Bengal ....Gazettier lndia

March12

From a 2004 blogspot films

I cannot do a top-ten list so here are my favorite thirty DVDs -- in no particular order. That would take hours. Home entertainment is hot and I like Netflix -- and you can control the volume!

Under the Sun (Swedish)
Cinema Paradiso (Italy)
Il Postino (Italy)
Solas (Spain)
L'Auberge Espagnole (France)
Chaos (France)
Burnt by the Sun (Russia)
Lawless Heart (U.K.)
Mostly Martha (Germany)
In the Bedroom (U.S.)
Spellbound (U.S.)
Nowhere in Africa (Germany)
The Crime of Padre Amaro (Mexico)
The Housekeeper (France)
Secretary (U.S.)
The Big Night (U.S.)
Shall We Dance? (Japan!!!)
Jew-Boy Levi (Germany)
The Mystery of Rampo (Japan)
Together (China)
Dirty Pretty Things (U.K.)
East-West (France)
Russian Ark (Russia)
Man on the Train (France)
The Thief (Russia)
Swimming Pool (France)
Indochine (France)
Sex and Lucia (Spain)
The Barbarian Invasions (French Canada)
My Wife is an Actress (French)

Muslim candidates wiped off in India

Politics

13 hours ago

In the 2014 general election, for the first time since independence, no Muslim candidate was elected from any seat in Uttar Pradesh, despite several of them contesting from various political parties.

In the five years since, there have been fierce debates on the future of Muslim representation from India’s most populous state. It was only in the 2018 bypoll that Tabassum Begum, contesting for the Rashtriya Lok Dal, won the Kairana seat and became the sole Muslim MP from UP in the Lok Sabha.

Now, as parties prepare to distribute tickets for 2019, many are apprehensive that fair representation will be denied to UP’s Muslims.

In 2014, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) together fielded 30 Muslim candidates. The number is likely to decrease, according to Syed Asif Raza Jafri, a senior journalist.

“If there are more Muslim candidates in the opposition parties, it will allow the Sangh parivar to communalise the issue,” he said. “It may result in reverse polarisation of the Hindu community in favour of the BJP. Both the SP and BSP cannot take this risk.”

Consolidation without representation

Muslim candidates of the Congress fared especially badly in the last polls – they received more than one lakh votes in only three constituencies. As a result, the SP-BSP alliance is not concerned about the Congress’ Muslim candidates. It is understood that for the community, the first choice still remains the SP-BSP, which is better placed to defeat the ruling BJP.

If rumours are to be believed, from the SP and BSP combine, there could be fewer than ten Muslim candidates for the polls.

In 2014, at least five seats – Moradabad, Rampur, Sambhal, Amroha, Saharanpur and Meerut – witnessed a tight contest between Muslim candidates of three major parties (SP, BSP and the Congress). This worked out to the advantage of the BJP.

In six seats, both the SP and BSP both fielded Muslim candidates, each of whom received reasonably high vote-share, but still failed to emerge victorious. The SP-BSP alliance will likely prevent this happening again.

Prospects in the Samajwadi Party

From SP’s 13 candidates only Shazan Masood got the lowest – 52,165 votes – while five got more than three lakh votes and seven got more than two lakh votes.

Interestingly, of the 13 seats in which SP fielded Muslim candidates in 2014, BSP has bagged seven in the new seat-sharing arrangement. One has gone to RLD, leaving only five seats where SP’s Muslim candidates may contest. The SP has a total of 37 Lok Sabha seats in the alliance.

Important faces who are likely to lose out because of the new equation include:

• Shazan Masood, the son of former union minister and stalwart Rasheed Masood,
• Shahnawaz Rana who contested from Bijnor,
• Humera Akhtar who polled nearly 3.70 lakh votes from Amroha,
• Former minister Shahid Manzoor who contested from Meerut,
• Former MLA Ghulam Mohammad who got 2.13 lakh votes from Baghpat,
• Former MLA and industrialist Zafar Alam too polled 2.27 lakh votes from Aligarh,
• Shakeel Ahmad from Sultanpur, who got 2.28 lakh votes,
• Former MP and Mafiosi Atiq Ahmad from Shrawasti.

In the five constituencies which remain with the Akhilesh Yadav-led party, the party had a close finish in 2014.

