Introduction

HUMAN PASSION TO TECHNO-POWER

Nature of Power and its Appearance 

In the Hyperconnected World

It has been asserted that man alone is capable of progressive improvement; 

that he alone makes use of tools or fire . . . mainly due to his power 

of speaking and handling down his acquired knowledge.

(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man)

Whereas we find man having fatherly power naturally at the birth of physical life, we also find appearance of power spontaneously at the birth of social life. Arising from its root force, power started revealing its creative aspect when the Homo erectus, using his freed hands and energetic imagination, shaped the dimension of his passion to power as “techno-power” to give meaning to life and his society. It began to expand when the descendants of an ancestral line of apelike creatures first picked up stones as tools and laid the foundation of the power of science and technology. Power’s appearance as a brutish, cruel, and savage force, determined its application as unjustified behavior. But its creative aspect viewed as noble and altruistic, to have helped man and society grow into a large group and a humanity, the passion to power is a justified and noble motive to have worked in mankind’s evolution, growth, and progression. However, changing its many faces, emerging from the hands of a family head, passing on to the control of a tribal chief, monopolized by nobility, exploited by religious and political leaders, dominated by the wealthy, instructed by the sages, directed by ideologies, principled by knowledge, systemized by science and technology, and managed by the elected authority, power before today’s hyperconnected world has been inaccessible to those it oppressed and subjected to obey. 

Whereas in the past, power has remained in the hands of centrally operating authority just like a state-controlled currency, today in the contemporary era of network, in which everyone is connected with everyone in every corner of the globe, power is like a current accessible freely to everyone. The revolution of modern technology is fast diffusing power from the possession of a centralized authority and is empowering individuals, even those who in the past have been victims of rich and powerful lords. Modern technology is a function of how smart we are, not how rich or powerful we could be. Cyber-revolution, heading rapidly towards enlightening a cyber-renaissance, is developing amazingly a borderless, nonracial, non-preferential, physically alienated, yet intellectually close-connected humanity, where highest value would be the power of smart brain. Thus, the culminating enlightenment of the cyber-renaissance would be, that the spectrum of power freeing from the hold of rich and elite, is rapidly passing on into the hands of those who were powerless in the past. With everyday technological progress it is slipping out of the hands of rich and powerful and is shining in the hands of intellectually smart ones. 

MIRZA ASHRAF_______________________________________________________________

To read full article, please visit https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf

On 23 May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college dropout, became the world’s most famous ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate. The term can, in theory, be applied to both men and women, but in practice it picks out not sexless men in general, but a certain kind of sexless man: the kind who is convinced he is owed sex, and is enraged by the women who deprive him of it. Rodger stabbed to death his two housemates, Weihan Wang and Cheng Hong, and a friend, George Chen, as they entered his apartment on Seville Road in Isla Vista, California. Three hours later he drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house near the campus of UC Santa Barbara. He shot three women on the lawn, killing two of them, Katherine Cooper and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head.

In the hours between murdering three men in his apartment and driving to Alpha Phi, Rodger went to Starbucks, ordered coffee, and uploaded a video, ‘Elliot Rodger’s Retribution’, to his YouTube channel. He also emailed a 107,000-word memoir-manifesto, ‘My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger’, to a group of people including his parents, his therapist, former schoolteachers and childhood friends. Together these two documents detail the massacre to come and Rodger’s motivation. ‘All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life,’ he explains at the beginning of ‘My Twisted World’, ‘but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.’

He goes on to describe his privileged and happy early childhood in England – Rodger was the son of a successful British filmmaker – followed by his privileged and unhappy adolescence in Los Angeles as a short, bad-at-sports, shy, weird, friendless kid, desperate to be cool. He writes of dyeing his hair blond (Rodger was half-white and half-Malaysian; blond people were ‘so much more beautiful’); of finding ‘sanctuary’ in Halo and World of Warcraft; being shoved by a pretty girl at summer camp (‘That was the first experience of female cruelty I endured, and it traumatised me to no end’); becoming incensed by the sex lives of his peers (‘How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half-white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves’); dropping out of successive schools and then community college; and fantasising about a political order in which he ruled the world and sex was outlawed (‘All women must be quarantined like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender … hot, beautiful blonde girls … spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches’. He would show everyone that he was ‘the superior one, the true alpha male’.

Late in 2017, the online discussion forum Reddit closed down its 40,000-member ‘Incel’ support group, for ‘people who lack romantic relationships and sex’. Reddit took the action after introducing a new policy of prohibiting content that ‘encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence’. What had started out as a support group for the lonely and sexually isolated had become a forum whose users not only raged against women and the ‘noncels’ and ‘normies’ who get to sleep with them, but also frequently advocated rape. A second incel Reddit group, ‘Truecels’, was also banned following the site’s policy change. Its sidebar read: ‘No encouraging or inciting violence, or other illegal activities such as rape. But of course it is OK to say, for example, that rape should have a lighter punishment or even that it should be legalised and that slutty women deserve rape.’

Soon after Rodger’s killings, incels took to the manosphere to explain that women (and feminism) were in the end responsible for what had happened. Had one of those ‘wicked bitches’ just fucked Elliot Rodger he wouldn’t have had to kill anyone. (Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day, vowed in a comment on a YouTube video that ‘Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.’) Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been obvious: that no woman was obligated to have sex with Rodger; that his sense of sexual entitlement was a case-study in patriarchal ideology; that his actions were a predictable if extreme response to the thwarting of that entitlement. They could have added that feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy, may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel – as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy – inadequate. His manifesto reveals that it was overwhelmingly boys, not girls, who bullied him: who pushed him into lockers, called him a loser, made fun of him for his virginity. But it was the girls who deprived him of sex, and the girls, therefore, who had to be destroyed.

