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Ethiopia is Blocking the Internet Again To Stifle Unrest in Its Troubled Eastern Region (qz.com)
Ethiopia's government has regressed to an old habit: shutting down the internet. From a report: Reports show the internet has been blocked in the eastern cities of Jijiga, Dire Dawa, and Harar following violence and simmering political tensions. Over the past weekend, federal troops were deployed to the eastern Somali regional state, leading to a standoff with local police, lootings, and death. The region's leader Abdi Mohamoud Omar, better known as Abdi Iley, was forced to resign and replaced by his finance minister Ahmed Abdi Mohammed. Following the unrest, officials cut off internet access to the region, with no explanation from either the ministry of communications or the sole mobile operator and internet provider Ethio Telecom. The move is indicative of an old Ethiopian government trick, blocking the internet or access to specific social media sites like Facebook and Twitter during anti-government protests or unease.
What did the 9 year old Ethiopian say to his therapist? That he was having mid-life crisis.
Have you ever had Ethiopian food?
Neither have they.
There was a recent football match between Ethiopia and Egypt⦠Egypt 8, Ethiopia didnâ(TM)t
How do you kill 100 flies at once?
Hit an Ethiopian in the face with a frying pan.
Blocking Twitter and Facebook would also stifle a lot of dissent in the USA.
lol this cant be real
Ethiopia and Somalia are examples of shit hole countries.
I don't care if it is politically incorrect but the fact is they are shit hole countries. There is a big Ethiopian community where I live and they left because is sucks over there. Wonderful people and awesome food! See, the good people emigrate and leave the assholes behind to kill each other and fuck up the country some more.
When someone is a meth addict, you don't pussy foot around and say that he's a developing sober person.
You call him a fucking addict to his face. The same for much of the continent of Africa - what's the problem? Smart wonderful people but they're stuck. It can't be Islam because many of those countries have a majority of Christians. It's not because of race because they aren't all negroid.
I have a basic understanding of African history and what the Europeans did to them, but fuck'in A; they are gone now and have been for decades.
What's the problem?! Why so many failed states?
...does shutting down the internet just lead to more unrest? Wouldn't a better strategy be, "Eithiopia is footing the bill to make Netflix free during peak protest hours"?
After fighting off imperialist powers, Ethiopia is the only example of an African nation to develop outside the colonial system.
Marvel in Wakanda's light.
It's dictatorship. You need the people to be economically free to generate wealth and progress for all. Without having to bend the knee to a hundred local officials, corrupt or otherwise, to do anything, free people can respond to and meet needs amd wants, and do so faster than shortages can become serious or chronic.
But dictatorship, with little chance of economic success, myriad "additional costs", and the omnipresent fear of falling afoul of someone in power, most say to hell with it, and there's the "inescapable poverty".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
After all, there have never been any troubles in Ethiopia before the invention of the Internet.
Ezekiel 23:20
You don't cut people's Internet access off. That's like taking cigarettes away from a smoker. You wanna see some violence? WOW!
This is what our second amendment was designed to prevent.
How hard would it be to design an airdroppable package that had a SatLink , a wifi hotspot and Solar? power (with battery backup)??
If you want to err "Church it up" a bit you could have aid supplies form some of the packaging.
In fact SLASHMIND CHALLENGE TIME
lets see what y'all com up with
See, the good people emigrate and leave the assholes behind to kill each other and fuck up the country some more.
There's your mistake. It's not the "good people" that get out, leaving the bad people behind; the people that get out are the people who can get out. There are plenty of factors that keep people in their home country that do not preclude them from being good people. And quite often the people who have the means to get out are the assholes killing people because they've taken from other people.
I have a basic understanding of African history and what the Europeans did to them, but fuck'in A; they are gone now and have been for decades. What's the problem?! Why so many failed states?
The problem is twofold: first of all, Europe fucked up Africa enough that it still hasn't recovered (same with the Middle East). Europe had a history in Africa of very harsh and draconian rule, often playing tribal/ethnic groups against each other which only exacerbated existing tensions. Many African states won independence only through rebellion and war, others had a long drawn out process. By the time European states had left they had extracted a significant amount of wealth and resources (as well as the technical knowledge necessary to produce said resources and wealth), leaving the new African states on their own. You had fights for power, fights to control resources, etc.
