As usual, I don’t know a lot about Egypt, but I thought this picture was pretty amazing (video here) as was this picture tweeted by a CNN reporter.
Photo: The anti-Morsi demonstrations are THE biggest I've ever seen in #Egypt. #30June pic.twitter.com/BTA0N18RVq
— benwedeman (@bencnn) June 30, 2013
Mark S.
Turkey, Brazil, now Egypt. Something big is happening.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mark S.: You forgot Austin. :)
Shakezula
Miserable Morsi.
ruemara
I do wonder what the outcomes of these protests will be. And if we can export some of this unrest to our dumb, sedated working, middle and poor classes. Plus tumbrels.
Jockey Full of Malbec
Is anyone talking about why?
All the articles written in a language I can read are along the lines of “Protests! Freedom! Awesome!” but are otherwise content-free.
grass
Yeah, that just seems incredibly dangerous and stupid. The helicopter wasn’t dropping tear gas or anything was it?
Amir Khalid
@Mark S.:
Maybe this song captures some of it.
grass
@Jockey Full of Malbec:
I haven’t followed the details, but the general problem is that the protesters are mostly liberal and secular, but completely suck at democracy with poor opposition organisation, while the Muslim Brotherhood are well organised and in power. Toppling a legitimate government can only be a bad thing for Egypt, but maybe this will moderate Morsi.
Mandalay
There is a ton of reporting on what is going on in Cairo right now, but little analysis of what is causing it.
Here’s a nice why-is-it-happening-101
And also from Juan Cole.
Elie
— Tipping points — convergence of economic, political and social factors are showing the people the way. Just enough have died and been abused by their governments to lose fear. That said, they will have to be careful in what they replace anything with… if free elections aren’t eventually a part of a solution, then chaos could ensue for some time, Maybe necessary chaos, but chaos just the same.
I am very sympathetic to secular governance and wish the Egyptians and Turks the very best. I want that message here at home as well in states where the right winged religious nuts want to have their own theocracy. People are sick of having restrictive religions crammed down their throats..
elmo
Color me ignorant, but I can’t make out what’s going on with the helicopter. Can somebody enlighten me?
Jay C
Yeah: must be one of things about “old civilizations”, or something: when faced with severe economic woes, the elected government spends/wastes its time enacting various restrictive social/religious stuff, instead of trying to find worthwhile jobs for its citizens. In Egypt, this results in millions of people pouring into the streets in protest: Here? A general “Meh”…
Alex S.
The civil society of Egypt might be the strongest civil society in the muslim world. And in the past 60 years or so, most of the muslim countries have been ruled by either one-man dictatorships or religious fundamentalists. Last year, the civil society of Egypt toppled their one-man dictatorship. Now they fight against their religious fundamentalists. I wish them success, but the lines between fundamentalists and conservatives are blurred and what looks like radical islam to us might be mainstream there, and has the support of half the country. Let’s see…
Mandalay
@grass:
That’s what Morsi’s supporters are arguing as well, but can’t gross abuse of power sometimes be a valid reason to overthrow a legitimately elected government if it’s done through protest? Morsi has been trying to do some nasty shit since he was elected….
Betty Cracker
@Jay C: I’m sure if things for your average Joe were as bad here as they are in Egypt, we’d have demonstrations and violence aplenty. It just hasn’t reached that tipping point.
handsmile
Pro-Morsi demonstrators will take to the streets by tomorrow in response to the ultimatum that he resign the presidency by Tuesday afternoon. Also, the Muslim Brotherhood will respond forcefully to the burning and ransacking of its Cairo headquarters and the alleged delay in police response.
Fans of a return of military rule to Egypt will probably not have long to wait.
The Guardian’s live blog is, as usual, indispensable.
p.a.
The Islamist parties seem to like the ‘one man one vote one time’ theme. I know little about the area, so I am more surprised at the secular nature of the Egyptian protests than I am by Turkey’s. Should I be?
grass
@Mandalay:
I really haven’t followed the details, but what if these protests are successful, a free and fair election is held and the Muslim Brotherhood secure their position? Do protesters resort to calling for the army to step in? Honestly, unless Morsi has been doing significant repression of the opposition, this all seems premature.
scav
@elmo: There were a lot of fireworks and what seemed to be laserish (at least brightly colored and very focused) searchlights in early videos I saw (when they were still marvelling about large early turnout and it was just getting darkish). looked like a very-crowded open-air disco, so this seems to rhyme with that. Hell of a big cat needed to play with that laser pointer though.
Cacti
O/T:
Ed “The Terminal” Snowden presents Russia with an appeal to 15 countries for asylum.
Trusting Julian Assange seems to not work out so well for the Mannings and Snowdens of the world.
Mandalay
@grass:
No need. The army has already offered to “help”….
