40,000 new laws will go into effect in 2012 across the United
States., from placing fines on texting while driving to including gays
and lesbian contributions in history books. That’s a lot of laws, yet
one could imagine the staggering number of proposals that didn’t make it to the lawbooks this year. Below are a few Iranian.com proposed laws that probably would’t make it on account of the nothing is sacred business or implementation issues:
1. Mandate a limit to the number of foam-at-the-mouth blogs/articles/comments to no more than five hundred per day.
2.
Googoosh impersonator videos must carry a “Don’t Be Mean” warning.
Being mean to a Googoosh wannabe is a misdemeanor punishable by 40 hours
of community service in a Persian restaurant that plays non-stop
Tehrangeles pop.
3. Create a separate IC subsidiary
for “Shah-Mossadegh” fights with its own URL. Intruders into regular IC
pages shall be exiled to the village of Ahmadabad.
4. Add a Farsi thesaurus to the site for overused labels such as mozdoor, khaaen, baseeji, etc. Any mozdoor calling anyone else a mozdoor shall have his/her wages cut in half indefinitely.
5.
Create a front page memorial tab for banned IC members to house
deceased user IDs, list of crimes, eulogies, and reader pleas for
resurrection.
6. Add more canned avatars to the user
account creation page. As of Janurary 1 2012 two IC members using the
same canned avatar shall bid in Rials for the image regardless of who
had priority.
7. As of Janurary 1 2012, uncaptioned
photos in photo essays are fair game for reader captioning. Uncaptioned
photos shall be automatically entered in a weekly contest for most
creative caption.
8. Create software to automatically
scramble swear words in comment text to comply with IC policy. Until
such software is in place, commenters cannot be held liable for damages
or insults resulting from their use of poorly disguised expletives.
9.
Authorize writers to demand at will a quiz about his/her blog from any
commenter. Flunking the quiz permanently prefixes all the titles of the
flunker’s comments with, “This commenter has not read the blog.”
10.
Create ratings G, PG, PG-13, R and X for postings, with parental
control settings for each category. After which the sky is the limit for
erotica, and complainers shall be limited to G, or PG posts for a
period of no less than one month and no more than 6 months.
11.
Add a “get a room” feature for flagging public displays of affection
between political e-gang members. Should the IC editor find the flagging
appropriate, the love fest exchange of comments shall be transferred to
the X rated section of the site for more general audience enjoyment.
Needless to add, some of 2012’s passed laws are weirder than the above IC
rejects. Among them, our mass media gripes a lot about “happy hour” now
being illegal in Utah. Less painful to journalists seems to be the NDAA 2012
legislation that codifies the power of the President of the United
States to indefinitely detain a citizen without charge or trial. As of
the new year our human rights are unambiguously at the discretion of the
President. We’re lucky that he’s a nice guy, but on the eve of this new year, I’m already nostalgic for the old fashioned kind of human rights.
