[Dhaka Tribune] The law minister is right to describe last Friday’s mob attack on headmaster Shyamal Kanti Bhakta in Narayanganj as a punishable offence that must not be tolerated.
It is disgraceful that a mob beat up the senior teacher and sought to humiliate him by publicly forcing him to do squats holding his ears.
Although the education minister has apologised for the incident, later setting up an investigation, this is not enough. By their own accounts, the local MP -- in whose presence the attack was carried out -- and the local police did nothing to stop the mob or hold them to account after the incident.
Moreover, the school management committee that instigated the attack and has reportedly been harassing the victim for months in order to replace him with a relative of the committee’s president, is still in office and has officially suspended the victim.
Although those involved are making conflicting claims, there are clear indications that the headmaster is the victim of systematic harassment by a corrupt school committee that has turned on an individual for not giving in to their demands.
To make matters worse, the committee orchestrated the public beating by making completely baseless accusations that the victim, a Hindu, had made "offensive comments" about Islam. It is doubly dangerous and deplorable that they cynically misused religion to incite communal hatred.
The government must stand by the headteacher and uphold the law minister’s promise that those involved will be punished because no one can take the law into their own hands.
There is no place for mob violence in Bangladesh.
The Supreme Court has long since ruled on the illegality of arbitrary "village courts." All those responsible for mistreating the headteacher must be held to account.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/20/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11127 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Actually, it might be kind of fun to see that Schmo character from the story about GEN Boykin forced, er, strongly encouraged to do such a thing publicly for the amusement of the undergraduates.
#2
No. The reason to have strong rule of law is to prevent exactly this kind of mob lynching based on lies to benefit crony insiders. In this case, the Hindu school principal was abused for months to drive him out in favour of the school board president's relative. When that didn't work the Muslim mob was galvanized by a deliberate lie (and even if it were true, that's no excuse) about the Hindu insulting Islam, whatever that means.
About as funny as making Jews scrub Nazi gutters with a toothbrush, and equally bad for the character of the watchers.
#1
And given that there are only eight months left to take advantage of this global void, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Islamic terrorists are beginning to believe that the U.S. will not do anything to stop their aggressions once they change global realities by force.
The fear we have all had here for quite some time.
#2
He's just greatly accelerated the process. Too much of the world has relied upon the 'evil' US to supply military welfare to provide stabilization where history has always been chaotic. At some point, the magic money tree dies and the legions return to Rome. Ironic that Central Europe has enjoy the longest period of peace since Rome. What too many wished, "The End of History", was simply a rare pause in the natural aspects of the human record.
#3
Remember the good old days in 406 AD when the Legions hadn't been paid in a while, and the Limes forts on the Rhine were falling to pieces?
And that year the Quadi and the Marcomanni were massed in the hundreds of thousands beyond the Rhine and that year was the coldest in 40 years and the entire Rhine River froze and the tribes came across in wagons with their families ?
A 70,000 man Barbarian Army swept the last Legion aside outside Mainz where it died in the snow in half a morning and the wagons and the army swept south taking Cologne and then the Huns decided to head for Chalons and Aetius had to call on Theodoric and Torismund and the Alans and the Burgun to hold the line at Petit Mons? The last of the Legions in Reserve.
How did that all end? Half a million dead in a couple of days ? and then the Vandals under Gaeseric headed south for Rome and Spain.
And the next Roman General was a transgender dwarf sent in to hold Ravenna. His name was Nepos, i seem to remember. Where we get the word Nepotism.
Or an approximation thereof. Anyway being naked and covered with hair was the fashion for the next few centuries/ Oh, and stacking mud was popular too/
[Into the future... By Udo Gollub at Messe Berlin] During this presidential primary voters are most interested in jobs and the economy. Candidates are discussing "plans" to "bring jobs back to America." However, we are moving in an economic direction no one ever anticipated. None of the candidates is discussing the amazing changes that are occurring. The future won’t look anything like the past.
Let’s look at a few examples. Which company is the largest taxi company in the world? The answer is Uber. They do not own a single taxi cab! Which company is the largest hotelier in the word? The answer is Airbnb. They do not own a single hotel room! While Amazon.com isn’t the world’s largest retailer, it is bigger than Home Depot and Target and is far and away the fastest growing retailer. They do not own a single store!
#1
Lots of good stuff in the article, but lots of stuff that won't work, either, Besoeker. For example, the bit about automated cars will only work in cities and close-in suburbs, due both to economics and logistics. And disruption is something everyone likes until the disruption includes their own income stream. That doesn't mean some things don't need to be disrupted, but we all need to be honest about it.
One of the biggest mistakes we've made is letting the business school types tell us that every industry fits into a "bigger is better" model. Not only is this untrue form a math standpoint, trying to make it work has destroyed communities and resulted in industries trying to provide something that is not what consumers want.
The guy's basic premise is accurate, though. The Blue State model has been dead for decades, and its stinking zombie corpse has been kept alive by irresponsible politicians and citizens motivated by completely unenlightened self-interest, the mechanism being 1)borrowing and 2)thuggish inflating of pay rates for most lines of work above what can be sustained. Not just here in the U.S. but throughout the developed world.
When those jobs come back, if ever, they will be done by robots. All unnecessary, if politicians hadn't told workers that the economic times of the postwar era could last forever in the real world, and workers hadn't been so foolish to believe them. If the work force hadn't told themselves that they deserved so damned much more money than the invisible hand would allow, most if not all of those jobs would never have left and automation wouldn't have made economic sense.
We are living at the end of a three-generation fantasy that voting for what feels good and enhances our status is better than voting for what actually works. Certain groups within society have been the worst actors in all this but every group to one extent or another has contributed to this lunacy.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
05/20/2016 5:48 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Lots of good stuff in the article, but lots of stuff that won't work, either... nmu.
I absolutely agree. In the marketplace of ideas however, it is not vital that all ideas pan out. It is only vital that the marketplace continues to thrive.
#6
What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.
So you wanna be the one who controls it. You want to be the system administrator who controls access to this machine. You want this machine to be on your side. You better study computer science and study hard.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Victor Davis Hanson
