraq's people suffered under years of sanctions due to Saddam's misgovernance, and saw none of the wealth from oil or gas.
I grant you he was fairly effective at suppressing the inter-group fighting, but that's hardly a reason to vote for him unless you celebrate the values of brutality, corruption and repression.
Come off it, they didn't have a competent government to start with. The deservedly dead Gadaffi
Uh... Ghadaffi (our acceptably-good-guy/bad-guy permamorphist) is starring in another show with Hillary Clinton.
killed about a million in his hobby war with Iran
Well, we delivered the goods and the gas to do it because we didn't like people not liking our bastard the Shah or Iran. Basically, we were for Hitler before we were against him. If there were any justice, big radioactive meteors incubating flesh-eating diseases would strike the "West" any minute now. Luckily, there isn't.
I won't even go into the utterly despicable French/British behaviour post-WWI and Skyes/Pikot, which deserves a separate introduction of the people involved to the Black Box of Pain.
"I won't even go into the utterly despicable French/British behaviour post-WWI and Skyes/Pikot, which deserves a separate introduction of the people involved to the Black Box of Pain."
Guilty. M'lud. And of course there was the British government's Balfour Declaration, that through a combination of subsequent Goldman-esque politicing and European guilt over The Austrian's activities eventually led to the formation of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians. Factor in French, Russian, British and American interference throughout the Middle East ever since, and "westerners" in the most general sense really have a lot to answer for. If the British civil service (past and present) burn in the fires of hell for this and everything else they've ever done then I'll be happy to get a long stick and bag of marshmallows to share with you. But...
...what about your lot? Would things have panned out better and more peacefully if the Brits and Frogs hadn't darkened your doorsteps? In both Britain and France we had centuries of epic bloodshed and civil war in our transition from wiping our arses on stones and believing the crap spouted by religious leaders, through to having access to quilted labrador pelts on a roll and going shopping on our sabbath. I suspect that even with the efficiency of modern death machines, the same journey will involve less bloodshed (end to end) for the peoples of the Middle East (not that I'm condoning or excusing the Western interference).
But we are where we are. How about the people of the Middle East stop worrying about what their neighbours believe, say or practice in their own minds or homes, put the guns and bombs away, and round up and burn ALL religious books, religious scholars, zealots, religious officials and tribal elders? In the meanwhile the UK's foreign aid budget could buy one hell of a lot of Andrex, and the NATO air forces could deliver that - Hercules drops to metropolitan areas, surgical fast jet deliveries to smaller towns, and drones firing three ply cluster packs or JP233's onto isolated rural targets. Global peace would break out as Middle Eastern men were suddenly able to retire for a comfortable dump with a copy of the Arabic version of Viz.
As softening up work we might have the collected works or Richard Dawkins translated into Arabic and then carpet bomb the whole Middle East with it?
"Don't forget the first step, Invade and make sure they have nothing resembling a competent government left"
And the last step; wait for a genuine democracy to break out, stage a coup, put your own dictator in charge and help him kill those democrat terrorists. Then rinse and repeat
"And the last step; wait for a genuine democracy to break out, stage a coup, put your own dictator in charge and help him kill those democrat terrorists."
That's Ukraine that you're thinking of, where US interference is what toppled the last nationally elected president, leading to instability between factions that might otherwise have been managed.
Not necessarily a bad thing. The news is too depressing!
(I accept that the joy of not knowing the news is tempered somewhat by the risk to life and happiness offered by Eternal War (tm) which seems to be blighting the region (and I'm not too happy about our contribution to it).
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