Pulling together various resources, I’m beginning to get a picture of what happened with the cut-off and restoration of the Internet in Egypt. First up, at least in some senses, it may be valid to say that the Internet played a role – Arbor Networks observed that traffic to and from Egyptian networks (and between…
Read More A Little Bit of Egyptian Internet TwaddleThanks to reader Koranteng for this data point. You may recall this post about the market for thugs in Egyptian politics. Specifically, when the government needed arseholes to attack the protestors, it had to pay four times per capita GDP to get them. In Libya this week, it is said that the government is using…
Read More Market forces live: ArseDexIn other, tangential, mobile industry news, I was amused by this: Apparently, if you drive around Alaska with a spectrum analyzer on the front seat of your car, nobody stops you. This is awesome. It’s awesome, and it’s also true of huge nuclear reactor complexes near Bratislava, where I once did just that back in…
Read More Admin: MWCNon-Thursday music link. But on Thursday! Richard X vs. New Order “Jetstream”.
Read More musicMeanwhile, a scoop from Robert Fisk. This is amusing; if some sort of art-terrorist group had wanted to mock US policy, could they have done better than appointing as special envoy a man whose father was the CIA’s head of planning and who is actually Mubarak’s lawyer? The State Department should probably review personnel policy.…
Read More lawyerDaniel Davies‘s post about arseholes, and more formally about the importance of the reactionary mob as an institution, has been a well deserved hit. Here’s something interesting, though. Fairly serious rumours reckoned that the arseholes were being paid as much as $68 a day. In theory, if an arsehole was on duty 340 days a…
Read More Cash rules everything around me (but perhaps less than you might think)So what happened in Tunisia? It’s probably worth pointing out that they’ve signed a gaggle of UN human rights conventions, dissolved the old ruling party, and are having a strike wave. Having done the broad strokes of the revolution, they’re now working on the detail.
Read More detailIs it meaningful to say that the Egyptian revolution is calming down, or petering out? I ask because a common flaw of the reporting on it has been to treat the basic dynamics of mobilisation as if they were signs of huge political shifts behind the curtain. It’s obviously true that both revolutionaries and reactionaries…
Read More From the noisy phase to the quiet phaseThis WSJ piece is a crucial document on Egypt: At 4 p.m., the battles appeared to tip decisively in the protesters’ favor. An order came down from Mr. Mubarak to the Minister of Interior, Habib al-Adly, to use live ammunition to put down the protests, according to a person familiar with the situation. Mr. al-Adly…
Read More tick-tockOur former prime minister supported Hosni Mubarak this morning in the name of stability. Blair said that meant there should not be a rush to elections in Egypt. “I don’t think there’s a majority for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On the other hand, what you’ve got to watch is that they are extremely well-organised…
Read More da brother’s gonna work it out