What a perfect tribute to satire the Paris march turned out to be

Mark Steel in The Independent

To start with, we should congratulate the Prime Minister of Israel and ambassador for Saudi Arabia, for honouring satire in its time of need, by turning up to a march for free speech and against violence and murder.

Across Gaza, people must have sat in the rubble that used to be their living room or local hospital and said: “Fair play to Netanyahu, at least he knows how to have  a laugh.”

And Raif Badawi will appreciate the Saudi government’s presence on a day for free speech, because he’s been sentenced to one thousand lashes by the Saudi government for setting up a liberal website. They must be lashing him for not being critical enough I suppose.

If the Saudis were really imaginative they could have taken Badawi to Paris, and dragged him through the streets on the march. His screams as his lacerated back bounced over the cobbles at Place de la Concorde would have made a marvellous satirical statement.

Or it’s possible the famous phrase that, “I don’t like what you say but will defend your right to say it,” gets lost in translation to the Arabic, and comes out as, “I may disagree with what you say, in which case I’ll strap you to a stick and rip your skin off”. Presumably the judge said to him: “Your website shouldn’t just be liberal, it should show cartoons of the King riding around on a pig at the very least. Take off your shirt.”

It was also cheery to see Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, having a giggle by showing up. Because the first thing you think whenever you see Putin is how much he loves it when journalists take the piss out of him.

“Make my nose more grotesque, I’m not hideous enough,” he shouts at legions of cartoonists employed to mock him. And he was genuinely angered by the shootings in Paris, because he’s adamant that critics in the press should be poisoned, not shot, as it’s much less messy.

Alongside the Russian was Sameh Shoukry, foreign minister for Egypt, where his government has jailed Al Jazeera’s journalists. What a good sport Shoukry was, prepared to send himself up by marching for free speech, hopefully with a placard saying: “Je suis Al Jazeera.”

Because everyone agrees it’s essential to allow things to be broadcast, even if we don’t like them. Newspapers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail have been especially passionate about this issue, which must explain why they’ve never criticised the BBC or Channel 4 for showing anything too sexual; or with swearing; or critical of the Royal Family.

They were particularly animated a few years ago after Russell Brand’s unpleasant prank with an answerphone. I don’t recall what they said exactly, but presumably it must have been: “We may not agree with it, but we defend to the death the right to broadcast whatever message he left.”

Satire, The Sun has insisted all week, is an essential part of our democracy because it mocks the powerful. That’s why they’ve always taken the side of the common person, and happily sent up important figures, such as newspaper owners, as in that biting sketch where the head of a media empire suddenly forgets everything he’s ever done when he’s in front of a  phone-hacking inquiry.

“It’s essential to allow satire to puncture those in charge,” agree those in charge. So David Cameron and the Mail would love it if an act at the Royal Variety performance did a sketch called Benefits Palace, featuring all the royals screaming it was their right to live off the state. “What a splendid example of our freedom of speech,” they’d all declare.

They’re all resolute that any religion should be able to take a joke, which it undoubtedly should. So now’s the time to make a situation comedy called A History of the Vatican, in which Jimmy Savile is elected Pope because he’s the best at covering up child abuse. “A tour de force, simply delightful,” would be the review in The Times.

Similarly, during one spate of bombing in Gaza, when this newspaper printed a cartoon of the Israeli leader Ariel Sharon eating babies, the Israeli embassy made an official objection to the Press Complaints Commission. The Israeli government appears more concerned than anyone with the right to publish cartoons, so I’m sure if you look back at the records, you’ll find their complaint was that the cartoon should have been much more vicious. Because you can’t put a price on the right to publish satire.

This is why there should only be one regret about the choice of personnel to lead the march for peace and freedom of speech. The ultimate satire would have been for the final speaker to have been a representative from al-Qaeda. He could have come on as a surprise guest and begun, “We sent the gunmen, but we thought we’d like to be here anyway”, to rapturous applause, as everyone fell about laughing at the wonderful satire of the absurdity on display.

