Certainly the Punjab Government has a lot to answer for. Headed by Shabaz Sharif, brother of the former two-time Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who remains head of their party PML-N, the provincial government contains a number of shady characters. Chief among them is Rana Sanaullah who has a record of openly courting the leader of the banned militant organisation Sipah al-Sahaba to ensure votes. The PML-N also houses Sajid Mir, the leader of the political wing of the Ahle Hadis sect who last month, a few days after the cold blooded murder of 86 Ahmadis at two of their mosques patronised a hate conference directed against them. The political situation is rapidly spiraling out of control.

The departure of General Musharraf has led to a worsening law and order situation. At the very end of his reign, electricity supply in the country became erratic, something initially blamed on the populace rioting and destroying electrical connections in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s murder. There is now a gas shortage in the country – boding ill for the winter. A looming water crisis may force a confrontation with India – potentially catastrophic given that both are nuclear states. The price of basic commodities continues to soar, all the more worrying given that 17.2% of this 180 million strong country live below the poverty line. Yet nothing stirs the average citizen of Pakistan more than the issue of religion. A right wing media and a parliament built on the twin principle s of pliancy and expediency, provide optimum conditions for the spread of misinformation. The War on Terror charged religious sentiment and inadvertently reawakened Pakistan’s sectarian divide (never quite dormant). At its foundation in 1947, Pakistan’s leadership prided itself on its secular values. Not any more. Gone too are the values of love and brotherhood that characterized the life of Ali Hajweri.

How on earth does this study - or any study - come up with a figure for piracy-related losses? When they’re hijacking ships in the Gulf of Aden, I imagine the calculation is quite straight forward. But digital is somewhat different.

The first question we need ask is: How many cinema visits or DVDs etc. do consumers not buy because they watched it online instead? It is not sufficient to say how many films are watched online and then extrapolate backwards - clearly ‘consumers’ would be willing to watch a movie for free that they  wouldn’t be willing to pay for. How then can the numbers of visits/purchases/rentals forgone be calculated?

It might have been a simple calculation if the cinema industry was making less money, but, as always, the sky has not fallen and profits continue to increase. Cinema attendance is on the up. DVD sales are booming.  But are they increasing at a slower rate? Shockingly, information that might allow us to answer this question is hard to come by. If anyone does have the inside scoop, please do let us know. In any case, how could a study separate out the influence of piracy from, say, the recession, the position of celestial bodies, or the impact of making terrible films like SATC2?

I’m not the first to say it, and I wont be the last, but the Hollywood could learn a thing or two from the music industry, which has finally stopped kicking and screaming like a spoilt, ugly child and embraced digital distribution. Its shocking, really, that it took so long for high-powered executives to realise that there’s money to be made in giving consumers what they want rather than trying to force them into buying obsolete media or treating them like pirates when they don’t.

The movie industry should grow up, adapt, and get with the programme, since the pirates are obviously leagues ahead.

Click here for an excellent article giving a deeper look at piracy issues.

]]> http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/blog/?feed=rss2&p=176 http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/blog/?p=173 http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/blog/?p=173#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 18:08:44 +0000 TariqSami http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/blog/?p=173 TO: Anne Milton, MP
The House of Commons
Westminster
London

29th May 2010

Re: Situation of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan
Recent terrorist atrocity in Lahore leaving over 80 dead

Dear Mrs. Milton,

I hope this letter finds you well and congratulations for you recent election victories both locally and as a party.

You may remember that I had written to you as a constituent in 2005 about the situation of Ahmadis and other minority communities in both Pakistan and Indonesia. I recall that you had been kind enough to pass on my concerns to the secretary of state and had forwarded me the very detailed response. I am thankful for this. I remember I had had some comments to make on the response but given the earthquake in Pakistan which occurred around the same time I had felt it prudent not to push further international criticism of Pakistan at a time when the country was self-evidently in need of massive international aid. I note that you attended the Peace Symposia in the Bait-ul-Futuh mosque amongst other events and are therefore reasonably aware of the Ahmadi community.

In Lahore yesterday two Ahmadi mosques were attacked by suicide bombs, grenades and shooting and leaving over 80 dead and approximately 150 injured. This was an attack on a peaceful community during their worship. At this stage the Pakistan Taliban have laid claim to this action.

