Mubarak says that he will not be leaving office | Hacker News Reader

Mubarak says that he will not be leaving office

blogs.aljazeera.net

124 pointsjim_h87 comments

The day before Tunisia dictator departure, he made a talk to the Tunisian people. (It's good to note here that in 13 January no one is calling to his departure, but just angry population due to the situation).

The president made some good decisions: lowered the prices of food, removed Internet censorship (yes, even Wikileaks worked), said that we can protest freely, promised to sue the snipers....

After the talk, I didn't feel like that something has changed [1]. Actually, me and my family and my friends, nothing has really changed and it's like he had said nothing. I was happy with YouTube uncensored, not more. The day after that one, Tunisians walked in masses asking for his departure.

What I wanted to say here is that the scenario is quite different. ZBA (Tunisia old president) worked on his last talk to lower the tensions. It hadn't worked out. Now in Egypt, the leaders are rising the tensions (asking the protests to go home and actually not giving anything). I'm seriously afraid about tomorrow that the current government still has plans to flow more blood.

[1] I noted my feeling because some journalists that day said that the talk is revolutionary (like opening the doors for opposition). I think, and from experience, after 23 and 29 years of the life under such regime, what the population wants is the leader and his party to go and not jobs, money or freedom.

I'm glued to AlJazeera at the moment and have definitely been following the whole story with enthusiastic interest since the beginning.

BUT

Why are we discussing this topic here again? Seems completely off-topic...

Pretty much every piece of really significant world news gets discussed here, no matter what the topic. I find that fine, as long as the bar is high enough that it's not all the time.

Agreed, it actually makes me feel proud that this community is so well rounded...unlike a lot of other fields.

This community is not supposed to be "well rounded". I think you're looking for Digg and Reddit.

If the community doesn't want this here then why does it have nearly 100 up votes in under an hour?

Have you stopped beating your wife?

For the downvoters, zeteo is referencing a logical fallacy used by the parent comment to his: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html

It's not a loaded question, it's a statement of fact "100 upvotes", implied conclusion "community wants this", and invitation to provide alternative explanation "question mark".

It's loaded because it sets up and destroys a straw man. The great-great-great-grandparent never argued that the community doesn't want this, only that it's not supposed to.

I agree, how does this qualify as hacker news ? There are other websites where this has its place.

I agree that it's not exactly "on topic" in the traditional sense, but it's important enough in the general sense, that a lot of hackers actually are interested. At the end of the day, what's on-topic or not reduces to what people vote up and/or don't vote up. People want to discuss this, so it's on topic unless pg or an editor decide they don't like it for some reason, and manually axe it.

agreed. it's also widely considered to be a technology-inspired revolution.

I have no sympathy for Mubarak, but the way the mass-media has been covering this has been totally one-sided. There are a few interesting technical sides of the story (Internet getting shut down), but overall the whole thing smacks too much of propaganda. So I agree that the general story has no place on HN.

Does every story have an "other side" like you seem to expect? What if Mubarak really is just another kleptocratic authoritarian now showing possible signs of mental instability with his "I'll leave/I'm staying" schtick? Is it the media's job to make that seem sympathetic?

In fact, I'll go further with this: One of the big things I hate about (American) mainstream media is that it tries too hard to give "both sides" of a one-sided issue. A case in point is the whole thing about whether vaccines cause autism: Informed people knew from pretty much day one that they don't, and that the whole supposed 'debate' was completely manufactured by a combination of cynical lawsuit-mongers and abysmally ignorant celebrities. Yet you'd have never known that from how respectfully those trolls were treated and how seriously the 'debates' were handled in the mainstream media.

That's actually a somewhat common critique of the media; I'm bringing it up now because what you said happened to clang on it to some extent. I'm not trying to attack you with it.

For what it is worth, Mubarak has been a peacemaker in the Middle East, and largely a protector of Egyptian minorities.

As years go by, we discover that even Nicholas II had his good sides, and his regime was certainly better than its replacement. And the last czar was much more of an autocrat than Mubarak ever hoped for.

In any case, what I'm taking issue with is that the media show huge bias by immediately jumping on any rumors of Mubarak's resignation (self fulfilling prophecies, anyone?), that all anti-government protesters are portrayed as noble heroes (even though a significant proportion are certainly West-hating Islamic radicals), that all of Mubarak's supporters are paid thugs etc. This is a huge political morass and something that doesn't belong on HN.