And it would be easy to film the whole show and put it out as a DVD – jihadists seem quite adept at organising that side of things already.

Perspective on Charlie Hebdo, Peshawar killings; In maya, the killer and the killed

Jan 14, 2015 12:21 AM , By Devdutt Pattanaik in The Hindu |  

Emotional violence is not measurable. Physical violence is, which makes it a crime that can be proven and hence a greater crime, especially when emotional violence is directed at something as notional as religion

When the Pandavas invited Krishna to be the chief guest at the coronation of Yudhishtira, Shishupala felt insulted and began abusing Krishna. Everyone became upset, but not Krishna who was listening calmly. However, after the hundredth insult, Krishna hurled his razor-sharp discus and beheaded Shishupala. For the limit of forgiveness was up.

Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly, published cartoons; offensive cartoons that I have never seen, and would never have, had someone not killed its staff. With that Charlie became a person, a victim, a martyr to the cause of the freedom of expression. We became heroes by condemning the killing. And so millions have walked in Paris to declare that they are Charlie.

Will there be a march where people identify themselves with Charlie’s killers? Is that allowed? Who are the killers? Muslim, bad Muslim, mad Muslim, un-Islamic Muslim? The editorials are undecided, as in the attack in Peshawar on schoolchildren. The victims there did not even provoke; their parents probably did.

The provocation in Charlie’s case was this: perceived insult to the Prophet Muhammad, hence Islam. Charlie, however, was functioning within the laws of a land renowned for the phrase, “Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood!” Islam is also about brotherhood (Ummah, in Arabic) and equality, though not so much about liberty since Islam does mean submission, a submission to the word of god that brings peace.

Managing the measurable

The two siblings, believers in equality and their own version of liberty decided to hurt each other, one emotionally, the other physically. Emotional violence is not measurable. Physical violence is. That makes the latter a crime that can be proven, hence a greater crime, especially when emotional violence is directed at something as notional as religion. Because we are scientific, you see.

And here is the problem — measurement, that cornerstone of science and objectivity.

We can manage the measurable. But what about the non-measurable? Does it matter at all? Emotions cannot be measured. The mind cannot be measured, which is why purists refer to psychology and behavioural science as pseudoscience. God cannot be measured. For the scientist, god is therefore not fact. It is at best a notion. This annoys the Muslim, for he/she believes in god, and for him/her god is fact, not measurable fact, but fact nevertheless. It is subjective truth. My truth. Does it matter?

Where do we locate subjective truth: as fact or fiction? Some people have given themselves the “Freedom of Expression” and others have given themselves a “God, who is the one True God.” Both are subjective truths. They shape our reality. They matter. But we just do not know how to locate them, for they are not measurable.

We cannot measure the hurt Charlie’s cartoons caused the Muslim community. We cannot measure the Muslim community’s sensitivity or over-sensitivity. But we can measure the outcome of the actions of the killers. We can therefore easily condemn violence. That it caused hurt, rage, humiliation, enough for some people to grab guns, is a non-measurable assumption, a belief. Belief is a joke for the rational atheist.

The intellectual can hurt with his/her words. The soldier can hurt with his/her weapons. We live in the world where the former is acceptable, even encouraged. The latter is not. It is a neo-Brahminism that the global village has adopted. Those who think and speak are superior to those who beat and kill, even if the wounds created by word-missiles can be deeper, last longer and fester forever. Gandhi, the non-violent sage, is thus pitted against Godse, the violent brute. I, the intellectual, have the right to provoke; but you, the barbarian who only knows to wield violence, have no right to get provoked and respond the only way you know how to. If you do get provoked, you have to respond in my language, not yours, brain not brawn, because the brain is superior. I, the intellectual Brahmin, make the rules. Did you not know that?

Non-violence is the new god, the one true god. When we say violence, we are actually referring only to the physical violence of the barbarian. The mental violence of the intellectual elite is not considered violence. So, one has sanction to mock Hinduism intellectually on film (PK by Rajkumar Hirani and Aamir Khan) and in books (The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger), but those who demand the film be banned and the books be pulped are brutes, barbarians, enemies of civic discourse, who resort to violence. They are not as bad as the Charlie killers, but seem to be on the same path.

