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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.
You think the US is hostile to women in tech?
I hope they find the bastards who did this, but I'm not holding my breath. She seemed like a vibrant, engaging, and intelligent woman. Pakistan will need more people like her to continue the fight against their more regressive, barbaric elements. My condolences to her family and friends.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This is truly a tragic death. I often hear a lot from people in our society (United States) is so aggressive and repressive towards women, which I greatly disagree with. Giving soap operas here about how horrible it is is a disgrace compared to those in places like the middle east, who endure credible death threats and the like everyday. I hope this lady will be remembered, and may her death not be in vain.
Sabeen Mahmud, Anwar Sadat, Theo van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, Lee Rigby, people in the World trade Center on 9/11, Copts in Egypt, school children in Pakistan, Christian girls in Nigeria, Yzedis in Iraq, Kurds in Syria.
It's almost as though there were some sort of shared transnational ideology behind all of their attacks.
If only our world leaders could somehow deduce the nature of this ideology, name it, and set about creating plans to fight it...
Man here, putting in my two cents under the secure veil of anonymity:
1. Yes, women deserve equal rights and should receive equal treatment.
2. It is not only justified, but beneficial, when feminist groups publicly point out and aspire to correct cultural failings in point 1 above.
3. Encouraging video-game audiences to be displeased with disrespectful treatment of women, and to request better treatment of women from game creators, is exactly the right thing to do.
4. Trying to force game-makers to make products that don't suit the tastes of their primary target audience is exactly the wrong thing to do. It is contrary to good economics, and contrary to freedom.
5. Trying to encourage game-makers to make produces that don't suit the tastes of their primary target audience is silly, and doomed to failure.
On a more personal note.....
I see women every day, both in my professional life and randomly in public (in America). Most of them can't follow me in a real conversation, nor do they care to. The topics that interest them seem vain and insipid to me, and the topics that interest me seem boring or pretentious to them (based on their direct feedback). I have found a few women who are my authentic intellectual equals (and even a few who were my intellectual superiors), but these women have been VERY few and VERY far between. I have had a *much* easier time finding men who are my intellectual equals (or superiors).
So, that is my common, everyday experience of women. Where I want to talk about the problems of our day, they want to talk about shoes or celebrity gossip. Where I want to apply my skills to the creation of new and serious economic value, they are content to organize meetings and run through checklists. Not all of them, by any means. But most of them.
If women truly want to be respected as equals, it may help if feminist groups worked harder on encouraging women to aspire to higher levels of intellectual self-cultivation.
I am sorry if you hate me. I am just reporting on what I see.
some bodyguards kill the people they are supposed to protect, especially in Pakistan when the person being protected in non-Muslim or tries to change stupid blasphemy laws http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
But then I saw the cat pictures.
These were, of course, her own cat pictures. It is sometimes the most ordinary things in our lives that speak the loudest, if you are willing to listen.
Most of them can't follow me in a real conversation, nor do they care to. The topics that interest them seem vain and insipid to me, and the topics that interest me seem boring or pretentious to them (based on their direct feedback).
So your argument is that because they have different interests you're smarter than them? That's not sexist, that's fucking stupid....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
She wasn't a "SJW", she was actually trying to help effect change in an environment in which women are not only oppressed, but it is distinctly easily visible in most, if not all, walks of life in Pakistan (and other countries with an Islamic majority that isn't too opposed to Sharia law).
SJW's are usually trust fund babies and well-off morons that got bored with collecting tangible things and began collecting stories of oppression as bling. They're charlatans and ideologues, profit mongers and zealots.
Ms. Sabeen Mahmud was far closer to Mahatma Gandhi than any "Social Justice Warrior" (who often, without a shred of humility, compare themselves to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, or hell (I've yet to see them mention her but she fought for women's rights) Theodora the Empress alongside Emperor Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire).
Everyone lies sometimes, SJW's lie more often.
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."
If you don't care for what other people think or their interests, why would they care about your ideas and interest?
Really intelligent people - those who are smart over the whole range, not just the logic puzzle part, are normally a delight to talk with.
And although they might be smarter than you, and know more about the world, they generally do no tell you so.
as it is for his followers to keep using those long out-dated moral standards from then in today's world.
The problem is that a large portion of the world's population (that is, everyone who follows an Abrahamic religion, which is probably at least half the global population) does exactly this.
That's the whole problem with these religions: they hold up these "holy books" as "the inerrant word of God", and claim that everyone should follow the moral standards contained in them.
No, it's not, it depends on the particular interests. If they have interests such as following the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and you have interests which include baroque music and classical literature, then it's safe to say that you're more intelligent than them.
There's nothing sexist about it. There's no shortage of idiot men who are big fans of Duck Dynasty, and there's relatively few people of either sex who are big fans of more intellectual pursuits like classical literature.
I think it's a generality to say that "neither Christians nor Jews do this". Certainly, Christians do this sort of thing at much lower rates.
Jews? It's really ludicrous to even bring up the Jews. Jews don't exist. Numerically, that is.
A third of the world is Christian, roughly. (50% Catholic, 40% Protestant, 10% other, including the Orthodox churches)
A quarter of the world is Muslim, roughly (90% Sunni, 10% Shia)
15% of the world is Hindu, roughly.
Two tenths of a percent of the world is Jewish.
