According to the Guardian live feed, the Internet is cut off, opposition leader Mohamed El Baradei is in custody has been detained, and police are siding with rioters in some cities.
I’ll leave it up to you to check the Washington Post editorial page to see if the right sort of Muslims are rioting, and therefore this is another blow for democracy and liberty, or if it is the work of terrorists.
Maude
I heard that 7 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were detained.
I wonder if this is at the point where Mubarak is trying to hang onto power.
Short Bus Bully
If they are brown and swarthy, I’ll take “wrong kind of muslims according to the WAPO” for $200 mistermix.
Comrade Jake
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
4tehlulz
Yes.
joe from Lowell
These uprisings have a chance to work only when some of the state’s security organs – police, army, secret police – side with the protesters.
So far, there are sporadic reports of police and soldiers refusing to fire on the crowds.
Poopyman
I haven’t seen reports of ElBaradei being detained. He and his supporters were hit with water cannons, and some of his supporters were beaten with battons, so I would think the next escalation would be his arrest, but I’ve seen no report.
And I thought the first fighters for democracy and liberty in just about every regime are labeled “terrorists”, or whatever that age’s term is/was.
Poopyman
@joe from Lowell:
Suez, from what I’ve seen. If it gets to Cairo, then Mubarak has a real problem.
ETA : See the Beeb reports now, which seems way better tha al Jazeera. Odd, that.
p.a.
Some writer at Sully fisks (much too gently) a HHewitt post which says if we had just overthrown the Egyptian and Saudi gvts. in 2005 we would not have to worry about Islamist revoultions there. to quote Dave Barry “I’m not making this up.”
David Fud
@Poopyman: Umm, it is the first headline in the link mistermix provided:
• Mohamed ElBaradei has been detained
ETA: though it seems that link doesn’t provide additional information. So, I guess it is a headline with no substance at this point.
Jack Bauer
Walk Like An Egyptian
Poopyman
@Poopyman: Guardian, not the Beeb.
And FYWP.
Poopyman
Found the al Jazeera liveblog, for more info.
Gin & Tonic
I posted this in the meatloaf thread last night, but fairly detailed analyses of the Egyptian Internet cutoff can be found here and here. These actions are truly unprecedented.
Anya
They don’t want Egypt to be democratic, they just want them to have the right sort of a dictator, for Israel’s sake, of course.
SteveinSC
Tunisia and Egypt: Spotlights on the hilarity that was George Bush’s and his apologists’ “Wave of Democracy” spreading across the Middle East as a result of the Iraq fiasco. Just like the 1950’s anti-communist dictators of Central and South America, our bulwark of freedom. American exceptionalism at work.
Ija
NY Times has already invoked the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course this is not the right sort of Muslims. Expect editorials denouncing the protesters for their violence soon.
Pococurante
Cutting off our aid to Egypt would go a long way towards weakening the authoritarian regime. Assuming of course that was actual US policy.
What gets missed in the “why do they hate us for our freedoms” rationalization (not here among the BJ Commentariat of course) is that they actually hate us because we enable these regimes and have for over a century. And of course the US was simply a latecomer to the game.
We all had a good time in another thread piling on Aqua Buddah, but his fundamental point was that we shouldn’t be meddling at all – that seems reasonable to me.
Frankly I’m tired of propping up North Korea by keeping bases in SoKo and Japan. I haven’t understood bases in the EU since 1991.
Cutting aid seems reasonable to a lot of people here when the topic is Israel. This feels inconsistent to me because we prop up a lot of regimes that are far more ruthless. And by propping up those more ruthless regimes we wonder why they hate us for our freedoms. It’s not like any of the recipients stay bought anyway.
/ponder
Cacti
@Ija:
And some handwringing about how unfortunate it is that these poor benighted sods aren’t ready for “teh tru demokkkracy” and need the steadying hand of a west-approved dictator.
beltane
Netanyahu cannot be happy with the events in Egypt so neither will the Washington Post’s editorial board.
Seriously, the past few days have rendered the US media completely useless. I’ve been getting all my information from the Guardian and Al Jazeera; MSNBC & CNN are all caught up with Charlie Sheen and the Kardashians.
