Amia Srinivasan & the aptness of anger

Substantive normative conflicts constantly arise in our mental life. A typical example is the mental torture we face when attending a social event and suddenly feel torn between the urge to urinate on the carpet or wait five minutes till we can use the little boy's room and urinate on the entitled little shit's birthday presents.

Do such substantive normative conflicts impose a type of affective injustice upon oppressed people?

Yes, according to this essay by Amia Srinvasan which focuses

 'on occasions where anger would be counterproductive but nonetheless apt'.

Prima facie, this is utterly silly. 'Counterproductive' can only be a consequentialist term- because it is defined in relation to a production function- and must be global and substantive in scope. A thing can only be counterproductive if it produces something which is worse or not as good as some alternative which was available. Thus, a counterproductive action is not inevitable, because an alternative is available. Nor is it gratuitous because it has an opportunity cost.  Any signalling or cathartic value it has is already accounted for in the production function. Thus, it is essentially economic and wholly positive. Only that action which minimises opportunity cost can be called apt- so, provided an action has been properly denoted as 'counterproductive', it can never be called apt. Thus, strictly speaking, Amia is talking nonsense.

However, in real life we speak in a loose, not a strict, manner.

What sort of occasions are compatible with an informative statement, let us say from a sympathetic advisor, that 'on this occasion, showing anger is apt though it would be counterproductive?'

I think the following occasion fits the bill. The anti-terrorism squad invades my home and demands to search my turban and beard. I get angry saying- 'you damn idiots! Don't you know that my affiliation is anathema to that of the people you fear?'

You happen to be a guest in my pied a terre- a capacious cardboard box conveniently located for the Bakerloo line-  and you put your hand on my arm and say loudly and clearly- 'Please don't get angry. These highly trained soldiers have to confront suicide bombers every day. If you appear agitated and gesticulate wildly, they have orders to shoot. This rage of yours is perfectly apt- it is the anger of a man falsely accused- still, you must understand it is counterproductive. Put your hands up and let these brave soldiers do their job. After all, it is ordinary people like you and me whom they are defending.'

This is an occasion where anger was apt at its first manifestation but would have been counterproductive in its conatus. Alternatively, one could say, anger needed to be redirected properly so as to serve the conatus of the victim properly.

Once the anti-terror squad has done a thorough search and established your bona fides they may make a note on your file saying 'subject was genuinely outraged at the suggestion that he had any link or sympathy for the terrorists- or indeed for the Religion they claim to profess. He is a bit of a hot-head, but can be reasoned with.'

It may be that this report helps clear you of charges of obstructing justice or endangering Air-line safety on some other occasion when you get angry for being thrown off a plane because of your suspicious appearance.

It is noteworthy that this occasion features a time lag within which display of an emotion could occur, be apt, and yet not really be counterproductive because compliance did not have to be immediate.

In other words, the emotion was only apt because it was the initial response in a permitted time frame for the production of the  required act. It wasn't really counter-productive at all because the best outcome was finally chosen.

Amia, however, is not taking this common sense view. This is because- she believes,

There is a striking difference between how anger is discussed in political contexts and how we talk about anger in more mundane situations.

Nonsense! We say voters are angry with such and such Party, because it failed to deliver on its promises. Voters will vote against it even if the alternative is not significantly different.

In ordinary conversation, we can and do talk about whether anger, independent of its effects, is the apt response to how things are; whether how things are provides one reason to be angry; whether one’s anger is a fitting response to how things are. We talk, I want to say, as if anger exists within the space of intrinsic reasons, as opposed to merely instrumental reasons. Suppose you are my friend, and I ask you what reason you have for being angry with me. You respond: ‘because you were late again!’ I say: ‘well, you shouldn’t be. I told you I was going to be late’.

So, this person wasn't late. The reason for the other person's anger is that she had been put to inconvenience on more than one occasion. Similarly, if we voted for the Party that promised to cut unemployment and the spokesman for that Party later said- 'we are sorry, we find we can't do so at this time'- we still feel angry with the Party. It raised our expectations and then failed to meet them. Similarly, a person who often keeps us waiting- even if they always phone to say they will be late- disappoints our expectations.

The subject of our conversation is whether your anger about my lateness really is fitting, whether my lateness constitutes a genuine intrinsic reason for your anger.

This is not the subject of the conversation. It is that the other person is angry because you are unreliable and appear to care little about the inconvenience you cause to others.