Could it also be said that Rodger’s unfuckability was a symptom of the internalisation of patriarchal norms of men’s sexual attractiveness on the part of women? The answer to that question is complicated by two things. First, Rodger was a creep, and it was at least partly his insistence on his own aesthetic, moral and racial superiority, and whatever it was in him that made him capable of stabbing his housemates and his friend a total of 134 times, not his failure to meet the demands of heteromasculinity, that kept women away. Second, plenty of non-homicidal nerdy guys get laid. Indeed part of the injustice of patriarchy, something unnoticed by incels and other ‘men’s rights activists’, is the way it makes even supposedly unattractive categories of men attractive: geeks, nerds, effete men, old men, men with ‘dad bods’. Meanwhile there are sexy schoolgirls and sexy teachers, manic pixie dreamgirls and Milfs, but they’re all taut-bodied and hot, minor variations on the same normative paradigm. (Can we imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod’?)

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Pakistanis are the happiest among all their bordering nations, a 2018 United Nations reporton happiness revealed.

According to the sixth World Happiness Report, Islamabad is 58 points ahead of its arch-rival India, 11 points ahead of all-weather friend China, 31 of Iran, and 70 points ahead of Afghanistan on the ranking table of happiness.

The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s annual survey report ranked Pakistan on the 75 spot among 156 countries. The ranking was based on six indicators: income per capita, life expectancy, social support, freedom, generosity and corruption.

The report declared Finland the world’s happiest country whereas Burundi bagged the last position; Bangladesh was ranked 115, down 40 points compared to Pakistan; Sri Lanka was ranked 116; China 86; Iran 106; India 133; and Afghanistan was ranked 145 on the index.

Norway, Denmark and Iceland clinched the second, third and fourth position, respectively.

Happiness of migrants

The issue of migration was placed at the heart of the 2018 report, which also ranked 117 countries according to the happiness of their immigrants.

“The most striking finding of the report is the remarkable consistency between the happiness of immigrants and the locally born,” said John Helliwell, co-editor of the report and a professor at the University of British Columbia.

The study found that the 10 happiest countries in the overall rankings also scored highest on immigrant happiness.

According to the report’s website, the World Happiness Report was compiled “by a group of independent experts acting in their personal capacities”.

“Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency or programme of the United Nations,” reads the disclaimer.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1395423/pakistan-ranked-happiest-among-neighbouring-countries-un-report

posted by f. sheikh

A fascinating article by Kenan Malik comparing verdict by Judge Aquilina on Larry Nassar case about sexually abusing young Olympic gymnastic girls and Darren Osborne who mowed down Muslim worshipers in London and killing one and injuring many worshipers. F. Sheikh.

Two court cases last week, on either side of the Atlantic, helped illuminate the tensions in our thinking about justice. The first was the harrowing trial of Larry Nassar, the American doctor who, over decades, had abused dozens of gymnasts, mainly young girls, in his care. In the final week, 156 women gave personal statements, testimonies that were both distressing and inspiring.

In her summing-up, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina observed that ‘our constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment’. If it did, she would have allowed ‘many people to do to him what he did to others’. She then sentenced Nassar for to up to 175 years in prison.

The second trial was that of Darren Osborne, accused of mowing down Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, north London, in a van last year. One man was killed, many others seriously injured. Osborne, who denies charges of murder and attempted murder, allegedly tried to flee the scene, but was set upon by the crowd. Mohammed Mahmoud, an imam,intervened. ‘I shouted, “No one touch him”’, he told the jury at Woolwich crown court. Osborne ‘should answer for his crime in a court such as this and not in a court in the street’.

Where Aquilina would have imposed an ‘eye for an eye’ punishment, if she could have, Mahmoud insisted that such retribution had no place in justice. There is no direct comparison between the two cases. They pose different moral questions and create different emotions. Had Aquilina been in Finsbury Park that night, she would probably have protected Osborne too. Nevertheless, expressed in Aquilina’s words and in Mahmoud’s actions are two very different conceptions of the relationship between justice and vengeance. For one, justice requires a measure of vengeance; for the other, the two are incompatible.

More than two millennia ago, the Greek playwright Aeschylus explored these very tensions in his magnificent Oresteiatrilogy. Written in the fifth century BCE, it remains one of the most profound studies of the meaning of justice.

Aeschylus’s Oresteia begins where Homer’s Iliad ends. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, in which Greek warriors, led by Agamemnon, avenge the kidnapping of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. In Oresteia, the war is over and the warriors are returning home. In the opening play of the trilogy, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, brutally murders her husband on his homecoming. It is an act of furious revenge for his having sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, 10 years previously on the eve of the war to placate the gods.

In The Choephori, the second of the plays, Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is faced with a terrible dilemma: murder his mother or leave his father unavenged. He kills Clytemnestra.

In the final play, The Eumenides, Orestes is pursued by the Furies, deities whose role is to exact vengeance for sins such as the shedding of kindred blood. He finds refuge in Athens where, in the Acropolis, the goddess Athena convenes a jury to try Orestes. The jury is split. Athena casts her vote in favour of acquittal.

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