(Sarah Anjum Bari on the Power of Visible Words)

Amar bhai ke marli keno?: Why did you kill my brother?

Past midnight on August 11, as my parents drive me to Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport, the city I call home seems locked in a tense quiet. No one has gone to sleep, our WhatsApp groups and Facebook feeds remind us—it’s been a month since Bangladeshis went to bed at a decent hour—but the roads are empty of both pedestrians and traffic police. The few cars and trucks passing through are shepherded by cap-wearing, whistle-wielding students, the streets somehow more ordered in their untrained hands. Entrances to neighborhoods are being manned by volunteer groups from resident families. Their stake out is a precaution against a recent surge of burglaries.

In this absence of Dhaka’s usual nighttime soundscape, what calls out to us on the roads are the red and black words streaked across the city’s walls, its pillars, shop fronts, gates, along the beams of flyovers and even the trunks of trees. At varying heights and in varying directions, we read, among other phrases:

Noy dofa dabi: A nine-point demand

Ek dofa dabi: A one-point demand

Dhaka, a city of corpses. 

Sheikh Hasina is a murderer. Sheikh Hasina must step down.

36 July. No more lies. The dictator has fled.

We are free.

Since the beginning of June 2024, public university students in Bangladesh had been protesting for a reform of the job quota that unfairly benefitted freedom fighters’ descendants, thereby benefiting supporters or relatives of the ruling party who had fought in the war. In a national address to the protests, the (now former) Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina mockingly inquired whether the jobs should instead be allocated to “razakars.” By using that term, the gravest of insults for a Bangladeshi, she had compared university students asking for a fair shot at employment to collaborators who aided Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladesh during the ‘71 Liberation War. Students and their allies across the country were outraged. They poured onto the streets demanding both apology and reform, carrying slogans that now endure on the city walls.

Tumi ke, ami ke? Razakar, razakar. Ke bolechhe, ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, shoirachar!

“Who are you, who am I? The dictator says we are razakars!”

Chaite gelam odhikar, hoye gelam razakar.

“We came to ask for our rights, only to be labeled traitors.”

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After years of debate and contemplation, I’ve come to believe in a Christian God of limited abilities. Here’s why: I rejected Christianity at the age of 14, upsetting my grandmother by refusing to get confirmed in the Catholic faith of my upbringing. Partly it was intellectual issues: why would a loving and all-powerful God create a world with so much suffering? Partly it was ethical issues. It was a time when I was questioning my sexuality, and it seemed to me wrong not to allow a gay person to flourish through a loving relationship with a partner they are attracted to. But, most of all, Christianity just seemed very unspiritual. I got very little out of boring church services, and it seemed to be all about pleasing the old guy in the sky so you get to heaven. Science and philosophy seemed a more rational way to make sense of life, which ultimately led me to become a philosophy professor. I now think the evidence points towards a hypothesis that John Stuart Mill took seriously: a good God of limited abilities. This hypothesis is able to account both for the imperfections of our universe – in terms of God’s limited abilities – and for the things about our universe that are improbably good, such as fine-tuning and psycho-physical harmony. God would have liked to make intelligent life in an instant, or by breathing into the dust as we see depicted in Genesis. But the only way God was able to create life was by bringing into existence a universe with the right physics that would eventually evolve intelligent life. God made the best universe they could.

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“While protests continue erupting with remarkable frequency, they are also failing, at historic rates, to achieve protesters’ stated goals. As Time hailed the power of the protester, the rate at which mass protests succeeded in meeting their objectives was plummeting, from two in three during the early 2000s to just one in six by the early 2020s. Activists are now reaping less fruit from their labour, while many would-be activists never take the plunge in the first place because they reasonably doubt that their participation will make any difference. Why aren’t protesters winning like they once did, and what would make protests more effective?”

