14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
tribuneindia.com
tribuneindia.com
(reposting as a top level comment, thanks to original poster)
I was there a few hours ago. It was a class struggle, but it was bound to be spun up as "kids don't get facebook and throw tantrum".
Years later the fixer was finally jailed for gold smuggling. https://english.khabarhub.com/2022/16/232667/
Edit: add link
Low-level 3rd world officials love showing off whatever they're doing to whoever will listen. They usually don't have much else to do. It is best to accept their offer and drink the tea with them or whatever, get on their good side and talk about how modern their little village is, and get on their good graces.
I don't know much about Agriculture Engineering but there were a bunch of big milk vats, a couple electricians, and then a bunch of officials sitting around drinking the cold Yerba Matte stuff.
I assume they brought me because they heard I was an electrical engineer and I saw they were wiring the place up.
Yeah, that adds up. Small cities in South America usually have difficulty attracting qualified people to work there. It's a bit better now than it was 10 years ago, though.
Just an add to what has been said. This might be because they heard you are an electrical engineer. I really don't know your qualifications, but here (in Paraguay), electrical engineering is a different degree than electronical engineering.
You might be versed in electronics as your primary field, but since they heard you are an electrical engineer, they thought you could check out the facility's electrical wiring setup.
Thus, if you do mainly electronics, you might want to present yourself here (in Paraguay) as an electronics/electronical engineer.
Also pretty big language barrier because my Spanish is pretty bad. And Guarani, forget it.
I could probably "fake" it enough to do it now, but not back then.
They were extremely nice though and it was cool to check out a farming project. I would have liked to see some of the more remote farms but never got around to it.
Paraguay felt very much to me like the midwest / "Iowa/Ohio" of South America. Extremely practical hidden gem that is easily overlooked, but makes you feel right at home. Even in Asuncion I felt quite safe. Seems like the country is very active in fostering getting agricultural investment and development.
Funny that you say that. I am by no means a countryside person, I'm as urbanite as any other. But while I never was in Iowa or Ohio (save for a short layover), I lived in West Michigan, and therefore in the Midwest, for some time; and yes, despite the climate being quite different, things seemed somewhat familiar to me in many aspects.
I live in New York (Long Island). People are constantly telling me that I should be having jobs thrown at my feet, considering my skills and track record.
That was not the case, which is why I'm retired.
If I were an inexperienced young buck, living in Brooklyn, that might be the case, but not for an old expert, out on The Island.
It's likely that it's difficult to get capital in East Africa. I knew many very smart, educated people, when I lived there.
On Long Island, it's easy to get capital for non-tech stuff, but tecchies are kind of ghetto, out here.
Does location matter as much in 2025 when there are oodles of remote first companies out there?
http://codingforafrica.at/about.html (no HTTPS option)
I sincerely wish them luck.
I got stuck in the city for two or three days waiting for my flight, under the supervision of the team's local fixer. This guy had his finger in every pie: tourism, automobile importing, etc. I wound up at lunch with him because his assistant wasn't available to play tour guide.
Edit: I'll add that I got lucky getting sick. Shortly after my flight out a large earthquake struck, stranding the rest of the group in the Khumbu for nearly a week.
You managed to make melting ice sound exciting.
It doesn't sound like the parent commenter was having lunch with the president. Just some random bureaucrats overseeing a construction project.
I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'. Amusingly they were all on one side of the plane too, the side that can see Mount Everest during the flight.
> I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'.
The "just in case" sounds like speculation to me so all it sounds like is the flight they were on was reserved.
The longer term is literal desolation. People simply do not start business as time goes on so there is nothing to exploit as time passes. Business that exist simply don't operate in that country anymore so there is not even anything to buy if you have money. Then the violence and enslavement starts.
They could have just bumped anyone when they needed a ticket.
This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.
No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA.
Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943.
One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves.
Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology
one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes.
China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality.
The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position.
"People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless?
"Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example)
No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
Lobbying is not a tool designed for the rich/powerful. It is literally just communicating with to politicians your interests. Corporations spend a lot on lobbying, but that's because they have to pay "corporate rates". Grass-roots organizations only need to pay for the basic expenses of their lobbyists. The NAACP successfully lobbied for multiple Civil Rights Acts with a much smaller budget than nonprofit organizations today.
> What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless?
Yes. People's reactions to corporations getting better at lobbying was to act like it's something only evil people do, so that they could feel better about themselves. As a result, grassroots lobbying has declined and knowledge of how to do so has been lost [1]. This is a gift to billionaires that they never could have dreamed of.
> institutionalized looting
Sure, but that is a central plan.
> No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power
The CCP has unlimited power, which was why they could arbitrarily silence Jack Ma, without even formally accusing him of anything.
> by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state
This is a way bigger problem in China than the US. China does not collect enough tax revenue to fund its local governments, so many departments are essentially funded by corruption.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
Corporations are centralized entities that have access to a lot of money and (also through money) to lobbying specialists with know-how hot to push their interests.
Normal citizens face and uphill struggle in every step - they have to get organized, get money, get specialists. This is not a level playing field, and the argumentation that it is, is exactly what those with an advantage engage in.
Shouldn't voting for the people who represent your interests be actually enough? What the lobbying does is that whoever you vote-in, if not already corrupted, will be corrupted by the lobbyists. So democracy (will of the people) is just a theory, wool over your eyes, similarly as communism was, the practice is totally different. People are waking up to that, and that's the reason for the rise of all anti-system parties all over the west.
2.) more grass-roots involvement: yes. Thinking that that is enough: hell no, people did that, got disillusioned when that repeatedly yields minimal results
3.) Colonisation of North America was not a central plan. You repeatedly bringing central plan just points to your ideological blinders.
4.) Ultimately, it is not about who has the power and where does the legitimacy of power come from, but how is that power wielded. Wield it to improve the lives of your citizens, you gain legitimacy even if you got the power in an illegitimate way. Wield it to enrich a narrow elite, at the expense of everybody else, and you will start to lose the legitimacy, even if you originally got it fairly. Nothing new there.
What is new is that the elites in China managed the country in a way that significantly improved the lives of its citizens, while the elites in the west managed their way into dystopian future ruled by mega-corporations, with melting middle class and unsustainable levels of debt.
This goes against the prevailing wisdom in the west that liberal democracies are the only ones capable of taking care of their citizens, while the authoritarian rest is just a cesspool of corruption and inept governance.
Other examples of authoritarian countries reaching (or at least starting in a significant way their path to) prosperity are Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan... (all of them were authoritarian at the time their economic boom started and progressed).
Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. Every democratic country has professional lobbyists.
> Corporations are centralized entities that have access to a lot of money and (also through money) to lobbying specialists
Indeed the purpose of money is to purchase goods and services. That doesn't contradict anything that I said. My point is that you don't need a lot of money to lobby. There are plenty of people who are willing to lobby for just causes for their bare minimum expenses. Nowadays, people have forgotten it is even an option.
> Normal citizens face and uphill struggle in every step - they have to get organized, get money, get specialists.
Achieving goals requires investment and effort. Boo hoo. The demographic that frequents HN absolutely has the time and money to make meaningful changes in the world that they complain about, yet they act like they're helpless victims.
> Shouldn't voting for the people who represent your interests be actually enough?
For one, voters only care about vibes. They don't give a shit about policy. Mitch McConnell reassured fellow Republicans that voters would "get over" the Medicaid cuts. He may be evil, but he is good at what he does and is 100% correct here. This attitude goes across the political spectrum. The most popular politicians on the left (e.g. AOC and Sanders) have some of the weakest
Even in a best case scenario of an informed voter base, voting still isn't enough. Politicians and their dozen or so staffers can't be experts in every aspect of society.
> Colonisation of North America was not a central plan.
It's almost as if you brought up a famine in a different continent. Colonization of land and resources is different from the colonization of a people, which is central planning.
> Ultimately, it is not about who has the power and where does the legitimacy of power come from, but how is that power wielded.
I don't really disagree with anything below.
> The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...
And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects.
Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.
This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.
Is that really what passes for a "You can't blame capitalism" source on this damn site?