Role of the thinker

We refuse to see arguments as brutal bloodless warfare, mental warfare. We don’t see debating societies as battlegrounds. Mental torture, we are told, is merely a concept, not truth: difficult to measure hence prove. The husband who mentally tortures can never be caught; the husband who strikes the wife can be caught. We empathise with the latter, not the former (she is over-sensitive, we rationalise). Should the mentally tortured wife kill her husband, it is she who will be hauled to jail, not the husband. Her crime can be proved. Not his.

The thinker we are told is not a doer. The killings provoked by the thinker thus goes unnoticed. The thinker — the seed of the violence — chuckles as the barbarian, whose only vocabulary is physical, will be caught and punished while mental warfare will go on with brutal precision. When the ill-equipped barbarian even attempts to fight back using words, we mock him as the troll.

In Sanskrit, the root of the world maya is ma, to measure. We translate the word as illusion or delusion but it technically means a world constructed through measurement. Thus, the scientific word, the rational world, based on measurement, is maya. And that is neither a good or bad thing. It is not a judgement. It is an observation. A world based on measurement will focus on the tangible and lose perspective of the intangible. It will assume measured truth as Truth, rather than limited truth.

Those who felt gleeful self-righteousness in mocking the Prophet are in maya. So are those who took such serious offence to it. The killer is in maya and so is the killed. Those who judge one as the victim and the other as the villain are also in maya. We all live in our constructed realities, some based on measurement, some indifferent to measurement, each one eager to dismiss the other, rendering them irrelevant: The other is the barbarian who needs to be educated. The other is also the intellectual who is best killed.

Essentially, maya makes us to judge. For when we measure, we wonder which is small and what is big, what is up and what is down, what is right and what is wrong, what matters and what does not matter. Different measuring scales lead to different judgments. Wendy Doniger is convinced she is the hero, and martyr, who fights for the subaltern Indian in her writings. Dinanath Batra is convinced he is the hero who opposes her wilful misunderstanding of sanatana dharma. Baba Ramdev feels he has a right to demand the banning of PK. And the producers of the film respond predictably about the freedom of speech and rationality, as they laugh their way to the bank. Everyone is right, in his or her maya.

Every action has consequences. And consequences are good and bad only in hindsight. The age of Enlightenment was also the age of Colonisation. The most brutal wars of the 20th century, from the world wars to the Cold Wars, were secular. Non-violent thought manifests itself in non-violent words which give rise to violent action. The fruit is measurable, not the seed. To separate seed from fruit, thought from action, is like separating stimulus from response. It results in a wrong diagnosis and a wrong prescription. The killer does not kill thought. The thought creates more killers.

What goes around always comes around. Outrage over violence feeds outrage over cartoons. Hindu philosophy (not Hindutva philosophy) calls this karma. We don’t want to break the cycle by letting go of either non-violent outrage or violent protests. Ideas such as maya and karma annoy the westernised mind for they disempower them: they who are determined to save the world with measuring tools dismiss astute observation of the human condition as fatalism.

In his past life, Shishupala was the doorkeeper Jaya of Vaikuntha who was cursed by the Sanat rishis that he would be born on earth, away from Vishnu, for daring to block their entry. The doorkeeper Jaya argued that he was doing his job but the curse stuck and Jaya was reborn as Shishupala. Vishnu had promised to liberate him and to expedite his departure, Shishupala practised viparit-bhakti, reverse-devotion, displaying love through abuse. So he insulted Krishna, knowing full well that Krishna was Vishnu and would be forced to act. There is a limit to forgiveness. But there should be no limit to love.

The 'Buffett Formula' Will Help You Get Smarter Every Day

by Business Insider

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

— Charlie Munger

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”

— Charlie Munger

Most people go though life not really getting any smarter.

Why? They simply won’t do the work required.

It’s easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV and zone out until bed time rolls around.

But that’s not really going to help you get smarter.

