14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban

I don’t quite see how this is indicative of corruption

One of my college friends is a documentary filmmaker. He dragged me along as he followed a group of glaciologists up to a high-risk melt lake in the Himalayas. Somewhere above 16,000 feet I got altitude sickness and headed back to Kathmandu ahead of the group.

I got stuck in the city for two or three days waiting for my flight, under the supervision of the team's local fixer. This guy had his finger in every pie: tourism, automobile importing, etc. I wound up at lunch with him because his assistant wasn't available to play tour guide.

Edit: I'll add that I got lucky getting sick. Shortly after my flight out a large earthquake struck, stranding the rest of the group in the Khumbu for nearly a week.

It's not terribly unusual to end up with random government officials if you're a white guy going into a non-touristy part of the 3rd world. I went to a village in Paraguay, first thing locals did was take me to some government project creating an industrial cow milking operation where I was promptly offered an engineering job.

Low-level 3rd world officials love showing off whatever they're doing to whoever will listen. They usually don't have much else to do. It is best to accept their offer and drink the tea with them or whatever, get on their good side and talk about how modern their little village is, and get on their good graces.

There’s an interesting book “What is Wong with the World”, which points out that despite everyone agreeing that things are broken and people should unite to fix them, there are many competing visions for what “fixed” looks like, and this is been the source of much of the contention.

It was written in the early 1900s.

Exactly. The problems with both governments and corporations come from when individuals working for them are able to act "above the law", and get away with things that if done by a solitary, poor person would land that person in jail. In a truly just society nobody would be above the law.

That's probably a healthy way to see things. Ideally all people that are actively working to create or improve should be on the same "side" against those that are destructive. The second order conflict then becomes what the rules are, and how we guide that side. That is, I think, where most of the factionalism historically plays out. It does feel like we're regressing to fighting that first order conflict more often now though.

In reality, it may be more complicated than that though. Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.

[flagged]

Rich vs Poor is the only division, and that happens when you allow for concentrations of wealth. So I would say capitalism vs socialism is the rich vs poor division as well.

Yes, because all rules have been created for your own good, so you must follow without ever questioning them. The world is more nuanced than your silly black-and-white duality, unless it's a Twitter argument and it's all about dividing the world in convenient us-vs-them boxes.

I put that number from the lower end, but actuals are closer to $10B, if all his corruption is totaled together. Just making himself great! The key is - when he points anything at others or asks to do something for country, it is actually about himself.

For instance check this https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-...

Here is the most detailed analysis so far: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/18/the-number

You can look up the figure pretty easily but from what I’ve glanced it seems to be related to his and his son’s crypto schemes, touted through official WH channels

>WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other.

People need to start learning XMPP, cutting off of centralized services is only going to get worse.

First, Maldives.

Then, Bangladesh,

Now, Nepal.

An unstable Nepal allows the destabilization of two critical states in India.

Regime change in India is the big prize.

--

China and India do meddle.

But a classic color revolution, such as this one, is the signature of you-know-who.

About china/india: Nope. This is objectively false.

Let's leave the schizoposting out of HN

George Washington's single greatest feat was not making the office of the president just another way of saying 'king'.

A bit of brainwashing through some media owned by billionaires and there we go for another round. My parents' generation is voting en masse for a party that was literally funded by a former Waffen-SS leader after WW2, while thinking "the left" is antisemitic.

To be fair the people who care about a single nation, to the detriment of all other nations, are freaks

Hilton is their passport.

> Protests are rarely effectual

False

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].

Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)

[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...

The new tools are largely tools of surveilance and censorship, etc.

Essentially they are tools that affect democratic coordination more so than fighting. If you can still coordinate despite them, then the amtal rule applies.

Lucky you! Taiwan is such a great place, I hope it will thrive in spite of its bullies.

> US has definitely loosened some of the free speech restrictions

Press, academic and political speech freedoms are at a generational low point in America.

The President has never before had the power to directly police academic speech and the media’s coverage of him. MAGA voters have no idea the power they’ve given the Presidency, which could be used in the future by a Democrat President to literally just cut funding and pull licenses for people who say stuff the left doesn’t like. (On the other hand, we can put the J6’ers in a foreign prison for a few months, mothball the antivax movement and maybe dismantle the coal plants.)

What exactly are you referring to, reduced political correctness demands?

On the other hand, you have the government meddling with the political alignment of educational institutions, which is both new and alarming (e.g. the Harvard thing).

Domestic use of military is another really bad precedent from a "freedom" point of view, so I think the current administration is significantly net-negative so far.

Demonstrably false. The press is being actively extorted by the government in an effort to dictate their coverage. Our academic system is being eviscerated by the government in part to undermine dissent against the Israeli war. Corporations are being punished by the government for efforts to develop inclusive workplaces.

Please provide an example?

Not even close. Sure, the cancel-culture of the left twitter-verse has weakened, but that was not a government enforced restriction. Meanwhile, the current administration is literally removing signage and museum exhibits which offend their sensibilities. They are removing funding from institutions, kicking people out of the country, and manufacturing 'investigations' into anybody who opposes them. They took over the damn Kennedy Center for honoring people they don't like. You've lost all manner of sense thinking this is improving free-speech. Listen to the tech bros and any other official sitting at the white house glazing the president to his face and tell me that's due to increased free-speech.

I'm sorry, what?

