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Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#51

Post by dsfyu404ed »

dragonwriter wrote: post #45
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

> See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years Violent regime change was quite common in the Roman Empire as most people use that term, and even in ~thousand years of Byzantine history after the final East/West partition of the Empire it's hard to find a period of more th…

I meant "violent" like "there was a war and plenty of destruction" not "the ruler got stabbed to death".

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#55

Post by forapurpose »

dragonwriter wrote: post #36
forapurpose wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient. At the same time there seems to be a v…

> The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time. The quality of leaders you must have for a mature (and thus taken for granted ) democracy to survive as a democracy increases with maturity, so this is arguably simple survivorship bias: democracies that get poor leaders when the people have lost the immediate visceral understanding of the frag…

Could you cite some examples, especially of the first paragraph? I don't recall many (any?) mature democracies that changed to another system of government.

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#56

Post by acct1771 »

eloff wrote: post #44
londons_explore wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bet that government was the UK, as part of the Five Eyes program, which has significant surveillance hardware in the middle east. Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar. The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a pr…

There must never be a third world war, it would imperil human civilization itself. There can never even be a total war between two major powers anymore. Our weapons are just too awful. Unfortunately I'm not sure that our politicians self-preservation instincts, strong as they may be, trump their egos (sorry for the pun.)

You don't need survival instincts when you're insulated, and, in many cases, easily isolated (see: elite class buying bunkers).

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#57

Post by talltimtom »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #52

I stopped reading at this bit: "These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC." Uhuh. So... how did you verify them?

Uhh RTFA?

“Qatari officials accept that the texts and voicemails are genuine, though they believe they have been edited "very selectively" to give a misleading impression.”

Re: Did Qatar pay a billion dollar ransom?

#59

Post by justsomedude43 »

paidleaf wrote: post #26

So did they or didn't they? Are they asking the readers? Is this our homework assignment that we are supposed to answer and turn in to the bbc? Can the news start reporting on facts? Read the article only to find out that we don't know who the kidnappers are, if and how much they got, how much cash qatar sent to iraq, etc. Whenever I read articles like this, it leaves me angry and wanting to never read anything from…

Where did they get the txt screenshots from? Looks like these Arabs communicate in perfect English among themselves.
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