Iran's fruitloop of a President starts blogging and the FAQs of Islam

Yes, it's true - the holocaust denying, genocide supporting, non-transparent nuclearphile President of the Islamic Republic of Iran is now blogging - and using technology from the great Satan to do so. He even has a poll on whether the US and Israel are trying to start another word (sic) war, which is running 56% AGAINST the notion (probably helped by the Daily Telegraph publishing the blog details).

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So go on, comment on his blog if you can, and show him how unwelcome he is on cyberspace. Remember he advocates wiping out another state - wiping out its people, and he hates Jews just as Hitler did. He also advocates Islamist fundamentalism applied as law... you will find this with a couple of clicks from his blog in the FAQs on Islam posted on the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's site. That gives you some interesting reading.

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This includes the beautiful statements like:

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"Q: What is Allah’s ordinance regarding the deviant Bahā’ī sect in cases of car, furniture, flower and the like which have nothing to do with purity or najāsah?

A: Any sort of social intercourse with the deviant and misleading Bahā’ī sect should be avoided."

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Nice people.

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"Q: Is it prohibited to use American products in general?

A: Any transaction with a company whose profit is used in helping the enemies of Islam and Muslims or for supporting the Zionist regime is not permissible. "

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Well damn well enforce it then, be strict about it, don't buy anything from the western world, it will keep you in your place.

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"Q: I would like to know if wearing a tie is ḥarām?

A: It is prohibited to wear a necktie that contributes to the spreading of western culture. "

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A prominent Green party member once said that ties separate the heart from the head hmm.

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"Q: What is the ruling of listening to women’s singing whose words and tune are neither lahwī nor rubbish?

A: If women’s singing is of the type which is sexually exciting or listening to it brings corruptive consequences, one is not allowed to listen to it."

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Poor Shakira. Although it seems singing isn't allowed at all given the following answers.

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"Q: What is your opinion about listening to children’s songs? Are the children allowed to sing for their homeland, parents, etc. while using singing equipments?A: Listening to ghinā’ is impermissible no matter whether it is sung by children. Also, the parents should not provide their children with musical instruments to be used in songs even though children are not bound to religious duties. "

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Ghina means songs. So you cannot listen to songs, even those sung by children, and children shouldn't be exposed to musical instruments. Don't try to sing or hum to yourself too, you heretic!

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Q: A not very religious Muslim recently became faithful. Is he allowed to sing/hum — to himself or in front of his friends — the songs he learnt by heart?

A: He is not allowed to sing the ḥarām ghinā’ even to himself, let alone in front of his previous friends.

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Don't be wearing dark blue clothes girls, unless you get attention - from dark blue fetishists!:

"Q1355: Is it permissible for a young woman to wear clothes that are dark blue in color?

A: There is no objection to it in itself unless it attracts the attention of other people and leads to bad consequences."

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you can figure the theme here - women make sure you are wallpaper and not seen:

"Q1357: Is it permissible for a devout woman to wear glittering black shoes?

A: There is no harm in wearing any type/color of shoes unless the color or the design attracts the attention of other people, or makes her conspicuous."

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If you had any doubts about its sexism, check this out:

Q1251: Is it permissible for the woman to use contraceptives without the permission of her husband?

A: It is problematic.

Q1252: A man with four children underwent an operation of vasectomy, without the consent of his wife. Is he guilty for not obtaining his wife’s approval?

A: Its permissibility does not depend on the consent of the wife and he is not liable.

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So a wife can't do what her husband can do. Her body is owned by her husband, and before that her father or grandfather. Shame we see so few feminist activists burning Iranian flags or getting angry about this. Lucky female circumcision isn't compulsory:

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"Q1299: Is girls’ circumcision obligatory?

A: It is not obligatory. "

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However, Islamic Iran seems to believe in intellectual property, more than some in the West:

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Q: Some of the computer soft-wares work for 15 days only and are made by foreign companies. What is the ruling of breaking the protecting system of these soft-wares to make them free and work forever or taking the ready-made broken file? Knowing that these soft-wares are useful and are so expensive in the market and one can download them from the company’s site to be tested on the computer. Moreover, when breaking the protecting system, nothing is stolen from the company or the market and by this act I will benefit many people who cannot afford the soft-wares’ price. Also, what can I do with the cracks I used? Can I just use them instead of making them?

