Editor’s Note: My sister Azra has kindly given us permission to publish remarks that she delivered to The Citizen’s Foundation gala in Houston a few days ago. She will provide translations of the Urdu poetry soon.

by Azra Raza

Thank you Dr. Abdullah Jafari, thank you TCF, thank you Houston for giving me this opportunity to speak tonight. I am greatly honored. This evening, we are going to celebrate the women of Pakistan.

In the 1930s of Aligarh, my mother was sent to Merath for a vacation. She was barely ten years old. In Meerath, she became homesick in the house of her relatives. A few weeks later, she learnt that her father would be visiting a nearby town so she wrote begging her mother that her father should take her home to Aligarh when he returned. This one simple act of letter writing caused a major upheaval in Aijaz Manzil because the first thing my Naana wanted to know was how Naani Amman found out about Ammi’s unhappiness. Naani Amman had to produce the letter which was examined carefully. My Naana was scandalized by the idea that his daughter had secretly learned to read and write, an activity considered subversive and dangerous. While a good head and a good heart in a woman was a desirable combination, adding a pen to that was tantamount to outright rebellion.

I remembered this story because when my own daughter Sheherzad was ten years old and I asked her one day what she would do if she won the lottery and had millions of dollars, her instantaneous and forceful response was, “Finish my education, of course!” What a contrast between two 10-year olds separated by one single generation. Sheherzad did not have to think twice about her education because of the sacrifices made by my mother and by the women of her generation in the pre-partition subcontinent. So if we are going to celebrate the women of Pakistan, let us begin with the pioneers. Ms. Fatima Jinnah and Begum Rana Liaqat Ali Khan, Lady Haroon and Begum Shaista Ikramullah. My mother became deeply involved in women’s education in Karachi and through her tireless efforts, managed to provide for both primary and higher education to hundreds of underprivileged students. When she died 15 years ago, my epitaph for her was the famous Faiz sher:

Karo kaj jabeen pay sar e kafan
Meray qaatiloun ko gumaan na ho
Kay ghuroor e ishq ka baankpan
Pas e marg ham nay bhula diya!

(Faiz)

(Keep the shroud tilted on my forehead as a sign of defiance and pride. Let not my assassins have the misapprehension that in death, they succeeded in crushing the honor and pride I took in my passions).

The first University open to women was in Bombay in 1882 while Harvard Medical School admitted women for the first time in 1945. As far as Pakistan is concerned, let us do a little math. The population is roughly 186 million. There are 296,832 students enrolled in degree level education which comes to 0.1% population. Despite these dire statistics, the good news is that 62% of them are women and the level of achievement of girls is consistently higher than that of the boys. Girls outclass boys in examination, and they are also higher achievers. And yet, when it comes to the work-force, their efforts are not rewarded equally. I was horrified to hear the goal announced at the International Women’s Conference last year: 50-50 by 2030 meaning equal pay by 2030. Why?

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by Paul Braterman

R: Sagan warns us against fallacies. But is exposing fallacies enough to shield us from the demons?

I had been waiting for a quiet moment to write about this, but there isn't going to be a quiet moment, so now will have to do.

Debaters regularly accuse their opponents of using fallacies. These can be formal fallacies, such as simple errors of logic, or informal fallacies, such as appeal to authority, ad hominem and strawman arguments, among others. If a piece of reasoning depends on any of these fallacies, so it is claimed, the conclusion does not really follow from the premises, and while it might still be true we have not been given any good reason to believe it.[1] And so books that discuss logic, and science-promoting blogs (including one I follow), regularly include descriptions of informal fallacies, with stern instructions to avoid committing them.

In an article entitled The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life, Maarten Boudry, Fabio Paglieri and Massimo Pigliucci (henceforth BPP) challenge this view. BPP is written for the perusal of trained philosophers, which I am not, but I use it here as a jumping off point, while mixing in further content of my own.

BPP apply what they call the fallacy fork test to accusations of informal fallacy; either the reasoning is obviously erroneous, in which case no one would really use it, or else it is not obviously erroneous in context, and we still have all the work to do. In the first case, formal analysis is redundant; in the second, the facts of the matter need further consideration. So naming and shaming the particular kind of fallacy is either unnecessary or uncalled for. I agree, and suggest that we drop the label "fallacy" for such informal arguments, since to make the label stick we have to show on other grounds that the argument as used really is fallacious. The discussion made me think of my own reflections on formally valid logical arguments, which only work because the conclusion has actually been accepted in advance, otherwise we would not have accepted the premises. In both cases, the formal or semi-formal reasoning, while seemingly at the heart of the argument, is an unnecessary elaboration, and we can cut out the middleman.