The second part is that quite often their own government screws them over. Africa is rife with corrupt or inefficient governments, both at the state and local levels, so that quite often international aid or domestically produced resources get diverted to line pockets. Weak central governments lead to criminal or militant groups controlling areas outside urban centers, political parties work with military officials to promote dynastic one-party rule (Zimbabwe, others), populist governments create inefficient or unworkable policies (SA), and violent conflicts such as in the Congo, Sierra Leone or Rwanda create lasting effects not just internally but in neighboring states as well. And being poor is not the issue; in fact, some of the states with the worst problems are rich in resources (this is known as the resource curse).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Q: What's the fastest animal in the world?
A: The Ethiopian chicken.
This is the end result of literally every right wing authoritarian in power in the history of the world. They corrupt the government, fleece the people, and then censor and/or kill anyone attempting to speak out about it. Right Wing Authoritarianism is the biggest factor in how wealthy and successful a country is. The democratic socialist European states are among the wealthiest and most free, and generally the happiest. The right wing authoritarian African countries have a kleptocratic ruling class and heaps of propaganda to tell the outside world that everything is ok.
Guess which way the US is headed? We will see the end of the American Empire in our lifetimes.
1) Corrupt governments 2) No public education 3) Emphasis on monolithic projects, since that's where the biggest graft is 4) Still haven't recovered from the colonialists pulling out I'm still not clear on why the only industry for most countries is resource extraction. Do they manufacture ANYTHING in Africa?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Abdi Mohamoud Omar....Ahmed Abdi Mohammed
I wonder just who might be fomenting this unrest.
All those people who would be playing Fortnite or watching YouTube or doing actual work now have nothing to do. Idle hands create mischief and all that... Shutting off the Internet is something that will eventually backfire badly.
Funny i came up with the exact opposite conclusions. Governemnt does not get started saying we are going to enslave the people. Authoritarian goberments get started by helping the people. The government needs to protect you fron those evil capitalists. You are too weak and helpless to protect yourself from injustice so you must the goberment more power. Then people do injust things so you must call on the gubermint to round up and prosecute those wrong doers. You cant have people running around with guns. You take those guns away to protect the people. You cant have homeless people, so we must have the gubermint give large sums of money to rich well connected doo gooders to provide housing to all those people that can not afford housing due to all the regulations put on construction to protect the people from construction companies
It's the curse of resource-rich economies. For a short term thinker -- which includes most politicians and businesses -- it's so profitable to just dig and sell that nobody with the resources works on doing anything else. Why waste your time trying to convince a company make a long term manufacturing investment when you have companies begging to pay you huge bribes for resource extraction?
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I'm waiting for the laundry list of methods to circumvent this that are completely impractical:
1. Mesh nets of laptops and pringles cans. (Can they even get pringles in Ethiopia)
2. Launching drones to fly over the area using wrt54g's for the APs
3. Richard Stallman and a station wagon full of 9 track tapes.
Do we have any more stupid ideas?
Seriously, the companies that design hidden antennas for sat companies will do a lot of sales.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
4) Still haven't recovered from the colonialists pulling out
I'm still not clear on why the only industry for most countries is resource extraction. Do they manufacture ANYTHING in Africa?
They don't manufacture much in Africa because they still haven't recovered from the colonialists raping their countries and then pulling out. That's left unstable situations behind that discourage investment. Still, various automakers are saying that Africa is going to be their next manufacturing hub, because it's the last place on the planet with cheap labor and virtually nonexistent labor law.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's the problem?! Why so many failed states?
Maybe they don't generally have nearly as a strong idea of a nation state as we Europeans have. For the Jeff Johnson's sake, we invented the concept in its modern, nationalist and romantic forms. African borders were originally negotiated by the colonial states and it could well be argued that not all divisions were based on tribal borders or areas of single language or culture.
I hate to think that the future of African nations would be as filled with war as we had, but we started learning only when our rulers didn't have enough money to hire more mercenaries. Maybe the distances and nature is keeping the Great African Conflict at bay, but the existing conflicts and mismanagement of funds linger. Most people want to be kings, a few serve the people. And which people is that exactly? Their own perhaps?
Mostly they're superstitious savages who don't know how to "run things." (Dear reader, fight the urge to make a sarcastic retard reply about USA, please)
And that's perfectly okay. It isn't the white man's -- and now increasingly, the chinese's -- burden to elevate every single ethnic group on the planet to western-style expansion and sprawl.
they still haven't recovered from the colonialists raping their countries and then pulling out.
This is not supported by evidence. The countries where colonialism was longest and deepest (e.g: South Africa, Ghana, Kenya) are doing the best, because of strong institutions, rule of law, and economic ties to the wider world. Countries where colonialism was shortest and weakest, and tribalism left intact, are doing the worst.
