8 ms·

2019: The year revolt went global

53 points by zby 7y ago

Miner49er 7y ago
One thing that's interesting about all this is the media's coverage. The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests.
- chewz 7y ago
  Better do not give people the ideas..
- adventured 7y ago
  > The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests. That's clearly not true and very easy to disprove. Iraq, Iran, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia have all gotten continued coverage in US media. I can provide, say, 100 links to stories spanning all the major US news sources for those protests if you require it, dating back to the beginnings of the protests in Chile and going forward. NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NY Post, NPR, TIME, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hill, Bloomberg, Voice of America, Reuters US, CNBC and so on have in total covered all of the protests persistently. A quick drop into Google news with "Iraq protests" or "Iran protests" or "Bolivia protests" or "Chile protests" pulls up a lot of US news articles spanning the totality of the protests in question. Chile got enormous coverage in particular.
  - jethro_tell 7y ago
    well, sure, if you're reading your news. I'm not sure why someone's surprised this didn't bump the dog riding a tricycle from evening news shows?
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    Try France general strike protests to see a relative pacuity of coverage in the US media - one round at the start, and 6-7 days later, another round as the government moves a bit. Maybe a smattering a couple days ago. I think the assertion is not there is no coverage, just little coverage - and that's difficult to prove with data as it's a judgement call as to how much is too much or too little. It ends up a matter of opinion for the most part.
- paulpauper 7y ago
  that is because Hong Kong is very close to china, geographically and economically, so the stakes are higher. China under Trump has become more relevant than ever, compared to the rest of the world which has been pushed to the periphery
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Yes, this time we actually have a chance of fixing the mess we've gotten into with China. They tried to lord rare earths over the rest of the world, and it backfired massively, that's a great sign.
- CM30 7y ago
  The media coverage is likely affect by the increasingly elite backgrounds of people working in it, and the large corporations buying outlets/pushing more pro status quo views (for the latter, see Sinclair and their buyouts of local TV stations).
- tempsy 7y ago
  Not true...I can recall seeing news on Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Netherlands, Germany, France in recent weeks/months.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    What protests in Germany could possibly have been large enough to make international mainstream news? There were a bunch of protests about mostly random things, but none were really large by German standards. Well maybe the farmers protesting (imteresting because somewhat unexpected), but that seems too boring from an international perspective.
    - tempsy 7y ago
      i'm thinking of the farmer protests on tractors
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Have any of the protests been anywhere near the scale of Hong Kong? The Hong Kong protests regularly drew as many as 2 million people. That's more than 25% of the entire country. For comparison sake, that'd be like a single US protest drawing 82 million people. Even comparing to the Chile protests, those were just 1 million people in a country with 18 million. Proportionally that makes them only one fifth the size of Hong Kong. Plus the Chilean protests only lasted for a few weeks before quickly falling to under 10,000 people. In comparison the HK protests have been ongoing for nearly a year.
  - incompatible 7y ago
    I'm not sure why the Netherlands is even included in the list. There have been some protests against specific government policies, but not an attempt to overthrow the government as such (as far as I noticed). Edit: Currently certain suburbs of The Hague are in revolt because the New Years bonfire was cancelled. It seems pretty childish, and I think most of the rioters are in fact children, but they have heavy weapons in the form of fireworks taped together.
  - Miner49er 7y ago
    I'm a little late, but maybe Iraq is? I can't find anywhere online that mentions the protest's size, but security forces and militia have killed over 400 protesters so far. In some ways that seems to make it more newsworthy then Hong Kong. Here's an article criticizing the media for not covering it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-iraqis-have-been-killed-medias-silence-is-deafening/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-...
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Maybe the masses are saying "This isn't working for us! We don't know what would work for us, but this isn't it!" And I wonder how long until this comes to the USA...
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  I couldn’t find a source for this photograph, but my dad showed it to me a few years ago and I feel like it perfectly captures the tone of the current global civil unrest: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c0/e4/06/c0e406018cc6b42ad0a2562f89fe4de1--protest-signs-protest-posters.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c0/e4/06/c0e406018cc6b42ad0a2562f8...
  - adamsea 7y ago
    Agreed. I think the beauty of the phrase "shit is fucked up and stuff", is that the problems we face are so overwhelmingly obvious that we don't actually have to articulate them. And since the usual way calls for change are defused is by arguing about definitions, terms, assumptions, etc, in many ways articulating what shit is fucked up is counterproductive to change.
    - sandoooo 7y ago
      I think you will find that when you do articulate, absolutely everybody has a different interpretation of exactly which parts are fucked, and how to unfuck it, and who exactly should foot the bill. Perhaps some of them think you should, or people of your income bracket, or people who share your other demographic traits. Presumably you have a different opinion. And, of course, differences in opinion is anathema to a good protest march. The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you (and the guy you would both intensely dislike if you knew the full extent of their opinions) to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner.
      - malandrew 7y ago
