I feel like your story is really missing some details.

This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent people very fast by the way.

The ruling party seems to be allied with a student paramilitary to help act as their enforcers.

"Chhatra League distributes dormitory seats at Chittagong University instead of authorities. Only those who join Chhatra League after being enrolled, get the chance to stay in the residential halls."

It's the student wing.

In South Asia, all party student wings are basically paramilitaries and gangs.

I have a thesis musting somewhere in Cambridge MA about this parallel.

When I googled “2020 summer of love riots” in the first results are the Wikipedia page and an article from the heritage foundation that both probably give you an idea

Interesting- that's how it is in Nigeria, another former British colony:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confraternities_in_Nigeria

Though those sound more like militarized cults, while the South Asian ones are more like student orgs of political parties that have street militias.

Is it poverty that brings out the worst in people? Or something else?

If it was really a response to Saudi Arabia on the verge of signing a peace agreement with Israel, what would that say about the unfortunate aggressors?

Before we crow too hard over other countries' inept leaders, we should all look at the leaders in whatever nation we are from. I know here in the US, we can take one look at our own presidential candidates. (Or heck, even our vice presidential candidates.) Take a gander around the congress, or the statehouses, or the governors, or the supreme court. We have our own crisis of ineptitude running a nation into the ground. We should probably try to put that fire out first.

No matter where you look, corruption and unpunished scandals galore in the West. And the general public doesn't care.

The general public doesn't care about corruption if it doesn't affect them directly and if their basic needs are met. As long as the valuation of their housing keeps going up and so is their pension, they don't care what corrupt shit those in power are doing. It's the "fuck you I got mine" human mentality.

I would argue that it is more of learned helplessness.

My experience from 35 years of democracy in my country is that either you vote for corrupt old crooks, or you vote for outsider rebels who promise to uproot corruption only to become corrupt crooks themselves once they got to the levers of power.

Once you witness the same process iterating itself five or six times, you start regarding corruption as approximately as inevitable as aging or bad weather.

Yeah, the US presidential candidates are either an old senile man and an old xenofobic liar, either not great options, but none of them have run the country into the ground no matter how shit they are. I mean Trump spews complete nonsense and Biden can barely string a coherent sentence together or remember what he said 30 seconds ago, let alone run a country and yet the US seems to be doing fine.

Part of me thinks that the US still functions so well no matter the president or political situation is that F500 actually run the US and the president is just for show kind of like the monarchies in some European countries.

There's just no explicit quota system like in Bangladesh, but everything is done in the shadows under the table, and the economy and freedom is good enough that people won't bother revolting over it (again), but everyone knows it's happening. I think it's similar all over the Balkans, Former Yugoslav and former USSR countries.

It's still very much developing imo.

In 10-15 it will become a developed country but right now it isn't.

I am a big Romania booster though so I'm not trying to put it down

[0] - https://insse.ro/cms/en/content/household-income-and-expendi...

>average household income is still below $6,000/yr

WAHT?! That smells like bullshit. Average NET monthly salary in Romania is around 1000 Euros[1] now meaning roughly 12000/year.

Did you check your link you posted? According to that average household income in Romania is 1334 Euros per month or 1600 Euros per year. Where the hell did you get 6000 USD/year? Did you ask a hallucinating LLM and didn't bother to fact check it? Romania is poor but is not that poor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

There absolutely is nepotism in the political sphere in every political system - but that's not what students are opposed about alone.

Basically, every government job (teacher, doctor, tax collector, bureaucrat, bus driver, etc), government funded service (college, hospital, etc), and PSU (eg. govt owned banks, energy companies, factories) will have a quota in favor of those who are the descendants of martyrs from the 1971 Liberation War.

It's the equivalent of party apparatchiks and elite in Ceceascu era Romania who had the pick of the litter for high paying civil service and public sector jobs.

This does not happen in developed countries, and in situations where biased hiring is found, you have a slam dunk corruption case.

There's a reason Leyen became a party politician and not a nameless civil servant.

