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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.
"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)
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.
I am no friend to Muslims. If all of them were slain, I would not weep a single tear. (Can you hear the 'however' coming up?)
However, back then men were basically either a warlord, a vassal, or a slave. Also, back then it was commonplace to take humans that we now classify as 'children' in marriage. Or if slaves, use them however the master liked, including sexually. They were just slightly smaller meat puppets than all the rest of the meat puppets. The point is, Muhammad was of his time.
It is just as silly and repugnant to use today's moral standards to judge people who lived in far different times, as it is for his followers to keep using those long out-dated moral standards from then in today's world.
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.
I listen to brutal death metal but i also listen to Tchaikovsky.
Metal has a fair amount in common, musically, with classical music. Metal typically emphasizes complex song structures and virtuosic playing more than other forms of modern music. I'd say country is probably at the opposite end of that spectrum. I like progressive metal like Dream Theater, I also like Bach and Telemann, but I also like Rolling Stones, Boston, AC/DC, etc.
As for all your other interests, none of those carry any kind of political connotations or religious content. None of them indicate that you're a rabid homophobe who thinks the Rapture is coming any day now. Watching Duck Dynasty indicates exactly that. There's nothing wrong with having sexual fantasies or liking different levels of literature and music. There is something wrong (IMO) with watching TV shows or listening to music which pushes moronic religious viewpoints. It's very simple: if you listen to some type of "entertainment" which preaches to you to hate people who were born differently from you, and you buy into this, then you're a moron IMO.
Yes, but poll numbers show Muslims think Jihad in the name of Islam is perfectly potty, just as long as it isn't Muslims getting whacked. Also, Muslims believe political power comes from Allah, most Western (and Christian, I might add) nations believe political power comes from the people. As long as Muslims indulge themselves in this belief of Allah and political power, they will have no problem killing off non-Muslims, and they will never assimilate into Western nations. They will, instead, look at Western nations as nations not yet taken over.
And the Muslim saying, "if Allah wills it" shows just how morally bankrupt they are. They will never lift themselves above dictatorships or dictatorships masquerading as theocracies. And don't bother pointing at Indonesia as a counterpoint, they periodically have pogroms targeting non-Muslims.
When your holy book says this is the word of God and these are the rules you shall live by, those outdated morals become a problem. We need to find a way to issue updates to the religions of the world. Continuing to use version 1.0 is causing compatibility issues.
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
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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