Saturday, April 26, 2008
Blogger Problems
I've been having trouble accessing Blogger in the sense that I can't access this blog directly at http://sean-reeves.blogspot.com. I can access my dashboard via http://www.blogger.com however, which is odd. Maybe the government is following up on its YouTube debacle and has decided to ban access to Blogger. Anyway, I'll attempt to post this and see what happens.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Back to Biasa
The bans have been lifted after many complaints, especially from businesses who rely on YouTube and multiply.com for advertising. Instead, the ISPs will focus on banning individual pages that are causing offence. This could easily be a solution to Indonesia's unemployment problems because this approach to the problem will necessarily employ massive teams of people working in shifts, night and day, scouring the Internet for offending pages. Additional teams could be employed tracking down Indonesian bloggers who are causing trouble in the blogosphere.
Latest laugh in town concerned a very popular music group called Slank who wrote a song four years ago about the members of the House of Representatives, accusing most of them of being a bunch of crooks. Some of the current crop of members had recently begun considering legal action against the group after they performed the song at the Corruption Eradication Commission's Jakarta office last week. Unfortunately, one of them has been caught accepting a bribe and so the prospect of litigation has suddenly evaporated.
As writer for the The Jakarta Post commented:
The problem with our lawmakers is they are not used to critics. Nearly half of them date back to the New Order era, when lawmakers were protected from criticism by the heavy-handed tactics of the regime.
Latest laugh in town concerned a very popular music group called Slank who wrote a song four years ago about the members of the House of Representatives, accusing most of them of being a bunch of crooks. Some of the current crop of members had recently begun considering legal action against the group after they performed the song at the Corruption Eradication Commission's Jakarta office last week. Unfortunately, one of them has been caught accepting a bribe and so the prospect of litigation has suddenly evaporated.
As writer for the The Jakarta Post commented:
The problem with our lawmakers is they are not used to critics. Nearly half of them date back to the New Order era, when lawmakers were protected from criticism by the heavy-handed tactics of the regime.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
RetroWorld
Welcome to RetroWorld, also known as Indonesia 2008. Recent government initiatives have been to pass legislation that will impose draconian penalties on bloggers who are a little too outspoken and to ban YouTube, MySpace and some other sites that have hosted a recent video that was critical of Islam. The ban is very easy to circumvent and only serves to further diminish the country's status within the international community. If the government's reaction is to ban any site, blog, video-sharing or social networking site that features anything that is critical of Islam, then it may as well ban Internet access completely as Burma effectively does.
The blogging legislation is perhaps most disturbing because it threatens to muzzle the burgeoning community of Indonesian bloggers at a time when freedom of expression elsewhere within the country is already under threat. The black cloud of Wahabism is growing darker and more ominous within the country and continues to intrude into the everyday lives of Indonesian citizens. The latest craziness involves a call for masseuses in Jakarta to wear some sort of chastity belt when they are working in massage parlours. Apparently, such devices are already in use in East Java. Jakarta is a relative oasis in the surrounding desert of Islamic conservatism but maybe not for much longer.
The blogging legislation is perhaps most disturbing because it threatens to muzzle the burgeoning community of Indonesian bloggers at a time when freedom of expression elsewhere within the country is already under threat. The black cloud of Wahabism is growing darker and more ominous within the country and continues to intrude into the everyday lives of Indonesian citizens. The latest craziness involves a call for masseuses in Jakarta to wear some sort of chastity belt when they are working in massage parlours. Apparently, such devices are already in use in East Java. Jakarta is a relative oasis in the surrounding desert of Islamic conservatism but maybe not for much longer.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)