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/egypt-s-military-chief-gives-morsi-48-hours-to-answer-people-s-demands-1.533157
Morsi won’t like hearing that from the leader of his armed forces. Morsi is on very thin ice.
mistermix
@elmo: It’s being highlighted by hundreds (thousands?) of laser pointers aimed by protesters. Watch the video I linked.
grass
@Mandalay:
Yay, the return of the benign military dictatorship is almost here.
maya
@elmo: Egyptian protesters were siccing their cats on the chopper by directing their laser pointers at it. In Egypt they use green dots instead of red because it’s the significant Muslim color. Cats are colorblind so either works for them but their jumping ability is questionable.
elmo
@mistermix:
Ah, thanks. I’m at work, so video no worky. Just looking at the pic, that must be at least approaching thousands. Wow.
Amir Khalid
@Mandalay:
When was the military in Egypt ever not in charge?
Mandalay
@Cacti: Not sure how much I would trust your LA Times article. This is a red flag:
That comment from an anonymous Russian official is way out of line from all the other sympathetic sourced quotes from other Russian officials, including Putin.
Unless Russia has just struck a deal with the US on handing over Snowden (in which case the comment would make sense) I call bullshit on the article.
liberal
OT: just wanted to say “thanks” to everyone who answered my question about asking prospective employers about work/life balance in the Dexter open thread.
Betty Cracker
@maya: Haha! One of my dogs would also attack any object that was lit up by laser pointer beams. The other seems to not see it. Weird. In my experience, 100% of cats respond to lasers. But I don’t know as many cats as I do dogs.
liberal
@Cacti:
Manning’s problem with trusting others lies with Adrian Lomo, not Assange.
Cacti
@Mandalay:
From Putin today:
President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Russia would not hand former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden over to the United States but that if Snowden wants to stay in Russia he “must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners”.
Sounds like Ed’s fresh out of friends.
Punchy
Whomever painted that helicopter did a shitty-ass job.
liberal
@Mandalay:
By those standards, it would have been entirely reasonable for us to try to use whatever means available to throw Bush 43 out of office.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
Which they ought to be smart enough to tell. Assange may be really smart about legal tricks to protect the data Wikileaks gets from being shut down, but it doesn’t have an equivalent ability to protect leakers.
WaynersT
All the 24hr cable channels are only showing non stop Zimmerman coverage over a revolution in Egypt – ugh. Last night it was all “Locked Up” specials. I haven’t seen anything on TV about Eqypt at all.
Isn’t Egypt just slightly more important than a criminal trial in Florida right now?
Jeez.
Mandalay
@Cacti:
Well if Putin is now taking a dump on Snowden as well then I think you are correct. That could signal the beginning of the end for Snowden,
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@WaynersT: Are you talking from a news POV or an entertainment POV? There are plenty of people in this country who think picking on a black girl is pure entertainment, ie Race Porn.
srv
@Mandalay:
I could hear that at any Tea Party protest. Or the July 4th Civil Liberties protests.
The liberals, elites and secularists believe in democracy on their terms. I don’t have a problem with that, but would not call it democratic. Do give them credit, they actually get out in protest, whereas in the US we’d have a fringe OWS and they’d whine about them.
Persia
@Roger Moore: And, for that matter, he doesn’t seem to give a shit about them anyway. Assange won’t lose a night of sleep over this.
Mnemosyne
@p.a.:
I haven’t been following it closely, but given the reports from last year’s revolution it being partially triggered because Muslims were protecting their Christian neighbors from attacks by militias, I’m not all that surprised.
IIRC, the Coptic Christians of Egypt are considered to be the oldest surviving Christian sect in the world, with the closest ties to the “original” version of Christianity (ie pre-Popes).
Shakezula
@Cacti: Sounds like we have someone the Russians want back. Mr. Snowden’s current official status has likely been revised to Bargaining Chip.
lamh36
According to AP on twitter
Cacti
@Persia:
Martyrs make for much better agitprop, so just as well for wikileaks that the Mannings and Snowdens twist in the wind.
The only hide Assange is ever worried about saving is his own.
Soonergrunt
The green spark effect around the helicopter rotor tips appears to be St. Elmo’s Fire. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in a helicopter at night has seen it. It’s static electricity build up and discharge. It’s harmless to the people in the bird, but I’ve seen ground personnel get hurt, particularly when they’re trying to attach sling loads to the bottom of a hovering bird, if they do it wrong.
As the Wikipedia article notes, it has been noted on tall-masted sailing ships for hundreds of years.
As far as the green lasers, that’s the wavelength that is typically seen in those visible light hand-held lasers that people shoot at aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers_and_aviation_safety
liberal
@srv:
Yep.
