Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night
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Check out his Enlace Ciudadanos on their youtube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/PresidenciaEc and you'll see how he goes way beyond the stump speech. He's spending 2 or 3 hours every week personally articulating the government's policy at the town-hall level.
Yeah, like every politician everywhere who wants to consolidate support, he uses the US as a punching bag. And the one genuinely messed-up thing he's done are his media laws, which make it hard for any large independent media companies to flourish. But he's no Hugo Chavez. He's too smart, and too good of a politician, to need to be.
I'll have to look things up :)
He just did one of these at the refinery right outside where I live (about 5 minutes away) - notice his entrance after the video intro, where he joins a folk music band in singing "Bonito Manabi" (name of the province).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VntkFqT7tQ4&feature=c4-overvi...
He's got world-class skills, so he's like a man among boys down here. I'm just worried about who's going to inherit the concentration of executive power that he's built up.
The preventative injunction are in place to put the measures on hold while the court decides if the made-to-order laws she comes up with twice a week are constitutional or not.
For those unfamiliar with Argentinian politics: don't be too impressed with Mrs Kirchner. This Us vs Them is her bread and butter and a perfect opportunity for her to leverage for some cheap points. She's not really that communicative in real life. To put it in perspective, if Mrs. Kirchner was in Obama's spot right now facing spying accusation her response to the reports would be to totally ignore them and instruct her subordinates to mention that Snowden is a liar, all the documents are forged and everything is a plot by the enemies of the American people.
"You can neither explain it or understand it, you just endure it." — Enrique Pinti, Pingo Argentino
We had a similar case in my country (a politician trying to break large media empires). Nothing worse than media conglomerates belonging to powerful corporations. They control politics AND public perception -- and the use them to funnel resources, contracts and deals in their favour.
Thing Google or Facebook is "the big brother"? Well, imagine those also having several large banks, Apple, newspapers, internet news outlets and several TV channels on their disposal. Well, it seems they have some leverage with the courts in Argentina too.
>For those unfamiliar with Argentinian politics: don't be too impressed with Mrs Kirchner. This Us vs Them is her bread and butter and a perfect opportunity for her to leverage for some cheap points.
Well, if you are in an Latin American country, as history has shown, it's mostly "us vs them". The name "banana republic" did not came about because there weren't enough foreign interests.
http://contenidos2.tn.com.ar/2012/12/09/medios2.jpg
The few purple dots in that map are the only remaining independent media companies in Argentina, all the other red ones are owned directly by Kirchner or indirectly by cronies and such, but subservient to her nonetheless.
Not only that, Cristina's Government anticipates Obama using the local IRS against the opposition and individuals speaking against the government in the press.
Finally... a few days ago Assange said: "Argentina has most aggressive surveillance system in Latin America" http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/29/311375/assange-argen...
Link to the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If7MbOvuEbg
That and a set of laws that allow the government to make life a living hell to any dissidents: had Snowden been Argentine getting his passport cancelled would be the least of his problems.
In particular, she is not taking a stance regarding spying, but against the humiliation suffered by the president of a sovereign nation.
> He has the advantage of thousands of years of civilization over me. [Not sure I understood that sentence correctly.]
It refers to the bolivian/peruvian aboriginal culture from which Morales' is considered a representative so the translation is correct. It's just a political compliment, nothing more than that.
I'm not really sure if "buddy" is a good translation of "compañer@", but it seemed about right. "Comrade" might be an equally good translation if you wanted to prejudice people in the US against her.
"Fellow", "brother" or even "mate" sound better in this context.
Peron put that word en vogue around here.
TBH I'm surprised she didn't mention the Falklands as well.
The rate of political stories after datagate broke has skyrocketed, and I don't think the genie will go quietly back in the bottle.
You can downvote me all you want: I have a shitload of this useless karma stuff that I built up on the old HN.
Perhaps some people (including, you, I presume) don't care about surveillance, privacy, freedom of information and the like enough to want to highlight those issues on HN.