Also Read: We Want to Fight BJP, Others Want to Build Their Party: Akhilesh Yadav on Congress

• In Sambhal, veteran leader and former MP Shafeequr Rehman Barq lost by a narrow margin of 5,074 votes.
• In Rampur, the citadel of Azam Khan, Naseer Ahmad Khan got 3.35 lakh votes but lost by 23,435 votes. There is speculation that Azam Khan may personally contest this time from Rampur.
• In Moradabad, former Mayor S. T. Hasan won 3.97 lakh votes,
• In Bareilly, Ayesha Islam won 2.75 lakh votes,
• In Kairana, Tabassum Begum is the sitting MP.

Prospects in the Bahujan Samaj Party

Mayawati’s party fielded 17 Muslims in 2014 elections. Seven of these have gone to SP under the terms of the gathbandhan.

Among BSP’s 17 Muslim candidates in 2014, Saleem Ahmad from Kanpur scored lowest – 53,218 votes– whereas two garnered three lakh votes.

The BSP is left now with ten seats where it had earlier fielded Muslim candidates. From these ten, several candidates are no longer with the party: Kaiser Jahan (3.66 lakh votes) from Sitapur, Afzal Siddiqui (2.07 lakh votes) from Fatehpur, and Mohammad Muqeem (1.95 lakh votes) from Dumariyaganj.

The BSP has, however, appointed Muslims as in-charge of six Lok Sabha seats (Amroha, Saharanpur, Ghazipur, Meerut, Bijnor and Dumariyaganj). They are also likely to contest the election as BSP candidates – byt even so, the BSP is not likely to repeat the same number of Muslim candidates as it did last time.

Prospects in the Congress

In 2014, the Grand Old Party fielded 11 Muslim candidates.

Only three of its candidates could cross the one-lakh-vote mark – Imran Masood from Saharanpur, Nawab Kazim Ali Khan from Rampur and Zafar Ali Naqvi from Kheri.

Two former union ministers, Saleem Iqbal Sherwani from Aonla and Salman Khursheed from Farrukhabad, made respectable tallies – 93,861 and 95,543 votes respectively.

The party’s tactic to field celebrities also failed as former cricketer Mohammad Kaif ended up with only 58,137 votes from Phulpur. Bollywood actor Nagma, who contested from Meerut, got only 42,911 votes.

With such a arithmetic, chances of Congress’s Muslim candidates look dim.

The others

A few Muslim candidates who performed for smaller parties also stand to lose out in front of the formidable SP-BSP alliance.

For instance, Mukhtar Ansari of Qaumi Ekta Dal had secured 166443 votes from Ghosi while his brother and former MP Afzal Ansari got 163943 votes from Ballia.

Since the party has now merged with BSP, only one of the two is likely to get a ticket.

Also Read: Priyanka Gandhi Is Embarking on a High-Risk Mission in Uttar Pradesh

Similarly, Muslim outfits like the Peace Party, headed by Dr Mohd. Ayub, and the Rashtriya Ulema Council will face a serious challenge retaining its core vote-base.

These parties are looking to be accommodated elsewhere. Ayub, it is said, tried unsuccessfully to find room in the SP-BSP alliance, and has now met Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi.

In 2019, the the opposition’s joint front will pose a tough challenge for the BJP. But this had also led to a political scenario which will deny fair representation to Muslims in the country’s Parliament once again.

Uber Lyft ..share holders ....taxi driver s against the second laws in India

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/cabbies-to-crorepatis-uber-and-lyft-likely-to-dole-out-cash-for-drivers-to-buy-shares-in-upcoming-ipo         

Taxi hailing apps Uber and Lyft are planning to give thousands of its contract drivers cash bonuses to help purchase stock in their forthcoming initial public offerings (IPO), The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The cash bonuses can be either used by the drivers to invest in IPO or they can also choose to simply keep the money.

Due to regulatory restrictions by Securities and Exchange Commission, ride-sharing companies cannot grant stock to their drivers. As per SEC rules, private company are barred from granting stock shares to contractors, who technically aren’t considered full-time employees.

The cash bonus plan by Uber and Lyft is seen as a way to circumvent these restrictions.

According to the WSJ report, Uber is working out the details of a program that will grant cash awards based on a sliding scale related to the driver’s length of service and number of trips or deliveries. The cash bonus plan is expected to cover significant portion of its 3 million active drivers and couriers associated with the company.

Lyft is planning to give drivers who have completed 10,000 rides $1,000, either in cash or put towards IPO share purchase, while drivers with over 20,000 rides will get $10,000.

