[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/europe/netherlands-election-po...
[2] http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/03/turkey-suspend...
You can wrap, among other things, the 70's OPEC wars, 79 Iranian revolution, 9/11 and the rise of Trump in a nice tiny bow and create a coarsely accurate depiction of history over those 45 years. You can even have a little side story about things like the 1985 "We Are the World" charity song without missing a beat.
In the long run, things like Facebook and Snapchat will probably be as relevant and well-known as say, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Never heard of it? It's a charter member of the Dow Jones Transportation Average (the predecessor to the DJIA) and an important company from the 1800s ...
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott-negin/think-todays-ref...
I don't know why I wrote all of that. Maybe just to say that I'm sorry for my part in all of this bullshit.
There will be plenty of more serious stuff to read later.
I don't blame you. You were doing the job you swore you'd do, were paid to do, and likely ordered to do.
Thank you for sharing your story.
The history books will be written by the victors. What the history says will depend hugely on whether we have free informational continuity between now and then or a massive legal/totalitarian/military/nuclear/catastrophic "wipe" destroying that.
(Less dramatically, this is obviously the era when intelligence agencies are fighting and the internet is their battleground. ""Cyberwarfare"" is not about turning off power stations, it's about destroying your opponent's ability to do normal open democratic politics. There's even tension between US domestic security services - the FBI director Comey is clearly pro-Trump while the CIA are not, and Trump has gutted the US State Department which has traditionally been the department for interfering with other countries.)
For instance, free speech, as we know it, really came around WW1-era and was due to people like Learned Hand convincing Oliver Wendell Holmes. But since then, history has been seemingly rewritten to make it look like it was part of the revolutionary war.
There's plenty of other things ... non-citizens could vote up to 1926. The "American Dream" was coined in 1931 and was essentially backdated to colonial times, etc.
Accurate realities will bunch the pants of essentially everyone regardless of politics. One could argue being openly gay, for instance, in the 1800s was not seen as insufferable. James Buchanan, the 15th president, lived with a man and was referred to by terms that were contemporary to homosexual. I've done fairly extensive private research and can't find it being a controversial thing during his campaign, even though this was a well known fact (I've meant to do some more microfish reading at the library about it). See, there I go messing up the narrative of progressivism and civil rights. Sorry.
The guy after him, Lincoln, was seen so unfavorably at the time that he won the popular vote in 1864 by only 10% - this was after everyone who disliked him had ostensibly already left. You think he'd be a landslide in the remaining states.
There's a narrative of a cordial press during FDR being too polite to take photographs of the man in a wheelchair. Nope, the secret service would confiscate your camera, possibly strip you of press privileges and destroy your film. Kinda like a repressive state.
This isn't the tropish "victors write the history" - this is a more nuanced instance of people framing benign things to support a narrative arc and defend a lensing through the politics of storytelling. The deviations, far-reaching connections, and omissions, can often reveal preferences on what the underlying culture of the author would prefer them to see and can be as revealing as the text itself.
> messing up the narrative of progressivism and civil rights
Is it? There's a whole subfield of queer history devoted to getting an accurate record of this kind of thing. Arguing that it's always been present in society but treated very differently by different societies.
It does mess up the Whig view of progressiveness being on a ratchet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote_in...
I'm curious if there was an against campaign for its repeal. Most of the online archives I could find referred to it as antiquated and unenforced but I would like to know what the results were and if there's any op eds leading up to it.
Edit: nope, there was an 1880 case that nullified the article. This was a mere formality. There was very little mention of it beyond that. Passed with 78%
Look at nationalism and populism on the rise. We've passed the point of no-return I think... that will be the lesson for any surviving future historians.
I see that as a symptom of how futile most public office has become. Maybe term-limits would help, maybe other things would. If we want to fix the problem though, I think the answer starts with the candidates, not just trying to re-engineer a system to persist in spite of all apparent efforts to subvert it. I guess we can all watch, though.
//kind of off topic, but I felt like this was the place to say it.
I think this will persist for quite some time e.g decades until the next era arrives which will see more earth-friendly, people-centric, less capitalist views come to the fore e.g base income, renewable at all costs etc as automation and climate change reek havoc.
The one with dictatorial tendencies here is Erdogan
The stance is certainly not against Muslims although people might feel it that way. It is against the fact the pro-Erdogan Turks and anti-Erdogan Turks and Curds etc cause unrest in the Netherlands. Most people are welcoming of other cultures but not when they bring their political unrest with them. This whole circus was a signal to Turkey to keep Turkish politics within Turkey. Still, I'm certain our PM would have been less strong if there weren't any elections.
I don't understand Erdogan though, he called on the dutch Turks to not vote for the current PM and Geert Wilders (PVV, far right, anti immigration, pro Netherlands), and now this?! He must know that the couple of Turks that will listen to this will be overwhelmed by Dutchies wanting to vote anything that Erdogan doesn't like... It's like he is intentionally putting oil on the fire, helping PVV. Why is the very important questions, what does he or some other party have to gain? Who benefits from poor EU/Turkey relations?
