LIRA: The Lebanese Internet Regulatory Act – What You Need To Know

The news about an internet regulatory act, targeting Lebanese bloggers mainly, surfaced a few months ago and then died down. No one had taken the whole affair seriously. After all, in the country of freedom of the Middle East, such a thing could never be viable – or so we thought.

Efforts by minister Walid Daouk to pass the law have exponentially increased recently, including him bypassing parliament and taking the law immediately to his cabinet, an obvious breach of hierarchy, but what could you expect from a minister in a cabinet that has done next to nothing in the year it has been ruling except create hurdles for itself, protest on itself, quit within itself and preach about “shortcomings” of previous governments?

Al-Nahar has published the law in its current form. Blogger Joseph Choufani has translated it to English as well, for those of you who cannot read Arabic.

The law has been dubbed LIRA – the Lebanese Internet Regulatory Act, an interesting name if you ask me. It is the Lebanese version of SOPA and PIPA, which took the internet by storm back in Janurary.

What does the average Lebanese user need to know about LIRA?

Simply put, for a blogger like me, I’ll have to register my blog with the ministry of Information. For me to be able to run this blog, I shouldn’t have committed any crimes or misdemeanors. So if your judicial record is not “clean,” you cannot express yourself online (or even in voting but that’s a different matter) – so your voice is quenched. I also cannot run more than one blog at a time. So you’re stuck with “A Separate State of Mind” by yours truly.

For people using electronic media, the same rules regarding journalism will apply to you. Never mind the fact that most of us use electronic media as a carefree medium to express ourselves, the minister expects us now to behave on our blogs, online accounts and any other social network we are present on as if we are journalists in some fancy Lebanese newspaper – with punishments applicable.

On top of that, the law is actually very vague. It states that every Lebanese website needs to go through the proposed regulations. But what’s the definition of a “Lebanese” website? Is it one hosted in Lebanon? Is it one whose domain has been purchased by a Lebanese?

In simple and concise terms, your whole online presence will have to go through in a way that is approved and clear to the Ministry of Information, conforming with the rules it has set for you.

As BeirutSpring points out, the motivation behind such a law is not to “protect” Lebanese internet users but rather to have a 21st century big brother presence over them, punishing those who stray away from the pack set forth by the law at hand. In a time when neighboring countries are moving towards more freedom (regardless of what you think of the process taking them there), Lebanon, the country which has the most freedom out of the bunch, is taking steps backwards.

This is not only detrimental to us as individuals, it is also detrimental to us a society at a time where online presence has become a make it or break it deal for businesses, people and everything in between. If Lebanon’s online presence, however dismal that may be with our horrible internet, is threatened by regulations on top of our pitiful bandwidth, then we might as well kiss our position in the 21st century bye bye.

Minister Daouk must heard Somalia’s information darkness is very nice all year round. If you care to join him, be my guest. If you don’t, Lebanon’s online community has decided to fight the bill using the medium the act is trying to regulate. The hashtag #StopLIRA will be used on Twitter. Sharing articles with your friends (such as this one) to raise awareness about the issue is a must. Get going, everyone.

 

Good Girl (Music Video) – Carrie Underwood

Carrie Underwood has just released the music video for Good Girl (check out the lyrics and my review) and she looks absolutely stunning in it. Playing both good and bad girl, she waltzes through impeccable art direction, many outfit changes and, as I’ve mentioned before, turns up her sex appeal a few notches.

With hints here and there, be it through the dresses or through the flowers (which are a constant fixture in three of her album covers), Carrie is also passing on a subtle meaning that she is moving on to a different direction: the character pulls off the petals from the daisy that was present on the cover of both Play On and her first album Some Hearts.

Some are calling it her best music video yet. Regardless of what your preference may be, this is one of her best, without a doubt. In fact, the professionalism of this video is giving me hope that this album round will not be another color by number era for Underwood. She’s actually trying her best to make it count – and it clearly shows.

The video is also very fast paced, similarly to the song, making it quite fitting and it will surely help Good Girl to become a bigger hit than it already is. And with Underwood hinting that it may soon rival Before He Cheats as her biggest hit, this video will contribute to any crossover attempt the label may be working for.

Without further ado, I present Good Girl:

Beirut Hotel – Movie Review

Beirut Hotel Movie Poster
I finally watched Danielle Arbid’s infamous Beirut Hotel, the Lebanese movie that has spurred a huge controversy back in November due to it being banned from Lebanese theaters. The reason I took time to watch it is twofold: one because I hadn’t heard of any good responses towards it. And two because I didn’t want to waste my time on a movie whose trailer made it look cheesy and whose hype was only generated by the simple fact that everything forbidden is usually wanted.

