Read an interview with someone arguing for court packing the US Supreme Court. I have to say, it has rather convinced me the other way, though admittedly I already had a somewhat regressive fondness for norms and steering ships slowly rather than running through and breaking (other people’s) things. Though the argument that climate change […]
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 […]
Man on a boat
I joined in the collective global snigger when Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud whilst on an absconding Chinese billionaire’s superyacht. I then joined in the global raised eyebrow that the arrest was conducted by the US Postal Service’s police force. I mean… how militarised is that country that the post office has an armed […]
Monkey say, monkey do
There is something destabilising about the playacting in politics these days, so much of it seems to take place in a no man’s land. On one hand, there is a dismissal of norms that normalises new ones, and on the other hand there is this peculiar monkey-say-monkey-do business, a robot or an alien creature pretending […]
Earning their keep
Pakistan’s maulvis are hard at work. Mufti Muneeb says charity no substitute for animal sacrifice Mufti Muneeb Says Online Buying Of Sacrificial Animals Is ‘Un-Islamic’ CDA stops construction of boundary wall at temple’s site in Islamabad
New identity
A friend, contemplating the stock markets: I hereby dissociate myself from humanity. I am going to self-identify as a coronavirus.