 In ordinary conversation, we can and do mark a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental reasons for getting angry. If you are someone who takes pleasure in getting angry, I might say to you ‘I know it makes you feel good to get angry, but you really have no reason to be’.

Actually, the other party does have very good reason to be angry. Moreover, she now knows that this perpetually tardy person will not change her ways. Rather this person will dismiss any criticism by saying 'oh! you like criticising people and getting angry. That is why I should always keep you waiting in order for you to enjoy your rage.'

Here I contrast your instrumental reason for getting angry—it gives you pleasure—and your (lack of) intrinsic reason for getting angry.

You also show that you are very stupid and can't reason and have no empathy. Of course- if you are  Sheldon from Big Bang Theory and can prove Super String Theory- then people may still put up with you.

It is also striking that in ordinary, everyday situations, a shift of focus from intrinsic to instrumental justification for anger often comes across as a non sequitur (at best) and morally obtuse (at worst). If an unfaithful lover says in response to your anger: ‘you shouldn’t get angry because it’s just going to make me cheat more’, you have just been given additional reason for anger. For two wrongs have now been done: first, the initial betrayal of your trust, and second, the subsequent refusal to treat your anger at that betrayal as existing within the space of intrinsic reasons. The proponents of the counterproductivity critique run the risk of the second sort of wrong, the one committed by the unfaithful lover.

I am sorry to say, in our Society a person who says 'I won't be faithful to you' is not, ceteris paribus,  committing any sort of wrong. If the person betrayed your trust, that is one thing. But she is now saying 'I'm not going to be faithful to you. Indeed, I'm going to sleep with more, not less, people.' There is no question of any further breach of trust. You may feel angry and hurt but no wrong has been committed.

There is only one counterproductivity critique- viz an analytic one which says 'by definition, no apt action can be counterproductive'.

It is a wrong that has something in common—in structure, if not intent—with the most straightforwardly oppressive ways of speaking about anger. The misogynist dismisses a woman’s anger by calling her shrill or strident; the racist dismisses the black person’s anger by calling him a thug or an animal.

Really? So, if I were prosecuted for sexual harassment or discrimination in the work place would my saying 'this woman is shrill' lead to the dismissal of all charges against me? No. The only 'dismissal' which matters is that of the Court or other appropriate body.

These are not mere insults. These are rhetorical strategies that shift the explanatory context for the subject’s anger from the space of reasons to the space of causes.

They may be what they like- they have no persuasive or other force. I have the rhetorical strategy of making cat like noises whenever I am asked why I'm sleeping instead of doing the joy I'm paid to. This does not stop me getting fired.

The misogynist or racist explains away the woman’s or black person’s anger as a product of inferior character, treating the question ‘why is this person angry?’ as a request for a causal explanation rather than a justificatory one. And so the bigot says: she is only angry because she’s a shrill bitch; he’s only angry because he’s a thug. Thus the bigot obscures the possibility that the woman or black person’s anger is apt.

To whom? Does Amia herself get fooled in this way? The fact is, a causal explanation is also justificatory, if anger is justified- i.e. if you would feel angry under the same circumstances. The bigot's rejoinder has no probative value- on the contrary it is prejudicial to his own case. The bigot would be well advised to keep his mouth shut.

Intentionally or not, the counterproductivity critic achieves a similar effect.

Only in Amia's mind- but she is so stupid that when she hears some bigot say 'black peeps be stoopid' she thinks to herself 'OMG this rhetorical strategy is like totally obscuring the possibility, in my mind, that black peeps might be smart.'

By focussing on the putatively negative effects of the agent’s anger, the critic again shifts us from the space of intrinsic reason to the space of instrumental reason, thereby obscuring the possibility that the agent’s anger is apt.

But precisely the same thing may be said of making cat like noises. The reason logic is helpful to Philosophers is because it enables them to see that an argument which licenses any and every absurdity must be a false argument.

But when is a person’s anger apt? Consider the difference between anger and another negative emotion: disappointment. What makes anger intelligible as anger, and distinct from mere disappointment, is that anger presents its object as involving a moral violation: not just a violation of how one wishes things were, but a violation of how things ought to be.

Nonsense! Imagine a lawyer saying 'Smith kicked his kid's head in because the kid's un-kicked in head involved a moral violation; not just a violation of how Smith wished things were, but a violation of how things ought to be.'

When I say that I am disappointed that you betrayed me, I imply that I wish you hadn’t; when I say, by contrast, that I’m angry that you betrayed me, I imply that you shouldn’t have.

