Author Archives: Editors

Interesting and challenging Inetractions among TF USA Affiliates!

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Thinkers Forum USA Affiliates!

Mirza I Ashraf wrote a blog “Life is Plugged in Today” about Science and Information Technology.

Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa wrote comments. You may read the original article and comments in www.ThinkersForumUSABlog.org

Noor Salik wrote a comment on Wequar Azeem and Babar Mustafa comments.

Saeed ul Hassan wrote a comment on Noor Salik’ comment. The comments of affiliates is the real power of Thinkers Forum USA.

I am entering the comments in chronological order. Please read them and comment on them if you feel like.

Editor of the Month TF USA.  (Editors@ThinkersForumUSABlog.Org)

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=========  Comment by Noor Salik ======

An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem

Three intellectual giants of TF USA.  (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf  (2) Babar Mustafa  (3) Wequer Azeem  There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either  they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual  foray.

TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment.  You decide what you want to say.> But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different angles.

TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal.  You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker.> You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. I mentioned two groups/categories.  I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond.

NSalik

 

 

 

==========  Comment by Saeed ul Hassan  ====

Who decides based on what criterion that an interacting person is conservative or regressive, analytical or progressive.

Merely being skeptical towards divinity and act of disowning one’s roots gives him or her impressive look?

Only gratitude turns denial into acceptance and chaos into order.

Saeed

My comment is not on trail of the mail below but on Noor’s remarks.

> On Dec 6, 2013, at 1:19 AM, editors@thinkersforumusablog.org wrote: > > > An interesting comment by Wequer Azeem > > Three intellectual giants of TF USA. > (1) Mirza Iqbal Ashraf > (2) Babar Mustafa > (3) Wequer Azeem > There are lot of other intellectual giants in TF USA but normally either > they are busy or they just choose not to participate in intellectual > foray. > > TF USA provides you empowering intellectual environment. > You decide what you want to say. > But you should be ready to face some intellectual onslaught by other > affiliates who have the capacity to look at an issue from different > angles. > > TF USA does not have any agenda. All views expressed in TF USA are personal. > You are most welcome if you are a conservative/regressive thinker. > You are equally welcome if you are a progressive/analytical thinker. > > I mentioned two groups/categories. > I will never know your if your point of view is different until you respond. > > NSalik >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > > > > > > > A new comment on the post “Life is plugged in today” is waiting for your > approval > http://www.thinkersforumusablog.org/archives/6875 > > Author : Wequar Azeem > E-mail : Wequar Azeem > Comment: > Hear,  Hear,  Baber Saheb ! Well said. Those days are gone when 3 R’s used > to be the foundation of education. We are in cyber age. I realize that > elderly among us are stuck in the 1950’s and 60’s and find it difficult to > keep pace with march of Time. The only constant in the universe is Change. > Not many people understand the difference between moment to moment passage > of time and the continuum of Absolute Time and its essence. We the humans > have come a long way and have a longer way to go. But the pace of change > is accelerating at geometric progression and even one life-time is too > long to cope with the changes. >

 

 

 

======  Comment by Babar Mustafa ========

Mr. Saeed has raised a very interesting question, “who decides …?”.

I would like to question the labels he mentions (and applies pretty clearly) in his question too of skeptic, gratitude, acceptance, denial, one’s roots, chaos …. Who is skeptic, one who thinks there is a God or the one who can’t find an iota of evidence of divinity? Who is in denial, one who can’t accept that all life is related and has diversified from a single origin or the one who thinks he (species wise) is created as a special being? Who is accepting myths as reality and who is following logic and reason to get to reality? Who is lost in a chaos, one who looks at diversification of life or the one who sees the symmetry in the building blocks of all life? Who is showing gratitude, one who is humbled to accept one’s origins and relations to all animal kingdom and even plants or the one who believes that angels bowed on one’s creation? Roots, ah roots; who decides that one’s roots lead back to ethnic divide, race divide or Garden of Eden or out of Africa or to the primordial soup or from out of other planets of solar systems or other galaxies may be or from the core of stars of this universe or perhaps from multiverse? There are some labels I would like to throw in too for my friends to elaborate, for instance” self righteous”, “custodians of morality”, “enforcers of one’s belief on others”.

