I woke up this morning to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. What a incredible person she was, a qutb of her country in this age. She leaves behind an abiding sense of fear and dread. It is going to be a terrible few months up to the election, and to the inauguration, […]
Nearly two months later
It’s nearly two months after the Beirut explosion. This blog has not reflected how much it’s been on my mind. The horror of what happened, in a long line of terrible events, is very persistent. Partly because I did fall in love, or at least in fascination, with Lebanon when we stayed there, and to […]
Determination
I closed my Metafilter account today, and deleted all the bookmarks. It had been increasingly clear to me that I was not getting much pleasure out it, only a lot of irritation. This was before I listened to a Talking Politics episode in which Jill Lepore appeared and talked about social media. What she was […]
گوشت کی دکان
Horror in Lahore as a woman driving along the Motorway with her children stopped as the car broke down, called for help, and before help arrived was accosted by several men who gangraped her. The horror of that is bad enough, what is worse is the response – of the police, of the politicians, of […]
The virtues of lockdown
I have been mulling for some time now, perhaps since the start of the pandemic, on the moral attached to being in lockdown. The GF and I were talking about it this morning, of how locking down, of shutting down, was given a sort of moral weight, and more a political weight: we care for […]
Looking glass histories
Pakistan and Turkey seem to me to have very similar histories in a number of ways, in terms of civil military relations, how restive areas are treated, etc. Given the long history of closeness between the two, I wonder how people who matter in Pakistan have learned from those in Turkey. The memorandum of 1971 […]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pakistan is doing well on the coronavirus front, much to the befuddlement of all. Hard to say if it will last, but for now. In the meantime, I happened to be at the birth of a meme. One of the people I follow on Twitter lives in Karachi and with the devastating monsoon rain there […]
Astonishing
The Republican National Convention is on this week, and the party has decided that instead of having a manifesto it is supporting Trump. This is really remarkable, really dangerous. Clearly time for a USAID funded project to develop democratic institutions in that country – I worked on one a few years ago (funded by another […]
Shameful ripoff
Business degrees, especially those offered by private universities, especially those offered online, and most especially those in Switzerland are a really shameful business. I have recently come across one of these via a student, an African fellow who has shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to one of these to do an MBA online. […]
Why vote for Biden
Metafilter has had one of its ugly circular firing squads about the Democratic convention, with some saying that they will not vote for Biden because of the neoliberal establishment nastiness. I wrote a comment making the argument from outside the US to vote for Biden, then decided not to post it: if there is one […]