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14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
61–70 of 504 posts
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The corruption is simply incredible. About fifteen years ago I found myself in Kathmandu after getting altitude sickness. The team's fixer brought me to lunch with some government officials. The topic of discussion? How to steal from a hydroelectric project. One of his guests outright asked, "should we be talking about this in front of this guy?" The fixer shrugged it off saying "he's a Westerner, what is he going to…
Just went to look you up on your profile to see why you might be hanging out with government officials, and just fyi your website link seems gone.
One of my college friends is a documentary filmmaker. He dragged me along as he followed a group of glaciologists up to a high-risk melt lake in the Himalayas. Somewhere above 16,000 feet I got altitude sickness and headed back to Kathmandu ahead of the group.
I got stuck in the city for two or three days waiting for my flight, under the supervision of the team's local fixer. This guy had his finger in every pie: tourism, automobile importing, etc. I wound up at lunch with him because his assistant wasn't available to play tour guide.
Edit: I'll add that I got lucky getting sick. Shortly after my flight out a large earthquake struck, stranding the rest of the group in the Khumbu for nearly a week.
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a random tourist caught up in all of this in Nepal right now, but what I gathered was that corruption and anti-government sentiment was the reason, but the social networks ban tipped people over the edge to start protesting.
Nepal government made the classic mistake of not realizing if you let people scream into the ether on whatever the youth use as twitter, they won't meet up with their friends to scream on the street or even worse.
> “No movement of people, demonstration, meeting, gathering or sit-in will be allowed in the restricted zone,” Chief District Officer Chhabi Lal Rijal said in a notice.
This is what I'll never understand about neolib governments sliding towards authoritarianism: why push back so hard? Evacuate the parliamentary buildings, don't meet the protestors with police, and let them have the run of the place. Record every face on CCTV, and then spend the next couple months vanishing them. The USSR understood this and it's that kind of forward-thinking that lets the likes of Putin maintain authority all the way from his career as a KGB agent through to now.
These governments responding to protests with tear gas and batons fail not only at effective authoritarianism, but also at being good liberal democracies where people can safely protest - which is possible, Taiwan has had two record sized protests in my life and at neither of them did the police advance with batons and beat the shit out of people.
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#64Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other. This is all so disheartening.
I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. There are countries where millions of people have protested, but in time the protests always fizzle or are stamped out, and things continue on the same trajectory.
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Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because people in the West have been indoctrinated to trust their governments far too much to an unhealthy degree Can you give specific examples? I frequently find the US outlook to be exactly the reverse, where people pretend like "the government" is some conspiratorial shadow organisation undermining all the citizens at every step (which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that yo…
>Can you give specific examples? Most rich western/northern European countries. >which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for It's not silly when you consider that the candidates you can vote for, are all managed oppositions, each owned and supported by various mega-money interest groups. Why else did Bernie Sanders never got nominated as a presi…
I'm not disputing that there is gonna be some degree of plutocracy when political funding is uncontrolled and media presence can be bought for cheap.
But I think "managed opposition is the best you can get as voter" is incorrect; Trump is in my view neither managed nor "pro-establishment" in any way, and if everything was actually under "capitalist" control, then people like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or Tim Walz would never be allowed even close to a position of power.
Anti-establishment populists in Europe have seen comparable success (e.g. Italy where they are in power, or Germany where it just looks like a matter of time).
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. There are countries where millions of people have protested, but in time the protests always fizzle or are stamped out, and things continue on the same trajectory.
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> US has definitely loosened some of the free speech restrictions
Press, academic and political speech freedoms are at a generational low point in America.
The President has never before had the power to directly police academic speech and the media’s coverage of him. MAGA voters have no idea the power they’ve given the Presidency, which could be used in the future by a Democrat President to literally just cut funding and pull licenses for people who say stuff the left doesn’t like. (On the other hand, we can put the J6’ers in a foreign prison for a few months, mothball the antivax movement and maybe dismantle the coal plants.)
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#67> The demonstration turned violent when some protesters entered the Parliament complex, prompting police to resort to baton charges, tear gas shells and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, eyewitnesses said. 14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
19 people so far. mostly peaceful protestors shot. 80+ being treated, ~50 serious. It was "Gen Z" kids raising one-piece flags among other things.
some killed were still in their school uniforms, at least one was 16.
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#68> The demonstration turned violent when some protesters entered the Parliament complex, prompting police to resort to baton charges, tear gas shells and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, eyewitnesses said. 14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
Also note the phrasing. The content is "the police killed 14 people". But the form is "the situation turned violent as a result of the protester's actions".
I mean, what what do you do to protect the parliamentarians from blood thirsty crowds. Which side were you on during the January 6 riots/protests?
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#69So where's the donkey and where's the cart. It reads like: citizens have been protesting the government using social media, government desperate to curb dissent bans social media, dissent is now on the streets.. Or maybe it's as straightforward as the media has been reporting.
It shows that the Nepalese have a higher civic response compared to many in the West, just look at the Brits, where in effect there is a social media ban on lots and lots of things that affect day-to-day life.
The only ban on media I've seen is from Farage, who's banned the media from covering local government where he has the power
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-media-...
Trump has a similar playbook.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-white-house-press-pool-b...
Then there's also the normal US style limits (fighting words are banned, speech which harms big companies is banned, "obscenity" is restricted or banned, death threats to the president are banned (the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president)
Re: 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
#70Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other. This is all so disheartening.
Hard agree. I’m always trying to get my fellow young Americans to understand this and it seems to go right over their heads a lot of times. My parents lived through multiple oppressive dictatorships before emigrating to America. Once I understood everything that they and their families experienced ( e.g. , family members being kidnapped, disappeared, and eventually murdered simply due their political views), I gained…
liberalism is passé nowadays, but it will see a resurgence akin to the “hard times make hard people, hard people make good times” cycle