Dancing around the world is a post from: Kiran

So lately, we have been going out biking almost everyday, getting used to the rules and routes of the city, it’s a whole other world when you’re on a bike. I noticed that when I first started driving years ago too – your perspective of the space you inhabit changes based on your mode of transportation – subways make me consider the underground routes to get from one part of the city to another, cars make me consider the highways, the one-way streets, the alternative smaller streets I can take to avoid heavy traffic. And now, biking is teaching me to notice even more things like where the ramps are, where the road is most uneven, where there are long blocks versus short blocks, and where the road is on an incline and where it’s on a decline, where cars tend to cluster and where there are bike lanes in the city.

I love noticing this shift in perspective, and I would encourage everyone to try different modes of transportation in whatever area you’re in, to get an idea of the perspective shift – try walking around for a week instead of driving to wherever you normally go in your neighborhood. Or take the train or the bus, instead of driving to a distant destination. Most of us are so hooked on cars and highways and parking lots, that we rarely just walk, or bike anywhere. I urge you to try it sometime, especially if you live in a part of the planet where it’s the later half of the summer season now. Just go, go out, and walk, or bike if you can get a bicycle (hint: they’re also a lot cheaper than cars!). You’ll love it!

On a related note, check out this site to see how Toronto is becoming more and more bike-friendly.

Bicycling in Toronto ~ Lovin’ the ride is a post from: Kiran

Tragedy in Pakistan is a post from: Kiran

I’d like to share my personal view on the burqa (face mask) controversy. My views are not based on the black-and-white, binary, false dichotomy presented too often by both supporters of the face-mask ban and those who wish to defend the garb.

Put simply: I support *regulation* of the Burqa/Niqab (the FACE covering part), not a “ban” on it.

Why? The key here is to understand the difference between regulating and banning something. Can we walk around naked in society? Besides in nudist beaches, at private gatherings, and a few special events in a few places, like some pride parades, is there legal and social regulation in place to stop people from walking around buck naked? Is that an encroachment of people’s right to be buck naked? Why is that regulation okay? If a cult started walking around buck naked and saying it was their religious duty, would we have to argue on their behalf too?

People who defend the right to wear a face-mask sometimes say that it is wrong to assume that anyone is ever speaking from an “objective” stance, and they are quite right. Yes, we are all socially programmed by many things in the worlds we live in; we all follow some normalization codes or other, whether we are aware of our own programmed behaviours or not; what we consider “normal” is a combination of what the societies we grew up in tell us is normal, and our own views on what we find natural for each of us. The question is not whether we are all programmed with different ways of thinking about things, but which of those ways of thinking is worthy of widespread support; which of those memes is something that supports the human rights and well-being of the maximum number of people.

Yes, freedom of expression needs to be preserved, however, it is not to be given completely free reign, otherwise we could all walk around naked anywhere in the public sphere. The fact that we can’t, the fact that strangers hanging about on the grounds of schools are looked upon with suspicion, the fact that we are not supposed to swear or smoke around kids, the fact that restaurants deny service to those not wearing shirts or shoes, the fact that your driver’s license and passport photos have to show your face, the fact that banks and airports have cameras to catch the faces of would-be criminals and of witnesses; these and many more social and legal regulations are in place to try to create a somewhat level playing field, at least in public spaces, where one’s identity is always at stake, should one try to break the law or cause trouble. Why should niqabis (and those who would don the niqab to commit crimes, or hurt people in public spaces) be exempt from these and other regulations? Because “God” told them to? The burqa / face mask is not even Islamic! Where does the Quran say a woman’s face must be kept hidden? It’s actually a sin, bida’h, if you consider the Islamic rule to not say that God said something he didn’t (according to Islam’s own rules!).

