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What Beirut was like before the war (2019)

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

#141

Post by raincom »

nemesisj wrote: post #4

I follow the referenced instagram account and I actually find it depressing. I've probably visited Beirut 20+ times over the last 7 years. Last visit was summer of 2019, so haven't been since COVID. My company has an office there. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. It's also one of the most heartbreaking situations in economic and humanitarian terms. The country has experienced one of the worst currency cri…

This is what happens, when the goal of politicians is to acquire wealth for ten generations, and the welfare of people becomes secondary. This leads to "brain drain". The only people are left: the old, the weak, those who can't migrate to other countries.

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

#142

Post by benburleson »

deepdriver wrote: post #124
spaetzleesser wrote: post #111

Beirut should be a warning for all of us who live in comfortable countries and think things well be like that forever. I remember talking to somebody who grew up in Beirut sometime in the 60s or 70s and she said at that time nobody would have believed that their well developed, prosperous city would descend into chaos only a few years later.

Minneapolis is well on its way.

Really? As an American (on the West coast), I had no idea.

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

#143

Post by petre »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #100
babarock wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description of Lebanon is correct, but incomplete. - Lebanon (as an independent state) has been created in 1920, right after WW1 by the French "colonialists" specifically to draw an enclave of non-muslim minority in the country. It's classic Divide&Conquer strategy. - The PLO (Palestinian Islamists) did try to set up an Islamic state in the country, but they were aided, or at least encouraged through inaction, b…

A huge issue in the middle east for democracy is that muslims, or the very very substantial percentage of them that are fundamentalist, want democracy if they aren't in power, and a super oppressive totalitarian state if they are in power. To the point that it isn't just about establishing islamic states and oppressing non-muslims, it's about establishing an islamic state of the Sunni or Shia variety and brutally opp…

The USA should at the very least support the Kurdish region in Iraq if it bothered to topple Saddam. The thing is that it can't/won't stand up to Türkye mainly because we (all) need it in NATO, we need it meddling into Russian affairs in the Caucasus and the Black Sea, at the expense of the Kurds and the Armenians.

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

#144

Post by vineyardmike »

suzzer99 wrote: post #87
nonrandomstring wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the best or deepest account, but for the modern reader who can't spare time on Aristotle and a gamut of old beards [1] Acemoglu and Robinson's account is clear and interesting reading [2]. In the case of Lebanon, the story is that it's ethnic/religious diversity is too much for stability, it being constantly open to interference from its neighbours and super-powers playing proxy war games. [1] https://en.wikipedi…

Plenty of places with high ethnic/religious diversity have thrived: Singapore, Istanbul, New York City, (increasingly) the capitals of Western Europe. Teotihuacan, the largest pyramid complex outside of Egypt, was a multi-cultural city where different religions, languages and ethnicities lived side by side for 1000 years. It can be done.

1. Singapore has an extremely controlling government and lots of accounts of an ethnic non-citizen “underclass” being exploited.

2. Turkey as a whole is questionable. They have rampant ethnic violence even if Istanbul is doing ok.

3. The US and Western Europe arent turkey but again, have various degrees of ethnic tension being played out. Whether that’s trump and all he stands for or France’s burka bans. They’re also generally more powerful so less susceptible to meddling.

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

#145

Post by rayiner »

petre wrote: post #120
rayiner wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this fact is more well recognized outside the west than inside it. Fareed Zakaria predicted the failure of the democracy experiments in iraq and afghanistan back in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom . Those predictions were widely shared among the Muslim diaspora in the U.S. The british sent their criminals to Australia (a harsh island continent) and they turned it into a thriving libe…

> 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 has had in decades.

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

#146

Post by detritus »

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.

'Dismembered the carcass of the Ottoman Empire' surely? Maybe my sense of history in this regard is flawed, but the Ottoman Empire was much to blame for its own demise.

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

#147

Post by watwut »

vkou wrote: post #140
narag wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Stalin) [1]. That would be a waste of time. Stalin had no intention to do anything of that and everybody knew where dissension would send them: jail, gulags, torture and death. That's not "a cultural thing", that's just cynism and propaganda. A cultural thing is when everybody wants to make it work but it never really works as intended. But that's more like the government…

Government is part of culture , as there's a feedback loop where culture shapes it, and is shaped by it. It can absolutely happen here, too, if we elect clowns who explicitly want to break the working parts of the system. The ones that have no intentions of making it work (Except in a way that serves them). Laws and constitutions are indeed just pieces of paper, and carry no power in themselves. It's culture that ult…

The Stalin was in power, because of party victory in war. Not much to do with culture, they won and a lot to do with who wins the fight. The winner of war then driven the culture, sure, but the deciding thing was about power.

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

#149

Post by petre »

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

I guess Charles taking Bakr Bin Laden's (the half brother of Osama Bin Laden) money is not enough to outrage the English enough to strip him of his powers. But maybe if Scotland and Northern Ireland secedes, they'll realize their queen's successor is quite useless.

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

#150

Post by rayiner »

azth wrote: post #126
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge issue in the middle east for democracy is that muslims, or the very very substantial percentage of them that are fundamentalist, want democracy if they aren't in power, and a super oppressive totalitarian state if they are in power. To the point that it isn't just about establishing islamic states and oppressing non-muslims, it's about establishing an islamic state of the Sunni or Shia variety and brutally opp…

I disagree that Muslims want democracy (I'm Muslim). Present day democracy generally contradicts and is against Islam, so I'm not sure where you're getting your information from.

I’m from a Muslim country, and I think they do want democracy. What they don’t want is liberal democracy like in the west.

Shadi Hamid has been instrumental in helping me understand the distinction between the two things. Here’s a good example: https://mobile.twitter.com/shadihamid/status/144363599537580.... More generally: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/08/shadi-hamid-on-i...

What (most) Muslims want is something like what America was like in the early days. Puritan society was extremely democratic, insofar as the people did make the rules for society. But it was not liberal democracy—the puritans created public schools for the purpose of socializing children into religion. They also made it a criminal offense to celebrate Christmas: https://www.history.com/news/when-massachusetts-banned-chris...

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