91–100 of 223 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... the UKs Tories have been a corrupt shitshow for the last decade. Germany's President Steinmeier was involved in the Murat Kurnaz mess (an Afghani dude wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo), the Chancellor in the Cum Ex tax-cheating scandal, and the opposition parties are taking lessons from Trump in rhetoric tactics. Italy's government is composed of a literal post-fascist party whose youth openly glorifies Musso…
>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.
"Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle coverage and online engagement with police killings at student protest" 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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Chhatra_League 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."
> The general secretary of Bangladesh Chhatra League Jahangirnagar University unit, Jasimuddin Manik and his followers celebrated the rape of 100th girls including at least 20 students of the university in 1998. Is it poverty that brings out the worst in people? Or something else?
A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn’t yet have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2 w…
Ideally protests should be peaceful. 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 pos…
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.
A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn’t yet have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2 w…
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?
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.)
"Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle coverage and online engagement with police killings at student protest" 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.
Headlines are usually written like this to avoid libel suits. Even if you have a defensible case it’s quite expensive to go through the motions of a lawsuit.
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.