Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 17

Get Your Omicron Booster and Flu Vaxx

Good stuff, to include that you reduce your risk of heart attacks etc if you get the vaxx. Do it.
Edit: Oh here is some more on the vax (not tested on humans, apparently, but that doesn't mean as much as you think. 
And yet more info from the horses mouth. The past:



the future:




I should also note that the death ticker for covid on the Times site has it going up, while worldometer seems to think it's different. be safe out there:





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Bookstores. Indie types

Yeah I'm a fan. Especially of the used bookstore and the mode of discovery there. That being said, apparently bookstores did real well recently. But their bump in sales is going down. Which reminds me I gotta hit up my local used bookstore. 
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Knights and Poetry

No, not that kind of knight but this:


And so someone mentioned the knights tour and how a knight can touch every square (no repeats). Well of course it's been proven. But poets centuries ago were doing it:

The earliest known reference to the knight's tour problem dates back to the 9th century AD. In Rudraṭa's Kavyalankara[5] (5.15), a Sanskrit work on Poetics, the pattern of a knight's tour on a half-board has been presented as an elaborate poetic figure (citra-alaṅkāra) called the turagapadabandha or 'arrangement in the steps of a horse'. The same verse in four lines of eight syllables each can be read from left to right or by following the path of the knight on tour. Since the Indic writing systems used for Sanskrit are syllabic, each syllable can be thought of as representing a square on a chessboard. Rudrata's example is as follows:

सेनालीलीलीनानालीलीनानानानालीलीलीनलीनालीलेनालीनालीलीलीनानानानाली

transliterated:

senālīlīlīnānālīlīnānānānālīlīlīnalīnālīlenālīnālīlīlīnānānānālī

For example, the first line can be read from left to right or by moving from the first square to the second line, third syllable (2.3) and then to 1.5 to 2.7 to 4.8 to 3.6 to 4.4 to 3.2.

The Sri Vaishnava poet and philosopher Vedanta Desika during the 14th century in his 1,008-verse magnum opus praising Lord Ranganatha's divine sandals of Srirangam; i.e., Paduka Sahasram (in chapter 30: Chitra Paddhati) has composed two consecutive Sanskrit verses containing 32 letters each (in Anushtubh meter) where the second verse can be derived from the first verse by performing a Knight's tour on a 4 × 8 board, starting from the top-left corner.

Now that's pretty cool. 
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Of Proxies & Purity

Was having a discussion with my BIL about proxies and outside interference and times of instability [1] and I was thinking about the line drawn between a thing merely having outside help (does it then become tainted and untrue to its grassroots start...) and having something simply funded and started by billionaires and states and then where does it stand in terms of reality?). Astroturfed as it were. 
Hard to draw that line and in the fog of war damn near impossible. 
To that end, there was this piece on twitter lamenting (as I do, though now I wonder if my style reeks of this sameness) how al the pieces read the same. Like same voice etc. And tbf, blaming MFAs and their outsized influence is certainly valid. Hell I do it all the time.



And then it's hard to not remember that the MFA's foundation was funded by the CIA. Crazy, right? This includes how political writing is considered "beneath" the writer (good for Cold War propaganda and very different from the writers who got famous in America during the depression). Nevertheless, I've heard those who want to back the literary status quo say things like, well, it was just funding and he got it from them and then the literary stuff was organic. Or even that it was the past (nvm that the past is never past) and has changed since then. 
Ostensibly, but it's hard to say, right? Especially when the exact same rules of Cold War PR writing are still with us today. 
Proxies and Purity. Hard to discern, tbf. 
[1] Still reminds me of a character in a Singer novella who said (~), when the winds of change kick up, it's the garbage that floats up top. Though I do wonder how they had that when there weren't plastic bags around... 🤔 
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Cracked Parking lots

grass pushing up, taking back. 
but you've never seen so much unused space like rust belt dreams long gone. 
boarded up shops but not just the pandemic though yes the pandemic
closed it all down. 
Was just another wave here. 
More waves to come. 
Soon gonna be a whole lot more. 




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Workshops

and the long arm of CIA interference in that which we call literary writing. Good article on it. 
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Huh. TIL

This post seems to indicate the colonial underpinnings of homophobia in Islamic societies. Though there is one person claiming that the Quran has a statement disproving them so I'll keep you updated on that. 
–]EgyptianNational 223 points 4 hours ago 

Okay, 

So I see that a lot of people already took a stab at this and had their comments deleted so I’m going to guess that has to do with the fact that this is a on-going discussion in Islam (a big reason why some elements are recently pushing so hard the other direction)

To briefly housekeep some things first. 

One: I will be relying on research work done by Scott Alan Kugle’s: Homosexuality in Islam and the many graduate level Islamic studies work it has spawned. (Link to book at bottom). 

