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Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh

Image is of vehicles set aflame by protestors near a government building.

Since July 1st, students have protested the unpopular proposal in which 30% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans of the 1971 War of Independence and their relatives. In a country with a youth unemployment rate of around 20% and a population of 170 million, a large number of otherwise eligible and competent people would have been forced out due to favouritism for veterans. As with basically every country on the planet over the last couple years, Bangladesh is suffering from inflation and an increasing cost-of-living, further exacerbating tensions.

The student protests have been met with significant violence by the government - local newspapers report that over a hundred protestors have been killed, and thousands have been injured. Guns and tear gas have been used. Additionally, the government has completely cut internet access throughout Bangladesh to prevent organizing, which has had some success in dividing protestors, but has also only further angered various parts of the country due to the massive impact to Bangladesh's online industries and various startups. And a national curfew has been in place to limit movement, with the population told to remain home if they want to be safe.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh relented, stating that now, only 5% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans and their families. 2% would be allocated to members of minorities, with the remaining 93% distributed on merit. A period of tentative calm has arrived, but Hasnat Abdullah, a coordinator of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, has stated that unless the government restores the internet, removes the curfew, releases detainees, and forces certain ministers to resign within a few days, then the protests will resume.

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Bangladesh! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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1.7K comments

  • Seeing how the chattering classes' coronation of Genocide Joe's handpicked successor has led to her apparently being successful in the polls has made me wonder whether the predominant analysis of her viability has been lacking.

    Before everybody with access to mass media decided that she was going to be the champion of the democrat faction of the state party, people here were dismissive on her chances of winning, pointing out how unrelatable and awkward she is and how embarrassingly unpopular her primary campaign was. All of this is still true but it doesn't seem to matter, she has lots of things going for her. She is not another racist old white man, despite being part of the inner circle for all of Genocide Joe's regime she has been assigned the "fresh face" role meaning that she gets none of the blame for the mismanagement and broken promises and she is neither Genocide Joe or Donald Trump. Even the anti-genocide voices seem to have been dampened by her saying some disingenuous and uncommitting niceties about Palestine and doing some political theatre around Zyklon Bibi's performance.

    To me it seems like the individual merits of a bourgeois politician has less to do with their success than one would otherwise assume and that a weak candidate can be carried across the finishing line by media consensus. A similar thing happened with the appointment of Genocide Joe himself in 2020 who went from being a low-energy loser to bring handed the candidacy after the democrat elite formed a consensus around him.

    Examples like these suggest the existence of a powerful political machine with the ability to manufacture consent very effectively on a large scale. If the powers that be decides that people should be enthusiastic for Kamala Harris, people will be that. If they decide that nobody should care about Genocide Joe being demented, nobody will care, if they flip and decide that people should start caring about it they will.

    This raises the question of how the left is going to engage with that machine. Obviously liberal Electoralism is insufficient and nobody on the left has the means to do a protracted people's war but.

    • The truth is, Biden was just a historically awful candidate. We don't even need Marxist clairvoyance to see this. Biden has been a figure in national politics for FIFTY YEARS, first being elected to the US Senate in 1972. He has been an obsequious corporate servant and a bulwark against progress the entire time. Thirty eight years in the Senate, plus twelve in the White House is enough time to comprehensively impact the body politic. This man has made a negative impact on every corner and crevice of American life. He is the Forrest Gump of nearly every odious US policy, both foreign and domestic. In our acutely gerontocratic government, there are still few figures who compare.

      The real media coup took place four years ago, when we had a competitive primary election and the candidate running on Medicare for All in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic get sidelined for an absolute fucking barnacle who was ALREADY exhibiting the signs of cognitive decline. A man so incapable of reading the room that he suggested the police shoot people in the legs during the largest uprising against police brutality in US history. The existential dread of Trump's reelection was enough to force people to accept this, but the implication was that this was an emergency measure. That deep cutting reforms could not be avoided indefinitely. Compared to the counterinsurgency deployed in 2020, what we are seeing this time around is fairly tame.

