I would like to believe there is a future where blocking access to the internet is unilaterally impossible. Major powers being able to pull the rug on what has become a foundation of modern society like this is too scary of a thing to allow. What could the answer be? Satellite-powered relays and DIY-able user devices to talk to them?
What you suggest is impossible, because you are attacking a wrench on the head problem with a coding solution. You can always get a dish and connect to your choice of orbital provider, if your ISP - which is regulated - is blocked. The problem is, guys with guns will come to your door, beat you with a wrench, and put you in jail.
Now if we solve for the real issue - lack of freedom because of a ruling class, the technical issue goes away. There's nothing to solve if you can't be oppressed, and if the ruler has no way to oppress, they'd have no way to block your ISP in the first place.
The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed. Even in a democracy, the oppression of you can simply come from a majority (EU citizens have no freedom of speech) or large minority (magats prosecuting women and doctors for murder because of a life-threatening abortion).
There is no answer, because many people want to control and silence others who don't agree - or to compensate for lack of control of their crap lives by controlling other lives. Take a look at this site, and most social media sites. Tiny-dick big-belly mods shadowbanning, the other users downvoting, making comments gray so you can't read them.
Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
>The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed.
Nobody wants to be oppressed. A large portion of the population often wants to be oppressors themselves. They are addicted to controlling others. This might be raising tax on X group, or criminalizing Y minority.
Many people don't like voluntary association and choice. They want compelled behavior that conforms to their expectation.
The only way to combat this is to establish a baseline respect for individual autonomy and choice as long as it doesn't harm other people.
Most people are hesitant to allow this because they don't like the choices that others make. Either that or they define harm as doing anything which they don't like.
are you familiar with the lower middle-class rednecks who form the republican party, and elect people who at every turn scam them, screw them, and try to take away their medical benefits and social security? yes, they do want to be oppressed - but by their own people. not by your people.
my wife is a chinese xpat who got her master's here and stayed. when we go to visit her old parents who have a picture of mao on the wall, half the sites she visits are blocked. She can't get to the things she spends half her free time on. But it's "good that youtube is blocked, there's bad stuff on it."
Most of that country is like that. The millions you see protesting on the street - there's over a billion who are against them and love their firewall which keeps out western propaganda. and when they get their door nailed shut from outside and die of starvation? we don't talk about that, that didn't happen, gramma just died of old age.
i have friends who live in moscow. lots of people - way over half, support the war. when their son gets drafted, given a non-working rifle with no bullets, and shot, and they don't get paid as promised - they get mad at putin for a day. they next day though, they blame the Ukrainians and support the ugly little bald troll even more.
trust me - you are very wrong. probably not in your local social circle - but that has a huge selection bias. go to the DMV, sit there for an hour, and just listen to people talking.
being under the boot is safe, you don't have to make decisions, you don't have to thing as your opinions are provided - as is at whom you should be angry. it's paradise for many a housecat.
>...lower middle-class rednecks who form the republican party, and elect people who at every turn scam them, screw them, and try to take away their medical benefits and social security? yes, they do want to be oppressed
>Mao
>...it's paradise for many a housecat.
Feels like a non-sequitur to compare opposition to state controlled medical coverage to the charmed life of house cats. People often opt to euthanize their aged pets. Animals which misbehave or become unmanageable are sent to shelters where they are euthanized. On the other hand, concerns about death panels and eugenics are laughed away.
Otherwise I agree somewhat with your sentiment. The two goal posts of tribal affiliation are pitted against each other. Authorities take their free kick.
The description of, "lower middle-class rednecks who form the republican party" reads exactly like the kind of partisan 'othering' you describe.
Maybe he's saying that lack of education and or genetics causes people to desire control, to have someone who tells them everything will be allright because they can't handle the size and complexity of the modern world.
They want that particular kind of safety that comes from being under one’s boot: the incredibly reassuring, simple worldview that one can pour all their misgivings and praise for their lot in life into a singular place.
“Bless the king, for I can do X,” “The leader knows how to stop Y from harming us, and knows what we need,” “Damn the council, I get that I must go through them to do toys safely, but it’s so tedious,” etc. You may have never heard any of this, but it’s rather common all the same.
Unfortunately this is so true. I made this experience after travelling to oppressed countries. Just to add, a lot of time it is a net positive for the people, and more complex than propagated from the outside.
I think you are making the grave mistake of confusing cause and effect. Confusing a price willingly paid for motivation.
>yes, they do want to be oppressed - but by their own people. not by your people.
This is a half truth. Nobody wants to be oppressed, but they will choose the boot they think is lighter on them or heavier on others.
You may have been around a lot of different people, but I don't think you actually listened if this is the conclusion you are drawing. You can take that as a comment from someone who identifies more as a "middle class redneck" and then the equivalent alternative.
Nobody is clamoring to have their medical and retirement benefits taken away, but they have been sold on the idea that the alternative is to pay for both their own and that of other people. They are picking the less oppressive option as they understand them.
You can ask your in-laws what they think the alternative to Mao was.
You can ask the Russians what they think the alternative to Putin is. Both will provide you an alternative that they think would be worse.
People will accept some oppression if they think it is the Lesser of two options. They don't actively seek it out
I was thinking exactly that the other day, while watching a TV show on national publicly funded television, where a variety of pundits where discussing the first year of the present term of the ruling president, and the on-set comedian summed up the situation : "the panel and the country is split in two : those that don't like the ruler, and those who hate him".
The youngest panelist (a twitch political streamer) argued about constitution changes with an older panelist (journalist in a far right newspaper). The table was filled with various levels of right center, vaguely socio democrats, a few has been still stuck in the 70s, etc...
Everyone talked very loudly and eloquently.
We may lack direct power, direct control over our institution, we may live in tight societies with few chances of social mobility, we definitely have press ownership issues, etc...
But for one think, i believe we have _some_ freedom of speech.
No, I'll leave the floor to those who define "free speech" as "the freedom to insult" :P
I believed this as well. Then came covid-19, and I had to learn that power corrupts people, same for those on the left as well as those on the right. Since then, I basically lost all believe in the narrative of democracy that I have been fed with my entire life. Its all a lie.
Emergencies and wars are bad for démocraties. The question is how fast and bad you come out of them.
Societies stood, jails are not flooded with opponents, I get the weekly interview of an antivax/covidsceptic/whatever on the radio because they're on the "right" political team, the governments are paying the political prices of their handling in the ballot boxes.
This is not perfect and never was meant to. Sorry if you were told otherwise.
Tides turn. People you agree with will be in the ruling majority some day. This will hurt even more ;)
Thanks for this compassionate reply. Its about time that we start understanding eachother even if we are in disagreement. It is subtle, but it really makes a difference. Let me just reply to your last point:
< People you agree with will be in the ruling majority some day. This will hurt even more ;)
In fact, I am psat that, because this was exactly what happened to me. We had a coalition between center-right and the green party. Even the socialists turned up and everyone seemed to unite into a coalition to divide the people. I am lacking the eloquence in english to explain myself fully, but the lesson I got, sadly, was that you really can not trust anyone to not corrupt and try to control you.
"but the lesson I got, sadly, was that you really can not trust anyone to not corrupt and try to control you. "
Even if this would be absolutely true, it would not undermine democracy. It just would proof the need to have build in mechanisms to keep the people in power in check. Exactly because you cannot trust people 100%. And mechanisms like this exist and are in place, but I agree, they should be improved.
This is what I believed as well, until I saw how one of the basic democratic rights, the right to demonstrate, was undermined in my country from the first day on. The main argument wasn't even spreading the virus, while that was aso mentioned as an aside. The main argument was "all of the demonstrators are right-wing nuts, these demonstrations must be condemned". I was schocked, because I knew this wasn't true at all. This is when I reaized, all the safety mechanisms we have been taught about democracy are a shim which can easily be disabled at the time of "need" from a autocratic regime.
I'm sorry that you felt silenced during demonstration. I hope you got other chances to get your voice heared afterwards (and if your voice was heard but just happened to be in a minority... Not much more to say than 'this too, shall pass'.)
As an aside, to be honest, I've always been undecided about demonstrations.
I dread for the day were they will be systematically forbidden or brutally repressed.
And then again, I live in a country that is in a perpetual state of strike and demonstrations, but we're it's cool and fashionable not to vote, because, "it doesn't change anything".
I love the creativity that comes in cardboard slogans. (I want to meet the person who invented "16-64 : it's a beer, to a career" during this pension reform season.)
And yet, I always feel uncomfortable about being in the same crowd as other, much less original and much more simplistic slogans.(sorry, but I _saw_ the posters explaining that every single person wearing a mask or getting a jab was a fascist decrebrated sheep. Or
that COVID was just a trick from the <insert your favorite scapegoat here>. I would not have like walking behind this, sorry.)
Also, at how many people does a demonstration starts to represent "the will of the people" ? It seems like any cause can summon 500.000 people in the streets in May, provided the weather is good. 1 million people is almost a "revolution".
And yet, 1.000.000 people gets you less than 5% of any election with a decent turnout. Should that matter ?
Also, to be clear : I'm frailed or not particularly brave. The idea that "just because you're a big mob, and you can threaten to break stuff, you're right" is frightening.
I supposed I would be even more frightened in an "actual" dictatorship. So, plenty of cognitive dissonance to deal with, hey ?
Maybe I'm just enjoying the privileged position of a country where we get elections that are not entirely tricked (source : my perversion is tallying votes on Sunday nights. Cool kids don't do that, but they don't vote either - They get ready for the next demonstration.)
I hope that, if we ever loose that, I'll get the courage to demonstrate.
The problem with it is that you only have free speech until someone higher in the power structure decides whatever you're saying is insulting.
Free speech in the US is actually limited in some ways, for example speech is only protected from abridgement by the government, something that's becoming more relevant by the day as social media platforms gain more and more sway over the public discourse.
Well, someone "higher in the power structure" has to decides what your saying is insulting _and_ put in place the means to actually punish you for that.
Speech, like pretty much every other freedom, is restricted by laws. And, we do have a pretty decent level of separation of powers as far as "putting people in jail" is concerned; so, to put you in jail for a long time, the "insult" has to be recognized by lawmaker, judges and governement.
(The situation is more troublesome for "putting you in jail for a few hours after a demonstration". But the forerunner for "repression" on this front at the moment in Europe, is, ironically enough... the UK [1]. So, good for them that they're not under "EU tyranny" anymore, I guess ?)
Europe has a troubled history on this front (we had certain issues for letting certain people "freely" explain why certain religious minorities had to be "dealt" with). So some countries passed some laws barring some discourse about race, slaverly, discrimination, etc... that would be protected by free speech laws in other countries.
(And, contrary to one pervasive piece of "free speech", there is not yet a "global goverment" enacting the same laws everywhere. Go figure.)
As for free speech on social media platform, that's a different topic. But my very personnal opinion to think that "insulting people while protected by putting the blame on twitter" is not a fundamental right.
Open a blog, become a "publisher" under "freedom of the press" laws dating back to the late 1800s. Then, bear the consequences of your speech.
(Neither is twitter's right to earn money from publishing insults while claiming they're not a publisher.) But, just my 2c, and I agree to disagree.
I'm not aware of a single issue which has been effectively banned from public discourse due to being moderated on social media, nor any person who has been unable to continue public life or communication, for the same reason. Even "vaccine critical" discourse during COVID was rampant during the time when, supposedly, social media platforms erased it completely.
The "sway" that social media platforms have over public discourse is often vastly overstated for political ends, certainly compared to that of governments (as the argument is often made that social media platforms are more powerful than governments, to make them seem more threatening.)
And the real problem is, if you consider the ability of social media platforms to moderate content to be harmful, the only solution is to have government limit the free speech of those platforms and those who participate on them by coercing them into publishing speech they don't want to, which cedes power to a potentially even worse entity. People are so terrified of the perceived power social media has now (to the point of wanting to make "algorithms" illegal) that they're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Facebook can ban me from their platform but at least they can't send goons to my house and ban me from life.
They are very few (read: "none as far as I know it") people jailed in the EU for having said that vaccines were "dangerous / ineffective / a plot by the governement to inject 5G chip / insert theory here" - neither for writing it on social media, nor for telling it on broadcast radio / TV.
However, and sorry for the cliché, there seems to be some places where you can get in jail for calling a "special operation" a cat.
> The problem is, guys with guns will come to your door, beat you with a wrench, and put you in jail.
This is hyperbole. A dictator might have the tools to shut off a couple of dissident. But if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.
> Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
That's a bit contradictory to what you said a few sentences before. Most people like to be the oppressors but not oppressed.
