Razib & I played host to MJ, Kushal (Carvaka Podcast) and Vidhi.
It was a very long podcast (1hr 40 minutes) and it was really entertaining. Kushal & MJ are BJP-lite while Vidhi (if she was forced to vote) is Congress. We skipped the technical discussion since we will serve that after the elections. Continue reading Browncast Ep 38: Indian Elections
In our podcasts we are touching on (but not necessarily addressing directly) “The End of Universal Western Civilisation.”
This is to alert BrownPundit readers to a series I’ve begun on Zenpundit, my other punditry-posting place. It’s about Ioan Couliano’s argument in his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance that the Renaissance art of Magic was essentially a matter of conjuring desire in the recipient by means of visual imagery, and that the Art has been revived with great success in the present day, in the form of commercial advertising.
Roughly speaking, then, Magic is the defendant, modernity-secularity-technology is the prosecution team — who don’t bother to call witnesses because, m’lord, it’s plain obvious that magical thinking is superstitious nonsense — and a bucket-load of TV commercials form the evidence presented by the defense.
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But wait a minute — here’s magic:
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Whether you’re secular or a devotee, that photographic image is magical in that a simple hand-gesture conjures up a flute. The flute isn’t there, objectively speaking — and yet there’s a flute, Krishna is quite obviously playing it, and indeed its mellifluous power of enchantment has drawn the lovely Radha to his side.
About Krishna’s flute — you may know far more than I, but at least I can point to Denise Levertov and Edward C Dimmock’s poem in Songs in Praise of Krishna — from the Bengali:
.
Radha is terrified on her way to the forest
O Madhava, how shall I tell you of my terror?
I could not describe my coming here
if I had a million tongues.
When I left my room and saw the darkness
I trembled:
I could not see the path,
there were snakes that writhed round my ankles!
I was alone, a woman; the night was so dark,
the forest so dense and gloomy,
and I had so far to go.
The rain was pouring down —
which path should I take?
My feet were muddy
and burning where thorns had scratched them.
But I had the hope of seeing you, none of it mattered,
and now my terror seems far away. . . .
When the sound of your flute reaches my ears
it compels me to leave my home, my friends,
it draws me into the dark toward you.
I no longer count the pain of coming here,
says Govinda-dasa
**
And what does all this have to do with advertising?
My response is that the Krishna and Radha in this photo were captured, and Krishna’s flute conjured, by the eye of a pro commercial guy:
JEREMY HUNTER began his career in advertising – as a television creative, working for Young and Rubicam, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy and Bates, along the way winning a number of international awards in Cannes, Venice, New York and Los Angeles. During this time he worked with some of Britain’s most iconic film directors – John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, Tony Scott, Dick Lester, Nic Roeg, Richard Loncraine as well as Oscar-winning Editor Jim Clark and photographer Terence Donovan.
That’s the resume of a contemporary magician.
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In case you’re interested, the posts in my Magic and Commercials series on Zenpundit to date are:
Advertising series 01: Music
Eros, the Renaissance and advertising
Authentic, spiritual magic!
The magic of advertising or the commercialization of magic?
Here’s magic!
The magic of miniatures
I imagine there will eventually be about twenty posts in the series — but more and more evidence keeps turning up in favor of the defense.
Magic, court observers seem to think, is likely to be vindicated.
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.
You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else…).
In this episode we talk to Dr Ahmed Al Jallad, Sofia Chair of Arabic Studies at Ohio State University. Dr Jallad is an expert on the languages and scripts of pre-Islamic Arabia. We talk about the origins of Arabic (most likely in the Northwest of the peninsula and not in the South as previously believed), the development of the Arabic script (most likely from Nabatean Arabic) and the inscriptions of the region (In the 6th Century CE the ones that do reference a religion mostly reference Christianity, not the pagan gods of pre-Islamic Arabia that dominate our vision of the “era of Jahiliya”..
I came across two images recently which seemed closely parallel, and yet distinctly different.
When I saw this image:
it immediately reminded me of this one, which I’d seen a few hours earlier:
That’s the first clue as to how to play the Glass Bead Game: it’s as simple as this reminded me of that.
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The two images are very different, yet very similar.
