Category Archives: Rationalism

The growing religious-ideological discord and presence of an assortment of religiously inspired extremist movements and groups in Pakistan have complex socio-political implications. Where these processes of negative social change will lead Pakistan is a worrying prognosis.

The religious discourse in the country, though diverse in sectarian terms, is largely monolithic intellectually. Even ideological diversity is rare; historically two trends have remained dominant, ie a traditional religious-political discourse, and Islamisation.

Although the two trends have some common violent and non-violent expressions, Islamist movements have also nurtured certain rational tendencies. These rational tendencies acted as a catalyst for overall religious trends in the country. On the one hand, rationalists shaped their own movements and established their institutions and on the other, under their influence or in reaction the traditionalists and Islamists tried to amend their strategies. However, the rationalists have failed to completely transform the religious discourse in the country. Their desire to become distinguished among the religious discourse would be a reason for this failure. This is strange, that in South Asian intellectual discourse leading Muslim scholars, rather than contributing, established their own movements while being part of the mainstream tradition.

An examination of why post-Islamist movements are unable to transform into populist social movements

Scholar, researcher and professor Dr Husnul Amin argues in his doctoral thesis about why the rationalists could not develop a populist approach. He counts many reasons, including the countrys peculiar societal structures, rationalists comfortable relationship with the power elites and most importantly the rationalists larger focus on the middle classes and special interest in academic issues. These findings give an impression that the rationalists failed on a strategic level, but one can argue about their whole intellectual paradigm, which may be borrowed from the West and influenced by contemporary socio-political environments rather than be linked with philosophical tradition or evolution of Islamic thought.

In pursuit of alternative modernity, the rationalists are developing compatibility with Islamic text and democratisation. Amin has tried to understand the dynamics of this process in his book Post-Islamism: Pakistan in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation. This is indeed an important contribution to understanding the construct of Muslim intellectual movements in contemporary societies. He takes Javed Ahmed Ghamidis blueprint as a case study to comprehend the phenomenon, but uses the term post-Islamism for Muslim rationalism.

Post-Islamism is not a new term. French scholar Olivier Roy, as well as Iranian Asef Bayat, have mainly constructed the framework of post-Islamism, which is taken as a transformative form of Islamist movements of post-world wars that emerged in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Bayat contributed more in shaping the conceptual framework of Amins thesis, as he has acknowledged, but Amin applied this framework in a different context and with some variation. Amin believes post-Islamism is not the dead end of Islamism. It may not be dubbed anti-Islamic or secular, but secularisation of state/society. Post-Islamism proffers a framework where political reform is linked to religious reform. The Islamist parties have shifted their focus to minorities, youth and gender concerns and adopted a rights-based approach this is a practical manifestation of post-Islamism.

As far as Islamism is concerned, Amin considers it a revivalist movement and lists three factors that contributed to the conceptualisation of Islamism: 1. Political interpretation of religious text and thus blurring of categories of collective obligation and personal obligation. 2. Socio-political struggle to enforce Sharia, pursuance of an Islamisation programme through the institutional arrangement of the state and re-affirmation of Islam as a blueprint of socio-economic order. 3. Islamists openness to adopt and deploy all modern means of propaganda machinery, technology, print, electronic and social media.

In that context, he distinguishes post-Islamism as a social movement with a retreat from the idea of creating an Islamic state and an outcome of neo-liberal globalisation inspirations on modern Muslim minds. The Ghamidi movement is a perfect manifestation of this phenomenon as it has succeeded in creating an interpretive community in Pakistan that engages with liberalism and democracy.

It is interesting that Ghamidi thought was promoted by military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf as his top-down project of enlightened moderation. It could be conceived as an enforced moderation project, that was part of a political tool and foreign policy agenda of the military government. Amin rightly argues, Ghamidi and his close associates received disproportionate media coverage on newly liberated private television channels. He became a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology in 2006 and remained in this position for two consecutive years. Despite an overwhelming emphasis on the status of democracy in their [Ghamidi movements] religious discourse, Ghamidi has hardly directly questioned the legitimacy of the system in place in which he gained the opportunity to flourish.

It is also interesting that Ghamidi does not subscribe to major Islamic schools of thought in the Indian subcontinent and places himself in a self-constructed category, Dabistan-i-Shibli. Amin believes that this imaginary school of thought has served the Ghamidi movement in multiple ways. It enables them to place themselves in the middle of two popularly known opposite poles, namely Deobands conservatism and Sir Syed Ahmed Khans rationalism. As a post-Islamist, Ghamidi has challenged the notion of the Islamic state projected by the Islamists including Maulana Maududi, who believes in the supremacy of Sharia over all aspects of social, political and religious life.