> Where the hell did you get 6000 USD/year

From the Romanian government press release I linked - "The total monthly average income*) was, in nominal terms, 6634 lei per household and 2648 lei per person in quarter IV 2022."

Multiply that number by 4 (because it's quarters not month) and that the yearly average income.

Edit:

Good catch - I misread the data. Average income PER PERSON is around $6,000. Average HOUSEHOLD is around $12,000.

I still stand by my assertion though, because Mexico's average household income is around $12,000-15,000.

Can't reply to you OP (I think the flame war detector got a false positive) but yea you are right that the numbers I gave were wrong so I've added edit comments.

I don't use LLMs btw. I inherently distrust them. I just have these numbers imprinted in my mind because I have no life.

Yeah it does.

>and in situations where biased hiring is found, you have a slam dunk corruption case.

Except when you don't because that's what corruption does. Should I start listing every major German and Austrian corruption scandal where nobody got punished off the top of my head?

>From the Romanian government press release I linked - The total monthly average income) was, in nominal terms, 6634 lei per household and 2648 lei per person in quarter IV 2022.*

That's not at all what that document says. It explicitly and clearly says those numbers are for monthly wages with info gathered in a quarter. Are you using a LLM for this? Because you're wrong, I show you that you're wrong, yet keep doubling down on your mistakes. Check other sources too and you'll see.

I edited my response to take your VALID critiques into account. I appreciate it - we need to keep all of us internet commentators honest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide

> Pakistan's imams declared Bengali Hindu women to be "war booty”;[11][12] and Pakistani fatwa were issued legitimizing Bengali Hindu women as spoils of war.[12][13] Women who were targeted often died in Pakistani captivity or committed suicide, while others fled to India.

This is based on a non-contextual reading of Quran 4:24, Quran 8:69, Quran 23:5-6:, Quran 33:50 and various hadiths, which continue to be taken literally (when it is convenient to do so) by belligerents, hundreds of years after they were written. I refuse to cite them here because they are offensive to humanitarian/modern ethical worldviews (and because I do not wish to play a game of moral relativism).

An Nisa (the women) - https://quran.com/4, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa. In dowry and inheritance matters it’s actually quite advanced for its age.

Al Anfal (the spoils of war) - https://quran.com/8, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal. These are, of course, orthogonal to our moral values but not more depraved than bounty customs employed hundreds of years afterwards.

Prophet Mohammed himself took one fifth of the spoils, including taking women as wives, eg see Safiyya bint Huyayy, who was his tenth wife after her tribe was killed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiyya_bint_Huyayy).

I’m missing your point about adhering to these “when it’s convenient”. This was standard practice for Muslim armies for hundreds of years afterwards (of course others did the same).

I’m just surprised nobody is talking about the reason the government claims it has limited access to information: preventing disinformation.

Not a single person here has commented about disinformation, but it is the single most applicable part of this article for Americans.

Preventing the spread of disinformation has been the supposed in the last decade reason for the largest censorship campaigns our nation has ever seen.

The war happened in 1971. To get public job and avail the quota, it must be their 3rd or 4th generation now. Which is plain unfair.

But it’s not about that, the gov loyalists and their goons fake these veteran certificates to land these jobs. Bangladesh is one of the most corrupted countries in the world after all. So real veteran relatives are seldom the beneficiary.

These students just wanted to reform this system. But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.) This was completely unprovoked and unnecessary. Basically any forms of dissent have been dealt with this way since 2009. No one can criticize or protest the big brother.

We have a dictatorship since 2009. People are angry - due to corruption, inflation, joblessness and tyranny. This is just some outburst of it.

When you see the videos how the police are killing teenagers and university students in the road - our future generation - no one can tolerate this.

Now the fascist gov has closed all internet and phone connection to outside world. I can't contact my family anymore. I don't know their well being.

There is of course more to it. But this is the summary.

I agree that Sheikh Hasina is extremely authoritarian and corrupt dictator but imo JeI are the actual fascists, and the BNP has absolutely been enabling them.