Rubbish! Disappointment means having had a reasonable expectation which was not met by reason of some act of omission or commission by the other party. Anger has no necessary connection with expectations or trust or betrayal. Football hooligans may have no reasonable expectation that their side will win against a superior rival, but they may still go ape-shit when their side loses.

(This isn’t to say that if I’m angry that you betrayed me, I must believe that you ought not have betrayed me; I am concerned here with the normative evaluation expressed by my emotion, which might well come apart from my normative beliefs about the situation.)

Why must you believe any such thing?

Since anger presents its object as involving a moral violation,

there is no reason to believe anything of the sort. Intoxicated and low mental competence people can get angry.

, one’s anger that p is apt only if p constitutes a genuine moral violation.

Nonsense. Even suppose there was an A.I with a deontic logic such that 'anger that p' is 'apt' only if p is X, it would not be the case that 'anger would be presenting' anything at all. Rather the A.I would have a 'presenting' module which was wholly different from the 'anger' module. The 'aptness' function too would be independent.

But if this true of an A.I implementing a deontic logic of a particular type it must also be the case that there is no necessary connection of the sort Amia describes. In other words, there is at least one possible world where this statement would be false.

As a matter of fact, if mathematics is the same everywhere, there is no possible world where it could be true, but it is unnecessary to show that.

If I am angry that you didn’t come to the party but your not coming to the party constitutes no moral violation, then my anger is hardly fitting.

Not in all possible worlds. It may be fitting. It may not. It depends.

What of the common claim—made for example by Nussbaum—that anger necessarily involves a desire to make the offending party suffer, and/or the belief that the offending party should suffer?

It is false.

Nussbaum, like many other contemporary philosophers, inherits this claim from antiquity; both Aristotle and the Stoics seem to have agreed that anger constitutively involved a desire for revenge, and ancient stories (most obviously the Iliad) suggest that the satisfaction of the revenge impulse did answer anger’s conative call. In turn Nussbaum uses this claim to support the conclusion that anger is never apt, for either, she argues, it involves the false belief that revenge will undo the original harm, or the morally suspect desire to ‘downrank’ the offender.

Mum is angry with me coz I'm better than this. Her anger is apt. It involves no desire to see me come to harm or 'downrank' me.

Perhaps this was true of the ancients.

It wasn't. The guys who wrote this shite were stupid pedagogues whom people made fun of.

But is it true for us? The nature of anger—how we experience it, what it calls on us to do—might well shift with historical and political circumstance. For example, Myles Burnyeat argues that the erosion of the honour code under the influence of Christianity has made common a form of anger that involves no desire for revenge—a possibility unthinkable, he says, to ancient philosophers.

So what? He's a stupid pedagogue of a shite subject.

Indeed, this is the problem with Amia's essay. She thinks the availability cascades of a wholly unimportant branch of the Academy has some political significance. It does not at all.

The truth is political discourse is exactly the same as ordinary discourse. An affect is not apt if it is counterproductive. What determines whether it will be counterproductive is the time-frame within which the reaction has to be produced. Amia is speaking of wholly different occasions-  where there is no time-frame and nothing is actually being produced because only idle chatter occurs.

Thus she writes-

Martin Luther King wrote of Malcolm X that in ‘articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative’ he has ‘done himself and our people a great disservice’ for ‘[f]iery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos can reap nothing but grief’.

This is mere rhetoric. It produces nothing. King was preaching to his choir and X to his. So what? Both may or may not be 'icons' but neither, to our knowledge, either materially hastened or retarded the process whereby some of  the finest, most patriotic, most productive people in the USA came into their own.

Would Amia, who is of Indian origin, dare to suggest that Indian Dalits did not achieve exactly the same goals purely because of their own sterling qualities? It is a different matter that armed cabals and criminal gangs can coerce a productive and pious population. But how many Dalits, how many African Americans, how many Black or Coloureds in South Africa, were themselves made of the same sterling stuff as an Ambedkar or Jagjivan Ram, a Dr. King or a Harriet Tubman, a Mandela or Bishop Tutu? I am happy to say, in each of these great democracies, it was the vast majority. Thus 'Upper Castes' did no favours to the 'Harijans' nor do any of their Pundits or Mahatmas deserve adoration for some supposed magnanimity in permitting the hardest working, most patriotic and productive of communities to take a bigger role in raising up the mother country.

Amia takes a different view. She thinks some historical personalities had magical powers and the journalists or academics who write about them as if they did aren't widely known to be as stupid as shit.

