By this logic such a nation does not exist, as you can’t be both Islamic and secular at the same time. You can say the same about Turkey as Indonesia, it’s a secular nation even though the majority of its population is Muslim. I think the OP comment meant to ask about a secular democracy in a country where most people are Muslim. And in that case Turkey could be an example, even though Erdogan is fairly dictator-ish, we’ll see how their elections go this year
> all nations of muslims are ruled by a-secular, illiberal dictators
This describes none of the Arab monarchies. Neither does it describe Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan. (Indonesia and Malaysia are political science’s Rorschach tests.)
Secular dictatorships in the Muslim world are the exception, unless we’re using highly unorthodox definitions of secularity or dictatorship. (Secular government in Muslim-majority countries is common; most are not dictatorships [1].)
It should go without saying that you cannot have religion be part of a secular democracy.
Turkiye has not been a secular nation for a very long time. Go read hurriyetdailynews.com, a moderately pro-government site. Currently the government is trying to make it illegal to be gay by attaching it to a bill that supposedly protects the rights of turbanli (covered women). The full text of the bill practically Turkiye into every other shariah nation.
Also read up on "Imam hatips", which are failed religious school the government forces us to pay for. Nobody wants to go to them, because the educational quality is garbage, so they actually started forcing students to go to them.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's democracy could have been the most inspiring democracy the world has known, but the democracy itself died within 10 years of him. I think we're on our 6th constitution since then.
During the 2 year "state of emergency" after the coup, he rewrote the entire constitution.
Currently there are over 250 politicians in prison from the HDP (Kurdish party), and EVERY major name in the CHP is being prosecuted, or has been convicted of "insulting the cumhuriyet" in the past 3 months.. This is the most democratic nation in the ummah. :(
What iPad app are you using for this? And do you also have an Apple Pencil? I also do some math online tutoring, and what I’ve been doing is connecting my iPhone to my Mac, mirroring the iPhone screen on the Mac, and sharing that screen during a Skype call. Then I can use the camera app on the iPhone (mounted on a little tripod) to look down on a piece of paper that I write/draw on. I considered getting an iPad, but even with an Apple Pencil I imagine I wouldn’t feel as free as when drawing on a real piece of paper with a real pen, I’m curious as to what your thoughts on this are
I use Flow on the iPad by Moleskine Studios, it's priced on a subscription (reasonably priced, albeit a little annoying) but a wonderful drawing app. I use an Apple Pencil with it.
I like the ability to easily export documents and send them to my students, as well as the freedom you get with a digital whiteboard––you can drag and manipulate individual pieces of your sketch as if they were magnets on the board in a traditional setting.
The Pencil definitely does not feel like using a regular pen, but it's rather similar to writing on a whiteboard and is rather comfortable to use (you get palm-blocking and everything). If you use the first-party Notes app, you also get automatic handwriting recognition and indexing in iPadOS 14.
Assuming they're currently accepting returns given the pandemic, Apple has a relatively reasonable return policy – 14 days for a full refund provided you repackage everything, so if you find you don't like it you can just return it.
Honest about what he would do?
- Build the wall: almost no new wall has actually been built
- Drain the swamp: puts friends and family members in positions of power or influence, gives get-out-of-jail cards to convicted loyal friends, literally spends millions of government dollars to vacation and golf at his own resorts
- Other random things he said early on: peace in the Middle East will be easy (lol), get rid of Obamacare but offer a better alternative (gets rid of provisions during the pandemic)
- the list goes on and on
I don't totally understand why there's so much hate on MIT for this, so consider this more of an inquiry rather than an outright defense of what happened and let me know if I'm missing something critical:
Based on what I know, Aaron Swartz - someone with no affiliation to MIT - abused MIT's open campus/network policies and tried to download all of JSTOR by hiding a laptop in a closet. At best, this is at least something sketchy to do by someone with no connection to the university. MIT discovered this, turned the matters over to the police, Swartz got caught, and the (overzealous) prosecutors took it from there. MIT did not "make it [its] life's work to go after [Swartz]". You can certainly criticize it for not trying to help him, especially given MIT's hacker-friendly culture and the fact that his actions did not hurt anyone, but I think it's unfair to have expected MIT to make a stand against the prosecutor/criminal justice system and predicted Swartz's suicide, after he rejected the 6 month minimum-security prison deal and decided to go to trial instead.
