iniekaas's comments

It’s the best intelligence, but not for production. Production is more about quantity than quality.

I finished my highschool in Qatar, and a part of the program was an internship. Mine was at QFCHT, Qatar Foundation for Combating Human Trafficking.

It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.

Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.

We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..

I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.

I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.

I had actually bought Mod’s book, and she’s absolutely one of the best authors in the field. She takes the notions of giants like Moshe Haviv and Gallagher and translate it in a way that is super intuitive and simple. She’s one of my role models in academia. Pass her my greetings. I intend to teach a course based on her textbook after I’m done with my PhD (but mostly IEEE articles here, so not real science like ACM’s SIGs. Wish my PhD was in the awesome topics you guys are working on. I see the papers of Mor’s and Ziv Scully and the whole lab, really awesome work! Kudos to you guys. I won’t hide my envy of having Mor as a supervisor :D)

That is true. The speed of how thought transmits and how notions are, for a lack of a better word, globalized is a great challenge for cultures that emphasize tradition. There is a passive agent in the dissolution of traditional cultures by means of “globalization”.

Language, size, politics (especially the more polarizing they are) and the availability of resources (labor, land, capital and the like) has a big impact on which “traditionalist culture” is a big part of what dictates the active agents of that transformation. Biden’s administration aimed at being an active agent (E.g., statements to make Saudi Arabia a pariah) but the circumstances are not allowing that at the moment. The Saudis are aware of this intention of active intervention, which is why they emphasized the notion of “Arabs are a different people from the west” during Biden’s visit.

Being conservative (in the actual sense, not the political connotation) in the presence of the internet and the huge mass of consumable media - that is biased from a conservative perspective - is a challenge indeed.

Turkey seems to be embracing the inherent chaos easily, and I suppose that’s due to the presence of some Sufism that allows a great deal of tolerance (although, as an Arab Salafi so-called Wahhabi, that tolerance comes with a great deal of blasphemy, like worshipping by Mawlawi dancing, Rumi’s and Ibn Arabia’s spiritual pantheistic Wujood notion). That makes it similar that’s akin to Buddhism in how easy for it to spread. I heard of a Turkish Dervish creating some sort of a “Western Sufi Order” where dance moves are taught. But again, I’m not Turkish so my perception might be incorrect or misinformed. Would be interested to learn more!

Well, the Arabic version of that same Wikipedia article provides the Hadeeth transmitter’s analysis of the Hadith regarding Al-‘Asmaa bint Marian, and the verdict that this hadeeth is fabricated (Mawdoo’). It simply isn’t true.

Moreover, the language of the claimed poet - I’m an Arab - is far different from the language of the time, far from being poetic, and the statement claimed that Prophet Muhammad said has a very different tone from his usual tone (He said “Who’d save me from Al ‘Asmaa bint Marwan?” and the Prophet himself mentioned that there is no savior other than Allah. The prophet approach would be something like يريحني (v. make me relaxed) from so and so. It’s a very horrible and easy to spot fabrication, the fabricator almost didn’t put any effort in it and used the language of his time instead.

You don’t need to mention a fabricated story to attack Islam’s take on free speech. Free speech is simply not a principle that was ever well-regarded in Islam. “Whomever believes in Allah and the last day should only say good or be quiet” and “Are people thrown into the depth of hellfire except by the sowing of their tongues” and “It is enough for one to be described as a liar is to talk about everything he heard”. The notion of “freedom” is a very western notion that - in its current form - very alien to the sort of freedom that Islam talks about: minimal freedom that is constrained by rules. Free speech certainly isn’t regarded as part of that minimal freedom. More like “constrained speech”, because of the inherent Islamic belief that free speech brings chaos. In times of Fitnah (tribulation, calamity) people are commanded by the Prophet not to speak a word: “Hold your tongue, stay at your home, and abandon the matters of public”; which is absolutely against free speech because people’s opinions are stirred most when there are events, and they’re commanded to be quiet and bottle it in.

It is just that we, Arabs, are a radically different culture that values stability and tradition. Something of the sort of “People should mind their own business”. Free speech undermines both. It’s a significant cultural difference that the west has no intent to respect, because they regard it as oppressive.

You don’t need to mention a fabricated story to highlight that.

I’ve been using the catechism in everything I write throughout my PhD. It’s real a catechism for academia, it’s all about answering these questions in one way or another.

I just start with it and start adding bullet points to answer these questions, then I put more bullet points and expand in them, and so on until I have enough material. Then I map it to each section of w/e document I am writing.

It’s been one of the most useful things in I’ve ever learnt about. Came to learn about it from an IEEE webinar by a professor of power systems (Siddharth Suryanarayanan) that I stumbled upon via vEvents when COVID-19 lockdowns started. I presented a copy of it to my lab in my PhD, helped my lab-mates clarify things to their supervisor and write. It was super effective.