They'd rather talk about Google buying some company, how someone learned Golang and Node.js all day.
But I wouldn't call those people "hackers".
Not in the traditional cultural sense.
Another site I read often is www.cyclingnews.com - they have great coverage of professional bicycle racing, which I love to read about and watch.
You know what, though? I find politics annoying there too.
You know where I like to read about politics? The Economist is pretty good. www.corriere.it is pretty good for local stories. And there are other sources I read from time to time.
This site is a great place to talk about startups and tech. There aren't many of those. There are approximately 343244329165 sites where people can have inane discussions about things like whether the US is really "exactly like China and Russia".
It's a very simple process.
People that like sites like this "segmented" and "pure" are mostly apolitical and don't care about the issues they want to expunge from them in the first place. I've seen such people in lots of other places.
Hackers tend to be all over the place. They tend to appreciate tech, science, politics, philosophy, Star Wars, startups, what have you, and to want to discuss it at the same time.
Kind of like PG discusses tons of things in his essays, not just tech or startups all the time.
>You know where I like to read about politics? The Economist is pretty good.
Not really the outlet for a hacker interested in politics, and especially the stuff we're discussing here. Actually, it's as far away from the traditional hacker culture as you can get -- and quite far from caring about privacy, surveillance, and the whole EFF spirit too.
It's basically a status quo rag for rich folks and middle class wannabes.
PLONK
Those kind of stories were not that many to begin with.
Except if by "research in compSci" one means "My impressions after 1 day with Go", "Node.js cured my dog", "Web framework benchmarks 24", "Sexism in Babes-In-Bikinis-Coding conference", "LLVM 3, now with a ho-hum debugger as standard", "Functional concepts in BASIC", "Father of sextuplets,, startup founder, how I manage my time", "iOS 7 icons have colors I don't like".
Everybody has his gripes about this or that content. But it's the community that makes it all relevant. And those stories have huge implications on technology, the intertubes and enterprise.
>Unfortunately it has been demonstrated time and time again that popularity destroys communities.
That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it").
>That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it").
I really can't agree with this. In 10 (12?... Getting old I guess) years of online participation, I've seen time and time again relatively small forums and websites grow in user numbers and the quality of the popular submissions/threads/posts decline.
Perhaps a good example is Reddit. At one point it was a site for submitting links to news articles. The userbase was fairly heavily skewed towards tech and programmers. Looking at Archive.org from 2007 the front page is perhaps 1/3 programming related, 1/3 "interest" articles and 1/3 current events. There's not a single link to an image.
My belief is that when a site grows in popularity, and so the interests and backgrounds of the users expands, the posts that consistantly attract more interest or votes are those which appeal to the largest common aspect of the community - the community itself. Once Reddit was large enough to have its own in-jokes and themes, submissions related to those tended to receive lots of attention. I think many people enjoy belonging to online communities with injokes, and so once it started that shift the demographic of new users changed as well. In 2007 nobody would have strongly defined themselves as a "redditor" in the way that people do today because at that point it was nothing more than a site for sharing interesting news articles.
As someone who enjoys reading thought provoking articles (and sometimes commenting on them), I find it frustrating to see websites I like move towards lowest-common-denominator submissions. I'm no fan of "it was better in my day" baseless nostalgia, but Archive.org provides us a fairly effective window into the past and it is clear that many sites are today demonstrably different than they were a few years ago. I don't think it's elitist (or "hipsterish") to want to maintain the spirit and submission quality that was the basis for this sites popularity.
I, on the other hand, have built only a few small open source things. My karma consists overwhelming of political-related posts.
But I still liked HN better when I had nothing to contribute to the conversation, as there was always a comment to upvote which had already said what I had wanted to say.
If you think it has "argentinian government propaganda" point to it.
Not to the obvious fact (that it was written by the argentinian president).
Specifics. What is propaganda in it, what is bad about it, etc.