It's not clear how many died in TSquare but it's a few thousands at most. That's very far from the hundred of millions of people China has.
A counter example is the CCP backing down from the Covid restrictions under popular pressure. If enough people put pressure, the government will react.
> Dictators will massacre their own people
You have to be reminded that the government (and the army) are themselves made of the people. This has the interesting consequences that the most brutal ones are actually oil-funded (because they can outsource security) or countries that have a racial/cultural divide (because they can rally one segment of the population against another, ie: Syria).
Afaik it was not "planned" unlike Stalin and Beria's NKVD - Mao ordered crows killed to increase crop yields not thinking about the consequences of remove a predator from an ecosystem because the smart folks were either ignorant or afraid of going to a re-education camp.
Under Mao's rule, millions of people were overtly executed. It wasn't just Mao's incompetence that got people killed accidentally. He ordered millions of people to be murdered.
The space of democracy is already taken by the leader of the freeworld that dictates how democracy should look like. So if you can't play the game, it is logical to want to play your own game.
Perhaps you should read this book. The first chapter is about Ai Weiwei's dad, Ai Quing, being deported to a work camp in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, along with his two sons.
The solution is not technical. My dad had a TV sat dish during the communist regime. He was scheduled to be arrested in '90, but the regime fell during the winter of the previous year.
A significant portion of Mainland Chinese Internet users have access to a VPN. They can read the whole Internet. It's been that way for about 10 years. Why isn't it "game over" yet for the Chinese Communist Party? How about Myanmar or Cambodia, which have much less sophisticated national Internet firewalls? Still going dictator-strong.
That's only on paper. During anniversaries of various politically important events, access to the foreign segment of the Internet is slowed down, infected with packet loss, and disrupted in other ways so that VPNs become practically unusable. This obviously affects not only VPNs, but other kinds of traffic.
Source: I worked for a company that had an office in China, and was responsible for maintaining the Chinese servers. In that case, I had to troubleshoot multi-hour MySQL replication lags. Solved by switching the TCP implementation to BBR, because it is resistant to packet loss.
The point missed by the comment whom you reply to is that tech that enables information sharing (Internet, VPN, comms satellites) comes together with tech that allows for more effective population control and propaganda (great firewall, surveillance satellites, social karma, "everything app", electronic money). It's back to the human factor again: if you don't have protections against dictatorship tech won't help you, but if you do have democracy you don't care about that fancy tech.
> But if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over
It is illegal to bring them into the country, and if you get caught doing so it's jail time. That is true today of drones and any sat communication system in many, many countries.
The black market tends to pop up to satisfy demand in violation of controls. Find a high ranking official who can tell the police to back off and cut them in: then you're in business, at least until they're purged. But even then, the next person in the seat will most likely respond to the same incentives and business will resume...
Even in North Korea, this process takes place. It's just that much slower and riskier, and when lots of controls are slapped on people become too destitute to buy product. But the letter of the law is ultimately just a "threat" in your SWOT analysis when you're able to tempt people with personal gain.
What good governance ultimately does is to enable everyone's indifference on these matters: the rules are out in the open, nobody's keeping secrets and blackmailing their rivals, and the result is sufficiently fair that going against it is a position only a tiny minority are inclined to take. Once everyone's in circumlocutions about their actual position because the politics have gotten out of hand, you have the kind of confusing, hysterical mess that would move someone to turn off the Internet rather than let any more rumors spread.
Thus, this kind of tech - anything in the realm of decentralized communications - is easiest to access in the places of the world that need it the least.
While your philosophical approach sounds good written down, I can tell you from experience, the reality on the ground is vastly different.
I drove my own vehicle across the land borders into Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, DRC, Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Egypt and about 40 more countries.
You DO NOT want to bring sat communication equipment into countries where it is strictly prohibited.
Some of those countries won't even let you bring 2-way radios in (military tech)
There are no "EU citizens" only citizens of EU member countries. None of those countries have freedom of speech as expansive as Americans but Americans in practice also don't have absolute freedom of speech.
1) Certain speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" has long been considered illegal.
2) The US has much more expansive laws about "conspiracy to..." which make it illegal to have certain conversations.
Oh, those don't count? Not real speech. Sure, why not.
3) Most people will experience very real economic consequences for a very wide range of speech. We're not all yeoman farmers entirely independent of paid employment.
That presumably doesn't count because only governments can restrict liberties? Well, have it your way but I would regard losing my job due to speech as a pretty severe restriction on my liberty.
> 1) Certain speech such as "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" has long been considered illegal.
This was a serious curtailment to free speech. "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a euphemism for telling people to dodge the draft during WWI, making this restriction an overt curtailment of free political speech. Thankfully though, this was overturned several decades ago. The current standard is that you can't "incite imminent lawless action", so for instance it's not legal to say "Hey everybody, let's lynch Mvandenbergh from that tree right now!" But to your point, this is still a restriction on free speech, it's not an absolute right in America. You are correct on that point.
EU citizenship was established by the Treaty on European Union [1] in 1992. While EU citizenship is different and additional to national citizenship, it does exist in law.
> Revoking someone’s citizenship is hugely controversial. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines having a nationality as a right, forbidding countries to arbitrarily deprive someone of it.
It seems to me that if I were an EU citizen, the EU would be the ones who had to remove my citizenship, and that would be a very controversial step. I don't recall long winded speeches in the UN denouncing the EU for forcefully removing the citizenship of millions of people, which leads me to think that it's not a "real" citizenship.
The UDHR, Article 15, says that everybody has a right to have nationality and can't arbitrarily be deprived of nationality. The EU is not a nation and nobody has an "EU nationality", so depriving somebody of their EU citizenship doesn't violate Article 15. People in the UK retained their nationalities.
Sounds like you figured it out. Germany and Nigeria are nations, the EU is not. Appropriately, Germany and Nigeria are represented in the United Nations, while the EU is not.
"Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing."
There, you nailed it. I wish I could give you +10 ;)
> The problem is, guys with guns will come to your door, beat you with a wrench, and put you in jail.
Counterpoint: guns, doors, wrenches and jails are tools as well. So, I don't buy this notion that technology can't solve societal issues.
It's like saying you can't fix a leaky faucet with a wrench because the real problem is that the pipes are old and rusty. Sure, the root cause may be a societal issue, but that doesn't mean we can't use technology to mitigate the problem. I mean, imagine telling a doctor not to prescribe medicine to a sick patient because the real issue is poor lifestyle choices.
> Counterpoint: guns, doors, wrenches and jails are tools as well. So, I don't buy this notion that technology can't solve societal issues.
I'd go as far as saying, technology is by far most likely to solve societal issues, but it usually happens indirectly, in ways not easily predicted.
To use your example:
> It's like saying you can't fix a leaky faucet with a wrench because the real problem is that the pipes are old and rusty.
Yes, and technological solution for this ends up being... all the metal pipes getting replaced with plastics, because plastics are that amazing and petroleum industry made them cheap as dirt. There are many "technological solutions" at play here, most of them have nothing to do with plumbing, but together they both make the plastic pipes possible, and through economics, make them suddenly appear in everyone's houses.
(The whole setup of course comes with new problems in other areas, but that's almost always the case with any solution to anything.)
> I mean, imagine telling a doctor not to prescribe medicine to a sick patient because the real issue is poor lifestyle choices.
This is what a good chunk of the world believes, and tries to tell the doctors and patients alike. I consider this to be "fuck you advice"; "poor lifestyle choices" are usually not actually choices, and lifestyle changes are much, much harder to implement (often impossible in practice) compared to a medical intervention.
I don't know if the majority of people want to be oppressed, that sounds like a simplified generalization. Specially taking into account the variances of oppression between different regimes across the world. The reasons for oppressive regimes to arise may be completely different, even if there are some shared psychological and sociological features. The very concept of freedom is not stable and is constantly being negotiated. However you point out an important issue that I agree with, and is many times forgotten: the questions about freedom that arise with technological developments are not technological per se, but political and ethical in their nature
First, technically there are no EU citizens, only citizens of EU member states. Speech is handled at member state level (e.g. hate speech, as in inciting violence against an ethnic or religious group, or displaying Nazi affiliation will be handled very differently in Portugal that never had direct Nazi rule, Germany that is doing it's best to make sure there are never Nazis again, and Poland that suffered centuries of massacres from violent oppressors, including the Nazis) so it's even less correct of a saying in this case.
Second, just because it doesn't fit your ideal of free speech, it doesn't make it non-free. Free is directional (from or to), on a spectrum and a matter of perception.
There are no public places on Earth with absolute free speech, and the vast majority of people prefer it that way.
Varies from country to country. Here in Germany we have substantially stricter laws against hate speech for example. Even more egregious, we have pretty strict laws against insults as well, which do get abused by people in power. For example, not too long ago someone got his house raided by police for calling the state interior minister a dick on twitter.
These kinds of laws are only possible because we have less strict and explicit rights to free speech in our constitution than the us.
Yes, sure this is a bit of dark spot for freedom of speech in Germany. From what I'm seeing though pauli zoo got suspended from twitter afterwards and there has been neither suit nor countersuit in that case. So maybe there is more hidden detail here than is publicly known.
So I wasn't really participating in social media anyways, but it still had a cooling effect on what I'm willing to say in public.
The leader of my state (Berlin) is a cheater (proven; plagiarized heavily in her diss) and I strongly dislike her. I'm also positive she's exactly the kind of petty and vindictive person to go after random people insulting her.
A police raid in itself is a huge punishment already. Your home gets violated, lots of stuff destroyed and in this case, all computers and hard drives taken away. If that happened to me, it would be months of absolute pain to return to normality.
Which is hilarious given the restrictions on freedom of speech in the US
European countries have different levels of restrictions on the US, more lax in some areas, tighter in others. The main difference with the US is that the EU doesn't pretend they have unlimited free speech, the US does.
>What you suggest is impossible, because you are attacking a wrench on the head problem with a coding solution. […] The problem is, guys with guns will come to your door, beat you with a wrench, and put you in jail.
I would rather suggest that this is a education issue, mainly on how to widespread behavior that favor common goods and reciprocal mutual help as the basis of every single human out there. That is, methodologies like Marshall Rosenberg worked at disseminating.
Any other option is a race to the bottom of the rawest brutality.
>The reason for the oppression is, a large portion of every country actually wants to be oppressed.
Should I be haunted with so awful thoughts, I wish some people could help me to find an effective mental healing process, really.
Life is hard, and people having to struggle with of all sort of issues will certainly take what seems on the moment to be the easiest path to bring a bit more stability in the mess they are going through. But in no case that mean that anyone is deeply craving for oppression.
>many people want to control and silence others who don't agree
Well, that doesn’t reflect my own experience of interacting with many people. We agree that some people can be animated with that kind of despicable mindset. And we agree, certainly, that some of them can successfully gain significant political/social power. A very small minority of people like that is enough to engender nation wide desolation.
>Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
Maybe try to go in different social circles out there. You might be positively surprise.
GP didn’t say “your access to the internet”, but “access to the internet”. The solution is partly technical, because it’s about increasing the number of heads that must be wrenched to disrupt a society’s access to the internet.
The only way that can be done is by reducing the cost and technical ability needed to connect to the internet with fewer intermediaries that can be wrenched by governments.
> You can always get a dish and connect to your choice of orbital provider, if your ISP - which is regulated - is blocked. The problem is, guys with guns will come to your door, beat you with a wrench, and put you in jail.
They have to catch you first.
What if every computing device sold in the West came as standard with built in, secure mesh networking and ability to uplink to satellites?
Then governments like Pakistan would have to use those computers, and lose the ability to control what their people say.
Alternatively, they could:
(1) not use computers, dooming their country to perpetual poverty
(2) come up with their own solution, and they're too small an economy to come up with one that isn't backward
(3) buy a solution from another autocracy, such as China -- and doom their country to be forever controlled by China
The problem with this idea is that the West doesn't want every compute to come with built in secure mesh networking, because they want to snoop on their people too. But if they did go for this idea, because they're a freer society than their competitors (China and Russia, mainly) it would give them a massive advantage.
> the oppression of you can simply come from a majority (EU citizens have no freedom of speech)
That's a gross over-simplification. EU citizens have a good deal more freedom of speech than in most societies that've ever existed; and in every society there are things you might say that will get you in serious trouble.
> There is no answer, because many people want to control and silence others who don't agree
A lot do; these people are stupid and if they were more sensible they would realise that among societies, there is a strong correlation between amount of freedom of speech and how nice the place is to live in.
