Yeah and what is wrong with whataboutery? I have no issues with sprinkling some whataboutery to expose the West for the ridiculous expectations it has from a developing country like India while at the same time indulging in worse acts itself. I mean at least don't effing preach if you can't show yourself to be a good example/role model. That's the least you can do.
There’s little one can do if some in the country are hell bent on putting their heads in sands like an ostrich. Doesn’t change the truth, unfortunately.
As for Al Jazeera and other channels you mentioned, they can be watched online – unlike the Modi documentary.
We have readers at the Delaware courthouse and, incredibly, the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare. I tried for weeks to find a solution other than removing Cloudflare but nothing seemed to work, and I really want people from the courthouse to be able to read the blog!
> the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare
Lovely.
As my local county attorney told the court, "We will not be using the cloud because it is not secure," this doesn't surprise me. The bane of local governments strikes again.
I would ballpark Delaware court IT security requirements as similar to DoD Secret level clearance.
And as far as I understand a higher security cloud solution is usually a custom ask and really expensive at any of the major providers, simply not affordable for smaller organizations.
Most of the cloud providers (at least AWS/Azure) charge about 15-20% more for the "government" data centers. It's really not that much more. It's also not really much different, just slightly more auditing, if any difference at all. You also don't have to strictly be a government agency, you can also be a government contractor.
From what I understand, the infrastructure is really, technically, exactly the same, but just limited to certain customers. It's also, generally speaking going to be as, or more secure than any self-managed datacenter connected to the internet. The transparency could probably be a bit better.
note: used to work for a government contractor that received a LOT of hacking effort as a target.
Since “cloud” is actually a marketing term (usually meaning virtualized servers), any company or department who says no to any mention of using the cloud is showing willful ignorance.
If you know you don’t know enough, demanding paper documents makes sense. It takes quite a bit of study and knowledge to determine that a “cloud document” cannot be changed or altered after submission (and by whom).
Generally Cloudflare is integrated as the DNS level. In most configurations that would prevent intercepting their network requests and redirecting them to a copy hosted elsewhere or on another CDN.
Pretty much every CDN works the same way or very similarly.
Being the vaccine manufacturing hub of the world since a few decades, if India did not manufacture its own vaccines it would be a shock. I don’t think that’s something unusual – if anything failure to scale up vaccine manufacturing that led to a deadly second wave is to be considered an abject failure.
I don’t get this Whataboutery? The news story and the article is about Meta - why bring Twitter or any other media into discussion, unless you want to distract from the topic at hand.
Because I have seen this bias on HN. I feel the need to call it out. Why is it bothering you? Can't I have my opinion? Or should I be forced to conform to everyone's opinion here? I'm no sheep. I have my own independent thinking and I base my opinions on that. I am infact against Big Tech censorship as a whole. What I find amusing is that Big Tech on HN gets preferential treatment based on which side of the political aisle one is on (as the Company you support or are against depends on the Company's overarching political leaning).
Well, it is an object fact though — isn't it? Twitter is an order of magnitude smaller than Meta, and Facebook / Meta / Zuckerberg have been fined and trialled an order of magnitude more times than twitter for its deeds. Whistleblowers have presented an order of magnitude more documentation and proof for Facebook's shady practices. It is only fair that it is discussed an order of magnitude more times than Twitter.
Just because you want the two to be "equally bad" doesn't make it so, and bringing up Y when the topic is X in this case is the textbook definition of whataboutery.
I think you should speak for yourself instead of for all Indians. You believing or not believing something has little effect on facts. Bullying everyone into believing your unquestioned love for the present day government is rather disenginious.
You are mostly sharing your opinion. I am not saying that you are wrong, but stating your opinion has much less weightage than stating the facts where your claims are supported by some data/references.
How do I share "facts" on somethings that are fabrications by the Opposition?
I'll attempt it: let us take the Rafale Deal accusations that was leveled against the Government of India by the Opposition Parties. They could not substantiate it with any evidence whatsoever except to claim that Modi and his Party, along with billionaire Ambani, minted billions of dollars from a defense deal which involved Government of India and the French Government in procurement of Rafale Jets (Dassault Aviation). The Opposition mounted an offensive right before the 2019 elections and even took the case to the Supreme Court of India. There, they could not substantiate any of their claims. And they took the case to the same court 3 times with various appeals. In the end, the Supreme Court got frustrated by the repeated petitions and threw out the case [2].
