Slashdot Mirror
Organized Online, Students Storm Gov't. Buildings In Moldova
An anonymous reader writes "Reacting to allegedly fraudulent election procedures, students are storming the presidency and parliament of the small eastern European country of Moldova. It is reported that they used Twitter to organize. Currently twitter and blogs are being used to spread word of what is happening since all national news websites have been blocked. If the 1989 Romanian revolution was the first to be televised, is this the first to be led by twitter and social networks?" Jamie points out this interesting presentation (from March 2008) by Ethan Zuckerman about the realities of online activism, including how governments try to constrain it.
...So Twitter is *occasionally* filled with useful material. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
will not be televised, but apparently it will be twittered.
I am officially gone from
Tomorrows CNN: "According to Twits from the Moldovian front...."
Maybe after this, twitting will sound a little less stupid.
Maybe.
I'm really surprised they managed to send so many messages without Twitter displaying the Fail Whale.
Summation 2
People use communication tools available to them to organize and carry out tactics?
Oh, it's because it's twitter it's a novelty.
Sent from your iPad.
If it isn't, Slashdot ain't doin' its job.
If Slashdot was doing its job it would be the FRIST REVOLUTION!.
From my time in Moldova with native students, all they want is to join up with the rest of Europe and get the show on the road. They're really frustrated at "the Man". There's the Romanians who don't want to reunite the countries (since Moldova is poorer), the Russians who keep feeding the border conflict with Transnistria (fascinating read about that tin pot narco/weapons state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria ), there's the EU that doesn't even want to consider Moldova as long as there's an unsolved border conflict, there's the communists in power, and so on. Doesn't surprise me much that they're going the same way as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine -- which was much the same circumstances.
Totally OT: Moldova has the BEST wine and the CRAZIEST Nightclubs. Gotta believe me on that one ;-)
As told in a lot of reports. But the government can't do much when suddenly it's stormed from everywhere, and after days and days of riots, some cop say: "hey I saw a blog that calls for this demonstration that was more like an angry mob !" I even think they didn't manage to close one of those blog. Also the election of 2004 in Spain, which happened three days after the Madrid train bombing, was won by the socialists, even though national TV was continually broadcasting that the ETA made those bombing (the ETA is a left wing basque nationalist group). Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist claim that everybody in the country was just SMSing all day for those three days, since it was clear for anyone left wing that it wasn't the ETA: the ETA usually claim their attacks, and do not usually target civilian.
The Soviet Union was crushed by fax machines. Twitter is just sort of a chickenshit fax machine for people who like to run their mouths.
BTW, good for the students.
You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother. There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance. NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be right back after a message bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.
Burmashave
Alright, we've got to overthrow those assholes running this country. And we've got to do it in 140 characters or less. So I want everyone to
Tomorrows CNN: "According to Twits from the Moldovian front...." Maybe after this, twitting will sound a little less stupid. Maybe.
Somehow I doubt it. Somewhere, the twits will be twoted as twaying something or other about how these tweettacks are a violation of their twitful rights...
But don't twote me on that...
Once you have stopped/destroyed "the machine", what will replace it?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Just take a look http://unimedia.info/ ! These guys are serious...
To anyone who understands anything about economics, this statement, honestly, looks like a troll. It's like reading someone saying "I thought Windows was better? Isn't that what 95% of businesses use?" or something like that. Yes, there are many, many people who thought (and perhaps still think, although OS X and even linux have made tremendous inroads into the public consciousness now), for example, that it was "obvious" which operating system was best. For one thing, there were many, many people in the media who would pontificate about the superiority of Windows over any alternative, and then you could back that up by finding hordes of Windows weenies who would enthusiastically repeat the tired, old, canards in a way that made them sound all sarcastic and superior.
The people talking about the current crisis as a failure of capitalism understand economics in the same way that the people referenced above understand technology. They hear people talk about it, some of them sound like they know what they're talking about, they look around at other people in the crowd and go with what they think of as the consensus of the smart/informed people.
In fact, they know very little, and the people that do know are sharply divided over what is "obvious".
But if you think that you have seen capitalism fail, you just aren't looking hard enough to see past the Democrat's distortion blitz.
I agree wholeheartedly that the novelty of credit default swaps were an artifact of capitalism. A stupid investment which Buffet called a time bomb--but capitalism produces stupid investments, as it reflects the desires of individuals to get something for nothing. That's not all it produces, but because it embraces freedom, it embraces people's freedom to dumb as well as to be smart. And sometimes what one person says is dumb turns out to have been really smart.
But let's get back to the current useful-idiot-producing crisis. Where did the "money" come from that went into the bubble that just burst? It came from "money" (fiat money, meaning you aren't allowed to compete with it like you would in capitalism; political money, meaning it's produced by a quasi-government entity (the Federal Reserve) ) that was "created" when banks sold mortgages. There was a huge influx of "money" into the system. All the dizzying loads of information you can find about what happened after that--the "exotic derivatives" and so forth--is just the result of people trying to cash in on a flood of "money". Basically, yes, if you pour money into a capatilist system, it will figure out all kinds of ways to attempt to drive that money into the pockets of various players. No surprise there, and you can call it capitalism.
Over time, after a source of money shows up, once people figure out what the real nature of that source is and how to value it, the activity around it calms down. There may or may not be a bubble, depending on how risky or cautious people are, whether quality information is available, and a host of other factors. Capitalism does not instantaneously find the value of something new, it tries hundreds of different ways to measure and extract that value.
What, in the case of the current crisis, is the source of the "new money"? Well, we've already talked about the mortgages, buy why did they show up? Was there some kind of twitch in the invisible hand? Some evil capitalist corporation put subliminal messages into advertising convincing people that they should really be buying a house, it's what all the cool people are doing?
No, no, and no. Although things something like that happened once it was shown that there was money there, what started this artificial glut of money was the government. Some politicians, concerned that people that couldn't afford to buy homes by evil capitalist banking standards, well, couldn't afford to buy homes by the evil
Liberty uber alles.