Stop having fun, too
The Iranian state is worried about the potential of subversive organization to the degree that having fun is banned. It might lead to something politically subversive.Iran Opens New Front in War on Fun
While the young Syrian activists who use the Web to organize and document antiregime demonstrations across the country are once again counting the cost, in lives, of continuing to pour into the streets, their counterparts in Iran, who helped to pave the way for such protests, are living with a form of repression that is less violent but in some ways far more efficient and demoralizing.
As the Iranian-American Web site Tehran Bureau reported this week, Iran’s government has recently started to crack down hard on young people who use Facebook to organize even mildly subversive gatherings, like mass water gun fights.
Last week, when hundreds of young men and women responded to Facebook invitations to meet at parks in two cities… and spray each other with water, the authorities intervened, stopping the fun and making several arrests, even though there was no overt sign that the gunplay was at all political…
As Jason Rezaian explained in a blog post for Monocle, after the authorities broke up the gathering of about 3,000 people in Tehran’s Water and Fire Park, “Tehran’s chief of police, Hossein Sajednia, boasted … that the rule breakers had been identified and would be punished for actions that both ‘opposed Islamic values’ and 'disrupted social order.’”…
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Labels: civil society, Iran, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:22 AM
1 Comments:
Not only in Iran are water fights apparently illegal.
English cops arrest man for planning water-fight via Blackberry Messenger
"Police in Essex, England have charged a 20-year-old man with "encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence" (under the 2007 Serious Crime Act) because he used Blackberry Messenger to encourage people to attend a public water fight…"
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