If they are very good socialists they will redistribute it all. If they are not-very-good socialists they will redistribute some of it and reserve some to support a nice lifestyle for themselves and their families. They won’t personally “own” mansions, airplanes, factories, etc. like capitalists do, but they still control them legally so the practical effect is very similar.
The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society.
Too much ideological argumentation here...
Centralized government is the big distinction here. Libertarian socialism of a decentralized government.
Those are the same thing.
> The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale.
That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible.
> Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation
Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work.
Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.
Its not just about the rules and if you follow them or not, its about the belief in turn-taking, in other people having the same rights as you, a belief that in society; everyone is important, everyone is mostly equal and that the society should be fair. Perhaps my phrasing could be improved? For the most part I am simply trying to define the difference between people being selfish and not.
This makes GP even more correct. One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs.
> One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs.
Sure but I mean in terms of the abstract. The idea that those most successful may have to pay more in taxation, the idea that justice should be blind and that everyone deserves a trial. I guess the tipping point is when your belief in the part of society that are wrong are so extreme that you think its ok to undermine society (e.g. steal public money, push infront of queues, etc) in order to combat that "wrong".
Grand parent, the person you were responding to
> Sure but I mean in terms of the abstract. The idea that those most successful may have to pay more in taxation, the idea that justice should be blind and that everyone deserves a trial. I guess the tipping point is when your belief in the part of society that are wrong are so extreme that you think its ok to undermine society (e.g. steal public money, push infront of queues, etc) in order to combat that "wrong".
There are much more nuances and rules in (today's?) society. Just a quick examples of things that can be considered good but are actually controversial if you stir it a bit: there are concepts considered "rights" almost everywhere, yet you have to pay money to actually enjoy them, and if you don't have money, you lose the "right" (i.e. home). You can be in favor of the right but not of the implementation.
In reality, it may be more complicated than that though. Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.
If you believe in tax cuts as a principle (i.e. 0% is a goal), then generally its hard to support government spending, which means its hard to support solving problems within your society, because doing so makes it harder to cut taxes. So with that in mind, I personally think people who believe in the Von Mises model of taxation (i.e. "all taxation is theft") are ideologically incompatible with any sort of society that tries to solve its own problems.
How about people who genuinely believe in a minimal state? They often believe in charitable giving and local community organization, in my experience. Maximal civil society vs maximal government. A good example of this type is people who believe in the ideas laid out in Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even the more hard line Von Mises types are close to this. There are disgruntled people who are just asocial in that camp, like any other, but they are over emphasized by opponents just like every political group.
It would be very hard to argue that Nozick wasn't someone concerned with advancing society. The difference for that type is just a strong disagreement about how to do so. Painting them as first-order opponents is a mistake, I think.
I agree that its technically a position but while that venn diagram may well include people who believe in charitable giving and local community organization its those who do not believe in those things (which I would argue constitute the majority of that position) who are the problem here. Even so, the idea that everyone gets to choose themselves what the issues are, belies a lack of unity and community that is close to what I'm trying to define. To respect society, one must give up an aspect of control.
Again, its not about tax in general, its the desire to get to 0% that is indicative of the sort of selfishness that defines the line I'm trying to draw.
> Painting them as first-order opponents is a mistake, I think.
You might be right. I think the bigger problem definitely are those who think stealing public money is ok to do.
I agree with your broader point. A hair to split is that I tend to see those "you leave me alone, I leave you alone" types as sort of side-line sitters. They're a neutral party who genuinely want to mostly opt out for one reason or another. I don't think that taking a stance of them either being with us or against us is healthy when there are so many genuinely destructive people.
> Even so, the idea that everyone gets to choose themselves what the issues are, belies a lack of unity and community that is close to what I'm trying to define. To respect society, one must give up an aspect of control.
Interesting. I'm curious what you mean here, as this could point a lot of different directions. Are you saying that you don't think individualism is healthy in general?
Do you mean that broad disunity and lack of alignment on societal values is dangerous? If so, I totally agree with that and wonder how it can be squared with modern multi-cultural pluralistic society. I don't, personally, believe in enforcing ideological conformity, but struggle to see how a society that doesn't believe in shared underlying mores can coordinate itself and have shared purpose.
> I think the bigger problem definitely are those who think stealing public money is ok to do.
No disagreement, and I think that's a good starting point. Those plundering the commons for personal gain are pretty clearly first-order opponents.
I agree in principle, although there is a slight harmful component to it that I think is best described in defence (now WAR) spending. This is perhaps an element of taxation that most people do not see a direct benefit from, but in the scenario where they do suddenly need it, but don't have it, they lose absolutely everything. Its almost akin to the parental demand that a child eat its vegetables where the child doesn't see the point.
> Interesting. I'm curious what you mean here, as this could point a lot of different directions. Are you saying that you don't think individualism is healthy in general?
No, I think it is healthy but we also have to accept that we live in a society so that individualism must be tempered with a modicum of respect for others. We take much of this for granted, such as not murdering each other. Thankfully we are beyond the point where somebody takes to the air to decry their inability to arbitrary kill other people as some sort of government oppression.
I feel like part of the abstract of a more model citizen is accepting that sometimes society will do things that you don't necessarily agree with. For me there has to be some level of acceptance of this with arguments about ratios being entirely acceptable. I'm content for people to make that argument that tax cuts to 0.1% are okay if they result in the sort of growth where that 0.1% can actually cover the problem solving fund, but you have to accept that to some extent.
For example I live on the ground floor of an apartment block and would be insane for me to lobby our management firm to defund the elevator, which I partly pay for, despite never needing it. I accept that the elevator is part of my society of appartment block, despite it not directly benefitting me in the slightest.
I do agree that preppers/anarchists/von-mises are hardly the most destructive people out there, however their entirely individualistic attitudes do hold a parallel with those who think robbing the commons is ok. Especially since the whole "taxation is theft" idea creates a imbalance where robbing the commons is just redressing that balance. But I agree that we might be too zoomed in here to have the sort of impact we might hope for.
Yes, certainly. Security is actually the point "minimal state" (Nozick) crowd agree we need, which is why I pointed to them as opposed to the Von Mises hard liners. I see your point about the argument against this being harmful.
> I do agree that preppers are hardly the most destructive people out there, however their entirely individualistic attitudes do hold a parallel with those who think robbing the commons is ok.
Sure, I think I see the point you're making. I disagree with it partly, but it's a quibble and not really the point we're discussing, I think.
> I feel like part of the abstract of a more model citizen is accepting that sometimes society will do things that you don't necessarily agree with.
Yes, this is the heart of Social Contract theory. We agree we're going to give up some amount of control of our own lives and freedom in exchange for greater security and prosperity. Maybe that's a good lens to look at the original delineation we painted through. First-order opponents are violating that core Social Contract agreement by looting the commons. Second-order opponents adhere to the SC, but disagree with how we proceed within the agreement.
You are giving an example of a position and later on discussing the people who have this position as their first and main principle. Seems like a valid example to me, but perhaps people can explain why not.
I would suggest that the context of government is superior than the context of the individual or localised groups in solving issues in a fair and just manner, as long as its institutions are well balanced. That's because it has a national perspective as opposed to a localised one. In practice there is a balance at play that is necessary, I think there is arguably a tyranny in only one of these two choices. The principal issue with giving up on the federal level is that minorities will be disadvantaged.
I think that's partly true. e.g. pro life vs pro choice I can see both sides pushing for what they think is right.
Some people though do bad things, knowing those things are bad. But they do it anyways because it benefits them. So maybe it's not seeing themselves as being "destructive" per se, but at least not caring about the negative consequences to others.
It was written in the early 1900s.
Most people probably universally agree on the topic of corruption, unlike economics or social policy. But it requires a well designed political system and a strong culture, which is difficult to do retroactively.
I think there is broad consensus that too much poverty is a problem, and (perhaps somewhat less broad) that therefore too much wealth inequality is a problem. I think there's fairly broad consensus that college costs are a problem, that healthcare costs and access are a problem. I think there's a fair consensus that fixing these things would make the nation better.
Then you get to "how do we fix them?" and all consensus disappears.
As for the rules, it seems pretty clear to me that "the rules" are the Constitution and the existing law, plus the rules on how to pass or repeal laws.
But this framing also misses one category: Those who think that they should break the rules to make the nation better. I think that they are misguided at best and lying (either to others or to themselves) at worst.
