{"id":2062,"date":"2007-12-27T14:52:25","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T19:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/27\/bhutto-and-the-lure-of-easy-solutions\/"},"modified":"2007-12-27T14:52:25","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T19:52:25","slug":"bhutto-and-the-lure-of-easy-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/27\/bhutto-and-the-lure-of-easy-solutions\/","title":{"rendered":"Bhutto and the lure of easy solutions"},"content":{"rendered":"

This isn’t a political blog, so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the completely unsurprising (but still saddening) assassination<\/a> of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. But I will note that I found out about it first from Twitter — where online friends such as Muhammad Saleem<\/a>, as well as Rob Hyndman<\/a> and Steve Rubel<\/a> posted updates and news links almost minute by minute. <\/p>\n

I find that kind of thing happening on Twitter more and more, and it’s one of the fascinating things about what amounts to a combination IM client\/group mini-blog (Dan York has some thoughts<\/a> about Twitter and “micro-publishing”). In any case, one of those links was to Hot Air, which had a great running update<\/a> with lots of links, including one to a short take on the assassination from Mark Steyn, a former neighbour of the Harvard-educated Bhutto. <\/p>\n

I don’t know a lot about Pakistan’s troubled political scene, apart from what I read in my newspaper and others, but I have a sense that Mark’s take<\/a> is right on the money. In many ways, Bhutto was a prime minister right out of central casting: an attractive and Western-educated woman, a prettier, Muslim version of Maggie Thatcher. That made her hugely popular in the West, but to the people of her own country she seems to have been a much more troubled figure<\/a>, as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n

From most reports, she sounds like someone who promoted democracy and populism, but while in power was distant and somewhat autocratic; someone who trumpeted openness, but was tossed out of office amid a long trail<\/a> of corruption allegations, not all of which could be explained as a government plot against her. The Telegraph’s obituary has a fairly comprehensive look at the woman and her legacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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This isn’t a political blog, so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the completely unsurprising (but still saddening) assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. But I will note that I found out about it first from Twitter — where online friends such as Muhammad Saleem, as well … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Bhutto and the lure of easy solutions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}