Saudi Arabia Implements Electronic Tracking System For Women 591
dsinc writes "Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements. Since last week, Saudi women's male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together. 'The authorities are using technology to monitor women,' said columnist Badriya al-Bishr, who criticised the 'state of slavery under which women are held' in the ultra-conservative kingdom. Women are not allowed to leave the kingdom without permission from their male guardian, who must give his consent by signing what is known as the 'yellow sheet' at the airport or border."
Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions.
Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't happen, and remember this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.
We need to frack (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to get our fracking industry going full bore, convert all semi's to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Let China and Russia keep the straights of Hormuz clear. Let the Saudies fall back into the decrepit 3rd world pit it deserves to be.
Re:We need to frack (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to get our fracking industry going full bore, convert all semi's to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Let China and Russia keep the straights of Hormuz clear. Let the Saudies fall back into the decrepit 3rd world pit it deserves to be.
No... We need to get our bio-diesel industry going full bore, convert all vehicles to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Fracking is simply the equivalent to swirling the straw around the bottom of the cup, trying to suck up the last dribbles of milkshake. If you have to frack, the well is dry.
Re:Apartheid (Score:2, Insightful)
When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions. Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.
Because it goes against Political Correctness.
See Apartheid was done by white people against black people. Political Correctness says it's okay to be against that. Matter of fact it's mandatory.
But sharia law is implemented by "brown people" against other "brown people" and comes from a non-Western mostly non-white religion. So Political Correctness says that anyone opposing it must be a racist. Political Correctness does not allow for a principled stand against anything. It is strictly based on group identity.
So if you think treating women like shit just because they are women is brutal and oppressive, well you're just oppressing those poor brown people by trying to enforce your Western norms on their culture. How dare you say that no person should systematically abuse any other person for any reason? Who are you to judge?! So on and so on... It's why nothing ever changes.
When the day comes that we finally figure out that WE'RE ALL HUMAN FUCKING BEINGS then perhaps more of us can be adults about this. Until then the group-identity hypersensitivity will reign supreme, in its shrill, foaming-at-the-mouth unreasonable "that's so offensive!" sort of way.
The only thing dumber than Political Correctness are the people who don't question it.
Re:Dangerously spreading islamic radicalism (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing about half the population doesn't like this idea. But that half can't vote so who cares about them.
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
Won't happen, and remember this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.
Sure, just like Islam is the "religion of peace" even though, of the 120 or so active shooting wars happening today, Muslims are involved in over 100 of them.
At least during the Crusades and the Inquisition, nobody went around talking about how the Catholic Church was the "institution of peace". It's like the farther back in time you go, the more sense the average person had.
Re:This will be reality in all countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
... if you let the insane Muslims invade them.
Just ask France. France has entire districts run by Muslims that even the police are afraid to enter. In their own country. France is not alone here. It's spreading across Europe.
These are generally not people who assimilate into their new culture melting-pot style. These are people who take over by having a drastically superior birth rate.
I'll give the Muslims credit for one thing - they're smart in that realistic sense, same way the Chinese are. They won't fuck over their own nations with psychotic immigration policies just to prove how "inclusive" they are. We do. Perhaps they deserve to survive in a way that we don't.
No culture that doesn't preserve itself has ever survived, big surprise there. No, valuing and preserving your own culture is NOT wrong in any way and feeling guilty about that is just the kind of plain insanity that's so common these days. It's only wrong if you try to stop someone else from doing the same.
Re:That's a waste of resources (Score:4, Insightful)
- kill them all
This is the best of all of those solutions. Think about it .. it doesn't take any resources at all to implement, and in a generation or so Saudi Arabia will have totally cured itself of all those pesky upstart women!
Re:Apartheid (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this a patented method...? :)
Really, do muslim men have such small dicks & huge, over-inflated egos, that they cannot keep their wimen in check with flowers, chocolate & pretty lies? *duck*
Seriously, this is an entire country supporting gender-terrorism (there, I said it first!), but that's ok, because they have a 'state religion' to hide behind & rationalise an oppressive law??? Isn't it high time you yanks stopped chasing the oil/money & started disbanding all state religious leaderships in the world with your anti-WOMDs & laser-guided asshole destroyers...? Just please, for GOD'S SAKE, don't turn them into representative demoncracies FFS!
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but we need their oil. Oil is more important that women's rights, obviously.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
To leave China, you need an exit visa. This is also in contravention of UN declaration of human rights. Would you expect a trade embargo against the Chinese too?