One thing I don’t get about those guys: didn’t they know what the likely outcome was to toppling Mubarak? Didn’t they realize that the Brotherhood had a far more extensive network than they did and that might affect the post-revolution outcome?
Roger Moore
@Shakezula:
Not necessarily. Every government has an interest in keeping secrets, and Putin’s more so than most. He may find it fun to jerk our chain, but he also doesn’t want to legitimize leaking sensitive information.
Amir Khalid
@liberal:
There are differences. America’s system is more robustl, and so has less of a need for extra-constitutional popular intervention than Egypt’s. George Walker Bush was out come January 20, 2009, no matter what anyone did; Mubarak, as an effective president for life, was going to stay in power until the military either threw him out themselves, or let someone else do it. In the end, it came down to the latter.
Right now, the Brotherhood are the best organised political force in Egypt and (I suspect) the most powerful after the military, who may well retain an ability to make or break presidents and governments, even if they don’t wield it as conspicuously as they once did.
Elie
@Mandalay:
One thing that IS clear — if he had either assylum from Russia or papers from Russia or anywhere else plus assylum, he would not be in the transit section of the Moscow airport. He is demonstratably, in a supplicant position. He can ask for assylum from Russia, but those 4 laptops that he supposedly brought, become Russia. Once he is no longer in control of the information, who knows what happens to it? It is significant that Ecuador rescinded those documents, but even before that, he had not been given permission to leave or he would have, right?
He is in a bit of a mess and I don’t see Russia admitting him for assylum — though it could happen I suppose. Russia holds the key to whether he can leave or not and who knows what they are weighting in that decision.
I have no idea if what he released or will release did what damage to who. This story has changed so much I have no idea. He clearly does not mind doing damage to his country and he has many supporters including some on BJ.
Mandalay
@Shakezula:
You may be right. Perhaps the only options Putin ever offered Snowden were asylum in Russia, or being handed over to the USA, and the supposed flight to Havana was pure bullshit.
Putin comes out of the affair looking good whatever option Snowden picks, but he has no real incentive to let Snowden abuse his “hospitality”, and take asylum in some other country. And that is doubly true if the Russians have already extracted everything they can out of him.
Elie
@Mandalay:
Agree with you about how Putin comes out of this. How do you see the endgame on all this?
I think that Snowden will be in the US within a month or so…
Jockey Full of Malbec
@grass:
For as long as religious fanatics are more willing to shun, oppress and even kill seculars than the reverse, they will always have the advantage.
Same holds true here in the US, BTW.
Maude
Where’s Romney to make fun of the people in the Cairo US Embassy?
ETA The State Department has warned Americans not to go to Egypt.
Elie
Events in Egypt and Turkey highlight the challenge of “democracy”. Having an election where the winning group believes they only have to represent their own supporters, and ignore the rest, is not truly democracy. How do you get the “winners” to want to incorporate some of the needs/viewpoints of other groups? Parliamentary systems might do some of that structurally through shared governance if there is no clear majority. Still, all parties have to own a perception of being ONE country with one identify to want to have enough for everyone to support the governments legitimacy. Serial revolution is not democracy — just chaos. I think that the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood — its basis in fundamentalist religious tenets makes this very hard. Shared values and beliefs are ok as long as they are their values and beliefs…
Elie
@Maude:
I wonder how many Americans are already there? I would be departing.. I don’t think the US is evacuating its Embassy — yet anyway.
Soonergrunt
@Roger Moore: It’s possible (I’d venture that it’s probable) that we have information on a Russian operation somewhere like China or India and we’re essentially holding that operation hostage.
“Isolate Snowden and shut him down, or your rat-line out of the Chinese military goes away.”
Robert Sneddon
@Soonergrunt: The crowd might be trying to dazzle or blind the pilot of the chopper — some handheld lasers are a lot more powerful than the little red pointer types most folks use to annoy cats. Where the chopper would come down if the pilot was in fact disabled is a problem others might have to deal with, a bit like random celebratory gunfire into the air.
YoohooCthulhu
I was thinking the green lights on the helicopter might have been the protesters using laser pointers to harass it, but I can’t think of why they’d all be green in that case.
srv
@liberal:
They are as smart as the entire US political and media establishment in 2002-2003.
Most liberal Americans don’t understand why the US is the way it is now, the concept of a center-right nation, In God We Trust and all that.
Pincher
@Robert Sneddon: I think the laser pointers are a pretty smart idea – the low budget way to croudsource a no-fly zone. Much more impressive democratizing use of technology than Tom Friedman’s old chestnut, the taxi-driver-with-Bluetooth.
handsmile
@Elie:
More pointedly, I wonder how Governor Rick Perry and the GOP-led Texas state legislature will be handling the “challenge of ‘democracy'”, now that it has reconvened to pass its draconian abortion bill:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/headlines/20130630-texas-lawmakers-resume-debate-monday-on-abortion-bill-derailed-by-wendy-davis-filibuster.ece
One need not seek out stories in foreign lands or foreign faiths to discover how certain American Christians might address these issues. Elected state officials in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, for example, have provided abundant evidence in the past year alone.