      Trump's leadership is now four years in the rear view mirror. Things haven't gotten discernibly better. The pandemic went away because we stopped testing and abandoned all protocols. Inflation (driven primarily by unpunished price-scalping) has stung. The cops have only gained more power. The corrupt gangsters Trump staffed his administration with have been replaced by cold blooded, dead eyed ideologues of US imperialism, paired with the most unconvincing spokespeople imaginable. Biden's greatest policy accomplishments are infrastructure funding bills with no direct impact on the working class, which allegedly will make climate change one percent less deadly but still totally deadly 20 years down the road, and it was abundantly evident that any deep-cutting reforms were off the table for at least another four years.

      I am surprised they didn't smother this fucking guy with a pillow. Kamala is a completely unremarkable figure. Average democrat with a slimy record, but typical. She is not burdened by 50 years of skeletons. She is a known quantity only in California, and has been cloistered from the media nearly her whole time in the federal government, aside from her flash in the pan as a presidential candidate. People don't personally associate her with their misfortune they way they do figures like Biden, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons. Not yet, anyway.

    • IMO it's a coin toss between Trump and Harris. It's just like 2016 except Harris is a better version of Clinton while 2024 Trump is much worse than 2016 Trump. Trump was terrible in the debate, but since he was up against a decomposing corpse, he looked good by virtue of being able to speak in complete sentences. I think the debate between Trump and Harris will be completely inconclusive like the vast majority of presidential debates with both camps thinking their team won. The Trump vs Biden debate was truly exceptional for having a very obvious winner and loser.

      • It's just like 2016 except Harris is a better version of Clinton while 2024 Trump is much worse than 2016 Trump.

        It's pretty interesting because Clinton failed partially due to bad name recognition, while Biden succeeded partially due to good name recognition (VP to Obama, AKA liberal Jesus). Whereas Harris has, as far as I'm aware, little name recognition outside of California; she wasn't even part of the 2020 primary when it really began. But she definitely has the anti-Trump vibe around her even more so than Biden, as they're visibly opposites in a few ways whereas both Biden and Trump are white old men. Will that be enough? Time will tell.

        It certainly seems like Trump lost whatever edge he possessed in 2016 - that desire by people to punish the politicians in charge of them by protest voting a clown to the presidency, although many ended up believing in their own lies about that clown. 2020's result suggested that lack of interest in another Trump presidency, though he did gain voters partially due to mail-in voting. He's not nearly as subversive now. He's a known quantity. That being said, while he is weaker in that respect, things do also suck more than they did in 2016. Economic issues present back then have only ripened, and new ones, like inflation, have taken their toll. Hell, maybe we'll get another big economic disaster between now and then, though I imagine the US is quietly nudging Israel to not do anything drastic until November to prevent a war in the Middle East which could drive up energy/gas prices if shit really hits the fan. The Israeli strike on Yemen was not in the US's best interests, therefore.

    • It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.

      • Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics (1961)

    • We'll see where she's at come election time or a few years afterwards. Dems are honeymooning rn.

    • a) little brave dsa route: primary dems, and then throw elections as spoilers if they don’t play along, throw your candidates immediately from deviating from some set of core policies. Socdem way

      b) anarchist-nihilist route: wide spread slow campaign of terror for 50 years (with significant downsides, obviously, due to crackdowns, but those seemingly happen anyway). Worked in spain, russia and ireland, and not anywhere else

      c) maximizing utility value for an average small business-owned worker by impersonating business owners, and increasing economic potential

      ansyn route. Like make a delivery app for society of independent delivery drivers, explicitly non-profit, etc.

      d) waiting for capitalist exploitation calculus to implode (with huge unknowns of Africa/India situation as manufacturing hubs) (current timeline is like 2050-70), promoting competition and anti-trust is good here

      e) catastrophe via climate change/pandemic with natural/manmade virus (I still think people don’t realize how close are we for one person to be able to make designer virus with a pc, some chemicals and aliexpress parts, maybe that’s my paranoia)

      f) building orgs from scratch whose goal is not electoralism, like sra, but leisure and community ties (spd before shittification), and some awareness spreading there. “Churches” for working class so to say

      You don’t engage with a machine that’s designed to not do anything you want, I don’t go to vending machine to get surgery. The purpose of system is what it does and things of that nature

    • A slight bump in polls immediately after becoming candidate with a blitz of media fawning doesn’t indicate much. She’s still an incredibly weak candidate and this could easily be some of her best polling for the entire campaign.

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