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Why Protesters In Cairo Use Laser Pointers
New submitter Ahmed Shaban writes "Why do protesters in Cairo use laser pointers? At the beginning, they were used to light up snipers on rooftops. Later, it just became fashionable to use them, and such things spread very fast among the youth of Cairo, who can find the high power laser pointers for sale on the sidewalks. The article contains amazing photos of a chopper lit up by green laser pointers."
stupid people do stupid things like live in Egypt and blind pilots of vehicles carrying a ton of fuel over their heads
It is not working because they did not actually have democracy there, contrary to what the media (which likes to suck presidential wang) tells you.
...are the moronic A/Cs on /. who seem happy to denigrate the Egyptian people for celebrating the peaceful overthrow of a useless leader.
The fact that the army has removed these incompetants and are immediately handing power back to the people is un-precedented and incredible. The Egyptian people and army could teach some other nations a thing or two, I think, not to mention some of the ignorant bigots who plague /.
Smivs on the intertubes!
The military is on their side!...
Aren't these the same people that shoot live bullets in the air to celebrate? Maybe lasers are somewhat less dangerous...
Technically they did have democracy and got what they voted for, but what they didn't have were safeguards to ensure that a president couldn't just declare himself dictator for life after being elected. And so that's what he tried to do as early as possible. They need to adjust their system, institute checks and balances, constitutional changes requiring national referendums etc.
My understanding is that they didn't really have much of a choice in who to vote for. It was between a known bad guy and a probably bad guy, so they went with the latter due to lack of choices to begin with. Is it really a free and democratic election if you don't have choices?
I was in the dorms at college when Obama was elected for the first time. His supporters rioted and caused a bunch of property damage and ruffed up people.
There's also been cases of sports fans rioting when their team has won.
People do crazy shit to celebrate that just seems counterproductive to an outside observer.
If it were so easy, many South American countries would have become as prosperous and democratic as the US since their constitutions were basically copies of the US Constitution. Yet, somehow, it didn't really work.
You can see the same in many former British colonies. If you read their Constitution, you'll see that they're not much different from what you find in any modern democracy. Bill of rights, checks and balances, constitutional protections for both negative and positive rights. They also inherited the common law tradition and much of their legislation is copy-pasted from UK legislation circa 1960. It's so similar in theory that UK-trained lawyers can usually practice with minimum to nil extra training, as most of the legal education is done from UK textbooks and case books anyway.
Yet, in practice, it's quite different. Sure, you have the same theoretical protections, but they do little good when everyone is free to ignore them. It's nice to tell the courts that they have to be independent and fair, but how do you guarantee that?
"They need to adjust their system, institute checks and balances", etc. is all wishful thinking. It's about as useful as telling a developing country that all they need to do is grow. It's true but pretty useless as far as advice goes. The tricky part is knowing how to move from the equilibrium where the law is widely ignored, where formal checks and balances don't work, where the constitution is not worth the paper it's written on, to a better equilibrium. As far as I can tell, no-one has yet found a magic recipe for that because things are usually the way they are for a reason. It's not like bad institutions just spring up at random: they are usually people who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, and we were able to see times and times again that removing whoever happens to be in power doesn't do much to solve the structural problems and can even lead to worse outcomes (Iraq? Libya?).
"The pilot should have bailed out and let the damned thing crash into the crowd."
Pilot bailing out....of a conventional helicopter.
And to think /. was once a techy site.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Will not happen. It's a game of numbers. Let's start with 100% and start subtracting:
...
- people too young and people too old
- democrats
- liberals
- socialists/communists
- african americans
- hispanics
- lbgt
- with free cell phones
- on government aid
- holding a lot of government debt (eg student loans)
- fans of actors/musicians who entertain president
-
Even with the partial list you can probably see how this game was won much before it started.
If Obama woke up tomorrow and ordered that all Tea Party members be arrested, I would expect our military to essentially remove him from office - in the immediate case by ignoring him, and in the longer case by Congress impeaching him and removing him from office - which would still require the cooperation of the military (they'd have to decide to listen to Congress and not the President.)
This is what Abraham Lincoln did and he is considered a hero.
Even heroes do really shitty things from time to time.
Did Abraham Lincoln violate the Constitution, and should he have been called to account for it?
Yes, and maybe. Sometimes the spirit of the law is fulfilled in different ways than by following the letter of the law, but in the case of Lincoln, it isn't clear that it was necessary.
Oh, and FDR, who probably saved the world from the Nazis by supplying the Soviets and Britain against popular opinion in the US (before Pearl Harbor), his government opened concentration camps for Japanese Americans. Being a hero doesn't mean everything you do is heroic.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.