As far as women’s choices, sure some women want to wear the burqa, but can we deduce – given the nature of violent patriarchy – how many more are forced or compelled into wearing it? Of course there are no hard and fast statistics, like there usually aren’t when there is socio-culturally accepted oppression going on. What about those women’s rights? Is it “white guilt”, or Cultural Relativism as it’s known in Anthropological circles, that makes some otherwise lucid feminists lose sight of the fact that there are severe human rights abuses happening within Muslim cultures too, just like within all human social groups? Why do some feminists and liberals refuse to accept that there exist widely differing views within Muslims, and that certain segments of Muslims (like segments of virtually any other peoples on Earth) really do oppress women, gays, apostates, dissidents, religious and ethnic minorities, etc.; and that being liberal, progressive or left-wing in the west does not have to mean one has to align one’s self with right-wing, conservative, traditionalist, anti-liberals among Muslims, just to prove a point to the right-wingers of the west?

Proving a point should not be more important than defending the human rights of individuals, no matter what culture they happen to be from. If liberal feminists ignore them, who among progressives will speak up about those women oppressed by patriarchy in “other” cultures, while we are busy defending the patriarchal structures that exist inside those countries and cultures? Why has it been left up to right-wing think tanks to challenge the most right-wing branches of Islam? Why is it fine and dandy if a Muslim woman is oppressed by Muslims, but not okay if she is told she has to show her face to confirm her identity, to communicate etc.?

Women do bad things and wrong things too. I’m the type of feminist who believes in COMPLETE equality of both potential good and potential harm by both men and women. Women perpetuate male and female genital mutilation, as much or more than men. Women put their daughters into beauty contests, women treat their sons and daughters unequally too. Women participate in anti-choice rallies, women are as liable as men to be homophobes, including many members of the Westboro Church and the governer of Hawaii, and Sarah Palin and perhaps millions of other women who remain silently homophobic, and vote in homophobic laws with the right to vote their grandmothers fought tooth and nail for them to have. Women betray women’s rights, just look up Phyllis Schlafly. Just because a woman is doing something or saying something, does not automatically make it correct, right, good, humane or the best, most reasonable idea to listen to. Women can be very wrong about things too. Ann Coulter, anyone? Michelle Malkin? Especially when the women have internalized patriarchal values – when they believe in the deepest recesses of their socialized brains that they have no existence or value in the world unless men are owning them or using them or heckling them or treating them like their personal stash of pearls.

I definitely think ALL gender role socializations are bullshit and can and should be challenged and confronted and mocked and changed as needed. That includes the gender role that says that women are pearls and candy and rosebuds and princesses; fragile, helpless damsels to be saved and whisked away by a Prince Charming or Prince Alladin. And that includes the gender role that says that men have to be stoic and macho, and never show any emotion that isn’t anger or jealousy. That also includes the gender role that people are, by default, exclusively heterosexual, and any variation is thus a deviation.

But the Burqa/Niqab does not liberate anyone from anything. It only deflects the issues of gender role socializations, patriarchy and women’s self-worth. What are the similarities between a burqa-clad woman walking down the street like a Dementor from Harry Potter movies, and an anorexic, breast-implanted, botox-filled woman walking down the street in a halter top and short shorts? They have both accepted and internalized the notion that they exist to satisfy men. The niqabi woman (who is doing it out of “choice”) wants to be owned by particular men, her father, husband, brother – she wants to be private property. The halter-top woman wants to be desired, admired, and have her existence affirmed by the maximum number of men – she wants to be  public property. But both only see themselves and all other women as men’s property. How is it liberating to be on one extreme or the other?

I wonder what it would be like for more women to learn their own self-worth and not define or dress themselves purely for the benefit of men. What irks me about those feminists and otherwise liberal westerners who would disregard the ethical implications of too much cultural relativism, and who look the other way at any mention of Muslim-on-Muslim oppression, besides the fact that they are subscribing to the “noble savage” cliche of the exoticized “other”, is that they are also still playing by the same rules that patriarchy has outlined for millenia: “Women, you were created for men. Your only choices are: either be a virgin or a whore, your womb is the only thing that matters. The rest of you, your brain, your heart, your talents, your ambitions, your words, your voice, don’t matter, unless some man somewhere finds you worthy of being his property.”

