It was commonplace experience growing up in Ashraf-majority village to hear slurs like "musalman hai to kia hua, hai to badzaat hi nh". once I heard someone say "jis gaon me Syed hota, us gaon k aas paas koi shaitan nhi aa sakta". But the most flagrant but less obvious ways

Casteism is perpetuated, I have witnessed and continue to, is via religious gatherings-Juma khutba, Milaad, Jalsa etc- where Ashraf Maulvis indulge in direct casteist slurs like "badzaat"(while referring to lower caste muslims) and not so direct like-
Ek "Ahmaq(idiot) dhobi", "Nafarmani Julaha", Bedeeni qasab" etc as part of their anecdotes/quips(Notice here the particular quality of individual is not his quality it represents "caste quality"). And how one Awliya/Buzurg (of course Ashrafs) rescued/saved those Ahmaq/Bedeen...
Here again saviourship is estblshd as "caste quality" of Ashrafs). In Ashraf Maulvis' sermons, casteism peppered anecdotes abound where inferiority of lower caste muslims(badzaat, badmaash, bezaat, Bedeen etc) and corresponding superiority of upper caste muslims(wherein They
would refer certain upper caste individual past or present in grandiose and patronising tone and tiltle eg Auliya, Murshid, ek Buzurg, Sahab-e-qalam etc.)is very skillfully estblshd.This work of normalising casteism in two-way traffic has very real cnsequences. I heard once my
Aunt(Julaha caste)counselling my cousin(who had joked of marrying a syed)not to ever marry a Syeda. Why, because if u ill-treat a Syeda, u incur huge sin. Implications clear: veneration is one-sided "reserved" and consequently contempt for the other is legit tolerable.
Interestingly, my uncle had different reasons not to marry a syeda: she would call everyone of us a "badzaat Julaha".
Some might call uncle reverse casteist. I call it Pasmanda defence mechanism.
PS: Ashraf hegemony is thorough. Psmanda mvment needs to estblish its
Counter-hegmony in all spheres including challenge to counter-hegemonic theology.
@AnisShafiullah
Correction:
*Including the sphere of theological hegemony.

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1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
This response to my tweet is a common objection to targeted advertising.

@KevinCoates correct me if I'm wrong, but basic point seems to be that banning targeted ads will lower platform profits, but will mostly be beneficial for consumers.

Some counterpoints 👇


1) This assumes that consumers prefer contextual ads to targeted ones.

This does not seem self-evident to me


Research also finds that firms choose between ad. targeting vs. obtrusiveness 👇

If true, the right question is not whether consumers prefer contextual ads to targeted ones. But whether they prefer *more* contextual ads vs *fewer* targeted

2) True, many inframarginal platforms might simply shift to contextual ads.

But some might already be almost indifferent between direct & indirect monetization.

Hard to imagine that *none* of them will respond to reduced ad revenue with actual fees.

3) Policy debate seems to be moving from:

"Consumers are insufficiently informed to decide how they share their data."

To

"No one in their right mind would agree to highly targeted ads (e.g., those that mix data from multiple sources)."

IMO the latter statement is incorrect.

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