Amin also examines existing religious political movements in the country in the third chapter Islamism Without Fear. He argues that though the Jamaat-i-Islami is a well-structured and organised party in Pakistan and played a leading role in shaping the Islamism discourse in the country, compared to the Jamiat-Ulema-i-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), which is a loosely connected party, the latter remains more accommodative to religious minorities and in its political approaches. It can be assumed that despite its conventional credentials, the JUI-F has more flexibility to accommodate post-Islamism concepts of a social life.

Despite making some visible intellectual contribution, post-Islamist movements have failed to transform their ideas into a popular social movement. Amin is not hopeless and he agrees with Bayat that post-Islamism is an evolving concept and a conscious attempt to conceptualise and strategise the rationale and modalities of transcending Islamism in social, political and intellectual domains. Most importantly it provides an inward-looking approach, which may have a slow impact.

Amin is a fine scholar with exposure to the best international academic forums and his attempt will provoke healthy academic debate in Pakistan.

The reviewer is a security analyst and director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, Islamabad

Post-Islamism: Pakistan in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation By Husnul Amin International Islamic University, Islamabad ISBN: 978-9697576050 198pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2017

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NON-FICTION: THE FAILED RATIONALIST - DAWN.com

Here we are with 2017 more than half over and weve got a lot on our plate to deal withour political system, our environmental problems, our federal and state debt, our infrastructure, our civil unrest, our dealings with domestic and international terrorism, our health care problems, and many more.

But one issue that is rarely brought up these days is education; specifically, where is education in terms of priorities, what are the issues and how will its shortcomings be remedied?

The people of the United States need to know that individuals in our society who do not possess the levels of skill, literacy and training essential to this new era will be effectively disenfranchised, not simply from the material rewards that accompany competent performance, but also from the chance to participate fully in our national life. A high level of shared education is essential to a free, democratic society and to the fostering of a common culture, especially in a country that prides itself on pluralism and individual freedom. That quote was taken from a report called A Nation At Risk and presented to president Ronald Reagan in April 1983.

The report goes on to enumerate the deficiencies of our school systems and to offer suggestions for improvement. But the negative findings in that very report are just as valid today as they were 34 years ago. Arguably, even worse.

Youve probably seen some of the statistics. The United States ranked 14th out of 40 nations in overall education. We are 24th in literacy and 17th in educational performance. In its 2015 report by the Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. was ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science and reading. Among the 35 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

This lack of education has produced some disappointing results. For example, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77 percent didnt know that George Washington was the first president, couldnt name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and only 2.8 percent of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5 percent of students passed the civics test. According to the National Research Council report, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design. And 18 percent of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll.

Another statistic that is alarming today is the result of a July 10 poll taken by the Pew Research Center in Washington, where 58 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said colleges and universities had a negative impact on the way things were going in the country. Two years ago, only 37 percent of that group said that. In recent months, that seems to ring true.

This decline of education in America has been going on for years. And problems engendered by this diminution have been and continue to show up in most of our institutions, our culture and our national conscience. As a result, we are losing respect from the rest of the civilized world along with our competitive edge. In short, we are facing a national tragedy.

As Susan Jacoby writes in a 2008 article in The Washington Post, The Dumbing of America, Dumbness, to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. Its the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

So here we are at the beginning of the 21st century with too many of us dismissive of science and rational discourse. Literacy and critical thinking are becoming anathema to our future leaders.

For some time now, Ive been studying the Iroquois Confederacys political philosophy as set fourth in its constitution. A small excerpt from that document seems pertinent here.

In all of your deliberations in the Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion. ... Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground the unborn of the future Nation.

Time to wake up America.

HERB VAN FLEET, a former Joplin resident, lives in Tulsa.

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Herb Van Fleet: The sad state of education in America - Joplin Globe

Much has been made about how the rise of right-wing demagoguery today has roots in the sociopolitical aberrations of 20th-century fascism, a tragic detour in Western modernitys supposedly gradual road of infinite progress. This is much too truncated an analogy for Pankaj Mishra, a London-based Indian writer whose new book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (to come out later this month), reaches back even further in the history of Western thought to argue that contemporary rage the kind thats being generated and exploited by opportunistic politicians around the world is actually a logical byproduct of liberal rationalism, the bedrock of our modern reality and philosophical backdrop to the now fraying fabric of globalization.