The reason being that the Government of India, for the first time ever, had inked the deal with the French Government directly instead of going through middlemen (which was the case with Bofors Scandal of the 90s and Augusta Westland scandal of the 2000s). Earlier Governments used middlemen to sign deals so that the monetary exchange happened through these middlemen who would give a kickback to the politicians involved in making the deal happen.
The current Government of India decided not to go through the middlemen route and instead inked a deal directly with the French Government. This obviously did not sit well with the Opposition as it lost a big source of corruption revenue (the Opposition was gunning for Lockheed Martin's F-16 (and subsequently Hybrid F-21 jet) or Eurofighter and wanted it done through middlemen). If Government had gone through this route, there would be huge kickback (to the tune of billions of dollars) that would go straight into the pockets of greedy politicians.
Now since the Government did not take that route, there was no scope for corruption anymore as everything had to be done in black and white (with the French Government having to pay the Indian Government directly which would be received by the Treasury and not some corrupt politician or middleman).
Yet the Opposition cried that there was corruption in the deal by picking clauses out of context (for example, the offset clause in the deal) or randomly accusing the Prime Minister of actually facilitating the deal on behalf of billionaire Anil Ambani. None of these accusations withstood the scrutiny of the Supreme Court of India [1]. But in 2019, it was the biggest election issue. Turned out to be a damp squib.
It's not about your laws vs my laws — I think we can objectively judge what sort of protections make sense for someone who doesn't necessarily agree with the government of the day, without going into defensive nationalism.
Sure, again, context matters. A lot of Delhi, and probably a lot more of Mumbai is just illegal construction, if you were to apply the law squarely, a large part of the cities would be rubble.
You're (perhaps rather knowingly) ignoring the nuance here.
Agreed but this is not unique to the current federal government at all. Whoever is in power at the state or national level has used this power for their benefit.
Case in point, office of a prominent Indian actor was broken by a state government which is the political rival of the government at national level, even after a high court order preventing them from doing so.
I seriously don't want to engage with whataboutry, but I'm going to reply to you with the tiniest hope that you might be willing to listen to reason.
So first, i agree with you that power structures have always taken advantage of their position to shutdown their opposition.
The reason that this has become significant enough in India for someone to take note and take action, is because of the blatant and frequent application of authority in this manner and that too targeted towards a specific community. The scale is enormous and is not showing any signs of decreasing.
If you really want to discuss with civility, don't start with an accusation. I agreed with the commenter that there is definitely political motive to these demolitions and it is definitely not right to not follow procedure even if these are illegal. My point is against this belief that this is something recent. It has been always like this, no matter who is in power. It might have increased or decreased; that I don't know without stats. I am old enough to have seen media being used to create narratives like WMD in Iraq to know not to go forward with the narrative pushing in media.
> The reason that this has become significant enough
> The scale is enormous and is not showing any signs of decreasing.
There is also a narrative in media that these communal incidents have increased recently. When I looked at data on this the last time in 2020, the crime record data pointed to much higher rates of communal violence in 80s and 90s than 2010s, so I will not be sure if it has increased or is it just fanned more in media.
I am also aware it can very well be that cases are being registered less that's why the stats seem lower.
> that too targeted towards a specific community
This is something I am concerned about though. There seems to be definitely increase in overt bigotry.
> Why would you compare violence from 1980's to 2020? You realise thats a gap of 40 years?
I said 90s too which is a gap of 20 years. I skipped 00s because I don't recall the data completely now, but I will check.
> In terms of trends in the 20th century, there's been a clear noticeable jump after the current government came in, which is what should matter.
00s had clearly more terror incidents in India than 10s. There were several major metros and big cities hit with blasts every year. So, one form of communal violence has definitely gone down. Even early half of 10s had much more of these than the latter half. There is a whole Wiki article that lists these incidents, you can have a look at that.
This assumes people vote on election manifestos, which is far from the truth, at least in India.
How many people who voted for the current government do you think would know what NRC meant when they voted? Infact, does the general mass understand it even to date?
We could all use a little drama to support our points here.