"The United Nations’ main internet governance body will host its next international forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 2025, the UN may take its discussions on the future of an open internet to Russia."
And how does the article discredit any criticism of Saudi Arabia's oppressiveness? Not only does it plainly state how badly free expression is crushed in the country, it also adds wonderful PR-friendly zingers like this about the country's de facto leader MBS:
"He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”
Yeah, sounds positively anarchic in its protections of free speech.
Then again the UN has a long history of tacitly and sometimes openly kowtowing to the "social needs" of its more repressive members, who routinely bribe and browbeat their way through the organization towards more anti-liberal influence than many of them have any right to claim on the world stage.
Just holding a conference like the one in this HN post in a country like the Kingdom is a grotesque joke
You can criticize MBS all you want. What I disagree with is criticism that fails to admit that the regime would very likely be even worse overall without MBS.
How do you weigh MBS's substantial social reforms against his retaliation for personal criticism? This isn't a simple trade either, since a more socially repressive regime would still retaliate against critics, just maybe not Khashoggi, or not in the same discoverable way.
I don't see MBS or his underlings assassinating Atlantic staff over that article. Do you?
Are you aware that India just assassinated an Indian national in Canada? It's causing a diplomatic spat, but I don't see mass outrage over Murmu akin to outrage over MBS.
Yeah, while that is technically true [0], the difference of being gay in Israel vs gay in Palestine seem to be more about, you know, a life and death situation [1]:
> Gay Palestinians frequently seek refuge in Israel fearing for their lives, especially fearing death from members of their own families.
The thing they have in common is believing politicians that say that if said politicians can be given unlimited power, and can have every one of their crimes ignored, and are allowed to eliminate their political adversaries then they will solve all problems of LGBTQ, Palestinian, Jews, Israelis, and any other non white male minority you can think of through their exercise of that power. They are murky on the details except that they need more power. It's kind of a repeat of the 20th century if you ask me.
I think whether or not a population in general supports gay marriage has no bearing on the morality of ethnically cleansing them. Civilians being cut off from food, water, fuel, and electricity is not defensible. And trying to turn it into this transactional gotcha is really gross, coming from a queer person.
Various countries in Europe are doing the same thing [1,2,3]. Just recently, Britain has been threatening to jail people if they show support for the wrong organizations. Free speech is dead in the vast majority of the world. Casting shade on the "non-west" like Saudi Arabia as though they are alone in this guilt is ignorant at best.
Sure. The United States commits extra judicial killings all the time, including of it's own citizens. They have tortured countless innocent people at various dark sites. There is absolutely nothing about the west which is morally superior. The fact that they try to hide these acts or justify them through sophistry makes the west even worse.
Remember a few years back when cops kept roughing up journalists at anti-brutality protests? There was that one guy who lost an eye to a rubber bullet.
Yes, it does! Freedom of speech is specifically to prevent the government from retaliating against speech it doesn't like. The consequence of being thrown in jail for saying something the government doesn't like is not just.
They are talking about the security council, not the UN. The way members in the security council holds a veto to every decision paralyzes it. You should automatically lose your veto/seat in the council if you invade another country.
Last I looked there were more than two members in the council, and also USSR hasn't been a member since 1991 if I recall correctly. Anyway here's the current list for you convenience: https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/current-members
If the bylaws of the security council contained the risk of exclusion or at the very least loss of veto, I think both the US and Russia would more carefully contemplate the cost of the invasions they are guilty of.
The already limited authority of the UNSC is almost meaningless without the consensus of the great powers. An UNSC with only (pro-)Western powers sanctioned US intervention in the Korean War, did it make any difference beyond the use of the UN flag?
Can you stop supporting an agenda that promotes world war and the America first way?
If you don't want people to comment, close comments and remove your platform
I will keep posting my opinions and if you don't like it you can ban me and will create new accounts.
How come you aren't threatening the flame baiter who posted this above comment? Because you are an America faschist who supports the US world domination agenda
If you haven't noticed all the times we've moderated and scolded the "US world domination agenda" (or flamey partisans thereof), that's because you haven't noticed them—not because they don't exist. I promise you that in a parallel universe (or rather, a parallel sector of HN) there are people railing against us for siding with America-haters-and-all-that. In reality, we're siding with neither. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
Of course there are tons of guideline-breaking posts that we don't moderate, but that's because we don't see everything. One can't moderate what one doesn't see.
Considering the decades of wars and regime change operations and sanctions around the world, So you have a good reason why the US shouldn't be removed? There shouldn't be a Security Council to begin with, imo
Any argument I provide for Russia not on the being on the council I will also happily accept for any other country including the US. Russia is simply the latest most egregiously blatant violator. So that is a good question, why do we have a security council? Seems to be a hold-over from the cold war. Why not give every country an equal vote?