I'm all for open access, but Swartz's methods were at least a bit questionable and he should have expected some repercussions should he get caught (I'm sure he did, hence the hiding of the laptop). And in the end, blaming MIT for being neutral in a politically-charged case and for Swartz's death seems unfair, it is an academic and research institution after all, not a public defender.
1) Saying Aaron had no affiliation to MIT does not reflect the reality of the situation. MIT, at the time, had an open door policy. There were a lot of people who hung out at MIT -- accepted, participating, contributing members of the MIT community (often actively participating in running MIT classes or doing MIT research), who just happened to not be in a formal role (student, faculty, etc.). MIT has clamped down on that since, but it's a lot of what made MIT awesome in its heyday. The reason the MIT community was so offended by the MIT administration is because it was an attack by the administration on a member of the community.
2) Saying MIT took a neutral role is also false. JSTOR took a neutral role. MIT actively pressed charges.
3) As unreasonable as Swartz' actions seem in 2020 mainstream culture, they were not out-of-line with MIT culture of the time. People were encouraged to actively pushed boundaries, and property was a bit more communal. As an undergrad, I might go into a lab I had no affiliation with, and use equipment to build something. I wouldn't do that if it was indicated that wasn't okay, but for the most part, there was an expectation that if the Institute had a classroom no one was using, you could use it to run a community activity. If there was a lab with equipment you needed, unless there was a sign posted to the contrary, then you should just made sure you left it better than when you found it (and if it was something like a bandsaw, had the safety training you needed). I was trained on equipment in a several labs I had no formal affiliation with, and regularly used them for personal projects. This was 100% okay and everyone knew about this.
4) I don't have any reason to believe Swartz hid a laptop in a closet. He left a laptop in a closet. There were some things he did -- like spoofing IPs -- which were less transparent. But there were plenty of times I'd left equipment connected to random places on the MIT network for long-running network operations, never nefariously. It's an unlocked closet with an ethernet drop. No one in the community would think twice about using it for e.g. a large download overnight.
A lot of these things would not be done in 2020 MIT. Not a million years. The administration's handling of Swartz was part of this culture change, and a lot of MIT's soul died in the process. It has had a continuing chilling effect on the culture of the MIT community. What's really evil is that the MIT administration continues to uses Swartz as an example to intimidate community members into compliance with what it wants them to toe the line.
> an attack by the administration on a member of the community
Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal activities is attacking them?
> What's really evil is
Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions. "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed.
If we all really cared enough about open access journals, there would be a world-wide boycott of science education until a national law was passed blocking all public funding to anything but open access. But that's not going to happen, and we all know why: it's not evil enough for us to drop everything and use collective action, but we still want to pose it as evil because we're really angry, and we're really angry because we don't know enough about how it all works to find a better solution.
> Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal activities is attacking them?
It depends on where you draw the boundaries between "yours" and "ours." My family can walk into my closet. A stranger can't. From the perspective of most of the MIT community, Aaron didn't break into the MIT network. He had both legal and moral access to use it, and he did that like many other community members. People plug things into MIT network jacks all the time. I did that too. I never hid that I did that, and no one thought I was breaking, stealing, or doing anything else wrong. I saw others do likewise. It's how the place worked at the time.
He did bypass protections on JSTOR's systems. If someone had grounds to press charges, it was JSTOR, not MIT.
> Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions. "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed.
That's a very culturally narrow point of view. It places you as being mostly likely of either of Western European descent or Japanese, but there are a few more cultures which define morality in terms of following the law. I think this is the point at which you check out from the conversation -- most monocultural people get very uncomfortable with foreign things, but:
That worldview completely breaks down when Hitler makes it a crime to kill Jews, you have BLM protests in the US, or democracy protests in Honk Kong. It breaks down in more subtle ways across the board.
