adnan siddiqi is a choot

Some of you may have noticed that I cross-post my cricket posts on cricket.bloggers.pk, a sort of combined forum for Pakistani cricket bloggers to get better outreach for their posts.

Well, I recently posted michael holding is a choot there, and here is a comment I received from a fellow named Adnan Siddiqi.

"Your voice could be heard if you had no't (sp) prefered (sp) to choose censored words. I hope you can make a difference between a personal blog and a collabrative (sp) forum?

thanks"

First of all, I didn't prefer to choose "censored" words. No words in my post were censored. Mr. Siddiqi would like for some of them to have been, but they were not.

In any case, I recently wrote about the differences between the real argument for free speech and the not-so-important argument about being able to do whatever you want for no reason whatsoever. Well, here's an example of the former.

I am not asking Mr. Siddiqi to read my articles, and I am not certainly not asking his opinion on them. God knows I have a painful time trudging through his overlong posts to edit them. He does, however, get 100 times the hits I do, so he's probably doing something right... But that's not the point.

I also noticed that he has a link on his blogroll to a site called "Fucked Company." I can only assume he endorses this site. So my guess is that Mr. Siddiqi has one of two problems:

1. It is fine to cuss in English, but the word 'choot' is particularly offensive.

2. There is a difference between posting on billu.net and cricket.bloggers.pk.

Of course, he mentions that it's the latter, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that if I had merely substituted for an English term (say, 'pussy'), it would not be quite as much of a problem. In fact, I have written some pretty nasty things in English on cricket.bloggers.pk that seem to have gone unnoticed, which is a particularly disturbing double standard.

As for the second point, I will admit that for a while I was hesitant to post darrell hair is a choot pt. 2 in its entirety on cricket.bloggers.pk, but more out of respect for the creator of the site (Teeth Maestro) than anything else. But Mr. Maestro went on to express disappointment that I had censored the post, since he is a true champion for free speech. Add to this the fact that I am one of the three official site editors, and I set about the task of expressing my opinions in most unbridled fashion.

It may be a collaborative forum, but it is still a forum for free expression, and I should be able to use whatever words I wish, as long as I talk about cricket. That's what makes it interesting. If everyone expressed their thoughts in a predetermined template, there wouldn't be much point in collaborating, would there?

"Don't block the blog" is the word on the street among Pakistani bloggers. Well, don't temper the blog either, I say. Otherwise everyone's blogs will start sounding like tepid, watered down drivel...

every f%#$ing thing is not censorship

Here's an interesting piece in the New York Times. Basically, students at Middlebury College have been told they can no longer cite Wikipedia as a source in History papers. For some reason this has created a big furor.

Apparently this article has been making the rounds, and a lot of campuses are starting to talk seriously about the issue. As usual, the New York Times has painted the issue in broad black and white strokes along the lines of: "Some professors are so old school they want to ban laptops altogether, and others so hip they have robots for TAs."

But jokes aside, it does seem as if a lot of students are very vociferously against any such policy. The article cites one writer in the Middlebury Campus in particular who says that the ban heralds "the beginnings of censorship."

Of course, as enlightened semi-divine beings, we all have a problem with this on a very visceral level. We like to say things like: "Censorship and academia are mutually exclusive," "Censorship is modern fascism," and other similarly wordy rhetoric that doesn't actually mean shit.

How is it censorship for a professor to say that a student can't cite bloody Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper? If you want to cite lyrics from Smash Mouth's "Can't Get Enough of You Baby" in an Economics paper about supply shortages, and your professor says you can't, is that censorship too?

No matter how much we may hate to admit it, an academic environment is actually pretty regulated. If it weren't, we wouldn't learn anything. Everything doesn't have to be free all the time. Talking about free speech just for the hell of it only detracts from the real (and incredibly important) argument for freedom of speech.