As opposed to the us who has in the last 2 decades only managed to invade and fuck up multiple sovereign nations under known false pretences and yet no one thinks they are a threat to the world just because they seem to control the overall narrative
I fully agree that too much direct and indirect international "intervention" in pursuit of influence toward their interests is not helpful to overall global peace and prosperity.
What you just described is the reason the USA refused to join the League of Nations and broadly viewed as one of the reasons the League of Nations failed. FDRs "4 policemen" (which evolved into the P5 vetoes on the UN security council) was intended to address that issue. The UN has arguably failed too in that regard (although we also haven't had another world war so perhaps it depends on what you view as its purpose).
But more importantly in this case, the UN has grown enormously beyond its original setup and taken on many other functions. This has led to corruption and worse, the ability for bad actors to put a veil of legitimacy over their intentions and actions. It seems to that that is what has happened here. Unfortunately it's all too common with the UN.
> between censorship-minded countries and those who support an open internet
The problem is that there really aren’t countries who are pro speech and support an open internet. The countries are all just pro-speech that they support.
I understand the concern, but why we act like this sort of stuff isn't just at the worst case a strongly worded letter just everyone knows an UN General Assembly resolution is? What can the IGF or the ITO actually do?
Between blatant authoritarian regimes wanting full access and control, the US data hoovering which is definitely greater than a decade old, and the EU trying to push through a measure to get around encryption for the purpose of finding CSAM, there will be no bastions of privacy or anonymity within the decade.
The irony is that speech restrictions are most likely to harm the common people that are advocating for them, over the long term.
If they are advocating for them because and while they are vulnerable, then it stands to reason that less vulnerable people will eventually dictate how the laws are applied.
The same officials who think that "whataboutism", aka the call to ignore unequal application of the law, is a positive argument are the same officials that want censorship. That isn't a coincidence, and the same resultant risk to the population is shared between the two strategies.
49 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadThe opening line reads like an Onion article.
https://archive.ph/s6i5m
"He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”
Yeah, sounds positively anarchic in its protections of free speech.
Then again the UN has a long history of tacitly and sometimes openly kowtowing to the "social needs" of its more repressive members, who routinely bribe and browbeat their way through the organization towards more anti-liberal influence than many of them have any right to claim on the world stage.
Just holding a conference like the one in this HN post in a country like the Kingdom is a grotesque joke
How do you weigh MBS's substantial social reforms against his retaliation for personal criticism? This isn't a simple trade either, since a more socially repressive regime would still retaliate against critics, just maybe not Khashoggi, or not in the same discoverable way.
I don't see MBS or his underlings assassinating Atlantic staff over that article. Do you?
Are you aware that India just assassinated an Indian national in Canada? It's causing a diplomatic spat, but I don't see mass outrage over Murmu akin to outrage over MBS.
> Gay Palestinians frequently seek refuge in Israel fearing for their lives, especially fearing death from members of their own families.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_State_of_Pa...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42164853
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefar...
[3] https://jacobin.com/2022/09/queen-death-monarchy-censorship-...
[4] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign/uk-threate...
It's crucial to understand when to voice one's views both in a public and private setting.
Me: “You shouldn’t kill Jews.”
Nazi: “Get on this train. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, you know.”
gp is referring to government policing of speech and legally punitive consequences
If the bylaws of the security council contained the risk of exclusion or at the very least loss of veto, I think both the US and Russia would more carefully contemplate the cost of the invasions they are guilty of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860384
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860346
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37842644
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37842482
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you don't want people to comment, close comments and remove your platform
I will keep posting my opinions and if you don't like it you can ban me and will create new accounts.
How come you aren't threatening the flame baiter who posted this above comment? Because you are an America faschist who supports the US world domination agenda
If you haven't noticed all the times we've moderated and scolded the "US world domination agenda" (or flamey partisans thereof), that's because you haven't noticed them—not because they don't exist. I promise you that in a parallel universe (or rather, a parallel sector of HN) there are people railing against us for siding with America-haters-and-all-that. In reality, we're siding with neither. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
Of course there are tons of guideline-breaking posts that we don't moderate, but that's because we don't see everything. One can't moderate what one doesn't see.
But more importantly in this case, the UN has grown enormously beyond its original setup and taken on many other functions. This has led to corruption and worse, the ability for bad actors to put a veil of legitimacy over their intentions and actions. It seems to that that is what has happened here. Unfortunately it's all too common with the UN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The problem is that there really aren’t countries who are pro speech and support an open internet. The countries are all just pro-speech that they support.
If they are advocating for them because and while they are vulnerable, then it stands to reason that less vulnerable people will eventually dictate how the laws are applied.
The same officials who think that "whataboutism", aka the call to ignore unequal application of the law, is a positive argument are the same officials that want censorship. That isn't a coincidence, and the same resultant risk to the population is shared between the two strategies.