Each is an image with a strong Catholic resonance — one image is of a statue of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, the other is an image of a chalice, the cup which Jesus passed to his followers on the night before his crucifixion, and which Christians to this day drink in their various communion services, remembering him.
And both images are very visibly shattered — the shattered statue representing the devastating impact of jihadist suicide-bomber attacks on churches across Sri Lanka, the shattered chalice representing the Catholic Church, “broken” by priestly sexual abuses, and in urgent need of reformation.
In playing Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, at least in the variants that I have devised and which I call the HipBone family of games, the move from one of those images to the other is a move. And the nature of the move is their resemblance across a cognitive distance.
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Hesse’s book was written in 1943, a time when elite thinkers — and Hesse was certainly elite — were more comfortable than we are today with sheer erudition — and he gives as an example of a move in the game, a player who had been studying —
…the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar’s Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns…
— and here’s another move for you, one of my own. Little did Hesse know it, but I myself was studying up on Church music one day, and dis=covered a book by a nun, Jane-Marie Luecke OSB, entitled:
Measuring Old English Rhythm: an Application of the Principles of Gregorian Chant Rhythm to the Meter of Beowulf
Not only is Sister Jane-Marie’s book itself a monograph length move, buy my association of Hesse’s move in his book and the good Sister’s monograph — one reminded me of the other — is also a move, and a most fortuitous one, starting in the pages of the book I devoted ten or more years of my life to, and ending in a discovery in an area of my own scholarly interest — and now, in my proud ownership of Sister Jane-Marie’s slim blue volume.
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Remember, mnthe scope of the game allows moves to be made from the whole range of human intellectual production:
The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.
If you can think it, imagine it, jot it down, sketch it, hum it, or represent it as an equation, you can make a move of it, linking it to some other move already in play, or proposing it for others to link to.
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Music is notated in a score, and in the music of ideas which Hesse’s game proposes and my HipBone Games attempt to make playable, my suggestion is to notate such moves as simple graphs — in the form of two named nodes with an edge connecting them.
Here’s a board I’ve devised to allow you to notate a move with two concepts and a linkage between them. I call it my DoubleQuotes Board, and it represents the smallest board on which a HipBone Game can be played — either solo or with a friend:
You can then assign your move to to a node in your game, and link it to another in a way that is rich in content at both ends, and which features rich connections between them, across some conceptual distance — perhaps across distinctly separate disciplines.
Here’s a DoubleQuote between Theodor von Kármán’s Vortex Street, and Van Gogh’s painting of the night sky:
From the dynamics of flow nto post-impressionist modern art — that’s quite a leap! And yet the two are so close, they might as well be twins!
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So — the challenge:
What memory-leap — what associative leap, what creative leap can you come up with that most neatly and beautifully links two conceptually distant but richly associated concepts? If you feel like it, you can identify them in the Comments section, or email me at my gmail address — my handle there is hipbonegamer.
You’ll be playing one of my playable variants of Hermann Hesse’s Nobel-winning Glass Bead Game. And if you have the skill-set to drop your move onto my DoubleQuote board and post it, so much the better.
Here’s that game board again:
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Oh, and for Ali Minai in particular, given that self-referential paradox must be an issue in AGI — here’s a board for the self-referential one-move game, with one of my poems in it:
Wanna try?
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Enough — until next time..
We’re currently doing a podcast that is exploring Pakistan and China; I’m really shocked by what I’m hearing.
Epitome of Dynastic politics #BilawalKiIftaar pic.twitter.com/OmwCTVZCqL
— Sara Taseer (@sarataseer) May 19, 2019
I predicted after last year’s Pakistan election that the Provincial Parties (which were dynastic) would set off against the military backed Imran Khan aegis (Madinat ethics).
I’m quite impressed by how Pakistan is transforming. I’m also a bit taken aback that it seems a Saffron wave is taking over India. Karan Johan is the last man standing for Islamicate culture in Hindustan.
Finally in Bilawal’s iftar; it’s interesting the Baloch and Pathan parties did not attend. Sindh & Punjab are vested in Pakistan but the periphery not so much (no word on MQM).
Bilawal also needs to lose 10-15kg if he wants to look Presidential whereas Maryam looks transluscent (she really lives up to the Kashmiri stereotype).