Why misguided? Because preserving the rule of law is a really big deal. Even if they have the best of intentions, once they knock the law down flat and pave a road over it, they won't be the only one to drive on it. Tyrants try to build that road; if it's already there, the tyrant's job becomes much easier and much harder to stop.
So I oppose such tactics. It doesn't matter whether they are well-meaning or not. Even if the person doing them will never be a tyrant, the next person who wants to be a tyrant will find the door wide open.
This is by design( divide and rule...). And it works as intended.
The desperation from the youth is so heart breaking when there is no jobs creation, no industry. Depending on their ability they go and work in middle east doing all those dangerous work in the desert heat. The country is empty of youth. If you go to the airport you will see thousands leaving the country each day. Coffins of workers who died in middle east.
The political parties? They are profiting for everything. In the last 10-15 years there were basically 3 guys who would become the prime minister in round robin always blame opposition when in government and always blame government when in opposition. Its like 1984 but without the surveillience but that also caught up with the ban of social media.
Even the Armed Forces(pro-India) and the Armed Police Force (pro-China) are at each others throats.
Whenever India feels Nepal is getting too close to China, a crisis happens. When China feels Nepal is getting to close to India, a crisis happens as well.
It's like how Iraqi and Lebanese politics is always meddled in by Saudi and Iran.
Also, the social media ban is extremely damaging.
Most students use Google and YouTube to study, and WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other and getting job offers.
Then, Bangladesh,
Now, Nepal.
An unstable Nepal allows the destabilization of two critical states in India.
Regime change in India is the big prize.
--
China and India do meddle.
But a classic color revolution, such as this one, is the signature of you-know-who.
In Nepali politics, Sher Bahadur Deuba is pro-India and Prachanda is pro-Prachanda (will back India some years, other years will back China).
The whole Indian internet conspiracy of "CIA ki saazish" is ridiculous when the US has barely 20 India scholars at all. There is 0 domain experience in India studies in the US, and that reflects in America's South Asia strategy (there is none).
[0] - https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/09/07/oli-s-diplomati...
IMO, the only American program that has a good program in Contemporary Indian politics and foreign policy is Stanford, as Sumit Ganguly acts as the primary linkage between American and Indian policymakers, and the FSI and Hoover Institution tends to host Indian policymakers and career bureaucrats as affiliates and fellows. For example, during the US-India trade negotiations, the only public visit Nirmala Sitharaman and her staffers had was at the Hoover Institution [0]. Even the USIBC is hosted at Stanford, and that event has a lot of Indian and American dignitaries and policymakers coming.
Other than Christine Fair and a couple Pakistani fellows at HKS, I can't think of a similar domain experts on Pakistan either in the US.
If you want to study contemporary Indian foreign policy outside of India, your only options are NUS, ANU, Stanford, LSE, and maybe Oxford.
It's the same reason why the best China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea scholars tend to be clustered at Harvard and Stanford.
[0] - https://www.hoover.org/events/laying-foundations-developed-i...
Understatement of the year.
> Maybe Michael
I've never been impressed by Michael K. He's tends to view South Asia relations from a NatSec only view that is heavily colored by his experiences during the GWOT.
He isn't the most proficient in understanding the ins-and-outs of institutions. And fundamentally, it's institutions - not interests or personas - that set strategy or goals.
I think he is a good source if we want to understand KPK and transnational terrorism, but not really beyond that.
-----------
And this is the fundamental problem with South Asia studies in the US - almost all academics in the space largely entered during the GWOT or the NPT, and their domain experience is largely around either transnational terror or nuclear posture.
There are almost no academics in the US with US citizenship who have significant experience and knowledge about how institutions work within South Asian countries, and those who have that knowledge decide to retain their home country's citizenship becuase they know they can pull a Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramaniam, or a Krishnamurthy Subramanian (no relation to Aravind).
Chinese studies faced the same issues before 2017-19 as well, because there were few Chinese born American naturalized academics with a background in Chinese institutions, plus when I was in college (Obama 1/2) the majority of the limited academic funding in Govt/PoliSci was devoted to Russia, Iran, and the Arabic speaking nations. China was largely viewed the same way India is today and India the same way Vietnam or Indonesia are viewed today in American academia.
These academic blind spots are a major reason why American foreign policy keeps failing - there is almost no domain experience outside of Russia/CEE and MidEast studies in the US. We barely built Chinese studies domain experience but a lot of that is ex-USSR scholars pivoting to China for funding.
I literally don’t.
What did Nepal fail to do for America that supposedly caused this?
Pakistan/Bangladesh is another manner. The way Imran Khan was ousted...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Without evidence, yes, it should be. Just as it should be dismissed, if proposed without evidence, that this was the product of Indian, Chinese or Iranian meddling. Particularly when we have credible evidence going the other way of legitimate reasons a population would flip out.
Every country has problems that atleast look worthy of an uprising. CIA has both the means and the track record of messing with countries, so its natural to be suspicious.
If Russia had control of social media narrative in US and wanted to cause trouble, nobody would know for sure if an uprising was due to their meddling or due to current political climate.
Lack of evidence doesn't prove or disprove anything.
These entities are in the business—by their very nature—to lie and hide their activities as much as possible.[1] To dismiss speculation out-of-hand because it has no evidence is ludicrous.
[1] Not only that but to actively push counter-narratives.
But run the experiment the other way. A friend of mine once said that if a light bulb burns out on Tierra Del Fuego, somebody claims that it's a CIA conspiracy. Of all the public claims (gated by some level of seriousness or authority) of CIA involvement, what fraction turned out to be true?
A lot of authoritarians just like to blame their self grown domestic problems on the CIA. China having another stock market crash? The CIA must have done it.
True, if the goal of the CIA is to provide quality intelligence to the elected US government. That's a pretty big assumption, though.
But historically there are definitely examples of the CIA achieving this. Iran's 1953 coup was overwhelmingly successful and a joint operation between MI6 and CIA. The consequences irrevocably tipped the balance of power away from Pan-Arabism and towards a globalist, American-driven order.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9ta...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9...
Bay of Pigs wasn't a revolution, it was a failed invasion. The others, however, absolutely were instigated by the CIA.
You can compile similar lists for Iran, Russia, France and India. Reflexively dismissing every coup, much less protest, as the product of foreign involvement without evidence isn't thoughtful.
> Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506) was a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed in 1960 to attempt the military overthrow of the Cuban government headed by Fidel Castro. It carried out the abortive Bay of Pigs Invasion landings in Cuba on 17 April 1961.
Shame, it’s one place I really want to visit, but it seems like it will be a bit of a challenge (well, at least not Iran-level challenge, which is another place I want to visit someday and has different but even bigger problems).
And I agree with them - the ongoing protests are a result of anger against the political establishment's corruption - while thousands of Nepalis go abroad to work in the Gulf and India as menial labor, the political establishment's kids go abroad to America, Canada, and Australia to study, party, and live their best life.
My point was orthogonal to that - I'm saying that Chinese and Indian influence on the political establishment has been strongly entrenched.
Even Nepali media calls out Sharma's pro-China leanings and Deuba's pro-India leanings, and Prachanda's "paltu Ram" antics.
People need to start learning XMPP, cutting off of centralized services is only going to get worse.
Neither China nor India have so far meddled in this. It came as as surprise to both nations.
Also, neither China nor India control Nepal's social media. You would have to look at the yanks for that.
This is Nepal's self owned problem. Corruption has got entrenched into the system and you need fresh blood and a large number of hard-working politicians to fix these issues and make the government accountable.
We had many extensive corruption protests in India before the national BJP took over 15 years ago and Modi made bureaucrats accountable. Sadly, there has been some slacking after the initial years.
The recent appearance of William van Wagenen on the Scott Horton Show was rather eye opening to me on some matters, even though I have been very well aware of these types of operations for many years now. For example, the "Arab Spring" that most people at the time thought was an organic citizen protest/uprising, but was clearly a clown cabal operation, has even deeper roots with position papers for many years prior clearly outlining the exact progression for how things would end up unfolding during the "Arab Spring".
It's definitely worth a listen, even if it may sound bewildering to people who have no real context for that world outside of the mainstream.