        > The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner... ... but the hidden ugly side is that you and the guy next to you will not agree on how to rebuild things once you're both done smashing stuff. What really scares me is not only how fragile things are, but how expensive it's going to be to get back to the level of wealth we enjoy today, assuming it's even likely we are able to (which I'm not so sure about).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
larnmar 7y ago
A fairly silly article with a fairly silly thesis. There’s always protest movements going on somewhere; it would take a lot of statistics to convince me that 2019 is any kind of outlier. And there’s nothing global about the current grab-bag of movements, they’re very much local issues.
- airstrike 7y ago
  Agreed. If anything, the Arab Spring was much bigger than the current set of unrelated protests
- paulpauper 7y ago
  exactly. many of these counties are always protesting about something. America's constitutional republic , compared to direct democracy, somewhat helps buffer against such unrest.
- zby 7y ago
  My intuition is that you are wrong - but your argument is important one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
paulpauper 7y ago
>So what are we to make of this mess? Why the frenzy of protests – and why now? Except that many of these countries are always protesting about something. In any year one can find at least a dozen countries that have had protests of some sort. Hong Kong had protests in 2014 too. And Brazil had protests in 2016 over bus fares, and in 2015, 2013, etc.. Brazil has protests every year over bus fares, it seems. The remarkably geopolitical stability of the US and its strong economy , compared to the unrest everywhere else (such as Hong Kong, Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Chile, etc.), yet again torpedoes the media narrative in 2016-2017 that Trump would user in an era social unrest and economic instability in the US...the opposite has happened, with America being even more stable and economically successful relative to much of the rest of the world. The media got it all wrong, predicting collapse and instability in the US, when the instability and high inflation occurred elsewhere instead.
- malandrew 7y ago
  Given the post-modern reality we occupy, where people can basically pick and choose their reality (read: echo chambers) and not only pick them, but entrench themselves due to the cognitive dissonance felt if you try to exit them, I suspect you're partially correct. Never before in history have journalists had the analytics tools to carefully guide stories to virality. If it bleeds, it leads has always been true, but now journalists have the ability to not just find stories where it bleeds, but they have the analytics and the tools to massage the story such that a papercut is perceived by the reader as a mortal flesh wound. Everything is exaggerated in the pursuit of eyeballs and ad impressions. Furthermore, you can get "stuck" in a story by following hyperlinks of tangential information, and assign greater importance than you would in the past when newspapers were read top to bottom, front to back, changing subjects with each article.
ilaksh 7y ago
This is a symptom of economic problems. Look up what hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has to say about the global debt crisis. https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec Basically we are entering a global depression due to untenable debt levels. WWIII is a distinct possibility.
munificent 7y ago
The current power structures are responsible for climate destruction that means many of our children will be forced to spend their lives in an Earth worse than what their parents experienced. Meanwhile, the leaders of those power structures have taken no responsibility, no change of course, and instead have enriched themselves more and more. The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Today we see billionaires, world leaders, and autocrats amassing ever more power while demonstrating no responsibility. Is it any surprise people want to tear it all down even if they don't know what they want instead?
- Infinitesimus 7y ago
  > The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Is that typically true? It seems the pattern is often: person/group amass power -> things are okay for a while -> power corrupts and there's longrunning abuse of power -> [time] -> society eventually makes noise and/group gets destabilized/dies -> repeat
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Sure. In fact, take any category of power relations; these are categories of people, related by power over one another. Then, the dual category is one of responsibility relations. To say that Prima has power over Secunda is to say that Prima can alter Secunda's environment arbitrarily. However, this is equivalent to Secunda requiring certain open-ended alterations to their environment, and being unable to establish those alterations without Prima. No matter how many times one goes around the concept, one cannot be responsible without having the power to enact the responsibility, and one cannot be empowered without having expectations on the use of that power.
  - sandoooo 7y ago
    group amasses power under leadership signifucantly more competent than competitors in a war -> things are ok for a while because group's opponents are spent in blood and treasure, and also because of competent leadership -> [time] -> new interest groups form, old opponents recover strength, leadership declines due to reversion to the mean and complacency -> war breaks out when the government is sufficiently weakened -> repeat
siavosh 7y ago
For anyone unfamiliar, this is Martin Gurri's blog. He's the author of The Revolt of the Public (Stripe press), a book that's making the rounds in the tech industry. I'm part way through with it, but it's main thesis is the rise of the internet and social media has increased and decentralized the public's access to information and this has led to a break down in the legitimacy of traditional authorities (governments, media, academia, elites). I don't think anyone can doubt that narrative-breaking information is now more readily available and that authorities are more under the microscope than ever. This must have some political/societal ramifications. The result of all this information is as much a more informed voter population as it is creating a huge swath of just angry people. Whether this burst of protests in 2019 fits this narrative is open to debate and probably unprovable, but to his point calling it all random ends the chance of considering what the effects are of the continuing and accelerating flood of information available to people and the lowered efforts needed to create mass protests.