Mishra uses what the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ressentiment an existential resentment of other peoples being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness to describe the origins of todays mass expressions of nativist rage, validated by President-elect Donald Trump and his equally insurgent cognates across the world. This ressentiment is caused ultimately by the inherent unevenness of modern politics and economics, which is constructed on the assumption that human nature can be perfected through rationalized self-interest. Those who directly or indirectly sense the illusory nature of this pervasive assumption find themselves in rigged systems that only pretend to an equal and fair playing field, be it money-making, political representation or even interpersonal relationships.

After all, not everyone can be a recipient of modernitys material promises. Not every family in, say, China and Indian can be the proud owner of multiple SUVs, swimming pools and spacious garages, regardless of what the flagbearers of liberal globalization proclaim. Any attempt to do so would collapse an already frail planet before its even halfway realized. Those whore beginning to feel this gap between modern realities and modern promises in places like Asia and elsewhere turning to the same sort of nativist inwardness thats currently being exploited by strongmen like Indias Narendra Modi and the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte.

The GOP having majority sway over all three branches of the US government is scary enough, but its the global metastasis of this angry pattern thats truly frightening, as Asia and Africa long heralded as the rising tigers of liberal globalism produce their own versions of ressentiment demagoguery. Mishra reminds us that these waves of humiliated masses who feel like modernity has let them down are not unique to history. Theyre a type whove long existed in the Wests own history of modernization, a process thathasnt come to terms with the imperfections and limits of human nature, the darker aspects of our tainted souls thatgive rise to resentment and angry humiliation.

When the young man of promise fails to be admitted into the club of modern aspiration, he responds with bitterness at those whove been more successful, or those who he thinks have prevented him from attaining his rightful piece of the pie: Muslims, immigrants, gays, etc. This is where the response to getting left behind eventually morphs into a nativist and often fanatical defense of ones own sociocultural sect.

It takes a less-than-optimistic voice like Mishras to remind and prove to the public that, far from being the results of social or historical aberration, ressentiment is the inevitable byproduct of the continuous application of the conclusions of Enlightenment rationalism. This is when humankind replaced God with the Self, thus positing just as their societies entered an industrial age that the direction of civilization can be controlled by mans own rationalized self-interest.

Mishra quotes 20th-century Austrian writer Robert Musil in a recent introductory essay to Age of Anger: Its not that we have too much intellect and too little soul, but that we have too little intellect in matters of the soul. It seems like a simplistic reduction of what looks to most of us like a whole universe of various problems, but Mishra is convincing in his demonstration of how modern problems arent the products of modernity-gone-wrong, but of modernity itself. This sounds awfully similar to the social critiques presented by a host of traditionalist and Muslim intellectuals, from Hamza Yusuf to Seyyed Hossein Nasr and, though Mishra may not agree, it seems that Age of Anger is pointing toward broader solutions (insofar as they exist and its not clear that Mishra thinks they do) that would have to make use of organized religion.

It turns out that as the global order frays, religion itself isnt going anywhere. The global experience of Muslim terrorism, for example, is also an aspect of todays ressentiment. It points out that, among other things, religions have retained their power despite secular modernitys insistence that faith itself belongs ultimately to the myopic and backward stupidities/superstitions of simple people. Todays proponents of radical modernism now morphing precipitously into a mean laicism thanks to the rise of ISIS and the ongoing war on terror would be hard pressed to come up with a workable solution to our global crisis, since the problem is to be found at the heart of their own derivative worldview.

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Pankaj Mishra's eloquent anger - The Islamic Monthly

Scientific atheism and intellectual contempt

I give you a quote from David Berlinski: "Has anyone provided proof of God's inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt ? Dead on."

Berlinski was a research assistant in molecular biology at Columbia University,[3] and was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes tudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. How is it that he has come up with a totally different outcome?

Blair Hancock, Downie St.

Vastly different viewpoints on Khadr

Talk about black and white! The two letters printed Wednesday show both sides of this argument, I'm sure.

Mary Liz Allen describes so beautifully the point of view of Mr. Khadr, as the situation presented itself to a child of 15. Marion Hanysh describes a point of view that the rest of our great country is somehow being left out of some prize bestowed upon Mr. Khadr unfairly.

A Canadian is a Canadian and as such deserves all the protection that we have been taught to expect. If you really want to know what a burgeoning "banana republic" feels like, Ms. Hanysh, may I suggest you relocate to Mr. Trump's jurisdiction. I, too, am on the downslide, and am most grateful that my children, grandchildren and great-grandchild are growing up in the best, most open, accepting country on earth.