A favorite tactic of authoritarian regimes and the tankies that love them.
On the other hand, if a foreign country really wanted to destabilize you, can they do anything better than to exploit real grievances of the local population?
There are just as many examples of national identity being forged in war than there are it being removed.
For example, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine had no affinity for Kyiv and didn't think of themselves as Ukrainian before Russia invaded. Now they do.
Nope. The myth of parachuting into a country and overthrowing a government is just that.
It was amazing how many people who were not usually politically active joined the protests, and that they attracted support across racial divisions.
I think one of the problem with outside experts is that they try to reframe it in terms of the issues in their countries. For example, I have read articles trying to use Sri Lanka's excessive borrowing as a warning against modern monetary theory, which is either dishonest or incompetent - and I very much doubt the govt were even thinking in terms of MMT.
BTW I have probably met you at some point. I know Gehan from when i worked at Millennium (I was only there about an year).
The fact that Western countries aren't investing in Sri Lanka is always conveniently ignored. The CCP aren't geniuses they just fill a vacuum.
For instance check this https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-...
That's just one channel. There's more -
1. As of September 2025, Donald and Melania Trump have launched several crypto-related ventures, including meme coins named $TRUMP and $MELANIA and digital asset firms.
2. He's a majority shareholder in Trump Media n Tech Co. Many have bought shares in that co just to please him https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DJT/
3. The Trump family has launched several cryptocurrency ventures. An investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made a $2 billion investment in a stablecoin issued by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial. This investment is estimated to generate about $80 million in annual interest for the Trumps.
4. Trump-branded properties are in development across the Middle East, including a golf resort in Qatar and residential towers in Dubai and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. DAMAC Properties, a Dubai-based developer and long-time Trump business partner, also has ties to Trump-affiliated golf courses in Dubai and has announced major U.S. investments. Those deals were made during this year's trip.
How on earth you call that "corruption"?
Are you even aware of what the word means?
The dude wouldn't even divest himself of his businesses, nor would he reveal his tax returns, both items which would go a significant way toward easing everyone's concerns. (well, maybe actually looking at the tax returns would make everyone a lot more concerned...)
You can accuse him of beign inmoral, but “corruption” has a very specific meaning.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, just curious and seriously trying to understand the thought process. Not sure if I'll get a response here, but if we just take one example of trump coin and dinner invite for those bought a lot of it. How do you justify that? And if Biden or Obama did the same thing, launch their coin which they have control over while being president. Invite people that they can directly benefit or harm with their position to buy and hosts a person dinner for those that bought a lot of it, would you be as forgiving?
Just take a look at the whole Epstein files situation. Not to be too acute about it, but how is it wild to you that plotting would happen in the "third world" when it happens right in your face in the heart of the world empire, openly defying all of the most core Constitutionally enshrined principles, and even daring you to do something about it and also proving how powerless you/everyone is to even look the cabal that control the world in the eyes, let alone depose them.
As George Washington said in Hamilton: "Ah, winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."
Michael Shellenberger's site was blocked in Europe by the European Parliament after posting information for "The Twitter Files - France" which he's schedule to be testifying about to the House Foreign Affairs committee tomorrow.
These are pseudo journalists running cover for their billionaire benefactors.
It didn't prove any of the conclusions they had clearly already decided were true.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4536394-twitter-files-jou...
You people aren't real, I am convinced; no human being is this foolish if left to themselves.
Curse Vishnu if you are real, please and thank you.
You just gave a definition of "democracy". Thank you. /s
But you cannot ignore that aspect - addicts do get aggressive, even violent, when they don't get their fix. So they are indeed vulnerable and politically susceptible.
While I'm sure the connection to technology and the Internet as a whole plays a role, but much more-so the gross and clearly corrupt government is the reason why they demonstrated.
No one is willing to die so they can just post on social media.
This is all so disheartening.
Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).
No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.
That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.
You need moderation both ways.
Yes to the First.
But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.
Bonus points if the cops arrest him before he goes to school tomorrow.
Couching threats of violence in political language shouldn’t change anything in that regard.
(Well, it does these days. But it shouldn’t. That’s how you get kids gunned down at prayer.)
Anyway, bottom line is, adherence to the First doesn’t mean we abandon law enforcement, or military sense.
I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.
The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.
Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.
While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.
So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.
The jetset class doesn't really care about a single nation. For good (trade binds fractious governments) or ill (neofeudalism), they try to separate themselves from the proles.
When you centralize power you’ve created a point of control/leverage with significant value. It will eventually be captured.
> except for when it leans authoritarian
Totalitarianism, Crony Capitalism, State Enforced Communism, Authoritarianism, etc. are all variations of the same root rot: centralization.
When you centralize power you will always get centralized power. A global centralized power is terrifying.
In the end the state is a force of violence. Voting works in so much as it is roughly a tally of who would win if we all pulled knives on each other. Democracy was formed at a time when guns and knives were the most effectual tools the state had to fight against the populace. Now that the government has more asymmetric tools democracy is likely a weaker gauge of how to avoid violence, because the most practical thing voting does is bypass violence by ascertaining ahead of time who would win in a fight.
As this asymmetry becomes more profound, the bargaining power of the populace erodes, and voting becomes more of a rigged game. If the populace can't check the power of the elite, the elite has no carrot to respect the human rights of others.
False
“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].
Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].
[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)
[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...
At 3.5% of the populace taking up arms (not in protest but in war), that would far outnumber armed government officials in most countries. I don't doubt that a government choosing to concede at the point those 3.5% signaled peacefully they are likely to get violence soon, since the government conceding before that happens indicates they are weak enough to not be able to fight it off. Of course, If you have 3.5% of the populace fighting you can defeat even a horribly asymmetric situation, as the Chechens showed when they gained independence in the first Chechen war against Russia where almost everything beyond small arms were obtained via capture from the enemy.
At best your study shows that a government that capitulates before violence is more likely to be defeated, which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win -- and if both sides think they can win then odds are quite good the odds of winning lie somewhere closer to the middle of the odds if the actors are rational. Concession before violence is more likely to indicate the odds lie outside the middle.
No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].
Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.
> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win
This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.
Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.
[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...
[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...
You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.
It was an anti-vax protest [1]. Canada isn't anti vax [2]. The protests were unpopular [3][4].
The convoy didn't go anywhere because it had nowhere to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#cite_not...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-vaccination-poll-1.75...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/15/politics/fact-check-canad...
[4] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests
Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.
The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully
I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics
Recently more with Palestine
> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.
I think you're wrong here Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change
When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.
My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.
[] https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kep...
Occupy Wall Street lasted longer than a month, and I'm not sure they achieved regime change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
You could argue that it's below the 3.5% of the total population threshold mentioned in the previous comments tho.
Essentially they are tools that affect democratic coordination more so than fighting. If you can still coordinate despite them, then the amtal rule applies.
It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.
My curiosity is piqued by this. Do you mean to say you've moved there from somewhere place? And what do you mean, why is it the only country for which you're politically optimistic?
I don't mean to pry, and have no ulterior motive or point in asking. It just seems like a strong statement, and I cannot guess what you mean, or if I'm missing some cultural insinuation here or something. Taiwan does sound like a very interesting place to me, generally, though.
Political activity is high in Taiwan and there are many viewpoints represented. The government doesn't lash out mindlessly against protestors which is something I've never encountered having attended protests throughout the West - the USA, the UK, France, Australia, it seems governments are compelled to meet all protests with violence.
Furthermore taiwanese activists are incredibly organized. At the bluebird protests it was estimated there was many tens of thousands of people, but within hours of the protests being announced there were tents, food lines, water, and bathrooms set up for people. Some anarchists even set up a sound system and had a little rave down the street. There were also anarchists peppered throughout the crowd with medical supplies, and inevitably communists selling newspapers lol. There were two massive PA systems on side roads with hundreds of chairs for people to sit on, and plenty of cover to block the rain - and all these people her despite the massive rain storm!
I saw similar during the multiple pedestrian rights protests I've been to. The only bad protest I went to was a poorly organized bike protest.
I also very much enjoy the shenanigans of the Taiwanese legislative yuan. Throwing sausages at each other, stealing bills and running to the MRT so they can't be signed, barricading each other, getting into fist fights. It shows proper respect for the life or death nature of the decisions they're making.