Edit: after thinking some more: Of course Erdogan is the one who benefits greatly from the created "us against them sentiment" of the Turks. It distracts from all the turmoil and the approaching power grab.
Erdoğan never missed an opportunity to escalate the situation.
The German government remained mostly calm despite numerous incidents such as preventing government officials from visiting German soldiers stationed in Turkey, the frivolous lawsuit where German citizen and journalist Deniz Yücel is accused of "terrorism", threats of sanctions for preventing public speeches of Turkish government officials (foreign officials have no free-speech rights in Germany, their speeches happen entirely at the pleasure of the German government), and regular Nazi name-calling of German politicians.
The Netherlands however have elections this week where a far-right populist could get many votes, so the current ruling party there (VVD) wants to position itself strongly against Erdoğan's aggressive antics in order to retain conservative voters. This is understandable, but of course it has the disadvantage that it plays right into Erdoğan's strategy.
If what it takes for them to do the right thing if fear of losing power to another candidate, so be it.
Of Turkey, yes. There's an understanding amongst democratic countries that you do not interfere in national elections. Sending a member of the cabinet to another country during national elections is interfering. Any Dutch government should have sent them packing, and the Turkish government was actually counting on that: now Erdogan has additional ammunition to paint the EU as an enemy. It surprises me that he hasn't declared The Netherlands to be secretly ruled by Gulen yet.
Do you really think it would have gone down nicely if the European Commission would have campaigned in England during the Brexit campaign? Or if Putin would have gone to the US to campaign for Trump?
A Turkish minister's plane was denied landing rights because he intended to address a rally; the rally itself was not banned. Following that, a Turkish education minister was escorted out of the country after trying to address a rally that was surreptitiously arranged by the Turkish consulate. That rally was disbanded after it became unsafe.
This was the decision of local and state governments and was done because in the past similar protests became impossible to control. It's fair enough to allow protests about Dutch policies but a whole different story when it is purely about an internal Turkish issue.
You can't blame the Dutch for not rolling out the red carpet especially so close to an election.
A minister of the Turkish government is not entitled to campaign in the Netherlands. She was asked not to do so, yet the consulate arranged for a rally and she attepmted to address that rally. She was therefore escorted out of the country as she abused her privelege of being there.
It's not as if a Dutch politician were blocked from campaigning a pro-Turkish message; this is about a member of a foreign government campaigning to Dutch citizens in the Netherlands (ironically campaigning for the furtherance of a regime which is increasingly undemocratic).
Globalism is orthogonal to the nature of the global regime. Let us not forget that Communist International was also a globalist movement.
I personally don't know about the "so often" bit, but certainly that is the meme that is pushed by (globalist owned) Media. But should we accept that as a fact, then considering the fact that multiple powers would exist would provide at least the hope of future remedy to citizens of unsavory regimes.
The /only/ hope for remedy for citizens of a (authoritarian) One World Government is catastrophic system failure. That is it.
Those three words encompasses an awful lot of death and poverty.
Doesn't seem like a very advanced hack to be honest, and "twitter services" are a constant source of account compromises
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/erdogan-and-putin-take-...
Wait what?
Everything that works out for the right and against the left is a Russian plot orchestrated by Putin.
The eighties called and decided to lend their foreign policy to the democrats this time.
"Middle East Eye is registered as M.E.E. Limited. Registered in England & Wales, Number: 08803692."
http://www.middleeasteye.net/contact-1077837563
About M.E.E. Ltd. from companieshouse.gov.uk:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08803692/officers
Google "BESSASSO, Jamal Awn Jamal" (named as officer @companieshouse).
First result:
http://www.thenational.ae/uae/al-jazeera-executive-helped-to...
First paragraph:
"A senior executive with Qatar’s TV network Al Jazeera was closely involved with setting up the London news website Middle East Eye, some of whose staff have links to organisations sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood."
BOOOOM!
So you eliminate as sources any company that might have some staff "sympathetic" to the Muslim Brotherhood? That probably extends much further than you think.
>BOOOOM!
You didn't say anything revelatory or even exciting.
I think you're accidentally overstating the strength of their case, probably just the clause-level equivalent of a typo.
They actually said:
> some of whose staff have links to organisations sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.
So, just to be clear, they're excluding anything with (interpreting the vague language generously) <=3 degrees of separation from the Muslim Brotherhood (organisation -> staff member -> an organisation -> Muslim Brotherhood) as a reliable source.
Totally unscientific, but to put this in a kind of very loose and silly context, Facebook claims that its users are on average connected to every other user by 3.57 degrees of separation. I suspect that the figure for this kind of connection is actually, relatively, much higher, but I sincerely doubt it's all that much higher than 4 (i.e. enough to make this sort of connection relevant) - especially when you think that these aren't even friendship relationships, but something so much weaker!
edit: the link to Facebook's claim - https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separati... and some typos and omissions of my own
So we can point the attack at the party potentially standing to gain from EU disruption (Russia) or at Turkey itself. Probably the most dull argument (aka most likely to be true) is that this is the work of an enthusiastic member of Erdogan's fanbase.
You must be fun at parties