I sincerely hope that they will be part of an ever-caring and just society, throughout their lifetimes, and beyond. Thank you, Ms. Allen, for helping us all to FEEL what young Omar had to endure for all those years.

Bev Miles, Omemee

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Letters to the editor, July 21, 2017 - Peterborough Examiner

Introduction: The Tesla Freight Network

Following its strategy in passenger cars, I predict that Tesla (TSLA) will begin by selling semi trucks to customers before transitioning to an on-demand self-driving service. I believe that Tesla will launch a Tesla Network for freight like its planned Tesla Network for passengers. I anticipate that this service, which I call the Tesla Freight Network, will probably launch sometime in the early 2020s. Using some rough back-of-the-envelope math, I find that the Tesla Freight Network could eventually generate tens of billions or even hundreds of billions in revenue for Tesla.

This is not a new idea. Uber (UBER) already has launched a similar service, Uber Freight, although for now it still uses human drivers rather than self-driving trucks. Uber also acquired Otto, a self-driving truck startup, and continues to work on developing self-driving for long-haul freight trucking. Uber has made clear its service for passengers will go autonomous. Taking Uber Freight autonomous seems like a given.

In October, Tesla announced the Tesla Network for passengers, an autonomous ride-hailing service that will compete with Uber. With Tesla now working on self-driving freight trucks, the logical next step is to develop a competing service to Uber Freight. Tesla will have an edge over Uber, as well as over other competitors, if the all-electric Tesla semi can achieve a cost per mile than semi trucks powered by diesel engines. This should be achievable thanks to the lower energy cost, lower maintenance cost, and longer lifetime of electric powertrain technology. Tesla will have an additional advantage in machine learning for self-driving freight trucks if can build up a large fleet of primarily human-driven trucks with Autopilot that collect driving data.

Contrary to popular belief, Tesla is not already priced for perfect execution of its strategy. That could only possibly be true if Teslas strategy did not include self-driving, which CEO Elon Musk has stated is the companys No. 2 priority, behind only the Model 3 launch. Self driving for passengers would likely grow Teslas market cap several times over. Self driving for freight represents another opportunity for growth that ranges from around a 20% increase in market cap at 1% market share and a several-fold increase at higher market shares.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks about the Tesla semi truck at TED.

Let's spend a moment indulging in the dangerous game of linear extrapolation. If Tesla is successful in quadrupling its production volume in 2018, its share of the U.S. passenger vehicle market will be roughly 1%. At a 1% share of the freight trucking industry, Tesla would generate $10 billion in revenue. At the S&P 500s historical average price/sales ratio of 1.45, this revenue would add $14.5 billion to Teslas market cap. That's about 20% growth from Tesla's all-time high market cap of $63.6 billion.

By comparison, as of late last year Tesla's share of the U.S. large luxury sedan market is around 30%. It's a segment that includes the BMW (OTCPK:BMWYY) 7 Series and the Mercedes-Benz (OTCPK:DDAIF) S-Class, based on a combination of price, performance, and interior passenger volume. At a 30% share of the freight trucking market, Tesla would generate $300 billion in revenue and add $435 billion in market cap (at the same price/sales ratio).

However, I don't believe either of these precedents are a good guide to predicting Tesla's market share in the freight trucking industry. Freight trucking is purely about cost per mile, not about qualitative factors such as aesthetics, brand, or driver experience, which are important for car buyers. As such, Tesla's market share will be a function of 1) its cost per mile relative to the current industry average, 2) the degree of competition in the self-driving electric freight truck space, and 3) its production volume.

The economic rationalism of the freight trucking industry and the anticipated dramatically lower cost per mile of self-driving electric freight trucks means these vehicles will dominate the freight trucking industry. No other company is known to be developing this kind of vehicle.

Competition will no doubt arrive eventually, but right now it looks like Tesla might be the only company working on a self-driving electric freight truck. Until other manufacturers launch competing vehicles, there is theoretically no limit to Teslas share of the freight trucking market. The only limiting factor will be its production volume.

It's worth considering the following. At a 5% share of the U.S. freight trucking market, Tesla would generate $50 billion in revenue and add at least $72 billion to Tesla's market cap. That added $72 billion alone is more than 110% of Teslas market cap at its all-time high of $63.6 billion. As long as the Tesla Freight Network is successful, Tesla could lose revenue from all other sources and still grow 10% from its all-time high.