Upon watching Beirut Hotel, I can say for myself that my initial thoughts about the movie were perfectly on point – and no, this is not a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Zoha (Darine Hamze) is a sultry singer, more often than not out of tune, at one of Beirut’s bars. The purpose of her singing is not to please the ear as it is to please the eye and Zoha knows this perfectly well. She then meets an enigmatic French man named Mathieu (Charles Berling) with whom she has a late night talk, including informing him of the bar she sings at, before going back home, after a late night kiss of course.

Soon enough, Mathieu is infatuated by Zoha and starts following her around, which she finds creepy (as well as charming). So she storms into his hotel room the following day and before you know it, the anger subsides and turns into sex. But Mathieu may not be the lawyer he claims he is. And with a man wanting to exchange information about Hariri’s assassination for safe-haven in France, things will get messy. Add to that Zoha’s husband (Rodney Haddad) who can’t seem to let her go.

All of this may sound interesting. But trust me, the script is as cheesy and useless as it gets. Remember when Zoha tells Mathieu where she works? Well, when she storms into his hotel room the following day, she actually asks him how he knew where she worked – that is before they sleep together.

In fact, the Darine Hamze sex scenes in the movie are so out of place you can’t but feel they’ve been put there solely for the reason of making an uneventful movie talk-worthy, along the lines of: “There is a moment where Darine Hamze’s breasts show” – cue in thousands of Lebanese who are shocked that a Lebanese actress actually went there.

It is here that I have to commend Darine Hamze for the guts it took her to bare it all in this movie, be it through the various sex scenes or through the obvious sexual appeal she conveyed. She may be the only “good” thing about Beirut Hotel. It’s sad that what she does comes off as forced in the movie.

If Beirut Hotel had been let be – not made into a big media frenzy because of the Hariri plot line it contained, the movie would have crashed and burned at the Lebanese box office because, whether we like to admit it or not, most of us are very cautious when it comes to Lebanese movies. We only watch them when word of mouth is substantial enough to convince us to spend the ticket money on them. Word of mouth would have failed Beirut Hotel, as it should. The movie which takes Beirut’s name not only shows the city in a negative light, I was more than often surprised to see this is the Lebanese capitol we all cherish, coupled with a silly storyline that grasps at straws to become eventful.

2/10

A Lebanese Fight On MEA Plane from Paris to Beirut

Leave it to the Lebanese to forget every bit of “civilization” they’ve learned in Paris the moment their plane leaves the tarmac to their home country.

The first is “ebn l Chouf,” the second is “ebn Baalbak” because one’s region is enough threat apparently. Soon enough, the crew is involved in calming the men, followed by calls for every Holy figure known to man. Yes, a typical Lebanese fight – at several kilometers in the air – down to those filming planning to post it on YouTube the moment they land.

Well, the video is on Facebook and you can watch it here or on YouTube:

Does anyone know why they were fighting in the first place?

Crest Arabia: Spread a Smile?

Crest Arabia has recently launchedan online campaign called “Spread The Smile.”

Some of you may remember a campaign centered around “smiles” by Crest last year, where we had to vote for some of our female friends in their quest to be voted as person with the best smile. But no matter, the premise this year is quite different and more engaging: Instead of voting for the prettiest smile, you’d be voting for the person who made you smile the most, be it because of a joke they posted, a picture or even a video.

Upon liking their page and checking the leaderboard, I was surprised to see that almost none of the top-voted entries are actually creative. Most of them are pictures of babies looking cute. And what’s worse, none are funny.

I had to dig among the videos and pictures to find ones that made me smile. When it came to the text submissions, the corniness shone through. There’s one submission, with over 2000 votes, which goes like this:

“i wanna tell you a story
simply……. smile to everyone
no thing deserve ..smile ….life is short and at the same time it’s so good 🙂 :)”

If you think this is straight out of a tweet by Elissa, it’s highly possible she might have said it as some point.

Among other text entries, you have one with over 1730 votes that says: “Go east go west Oral B and Crest are the BEST” – what are we now, first graders?

Come on people, is this the best you can do?

The campaign is creative, to be honest. The involvement in it that I’ve seen so far? Pitiful.

If you think you can do better you can still enter the competition, which ends on March 31st. You might as well come up with a Lebanese Meme and submit it, it’ll still be better than the stuff getting votes, regardless of how overdone you think memes have become.

You can check out the Crest Arabia Facebook page here and the Spread The Smile competition here.