You're right that according to the site's guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) political stories are usually off-topic.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

However, there is an exception given for "interesting new phenomenon". I would say revolutions of a scale not seen in a region for thousands of years would qualify.

Turkey? Iran?

Seems like Iran gave that a try before but without much success. Depending on how you measure success of course...

What about Turkey? He is going through an era of political and economical stability unseen since his inception 80 years ago.

What is most compelling about this is first it was Tunisia, then Egypt. Who is next?

If it continues it will probably be world-changing no matter what the outcome.

I'd guess either Jordan or Syria.

Though I'd expect autocrats around the world will not be pleased.

What's interesting is that several of the potential countries have been taking pre-emptive steps to avoid exactly this situation. Yemen's dictator said he won't try to get his term extended to life, Jordan's king sacked his entire government, Algeria's dictator pulled back the country's two decades of emergency law, and Syria cracked down on protesters with police beatings...

It is completely off-topic.†

People will want meat to dig into for a meta-argument about global politics and I'm not going to offer it up, but let it just be said: it's very bad for HN that this stuff is being covered so prominently on the site. It absolutely, positively a slippery slope.

The site is clearly tacking away from serving entrepreneurial hackers and towards serving smart people who want a place to talk about everything they care deeply about.

I'm not writing my goodbye note or anything, but I'm having more and more of my best conversations in private cliques and off HN because HN is becoming less and less hospitable to those kinds of conversations.

† Need evidence? Graham appears to have manually weighted it off the front page; just a little while ago, a Mubarak story was parked there with 237 votes.

I have to disagree that the site is tacking away from serving entrepreneurial hackers. PG just recently posted that the site, even with all of its growth, seems to have kept fairly well the integrity of the homepage and quality of discussion. I can understand a fear that non-hackerish topics can threaten to steer a site more into the mainstream, but I don't think that's a worry with something like this because these kinds of events are not to be expected to occur all the time.

Then Graham is wrong. I appreciate the effort he puts in and that his heart is in the right place, but the metrics I've seen from him aren't compelling (for instance, /classic, compared to just comparing front pages with archive.org and --- particularly --- which threads generate the most heat).

And, sorry, but I've been watching conversations like this one for something like 3.5 years now, and this is a real issue.

Perhaps the problem is that there isn't really anywhere that serves that niche.

Not that I'm offering to try and fill it - but perhaps somebody else on here might want to give it a go?

> Perhaps the problem is that there isn't really anywhere that serves that niche.

The problem is that politics is poisonous for most sites. It really quickly degrades into the same rehashed arguments and name calling and other garbage.

Eh, I don't see it as any worse than any of the other miscellaneous distractions that've cropped up over the year I've been posting here (admittedly I don't know much of what it was like before then). Sometimes they're the top thing for a day or two, but not that big a proportion overall. We had 2 or 3 weeks where for some reason fitness/exercise/weightlifting was a big thing here ("hacking your body"), then there was a flurry of articles on dating and pick-up artists ("hacking dating"), etc. And generic politics/economics threads date back a few years, from what I can tell in the archives (a million rounds of libertarians v. social-democrats).

edit: As just one example, here's a 2007 HN debate on unions, with a mixture of good discussion and political acrimony, and a side thread where people debate whether this kind of debate belongs on HN, or should stay on reddit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249

This is just "hacking politics" :)

People tend to have much stronger opinions/prejudice on politics than on fitness.

It's interesting to read non-hacking discussions in HN when they are from a perceptive (vs. judgmental) standpoint. As it is now, there isn't really much difference between Egypt threads here and in Reddit (yeah, I know we're not supposed to compare. HN isn't Reddit yet, but HN geo-political discussions are)

A lot of HN users are also Redditors, and personally I think Reddit (perhaps r/worldnews or r/worldpolitics) would be a more appropriate forum for this type of thing.

That said, this particular ongoing incident is really really big. Like Tiananmen Square or Berlin Wall big. Once in a while something is important and far reaching enough for us all to shift focus for a moment.

Everybody thinks the things they are passionate about are important enough "for us all to shift focus for a moment".