That said, I agree with you that Hasina's authoritarianism needs to end.

Ideally all these old fossils (Hasina, Zia, Rahman, etc) need to be purged and the actual youth (who are the majority of Bangladesh) get a chance to have their voice in power.

It's a handful of elite 70 year olds who have been running a country where the median age is 25 and are ruining it due to their own personal drama from the 70s and 80s.

Revolutions turn into civil wars.

We forget but this is the sad reality.

This doesn't mean the students in Gulistan Maidan are wrong, but "Allah, Suriya, y Bashar" and the converse means a 15 year civil war like in Syria or 15 miles away from Chittagong in Myanmar (aka Asian Syria/Libya)

Khuda ki kasm - please walk off this brink Bangladesh (if someone Hasina adjacent is reading).

Same is the case in Pakistan. Every prime minister since 1988 was born in the 40s or early 50s [3]. India's PMs have, on the other hand, been from even an older generation [4].

This post-independence generation captured all the political power in their 40s, and refuse to give it up 40 years later. Is it not reasonable to demand that the PM and Cabinet today are largely in their 40s?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Hasina

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Ban...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Pak...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Ind...

If people wanted younger leaders they would have voted for them.

A revolution because you lost at the ballot box is ridiculous.

It’s not comparable to Pakistan where not a single Prime Minister has ever completed a full term and the country has been led explicitly by the military for decades and implicitly by the military for its entire existence.

[citation needed]

> The Awami League, led by incumbent Sheikh Hasina, won the election for the fourth consecutive time with less than 40% of the eligible voters voting according to an Election Commission, which is run by the ruling political party.[5][2][6][7] The party won 224 seats while independent candidates, most of whom were Awami League members propped up as dummy candidates to give a semblance of competition, won 62 seats.

You can click back to the last few elections on wiki, and see how much evidence there is of unfree/rigged elections in Bangladesh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Bangladeshi_general_elect...

I think I can guess why the comment is controversial. Some may have taken it as an authoritarianism apology, which isn't the intention. It's rather a reminder that things are more complex than just rooting for what intuitively feels right, because the average Westerners has little understanding of how such countries work. Since my point is the average citizen doesn't even sufficiently understand, and surely you will agree you understand less about Bangladesh than a student who grew up there.

There are many such examples. Taking out Gaddafi has not proven to be positive for Libya. Sometimes the "old witch" is actually the lesser evil. I'm talking strictly about politics in terms of practical reality, not what we wish were true. Of course we all root for the people to win and then they live happily ever after.

Source: Wikipedia

This sounds like the very definition of fascism to me.

The Awami League is ideologically a center-left party, it's not far right. The quota system that's being protested offers employment quotas to descendants of revolutionaries and minorities. It was the party that founded Bangladesh. Protests are occurring because of the corruption and joblessness that results from these quotas and because the law was overturned earlier but reinstated.

Moreover there's no belief in a natural social hierarchy or belief in subordination to the State. If anything the Awami League has historically claimed to champion minorities in the country like Hindus instead of championing Muslim identities like JeI. There's no concept of regimemting society at all by the Awami League, again that's more JeI's domain with its belief in Sharia.

Awami League is authoritarian and corrupt yes but not fascist. The Middle East has plenty of authoritarian dictatorships that engage in varying levels of human rights abuses but that does not make them fascist countries.

I'm sorry but your comment just comes off as really uniformed about Bdesh and South Asian politics.

It's an especially bad lens when you look outside the West because the second and third world has had plenty of trouble with left authoritarian regimes and comparatively less trouble with fascism and authoritarian right regimes.

If you're part of the minority Hindu and Christian community in Bangladesh you support Hasina, because the opposition made a coalition deal with hard-core Islamists (JeI) who are supporting the gold digger wife of the former (1980s) Military Dictator who was a puppet (like every other politician in Bangladesh sadly)

This does NOT mean Hasina is good.

Anything but.