A: As long as the soft-ware companies – be it foreign or local – have the right that nobody can use these programs by breaking their protection without their permission; it is impermissible to break the protection and use these programs without the consent of the producing company. The mere intending to benefit people by breaking or high prices and inability of most people to take advantage of these programs due to their price does not justify, according to shar‘, violating others’ legal rights. As per the crack you have used until now, you should acquire the agreement of the original company in this regard; otherwise, you are not allowed to continue with using them.

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So, that is the redeeming feature of the regime, it enslaves the population, hangs teenage girls for sex, bans singing, but hey Microsoft can relax, it doesn't support piracy (although you can't buy their software as Microsoft no doubt supports anti-Muslim activities somehow, probably by paying enormous amounts of tax to the Federal government).

Apparently 9 is the age of puberty for girls and 15 for boys, which also represents when they can be tried and sentenced like adults.

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Some people damned Bush for calling these people Islamofascists - look at all of the rules of fundamentalist Islam and tell me that this allows room for people to live their own lives - it is a form of slavery, because some men believe their ghost is a reason to kill. This is a political system and culture that says that children shouldn't be allowed musical instruments - by the end of the 21st century NO regime should be ruled by people who are such stoneage sexist joyless murderous control freaks.

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How deranged does one have to be, to believe that one's life should be micromanaged by rulings from old men who still think women are inferior?

Syria on the warpath

According to the Daily Telegraph The President of Syria appears to be wanting to fill his father's boots as a warmongering murderer.

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"Peace loving" Syria is talking about military action to recapture the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights are land occupied by Israel following the Six Day War, because ever since Israel was founded in 1948, Syria used the land (which comprises a hillside and plateau) as a base to shell Israeli villages and shoot at farmers. Israel has kept the land for self defence purposes, and although many of the Arab residents departed during the war, it now has a stable population of around 30,000.
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If Syria attacks Israel to recapture the Golan Heights, expect the peace movement to be muted - the leftist anti-Americans will say it is "legitimate", showing all of their pretenses about how war is always bad to be vapid ravings of hypocrites.
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Syria's regime, of course, should be subject to villification, flag burning and effigies of its President Bashar el-Assad being burnt. It wont happen though.
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You see Syria's record of being a totalitarian one-party state, which tightly controls all media, all protests and arrests without trial opponents, tortures them and imprisons them. Journalists writing anything critical of the regime face jail terms.
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Syria maintains a permanent "state of emergency" justifying Muharabat (secret police) action with impunity.
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It is led by the second eldest son of Hafez el-Assad, its President from 1970 to 2000. Assad applied hereditary succession, to this one-party state (not unlike North Korea), and Assad ("our leader forever" in propaganda) cultivated a personality cult surrounding him and his family's achievements. The eldest son, Basil, was meant to succeed his father, but died in a car accident - thankfully - as he had a reputation for being ruthless, getting family members to kidnap girls for him. Bashar is a trained opthalmologist, and not a military man. He is likely facing much pressure internally to be "tough" as the likelihood of a coup is significant - after all, the Assad clan have many enemies and are members of the minority Alawite ethnic group - they are not Arabs. Alawis have done well from the regime, much to the chagrin of some Arabs.

Bashar had to have the rubber-stamp "Parliament" change the constitution within hours following his father's death to allow him to succeed - given he was 34 and the old constitution required the President to be at least 40. He was elected with 97.29% of the vote with no other candidates - wonderful stuff!

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So Bashar is being the tough dude. He presumably will waltz over the UN Peacekeeping troops on the sliver of the Golan Heights between Syrian and Israeli control and start a war. He could have got back most of the Golan Heights peacefully, as Israel offered it to Syria in 1999 peace talks. Syria demanded all of the land, Israel refused so they parted.

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Israel conquered the Golan Heights fair and square, as Syria used the land to attack Israel. If Syria wants it back it should simply meet Israel's demands - cease supported Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad, cease interference in Lebanon and recognise Israel's right to exist. If Syria attacks Israel, Israel should respond with as much force as is necessary to clip Damascus's wings. Of course, if Syria uses its chemical weapon arsenal - then there will bloody regime change in Damascus, I suspect Israel will bomb the daylights out of as many strategic targets as possible in southern Syria.

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Bashar should abandon this policy of confrontation and follow Gaddafi - he should liberalise his country, negotiate a peace treaty with Israel, leave Lebanon alone and give up supporting terrorists. He is only 41, he has just enough time to be thought of by Syrians and the world as the hero who changed his country from a totalitarian nightmare to a more open society. His father was feared and hated, if he wants to avoid a military coup, he might try to burn his father's boots and make some more comfortable shoes of his own - and stop stepping on Syrian citizens in the process.