I’m still waiting to hear from Tom Friedman so I can know what to think.
Jack Bauer
Calling it an Islamist uprising allows them to avoid calling it a People’s Revolution.
xian
@Ija: I heard on NPR yesterday(?) that protesters were eschewing any signs or labels or party affiliations, to communicate that it was a pan-Egyptian uprising.
Ija
@Jack Bauer:
I predict many, many stories in the papers about the close relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.
Heck, maybe some anonymous source can provide “evidence” that the Muslim Brotherhood has been hiding Osama bin Laden all along.
beltane
@Jack Bauer: Since most of the people protesting are Muslims (though there is a strong Christian contingent) than any show of public anger is by definition an Islamist uprising. If they became whiter and evangelical and joined the Tea Party then it would be a true people’s revolution.
Ija
@xian:
If the Muslim Brotherhood people are smart, they will stay the hell out of this. The worst thing is for the revolution to be associated with them. Once there is a democratic election, they can always run.
Cacti
I hear the Muslim brotherhood is throwing babies out of incubators.
Joey Maloney
@Ija: If the Muslim Brotherhood people are smart…
They’re not, though, for good or ill. Most of the time, presented with a situation like this, they’ve behaved like Al Sharpton on meth, shoving themselves to the front of the line, annoying their potential allies and giving the enemies of those allies a convenient way to paint a big target on everyone.
…and even as I type this, the BBC is reporting that the MB is “jumping on the bandwagon” and the Egyptian Government is thrilled to be able to point at them and the threat of an Islamic republic. Damn I hate being right. Good thing it happens so seldom.
MattF
I’m just waiting for Frank Gaffney to reveal that the Egyptians have been building WMDs and will kill us all in the next six months if we don’t invade Egypt right now.
matoko_chan
@Ija:
untrue. The historical american foreign policy of supporting dictators/strongmen in the ME actually has extremely negative results for America. The oppressive regime becomes inexorably convolved with America, and by definition Israel, local oligarchs, and judeoxian style (western style) democracy, leaving radical islam to infill the oppositionary position of citizen rights and social justice.
The islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, get to become the liberal revolutionaries, even though they may be far more repressive when they actually take power.
The epic flaw in American “democracy promotion” theory in the ME is that when muslims are democratically empowered to vote, they vote for Islam.
Thus strongman policy, and the incredibly ignorant Bush Doctrine, just become recipes for building more islamic states.
In strongman theory, the idea is that the dictator sponsers an environment hospitable to the fostering of western culture and western democracy. But islamic culture is immune to western/judeoxian proselytization in situ, because of EGT.
So the result of both strongman policy and the Bush Doctrine is more islamic states…like Iran, like Iraq, like Turkey, and like A-stan and Yemen will be. And like Egypt. Does anyone doubt that the MB will be the power in the next government?
There is a perception problem in America. America is not a secular nation. The founders and framers would have liked it to be, but were trumped by human nature in the end. Consider racism and slavery. Modern america is not the nation of Martin Luther King, it is the nation of Martin Luther.
The new PEW survey points out that in 20 years 1 out of 4 humans will be muslim.
And only 1 out of 15 humans will be non-hispanic caucasian.
So while there maybe attractive and beneficial things in western culture, western culture proselytization, aka “democracy promotion”, can simply never succeed in +95% muslim states. Because of the consent of the governed and because when muslims are democratically empowered to vote they vote for more Islam, not less, and never for judeoxian/westernstyle democracy.
and…..tolejaso tolejaso tolejaso!
mwuahahahaha
stuckinred
@Cacti: bayonet
Poopyman
@Ija: Oh yeah. They’ve got a prime example in Ayman al-Zawahiri.
“By the age of 14, al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood.”
homerhk
It’s easy to be glib about this but it is a serious concern. The Iranian revolution in the late 70s was initially given impetus by the general population of that country railing against the Shah’s oppressive policies. The Ayatollah at the stage was in exile in France and completely eschewed any idea that he wanted to take over governing the country but ultimately what happened was something far more dangerous both to Iran and to the wider world. It is of course absolutely distasteful that the US and the world in general (this is not just a US made issue) have to do business with dictators like Mubarak but I will bet a lot of money that if the government is overthrown and Mubarak toppled it won’t be Al Baradei who takes his place (or at the very least there is a severe risk that this will not happen). And yes, Egypt was the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood which in some ways was a precursor to Al Qaeda.