There are billboards covering my local highway reminding me daily that I'm a racist antisemite because I don't support Israel's imperial occupation, political manipilation and wholesale genocide of Palestine civilians.

People in other cities who voice this same concern are getting kidnapped or become the subject of targeted harassment campaigns that include vans rolling around with the names and faces of dissenters hoping to inspire local stochastic terrorists to commit violence against them.

The federal government put out a memo attempting to ban government employees from using words such as "Black", "female", " marginalized ", "equality", "climate crisis", "sex", "victim" and more in their communications. [0]

Free speech is already dead, and is being held up in public like a puppet, brought out and paraded around when it serves the administration and then locked back in the basement when the day is over.

[0] https://archive.is/DL9dV

all that from one comment, huh?

Agreed but if the right doesn't exist on paper it's not likely the government is going to respect it in practice. Although there are exceptions (most Somalia has de facto right to bear arms despite it being super illegal).

The Chinese, North Korean, and old USSR constitutions all contain(ed) strong language "guaranteeing" universal freedom of speech.

It's a bit like that Game of Thrones scene where Sean Bean brings a slip of paper into the throne room.

Appreciate the analysis. Do you think this is the status quo continuing in Nepal, or is the human right situation degrading?

> That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.

So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.

That's a huge leap from directly instigating genocide that actually happened to "We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens." which is severe censorship of all sorts of political ideas, including ones which we already enact and most people agree with. There's a lot of widely-accepted government-enforced inequality (foreigners, prisoners, convicts, children, inherited rights, etc.) which just shows how overly broad the restrictions you say we must impose are. Even yourself saying that could be interpreted as a violation of your own rule! You also advocated for restraining orders! You're your own enemy. Your opinion could really benefit from some back and forth with other people to refine it into something more sensible. Hopefully I'm contributing a little to that.

> long periods of political instability make people quite happy to trade freedoms for peace

To be fair, the Romans traded long periods of recurring civil wars for peace. We’re nowhere close to that in America.

It’s also irrefutable fact that pro-state or pro-cop agitators throughout history will pretend to be a demonstrator and throw a single brick to give the cops an excuse to break some skulls

What the protestors did sure, their motive, the state's response wildly different. I'd say more but why bring the US into the discussion.

Of course the answer is that people cheer for protests they like and punish riots they don’t. This is politics and that’s why there is so much fighting about how news and history chooses to frame them. The headline we have received today is telling me it’s a good protest.

> it’s literally a war crime to use tear gas on the battlefield

Chemical weapons are banned because they’re useless for a modern military [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Social media has proven to be quite an effective tool for mobilizing protests and beyond. I get how the short-sighted might see it as a tactical move to "cripple logistics" by banning social media.

But, the reason I call it short-sighted is exactly what you said: Removing those earlier pressure-release valves doesn’t solve the underlying issue at all and just increases the risk of a more volatile outcome.

> “No movement of people, demonstration, meeting, gathering or sit-in will be allowed in the restricted zone,” Chief District Officer Chhabi Lal Rijal said in a notice.

This is what I'll never understand about neolib governments sliding towards authoritarianism: why push back so hard? Evacuate the parliamentary buildings, don't meet the protestors with police, and let them have the run of the place. Record every face on CCTV, and then spend the next couple months vanishing them. The USSR understood this and it's that kind of forward-thinking that lets the likes of Putin maintain authority all the way from his career as a KGB agent through to now.

These governments responding to protests with tear gas and batons fail not only at effective authoritarianism, but also at being good liberal democracies where people can safely protest - which is possible, Taiwan has had two record sized protests in my life and at neither of them did the police advance with batons and beat the shit out of people.

[dead]

> And who has the last word on what's moral?

The standard assumption in business is that you follow local laws and customs as they are a proxy for the moral system of the local people.

Are you operating a business or promoting western ideas?

Of course they log in, I never said otherwise, but only if they want to write about stuff that is pretty much inconsequential to their lives, such as sports or celebrity culture.

News to me that the French, for example, trust their government and do not protest.

Hey, Belgian here. Our government cannot just de-bank, de-pension or de- anything else you are suggesting, and definitely not by the "crime" of protesting (what a ridiculous statement!)

We protest here too by the way, this weekend about 100k in Brussels.

That you make these claims is just plain up ridiculous.

> Because people in the West have been indoctrinated to trust their governments far too much to an unhealthy degree

Can you give specific examples?

I frequently find the US outlook to be exactly the reverse, where people pretend like "the government" is some conspiratorial shadow organisation undermining all the citizens at every step (which seems quite silly to me because it basically consists only of people that you directly or indirectly voted for).

My view is that if you have incompetent, selfish administrators in a western democracy, then just don't vote for them next time; if they keep getting elected, then maybe your countries actual problem are the idiot voters instead (or possibly not-actually-independent mass media, the importance of which can not be overstated).

>>the UK also bans threats to people who aren't the president

It also bans non-specific jokey threats and arrests you with five armed police officers.

The difference is, you can trust an EU country isn't filing a claim to put down a color revolution or that you can appeal via the judiciary.

A hybrid regime like Nepal is not like that.

Nepali here. In this context, a jholey is a party foot soldier. An unquestioning party worker who would literally carry their leader's bag, follow them everywhere, and do any menial task in hopes of gaining political favor.

My understanding is a jholey is a sycophant who does not have their own political principles but are "carrying the bag" for someone else. Closer to paid thugs than idealistic activists. Might want to consider a different phone a friend.