There’s a middle ground in this oh-so-controversial debate, that’s a lot more reasonable and not based on demagoguery, but based on an honest examination of the deepest assumptions of people on both sides. This is all why I support regulation and not a ban, on the face masks in public spaces. At home, at private get-togethers, at designated events, I couldn’t give a damn how many tents a woman, or a man, wears or doesn’t wear. I don’t care if it’s religious belief causing a person to want to mask their identity in a public space, or simply a political fuck-you to the people he or she resents due to an ingrained sense of supremacism to the rest of society. If you’re going to be in a public space, you have to abide by certain regulations – you can’t go around flashing your genitals at strangers, and you can’t hide your basic identification from everyone around you either. Religious piety is no excuse to bypass the social regulations in a secular society.

I don’t support a ban because (a) bans polarize debates and create strong resistance movements that often make the debate more heated and dialogue and compromise less possible, (b) bans can’t be easily enforced without a society turning into a police state, (c) the women who are being forced to wear a face-mask may genuinely be cut-off from the rest of society if their male owners just outright lock them up rather than let them go outside showing their faces. For these reasons I can not and will not support a full out ban, though if it’s regulation in public spaces we’re talking about, and it’s presented with an eye towards, and education about, the gender role socializations that we all are subject to, no matter what we wear or don’t wear, then I could support such regulation.

Ultimately, what’s needed is a hearty discussion of what women’s and men’s roles are, have been and could be, within both Muslim and non-Muslim cultures.

Also, if our governments could just y’know stop fuckin’ with the lives of people in other countries, while telling them it’s for their own benefit, maybe there’d be less of a backlash against the freedoms and education many of us value. Something to think about.

________________________________________________________________________

Update [July 20, 2010]: This article has been reprinted in the progressive news magazine Online Journal.

The Burqa/Niqab ban controversy is a post from: Kiran

It’s got 103 of the most interesting figures of history juxtaposed together, and in some cases, interacting with each other, in a timeless image. From Bill Gates to Plato, Bruce Lee to the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, Margaret Thatcher to Audrey Hepburn, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Sigmund Freud to Jack Kevorkian, Albert Einstein to Che Guevara, Charles Darwin dressed as Noah, to Osama Bin Laden and the 72 Houris. Check it out!

Originally painted by three Chinese artists: Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, in 2006; oil on canvas.

A cool painting: Influential people, past and present is a post from: Kiran

The Semantic Web is a post from: Kiran

From their mission page:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

Fascinating stuff, actually. You just might get that addicting feeling using this search applet…

(yes I missed 1 day of the NaBloPoMo… sue me )

The Feeling Web is a post from: Kiran

and a *MUST WATCH* interview with her from AlJazeera English:

Nazanin – “Someday” is a post from: Kiran

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magical trick of human existence.” ~Tennessee Williams

“When you perceive that an act done to another is done to yourself, you have understood the great truth.” ~Taoist saying

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~Buddha

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” ~Albert Einstein

“To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other’s hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.” ~Clara Ortega

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength.” ~Ralph Stockman

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” ~T. Roosevelt

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” ~Albert Einstein

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.” ~Voltaire

“True love stories never have endings.” ~Richard Bach

“Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.” ~Rose Franken

“What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.” ~Pearl Bailey

“To all of us the thought of heaven is dear–
Why not be sure of it and make it here?
No doubt there is a heaven yonder too,
But ’tis so far away–and you are near.”
~Omar Khayyam

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” ~Lily Tomlin

Quotes for inspiring optimism, or some such… is a post from: Kiran

“Look up” invokes three basic concepts in my mind:

1: Optimism.

As in, looking up at the bright side of life… trying to find ways to look at things from a positive perspective as much as possible. This is hard for those of us who pay attention to the news, to politics, and the state of affairs in many, I’d say most, parts of the world. But as a wonderful visiting Professor told our Equity Studies class recently, “the greatest challenge for those of us aware of the problems of the world, is to learn how to love the world.” This really is the greatest challenge and one I’m learning slowly how to handle. I will blog about some of the people and organizations that have inspired me and are motivating me in the world today. I’m not sure if optimism is something I really understand, on a bigger scale, but I will make a honest effort at it. More on this as the month progresses, I’m sure.

2: Searching.

