Original RI quotes only

[Jeff]

Quit trolling the revolution.

[nathan28]

Do you remember the thread where Jackie shot JFK? To win, I realized that I would have to jump straight to JFK shooting himself (with a pen gun you can see him reaching for!). We are way past subtle escalation, salami tactics be damned, the logic is always first-strike nuclear. You must figure out where the last viable non-plus ultra lies -- no planes? no buildings, I say! no New York at all! -- and occupy it immediately. Gradually, as the range of debated ideas expands in the wake of an event, people will begin to reach the ground you first staked out, but they initially avoided as extreme. They called Nico crazy, but eventually he found his cult! Mwahahahaha!

[Jeff]

fucking violence. EVERY FUCKING TIME.

[barracuda]

I'm freaking out: there is now a complete blackout on live images from Tahrir Square. I shouldn't be surprised, this morning the Egyptian state tv stations had broadcasters sneering about "Al Jazeera's latest lies that there was gun-fire in Tahrir" (how would they know? Al Jazeera's been shut down here). Then, by just switching to BBC Arabic or CNN, there it was, live coverage of Tahrir Square with unmistakable gunfire, molotov cocktails and rocks raining down on pro-democracy demonstrators' heads.

All foreign news bureaus overlooking Tahrir Square have been shut down either by the army or the regime's thugs and journalists' cameras have been confiscated or broken. They don't want anybody to see what they are doing.

Tomorrow's demonstrations are supposed to be huge, all over Egypt. It's being called "the Day of Departure". I know people who are already downtown (it's after midnight here) and others who are planning to go. They know what the regime has been doing and that it's planning something terrible for tomorrow, but they're going anyway.

Bloggers are being kidnapped, journalists are being beaten and peaceful demonstrators are being killed. A huge supermarket near where I live was set on fire today, shortly after my husband had left it this afternoon. Thugs have been set loose and invited to go on a rampage. I've seen Youtube videos of some of the thugs captured by pro-democracy demonstrators say that they were released from jail by officers from the Ministry of Interior and promised LE 5000 (a huge amount for them) if they could get rid of the protesters.

Looking at the "pro-Mubarak demonstrators", it's obvious that the Ministry of Interior has emptied out the worst shanty-towns and is using hardened "baltagis" -- hired thugs with criminal records, police informants and police in civilian clothes. State tv keeps talking about how much money the Egyptian economy has lost and how many years it will take just to get back to where it was before January 25, in between old patriotic songs and wall-to-wall interviews with the new, smiling and friendly prime minister and the stern, scary vice president, both insisting that the demonstrators' demands have all been met and they should go home before "these destructive demonstrations do irreparable damage to the nation we all love". Wall-to-wall propaganda instead of news coverage, associating the demonstrations with chaos and loss and truly bizarre conspiracies contrasted with constant paternalistic appeals to security and stability and 'normalcy'.

People are exhausted, anxious and running out of money. Many who lived from payday to payday are now out of work or unable to do their jobs. For many, especially in the middle class, the chance to build a new system based on freedom and democracy and civil rights doesn't seem worth all this upheaval and insecurity.

If this revolution doesn't succeed, I think that Egypt will witness an even more horrific wave of violent repression and revenge from Mubarak's regime. They'll do everything possible to make sure this can't happen again. Next time, if there ever is a next time, peaceful demonstrations organized by smart young people won't cut it -- it will be the even worse nightmare of civil war, and the anti-regime forces will have to be hardened, armed warriors ready to kill and be killed. God forbid.

Never, in Egypt's long history, ever, has a government treated its people so savagely. Mubarak can be proud that he has added to his record for unprecedented corruption this black stain on Egypt's history with his name on it. I think he's literally become insane.

[barracuda]

Gosh, look what I found in my "Other Celebrated Revolutions That Would Have Failed Without Foreign Assistance" File

[Jeff]

Egypt you've shown us the way.

[JackRiddler]

This has been, like, the best blowback ever, if you ask me.

[DevilYouKnow]

Alice said:

Lies can only gain traction when the truth is suppressed. The power of Liberation Square is that it provided a space where the truth was on display for all to see, and before its awesome power, all the lies disintegrated and blew away in the wind.

[Allegro]

... It's wise, nay imperative, never simply to trust authoritarian command institutions like the Egyptian or any other military, or corporation, or international organization. It's always right to scrutinize motives and possible hidden agendas, and to understand how masses are fooled, manipulated and shaped by forces they don't understand, since they usually are, and since elite power has developed sophisticated sciences to do that. But to portray the popular uprising of the last two weeks as some kind of puppet show, the strings of which only a few special un-brainwashed observers among us can see, expresses the same mentality that robs We the People of our roles in the great French and Russian revolutions, or of our gains in the 20th century workers and womens and national and minority liberation struggles, and would represent all people's history as the product of long-armed but small cabals with thousand-year agendas. [Refer.]

.

Underscore is mine.

[82_28]

Jack's hittin' 'em out da park!

The gentle-seeming Google exec may want to go back to his life of "normalcy" with his family, working for the company in the Emirates, as I heard him say in a TV interview, but that's not what 99 percent of the people he helped to awaken to their own power can possibly do now (and it may not be what he thinks in two weeks either). If it's obvious to us, here, how much road still lies ahead, then it's even more obvious to the people who just cleared it! Egyptians never got to develop our kind of consumer complacency, where they could possibly be fooled into thinking the game is now won, justice restored, the movie over and they can go home and watch democracy unfold from on high.

[Allegro]

... But none of that means that progress in the direction of better things never occurs. Or that there's no point in celebrating it when it does. Or that celebrating it necessarily entails deluding oneself and others into thinking that evil has been vanquished and utopia on earth achieved.

In fact, when it comes to that last one, given that most rational and non-feral children have realized on their own that that kind of happy ending is nothing but a pure fantasy (though not one that's totally without its uses, imo) before they've make the non-definitive transition into adolescence, I personally am strongly inclined to just take it for granted that such delusions are fully pre-not-entailed, by definition. Absent some reason to think otherwise. [Refer.]

[Cosmic Cowbell]

It's the end of Act 1. Act 2 is where the Powers That Be try to get Egypt back under their thumbs. Act 3 is where it's all decided for good.

Evil is patient.

[streeb]

anothershamus wrote:

Yeah, he is the most underrated drummer of all time (arguably).

No argument from me. Ringo doesn't get the respect he deserves.



edited to remove idiocy

[JackRiddler]

From viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31254#p384143

OkCupid researchers recently came out with an interesting article "The Best Questions For A First Date." http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/ The question if you want to know "Is my date religious?" is to ask: "Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?" It turns out that as a group rationalist hate spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm not religious, but prone to making spelling and grammar mistakes, so I'm not very sensitive to them.

[...]

The centrality of self-esteem is key towards understanding both the effectiveness and pitfalls of ad hominem.

Left and left-leaning discourse online suffers from a lack of generosity. I think we often don't even notice that there's a problem because left and left-leaning folks hold vigorous rational debate in such high esteem. I fear that we often don't recognize how the psychology Street points to: "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are." affects people on the left as well as the right.

Singing to and singing with the choir aren't a waste of time because self esteem is central to our beliefs and acts. Attention to our rhetoric is important regardless of who we're talking too. Especially online, phatic speech acts, words serving a social function, are important. That's not to say rigor isn't important, of course it is; rather that for rhetoric to be effective, we must consider the importance of self esteem as we speak.

[Jeff]

unbiased observation of this planet must suggest that the long periods of conformity and "stability" (controlled misery) are at least as puzzling as the periodic tumult and revolt