Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

the961.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 258 posts

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#171

Post by mike00632 »

rayiner wrote: post #145
petre wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turned it into a thriving liberal democracy Until Scott Morrison and the last three conservative governments undid some of that.

Most developing countries would be lucky to have the order and competency even of the Trump administration. We aren’t even talking about the same planet here in terms of what’s a functioning democracy. In Bangladesh, the government is putting leaders of the opposition party BNP in jail ( https://learngerman.dw.com/en/bangladesh-court-sentences-opp... ), and even then it’s the most functional government the country ha…

The Trump administration literally attempted a coup.

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#173

Post by googlryas »

teh_klev wrote: post #135
googlryas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To label the protestors "pro-democracy supporters" is an interesting take. To me, it would be like labeling the Jan 6 protestors as pro-democracy supporters. The people protesting for him were the nationalists and the islamists, and some socialists. Not pro-democracy folk. Mossadegh's party also called for the assassination of the Shah during this time. Isn't Johnson declaring himself the leader of the nation autocra…

> Mossadegh's party also called for the assassination of the Shah during this time. Going to have to insist on a citation for that claim. > Isn't Johnson declaring himself the leader of the nation autocratic behavior? But simply non monarchical? That's not how it works in the UK. In a general election it's traditionally the leader of the winning party who becomes prime minister, the electorate know this and it genera…

My source would be Iran Between Two Revolutions, but that's just going from memory. Maybe I'm confusing some other party, but I am fairly sure it was the National Front.

> What's boneheaded about wanting to control your own natural resources and de-colonialise your country?

No, the goal wasn't boneheaded, but the policies he implemented towards that goal were boneheaded. Nationalizing your #1 and basically only source of revenue which is propping up your society, when you don't actually have the ability to continue operating it by yourself, is boneheaded. Thinking that the British would stick around after you nationalized their assets(one mans nationalization is another mans theft) in order to help you figure it all out, is bone headed.

Likewise, rural people deserve freedom and to not be serfs to local lords, but at the same time, just setting them free and thinking they will be able to manage the land as well as the centralized administrator immediately is boneheaded

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#174

Post by ballenf »

teh_klev wrote: post #107
googlryas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really what happened. The Shah was the ultimate authority in Iran, and he asked the Prime Minister to step down, which was his legal right. The Prime Minister said "No thanks, I'm the boss now", at which point the US/UK helped the Shah assert his actual legal right under their existing rule of law. Can you tell me - if Queen Elizabeth asked that Boris Johnson step down from role as PM(which is her right),…

That's quite the re-writing of history there. The Shah removed Mosaddegh from power in 1952 but re-instated him almost immediately due to pressure from pro-democracy supporters. The Shah was then exiled after a failed coup attempt by one of his Imperial Guard colonels effectively leaving him powerless. The rest is history and we've gotten to where we're at today because the UK and the US interfered with a nascent dem…

> I should reveal that I'm an anti-monarchist and a believe that states should strip any and all powers from from their monarchies, even if they are quaint and historical anachronisms.

Curious why? Would you hold that position even if the monarch has present widespread support from the population?

Do you think something has changed to make that form of rule more objectionable than it was in the past? I.e., do you have an equally negative view of historic monarchies?

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#175

Post by ben0x539 »

mikem170 wrote: post #121
egberts1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were saying? https://www.reddit.com/r/electionfraud/comments/v85iy4/mind_...

I see your graphic posted by someone named jgreene777 on reddit and raise you a 72 page report prepared under the direction of eight prominent conservatives - people like retired federal judges, former senators, a solicitor general, an election lawyer, etc. [0] This report looked at the 64 court cases and 187 allegations of election fraud in all 6 battleground states and documented the evidence showing that each and…

> [...] and raise you a 72 page report prepared under the direction of eight prominent conservatives - people like retired federal judges, former senators, a solicitor general, an election lawyer, etc. [0]

Well, what's their reddit user names?

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#176

Post by rayiner »

kamaal wrote: post #39
rayiner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secularism is also a western import. Mosdadegh was educated in Switzerland, after all. This is in the context of India, but does a good job explaining the phenomenon: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... Turkey and Bangladesh are other good examples of countries where elites tried to impose secularism, and succeeded for a time, but which ultimately failed because the public didn’t want it.

Speaking in the context of India, you can argue secularism has sort of failed here too. The problem happens to be with the top-down approach. You can't exactly ram down these political concepts down peoples throats. And when the popular leaders who were executing these concepts die, in time these projects fail. Secularism really is more of a process than a law, you can't exactly legislate a culture into people. On th…

I agree, but I’d go further and say that promotion of secularism is a warning sign. It’s indicative of a westernized elite trying to reshape the “common people” according to their own ideology.

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#177

Post by thfuran »

daveslash wrote: post #80
loonster wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May just be more obvious. Some of the scammers look to have been doing it for decades.

True. But the politicians who are scammers (not all are) seem to be much more brazen about it. And I can't help but feel that the public failing to hold them accountable is exacerbating and accelerating the situation.

I think that once you get to the point that "all politicians lie/cheat/steal" is a widely accepted truism, the system is pretty much doomed.

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#178

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

chadash wrote: post #60
martincmartin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The country is in complete deadlock politically - all of the warlords from the civil war just became politicians and then systematically looted the country. I always wonder why many democracies devolve into politicians just looting the government, whereas others become successful and relatively less corrupt.

We talk a lot about separation of powers, the constitution, etc. in the US, but until pretty recently, we failed to appreciate the fact that democracy is largely a cultural thing. It works because we believe it works. Go and read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Stalin) [1]. It talks about freedom of speech, freedom of press, assembly, demonstrations. It actually goes much further than the US constitution. It talks a…

> It actually goes much further than the US constitution.

The US constitution is specifically designed not to have an exhaustive enumeration of rights. Its terseness is its primary asset as it's solely a restriction on government authority with supreme power wielded by the populace. Every worker's paradise that tries to list all freedoms operates from the opposite principle that they are granted by government authority.

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#179

Post by Theodores »

rr888 wrote: post #153
Theodores wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there are many national identities that are similar. Poland is an example. Regarding the article, before and after pictures of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to name a few places are the same. Prosperous sovereign nations outside Western Europe and North America are bad for business.

> Poland is an example Poland has been around over a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Poland

I think you were a little bit trigger happy with that.

Show me where Poland was on the map before the Western powers drew it on the map after WW1.

Much like Lebanon which has cultural heritage going back, so does Poland. But maps might not reflect that.

Re: What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

#180

Post by bhupy »

eldaisfish wrote: post #61
guykdm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lebanese" is a modern invention. Lebanon is a contrived post colonial state with no historical foundations. Those most usually fail horribly.

One could make the same argument for a country like India. There is no "India" in the sense of an ethno-linguisic grouping. India is more akin to the European Union but even more diverse. The Indian state has survived for seventy five years now. Just as the French and British dismembered the Ottoman empire to create modern Lebanon, so too did the British dismember the Indian empire to create India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan didn't split up because of the British, they split up because Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted it. Pakistan was born out of a sustained bottom-up movement.

The reason the British get blamed for a lot of the Indo-Pak issues is that, absent an indigenous Indian/Pakistani civil service bureaucracy, the British were tasked with executing the plan originally conceived by the Two-Nation Theorists, and they totally botched that execution.

Post reply on HN