Authoritarian quasi-secularism means the only organized opposition is fundamentalist, like in Central Asia like Tajikia, Uzbekia, Kyrgyzia, Afghanistan, Parts of Pakistan, etc, or the India my parents grew up in during the 1980s.

Sheikh Hasina (literally) based her public persona on Indira Gandhi. All the Desis on HN know what that implies.

Sheikh Hasina is a left-leaning autocratic. She protects the Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist minority, but her authoritarianism against the religious Islamic community of Bangladesh (plus Khalida Zia's and moreso Shaibur Rahman's Pakistani funded bullshit) means the only organized opposition are non-secular.

As a Koshur-Hindu American, Hasina (and her enabler across the border) are playing with fire.

Bangladesh has strong institutions , diaspora, and economic relations (most factories in WB moved to BD because of bad policies and the FTA). Hasina is squandering them because of her childhood traumas.

Please please please become a Indonesia instead of a Myanmar

A simple example would be hundreds of years of authoritarian monarchies and theocracies.

I prefer the "Palingenetic Ultranationalism" definition [0], where fascism is largely distinguished by what myths and stories people are using seize and retain power.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalis...

fake news

If Bangladesh is the "Middle East" then so is Burma/Myanmar and Thailand (which is at most 200 miles from the Bangladesh border)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittlerer_Osten

Btw we say "Near East" in English too and it's vaguely defined but it usually includes Israel. But I don't think it's wrong to say that Israel is in the "Middle East" too - the two terms overlap somewhat.

The challenge of escalating partisanship is self-reïnforcing polarisation. The worse the leadership, the worse the opposition.

The operant question, thus, is not who is good but who is less evil, in the hope that this ratchet, a few times turned, yields goodness.

Politics in developing countries is a business, not ideological.

Ain't no good guys - only bad guys.

Everyone's in on making enough out of the grift to emigrate to the US or the UK (just like Sheikh Hasina and her opponent Khalida Zia's children)

What a joke! Imperialism flourished due to corporates being allowed to own their own private armies. The US is the best example of a country that exists for, and is run by corporates - and that happened because the older European powers clamped down on corporates, and they fled to the US.

This comment is a lot of nonsense, but this takes the cake. America has always had more powerful private interests than Europe.

It's kinda tough following Desi politics tbh - you want to be honest about ideals, but the reality is everyone in the home country is "Chust".

Idk, if Sheikh Hasina was a LKY or even a Park Cheung He then the protests seen the past week wouldn't have happened.

I guess the BAP is now facing the Zhao question (or Indira in Tughlabad Distict in 1976) - to shoot or not shoot. Either way India, China, Russia, and the Gulf will continue to give her and the BAP sanction relief because she's built strong relations with everyone.

I'm not Muslim so I automatically lean more towards Hasina (Zia's enabling of the JeI is a dealbreaker and would automatically result in a civil war or even Indian intervention if she became PM), but if she decided to remain quasi-democratic she cannot find a middle ground. Either she becomes a full blown authoritarian or she has to cede power. A Hybrid Regime is inherently unstable.

Really? Are you going to totally ignore that it is those very 25+ years old that gave the current premiere of Bangladesh her massive majority? (See also https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/88356/why-are-m... ).

> That said, I agree with you that Hasina's authoritarianism needs to end. ...

Beware of what you wish for! It's all nice and easy to harp at "undemocratic" and "authoritarianism". But understand the political context and history of Bangladesh before passing such blanket judgement. The reality of Bangladesh politics is:

1. Political violence is a fact there - Mrs. Hasina's father, a hugely popular leader, was assassinated and 18 members of her family, including her 10-year-old brother, and relatives were massacred. She had to seek refuge abroad to survive.

2. Bangladesh has also seen many military coups.

3. Some opposition parties of Bangladesh are backed by the military.

4. Some of the opposition lean towards religious fundamentalism and, as you pointed out, also associate with extremist groups.

5. Foreign powers - USA (and other western countries acting in cohort with the US), China and India - often interfere in Bangladesh's internal affairs.