Ija
@matoko_chan:
So, your solution is for us to prop up more dictators in these countries to avoid the dreaded “people voting for more Islam” thing?
Chris
@Pococurante:
The U.S. had a chance to try a different form of foreign policy in some parts of the Middle-East, Iran especially. Most people still didn’t know what to make of us in the immediate aftermath of WW2; Mossadegh’s government was on good terms with Truman’s and was actually hoping for a friendship with us, believing, based on their observation of our relations with the Saudis, that we’d be fairer partners than the British had been.
Just imagine how different the Middle East would be if we’d taken the kind of investment we made into the Shah and the Saudis and actually thrown it behind a populist, democratic government in Iran. And imagine what the third world would look like if we’d done the same with Arbenz in Guatemala and Lumumba in the Congo, instead of overthrowing them and setting up Wall Street friendly thugs.
Alex S.
I guess that islamic nations would naturally elect islamic parties in a democracy, just like there are christian or christian values’ parties in the West, like the Republicans (in some ways), the ruling party in Germany, the conservative party of Spain, and other examples from Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and so on… The prime example of a popular conservative islamic leader is Tayip Erdogan of Turkey and he has been vilified by the conservative media since the Israel Flotilla incident.
I guess that the democratic way to counter religious conservatives would be to form a strong labor party so you have one socially conservative party and one social democratic party (as in Germany, France, the UK, and lots of other places). But a true party of the workers would hurt western business interests and that might be the reason why the West prefers to prop up corrupt dictators to keep the islamic influence at bay.
matoko_chan
@Ija: nope. promote islamic democracy.
Like Dr. Atran says, you cannot stop humans from being religious— so exploit religious capacity. Bricolage it.
There are a lot benevolent memes in al-Islam.
membah, ima muslimah. so im not ideologically compromised by anglo-saxon protestant ressentiment of al-Islam.
Persia
@Chris: Just imagine how different the Middle East would be if we’d taken the kind of investment we made into the Shah and the Saudis and actually thrown it behind a populist, democratic government in Iran.
Ah, but that was when we hated commies, not mooslims. Don’t you remember?
matoko_chan
@Alex S.: yet Erdogan’s AKP is both the islamic party and the pro-business party in Turkey. US strongman policy in MENA has allowed the islamists to claim the mantle of citizen rights and social justice, because America is talkin’ the talk, and not walkin’ the walk by funding oppressive regimes that will make nice with Israel.
America is basically Israel’s bitch.
that wont change until the demographic timer goes off.
Persia
Six police vans on fire in Alexandria. This is…something all right.
Anyone who hasn’t found the Al Jazeera video feed yet– it’s here.
morzer
@Ija:
I don’t think the matoko-bot does rationality yet. They’re working on that feature for the next release. Until then, you’ll get simplistic waffle and grandiose pronouncements. This, after all, is the person who asserts that Frank Herbert was a Muslim.
matoko_chan
@Persia: what if we had gone into Iraq as real liberators instead of as missionaries with guns?
Saddam suppressed Islam mightily…we could have used social network theory to recruit iraqi defense forces at mosques, distribute aid thru mosques, liberated clerics from Saddams political prisons, etc.
we could have been heroes instead of goats.
and wound up with the same result much cheaper in blood and treasure.
Iraq is an islamic democracy. Shariah law is in the constitution, the clergy still exercise islamic jurisprudence, and act as advisors.
matoko_chan
@morzer: that has nothing to do with what i just said.
let me repeat.
This is an EMPIRICALLY sound position.
See, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
morzer
@Persia:
Whereas now we hate Commie-Muslims, Muslim-Fascists, Liberal-Fascists, Liberal-Muslims, Commie-Liberals, Steelers fans and in general anyone who doesn’t sound as if they grew up in some Midwestern/Southern/Real American rustic dump in the 1940s. I have serious doubts that the victorious faction in Egypt is going to qualify for membership of the GOP-approved demographic, whichever side ends up in power.