Its even worse in Saudi Arabia .. according to the great and powerful wikepedia Exit Visas [wikipedia.org] are required by foreign workers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar
Re:Allies... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's easy to miss... When Israel engages in ethnic cleansing, the West calls it "self defense".
Re:Dangerously spreading islamic radicalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Firstly, genetics isn't the only form of hereditary. Cultural values are transmitted from parents to children - including attitudes to women. Secondly, the GP was talking about Muslims, which is a religious group, not a racial group.
So, yeah, you're stupid on two counts.
Re:Newsflash! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Saudi Arabia (Score:2, Insightful)
That's great, but what do you think the ashfelt and tarmac that you cycle on is made of? Pixie dust?
Re:We need to frack (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, it's just not conveniently located at all the right places.
But give me 10 nuclear power plants and I can make all the fresh water you want.
Re:We need to frack (Score:5, Insightful)
We KNOW wind, solar, wave & geothermal work. We know a number of alternate bio-fuels work. We know natural gas works. We know hydrogen & electrical power sources work, the ultimate power source notwithstanding. We know nuclear fission reactors work, are relatively safe (I don't want to argue the point) & produce far less pollution & environmental damage per Gigawatt than fossil fuels. We know that nuclear fusion works, we just haven't invested seriously enough into it to make it practical, which we could have done 20-25 years ago. We know a number of other fuel sources & methods that could work, if adapted to varying degrees.
However, we also know that oil works far, far more easily & cheaply than any of those right now & into the foreseeable future & is far more profitable, both in a monetary and geo-political sense. Not to mention the very deep pockets half the world's politicians & corporate heads have that touches on the oil industry in one way or another. It would perhaps be easier to get rid of electricity & copper wire as the main delivery method that powers all our devices, than oil as a primary fuel source right now. And that's saying something...
Fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also hilarious how the USA are all over supposed human rights in Russia and Belarus where people live with dignity, and overlook insane places like the Saudi Arabia is.
Re:Apartheid (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.
It is suppossed to. The problem is that men are in charge of the implementation and that's a common problem across the entire world. Regardless of the laws on the books, if the people interpreting them are not representative of the people they are applied to, the end result is going to be biased like health insurance paying for viagra but not birth control pills.
Re:Apartheid (Score:3, Insightful)
"If not, turn em around and play in the mud," at least according to the religious leadership of the Cathos and Mussies.
Re:View from common person (Score:3, Insightful)
"... let's just tell all of their women to come to the West where they will be appreciated."
How, pray tell, can they do that without permission from their (slave?) masters?
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but ALL religion is insidious and evil. It is a means of control for the unintelligent and mentally lazy.
With organized religion there is some truth to that.
... there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Ignoring the progress made by those who came before means you are doomed to constantly reinvent the wheel.
When an individual is seeking a way to express the more abstract parts of his or her nature, what is called spirituality, and finds that some of the best real teachers had one "persuasion" or another but tend to all say very similar things, as though they all saw the same things and put them in different terms according to different frameworks
The trick any real individual understands is to not get caught up with any particular language or framework, to instead focus on what truly advanced people have seen or done. It's the difference between looking at the finger that points, versus seeing the heavenly constellation it tries to point out.
Obviously individuals who really grok this tend not to herd together in large congregations with bylaws and conventions and someone to take the meeting minutes. For the most part, that is for the insecure who need to be surrounded by the like-minded to feel validated. Thus anyone who seriously questions or objects is a sort of threat. I for one say fuck that.
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you seriously blaming the lack of an international response to this situation on political correctness? I just want to be certain because you would win my "Who said the stupidest fucking thing I've heard all year contest" without an even remotely close competitor.
NOBODY fucks with Saudi Arabia because of oil. Period. Political correctness doesn't even enter the picture. If they so much as fart in public, the price of oil doubles. Seriously, pull your head out of your ass and wake the fuck up.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it too complicated. The international boycotts against South Africa were justified because they were effective. An embargo against Saudi Arabia would be ineffective, even if it were possible.
In short, South Africa was a small country that could be pushed around; Saudi Arabia makes too much oil for that to be possible. Any such demonstrations would be pointless and would cause more harm than the original insult.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't happen, and remember this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.
The only idiot who has said Sharia law will elevate women above western standards is you.
The reason this wont be condemned like Apartheid in South Africa is that Saudi Arabia has oil and South Africa didn't.
