General Thoughts

Me, me, me, I know why, I know why, please let me answer.

Ehm ehm, it’s a conspiracy. Shhhhh!!

Yes, it is. Apparently the tobacco and alcohol lobbyists are the ones behind the lies and propaganda exaggerating the dangers of the relatively harmless drug and making it seem similar to the very dangerous ones such as cocain, heroin, ecstacy and meth. Plus these greedy lobbyists know very well that if marijuana gets legalized, their profits will come diving down like a crazy World War II Kamikaze.

Okay fine, let’s get serious. Yes, there is some truth to the aforementioned but are there other reasons? Why is it illegal? No, not in Sudan. There even alcohol is illegal. After all it’s a majority Muslim country and most Muslims want no alcohol or marijuana (for the record I don’t smoke weed or drink alcohol but I do enjoy shisha).

I’m talking about America. Alcohol is super abundant here and it’s legal but weed isn’t. Why? I mean scientific research shows that both substances - unlike other hardcore drugs - are relatively the same in terms of harmful effects. Some even say alcohol is more harmful than weed. In mainstream American culture, alcohol is a part of most adult social gatherings (just like it is in many other places in the world). Why is the attitude towards marijuana different and why is it illegal? 

So, besides the tobacco and alcohol lobbyists, what are the reasons? Maybe economic ones are also part of the answer. The “underground” economy is worth billions in various American states, especially California. Legalization will mean bye bye to all that money.

Any other reasons?

Just a random question that popped into my head after stumbling on a Facebook cause calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Oh and in case you didn’t know, Elephant presidential candidate Ron Paul basically supports its legalization. He thinks it will free more time for cops to go running after the real criminals instead of catching non-violent people who use it recreationally. Those who oppose him have begun calling him the Pot Candidate.

Too many people go through life unquestionably conforming to society’s status quo.

You go to school, you get your A’s, you graduate, you go to a good university, you study some more, you get your A’s, you graduate, you get a good job, you work hard, you get promoted, you work harder, you save some cash, you retire and you tell your kids to do the same damn thing.

You go to your local mosque on Friday, you listen to the super wise genius Imam yelling repeatedly about how evil Jews are and how America must be destroyed, you go home, you flip on the TV, you watch the news, you witness US-backed evil Israeli Jews in action, you tell yourself “it must be true, Jews are evil”, you go to sleep, you go to work next day, you have a conversation with your colleagues about how evil Jews are, you come back home and you continue the same wonderful conversation with your kids.

Conform and you’ll inevitably drown. Conform and you’ll be mediocre. Conform and you’ll parrot the same old boring views repeatedly.

Break away and you’ll slowly but surely find our own voice. It might not be popular. It might even enrage a lot of people. But at least it’s a voice you can call your own.

I know I made some sweeping generalizations in this post but I hope you got the point. If you didn’t, allow me to simplify it.

F*** the status quo.

I find it the spell check feature really annoying sometimes when I’m writing something in Microsoft Word, an American product. Let me elaborate.

When I started studying in English I first went to an international school following the British system which meant I got used to British spelling. Later on, I changed to one following the American system. The number of American teachers there was quite significant and every time they’d correct my supposedly “wrong” British spelling. Eventually I began listening to them. After that I changed back to a school following the British system and I had to readopt British spelling again. It was horrible. Needless to say, I stayed and graduated high school with a British GCE O’Level certificate.

Now a few years later, I’m still traumatized by my terrifying spelling experiences. I still get nightmares thanks to Microsoft Word and Firefox. I am torn between two spelling types even though I study in a university with an American curriculum. You can witness my spelling crisis manifesting itself in my previous posts:

American spelling - Color:

A chameleon changes its color very efficiently and effectively everytime it is in a different environment

British spelling - Colour:

Check the Star of David in the famous reggae colours of red, yellow and green

Which spelling should I stick to? Which one should I dump aside?

I think I prefer American English. British English is evil! The words are usually longer and include more letters, hence extra ink is wasted. Worse still, more trees have to be cut down which is obviously bad for the environment. Bleh, I pick American spelling.

UK sucks. USA rules! Yaaaay!

I’m still busy and I can’t manage to fix the bug in the comments section yet. I guess I might just get a new theme and modify it. It’s time for a new look anyway. But before that, here are some linkies for today:

1- Sudan ordered to pay $8 million to Cole victims’ families - fair enough, but the US government might as well pay for Bill Clinton’s mistake of bombing al-Shifa which was supposedly producing dangerous “chemical weapons”.