And yes, people did push for change. Aaron's Law was almost passed, but ultimately, it was blocked by Oracle. Oracle is a pretty evil corporation too, although for the most part, it does a good job following the laws. That's your queue to check out, I guess.
But the point is that the laws are at least as subjective and arbitrary as people's cultural biases about what constitutes good and bad. If you want more rational opinions of good versus evil, you can start with utilitarianism and other philosophies of morality.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. A few questions/comments on your points:
1) Ok, from that perspective Aaron Swartz was part of the MIT community, but I don't agree that his case "was an attack by the administration on a member of the community". MIT did not speak against (or in support of) Swartz, did not press charges, told the prosecution it should not think MIT wanted a jail sentence for Swartz, and really was not involved in the trial. As I said before, you can definitely criticize MIT for not actively supporting Swartz, but I get the sense that people think MIT was out there encouraging the prosecution and pushing for some severe punishment, which it was not.
2) MIT did not press charges, MIT called the police. I just took a look at the Abelson report and it in fact states multiple times that MIT did not press charges, although it also points out that MIT was not opposed to charges. I would call that being neutral. I believe the report is fairly objective in its fact-reporting, but of course we have to acknowledge that it comes from MIT itself, so please let me know if you think Abelson/the administration is outright lying when they say they did not press charges.
3) I agree that people at MIT are/were actively encouraged to push boundaries, and that MIT resources were for everyone in the community to use, although your description of using random lab equipment does strike me as a bit odd. Granted, I was not part of the makers community, but while I had friends who actively used the hobby shop for personal projects, I never heard of anyone just going into random labs while people weren't there to play around with equipment and build something. Not saying it's wrong, just wondering how common this actually is at MIT.
4) Maybe he just left a laptop in a closet, but I would argue Swartz had at least some idea he was doing something questionable - I'm not saying something illegal or even wrong - but somewhat inappropriate. When he was caught near Central Square, the MIT PD officer identified himself and said he wanted to speak with him, after which Swartz dropped his bike and started running away. If I'm a member of the MIT community working on a project while connected to the MIT network, I don't drop my stuff and run away when MIT PD approach me asking to speak with me if I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
I agree that the culture at MIT has changed over the past decade (in mostly a negative way), in large part because of the administration, but in this specific instance I feel like MIT is getting more hate than it should.
What's really evil is that the MIT administration continues to uses Swartz as an example to intimidate community members into compliance with what it wants them to toe the line.
Do you have any sources for this? I haven't heard of it, but if that is the case, that's a pretty shitty thing to do
1/2) I stand corrected. I will reread about what happened.
To answer your questions, though: In the generic case, the MIT administration lies or at the very least badly misleads in these reports (see the Epstein report, for example). In this specific case, MIT chose Abelson to author the report precisely since he has unimpeachable integrity. I'd trust whatever he signed his name to, as would everyone else in the MIT community.
3) It sort of depends. I wouldn't e.g. walk into a random biology lab where I knew no one, and no one knew me, in the middle of the night and use a centrifuge. On the other hand:
* There were plenty of times when I walked into 38-501 lab, which was a big undergraduate EE lab, and made things, even long after I graduated (and other alumni did too), waving "hi" to the desk workers if they were around (who knew me and knew I had no affiliation). It was pretty normal. And I think that extended to any member of the MIT community. Cheap things like resistors were also free. More expensive things, unaffiliated people were respectful of (indeed, more respectful than the people managing the lab expected them to be).
* I used a few machine shops around MIT, where I was safety trained by the staff but had no formal affiliation with the shop or lab. I'd walk into these and use them casually. When the people who managed these came in, we'd usually have a friendly chat about what I was making.
* There was one makerspace in the Media Lab where I used equipment regularly without asking. I knew the prof in whose jurisdiction it was, and it was sort of symbiotic. I reverse-engineered a lot of his equipment in the process, which was useful to his research group. There were plenty of hanger-ons too, doing likewise.
* Institute-wide communal resources, like classrooms or network drops, you'd just use. You definitely didn't ask anyone. I can't imagine I'd think twice about leaving a laptop connected (except for having it stolen; theft was not uncommon). Indeed, I'd likely look for a place like a network closet where it wouldn't be as likely to be casually stolen.
