Racism in cricket

It is said that sports do not build character as much as reveal it. The cricket cheating scandal is a good example of that truism. Today, the Australian cricket authorities issued further summary punishments to captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft, issuing one year bans for Test and first class cricket on Smith and Warner and nine-months on Bancroft. Smith will not be eligible for consideration for captaincy for two years. The announcement singled Warner out as the ringleader of the plot and was not only stripped from his leadership role, he was banned for life from ever being considered for the captaincy. All three will also have to perform 100 hours of community service.
[Read more…]

Transgender and third gender in Pakistan

I have been harshly critical in the past about Pakistan’s slide into religious intolerance, with its Muslim fundamentalist zealots killing and otherwise threatening non-Muslims under the cover of the state’s odious blasphemy laws. The prohibitions, discrimination, and harassment campaigns against the LGBT community in the Islamic world are also well documented. But I heard an encouraging story about a Pakistan TV station having its first transgender news anchor. Maavia Malik is a former model and her selection has not caused the kind of uproar one might have expected in a conservative Muslim country but was instead greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
[Read more…]

Why this cricket cheating scandal generated such widespread outrage [UPDATED]

[UPDATE: According to this report, Australian cricket captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft have been ordered home immediately from South Africa by officials from Cricket Australia. Coach Darren Lehman was deemed to have no prior knowledge of the cheating plan and will remain in his position. But there will be a fuller investigation of the culture and behavior of the team and Lehmann’s role will undoubtedly be closely examined.]

The fallout from the ball tampering scandal by Australia continues with the cricket playing world expressing shock and even the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighing in, saying that he and the nation were deeply disappointed and calling for the cricket authorities to take action. The intensity of the reaction is not because cricket is so pure that cheating does not happen at the highest levels but because what happened here was, to use a popular cliché, a perfect storm of events.
[Read more…]

These students keep impressing me more and more

Siblings Lauren and David Hogg, both students at the Parkland high school where 17 students were killed, were on CNN after the rally being interviewed by Alyson Camerota. Just watch the interview and you will be impressed by how skillfully they countered Camerota’s repeated suggestions that they tone down their rhetoric against politicians and the NRA so that we can all ‘come together’ to solve the issue, the bogus ‘kumbaya’ bipartisanship rubbish that mainstream media love to promote as a means of maintaining the status quo. She was quite condescending in the way she spoke to the Hoggs, treating them as if they were naïve about political realities. They were having none of it and quickly shot down her suggestions using cogent arguments. It should perhaps be noted that Camerota used to work for Fox News before shifting over to CNN.
[Read more…]

I got suckered yet again into watching TV, dammit!

I have been vaguely following the Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) and Donald Trump story as just one more tawdry detail about the political world. I have a TV but no cable and almost never watch any broadcast programs mainly because the constant interruptions for commercials drive me crazy. So it takes considerable prodding for me to watch a program. The much-hyped 60 Minutes interview of Clifford was on last night and I had heard so much about it being explosive that I decided to check it out. The program was due to start at 7:00pm but the preceding basketball game went into overtime so it did not get going until after 7:30, so I got to watch a huge number of commercials.
[Read more…]

How Cambridge Analytica got people’s Facebook information

Much attention has been focused on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica used various forms of dirty tricks to try and influence elections in various countries. The level of success achieved by them is hard to gauge since, unlike with advertisements aimed at selling products where there is a measurable outcome, electoral success is harder to gauge since we don’t know how individuals actually voted and also so many factors go into how people vote that drawing a straight line from cause to effect is hard. Pointing to the fact that winners in some close elections, like Donald Trump in the US and Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, were clients of CA as evidence of their effectiveness is interesting but we don’t know how many of their other clients lost.
[Read more…]