True, however I think we can all recognize this as an event that could shift the political and power structure of the entire Middle East (should those dominoes start to fall). Even if politics bores you, this is of major significance regardless of personal opinions.

> "serving entrepreneurial hackers "

well, one can make an argument how revolution is a social hack, and vice versa - hacking in software industry has frequently been a particular manifestation of general phenomena of people not wanting to just go with the flow of the established system, and wanting to change it instead. Open source movement ~20 years ago or WikiLeaks today seems to be very illustrations of it.

And also for the fact that social networks have played such a large role.

Evidence? Yes, some of the protesters have been using Facebook and Twitter, but were they a large proportion of the total, and how could this have been significant when the Internet itself was shut down over there? Don't confuse the fact that you found out a lot about the protests on social media, with the social media having a lot of influence upon the Egyptian events.

It is very much off topic. However, my interest in what this community has to say about it is of abiding interest.

You're right. Let's discuss why we're discussing it, instead.

Because it's an interesting phenomenon as previosly stated, and because we're talking about a politician that managed to cut off an entire country from the Internet.

I'd say a developing grass-roots democratic revolution in the middle east is of supreme interest to most people here, as is evidenced by the stories being atop the front page.

Don't worry, we're not turning into reddit. This is just some momentous shit (pardon my french), and it would be pretty silly not to have breaking developments up here.

Full story is up: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/2011210...

Mubarak is baiting the protesters to become violent so he has an excuse to crack down on them. This will get messy soon.

I very much doubt that the military would be willing to follow such orders, even given violent incidents. They might but I don’t think that Mubarak has currently anything like absolute power over the military.

The military has never really been Mubarak's tool of repression, but rather the police force as well as hired thugs.

The problem for the police and hired thugs is that the military is on the street. I don’t think cracking down on the protestors is currently possible without the support of the military.

I think that the military is the key actor: Will they use violence is the big question.

Well that's the big question if Feb 2 happens again. You'll recall that the military was on the streets for that entire debacle and did next to nothing.

Mubarak can only hang on because the military supports him. The military is a giant conscript army of regular kids, and a corrupt officer corp that controls a giant chunk of the Egyptian economy. Those officers will never release their grip on the country. They will replace Mubarak with another strongman.

I wouldn't be surprised. Desperation move but I suspect someone if not him specifically has been trying to do this since this whole thing started. They violently defended themselves on the night of Feb. 3/4 but immediately went back to peaceful when the attacks stopped. Another expected reaction would be rioting, burning, and looting, which has yet to happen.

I hope they can restrain themselves this time too until Mubarak wakes up from his dream, but there is a ton of anger now.

Exactly. The last time he gave a speech, it was the very next day that the supposed pro-Mubarak supporters turned Cairo into a medieval warzone.

Some key elements of the speech. Not exact wording, but key phrases.

"I announced that I will not be running in the next presidential elections." "I also announced that I will remain shouldering the responsibilities until September."

When I heard that, and given the political corruption there, I'm anticipating that he's going to be unanimously re-elected by write-in vote or something even though he's not actually "running".

I've also said on occasion that I have to "shoulder the responsibilities" of watching football in my PJs all Sunday. No one at my household is fooled by it either.

Maybe we can turn this into a useful HNer discussion.

Has anyone been involved with enterprise sales where one part of the company is supportive of the project while another isn't. The worst thing is no one knows what is really going to happen and a turf war is about to break out. The US administration is like the sales guy trying to influence the outcome, but really has very little ability to guide the result.

I think... the protesters won't accept it. I also think the ball is in the military's court now, they've come down quite heavily on the side of the protesters.

Crucially the army leaders seem to have made some quite strong statements tonight when it looked like he was leaving.

Strange. The military was hinting pretty strongly all day that something major would happen in this speech, but the speech seems generic and has no real concessions over the previous one. Wonder if the military was the one misleading, or being misled.

Could be posturing by some in the military for a coup attempt

Wouldn't his refusal to step down in the speech be a major revelation given that the expectation was that the speech would announce his stepping down?

I'd say that "Mubarak announces he will not step down during his speech which was to announces his leave..." is something major.

