[Foofoobar12345]

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 weeks of poor internet for everyone.

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.

[TulliusCicero]

> Ideally protests should be peaceful.

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.

[Foofoobar12345]

It’s easy to encourage this when there’s nothing at stake. I personally have friends and family who are trapped and fear violent protestors as much as violent police.

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.

[TulliusCicero]

Well obviously violence against random civilians is not justified, the target should be the state, especially leaders and security forces.

[Foofoobar12345]

In most of these movements that discipline isn’t maintained. What do you think happens when thousands of students, many of whom are discovering a city the first time in their lives, suddenly realize they can set grand things on fire?

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

[t_mahmood]

Your comment about students is absolutely unfair, and wrong.

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...

[t_mahmood]

Can confidently say, all the previous student protests, along with this one, students have never been the violent one.

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.

[lostlogin]

Where is the line? Who people support and who a company supports all becomes relevant in a civil war.

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

[Foofoobar12345]

It’s tanks vs sticks, the govt will prevail. In a few days we’ll all forget about this.

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 :)

[rubayeet]

You are missing the point. It may look like protests are about having a fair shot at getting government jobs on the surface but it is more than that:

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.

[ridiculous_leke]

> 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.

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.

[Rinzler89]

Even if you have evidence against the state, do you think all those in power will just step down peacefully without a fight? No, they'll still send the military and law enforcement out to bash your skull in or arest you.

[yupyupyups]

>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.

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?

[t_mahmood]

Students didn't burn the buildings, nor any other hostile power. As the hostile power already have their puppet installed. Only building they might've burnt is the Government sponsored, tv office.

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

[__green_pixel__]

The protest WAS peaceful until one protester was killed by the Police for no reason.

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.

[Foofoobar12345]

I’m not blaming anyone for anything. I’m saying buildings were set on fire.

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.

[AlexeyBelov]

> The protest WAS peaceful until one protester was killed by the Police for no reason.

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.

[t_mahmood]

Keep in mind, in Bangladesh, no newspaper can say anything more than the government allows them to. And each newspaper reported the protest to be peaceful.

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

[ridiculous_leke]

South Asia is a messy place. Governments do have a terrible human rights record but these governments are democratically elected and are clearly a representation of the general sentiment.

[anigbrowl]

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 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.

[Foofoobar12345]

Both sides of the political spectrum are authoritarian. Each dominant party will do whatever in their power to hold onto it.

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.

[anigbrowl]

You can equally argue the government is not mature enough to recognize the validity of their protest and is violently oppressing them, leading to predictable further violence. If the government are so well-informed and wise in the ways of the world, why are they engaged on such a self-destructive course?

[t_mahmood]

Seeing the pictures of so called burnt "data center", I would say it was definitely not the students. But hey, it's their (government 's) game, and they can twist it around as they like.

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...