Lyft expects only a minority of its drivers to be eligible under this program.

https://github.com/Gecode/gecode/blob/master/examples/scowl.hpp

https://github.com/Gecode/gecode/blob/master/examples/scowl.hpp

Elementary

Tom Graham considers a theory of why some things do not exist

TOM GRAHAM

That some things – unicorns, the largest number, Sherlock Holmes – do not exist seems so obvious, and is so frequently taken for granted in our everyday discourse, that denying it would be ridiculous in any ordinary context. And so it may come as some surprise that since the beginning of the twentieth century this view has been among the least popular and most berated in anglophone philosophy. Many even claim that the position, so widely held by non-philosophers, is unintelligible, and the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle even went so far as to say that if it were not a dead view in philosophy, nothing was. To revive the view that some things don’t exist (known these days as “noneism”) and situate it as a plausible contender in current debates on existence is the aim of Graham Priest’s formidable 2005 book Towards Non-Being, which has now appeared in a significantly expanded second edition.

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A fundamental motivation for the dominant view is that to lack existence, it seems, is to be nothing at all. Things, by contrast, are not “nothing” – they are things! If so, then “being a thing” and “existing” go hand in hand, and there cannot be “things” that do not exist. Adherents of this view thus read the noneist’s claim “some things don’t exist” as entailing the self-refuting “some things are not things” and therefore to be self-contradictory. The dominant “Quinean” approach to existence (named after the influential American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine) holds this position. For Quineans, all things exist – that’s what it is to be a thing. But this does not mean that, for example, Sherlock Holmes exists. Rather, they believe that since Sherlock isn’t any kind of thing at all, the phrase “all things” in “all things exist” does not cover him. There is simply no “him” for it to cover.

Matters are complicated for Quineans, however, by at least two aspects of our everyday discourse. Firstly, consider that many things appear to be true of supposed non-existents. It is apparently true, for example, that Sherlock Holmes is a popular fictional detective. And yet how can this be true of Sherlock, if there is in reality no Sherlock for it to be true of? Secondly, many philosophers (beginning with Plato) have supposed that that we can – among other things – think, talk, dream, argue and make television series about supposed non­existents (philosophers use the word “intentionality” for this mysterious quality of “aboutness”). They have argued that for this reason non-existents must exist in some sense – otherwise how could we do all these different things to them? Quineans maintain that any features of our discourse that appear to commit us to the existence of non-existent things can be reconstructed in such a way as to make that commitment disappear. Unfortunately, however, no satisfactory general account along these lines has so far been delivered, despite the fact that the Quinean orthodoxy has now been in place for over fifty years.

The principal achievement of Towards Non-Being is that it provides a detailed, rigorous and thoroughgoing theory of non-existent objects capable of neatly accounting for a wide (and possibly exhaustive) range of phenomena concerning the non-existent. Truths about all kinds of non-existent things, from fictional ones such as Sherlock to impossible ones such as round squares, are elegantly covered by the theory’s powerful logical framework in a manner that supersedes the Quinean approach in both its scope and uniformity. The theory also affords a compelling and seemingly quite general account of the puzzling notion of intentionality, which is more than can be said for its Quinean counterpart. Far from merely rescuing noneism from the grave, then, the versatility and apparent completeness of Priest’s theory render it one of the most fully worked out accounts of the non-existent there is, and a force to be reckoned with by the Quinean orthodoxy.

The noneism of Towards Non-Being builds on the idea that though many things do not exist, some of them could have existed. Thus, though Conan Doyle’s stories are fiction, if the world had been different they might have been true and Sherlock would have existed. According to the theory, non-existent things such as Sherlock are therefore best thought of as unactualized possible objects. Priest uses the now-standard logical framework of “possible world semantics”, which posits a distinct possible world for each way the world could have been, to explain his view. In some of these worlds Sherlock exists, whereas in others (like this one) he does not. Since Sherlock does not exist in this world, Priest’s theory does not allow that he has any existence-entailing properties (like “being a detective”) here. But the theory does allow us to explain why it seems truer to say that Sherlock is a detective than to say that he is a fishmonger, for example. According to noneism this is because, in those possible worlds that realize the way that Conan Doyle’s stories represent the world as being, Sherlock is a detective (and not a fishmonger). Furthermore, though non-existents cannot have any properties in this world that entail existence, Priest’s noneism does allow that they can have certain “non-existence entailing” properties here, among which are intentional ones like “being thought about”. According to the theory, what we are doing when we think about Sherlock, for instance, is thinking about an object that exists in other possible worlds.

That Priest achieved his initial goal for Towards Non-Being, to reposition noneism as a key player within the philosophy of existence, is borne out by the extensive discussion that has followed its original publication thirteen years ago. This second edition is principally concerned with addressing these recent criticisms. In almost every case, Priest’s artful discussion leaves one with the clear sense that noneism is capable of overcoming the problem at hand, and during the course of the book many such problems are seemingly conclusively, and often ingeniously, laid to rest.

