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Woman Behind Pakistan's First Hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, Shot Dead
An anonymous reader sends word that Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead. The progressive activist and organizer who ran Pakistan's first-ever hackathon and led a human rights and a peace-focused nonprofit known as The Second Floor (T2F) was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi. Sabeen Mahmud was leaving the T2F offices with her mother some time after 9pm on Friday evening, reports the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. She was on her way home when she was shot, the paper reports. Her mother also sustained bullet wounds and is currently being treated at a hospital; she is said to be in critical condition.
"Hypatia (born c. AD 350 – 370; died 415[1][3]) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Byzantine Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy."
"One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict."
I hate these islamic extremists at least as much as anyone here. But it isn't just islam that is capable of such things.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
These neat little theories are always so so convenient to explain why everyone else is inferior. Yet Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.... Perhaps the world is more complicated than these little theories suggest?
> Jews? It's really ludicrous to even bring up the Jews. Jews don't exist. Numerically, that is.
And yet, their cultural identity as the foundation of Christianity and Islam make them culturually. And they are politically very powerful in the Middle East, for many culturual, economic, and technological reasons. So the whole "compare by numbers" concept falls apart very quickly.
Also, many Muslims and even other nations take the ongoing battle with the Palestinians over land, security, and self-government very seriously.
Yes, if you really believe there's a "gay agenda" and that homosexuals are bringing God's wrath upon us and that the Rapture will happen any time now, then you are a moron.
That's like the opposite of what happened.
Pakistan does not exist because of the machinations of the British. Rather, Pakistan came into existence due to the withdrawal and general shutdown of the British Empire, which like many occupations was suppressing tribal and ethnic dissent in order to keep their territories together. The moment the Empire (which was weak and failing at this point in time anyway) released its hold on the country there was a huge bloody massacre and a civil war ("The Partition") which resulted in the creation of Pakistan.
So it's not like the British stood around and encouraged Muslims and Hindus to fight each other. They did that all on their own.
> We didn't have any inquisitions.
Unless you were native American, in which case your land and property were taken and your people murdered, partly because you weren't Christian. Or if you were black, in which case you were enslaved and forced to a new language and not permitted to follow your old gods. Or, if you were a member of the Latter Day Saints, who were considered non-Christian and heretical and dangerous and were kicked out of state after state until they settled in the effectively empty, very poor land around Salt Lake City. Or unless you were Jewish, which prevented entry into various political and social clubs and even prevented people from doing business with you in various times and places.
Make no pretense that the USA has been consistently tolerant of religious belief. The modern Christian religions may be accepting of other faiths, but they have not always been this way.
Christians ran the colonies from roughly the 1550s when the Spanish colonized Mexico and the Southwest to about 1785 on the East Coast when the Constitution, guaranteeing that the government could not endorse religion (e.g., "Congress shall make no law regarding an endorsement of religion") to bit less than a hundred years later when the Spanish/Russian governance of the west coast ended.
During that time, the Christians did all kinds of good things:
- they ran witch trials in Salem (and other places), hung or otherwise executed lots of people for not believing the right way - aka blasphemy, which is a completely bullshit crime, and anyone who calls for punishment for blasphemy is too stupid to swim in the gene pool;
- they found and perpetuated biblical justification for slavery and the economic excesses of industrialism - remember, kids, Calvinism teaches that your state of being is an expression of whether or not god loves you, so if you're poor or a slave or otherwise marginalized, god doesn't love you much, and you're probably going to hell;
- they abused the crap out of the people actually living in the territories they took over, and decided it was OK to do it because the xtians were bringing the natives the benefits of xtianity - all of which, interestingly, accrued to the xtians, with the natives decidedly getting the short end of the stick, which situation is perpetuated today;
- they elevated biblical literalism - another shallow-gene-pool thing - into a place where they asserted that their dogma, untested, untestable, utterly unverifiable, and completely subject to interpretation, was more true on an objective level than empirical science - as witness the witless xtians who still defend the Scopes trial and question basic science, or who think (for example) that women's bodies somehow protect against pregnancy from rape....
So, yeah, we didn't have inquisitions, exactly, other than bunches of millions of people who died as the result of gentle xtian doctrine over the last couple of hundred years. And we still have a strong streak of aggressively ignorant xtianity which is crudely bound to a set of racist, sexist, hateful, marginalizing beliefs that have achieved ascendancy that scars the political landscape
These neat little theories are always so so convenient to explain why everyone else is inferior. Yet Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.... Perhaps the world is more complicated than these little theories suggest?
... the fine print being that she too was murdered (in 2007), with Al-Qaeda claiming responsibility. Arguing that Pakistan doesn't have a problem with militant islamist groups murdering women is a pretty tough sell
wrong, get a refund on your history lessons, radical islam not responsible for Pakistan but rather push lead by All-India Muslim league which was concerned with rights for muslims and also by the way led in promoting the democratic process for Pakistan.
only about 15 of the populace of Pakistan would be "radical" by any standard. The rest are "hippy muslims" that drink, smoke (and not just tobacco), watch porn, gamble etc.
I'm not sure you are defining "radical" the same as we would in the western world. Does support for punishing blasphemy and apostasy with the death penalty count as "radical"?
Shahbaz Bhatti was Pakistan's Minister for Minorities Affairs and he made his opposition to the blasphemy laws known, and he was assassinated in 2011.
Salmaan Taseer was the Governor of Punjab and he made his opposition to the blasphemy laws known. He was assassinated by his own security guard once again in 2011.
Now, before you declare that assassinations are often a fringe movement, lets look at the treatment of the guard that killed Taseer. Nearly 500 clerics praised the murder and called for a boycott of Taseer's funeral.
Also take a close look at the blasphemy cases brought up regularly in Pakistan. Very often the accused don't make it to trial or execution before they killed by an angry mob, or while under police 'protection'.
There are moderates in Pakistan that are opposed to the same radicals that we are. People like Sabeen Mahmud, Salmaan Taseer, Shabaz Bhati, and Benazir Bhutto all share many of our more moderate and tolerant views and values. The severity of the problems in Pakistan though are revealed in that same list as those moderates are increasingly ending up dead like EVERYONE in that list. We have survivors as well, like Malala Yousef, the young school girl shot in the face on her bus by the TTP. Of course, she is carying on from Britain right now because the TTP have sworn to finish her off should she return.
Oh, and it should be noted that everyone on that list save Shabaz Bhati were muslims as well. The severity of the extremism in that ?15%? is staggering and I also seriously question that the percentage is fairly characterized as merely 15%.