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

What was Syria like before the war

searchingforsyria.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 213 posts

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#41

Post by matt4077 »

roadbeats wrote: post #38

The UN is not objective. They keep repeating the "peaceful protests" thing, but what sort of peaceful protests would aim to take down the president by force ? I'm not an Assad supporter but come on, we saw how that peaceful protests ended up in Libya; France was doing air strike to stop the Libya government to interrupt the protests, people killed their former leader with their bare hands. The only peaceful end durin…

They're not repeating the "peaceful protests" thing just like that:

    The conflict in Syria is complex

    It dates back to March 2011, when several teenagers 
    were arrested for painting anti-government graffiti 
    in the southern town of Daraa.

    Public demonstrations calling for democratic reforms
    spread across the country, meeting swift government
    opposition. Peaceful uprisings gave way to violent 
    clashes, and ultimately a brutal civil war.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#42

Post by Phil_Latio »

matt4077 wrote: post #34
Phil_Latio wrote: post #28

>Meet 7-year-old Bana, who shared her experience of war on Twitter. It's like the movie Wag the Dog. Sad to exploit a child like this.

She posted on Twitter: > Why would they bomb us and kill innocent people everyday? > - Bana So I doubt that being "exploited" by the evil UN anti-warmongerers is of particular concern to her. I'd even guess she would want to help to stop this, and prevent further atrocities of this magnitude. You've really gotten away with the wrong lessons from Wag the Dog if you consider this exploitative. The problem in WtD was th…

Well I mean this, and it's just the info you find on wikipedia, there is more:

> Observers have questioned whether Bana understands the concepts that she tweets about. She is a seven-year-old child who does not speak English. A journalist for The New Yorker noted that her "video statements often have a scripted quality, as if she is being coached by her mother to communicate her thoughts in a language that she is only beginning to learn."

> In a now deleted tweet, Bana said it is "better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia & assad commit #HolocaustAleppo".

> In a separate incident, Bana appeared on Turkish television program Channel TV, where she was asked what her favorite food was, and she replied, "Save the children of Syria".

"Bana" is a media campaign.

>The problem in WtD was that it was intended to rouse nationalistic furore justifying a military intervention.

Yes

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#43

Post by mafribe »

netsharc wrote: post #7
candiodari wrote: post #3

I wish there were more definite sources detailing what the actual conflict is about. People are giving all sorts of accounts online and it seems to be divided into a few camps: 1) western and sunni middle eastern press: it's all Assad's (government's) fault. People want democracy. Specifically this is supposed to be a response to violent repression of pro-democracy protests from March 2011. Problem: very hard to beli…

Not that I have followed it that closely, but of course it's not a black vs white conflict, more like several factions wanting to win power/suppress their enemies. I think it started as a demonstration against the corrupt Assad that turned violent when his army started shooting. The "rebels" picked up arms and probably brutally kills pro-government soldiers/citizens, so they are not saints either. Meanwhile ISIS take…

   started as a demonstration 
   against the corrupt Assad
It's unlikely that this was spontaneous, and most likely the first public result of a planned and well-funded regime-change operation.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#44

Post by PetitPrince »

iamjeff wrote: post #12

This is totally off topic (and may even be taken to be insensitive considering the plight of the Syrian people), but I had to ask: is there any way that you/anyone/HNer could offer suggestions on how to deploy such a site for a non-developer...are there free/self-hosted themes and/or frameworks whose installation and use is noob-friendly enough to lend themselves well to interactive storytelling...? Any help/pointers…

From a "I think it's more technical" to "I think it's less technical" order:

* This website uses fullPage.js [1], which is a widely used javascript library for such full screen presentation (for instance Apple use it in their Mac Pro promo page [2]). You can get around it's API if you know a little HTML and a little javascript, but it's still a lot of manual work. And the neatier features are locked behind a (totally justified) paywall.

* One neat generator I know is Jack Qiao's Expose[3] which he mainly uses in his travel photography website [4]. Check out those sweet cinemagraphs ! Unfortunately it is a command-line program which may be a bit obtuse to non-developer (especially on Windows), and the text placement has to be set manually

* Shameless plug: as a side project, I made a clone of Expose in Python [5] (demo [6]) with no video support but explicit Markdown support (so you can embed maps, youtube videos and others ). It's still a command line app, but I'm working on a second version that uses Electron and has a more WYSIWYG approach. It is still very much a side project though.

* You could look at some web-based presentation framework. Slid.es [7] is an WYSIWYG builder for the reveal.js library [8]. It's mainly used for Powerpoint-ish presentation (ex. [9][10]), but with a touch of creativity you can do neat thing, like this portfolio [11].

[1]: https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/

[2]: https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

[3]: https://github.com/Jack000/Expose

[4]: http://jack.ventures/

[5]: https://github.com/PetitPrince/pyxpose

[6]: http://petitprince.github.io/pyxpose-demo/gallery.html

[7]: https://slides.com/

[8]: https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js

[9]: http://motivate.slides.com/motivateco/deck-8-9#/

[10]: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/

[11]: http://ianspiro.com/portfolio/

EDIT: Whoa, paradite mentionned Pageflow. This seems really neat !

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#45

Post by MattLeBlanc001 »

roadbeats wrote: post #38

The UN is not objective. They keep repeating the "peaceful protests" thing, but what sort of peaceful protests would aim to take down the president by force ? I'm not an Assad supporter but come on, we saw how that peaceful protests ended up in Libya; France was doing air strike to stop the Libya government to interrupt the protests, people killed their former leader with their bare hands. The only peaceful end durin…

>The only peaceful end during the Arab spring was in Tunisia as their former king escaped in the beginning.