53 points by zby 7y ago

One thing that's interesting about all this is the media's coverage. The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests.

chewz 7y ago
Better do not give people the ideas..
adventured 7y ago
> The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests. That's clearly not true and very easy to disprove. Iraq, Iran, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia have all gotten continued coverage in US media. I can provide, say, 100 links to stories spanning all the major US news sources for those protests if you require it, dating back to the beginnings of the protests in Chile and going forward. NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NY Post, NPR, TIME, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hill, Bloomberg, Voice of America, Reuters US, CNBC and so on have in total covered all of the protests persistently. A quick drop into Google news with "Iraq protests" or "Iran protests" or "Bolivia protests" or "Chile protests" pulls up a lot of US news articles spanning the totality of the protests in question. Chile got enormous coverage in particular.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  well, sure, if you're reading your news. I'm not sure why someone's surprised this didn't bump the dog riding a tricycle from evening news shows?
- dv_dt 7y ago
  Try France general strike protests to see a relative pacuity of coverage in the US media - one round at the start, and 6-7 days later, another round as the government moves a bit. Maybe a smattering a couple days ago. I think the assertion is not there is no coverage, just little coverage - and that's difficult to prove with data as it's a judgement call as to how much is too much or too little. It ends up a matter of opinion for the most part.
paulpauper 7y ago
that is because Hong Kong is very close to china, geographically and economically, so the stakes are higher. China under Trump has become more relevant than ever, compared to the rest of the world which has been pushed to the periphery
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Yes, this time we actually have a chance of fixing the mess we've gotten into with China. They tried to lord rare earths over the rest of the world, and it backfired massively, that's a great sign.
CM30 7y ago
The media coverage is likely affect by the increasingly elite backgrounds of people working in it, and the large corporations buying outlets/pushing more pro status quo views (for the latter, see Sinclair and their buyouts of local TV stations).
tempsy 7y ago
Not true...I can recall seeing news on Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Netherlands, Germany, France in recent weeks/months.
- chmod775 7y ago
  What protests in Germany could possibly have been large enough to make international mainstream news? There were a bunch of protests about mostly random things, but none were really large by German standards. Well maybe the farmers protesting (imteresting because somewhat unexpected), but that seems too boring from an international perspective.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    i'm thinking of the farmer protests on tractors
dcolkitt 7y ago
Have any of the protests been anywhere near the scale of Hong Kong? The Hong Kong protests regularly drew as many as 2 million people. That's more than 25% of the entire country. For comparison sake, that'd be like a single US protest drawing 82 million people. Even comparing to the Chile protests, those were just 1 million people in a country with 18 million. Proportionally that makes them only one fifth the size of Hong Kong. Plus the Chilean protests only lasted for a few weeks before quickly falling to under 10,000 people. In comparison the HK protests have been ongoing for nearly a year.
- incompatible 7y ago
  I'm not sure why the Netherlands is even included in the list. There have been some protests against specific government policies, but not an attempt to overthrow the government as such (as far as I noticed). Edit: Currently certain suburbs of The Hague are in revolt because the New Years bonfire was cancelled. It seems pretty childish, and I think most of the rioters are in fact children, but they have heavy weapons in the form of fireworks taped together.
- Miner49er 7y ago
  I'm a little late, but maybe Iraq is? I can't find anywhere online that mentions the protest's size, but security forces and militia have killed over 400 protesters so far. In some ways that seems to make it more newsworthy then Hong Kong. Here's an article criticizing the media for not covering it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-iraqis-have-been-killed-medias-silence-is-deafening/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-...

