Greek Blog Aggregator Arrested 180
arcanumas writes to tell us that Greek authorities have raided the house of Antonis Tsipropoulos, administrator of the blog aggregation site Blogme.gr. His hard drive was seized and he was arrested. The impetus was a satiric website, not named in the stories, that apparently offended a Greek public figure (also unnamed). The site in question was not hosted by Tsipropoulos but was merely linked to by his RSS fed. From the first article: "The developing story coincides with the Internet Governance Forum being hosted in Athens this week, to be attended by Internet luminaries, entrepreneurs, and activists like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Joi Ito and featuring panels on Openness and Freedom of Expression."
Typical (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Monsters (Score:5, Interesting)
Religion, as a whole, is a very bad thing to base government off of because it is so absolutist. "This is the word of God. You can't argue with God. The gov't is God's will on Earth, so arguing with the gov't is like arguing with God, you heretic." The problem is, God isn't around to run things and the people that do, in His name, are frequently bloody autocrats.
Re:Monsters (Score:3, Interesting)
It's "southernness".
In general, "southern" countries, that is, countries which do not experience overly cold climate have in common the fact that democracy is either poorly developped or a newfangled phenomenon (think of Spain, Greece and Portugal who ditched their fascist dictatorships [often installed by the US] around 30 years ago).
In these countries, the mild climate means that one can live for cheap, as one does not need an elaborate house to keep him warm during the winter.
Thus, the necessity of work is less ingrained in southern populations, and this is reflected by the presence of stupid religions that do not push hard towards hard work (scatholicism, orthododoxy or islam), and actually suppress the accumulation of wealth (for a devout scatholic, making money is a one-way reserved ticket to hell; I recall seeing in a scatholic school book that "money is the devil's dung" [actual french: l'argent est le crottin du diable]).
Contrast this to northern protestant countries where wealth is not only welcome, but necessary for survival in the winter; hence, it's not surprising that protestantism evolved this way because when you have to bust your arse all year long to insure that you won't freeze in winter, any jerk who comes along and tells you that you oughta share with the poor is going to attain #1 grade asshole status pretty quickly...
In southern countries, democracy is underdevelopped also because only a few people managed to hold a disproportionate amount of influence, because they alone worked harder than the rest of the people whose religion does not push them towards hard-work. Hence governments are more tilted towards the oligarchy and the kind of stupid banana-republic antics southern countries are well known for.
The greek blog aggregator crackdown is yet another illustration of this principle that little chickenshit dictators can pop-up everywhere (a good example is the sicilian and calabrese mafias of southern Italy) and are able to bamboozle authorities into silencing critics (interestingly, this principle is also alive and well in the US, too, hardly a southern scatholic country in principle).