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Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

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Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#121

Post by kerkeslager »

emptyfile wrote: post #8

2019-10-09 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/iraq-protests-latest-... >At least 110 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in Baghdad and in the south, since security forces started cracking down on demonstrators. And the whole world is "outraged" about HK. Here on this thread the other posters are making jokes. If they killed every single person in the country no one would give a shit. Same way no…

At this point, if a person doesn't read Al Jazeera regularly, I can't take that person's opinions on global politics very seriously.

It's not that Al Jazeera isn't biased, or even that it's less biased, it's just that it provides a viewpoint which is so obviously missing from western news sources, and if you're not making an attempt to expose yourself to that viewpoint, you are only hearing one side of quite a wide variety of global political issues.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#122

Post by alexandercrohde »

coldtea wrote: post #103
alexandercrohde wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If they killed every single person in the country no one would give a shit. Same way no one gives a shit about Yemen. What's your point exactly? Is it that human nature is broken, and that we should try to compensate for it [by trying to force ourselves to care more] ? (Because I wonder how many atrocities there are in the world, and how that scales if every internet stranger needs to be angry about every atrocity…

> Is it that human nature is broken, and that we should try to compensate for it No, that if we should be aware, we should be aware for all injustices, not just follow the ones we are force-fed by hypocritical self-serving interests (e.g. our country's diplomacy and subservient media preferring this victim over that, or getting outraged at this player over that - because it suits some diplomatic plans). Especially wh…

>> not just follow the ones we are force-fed by hypocritical self-serving interests

Nobody is force-feeding anybody. TV news is dead, the newspaper is dead. People read the news they find interesting.

If you really think the reason people prefer read US-weekly to civil wars in foreign countries is because "The Man" then you're in for a rude awakening.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#123

Post by mc32 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #119
mc32 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet as the US disengages people are saying on my god, we’re abandoning allies, we’re letting them fend for themselves. The alliances are going up in smoke. The world depends on you guys to keep the peace, send troops and quash problems. Now we’re going to have fight ourselves and send our troops in, you guys are bad!

Again, the point is: if you engage for wrong reasons (or lie about reasons), then mess up and disengage, people have a point in complaining. What's being asked is: don't engange in the first place, if you must start shooting somewhere then do it for the right reasons, and if you absolutely must do something for the wrong reasons, at least be up front about it and clean up your mess afterwards.

Can’t disagree with you there. Blame Busch and Obama and their SimCity approach to geopolitics. That said, things are thorny and messy there and they have to be resolved locally, though if international pressure helps that’d be good. Yet, the chasm is too big right now. They’re gonna have to get tired of war themselves as other places have. Saddam’s peace was a forced peace. International peace would be in similar vein.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#124

Post by vkou »

yorwba wrote: post #105
vkou wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never happened, never will happen. You have thousands of gallons of e-ink spilled over police brutality in HK, a few drops on Iraq, and humm-hawws and 'well, they are all terrorists anyways' on Gaza. Otherwise intelligent people are incapable of understanding that their outrage is being directed to serve geo-political ends. Antagonising China is patriotic. Antagonising Israel serves no end, and is, also of course, an…

> Otherwise intelligent people are incapable of understanding that their outrage is being directed to serve geo-political ends. "Direction" implies that there was a coordinated decision to inflate the importance of the Hong Kong protests by sending more journalists there to produce more articles. But Hong Kong was already an internationally important city with many journalists. Of course they were going to report on…

>"Direction" implies that there was a coordinated decision to inflate the importance of the Hong Kong protests by sending more journalists there to produce more articles. But Hong Kong was already an internationally important city with many journalists. Of course they were going to report on protests happening right under their nose.

You don't need to send more journalists to a place to have more coverage of it.

You need to promote the articles journalists write to front-page headlines. You need to have talking heads who have never left the telestudio talk about the issue.

Sure, you have to deal with the constraints imposed on you by local authorities. Israel for some odd reason isn't super-keen on letting journalists into the Gaza strip, either. But that, itself, is part of the story.

There's a trade war going on, and China has never been in the Western sphere, and antagonizing it is popular and easy, and currently very patriotic, because they are also stealing all our jobs.

Antagonizing Israel is not patriotic, and it's a 'Western' nation, and it's not stealing our jobs, and also you will be in the company of a bunch of truly despicable anti-semites, and the people repressed there are definitely 'non-Western'.

The media cultivates this particular branch of selective empathy, in a way that just happens to coincide with geo-political leanings of our governments. And we eat it up, wholesale, without even a shred of self-awareness.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#125

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dastx wrote: post #120
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those kids might have nothing except go outside and assemble together...perhaps another instance of the law of unintended consequences?