Sure you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night’s episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And, yes, you know what happened on Survivor. But that’s not knowledge accumulation, it’s a mind-numbing sedative.

But you can acquire knowledge if you want it.

In fact there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. Simple but not easy.

It involves a lot of hard work.

We’ll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. These two are an extraordinary combination of minds. They are also learning machines.

“I can see, he can hear. We make a great combination.” —Warren Buffett, speaking of his partner and friend, Charlie Munger.

We can learn a lot from them. They didn’t get smart because they are both billionaires. No, in fact they became billionaires, in part, because they are smart. More importantly, they keep getting smarter. And it turns out that they have a lot to say on the subject.

How To Get Smarter

Read. A lot.

Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.”

What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80% of his working day reading and thinking.

“You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented.

When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”

All of us can build our knowledge but most of us won’t put in the effort.

One person who took Buffett’s advice, Todd Combs, now works for the legendary investor. After hearing Buffett talk he started keeping track of what he read and how many pages he was reading.

The Omaha World-Herald writes:

Eventually finding and reading productive material became second nature, a habit. As he began his investing career, he would read even more, hitting 600, 750, even 1,000 pages a day.

Combs discovered that Buffett’s formula worked, giving him more knowledge that helped him with what became his primary job — seeking the truth about potential investments.

But how you read matters too.

You need to be critical and always thinking. You need to do the mental work required to hold an opinion.

In Working tougher: Why Great Partnerships Succeed, Buffett comments to author Michael Eisner:

Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie — his children call him a book with legs.

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Continuous Learning

Eisner continues:

Maybe that’s why both men agree it’s better that they never lived in the same city, or worked in the same office. They would have wanted to talk all the time, leaving no time for the reading, which Munger describes as part of an essential continuing education program for the men who run one of the largest conglomerates in the world.

“I don’t think any other twosome in business was better at continuous learning than we were,” he says, talking in the past tense but not really meaning it. “And if we hadn’t been continuous learners, the record wouldn’t have been as good. And we were so extreme about it that we both spent the better part of our days reading, so we could learn more, which is not a common pattern in business.”

It doesn’t work how you think it works.

If you’re thinking they sit in front of a computer all day obsessing over numbers and figures? You’d be dead wrong.

“No,” says Warren. “We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.” And when it gets to the thinking part, for Buffett and Munger, there’s no one better to think with than their partners. “Charlie can’t encounter a problem without thinking of an answer,” posits Warren. “He has the best thirty-second mind I’ve ever seen. I’ll call him up, and within thirty seconds, he’ll grasp it. He just sees things immediately.”

Munger sees his knowledge accumulation as an acquired, rather than natural, genius. And he’d give all the credit to the studying he does.

“Neither Warren nor I is smart enough to make the decisions with no time to think,” Munger once told a reporter. “We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.”

How Can You Find Time To Read?

Finding the time to read is easier than you think. One way to help make that happen is to carve an hour out of your day just for yourself.

In an interview he gave for his authorized biography The Snowball, Buffett told the story:

Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, ‘Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day.

It’s important to think about the opportunity cost of this hour. On one hand you can check twitter, read some online news, and reply to a few emails while pretending to finish the memo that is supposed to be the focus of your attention.

On the other hand, you can dedicate the time to improving yourself. In the short term, you’re better off with the dopamine laced rush of email and twitter while multitasking. In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further.

“I have always wanted to improve what I do,“ Munger comments “even if it reduces my income in any given year. And I always set aside time so I can play my own self-amusement and improvement game.”

Reading is only part of the equation.

Lane Hickenbottom/Reuters

But reading isn’t enough. Charlie Munger offers:

We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

Commenting on what it means to have knowledge, in How To Read A Book, Mortimer Adler writes: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

Can you explain what you know to someone else? Try it. Pick an idea you think you have a grasp of and write it out on a sheet of paper as if you were explaining it to someone else. (see The Feynman Technique and here, if you want to improve retention.)

Nature or Nurture?

Another way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas.

“Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” — Charlie Munger 

Whither Pakistan?

Interview with Tarek Fateh