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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Iran is offline and has been for three days after the government responded to widespread protests by killing the internet.
Anti-government protests started on Friday when the authorities announced a sudden 50 per cent increase in fuel prices. The protests quickly spread to over 100 cities and towns, reflecting deeper hostility to the authoritarian establishment. That establishment responded by cutting off the internet to 80 million people on Saturday night.
As a result it has been increasingly difficult to follow what is going on inside the country or how many people have been injured or killed. The government has acknowledged three deaths, but there have been at least eight reported and more are expected.
Even with the price increase Iran’s 13 cents a liter gas prices remain among the cheapest in the world, but the decision to raise the price was just one more sign of Iran’s faltering economy, in part due to continued sanctions on the country.
Iran’s response was depressingly predictable - its National Security Council instructed all ISPs to cut off internet access out of “national security interests.”
Despite the ban however, citizens have quickly discovered that Iran runs two internets: a public internet and a separate network that the government and universities are tapped into and which is still operational.
[...] In a worrying sign of what may really be going on, however, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in an official statement on Monday that it was planning to take “decisive action” against any further protests, raising the possibility of dozens of deaths as has happened repeatedly in recent years.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 20 2019, @09:17AM (3 children)
Does Iran have free and fair elections?
Are Iranians protesting simply because of gas prices or was it the straw that broke the camel's back?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:18PM (1 child)
I'm starting to realize it was never democracy that has produced the results it has. It's been collections of people generally being able to put aside their differences to work together. Democracy was just a proxy for this underlying phenomena and a natural result of such. In modern times I think we're seeing what happens as that willingness to work together starts to fade. It's the same reason that you never saw democracy arise organically in most places outside Europe. It's also probably the same reason that the original democracy, in Greece, was quite short lived. The system is nothing particularly unique or surprising. "Hey guys, we want pizza. Screw that, we want hamburgers. How do we decide? Vote." Probably something that's been done since the day of the first disagreements. What was lacking was not democracy, but cooperation on a very wide level that enables democracy to function.
The point of this is that votes have nothing to do with really making meaningful change.
- 'Here we'll decide by democracy. Vote if you'd like to leave the EU!'
- 'WTF you imbeciles? You weren't supposed to say yes. No we're not leaving, you uninformed ignorant peasants.'
- 'Hey I agree Guantanamo Bay is an awful place and thing that goes against everything our nation stands for. Vote for me and I'll close it on day 1!'
- [1500 days later] 'Oops my bad. I can't close it. I'm only the president and with a majority in both the house and senate, after all. Oh yeah, but what I can do is pass a new law [wikipedia.org] to enable me to throw American citizens in there if need be for arbitrarily long times without trial or charge. Don't worry, it's for your safety and I think the founding fathers would really appreciate the wisdom behind this. It was none other than Ben Franklin that said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety are really smart people." Indeed his wisdom, really gives one the chills.'
But of course you can make change. But change doesn't come from acting like a monkey in the streets. It comes from understanding what the other guy wants and then cooperating to try to create some meet in the middle. And in the grand scheme of things we all want the exact same things. That's not to sing Kumbaya - obviously there are some people who this world would be much better off without. But I think now a days people are just labeling everybody who doesn't agree with them down to a tee to be those people. It's like we jump straight from "Well I didn't get exactly what I wanted." to "RIOT!!!"
And people don't seem to understand that those who are in power just cannot concede to such things, even if they want to. It would incentivize that behavior in the future. E.g. if Hong Kong gave the protesters what they wanted at this point, all it would do is tell them that anytime they want to get their way they just need to go hurt a lot of people and destroy a bunch of other peoples' property. Hong Kong runs a democratic election. Pro-china party wins!?!? RIOT!!! You don't get change like that, you end up repeating exactly what happened in the past where "discovered" democracy only to have that entire civilization collapse and end up being supplanted by the quite regressive, but incredibly successful, feudal systems from which most of us now descend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:36PM
Pro-china party wins!?!? RIOT!!!
Trump wins!?!? IMPEACH!!! and a few riots too, just for the hell of it, why not?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:33PM
Not really: All candidates for elected office have to have the approval of the Guardian Council, an unelected group of ayatollahs. And if it comes down to it, the armed forces also answer to the ayatollahs, not the elected officials.
From what I can gather, a lot of the problem has to do with a lot of younger Iranians wanting a secular democracy, while older Iranians who were alive in the 1970's and/or fought in the Iran-Iraq War are still pretty loyal to the regime. A lot of the youth want to be able to drink, smoke, and bang freely, and the strict moral laws they're living under don't allow for that (although my understanding is that there are some who do that sort of thing anyways despite it being illegal).
Unfortunately, those younger people longing for freedom are screwed for the foreseeable future, due to what's going on internationally: The Russians consider the current Iranian government a strong ally, and the Israelis and Americans by all appearances would rather have the status quo than a secular democracy.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.