(Source: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/80654/ )

Being a young democracy, amidst such a political environment necessarily requires an authoritarian streak in a politician to survive and to nurture a secular democracy. As an indian, I genuinely admire her commitment to create a democracy in an Islamic republic that is easily prone to religious fundamentalism and sectarianism - sometimes she reminds me of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who did the same with Turkiye. (Remember that Bangladesh is one of the few islamic Republics that has actually committed to democratic political values).

-----

All that said, it is very clear that the current protests were very poorly handled and will be politically damaging to her, and could be a turning point in Bangladesh politics. Whether it will be good for Bangladesh totally depends on how her government handles these protest. Even if the matter is sub-judice, and being examined by the Bangladesh Supreme Court, the government should have engaged more deeply with the protestors and anticipated the political violence.

  > But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.)

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/05/imran-khan-interview/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/10/did-us-ask-for-imra...

You are presumably an intelligent person, but you, and everyone else that could, left your home country for economic opportunities elsewhere. Now, your home country is administrated and governed by the people without the opportunity to leave and you are on the other side of the world.

I think it is extremely weird to see the people with the best opportunity to reshape their country leave and then from overseas complain about the politics in that country.

Honestly, it sounds like you want to gatekeep political discussion. Am I misunderstanding you?

Seething about the politics of the country you left behind means you have gate kept yourself already.

Again and again the most intelligent people emigrate to the West and then seethe about the politics in their home country. I get why they do it, but it is really obnoxious. One main reason why developing countries have bad politics, is because everyone intelligent is leaving for the west and the same people who, for their own economic interest have left, are then agitating from the other side of the world for political change.

In some real way, leaving your home country also means leaving behind the ability to change anything about it.

Related article for some context: https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-t...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370)

There is some similarity to the system of nobility. Although this seems to give lesser privileges but to more people compared to that.

Now what these protests reveal is that similar to the warriors of the past, these protestors are willing to risk death for these privileges. This suggests a pragmatic solution, that instead of abolishing the privilege, they could offer a path for these protestors to also be granted it. This could redirect their youthful energy and ambition into more useful avenues.

</armchair>

Because the supreme court reinstated a law that reserves a whopping 30% of all government jobs to only people with family members who fought in a war 50 years ago. As anyone could have trivially predicted, that doesn't sit well with the entire generation that's currently in school and hoping to actually, you know, get a job in the next few years.

While Europe has many circles and therefore some networks are down, because they are blue that means it's only a few that are unreachable. Europe has many, many networks.

AS 17494 AS 38592 AS 136246 AS 152304 AS 24323

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396

Depending on the results of US election, we might even see the rise of a Christian fanatic government.

I’m not liking this timeline to be honest.

Fascism is lives on xenophobia, ignorance, and inequality. It is aided by being able to control the flow of information and manipulate people's emotions.

The last several decades of attacking wealth redistribution has created the inequality, and what we've built with social media is essentially a Fascism toolkit. AI advancements are getting better and better about keeping people angry and irrational. All it takes is the backing of several smart, sociopathic wealthy people and the right figurehead; most people are more amoral than they'd admit and will go with the flow.

This isn't true on the face of it. Redistribution wouldn't be on the populist agenda if inequality didn't exist. It's like saying that anti-vax people created the disease in the first place.

That doesn't make the news though.

you mean another one. the church has been in charge for large chunk of history.

We, through naivety and greed, made the internet this way. It's not gonna get better any time soon, now that politics, social media and news keep feeding from themselves in a spiral of polarisation.

I am not familiar with that part of the world, but the relative neighbour of Bangladesh, Myanmar, has seen massive genocide and devastation thanks to hate campaigns that spread like wildfire thanks to Facebook a few years ago, while the fat cats in Silicon Valley in their ivory towers were totally oblivious first, and incapable later of dealing with it, while tens of thousand died and hundred of thousands fled as refugees.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://youtu.be/K8B0bWO9u3M?si=x2WYJ_kGoipr6WWF

Bangladesh as such has a severe lack of capital, and rebuilding all this is costly.