This is already the case for those that are up in arms about these protests. People in Iraq aren't as fortunate as the west where every 5 year old has their own ipad for youtube or what have you. The streets are still full of kids because no one can afford to give every child the latest smart phones.

Iraq isn’t Afghanistan, they might not be rich, but the country is in the upper middle income development band.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#126

Post by vonseel »

kerkeslager wrote: post #121
emptyfile wrote: post #8

2019-10-09 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/iraq-protests-latest-... >At least 110 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in Baghdad and in the south, since security forces started cracking down on demonstrators. And the whole world is "outraged" about HK. Here on this thread the other posters are making jokes. If they killed every single person in the country no one would give a shit. Same way no…

At this point, if a person doesn't read Al Jazeera regularly, I can't take that person's opinions on global politics very seriously. It's not that Al Jazeera isn't biased, or even that it's less biased, it's just that it provides a viewpoint which is so obviously missing from western news sources, and if you're not making an attempt to expose yourself to that viewpoint, you are only hearing one side of quite a wide v…

You’ve just convinced at least one person to add Al Jazeera to his primary news sources.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#127

Post by vonseel »

serf wrote: post #110
ephemeralism wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, you did invade them. Overthrew their government. but sure, other than that, next to no connection.

>well, you did invade them. Overthrew their government. A one-person invasion? And he even succeeded at overthrowing a government all by his lonesome self? That's impressive. This mild sarcasm I used above is to draw attention to the ludicrous idea that any citizen, anywhere, is responsible for the actions of their government. Hee and haw about how we citizens brought whoever to power. I don't care. Until the day tha…

He’s like Liam Neeson. He has skills. Very specific skills.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#128

Post by vonseel »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #89
freeflight wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is part of FiveEyes, thus aid was offered [0] and very likely taken. The lack of Canadian large scale military participation was due to practicality and not moral objections to the invasion [1]: "The weakness of the Canadian military had been a factor in its very limited role in the 1991 Gulf War. While the military had been asked about the feasibility of sending 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (4 CMBG) fr…

Again, I was not in the military in the early 90s. I have no connection to Iraq personally. I do not collectively harbor guilt and constantly stress about the horrible things that the country I choose to reside in has done in their past. I have Hong Kong products in my house, and I interact with people who were born in Hong Kong all the time. The same cannot be said for Iraqi products or people. That is the point I a…

What’s made in Hong Kong? iPhones and electronics? I feel like most of the stuff in my house that has a “made in X” tag says something like China, Bangladesh, or Taiwan.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#129

Post by kerkeslager »

vonseel wrote: post #126
kerkeslager wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, if a person doesn't read Al Jazeera regularly, I can't take that person's opinions on global politics very seriously. It's not that Al Jazeera isn't biased, or even that it's less biased, it's just that it provides a viewpoint which is so obviously missing from western news sources, and if you're not making an attempt to expose yourself to that viewpoint, you are only hearing one side of quite a wide v…

You’ve just convinced at least one person to add Al Jazeera to his primary news sources.

I'm glad!

The need to get my news from international sources became apparent to me after hearing two radio reports on the same story. The local US radio said something along the lines of "Two Palestinians are dead after they attacked Israeli police." The BBC story said something like, "Israeli police shot and killed two Palestinian youths after the youths threw stones at the police." That's not even an openly pro-Palestinian organization, it's the BBC. There's still bias[1], but it's clear that the bias is in a different direction.

[1] I've been told by a 5-lingual friend that "throwing stones" is often a translation of a Hebrew/Arabic word (directly, "stoning") that sometimes includes behaviors like "dropping a refrigerator off the top of a building onto your target"--certainly a lot less innocuous than "throwing stones". I'm not saying that's what happened--I don't know--I'm just saying to be wary of assuming that any amount of secondhand reporting gives you an accurate impression of what's happening on the ground.

Re: Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew

#130

Post by kuzimoto »

bjourne wrote: post #15
emptyfile wrote: post #8

2019-10-09 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/iraq-protests-latest-... >At least 110 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in Baghdad and in the south, since security forces started cracking down on demonstrators. And the whole world is "outraged" about HK. Here on this thread the other posters are making jokes. If they killed every single person in the country no one would give a shit. Same way no…

Same thing is happening in Gaza where over 200 civilians have been killed in the March of Return demonstrations over the last year. Our Western media reporting is insanely narrow and single-minded. One can only hope that, since we are outraged about the HK situation (as we should be!), it follows that we should be outraged about other worse situations too.

The important thing to note here about the March of Return "demonstrations" is that is was not entirely peaceful.

From Wikipedia:

> Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahhar, admitted in an interview to Al Jazeera "when we talk about 'peaceful resistance', we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support."

So you basically had a bunch of militants using civilians as cover. They were throwing Molotov cocktails and using kites with incindiary devices.

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