Khumoyun Suyunov

Happy New Year to those who celebrate.

That's right.
What's what I said.
It happens to be correct grammar and proper use of vocabulary.

@pursuit_of_truth

By sheer luck and mere coincidence I ended up the other day in Al-Safwa lounge at HIA and accidentally saw some really rich people. Now, I want to share this very interesting op-ed by an economic historian who studies the rich and wealthy globally:

In the past century, in the West, the rich were keen to pay for a welfare state to maintain its legitimacy and avoid a revolution in times of need and crisis. And they succeeded in ensuring that no Western European or North American country had a communist revolution. They could loudly proclaim Marx was wrong and so on. But all of that is in the dustbin of history now.

Since the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, a new trend is visible in the US and beyond. The rich have seemingly escaped nation states to form a global club. They fly around to Davos and Dubai, eating rich people food, speaking in politically correct terms about climate change and women's rights, and consume various brands from cosmetics and clothes to universities and whole countries. The behavior of the rich world-wide is highly understudied because access is hard.

However, it is a puzzle why any sense of accountability to or fraternity with one's fellow citizens would disappear in a ggeneration. How does the rest of society respond? Do they seek to emulate Trump and Co? Or do they unionize as in the past to ask for a living wage? In the US, both trends seem very visible. If Trump and de Santis are prominent, so too are Sanders and AOC. As I mentioned before, any honest reckoning would require us to embrace contradictory and incongruent realities, including some that we really don't like. In other words, it involves embracing the messy complexities of the offline world and giving up the safety of remaining secure in virtual echo chambers and the emerging metaverse.

@pursuit_of_truth

Qatar National Day 🇶🇦

(Doha)

She doesn't force you to like her, this pretty little city — she's not aggressive. You wake up one day and find yourself disarmed, fallen for her without intention. She's gentle, mostly, not abrasive - perfectly comfortable with what she combines of radically contrasting elements. And there is privilege of course, in not being entirely privy to the unpleasant. Every existence is not without secrets - but even in her rougher edges, in the back streets with dustier walks, in the expanses and sometimes corners where the bushes aren't as pruned, the spaces more clustered — there is a charm. She is charming in her authenticity, when the glitter and glam do too much — and even then, she remains authentic throughout. Or perhaps it's her people, those who reside within her, who have made her a home through their multitudes and diversity - an effervescent simplicity contagious in them all.

It's not entirely true, what they say of the Gulf — the generalisations of money and bling — a narrative omitting almost entirely the growth of those young. Not all descend from empire, not all claim heritage from aged roots — some spring later, from tribes and collectives, from nomadic movement matured into settlement, at their own pace, forging a present in a world so obsessed with past grandeur.

(The only country where some have genuinely felt at home though it will be never theirs)

December 18, 2023

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There is purification in punishment. Today, not "forgive us our sins" but "smite us for our iniquities."

14/12/2023

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How can people endure this living abroad? By God, without home, life is torture! Don’t get me wrong, if I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move and I can understand going abroad for six months, or even a year. But to travel, as I do, without knowing or even guessing when one will get home again, is very bad and grievous. The mere thought of it is hard to bear. I need homeland for my work, for my life (I speak of no life but that). I am like a fish out of water; I lose all my energies, all my faculties....

@pursuit_of_truth

Speaking of Napoleon and winter, the Russian winter utterly defeated his war campaign, as every Frenchman knows it. It also defeated Hitler, as most Germans know. I’ve never been to Russia in winter or spring or any other season. But I’ve been there all year round as a reader ever since the St. Petersburg summer I spent in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This is a Russian winter, made famous by the great novelists of Russia.

A hundred writers have said it before and a hundred will say it again, but it is no less true for being a common-place that the way to an understanding of Russian life lies through the ordeal of a Russian winter. Russkaya zima (Русская зима), the great depressant of spirit and water of animation. It is not a season of the year like other seasons, not merely a longer, darker, crueler span of time than that which annually slows the countries of northern Europe and America. It is a life sentence to hardship that prowls near the center of the Russian consciousness, whatever the time of year. As a prime cause and a symbol of Russia’s fate, it molds a state of mind, an attitude toward life.