Tesla also will capture market share internationally. While statistics on the global freight trucking industry are not readily available, the U.S. has a 25% share of the overall global transportation industry. The international opportunity, then, may be several times larger than the opportunity within the U.S.

U.S. freight trucking already was a $726 billion industry in 2015 and its growing. The American Trucking Associations forecast a 35% increase in freight tonnage moved by trucks from 2016 to 2027 as its baseline scenario. A 38% increase in revenue would push the industry past the $1 trillion mark.

I anticipate that self-driving electric freight trucks will accelerate the climb to $1 trillion in revenue. Driver compensation accounts for 31% of the operating costs of a freight truck, with fuel costs at 25%, repair and maintenance at 10%, and insurance at 6%. Thats 72% of operating costs that can be reduced dramatically by a self-driving electric freight truck. Far lower costs mean that freight companies can offer far lower prices. This has the potential to unlock a new level of demand for freight transportation. Moreover, as Galileo Russell observes, self-driving electric freight trucks are likely to grab market share from rail.

This article is based on rough back-of-the-envelope math. High-powered research teams will release different estimates based on sophisticated mathematical models. These models capture subtleties back-of-the-envelope math cant. Its possible that due to factors Im not modeling in my rough math, Teslas opportunity is much smaller than I claim.

For instance, perhaps under conditions of dramatically lower costs and intense competition, aggregate freight trucking revenue could drop so low that Tesla would require a much larger market share to add $72 billion to its market cap. I am somewhat skeptical of this particular scenario because I dont see competition intensifying quickly and I suspect growth in freight volumes may offset the drop in costs. However, I cant rule it out and there may be other scenarios I havent considered.

A successful launch of the Tesla Freight Network will, I believe, eventually add a minimum of $14.5 billion in market cap to Tesla and more likely a multiple of that number. Investors who feel confident in Teslas technological leadership and ability to execute, as I do, should consider seizing on this opportunity. Since the Tesla Freight Network may not launch until years after the initial production of the Tesla semi truck currently planned for 2019 this is an opportunity for investors who are prepared to hold onto their stock for a long time.

My recommendation: Buy TSLA and hold on a very long-term basis, i.e. at least 10 years and ideally longer.

Disclosure: I am/we are long TSLA.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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The Tesla Freight Network: A $10 Billion Opportunity - Seeking Alpha

ThinkTV hasannounced that Bob Hoffman, the best-selling US author, speaker, blogger and advisor, will deliver the keynote speech at ReThinkTV 2017 when the advertising and marketing forum returns on September 14 at Luna Park in Sydney.

Hoffman is one of the most sought-after international speakers on advertising and marketing: Time, Inc calls him fabulously irreverent, The Wall Street Journal calls him caustic yet truthful, The Financial Times says he is responsible for savage critiques of digital hype and Fuel Lines calls him The most provocative man in advertising.

Renowned for his acid wit and entertaining style, Hoffman has titled his presentation Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey.

Marketers are living in a dream world of their own invention, he said. I will be speaking about three delusions that demonstrate how marketers have lost touch with consumers and to some degree, with reality.

Hoffman has been chief executive of two independent agencies and the US operation of an international agency. He has created advertising for McDonalds, Toyota, Pepsico, Bank of America, AT&T, and more companies than he cares to think about. Through his company, Type A Group, Bob advises advertisers, agencies, and media.

Kim Portrate, chief executive of ThinkTV, said: ThinkTV is delighted to have Bob deliver the keynote at ReThinkTV 2017. His wise-headed rationalism and entertaining delivery will be a draw card in a what is rapidly shaping up to be one of the key advertising and marketing events of 2017.

We have an exciting schedule which is designed to provide advertisers and their agencies with invaluable insights into advertising effectiveness and to help them to get the very best of todays multi-platform TV. Stay tuned for more announcements.

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Famed Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman To Deliver ReThinkTV Keynote - B&T

When Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, even in Australia, in what was then the outer suburban offices of Penguin Books, fear changed the way we not only acted but also thought.

We debated the pros and cons and many of us believed that if people are put at risk by a book and by writing even by commenting on books and writing then maybe its better if we choose silence.

Twenty years on, British writer Kenan Malik took us back to that time in a book he called From Fatwa to Jihad, showing with measured and powerful analysis how that was a moment that changed the world.

Following the murders of journalists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, Malik updated his book, reiterating his sharp criticism of Leftist support for dangerous identity politics.