Going beyond this, it is becoming increasingly clear that the logical is only one aspect, and not usually the most important aspect, of an argument. More important are the heuristic and rhetorical aspects; will the reasoning point us towards a way of acquiring new knowledge, and how useful is it in the attempt to persuade our opponents to change their minds. (In passing, I suggest that if our objective is to persuade others to change their minds, we are not arguing in good faith, unless we are at least in principle open to the possibility that we too might change ours.)

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by Katrin Trüstedt

While the murder series of the right-wing terror trio National Socialist Underground (NSU) has generally escaped major international attention (especially in comparison with Islamist terror attacks), one of the assassinations continues to come up. The murder of Halit Yozgat, the 9^th assassination of the NSU, resists the fate of the others, because of one rather delicate detail: a secret service agent was present at the crime scene at the time of the murder. When Halit Yozgat was shot in the head by two members of the NSU on April 6, 2006, from a close distance with a silenced Česká CZ 83 pistol (the signature style of the NSU assassinations), Andreas Temme, an agent of the Hessian domestic intelligence service, was in the internet café in Kassel. When Halit Yozgat's father, İsmail Yozgat, found his son when he returned to the café a few minutes after the murder, Temme was gone.

The agent claimed first to have been at the café the day before, and then that he had left the place right before the murder. He later changed his statement when confronted with overwhelming evidence placing him at the scene when the murder happened. He then claimed he didn't see or hear Yozgat getting shot while he was chatting with his online affair; that he put coins on the reception desk and left, not noticing that Yozgat was dying on the ground behind the desk; and that he didn't report back to the police like all the other witnesses in the café because he didn't want his pregnant wife to find out what he was doing there. The police, the court and his employers at the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution accepted his testimony. But his presence continues to raise suspicions that government agencies might in some way be involved in the murders, fueling conspiracy theories in various directions. Much justified criticism of the authorities' handling of the case came from the left, pointing out the general trivialization of right-wing violence by state agencies combined with racist prejudices when it comes to the victims, when the various agencies investigating the murders had disregarded the possibility of right-wing terror and rather investigated the victim's families for possible criminal ties, thereby doubling the crimes they were supposed to prevent. Against this background, the fact that an agent of the domestic intelligence service was present at the scene raised the suspicion that government agencies might have actively protected or enabled the NSU. Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, many rumors in the right-wing scene itself claiming the NSU murders were orchestrated by the state authorities in order to hurt the scene.

Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths around the architect Eyal Weizman, have launched an independent investigation into the case and recently presented preliminary results.

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by Elise Hempel

I'm about to enter yet another poetry chapbook contest that I'll have little chance of winning. This one's cheap – only $10 to enter (compared to the usual $20 to $30), but that's because there's no monetary prize (most chapbook and full-length book contests award $1,000 to the winner), only publication and a contract for a certain percentage of the printed chapbook's sales.

Though we're now in the age of Trump, in the age of "winning," of loving winners and loving to win, I'm still the same person I was before November 8, 2016. Of course I'd love to win this chapbook contest, to have my 20 to 30 poems neatly packaged in a perfect-bound little book with a colorful glossy cover, to add one more publication to my résumé. But, like Anis Shivani, I also don't believe in poetry contests, and I resent the fact that this is what I, and other less-well-known poets, must do to even come close to getting just a chapbook published. And I continue to be baffled by the fact that most poetry contests (for both books and chapbooks, and for a single poem or group of poems) name only a single winner, awarding prize money and publication to the one "best" submission, though sometimes a few lucky finalists are also given publication and a lesser amount of cash.

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by Christopher Bacas

After any commercial job, I was a whirling particle; negatively charged. I wanted to appear simultaneously in a distant vector of the universe (preferably, garage level). Spooky action proved impossible. Quantum properties aren't conferred at loading docks. A single sound launched our universe, though. I wonder who was on that gig…

One band leader, obsessively germ-phobic, always brought food; peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches held tightly between layers of crinkled foil, fingers never touching bread. His musicianship so secure, he'd simultaneously walk impeccable left-hand bass, comp and go over details with the party planner. Preoccupied with himself, he never requested dinner service for sidemen, even when available. We usually got squashed sandwiches in clear folding trays. The potato chips inside, moistened by a pickle, bent a full 360 degrees without breaking. Once, a maitre'd bypassed him and asked the horn section if we wanted surf and turf. At break time, our boss fumed while staff uncovered our glistening plates and poured bubbly into elegant flutes.

We worked exclusively for a suburban Maryland office. They had high-end bar-mitzvah work sewn up. The chief drove a Porsche. He required us to make a new video at least once a year. The sound stage and audio/video team were part of his business; a club date version of the company store. Shoots dragged for needless hours as the "crew" struggled to properly mic and mix instruments and music they saw and heard weekly. While the smoke machine wafted saccharine clouds through skronking feedback and buzzing amps, grown-up high-school AV nerds, pocket protectors and cluttered tool belts included, scuttled around jabbering into wireless headsets.

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