Tunisia set to have second free election:

[applegrove]

Link to tweet

[malaise]

1. What free elections

If the people vote for who they really want. Western interests will organize and pay for the coup - ask Egypt, ask Iran, ask Latin America and the Caribbean - wait ask the US.

[applegrove]

4. Wanting democracy is something the West wants these days.

In the past they had interests or enemies to foil. Now they have trade. They don't need to own the president of a country in order to sell apple phones there.

[malaise]

5. What trade

Tariffs baby tariffs

[CurtEastPoint]

2. I know this is serious but every time I see 'free elections' I think of SNL...

"What's all this fuss I hear about flea erections?"

[Hortensis]

3. "only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia."

From what I've read, Tunisia has long been more advanced and prosperous than its neighbors, and relative prosperity no doubt helps a lot.

This is really a great thing -- please let it be an auger. The thrilling wave of new democracies in the 1990s turned into an era of destroyed democracies in the new century. Many are in grave trouble now, as populist movements around the planet work to bring them down. Usually with assistance from enemies as here in the U.S. But at the same time many places are prevailing over and rejecting the extremists, especially RW authoritarian, who are trying to drag them down into the darkness.

[malaise]

6. Read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine

Democracies cannot survive structural adjustment

[Hortensis]

7. Depends, but certainly in part. Culturally especially,

very traditionally conservative Muslim regions at least a couple centuries behind simply weren't close to ready. The eagerness of predatory business to use whatever means available to access commodities definitely didn't help, but from what I've read far more serious, yet overlapping with often some of the same people, were the same kind of archconservative movements that are working to destroy established liberal democracies here, Europe, around the planet.

My mind just took a leap to the Chinese lingerie venders in Egypt. Hardly the same thing, but! You may have read the New Yorker article, but if not it's a hoot, an eyebrow raiser, and an eye opener.

[malaise]

8. I need to look for that again

Predatory capitalism is destroying society as we know it. Now people vote for oligarchs or parties controlled by them. We have to fight for our basic human rights

[Hortensis]

9. It's called the vote. While we have it we can smash them

with one hand while doing our fingernails with the oother. Without the power of the vote, they smash us.

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealthconcentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Nancy Pelosi quoting Justice Louis Brandeis to the nation at the opening of the 116th congress.

Last century our grandparents also faced dangerously grim times, with kleptocrat classes, growing poverty, and left and right-wing extremists fomenting revolution. We're up.

[malaise]

10. I'm with you on that

but its meaning must be renewed