The Germans occupied Norway for longer than the Italians occupied Ethiopia. Blaming Ethiopia's problems on "colonialism" is absurd.
By any objective measure, Africans that gave up tribalism and adopted western ways, are doing relatively well. If you look at income, infant mortality, maternal mortality, violence, longevity, nutrition, literacy, health, sexual abuse, alcoholism, or any other measure of human welfare that you can think of, traditional tribal societies are at the absolute bottom.
I'm white, but I like Ethiopia and Ethiopians. I'll tell you why. First, they are not Muslims, they are majority Christian and have been for so long there is a myth that their former emperor (Ras Taferi also known as Haile Salassie) claimed to have lineage going back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. I'm Atheist, but I find stomaching xian bullshit is easier than Islamic bullshit, since there is less "cut the head off the infidel" stuff going on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beheading_in_Islam).
Also, Ethiopia was never completely conquered by any western power. Italy made a go of it but couldn't hold the ground long and mostly just gassed a bunch of defenseless women and children. Ethiopians are the most sophisticated, civilized, and well educated of the Africans I meet (and I meet a lot, there are tons of them in my town). They also have the best food, the hottest women, and the most easy-going attitudes. Don't believe all that cracked Earth starvation shit from the 1970's famines, it's a beautiful country with lots of rainforests and different geography. Their language (Amharic) is also interesting and cool sounding. Their only real problem is an extremely fucked up government and the fact that they tried "multiculturalism" with the Salafi dickheads next door in Eritrea and Somalia (not by choice) and, like it always does, that resulted in big time civil war a few generations later.
Funny i came up with the exact opposite conclusions. Government does not get started saying we are going to enslave the people.
You're right, they enslave those who are not the people. See the US.
You cant have people running around with guns. You take those guns away to protect the people. You cant have homeless people, so we must have the gubermint give large sums of money to rich well connected doo gooders to provide housing to all those people that can not afford housing due to all the regulations put on construction to protect the people from construction companies
Actually, the problem in the US is that the people with guns are allowed to take lives away without the government doing much of anything, and houses are literally stolen from the people who live there and the government does nothing but help the rich along.
The US isn't am empire. Never was.
So, congrats. You won! You have what you wanted. Must be a happy feeling.
The problem is twofold: first of all, Europe fucked up Africa enough that it still hasn't recovered (same with the Middle East).
The second part is that quite often their own government screws them over.
Let's assume for the moment that I agree with you. Let's assume the problems with Africa started with European influence, and the governments in Africa are inefficient and corrupt. So, how do we fix it?
Do we fix this by allowing waves of immigrants from Africa into Europe? How does that resolve the problems? Seems to me that allowing refugees to leave these shit hole nations might be a good means to resolve the immediate problem of people being mistreated, but so long as these corrupt governments are allowed to exist they will continue to drive more and more people out of Africa. Who is going to bring viable governments to Africa? These same Europeans that fucked them over? Maybe these refugees should return. But then they'd return "spoiled" from European influence, no? Maybe they aren't "spoiled" but can return with an education of how a free nation can operate.
I could even argue that allowing refugees to flee to Europe is bad for Africa, or at least a greater cost to everyone for less benefit. Taking someone from a place in which they are accustomed and have family, and putting them in place with a different climate, language, and culture, is very stressful. This movement is very expensive, in both resources consumed and in lives lost. We should demand they stay for their own sake. The problems of a corrupt government is not resolved by fleeing it, it is resolved by fighting it. If Europe wants to help these people then they should not take them in, they should provide the resources they need in Africa to create free nations.
But we can't stand the idea of Europeans going in to help restore order in Africa, because that might be considered another colonial invasion. So, instead of correcting for past errors, we do what's "politically correct" and allow corrupt African governments to continue killing and driving out people.
Blaming Europe for the problems does nothing to bring a resolution. Especially if these accusations come with handcuffs to prevent an effective resolution. Okay, fine, Europe broke it. So then just maybe we should allow Europe to fix it. I'm guessing they might just go along with this because it's not cheap to take in all these refugees, it would be better for both Africa and Europe if Europe was allowed to go in and fix the problems.
If the argument is that Europe should stay out of this then I can agree with that. Staying out of it should then include refusing to take in refugees because, so the claims are, that it was European influence on these peoples that caused the problems. By keeping these refugees out then they are being "saved" from European influence.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
...in most of the world. You know, the parts that have ever actually had the internet.