Death by 140 characters

– The great equaliser: death by 140 characters – Dr Mohammad Taqi

….. The said televangelist, speaking on his current television show, has since impugned the authenticity of the video and has claimed that the clip had been fabricated by way of editing and dubbing to malign him by other channels and jealous people. Maybe so. Moreover, in biometrics, voice authentication is already an established tool, along the lines of fingerprinting, available to forensic scientists to confirm identity.

The video was removed from YouTube due to a copyrights claim. But before that many users of contemporary media had reportedly downloaded it already. The new balance of power is apparently still lost on the media honchos giving space and airtime to hypocrisy, lies and slanted truths. Death by a thousand cuts has decimated superpowers. If they do not heed the audience, death by 140 characters (on Twitter) is the equaliser that could seal the fate of the traditional media dinosaurs running the show.

To read complete article → Daily Times

Current wave of extremism in Pakistan

Statistical ambiguity society

Just how some recent events of our surface politics offer an interesting study of the deep politics

By Dr Ahsan Wagha

It started with the worst ideological polarisation promoted by the military generals in the 1970s when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was forced to invite Saudi ambassador Riaz Al-Khatib to mediate between him and the opposition, a practice that was reverberated during the Musharraf-Nawaz conflict and has almost culminated into becoming one of the basic features of our foreign policy. The phenomenon can be investigated in the background of the history of Arab colonisation of this region.