Recently this article from the New Yorker was submitted by Suhail Rizvi to some of us via personal emails. After today’s discussion about the “Hazards of Free Market” I feel compelled to publish on this site ( I hope the Editor of the month does not mind). This article shows, as was evident today – that most of us have preconceived notions about a topic and we cherry pick data (some made up) that helps to prove our preconceived notions; truth, logic and commonsense be damned.
Shoeb Amin
{Worth reading article by Mohsin Hamid on the dangers of nostalgia of the glory of the past and what writers can do to imagine a new bright future}
As I travel the world on my phone and computer and by foot and aircraft, it seems to me that nostalgia is a terribly potent force at this moment of history. Nostalgia manifests itself in so much of our political rhetoric. Islamic State and al-Qaida call for a return to the imagined glories of the early years of Islam. The Brexitcampaign was fought with a rallying cry of taking back control from Brussels, promising a return to the imagined glories of pre-EU Britain. Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US election wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again”, words chanted by his supporters, envisioning a return to the imagined greatness of an America recently victorious in the second world war. In China and India, too, leaders seek a return to imagined past greatnesses, usurped by foreign invaders, colonisers and barbarians. All of these movements are, at heart, projects of restoration.
Nostalgia manifests itself in our entertainment and artistic culture as well. The most viewed films of our time revolve around protagonists created a generation, or multiple generations, ago: superheroes, super villains, super secret agents, super space adventurers, super ironic symbols of super sexy pasts. And on television, where we are told great storytelling happens, much of what we see in popular and acclaimed shows comes situated in a past where characters can still plausibly be almost all white. I loved Mad Men and my wife loved Downton Abbey; we and many of our friends in Pakistan loved these and countless other shows so much that it has only intermittently struck us that they are imaginative vehicles hurtling back and away from our vastly non-all-white present-day planet. Even in Game of Thrones, the laws of physics and biology and consistency allow for fire-breathing dragons and undead warriors and interminable winters, but not for non-white people living in most of Westeros. The laws of race, it seems, are immutable even there.
posted by f.sheikh
Americans are seriously stressed out about the future of the country, survey finds
The Washington Post
Americans are the most stressed they’ve been in the past decade, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association. Read the full stor
Nasik Elahi
By Waqar Mustafa
LAHORE, Pakistan, Jan 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death on Monday for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family’s consent.
Parveen Bibi confessed before a special court in the city of Lahore to killing her daughter in June for what she said was “bringing shame to the family.”
Police said 18-year-old Zeenat Rafiq married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed.
The court sentenced Rafiq’s brother Anees to life in prison after the evidence showed her mother and brother had first beaten her, before her mother threw kerosene on her and set her on fire.
After Rafiq’s murder in a poor district of Lahore, none of her relatives sought to claim her body, police said, leaving her husband’s family to bury her charred remains after dark in a graveyard near the city.
Violence against women is rampant in Pakistan, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Citing media reports, it said there were more than 1,100 “honor killings” in 2015.
Pakistan’s parliament passed legislation against “honor killings” in October, three months after the murder of outspoken social media star Qandeel Baloch. Her brother was arrested in relation to her strangling death in July.
Perceived damage to a family’s “honor” can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or other breaches of conservative values.
In most cases, the victim is a woman and the killer is a relative who escapes punishment by seeking forgiveness for the crime from family members.
Under the new law, relatives can forgive convicts in the case of a death sentence, but they would still have to face a mandatory life sentence.
(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org.)