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Indonesian Imams Concerned About Facebook Flirting

Interest in Facebook is growing fast in Indonesia, a primarily Muslim country, and clerics there have become worried that participating in activities on the social network could lead to sinful behavior. A group of imams met to consider the problem, and reportedly may set some Facebook rules for their followers, which could set strick limits on their use of the site.


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Muslim clerics are seeking ways to regulate online behavior in Indonesia, saying the exploding popularity of social networking sites like Facebook More about Facebook could encourage illicit sex.

Around 700 clerics, or imams, gathering in the world's most populous Muslim nation on Thursday were considering guidelines forbidding their followers from going online to flirt or engage in practices they believe could encourage extramarital affairs.

Inside Facebook, an independent Palo Alto, Calif.-based blog dedicated to tracking the site, says Indonesia, a nation of 235 million, was the fastest-growing country in Southeast Asia for the site in 2008, with a 645 percent increase to 831,000 users.

It is already the most visited site in Indonesia, and with less than 0.5 percent of Indonesia's citizens wired, there is a huge potential for growth.

"The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on virtual networking, because this online relationship could lead to lust, which is forbidden in Islam," said Nabil Haroen, a spokesperson for the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school, which was hosting the event.
Fear of Facebook Fatwa
Though followers could still be members of the networking site, guidelines dealing with surfing the Web and Islamic values are urgently needed, he said.

"People are typically using Facebook to connect with their friends, family or learn about local and world issues and events," said Debbie Frost, a Facebook spokesperson. "We have seen many people and organizations use Facebook to advance a positive agenda."

Ninety percent of Indonesians are Muslim, and most practice a moderate form of the faith.

An edict by the clerics would not have any legal weight, but it could be endorsed by the influential Ulema Council, which recently issued rulings against smoking and yoga.

Some devout Muslims adhere to the council's rulings because ignoring a fatwa, or religious decree, is considered a sin.

Amidan, who heads the Ulema Council, said the growing number of Facebook users in Indonesia was a controversial subject among Muslim leaders and that he favored a ban because of possible sexual content.
Driven to Pornography?
"People using Facebook can be driven to engage in distasteful, pornographic chatting," said Amidan, who was monitoring the two-day conference in the town of Kediri, in eastern Java More about Java.

Many clerics are concerned that "inappropriate content" on Facebook could be accessed by children, said Amidan, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name.

Facebook is the top ranked site in Indonesia, ahead of search engines Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) More about Yahoo and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google, according Alexa.com, which tracks Internet traffic.

Nearly 4 percent of all Facebook visitors are from Indonesia, making it the largest source of visitors after the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

© 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

a neo-lib

PM's hero a neo-lib | The Australian

WHEN Kevin Rudd published his lengthy essay on the global financial crisis, it was not only an attempt to strengthen his reputation as Australia's philosopher Prime Minister but also to mark the day of reckoning for neo-liberalism. "Neo-liberalism has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy," he wrote. Despite this stark rhetoric, Rudd's essay revealed only one thing: neo-liberalism is one of the most sloppily used words in today's political debates. The original philosophy of neo-liberalism, of which Rudd seems unaware, was anti-capitalist and the opposite of a laissez-faire free-for-all.

The term neo-liberalism was invented at the time of the Depression in the 1930s. The belief in eternal prosperity had been shattered by Wall Street's Black Friday and the events that followed. Liberalism and capitalism were blamed for the global economic crisis. Across the world, economists such as John Maynard Keynes and politicians such as US president Franklin D. Roosevelt were looking for alternatives to a system that they thought had failed spectacularly.

In Germany, too, the mood had turned against unfettered capitalism. However, not everybody believed this had to mean a complete departure from a market-based economy. Young German economist and sociologist Alexander Rustow certainly did not. In a speech he delivered in 1932, regarded as one of the founding documents of neo-liberalism, he called for a "third way" between socialism and capitalism. Rustow's speech was titled Free Economy, Strong State and in these four words he summed up the core of the neo-liberal project.

He rejected markets left to their own devices. Such markets, he was convinced, would always degenerate. "We agree with Marxists and socialists in the conviction that capitalism is untenable and needs to be overcome," Rustow wrote in a later essay.

If laissez faire and Adam Smith-style liberalism were so bad, according to Rustow, would he then have preferred a planned economy? His answer was a resounding no. With the same rhetorical verve he used to condemn capitalism, he equally rejected the promises of socialism and communism. They were not viable economic systems and were incompatible with democracy, freedom and human dignity.

