Ladies and gentlemen… behold… the newest Danish cartoon crisis. Except this time it comes in two fantastic parts:

1. Part “Israeli conspiracy theory to brain wash our youth into only caring for immoral strippers” courtesy of many of the so called “parties” who only have a say on such silly events, including leftist, socialist, Muslim Brotherhood, conservative, and so on.

2. Part “THEY’RE ENCOURAGING HOMOSEXUALITY!”, courtesy of a lot of the other parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, conservative, etc.

Around these two points, both teams have managed to rally a number of people around them. Because naturally, people never really bother thinking about anything.

You know, regardless of whether it matters at all if Publicis was the organizer or not (because after all, read the news), the actual organizer is called Les Visiteurs du Soir, and it’s a French company that you can read about here.

وعلى عكس ماهو متوقع من - المدونين السعوديين - وبالأخص مناصري حرية الرأي و التعبير ، فقد كانت ردة الفعل ضعيفة للغاية إن لم تكن على استحياء ، وهو مشهد أعاد لي بعض الذكريات بخصوص ردود فعل المدونين الضعيفة ضد الأحداث التي تُهمنا أكثر كـ مسلمين ، مثل موضوع الرسوم الدنماركي و “باب” الفاتيكان وغيرها ، لاسيما عند مقارنتها بـ ردود الفعل التي نشاهدها عندما يدور الحديث حول اصلاح سياسي لا يحمل من الإصلاح سوى الإسم ، أو قيادة المرأة ، أو حقوق الإنسان، أو إنتقاد للسياسات الداخلية للبلد - هل غلاء الأسعار أهم ، أم الدفاع عن الإسلام ؟ -

Translation, referring to the dutch movie “Fitna”, which I hate to be mentioning, as in my humble opinion, it is not worth the mention:

“Contrary to what is expected from Saudi bloggers, especially those who are supporters of freedom of expression, the subtle reaction has brought back memories of similar subtle reactions from the bloggers when it came to events that matter the most to us as Muslims, such as the Danish cartoons and the Vatican “door” and other similar events. Especially when compared to the huge reactions that we see when it comes to discussions about political reform, women driving, human rights, and criticism of internal politics. What is more important- the rising cost of living, or defending Islam?”

Hattip: Saudi Jeans (who has an awesome blog, by the way).

Due to the new copyright legislation that are taking effect in Europe, torrent-site The Pirate Bay is moving to the desert of Sinai in Egypt. Besides local connectivity in Egypt, they also have connectivity to Saudi-Arabia and are planning to install a link to Jordan. This could be an April’s Fools joke, but it was enough to get me to want to give my 2 cents on copyrights.

Personally, I dislike copyrights, although I’m in the creative field. I feel like they are just another way to enforce cultural imperialism.

Anyway, cultural imperialism aside, when it comes to music, piracy is not all that bad for musicians. In fact, research has shown that less popular artists actually profit from piracy. A study found that the 75% of the artist actually profit from piracy, with the most popular artist (top 25%) selling less records, while the remaining 75% of all artists actually profit from filesharing.

In my personal opinion, the answer to moral creativity is copyleft.

Copyleft is a form of licensing used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. Using copyleft, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.

(why let all your ideas die with you? Current copyright laws prevent anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death, live in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation.)

They call this system “permission culture”.

This blog, for example, is licensed under a Creative Commons license. All the content I produce, the photographs I take, and the designs I design that I show on this space are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which means anyone has the right to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to remix it — to adapt the work, under the following conditions: attribution, noncommercial, and share alike, meaning that if you alter, transform, or build upon anything on my blog, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

I have already blogged about Radiohead’s experiment with copyrights with their seventh album, In Rainbows, released in October 2007. Radiohead’s profits from the digital download of In Rainbows outstripped combined profits from digital downloads of all of the band’s other studio albums.

With no petrol and landspace, a lot of wars and poverty, lack of education and resources, I think that spreading a healthy culture of information is our best bet. On one level, I do not usually deal with movie piracy because I do not watch movies, but I believe that having cheap access to movies in a country like Jordan helps in widening horizons and keeping the youth acquainted with what’s happening around the world. On another level, books, softwares, tutorials, and other informational material that a person like myself uses to learn and develop are locked by copyrights due to their very expensive prices.  Unless content-providers like Adobe make special packages for the developing world that’s tagged with much cheaper prices, then I really don’t see a way around piracy.