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Maybe the masses are saying "This isn't working for us! We don't know what would work for us, but this isn't it!" And I wonder how long until this comes to the USA...

notduncansmith 7y ago
I couldn’t find a source for this photograph, but my dad showed it to me a few years ago and I feel like it perfectly captures the tone of the current global civil unrest: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c0/e4/06/c0e406018cc6b42ad0a2562f89fe4de1--protest-signs-protest-posters.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c0/e4/06/c0e406018cc6b42ad0a2562f8...
- adamsea 7y ago
  Agreed. I think the beauty of the phrase "shit is fucked up and stuff", is that the problems we face are so overwhelmingly obvious that we don't actually have to articulate them. And since the usual way calls for change are defused is by arguing about definitions, terms, assumptions, etc, in many ways articulating what shit is fucked up is counterproductive to change.
  - sandoooo 7y ago
    I think you will find that when you do articulate, absolutely everybody has a different interpretation of exactly which parts are fucked, and how to unfuck it, and who exactly should foot the bill. Perhaps some of them think you should, or people of your income bracket, or people who share your other demographic traits. Presumably you have a different opinion. And, of course, differences in opinion is anathema to a good protest march. The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you (and the guy you would both intensely dislike if you knew the full extent of their opinions) to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner.
    - malandrew 7y ago
      > The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner... ... but the hidden ugly side is that you and the guy next to you will not agree on how to rebuild things once you're both done smashing stuff. What really scares me is not only how fragile things are, but how expensive it's going to be to get back to the level of wealth we enjoy today, assuming it's even likely we are able to (which I'm not so sure about).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

larnmar 7y ago

A fairly silly article with a fairly silly thesis. There’s always protest movements going on somewhere; it would take a lot of statistics to convince me that 2019 is any kind of outlier. And there’s nothing global about the current grab-bag of movements, they’re very much local issues.

airstrike 7y ago
Agreed. If anything, the Arab Spring was much bigger than the current set of unrelated protests
paulpauper 7y ago
exactly. many of these counties are always protesting about something. America's constitutional republic , compared to direct democracy, somewhat helps buffer against such unrest.
zby 7y ago
My intuition is that you are wrong - but your argument is important one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...

