The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Thursday August 11th, 2022
The Sulu Arbitration Scam – The biggest attempted fraud case against Malaysia ever perpetrated by Murray Hunter
Can you imagine what would be the consequences if a rogue
freelance lawyer misused the good offices of the Malaysian courts and
awarded USD 15 billion against Spain or France in an arbitration
hearing, without either country participating?
This is what happened to Malaysia in what could be called the most elaborate international legal scam ever perpetrated.
Malaysia has fallen victim to a scheme by developed by arogue lawyer
Gonzalo Stampa, in a scheme to extort Malaysia. Stampa used the offices
of both the Spanish and French courts of law to enact his arbitration
charade, clearly without legal authority and sanction, and clearly
without jurisdiction.
The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the
cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Monday December 13th, 2021 – World
Violin day
The ‘Modi-fied’ #Indian democracy is a threat not only to its
religious minorities but also to its neighbors by Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Indian democracy has always been majoritarian since its first
day as a republic. As a matter of fact the trend has its roots in the
pre-partition days of Congress leadership that did not allow for an
inclusive democracy in which Muslim and other non-Hindu minorities could
participate on an equal footing. That majoritarian pull of the Hindu
leaders like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel pushed Jinnah and tens of millions
of Muslims to feel alienated. And the rest is history! Pakistan emerged,
albeit moth-eaten, as a separate state.
While all the founding fathers of the Indian republican are dead now
but their ghosts are still with us in the likes of Narendra Modi and
other Indo-centric politicians to whom majority has the absolute right
to decide how India should be run, and who is an Indian and who is not.
Thanks to the toxic fascist ideology of Hindutva, promoted under the BJP
(Bharatiya Janata Party)-rule, the non-Hindu minority religious groups
are worse off today than any time in the past in India’s volatile
history.
Talcott Parsons and the Promise of Transdiscipliarity by Rene Wadlow
Talcott Parsons (13 December 1902 – 8 May 1979) was a
leading US sociologist usually considered a member of the
structural-functional analysis school. Some of his major theoretical
writings are The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1949), The Social System (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), and Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (Editors). Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). Parsons taught at Harvard
University and was the doctoral thesis advisor of students who went on
to became important figures in the same tradition such as Robert K.
Merton Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), Marion J. Levy Jr The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) and Clifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures (New
York: Basic Books, 1973). He also had students who went on to have
radically different approaches and who became strong critics of Parsons’
approach such as C. Wright Mills in his The Sociological Imagination (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Parsons’ approach was also
attacked by George Gurvitch (1894-1965) a Russian-born French
sociologist who spent the Second World War years in New York City and
became knowledgeable with the schools of US sociology.
The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Saturday November 27th, 2021
Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of
Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty
and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious,
demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of
information and flashes of data. Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt
somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world
excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and
regret. So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime
of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the name
of experience, destroys imagination even as it celebrates it, and
luxuriates in a lowly prurience.
Facebook, in particular, has been trying to push such a model using a
tactic all companies in distress have sought to adopt: rebranding. Be
it the scandals disclosed by the Facebook papers, the scrutiny over the
use of algorithms by the company, the inability to combat galloping
misinformation on its platforms, or the stark amorality of the company’s
founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the chance to seek the metaverse has
presented itself.
Enter, then, the world of Meta Platforms, aided by the virtual
reality headset company Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014
for $2 billion. Astute watchers then would have been the strategy afoot
at the time; most, however, thought the decision misguided and destined
to flop.
Book review: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir by Joseph Gatt
Published in 1949, simply put, Simone de Beauvoir answers Sigmund Freud’s question: who are women.
The book mixes descriptive accounts of the social and
individual lives of women with literary accounts of the social and
individual lives of women. That, along with legal and religious views on
all matters pertaining to women.
The common thread of the book: men usually live their life cycles
without having to worry about getting pregnant, without having to worry
about “forced hangovers” once a month which is what menstruations really
are. And men usually don’t have to worry about becoming anyone’s sex
slave or domestic slave or domination within the household.
So women are mostly reacting on a daily basis, on an hourly basis to these threats.
