Iran Plans To Launch an 'Islamic Google Earth' 181
Shipwack sends this quote from the Guardian:
"The Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool for western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks on the 3D mapping service one step further — by planning the launch of an 'Islamic' competitor. ... The minister, however, gave little information on what he meant by an Islamic 3D map. 'We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the U.S., England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel].' Experts, however, have serious doubts about the project. An IT consultant who has worked on Iran's national internet project in the past said the announcement was merely an excuse to obtain funds and secure working contracts for the future. 'They have claimed to run their service in four months and said their data centre capacity will reach Google's size in three years,' he said. 'Three-year project, no business model and only relying on government funding, a piece of cake indeed. To have a data centre with such capacity and security level they need power stations, cooler systems, bandwidth, etc, which will require billions of dollars of investment that doesn't fit with Iran's sanctions-hit economy.'"
I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?
I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.
Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...
Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?
French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes (Score:4, Interesting)
Leave aside that the US would still be a British colony if the French hadn't supported the revolutionaries as part of their war with Britain.
The reason we've had the "France surrenders" and "Freedom Fries" memes spread around by the US press since 2002 or so is that France didn't support Bush's war on Iraq, and the Bush League didn't want people comparing the Iraqi resistance to the WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders. Bush's propaganda push was that after the US beat Saddam, any Iraqis who didn't hail us as liberators were terrorists who deserve to be stomped into the ground because they hated our freedom.
Oh, yeah, the French Foreign Legion? They were colonialists who were generally on the side of evil, but they were also badasses.
Re:French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes (Score:4, Interesting)
WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders
And a tiny fraction of the French population, much of which instead spent the war handing over their Jews to the Nazis, especially the (100% French) right-wing Vichy regime. Compare this to the Danes, who also pre-emptively surrendered and were generally nonviolent during their occupation - unlike France, they were not a military/industrial empire and would have been overrun no matter what - but helped nearly their entire Jewish population escape to Sweden and refused to cooperate with the Germans. After the war, France was treated as a "winner" in part because of the political smarts of de Gaulle, and in part to make them feel better and secure their cooperation against the Soviet Union, but in fact the war was won almost entirely by the US, UK (and affiliated nations), and USSR.
The "France surrenders" meme was around long before the run-up to the Iraq war, which is part of why it caught on so quickly (it didn't hurt that a large fraction of Americans are credulous morons happy to believe anything bad about everyone who opposed Bush's lunacy). WWII wasn't the last time France was completely embarrassed; the battle of Dien Bien Phu was another low point.