paulpauper 7y ago

>So what are we to make of this mess? Why the frenzy of protests – and why now? Except that many of these countries are always protesting about something. In any year one can find at least a dozen countries that have had protests of some sort. Hong Kong had protests in 2014 too. And Brazil had protests in 2016 over bus fares, and in 2015, 2013, etc.. Brazil has protests every year over bus fares, it seems. The remarkably geopolitical stability of the US and its strong economy , compared to the unrest everywhere else (such as Hong Kong, Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Chile, etc.), yet again torpedoes the media narrative in 2016-2017 that Trump would user in an era social unrest and economic instability in the US...the opposite has happened, with America being even more stable and economically successful relative to much of the rest of the world. The media got it all wrong, predicting collapse and instability in the US, when the instability and high inflation occurred elsewhere instead.

malandrew 7y ago
Given the post-modern reality we occupy, where people can basically pick and choose their reality (read: echo chambers) and not only pick them, but entrench themselves due to the cognitive dissonance felt if you try to exit them, I suspect you're partially correct. Never before in history have journalists had the analytics tools to carefully guide stories to virality. If it bleeds, it leads has always been true, but now journalists have the ability to not just find stories where it bleeds, but they have the analytics and the tools to massage the story such that a papercut is perceived by the reader as a mortal flesh wound. Everything is exaggerated in the pursuit of eyeballs and ad impressions. Furthermore, you can get "stuck" in a story by following hyperlinks of tangential information, and assign greater importance than you would in the past when newspapers were read top to bottom, front to back, changing subjects with each article.

ilaksh 7y ago

This is a symptom of economic problems. Look up what hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has to say about the global debt crisis. https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec Basically we are entering a global depression due to untenable debt levels. WWIII is a distinct possibility.

munificent 7y ago

The current power structures are responsible for climate destruction that means many of our children will be forced to spend their lives in an Earth worse than what their parents experienced. Meanwhile, the leaders of those power structures have taken no responsibility, no change of course, and instead have enriched themselves more and more. The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Today we see billionaires, world leaders, and autocrats amassing ever more power while demonstrating no responsibility. Is it any surprise people want to tear it all down even if they don't know what they want instead?

Infinitesimus 7y ago
> The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Is that typically true? It seems the pattern is often: person/group amass power -> things are okay for a while -> power corrupts and there's longrunning abuse of power -> [time] -> society eventually makes noise and/group gets destabilized/dies -> repeat
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Sure. In fact, take any category of power relations; these are categories of people, related by power over one another. Then, the dual category is one of responsibility relations. To say that Prima has power over Secunda is to say that Prima can alter Secunda's environment arbitrarily. However, this is equivalent to Secunda requiring certain open-ended alterations to their environment, and being unable to establish those alterations without Prima. No matter how many times one goes around the concept, one cannot be responsible without having the power to enact the responsibility, and one cannot be empowered without having expectations on the use of that power.
- sandoooo 7y ago
  group amasses power under leadership signifucantly more competent than competitors in a war -> things are ok for a while because group's opponents are spent in blood and treasure, and also because of competent leadership -> [time] -> new interest groups form, old opponents recover strength, leadership declines due to reversion to the mean and complacency -> war breaks out when the government is sufficiently weakened -> repeat

siavosh 7y ago

For anyone unfamiliar, this is Martin Gurri's blog. He's the author of The Revolt of the Public (Stripe press), a book that's making the rounds in the tech industry. I'm part way through with it, but it's main thesis is the rise of the internet and social media has increased and decentralized the public's access to information and this has led to a break down in the legitimacy of traditional authorities (governments, media, academia, elites). I don't think anyone can doubt that narrative-breaking information is now more readily available and that authorities are more under the microscope than ever. This must have some political/societal ramifications. The result of all this information is as much a more informed voter population as it is creating a huge swath of just angry people. Whether this burst of protests in 2019 fits this narrative is open to debate and probably unprovable, but to his point calling it all random ends the chance of considering what the effects are of the continuing and accelerating flood of information available to people and the lowered efforts needed to create mass protests.