Tunisia is not a kingdom, never had a king.

> A coalition of western countries took over their country to "establish democracy"

Again, this shows your lack of knowledge, there was no take over or any coalition that went to Tunisia.

> letting Europe teach them how to be a democracy

Working for someone and "Teaching them" are two different things.

> Syria was a failure for whoever organized Arab spring

If you don't know who initiated the Arab spring, you should probably not talk about it as if you were an expert.

> Assad gave a CNN interview in the beginning of the war, saying that he'll lead the transition to democracy

Ohhh, Thank you. Let's all believe the guy who is and was using violance before the arab spring even happened and is a dictator.

> Please go back to 2011 editions of your favorite western papers and look at the news about Syria, reporters based in London were hysterically telling people about how peaceful protesters in Syria are being killed by a demon, Assad.

That is actually true. Other parties/nations got involved in the conflict with different interests. Situation escalated and became what it is today; a nightmate.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#46

Post by mafribe »

ido wrote: post #31
temp_12345 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this mirrors my impression. It was unequivocally a controlled society : one simply didn't speak about the regime in anything less than absolutely glowing terms. The threat of the secret police was persistent. As far as the people go, your odds of being hustled in Syria were pretty high (but not any worse than, say, Thailand) - other than that I totally agree wrt the westernization and general pleasantness. I do…

I don't think it's really possible to argue the country is in any way better off than it was before the insurrection. The question is then, what would have been a better solution? Surely as long as Assad was ruling they were stuck (at best) at a local maximum and would have never transitioned to a free democracy without overthrowing the current government.

   as long as Assad was ruling
Assad's secular dictatorship is massively preferable to ISIS rule, especially to the 25% of the Syrian population that are non-Sunni.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#47

Post by unicornporn »

madiathomas wrote: post #20
raverbashing wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version 57 on Mac. "Older device or Web browser" Edit: updated to 58, still get the message. What a joke Edit2: Worked under FF on Mac

Maybe they are sniffing for OS and assume you are using Safari.

For me it didn't work in Firefox on macOS, but it worked in latest Chromium. What a mystery.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#48

Post by matt4077 »

roadbeats wrote: post #38

The UN is not objective. They keep repeating the "peaceful protests" thing, but what sort of peaceful protests would aim to take down the president by force ? I'm not an Assad supporter but come on, we saw how that peaceful protests ended up in Libya; France was doing air strike to stop the Libya government to interrupt the protests, people killed their former leader with their bare hands. The only peaceful end durin…

What a load of conspiracy-bullshit:

>If you're looking for truth, don't expect these corrupt organizations to tell you, do some research.

Here's the data, from the horses' mouth: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php. UNHCR runs accommodation for half a million refugees. More importantly, they have changed tactics in the last decades, and are trying to get refugees to live among the normal population, instead of tent cities.

If you doubt their numbers, a simple search on youtube will give you hundreds of videos from UNHCR camps. Are they all fake? Here's one of many: https://youtu.be/04sN1xn5tTQ?t=3m17s

> Who was the US foreign minister during arab spring, who has been backing his/her political campaigns ? If you find this name, all you need is to research that person and find out what he has been organizing "peaceful protests that turn to violent" all over the world, from Ukraina to Egypt, from Libya to Syria.

Ohh, now I get it! It's the evil zionist George Soros, isn't it? Yes, I'm sure it's Hilary Clinton's jewish conspiracy that started all this.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#49

Post by paradite »

PetitPrince wrote: post #44
iamjeff wrote: post #12

This is totally off topic (and may even be taken to be insensitive considering the plight of the Syrian people), but I had to ask: is there any way that you/anyone/HNer could offer suggestions on how to deploy such a site for a non-developer...are there free/self-hosted themes and/or frameworks whose installation and use is noob-friendly enough to lend themselves well to interactive storytelling...? Any help/pointers…

From a "I think it's more technical" to "I think it's less technical" order: * This website uses fullPage.js [1], which is a widely used javascript library for such full screen presentation (for instance Apple use it in their Mac Pro promo page [2]). You can get around it's API if you know a little HTML and a little javascript, but it's still a lot of manual work. And the neatier features are locked behind a (totally…

There was a huge discussion of scrollytelling (company creating propitiatory interactives with Pageflow) accusing Al-Jazeera of using their code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524998

https://www.scrollytelling.io/al-jazeera.html

That's when I learnt about Pageflow.

Re: What was Syria like before the war

#50

Post by boomboomsubban »

roadbeats wrote: post #38

The UN is not objective. They keep repeating the "peaceful protests" thing, but what sort of peaceful protests would aim to take down the president by force ? I'm not an Assad supporter but come on, we saw how that peaceful protests ended up in Libya; France was doing air strike to stop the Libya government to interrupt the protests, people killed their former leader with their bare hands. The only peaceful end durin…

The protests probably started organically, the neighbouring Arab Springs seemed successful at the time and Syria was dealing with a long drought, food being one of the primary causes of major protest. Various Sunni generals then defected, probably figuring it would end quickly and they would be primed for chief roles in the new government. al-Assad didn't step down though, and outside help started pouring in from both sides.

Whether Clinton got involved before the Sunni generals defected or after, I can't say for sure. The US has no qualms supporting potential coups but Sunni's rising up against an Alawite leader isn't surprising either. Blaming her for the protests seems like a stretch. Acting like she's some lone agent in the US pushing this kind of stuff requires ignoring centuries of history.

Post reply on HN