Most Western politicians don't understand the interwebs
so there's not a great deal of hope for the Russkies
Russian deputy prime minister and energy minister Igor Sechin has blamed Google for unrest in Egypt, accusing the search giant of "manipulations of the energy of the people". The comments were made during an apparently ill-tempered interview about the investment climate in Russia with the Wall Street Journal. The interview …
He mentions Marx in one place but seems to forget the Lenin's maxim that
1) For a revolution to take place there must first be a revolutionary situation
2) A revolutionary situation happens when the working classes no longer want to live as before while the ruling classes can no longer rule as before.
I doubt Google executives could arrange that even if they really wanted to, but it is even less likely that any of the said executives would have decided to leave a nice office in Mountain View to go to Egypt, of all places, to work as an underground revolutionary, even only as an adventure holiday...
Quote: "A revolutionary situation happens when the working classes no longer want to live as before while the ruling classes can no longer rule as before."
That is a description of half of the world. It takes an active involvement of a foreign power (not necessarily a state, anyone with resources can do) interested in a regime change to exploit the situation.
There are many different ways of exploitation like shipping a Lenin across half of Europe in a railway cargo carriage, sponsoring pseudo-dissidents and keeping the first new president on your payroll, payments to appropriate organisations from "democracy supporting foundations" and so on.
Further to this, even after a situation has been exploited, it takes money to finalise the exploitation. If you do not have the money to feed the "thick necks" to police the protest on your side you end up with provocators and idiots becoming the face of the protest.
Example - the student protests in London this summer. I have run a "small" (national size) student protest myself a few decades back and I can tell you first hand - 30 minutes after we had the main uni building occupied a "friendly gentleman" from a "sympathetic union" was there with a briefcase full of notes. I was young and stupid then and I did not want to go into politics so I counted the steps of the main staircase with his bottom and ran the whole thing purely on public donations. I have understood however why the leaders of the previous protests about a year prior to that were driving brand new BMWs.
"It takes an active involvement of a foreign power (not necessarily a state, anyone with resources can do) interested in a regime change to exploit the situation."
No foreign power will ever be able to make a revolution among people who content and are not ready to revolt themselves.
To say otherwise is like repeating that nonsense about butterfly in Asia causing a hurricane in the Mexican Gulf, yes, you need a trigger for any thermodynamic process but first you have to store the energy required for that process to take place.
Water starts boiling around microscopic impurities and bubbles of air but no matter how much crap you put in it it won't boil until you heat it to the right temperature under the right pressure.
The foreign conspiracy theories things are always nothing but fairy tales for easily impressionable, spread by the people who fear that the chairs under them are shaking.
... pig-ignorant politicians (is there another sort?) have a lot of sway and power to affect the lives of people by the decisions they make in parliament.
Need i remind you of George Dubya? He wasnt a scientist, a web developer, a technologist or an engineer, but i think its fair to say he had a bit of an effect on the world... im sure the Iraqi people would agree with that...
@"Russia blames Google for Egyptian revolt"
Because they fear their puppet dictatorship could be next!. After all, when Putin removes his puppet government at the next *"elections" he wants his job back!.
* = I use the word "elections", in the time honoured context that has been used by all dictators. Oh hang on, that’s Machiavellian, two faced, lying, cunning and duplicitous dictators.
By the way, its not Google, its the whole Internet!. People all around the world are finally comparing notes about their own tyrannical two faced bastards in power over them and surprise surprise, we all find our tyrannical two faced bastards over us all have the same pattern of Narcissistic behaviour!
Reading the news these days feels like playing Dictatorship Bingo! ... who will be next? ... So far we have for example, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya. I see the Saudi King has today announced increased benefits for his people. Funny how they only start caring about their people, when their people start protesting! So who's next?. Clearly this news shows Russia is more than a bit rattled. Meanwhile Greece yesterday had 30000 people march on their parliament!.
The Dictatorship Bingo number I'm most waiting for people to finally get totally fed up with, is Putin's old friend in Italy, non other than Mr two faced crooked himself, Berlusconi.
Its about bloody time the tyrannical greedy two faced bastards of this world were made to look over their shoulders. They show they don't have empathy for their people, so they need pressure on them, from their people to make the tyrants think of their people!
"Google executive and prominent internet activist Wael Ghonim" is one of the leading Egyptian revolutionaries. And "former UN atomic energy chief, Mohamed Al-Baradei" is now talking about running as President - he previously was talking about not running as President.
So anyway, that's what it's got to do with Google: one of their senior blokes apparently used his 20% of time to work on personal projects to overthrow a Middle East government that was next door to Israel in more ways than one. This may have been done in order to put something interesting to read on Google News, and YouTube.
Personally I expect each of these revolutions to generate a new Somalia or possibly Dafur/Darfur, I forget which spelling it is and a certain news search engine isn't helping me to decide... suspicious?
Are 2 faced, in the sense when you learn you got something wrong you have to either persist in wrongness or change your mind. When you have to do a deal based on positives and negatives which add up differently from how they did when you made promises before an election you've sometimes got to change your mind.
That is part of the nature of reality which inherently sucks and it doesn't matter what the name of your party is. We're all as bad as each other in these respects.
Not the same as living in a country where you can't vote us out and another bunch of fools/jokers in instead.
The Russians never take responsibility for their lot in life, they always pretend they are someone's "victim" to justify everything, especially their disproportionate responses to things. So it's no surprise they'd blame something like Google for the Middle East people's revolts, rather than accept that the populations finally reached a point where being fed up created more pressure than fear of the regimes.
> Other officials objecting to Western support for the unrest said revolutions often
> start like February, but end like October
Have the officials concerned perhaps been spending too much time in California?
"These revolutions often start like February but, like, go on for ages and end like October".
I thought the huge spike in food prices had more to do with it than Google. Heck one could argue the wikileaks cables showing that the former Tunisia leaders were even more corrupt and richer than their public image had more to do with this movement starting than Google. Sounds like autocratic Russia feels a bit threatened.
There was one Google exec imprisoned, Ok, but that was about it ...
Let's be stupid and believe the conspiracy theory: it was Google, Google has the power to topple dictators and Russia brought it out to the world .. great ... which dictatorship will be next to go tits up? Krml
So we will soon see if it was all google ....