And there were plenty of places which were restricted-use. For example, Edgerton shop made it clear it could only be used for specific uses. I didn't use that one. You got a feel for the specific lab.
That's actually a lot of what made MIT great. If you wanted to make something (virtually anything) you had the resources at your disposal to do it. I learned a lot from more experienced people who were hanging out making things when I was an undergrad, and I think undergrads learned a lot from me once I was an alumnus.
To be clear, that culture is dead now. I couldn't go to MIT and use a machine shop or EE lab right now, at least without paying an annual alumni membership fee.
And to be clear, there were people doing the same who weren't alumni too, but who were accepted as members of the community.
4) re: Using Swartz as an example: I can say that happens with 100% certainty, but these things wind up under NDA, so I don't know of public sources.
re: Doing something wrong: I don't disagree he knew he was doing something sketchy, but it comes back to who the victim is. It was JSTOR, not MIT.
Moscow is a great place to live/base, but $800/month for a comfortable middle-class life here is definitely an underestimate. I'm from the US - lived in NYC, Boston, and LA - and have been based in Moscow for the past year; it's hard to overstate what an amazing city this is, though it's important to note that there is a massive difference between Moscow (or St Petersburg) and the rest of Russia. I've traveled to many places within Russia and they might as well be different countries when compared to this mega-city. Speaking of Moscow specifically: it's incredibly beautiful, it has the best metro system I've seen in the world (to the point that some metro stations are actually tourist spots), world-class international food, plenty of museums, shows, theaters, active nightlife, plus all the conveniences you'd find in the West. And of course there's the comfort of a European feel to the city, with the excitement that comes with learning about the Russian/Soviet culture and mindset of some people (esp. the older crowd, whereas the younger educated muscovites are basically European). Flights to the main European, US, and Asian cities are cheap and frequent: a roundtrip nonstop flight Moscow-NY is usually ~$300, London can be as cheap as $15 (yes, that's fifteen dollars), and I've even booked a flight to Hong Kong the day before flying for like $200 direct. The people are super friendly, and although the majority do not speak English, it's fairly easy to find English-speaking Russians or expats if you hang out in the center or know the spots (I have many expats friends who've been here for 2-3 years and don't speak a word of Russian beyond saying "thank you", yet manage to live very active social lives).
Having said all of this, however, I am also very aware that my experience here is very different from the average Russian. Being an expat, from the US, speaking English, and being able to afford a comfortable lifestyle in the center give me a much rosier perspective than if I were a low-income worker having to commute 1+ hours to get to work. I'm ethnically Latino and look obviously not-Russian, so people here are curious about me and act extra nice - especially when they find out I'm American. It's not uncommon for someone to approach me on the street, a park, or a bar just because they heard me speaking in English. On the other hand, however, immigrants from ex-Soviet countries (particularly Central Asia) face discrimination and racism, as do non-European Russians (eg: Russians from the Caucasus region, or the east of Russia), and it's not uncommon when looking to rent an apartment to see the words "FOR SLAVS [white Russians] OR FOREIGNERS ONLY", something that would be completely illegal in the US. Don't get me wrong, as an expat from the West I find Moscow to be just about the perfect place to live, but I totally understand the perspective of many Russians or some immigrants that criticize it harshly. I love this city, and I think loving it means also being aware of its shortcomings.
You can get a 3 year multi-entry tourist visa to Russia which allows you to stay for up to 6 months, leave the country for a day, and then re-enter for another 6 months, etc, for the entirety of the 3 years (yes, legally). Funny enough, the US is the only country for which such a permissive visa is allowed, Russian tourist visas for other countries are usually restricted to a single-entry, one month maximum, not sure why we get such good treatment (just like the multi-entry 10 year tourist visa for China, which I think only US and Canadian citizens can get).
I don't think they're issuing visas rn due to the pandemic, but I imagine they will resume consular services this year, and then you can just apply through your local embassy/consulate, just look up the required documents and submit them, it's fairly straight-forward and does not require an interview, proof of income, etc.
