261–270 of 325 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iraq is a basket case country whose government is hanging on by a thread. China is a superpower with clear aspirations to unipolar hegemony. They are not comparable and cannot be held to the same standard.
Iraq used to not be a basket case country until it was invaded by the unipolar hegemony.
Iraqi here (But I live in Turkey), protests were raging yesterday and today, first social media was taken down now the whole internet from mid (Baghdad) to the rest of the south of the country Here is a local service monitor for all major ISPs in Iraq: http://akonet.info This is the usual procedure by the "freedom" government they do this every time, the only issue is this time the protestors are not carrying any fla…
If so, it's a sign of good progress in Iraqi society and mindset. Such a thing wouldn't be possible just 10 years ago, it was always sort of 'us' vs 'them', these groups being ethnically and/or religiously defined.
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> imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths Huh? Radios are Kilo/Mega/Gigahertz. Light is Terahertz.
Okay, sorry, "electromagnetic radiation amplified and collimated in the same manner as a laser does to visible light". Better?
From a pragmatic perspective, what is the West and the US in particular supposed to do about this? We shouldn't have gone into Iraq in 2003 in the first place, but we did, so what now? Our government is going to keep its boot on the neck of Iraq and stay involved over there as long as Iraq still has oil, right? If the problem now is more that we have too little influence, so what? Are we supposed to try regime change…
"Water under the bridge ... what can we fuck up next?"
That aside (and no, US/NATO won't learn from that): split Iraq up in three entities (Kurdistan, Sunni and Shia parts), help with the separation, guarantee the agreed upon borders, and then invest lots of money.
> The current Iraqi regime may not be good, but neither was Saddam.
Compared to post-Saddam Iraq, Saddam was good. Good is relative. Want to lose a finger? Of course not. Want to lose a finger instead of losing both legs? Yeah, losing a finger is okay.
From what I’ve gathered, disenfranchised citizens in Baghdad are protesting, and the government has responded by shutting down the internet. I understand it’s reactionary but what is their logic here?
You mean the logic in shutting down the internet? Countries do that these days (see Kashmir) to keep the protests under control by blocking communication and collaboration among the protesters. It increases the barrier to discovery and participation in a protest basically.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/body-of-thiruma...
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Contrast the public and political reaction to these events with the public and political reaction to the protests in Hong Kong.
What are you implying?
When a protestor in hong kong gets shot "the whole world" is on its feet, when SA and USA starve to death 80 000 children in Yemen no one bats an eye.
For example, using the Scuttlebutt network (SSB), you can deliver messages from your contacts, using Bluetooth or just by being on the same wifi. They can be public messages, or encrypted private messages so only certain recipients can decode them. Manyverse (https://manyver.se) is a decent Android app for SSB.
There are other tools like Briar, which I don't know much about, but other people here may be able to help...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iraq used to not be a basket case country until it was invaded by the unipolar hegemony.
If you were not part of the governing minority you got brutally suppressed. If you dared to voice a different opinion you got send into prison for a nice round of torture. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The invasion of Iraq was a shit show, but let's not get into history rewriting here: Living in Iraq before the invasion was not some kind of utopia. He was a brutal dictator. And people suffered for it.
As long as we are clear on that, yes, Iraq under Saddam was shit. That's no excuse to make it worse.
https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org
but I guess it needs internet at least...
Well mission accomplished .. I guess. A great documentary if you haven't seen it is "Iraq: No End in Sight." It's pretty clear that the completely failed (non-existent) reconstruction efforts of the Bush administration would lead eventually to a failed state. The same thing is happening in Libya after the Obama era bombings. These places weren't democratic paradises before or anything; I'm not saying that. They had c…
My operating theory of foreign policy toward the countries of the former Ottoman Empire is that the US/EU do everything they can to keep it from re-forming. The peoples of these countries have far more in common than they have in difference, and if they pooled their oil money and weren't busy fighting each other they'd dominate the rest of the world.