Stories about life in Syria

Buy New Zealand campaign - racism by another name

Is there anything more stupid than a Buy New Zealand Made campaign?
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It is about as clever as the Invercargill City Council advertising “shag a Southlander”, or Manukau City advertising “Buy Manukau Made”. It is saying “it is good because it is made in New Zealand”, not because of quality of the product, after sales service or price.
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So is something is more expensive but NZ made, then you should buy it because it is better to do that than buy something else with the money you wasted on nationalism. It is better to buy something inferior because of nationalism.
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It is racist because it is saying that products made by NZers are better than those made by foreigners in one respect – their origin.
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No, it is not about economics. The childish theory of keeping money in the country is sheer nonsense. It is better to maximise utility – better to buy 3 pairs of socks for $3 than buy 1 pair, or better to buy one pair for $1 and spend $2 on something else you want. That is how we are better off. It is a concept the Greens and NZ First don’t understand because they are both xenophobic at heart – both hating “foreign investment” and suspicious of “foreign made” goods. The Greens because they see blind children stitching shoes, and NZ First because they see hard working Asians staying up late in the sweatshop looking determinedly like they want to fight another war by working harder and destroying “our jobs”.
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Imagine if there was a “hire a New Zealander” campaign, “donate to New Zealand charities” campaign or a “make phone calls to New Zealanders” campaign – all could be justified on the basis of “keeping money at ‘ome”.

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You might like supporting a local business because the owner is friendly, the product is good and you can guarantee quality, or maybe you are always able to find someone who can help you. However, if you take this to its logical conclusion, you'll go to the most local shop to buy your groceries, because it is a "local person" living in "your community", and you should "support" them.

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My advice is simple. Buy what you want from whoever sells you it for the best deal, wherever in the world that seller is. Judge products on overall quality and price - remember, odds are that the New Zealand business owner is as likely as you are to want to spend profits on buying an ipod, a holiday to Europe, a new car or new clothes. You don't benefit from shortchanging your choice by applying anti-foreign bigotry to it.

State funding of political parties?

Michael Cullen, Jordan Carter and the NZ leftwing political world is now promoting state funding of political parties. This already happens for TV and radio advertising and is immoral. Libertarianz only takes the funding because it is not allowed to buy its own.

Now the motivation for promoting state funding is as follows:

1. Distract the media and public from the scandal around funding pledge cards.

2 It means parties can give up that tedious task of asking for funding from people who may otherwise choose to buy a beer, a pair of shoes or a movie ticket. That takes a lot of effort that people in parties would rather spend socialising moaning about the state of the government. It enables parties to be lazy, to be out of touch with grassroots supporters, and simply be corporate political bodies that exist because the public is forced to pay for them.

3. It means that parties that are supported by the most productive and successful (typically wanting less government), don't do better than those supported by the least productive, parasitical and statist. In other words, the left's supporters are poorer because they vote for governments to take from the more successful to give to the less.

4.. To remove allegations of corruption and pork-barrel politics with funders wanting "payback" from the party they help elect (Labour never did that for its supporters now did it?).

5. To save the trade union movement buckets of money it would rather spend on beer, shoes and movie tickets. Far better to get the government to collect it from members and non-members by force.

Jordan Carter's approach to state funding of political parties suggests it would see funding allocated according to the votes cast at the previous election. Given it would mean parties couldn't receive large donations, this means:

1. The incumbent has an advantage. Even if it is deeply unpopular, it will get the greatest amount of funding. So funding will be biased towards NOT changing government, or Parliament.

2. New parties are fucked. Even if they are dripfed some crumbs, the likes of the New Zealand Party, New Labour Party/Alliance/Greens, NZ First, United, ACT, Maori Party and Libertarianz will get little. Just what Labour (and I suspect National) would simply love. It is destroying MMP through the back door.

3. Personal freedom of citizens to donate to causes they support is destroyed. What if I wanted to give a party thousands of dollars? Why the fuck is it the business of any other party, the public or the government if I willingly support the campaign? The only answer is...

ENVY.

Sanctimonious pricks who support state funding of political parties are envious that other parties do better than theirs. They are envious that people with more money (they probably made it by oiling factories with the blood of working class children) HAVE more money and DON'T give it to them, they sometimes give it to National or ACT, or even NZ First or the Maori Party. They give to Labour too of course, but less often.