Perhaps the most recurrent criticism of the first edition is its treatment of fictional objects. As we saw, noneism evaluates certain claims about fictional objects by considering the ways those objects are in the possible worlds that realize the stories that characterize them. Thus, in evaluating certain claims about Sherlock, we look to the worlds that realize Conan Doyle’s stories, and assess whether those claims are true of Sherlock in those worlds. However, consider that there are seemingly possible worlds that realize the Holmes stories in which e.g. Benjamin Disraeli was the one to fill the shoes of Sherlock (that is, in which Disraeli became a detective, lived at 221b Baker Street, etc.), and yet others in which, say, William Gladstone did. Indeed, there would even seem to be possible worlds that realize the Holmes stories in which I play the role of Holmes, and still others in which you do. And yet we cannot all be Sherlock Holmes.

Priest’s response to this problem is to say that when Doyle first imagined the character of Sherlock his mind pinpointed a specific non-existent object, which he then named “Sherlock Holmes”. For this reason, possible worlds in which Disraeli, Gladstone, you or I play the role of Sherlock are not in fact worlds that realize the Holmes stories, precisely because theSherlock (the object that Doyle thought of when he first imagined the character) is not the one doing the detective work in those worlds. Though one may take further issue with how exactly this mental pinpointing is supposed to work, the initial familiar objection is satisfactorily overcome by Priest’s response.

Priest’s responses to this and a range of other recent objections to noneism make this new edition of Towards Non-Beingessential reading for any philosopher concerned with the philosophy of existence. Though parts of the book are necessarily quite technical, non-specialists will also gain a clear understanding of the central themes via Priest’s informal exposition of each chapter’s key ideas. In addition, Towards Non-Being provides a fascinating account of the historical roots of noneism and a reappraisal of the arguments that led to its decline during the twentieth century. Of par-ticular importance is Priest’s re-examination of Quine’s seminal paper “On What There Is” (1948), which is widely considered to contain the most devastating attack on early forms of noneism. Priest persuasively argues that Quine’s accomplishments here are largely rhetorical and that whatever substantial arguments the paper contains are very thin. Overall, Towards Non-Being’s breadth, scope and detail undoubtedly make it a key text in the contemporary philosophy of existence.

This said, there is one central, lingering concern that I suspect will continue to keep noneism from toppling the Quinean orthodoxy. Early noneist theories were criticized on the basis that in addition to “existence”, they posited some lesser, spurious existential category of “being” or “subsistence” which non-existent objects possess, in order to account for the facts that they can be the objects of intentional activities, and that there can be truths about them. On such views, Sherlock does not exist, but there is some lesser sense in which he “is”, in virtue of being characterized as existing in certain ways. This puzzling feature of early noneism is part of what led to its original demise.

Priest’s modern version, by contrast, is adamant that non-existent things do not exist, and “are” not, in any way – they are simply nothing at all. Nonetheless, though Sherlock is “nothing” on Priest’s view, he is still an “object”, distinct from other non-existent objects – such as, for example, Zeus – which are also just “nothing”. As we have seen, these objects, which are supposed to be absolutely nothing, exist in other possible worlds, and are capable of doing a plenitude of interesting things in those worlds. That a thing can both be “absolutely nothing” and yet also be a distinct “object” capable of having all these properties is difficult to understand. The thought recurs that surely these things must have some kind of existential status, otherwise how could they, for example, be distinct from one another? If legitimate, this concern would appear to show that Priest’s theory does not yet adequately solve one of the central problems of non-existence. At the very least, it is fair to say that the noneist uses the phrase “absolutely nothing” in a very unusual way.

To Priest’s credit, important new sections of this edition do attempt to deal with the difficulty of understanding proposed “objects” that are “nothing at all”. In one section, he attempts to trace the history of the idea that the phrase “some things” carries any implication of existence, showing quite compellingly that this is a fairly recent development. But he is ultimately unsympathetic to those who say they cannot understand his idea, suggesting that such commentators are simply too steeped in Quinean dogma and need to “get their understander re-wired”. To my mind, however, the worry is an obvious one not reserved for those brought up on Quineanism. It seems plausible that our usual, everyday understanding of the terms “thing” and “nothing” is that they are contrasting and incompatible, such that a “thing that is nothing” is likely to be confusing even to a non-philosopher. For all its brilliance, then, it seems that more needs to be said on this front if Graham Priest’s theory is ever to take centre stage.

• On 23/2/18 this article was amended to correct “pivotal” to “key”

   

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