Originally published at: Taliban bans all images of living things in Afghanistan - Boing Boing
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Best of luck to the students studying for their medical degrees there
Licenses? Security badges? General needs? How can a totalitarian theocracy maintain control of the population if identities cannot be matched to faces?
This ban includes hand-drawn images, not just photos. So even a child’s drawing of a tree or flower would be prohibited.
I don’t think that having the U.S. occupy the country for longer than we did would have accomplished anything other than getting a lot more people killed, but you know what we could have done? Granted political asylum to every Afghani who wanted it.
Saw this in a Peta Pixel article. How convenient.
Such a law is convenient for the Taliban, which is ranked 122nd place to 178th out of 180 countries in a press freedom ranking compiled by Reporters Without Borders, as showing images of those who enact these harsh laws is now illegal, making tying a face to a name all the more difficult
What about AI images?
Plants?
Getting back to their religious roots. Geometric shapes here we come!
I would say this guarantees Afghanistan will be stuck in the Stone Age, but that may be to ambitious. Even in the Stone Age they had cave drawings of animals and people.
So, no photo ID’s then. I would assume they would want some sort of database of their citizens.
An immobile populace and feudal power structure won’t need ID cards.
True. But you would think having photos in a database of some sort would help them sort out the good, the bad and the ugly. I guess they really just want to treat EVERYONE like shit.
I should have read the article. It bans news media from publishing pictures.
ETA: From a non paywalled site…
Another triumph from the greatest minds of the 9th century.
Women seem to be the main focus. And (based on others’ posts) who needs to know women’s identities for adjudication beyond simply noting the infraction then taking action? Veil not worn? Stone them. Reading loud enough for someone to hear you (i.e., a man)? Stone them. Reminds me of an old ST next gen episode where they visited a planet that had one sentence for all infractions. Death.