Of course, if you do want free expression, then everyone should have the right to exercise it. So how's this? You are free to cite Wikipedia to your heart's content... and your professor is free to flunk your ass out of school.

the splinter of our discontent

In this post, Teeth Maestro refutes my (and to some extent, Omar's) argument that Shoaib Akhtar should play on the Pakistan team based on performance and not personality. His point is that Shoaib’s unruliness and disregard for authority splinters the Pakistan team, generating a lack of discipline and unity.

As usual, I have something to say about this.

First, I agree that a side needs to be, as Mr. Maestro puts it, a “coherent organization”. But one rogue character does not an incoherent organization make. There are far worse things for our team’s collective coherence than Shoaib. Nasim Ashraf is one of these things. His shady dealings with Waqar and the doping scandal, for example, must surely have divided opinion among the players, and can hardly be considered good for team spirit or morale. Why blame Shoaib for the team's lack of discipline as a unit, when the management's divisiveness is so painfully blatant?

Mr. Maestro also argues that Inzi and Woolmer should have all the power to administer the team. I agree, but implicit in his statement is an assumption that without Shoaib’s antics, they would have this power. This is naïve. It is a well-known fact that the PCB clings firmly to the reigns of power in Pakistan cricket. Removing Shoaib is not going to change that.

On another note, perhaps there is another side to the Shoaib story that we are not seeing. Why is Shoaib so frustrated as to be perpetually fighting with Woolmer? It seems nobody is sparing a thought for the way the management may have been treating him. Sure, he is aggressive by nature, but at least some of his actions must be provoked. Quiet provocation by Woolmer and/or the PCB may be less obvious to the naked eye, but isn’t it possible there may be something in it that is going unnoticed?

Shoaib is our best bowler, and every effort should be made to accommodate him in every game we play. Does nobody find it at all surprising that this is not happening? That he is, in fact, being discouraged from playing, through a combination of childish he-said-she-saids? These shady reports about how he is "also carrying a knee injury" and is therefore "not guaranteed" to play in the World Cup are suspicious and need to be investigated, instead of just saying: "Well, he was an arrogant prick anyway, so good riddance."

The PCB exists to protect the players’ interests, not undermine them, and certainly not to conduct personal feuds with them. When the latter starts to happen, it is time for us to demand an explanation. We should support our players, rather than the crooks that run their careers into the ground.

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cross-posted at cricket.bloggers.pk

arrogance shmarrogance

I am sick of people saying:

"Shoaib Akhtar is arrogant and therefore should not play."

It is idiotic. Since when did humility become a prerequisite for playing cricket, or any sport for that matter? These players are supposed to be professionals. This is their job. If Shoaib is arrogant, don't go to dinner with him, or invite him over to play with your kids. But surely you can work with him. God knows we've all worked with a few arrogant idiots from time to time.

I am not a fan of Shoaib's antics. But his 'arrogance' does tend to make him an exciting player to watch. He is a celebrity and a superstar, and every now and then he should be allowed to act like one. The way his career has been manhandled says less about him and more about the disastrous state of man management in the PCB (and in Pakistan in general, for that matter).

It is a pity that the PCB has not learned to deal with Shoaib the way the Australians managed to deal with Warne. The Aussies did so well, in fact, that a man who has been found guilty of both match-fixing and doping is still hailed as a hero around the world. There are other circumstances at play here of course (the Australian media is a tad more influential than the Pakistani media, for example) but even so, Shoaib is lucky if he gets respect from his own countrymates.

So what if he's arrogant? He's the best bowler we have (sorry Asif, but it's true). Unless I'm missing something, the team that goes out to represent Pakistan should consist of its best players, not its most humble. Otherwise we may as well just send out a bunch of 11 beard-toting, God-fearing mullahs and see how they do.

Oh, wait... we already did...

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cross-posted at cricket.bloggers.pk

lost in the desert

Nicholas Kristof has written an interesting piece in the New York Times on the common stereotypes about Islam. In it, he argues that no "religion's influence is intrinsically peaceful or violent," but admits that "some Muslim societies do have a real problem with violence, wih the subjugation of women, with tolerance."

His main point is that Muslims exist across the world, and subsequently the practise of Islam spans too broad a spectrum to be so easily summarized. In fact, "The mosaic of Islam", he says, "contains many hopeful glimpses of the future."