2- Sudan’s president declares 2007 as year for peace in Darfur - yeah, sure thing. We might actually get celebrate, I repeat might… in December 2007 being the earliest.

3- Celebrating Sudan, With Songs of Peace and Protest (Sudanese Concert in New York) - Rara Avis, who is a Sudanese girl living in NY, blogged about it after attending it. For cool pictures of the event you can click here and scroll down.

4- Anti-Zionism Vs Anti-Semitism - an excellent comment.

5- Israel’s mob wars: Hit men, drugs and recycling - looks like Israel is also having its own mini version of “Hamas Vs Fatah” issues to deal with.

6- Land For Sale…to Jews - Israel’s racist land policies.

7- I hate Israel - if you reverse the terminology (for example “Muslims” instead of “Jews”), what this loony nut is saying would be no different than many of the comments you see on LGF or JihadWatch. How ironic.

8- Apostate - She’s a Pakistani ex-Muslim. I just discovered her blog a few days ago. Even though I disagree with her points of view, I enjoy reading it. She’s a gifted writer. Moreover the fact that she blogs openly with a revealed identity is simply fascinating and interesting. The same can be said about Umar Lee, a white American Muslim convert.

Don’t you just love the blogosphere?

My dad was talking about this yesterday. It happened 2 months ago. I was not aware of it. Were you?

In May the Amir of Qatar sacked the entire management board, including Wadah Khanfar, its director. In the turbulent politics of the Middle East this would not be considered unusual, except that the new chief is none other than Hamad Abdul Aziz al-Kuwari, a former Qatari ambassador to Washington, who is known for his close links with both Republican and Democratic politicians in the US. His appointment is seen as a sop to US sensitivities because the Americans had been exerting pressure on the Qatari government to rein in Al-Jazeera, claiming that its coverage of American crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq was undermining its policies. Other appointees include Mahmood Shamam, another pro-US figure, and the new managing director, Ahmad Kholeifi. Insiders at the station say that Kholeifi has instituted sweeping changes that will affect news coverage drastically, undermining what little independence the station enjoyed.

I’m not sure if the coverage now is any different now than it was previously. Two months is still a short period though to spot a real change. Anyways, just letting you know.

Victimhood, Personal-Success Literature, & the Social Construction of Reality

My intention with this series of posts isn’t to answer questions or provide solutions. I’m simply pondering and thinking aloud in the hope of getting you to think along.

Growing up, I’ve had too many mostly seemingly unrelated interests and lacked a focus on one particular topic. More recently however there has been a convergence occurring in my mind, a convergence which I’m very excited about.

I sincerely believe that one of the biggest things holding us Muslims, Africans and Arabs back from moving forward is the collective state of mind we’re entrenched in and suffering from. Victimhood. But this is only a symptom of a deeper underlying problem, and that is a collective paranoia based on the premise that we’re under siege. It’s this deep paranoia that is crippling us and consuming our energy. Many, if not most of us are so obsessed and focused on outside threats or “threats” to such an extent, that it makes us lose the focus desperately needed to solve our internal issues.

How did that become our reality? How do we deal with it? These simple questions awakened me to the immense complexities we face if we are ever to truly progress.

I’m a huge fan of personal-success literature. In fact I like it so much that if I were the minister of education of any country, I’d make it part of the education syllabus. I’m dead serious. My most favorite author of all time is none other than Napoleon Hill. Anthony Robbins has also written some pretty good books. Moreover, he once said “the only thing that’s keeping you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself”.

The story we keep telling ourselves is a negative one infested with victimhood. How do we change that? I believe a large part of “the answer” lies within personal-success literature and studies related to the sociology of knowledge. One particular topic that has recently captured my attention is social constructionism, originally born out of the book “The Social Construction of Reality”.

The Social Construction of Reality is a classic book in the sociology of knowledge written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and published in 1966.

The work introduced the term social construction into the social sciences. The central concept of The Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting together in a social system form, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other’s actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalised. In the process of this institutionalisation, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people’s conception (and belief) of what reality is becomes embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Social reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.

The vast majority of people have the intellectual capacity to learn, do and become what they want. However the majority of those same people unfortunately don’t have the emotional capacity to step up to the challenges. IQ is great, but EQ is more important. A reality infested with victimhood only escalates the problem further.

There is a significant overlap between personal-success literature and what has been written about social constructionism. Also as a blogger or a person who reads sociopolitical blogs regularly, you’d realize that the internet and blogging are playing an increasing role in the social construction of reality for people around the world with access to cyberspace. Furthermore the effectiveness of the construction and or deconstruction of social reality is determined by various aspects including two things which I already have deep interests in, marketing and knowledge management.