The Rushdie affair, he wrote, gave early notice of the abandonment by many sections of the left of their traditional attachment to ideas of Enlightenment rationalism and secular universalism and their growing espousal of multiculturalism, identity politics and notions of cultural authenticity.

Maliknow campaigns in words to challenge what he sees is the odd situation where both Left and Right claim national identity must be defended.

Malik doesnt talk much about his background, although he recently wrote an article about growing up in Manchester and the killings at the music concert. That he was born in India to a Muslim father and Hindu mother and arrived aged five to live in England is not something he puts forward to justify his ethical and social thinking about identity politics.

He does talk at his Pandaemonium website about his interest in radical far-Left politics when he was younger, and about how the response to the Rushdie affair changed his mind. He now campaigns in words to challenge what he sees is the odd situation where both Left and Right claim national identity must be defended.

The consequences of identity politics and of concepts such as cultural appropriation is to bring about not social justice but the empowerment of those who would act as gatekeepers to particular communities, he says.

Hes been attacked, of course, for criticising multiculturalism policies that curtail freedom of speech, but he shows, in his magisterial new book, The Quest for a Moral Compass, how ethical thinking can provide a path down through history and hopefully into the future.

His books are not widely distributed yet in Australia, but his imminent tour may amend that a little: he begins his tour at Byron Bay Writers Festival from August 4 to 6, then speaks at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on August 8, State Library of NSW on August 10, and finally at Bendigo Writers Festival, August 11-13, where he is in conversation with Tony Walker for La Trobe Universitys Ideas and Society talks.

Rosemary Sorensen is director of Bendigo Writers Festival

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Kenan Malik on 20 years after the fatwa on Salman Rashdie - Daily Review

Whats the rush?

We should not rush and make errors for the sake of satisfying raised emotions.

Pakistan as a nation is driven more by emotions rather than rationalism, rule of law, or political tradition. This emotionalism is ingrained in us from an early age and critical inquiry is discouraged to build rational thought and logic. Every now and then there are cries of lack of moral authority and demands that an elected Prime Minister should resign because of that. As soon as Panama JIT report was made public then once again calls were made by opposition politician that the elected Prime Minister should resign. I have never understood what this moral authority is that is so frequently invoked in our politics and whether it is really very critical to use moral authority as a legitimate demand to seek resignation.

Since early days of Islam, the question of moral authority using concerns about legitimacy have been raised and became a cause for political division. Till this day, the question is hotly debated and even gave rise to a separate sect pursuing those arguments. The reality is that these questions of moral authority did not matter much as allegiance was given to the Caliph that ascended to the position as per tradition of the day. It is also a reality that Islamic political entity grew many folds during the tenure of first four Caliph and we dont know what would have happened if the allegiance was not given to them by the community. I dont think our present day politicians are in any ways equal to those great men of our history but Quran proposes that we should learn from history so I had to remind all of you about it.

Now lets suppose, since the majority of our nation is emotional rather than rational, that moral authority has to be applied then it should apply to everyone and should be codified in a legislation. If the moral authority has to be invoked then ISI and MI should have refused to become part of a JIT because there is a long history of a military takeover of governments. The military should have first apologised for the past transgression of the constitution as an institution and then sent their representative to sit on JIT. They should have also asked its former Chief General Musharraf to come back and face courts before they become the part of a legal process against an elected PM. If the moral authority has to be invoked then Imran Khan should not be the Chairman of his party because he violated the constitution of his party every day and even now holds an illegitimate title of party Chairman. He should also not ask for an elected PM to resign until he first clears his name in all cases against him because that has deprived him of moral authority. If the moral authority has to be invoked then Judges should have first tried their own brother judge named in Panama papers before they took up the case of a civilian politician. So moral authority should only be invoked by those that are themselves not encumbered by engaging in violating moral conduct. Bottom line is that moral authority has no place in politics.

The question of political authority does have to deal with the question of legitimacy. Anyrulerwhether a King/Queen, elected Prime Minister/President or a military dictator has to deal with the question of legitimacy. Legitimacy is provided by rules, procedures, laws, and constitution. A ruler that does not have legitimacy will always have to deal with uprisings and dissent. So moral important barometer for a government is legitimacy in realpolitik rather than any adherence to some invisible and intangible moral authority. First four Caliphs of Islam as soon as they took the oath of the office sought allegiance of the citizens. Since majority pledged their allegiance the rule became legitimate and enabled them to take actions against those that challenged their authority.