He cites a Muslim in Brunei who implies that the problem is not with Islam, but with 'Arab' Islam. By putting it this way, Mr. Kristof simplifies the problem by breaking it up geographically: Asian Islam is like this, and Arab (or more specifically, Saudi) Islam is like that. This is partly true. Local culture and history do tend to play a large role in the way the religion is practised. But that's not the whole story.

The trouble with Saudi Islam is that it, moreso than its counterparts, is so opposed to updating its rituals in any way that integrating its followers with the rest of the world is becoming increasingly difficult. As a smart Muslim once pointed out to me, it "needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century."

What Mr. Kristof fails to point out, however, is that Saudi Islam, as the supposed purveyor of the faith, has a significant influence on other varieties, regardless of geography. Pakistani Islam, for example, often uses the Saudi model as a yardstick, unwilling as it is to carve out its own identity.

What's left is a problem that is exported out of Saudi Arabia into other parts of the world. The Saudis are quick to justify everything they do in the name of Islam, making it hard for Muslims everywhere, especially less educated ones, to deny their alliegance to some pretty dastardly things. The result is that many Muslim societies, among which Pakistan is a shining example, are sharply divided along educational, not geographic, lines.

Mr. Kristof drives home his point with a slightly melodramatic comment:

There is a historic dichotomy between desert Islam — the austere fundamentalism of countries like Saudi Arabia — and riverine or coastal Islam, more outward-looking, flexible and tolerant. Desert Muslims grab the headlines, but my bet is that in the struggle for the soul of Islam, maritime Muslims have the edge.

So what about places like Karachi, that are, quite literally, both maritime and desert at once?

pushing the envelope

Sacha Baron Cohen, the guy who does Ali G and Borat, is selling out.

First, he has started to appear on talk shows to promote his show, when earlier he would refuse to be seen in public out of character. When this first started to happen, I thought, well, enough people are in on the joke now that it's okay. But I still feel he could have kept his integrity by staying out of the public eye.

Second, he is taking this whole Borat thing a bit too far. Basically his Borat act involves saying horrible things, racist and otherwise, while pretending to be a Kazakhi television reporter. When it started, it was a nuanced and deftly constructed act, in which he would use people's ignorance against them by pretending to be completely out of sync with civil society, and in doing so bring out their own lack of civility. Kazakhstan at the time was just a symbol, representing a place about which most Westerners are completely ignorant, to the point where they could expect anything from someone who was from such a place.

This involved him making fun of many races, but also of Kazakhstan itself. Needless to say, everyone got offended, but none moreso than the Kazakhs themselves, who started having to defend their own traditions and decrying what was being said about them. At this point, Cohen had two options: 1. to ignore the Kazakh response, and 2. to retatliate. Unfortunately, he chose the second. So instead of being a nuanced attack on people's ignorance, it became an all out schoolyard brawl with the Kazakh authorities.

The latest episode in the saga involves him parading outside the Kazakh embassy maintaing that despite what the Kazakh embassy might try to tell you, rape and ping pong ARE in fact the two favorite pastimes of Kazakhstan.

It is childish and mean. It is irresponsible, and it is unnecessary. Media is powerful, and he should know how badly his words can hurt the image of a country. If his idea is to manufacture high-brow comedy then he shouldn't assume everyone will get it. And if they don't he shouldn' lash out at them.

Needless to say, I still think he is a genius, and the new Borat movie will definitely be worth a watch. But the joke is starting to go sour now. Let's hope it doesn't start to stink anytime soon.

speed dating for muslims

Here's a sample from an article in the New York Times about the whole marriage meat market thing that supposedly goes on at ISNA conferences.

The questions raised at the seminar reflected just how pained many
American Muslims are by the subject. One middle-aged man wondered
if there was anything he could do now that his 32-year-old son had
declared his intention of marrying a (shudder) Roman Catholic. A young
man asked what might be considered going too far when courting a
Muslim woman.