The American journalist Jonathan Chait defended President Obama’s reluctance to get publicly angry about white racism on the grounds that Obama was employing the ‘sensible practice’ of encouraging black people to ‘concentrate on the things they can control’ rather than ‘lash[ing] out’

Fuck Jonathan Chait. He has shit for brains. Has he cured cancer? No. Why listen to him?
Obama, by contrast, was smart. He knew what was the apt thing to do or say or emote. That's why he was a two term President who may remain a great force in American Politics for decades and decades.
Obama, unlike Chait or Amia, had great power and exercised it in a responsible manner. If Chait or Amia or any of their ilk had any great insights to offer, Obama would pick their brains. But they have none.

...Writing on Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, in which Israel killed approximately 1500 civilians in the blockaded Gaza Strip, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof exhorted Palestinians to abandon the anger that ‘has accomplished nothing but increasing the misery of the Palestinian people’; if only Palestinians would adopt the model of Gandhi, Kristof argued, the result would ‘reverberate around the world and Palestinians would achieve statehood and freedom’.

Who the fuck is Kristof? Has he invented Time Travel? No? Then fuck him. A Palestinian leader who adopts the methods of Gandhi would be shot by a fellow Palestinian, just as Gandhi was shot by a fellow Hindu, before he fucked over his own people in perpetuity.

Women have long been told that feminist progress would be swifter if only they would be less shrill about it.

By whom? Anybody who mattered? Fuck no. Which woman listens to shitheads? If you know any such woman, kindly give me her number and I'll tell her that feminist progress would be swifter if only she'd come over and do the washing up and then, like, cook a nice meal and light some scented candles and talk sweetly to me to put me in the mood....

LGBT activists are reminded by their allies that progress takes time, and that stridency gets in the way.

Allies? Does Amia mean deeply boring shitheads who like hearing themselves talk? Fuck have they ever achieved?

The counterproductivity of one’s anger is often seen as dispositive reason not to get angry, whatever the circumstances

Judges have dispositive reasons for actually disposing with cases. None of them takes such a foolish view.
Indeed, nobody does. Emotions could be thought of as Darwinian algorithms of the mind. It is likely that there are circumstances where they have survival value.

On such occasions, I want to suggest, reasons of prudence and reasons of aptness come apart, generating a substantive normative conflict.

Reasons of prudence are not reasons of aptness. They have no business being together. Prudence is demanded in certain professional codes of conduct and has a buck stopped definition. The Auditor or Treasurer may have a professional or fiduciary duty to take a gloomy view and put on record reasons against an entirely apt action.  Such Accountants expect to be overruled. They may qualify the Audit Report fully expecting to be disregarded as 'fuddy-duddies'. Still, everybody is pleased that the forms have been observed.

No 'substantive normative conflict' can arise in any essentially economic calculus because the discipline is wholly positive. It is a different matter that, if Knightian Uncertainty obtains, Regret minimization, not Utility maximisation, is procedurally rational.

Two things, I will argue, follow. First, the counterproductivity critic faces the burden of explaining why, in such conflicts, reasons of prudence trump reasons of aptness; until this burden is met, there is no obvious inference to be made from the counterproductivity of one’s anger to an all-things-considered prohibition on one’s getting angry.

Suppose the C.F.O of Tesla said-  'prudence dictates our M.D not tweet his belief that a diver, acclaimed for rescuing a child in Thailand, is actually a paedophile. Such an action will be counterproductive. Instead of causing the public to believe in our magical submarine, people will think it to be wholly worthless. They will also think our M.D is a piece of shit. They will dump our shares.'
I suppose Musk got angry because the diver said the submarine offer was worthless. So he fired off a tweet. It was not prudent to do so. It was highly counterproductive. Thus, it was also not apt.
An economic calculus reveals this. This is a purely positive matter. There is no Philosophical angle to it at all.

This does not mean that some supervening circumstance nobody foresaw might not cause a prima facie counter productive action to prove otherwise. Thus, suppose Musk is acquitted by a court of tweeting misleading information regarding his having secured funds for a buy out in order to illegally manipulate the stock price and destroy short sellers, because his attorney is able to show that he had a history of tweeting crazy shit and thus no reasonable person would have placed reliance on his statement; then, we might say, with hindsight, that pedo tweet was actually very productive. Musk's counterproductive ire saved his bacon.

However, this is merely a manner of speaking. It has nothing to do with either Economics or Philosophy.

Second, such conflicts—where victims of oppression must choose between getting aptly angry and acting prudentially—themselves constitute a form of unrecognised injustice, what I call affective injustice.