In our current political crisis many intellectuals, amateur politician, newspaper editorials, and power hungry opposition is invoking moral authority to push an elected Prime Minister out of office. My position has been consistent that the elected Prime Minister should go home through a due process which is the only way he will lose legitimacy to rule. PML-N decision to seek a vote of no confidence, as reported by some media, for their Prime Minister is a good political move. If the opposition has any support then they should defeat him on the floor of the assembly and throw him out of the office. While the other legal process of ascertaining disqualification of individual MNA Nawaz Sharif should proceed in the court of law as per the provisions of the constitution for a fair trial.

We have to become a nation of citizens that respect rule of law and strive for its application uniformly. Islams main message is also justice. The main purpose of Jihad is also to seek social justice. Selective justice does not help anyone but rather creates instability. We are a nascent democracy that is still trying to find its feet on the ground and deepen its roots. We cant be using intangible ideas like moral authority that has no precedence in law or history to seek removal of an elected Prime Minister.

I have faith in the nation that it has the ability to make a good collective decision. There is no evidence yet that PML-N or its government has lost support of majority of the nation which can only be established through a free and fair election. I also have faith that our judicial system has the ability to reform itself and ensure justice for all without favour or bias. I believe our democracy is slowly but surely taking root and a tradition building to guide future parliaments and governments. The process ofehtisabhas to continue and take its natural course as per constitution of the country. We should not rush into it and make errors for the sake of satisfying raised emotions.

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Moral authority, realpolitik and state craft - Pakistan Today

Walkaway is an optimistic disaster novel. Its about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains arent the people next door, whove secretly been waiting for civilizations breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.

In Walkaway, the economy has comprehensively broken down, and so has the planet. Climate refugees drift in huge, unstoppable numbers from place to place, seeking refuge. The world has no jobs for most people, because when robots do all the work, the forces of capital require a few foremen to boss the robots, and a few unemployed people mooching around the factory gates to threaten the supervisors with if they demand higher wages. Everyone else is surplus to requirements.

But just because youre useless to the rich and powerful, it doesnt follow that youll lie down in a ditch somewhere to take yourself off the game-board. The useless people declare the system to be the problem and walk away from it, forming a kind of parallel, bohemian society that uses software and automated manufacturing techniques to build a post-scarcity world on the fringes of the terminal phase of late-stage capitalism.

This is harmless enough for the powers that be, so its a relatively stable relationship until, that is, the scientists whove been working on a moonshot project to create practical immortality treatments for the 0.1% decide to take their work to the walkaways then, as the rich figure out theyll have to spend eternity with us, all out war breaks out.

Its a book about the struggle between people who think other people are the problem (the rich) and people who think other people are the solution (everyone else).

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Awareness of self-deception is a tactic thats deployed very usefully by a lot of people now. Its at the core of things like cognitive behavioral therapy the idea that you must become an empiricist of your emotions because your recollections of emotions are always tainted, so you have to write down your experiences and go back to see what actually happened. Do you remember the term Endless September? Its from when AOL came on to the net, and suddenly new people were getting online all the time, who didnt know how things worked. The onboarding process to your utopian project is always difficult. Its a thing Burning Man is struggling with, and its a thing fandom is struggling with right now. We were just talking about what its like to go to a big media convention, a San Diego Comic-Con or something, and to what extent thats a new culture, or its continuous with the old culture, or its preserving the best things or bringing in the worst things, or its overwhelming the old, or whatever. Its a real problem, and there is a shibboleth, which is, I dont object to all these newcomers, but theyre coming in such numbers that theyre overwhelming our ability to assimilate them. This is what every xenophobe who voted for Brexit said, but you hear that lament in science fiction too, and you hear it even about such things as gender parity in the workplace.

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For me, I live by the aphorism, fail better, fail faster. To double your success rate, triple your failure rate. What the walkaways figured out how to do is reduce the cost of failure, to make it cheaper to experiment with new ways of succeeding. One of the great bugaboos of the rationalist movement is loss aversion. There is another name for it, the entitlement effect: basically, people value something they have more than they would pay for it before they got it. How much is your IKEA furniture worth before and after you assemble it? People grossly overestimate the value of their furniture after theyve assembled it, because having infused it with their labor and ownership, they feel an attachment to it that is not economically rational. Sunk cost is another great fallacy. You can offer somebody enough money to buy the furniture again, and pay somebody to assemble it, and theyll turn you down, because now that they have it, they dont want to lose it. That was the wisdom of Obama with Obamacare. He understood that Obamacare is not sustainable, that basically letting insurance companies set the price without any real limits means that the insurance companies will eventually price it out of the governments ability to pay, but he also understood that once you give 22 million people healthcare, when the insurance companies blew it up, the people would then demand some other healthcare system be found. The idea of just going without healthcare, which was a thing that people were willing to put up with for decades, is something theyll never go back to. Any politician who proposes that when Obamacare blows up that we replace it with nothing, as opposed to single payer where its going to end up that politician is dead in the water.