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but ALL religion is insidious and evil. It is a means of control for the unintelligent and mentally lazy.
You may have a problem if you are born into one of "those" societies, conditioned from day one and then having to work off that imprint.
Your statement is pretty arrogant, blaming laziness and stupidity as cause. There are people - smart and courageous - putting their life on the line in totalitarian societies.
It's probably more beneficial to understand the pathological mechanisms causing the exploit by "leaders" and exposing it.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
I would more classify it as the central component of religion—into which mythology and theology and laws can be plugged to create a full structured belief system—rather than a 'version' of it. It's the sense that there must be something greater out there, a result of human curiosity and imaginativeness untempered by the agnosticism of science.
(In computing, we call this a security vulnerability.)
That being said, spirituality doesn't make you go out and start wars or subjugate others. That takes someone with ambition. Ideally with a beard, narcissism, and/or early signs of schizophrenia (read: a Messiah complex or pathological liar claiming to have a Messiah complex.) In the absence of such god-kings, religions with destructive practices tend to limit themselves to the occasional virgin sacrifice. No one had to invent a religious motive to attack Carthage.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's fair to say that this specific situation has bugger all to to with "political correctness" in the sense you mean it.
It's about oil, "stability in the middle east" (ie oil), an "ally to the west" (ie oil).
It is not "political correctness". It is diplomacy in the worst sense of the word. The sense that allows countries to "smooth over" inconvenient realities and buddy up to the extent that dependency increases to the point becomes practically impossible to say "no". The "bleeding hearts" didn't get us here, the cold pragmatists did.
Political expediency is the problem not political correctness. The solution? Frankly I don't see an easy one.
They're just one step from... (Score:5, Insightful)
...taking them to the vet and "chipping" them.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newsflash! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's retarded.
You don't "give" people democracy.
They have to take it for themselves.
You can nudge, encourage, provide education, but ultimately "democracy from above" will never work, because it's a matter of culture and you can't have democracy if first you don't change the culture.
Dear Muslim world: (Score:5, Insightful)
as long as you treat half of your society like cattle, you are never going to have a happy, prosperous, or just culture.
Yes, I know: "honor," "dignity." Well why don't you let your women take care of that for themselves on their own.
The Chinese, the Indians, the Americans, the Europeans, they will advance. And you will fester. Because of your poor choices.
Regards,
the rest of the world
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite possibly true in the distant path. But demonstrably untrue since the Age of the Enlightenment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment) and the improvement in mankind's general condition from the accompanying industrial revolution.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
It is suppossed to. The problem is that men are in charge of the implementation and that's a common problem across the entire world. Regardless of the laws on the books, if the people interpreting them are not representative of the people they are applied to, the end result is going to be biased like health insurance paying for viagra but not birth control pills.
Really? So I now have two people within a mere 40mins of each other, one saying it does. Another saying it doesn't. Odd. Oh, as for your idea that it does? I take it that you've read that good book, and the various legal documents surrounding sharia. Especially the parts where a women's testimony is worth less than a man's, where rape is the women's fault and so on.
Don't be naive. It has nothing to do with "men who institute it." The entire system of sharia, is built around oppression, for the sake of oppression.
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
>> back then the average life expectancy was about 35. So if you didn't have kids young, you wouldn't be around to raise them for long.
Slight side note there. The average life expectancy may have been 35, but remove all the infant deaths (those dying aged 0-2 years old) and the average bounces way up into the mid-60's, not so massively different to today's.
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but ALL religion is insidious and evil. It is a means of control for the unintelligent and mentally lazy.
Completely true. But some religions are worse than others - and Islam is terrible.
Re:Apartheid (Score:3, Insightful)
They weren't idiots any more than anyone else is. You demonstrate what such a weapon can do, and they wouldn't have used it either.
They would've used them all the time. Just giving them the weapons, and showing them the immediate results, is not enough to deter future use.
In order to stop they would need a complete understanding of the environmental impacts, advanced medicine, genetics, complex systems, etc.
Even right now you have morons who can't figure out, or believe, how small the world actually is and how a single nuclear event can have widespread, long lasting consequences. Same people who believe the world is too large, complex, and that the Jesus would not allow it to happen.
If Galileo had problems explaining the Earth revolved around the Sun, just how hard do you think it would be to really explain the consequences of such weapons to people who were wholly ruled by superstition?