Omnes Omnibus
@matoko_chan: A US government with those goals would not have invaded in the first place.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
If we didn’t have glib, all we’d talk about is how many libertarians can dance on the head of a pin. Said pin being manufactured and distributed under the best free market, zero-gubmint regulation conditions.
Mubarak’s like so many ageing dictators, they never know how to bow out gracefully. Some things are universal.
Persia
@morzer: Agreed. Biden just came out saying Mubarak shouldn’t resign. I think he’s about five hours behind the headlines.
Ija
@morzer:
I might be wrong, but I think her point was that we are all born Muslim or something. So not only was Frank Herbert a Muslim, you, me and everybody else here were born as Muslim until we decided to be something else. There was a huge argument with someone about “convert” versus “revert” or something.
At least that was the product of my last attempt to decipher matoko speak. I should just give up, it’s giving me migraines.
morzer
@Persia:
Well, that puts him about five years ahead of US foreign policy, which has consistently propped up Mubarak’s bungling regime, despite abundant evidence that Egypt was stagnant, at best, economically, and that popular anger was rising. My guess is that Biden and Obama fear the Muslim Brotherhood (which would certainly have won a genuinely democratic election in Egypt, had one been held any time in recent memory). I wish they would realize that trying to exclude Muslim “radicals” from power by propping up incompetent dictators only makes them more resentful and more radical.
matoko_chan
@morzer: in 20 years one out of 4 humans on the planet is going to be muslim.
don’t you think we better call a truce in the Global War on
TerrorIslam while we can?we cant win, you know. EGT and population genetics are against us.
SCIENCE and EMPIRICAL data are against us.
morzer
@Ija:
No, she actually believes that Herbert was a Muslim, based on his use of Islam in Dune. Of course, that sort of witless “autobiographical” reading also makes him a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer, and Baron Harkonnen’s male escort, but who’s counting, really?
PS. I use MikeJ’s version of cleek’s pie filter for Chrome, and it really does make life much better. Matoko now admits to being REDACTED with every post, and the threads are much improved thereby.
Cacti
@Ija:
Interesting.
I always thought everyone was born an atheist until a parent or some authority figure filled your impressionable young mind with religious gobbledygook.
Chris
@Persia:
Oh, I remember. It’s just that Mossadegh wasn’t a commie. At worst, he was a European-style Social Democrat, and we supported quite a few of these during the Cold War. Personally, I’d say he was just doing for his country what FDR did for America.
A moot point if you’re a Republican, for whom the Cold War wasn’t against commies but against the left in general.
Ija
@Cacti:
Yup, this.
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: what were the goals?
as i recall, when no WMDs were found, the mission became nationbuilding.
We wound up building an islamic nation, not a judeoxian one.
It would have been far more efficient to promote islamic democracy, instead of judeoxian democracy.
Promoting judeoxian democracy in MENA is doomed to fail for a variety of reasons. It cannot ever work.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Oh, here’s something FASCINATING I just found.
This is the Google cached version of a New York Times index on Mubarak, as it appeard 28 Jan 2011. It contains the following:
And now look at the version on their website…
So they’ve updated it with current events – but they seem to have dropped something…
matoko_chan
@Ija: bzzt false. religious capacity is hardwired in homosapiens. this is documented.
see Tomasello, Sperber, Atran, Boyer and any number of other scientific researchers.
Atheists just have less organic religious capacity.
there is a biological basis for all behavior.
matoko_chan
@morzer: /shrug
old ppl will be old.
the filters preserve the 20th century information cocoon so necessary to the aged balloonjuice commentariat.
Uloborus
Makoto, here is the problem:
We know everything you’re saying already. They’re not world-shaking new truths. They’re ‘Duh, now can we get back to wondering what effect this particular uprising will have on us, Egypt, and the world?’. I swear you sound like a 19 year old libertarian who’s just discovered that people work harder with incentives.
Omnes Omnibus
@matoko_chan: Read the neocons to figure out what the goals were. My point was that a US government that actually sought the goals that you described would not have have invaded Iraq in the first place. Please feel free to twist this statement into a belief that I supported the invasion or the way things have played out in Iraq. The world would be a much better place if the US government had developed a sensible Middle East policy 60 years ago, but it did not and we are living with the consequences.