*

Getting back to the availability heuristic, what I want is for people to be able to vividly imagine that the heroism in the moment of disaster is to avert catastrophe by bugging in instead of bugging out. Because the heroic story, in a lot of traditional science-fiction, is that when disaster strikes, the hero runs to the hills. The hero bugs out of town, and defends a small group of people from the ravening hordes. Its The Road. Its John Wyndham. The reality is that power plants have been failing for a long time, and the people who ran to the hills during the blackout didnt fix the power plant. Its the people who ran to the power plant who fixed the power plant. Those are the heroes. I want to give people the intuition that what the right sort of person does is look after their neighbors, thats what stops disasters from turning into catastrophes. I really want this book to be an intervention in the world. I want it to be something thats easy to call to mind in the moment where your heart is thundering and things are going terribly wrong, to realize what you do in that situation is help out. Mr. Rogers said when theres a disaster, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. If you ever take a first aid class, 99% of that first aid class is the knowledge that everyone else is going to assume that someone else is going to take care of a problem, and the realization that the perfect person doing the perfect thing is less important than any person doing something. Even if you know a small amount about looking after someone, you should rush forward. Be prepared to get out of the way if someone says, Im a doctor, but rush forward.

*

Later on this tour Im going to stop at Reason Magazine, which is part of the Cato Institute. Ive talked with those guys a lot before, and we have a lot in common, and a lot of places where we differ. Like with Occupy, I think you should never over-specify your values. Walkaway plants some flags that are unequivocal in terms of how I stand on some issues where I have deep and probably irreconcilable differences with some of my allied people in the libertarian camp. I speak as a guy whos won three Prometheus Awards! I have a lot of respect for elements of libertarianism, but I also have some gaps. I dont dispute that libertarianism works well, I dispute whether it fails better than collectivism. I think libertarianism has some really grotesque failure modes. This is what Im planning to dig into when I talk to them. I keep having dialogues in my head where I try to Iron Man their best arguments and think about what my best arguments will be. Do you know the term Iron Man? Its the opposite of a Straw Man argument, so when youre having a dispute with someone else, and you say, Can we stop, and Im going to tell you what I think your best argument is for your position, and you tell me if I have it right? Its a way of advancing the debate beyond exploiting bugs in how the person has expressed themselves, and trying to come to common ground so that you can argue about substance. The one thing I love about libertarians is that they often overlap with the rationalist movement. Rationalism is not without its flaws, but its a very powerful force for improving the world.

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Im working on a third Little Brother book now, for adults, called Crypto Wars. Paramount has the film rights to the first one. Im doing some screenwriting for the first time. Id always resisted screenwriting, because everything Ive ever written thats fiction has been published, and screenwriting is the last scene of Indiana Jones, over and over again, the most amazing thing anyones ever done, and its in a warehouse somewhere, and no ones allowed to know it exists. My agent was able to cut a deal where even if no one turns this stuff into a movie, I could turn the writing into books and stories. Russ Galen is the agent. Hes amazing. Hes also the agent for Philip K. Dick, Norman Mailer, and Arthur C. Clarke, and there are a remarkable number of PKD and Arthur C. Clarke movies where hes an executive producer, so hes got a lot of experience. Its through a media company I like, a fairly new one thats done some incredible work, so Im happy to be doing it. After that, I dont know what Ill do. I sell books after Im finished, partly out of superstition that if I sell the book and cant finish it, that would be a problem, but also because in general my career has just gone up, and the longer I wait to sell a book, the more I can get for it.

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Locus Online Perspectives Cory Doctorow: Bugging In - Locus Online

The Hindu

Fear of holy snakes is flushing out toilets in Malnad region The Hindu It is also the birthplace of enlightened writers such as Kuvempu, U.R. Ananthamurthy, and P. Lankesh, who advocated rationalism. Epidemics are known to break out regularly in villages of Udri-Vaddigeri, Aralasurali, Kudumallige, Bejjavalli gram ...

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Fear of holy snakes is flushing out toilets in Malnad region - The Hindu