Babar

============  Comment by Mirza I. Ashraf ========== Dear Brother Salik Sahib,

Please do not bury me under the weight of “intellectual giant.” Though it is to compliment the drop of knowledge which I am still trying to understand, but I have not yet stepped into the shoreless sea of knowledge . . . . Mirza

بس اتنا جانتا ہوں کچھ نہیں میں جانتا لیکن میں بے خبری سے با خبری کے افکاروں میں ڈوبا ہوں

اشرف

 

 

For Mandela, Reverence, but Criticism, Too

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At his death, Nelson Mandela received a saint like praise around the world, but he has his critics also. Rick Lyman looks at him from critic’s point of view. ( F. Sheikh)  Some excerpts;

“When Andile Mngxitama, a black-consciousness advocate and frequent critic of Mr. Mandela, fired yet another broadside at the former leader before he died — comparing him unfavorably to neighboring Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe — it certainly caught the attention of South Africa’s political class.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Mandela’s leadership style, characterized by accommodation with the oppressors, will be forgotten, if not rejected within a generation,” he wrote in June.

““There isn’t this kind of mania about him here that there is in some quarters overseas,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Mandela. “This sanctified image of him has always been more extreme elsewhere in the world than the local attitude.”

“Often, criticism of Mandela was disguised as criticism of others,” said Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Some of the things that his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was criticized for were actually things that Mandela had initiated or supported.”

“The criticism has been that he made too many concessions, while the real victims of apartheid still have to live with the consequences,” Mr. Habib said. “He is a global icon, a great leader, but he was not perfect.”

In a widely noted 2010 interview with Nadira Naipaul in The London Evening Standard, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela leveled blistering criticisms at her ex-husband.

“Mandela let us down,” she is quoted as saying. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.”

“Who really gains from the elevation of a political figure into an untouchable icon?” Anthony Butler, a University of Cape Town political science professor, wrote in his column in the June 28 issue of South Africa’s Business Day newspaper. “Not Mandela himself, who does not need our plaudits. The mythmakers who claim that a leader is beyond fault are ultimately seeking to shield a whole political class, and not just one individual, from the public scrutiny upon which democracy depends.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/world/africa/mandela-politics.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1

Should Chimpanzees be given a legal ‘personhood’ status?

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By Kenan Malik

apes 1

The Nonhuman Rights Project, an organization founded by Massachusetts lawyer and animal rights activist Steven Wise, has this week filed a series of lawsuits in New York demanding that chimpanzees be granted ‘legal personhood’. The lawsuit seeks to extend the concept of habeas corpus to chimpanzees, drawing an analogy with one of the most famous anti-slavery cases, that of James Somerset in 1772, an American slave

who had been taken to London by his owner, escaped, was recaptured and was being held in chains on a ship that was about to set sail for the slave markets of Jamaica. With help from a group of abolitionist attorneys, Somerset’s godparents filed a writ of habeas corpus on Somerset’s behalf in order to challenge Somerset’s classification as a legal thing, and the case went before the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield. In what became one of the most important trials in Anglo-American history, Lord Mansfield ruled that Somerset was not a piece of property, but instead a legal person, and he set him free.

 

Click link for full article;

 

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/human-rights-and-animal-rights/

 

Life is plugged in today

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LIFE IS PLUGGED IN TODAY

Today, children are being robbed of their childhood by science. Playing together used to
be the way children discovered themselves and explore the world around them through their own perception, imagination, and individual as well as group contacts and
interactions. They would argue with friends, draw lots, chase each other,
sometimes laughing, sometimes tumbling, bumping and bumbling around. They
talked, fought, and resolved their conflicts face-to-face. This helped them to
be connected with each other, with their parents, siblings, and friends. Life
was not only physically active and immediate, but also was spiritually
connected, in which every interaction was direct: body to body and soul to
soul.

Modern technology has changed all that was a charm in life. Adults, as well as kids
now contact on face book, twitter, and text messages. Information, learning,
knowledge, and life experiences, all come to everyone pre-managed,
scientifically prepared, readymade, and above all filtered through digital devices. Today even before the babies can walk they are exposed to screen media, and our children are plugged in 7 to 8 hours daily, relating to each other differently–without any
physical or spiritual contact. Teen-agers woo each other by text; be-friend or
break up on twitter, tease and taunt, cheat and deceive each other–in some
extreme case commit criminal acts or get depressed to the point of
suicide– all being performed in cyberspace. Whereas the consequences of such a hyper-wired life style is physical crippling, social isolation, intellectual introversion,
imaginational stagnation, it is dangerously emotional decadence and spiritual
dissipation. The new generation is depriving itself of direct intellectual
investigation, interpersonal social skills, emotional bonds, spiritual quest,
and morality as a virtue, that the older generation learned through common
interaction. Today, before all of us is a big question: Is modern science
tyrannously changing our course of evolution? Is science taking over the
divinely designed or the naturally evolved man and arbitrarily shaping him
as an emotionless and spiritless figure servant to technology’s
sovereignty?

Mirza Ashraf