> Most people are bootlickers. Most people want the type of power structure that ends up with the internet blocked. They don't want freedom - they want to be on the side doing the oppressing.
They imagine they will be the person wielding the fist and not the person being punched by it.
In truth it will be the ruling class doing the restrictions on freedom. And because power corrupts, even if the ruling class start off as perfectly moral and just people (ha!) they won't stay that way for long.
Although this is not a EU thing, thus varies country by country, that’s something I’m not happy about the European approach to freedom of speech.
It’s usually the Nazi stuff and defamation that is not allowed, so it doesn’t affect most people but still is in principle I would prefer the absolute free speech. The American approach is better on this.
It is not if you're the victim of the so called "freedom of speech" of others and can't do anything about it... The US also doesn't have absolute freedom of speech, just a different set of rules that makes them believe they do.
As a EU citizen, I really have no clue where you pulled that from. We must have a very different definition of freedom of speech.
I can criticize my government openly and as much as I want but I can't call for a genocide or do a nazi salute. Most of us are perfectly fine with that, but thanks for your concern about our freedom.
Many women with life threatening conditions get stuck waiting for the inevitable because they have already created evidence by going to a doctor. If anything happens to the baby without evidence of natural causes, they can be prosecuted. This has put women in a tough place.
You'd need more than an internet that could not be shut off. You'd also need an internet where communication could not be tracked.
One of the most effective ways to maintain an authoritarian regime is to proactively prevent a critical mass of revolt from forming. You just need to keep a steady low volume of arrests and disappearances going for people who express discontent. If not enough people are actively expressing discontent, you fill your quota with members of a group or area that you see as a risk. History shows that your people will stay silent and meek, clinging to the belief that they personally have done nothing wrong.
A means of communication which authorities cannot snoop on is absolutely essential for any oppressed population that yearns to breathe free.
Everyone knows what is going on and keeps the status quo, but a shock (often external) occurs to ignite the dry wood, and disruption erupts.
Demonstrations and riots can be healthy releases of tension in democracies. Bottle-in the regular microquakes, and you get devastating earthquakes instead.
I would say Russia, China, and North Korea (all well-known to disappear people) have been incredibly stable. Even countries that were quite liberal (e.g., Iran, Myanmar) have worn their populations down into compliance in their major cities. Even the liberal West is borrowing from the same playbook (e.g., police raids on investigative journalists, politically motivated prosecutions).
The strategy works, but as you imply, maybe there's a breaking point... or maybe totalitarian states have figured out how to get as close to that line as possible without crossing it.
I don’t think so. Internally all these countries are very stable, they are just weak to external forces that are out innovating then and move up on the tech/production tree.
Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links? Perhaps we can mechanize the selection of important content.
The real question is how you do this in a way that doesn't encourage one-sided propaganda, sybil attacks, etc.
I'm reminded of systems like Secure Scuttlebutt and the Othernet satellite transport. https://othernet.is/
I know the internet is fundamentally two-way. It seems there's always a few competent users who know how to get information out of a conflict zone or disaster area... getting information in beyond a few choke points seems to be the hard part.
I think Othernet is really cool. Don't even need a big dish. In 2kbps, they fit in RSS news feeds (BBC, Al Jazeera, Boing Boing, and others), APRS messages, WikiNews, global winds report, a daily Voice of America news report.
Currently only works in Europe and North America, but nice to know there's a middle-of-no-where service that doesn't require a sub that gives you some barebones info from the outside world.
It's a social one, because social means are what are used to enforce the lockdowns - and those social means exist because of socially justified purposes in the societies.
Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).
> Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).
Yah, these types of things would be hard to detect (just point an LNB at the southbound sky... no dish... cheap electronics...)
What it's not is turnkey or filled with a good feed of information that people would want at baseline. There's no adoption model besides being a dissident, and people tend to start planning for that too late.
Starlink dishes are trivial to detect with even 1990s military technology when active. There's no way any satellite uplink can be hidden from a motivated adversary.
Any receiver using the heterodyne principle (this includes most current digital radio modems) is trivially detected by its local oscillator, often to some considerable range (potentially hundreds of metres).
In the UK, the BBC used to exploit this, with radio detection vans patrolling the streets for unauthorized receivers, to fine people for watching TV without a license. So did the USSR with shortwave receivers, where the penalty was potentially more than a fine. A satellite receiver is the same, in principle.
> Any receiver using the heterodyne principle (this includes most current digital radio modems) is trivially detected by its local oscillator, often to some considerable range (potentially hundreds of metres).
I'm sorry. This is not intrinsic; this is a design choice. Yes, most LOs just care about getting under legal emission masks, but there's nothing to prevent one from bringing it much lower.
Further, as I explained: the LO frequency of the LNB for the first conversion is often the exact same frequency as you'd use to downconvert digital TV broadcast.
> In the UK, the BBC used to exploit this, with radio detection vans patrolling the streets for unauthorized receivers, to fine people for watching TV without a license.
They never found anyone in a way that could be used for prosecution. "A freedom of information act has revealed that TV Detector vans have never to date provided evidence to be used in court against the TV Licence Non-payer, and have therefore never succeeded in enforcing the TV licence."
It's not intrinsic, no. It's possible to design a receiver with its local oscillator emissions to be down to an arbitrarily low emission standard. (But who actually does that?) And not all reception techniques require a local oscillator at all. Still. My point was merely that with an average radio, which was designed to just not be harmfully interfering, such as typical satellite TV receiver? It's quite possibly lit up like a beacon if you know what to look for.
> with its local oscillator emissions to be down to an arbitrarily low emission standard. (But who actually does that?)
Better testing to compliance standards has pushed LOs down way lower than they were in the 40s-60s. We have relatively cheap high quality spectrum analyzers and big integrated measurements. So-- kinda everyone pushes things down pretty low now.
> My point was merely that with an average radio, which was designed to just not be harmfully interfering, such as typical satellite TV receiver?
Yah-- this LNB looks just like a satellite TV receiver, with the exact same LO frequency. So your rogue downlink looks exactly like something that there's hundreds of innocent versions around.
Then a SDR inside your house chooses a different signal from the transponder and gets the data.
The point is, there's a whole lot of (mostly legal) satellite receivers around, so looking for satellite receivers doesn't seem like a great way to spot dissidents immediately.
It's trivial to force all the registered satellite broadcasters servicing a country off-air, if your already willing to arrest the former prime minister in public view, so anyone left with a hot dish would be easily identifiable.
So, you turn off all the state TV coming by satellite... so that you hope that all the satellite receivers get unplugged from the wall (else, they're likely to be listening to reacquire and get program guide etc)... so that you can drive around in vans and look for the -remaining- satellite receivers as a conduit of information coming in.
I mean, I guess it's possible. But probably not your top priority during a time of potential unrest. And it probably won't work that well as a way to find people with the links.
Any non zero amount of incoming radio signal to a hot dish would be suspicious, and easily identifiable, if all the registered broadcasters are offline.
I suppose the heterodyne frequently (the 465 kHz of AM, for instance) can be effectively hidden. Put your whole receiver into a metal enclosure, have a high-pass filter before the antenna connector, and a low-pass filter before the outputs and power connectors.
Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable, though, so you'll need to hide it, possibly inside some innocuous-looking other device or enclosure.
The whole setup becomes somehow more involved, but still cheap enough.
> I suppose the heterodyne frequently (the 465 kHz of AM, for instance) can be effectively hidden. Put your whole receiver into a metal enclosure, have a high-pass filter before the antenna connector, and a low-pass filter before the outputs and power connectors.
Yes-- and every piece you mention is "quality radio design 101".
> Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable
I'm not sure about that.
The biggest most suspicious thing is, if they're resourced to investigate everyone with a piece of coax going outside-- where does yours plug into?
Of course, if you're really dedicated-- get a satellite TV receiver, empty out the nice metal box, put the receiver inside ;).
Sounds useless for the internet (where every protocol is fundamentally two way), but great for ‘Radio America’ type broadcasts. Of course, so is shortwave.
definitely not solving the same ‘problem’ at all though.
The more random it is, the harder it is to have certainty, but at high enough transmission rates and powers the raised noise floor is impossible to miss and is definitely something that can be triangulated.
If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow.
Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.
> The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable
A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic.
> and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit.
Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted.
"Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
> what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
- Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment.
- 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see.
- An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable).
That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
> That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
I'm probably failing to articulate what I'm describing. Not really. I've been part of the SSTV scene. I know about packet and things like PACTOR etc too.
I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever.
Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
The reason I think you’re getting so much confusion is it doesn’t seem to make any sense to folks what you’re proposing.
It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway. They’ll just knuckle under the societal rules which forbid it, because the cost of doing it in a way they won’t likely be caught and imprisoned isn’t worth it to them.
Most people just care about having food in their belly every day, feeling safe and loved, and being able to believe that what they’re doing is okay day to day and will work out to be all good in the future.
Doing what you’re proposing doesn’t really help them with that.
> It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway
Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future.
SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted.
Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.
I think to answer your underlying question of ‘why’ a bit.
You say ‘robust’ for societies as if it’s a given positive, but there is an implied statement hidden there.
Robust against what?
Robust against censorship is rarely desired by the majority (and certainly not openly), because the censorship is with the consent (and often at the request of!) the majority.
Just look at the CSAM/Kiddie Porn discussion in the US.
At least as long as the majorities interests and the gov’ts interests align enough, which is usually for far longer than anyone wants to admit.
So as long as it doesn’t step on the majorities ability to get what they want when they want it more than they are willing to tolerate, robustness against it will always be a feature with a limited market and a lot of opposition. An anti-feature in some ways, or at least it will be spun that way.
We may consider robustness against this good - and I personally do - but in my experience that is far from a common attribute, especially if you boil it down to specific examples.
Should Pakistan be able to robustly send how to bomb US targets + propaganda to everyone? Should someone be able to do the same with child porn? Or anti-Islamic rhetoric? Or anti-women’s rights? Or anti-free speech?
I think I explained "robust" in the post above pretty well. It's about making a network that works and delivers information even when things go wrong or when there's not much infrastructure available.
Primarily for the use case where there's just not much reliable infrastructure. I like the idea of getting a local snapshot of news, important source repository updates, and other things important to me during little snippets of connectivity.
But this also makes things useful for the case where the infrastructure is impaired. Perhaps by natural disaster. Perhaps by state interference. Perhaps by individual commercial actors.
Yes, "how does one determine what the network distributes broadly" is a complicated question. It should be democratic and resilient to being coopted. I understand this is very, very hard. But I don't think it's intractable, and even without it the other building blocks of a network like this are attainable (general resilience and reliability).
We now have the ability to train entire language models that contain information, can regurgitate it in the form of articles, and can even interact through conversation. Right now they’re big, but with continued improvements we could likely have useful and accurate models that fit on USB sticks and can be distributed through Bluetooth.
You aren't. The entirety of English Wikipedia (sans history) compressed with zstd is currently ~93 Gb from https://www.kiwix.org/. If you exclude the images, it's ~13 Gb. It's a much better bang for the buck than any LLM storage-wise, and that's before we even consider the hardware requirements to actually run an LLM vs an offline wiki reader.
Storage is effectively free. I can fit the entire Vicuna LLM on a $5 (US retail) SD card right now, and in a decade that’ll be less than $.50. LLMs will also presumably get more efficient at storing fact data outside of the network parameters.
People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t. They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and easier to distribute in a censorship-resistant manner. That’s why Tor is much more popular than high-latency censorship resistant networks that share static blobs, even though low-latency networks are relatively insecure and much easier to block. The question then is not how to save $3 of storage media: it’s whether you can simulate the interactive experience of the Internet in a satisfying way without a reliable low-latency network connection. Maybe the answer is no, maybe it’s yes. Imagine a really high-quality future LLM that you can actually interact with and ask questions about specific topics, maybe even using voice communication, and that can play games with you and generate other types of “web like” experiences. Is that really less compelling than a download of Wikipedia?
People in regions where Internet access is a problem to begin with do not download Wikipedia because they don't have the ability to do so. That's why Kiwix has side projects such as a Raspberry Pi based content server that can be set up in e.g. a school and used to serve content to all students using whatever cheap phones they might have, or a reader that runs on WinXP. And, yes, that stuff is actually deployed in various places in Africa.
Now imagine the hardware that you'll need to run that high-quality future LLM. How many Kiwix hotspots could you set up for the same money?
Mind you, I'm not saying that there aren't compelling use cases for LLMs. It's just that it's a thing that's nice to have after you have Wikipedia etc. Indeed, ideally you'd want to have Wikipedia indexed so that the LLM can query it as needed to construct its responses - otherwise you're going to have a lot of fun trying to figure out which parts are hallucinations and which aren't.