Re:Apartheid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apartheid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apartheid (Score:4, Insightful)
... Bronze Age morality that the world's mainstream religions have saddled us with
Stop slandering the Bronze Age - ancient Greece, where democracy was invented, was a Bronze Age society. Oppressing and enslaving people for "moral" reasons is an invention of a more advanced civilisation; the Greeks had slaves, but their slaves could win their freedom, unlike in the modern versions.
It is worth remembering also, that religion is constructed by people, and religious people wrote the stories in the holy books. It is wrong to say that religion makes people do things, whether they are good or bad. Good people do good things and bad people do bad things; and if they happen to be religious, then they will blame both on their religion, but it doesn't mean that it is true.
There was a time when the Muslim civilisation was the greatest on the planet, a beacon of knowledge and tolerance, while the Christian world was in the deepest darkness; now it is the other way round. This is not because of religion, race or any of the other stupid non-explanations - it is simply because of wealth and power. Freedom, democracy, tolerance and so on tend to seem like luxury items when you can barely find enough food or water each day. Perhaps it would be helpful if we stopped going on about what people in developing ought to do in terms of freedom, and instead concentrated on making it possible, by fighting poverty and corruption.
Re:Hmm ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They're just one step from... (Score:4, Insightful)
In modern US more that 200 thousand women are sexually assaulted each year http://www.rainn.org/statistics [rainn.org]
No, read it again. It indicates about 200 thousand PEOPLE are sexually assaulted each year.
About 100% of assaulters are men.
Factually false.
If we want to combat sexist prejudiced stereotype bullshit in society, we need combat all of it. And that includes the sexist notion that any man is "lucky" to have sex. The sexist notion that men cannot or do not refuse consent to sex. The sexist notion that men are not raped, and fucked-up definitions of "rape" which categorically deny the possibility of a man being raped (except by another man).
Lets look at a very recent survey [cdc.gov] done by the United States Center For Disease Control. It defines "Rape" as attempted or competed forcible penetration of the victim as well as drug/alcohol facilitated completed penetration of the victim. It reports lifetime "rape" rates at about 18.3% of all women and about 1.4% of all men. However this report has a brand new section, a category that has been implicitly excluded for pretty much all previous rape research. It's a category called "made to penetrate". I will remind you that "made to penetrate" does is EXCLUDED from the definition of "rape". The report gives a lifetime rate of 4.8% of all men "made to penetrate".
And lets be clear on what "made to penetrate" means. I was recently reading a message board which had nothing to do with sexuality where, out of the blue, someone commented on the stereotype that men cannot be rape victims, and posted a request for men to share their stories if they had ever been raped. A completely generic non-sex-related community with a fairly random sampling of male readers. Unsurprisingly most of the replies were anonymous. They included reports including a man raped at gunpoint, a man walking on campus in the dark being tasered by an unknown woman then handcuffed to a tree raped and tasered again to the rapist could remove the handcuffs and run off, multiple reports of men discovering their drink had been drugged and being unable to fight off their attacker, multiple reports of men being threatened with being accused of rape themselves if they did not submit - including a case where a man walked into his bedroom to find a naked woman demanding sex and when he resisted she deliberately scratched his neck and hands and threatening to claim he tried to rape her. The reports just went on and on. Those are just what I recall offhand.
Not a single one of those incidents qualifies as "rape" in the CDC survey, not a single one of them constitutes "rape" under virtually any rape survey ever done. They fall under the brand new category "made to penetrate"..... because somehow forcible penis-in-vagina sex is not rape when a woman does it. All men are sex-obsessed animals without the ability or right to decline sex. Because any man who gets raped is "lucky" he got to have sex.
And one notable fact is that not a single one of them reported their rape to the police. The rate of women reporting rape is abysmally low, but it doesn't remotely compare to the effectively ZERO rate of men reporting rape. The social stigma, victim blaming, shaming, and rape-denialism against women is an abomination, but it is as bad or worse for any man attempting to report being raped. Not a single one of the male rape victims reported it to the police.... but there was one case of a male rape victim who tried calling a rape-support hotline. And you know what happened? The person who answered the phone (presumably female) CALLED HIM A LIAR and told him to stop making prank calls. Seriously, how fucked up is that? A fucking RAPE SUPPORT LINE calling a rape victim a liar, saying no you weren't raped and stop fucking calling. Solely because the victim was male. Pure unadulterated sexist ideology and prejudi