I beg to differ. I don’t think that any of these governments are shocked that the people eventually fight back. I think that they simply make the mistake of underestimating the power of the people (especially when united) and severely overestimating their ability to suppress the people and their dissent. That’s how tyranny works.
That said, freedom of speech is always worth fighting for! Once you lose your right to speak freely, it’s only a matter of time before you start to lose everything else.
The next billion users were more important to Zuck than listening to 5 years worth of progressively more desperate pleas from the likes of Amnesty, humanrightswatch.org, the UN, as well as Facebook's lone Burmese speaking moderator: all begging Facebook to reign things in.
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.
This is all so disheartening.
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
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.
You need moderation both ways.
Yes to the First.
But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.
Bonus points if the cops arrest him before he goes to school tomorrow.
Adherence to the First doesn’t mean we abandon common sense law enforcement, or military sense.
While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.
So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open those doors too widely.
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.
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.
False
“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].
Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].
[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)
[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
At 3.5% of the populace taking up arms (not in protest but in war), that would far outnumber armed government officials in most countries. I don't doubt that a government choosing to concede at the point those 3.5% signaled peacefully they are likely to get violence soon, since the government conceding before that happens indicates they are weak enough to not be able to fight it off. Of course, If you have 3.5% of the populace fighting you can defeat even a horribly asymmetric situation, as the Chechens showed when they gained independence in the first Chechen war against Russia where almost everything beyond small arms were obtained via capture from the enemy.
At best your study shows that a government that capitulates before violence is more likely to be defeated, which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win -- and if both sides think they can win then odds are quite good the odds of winning lie somewhere closer to the middle of the odds if the actors are rational. Concession before violence is more likely to indicate the odds lie outside the middle.
No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].
Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.
> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win
This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.
Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.
[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...
[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...
You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.
Essentially they are tools that affect democratic coordination more so than fighting. If you can still coordinate despite them, then the amtal rule applies.
It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
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.
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.
Protests succeed, and they crown (usually conservative) authoritarians as the new king. Arab spring & Bangladesh are the 2 recent examples.
In the copy I found of their constitution, it only mentioned freedom of speech for the government. On their house floor.
What was it like there in recent times? Much state repression for political thought or unapproved opinions?
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
It's a bit like that Game of Thrones scene where Sean Bean brings a slip of paper into the throne room.
I mean thats a bit rich given the massive civil war, dictatorship and overthrow of the monarchy that all happened within living memory.
In reality long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace.
To be fair, the Romans traded long periods of recurring civil wars for peace. We’re nowhere close to that in America.
You are a coward who does not take place in the fighting of "hard fought freedoms", but feels entitled to the levers of power
The only solution is for the left-wing of US politics to stop disarming itself. The reason that voting power exists is because it represents the fighting power of the voters. When you decouple the two, you create a power imbalance that gangsters and tyrants can exploit.
Capitol riots are just a symptom of that power imbalance.
0. Start by moving the overton window to the edge of civility. Do not provide any justifications for your opinion. For example, "Protestors inside a government building should be met with violence"
1. Don't address any points they make
2. Make a snarky passive agressive response, thus winning.
3. Flag them for hurting your feelings. By discussing your ideas concretely ("who should perform the violence" "why?"), they have explored the "uncivil" aspects. This grounds for deleting their comment.
What is to be done?
I was there a few hours ago. It was a class struggle, but it was bound to be spun up as "kids don't get facebook and throw tantrum".
Years later the fixer was finally jailed for gold smuggling. https://english.khabarhub.com/2022/16/232667/
Edit: add link
Low-level 3rd world officials love showing off whatever they're doing to whoever will listen. They usually don't have much else to do. It is best to accept their offer and drink the tea with them or whatever, get on their good side and talk about how modern their little village is, and get on their good graces.
I don't know much about Agriculture Engineering but there were a bunch of big milk vats, a couple electricians, and then a bunch of officials sitting around drinking the cold Yerba Matte stuff.
I assume they brought me because they heard I was an electrical engineer and I saw they were wiring the place up.
I got stuck in the city for two or three days waiting for my flight, under the supervision of the team's local fixer. This guy had his finger in every pie: tourism, automobile importing, etc. I wound up at lunch with him because his assistant wasn't available to play tour guide.
Edit: I'll add that I got lucky getting sick. Shortly after my flight out a large earthquake struck, stranding the rest of the group in the Khumbu for nearly a week.
You managed to make melting ice sound exciting.
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.
This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.
> The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...
The tribalism of two party politics blurs those lines and replaces them with arbitrary forms of tribal allegiance. i.e. under a freer political system with a vibrant set of political parties that actually matched peoples political interests you might find former democrats and republicans voting together for the same party. Its my belief that the political divide in US mostly comes down to what TV channel your parents had on.
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.
Then, Bangladesh,
Now, Nepal.
An unstable Nepal allows the destabilization of two critical states in India.
Regime change in India is the big prize.
--
China and India do meddle.
But a classic color revolution, such as this one, is the signature of you-know-who.
In Nepali politics, Sher Bahadur Deuba is pro-India and Prachanda is pro-Prachanda (will back India some years, other years will back China).
