14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban

re corruption:

I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'. Amusingly they were all on one side of the plane too, the side that can see Mount Everest during the flight.

Just went to look you up on your profile to see why you might be hanging out with government officials, and just fyi your website link seems gone.

I think its quite something that we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice; this is the only division that matters. Those who are trying to follow the rules and make the nation better, and those that are only active for their self-interest.

I was thinking exactly the same. I was not there at the time, but I have family there and have lived there.

It was amazing how many people who were not usually politically active joined the protests, and that they attracted support across racial divisions.

I think one of the problem with outside experts is that they try to reframe it in terms of the issues in their countries. For example, I have read articles trying to use Sri Lanka's excessive borrowing as a warning against modern monetary theory, which is either dishonest or incompetent - and I very much doubt the govt were even thinking in terms of MMT.

BTW I have probably met you at some point. I know Gehan from when i worked at Millennium (I was only there about an year).

Unlike those that came before him of course, who are just regular folk like us making ends meet.

That number can’t be right, must not be right, do you have a source for that?

Feels like we are watching a poor man's caligola

to be extremely clear - it was blocked in the European Parliament network, not all of Europe by the EP

China and India are meddling in this. Nothing in Nepali politics happens without either China or India's hands or implicit blessing. Heck, regional Nepali politicans will literally vie for Nitish Kumar or Lalu Prasad Yadav's (the two perpetual CMs of Bihar) backing.

Even the Armed Forces(pro-India) and the Armed Police Force (pro-China) are at each others throats.

Whenever India feels Nepal is getting too close to China, a crisis happens. When China feels Nepal is getting to close to India, a crisis happens as well.

It's like how Iraqi and Lebanese politics is always meddled in by Saudi and Iran.

Also, the social media ban is extremely damaging.

Most students use Google and YouTube to study, and WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other and getting job offers.

The open plotting happens in western countries too, my friend. I have personally been witness to it. The irony is that the same reasons that were give for not "reporting" things is also similar to why things in the west are not "reported", albeit due to far more sophisticated and complicated reasons. Must I remind you of all the examples of "whistleblowers" who were not protected, not lauded and championed, sometimes not even respected by the public they were acting in the name of. I have personal knowledge of very similar types of circumstances where people have "whistleblown" and at best, as Snowden back then indicated, even the most gross violations simply just fall on "def" ears, which is more like simply inaction; with you only having identified yourself as someone moral or principled in a system that is inherently immoral and unprincipled.

Just take a look at the whole Epstein files situation. Not to be too acute about it, but how is it wild to you that plotting would happen in the "third world" when it happens right in your face in the heart of the world empire, openly defying all of the most core Constitutionally enshrined principles, and even daring you to do something about it and also proving how powerless you/everyone is to even look the cabal that control the world in the eyes, let alone depose them.

I've found it to be the other war around.

Protests succeed, and they crown (usually conservative) authoritarians as the new king. Arab spring & Bangladesh are the 2 recent examples.

As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, our country now having a right majority with a Nazi party in the mix, makes me really sad.

How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.

Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.

I fear that your observations speaks more to protest being an inefficient catalyst for regime change more than it speaks to the efforts and initiatives to preserve freedom.

The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.

Protests are rarely effectual, they serve more to gauge interest of others and provide connections.

In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.

As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.

You can't make people care.

Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late.

---

The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion.

You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others.

Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.

We recently had a record-sized protest in Taiwan and major political movements as a result. The recall movement was also unprecedented, though it ostensibly failed. However the KMT has failed in its coupe so there's still a positive outcome.

It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.

A Constitution is just a piece of paper.

I think Westerners and perhaps especially Americans think it has intrinsic power because they have a strong rule of law and effective independent courts so they are used to their Constitution being well inforced.

However, in a country where this is not the case the Constitution is just a piece of paper...

Always have to look deeper either way

The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state

Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything

I actually don’t know if I agree with the last part. A chunk of the Rwandan genocide was a radio station instigating and advocating for the mass slaughter of a people. Atrocities in Myanmar also were originally advocated for in Facebook. On more personal levels, domestic abuse is also psychological torture and the wearing down of a person with words and it should be in someone’s right to file a restraining order to stop being contacted by their abuser even if the abuser doesn’t perform physical violence.

That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

liberalism is passé nowadays, but it will see a resurgence akin to the “hard times make hard people, hard people make good times” cycle

It is not a question of what, but a question of why.

Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?

I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.

Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done

celebrate?

It's an overtly American perspective - perspective of a nation perpetually terrified of repeating the downfall of the Roman Republic.