Just check out this quote:

"The right stands for the interests of those with money and power. The left stands for redistributing money and power more fairly."

That's right Jordan, the "right" were born with it. Full of hand wringing Montgomery Burns and Uncle Scrooges, money they must have not earnt "rightfully". Whereas the left are so honourable - they call theft, "redistribution" (Robert Mugabe calls it that too), and power redistribution means removing individual freedom and making it political control - fairer power means power to bureaucrats and politicians.

State funding of political parties is wrong because it is fundamentally immoral to force citizens to pay for organisations whose goals and objectives they do not believe in. Would it have been good to force people on the left to pay for Labour and National in 1990, when both parties were pushing economic liberalism? Is it right that the last election result should decide funding to campaign for the next one?

How about this one? Would you have been happy being forced to fund Graham Capill's campaign for election in 1996, 1999 and 2002, how about Destiny NZ in 2005, how about the National Front?

and shouldn't political parties who can't rustle together funds outside the state, simply be allowed to wither?

Those who support state funding of political parties need to be transparent - they are envy ridden Marxists. They oppose parties they disagree with receiving more voluntary donations, and oppose it because they don't believe the people who GAVE the money truly earnt it or deserved to choose what to do with it. Accusations of corruption from money donated by business are equally laid at those who get money from unions, or tribes.

Democracy is about individual votes counting -and about people who are like minded supporting political parties through either donations of money or time and effort. The state should remain separate from that - and parties survive, grow or die because of voluntary effort only.

Those who oppose that - oppose liberal democracy - they support statist democracy, where the state protects and supports the dominant incumbent political views.

Stroessner dies at last

It would be nice to collect a set - Castro would be good to follow, but at least for now, there is cause to celebrate - Alfredo Stroessner is dead. Who? you say?

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Most of you wouldn’t have heard of Alfredo Stroessner. He was the military dictator that told Paraguayuan what to do for decades, from 1954 to 1989. He was living in exile in Brazil since he was deposed, and finally at 93 the evil bastard is dead. He was the second longest lasting dictator in Latin America, after Castro – and fortunately Paraguay has been spared his brutal rule for 17 years now. (Where is Paraguay you might ask? Look it up!)
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He was no Marxist, he was an old-fashioned militaristic fascist dictator – the type the left loathes, quite rightly. He hated communism, and Paraguay maintained diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan because of it, with no relations with the USSR or any other Marxist state. The US was friendly towards Stroessner’s regime until the 1970s. Although he was fiscally prudent, his attitude to individual rights was increasingly abhorrent, with both the Carter and Reagan administrations having little time for him. His sheltering of former Nazis, like Josef Mengele contributed to this (he was of German descent which explains this mostly German language anti-Stroessner site). Despite what this website says, he was no US puppet - the closest he got was being warm to Lyndon Johnson.
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He deposed the centre-right democratically elected government of Federico Chavez, because Chavez wanted to arm the Police! From then on, Paraguay lived under military dictatorship. There were “elections” which were either fraudulent or with only one candidate. His Colorado Party would dominate politics for decades to come.
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Stroessner killed and tortured his political opponents, practiced corruption and suppressed freedom of speech. Several thousand are estimated to have been murdered, and many more detained without trial and tortured. He forcibly assimilated the
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The only good thing that can be said is that he wasn’t economically insane, like Julius Nyerere or Castro. He commissioned the Itaipu dam, currently the world’s largest operational hydro electric dam by generating capacity. This has enabled Paraguay to export electricity, a rare commodity for international trading. However, the ends do not justify the means - he believed he knew what was best for Paraguayuans and anyone who got in his way got hurt!

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The Aché people of Paraguay, an indigenous tribe, were subject to raids, kidnappings and enslavement by the army and a supportive weird Christian fundamentalist group - the New Tribes Mission, which sought to convert the Aché to Christianity. They were hunted down, enslaved and used for domestic chores and sexual purposes for years. It was somewhat genocidal, in that the regime and the New Tribes Mission essentially saw the Aché as inferior and able to be used for sport or slavery. The New Tribes Mission still exists, although the genocidal behaviour has ceased with the fall of the regime, and extensive publicity - the evil bastards continue to propagate their filthy philosophy to people who need something other than religion.

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Stroessner WAS the last South American dictator, but Hugo Chavez has that mantle now. However, the left love him, ignoring his treatment of political opponents, control of the media and confiscation of private property. HE is anti-American and that is the religion of much of the intelligentsia of the western world.

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Dictator of the month website