 I am a victim of oppression caused my neighbour's cat which has jumped through the window and is sleeping on my tummy. If I get angry, it may wake up and scratch me. I may well consider my prudential inability to get angry to be an affective injustice. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I see myself as a perpetual victim of this type of atrocity. Every time some one says something or does something which prudence alone counsels me to ignore rather than indulge in the small pleasure of blowing my stack, I become the victim of affective injustice. Laws relating to Hate Speech and Threatening Behaviour and Assault and Breach of the Peace inflict enormous amounts of affective injustice on people like me.

Unfortunately, despite the huge amount of affective injustice I suffer, not even one such case is justiciable. True some victims of justiciable oppression also suffer affective injustice but they have an avenue of redress, which may be expressed in terms of court awarded damages, which however I and people like me do not have. Thus, Amia's type of injustice is only denied any possibility of judicial redress if it corresponds to something reasonable people would consider to be genuine oppression.

Why has Srinivasan introduced, in the name of the oppressed, a type of injustice they alone may gain judicial redress for? She invokes James Baldwin in this context. But we know that Baldwin was referring to injustice done to African Americans. As a matter of fact, Affirmative Action programs did come into existence which took account of this 'affective injustice'. Universities, often created or funded by racists, made provision for academic programs where African American intellectuals could develop precisely this sort or irate critique. Tom Wolfe's essay 'Mau Mauing the Establishment' describes another facet of a process of reparation which had a juristic or justiciable aspect.

Is Srinivasan trying to say 'affective injustice', of an unfairly unjusticiable sort, arises everytime there is an instance of 'White Rage' which must suppress itself, for prudential reasons- for example by forswearing the n-word?

If so, she must endorse William Buckley's rejoinder to Baldwin which she selectively redacts as-

'If it does finally come to a confrontation, a radical confrontation ... then we will fight the issue, not only in the Cambridge Union, but we will fight it ... on beaches and on hills and on mountains and on landing grounds.'

Amia believes Buckley was saying-

Tolerance might be extended to Negroes, but not to their anger. Fiery prophecy must give way to cool pragmatism.

I think Amia is being very naive. Buckley was openly boasting that White America would slaughter African Americans if they dared to rebel. There was no question of tolerance- which means permitting others to do what you yourself are permitted to do.

Amia says-

 Buckley’s insistence that black anger is wrong because counterproductive for black people themselves places him in a long intellectual tradition

and goes on to talk about the Stoics and the early Christians. Is she utterly mad? Does she really not know that Buckley thought of himself as an 'Old Bourbon' Southern Conservative who could use affirmative action for Blacks as a way to destroy the appeal of white trash 'welfare populists'. That is why he endorsed affirmative action during his Mayoral run. Long term, this strategy paid off for the Conservatives. The Whites began to feel that Blacks and Hispanics and so on would disproportionately benefit from welfare and thus moved to the Right. Reagan couldn't have talked of 'Welfare Queens' if Blacks couldn't get Welfare. Desegregation of schools would have been meaningless if Colleges didn't have Quotas. Buckley's dream of turning White people against both 'the Harvard faculty' and 'Big Government' required a seeming accommodation with Dr. King's dream. But only seemingly.

Let us look at what Buckley actually said-

“Because if it does finally come to a confrontation, a radical confrontation, between giving up what we understand to be the best features of the American way of life…then we will fight the issue, and we will fight the issue not only in the Cambridge Union but we will fight it as you were once recently called to do on beaches and on hills and on mountains and on landing grounds and we will be convinced that just as you won the war against a particular threat to civilization, you were nevertheless waging a war in favor of and for the benefit of Germans, your own enemies, just as we are convinced that, if it should ever come to that kind of a confrontation, our own determination to win the struggle will be a determination to win the war  not only for whites but also for Negros.”

For Buckley, 'the best features of the American way of life' included things like laws against miscegenation- which were only declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, two years after this speech. At that time, some claimed to believe that the products of mixed marriages inherited the worst characteristics on both parents' races. This is what Buckley is getting at by saying White People will slaughter African Americans, and their allies, if they attempt to change these very marvellous features of the American way of life and that Negroes too would benefit by there being fewer 'half-caste' people.