Here’s to creative freedom, digital freedom, and a world where ideas and knowledge are not owned or controlled, where people respect acknowledge original creators for their intellectual property due to inherent morals and respect rather than laws.

Because of this. And this. And that.

R: Can you believe they are going to raise the prices of fuel AGAIN? And that they’re raising the prices of electricity by 36%?

I: A person who makes 700 JDs these days is like a person making 300 JDs two years ago. Damn it, how are we supposed to live?

K: I think we should all go and try to get a job in America. Or at least get married to an American to get the passport. It’s impossible to stay here. Yeah, America it is.

I: Yeah, we should start applying!

K: That’s what they’re trying to do anyway… to get us to immigrate abroad.

I didn’t write anything on the occasion that marks Women’s Day, mainly because I have not been in a very optimistic mood lately as I cannot help but feel that the Arab world keeps sinking deeper every year.

There isn’t much good news to celebrate; women were not granted any life changing rights since the Kuwaiti women were allowed to vote back in 2004. Honor crimes are still at the same average in Jordan, and article 340 of the Penal Code is still not discussed. The women quota is still the only way to give women power in parliament (save for this year, where we had one exception) and Arab women hold 3.5 percent of parliamentary seats. We still can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. We still can’t give our nationalities to our children. For a more comprehensive list of how we still haven’t gotten anywhere, you can read this post courtesy of Tololy.

I will also share this plea, by a Saudi woman called Wajeha Al-Huwaider:

For those who don’t speak Arabic:

(via)

When words fail you. When you can’t have a decent discussion while visiting family because your eyes keep wandering to images of a flaming Ghaza on the muted television. When you feel guilty of posting a random post because you feel like you should be doing something more solid and more productive- something of value to those poor souls. When you can’t think of anything but that these people are your people, with only religion and barriers keeping you apart. When you spend the whole month thinking of what a horrible, unjust world this is, and how tiny and worthless you really are, sitting in the comfort of your living room, trying to avoid news channels, discussing the weather.

Tomorrow, you will get up, put your clothes on, drive to work, have your morning cup of coffee, and have the same day you have had for a while.

The world is an ironic place. You can give up once you realize that everything is futile, sit back, and decide to put all your faith in god, who will “solve everything eventually”. You can give up once you realize that everything is futile, sit back, and decide to spend your life working for your own needs and desires, building a happy future for you and your immediate family, all the while becoming a selfish, self-centered, quite futile person in the process. Or you can talk, discuss, and analyze the matters of the world for 50 years, spending your time arguing with labour parties and NGOs, then look back in your old age and realize that all those pointless years wasted on philosophizing have been as futile as really doing nothing at all.

I’m not sure why I find this extremely interesting, but I’m very inspired by an autistic girl called Carly Fleischmann, who is unable to speak a word due to her autism. Two years ago, working with pictures and symbols on a computer keyboard, she started typing and spelling out words, and the computer became her voice.

“It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms,” Carly said through the computer. “It is hard  tobe autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can’t talk or I  actdifferently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them. Autism is hard because you want to act one way, but you can’t always do that. It’s sad that sometimes people don’t know that sometimes I can’t stop myself and they get mad at me. If I could tell people one thing about autism it would be that I don’t want to be this way. But I am, so don’t be mad. Be understanding.”

[link]

I’m totally siding with Wikipedia. History doesn’t just belong to modern-day Muslims, especially if it is related to Islam as done by Muslims of other centuries. After all, modern-day Muslims are a very, very small part of all the Muslims in history, and these modern-day Muslims have absolutely no right to try to negate the history of Islam’s other Muslims.

Historical negation aside, these images were taken from Islamic manuscripts intended to actually SPREAD Islam by using images when most people in the world did not know how to write or read. That actually makes them a pretty lofty cause as far as Islam is concerned, because they did manage to convert some Berber, Persian, and East Asians to Islam.

So yeah, go Wikipedia. [link]

Well. For real. In 2008. A Saudi woman convicted of witchcraft. SERIOUSLY. I don’t know whether to laugh or sob.

More on The Black Iris.