Two: I will be relying on my own interpretations taught to me during my time at Al-Azhar university. As well as their interpretation. 

Finally. I will be looking at popular attitudes and origins of legal laws. I will also be largely ignoring homophobic arguments as I seem them largely without reason. But I will be exploring what the reasonable other side says. 

So to start off with. Let’s look at the assertions made by Kugle’s book: 

The primary assertions related to your question is probably that the Quran does not mention punishment for homophobic acts explicitly:

This is in fact true [1]. The closest the Quran gets is a retelling of the story of Lot. However, it is widely accepted by all Islamic scholars that rape and pedophilia are key aspects of the story of lot. As Krugle and other progressives have long argued that these passages have more to do with sexual predation then the explicit outlawing of homosexuality or minority sexuality. 

This is backed up by the lack of enforcement of homosexual punishment in early Islam. There are records of discrimination of openly homosexual men but no punishment per say [2]. 

One could thus argue that to early Muslims homosexuality and acts between consenting parties was seen not unlike homosexuality was in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. Outwardly shunned but largely ignored. [3] 

The last part of your question is the bit you seem to struggle with. As a fellow Egyptian Muslim I can understand where you are coming from. Unfortunately colonization and colonialism wasn’t just about owning land and using resources but it was also about controlling the populations they ruled over. This included shaping what laws the subjected people have. You will hear in the halls of al-Azhar hushed talked about some Hadith being fabricated from the time of colonial rule in order to shape Islamic societies in to something more easily controlled.

But to return to the provable. There is multiple sources one can site that shows a clear start of homophobic laws in Islamic regions with colonialism: [4] [5] [6]. 

The same sources above stress that by the time of ottoman rule ended (1800s) it was still common for Islamic legal systems to not get involved in homosexual relationships unless it involved rape. This was deemed inappropriate to European sensibilities and thus banned.

It should be pointed out that the wide spread acceptance of homophobic attitudes didn’t take off after colonialism ended but rather with the rise of whabbism across the Middle East. However lots of people argue that whabbism is only possible with neocolonialist involvement in the Middle East but that’s outside the scope of the question. 

Sources:

(1) : Schmidtke, Sabine (June 1999). "Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in Islam: A Review Article". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). 62: 260–266.

(2): Murray, Stephen O.; Roscoe, Will; Allyn, Eric; Crompton, Louis; Dickemann, Mildred; Khan, Badruddin; Mujtaba, Hasan; Naqvi, Nauman; Wafer, Jim; Westphal-Hellbusch, Sigrid (1997). "Conclusion". In Murray, Stephen O.; Roscoe, Will (eds.). Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. New York and London: NYU Press. pp. 307–310.

(3): Rowson, Everett K. (30 December 2012) [15 December 2004]. "HOMOSEXUALITY ii. IN ISLAMIC LAW". Encyclopædia Iranica. Vol. XII/4. New York: Columbia University. pp. 441–445.

(4): Ibrahim, Nur Amali (October 2016). "Homophobic Muslims: Emerging Trends in Multireligious Singapore". Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 58 (4): 955–981.

(5) Shafiqa Ahmadi (2012). "Islam and Homosexuality: Religious Dogma, Colonial Rule, and the Quest for Belonging". Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development. 26 (3): 557–558.

(6) Ira M. Lapidus; Lena Salaymeh (2014). A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press (Kindle edition). pp. 361–362.

Homosexuality in Islam the book.

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A Boring Dystopia

Right wingers getting ever more unhinged as it is. Apparently now they're targeting hospitals and staff for providing trans care. Add this to attacks on the FBI and one can only feel the crazy getting more fuel. Funny is how when it's right wing terrorism people immediately talk about negotiating with them. 
That being said, I remember reading about previous pandemics and how hospitals were the places that were usually attacked by people. Mistrust had generally built up far enough that no one wanted them around (sometimes, when medicine didn't know, this might have been slightly true, but not today). Seems like we've finally gotten there. Even with the sky high mistrust (mainly the right, apparently), I didn't think it would be happening that soon, but here we are. Nuts. 
Anyways, here's a pick me up tune I enjoy. Have fun. 



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Wow

Can't believe that the Times allowed this opinion piece to get by their editors, but it's solid. Really follows what I've been saying re debt fueled crises being the main instigator of change in our world (as it was with the fall of communism etc). Wonder what this one will bring. The piece claims that a change in the IMF's colonizing ways might be in store. We'll see if things get better or not. 
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Our Neo Feudal Dystopia Continues

Here's Facebook giving private chats of a girl to help have her prosecuted because she had an abortion. Yeah, it's why I really do hate FB and all it stands for. But read this twitter thread by Doctorow on big tech's alliance with the government to surveil Americans.
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