The situation I’m considering is not people who are sitting in regions where Internet connectivity is fundamentally poor, because there is no infrastructure. The situation I’m considering is one where Internet connectivity exists but is being deliberately throttled or filtered: either through periodic Internet shutdowns (as is happening in Pakistan right now as described in TFA) or through ubiquitous content and site filtering (as happens routinely in China and increasingly in other nations.)
There are places where Internet access and compute resources are fundamentally limited by lack of infrastructure. Talking about LLMs in those places doesn’t make sense. But on the trajectory we’re currently on, those places will likely become more rare while political Internet filtering will become more common.
If you live in a country where internet can be blocked, so can access to power. Satellite relays or other DIY devices or starling or pretty much anything else doesn’t work if you have no power.
In theory sure, but practically, it won’t. Even in the US, only 15% of households have any backup at all [1]. That number it drops even more in the rest of the world. And to add to it, just having a backup isn’t enough if the outage is sustained for a longer period of time.
For the rest of the world, especially countries like Pakistan, solar power or a battery backup is out of reach for the majority of the population, so they won’t work.
So you would suggest countries with more power outages should have higher adoption of power backups? Yet, about 25% of population in Pakistan does not even have access to electricity. [1] Meanwhile the rest of the country frequently is plunged into darkness with millions without electricity. [2] Yet, solar adoption in the country is very low and most of the population does not have any backup power.
More than anything, this is due to financing, not will. The reason why most developing nations don't have enough power, is they don't have enough financing (money) to build the power plants / windmills / solar panels.
North India has so many power outages that it is normal to have very large batteries in your house to ride them out.
That was the point I was trying to make: countries where such things happen, also often have populations that cannot and do not have solar or energy backups.
I used to live in New Delhi, India. In past there were frequent power outages and as a result almost everyone who could afford got either a generator or a battery based power backup solution. Not everyone can afford these, but whoever can would get the backup setup in place.
There exists a similar situation with water supply. What started out as 24 hours running water back in 1970s has ended up as supply at low pressure for < 1 hour once or twice a day. As a result everyone has built additional storage water tanks and added in line pumps to suck water when the supply is present. The in line pumps are illegal, but everyone has one.
getting back to topic, India also has the government frequently shut down mobile and broadband internet to control communal riots and anti-government protests.
That's because people in the US rarely, if ever, lose power, so there's no need for backups
This just isn't true. I had regular power outages when I lived in the US. Usually they'd only last some hours and usually they were caused by weather (the midwest has storms) or animals. This could have been solved by burying the cables, but that probably wouldn't happen any tine soon. In more than one location, it would have been helpful since the no power meant no water from the well.
Weather causes a lot of power outages - thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat, and icestorms cause this. In other areas, the electrical grid is barely holding up and just can't always take the demand well. (Example: Hot areas during the summer)
Losing power happens regularly.
Most people can't afford to have a backup system, and a good chunk of the folks that can have a backup simply can't install such a thing in their rental or the apartment they own.
> This just isn't true. I had regular power outages when I lived in the US
And I have never had an outage in the 20+ years I've lived in SF (except for the one time they were doing maintenance and had announced the outage days in advance).
See? Anecdotes prove nothing. Remember: I wrote "rarely". I would say 99.9999% availability (for me) is pretty good.
Any major/minor form used for communication/currency will be regulated in the end in the name of national security.
No amount of democracy, socialism, communism or any ism for the fact cannot overcome it.
As long as govts don't behave like a service provider but like a ruling class this won't change.
Power corrupts, anyone. Hard limits on power, individuals instead of parties, extreme transparency(including defence, yes), and war free world is the only way we ever achieve freedom. As long as we allow govts to function in secrecy, someone will not care about ethics and morals.
Also, I would like to believe there is a future where blocking access to money is unilaterally impossible. Major powers being able to pull the rug on what has become a foundation of modern society like money is too scary of a thing to allow. What could the answer be? Satellite-powered bitcoin relays and DIY-able user devices to talk to them?
HK protesters tried mesh networking in 2014-2019 as well as anti-Covid protesters in China in 2022 but both were quickly shut down by blocking the service providers (Bluetooth mesh sharing apps were removed in HK app stores and Apple Airdrop for the latter).
> HK protesters tried mesh networking in 2014-2019 as well as anti-Covid protesters in China in 2022 but both were quickly shut down by blocking the service providers (Bluetooth mesh sharing apps were removed in HK app stores and Apple Airdrop for the latter).
It doesn't help that even if app sideloading was made possible on iOS, the significant drop in installations will still happen once the apps are pulled from official stores. Most people are not familiar with installing apps from outside of their phone's sponsored ecosystem.
1. How do you access said apps? There has to be some repository storing the apps.
2. Certain regions can straight up ban sideloading by only allowing pre-approved app stores (eg. Mainland China). Ofc there will be technical ways to bypass this, but you are limited by technical knowhow and internal intelligence agencies abilities to find those people.
3. You could make using certain apps with such capabilities illegal. People may try to use it, but if found among a small set of protesters, they can just be "isolated". How do you prevent that?
Mind reading Necromancers (probably) don't exist, but every example I listed above has already been deployed in a piecemeal manner in various countries the last 10 years.
Mass File Sharing Blacklisting has been enforced by Indian ISPs since 2019
VPN+ISP traffic log sharing has been enforced in Kazakhstan (along with SSL stripping)
Blocking Tor downloads has been implemented already (with varying levels of success) plus attacks to deanonomize Tor have started occurring since 2021.
App Store restrictions and region locks have existed in Mainland China since the early 2010s.
It's very easy to tamp down and censor internet based communications. Individual corporations have the capabilities to apply such censorship if they wanted to, let alone ISPs.
That’s pretty risky, though: the authorities can track radio signals easily enough and they can hammer the exit nodes. One mole uploads a video to a known destination and they take down each IP seen delivering those packets.
The underlying issue in groups of people is that there is always a means of control (which is always good AND bad for different groups), which always wraps around a means of wealth (to various degrees and in various ways for different groups), so it is fundamentally a battleground between conflicting interests.
It can be civil (friendly arguments resolved directly to lawsuits) or it can be violent (cartels dissolving people in barrels of acid), but it always has the same problems - who has control/sets the rules. Those almost always include control of the money, control of women/men in their respective domains of producing kids/violence, and the definition of 'the truth'.
If you want to learn about the many different ways to accomplish goals like this, you can look into the terms 'decentralization' and 'post-scarcity society'.
Rather than wasting everyone’s time, why don’t you enlighten us about how you think those different concepts should combine? Be sure to include examples.
If you think such a complex and broad question can be distilled to a pithy HN comment, go right ahead - why demand that I do it?
I pointed OP to the words that best enable them to find their own answers. That's not a waste of time, it's useful information that they seem to have lacked.
If you don't think that's useful, fine - offer your own answer.
But you didn’t help them: you just added noise if you’re just mentioning two large topics without any connection or examples of plausibly working systems. For example, post scarcity is hypothetical at this point and nothing about it is incompatible with authoritarian governments. Similarly, decentralization covers a lot of ground but satellites are inherently centralized to some extent and there’s little precedent for decentralized funding of something that big, and even terrestrial networking has few examples of a decentralized system resisting attacks by even relatively weak governments.
>"I would like to believe there is a future where blocking access to the internet is unilaterally impossible."
Sure thing. All you have to do is to come out in big numbers, beat your fucking rulers into submission and replace them with do good types. Easy peasy. If not they'll get you no matter what tech you use.
Till someone pulls the plug on your satellite... I seriously doublt there is a way to prevent the powers that be to shutdown the internet for some. This will always be a threat, and before we have true worldwide anarchy, nothing will prevent this...
StarLink is beholden to at least one major power and directly has business interests exposed to something like 50 more. Its mercurial owner has more obligations and does not want retaliation against his other struggling businesses. For example, if someone protests in China do you really think he’s going to risk Tesla’s investments on their behalf?
Also, consider that ratio triangulation is a century-old technique. It seems exceedingly unlikely that a hostile government would forget this and not take out the transmitters.
We don’t need one perfect system as that is a fantasy. We need multiple systems with multiple sets of commercial interests and governance. Starlink is useful as one among multiple systems.
The likelyhood of a decentralized constellation of low orbit satellites ever existing is next to zero, and having additional internet connectivity options can never reduce availability. Sure corporations and governments are both corruptible, but if both are available, and neither can impose on the other (I don't think Pakistan has much of a say in how SpaceX runs StarLink, and SpaceX doesn't have a say in Pakistan runs Pakistan), the existence of another option is good.
there is no world where using Starlink won't be easily detectable. You're beaming radio waves up into space, all you need is a helicopter with a $100 antenna.
Just make it a crime to use the internet when the government tells you not to. The actual content doesn't matter. Or don't make it a crime, and just arrest people on spurious 'national security' charges, with vague allegations that they were spying.
Encryption is great but some of its proponents seem not to grasp more concrete realities.
The satellite dish is a spot light. It doesn’t matter if the signal is encrypted (it is), the radio signal can be detected. Maybe not from the side but definitely from above. The dish is big enough that can see it optically.
Something like a LoRaWAN meshnet node built into every smartphone may be practically unstoppable. But there are many approaches to censorship, and app stores are a potential one. Really depends on the adversary.
For most people, it's entertainment. And before the internet, we had newspapers and television and radio and telephones, much more easily blocked by authoritarians than the internet.
You need some controls. The death of licensed broadcast and high capital investment media like newspapers has damaged society. The notion that modern Nazis would have access to thousands of people was absurd in 1983. In 2023 it’s reality.
Its unfortunate because, common people of Pakistan are reeling under high inflation and lack of jobs and opportunities. There are the political parties involved - corruption run amok. The army profits in cash, whichever party is in power. I guess the dried up US financial handouts means the army has to steal money from its own people.
Mobs burning Armed forces buildings - this is a new one because the Army has always been successful in selling their narrative to the common people.
Can someone knowledgeable explain to me why the military keeps intervening. Is this basically the same situation as Turkey had where the military was commanded on Turkey’s founding by the Ataturk to prevent a religious fundamentalist takeover of the country, and so whenever they felt the elected government was becoming too “religious”, they deposed the government (now of course erdogan is in control, because he ensured to infiltrate the military after having a bad experience with them in the past.)
I am sorry to say but at this point Pakistan is a failed state.
It’s fascinating to see how India just leaped ahead of Pakistan even though they both got independence at the same time and were essentially the same people divided based on religion.
I hate to say this but maybe there’s something to be said about religion here.
Bangladesh and Indonesia, two countries in similar parts of the world, with a majority Muslim population, are much more stable, with strong, growing economies.
Maybe there's something positive to be said about religion here as well I guess? Reaching for a simple answer for a complex problem is plainly intellectually dishonest.
I'm ethnically Bangladeshi. Bangladesh is officially a secular country (at least in theory - religion is still a big part of day-to-day life) that has a significant Hindu minority whereas Pakistan is an "Islamic Republic". Your average Bangladeshi is less religious than the average Pakistani.
"I would rather live in Pakistan despite it allegedly being a “failed state” according to you over India any day of the week."
Can you give reasons for this? I have never been to either country, but I know many people who travelled all over india, but allmost none, who traveled in Pakistan, because as a westener you cannot even travel in many places there at all, or in others without police guiding you (and you paying them).
You make so many claims without evidence or even explanation. Extraordinary claims like "I’m sure many Indians will agree." require some evidence, if not extraordinary evidence.
You talk of the bad deal Jinnah made but again don't say what it was. I hope you are not seriously suggesting that the new country name slowed down progress.
> "we’ll just be this new thing in the side called Pakistan). Because of this, Pakistan is still a baby of a country. "
You don't owe anyone anything and I don't demand anything from you. My comment highlights the flaws in your argument for other readers to easily see that your comment is a rant and not a well thought out argument.
>I would rather live in Pakistan despite it allegedly being a "failed state" according to you over India any day of the week.
That's understandable if you're Pakistani and have a nostalgia for home, or perhaps some special affinity for their cuisine, but is nonsensical otherwise.
>I’m sure many Indians will agree.
So you might hear sometimes in Indian social media or op-eds the phrase "I'd rather live in Pakistan" (and to a greater degree "You should go live in Pakistan") but that's almost always used provocatively, because of how ridiculous it is. I don't even think that most Indian Muslims would prefer Pakistan over India.
Those seem like very ideologically pure motives to attribute to a political decision.
