Ingushetia is a good case. The thing is, Russia is not a centralized system. Far from it. It is run by lots of local little lords, of which the head of Inguishetia is one, and the lord down there is not feeling very secure given the stuff blowing up. Like I said, what "extremism" is is left vague and interpreted and implemented by local people. Thus, the temptation is to use it against your opponents or simply misdirecting it out of imcompetence or attempts by bureaucrats to build careers, as when Piontkovsky was labelled extremist in I think it was Primorye. (He's an idiot, but not an extremist.)
(Now it may actually be the case that inguishetia.ru is in fact extremist -- which would be ultranationalist or violent Islamist -- but I don't know since I never looked at them.)
--- On Sun, 8/31/08, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But if some bureaucrats came to do a hate-speech audit in,
> say, Canada,
> the investors probably wouldn't have panicked and fled,
> no? Because they
> would assume the worst that could happen was that a modest
> fine would be
> imposed or something. What Ames is saying, apparently, is
> that in Russia
> people panic when the authorities come to do a
> "routine audit" because
> much nastier things are expected to happen:
>
> > And if you do fight the law, then ... well, just this
> past week there
> > have been two examples of what can happen. The
> opposition webzine
> > ingushetia.ru was closed by court order, and its
> lawyer had his
> > apartment raided last week (I was planning to use him
> to help the
> > Exile until that happened); and one of Russia's
> largest radio
> > companies was raided by armed police, leaving it
> temporarily off the air.
>
> SA
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk