Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh
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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The bulletins site is here!
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Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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I'm on a little comment run here but fuck it.
Gotta say that we on the left have a lot to learn from the sheer impressive power that the DNC have when it comes to consolidation when the serious shit happens. Any issue on the left is debated and derailed by loser energy, while the DNC machine can just snap into overdrive mode where literally every single voice all fall in line when there is a serious lib matter. Remember how hard they consolidated for Biden pre-Super Tuesday in 2020, or how the discussion around Kamala went from "can she do it" to "I'll die for her" in literal hours in the last three days. Yeah of course we don't have the media tools for that, but it just pains me to see how hard the "ackshually" loser energy derails any leftist momentum these days, while libs all deeply know that their candidate is a loser but still delude themselves into actually fully believing.
Remember how hard they consolidated for Biden pre-Super Tuesday in 2020
I can never forget this. We nearly ran Reddit. We nearly even had r/Politics under our thumb. And it completely flipped in a matter of two days. The power of astroturf is tremendous. You assume it is happening all the time. Nobody ever shuts up about bots and shadow bans and power mods, but when this infrastructure truly gets activated, it is incredible. Like watching a tsunami.
saw it happen after Feb 24th 2022 and on October 7th too. the telltale sign of an astroturfing campaign is
- event occurs
- brief period of confusion where countervailing opinions can gain ground, before feds and corporations establish and unify their responses (usually about an hour; rarely exceeding a couple days)
- sudden, absolutely colossal wave of propaganda, using similar words and phrases to create a spreadable meme (in the classic, information sense). "unprovoked, all-out invasion of Ukraine"; "ghost of Kiev"; Ukrainian sailors telling Russians to "go fuck yourselves" "do you condemn Hamas?"; "free Gaza from Hamas"; "I support Palestinians but violence is not the way to solve this problem" etc etc etc. social media platforms unusable, resulting in retreats to safer places with good opinions and analysis (e.g. Hexbear, some scarce remaining subreddits)
- propaganda is maintained for weeks afterwards until attention gradually dissipates; population has their opinions primed by thought-terminating cliches and major effort is required to combat this. narrative firmly established.
"invasion war" was a particularly blatant one, every EU politician must use these words or be outed as a lover of Putin
Yeah it was crazy when the SMO started too. All the sudden the rules were out the window and racist dehumanizing slurs were everywhere and if you pointed out the "orc" is as bad or even worse than the n word you catch a ban.
" orc" is as bad or even worse than the n word
"N" is a derogatory name for a race that implies they are lesser than humans. An "ork" is a non human monster that is an existential threat to all mankind. It implies that they must be genocide to the last if there is to ever be peace. A "N" is still usable as a laborer but doesn't deserve any self determination. "orks" are useful for nothing but killing.
You're only saying one of the words though lol
Orc is dehumanizing and shitty, sure, but it still doesn't hit like the ol hard-ROnly one of those words gets through the filter. If I said "the 'O' word" you wouldn't know what I was talking about. While Ork didn't reach the same prominence as N that is only because the astroturfers pulled the plug on ork because it undermined the "No nazis in Ukraine" narrative.
This is such an incredibly liberal, non-materialist take. History plays no role?
We are talking about relative "badness" of racial slurs. Nobody has anything to offer but "non-materialist" takes. I've explained my position quite clearly. All you have offered is an aggressive tone and a vague argument about history. Who's acting like a liberal?
The long history of the n word being used to denigrate people is the only reason the 2 are even close. The intention behind those using "N' was always subjugation not extermination.
Hot take: Slavery is bad but genocide is worse.
It's funny. You see, not me, but a guy i know, was there, in SC, volunteering for the false king Bernie, when Clyburn kneecapped Bernie on Obama's orders and then the bourgeoisie Reek'ed Bernard within a fort night. He's been a loyal lap dog ever since.
Politics is about power and, well, how do you compete with the kind of power that can flip a country in an instant?
One of the most annoying things to me about the current Western left is the seemingly almost total lack of realistic perspective. It feels like half of all struggle sessions boil down to something that is such a far off possibility, it might as well be "will you be able to fuck in the holodeck when we build the USS Enterprise-D?"
you won't.
The internet is the bourgeois’s newest weapon for class warfare. Hasn’t always been this way
It has always been this way. Read Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. The Internet was build with counterinsurgency in mind.
Summarize it
Around the time of the Vietnam War, the US military saw the need to have the capacity to number-crunch data for counterinsurgency purposes. This was done through computers and digitization of data, at this point turning written reports of dissidents into digitized punchcards. These punchcards were more easily duplicated and propagated compared with written records. The next stage was to build a national network that these digitized records can be easily transmitted. This was originally done through ARPANET, a predecessor of the Internet and funded by DARPA.
The book also goes into how search engines like Google work hand-in-hand with US intelligence and how crypto and Tor were both developed by US intelligence for the purpose of clandestinely transferring funds and info between US assets in enemy countries like Iran and their handlers working for US intelligence.
Nevertheless, there was a time when the surveillance state was using the Internet for its own purposes and the public was using it by putting our own servers on it, using newsgroups, IRC, gopher, eventually bulletin boards, etc., and the state and capital (i.e. data collection for advertising) seems not to have turned its surveillance on the network itself (much). A brief window in which we also rather opportunistically used the Internet without Big Brother breathing quite so heavily right down our necks. While the Ever-Watching Eye™ was focused outward on the so-called "real-world", even while crunching all the data online.
they have this amazing thing called 'money' and when leadership decides to orient in a way, everyone else has to align with them or lose access to the 'money'
We have to change our loser energy and replace it with winner energy. By being cool and righteous. Winners aren't afraid to lose but losers are also afraid to win. I don't really have a disagreement with the libs exercising power, I just think they're making the wrong, shit ass lib decisions. I will say in real life I've met many people who have said "if there only was another candidate" and I do believe that sentiment is real. Kamala is probably falling outta the coconut tree tree into that favorable situation, but rest assured the winds will change in 3 days time. Definitely not sold on how this looks in November.