The boiling frog: Internet censorship (Fitna) in Indonesia.

Have you heard the story of boiling frog? Taken from wikipedia: "The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out."

This blog told me about a decision of a major ISP in Indonesia to censor the controversial fitna film. Regardless of whether that movie deserved to be ban or not, I fear that this censorship is the beginning of boiling frog phenomenon. The justification for the next censorships will be more and more ridiculous that it won't take too long for Indonesia returning to a police state again..

And I do think that the censorship decision is ridiculous. Yes it is probably important to ban this movie in Europe where a majority or people in power are not moslem, because the hatred towards moslem induced by that film put many minority moslems in trouble. But in Indonesia, where the majority are moslems, banning that movie is not only unnecessary, but has the potential to make religious conflict sharper due to the discriminative privilege to censor for moslem majority.

Edit: Now that I am calmer, I can emphatize how in collectivistic culture, insult to a group will be considered very personal attack to individual. But I'm getting more and more concerned with the humanity if collectivistic culture dominates the earth.. One concern is how internal conflicts are more likely to occur the bigger a group is, compared to individualistic culture. *sigh*, oh well.

And yeah, I'm still very concern with the eventual state of freedom of expression.