Ideally protests should be peaceful. But along with protestors, we tend to unleash anarchists who just want to watch the world burn.

They also have rival political parties who clearly use this situation to their advantage.

All is not what it seems. Truth is whatever you believe.

I hope for a swift restoration of law and order, followed by productive dialogue. And for the love of god, let’s not condone setting things on fire. That will destroy innocent lives and what little financial security they have built.

Other people in the thread are saying that Bangladesh is a dictatorship, and security forces are killing people for protesting.

Just to be clear, if that's the case, violence against the state is entirely justified. There is nothing morally wrong about rebelling against autocracy, in fact, it's quite a good thing.

And when the protests die down in a few days or weeks, there will be even fewer jobs. And the attacks aren’t against the state but against the people as well.

There’s certainly the core movement that is disciplined, but its very hard to control the beasts in the fringes.

The students are much more civilized than the goons and deployed police. The political wing of the party consists of uneducated street locals, or students who are not smart, and easy to manipulate, and looking for easy way to get to the top. I have worked with them, and I know their level.

And the students are the one who allows to go all the emergency vehicle peacefully. Never heard any students attacking an ambulance. Refer to safe roads movement by the students few years back.

Things go bad only when government goons gets involved. They are the beasts you are trying to make the students to be.

And link for you.

https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/dhaka/352655/when-ja...

But we civilians are more afraid of violence from the ruling party's goon. These people are coming from some remotest parts of the country, have no good education, but empowered by the government to do anything deemed necessary to stop people's movement.

Quite how this gets resolved is beyond me - the west has been quite happy to enjoy products from sweat shops, so is probably complicit.

That said, I personally believe the future of the country lies in private enterprise - not govt jobs. People in BD want these govt jobs for job security. They need to rise above that fear.

I hope more will choose the path of entrepreneurship - whether by starting an AI company or a street-side teashop - there’s demand for both.

I’ve interacted with the software engineers at my friend’s company. The country has a lot of talented coders. I consider myself a veteran programmer - I’ve cracked all interviews thus far in the valley, but I get out-coded by these young chaps who’ve not had access to electricity till they were 15 (yes, there are still villages without power).

Truly inspiring stuff. Not if only we can all stop killing each other, the future will be bright :)

1. Corruption / Nepotism - Quotas in gov jobs are exploited by the powerful to hire people in important positions who will keep them in power.

2. Violence against Peaceful Protests - The protests started peacefully until the police + the govt backed student org (who work as hired goons for the ruling party and do the dirty job cops are unable to do) started violently suppressing them.

3. A Head of State who appears to be inconsiderate - The PM referred to the protesters with a term that is _extremely_ offensive. There is a track record of this Head of State using language that is unbecoming of their station, or simply unacceptable (think MAGA but 100x worse). Power keg exploded.

No matter how much talent or coding chops you have, you can't thrive in a society where the powerful are unchecked, unaccountable, and your right to protest peacefully are met with extreme violence. Try to see the world without the lense of SV.

Only if you have evidence against the state. Otherwise the state (which always has more resources) is going to take it to the next level.

Not sure how you are blaming the massive countrywide internet outage on the protesters. It was literally announced by the government that they were shutting everything down to control the movement.

And yes we know that internet was shut by the government, but we had a day of burning overhead optical fiber that serves as the backbone for many peoples home internet connections.

My team of network engineers was brought in by some companies to try and reroute and stabilize the country’s infrastructure before the full shut down.

And when the internet is turned back on, there are the unlucky ones such as us who have to debug the remaining issues and asses the damage of a burnt central node that all ISPs connect through.

I'm inclined to believe it, but let's be honest: protesters always say that. From their point of view that's how it always is and they are never in the wrong. Statistically it's very unlikely.

The students reacted when the pm threw a attacking comment toward them, and they were still peaceful in their reaction. Then then student wing of the party started attacking and things got violent

When there's no consequences for bad authoritarian behavior, you get more of it. Your plea for law and order is (probably inadvertently) a plea for the ongoing dominance of the established order. If it's peaceful only because everyone is afraid or unable to resist, then what you have is a police state. And in authoritarian societies like that, peaceful protest doesn't make any postive difference whatsoever, while often making things noticeably worse for the protesters.