Maybe the generals just think they'd like to run the country for a while, and they've promised their colonels positions of power, and the colonels have promised their lieutenants promotions, and so on all the way down.
These personal reasons would always exist. I’m curious about the justification they would provide to the rest of the world about why they intervened? That gives the moral basis for their use of power. I personally think, even if good rewards existed without a justification to provide that is consistent with their morality/ history of the country it would be very hard for the military to depose a government like they do in Pakistan. Though I suppose now that it has happened so many times in Pakistan, there is good precedent and this justification is less necessary.
> there is good precedent and this justification is less necessary
I guess this is more or less the reason. They probably see themselves as the first line of defence in internal security unlike at other democratic countries.
The repeated military intervention in internal matters has set off a positive feedback loop where those capable enough and wanting to bring positive impact join the military. So remaining institutions (civil services, police, law& order, politics etc.,) continue to erode and get more corrupt.
Does it matter? Hitler/Stalin/Mao also had 'good reasons' that they claimed for for doing the things they do. End of the day, the military is clinging to power
No, I’d say you’re completely wrong on that part. Hitler/ Stalin/ Mao is a very bad example of institutions clinging to power through pure force. Each of those examples, had grand visions of what was right and why they were justified to completely take over the government. I would even venture that in each of those cases there was broad popular support at the start which led to the complete overthrow of the government.
An incident where power was taken to rule a country just because you could without any great moral basis was probably Pinochet in Chile, not many examples of this case exist.
Feels more like a polemic against the Pakistan military. For example unlike how presented in the video there was majority public support for the first military coup of 1958 in Pakistan because that was a period of serious political turmoil. Pakistan went through 4 prime ministers in 2 years and the public was agitated by the unstable economy especially regarding water canal issues and it seemed like the military could come in and bring some stability.
Pakistan is the only true Muslim country in the world. There is no 'too religious'. I think you're missing the much larger picture. All of the conflict in that area is connected.
Turkey is melting down because of their public positions on various matters; especially Xinjiang; not to mention poor decisions around fiscal policy.
Pakistan and Khan mess. Super happy they finally arrested him. We shall see how it goes, I'm optimistic it should stabilize pakistan.
Karakoram highway is a huge deal. The probability it doesn't get blown up is quite low.
Kashmir matters no doubt, but this will make talks between the 2 nuclear powers never happen.
Khalistan/Punjab, I must admit I'm surprised how many gurdwars are flying the khalistan flags here in Canada. It's their last chance for at least a generation if they want it to happen. It's not going to happen this time, they likely popped this movement. Some entity pushed it too soon.
Ladakh conflicts... Basically China isn't happy about a road being built toward them in ladakh. 250,000 indian troops vs 60,000 chinese troops accidentally collided... 3 times. But dont worry it was just 'melee' or 'skirmish' and was no big deal... India proceeded to ban all of china's internet things. China has been a sleeping tiger for decades and they wake up to attack india? Interesting. Not saying they are wrong, but China also understands why and what's going on.
I know that Musharraf used to say Pakistan is fortress of Islam but saying you’re the only true Muslim country in the world is kind of a stretch no? Why? Blasphemy laws? Nukes?
>Pakistan and Khan mess. Super happy they finally arrested him. We shall see how it goes, I'm optimistic it should stabilize pakistan.
Hahahahahahahaahahahahahaha.
By this, your definition of stabilize is that the USA is again more firmly in command of Pakistan as a country. Khan is an antagonist who tried and failed to get Pakistan to be truly independent and not controlled by any other nation. Pakistan is unfortunately a pawn in geopolitical moves, and with his arrest the stooges in place will happily bend and dance for the powers that be as long as they can pocket a tidy sum.
Scrolling through the comments, Imran was arrested for accepting bribes worth billions while in office.
Some comments say it's true, the other it's false charges.
Does anybody have a credible source for what's really going on?
The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it. It is to foster cynicism so that we don’t know what to believe and come to believe that nothing is true, no facts are reliable, and the world is simply a battlefield for partisan ideas. ~ Hannah Arendt
In South Asian politics, bribes are a way of life. No one goes to prison for bribes. They go to prison, and then it's decided which bribe will be used an excuse to put them there.
Imran is currently ushering in an 'Arab Spring' style movement in Pakistan. I use that phrase with all the positive and negative connotations that go with it. The army wants to maintain dictatorial-ish control and want to do to Imran what they've done to every Pakistani leader before this. (prison /exile/assassination) But he is too popular, now riding a fundamentalist wave that he himself can't control. So the army is having to resort to increasingly contrived methods to keep Imran under control.
I'll answer the question you presumably want to ask : "who are the baddies?". Sadly, that's a question that only the future can answer.
You have 55 countries between rank 85 and rank 140 that are better match to Pakistan than India: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 , why this privilege to only us Indians? I read the above comment as "See we are as good as Indians, this is just a blip".
On a scale of 100, Pakistan got a 27 and India 40. Definitely similar. Particularly as Pakistan's perceived corruption score has been falling, likely partially due to Khan's highlighting of the issue.
Fun fact: In terms of rank , the difference between USA and India is similar to India and Pakistan. Maybe the commentor could have chosen USA for comparison.
Funny thing is perception, these comments just harm India's perception for readers here. Why drag us here?
Fun fact, there's a 13 point gap between rank 1 and rank 10. So those two also are apparently incomparable.
Why are you comparing rank? They give the index a score for comparisons sake.
If I were working to set up a business in one of the two countries, maybe a thirteen point gap in perceived corruption would be important to me. But for casual conversation they're both very corrupt.
It is a familiar trope when it comes to India: dragging it to any topic that is potentially negative. ISRO launches a new rocket? "Oh but India is so poor does it really need a Space Industry?". And it is mostly perpetuated by Indian Elites themselves as they want to get into the good books of their Western counterparts. It is just an extension of the brown coolie mindset ("Yes Sir! At your service Sir!") that has carried on since the times of British Colonization. Where looking down upon India was and is still a fashion among these Indians with inferiority complex. I have lived 34 years of my life in India. Never have had to pay a bribe. Through all sorts of Governments (Governments that I liked and Governments that I disliked). Now my anecdote will be summarily dismissed with "but yours is an anecdote and doesn't represent India". Sure. So does yours! Yet somehow your pitiful description of India is more valid than my experience of living in India.
All these so called "rankings" are mostly fudged/distorted statistics to push a narrative. Why do I say that? Take a look at the "Press Freedom" rankings as an example. Afghanistan has higher ranking in "Press Freedom Index" than India. Can you believe it? Taliban ruled Afghanistan, which has pretty much demolished any ounce of Democracy that was left in its country, has freer press than India? LMFAO. The authoritative government of Uzbekistan has freer press compared to India in the same ranking. Such useless rankings shine no light except can be used as points to counter/shutdown criticism.
Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar gave a really good interview recently where he highlights how these rankings are cooked up/manipulated. Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5qw_rijRI
>Does anybody have a credible source for what's really going on?
Everyone will have their own take, here is mine:
What it boils down to is that Imran Kahn is by far the most popular politician in Pakistan. He was Prime Minister of Pakistan in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. He refused to take sides in the conflict, despite pressure by the US. In March of 2022, Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed Khan (no relation), sent a letter to the PTI government from his post in Washington DC saying that the US government was threatening to withdraw financial aid to Pakistan (at least $32 billion over the last 20 years) if they didn't get rid of Khan (denied by the US government). Days later Khan was removed as Prime Minister by a "no confidence" vote. Since then, corruption charges have been filed again Khan and thousands of his supporters have been surrounding Khan's home and repelling attempts by the government and the army to arrest him (until now). Now the situation is extremely volatile as the extremely unpopular government, seen as deeply corrupt by the vast majority of Pakistanis (corruption is endemic there), has arrested the most popular politician in the country on charges of corruption.
Unfortunately for them, IK was too ambitious and rebellious.
He started using the army's traditional rhetoric against them.
However, due to economic turmoil, IK became very popular right under the nose of the army.
This causes more difficulty in removing him for the army, than what they had faced with others.
Now, the army and IK are at loggerheads with each other. Essentially a good chunk of the population with a cult like following for IK, against the army which is a major political and economical force in its own right, but not power given by the people.
An immovable object vs. an unstoppable force.
Looks like IK will be the one who will be destroyed.
All other narratives (corruption, bribes, etc) are for plebs like us to debate. In the grand scheme of things, those don't matter to Pakistan, because the struggle is not over corruption, but power politics.
Down the grapevine (this is the internet so take with a massive grain of salt - I trust my source but you shouldn't trust me or any other anonymous commentator) I heard from Hill adjacent friends that there was some tussle between the upper level Army generals and upper level PTI members surrounding normalizing relations with India following the 2018-19 crisis. Higher ups in the Army wanted to normalize relations as a legacy making project, but certain political actors felt it would be electoral suicide for them if that happened.
They arrested him, and many others, because he's demanding the constitutionally mandated elections be held. He'd been going to court for cases like terrorism because of "blasphemy".
He's a major threat to the very corrupt army and dynastic parties. All other parties have joined in a coalition with the army. The only opposition is Imran Khan.
Sharifs: The head of one has been in self exile in London while he made his brother prime minister. His daughter and nephews run the party. He was found to have been hiding money when the Panama papers came out.
Zardaris: Was prime minister when Osama bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan. Known as mr 10%. His niece and disgraced generals accused him of killing Bhuttos. He's made his son the heir to the party.
Of the top 10 richest folks in Pakistan are Sharif & Zardari.
Imran Khan is not. Instead earned most of his money through cricket when he led Pakistan to the only World Cup victory. Then he'd opened the best hospitals in Pakistan that treat most patients (all of them desperately poor) for free. Then founded/created an entirely new party that after decades came to power.
Imran was openly insistent about releasing Pakistan from being under USA's thumb, about the nation needing make its decisions for itself. Just a couple days before his ousting, he made comments about how some countries treat Pakistan like their slave, and that is not acceptable any more.
Right away after reading that news, one could have predicted how things would go.
while he most definitely profited from this (and other) deals, the fact that this deal was passed through when he was in office without any issue then, and the fact that the other party (the property tycoon) is NOT also been indicted means that there is most definitely a political manoeuvre.
The same happened with the previous PM, Nawaz Sharif. Most people remember his name with the Panama papers, but the funny thing is, that was NOT the reason he was disqualified from office; because that would have implicated other people, and that's a no-no.
Instead he was indicted another, frankly stupid, reason... and used that as a basis to effectively neuter him by disqualifying from holding any public. This is the new tactic our benevolent overlords have chosen. Instead of assassinating someone, or jailing them for life... they just make you ineligible to hold public office and then cut their strings.
I guess the same will happen to this guy also. Meanwhile inflation is at an all time high, and I am worried about staples, but govt is too busy with random shit to focus on nation building.
Like imagine, while elon musk burnt 44 billion dollars for teh lulz, here we are, a nation of 230 million, begging for a single billion dollars just to avoid bankruptcy; we won't even be able to do anything useful with it, we will be begging again in a few months again.
I can't live here, I can't escape from here, it's like some weird Dante's hell type shit. I just envy my deceased father for having outlived this nonsense in 2020.
I'm seriously confused how people can remotely equate them. Nawaz sharif is worth 100s of millions. He's driving around in Bentleys in London for 4 years while his brother is PM of Pakistan.
I really want to know what did IK profit in the current allegations? He's creating a university where students learn for free like his decades old hospitals where people get free healthcare.
I am not exactly sure what I can say that will convince you.
----
Not everything is about money, some times it's about power.
Just because one is more corrupt doesn't mean the other is not corrupt.
Just because one does good thing doesn't mean that everything they do is good.
Just because a certain thing is good doesn't mean it's not also a white-washing attempt.
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I really don't want to get into a he-said she-said, because frankly I damn care.
Also, before I get accused of favoritism, let me just say beforehand that me ( and my family) were voters of the party Mr. Khan belongs to (PTI) during the 2013 and 2018 elections.
This is not a good guy / bad guy kinda deal. This is a political struggle between two factions, and the less emotionally attached you are, the better you can judge it.
Truman lived up to his words, too. After leaving the White House he and his wife had nothing except their existing property in Missouri. Their relative poverty is the reason why presidents get a pension.
Noone familiar with the situation would seriously accuse khan of corruption. All the charges against him are bogus too (hence the response by the public, of which 60-70% supported him).
I love when authoritarian nations just block internet. India did it in Kashmir for a fuckton of time, and it was practically unusable for a longer period (2G speeds).
they also do it at even little bit of protests. How dare the citizens protest their own governments, no, no internet for you!
