The Largely Unknown Success Story of Afghanistan's Television Network 78
Daniel_Stuckey writes in with an Afghanistan media success story. "I met Orner at South by Southwest, where she was hustling her latest film, The Network. The Network features a brighter side of Afghanistan's brighter side: the story of its television revolution. In Orner's opinion, it's a narrative that runs contrary to our common conceptions of a country that has spent decades in a state of war and instability. She followed Saad Mohseni, a media guru and founder of Afghan media firm Moby Group, who is credited for jump starting the nation's media transformation. Sometimes referred to as the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, Mohseni, an Afghan expat and entrepreneur, explains how he and his siblings returned to Kabul from Australia in 2001, amidst the war shifting into gear. First, they launched a radio station, and by 2004 they'd shifted to television with Tolo TV, quickly turning Moby Group into the largest media conglomerate in the nation."
Re:Afghanistan may not be all that bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? I assume you must watch a fair bit of Fox News. Granted, the 'stans' are not great, but Afghanistan is undoubtedly one of the worst places to live in the entire world. Afghanistan is so bad that it even makes Pakistan, China and Iran all look like great places to live.
Life expectancy at birth: (CIA World Factbook)
Afghanistan: 49.72 years
China: 74.84 years
Pakistan: 66.35 years
Iran: 70.35 years
Literacy: (CIA World Factbook)
Afghanistan: 28.1%
China: 92.2%
Pakistan: 54.9%
Iran: 77%
Corruption Index (Transparency International)
Afghanistan: 174 (equal last with Nth Korea and Somalia)
China: 80
Pakistan: 139
Iran: 133
With such stark stats do I even need to mention that according to the UN, 90% of the worlds opium is supplied by Afghanistan? Do I need to mention that Afghanistan is in the middle of a civil war provoked by the ongoing US and Nato invasion?
Re:Islam and secular-progressive culture (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, men having multiple wives in different places and being at liberty to divorce them at will and take more - there is something in Islam that the hippie and punk movements would envy, and only resent that women don't have the same leeway. Free sex already exists in the Muslim world - for men. Muslim societies are already dysfunctional - introducing MTV values there isn't going to do more damage.
So how do poor men get free sex when the available women have all been sold into harems of rich men?
Re:Islam and secular-progressive culture (Score:5, Insightful)
There will never be a shortage. Islamic law allows men to seek out girls as young as 9 for marriage - following the example of Mohammed himself. So it's not like there will ever be a shortage of women - and also, not all women of age would get sold into the harems of rich sheikhs. The ones that don't, and also the divorced ones would always be available to the poor Muslims. And heavens forbid, if there are non-Muslim women in the neighborhood, don't be surprised if they disappear, as they regularly do in Pakistan, even when they are underaged: there have been hundreds of instances of Christian or Hindu girls being kidnapped and 'married' to Muslim kidnappers, and that has also caused a quiet exodus of a good portion of the remaining Hindus to India.
In a typical normal country of 10 million there are about 5 million women and 5 million men.
If you change this to exclude women under 9 and men under 25, you get about 4 million women and 3 million men.
This means 1.3 wives per man. In a middle-age country, where the men are dying by their millions in war, the numbers come out to be about 4 million women and 1 million men, 4 wives per man.
Islam's view that men should take wives made sense in the dark ages when women couldn't look after themselves, and men were usually dead.
Most Islamic countries are stuck in those dark ages.