Even more appreciated would be n extra line or two, of why "argentinean government propaganda", even if it DID exist in the article, would be of any concern to us (as if Argentina is some powerful country that messes up with our own or something).
> [a word which here evokes the memory of the last dictatorship, which exterminated some ten to thirty thousand of its political opponents, a crime that wasn't successfully prosecuted until Sra. Fernandez and her late husband did so in their presidencies]
That is a totally unnecessary glorifying addition not even present in the original tweets. Has little to do with the subject but hey let's drag it in. Happy to see those fuckers locked up though, no question about that.
> [This is a reference to the President's years-long struggle against preventative injunctions put in place by Argentine courts against her efforts to break up the big Argentine media trusts that are her strongest local political enemies.]
Another addition that tries to justify the pretty questionable action of limiting the powers of the Supreme Court.
I allow anybody to have an opinion but if this is clearly written by a staunch supporter of the government copying and adding to what I already consider propaganda I just want to let people know that it is what it is: propaganda.
That's a circular argument. It's only a propaganda channel if the president it's dishonest. And even then, it's only propaganda if she is dishonest in THOSE particular tweets.
>That is a totally unnecessary glorifying addition not even present in the original tweets. Has little to do with the subject but hey let's drag it in. Happy to see those fuckers locked up though, no question about that.
For one, it's not even present on the original tweets, as you say.
I'd hardly call it "propaganda" by the president, that some random person on the internet put it as a "reference note" on his translation.
Not to mention that, Argentinians will read the original Spanish in her account and not the guy's english translation. So they won't even see it.
I don't see where's the "glorifying", either in his addition or the original tweet either. I mean, even if she did used the word "impunity" also as a reference to those people.
>Another addition that tries to justify the pretty questionable action of limiting the powers of the Supreme Court.
Perhaps -- but it also serves to give some context to the reader that doesn't know about this (and who, of course, doesn't vote in Argentina, so any propaganda won't do anything for him).
>I allow anybody to have an opinion but if this is clearly written by a staunch supporter of the government copying and adding to what I already consider propaganda I just want to let people know that it is what it is: propaganda.
Sorry, but I'm more of the impression that you are a staunch non-supporter of this government than the opposite!
I mean you took all this offence to a translation by some random guy (I think he's on HN too -- maybe the one who posted this), and two small additions of reference notes, that weren't even meant for the Argentinian voters (who will, of course, read the original spanish tweets).
Propaganda is too strong a word. You can publicly agree with a government and it's actions without being a "propagandist". If I say "the health reform in the US is a good thing" is that propaganda?
I don't think "propaganda" implies dishonesty, just advocacy.
"Impunity" in English is mostly used in a metaphorical sense in these centuries, for example, and doesn't at all evoke the issue of not "locking up" "those fuckers". Without some kind of note, what I read as Cristina's allusion to her own legal battles would be lost on an English-speaking audience. Do you think I'm imagining the intended allusion, or just that it would be better not to explain it for some reason?
As for the medidas cautelares, I think my summary of what's going on is pretty even-handed. You can certainly argue that presidents shouldn't be trying to take legal acting against their political enemies, especially if they're media companies, or you can argue that breaking up big trusts is a perfectly legitimate thing for the government to do, in general.
I think "propaganda" is a perfectly reasonable description of what Cristina wrote. She's telling her side of the story, not Nicolas Sarkozy's or Anibal Cavaco Silva's. I think it's very informative to know what her side of the story is, and that's why I took the trouble to translate it.
The wonders of semi-permanent emergency presidential powers...
However, since it seems there is nothing more to be gained by continuing to hold the plane, what will actually happen is that high ranking politicians in the involved countries will apologise profusely, claim this was done by some low ranking bureaucrat that will be appropriately disciplined (sounding familiar?), and everything will go back to normal since no one wants to risk major economic repercussions over a minor incident.
I wonder if this could have a long term impact on how the South Americans view Europe ideologically though.
In any case, the deep-rooted corruption of her administration (and practically all others decades before it) is a symbol of Argentine culture.