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Code that helped end Apartheid

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Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#141

Post by motohagiography »

nxobject wrote: post #129
motohagiography wrote: post #101

I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it. I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused…

> it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building o…

the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions.

it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#143

Post by cyberax »

nxobject wrote: post #129
motohagiography wrote: post #101

I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it. I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused…

> it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building o…

> That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy

Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#144

Post by zellyn »

motohagiography wrote: post #101

I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it. I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused…

I remember traveling to the US from South Africa when I was 14 in 1990 and my dad renting Cry Freedom on VHS so we could watch it, since it was banned in South Africa. The long roll of peoples' names and how they died "accidentally" or "falling from window" in prison at the end was haunting and the experience of watching it has stayed vividly with me ever since.

It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.

Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#145

Post by oa335 »

klipt wrote: post #142
oa335 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it "Palestinian apartheid" when Israeli soldiers are the ones enforcing it?

[flagged]

> If the alternative offered by the Palestinian Authority is ethnically cleansing all the Jews out of Hebron, it seems reasonable for the soldiers to be there to keep the peace?

So demanding that settlers who illegally occupied land is “ethnic cleansing”? And you seem to be ceding my point and agreeing that it is apartheid, but justified.

> The Israeli government is obviously not perfect, but Arab citizens of Israel are generally treated way better than Jewish citizens of Muslim countries.

Whataboutism and irrelevant.

One comment ago you were saying it’s “”Palestinian apartheid”, now you are saying that it may be apartheid but it’s justified and so what, other countries are worse. I’m sorry but this I’m not going to engage any further with this type of discourse.

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#146

Post by cutler »

jgrahamc wrote: post #3

So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded. Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story! The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If yo…

[flagged]

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#147

Post by left-struck »

GordonS wrote: post #15

[flagged]

I think mass refusal to work and spend money to the point where it starts inflicting enough pain on the government to take the desired action, would also significantly affect people who have nothing to do with the conflict, and it would have a greater effect on the poor than the rich as recessions tend to do.

I’m not sure if that would be an ethical course of action outside the country where the oppression is actually happening.

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#149

Post by mmooss »

tdeck wrote: post #72
mmooss wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world would be better off if all the defeatists followed their own advice and did something else with their lives, and left the political activities to a new generation with fight and committment and passion in them, people with leadership and agency. If people are going to quit, then quit! Stop coming to the meeting and talking about you've quit!

I don't disagree with what you're saying but I'm confused about why it's a reply to my comment.

Yours looks (to me) like yet another person saying action by citizens is ineffective or of rather limited effectiveness.

Re: Code that helped end Apartheid

#150

Post by mmooss »

banku_brougham wrote: post #128
tdeck wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this greatly depends on rhe type of protest, specifically whether it threatens the ruling class's ability to make a profit or to govern. In recent centuries liberal governments have gotten better at channeling discontent into forms of protest that are less consequential and more performative.

I remember the massive protests against the Itaq war, and how they were effectively managed in the US. In NYC for example, the train service into the cott was interrupted, delaying many protesters.

Like anything worth doing, it might be hard at times; there might be challenges to overcome.
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