This led Rustow to call for a middle way: between laissez faire and socialism, his third way. "We should be happy that we do not have to make a difficult choice between capitalism and communism, but that there is a third way," he wrote. Ironically, it is the same logic that makes today's critics of neo-liberalism claim that one no longer has to choose between Friedrich Hayek and Leonid Brezhnev, as Rudd expressed it last year.

Although contemporary supporters of a third way claim to be fighting neo-liberalism, to Rustow this same third way was neo-liberalism. He called it neo-liberalism to differentiate it from earlier liberalism, for which Rustow frequently used derogatory terms such as "vulgar liberalism". Rustow wanted to break with this old liberal tradition to put a new liberalism in its place, hence the prefix neo. It was the philosophy for the state setting and policing a regulatory framework without actually planning the economy.

A group of German economists and lawyers continued to develop this neo-liberal philosophy in the '30s and '40s. Some of them, such as Rustow himself, left Nazi Germany to work in exile. Others such as Walter Eucken, a close friend of Rustow, remained in Germany, under constant threat.

Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well known to an Australian audience since Rudd named him "without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the 20th century". It may be of some interest that Bonhoeffer, too, was connected to the German neo-liberal movement.

None other than Bonhoeffer commissioned the neo-liberal economists around Eucken to develop a concept for domestic and foreign policies in Germany after the end of National Socialism. When the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, failed, parts of this memorandum were obtained by the Gestapo, and Bonhoeffer was executed for his involvement.

It may seem ironic that Rudd's most admired man in recent history had sympathies for neo-liberalism, when the same Rudd has subsequently denounced neo-liberalism as an empty philosophy. The philosophy of neo-liberalism was eventually implemented in West Germany's "social market economy". There it became the foundation of the country's rapid economic growth after the war, the so-called economic miracle.

Neo-liberalism is a far richer, more thoughtful concept than it is mostly perceived today. To those criticising neo-liberalism today, the answer may well be just that: we need more of this kind of neo-liberalism that sets a good framework for a free economy. What we would need less of is only the rhetorical abuse of neo-liberalism for political purposes.

Oliver Marc Hartwich is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. His essay Neoliberalism: The Genesis of a Political Swearword is published today.

University of Sydney posted a deficit

University of Sydney's losses 'threaten operations' | The Australian

NSW universities have been savaged by the global financial crisis, suffering a $500 million loss in the value of their investments, led by the University of Sydney, which recorded a staggering $347 million reversal to its bottom line.

Sydney University posted a surplus of $187 million in 2007, but its annual report shows the country's oldest and wealthiest university filed a $160 million deficit at the end of last year.

The reversal to the university's bottom line flowed from a 23 per cent or $271 million fall in the value of its $1.15 billion investment portfolio, one of the country's largest university-based pools of investments and bequests.

The results from the NSW universities' annual reports - tabled in parliament yesterday - dramatically revise upwards university investment losses previously projected to be about $800 million across universities nationwide.

NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat said the global financial crisis and the volatility in financial markets had the potential to significantly affect universities' operations.

The auditor criticised Sydney University over failing to meet adequate liquidity performance guidelines, describing its position as "high risk".

The university may have to make borrowings to fund capital spending, defer or make significant changes to its capital works program, or even reduce discretionary spending on research grants, scholarships and prizes, the auditor's report said.

But Sydney University chief financial officer Mark Easson said despite the reduction in investment income, the university was in a strong financial position with annual revenue of $1.3 billion.

"We remain debt-free with a pool of discretionary funds available for contingencies. Our investment portfolio is well diversified and performed better than most similar sized balanced funds against which we benchmark," he said.

Mr Easson stressed that there would be no impact on the university's core teaching and research programs.

"Student demand remains high with increased enrolments this year from both local and international students," he said.

As recently reported in The Australian, the state's only other research-intensive university, University of NSW, also posted an $87.4 million deficit for 2008, well up from its $6.5 million deficit the previous year.
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Guess who? Mariah Carey in Precious....couldn't recognize her

Mariah Carey glam at Cannes, but dowdy in Precious | Movies | News.com.au

IT'S Mariah Carey as you've never seen her before.

The singing star who has refused to travel without an army of beauticians and once admitted sleeping with 20 humidifiers around her bed ditches the glamour for a movie role.

And the switch from diva to dowdy could be her best move yet, with the film, Precious, already winning critical acclaim.

The 40-year-old sports a scruffy hairdo and unflattering blouse to play a social worker in the movie.

Set in Harlem in 1987, Precious tells the story of an overweight, illiterate girl who becomes pregnant with her second child at the age of 16 after she is raped by her father.

Gabourey Sidibe plays the title role after director Lee Daniels discovered her on the streets of New York.

The film - adapted from Push: A Novel - premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January where it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury prize for best drama.