Chris
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
Shiiiiit…
“Pharaoh” is a dog whistle meaning “pagan rule” (yup, Muslims know about Exodus too). Hence the guy who killed Sadat yelling “I have killed Pharaoh!” after doing the deed.
That’s a very, very unsubtle way of calling Mubarak an apostate and an enemy of God.
ChrisB
As of 9:30 am EST, the BBC was saying that the report of El-Baradei being detained was a false report.
Wouldn’t the easiest lesson for the government to learn from Iran in 2009 be to crack down hard on the protesters? That’s what I’d expect, even though the situations may be quite different.
morzer
@Uloborus:
And to be fair, amid the blindingly obvious ideas that Matoko trots out so triumphantly, there’s a high percentage of fiction/dross/self-aggrandizing-crazy-Alaskan-former-gubner-talk.
Uloborus
Morzer:
Right. ’19 year old libertarian’.
Persia
Alexandria is in the hands of the protesters.
morzer
@Chris:
I suspect it’s more a way of calling him a tyrant who burdens his people with demands, while keeping them poor and miserable, not to mention stuck in the past. The pharoahs seem to get credit for most pre-modern events in that area of the Middle East, and so, for example, a major Roman water-tunnel/aqueduct becomes the Canal of the Pharoahs (Qanat Firaun).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,612718,00.html
morzer
@Uloborus:
Yes and no, Matoko did go through a phase of hinting darkly at having been recruited by the government as a young secret agent, and then Assange came along, or her medication changed, and she became Super Hacker Matoko-chan, Servant of Global Revolution.
Alex S.
From ‘A Night in Tunisia’ to ‘Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt’.
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: /sigh
the goal i described was democracy promotion. Bush’s exact words. judeoxian democracy promotion can never succeed in MENA, and islamic democracy promotion would have been cake. that is my point.
just as the right cannot turn off the racism embedded in their base, protestant evangelizing and proselytizing cannot be turned off in the electoral base.
judeoxian representative government is only ONE FORM of democracy.
unfortunately it is the only kind americans can comprehend.
unfortunate for these humans i guess.
Poopyman
A thread on the Egyptian crisis seems like the appropriate place to drop this.
(h/t AmericaBlog)
Tuttle
Matoko, see Jaynes. We evolved past that hardwiring a few thousand years ago. What you are seeing are the psychological remnants of the physiological basis of religion.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Chris:
It’s not so much the dog-whistle.
Obama was praising Mubarak back in 2009 and saying he was not authoritarian. This was not a controversial statement – meaning that the Village would not challenge it, and no other politician took exception.
It just happened to not be true – rioters in the streets, cops firing on civilians, and cutting off the Internet would be pretty good signs of a government gone bonkers.
So, consider, you have a statement which is not controversial but turns out to be completely false. The conventional wisdom, propagated faithfully by the New York Times, is shown to be an obvious lie.
So the response – from one of your foremost newspapers mind – is to quietly disappear the former US stance on Mubarak from obvious view…
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: i dont understand what is soo difficult about this. as long as the US aligns itself with strongmen and tyrants, that creates an opportunity for radical islam to define itself as the party of the people, of social justice and citizen rights….as the opposition.
the only criteria America seems to have for funding tyrants is make nice with Israel…..not, for example, let your people vote or build a social justice safety net.
This is a CONSERVATIVE policy, ie, anti-empirical…..in that the results of this policy empirically demonstrate it FAILS EVERY TIME. The strongman is replaced by a revolutionary islamic government resulting in an islamic state that is hostile to both Israel and America.
or an evolutionary islamic government in the case of Turkey. which is certainly hostile to the US and Israel after the flotilla.
Ija
Police have entered Al-Jazeera’s office in Cairo. I guess it’s just a matter of time until they start detaining journalists.
Ash Can
@ChrisB: From the Guardian link: “Egyptian security officials say Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei is under house arrest.”
Carol
@Persia: Six police vans on fire. It’s ON. When that happens, then the police either fight back or have given up.
Mubarak may be living in his Swiss chalet sooner than he thinks. He’s 82, and the stress of something like this will probably kill him.
Scott P.