ETA: don’t mean to suggest you are unmindful of these incidents; just that it’s a domestic as well as international problem.
Soonergrunt
@Robert Sneddon: I can see why they’d want to do that, but like most actions taken by large crowds of people, the consequences, even ones that should be blindingly obvious (pun not intentional) usually aren’t considered.
From the Wikipedia article:
There hasn’t been a crash, yet.
Soonergrunt
@YoohooCthulhu:
Green lasers are the most plentiful of the cheap hand-held laser pointers. They are also the easiest to see at night.
Elie
@handsmile:
I agree completely on our own home brew religious fascism. Its the same shit but the recent examples in other countries are happening in overall more unstable societies…
Oh yeah — we definitely have work to do here. The demographics are another thing here working a little in our favor right now. The highest birth rates in many of the countries in upheaval are within the more fundamentalist groups. Maybe also true here in US but the white fundamentalists are shrinking as part of the overall white shrinkage…
Jebediah
@Betty Cracker:
O/T:
I remember someone mentioning weird, troll-y commenters who would come in and drop some turds at the end of dead threads. I still had your “Creepy ass cracker” thread open and lo and behold, retarded racism long after everybody else had moved on to other threads.
Is that how you “win” a thread? Shout “black people suck!” into an empty room? I know, strange people on the internet, what a discovery…
c
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): and Moral Mondays in Raleigh.
srv
@Soonergrunt:
Maybe, maybe not.
Roger Moore
@YoohooCthulhu:
Green is the best choice if you’re trying to dazzle somebody because the human eye is most sensitive to green light. They eye is something like 4-5 times more sensitive to light from a green laser pointer (532nm) than a red one (635nm), so you get much more dazzling effect for the same output power.
c
@Elie: My bias is to think that many Egyptian protesters against Morsi are old Mubarak followers getting revenge. I was sold by the complaint that the judiciary he inherited from the Mubarak regime was blocking many of his initiatives. I could just be uninformed and on the internet. ;)
If I am right, this is more like the Brooks brothers riots of 2000 in Florida. Whether it is, I have no idea.
Elie
@c:
This is a quote from Juan Cole’s site. He has an excellent reputation as a Middle East expert.
“Much of the protest is economic. Morsi’s government has pursued austerity policies and it has failed to revive tourism or attract substantial productive investment. Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have been cut in half, causing the Egyptian pound to fall in value, and hurting Egyptians, who depend on imported food and fuel. The textile workers of al-Mahalla al-Kubra, whose 2006-2008 strikes were a rallying cry for anti-Mubarak activists, have warned that under Morsi their factories are threatened with closure altogether. Although some of the animus against Morsi comes from liberals and secularists annoyed by his religious fundamentalism, many of the protesters on Sunday were devout Muslims who just object to Morsi’s high-handed style of governing, failed economic policies, and favoritism toward his Muslim Brotherhood base. One banner in Tahrir said, ‘we are for Islam, against the Muslim Brotherhood”
liberal
@Amir Khalid:
Not so simple. He also appointed some USSC justices.
liberal
@srv:
Actually, it’s rather complicated why the US is a center-right nation. There’s definitely issues on which Americans poll left of center.
The situation in Egypt wasn’t at all complicated. It was a matter of simple math: who had people on the ground and networking infrastructure in place. It might be hard to believe, but just knowing stuff about Google and Twitter does not an infrastructure make.
Mandalay
@Elie:
I would have agreed with you until I read this:
This is not being reported by the US media yet. Now have no clue what will happen next.
Mandalay
@liberal: With all due respect, you are now shifting your argument. Yield with good grace.
Elie
@Mandalay:
I just read that Snowden has asked for asylum from Russia per AP
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/edward-snowden-asylum-russia_n_3529611.html
Mandalay
@Elie: Interesting….but there are so many apparently conflicting statements coming from the Russians at the moment that I think I will just wait for the dust to settle.
Elie
@Mandalay:
I agree. What a book this is going to make!
Mnemosyne
@Elie:
IIRC, the Brazilian protests are also economic and also the result of failed austerity measures.
fuckwit
National Salvation Front???!?!! WHAT THE FUCK?
Jeez, this Egypt coup is such a fucking military coup, just like Romania, that they even aped the exact same NAME of the front group that the Romanian second-tier communists under Ion Iielescu used when they took over from Ceaucescu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Salvation_Front_%28Romania%29