Someone in the comments posted the results from The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. I put the percentages with a few ratios in a Google doc. I don’t know what a lot of these groups are. Can readers illuminate? We need to be careful about the sample size, but I think there are a lot of interesting patterns in there.
Remember that “Steppe”, “Indus Periphery” and “Onge” are populations artifacts within a model. The way I explain it to people is that rather than focusing on the percentage, look at how the populations vary across the parameters. That is a pretty robust result. No matter what outgroups you’re going to use, Brahmins in most of South Asia seem to have more “West Eurasian” type ancestry than other populations (except in the NW). Because “Indus Periphery” has a minority of “Ancient Ancestral South Indians” (AASI) as part of its ancestry, the “Onge” fraction should be seen as a floor on AASI ancestry (the Onge ancestors diverged from the AASI ~40,000 years ago, so it’s a very large difference).
Continue reading Genetic variation across many South Asian communities
(This reflection-piece was written for an event where I was called as a speaker by Vichaar Manthan – UK in Leicester on `The Role of Dharma in the Post-Brexit Indo-British Relationship’. It looks at the spirit of India, and how the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ has been ingrained in its core, and what UK could obtain from this understanding in a post-Brexit world)
Jaimini, the author of the celebrated Purvamimamsa and Uthara Mimamsa, explains ‘Dharma’ thus `Dharma is that which is indicated by the Vedas as conducive to the highest good’. Dharma comes from the word ‘Dhr’ and related to that which upholds equilibrium and balance in society and the Universe. Dharma is a term that appears in a very fluid manner in the ancient and medieval texts of Indi, particularly the itihas or epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Krishna and Rama, however, do share the commonality of not just the speaking of and on Dharma but living Dharma. And it is this that ancient Indian philosophy embodies. Not just saying or doing things, for these are but temporary flutterings on the cosmos, but rather orienting one’s existence so that that which balances, that which equilibriates and that which respects the inherent unity that the oriental traditions may see in the Brahman or Tao while the occidental, contemporary, scientific tradition may see as products of the singularity that exploded into form with the Big Bang.
So, in a world full of polarities, dualities, multiplicities and differences what can be regarded as the equilibrium, as the balance and the balanced, as Dharmic? When relativistic physics tells us that space (and its associated dimensions), along with time, is frame dependent and has no absolute aspect while quantum physics talks of an even more fuzzy reality, whose evolution depends on its observation, surely such a balance is tricky to demarcate or highlight. The Dharmic tradition therefore does a highly sensible thing in the process: it decentralizes the resolution of this dilemma. It makes Dharma the operational balance of elements in the Universe as determined by their innate tendencies and natures, or Swadharma. Gandhi may have called this Swaraj (or self-rule) as did Bal Gangadhar Tilak but the idea itself has its roots in the Vedas and Upanishads of India. This is turn neatly comes from the concept of Rta, the natural order of things in the Universe. Just like fire burns, water flows, snakes slither and so on. The more relative truths of these tendencies build up the relational reality of our universe. Currently I am studying the possibility of unifying physics as we know it using a relational reality as the basis. Regardless of the result of this research pursuit with Prof. Brian Josephson (Emeritus Professor, Cavendish Laboratory and Nobel Laureate 1973) at Cambridge, at a human level this presents a more accessible and equally universal gem of wisdom: unity in diversity.
Read more here: https://lincogle.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/for-a-dharmic-brexit-and-unity-in-diversity/
A teenage Christian girl claims she was raped, forcibly converted to Islam and then married off to a 45-year-old Muslim divorcee in the Pakistani port city of Karachi.
Neha Pervaiz, 15, a resident of Ittehad Town, told ucanews.com about her ordeal. “I was taken by my aunt, a Muslim convert, to her house on April 28 to help her look after her sick son.
But there I was asked to marry a Muslim man named Imran. When I refused, they beat me up and threatened to kill my minor brother who was with me,” Neha said.
“Later I was taken to a room where I was raped by Imran.
They then pressurized me to convert to Islam and marry Imran.“On April 29, I was taken to an Islamic cleric, who asked me to recite Quranic verses and gave me a new name, Fatima.”
Unfortunately, no authentic data is available on forced conversions and forced marriages in Pakistan, but about 1,000 cases involving Hindu and Christian girls were estimated to have taken place in Sindh province alone in 2018, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).