Finally, something we can agree on. Science and empirical data are definitely against you.
matoko_chan
@Tuttle: untrue.
read something.
Ija
NYT also has a live blog of the protests.
Ash Can
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: I’d wager that lengthy periods of lack of blowups like this lull people, otherwise-brilliant national leaders included, into a false sense of this sort of thing never happening — and even never needing to happen. Yes, it’s embarrassing, and Biden saying that Mubarak shouldn’t resign is embarrassing too. The difference between now and several years earlier is that I’m far more confident that this administration can avoid stepping in and making the situation FUBAR.
morzer
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
I suspect that Mubarak’s constant accomodation of Israel has quite a bit to do with how his policy is perceived in the Village. If Egypt goes democratic, or even Islamist, and turns away from appeasing Israel, that’s going to have a big impact on the region. In some ways, the neocons are caught between two positions here: regime change to democracy ought to be something they approve of, but then anything that might threaten Israel is supposed to be evil. My bet is that they’ll decide that regime change is bad in this case, and that Mubarak really was legitimately elected by some magical electoral alchemy. Something along the lines of “Lower Egyptians count as 3/5 of a person”, perhaps. Doubtless the Founding Fathers put it in the Constitution, somewhere in the fine print.
Persia
@Carol: Curfew’s supposed to start in five minutes. Ayman Mohyeldin (Al-Jazeera, Cairo) says the police are in their building and they’ll try to stay on air as long as possible.
Oh, and Mubarak’s supposed to be speaking.
Poopyman
5:03 pm – Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh reports some extraordinary events in Alexandria: Protesters, who often outnumber police, have “arrested” police officers and beat some of them with their own batons. Police without their gear are left alone, those in their gear are confronted. Protesters are also setting security vehicles on fire.
Also too:
Also also too:
Curfew supposed to go into effect in about 3 minutes….
Poopyman
Things getting interesting real fast:
joe from Lowell
@Cacti:
This is clearly someone who is not a parent.
No. No. Not even close.
Omnes Omnibus
@matoko_chan: Bush said a lot of things. If you believe that democracy promotion was really one of the Bush administration goals for the invasion of Iraq, you are even more confused than I thought you were. Are you familiar with the concept of a pretext?
Ija
@Poopyman:
Ahh this is not good. There’s going to be some a-hole tomorrow talking about how BOTH SIDES DO IT, and the protesters are equally as guilty as the security forces for the violence.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
Or, having become enraged at their parents, Sunday school teachers, and the nuns at their high school, find some other outlet for their impetus toward faith.
Christopher Hitchens’ eyes are on fire like the most devout Roman priest.
morzer
Quite a nice article by Robert Fisk on Mubarak’s Egypt:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egyptians-prepare-for-life-after-mubarak-2060150.html
Fisk has a more recent article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-egypts-day-of-reckoning-2196751.html
joe from Lowell
@ChrisB:
The Iranian regime had broad backing from something like half the population of Iran. “Red Iranians,” who thought Ahmedinejad seemed like the sort of guy they could
drink a beereat a goat with, weren’t too keen on those uppity, westernized, over-educated urban elites marching in the streets.From what I’ve read about the uprisings in Egypt, this is a much broader movement.
Poopyman
An 11:03 comment:
This can’t end well ….
ETA:
Carol
@Carol: So he has two choices, flee, and at least spend his final days before he dies in bed, or wait until the rioters get to the palace and kill him. He’s too old to mount a counter-revolution, and he’s too solitary too.
Shah of Iran, 2.0
This is 1989, folks. When the fires cool, the world will look a lot different than before. The fear of terrorism from the Middle East will fade like the fear of Communism did in 1989.
Alex S.
@morzer:
Interesting. Back in 1977, rising food prices triggered these riots. And at the moment, we are in a phase of rising food prices again:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/15/earlyshow/saturday/main7249451.shtml
Edit: The article says that “freak weather” is to blame. Is it weather or climate change?
Akak
Just wanted to point out that the “pharaoh” reference isn’t so mug to pagan times but to Mubarak as a great oppressor, signifying him as very cruel and heartless ruler.