However, Russian winter has its delights. Not long ago, I read that the huge expanse of land and climate, together with the hard struggle for survival, produces many good qualities. Absolutely right! The bitter weather drove away the French, of course, and there are dozens of delicacies you can freeze. All that’s true and the children and skate too: on a full stomach, layered with proper clothes, the cold’s amusing. But for a working man – people tramping or begging or making pilgrimages – it’s the prime evil and torment.

Let me finish these incoherent and bewildered thoughts with beautiful lines that I recently came across: “Winter can be cruelly cold on those who don’t have loving warm memories for their hearts. And it can be even brutally colder on those who have such memories but don’t have the ones they shared it with anymore“

@pursuit_of_truth

#classreflection

And see Leviathan Ch 6 for Hobbes' theory of the passions, which he calls "motions" produced in our bodies, of which he considered the brain to be a mere part (no mind-body distinction for him!):

Lastly, consider how political passions, when excited, take us beyond the basic unit of analysis in modern liberal thought, namely, the individual. If one person's nervous system is connected via external objects/devices to those of others (like social media of today), then what remains of each individual? And in this post-liberal world, isn't the digital collective or cluster of data points the basic unit of analysis for algorithms on each platform? Each of us when we like, comment or post (or purchase something) produces a data point. Are we not merely bundles of overlapping data points for our phones and the platforms/sites we use?

The political upshot is clear enough: righteous collectives online have coalesced on the left and right, and the political center that dominated North Atlantic societies and beyond has collapsed. In the absence of liberalism, socialism and fascism face off. This is glossed over as "populism" in media and.academia.Non-Western societies, which associate liberalism with their colonial experience, thrive in the new media of orality that enables rapid transmission of affect. Social connectedness among "dividuals" or "overlapping selves" makes intuitive sense.

Either way, the question with which I want to end is this: do the new.digital.collectives necessarily mean that outbursts of political expression are followed by the rise of Sisi, Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, etc? Watching the new Napoleon film last week made me think that every revolution produces a Napoleon, Stalin or Mao soon enough. Among warring factions in today's global civil war, is it not the case, as Hobbes told us four centuries ago, that all sides will voluntarily and happily sacrifice their liberties for security, order, and "peace"? I leave you with these questions that I myself am grappling with.

@pursuit_of_truth

All good things must come to an end. This semester too must have ended on Thursday, and I only have exams for the next 10 days or so. If you think about where we were in mid to late August, we have taken giant strides in the past three months. Now, we should end a semester on resistance, rebellion, and revolution with a bang, not a whimper :)

The best projects and essays are the ones that are done.

@pursuit_of_truth

parenthesis (vb): a migraine and reluctant urge to cancel on a desert excursion, pulling through and finding one's self watching fellow students decide between soft and ultra soft tissues for 5 minutes when on an immediate and urgent grocery run, we got the big water bottles because no one thought small ones would be better. hindsight: small water bottles would have been better. the perpetual context of you not knowing 'bangers' to join in the road trip experience but enjoying the passion of those around you nonetheless, a steady quad biking affair which started with fear and ended with 'just five more minutes' amid expansive sand dunes and a spectacular sun. how can something so dry, so hot be so versatile, so beautiful? a rescue team and strangers helping one another with the heaving of vehicles out of the dunes. prayers among the rocks and a swooning blushing sun as car tires are deflated, purposefully, for an expedition of exploring the sea within the desert. tires splashing against the tides; sunsets, laughter and terrible photos — crazy cars like the ones in reels zooming up and down the sandy cliffs challenging gravity for a duel with their lives — but bliss. until you're jerked up by a family searching for their children who disappeared with the sun at sea, a dozen people of different backgrounds walking around shouting the same names in a dozen different accents till a cry in the distance is heard and the hearts all settle back in their rested place — at once. the chatter rises and dips as the speaker in the background provides all the necessary feels for one to romanticise their life. you count the stars still shining through the energy-clad night sky before pulling yourself up; it's time to go home.