As in, searching for/looking up information, or a person, or a resource, group, or anything else that isn’t readily or easily available. It could also mean searching for answers, or at least, better ways of articulating the questions. This month, I’ll blog about some uncanny, off-the-wall, and interesting bits of information that I find, and also about how to search for things on the internet.

3: The Sky.

Halley's Comet 1986

One of my earliest memories is of my dad taking us out near the airport to watch for Halley’s Comet as it came within viewing range from Earth in early 1986. He explained to me what a comet was, and that the next time this ancient one came around I’d be in my 80′s. It was a mind-blowing thing for a 7 year old to discover. It made me appreciate from a very early age, the expanse of space and time, and how insignificant we really are in this grand, beautiful universe. Since then, my love for astronomy and cosmology has only increased. Some of my blog posts this month will revolve around this enduring passion of mine.

So, if you’re reading this and you’d like to comment, please do so, and let me know what “Look up” means to you.

NaBloPoMo May 2010 theme: “Look Up” is a post from: Kiran

Sigur Ros – Svefn-g-englar is a post from: Kiran

Aafia Siddiqui VS (Jews, Zarina Mari, Shazia Khalid and others) by Anas Abbas

The best analysis of the Aafia Siddiqui case. is a post from: Kiran

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

<snip>

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

<snip>

Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

There was a time when women, black people, mentally ill people, children, were all in various ways regarded as “sub human”, as inanimate objects, to be used, abused, and discarded. Today, we still have some segments of populations arguing for the lack of any rights of non-human animals. This will change, in time, and our current practices of cruel factory farming, animal testing, breeding for entertainment, etc., will, I can say with a some confidence and a lot of hope for the sake of humanity, become more obsolete, and become as illegal and socially unacceptable as slavery, child labour, pederasty, misogyny and eugenics are now.

Scientists think dolphins deserve “non-human person” status is a post from: Kiran

He said: “I think most people would rather be profiled than blown up. It wouldn’t be victimisation of an entire community.

What I like is that Muslim organizations and Muslims with influence are starting to finally speak up in mainstream society, bringing up important issues like the fact that many of the terrorist attacks happening in the world today are being committed by Muslims, and in the name of Islam.

What I don’t like is firstly that things have actually come to this, and secondly that profiling based on race or religion could really backfire. First of all, this opens a whole can of worms in terms of who is Muslim and who isn’t. Is it based on name? On one’s parents’ religion? What’s next? Requiring people to put their religion or religious background on their passports? Like what was done to Jews in Soviet Russia? And how hard would it be for someone to bypass such a superficial system of checks: a change of name, a change of outfit?

I do think that people of certain names, backgrounds, looks and ages will, and it could be easily argued, should, be scrutinized more than the mostly superficial checks that airline passengers are subject to. However, I think the issue needs to be approached intelligently, to find efficient solutions (and there have to be many complementary solutions, there really is no one simple magic answer), that precisely and successfully help identify and quarantine those who intend to use public spaces as personal, fatal soap boxes. We could start by hiring people of higher and more sophisticated educational backgrounds to screen passengers, and we could invest in providing training to airport personnel to better understand things like body signals, psychology, etc.

All of which leads me to wonder if perhaps we’re headed for this.

Your thoughts?

Profiling: Pros and Cons? is a post from: Kiran

If you are progressive, liberal, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever wondered why you need to give a disclaimer like that before expressing feelings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in relationships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term relationship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first separating themselves from people like me. There’s nothing wrong with being heterosexual, but there is something very wrong with being heterosexist, which is the idea that heterosexuality is the default, natural, normal thing to be, and that it’s a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you support gay rights, you don’t need to keep qualifying that with “I’m not gay or nothing, but…”. Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sexuality, would appreciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it’s a hot potato that you are willing to support in passing, but not willing to own, even when you yourself have feelings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Some might say that labels don’t matter. While I agree with that, I have to wonder why the label “straight” matters, while “bisexual” or “homosexual” or “queer” don’t. If none of them matter, why label yourself anything at all? Saying “I’m straight, but I’d totally do that guy/girl” is tantamount to saying “I’m not a transvestite – I just love wearing women’s clothes.” The first part of the sentence is only there as long as the speaker is assuming that something is wrong with the second part. No matter how progressive the speaker might be, the disclaimer unmasks the fact that heterosexuality is still the norm in the speaker’s mind.