Dominating the market place of ideas will only occur through better marketing, and that requires a thorough understanding of the audience we’re communicating our ideas to, which again brings us back to what the social reality of that audience is in the first place. What constitutes knowledge and what doesn’t to a particular society? In the West there is a higher emphasis on empiricism rather than revelation. In the Muslim world, the emphasis is instead generally on revelation. How can the proliferation of communication technologies and the internet be harnessed to spread empowering ideas that can bring about a positive mentality shift? If that happens, will it deal a sufficient and major blow to the victimhood mentality we generally suffer from? Those are just some of the questions that will be keeping me busy for the coming months (maybe even years).

I have a lot to read, consume, digest and learn. It’s fun. These are extraordinary times we live in. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to live and see the beginnings of the Sudan I envision, a Sudan with the best of Sudan, the UAE, America, Malaysia, Turkey, Europe and South Africa.

Information is like a drug and so I read to get my high.

Sorry, still super busy but here’s a well-written and straightforward post on Darfur and AI’s latest initiative related to the conflict. Here’s Colin Powell on Guantanamo and finally the news of Norman Finkelstein’s tenure denial.

I found this both extremely interesting and damn amusing. It had me laughing really hard. The title chosen by whoever uploaded it is pretty dumb and misleading though. Anyways, check it out. It’s only a minute and a half long.

Did you guys notice something about the recently announced sanctions on Sudan? There are numerous rebel leaders playing their part in running the Darfur show, but only one got singled out.

The companies named by the Treasury Department yesterday include a sugar producer, an automobile company and a vegetable oil producer. The administration also singled out two senior officials — Ahmad Haroun, state minister for humanitarian affairs, and Awad ibn Auf, the country’s director of military intelligence — and Khalil Ibrahim, leader of a rebel group called the Justice and Equality Movement.

Why only Khalil Ibrahim? What makes him different from other rebel leaders? Maybe this ought to explain it.

1-

Turabi often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur’s key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top former students are leaders.

2-

Dr Khalil Ibrahim, a protege of Islamist hardliner Dr Hasan al-Turabi. Formed in November 2002, JEM is increasingly recognised as being part and parcel of Dr Turabi’s Popular Congress.

So the one with ties to Turabi got targeted and those with no ties weren’t even mentioned. Is that it? Hmmmm…

If the blog starts looking weird and messed up, don’t worry. I’m testing out a new and better looking theme that will include extra functionalities. It’s time for the blog to evolve. I’m also playing around with different plugins. Thanks to my ongoing internship, I managed to improve my programming skills a lot. Not only that but I got to know a bunch of very friendly and smart techies who taught me some really cool new stuff. It’s time for some application.

I just got back from a superb business seminar. The main speaker was a successful millionaire entrepreneur from Canada who talked about a lot of useful and interesting stuff. One primary thing that truly stuck with me was what he called “the power of the dream”. I could really relate to it.

The dream is everything. It’s all you’ve got when you get started new, fresh and inexperienced. That dream better be mighty and powerful. You better be able to feel it deep down inside your gut and you better be able to clearly visualize it. Either the obstacles and barriers will win you, or you’ll win them but to do so you need to have a powerful dream. The dream will keep you “alive”.
A lot of people set out to achieve their dreams, most fail. Or to be more precise, as time passes by and the dream slowly dies, most settle for being mediocre. I never will.

I enjoy the struggle. It shapes you up. It transforms you and it keeps pushing you to the limit. Only when you’re pushed to the limit, you do realize what you’re made of.

I’ve tried 3 times and failed but those failures were the good kind, the kind that you learn from only to get up once again and start walking a stronger, wiser person. I’ve made progress and I’ll continue my journey.

Why? Because I’m a Drima.

I thought the following quote from this article was hilarious:

“Don’t let assholes rent space in your head.”

I love it! So true. LOL.

Money? Knowledge? Dick Cheney as your best friend? Marble balls? A Nuclear arsenal? What do you need most to become very powerful? This question had me thinking a lot and I believe I finally found the answer:

The ability to persuade and convince!

The following are some cool posts I read recently:

Obama speaks out on “acting white”.

Desi Nationalism, Hanafi Purists & the Ouster of an American-Muslim Pioneer.

Lookism. (this one is so damn good. I loved it. Field-negro is a new favorite)

On Fate & Faith 

Enjoy! Busy with work, album and entrepreneurial stuff. While it’s physically very tiring, it’s also fun. So much to say and write, so little time. More later as soon as I’m a bit more free.