Here's some photos from the bluebird protests https://photos.app.goo.gl/45L8FE6bVPDLVmdFA
I recently also went to a massive music festival that was highly politicized. Did you know there's a taiwanese politician that's also a singer in a metal band? Anyway his band did a lot of political speech during their show, which I found interesting. Furthermore there was a great deal of anti PRC messaging and art (which is often implied to be anti kmt as well). Another random memory of the music festival is that people will just leave their things lying around in the park, and the festival is ungated in the middle of the city, but nobody will take people's things because that just doesn't really happen in Taiwan. It's incredibly safe here.
I rambled. My overall point, is that people here genuinely feel like they can make a difference individually, because they truly can, and therefore they do. In my pictures you can see people sitting around on laptops. That's an impromptu working group to organize some recall efforts or something along those lines.
Other countries convince their populations that to make anything happen you need to convince 30 million people to agree with you first. In Taiwan you can go to a g0v hackathon and change the country in a small way in an afternoon.
Very much appreciate the insider story. I've had a quick browse of your blog and will go back to it when I get a bit more time. Kudos to you for pursuing your interests boldly.
This is my concern when I photograph protests, but in my experience the people that don't want to be identified are taking pretty big steps to ensure it, e.g. wearing masks and whatnot. Anyone else should safely assume they're being photographed, after all Taiwan has ubiquitous CCTV. And again, it's not like the USA where you shouldn't even bring your phone, and there's a high likelihood you'll be blackbagged by the cops, it's just safe and not a big deal to be at a protest. I'm very convinced Taiwanese people enjoy far more enforced rights than Americans.
When Audrey Tang was digital minister, you could just walk into their office during office hours and talk about whatever you wanted, so long as you consented to the meeting being recorded and uploaded to youtube. I met them at a g0v hackathon once and came to say hello, and they bade me sit down struck up an instantly deep-dive conversation into how to maintain data integrity using technology like ipfs what with the PRC constantly cutting our fiber cables.
I'm not quite sure what they're up to now that they're tenure's over, I saw their face on a massive billboard about some tech conference and heard a rumor that they're teaching at some university in like Australia or some such?
How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around, but apparently their memories and experiences now fall into death hears.
Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
Maybe I'm missing a pun somewhere, but the phrase is 'fall onto deaf ears'!
Particularly when the mistake you're correcting was so reasonable and charming. It's an excellent example of an "eggcorn".
If you haven't heard of eggcorns, fear not: the word "eggcorn" is itself an autology, i.e., a word that is an example of the phenomenon it describes. So if you remember the word, "eggcorn", you should be able to remember the concept. An eggcorn is a type of malapropism, but one that could plausibly fit the context of the misheard original word or phrase.
So, for example, "eggcorn" could plausibly have been the word for the object which we actually call an "acorn".
Similarly, when I read "into death hears", I immediately knew what the writer meant, and had a little chuckle to myself thinking about how it actually made total sense. So perhaps we could point out to them nicely the lovely eggcorn they were using, rather than text-shouting.
A good thing to remember is that shitloads of people didn't learn from those kinds of events.
The young adults who threw rocks at black girls going to white schools in the southern USA are still alive and still voting and still hold a grudge.
Look when the civil rights act passed, and look how hard the south went republican after that.
>Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.
A lot of genuine Nazi believers went to "political" camps during the Nazi regime and they did not change their tune. They eventually got out, and just kept being Nazis, because they were Nazis because they genuinely believe the ideology. People who were literally sidelined by stupid Nazis infighting continued to advance the goals of the Nazis regime. Getting targeted and harmed by their very own regime did not change their opinion of it.
The same happened in Soviet Russia to all sorts of genuine communists who got gulag'd anyway, and still strongly held communist (stalinist even) beliefs (if they survived)
Tribalism is one of the strongest buttons humans have. We should be less surprised that it works so effectively
Not by telling them they should care. They have to experience. Unfortunately, with dictatorship, once you are experiencing it, it's already too late.
---
The reasons democracies slide towards less freedom is that in theory decisions should be made by people who care and are informed. But in reality, a single vote every few years is too imprecise to express any kind of informed opinion.
You pick and issue, do research and vote according to what's best for you and/or society. Except you can't vote on the issue. You vote for a party or candidate which also has stances towards dozens other issues. So even if you provide signal in one dimension, you provide only noise in others.
Voting for parties/candidates is like expressing your entire opinion, a multidimensional vector, by picking one point from a small number of predefined choices.
Protests succeed, and they crown (usually conservative) authoritarians as the new king. Arab spring & Bangladesh are the 2 recent examples.
Honestly, would be nice for modern day leaders to have that kind of commitment to collaborative institutions.
I feel like some of them are just trying to openly accumulate power for personal gain.
Armed citizenry? I do not see any other way. Power always corrupts.
In the copy I found of their constitution, it only mentioned freedom of speech for the government. On their house floor.
What was it like there in recent times? Much state repression for political thought or unapproved opinions?
The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech universally, another part of the constitution is used to control all facets of life in line with the state narrative, and that’s a charitable interpretation when we just pretend that the process of law matters at all, and distinguish when it is just procedural theatre or a real constraint on the state
Conflicting parts of constitutions can change everything
It's a bit like that Game of Thrones scene where Sean Bean brings a slip of paper into the throne room.
I think Westerners and perhaps especially Americans think it has intrinsic power because they have a strong rule of law and effective independent courts so they are used to their Constitution being well inforced.
However, in a country where this is not the case the Constitution is just a piece of paper...
I mean thats a bit rich given the massive civil war, dictatorship and overthrow of the monarchy that all happened within living memory.
In reality long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace.
To be fair, the Romans traded long periods of recurring civil wars for peace. We’re nowhere close to that in America.
What is to be done?
Why do autocrats rise to power? Why are far-right parties rising in power in Germany, France, Spain and Portugal?
I've come to see this as a fundamental human nature one can't go against. Some people are, just evil. Humans will always love self more than others. This love of self can turn into a hatred of others, or easily be turned into a hatred of others.
Acceptance that evil forces and opportunitists and populists will always be around us is the first step in asnwering what is to be done
I think everyone understands tribalism to some extent. You would probably expend more effort to protect your child than you would a stranger. Populism just turns up the knob on this instinct.
What you view as hateful, others will view as loving. And what you view as loving, others can view as hateful. Painting the opposition in simplistic terms like "evil" and refusing to even try to see why they feel they way they feel solves nothing and empowers extremists. And when groups led by such people "win", the majority still lose.
IMO, any side of any belief, be it individualism vs collectivism, atheism vs religion, sexual openness vs sexual restraint, free speech vs censorship, capitalism vs socialism, etc, etc. can easily morph into something harmful. You may have discovered "evil", but after many decades, I've come to see that most people's hearts are in the right place. But there are always a significant fraction on any side of any issue that, for whatever reason, cannot regulate their emotions and seem to need to strive for the extremes.
Compromise can happen if you reject extremists. Solutions can be found if you understand that the extremists on your own side are as much the opposition as the other side of an issue. Purity of belief always seems attractive on the surface. But moderation is not a cop out, it's pragmatism. Moderation is the practical philosophy through which solutions can be found. Fundamentalism, extremism, dogmatism, are approaches that lead to worse outcomes. Moderation leads to better outcomes. History has shown this again and again.
14 people dead from so-called "non-lethal" means. How do 14 people end up dead without the police coming with intent to do harm?
But in "civilized" societies with multiple layers of power structures, you are not supposed to solve your own problem, you are supposed to show somebody in a position of power that you are the victim so they solve the problem for you. This means victimhood is the principal currency of power.
Don't believe me? Every governments which allows protests says they must always be peaceful and "violence doesn't belong in politics". Yet how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
I'm sure there will be no violence once the thugs have guns and I don't
Issue is many people believe that peace is more important than justice.
Or that fighting and losing is worse than not being able to fight at all. And there's a bit of concern trolling too - basically they say if you fought you'd lose so they'll take away your ability to fight to protect you.
This is happening in Europe too with plenty of people trying to stop weapon deliveries to Ukraine because that'll stop the war. It's "stop struggling, it'll be over sooner" with slightly more sophisticated words.