----
The world will be a better place without these govts.
India is particularly trigger happy with blocking the internet at the first sign of trouble in any city or region.
Makes me wonder what will happen to the internet - and politics - once generative AI tools are sufficiently advanced and easy to use. It’s already easy to rile up people with Whatsapp forwards. Imagine how easy it would be if the Whatsapp message comes with an inflammatory AI generated video.
It's possible that AI will make lies and propaganda easier, but we're already seeing plenty of people falling for obvious lies and clickbait.
As a simple example, just look at how in the USA, inventor of the internet, QAnon has gained zealous, violent supporters, over a bunch of intentionally cryptic messages and literal keyboard mashing to form a "code".
Look at the Reddit frontpage for an example of how easily people will believe the supposed context provided with a video. It usually takes hours for someone to actually check and comment "actually, this is a video from 2009 from another country" somewhere way down the bottom of the discussion thread. In private chat groups, this type of checking is almost entirely absent.
Why bother using AI when you can take an old video, add a title referring to a recent event, and spreading it around on social media? Good AI is expensive, lies are cheap.
Somehow some governments do it and go under the mainstream media coverage. is it because they got the green light from the bigger guys to do it? (I am talking about Algeria during the protests)
Just to say, it's not as simple as authoritarian vs not, it's mote like, authoritarian and didn't get the green light vs not.
> I love when authoritarian nations just block internet.
Much better to just have control over the popular platforms, have a revolving door between them and the government intelligence agencies, and do your communication control that way.
Explicit control is in many ways better than this kind of subtle behind-the-scenes manipulation. It's more visible, easier to gather resistance against (yes, even under the control), and relatively easier to dismantle. To "subvert the controls" people first have to know they exist, and then go through the friction of subverting them, which very few people bother to do in practice.
You can of course criticize whatever you want, have double standards, and call things "authoritarian regimes" with no idea what those actually look like. Doesn't make them so.
> call things "authoritarian regimes" with no idea what those actually look like. Doesn't make them so.
I'm Indian. My mother's Egyptian. I'm pretty certain I know what an authoritarian regime looks like. I've seen how the Indian govt has treated Kashmir. I've also seen how authoritarian Egyptian govts in the past have treated their own people.
But sure man, lick more boots. Just remember, the 5 Rupees Modi govt is paying you for this comment won't earn you any goodwill from your fellow man you rat out on.
I'm sure auths justify it just the way you're doing it.
I'm sure every authoritarian/genocidal govt in history has justified their heinous act with the same logic too. "It's for the common good/good of x people."
Protesting is the fundamental right of a human being. the 'cause' of protesting is irrelevant. You could stage a protest to have access to everyone's mothers at all time if you'd like, that too would be your right.
Lots of misinformation in the comments. I have been part of the ongoing protests. These actions are the ultimatum of a protest movement by Pakistani's from all walks of life which has been going on since April last year. After exhaustion of all legal and political options the government which has been historically a front for the military establishment has arrested the leader and Ex-PM Imran Khan who has organic and authentic support base in all social classes. The people have been fed up with the current economic situation due to continuous military interventions and are on the streets protesting for the Ex-PMs release and elections which are constitutionally over due. Digital media is completely censored and social media is only accessible through VPNs. The US has deep influence on the Pakistani military with officers being trained in the US ,historic ties and also following the same general command structure and SOP. I believe this is why people in the west will not be given the facts on the situation since the US would not want independent political leadership in Pakistan (The only Nuclear Muslim Nation). We are a peaceful and educated people who are protesting for our fundamental rights and rule of law at the moment and I would urge you to refrain from jumping to conclusions and pray for the freedom, life and liberty of the people of Paksitan.
Khan has been arrested in connection with the Al-Qadir Trust case, in which the former prime minister and his wife have been accused of receiving “billions of rupees from a real estate firm for legalising a laundered amount of Rs 50 billion”, Dawn reported. The former PM has been facing a clutch of cases since his ouster through a no trust vote in April last year. At present, he is facing over 140 cases related to terrorism, blasphemy, murder, violence, inciting to violence. However, he has rejected all these cases as political victimisation by the ruling alliance.
Lots of Pakistani journalists publish in Indian newspapers due to censorship in Pakistan. Just about every English language Indian newspaper has a column published by senior Pakistani journalists and press offices in every major city in Pakistan.
There's a very healthy cross-border journalism ecosystem in South Asia.
Which Indian newspaper has press offices in "every major city in Pakistan"?
> Lots of Pakistani journalists publish in Indian newspapers due to censorship in Pakistan.
Nonetheless, Indian media has consistently shown to provide either outright false news, or very exaggerated facts to suit Indian narrative. One example is :
> The researchers said they had “uncovered an entire network of coordinated UN-accredited NGOs promoting Indian interests and criticising Pakistan repeatedly. We could tie at least 10 of them directly to the Srivastava family, with several other dubious NGOs pushing the same messages.”
Trusting any content from an Indian news source about Pakistan without corroboration is entirely like trusting Russia when it's talking about the Ukraine War.
> Which Indian newspaper has press offices in "every major city in Pakistan"?
Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle, Indian Express, The Tribune, The Print, NDTV, The Wire, Scroll.in, Outlook India, Himal (technically HQed in Nepal) have all supported Freelance journalists plus the beginning few I have listed have had press desks in Islamabad/Karachi/Lahore as well. The list I created is non-exhaustive btw.
The example provided was specifically around IB creating fake webpages while misappropriating photos and names of Indian journalists. This was not done by existing Indian newspapers. In fact, Indian media would have had a massive field day parading political misinfo occurring in competing news organizations.
Btw - I do agree that a lot of Indian media orgs have a misconstrued image of Pakistan, but conversely so do similar orgs in Pakistan. Also, the Indian media market is extremely segmented based on readership.
A lot of the bad reporting about Pakistan in Indian newspapers comes from the newspapers aimed at normal citizens, nor policymakers. The type of newspapers that someone working in a Ministry reads is different from the kind that a migrant worker from Assam reads.
Also, you do realize that a significant portion of Indians can speak Punjabi/Sindhi/Pakhtu and listen+read Pakistani news channels or news radio along with Indians ones as well right?
It sounds like you might have some misconceptions about India as well tbh.
Indian reporting about Pakistan is about tamasha/entertainment now - Indian media orgs increasingly talk about China instead now and in the same manner that they used to talk about Pakistan.
Indian print media (The Indian Express is a print publication first and foremost), in my experience, has very legitimate journalism. Most of the vitriol from both sides happens on TV news, not print, and is manufactured for generating views.
It's a lot more nuanced than India hating Pakistan. Discrediting a newspaper for being Indian doesn't seem like the right approach - it's the equivalent of dismissing any and all news on Russia or China by American papers. Should the NYT or WSJ reporting on Putin and Xi be ignored for the sole idea that the US hates these countries?
Contrary to popular belief, at least in my country (India). I feel bad for the citizens of Pakistan. There has not been a single stint of govt that has lasted peacefully since independence. A country can never grow without a peaceful transfer of power, and constant political imbalance will just not allow anything to advance.
A shared history/culture with us and it's a shame our govts have differences. We fought together to gain freedom and just drifted apart.
Average citizens of both the countries, have nothing against each other, but propaganda doesn't just shut up on both sides, and tries to keep riling people up, and becomes the main topic to get elected.
A peaceful south Asia, would've been the glorious and powerhouse of the world like in the past.
Modi is corrupt. The guy does not have the interest of the country at heart, he just cares about the Ambanis and increasing the wealth of his political allies.
He was complicit in the Gujurat riots ethnic cleansing[0]
Demonetization was a scheme to enrich his billionaire friends and party[0].
There's a lot more, and being the PM he hasn't allowed the media to question him. He only appears in staged interviews singing his praises or speeches.
Even if that were true(which it's not), that's not a good defense of Modi.
"Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense which is undertaken by a person or an organization which is entrusted in a position of authority, in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain."
> in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain
You’re quoting Wikipedia [1]; see the “definition and scales” section. Personal gain in this context is contrasted with political gain. Using state power to openly reward boosters is not corruption, though it might be an abuse of power. Using state power to illegally use violence as a political tactic, similarly, is not corruption. It’s authoritarianism, possibly fascism.
It’s important for the word to have meaning, particularly in India, where overexpanding corruption to mean anything one doesn’t like could be particularly corrosive.
The word is commonly used to mean abuse of power, The original usage of the word in this conversation clearly meant that usage of the word:
> Modi is corrupt. The guy does not have the interest of the country at heart, he just cares about the Ambanis and increasing the wealth of his political allies.
Deciding whether Modi is corrupt or not based on technical differences between political gains and personal gains seems purely motivated to keep his image "squeaky clean".
He’s surrounded by corruption. There is no evidence he is corrupt. There is a difference there in terms of to whom the personal gains accrue. He seems to play India’s corrupt oligarchs for political, not personal, gain. That’s hugely problematic. But it does not make him corrupt per se.
Unfortunately, India today is not exactly a beacon of righteousness. The current government in India is taking the country on exactly the same path as Pakistan except that India has an oligarchy which is being setup by people in government which would make it more like Russia. I'll give the country 10 years to implode if it doesn't course correct to become more inclusive, social justice oriented, and less violent.
People have been predicting Pakistan will collapse since 1947. It can’t be as fragile as it looks or it’d be gone already. Regarding India, hoping people who have different values to you suffer isn’t a prediction .
> People have been predicting Pakistan will collapse since 1947
It would have. But decades of war in Afghanistan and the pouring of USD by America, disregarding the very fact that they are funding a well known and open military dictatorship, has kept the country floating.
It is in a deep cycle of debt and has no meaningful economy to speak of.
Thank god you havent been following the shootings of the US. Or else, the 10 year future prediction would be for the US as well?
Doing arm chair analysis on macro economics is quite hilariously ignorant. If you're so sure, why dont you short the indian markets with your life savings.
I am willing to take a bet for any $$ value with 10x odds in your favor to contest that claim.
more inclusive, social justice oriented, and less violent
Hot take. If you genuinely cared about these things, you'd end up a supporter of the Modi Govt.
I do not mind views that are diametrically opposite to me. But, every article in western media seems to be written by someone who is 1 degree of separation from the Indian opposition. The claims are never backed by statistics, and the infographics are often so absurd that I have to wonder if I live in an upside-down world. Apparently, India has the 150th [1] least free press in the world and India has been a country with on average 2nd highest chance of genocide [2] for the entire last decade. Dig into their data a little bit, and you realize that they either only interviewed opponents of the current govt. or used zero data what-so-ever.
Note: Modi is the world's most popular leader[3]. About 20% of Muslims and 30% of Christians voted for his 2nd term[4]. For reference, Republicans have never been able to come anywhere close to 20% of the black vote-share, and no is claiming that America will collapse when a Republican wins every alternate election.
The opinion of the average HNer on India, is as bad as a Q-anon supporter on American issues. I apologize for the somewhat angry tone I take on these threads. I do not intend to start a culture war. But when ignorance and arrogance are paired this frivolously, I can't help but respond in kind.
As a casual exercise, I would suggest you look for a graph of lynchings, riots, and raids in India especially of minorities and "others" for varying levels of trivial reasons by groups associated with the ruling party with patronage and overt support from it. Every festival season is open season for riots in many places. Execution style public hit jobs bypassing "due process" on rivals, criminals, and others are becoming more common.
I would also have you take a hard look at the fascist speeches of sitting ministers advocating for violence in India. All of these are documented and the perpetrators and sponsors of this are in government without consequence.
To make matters worse, the administration seems to be gnawing at some independence the supreme court shows by wanting to take over the appointments of Judges. It even gives judges plum positions post retirement for favorable judgements. Need I say more?
Without a course correction, I'll give it 10 years.
There were a total of 117 lynchings in India in 2019, compared to 41 for the US in the same time period. This is the same number of lynchings on a per capita basis - while 117 lynchings is a 117 too many, the number is effectively negligible in a country of 1.2 billion people.
Execution style hit jobs on rivals? When did these happen? Are you simply making up executions in your mind?
Claiming India will collapse in 10 years is one of the weirdest statements I've heard in a long time. Which countries will not collapse according to your standards then? I'm honestly asking - no major country seems to be surviving the next 10 years as per your worldview.
I'm open to debate, but you seem to be inventing executions in thin air.
I see what you're getting to - while you're not wrong, you're not right either.
They're not carrying hitjobs on rivals or opponents - they're eliminating gang leaders and major criminals. The judiciary is either afraid of giving these gangsters actual sentences, or have been bribed by the gangsters. To solve this, the police has effectively taken the execution of justice into their own hand.