The Ahmadi Community has often been particularly targeted but throughout Pakistan terrorism is reaching alarming levels. This is the latest in a series of long standing atrocities in Pakistan. In Lahore there has been an increase in terrorist incidents with over 265 people killed in nine incidents over the last year. Other main cities of Peshawer and Karachi have also seen alarming levels of violence. There is the incident of the “Red Mosque” in Islamabad in 2007 leading to a stand off between police and a girl’s madrassa armed with guns leaving hundreds dead. The Sri Lankan Cricket team has been attacked when visiting the country. Benazir Bhutto was targeted and killed. Other minority communities also come under attack. Christians have been attacked in Gojra Pakistan leaving eight dead in August 2009, in Mansehra “World Vision”, a Christian NGO was targeted leaving six employees dead. There are literally hundreds of incidents. One of the key factors behind all of these incidents is the atmosphere of hate and resentment which has been inculcated and spread by religious clerics for their own political means amongst certain extremist Muslim communities.

From the Ahmadi point of view there has been unrest been based on a systematic campaign of declaring Ahmadis as non Muslim and ‘Wajib-ul-Qatl’ (liable for death). Infact in a programme which was even aired in the UK on Geo TV a certain Dr Aamir Liaquat Hussain on 7th September 2008 declared Ahmadis to be ‘Wajib-ul-Qatl’. Two days later two Ahmadis were gunned down, one a doctor in a clinic and another a gentleman on his way to prayers (I attach a report on the subject). Similarly a recent programme aired on Ummah Channel called “Khatme Nabuwat‘’ in April 2010 was a particularly inciteful programme. A similar programme aired by the same channel was called “Friends of Allah” in an interview of the Pir of Golra Sharif. These programmes may escape the UK authorities attention as they are predominantly in the Urdu language but nonetheless they create an atmosphere of hate and resentment in Muslim communities based upon sectarian differences. There has been a mushroom growth of such TV channels over the last few years including “Ummah TV”; “Peace TV”; “Hidaya TV”; “Noor TV” and “Iqra TV” and the government should issue firm guidance as to what is and what is not acceptable and take action against the channels as necessary when the boundries have been crossed. Those who make such statements publically on TV Channels such as this should be persona non grata in this country whether they are broadcasting from the UK, Dubai or Pakistan.

In this regard I would hope that you would firstly condemn the incident in the strongest terms but also consider if there is anything that can be done to stop the proliferation of extremism using this country’s airwaves.

With Kind Regards

Dr M. Sami
A constituent
(Guildford)

If you are confused now, you needn’t worry. So, it seems, was most of the electorate for most of the election. On rights Cameron looked the easy winner. He had an unpopular Prime Minister trumpeting nothing more than a dying brand of new Labour. The Murdoch empire swung behind him with such enthusiasm that watching the later Campbell-Boulton verbally fisticuffs just underlined the embarrassingly over-involvement of the media within our politics. Yet our now Prime Minister still failed, at least in conventional terms. Why?

Hold on to that question. First let us recall that, despite the temper tantrums, Brown was no wronged Othello. At times his attempts to cling on to power just looked plain desperate. Remember the YouTube videos. Whose idea was it for Prime Minister to grin inanely from ear to ear? We are British. We prefer our Ministers with deep furrowed brows.

But if Brown could be thin on the ground, perhaps we shouldn’t expect much more from our new Prime Minister – liberal, perhaps, only in the manner of his appointment. And here we return to the failure of Cameron to win a convincing mandate. It is not that the Conservatives could not have developed a convincing strategy. Labour’s big government and over-regulation in almost every industry and sector should have been attacked. The failure to deliver an equitable distribution within the welfare state (perhaps a failure of the welfare state itself – perhaps a failure of mismanagement – the debate should go on…) needed to be addressed. The failure to resolve not only the deficit but also private household borrowing had to be tackled. So we had Labour failures. But what were the Conservative answers? Nimbyism on Immigration and the vacuous idea of “The Big Society” - the idea that government would be replaced by a sense of the best of British imbuing everybody with a sense of civic duty so that suddenly the public would flock to community town halls, the charitable spirit would return to these isles and the sky would once again be blue. Non-implementable, irrelevant waffle of no worth to the worries and woes of modern society – the idea was always a non-starter. Yet our Prime Minister thought it had enough intellectual weight to win him an election. Surely, it is enough to make one wonder if this man is really and truly capable?

So we are off to a bad start. A not-to-bright but ambitious chap as leader – winning by a slim margin – presiding over a coalition that is (lets admit it) ideologically 180 degrees apart, spouting a single ideology that neither of the two member parties truly and fully believe in. But why be so gloomy? Remember the 1997 Labour poster song? Things can only get better….? Too bad that was before an election.

Ground set, Wittgenstein as one of the key originators of Logical Positivism worked to promote language as essentially logical. True he conceded, logic was cloaked and disguised in the ambiguities and irregularities of language and emotion – but any expressed proposition could be essentially thought to be logical in content. Logic was the skeletal backbone of language. These ideas would be further developed by his close collaborator Bernard Russell in his skepticism of all metaphysical systems including most specifically theology. AJ Ayer went on to develop the idea that all propositions should be tested for corroboration with what truths we can gather from sense perception. If sense perception could not corroborate any assertion, the assertion was meaningless and should not be discussed. God could not be empirically proved, thus it was futile to discuss Him.