That means for every Jew, there's over a hundred Christians, over a hundred Muslims, around seventy Hindus, thirty five Buddhists,
There's more Sikhs than Jews. The Jews are roughly equal to the number of practitioners of Yoruba, and the Jewish number tends to include more non-religious folks than many of the other groups.
So if all religions were equally likely to incite violence, you'd expect for most violence to be Christian, then you'd expect Muslim, then Hindu, the traditional Chinese practitioners, then Buddhists.... you'd have a long list to get to Jews.
In practice, we hear more about Muslims than anyone, and we do hear about Christians some times. The fact that you don't hear about Jews doesn't mean anything- numerically, they don't exist. If you heard about Jewish violence at the same rate as you hear about Muslim violence, then the Jewish religion would be over a hundred times as violent or something. The fact that there's still some very violent strands of Islam that are extremely active right now is what makes the news, but seriously, Muslims as a group are so massive that it seems hard to make a comparison to billions based on the actions of thousands.
In many ways Anita Sarkeesian is asking for what she's getting. The rape/death threats are uncalled for, but she basically goes around slapping the misogyny label on everything and anything, even when there isn't, and it's just fucking annoying.
For example, she railed against Fox for canceling Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles and renewing Dollhouse, when the first is supposedly empowering females and the later isn't. I'm a huge fan of the Terminator franchise, but that show was so lame I couldn't even watch past the first episode. The writing sucked terribly, and the actors totally failed to live up to their characters from the movies, making the show a total let-down, so how does that make it misogynistic to cancel it?
Further, this whole tropes vs women thing is super exaggerated. I remember one time looking at Japanese animation and wondering why all of the characters looked white and not Asian/Japanese. When you look at the history of it, you notice that it isn't because their culture favors being white (like China currently does in many places,) because it still looked that way even during the WWII days when Japan saw themselves as a supreme race/culture and the white people were just a bunch of incompetents that they'd easily conquer in the coming years. It turns out that all human beings draw a mental picture of what the "default human" is, and for Japanese cartoons the default human *is* Asian. So when they draw a cartoon, they don't put much thought into it other than to make it look like a person. Think like how the Simpsons draws their characters as yellow, but in your mind you're thinking "white family." Anyways to the Japanese, white people have big noses, so when they draw people who are supposed to be white, you always see pronounced noses in the artwork, because it's the token "white feature." It's not racist, it's just saying: See this guy? He's white, so you know, you now have a better mental picture of what kind of character he is.
Likewise, with just about everybody in the world, the "default human" is a male. This is even true of female gamers. So when the creator of Pac-Man wanted to show that Mrs. Pac-Man was a female, what does he do? Attaches a token of Japanese girls to her, in this case, a bow. The purpose of the bow is just to say: This is a female, so now you have a better mental picture of what kind of character she is. He had no intention at all of trying to be sexist. (And this isn't even getting into the limits of what you are able to do with those low resolution sprites.)
This guy also says it pretty well:
https://youtu.be/v04IdNPuMlc?t...
Your fifth point is notably in error. The issue is one of changing norms; you can change the norms of behavior that people expect of themselves and others in part by changing how they think about other people. That's why you dehumanize the enemy in war with names like "Charlie," for example. That means changing the internal narrative that people use when they think about the person or group of people they are interacting with. Popular entertainment--be it television, video gaming, or via other media--is one way to begin influencing the narrative of a large number of people.
Certainly, there is an economic cost to the individual company to optimizing its narrative in part along the dimension of positive norm-building in those circumstances where it is not in keeping with optimization for marketing to the company's target demographic. However, there is also a cost to society to leaving the norms that this fails to challenge in place. That latter cost may result in many wasted lives, in substantial domestic violence, and in similar things generally considered bad today's standards. When the cost to society exceeds the gain to the company, society has a role in encouraging the company to behave differently. The only legitimate reasons we don't mandate that the company behave differently are that it is very hard to measure the cost to society and that the potential for misuse of the power of censorship is significant enough that we don't give that power to government except in the most extreme situations.
No, they aren't. Many of the "reformed" sects are the worst ones. All those fundamentalist Christians aren't part of the old Roman Catholic church (or any offshoots of it), they're offshoots of the Protestant movement. For all its faults, the Catholic church had a good idea, that just letting people read the Bible themselves and interpret it their own way would lead to all kinds of bad things, so they tried to keep people from doing that; the Protestant reformation is exactly what led to fundamentalism. Of course, the root problem is the whole idea that a book is "holy" and sacrosanct; trying to keep people from reading things for themselves is guaranteed to fail eventually.
Anyway, probably at least 1/2 of Protestants in the US are evangelical and/or fundamentalist. Just look at how popular the "Left Behind" books are and various other wacky Christian media warning everyone of the "Rapture". Calling it a "small minority" is ignoring a very large and serious problem in our society, no different than Muslims ignoring their own extremists and then waking up one day to find that ISIS has taken over their city.
Hitchens says it best:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yes, Christians did that 1500 years ago.
Muslims killed Sabeen Mahmud yesterday.
Pray forgive me if I see the Muslims as a significantly larger threat.
There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.
In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.
The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo.
When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists and those who can best be described as the American taliban. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Yet they're amazingly well represented in finance, media, and law.
European culture made sure that they couldn't do anything else. Historically, Jews in Europe were not allowed to be members of a trade-guild, because doing so required making a Christian oath. For city dwellers (i.e. non-farmers), peddling and money-lending were two of the only jobs available until quite recently.
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