The whole Indian internet conspiracy of "CIA ki saazish" is ridiculous when the US has barely 20 India scholars at all. There is 0 domain experience in India studies in the US, and that reflects in America's South Asia strategy (there is none).
[0] - https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/09/07/oli-s-diplomati...
I literally don’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
People need to start learning XMPP, cutting off of centralized services is only going to get worse.
The recent appearance of William van Wagenen on the Scott Horton Show was rather eye opening to me on some matters, even though I have been very well aware of these types of operations for many years now. For example, the "Arab Spring" that most people at the time thought was an organic citizen protest/uprising, but was clearly a clown cabal operation, has even deeper roots with position papers for many years prior clearly outlining the exact progression for how things would end up unfolding during the "Arab Spring".
It's definitely worth a listen, even if it may sound bewildering to people who have no real context for that world outside of the mainstream.
That’s why the crackdown hit so hard: documenting corruption online was one of the few tools young people had to hold power accountable, and banning it felt like a direct assault on their voice.
Reports confirm how serious this has become in the last week, thousands of young people took to the streets of Kathmandu, clashing with police who used tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and even live fire. Human rights groups say at least a dozen lives were lost. Protest slogans made it clear: “Stop corruption, not social media.”
So yes, this wasn’t kids throwing tantrums about apps it was a flashpoint in a much bigger struggle over democracy, fairness, and the right to speak freely.
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).
For instance check this https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-...
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.
As George Washington said in Hamilton: "Ah, winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."
No kings.
"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?"
14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
But in "civilized" societies with multiple layers of power structures, you are not supposed to solve your own problem, you are supposed to show somebody in a position of power that you are the victim so they solve the problem for you. This means victimhood is the principal currency of power.
Don't believe me? Every governments which allows protests says they must always be peaceful and "violence doesn't belong in politics". Yet how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
I'm sure there will be no violence once the thugs have guns and I don't
Chemical weapons are banned because they’re useless for a modern military [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
some killed were still in their school uniforms, at least one was 16.
Try this instead https://archive.is/zv17z . Not perfect, but the text can still be read behind the popover
I accept that there is corruption and manipulation by the government, but experience tells us also that these companies may be avoiding taxes towards zero.
The issue is the government in Nepal wants every social media holding company to have a designated person in Nepal who they can directly communicate with for takedowns without going through the traditional process, and if the company does not flllow through, hold that person legally liable.
It's a blatant censorship ploy because protests and dissatisfaction against the KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda musical chairs along with various constant corruption scandals are pushing Nepalis to ask for an alternative.
[0] - https://ekantipur.com/business/2025/01/28/en/from-google-met...
A hybrid regime like Nepal is not like that.
Quite ironic to choose this day to start trying to make an entire nation digitally illiterate.
Also while free speech and protests are important, the nature of protests or certain elements fuelling fire in the resentment can lead to these becoming completely out of control and destroying property or harming passersby. Sometimes pure anarchy is the goal of routine rabble rousers who use this opportunity. So I will go out on a limb over here and say no one over here really knows what happened in the sequence of decision making by the police and there may be some instances where certain actions may have been justified to avoid further escalation.
(Though the meme of all protests and civil discontent in Asia being the product of Western influence is a popular one among right-wing circles.)
(reposting as a top level comment, thanks to original poster)
Compared to nearby poor nations, Nepal is safe and its people are perceived to be welcoming. It's the only serious candidate for being a ski-nation in all of mainland Asia. If Nepal wanted, it could transform itself into a Bali style tourist destination and ascend towards being a middle economy. Unlike India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have to solve 1-billion-people scale problems, at 30 million, Nepal can resort to scaled down solutions.
Nepal's refusal to leverage the (few) advantages of its geography is baffling.
The internal politics are even more bizarre. As a communist-adjacent nation, it has a closed off economy with deep suspicion towards free markets. Yet, the national messaging alternates between blaming India or China for all their problems. The local populace (like every populace) eats this up. From my observations, neither nation affects Nepal's economics much. (national security is a separate conversation)
> protests reflect young people's widespread frustration with government action to tackle corruption and boost economic opportunities.
South Asia is coming off a recent protest->overthrow movement in Bangladesh. The youth protesters had similar complaints. Yet, the outcome was an even less democratic system which now owed favors to the violent parts of the society that helped complete the ouster. Similarly, Nepal has a history of political instability and violent ousters, most of which had led of very little economic change.
The youth's complaints are valid and I support their protests. However, do the protesters have an outcome in mind ? They want an improved economy. But, will they be okay with opening Nepal up to free markets ? This may mean selling resort building contracts to major western ski companies. It may mean opening unsafe sweatshops for Adidas to make shoes there. It may mean resource exploration by foreign mining companies.
I say this, because this is a South Asian disease. We want our nations to have a strong economy. But, economic liberalization can sometimes look like colonization, and this hurts the ego of proud global-south nations. We want progress, while keeping all foreign influence at bay. We want social welfare, but the nation is bankrupt. It's paradoxical. When our nations do move towards markets, it happens at gunpoint (1991) or with steep political costs (Farm Bill, GST) to the the incumbent.
