Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajays | Hacker News Reader

1 year away? It looks like we _are_ in a period of global riots: Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen. The sectarian violence in Iraq. Anarchy in Somalia, South Sudan. I don't think we've ever seen so many independent conflict areas.

View on HN

There has always been regions or unrest all around the world at the same time. It is not because you do not hear it in the news that it does not happen. Somalia, Nigeria, Rwanda, India, Pakistan, China (China itself has thousands of riots every year in the countryside that noone talks about), and I am sure there are probably a lot more that I am not aware of. You just see the tip of the iceberg.

Just open any newspaper from 20-30-40 years ago, you will see a picture of a world full of conflicts and disorder everywhere.

This being said, I do believe there are "triggers" that may help people to riot, and the price of food may be one. By the way, food pricing and "hunger" are two different things. Noone was suffering from Hunger in Egypt when they rioted. Let's call a cat a cat. I love when people write about "Hunger" while they live in a world where noone around them have experienced hunger once in their lives. Don't USE words you do NOT understand.

And this article is BS anyway, since the author throws some global warming salt together with some "evil speculators" pepper. Making a link between drought and global warming, maybe, without any clear explanation ? Droughts have ALWAYS happened in History, even when we did not produce carbon. Strange huh ?

Well, I have to say that your analysis of Egypt is quite wrong. The last time I was in the poorer parts of Egypt, in 2008, extreme food poverty was easy to find. Men in sack cloth queued at huts waiting for unleavened flat bread. One method used by Mubarak to contain dissent was in providing food aid to the poor, and wealth disparity in Egypt had fostered a festering hatred of the government.

The intensity of the Egyptian riots is very much connected to general poverty and food scarcity in large parts of Egypt, though not uniformaly. Cairo is a different circumstance. None the less, your point is incorrect.

Well, the people who were rioting in Cairo were certainly not suffering from Hunger, that is for sure. In other parts of Egypt, you may be right.

Wrong. The masses of people started over food problems. The government tried to crush them, and there was a massive response from other parts of society. Spain started the same way.

Food price increase!= Starvation or Hunger.

You see riots, demonstrations in western countries when prices for petrol or commodities rise, but that does not mean that the situation is necessarily unbearable.

By the way, price food increase has also a lot to do with the US government debt and the weakness of the US dollar (inflation) leading to increasing $ needed to buy the same amount of food over time. And poorer countries are directly impacted by this.

No we're not. Countries that have (or had) long standing dictatorships are rioting. The closest the first world has had to a riot is when Canada lost that hockey game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots

My mistake. I didn't think of those ones until ten seconds after my comment.

Let's just forget the mass protests all over the western world recently then.

Protests are very different than riots.

Riots are when masses 'give up' and resort to something else.

Needless to say the entire western world is very far away from it.

What about the Occupy Protests in LA?

The irony is that no where near 99% showed up, it was actually far closer to 1%.

Those were barely riots. A whole lot of college students killed some grass on some public parks. For a noble cause.

I would not even call the Black Bloc rioters. They use guerrilla tactics, hit and run.

Occupy protests are not riots despite all the police in riot suits standing around sweating.

Feds on hackernews, rad!

Don't forget Greece.

There were economic riots in the West Bank today. Although those were more due to corruption. However the thing people complained about was high prices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com