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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.
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.
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.
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.
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