This is actually an interesting question.
Many post-colonial governments, notably India, were create through what might be called non-violent means. Would be interesting to have someone properly research that.
How I see it:
- Victimhood works when there is somebody to appeal to or other people to gain support from. - Violence works when there's no higher power or when you already have the most popular support you ever will.
Getting more people to join you and openly protest is a lot of implied/potential violence. Meaning you can use victimhood (see how the police are beating us) to gain more potential violence for use later. Either the people in power see this and back down (e.g. Velvet revolution) before the violence materializes, or not. They can also see how successful materialized violence can become and flee (e.g. Syria) or they can try to win a civil war (e.g. Myanmar).
I haven't read much about India yet but my guess is victimhood worked in the case of India because essentially they were getting the support of citizens in the UK (a higher power) to pressure their government into giving it independence. It was costly for the politicians to be oppressors and also get reelected.
Victimhood failed in China and recently Belarus because 1) there was nobody to appeal to 2) the oppressors didn't back down 3) the protesters failed to materialize the violence and were defeated by the government's violence.
This doesn't describe how legal systems evolved at all.
They evolved to protect the powerful from each other. You went through the legal system because if you didn't you escalated your problem from a dispute with one powerful person to a dispute with the system of power.
The only way this victimhood notion works is if we describe all claims of damages as claims to victimhood. Which, I guess, they sort of are. But those pleas are made by the powerful, too. If you aren't the victim of something, if you haven't been harmed, what the fuck is the case you're bringing?
> how many of those governments were created by violent armed revolt against a previous authoritarian government? How many by "peaceful" protests?
Since mechanised warfare, I think there have been more peaceful revolutions than (non-state backed) violent ones. The latter tend to just result in failed states.
When I meant is that victimhood works when you need to gain support from somebody with more power than you. Either from the legal system or from masses of people. The latter can by foreign (putting political pressure on the government) or domestic (gathering more people to show how many are willing to stand against it). Violence is the only thing that can work when there is nobody to appeal to (again, not just legally but through empathy or intimidation) - see below - a large crowd is a lot of implied potential violence and you need victimhood to achieve that mass.
> Since mechanised warfare, I think there have been more peaceful revolutions than (non-state backed) violent ones.
I purposefully didn't mention examples like the "Velvet" revolution because they too use violence, they just don't materialize it.
Violence is most powerful when it's implied, before it's used physically. Imagine oppressing a nation >10 million and now 1 million are standing on the square in front of your government building, shouting slogans. Anybody would give up power "peacefully" because if they didn't, there's a high chance that implied violence would materialize and they'd end up killed instead of having made a nice deal for peaceful retirement.
> The latter tend to just result in failed states.
Because the latter tend to happen in states which never had functioning institutions to begin with so they have no experience with running a functioning let alone democratic state. Sarah Paine had a lecture about how restoring democracy to Germany or bringing it to Japan after WW2 was possible because they already has the organizational knowledge. But the US failed to bring democracy to Afghanistan or other places it invaded because those were always a mess full or corruption and you'd need several generations to ingrain the principles.
Yes. You described a “primitive” legal system that in truth didn’t exist.
Early legal systems didn’t have anything to do with victimhood beyond demonstrating harm. They didn’t have systems for the powerless because they didn’t concern themselves with them, they were a means by which elites peacefully resolved disputes.
> unless it has a mechanism how people can secede legally
What?
> When I meant is that victimhood works when you need to gain support from somebody with more power than you
How would you differentiate that from demonstrating harm?
I didn't describe a legal system at all. But it is certainly a modern way of thinking that one always needs some higher "authority" to resolve disputes or to defend against injustice.
> What?
secede /sĭ-sēd′/
To withdraw formally from membership in a state, union, or other political entity.
Note, this is a low effort reply to a low effort reply from you.
If you wish to discuss this politely, we can discuss which states have a legal mechanism by which a land-owning individual, a town or region can legally vote to gain independence. I don't know of any.
---
Victimhood is perceived harm (by yourself or others). But I don't understand why you focus on separating victimhood from demonstrating harm so much. See my other replies on this article, I explained my views in more depth there.
I dont think victimhood motivates those in power to take action. They care about votes. victimhood is but one of many factors driving votes.
Your conclusion supports the relevance of violence (it is always the final currency of power). your conclusion says nothing about victimhood.
How can you look around the country or world and think the victims have all the power?
Incentivizing victims to behave in certain ways such as not fighting back makes it easier to determine victim and aggressor.
I never said victims have power. Just that victimhood is encouraged from a young age.
It used to be normal for kids to fight and for parents to teach them to always fight back, stand up for others, do not let injustice stand, etc. Oh and do not tell on others, nobody likes a rat. Now the message is to not fight or you might get hurt, tell an adult to resolve conflicts, everything you do might have consequences later so be careful about what you do or say. There are schools where if two kids fight, both get suspended. You're literally not allowed to defend yourself. I've seen a video of a girl getting beaten in the head while she was lying on her desk, waiting for it to be over.
And you're right, victims have no power to influence those in positions of power. But victimhood is used as a weapon against those on the same level of power by making the "authorities" punish them for victimizing you.
It works on multiple levels of severity.
Online, if you're in a place which forbids swearing, you provoke others into swearing at you and they get punished - you used mods against them. At school, you make yourself cry and go tell the teacher what supposedly happened - you used the teachers against them. At work, you do pretty much the same thing, minus crying if you're a man. Using the legal system in this way is harder because unlike the previous places, it requires a certain level of proof which is harder to fabricate but false accusations do happen, not with the intent to be prosecuted but as a method of slander through a third party. Look how many men are afraid to make the first move because of the low-probability high-severity event that the woman sees it as harassment.
It might be one of many local currencies on a playground, but it isn't why the teacher has more power than the student. It isn't a generalizable theory of power.
You might think it's fat fetched but I recall a case where several teenagers conspired to accuse a youtuber of grooming them.
---
Now, you're right about one thing. I overstated the effectiveness of victimhood in the original post. The principal currency of power is always violence because it overrides all other currencies if you have enough of it available to you.
But for more pedestrian use-cases, other currencies are better. And victimhood is a very effective way to use other people's violence for your goals. It never gives true top-level power but it allows directing the levels of power above you against people on the same level as you.
EDIT: And TBH, it works well to direct those on your level against those on your level too. For example, on the nation-state level, every action Ukraine takes in its fight against Russia has to be weighted against the possibility of being seen as too aggressive and not just purely defending itself.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2025/09/wipe-them-out-tr...
Chemical weapons are banned because they’re useless for a modern military [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Did you read the article?
Chemical weapons provide no benefit to a modern army. They do, however, to simpler armies. So the world's militaries, who command modern armies, came together and banned them.
Put another way, the U.S. military gains nothing from chemical weapons over high explosives. The Taliban, on the other hand, might.
some killed were still in their school uniforms, at least one was 16.
It reads like: citizens have been protesting the government using social media, government desperate to curb dissent bans social media, dissent is now on the streets..
Or maybe it's as straightforward as the media has been reporting.
And also because they're in the trap of a government provided cushy lifestyle which the government can terminate at will without violence (de-banking, de-pensioning, de-uneployment, de-social housing, etc) if they're caught protesting. People in underdeveloped countries don't have anything more to loose anyway but their chains.
Can you give specific examples?
I frequently find the US outlook to be exactly the reverse, where people pretend like "the government" is some conspiratorial shadow organisation undermining all the citizens at every step (which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for).
My view is that if you have incompetent, selfish administrators in a western democracy, then just don't vote for them next time; if they keep getting elected, then maybe your countries actual problem are the idiot voters instead (or possibly not-actually-independent mass media, the importance of which can not be overstated).
Most rich western/northern European countries.
>which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for
It's not silly when you consider that the candidates you can vote for, are all managed oppositions, each owned and supported by various mega-money interest groups. Why else did Bernie Sanders never got nominated as a presidential candidate even though many people supported him? Because he's not bought and paid for by the lobbyist groups. In every country it's like that.
Because more people supported someone else.
This literally didn't happen. This sort of conspiracy-theorizing nonsense is akin to Trump's about the 2020 election and has lead to a bunch of low-info voters making bad decisions.