Even in places like the US/UK, nonviolent protests attract violent repression and call by some people for even more violent repression. Simply passively standing against the established order is treated by some as a license to commit violence upon the protesters.

You are right about Bangladesh having a lack of capital and the costs of rebuilding, but you're basically arguing that capital matters more than the people in society. I'm sure you would never advocate just killing off/stripping the rights of some % of the population to increase the average wealth, but that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do in practice. There's always a favored in-group (sometimes described as a 'selectorate', imbued with sufficient political power to prop up the incumbent regime in exchange for policy rewards) and a disfavored out-group (the wrong ethnicity, or the wrong idea-havers, or the wrong socioeconomic class) that gets saddled with the costs. The recipe for successful authoritarians is to strip wealth from the out-group(s) fast enough to keep the in-group happy but not so fast that the out-groups decide they have nothing to lose or that their loss rate is unacceptable, causing them to react violently against the authority structure and/or the in-group that benefits from it.

Capitalistic abundance through the satisfaction of demands by enterprise and markets is a nice idea, but it is in no way guaranteed. Very often the beneficial goods and services come with negative externalities (pollution, waste, second-order effects) that do not fall on the consumer beneficiaries. Capitalists and industrialists (who are often but not always the same) frequently avoid accounting for these; where they do acknowledge the problems, they promote changing consumer behavior to mitigate the problem, recycling being the most obvious example. Sometimes this is effective, often not. The problem is that you don't have to generate positive externalities to succeed in a capitalist system; you can have a zero- or even negative-sum strategy and still win in many situations, as long as you are good at divide-and-conquer and frustrating attempts by your detractors to coordinate against you politically/economically. This is why corporations spend so much money on lobbying lawmakers and regulators, and also why branding is such a huge industry, differentiating products as much as possible while downplaying the identity of producers to minimize the appearance of oligopoly.

That said, law and order is needed to sustain the population. The pop density of BD is incredible - imagine half the population of US crammed into the state of New York. Systems and processes were what BD out of being considered a “basket case “ as Henry Kissinger (?) once famously called it. A lot of it were built by NGOs and private parties.

Now you have these students who are protesting something valid. But they are also not mature enough to realize that if they start burning away the optical fibers and data centers, they’re destroying the systems they are using to self-organize.

And what happens once they topple the govt? Who runs their nuclear reactor and power stations? Who runs their comms?

Let’s not throw away the baby with the bathwater and try and find a more reasonable way.

And people were never afraid of the students, nor the students were destroying infrastructure.

People were helping the students. [0]

Targeting unarmed people with shotguns, is in no way justifiable, no matter how you want to sugarcoat it. Simply put you can plate and serve shit in a very classy manner, but at the end it will still remain shit.

[0]. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/dhaka/352655/when-ja...

Targeting critical infrastructure doesn't sound like purely "anarchistic" rioting to me. It sounds like something a foreign hostile power would want to happen.

It reminds me of what is happening in Ukraine at the moment, where critical infrastructure is being targeted to hurt the civilian population. But here, instead of rockets, we have goons who are paid to burn things down?

Its classic tactic employed by the government, many times over and over again. It's done by their student wing

And there are no opposition party left to do such attacks anymore, they've been systematically eradicated

The current protest is not about the quota system anymore. It is the result of the systematic breakdown of social and economic opportunities that stems from years of corruption and favouritism within every sect of the economy.

Most phones don't have a huge range in any case. So, covering a wide area with a mesh network would be very vulnerable against repression. Just take out all the nodes that you can detect. If your phone picks them up, the suspect is within line of sight probably.

Technology has very few answers to repressive regimes like this. Mostly people get afraid and refrain from using the things that might get them in jail and self police. That also breeds trust issues. The DDR regime ultimately got children to rat out their relatives. Modern repressive regimes are learning from each other as well when it comes to identifying and neutralizing pockets of resistance. The Bangladesh playbook was perfected by the Chinese, Iran, Myanmar, etc.