At the end there was an hourlong social hour which allowed
participants time to collect e-mail addresses and telephone numbers
over a pasta dinner with sodas. (Given the Muslim ban on alcohol, no
one could soothe jumpy nerves with a drink.)

First of all, what an inane thing to report, and second, what's with the tone? Isn't the Times supposed to be a respectable publication? Do respectable publications print articles in which they blatantly mock people's lifestyles and place them right next to foreign policy analyses? This is almost like the idiots who mock the people at the Scientology stands by shouting vehemently about how they "want to make noise when they give birth."

I'm the first to say I absolutely disagree with whatever goes on at these ISNA matrimonial events, but if this is how people choose to reconcile their conflicting cultures, then so be it. It's not as if Muslims are the only ones getting arranged marriages. And it's certainly not as if Muslims are the only ones who get pissed about their children being exogamous. Finally, it's not as if the entire concept of speed dating and online dating is immune to mockery, so why not start there first. Seriously man, report on some real shit for God's sake.

messing with nature

This wonderful article describes how some idiot named Jean-Michel is dissing the crocodile hunter for having too much of a "hands on approach" to nature television. Here's what he says:

"(He would) interfere with nature, jump on animals, grab them, hold them, and have this very, very spectacular, dramatic way of presenting things. Of course, it goes very well on television. It sells, it appeals to a lot people, but I think it's very misleading. You don't touch nature, you just look at it. And that's why I'm still alive. I've been diving over 61 years — a lot many more years than he's been alive — and I don't mess with nature."

I have two things to say:

1 - Why are we still talking about the crocodile hunter? Why are we so surprised that he's dead, seeing as how his entire life revolved around openly dealing with wild crocodiles?

2 - Don't diss on him dude. He's dead. Let him be. It'd be funny if this Jean-Michel guy died diving tomorrow. Then I could say "I sat on my ass jerking off and never left my house. That's why I'm still alive. And I've been jerking off for 13 years -- I don't mess with nature."

an incendiary comment

Woohooo! My blog has officially received its first incendiary comment! Omar has come through with a scathing response to my "saving face...book" post. To which I feel I must now respond.

First of all, I completely rescind my statement about facebook and 'keeping in touch' with people. I intended for it to tie into my argument, but looking back on it I realize it comes off as merely an unnecessary addendum and a spiteful comment. The statement I am referring to is:

"Now, to those who claim that they're on facebook to keep in
touch with people, I ask why your friends list has people on it
whom you can't even remember having met. Are these the
people you want to keep in touch with? And are you really
keeping in touch by asking them "wot dey r up 2" every six
weeks or so? "

Fair enough, I understand that people have different ways of keeping in touch. As for the rest of it though, I am still not sure I see what the problem is. But Omar definitely made a couple of statements that I feel I would be chickening out by not addressing. Here's one:

"Yes, I may like to put me and blah are going out, but that is
relying on the fact that this information is not going to
broadcast across my 400 'friends'. If I knew that was the case,
I would not have put up the relationship status." [then some
lines later] "Those 400 people on your list are not all equal and,
though they may each be able to find out what you're doing,
390 of them don't give a hoot."

Here's what I don't get. First, if 390 of them don't give a hoot about you, why are they your 'friends'? Second, even if they are your 'friends', if they don't care what you're up to, what difference does it make if what you're up to is broadcast to them? It seems like you want to have your cake and eat it too. Put yourself out there for all to see, and then hope that only certain people actually do.

The way I see it, the crux of the argument lies in this remark:

"There is a line between how much one is willing to show to
the world through a web profile, and how much the web
profile is projected to the world itself."

This is where I believe there is a fundamental disconnect in our thinking. I just plain don't agree with this statement. I feel like this line may have existed some time ago, but it is fast disappearing. Sites like flickr and youtube and even this blog are making it so that what you put online is there for everyone's consumption. As for projecting it, to me that is merely a side issue. To others, that is the issue.

But thanks for the comments. And keep them coming. Since there are only about three people that read this blog, it looks as if I should try to post as many things that will piss them off specifically… hmm…