But I think "managed opposition is the best you can get as voter" is incorrect; Trump is in my view neither managed nor "pro-establishment" in any way, and if everything was actually under "capitalist" control, then people like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or Tim Walz would never be allowed even close to a position of power.
Anti-establishment populists in Europe have seen comparable success (e.g. Italy where they are in power, or Germany where it just looks like a matter of time).
Bruh.
> Italy where they are in power
Melloni only pretended to be anti establishment to win elections, but isn't. She campaigned on deporting illegals, and then gave them residency and right to work lol. Tell me a bigger rug pull. Trump is the same, he campaigned on a lot of things(Epstein list anyone?), but not actually executed on them or only did it only as a show (DOGE).
I don't see why you would ever want some mercurial populist in power if you are rich and established; risks to wealth/investments wastly outweight any potential gains from billionaire-friendly tax policy (and you could lobby for such tax policy elsewhere, as well).
‘Mega-money interest’ groups are a bugaboo for people who find it hard to accept that a large swath of the public doesn’t agree with them.
An attitude that has become common in the UK is to say the government needs powers control the "gammon" (i.e. the hoi polloi) from themselves, and to protect their children from their terrible parents, etc.
We protest here too by the way, this weekend about 100k in Brussels.
That you make these claims is just plain up ridiculous.
For example in Canada they de-banked the truckers, in Germany they de-pensioned a retiree who was planning to bring back the Kaiser.
So yeah, it happens, you're just ignorant from your bubble.
Secondly, I don't believe a word you say about Germany. Source please.
Don't generalize what happened once in Canada to the whole "Western world" and all kinds of de-.... And as far as I remember, those truckers were protesting. So they certainly didn't comply to your description of being indoctrinated to trust their government.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-media-...
Trump has a similar playbook.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-white-house-press-pool-b...
Then there's also the normal US style limits (fighting words are banned, speech which harms big companies is banned, "obscenity" is restricted or banned, death threats to the president are banned (the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president)
It also bans non-specific jokey threats and arrests you with five armed police officers.
The reporting seems pretty meagre; even strictly with these events, how are so many dying from batons and rubber bullets? Sure these can kill, but fourteen people?
The standard assumption in business is that you follow local laws and customs as they are a proxy for the moral system of the local people.
Are you operating a business or promoting western ideas?
> Article 19
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Firstly, laws are not a great proxy for local people's moral systems in dictatorships. I am not sure they are even that reliable proxy in democracies.
Secondly, while some exact expressions are of western origin, the general concept of freedom is pretty universal. Secondly, ideas of western origin might well be widely supported by people anywhere. Ideas spread.
Finally, where do you draw the line? Will you be entirely amoral and cooperate with any laws? Will you supply torture implements because the government wants them? A surveillance system primarily aimed at a ethnic or religious minority, or to identify supporters of the opposition? Genocide?
Most businesses claim to have some moral stance, and when they fail to stick to it it just looks like hypocrisy to me. A very visible example is the complete lack of rainbow logos in the same companies Chinese or Saudi operations during pride month - and media businesses that have a gay rights stance in the west will edit our gay scenes in Asia. Plenty of companies will claim to be anti-racist but do business than funds the Uighur genocide.
Yes. Does your business have people who second guess local laws and customs according to their higher sense or morality?
> the general concept of freedom is pretty universal
No it’s not. To some freedom is doing whatever you want. To some freedom is free from bad choices and unhappiness. To others, freedom is for themselves and not others.
> Secondly, ideas of western origin might well be widely supported by people anywhere.
You’re still missing where this is a responsibility for operating a business.
> Will you be entirely amoral and cooperate with any laws
That’s what businesses generally do, yes. And they use the legal system to fight laws they disagree with.
I'm not sure what you mean by "justice".
No repercussions for anything short of calling violence is actually an American idea, to some extent other Anglophone countries. It is not generally accepted in continental Europe which has always had far more restrictions on speech. So its not generically "western". On the other hand some level of free speech is widely supported by many people in non-western countries. its in a lot of constitutions, and people will generally say they support free speech.
lazily pasting one of my comments from yesterday
"So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. "
Yes. That's as reasonable as the people there protesting their own government.
Corporations closing down there and moving away is completely reasonable. People protesting is completely reasonable.
The government forcing the corporations out is as reasonable as the people there say it is... so not at all.
But, the reason I call it short-sighted is exactly what you said: Removing those earlier pressure-release valves doesn’t solve the underlying issue at all and just increases the risk of a more volatile outcome.
Gatherings, yes. Effective protest, I’m less convinced.
Effective protests “have clear strategic goals, use protest to broaden coalitions, seek to enlist more powerful individuals in their cause, and connect expressions of discontent to broader political and electoral mobilization” [1].
Social media helps enlist the elite. But it absolutely trashes clarity of goals and coalition broadening, often degrading into no true Scotsman contests. If a protest is well planned, social media can help it organize. But if a movement is developing, social media will as often keep it in a leaderless, undisciplined and thus ineffective state.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-power-of-protest-in-t...
This is what I'll never understand about neolib governments sliding towards authoritarianism: why push back so hard? Evacuate the parliamentary buildings, don't meet the protestors with police, and let them have the run of the place. Record every face on CCTV, and then spend the next couple months vanishing them. The USSR understood this and it's that kind of forward-thinking that lets the likes of Putin maintain authority all the way from his career as a KGB agent through to now.
These governments responding to protests with tear gas and batons fail not only at effective authoritarianism, but also at being good liberal democracies where people can safely protest - which is possible, Taiwan has had two record sized protests in my life and at neither of them did the police advance with batons and beat the shit out of people.
Edit: And the protest was against corrupt politicians, not social media ban.
PS fancy seeing you here!
I accept that there is corruption and manipulation by the government, but experience tells us also that these companies may be avoiding taxes towards zero.
The issue is the government in Nepal wants every social media holding company to have a designated person in Nepal who they can directly communicate with for takedowns without going through the traditional process, and if the company does not flllow through, hold that person legally liable.
It's a blatant censorship ploy because protests and dissatisfaction against the KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda musical chairs along with various constant corruption scandals are pushing Nepalis to ask for an alternative.
[0] - https://ekantipur.com/business/2025/01/28/en/from-google-met...
A hybrid regime like Nepal is not like that.
For the EU? Genuinely, no. Curious for a source.
Try this instead https://archive.is/zv17z . Not perfect, but the text can still be read behind the popover
That's often true. However, in this case when visiting the linked page[0] I am able to connect and view the article without issue.
Some details:
Location: USA
Browser: Firefox 128.14.0esr
Ublock Origin running with mostly default settings
Perhaps there's a location blocking issue and/or malware that targets certain locations/browser types?
[0] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/massive-protests-in-...
A bit about Nepal—the government here is run by a bunch of old farts. They are deeply corrupt and will do anything, legal or not, to protect their positions and continue embezzling the national budget. They lack accountability because they know they can/and have gotten away with anything. Example of a recent one [1]. Their children live lavishly, flexing their designer bags and watches, while the commoners struggle working tough jobs overseas just to survive.
They know that by controlling social media—as they already did with TikTok—they can censor any news about their corruption (which is a norm here) easily and keep the people in dark and in their favor. Now, they want Meta and Google to comply with their agenda and with the election coming, they need this bad!
This protest was never about a “social media ban.” It was against years and years of corruption, embezzlement and censorship. It was supposed to be peaceful. But politics here is a dirty game, and these veterans are seasoned pros. They hired goons to infiltrate the peaceful crowds, cause chaos and damage public property—a very old tactic here. That is how the demonstration spiraled out of control.
If you want to hear the voices of real people, look at r/Nepal and r/NepalSocial on Reddit.
And ask yourself—do you really think people are ready to risk their lives just for social media?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/NepalSocial/comments/1n9ra2q/hit_an...
https://www.timesnownews.com/viral/why-nepo-kid-campaign-is-...
The government framed the ban as a measure against "unregistered social media" platforms. However, major companies like Facebook and YouTube have been registered and paying taxes for years. These companies did not agree to the government's overly controlling bill, which had not even been passed into law. The K.P. Oli government attempted to bypass a public vote and enforce it as a directive, threatening non-compliant apps with bans.
https://www.law-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Nep...
