Allah strikes again.

[BaalChatzaf]

TV and film actor (Veena Malik) issued the jail term in Pakistan, alongside husband and owner of a media conglomerate for ‘malicious acts’ of blasphemy against Islam

TV and film actor issued the jail term in Pakistan, alongside husband and owner of a media conglomerate for ‘malicious acts’ of blasphemy against Islam.

The actor Veena Malik has expressed anger at a 26-year jail term handed down by a Pakistani court after she acted in a scene loosely based on the marriage of the prophet Muhammad’s daughter.

The same sentence was extended to her husband, and to Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, owner of the Jang-Geo media group which broadcast the TV show. All three were ordered to surrender their passports and fined 3m rupees (£8,000).

The offending scene involved Malik re-enacting her own wedding to businessman Asad Bashir Khan while a religious song played in the background.

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The prior is a small snipped from the Manchester Guardian Dated Nov 27, 2014ard

also from the same Guardian article:

Announcing the verdict on Tuesday, judge Raja Shahbaz ordered the police make arrests under Section 19 (10) of the Anti-Terrorism Act in case of disobedience, as well as sell the properties of the offendants.

“After evaluation of the entire evidence of the prosecution, I am of the considered opinion that the prosecution has proved its case against proclaimed offenders and absconders,” Shahbaz said.

The order reads: “The malicious acts of the proclaimed offenders ignited the sentiments of all the Muslims of the country and hurt the feelings, which cannot be taken lightly and there is need to strictly curb such tendency.”

See also: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/veena-malik-pakistan-blasphemy-geo-tv-26-years-jail-mock-wedding-ceremony/1/403805.html

[Brant Gaede]

People writing for The Guardian can't write basic, standard English?

--Brant

[anthony]

This was done under the auspices of the "Anti-Terrorism Act"?

"Hurt the feelings"?

Nothing has objective meaning or feeling any longer when the last pretence at observing justice is finally abandoned to the emotionalism of mobs.

Brutal bastards.

[Brant Gaede]

Nothing has objective meaning or feeling any longer when the last pretence at observing justice is finally abandoned to the emotionalism of mobs.

This statement is over-the-top emotionalism. I do this kind of thing myself sometimes for fun and to make a point by making it obvious. Your premise, which follows your conclusion, is wrong. If you put the premise first--"the last pretense at observing justice" is gone, then it's made obvious. Some stupid Pakistani court isn't going to do that kind of damage nor is it the straw that breaks the back of objectivity. Instead that court has engaged in a reductio ad absurdum of the basic position of mixing up law with religion. It's generally educational that way. Slowly the world gets educated. Slowly the world is getting better. It's hard to appreciate this for we don't live very long. We see it by reading about it in referencing the historical record, even though it's true that most history as written is "bunk."

--Brant

[anthony]

I don't necessarily see "the world getting better" or more educated. For all its technological advances (because of them, too) it is just as capable of falling backwards now, as ever.

Intensified and instant data/information is just that - more, not better. It permits belief in a second hand 'cleverness', and predictability of which way the mass of public opinion is moving - in order to be in step with it. Without the individual integrating it - without each person knowing how to think of a situation, and what to do about it - its net result is collectivism (with all its worst ideas and force) being empowered at a greater rate.

I think the ability and tenet and freedom simply to think for oneself, was firmer in my parents' era than it generally is now, despite less information available then.

Of course this was and is my emotional response, not to forgivable ignorance, but to cowardly and knowing evil.

When an inhumane and immoral penalty like this is handed down - only one of many more that don't make the headlines, I'll add - justified by the "feelings" and the religion of some, I don't think it is possible for one to go too over-the-top, in disgust. What about those condemned by this town square judgement, their feelings and future lives?

When many things around one are disintegrating into polarization, now more than ever, it's a matter of not allowing a double morality for other cultures and peoples to take hold, it's a matter of not compromising standards of civilisation .

[Brant Gaede]

There are over 6 1/2 billion people in the world. You can find an endless stream of examples to support your thesis, but it's a thesis supported by anecdotal data not the rigorous analysis of statistical data addressing any one of many facets of human being on Earth. In the aggregate people are living longer and living better and this has been going on since the industrialization of agriculture and the advent of public sanitation off the germ theory of disease plus electrification. All the advances of modern medicine are next to nothing compared to two of them: sanitation and antibiotics and the latter takes a big back seat to the former. The former, by the way, is still being brought on line. We can also talk about how lumpy progress is throughout the world and philosophical and political and moral progress--or its lack. But if philosophy rules the world--a debatable proposition--then insofar as it is extant and right is reflected in human material progress. The idea then is to buff up philosophy so progress can ratchet up even more. This in turn brings on line the fact that even the best formal philosophy--let's say it is Objectivism--doesn't well match up with informal philosophy. Informal philosophy is what each person carries around in his or her head; everyone has a philosophy; it's a biological imperative off the necessity for survival and reproduction. Man on this planet has come a long way from little hunter-gatherer troops and the gross overt human sacrificing of Central Americans 500-2000 years ago. In a few hundred years our descendants may wonder how much better things are than that age of genocide and war and religious fanaticism that is too much of our own time. We are living in our ancestors better future, but some of us are living in an imagined better future yet to happen so we don't appreciate the present enough.

--Brant

[anthony]

Agreed with your roundup. On the existential front it all looks far better, hell - it IS far better - for mankind, than ever.

Except history shows nothing is linear in man's development.

What's missing from most analyses to my mind, is that proportionately, human consciousness is dropping behind human existence and evolution.

When it is taken as inarguable dogma by most people you hear locally and all over, that the State somehow creates all the progress and provides all the goodies, and the State will right all wrongs (including their own) - and it can't be any other way - you begin to catch a pattern of the type of Statist-collectivist mindset so common. With a little more in this direction, individualism and personal liberty will become (are becoming) laughable concepts, an out-dated notion from some old fogies of another time.

With that dangerous imbalance between individual mind and existence, with the deification of State and of populist media, and the reduction of self-accountability, the best of outward progress is not as permanent as it looks, I feel.

I realise this above case is only one small instance of immorality in the grand scheme of things: is it representative of a fast growing pattern of altruism-collectivism, as I see it? Or is it an anomaly? These philosophies ("informal", indeed, and religious) can ultimately undo the aggregate of created good, I believe.