Hacker News Reader

Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agreed with this piece, but...

>Democratic Republic of Congo is a hotbed for what many news agencies call rebel groups, but GPJ reporters there wondered: If DRC’s president has refused to leave office even though his term ended more than two years ago, who is the real rebel? Now, GPJ uses the phrase “armed groups.”

Even if the rebellion is just, and the government illegitimate, that certainly sounds like the definition of rebellion to me.

View on HN

You can be imprecise by not saying enough, and by accidentally saying too much. It sounds like here, they think the word "rebel" often says too much, connoting some splinter group off in the woods, when the organization in rebellion against the government might just as easily be the country's own military.

Surely the illegitimate government would be the rebels, they're the ones rebelling against the proper rule of law. The group that won the election is the rightful government.

Even if you disagree, it should be plain the term is ambiguous enough that it's probably better to just not use it. What is gained by calling either group "rebel" as opposed to "armed?" With either you'd need more information to have an understanding of the situation.

What a wonderful place the world might be, if only journalists would stop assuming the duties of sociologists, anthropologists, and anything else that requires a calc-based stats course to begin to get the gist of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com