The startling ingenuity of the Logical Positivist system was to argue that all real sentences with any genuine meaning had a logical content. All language, skeletally, was trying to make assertions about the world – assertions which could either be true or false. Therefore if language could be reduced to its logical frame and all propositions which could be said, said (the number of propositions being n) – we would be in the position to know that there was exactly 2ⁿ possible scenarios in the entire cosmos – meaning that one out of 2ⁿ possibilities would be a completely accurate description of the universe.

Sounds simple. Not quite. For a problem remained in the form of existence. True if all that can be said for existing items is n propositions, there may be only 2ⁿ possibilities. Yet we could surely make almost infinite statements about things that don’t exist. If we were to start listing all the possible Unicorns, round squares etc and all the possible features they may or may not have we would make the number of propositions n infinite, giving us infinite possibilities. And so language really solves nothing at all………….

Take a hypothetical situation: the Eatr is deployed to a conflict zone in the near future, probably in a desert or similar. It terms of efficiency, it makes sense to eat bodies rather than plants, given they are far more energy rich. In addition, if it were in fact deployed in an arid region, plant matter is unlikely to be in abundance. The deceased solider suddenly looks far more appealing. There is also the macabre realisation that a flesh-eating robot would have a dire effect on the moral of the enemy, helping to break down resistance and thereby ‘win’ the conflict in question. Finally, given the US Military’s apparent disdain for human life that wasn’t born under the Stars and Stripes, would it be totally unrealistic to think that the de-humanising discourses used to justify our current wars couldn’t be extended to ‘justify’ the desecration of the bodies of ‘enemy combatants’? If they were just ‘Terrorists’ rather than people when they were alive, why should they be shown any more respect when they are dead?

It is clear then that militarily, operationally, and psychologically, it makes logical if sickening sense to eat corpses instead of plant matter exclusively. But what is perhaps most frightening (if somewhat imaginative) is the idea that these machines could essentially power themselves indefinably (ignoring the need for maintenance, of course) as long as there were ‘enemies’ (people) to kill and plant life remaining to be stripped.  The needs of the machines would then be perfectly opposed to those of humanity at large, as both sides needed to achieve mutually exclusive outcomes in order to survive. But of course, I exaggerate; if this were a possibility, we would surely have been warned already, right?

Suggested further watching and reading:

Terminator 1, 2, 3

The Matrix

I, Robot

Most science fiction novels.

Two recent issues highlighted in the news have appeared to challenge the validity of what is an widely considered to be an overwhelming consensus of scientic opinion. First, the leakage of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia seemed to imply that manipulation of data had taken place, and then an error in the estimate of the rate of Himalayan glacier retreat, both have contributed to a decimation of public confidence in the science behind climate change.

To anyone - scientist or not - who has taken the time to familiarise themselves with the numerous IPCC reports in the last 2 decades, will quickly appreciate that these issues, while media worthy, do little or nothing to challenge the validity of climate science.

That is why, with the recent BBC poll showing that in the last three months the proportion of the public who believe that climate change has ‘now [been] established as largely man-made’ has fallen from 41% to 26%, is an extremely alarming metric that has almost unquantifiable implications.

For the moment, let us put aside what this might tell us about the Pope’s seeming insecurity about the solidity of his faith, and move onto quite how damaging such a stance is.

The killing and maiming of children throughout present day Africa for being witches is an increasingly well documented and widespread problem that blights the lives of thousands of people even in a world in which one would have hoped such vile and illogical practices had been banished.

And yet, unconscionably, the Vatican has determined to spend more time condemning children’s literature than addressing the very real and grave problems occurring within Christian communities on the sub-continent. Even worse, its outrage at books and films such as Harry Potter and Twilight actively reinforces and validates such prejudices and practices for any that would read them. Without further research, it would be hard at this point to define empirically the causal links between these two occurrences. However, such over-zealous criticism of essentially harmless fantasy on the one hand, and the turning of a blind eye to an extremely harmful reality on the other should be a source of profound shame for Vatican City.

If ‘New Moon’ is a deviant moral vacuum, what then can we say of the Catholic Church’s leadership?

http://www.affectjournal.co.uk/polspeechesissue.htm

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The theme for our next issue has also been decided: ‘Crisis and Collapse’. We’re now accepting submissions for our second issue, so please get in touch to discuss any existing articles you may have written, or to talk through potential pieces: editors@affectjournal.co.uk

We hope you enjoy our first issue.

The Editors