In reality long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace.

"See what you made me do" is a common phrase in domestic abuse.

Isn’t this very similar to what protestors did on the January 6th incident in the USA?

I mean, what what do you do to protect the parliamentarians from blood thirsty crowds. Which side were you on during the January 6 riots/protests?

Also, it’s literally a war crime to use tear gas on the battlefield, yet it’s somehow OK to use it on civilians. (I understand part of the reason is to prevent a slippery slope from tear gas to chlorine, but it’s still telling.)

Nepal government made the classic mistake of not realizing if you let people scream into the ether on whatever the youth use as twitter, they won't meet up with their friends to scream on the street or even worse.

It's awkward isn't it, because following local laws could mean being a helping hand of the oppressor... For an extreme example, an email company that is forced by a new law to reveal all emails of citizens of country X, or a payment app that has to upload all transactions to the government (and where the supreme court has ruled in favour of the surveillance state). The "moral" company would probably rather shut their operations, but even trillion-dollar companies relent... And who has the last word on what's moral?

- Local law meant to censor heavily any dissent - several pro corruption measures passed in the last few years - the people have been angry for long - social media just meant people now have to come on the streets

lazily pasting one of my comments from yesterday

"So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. "

Let’s not pretend the level of ban is equivalent, or the effect it has on people’s lives. More should be done, but there are levels of severity. UK citizens can and do still log on to many services daily that are not accessible in Nepal.

Because people in the West have been indoctrinated to trust their governments far too much to an unhealthy degree to actually think that maybe their government doesn't have their best interest at heart and to start protesting.

And also because they're in the trap of a government provided cushy lifestyle which the government can terminate at will without violence (de-banking, de-pensioning, de-uneployment, de-social housing, etc) if they're caught protesting. People in underdeveloped countries don't have anything more to loose anyway but their chains.

The only ban on media I've seen is from Farage, who's banned the media from covering local government where he has the power

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-media-...

Trump has a similar playbook.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-white-house-press-pool-b...

Then there's also the normal US style limits (fighting words are banned, speech which harms big companies is banned, "obscenity" is restricted or banned, death threats to the president are banned (the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president)

Ah, so they did the right thing for the (very) wrong reasons. Shame.

i’m pretty sure that’s a standard requirement.. or at least extremely similar to how Brazil does it and i think similar for lots of EU countries

So, very similar to what happened with X in Brazil.

It's called the global south because it is poor. These terms (3rd world, developing world) are associated with poverty because they are a cluster of poor nations. The countries are poor because they're badly run. Their institutions are corrupt. Their population is under-educated and under-productive.

It can't value free, because there will always be a value judgement here.

It hurts. Yes, colonialism and a history of foreign exploitation has meant that global south nations have been dealt worse cards. But, the present is what it is. I'm sick of poor nations (like my own) feeding their delusions about the current state of their nation. The people have to learn to separate their identity as proud successors of a rich historic culture and their current state of disrepair. The inability to do so, keeps us poor and susceptible to further exploitation by local power brokers.

Just because twitter influencers use more offensive terms for these nations, doesn't mean that civil forums should overcompensate with euphemisms that hides the obvious judgement inherent to such groupings.

Had to "phone a friend" on that one:

"In Nepal, “jhola” (bag) turned into “jholay” is slang. It usually refers to people—often students, activists, or intellectual types—who carry a cloth bag (jhola) and are associated with being overly “bookish,” pseudo-intellectual, leftist, or idealistic. Depending on tone, it can be affectionate, neutral, or dismissive (like calling someone a “hippie” or “armchair intellectual” in English)."

EDIT: sounds like "my friend" is hallucinating. Thanks, actual people for helping me understand jholay. It seemed lazy though to simply ask in the comments, "What's jholay?"

Interesting. Are you arguing in that case censorship would have been a good thing? Is there a principled stance to be made here, or is it just "people should have freedom of speech when I agree with their goals, and be censored if I don't"?

but look at those engagement numbers tho, numbers the like of which may never be seen again.

sacrifices were made - people put in long nights working, missed their childrens birthdays, anniversaries etc. years of A/B testing and tweaks to the algorithm went into fermenting that genocide.

facebook engineers really earned their pizza party that week.

> the meme of all protests and civil discontent in Asia being the product of Western influence is a popular one among right-wing circles

I listen to enough "right-wing circles" to end up getting people tarnishing me as one just for standing up for them (despite all kinds of progressive views) and I frankly don't know what you're talking about. My friends that tend to get interpreted as "right-coded" have historically been supportive of protest movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong.