Pragmatism and conscience are two different factors that often come into conflict when making decisions.

Pragmatism involves being practical and focusing on what is realistic and achievable in a given situation. It may prioritize efficiency, results, and the most effective means of achieving a goal, even if it means compromising on certain values or beliefs.

On the other hand, conscience refers to an individual’s inner sense of what is right or wrong. It involves moral principles, ethics, and values that guide one’s decisions and actions. Conscience is often associated with doing what is perceived as morally right, even if it may not be the most practical or beneficial option.

In some situations, pragmatism and conscience may align, leading to decisions that are both practical and in line with one’s moral beliefs. However, in other cases, individuals may face a dilemma where being pragmatic may conflict with their conscience, forcing them to make tough choices between what is practical and what is morally right.

If moral dilemma involves heinous or criminal acts against humanity, then the equation weighs heavy on conscience. Such horrific acts and atrocities are not only morally reprehensible but also a stark example of the dangers of unchecked power, systemic oppression, and the disregard for human life.

Pragmatism, if taken to an extreme without moral considerations, can potentially justify and rationalize heinous acts like the Genocide and total razing of Gaza in the name of self-defense. This highlights the importance of ethical principles, human rights, and moral values as essential checks on purely pragmatic decision-making.

Biden Administration abandoned any moral consideration when giving green light to Israel with no red-lines in the name of self-defense. Biden provided all the military resources, including mass civilian killing bombs, and diplomatic cover to Israel to unleash mayhem over Gaza leading to thousands of deaths of innocent Gazans and genocide charges against Israel at ICJ. Biden continue to send to Israel mass civilian killing bombs even after Genocide charges against Israel. Gaza Genocide is a glaring example of use of morally unchecked military power, both by Israel and our powerful country, over Gazans occupied and besieged from all sides by Israel-and innocent civilians nowhere to go.

In November 2024 voters will have the choice to use their conscience, moral authority, and pragmatism to weigh-in.

F. Sheikh, May 10, 2024

(Partly generated by ChatGPT)

In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20^th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.

( Fareed Zakaria : Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame and Joseph Nye.

Much of what Zakaria writes is familiar, but that doesn’t make it unappealing. Anyone assigned to read the classic tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by the famed German sociologist Max Weber won’t be shocked to find that Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire. The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—much like America’s founders did two centuries later. In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.

With the foundation for democracy laid, enter stage right: capitalism. In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one. Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachetand influence in this milieu. The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds. At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.

This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s. Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.

The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution. But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions? “For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.” Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands), and, of course, capitalism. Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England, Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity. These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

(IN FLORENCE, ON HER FIRST TRIP TO ITALY, 1994. COURTESY OF JHUMPA LAHIRI.)

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

Lahiri was born in London in 1 967 to Bengali parents from Kolkata, and raised in a small town in Rhode Island. In 2012, she moved to Rome with her husband, the journalist and editor Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and their children, Octavio and Noor. She has spent the better part of the past decade shuttling between Italy and the U.S., where she’s held teaching posts at Princeton, from 2015 until 2022, and, since this past fall, at Barnard College, her alma mater, where she also directs the creative writing program. When we met again in October, it was at her brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a four-story building bookended by a large kitchen and living space on the parlor floor and Lahiri’s top-floor study. She and Vourvoulias-Bush hadn’t lived in the house for a year or two, and while we spoke on the sofas, he was getting the place back in shape. Some of their furniture was still in storage, and several art pieces, abstract photo collages and large stretched canvases, lay against a white marble mantelpiece, waiting to be rehung. The walls were painted deep purple.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

A sentencing hearing has concluded in the case of Australian whistleblower David McBride who was forced to plead guilty to leaking classified documents to the media after he was essentially denied a defense at his trial in November. The documents ultimately revealed evidence of war crimes committed by the Australian Defence Force.

Justice David Mossop will pronounce the sentence next Tuesday. The government has demanded more than two years in prison, while the judge could impose as little as house arrest, monitoring , and counseling outside prison for up to four years.

McBride, a former military lawyer, was charged with stealing government documents and giving them to journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which revealed covered-up murders of unarmed civilians by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.  A four-year government inquiry later found 23 possible war crimes, including the murder of 39 Afghans. 

McBride’s defense had rested on the court accepting his argument that his oath to the British crown gave him a duty beyond obedience to military orders to instead inform the entire nation of government wrongdoing. 

But Justice Mossop refused that defense. “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order,” he told the court in November.

McBride’s legal team tried to appeal that decision, but its application was denied by Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucy McCallum. On the same day in November Mossop ordered that agents of the Attorney General’s office could remove classified documents from the defense’s possession, which McBride’s team had intended to present to the jury.  

Because of those regressive rulings, McBride accepted his attorneys’ advice that, left with no viable defense, he should plead guilty.  

In arguing for a lengthy prison sentence, the government prosecutor said on Monday that McBride was motivated by arrogance and a sense of personal vindication rather than the public interest.

“Anything less would fall outside the appropriate range [of punishment],” the prosecutor, Trish MacDonald, said. “A period of imprisonment of two years doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the offending.”

Stephen Odgers, McBride’s chief attorney. told the court that McBride was a man of high character who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, self-medicated with alcohol, and believed he was doing the right thing.  Odgers presented 13 character references.

But the prosecutor said McBride’s guilty plea to stealing government documents undermined his claims of honesty. “There’s no evidence, your honour, of contrition or remorse,” she said.

Sentencing will be handed down on May 14.

Whistleblower David McBride to Be Sentenced (consortiumnews.com)

posted by f.sheikh