
Save Your Kisses For Me - yottoy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/11/save_your_kisses_for_me.html
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nagrom
This is a wonderful article that gives great historical background to the
middle eastern conflict and sets it in a very real context of the distrust of
authority that has become so much more visible in the past ten years.

But:

This is an example of where HN's policy on titles fails. The title is a great
title for the article - it's pithy, relevant and captures the sentiment of the
writer exactly.

However, on a news aggregator, the title is useless. I don't believe that
anyone would have expected to read a treatise on the codependent relationship
between the various authorities in the Middle East when reading that title. In
this case, a better title could be generated without changing too much - "Save
your kisses for me - the codependency of middle eastern authority" - that
would accurately prepare the reader (and probably get more interest.)

------
Nursie
A good read, but this stuck out -

 _"Liberals in the west look on baffled and horrified. What they thought was a
glorious revolution in the Arab world is morphing into something they don't
understand."_

Really? I'm (pretty) liberal but I watched the revolution with the knowledge
that while evil was being ousted, revolutions seldom seem to end well. The
developments in Egypt since then have, if anything, been comparatively mild.
The Military either stepped aside or were made to step aside, without coups or
mass bloodshed, and now there is an elected president that everyone is
protesting over because he's given himself insane powers.

This is not a good situation, don't get me wrong, but for (almost) two years
after a revolution? We're lucky we're not reading about massacres and mass
graves.

~~~
mercurial
At the same time, I can understand it was easy to underestimate the weight of
the Brotherhood, with medias playing on the name of El Baradei and other
secular figures. I agree with your point that it could have been a lot worse.

~~~
oostevo
I get that our propensity for wishful thinking made it easy to underestimate
the post-revolution popularity of Islamists, but their rise shouldn't have
been that much of a surprise.

In Egypt at least, the Muslim Brotherhood had a number of pretty significant
advantages compared to liberals and secularists. Whereas Mubarak basically
crushed secularist dissent, he seemed to tolerate the Muslim Brotherhood (on a
very short leash) for use as boogeymen. They were also able to organize in
mosques, which were more or less untouchable, whereas nobody else had such a
safe place to organize. Finally, the Mubarak regime was largely secularist,
which tainted other liberals by association.

The end result was that, after the revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood had a
very well-organized political network ready to go, while everyone else was
going, "Hmm ... time to form a political party. How do we do that?"

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gadders
He seems to have glossed over the Palestinian support for Nazi Germany during
WWII.

And I found this section strange:

=====

By now Hamas was dominant and its military wing was ordering repeated car
bombings of Israeli civilians.

...

But there was a nasty and dark side to what Sheikh Yassin and his fellow
Islamists were up to in Gaza in the 1980s. They got a reputation for violently
attacking anything that supported the PLO - rather than the Israelis.

=====

Apparently attacking Israeli civilians doesn't count as "nasty and dark"?

~~~
subsystem
Read the article, your quote is out of context. Hamas military wing wasn't
formed until 1992. Therefor attacks on civilians doesn't reflect their
reputation in the 1980s, which is what those paragraphs are about.

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yottoy
Although many times provocative and even manipulative I always find Adam
Curtis to be thought provoking.

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kragen
This article is brilliant. As I write this, hundreds of thousands of
protestors are protesting outside Morsy's presidential palace, according to
Twitter.

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nuje
His blog is so awesome. Mosts posts are like a mini Adam Curtis documentary /
narrative. Now if the embedded BBC videos only worked on my Nexus 7...

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whyhellothere
Adam Curtis is one of the most important documentary film thinkers of this or
any other generation. Seminal.

'The Loving Trap' (2011) is a good place to start exploring this visionaries
ground breaking work...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg>

Why is this on hacker news?

~~~
new299
I'm also not sure why it's on hacker news, but his blog post are always
wonderfully detailed and fascinating.

Perhaps this is more appropriate for hacker news though:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_%28TV_series%29)