Labels define us only insofar as they stand for the feelings we experience. When people say “I’m not bi, but…”, they are deciding that one set of their feelings (feelings of attraction to a person of the same gender) are less valid than others. The “gay” feelings they might be feeling are less important, less defining than the “straight” ones. What does that say about their attitude, invisible as it might be to them, towards those of us who own up to our “gay” feelings and act on them daily? This separation of feelings into more important and less important colors the progressivism of the speaker: instead of expressing true unity with the people he or she is claiming to support, the speaker is now simply expressing condescending concern towards lesser beings for whom he/she feels pity, but one of whom he/she can not imagine actually being.

Society has given “straight” a higher status than every variation of sexuality, and calling yourself “straight” gives you the social status of one who is privileged. So, by denying your own bisexual feelings, and by constantly stating that you are *not* bisexual (or gay, or trans), even though you have feelings that “those” people have, you may be perpetuating the same heterosexism that you as a progressive, liberal person claim to be against. Heterosexism, like racism and classism, is the idea that one group of people ought to be privileged above everyone else. And many people, while they may have good intentions, are afraid of letting go of that privileged status in society. But then, how progressive are we if we’re not willing to live up to the principles we claim to uphold?

We need to start being honest with ourselves. And we need to think about the words we use to communicate, because that’s how people know each other, especially online. When you claim that you are yourself, of course, obviously, “straight” but that you have these little feelings that come up towards a certain person you know, or someone famous, who is the same gender as you, then what you are saying is that the label “straight” is more important to you than your feelings. And that your heterosexual feelings are what define you and are what are *real* and *important* and that your bisexual/homosexual side can be dismissed as something fun, but meaningless. That does not help LGBT rights, and that’s not what I would expect of someone who otherwise supports LGBT rights.

This is not to say that all progressives have a duty to identify themselves as bisexual. We can all recognize that sexuality is much more fluid than the narrow labels used to describe it. Identifying as straight in the context of admitting attraction to a member of the same gender tells us much more about the speaker’s prejudices against certain sexualities than it does about the speaker’s sexuality itself. The moment you have sex with, desire for, or fantasies about a person of the same gender as you, you are no longer fitting into the heterosexual definition, and by forcing that definition upon your multi-faceted and fluid sexuality and denying your sexuality and the sexual diversity of many others like you, you are actually helping the status quo, the privileged heterosexism that is the domain of religious fundamentalism.

So, the next time you want to express your bisexual tendencies while simultaneously denying that part of yourself, please try and think about who you are supporting and who you are dismissing.

I’ll end this with a montage of scenes that kinda highlight this issue, from the movie “Orgazmo” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park:

“I’m not a queer or nothing, but…” is a post from: Kiran

“Using unusual mannequins exposing body curves and with heads without hijabs [Muslim veils] are prohibited to be used in the shops,” police said in a statement carried by Irna.

Correspondents say that in the past such campaigns usually only lasted throughout the summer, but last year’s crackdown, including on tight trousers for women, was still continuing in the winter.

Oh woman, how many more religions have to be made up before you will realize your place: a degree below men?

It is time… is a post from: Kiran

From Funny Or Die!

Gus Porter gets mauled by a bear, but he won’t let the socialist Canadian health care fix him up, so he’ll hike back to America.

A true American Hero is a post from: Kiran

That state is not too bothered about what you believe, as long as it does not thwart the right of others to their beliefs.

<snip>

There should be laissez-faire in the realm of belief, just as there should be in the marketplace.

So nice of a person coming from white, western privilege to allow for such cultural relativism for us lowly colonial subjects. It’s a good thing he’s not, say a woman in Swat, or a young girl in Mississauga, who are being flogged and even killed for not following the beliefs of their parents and their communities.

So nice that he doesn’t have to live in Muslim ghettoes even in the middle of a Western city and has to follow a script made up for his life by everyone except himself.

