Weekend Sober Thread: Shit's Gettin' Real in Egypt

I haven't seen this here or on AJZ, but I found a pic of the checkpoint going in to Tahrir Square:

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramyraoof/5416754638/in/photostream/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramyraoof/ ... otostream/</a>

 

Sorry to spam again, but the April 6th youth group has named Wael Ghonim their spokesman in negotiations with the government.

Ghonim is the Google executive who went missing several days ago, and is widely suspected to be in government custody. Interesting play by the youth.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/02/04/businessinsider-missing-google-exec-egypt-2011-2.DTL#ixzz1D1RZkCOh" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z1D1RZkCOh</a>

 

Al Jazeera made a good point yesterday. Our government's position in the Middle East is tenuous. People there are starting to figure out that you can, in fact, disregard U.S. 'recommendations' without a great deal of consequence.

It's been suggested that the Obama administration is avoiding any strongly worded demands of the Mubarak regime because we don't want to give him the opportunity to hand us a flat-out 'No'. It would make us appear impotent, which we sort of are, but at least with all this semantic nonsense, we can still pretend we're not trying to control the situation, or failing at it.

It makes sense. It's lame, but it makes sense.

 

Oh, Bill Maher. Clearly, the best way to show Egyptians that you're "on their side" is to quote Pew statistics about national support for stoning and sharia law. Way to get in your jabs at religion while completely missing the point and displaying a typical television pundit's ignorance of the situation.

Sometimes, I want to punch that smug look right off his fucking face.

 

Latest development is a claim that an assassination attempt against Suleiman claimed the lives of two bodyguards.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/02/04/egypt-vp-targeted-assassination-attempt-killed-bodyguards-sources-tell-fox-news/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/02/04 ... -fox-news/</a>

The claim is that the assassination attempt came shortly after he was appointed on Jan 29th. But, the Egyptian government has made numerous speeches since then, and never mentioned an assassination attempt. I'm trying not to be too biased here, but the timing of the announcement is very suspicious.

 

And this means... what? That the Egyptian government false-reported an assasination for the sake of getting itself in the press? They're covering it up? The anti-mubarak group are such badasses that they don't even mention it? What about the timing? For those of us that are not good/don't care at reading between the lines, your frequent updates are (in many cases or at least in mine) more informative than what we'd find on the news, but are highly frustrating because they don't give us enough info. Maybe like 2/3rds of the story.

One of the things that I really appreciate about being part of this new "we know everything because of the Internet" generation is that I'm up to date on everything. One of the things I don't like is, I have to keep up with everything. And that's pretty fucking difficult.

 

Excuse me for not naming specific names... I'm drujhnk.

I can not believe that the US thinks that putting this VP in power is cool. He's most of the problem his self...

I hope to god... I pray it ends well.

 

What I've been trying to do is just write posts that let you know there's news in case you want to find out more, rather than providing the whole story.

 

Military says curfew tonight will be "strongly enforced." Starts at 7pm local time, 11am Eastern. They're still saying that they won't fire on protesters, so no idea what enforcement will involve. The plan might be to simply keep any new people from coming into the square to try to break their hold on it. But, once the curfew ends (6am), they could just come back.

Update: Daily News Egypt reports military turning back families with children, citing security reasons. Given that yesterday the protests were very peaceful, and the increased military presence means counter-protesters are unlikely to have more clashes of any significance, the citing of "security reasons" sounds a bit ominous.

 

Mubarak has resigned as head of the NDP, but is still President.

 

Man hit by molotov cocktail.



From the Washington Post Style section: <a class="postlink" href="http://washingtonpoststyle.tumblr.com/post/3091660685/the-instant-someone-gets-hit-with-a-molotov" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://washingtonpoststyle.tumblr.com/p ... -a-molotov</a>

And an update from Anderson Cooper.

 

With Mubarak entrenching himself and showing no sign of stepping down any time soon, the protesters have also started their long term strategy: get married, make babies, and have future generations continue occupying the square.

 

Great Tweet featured on Al Jazeera:

Mubarak has changed his Facebook relationship status with Egypt to "It's complicated."

 

Aren't we keeping Mubarak in power to keep this very thing from happening?

 

Fox News reports that "anti-government protests have killed nearly 100 people in the past week."

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/world/2011/01/26/deadly-egyptian-protests/#slide=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/world/ ... s/#slide=1</a>

I'll let you figure out what's wrong with that headline on your own.

 

CNN is interviewing Egypt's Prime Minister right now. I like how he understands every question except "why are you arresting journalists?"

My god those people are so dillusional.

 

That's not delusional. Delusional would be responding honestly to the questions.

"Why are you arresting journalists?"
"Because they're fucking shit up for us."

Put yourself in the position of an autocrat whose only real interest is securing further power for yourself. You can either come up with grand and crazy rationalizations for your actions, or play dumb. At least playing dumb means you don't look crazy.

 

Skip to 1:30.
It's really disturbing, you have been warned.



I can't really wrap my head around this. It's just all kinds of awful.