Some scholars pin declining protest success rates on social media, which allows huge crowds to assemble without building the organisational structures and strong networks necessary to effect meaningful change. Others blame dictators’ use of ‘smart repression’ techniques, including censorship, propaganda and misinformation. As the political scientist Kurt Weyland points out, counterrevolutionaries have historically held an advantage over revolutionaries because they are willing to bide their time, heed advisors, and do their research on which repressive methods have worked in the past. Revolutionaries, in contrast, tend to leap into action, sometimes miscalculating their odds of success and choosing misguided strategies.

Violence seldom pays. From 1900 to 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as effective as violent ones (though even nonviolent campaigns have struggled to achieve their goals in more recent years). One reason why violence backfires is that it discourages new activists from joining or otherwise supporting a movement.

Cohesive demands are more persuasive than mixed demands.

Diverse coalitions signal that a movement is more than a radical fringe. 

Marginalised protesters influence lawmakers more than privileged protesters.

Most protests fail. What are activists doing right when they win? | Psyche Ideas

posted by F.Sheikh

At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light was always the speed of light.

If you threw a baseball out of a train going 20 mph, it would travel the speed at which you threw it plus 20 mph, just as Isaac Newton’s laws predicted. However, if you aimed a flashlight out of a train going 20 mph, the light would travel the speed of light—no more, no less—no matter your perspective. And according to Newton’s picture of the universe, that didn’t make any sense.

“We didn’t have a theory that would explain why light was special,” says Lia Medeiros, a NASA Einstein fellow at Princeton University.

The key turned out to be something Albert Einstein would soon propose: the idea of spacetime.

The concept was revolutionary. “For common-day experience, as well as most experiments, space and time being separate is totally fine,” says Daniel Holz, a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. “But if you want to make a general statement about how the universe works, then you really need to view them as one object.”

A matter of perspective

In 1905, building on existing experimental and theoretical work, Einstein published the theory of special relativity. Among other things, the theory combined space and time into a single entity that he called spacetime.

“Spacetime is a necessary consequence of the fact that all observers measure the same value for the speed of light,” says Scott Hughes, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Einstein took the question ‘What if the speed of light is just the same to everyone?’seriously. And spacetime grew out of that thought experiment.”

It all starts with the concept of different frames of reference. How a person experiences the world depends on their individual frame of reference. Two people standing together on a moving train will perceive one another as stationary. But an observer standing outside the train will perceive both of those people as in motion, chugging along at the speed of the train. Zoom out even farther, and another observer floating in space will perceive the person standing outside the train as in motion as well, spinning along with the Earth while in orbit around the sun, which in turn is flying through the galaxy.

What Einstein realized is that something similar happens with time: Different people will experience the passage of time differently, depending on their frame of reference. The key to understanding how this works is the universal speed of light.

Imagine a single quantum of light, a photon, bouncing up and down between two mirrors that are facing each other. Traveling at the speed of light, the photon should bounce at regular intervals, like a steadily ticking clock.

A person standing on a moving train with this photon clock will see the photon moving up and down in a line. To a person standing outside the moving train, on the platform, however, the photon will seem to move in a different way. Not only will the photon bounce up and down, it will also move forward with the train.

From one frame of reference—on the train—the photon follows the shortest possible path, a straight line. From another—on the platform—it follows a stretched-out zig-zag path instead.

The puzzle Einstein faced becomes apparent if you imagine two photon clocks, one sitting stationary on the platform, and the other whizzing by in the train.

If the speed of light is constant regardless of the frame of reference, then to the person on the train, the photon clock next to them will tick more quickly, while to the person on the platform, that same clock on the train will tick more slowly. This effect is called time dilation. A similar thought experiment, with the photon clock tipped on its side, shows that objects are more compact along the direction of the train’s motion, an effect called length contraction.

This works out mathematically. It’s only when you combine the different measurements from the different frames of reference of space and time that all the observers will agree on the result, suggesting that space and time are inextricably linked.

“If you allow both space and time to change in a connected way, then everyone agrees that light moves at the speed of light,” Holz says. “Once you combine them, everything kind of follows naturally. The equations are very beautiful and elegant.”

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