Not sure what the solution is here. But, the last decade has made me suspicious towards protest movements that do not have positive policy outcomes in mind. The student's anger is valid, but impressionable students are the the time-honored vanguard used by more powerful opposition to trigger coups.
As with pouring water, the world keeps spinning, and the strife goes on.
netsharc•3h ago
It reads like: citizens have been protesting the government using social media, government desperate to curb dissent bans social media, dissent is now on the streets..
Or maybe it's as straightforward as the media has been reporting.
paganel•2h ago
FirmwareBurner•2h ago
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.
myrmidon•2h ago
Can you give specific examples?
I frequently find the US outlook to be exactly the reverse, where people pretend like "the government" is some conspiratorial shadow organisation undermining all the citizens at every step (which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for).
My view is that if you have incompetent, selfish administrators in a western democracy, then just don't vote for them next time; if they keep getting elected, then maybe your countries actual problem are the idiot voters instead (or possibly not-actually-independent mass media, the importance of which can not be overstated).
FirmwareBurner•2h ago
Most rich western/northern European countries.
>which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for
It's not silly when you consider that the candidates you can vote for, are all managed oppositions, each owned and supported by various mega-money interest groups. Why else did Bernie Sanders never got nominated as a presidential candidate even though many people supported him? Because he's not bought and paid for by the lobbyist groups. In every country it's like that.
glhaynes•2h ago
Because more people supported someone else.
salawat•1h ago
glhaynes•50m ago
This literally didn't happen. This sort of conspiracy-theorizing nonsense is akin to Trump's about the 2020 election and has lead to a bunch of low-info voters making bad decisions.
myrmidon•2h ago
But I think "managed opposition is the best you can get as voter" is incorrect; Trump is in my view neither managed nor "pro-establishment" in any way, and if everything was actually under "capitalist" control, then people like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or Tim Walz would never be allowed even close to a position of power.
Anti-establishment populists in Europe have seen comparable success (e.g. Italy where they are in power, or Germany where it just looks like a matter of time).
FirmwareBurner•1h ago
Bruh.
> Italy where they are in power
Melloni only pretended to be anti establishment to win elections, but isn't. She campaigned on deporting illegals, and then gave them residency and right to work lol. Tell me a bigger rug pull. Trump is the same, he campaigned on a lot of things(Epstein list anyone?), but not actually executed on them or only did it only as a show (DOGE).
JackFr•1h ago
‘Mega-money interest’ groups are a bugaboo for people who find it hard to accept that a large swath of the public doesn’t agree with them.
graemep•11m ago
An attitude that has become common in the UK is to say the government needs powers control the "gammon" (i.e. the hoi polloi) from themselves, and to protect their children from their terrible parents, etc.
koonsolo•1h ago
We protest here too by the way, this weekend about 100k in Brussels.
That you make these claims is just plain up ridiculous.
FirmwareBurner•40m ago
For example in Canada they de-banked the truckers, in Germany they de-pensioned a retiree who was planning to bring back the Kaiser.
So yeah, it happens, you're just ignorant from your bubble.
rkomorn•1h ago
FirmwareBurner•30m ago
jama211•2h ago
paganel•4m ago
ta1243•1h ago
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)
MangoToupe•2h ago
The reporting seems pretty meagre; even strictly with these events, how are so many dying from batons and rubber bullets? Sure these can kill, but fourteen people?
netsharc•2h ago
monkeyelite•26m ago
The standard assumption in business is that you follow local laws and customs as they are a proxy for the moral system of the local people.
Are you operating a business or promoting western ideas?
graemep•14m ago
monkeyelite•11m ago
nirava•1h ago
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. "
seer•2h ago
mothballed•2h ago
BoxFour•2h ago
But, the reason I call it short-sighted is exactly what you said: Removing those earlier pressure-release valves doesn’t solve the underlying issue at all and just increases the risk of a more volatile outcome.
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Gatherings, yes. Effective protest, I’m less convinced.
Effective protests “have clear strategic goals, use protest to broaden coalitions, seek to enlist more powerful individuals in their cause, and connect expressions of discontent to broader political and electoral mobilization” [1].
Social media helps enlist the elite. But it absolutely trashes clarity of goals and coalition broadening, often degrading into no true Scotsman contests. If a protest is well planned, social media can help it organize. But if a movement is developing, social media will as often keep it in a leaderless, undisciplined and thus ineffective state.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-power-of-protest-in-t...
komali2•2h ago
This is what I'll never understand about neolib governments sliding towards authoritarianism: why push back so hard? Evacuate the parliamentary buildings, don't meet the protestors with police, and let them have the run of the place. Record every face on CCTV, and then spend the next couple months vanishing them. The USSR understood this and it's that kind of forward-thinking that lets the likes of Putin maintain authority all the way from his career as a KGB agent through to now.
These governments responding to protests with tear gas and batons fail not only at effective authoritarianism, but also at being good liberal democracies where people can safely protest - which is possible, Taiwan has had two record sized protests in my life and at neither of them did the police advance with batons and beat the shit out of people.
Spivak•49m ago
ryandrake•10m ago