Posted on 02/19/2011 8:00:00 AM PST by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends.
Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms "Facebook", "Egypt" and "revolution". The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed.
As a reality check: the search terms "Egypt", "revolution" and "genital mutilation" turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation, while fewer than 10% of Egyptians use Facebook. Before long we will see whether the "tech-savvy" revolutionaries (172 stories with the qualifier on Google news) are just benzine bubbles floating atop the viscous Nile mud.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Searching "Egypt" and "Genital Mutation" turns up 309,000 articles.
Not sure why the author thinks "Revolution" and "Genital Mutation" should occur in the same article.
Go back and read the part about the new revolutionaries and their post cultural existence. They are less culturally tied to their cousins who mutilate their daughter’s genitals ,”They have no safe place in Arab society, except in the disembodied cyberworld of social networking”.
I liked the idea of the army using the Egyptian facebook crowd to teach communities to read. They don't have to draft them though, it sounds like they could easily hire them.
I also noted with interest the paragraph about Egypt being afraid to raise agricultural output out of fear of throwing millions of farmers out of work. That is the modern delimma of accepting any technological change that replaces large amounts of labor.
If you don't adopt the change, you are left behind. If you do accept the change, you have to deal with the labor dislocation until the labor market can adjust. Still, it is far better to accept the technological changes and provide safety nets for the labor dislocations than to risk becoming an increasingly poor outdated workforce.
Nice, thoughtful article. Thanks for your post.
Danny, you clearly don’t know the difference between Google and Google News.
Were I you, I would rectify this lack of knowledge before commenting further.
They are spoiled sons and daughters of the rich. Weekend warriors with utopian ideas and no practical view of things. The same type that permeated in Latin America in the 70’s. In the wings are always the opportunist professional revolutionaries ala Lenin who once the useful fools are done, take over the place. In this case it’s the muslim brotherhood.
As Egypt's new Finance Minister Samir Radwan said of the young people who put him in power (to the Financial Times on February 13), "I'm generalizing, but a large number of the Egyptian labor force is unemployable. The products of the education system are unemployable."
The foundation of the soon-to-be-created Egyptian democracy. At least that's what Anderson Cooper and the New York Times tell me. And when have they ever been wrong?
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