So nice of him to allow for the subjugation of people like me because he’s too afraid of not appearing “liberal” enough to his dead, white, male mentors.

Solipsism becomes him.

Cultural Relativism = White Man’s Privilege. is a post from: Kiran

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

Victim or Survivor? is a post from: Kiran

Nick Maxwell – The Philosophy of Science is a post from: Kiran

Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji – Moral Courage Conversations is a post from: Kiran

Thank you, Sarah Palin
for taking women – and men -
back a few notches so fast
we all got whiplash.

Thank you Sarah Palin for proving feminism right;
For showing that men and women are truly equal.
That women can be just as stupid
as the stupidest of men.
Like the men running the country
for most of the past decade.
And of course, Condi too.

Thank you Sarah Palin,
for flashing your girly smile,
and throwing back that silly Northern twang;
Your beauty queen charms warm the limp, lonely hearts
of Bill O’Reillys and Karl Roves everywhere.
Thanks for being the prettiest beard
for frustrated Republicans still in the closet.

Thanks Sarah Palin for charging rape victims
for their own rape kits, while preaching to us all
the joys of cherishing our rape babies.
Because life is precious -
until hunting season, that is.

Thank you Sarah Palin for helping intelligent women
realize they are intelligent first, women after.
Thanks for helping smart men appreciate
smart women more than ever before.

Thanks Sarah Palin for making George W. Bush
look educated by comparison.
Thanks for making Cheney look saner -
at least he shoots at things at close range and
doesn’t make couch covers from their bodies.

Thanks Sarah for not blaming us mortals for climate change -
None of us was around 6,000 years ago
when you believe the Earth was created…
How could we know what caused climate change?

Thanks Sarah.
For everything you do.
With everything you say,
you are a reminder
for every girl and every woman
of the choice inside each of us.
The choice…
to be a smart, savvy, self-aware human being
or to be
just another jackass, with lipstick.

~Kiran Mehdee, 1 October, 2008

Thank You Sarah Palin is a post from: Kiran

The word of the day is intersectionality — the understanding of multiple ways of being and living that shape a person and how we experience the world, and in turn how the world treats them. The idea that one individual can be faced with a multitude of oppressions which can’t be addressed individually any more than the person herself can be physically divided into pieces and be expected to survive.

3rd Wave Feminists is a post from: Kiran

~Kiran Mehdee [June 2008]

How To Stay Miserable Your Whole Life is a post from: Kiran

Here’s an interesting interview I came across with author Salman Rushdie

For the other geeks among us, you might find PC World’s list of the Top 50 Tech Visionaries inspiring.

Here, you can listen to an audio version of a Q&A between Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell and Ann Hathaway (listen to the audio online by clicking on the link in the middle there).

Lastly, but definitely not leastly, here’s a tribute to the funniest guy who ever lived who died this past weekend, George Carlin. The world was funnier with ya, George, we’ll miss your sick, twisted, brilliant brain. Here he is, in his own words…

Long time no blog! (Or R.I.P. Hazrat George Carlin) is a post from: Kiran

PETA wins over the hearts of KFC Canada is a post from: Kiran

Click on the poster to read more about Tricia and to enter a contest to win Battlestar Galactica DVD’s!

So Many Reasons to Adore Her is a post from: Kiran

Economics 101 is a post from: Kiran

Which Battlestar Galactica Cylon Are You?

Battlestar Galactica @ BuddyTV.

Which Cylon Are You? is a post from: Kiran

No longer do people rely on TV Guide to program their lives around their favorite TV shows. Now they can use a digital video recorder or watch shows on-demand online and fit their TV watching into their lives. The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want — and on the devices they want. And that goes for TV as well as radio and audio, with podcasts allowing people to listen on their own time and fast-forward or rewind shows at will.

What do we gain? We get more control of our lives and our media experience and we are no longer slaves to programmers. But what do we lose? We are losing shared experiences, where we all watch the same shows at the same time, or watch the same sporting events together. And our “water cooler” talk has a new etiquette, where we must tell people not to ruin our favorite shows because we’re taping it to watch later!

Evolve or Die is a post from: Kiran