Is cal even an ordinary person, might
joe from Lowell
matako,
There is no such thing as “Islamic democracy” or “Judeoxian democracy.” There is only democracy, which is universal, or the lack thereof. Of course, no system is every just pure democracy, and other values are present as well, alongside democracy.
Bush’s problem wasn’t that he was pushing “Judeoxian democracy” instead of “Islamic democracy.” His problem was that he was pushing the installation of strongman rule under Ahmed Chalabi, not democracy. It took Sistani’s threat to turn every Shiite in Iraq out in the streets to even get Bush to agree to population elections.
“Spreading democracy” was just an excuse they settled on once the WMD and al Qaeda-ties scares became untenable.
morzer
@joe from Lowell:
Better not to mention the non-Christian and non-Islamic Greeks of Athens during the Classical Period either. Too much reality would probably cause matoko-chan’s gears to seize up once and for all.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Ash Can:
Yes, it’s embarrassing, but it’s embarrassing to the Village rather than Obama per se, and so the NYT hides that embarrassment. That’s the point – it demonstrates the Village, that you don’t have a free press, but an organ to faithfully trasmit the conventional wisdom.
morzer
@Alex S.:
Well, an increased incidence of “freak events” is baked into the predictions for what global warming will do and has been doing to us. Not to mention a significant shift in the timing of the seasons relative to the calendar.
morzer
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,742186,00.html
Alex S.
The Guardian liveticker tells me that the regime won’t survive this night.
@morzer:
I was just a little annoyed because “weather” implies that there are just a few coincidences that will go away, but if it’s an indication of climate change, we will have consistently higher food prices and consistently lower political stability.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: no. more horses mouth
Westernstyle democracy is judeoxian democracy.
Iraq is an islamic democracy. In islamic states, the clergy ARE the lawyers. The elected representatives are also clerics, the major political parties are religious, the constitution incorporates shariah law, and islamic jurisprudence trumps secular law if there is a conflict.
It is still a democracy.
morzer
@Alex S.:
Right, plus there’s the usual crazy right-wing pressure to report it as freak weather, rather than part of an ongoing and terrifying pattern.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: possibly. Hitchens evangelizes atheism, just like Dawkins.
but consider conspiracy theory. it is hardly an evolutionary advantage, yet it strongly persists in the population. religious genetic tendency was a fitness advantage in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation), because membership in the religious memetic tribe increased the individuals chances of survival and reproduction.
some sociobiologists believe conspiracy theory is a spandrel of religious belief.
i myself am agnostic on that.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan: Why are you quoting me a piece about Afghanistan in response to a comment about Iraq?
Why are you claiming that something the subject describes as “mission creep” was the initial impetus for an invasion?
Why are you treating a a Bush administration’s official’s opinion about the nature of democracy as something authoritative?
You really don’t know what you’re talking about. In Pakistan, the democratic uprising that drove out Musharrif was led by lawyers, who were most certainly not clergy.
Except when they’re not, such as most of the elected representatives in Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Lebanon.
Except when they don’t, like in Turkey and Lebanon.
I think it’s a little presumptuous of you to tell the people in Islamic countries what their democracy has to be.
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: the Bush Doctrine.
COIN is practiced to this day, and COIN is just the Bush Doctrine cut down to village size.
democracy promotion, implanting westernstyle democracy, oilspot, standing up westernstyle democracy, all amount to the same thing.
proselytizing judeoxian democracy and western culture.
missionaries with guns.
Poopyman
Life During Wartime:
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
giggle.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: the AKP is the party in power in Turkey, and the AKP is the islamic party. Hizb’ has power now in Lebanon. Hizb’ is definitely an islamic party.
In Iraq. this is true. Iraq is an islamic democracy. The rule of law is the rule of islamic law.
Does that help?
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan: I think you should consider the possibility that the Bush administration used the term “democracy” as a synonym for “American influence,” as opposed to expressing a principled support for people power.
After all, did you ever see even the slightest indication that the Bush administration was trying to spread democracy to allied countries that had a lot of terrorism, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Musharrif’s Pakistan?
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell:
that was in response to your assertion that there is only one kind of democracy.
THE
matoko I have a comment in moderation at your Sufi blog. Please rescue.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
It is now, and the party they replaced, which was in power for decades of Turkey’s democratic history, was so secular that they banned headscarfs in parliament.
