The economy has grown 5-6% over the past few years despite inefficient state-owned enterprises, delays in exploiting natural gas resources, insufficient power supplies, and slow implementation of economic reforms. Bangladesh remains a poor, overpopulated, and inefficiently-governed nation. Although more than half of GDP is generated through the service sector, nearly two-thirds of Bangladeshis are employed in the agriculture sector, with rice as the single-most-important product. Garment exports and remittances from Bangladeshis working overseas, mainly in the Middle East and East Asia, fuel economic growth.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Two fallacies: Why not catch them ALL? Are YOU good enough to catch?

Two fallacies: Why not catch them ALL? Are YOU good enough to catch?
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
By GM Solaiman

Two fallacies:
1. Why not catch them ALL?
2. Are YOU good enough to catch?

Some people are not happy about current crack down of corruption in Bangladesh aka war-on-corruption. They “see” lot of problems with it. Most of the folks tell me about two problems.

First one is that why pick and choose? They say that if you arrest and punish them for this or that violation of law, then how come you are not punishing others? They laugh (showing there 32 teeth or 36?) about punishing some of our dons on tax violation? They are like, well, every body defy tax laws in BD. If you can not punish ALL of them, you should not punish ANY.

Second complain I hear is that, WHO are these folks to punish? They are doing the same mistake. They are violating this and that law themselves, they will give some examples. Folks get some how angry at this point, and say CG is not dhowa-tulshi-pata themselves either. They all are same, so no one should punish our corrupt leaders. Let them be free!

Say an officer stop you in the road and give you a speeding ticket. Does it mean that every one that have crossed speed limit also have to get a ticket. Hmm…. May be I will use this excuse next time. Tell the judge that, since law is equal to every one and you have not fined every one who speeds, you can not punish me. Interesting, huh? This is a fallacy I see many of my fellow Bangladeshi for some reason believe. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea.

Here is another fallacy. Think about the officer that gave you the ticket. Is he a perfect man/woman? Didn’t he ever violate any law? How come then HE give me the ticket? What if he get arrested the next day for some sin that he did? Will that make ME any less guilty? I don’t know how this fallacy comes into us either. It’s not between YOU and the OFFICER. It’s between YOU and the STATE. It is between YOU and the LAW.

On a second thought, may be I do have a hypothesis on why we have these fallacies. May be it’s because we have been ruled by our masters for centuries. Masters are not like us in any way (by the skin). And of course masters don’t have any fault, what they DO is the LAW. Problems start to pile on when we are in the arena of self-govern. Now, why the hell you deserve to punish me or judge me, huh? You are almost just like me. The masters were different at least by the skin, you are not. So YOU must have to be some kind of angel to deserve to judge me.

Yeah, I know. May be, there is very weak logic behind this hypothesis. Well, do you have a better one?

posted by x86 @ 4:24 PM

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