Rare earth

One day is much like another these days, weekend or not. I was working today, unwilling and unable to make much progress. The sun was out, and we went for coffee in the late afternoon, taking a winding way back. Now I am working again as the GF cooks dinner. I listened to an interesting […]

Another America

I worry at 9/11 and the Iraq war as though it were a sore tooth. This time it was on reading this piece about the ways in which the American response to the 9/11 attacks could have been different. The only scenario that I don’t remember even being raised at the time is the last […]

Founding fathers

The other founding father of the nation had his folk artistic treatment. First there was Jinnah’s birthday cake in December, and now there is this rather splendid sculpture of Iqbal in a Lahore public park. The first still makes me laugh, but the second I rather like, and thought it was rather lovely that it […]

Weight lifted

Trump is gone, and a weight is lifted. Now America can go back to being its usual bad self, instead of this weird bad self. Though I doubt it will ever be the exact bad self it was. While I see the value of reinforcing the national narrative, there did seem something hubristic about the […]

Thoughts consolidating

My thoughts and opinions about Trump’s deplatforming are slowly consolidating, developing vague outlines. I had a vague feeling that there was something not right, but there is also so much schadenfreude, that it’s hard to think through how. But there is a feeling of an establishment mob to counter the more violent, unruly neo-Nazi mob […]

Moral degradation

I have not written here about the massacre of Hazaras in Baluchistan some days ago because what was there to say? And it was so ugly. Over the days it feels increasingly like (yet another) symbol of Pakistan’s moral bankruptcy, as the Hazara, who have been targeted and killed by Sunni militants for years, refused […]

Not a coup

As usual, alarm at goings on in America is accompanied by irritation at the people I agree with. ‘Coup’ is a grandiose term for a ramshackle mob, but such is the self-aggrandisement that everyone seems to be using that word. Then there are at least a couple dozen examples of my old favourite, the point […]