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Posted by fivestones 9/13/2025

Nepal picks a new prime minister on a discord server days after social media ban(www.nytimes.com)
103 points | 68 comments
michaelsshaw 9/13/2025|
https://archive.ph/G3XjL
fivestones 9/13/2025||
I thought it was super ironic that after the government of Nepal banned almost all social media platforms last week, this week the Gen Z protesters who overthrew the government used one of those platforms, discord, to choose a new prime minister.

The person they picked is 73 year old Sushila Karki, who used to be a Cheif justice of the Supreme Court until she retired at age 65, and is the only woman to have ever held that position. She is also now the first and only female to run the country. The protests that overthrew the Nepali government this past week were started to protest corruption in government, and Karki is known for being fiercely against corruption as a judge. She was sworn in on Friday. Good luck to her. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c179qne0zw0o

cadamsdotcom 9/13/2025||
I highly recommend anyone interested in these processes read “The Democratic Coup”.

It tries to explain the circumstances where a coup such as this can lead to democracy.

Key interesting example include Portugal in 1974 ... and the American Revolution against the British.

It’s happened before and it could well happen again here. My heart goes out to the protestors. May they fill the power vacuum with strong leaders who can make their country better for future generations.

londons_explore 9/13/2025||
It's unclear if interim leaders should exist at all

Wouldn't it be best for the country to be leaderless, with no laws being made and all existing government departments continuing their work under the same set of budgets and instructions as before until a new leader is selected by the election department?

qgin 9/13/2025|
Even with no new laws, most countries still have non-automatic decisions to be made just as part of the structure.
londons_explore 9/13/2025||
But I guess they shouldn't...

Ie. The goal of lawmakers should always be to, at any given point, have a set of laws such that the country will continue for as long as possible with no further laws.

Ie. Perhaps do budgets by percentage of GDP rather than fixed amounts.

griffzhowl 9/13/2025||
It's not just about making new laws, but also running the executive branch institutions such as the police, intelligence, and military. It depends on the country's constitution, but Nepal is supposed to have a civilian authority at the head of these. The alternative would be to have left all this in the hands of the military
jongjong 9/13/2025||
I'm hereby announcing my candidacy for world leader. I'll be running on a populist platform of self-enrichment. My first executive order will be to give myself access to unlimited money. Then I will use the money to acquire and/or launch tech companies and use price-gouging and predatory lending techniques to run all major corporations out of business. Then I will proclaim myself "The most cunning entrepreneur in the world" and I will write a book and give inspirational talks about how I did it all by myself without any special advantage. Then I will offer compulsory business advice to all the CEOs of the corporations (which I would have bankrupted) to explain to them that it's their fault they went bankrupt and should have worked harder.
Ylpertnodi 9/13/2025|
If you politician bastards would just stick to your promises, I'd vote for you.
grumple 9/13/2025||
A discord server with 150k people whose identity or nation of origin are not verified, where only 8000 people voted. This is as illegitimate an election as they come. Come literally just have been elected by Russian (or any other) bots.
ACCount37 9/13/2025||
You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".

Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.

schrototo 9/13/2025|||
It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.
ytch 9/13/2025|||
Military of Nepal want to make an agreement with the activists, rather than the Nepali.

Therefore activists need suggesting a representative of the groups. IMHO a private voting is fine in this case.

113 9/13/2025||
Presumably if people aren't happy about it they'll just continue to revolt.
Yeul 9/13/2025||
Just wait until you hear America picked a president because of a TV show...
hackeraccount 9/13/2025||
Would that the country were as simple as electing someone because of a TV show.
Timwi 9/13/2025|||
As did Ukraine!
mrits 9/13/2025||
A little education would go a long way here
fredoliveira 9/13/2025||
Let's be honest: he had no other credentials when he decided to run.
mrits 9/13/2025||
That has nothing to do with the original statement
banana_giraffe 9/13/2025||
Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/world/asia/nepal-protest-...

FilosofumRex 9/13/2025||
[flagged]
nature010101 9/13/2025||
resulted in about 7000 prisoners escaping jail. A lot of them surrendered and were captured but It is unsafe out here in a long long time.
kryptiskt 9/13/2025||
It's kind of ironic that a nominally communistic government doesn't believe that the people have agency to act on their own, guess it reflects their own fears. I hope Xi lies sleepless at night worrying about the Chinese people getting rid of him.
close04 9/13/2025|||
The average Chinese who’s seen China progress by leaps and bounds continuously over the past 40 years probably wants this to keep up. So why change something that’s working?

It only sucks for the people who oppose the ruling party, the dissidents, which is true under any authoritarian government. But most people just go along, this is why such governments can exist. If you grew up barely able to afford a bike and now can afford to drive modern EVs through your modern city, it’s hard to argue the appeal of having it even better.

em-bee 9/13/2025||
that is true. the chinese also value community and harmony over individuality. it is part of their culture to go along with the mainstream. it's one reason why china is able to progress so fast. because people are generally united in the countries goals. there is no opposition just for the sake of opposition. opposition would have to have a very good reason, and even then the preference is to not rattle things up. even at the family level. i have experienced that myself.

but i also believe that a revolt is china's greatest fear. not for the sake of the leadership, but for the sake of the country as a whole. because a serious revolt in china would be massive and have many casualties.

this is why china blocks outside information. the less educated older generations lack the knowledge needed to separate misinformation and fake news from the truth. which incidentally i believe is also in part the motivation for the ban in nepal.

the difference is that china was able to block access to the outside before it got hold in the population. it also was able to build alternatives, and china is large enough for the outside not to matter.

china is exploring opening up. there was talk if reducing blocks in the shanghai area. and i believe it will happen as the education of people rises and outside influences become less of a threat.