- "if social media won't follow our laws, we should ban them" - "I am affiliated to this party so this is ok" - "social media bad, hence ban good"
of course the deeper issue was that the social media was banned because it helped backlash against the powerful spread. and backlash mostly well-deserved because of the objectively pro-corruption anti-press anti-people laws being proposed and passed.
In many ways, this protest and this massacre was probably step n and n+1 in the process rather than an accident:
Here's the drive link from the protest, recorded on camera.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Hardcover
https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea...
As with pouring water, the world keeps spinning, and the strife goes on.
Quite ironic to choose this day to start trying to make an entire nation digitally illiterate.
Also while free speech and protests are important, the nature of protests or certain elements fuelling fire in the resentment can lead to these becoming completely out of control and destroying property or harming passersby. Sometimes pure anarchy is the goal of routine rabble rousers who use this opportunity. So I will go out on a limb over here and say no one over here really knows what happened in the sequence of decision making by the police and there may be some instances where certain actions may have been justified to avoid further escalation.
I beg to differ. I don’t think that any of these governments are shocked that the people eventually fight back. I think that they simply make the mistake of underestimating the power of the people (especially when united) and severely overestimating their ability to suppress the people and their dissent. That’s how tyranny works.
That said, freedom of speech is always worth fighting for! Once you lose your right to speak freely, it’s only a matter of time before you start to lose everything else.
Compared to nearby poor nations, Nepal is safe and its people are perceived to be welcoming. It's the only serious candidate for being a ski-nation in all of mainland Asia. If Nepal wanted, it could transform itself into a Bali style tourist destination and ascend towards being a middle economy. Unlike India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have to solve 1-billion-people scale problems, at 30 million, Nepal can resort to scaled down solutions.
Nepal's refusal to leverage the (few) advantages of its geography is baffling.
The internal politics are even more bizarre. As a communist-adjacent nation, it has a closed off economy with deep suspicion towards free markets. Yet, the national messaging alternates between blaming India or China for all their problems. The local populace (like every populace) eats this up. From my observations, neither nation affects Nepal's economics much. (national security is a separate conversation)
> protests reflect young people's widespread frustration with government action to tackle corruption and boost economic opportunities.
South Asia is coming off a recent protest->overthrow movement in Bangladesh. The youth protesters had similar complaints. Yet, the outcome was an even less democratic system which now owed favors to the violent parts of the society that helped complete the ouster. Similarly, Nepal has a history of political instability and violent ousters, most of which had led of very little economic change.
The youth's complaints are valid and I support their protests. However, do the protesters have an outcome in mind ? They want an improved economy. But, will they be okay with opening Nepal up to free markets ? This may mean selling resort building contracts to major western ski companies. It may mean opening unsafe sweatshops for Adidas to make shoes there. It may mean resource exploration by foreign mining companies.
I say this, because this is a South Asian disease. We want our nations to have a strong economy. But, economic liberalization can sometimes look like colonization, and this hurts the ego of proud global-south nations. We want progress, while keeping all foreign influence at bay. We want social welfare, but the nation is bankrupt. It's paradoxical. When our nations do move towards markets, it happens at gunpoint (1991) or with steep political costs (Farm Bill, GST) to the the incumbent.
Not sure what the solution is here. But, the last decade has made me suspicious towards protest movements that do not have positive policy outcomes in mind. The student's anger is valid, but impressionable students are the the time-honored vanguard used by more powerful opposition to trigger coups.
As an aside, this categorization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South) has always seemed problematic to me.
> The Global South classification, as used by governmental and developmental organizations, was first introduced as a more open and value-free alternative to Third World,[6] and likewise potentially "valuing" terms such as developed and developing.
But I don't think it's "more open and value-free" at all. The rhetoric around it always seems to be alluding vaguely to racist and/or colonialist causes of the economic disparities; but labeling the disadvantaged places as "South" reinforces that colonialist view (cf. maps presented upside-down to avoid supposed biases), and also brings in connotations of specifically American political history (Union vs Confederacy kinda stuff, you know).
Excluding Australia and New Zealand also seems intellectually dishonest. If places like Moldova are "North" because of the physical reality rather than than economics, than Australia and New Zealand (which also were colonized) should be "South" (just as the wealthier parts of the Middle East are). The border isn't anything like straight, either.
If we want to highlight a problem with economic disparity, we should not turn up our noses at terms that are fundamentally about the economic disparity.
It can't value free, because there will always be a value judgement here.
It hurts. Yes, colonialism and a history of foreign exploitation has meant that global south nations have been dealt worse cards. But, the present is what it is. I'm sick of poor nations (like my own) feeding their delusions about the current state of their nation. The people have to learn to separate their identity as proud successors of a rich historic culture and their current state of disrepair. The inability to do so, keeps us poor and susceptible to further exploitation by local power brokers.
Just because twitter influencers use more offensive terms for these nations, doesn't mean that civil forums should overcompensate with euphemisms that hides the obvious judgement inherent to such groupings.
Indian Himalayas have ski resorts.
> If Nepal wanted, it could transform itself into a Bali style tourist destination and ascend towards being a middle economy.
Landlocked country with little natural resources. Who's funding this project? Watch a YouTube about the Kathmandu-Pokhara road. Infrastructure is not easy there.
> Nepal's refusal to leverage the (few) advantages of its geography is baffling.
They grow rice on hills, have a thriving mountaineering ecosystem, and build dense cities in the valleys large enough to support them. How are they not leveraging them?
> As a communist-adjacent nation, it has a closed off economy with deep suspicion towards free markets.
The county to their south went this way after the Raj, for what I believe are fair reasons. I can see how that influenced Nepal's hesitancy to open up more to international brands.
> Yet, the national messaging alternates between blaming India or China for all their problems.
They aren't wrong! India had "interstate entry taxes" up until 2017 - taxes that cargo had to pay in each state on the way to the ports. It wasn't even the just the national governments making life harder to Nepali, it was individual states!
> However, do the protesters have an outcome in mind
Their anger is justification enough. It's tough for college graduates in the region to find a career that matches their education level.
> But, will they be okay with opening Nepal up to free markets?
Nepal isn't as closed to free markets as you keep insinuating. There are malls with Asian brands where people can go shop. Not having as many American brands makes sense given the logistics problems. There are western restaurants. There are western hotel brands. There are Indian hotel brands.
> This may mean selling resort building contracts to major western ski companies.
Taj, Oberoi, Leela (Indian resort brands) could probably build a wonderful one. And they haven't, I presume they have the numbers demonstrating this doesn't work economically.
> It may mean opening unsafe sweatshops for Adidas to make shoes there.
There's no world where that makes sense economically. See my note about India previous state tariffs/state taxes. Just presume there's all sorts of hidden middlemen between KTM and ports.
> It may mean resource exploration by foreign mining companies.
China would be there already if it was viable (read more about the few roads north to China)
> with steep political costs (Farm Bill, GST) to the the incumbent.
Your wording makes me think you are Indian. If I'm correct, The best thing you can do is encourage more Indians to go enjoy what Nepal has to offer now, so they can afford to invest in some of the improvements you propose :)
Even in the case when the exploitation never ended.
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. The comment would have been fine without that line.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45173338 and marked it off topic.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/8/six-killed-in-nepal-...
(Though the meme of all protests and civil discontent in Asia being the product of Western influence is a popular one among right-wing circles.)
I listen to enough "right-wing circles" to end up getting people tarnishing me as one just for standing up for them (despite all kinds of progressive views) and I frankly don't know what you're talking about. My friends that tend to get interpreted as "right-coded" have historically been supportive of protest movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
No kings.
"In Nepal, “jhola” (bag) turned into “jholay” is slang. It usually refers to people—often students, activists, or intellectual types—who carry a cloth bag (jhola) and are associated with being overly “bookish,” pseudo-intellectual, leftist, or idealistic. Depending on tone, it can be affectionate, neutral, or dismissive (like calling someone a “hippie” or “armchair intellectual” in English)."
EDIT: sounds like "my friend" is hallucinating. Thanks, actual people for helping me understand jholay. It seemed lazy though to simply ask in the comments, "What's jholay?"