I know it may sound absurd, and the idea of the police taking matters into their own hands would normally scare me, but Uttar Pradesh seems to be an exception. The rule of law has broken down so completely it needs the law to be broken to be brought back, if that makes any sense to you.
The gangsters that were killed were a bit like the mafia in that sense - everyone knew they were crooks, and everyone knew what they did. It seems the tipping point for the ruling party to execute (or 'encounter', as it is called in India) these gangsters is when they kill policemen. Since the judiciary will not punish them, it becomes necessary for the police to inculcate a fear of the police in gangsters' minds in order for their policing activities to actually be effective.
>The gangsters that were killed were a bit like the mafia in that sense
Except that some of them were rival politicians. I'd also want you to look at the number of criminals elected into power before you tell us that "but those killed were criminals, so it's okay." It's systemic rot. Due process doesnt exist in some places and mobs rule.
You see the issue I have with people like you on forums is that you depend on westerners not knowing the details of these things in your country. Your messages appear referenced etc showing that you took time to make those answers, but you seem to miss key points, selectively.
In my above comment, in order to acertain the data and compare India's statistics to those of the US, I tried googling it, but could not seem to find any reliable answers. As an alternative, I decided to use ChatGPT.
Unfortunately, I did not do my due diligence and visit each link - the links seemed to be authentic, and I went along with it. ChatGPT gave me the number 41 and the links that I have mentioned above.
Now that you have pointed it out, I tried visiting those links and the pages seem to not exist. I also put them in the Wayback Machine, which says it hasn't archived them.
That's why you'll notice the statistics are for 2019 - the pandemic is not yet part of the equation and I expected ChatGPT to have information for 2019.
I fear ChatGPT may have 'hallucinated' the data and the links. I can't seem to find a reliable source for the 41 lynchings. As such, my comment above stands moot, and I hope it is ignored - I can't seem to find the delete option.
I do sincerely apologize. It was not my intention to spread misinformation. I didn't do my due diligence, and now know better.
We seem to disagree on the basic facts. Don't think anything productive will come out of this. I WILL save this comment and come back to it in 10 years just to be petty. (or eat my own words if it goes that way)
I'd hope that 'total collapse' would be self evident enough that I would not have to look at the data. But, Good data would convince me.
for social collapse, 'Pew Research' has conducted stellar surveys. I'd start there.
Another solid metric is low-income refugees. If a measurable number of low-income minorities start leaving India for countries of slightly higher average income (eg: Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia), then it's either a sign of collapse or religious authoritarianism. Differential rights is another sign. say for instance, if there exist specific laws that only Indian minorities have to follow nation-wide.
As for press freedoms, every political opposition party should get to have their own newspaper that can be freely shared on social media. ie. exception to exclude any party that actively seeks independence from India. Private universities should be allowed to teach anything that is constitutional, ie: don't teach violent fundamentalism or birth based bigotry. I should be able to call Modi any non-caste-based slur (Fascist, Bigot, Loser, etc.) on social media without getting a case thrown against me or violent assaulted on the streets. The front page of the Caravan or Scroll.in (online subscription based news media, subscription so I know they will be alive unlike ad reliant ones) should still contain a scathing accusation towards the BJP as it always has.
For economics, poverty and safety, the numbers should be easier to obtain. Proxy metrics like electricity availability, internet availability, infrastructure building and use rate, etc. are also great.
You have to be living under a rock to not see the continuous degradation of press freedom in the country. You can go through this research for some in-depth review
It's a domestic report that says nothing about other countries. I don't know what made you think of comparison to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but forgive me if I say this is classic signs of confirmation bias, where people tend to dismiss information that doesn't fit their worldview.
Let me be clear. I am not a Bhakt, don't particularly love Modi and have complained quite often about bad policies during his regime. My goal is to help people build a representative view of India, not one that fawns over Modi.
The BJP absolutely pushes for Hindutva, but 'Hindutva' is an umbrella term that can mean anything from 'places greater importance on cultural traditions that have been in the subcontinent longer' to 'murderous nazis' depending on who you ask. Since you asked the question, it would help if you specify what you mean by hindutva.
to your question--> what does 'inclusivity' look like? If inclusivity is complete blindness towards religion in front of the law, then you get France style secularism which BJP pushes. On the other hand, you have the Congress's secularism that is in complete contrast to those values. In that sense, both the BJP and the Congress are secular parties, without agreement on wat that term means.
85%+ of Indian muslims are pasmanda low-caste muslims. The previous govt. (congress) did not have a single pasmanda muslim represented in their govt. The BJP is now reaching out to them directly. India never had tribal representation at the national stage, and the BJP elected a tribal woman to the presidency. The BJP has time and again, promoted meritocratic candidates over nepo-babies, making the electoral system more inclusive. India is a not a nation divided on religion alone. It is mostly divided on economics. By focusing in more effective governance and distribution of social welfare, BJP's govt. has disproportionately benefited the poorer population of India. These policies do not discriminate by religion or any other identity. Western style views of inclusivity do not translate well to other nations.
As for the bills like CAA, removal of 370 and the like. The Congress's own policies show that these had bipartisan support up until the BJP brought it up. I don't blame them, politics is politics. But, in isolation, both parties acknowledge that these were necessary changes for national security. The CAA was initially instituted by the Congress itself and the sorry state of section 370 at removal was also a result of bipartisan erosion of that bill over time. (it was meant to be a temporary provision anyway. But I won't get into that right now).
Discussions around vague words like Hindutva and inclusivity are never productive. It would be more helpful to define what we mean by these terms. Create a list of policies implemented by the Modi govt. over the last 8 years and compare those against the govt. that came before. If there is a clear trend that emerges, then we can play ball. Or else, it is all smoke-and-mirrors.
somehow "more inclusive" than the policies that preceded it?
That one I can say with confidence. The congress has been a party of nepotism for so long, that Modi did not have to do too much to appear more inclusive than them. Modi's biggest strength right now, is the sheer incompetence of his opposition. They continuously pushed away their very best to the point of humiliation.
I am a Bhakt. I became one after I voted for the first time in 2019. I had to choose between Congress and BJP at that time and I decided to go with Congress because I hated Modi for the 2002 riots.
Afterwards, I had a nagging feeling that I had been conned. I am a 90s kid and am staunchly anti-Congress. I have seen first hand how they have ripped off millions in scams and destroyed India. It's almost as if the British loot of India never stopped. But how did I end up voting for corruption then? The con finally dawned on me when I realised that they point at Modi and vilify him not because he's anti-Muslim (he's not) but because he's cleaning up the mess. He is delivering on growth and and transforming India at a rapid pace. He's going to be the Deng Xioaping of India.
However, I was branded as a Hindutva fascist as soon as I voiced my support for him. And I have embraced that term fully. I've studied Hindutva and have turned into a complete Sanatani. My goal in life is now Moksha!
One of my greatest regret in life will be that I didn't vote for him in 2019. I am writing this from the queue of Karnataka assembly elections. I voted for him today.
This is my one hope for India. I disagree with pretty much everything else you've said, but I'm not as worried for India's future as I was previously; because I've come to realize that economic development is probably the best way to actually accomplish social justice - there's a strong correlation between countries becoming poor and them becoming more authoritarian and less fair.
So, even if he squishes press under his thumb, even if Muslims feel 10 times less safe, even if the autonomy of states is being eradicated to centralize all the power in their hands... I hope all of this at least results in significant economic improvement, and makes things work out in the end.
The brits were to blame for process of partition (or lack there-of). The haste, wanton disregard for life, the casual approach towards the largest refugee crisis in human history was certainly avoidable. They were also to blame for further exacerbating divisions via divide-and-conquer.
But the divisions already existed. The idea of a Muslim state had had been stewing for decades in certain circles. It was inevitable.
That's why I pointed to the 'process of partition'.
The border-lines were drawn by a man who had never visited India over a few months. They withdrew all state machinery overnight, and somehow expected 2 nations born into war to fare alright. Did they expect millions to cross borders and leave their homes behind without any resulting repercussions ? How is a country (Pakistan) divided in 2 by its biggest enemy (India) even supposed to work ? How are Sikhs supposed to live if the borders go right through their fields, dividing their 2 holiest sites ?
Animals when kept in captivity, cannot return back into the wild without supervision. Systems of govt are no different.
So it's the Brits fault that Pakistan/India immediately went at each others throat the moment they were gone and the solution was to keep both under "supervision" i.e. empire control? When exactly could they have left without that outcome? Or is the idea here that the British empire still exists in the 21st century?
At what point do the people living there take responsibility for ending their own violence, in this scenario?
If an outsider comes into your family (in the form of a wife or husband or some such relationship), destroys it from within, ensures your family is split and creates lifetime hostility. Then washes his/her hands off the mess and says "Sorry boys, you fight it out, I am out of here! Ciao!" would you be kind to someone coming up to you and saying "At what point do you take responsibility for ending your own violence?".
> At what point do the people living there take responsibility for ending their own violence, in this scenario?
Name your Country and I'll give you at least 3 examples of this.
So before the British, there was absolutely no Hindu/Muslim tension in south east Asia at all, it was all peace and friendship? The Mughals were taxing non-Muslims just for being infidels in the 1600s and that led to the Maratha empire which then proceeded to conquer parts of the Mughal empire, often inflicting retribution in return.
The idea that India was one happy family until the British came along is ridiculous. If anything the Brits were suppressing this conflict which is why it re-emerged literally the very same day they left.
I never said we were one happy family until the Brits came along. Whatever wars we had pre-Colonization was always the internal matter of the Indian subcontinent. It did not involve outsiders who took decisions on our behalf. Even when we fought the Greeks, it still did not end up in Colonization of any kind. Only post the Portuguese, the French and then finally the British did we experience Colonization. And this Colonization was through "trade" not through "wars". It was a gradual process because even the Brits knew they could not fight militarily (Wars not battles/skirmishes) and had to adopt a "Divide and Rule" policy to subjugate India.
Again, sticking to the analogy of a family, there is never a "happy family" anywhere in the World. Every family has its warts. I bet you have plenty of fights within your family. But still you stick together despite the fights. But all it takes is one outsider to undo it all. And that "undoing" cannot be reversed. Colonization is what happens when you let outsiders into your family and take decisions on behalf of your family.
> If anything the Brits were suppressing this conflict which is why it re-emerged literally the very same day they left
The Brits weren't "suppressing this conflict" by any stretch of imagination. They actually were fomenting it even more. It only turned against them in the 1857 First War of Independence when both Hindus and Muslims united. The reason for that is simple. Brits used cow and pig fat to grease gunpowder cartridges which required one to tear it open with his teeth. This insulted both Hindus and Muslims for obvious reasons. That was the trigger for both communities to unite and fight the Brits. But that still did not stop the Brits from exploiting the division based on religious lines.
> The Mughals were taxing non-Muslims just for being infidels in the 1600s and that led to the Maratha empire which then proceeded to conquer parts of the Mughal empire, often inflicting retribution in return.
And that won't stop even now. We still have groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda etc which still wreck havoc in all parts of the World. I bet your Country is no different either and I am pretty sure your Country has been at the receiving end of Terrorism since you are unwilling to divulge which Country you belong to. Makes it all the more obvious since you are willing to pontificate to Indians about how we should let all enmity be set aside and live like one happy family while not saying anything about your own Country.
> Name your Country and I'll give you at least 3 examples of this.
To explain it better, we have had fights/relationships between both communities going all the way back to 6th century. And the people who are Muslims today were of various Religious ethnicities (majority of whom were Hindus, Persian/Zoroastrians etc). So our relationships run way back before Anglo-Saxons entered our shores as traders/merchants. If you pick up our History you will see references to not just trade, politics or wars but also familial relations that spanned from present day Bangladesh all the way to the other corners of Iran. Even our Ancient Scriptures like Ramayana and Mahabharata has references to these regions and the Kingdoms within them. So yes when I say Indian Subcontinent I mean the entire extant region that includes present day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. So even if we fought wars with each other and one Kingdom sometimes reigning over other Kingdoms, we never felt it was some "outsider" who ruled over us.
The reason we blame the Brits is purely because of the Partition of India and the mess they created with drawing the various borders. That does not just include borders between India and Pakistan. It also includes borders between India and China. Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan and Iran. They left a huge mess when they left as the lines drawn did not account for natural resource sharing or even towns/cities. In some states, the border lines ran through actual homes. The Partition of India is heavily criticized also because the British Empire decided to divide British-India based on Religious lines. The ones who claimed to talk about "Freedom, Democracy, Rule of Law, Equality, Liberty" etc decided to divide the Country on Religious lines. This resulted in millions dying as they crisscrossed these artificially drawn borders which required them to leave their homes, family, everything on the basis of religious lines. There was absolutely no requirement for the Brits to divide India at all.