Mubarak has very strong personal motivations for staying and executing a calm hand-off of power. Other dictators have expatriated themselves suddenly, then later discovered their former countries repatriating their money.

I suspect Mubarak knows he's finished. But he knows that he has to make an orderly withdrawal and broker deals to ensure his family is provided for in their accustomed style. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to play well with that crowd. This looks to me a bit too much like the situation in Tienanmen Square.

Other dictators have expatriated themselves suddenly, then later discovered their former countries repatriating their money.

I don't think Mubarak has to worry about that. His close friend King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has already stated any aid that the US withdraws, he will make up. Money is not an issue in this.

It's not aid from the USA that Mubarak is worried about, it's his personal billions. He wants them safely away from where a future Egyptian government can get at them.

That's what I am saying; he knows Abdullah has his back financially. He can just stash his money in a Saudi bank.

If I were Abdullah, I might ask Mubarak to hold on and have a orderly transfer of power. I think a lot of middle eastern regimes are afraid of a domino effect.

Until September. And who would you have him give power to? There is no democratically selected replacement. Which is why he is waiting for an election, in which he will not be a contender, to give power. People will have time to vet and debate the candidates. You'd rather there be a power struggle amongst radicals leading an angry mob, to see who replaces Mubarak as dictator? I think Mubarak is doing the sensible thing, and at least deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Your arguments make sense, and if Mubarak had announced this a week ago, it would have flown. But I doubt the feeling of the people will allow this now. I will be surprised if Mubarak lasts until September, and if he does it won't be without a bloodbath.

Why not hand over power to a deputy until September then? It seems to me that the people really just want him to go, sure they won't support who he hands it over to but I think it will buy them calm until September.

> "And who would you have him give power to?"

I'm sure the Vice President, while quite possibly a stooge, is perfectly capable of running things until September. As are at least a dozen cabinet- or governor-level officials.

That Mubarak would have picked the interim leader doesn't delegitimize the process any more than his staying in place. It would instead underscore his promise and intent to not seek re-election, to not manipulate the process and to seek a peaceful transition of power.

And the idea that an interim leader would instead retain power for themselves is farcical. The Egyptian people have expressed their will and surely they could do it again. Unless the entire military apparatus wheeled around on the people, there is simply no option whereby an interim governor could crown themselves dictator.

I think the VP and the parliament chair have exhausted any trust too as they've been trying to demonize the protesters for a week. Military guy + committee of OK ministers and opposition is probably going to happen

Scared to see what happens by the end of the weekend. You could hear the crowds tone change as the man spoke trying to cling on to his power.

... ouch. This is going to be bloody.

That was probably the point of the CIA starting this rumor in the first place.

Why would the CIA want it to get bloody?

They don't want blood per se, but rather they want to end the geopolitical uncertainty. And the way they do this is by setting up the game theory so that it's in everyone's rational interest for the situation to resolve itself in a way that benefits the US and minimizes global risk. And if this means a few hundred protestors getting killed, that's what's going to happen.

It's not really different than any other coup or revolution.

There are people who fear the Egyptian electorate and want to discredit the protesters. Those people are hoping it gets as violent as possible so the television footage scares Americans and prejudices us against any government in Egypt that represents the people. I'm sure there are many individual CIA agents who share that bias.

That said, I imagine the leadership of the CIA has better sense.

Source?

"11:01 a.m. ET: CIA Director Leon Panetta says there is a "strong likelihood" that President Mubarak will step down today."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011...

...which is after it was already on the news. Not exactly proof that he started the rumor.

Certainly it's not proof, but I'd be surprised if the CIA wasn't involved. Their main goal is to minimize the uncertainty of the situation, so if they saw a play to both end the uncertainty and also have the situation resolve on US-friendly terms then it would be surprising if they didn't intervene. At the very least they are strongly encouraging the situation.

I wonder what the armed forces in Egypt are going to do. Will there be a coup?

Oh.... he'll be leaving, I think. Perhaps not in one piece, though. :/

Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Any violence on either side means many, many people will be killed in the struggle.

I think the word "voluntarily" is missing from the title.

I don't feel as though I know enough about Egypt and the political sentiment there to comment directly, but I sense that this is a very historical moment in time for the entire Middle East.

I actually thought he had come to his right senses!

m night twist

Son of a bitch

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