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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Did you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

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Wagner* and russia's Libya intervention to continuously arm and support general khalifa haftar against the internationally recognised government

Usually it’s only the propaganda outlets that get blocked, not all internet access.

I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.

I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.

> It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.

These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets.

That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.

"That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger."

Also known as the fallacy of relative privation. This line of reasoning quickly leads to the conclusion that only bad thing worth caring about is the absolute worst thing happening.

> These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time

Yet they’re still largely unknown. So the thought that reporting Internet interruptions in Africa => people all over planet earth will be talking about that in real life is just strange.

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