@pursuit_of_truth

Ignorance and knowledge go hand-in-hand - like shadows and light, you can’t have one without the other. But whenever you start considering yourself intellectually superior to others, you eventually get humbled (unexpectedly defeated) by those others and might look more like a real dumb.

I’ve just witnessed that!

@pursuit_of_truth

Wed Nov 1st, 2023. How is life treating you guys?

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“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.”

“Notes from Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Underground man is despicable. He loathes himself and everyone around him. He is filled with resentment, he projects his self-hatred onto others, he is powerless and insignificant so he projects out his power on the one who is more powerless still, thinks so lowly of himself, yet considers himself intellectually superior to others. Underground man is in pain and so he inflicts pain on others. Underground man hates society, yet dreams of a higher rank in it. Underground man hates those who are gifted by nature, with respect of which they are not deserving, yet wants to be seen by them, to walk alongside with them. Underground man hates love, thinks himself incapable of love and yet deep down yearns to love and to be loved.

I know I know, an underground man deserves no empathy. He is a social outcast and why shouldn't he be? He is clumsy, sadistic, socially awkward and lacking alpha male qualities. He is not rich, he has no one to claim him, he is just a nameless being.

But wait a minute, maybe society shaped him this way. Society wanted to cage him and fit him in a box, picking on him when he did not. Bullied him for the difference. Threw him into a deep pit of which he cannot pull himself out. Underground man thought of himself as a human and humans are free spirits, humans cannot be controlled, humans want control and power over themselves. What is a human say if he does not have free will? Without free will he cannot sin, if he does not sin, how will he get to meet himself? And so underground man sins profoundly, he knows it at least, this he tells himself to feed his conscience. At least he knows it unlike his fellow men who are unaware of their own undergrounds.

Underground man surely is despicable, he has sinned but he takes pride in self-awareness. In his humane quality to feel guilt. What of the guilt? He is stuck in a constant loop, he declared the underground as a permanent abode of which he cannot let go.

This ladies and gentlemen was his confession from the "notes from Underground!"

@pursuit_of_truth

The normal nature of human conversations are inherently nonlinear. So does human thinking. That is a main prerequisite component that makes it more beautiful and authentic.

@pursuit_of_truth

I was following the tournament from the get-go. Arjun Erigaisi, super GM from India, played 10 days of chess, eight exceptional rounds, secured 6.5 points out of 8, spent 4 hours playing his last game against Abdusattorov. And on equal position with 18 minutes on the clock, ONE MOVE (a shocking blunder) changed everything. Chess is so gut-wrenching, so brutal.

Anyway, shout-outs to the Uzbek Chess Players!

@pursuit_of_truth

The other day, I had genuinely meaningful conversations with Professor Kamrava about the tragic developments that started in Palestine during his office hours. The primary focus was how the outcome of future possibilities would end up for both sides. But it all began by crediting Hamas - an Irani-backed organization in Gaza, for brilliantly executed low-cost operations. It was a symbolic punishment for the overconfidence of Israelis (without having thought about the day after), similar to what happened in the 1973 war.

Israelis never learn one fundamental and obvious lesson after each destruction/killing: Palestinians will eventually come after them again, no matter what. So, Netanyahu (PM of Israel) surely could not stop making politically suicidal decisions after the October 7 attacks. But why this all suddenly happened on October 7, 2023? Mainly because of the Saudi-Israel bilateral agreement on normalization according to the Abrahamic Accord, which would ultimately be against the interests of Iran and Palestine.

In the end, I brought up some arguments from his own book, namely “The Impossibility of Palestine”, (it was enlightening reading for me) to dig up any plausible solutions for peace or, optimistically, the establishment of Palestine shortly. Unfortunately, I got the answers I knew, and I wish they could be totally different. Again, reality on the ground truly hurts.

@pursuit_of_truth