Category: Ignorance & Chutzpah
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Take this, you English-mangling, bumbling writers blending in your regional dialects, oddities of phrase and grammar in your writing. A pontificating pundit from The Hindu ('India's National Newspaper') laments the death of good English in Indian writing, and herself commits more than a few cardinal sins in the process.
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Here we go again. The headline reads "Study Ties Hot Flashes to Lower Breast Cancer Risk". The article goes on to blabber thusly: 'Here's some good news for women ever bothered by hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms: Your risk for breast cancer may be reduced as much as 50 percent, researchers from the Fred Hutchinson…
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Professor Razi Azmi has an op-ed in Pakistan's Daily Times today. The situation described by Dr. Azmi highlights one of the major failures of Islamicate thought in the last millennium: their inability to evolve a political theory beyond hereditary kingship or rule by strongman.
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The recent murder of Salman Taseer and the subsequent glorification of his killer by some parties has set a few Pakistanis on the path to creative writing. A few days ago I posted a story from Ahmed Asif and today we have another Asif stepping up to the plate…may their tribe increase. Meanwhile, yet another Asif has also taken up the…
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A rabbi discusses sperm donation.. A mullah discusses the art of wife beating… Another Rabbi offers his opinion on women drivers.. And a pastor explains floods.. And a Pakistani peers into the future.. OK, the last one is a fantasy. My point? Well, I have two. 1. That crazy is pretty much universal. 2. But the Middle East and Pakistan still…
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Lawyers (presumably supporters of Islamist parties) showered Mumtaz Qadri, self-confessed killer of Governor Salman Taseer, with rose petals on his first court appearance. He was also garlanded with a garland of roses. This post can be read in conjunction with this one…the comments on the earlier post are also relevant.
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One Thousand Year Writer’s Block? William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified? First things first: obviously we are not talking about all writing or all creative work. Thousands of talented writers have churned out countless works of literature, from the poems of Hafiz and…
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I hate to say I told you so, but here it is.. And the reason is not that millions of Pakistanis turned out on the streets to protest (only 100 protesters at Zardari house in Karachi…one can get more than that in a protest about goat prices on Eid) but they were enough.. The ruling…
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I Have Egg on My Face! by Norman Costa No joke! I misread the text of an article which contained an image of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' painting, L'Odalisque à l'esclave. The article referred to a gift made to John Kenneth Galbraith by the country of India. The generous gift was bestowed upon Galbraith, father…
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This was bound to happen.Major Pakistani newspapers have been duped (or "made an offer they could not refuse") into printing headline stories based on false wikileaks cables that are extremely unflattering to India. And I am not surprised that the finest intelligence agency in the world was first with this new form of communication. btw, the…
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The decision of a lower court to award the death penalty to a poor Christian woman accused of blasphemy has ignited a wide ranging debate over Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Liberals have asked that the Zia-era blasphemy law should be repealed or amended because it has become an instrument of oppression and injustice in the hands of mobs…
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An interesting fallout of the 2010 campaign of fear – Oklahoma voters have banned the Sharia law! This is more along the line of inoculation than an actual ban because Sharia is not law in Oklahoma or any other US state. The central US state of Oklahoma is to become the first state in the…
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