Point?
For the last couple of weeks. Point?
Yup, in Iraq. As opposed to Turkey, or Lebanon. As it turns out, not every Muslim country is the same, and not every Muslim has the same ambitions for their country.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell:
.irrelevent.
Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002.[
i have no clue about what that fucking WEC retard was actually thinking. Probably some sort of Gog-Magog biblical fantasy.
All i can cite is THE POLICIES HE PUT INTO PRACTICE AND CODIFIED AS NATIONAL “DEFENSE”.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
Then you are even more deeply confused than I thought. Not only are you in the wrong country, but you utterly misunderstood my point, having drawn a blank on
When the same religious values are present under Islamic democracy and Islamic dictatorship, and Islamic monarchy, the those religious values are not part of the democracy. They are alongside it.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell:
retard.
Ataturk was a dictator who was replaced by a military junta.
Turkey was not a democracy.
We are seeing 90 years of a Kemalist dictatorship evolving to an islamic democracy.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
Then you should stop asserting that the administration was committed to the promotion of democracy qua democracy on principle, since you acknowledge that you don’t actually know what their thinking.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Alex S.: NDP headquarters burning and Mubarak an hour late now for his speech. Its pretty much looking like the end of the beginning.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
This debate is not going well for you, is it? Getting a little hot under the collar?
You haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. You’re assuming facts to be true or false based on their conformity to your narrative.
I’m done with you now. You’re useless once you’ve reached this meltdown mode.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: still false. in an islamic democracy the people chose islamic representatives by voting.
we do not have a “pure” democracy in the US.
One major political party is wholly religious, and has the religious doctrine of ensoulment as part of the party platform, and had that doctrine as the law of the land.
religious doctrine encoded as law is shariah.
:)
Church Lady
I was in Egypt last March, going to both Cairo and Alexandria. The grinding poverty one sees in Cairo was startling after having been in Alexandria first.
What I noticed first was the vast number of buildings that didn’t have windows or had re-bar sticking up out of the rooftops. Our host explained that in Egypt, the owners of property don’t have to pay taxes until the property is completely built. By leaving out a window or two, or having a roof line look like an additional story is to be added, the owner avoids paying taxes. Our host said very few people in Cairo actually pay property taxes as a result.
The other thing that stood out was the sheer amount of garbage in the streets and the canals that snake through the city. In the past, garbage pickup was included with utilities, but within the past few years, garbage pickup became a separate bill and, given the poverty in the City, many cannot afford to pay for garbage pickup. Instead, they just dump their garbage in on the street or in a nearby canal.
Unemployment in Egypt is pretty high, and it was easy to see it on the streets of the city. Men were sitting in chairs on sidewalks, just watching the traffic go by, looking bored out of their minds. Many of them were in groups, surrounding a hookah, getting stoned on hash.
If I had to live in that hellhole, I’d be rioting too.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: Turkey was not a democracy under Ataturk. He was a dictator.
read a history book.
neither was Turkey a democracy under the military junta that succeeded him.
unless your definition of democracy is very strange indeed.
au contraire, this is going well for me.
soon you will pie me because i threaten to penetrate your info-cocoon with my truth arrows.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell:
Im citing PRACTICE and IMPLEMENTATION.
I can state that Bush was simply incredibly stupid.
Democracy promotion in majority muslim nations can never result in “implanting western-style democracy”.
Because when muslims are democratically empowered to vote, they vote for more Islam, not less, and they NEVER vote for judeoxian/westernstyle democracy.
QED
morzer
@joe from Lowell:
I am developing a theory that “matoko-chan” is just Conor Friedersdorf attempting to be hip and trendy, rather than permanently 55 and sexually unenthusiastic.
Peter
Hang on, Matoko, weren’t you professing just the other week to belong to some sci-fi religion? Did you have a conversion experience, or am I remembering wrong?
Jamie
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Send-The-Marines-lyrics-Tom-Lehrer/8BAC8D084920F0D348256A7D00258ABE
On things that never change
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@morzer:
Bwahahahahahahah!
Oh God, oh God – Jewish comedy at its finest!