The consequences of the division directly resulted in all the crazy stuff that happened after 1947. It was a ticking time bomb. 9/11 attacks, bombing of WTC, Taliban taking over Afghanistan, Iran going towards autocracy, emergence of ISIS and Al-Qaeda... all of this could have easily been prevented if India was not Partitioned. It was not just Indians but the World that paid the price for the British folly. And we Indians were in the right because in the entire Region we are the only prosperous ones as we chose Democracy, Freedom, Liberty, Rule of Law over Religious nonsense. The rest of the region fell apart into chaos after the Partition. Bangladesh is an outlier only because it took the support of India to help it achieve Independence from Pakistan and liberate itself. If not for India, Bangladesh would be in ruins today.
> The idea of a Muslim state had had been stewing for decades in certain circles.
How much of this was fostered by the "divide-and-conquer" approach the British took to ruling the country, including the partition of Bengal on religious lines decades before the partition of the country itself?
>We fought together to gain freedom and just drifted apart.
A movement propped up on the idea of a "separate nation for muslims", fought hard for and achieved with much violence and bloodshed is "just drifted apart"
I don't know what you are trying to say here, but it didn't have to be violent and persist after too, that's exactly what I was saying by "drifting apart". If they felt safer as a separate nation to have their interests protected that shouldn't be the cause of bitterness.
Jinnah and Nehru had both been adamant on their stances, former was proponent of federal governance while later a central.
India had several bifurcation of states, it helped in better representation.
Recent AP, Telangana state bifurcation was done after much violence, did they drift apart? Does an avg person of the 2 states have anything against each other now?
That was exactly my point, for avg people they're just other people, we are constantly washed by propaganda to believe they're enemies.
You are equating bifurcation of states for political & administrative reasons, within the same country, to splitting a country into two !
When a country is split, crimes committed against those who are migrating to another country will not be prosecuted by the home country, and will not be possible to be prosecuted by the split country.
Land, Houses and other immovable assets will be stolen from those who are forced to leave respective countries.
Rapes, looting and arson are rampant, on both sides.
In the case of India and Pakistan, the division was on explicit religious lines. Islam has an outdated theology of being the only true religion and all other religions are false (as is Christianity). This theology forms the basis (whether that basis evolved later or is advocated by islam is a secondary issue) of the idea than non-believers can be treated inhumanely and are essentially no different from animals.
In essence, Partition of India was not "drifting apart". It was a violent tearing apart of countries and communities. The origin was from the muslim community, whose political leaders realized that for them to seize power, a democratic setup with majority Hindu population will be impossible. So, to preserve their power and egos, they split the country, aided by pacifists like Gandhi and Nehru.
To note, Pakistan has one of the most fertile lands on earth. Abundance of natural resources and a strategically important location.
Also to note, the plan was to destroy Hindu civilization as a whole (a historical dream of Islam. Search google for Gazwa-e-Hind). Jinnah proposed a 10 mile wide corridor, cutting across the heart of India to allow road access to east pakistan (now Bangladesh)
Partition of India is the manifestation of the idea of Gazwa-e-Hind. A strike at the Hindu India.
neither Gazwa-e-Hind nor Islam as one true religion was not cause or even ideas behind partition.
And speaking about Gazwa-e-Hind, while conveniently ignoring Akhand Bharat, is pure propaganda.
If you read about Jinnah in old school history books which unfortunately are being edited out by NCERT in India, he was never was religiously motivated.
His idea was Muslim population would be a minority in Hindu controlled state, which wasn't far fetched, look at Indian politics right now, which runs on the basis of Muslim hatred.
Also claiming things like Gazwa-e-hind(Ignoring Akhand Bharat) and Muslims believing in one true religion and then saying India is tolerant or Muslims and secular becomes an Irony. You can't run both ways.
Also the violence during partition were on both sides, not just one side.
>The origin was from the muslim community, whose political leaders realized that for them to seize power, a democratic setup with majority Hindu population will be impossible.
Or put in other words, muslims being a minority in India didn’t want to now have new rulers as India got independence from the British.
> Recent AP, Telangana state bifurcation was done after much violence, did they drift apart?
Don't think it is right to equate the violence during the partition of India to the Telangana movement.
The 1947 partition had violence where communities fought and attacked each other.
The Telangana movement except for few minor instances in the very early stages post independence, was not directly against people from Andhra region. A major part of the casualties were during protests as a direct result of government action and self harm.
There may have been general dislike for people from other region but I don't think it ever turned into enemity and hatred towards each other.
unless you are Russian, they have no problem at all as we can see every day (I realize common folks are a bit different from the news image, but any news I hear from within Russia these days just confirms what I stated, and then you have those hundreds of thousands who voluntarily went to Ukraine to kill and steal)
Not at all: it s not because we have to alternate we should tolerate corruption, and what you see a lot is investigations catching up to criminals.
At least as a French even if we sue a few former presidents here and there, I still accept my candidate loses and we try something else for a whole (I vote Macron, as centre right).
I dont think the US should count much: they dont really transfer power, there are the same immutable parties that havent welcomed a serious challenger for decades playing theatre while having policy continuity by most standards, bar a few candies for the populace at the edge.
The so-called deep-state exists in all countries that have not experienced recent revolution. The deep state is simply entrenched unelected (appointed) bureaucrats who continue a steady policy who only marginally change course during elected government changes. Only revolutions tend to almost completely sweep out the old and usher in the new guard. In France you have the sciences po graduates. In America we have the Washington Establishment which consists of revolving door politicians|lobbyists.
In any case, the world is gravitating to Us vs Them in politics to win by divide & conquer.
So you made a throwaway to say this? Did you even read my comment properly? I said average citizens and people like you again go back to propaganda.
Tell me what BJP uses to win elections all the time?
Hatred against Muslims?
Top BJP Subramaniyam swami was quoted saying "Muslims are not equals, so they don't need equal rights".
>They preach hatered towards Hindus/Jews in their schools (books are filled with hatred).
Ofcourse, because your propaganda says so? I've met Pakistanis in real life in the US, and none of them want to hate me or kill me even the older generation ones.
Also doesn't RSS, VHP, Bajarang dal do the same in India?
Both governments failed us. We're fighting because they say so, tell me on a personal level what you hate about them?
I appreciate your moderation. This was not flame war, I even gave well cited references for OP to read. I also never attack anyone personally, but I do want them to be more informed.
I appreciate that you didn't attack anyone personally, but your comment was definitely written in the flamewar style: cross-examining, argumentative, and polemical on an inflammatory topic. That is not the curious conversation we want here, and even if you didn't intend it, it was likely to (and indeed did) provoke others into responding with inflammation of their own.
I was waiting for you to arrive, not you literally but some propaganda machine, I've moved to the US last year for higher education, and fortunately for me here I was able to meet a lot of Pakistani's. And not once did anyone say anything against India or me. In fact even the older generation was so thoughtful, and recognized our shared culture and history. And they were sometimes more friendly and less judgemental than fellow Indians here.
> Do you know what is officially taught in schools for India (and Hindus)?
Please enlighten me, how a govt controlled curriculum, doesn't affect what's thought in schools. Which is exactly what my point was and BJPs influence on NCERT in the past few years are no better.
If you come outside the bubble of propaganda between both the countries, you quickly realize how played the citizens of both nations are.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This part of your comment was great:
> I've moved to the US last year for higher education, and fortunately for me here I was able to meet a lot of Pakistani's. And not once did anyone say anything against India or me. In fact even the older generation was so thoughtful, and recognized our shared culture and history. And they were sometimes more friendly and less judgemental than fellow Indians here.
But the rest was much too disputatious and aggressive.
@dang wants this to stop, so i'll respect that and wont be back in this thread. But do put a link from india's textbook which spews hatred against Pakistanis or muslims? Please enlighten me.
Please don't obfuscate things here. Both OP and I are talking about Pakistani state. We all are aware that individual (particularly sane ones) have minimal control on government policies.
Edit: you've unfortunately broken the site guidelines in other cases too, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906633. Please don't do that - we have to ban accounts that do that sort of thing.
While imperial Britain has much to take blame for in South Asia, the partition is not really one of them.
Great Britain (or rather Mountbatten on its behalf) really just acted as a third party arbiter in the partition. It was Jinnah's insistence on a separate carveout for Muslims in South Asia, together with Nehru's refusal to meet any demands for federalism, that resulted in partition. Imperial Britain had nothing to do with Direct Action Day.
I think the argument is that for the previous 100 years, Imperial Britain had deliberately encouraged violent divisions between the Hindu and Muslim populations as a means of exerting external control, again this is called a 'divide and conquer' policy.
Your argument is sort of like saying, just because the British gave them the dynamite, they're not responsible for lighting the fuse.
Indeed, safe handling of dynamite involves not lighting the fuze deliberately.
What happened after the abolition of British Raj was in part a consequence of it, but I would not deny agency of the participants of the warfare that ensued.
> While imperial Britain has much to take blame for in South Asia, the partition is not really one of them.
I’m going to disagree; however little direct control they exert at that point, the imperial power always bears significant responsbility for the costs of problems that accompany imperial collapse.
Note: My comment is about communication restrictions and not about Imran Khan or Pakistan.
Restricting communication does indeed introduce a bias in information that people may get and thus the opinion they may forge. As such, freedom of communication is a pilar of democracy. But in some cases, communication may also be harmful and should be limited. Regardless if the info is true or false, if it may generate a harmful mass movement, it should be restrained. It's a bit more subtile than that, but I can't develop for conciseness.
This is not an Internet disruption, this is a coordinated shutdown by US social media networks to suppress protests against the illegal arrest of Pakistan’s president by a paramilitary organization.
Citation? I think you have cause and effect backwards? This post and all the news coverage I can find says that the Pakistani government is the one enforcing these blocks. Including wholly disabling the internet for mobile devices in some regions.
I don't understand how US social media networks could cause wholesale internet shutdowns in Pakistan, or why they'd suddenly be inclined to do so. Seems much simpler for the ruling government to require their local ISPs enforce these blocks.
This seems to happen often enough (in several countries) that I wonder if the US (or any other "1st world democracy") doesn't have the ability or a plan to do something similar, if determined to be necessary. And before you say it can't happen because Constitution, I'd be shocked if there wasn't some Patriot Act/Emergency Authorization that makes it close enough to legal...
Western countries prefer to cut off access to banking and individual social media accounts rather than the internet. It's more effective and direct. Look at the Twitter files, Canada for examples. Cutting off the whole internet is only necessary for Pakistan because they don't have allied political operatives working at Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.
There are projects like Phonon from GridPlus which use industry standard hardware to enable secure, private, offline trading of units of crypto. This is effectively digital cash. https://docs.phonon.org/readme
They either stop working or they're vulnerable to a double spend attack. Until the servers come back and processing payments continues, there's no way to know if your customer has already spent the crypto they're supposedly transferring to you or not. Double spend attacks have been used in some scams already where the payment system didn't wait for the payment to make it to what becomes the "right" chain (validation takes up to 1½ hours with Bitcoin, depending on how many blocks the payment provider waits before assuming the transaction succeeded).
You don't need to take down the entire internet to sabotage cryptocurrency either. Many cryptocurrencies rely on a few key validation servers as running and processing the entire block chain all the time becomes very resource intensive as crypto gains popularity. A strategic attack on only a relatively small amount of servers (8000 in the case of ethereum and all coins using that blockchain) can DoS many cryptocurrencies worldwide. Furthermore, over 46% of Ethereum's servers are controlled by two parties, so if a government can seize those companies it's likely capable of doing a 51% attack to sabotage many cryptocurrencies used on exchanges today.
I doubt there's any risk of sabotage in practice, but like most digital payment methods, this stuff only works if there's an internet connection.
If Secure Scuttlebutt had taken off at scale, blocking access to content could have been harder. It is not without security risks, but I found data transfer via local mesh networks a powerful capability.
I'll explain a bit. If Alice has some content to share but no internet access, Alice will sync posts (automatically) with Bob when he visits her. Then when Carol meets Bob, she gets uploads from Bob and 2 levels of his friends (not all of whom Carol might know). If Carol had some way to get online (or if she travels outside), Bob and his friends' data become available much more widely. It's basically a mesh network of friends, so much like the real world.