FilosofumRex 9/13/2025||||
Discord servers and its most active users were paid NGO workers of Samata Foundation and Hami Nepal, which are very well funded NGOs by The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is in turn funded by the US Congress and run by the CIA
baq 9/13/2025||
Ni hao from every Confucius Institute establishment ever. Expect such behavior from everyone everywhere, it’s basic game theory.
alephnerd 9/13/2025||||
Historically, China backed the monarchy (the royal family excluding Gyanendra never really forgave Nehru and Indira Gandhi for abolishing and then nationalizing royal property, as the Shah family continues to only marry Hindu royalty within their caste along with their historic antipathy to a monarchist Hindu Rashtra leading to the INC backing the Nepali Congress and Vanarasi-raised and ideologically Gandhian Koirala brothers) and KP Sharma Oli's Marxist communist faction, while India backed the Prachanda Path communists and the Nepali Congress (NC).

After the move to democratization, India continued to back NC and Prachanda (eg. He and his wife are/were devoted followers of BJP-aligned Baba Ramdev [0][1][2]), but KP Sharma Oli's faction continued to lean pro-China, as he and his peers started their revolutionary path during the Naxalbari uprising [3]. The monarchists (RPP) on the other hand switched to being more India leaning after Yogi Adityanath - the religious leader of the Gorakhnath Math which is heavily patronized by the royal family and Pahari Hindus from Kathmandu to Kashmir - became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Last year, the NC surprised everyone by collapsing Prachanda's government and making an alliance with KP Sharma Oli.

Based on how prominent Maoist Center (Prachanda), RSP, and RPP party workers have been during the protests and even within the discord, I am starting to suspect this was a repeat of the Rajapaksa-Siresena episode in Sri Lanka in the sense that a significant faction was used to undermine the China leaning Oli government.

Sushila Karki is viewed as fairy pro-India - the town she's from is for all intents and purposes Bihar, and she studied at the PoliSci department at Banaras Hindu University during the JP Andolan and when several future Indian political leaders were studying at BHU as well. China also hasn't congratulated her yet but the Indian government did almost immediately after the announcement. Of course, we will only find out once Karki's cabinet is announced.

[0] - https://english.khabarhub.com/2019/20/63249/

[1] - https://english.makalukhabar.com/ramdev-arrives-at-prachanda...

[2] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world/prachanda-fellow-maoist...

[3] - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b959a806-fd27-4c20-bfb3-a2...

StefanBatory 9/13/2025|||
It is. Communists are just imperialists in a red coat of paint.

They do not believe that people can act on their own, everything is a conspiracy to them. Because why you would rebel against their utopia?

Not worth arguing with them. Cast them to the dustbin of history where they belong.

seydor 9/13/2025|
i ve been waiting for democracies to go digital for ages. We should be electing mayors like that too. there s no reason for all this gatekeeping and secrecy in politics other than to enable corruption
croon 9/13/2025||
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two competing issues here:

1) You could make digital elections secure with issued digital IDs, and simply recording everyone's vote and it would be easily auditable.

But no one wants elections where (the contents of) your vote is recorded somewhere.

So 2) You use your digital ID to be able to vote once, but if you're no longer connected to your vote, it would be much more susceptible to tampering if you can't establish a double blind chain of custody of the votes, which is what expensive in person voting is doing very well.

The first option would be great if you could somehow guarantee a corruption free future of your country where no one will come after you for your vote (hint: you can't).

fivestones 9/13/2025||
Isn’t there a way to do the first option, but without attaching anyone’s votes to their digital id, except in a cryptographic way such that any individual person can look up their own vote online and verify that their vote has been counted correctly (with their own personal cryptographic key if some kind), but no one without the key can see which person made a given vote? I’m sure I remember watching a Ted talk about this years ago, but don’t remember the specific talk at the moment.

I’m sure there are other obstacles to surmount, but if that system works, you could have a digital id, use it to vote every time, and audit your own vote without anyone else knowing what you voted.

rkomorn 9/13/2025|||
Until someone with the proverbial $5 wrench shows up and tells you to unlock your last election's vote to prove you're one of the good guys?

I don't think we should ever be able to know any individual's vote.

croon 9/14/2025|||
How would you audit that all encrypted votes belong to one and only one other eligible voter?
fivestones 9/16/2025||
This is a good critique, and I’ve been wondering the same ever since watching that TED talk. Still. I’m not sure it’s much worse (or worse at all) than what we have right now, at least in the USA. Maybe I’m wrong about that though?
croon 9/19/2025||
Ballots are locked up and have detailed logs for where and who is handling them, and all critical processes have mutual verification from all (or both in reality) parties.

Ballot reconciliation ensures that every ballot printed is tracked, as well as ballots counted and ballots cast match up.

And as it is spread out over counties and districts, any injection anywhere would fail those checks.

I'm not an expert, and there is likely at lot more depth to this, but I did try to read up on it after the 2020 election and was sufficiently convinced at the time at least, but I'm happy for anyone to correct me.

mfru 9/13/2025||
because there is no safe way to vote digitally
esseph 9/13/2025||
Funny, don't you bank digitally?
Ylpertnodi 9/13/2025|||
I do, but I certainly don't consider it safe.
gus_massa 9/14/2025|||
Bank transactions are not anonymous. A big advance in elections has been the secret vote.