Usually those regimes only end when people get hungry and angry enough. As long as you keep the economy going, regimes can last a long time. And of course North Korea perfected the art of repressing a starving nation. So even that is not a show stopper.

We're not at zero risk of regressing into living under oppressive regimes like that. I live in Germany where the scars of communism and fascism are still very visible. It only takes some rogue fools to win an election to roll back the clock a century.

The other problem would be how to do the routing. The world sends the IP addresses to routers which are disconnected. Network is centralized so all the packets from country go to the router. Would have to VPN, which the whole country would have to install.

Calling things what they are instead of tortuously passive and neutral descriptions should be standard. The headline sounds like it's describing two separate things that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at the same time.

I'd love libel suits from hostile authoritarian regimes, personally. For a journalism organization, that would seem to be a badge of honor.

Something is deeply wrong if you have to essentially lie on behalf of the bad guys or risk significant financial penalties.

Mesh networks are generally slower and less reliable for large-scale data transfer as well as less secure by virtue of their distributed nature, but are more resilient in the event that natural/ social disasters take down communications infrastructure. Even janky analog radios work better.

If you figure the event is significant enough to be on the front page, isn't something about the event itself more appropriate? as opposed to a tweet about the network being down as stand-in

That seems like a good point. I hope it doesn't context-shift the comments too much (I'm in a meeting atm and don't have time to check.)

https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/25/1/89/151/Gene...

At that moment in time, Mountbatten was perhaps the personification of the Crown (and he would have known it)

Bangladesh started its journey as East Pakistan in 1947 after breaking away from India. Pakistan's political upper echelon were dominated by Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis. And it siphoned all resources and wealth of East Pakistan to West, and treated it as its colony. Bangladesh, or EP was more populous and more resources-rich. But it suffered under WP. Now, after a massive cyclone and loss of thousands of lives with millions homeless and uprooted, WP rulers did not come to aid. And, in an unrelated way, a Bengali politician was to be elected Prime Minister for whole of Pakistan. But WP elites didn't want that. In this time, WP rulers wanted to eradicate Bengali, the mother tongue of EP, the more populous fraction of population and impose Urdu. Bangladeshi people revolted taking the issues of election, cyclone, and language simultaneously. Protests started peacefully.

But WP rulers used military for genocide and massacre. Tens of thousands of women were gangraped, raped and killed. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and tortured- many students and intellectuals. Hindus were the main target, but they didn’t spare Bengali Muslims either.

So, a war of independence ensued, and rebels become victorious. India engaged in a war with Pakistan and won that war, too.

Now, there was a small but non trivial part population of EP supported the WP rulers in name of radical religion. They and their descendants are in current BD population, too. They are in political-religious org Jamat-e-Islami. Supported and allied by BNP.

So, Sheikh Hasina, the current PM, was actually popular and won elections fairly in the beginning. But, she wouldn’t concede fair seats to opponents who were often pro-Pakistan but not always. In the name of national integrity and safety.

In tandem, the ruling party became corrupt to the core, and its loyalists and cronies made bank in corruption.

There is always consensus against the ruling party and the PM. And what began as a anti-quota protest, now has become a anti-establishment movement.

The people protesting now are mostly normal people. But a significant portion are pro-Pakistan radical Islamist fundamentalist.

But the rulers want to paint all of them as being pro-Pak, fundamentalists. This is how dissent was handled for the last 15 years.

I have many friends in Bangladesh or who lived there. Now, ruler party's central policies are pro-minority. But, local partymen do perpetrate against minority. So, they have slowly become what they fought.

this should ring alarm bells for the other south asian neighbours who shared similar colonialism past.

socialist policies for the marginalized several decades ago seems to always bite back when leaders don't bring out more opportunities and instead play with the politics of handing out favourable access.

if some of these countries dream to call themselves developed in the future, they need to introspect whether you would need quotas and reservations after achieving it.