Weekend in Oslo

As an observer representing Trondheim local chapter, I attended SAIH’s general assembly 2012 in Oslo from 26 to 28th of October in a group of 5 from our chapter (Read about it in Trondheim team blog). This gathering is the year’s most important meeting of the organization in which the new board members are elected by the representatives of all local branches, new decisions are discussed and voted, new constitution is passed and all formal stuff that might happen in a general assembly takes place. Just for the preparation we  had to read a more-than-a-hundred-page report of goals and prospects, constitution, budget planning, etc. in Nynorsk! And we had to go through it once more in details two (three) days in a row. A tough weekend but that was worth it! At the end we brought home a trophie for the Best Event 2012, for arranging 2012 campaign’s kick-off concert at Familien, for which I had made the poster.

Aside from all this, I was lucky to be in the right time/right place on Friday evening to attend Norske Talenter’s quarter-final, the main Norwegian Talent show, live in Oslo’s Christiania Theater to watch my friends vanishing and appearing and turning into each other. Watch it from TV angle:

Survival of the fittest

There’s an evolutionary reason why everyone loves rainbows. Myth says there’s a treasure to be found at the end of it, for the person lucky enough to find. Well-said! That temporary treasure could be the right timing for food and water during tough ages of climate change in Africa. And those who found it were our mutant ancestors, lucky enough to search for it. Those who didn’t like rainbows, didn’t chase it, didn’t find the treasure, and died out.

Challenges on the road to Democracy in the Middle East

SAIH Trondheim in collaboration with Amnesty arranged a debate meeting with Café Nord-Sør about the situation and the ongoing happenings in the Middle East.

Three speakers were invited to tell more about the Arabic spring and the role of religion in the geopolitics of the region:

1. Ulrika Mårtensson: She is a professor at the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies, NTNU, Trondheim, and an expert on Islam. She talked about the challenges of drafting new constitutions, with special focus on the Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis). She focused on two cases within the Arab Spring, Egypt and Tunisia, which have so far been successful to overthrow their previous dictators.

2. Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam: He is a Norwegian-Iranian neuroscientist and human rights advocate and an international prize winner in both fields. As a spokesman of IHR (Iran Human Rights), he talked about the dilemmatic choice between the secular dictatorship and theocratic democracy, in the region. He gave a history of contemporary Iran and the process by which the Islamists, despite their promises, took over the 1979 revolution in Iran after removing the King.

3. Souhail Mahdi: He is a Syrian-Norwegian political economy student at NTNU. He gave a brief summary of the problems faced in three current democracies of the region: Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza Strip and he finished by updating the people with the situation in Syria and the potential prospects, from a “ground”-perspective.

The three speakers presented different cases linked together with the Arab spring and the Iranian winter (referring to what eventually came out after the Iranian Spring in 1979) which is much less discussed.

After the meeting it was time for questions and answers. The questions that were asked at the end of the meeting created an interesting debate about how much religion can be trusted not to interfere with politics in the newly changed governments of the Arab spring. The debate were between the speakers and also between the audiences. A well-established debate meeting that gave new information to the situation in the Middle East. Approximately 60 people showed up during the event and as usual cake and cofee was served for the hungry and thirsty audience, Hungry for information and thirsty for learning.

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Reposted from SAIH, Trondheim.

Internet and Organizing Student Protests in Iran

After more than one year that I hadn’t left the city of Trondheim, for a couple of days eventually I traveled to Oslo. This was to give a talk at the event Human rights, democracy and the students’ struggle in Iran, organized by SAIH. Not to cover the story from one side, the opposition, the Iranian embassy’s representatives were also invited to give a speech at the event, but they chose not to take part.

Iran is essential to development in the Middle East in the years to come and may both solve and aggregate existing and future conflicts in several countries. What are the interests of the Islamic Republic?

Iranian students have a unique position in the current geopolitical environment. What is it like to be a student in Iran? The participation in the development of a republic of 80 million inhabitant and several large ethnic minorities are underreported issues in Western media. Students advocating democracy and human rights often do so at great risks to themselves and even their families.

To further understand these issues, we invite you to this seminar where the current political situation in the area will be debated.

The panel

  • Mahmood Reza Amiri Moghaddam – Iran expert and researcher at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, UiO
  • Nima Darabi – data scientist, Zedge
  • Josef Asad Taghizadehnaser, politically active Azerbaijani

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You can download my presentation “Internet and Organizing Student Protests in Iran”. It won’t be so useful, however, as most of the information was carried out orally.

My loser present self

I never had a commitment device. Neither I was ever taught how to get one. In that sense, sacrificing my future in favor of my present has always been of my habits. As time goes by present becomes past and now I look back: my present self has already lost the battle against my past self (my past has won, to put it nicely!).

Now if I regret and if make myself commit to future, my present self will again lose, this time in a battle against my future self. This means that my present is the loser of all my lifespan, and life now sucks more than ever. If this is me at my worst, which is quite pleasant, then let’s drink a toast to all my selves!

I never saw my-old-self

Now he’s gone crazy and has told everyone: A man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future!

Believe me I’m not bullshitting! This man who calls himself Eloi is right. He had left the future long before my departure. He arrived later, however, since he couldn’t time-travel directly and had to stop a couple of “time”s.

I actually met him back in 2076. I was a kid when he picked me up and flied to a far old café: “You’ll make this place happen!”, he said. And I thought he’s mental. Eloi claimed he knows me and I don’t know him yet: “Not yet!”, he was repeating. He wished he had brought me to that weird place only two years earlier, to show me an old man who so wanted to visit me but he was told not to, strictly:

You could see your-old-self! Nima died without knowing that he could see you.

It was the first time I heard this name. Let me keep the details but he told me some stories, and that after the old man died, things turned out to be very different: “Nima should have come to tell you what he knew”. And then he gave me a note:

[You will grow and this time, remember you MUST meet that little kid to tell him what you will know…]

For many years I kept that note, but it was lost before I had to escape my homeland. I knew Persian from my biological mom. So it was not hard to make up stories after I arrived here. And the note was right! Many things indeed became clear throughout my life. But I never figured out what is that I will know and how long I should wait…

p.s. By the way, P=NP in case you were wondering!