It must be said that if Baldwin and Dr. King prevailed and if 'Affirmative Action' replaced Jim Crow and Active Persecution, then so did Buckley and his ilk consolidate their ideological hold on the 'silent majority' which was fleeing to the suburbs and abandoning Progressive Politics. It is interesting that 'White Grievance'- at what Amia calls 'affective injustice' is already a keynote in Buckley's speech. This is how he began his peroration-

“I propose to pay him [Baldwin] the honor this night of saying to him, ‘Mr. Baldwin, I am going to speak to you without any reference whatever to those surrounding protections which you are used to in virtue of the fact that you are a negro.”

It seems 'negros' are already habituated to superior entitlements and protections than poor old Whitey wot bin toting bales all the live long day for dem carpet-bagging coons in their fancy weskits and shiny silk hats.

Buckley would certainly have welcomed Amia's discovery that-

' Affective injustice is a second-order injustice that is parasitic on first-order injustice, a sort of psychic tax that is often levied on victims of oppression.'

This is quite foolish. If I suffer an unjust or oppressive act then part of the damage I suffer is the entire psychic cost no matter how it arises. The thing is wholly first order.

A second order effect might arise if I gain adequate damages for having had to suppress anger when I was genuinely oppressed but resent having to suppress my anger without any compensation in a situation where I would fall into the 'oppressor' class. Here an additional source of irritation and suppression has arisen purely on the basis of my gaining relief and damages for having been oppressed in another context.

Srinivas thinks affective injustice is bad though I suffer it in relation to my neighbour's cat and a man who has benefited from affirmative action may suffer it when he feels it imprudent to express his anger at his wife by kicking her head in.

She says

' Like more familiar kinds of injustice, the wrongness of affective injustice does not lie primarily in the fact that it makes its victims feel bad. Its wrongness lies rather in the fact that it forces people, through no fault of their own, into profoundly difficult normative conflicts—an invidious choice between improving one’s lot and justified rage.

This is nonsense. Suppose 'profoundly difficult normative conflicts' made a person feel good. Inflicting injustice upon her would still be wrong. This is why saying 'the dead are better off' is no defence against a charge of murder.

That said, first-order injustice need not be accompanied by affective injustice.

Or vice versa. Indeed, there is no connection between the two.

After all, it is possible that getting aptly angry about some first-order injustice would actually improve one’s situation.

In which case it wouldn't be counterproductive.

But that is likelier to be true for someone whose anger is not generally seen as sufficient reason to dismiss her from the public sphere—likelier, that is, for the sort of person who is not already stereotyped as rageful, violent, or shrill.

In which case anger genuinely is counterproductive.

If this is right—

it can't be because

if affective injustice is a genuine phenomenon

it is either first order or does not correspond to genuine oppression or injustice and thus is not potentially justiciable nor arises from an unconscionable type of contract, implicit or incomplete as it may be.

, one that disproportionately affects those who are already disproportionately affected by more familiar forms of injustice

as, indeed, it may appear to be but only if you believe stupid stereotypes

—then our political arrangements are festering with much unrecognised injustice.

which only Amia Srinivas has spotted. In which case she isn't as stupid as shit. But that can't possible be true- as witness

In other words, things are even worse than we generally take them to be.

Because people who commit road rage or spousal or child abuse are suffering some terrible 'affective injustice' in other areas of their life and so the true fault lies at another's door.

This is the ugly truth that those who would dismiss anger on the grounds of its counterproductivity obscure, inadvertently or purposefully.

Because, otherwise they would endorse not just majoritarian violence but also the rule of sociopathic mobsters.

A guy whose situation improves when he gets angry is likely to one who can oppress others or get away with injustice. Thus a mobster who gets angry with a traffic cop and pulls a gun and says 'I'm going to rape and kill your wife and children while making you watch' is likely to have his ticket torn up.
However, an even better result is achievable if he doesn't get angry but delivers his threat with chilling professionalism. This way, he can probably use the traffic cop for some criminal purpose to make even more money.

Human beings have evolved over millennia to use their emotions for signalling purposes as well as to motivate 'state dependent' disinhibition. Thus both the mobster and the traffic cop have sophisticated cognitive software for the relevant signal extraction problem. That is why a purely economic analysis- not a license for everybody to go ballistic- better models the macro equilibrium which Public Policy can then tackle.

Srinivasan takes a different view-

What, meanwhile, speaks in favour of apt counterproductive anger? What sort of value does an apt response have? I want to suggest that getting angry is a means of affectively registering or appreciating the injustice of the world, and that our capacity to get aptly angry is best compared with our capacity for aesthetic appreciation.

So, she is speaking not of affective injustice but vicarious or sympathetic anger which may cause a person with a lot of power, or a group which can gain a lot of power, remaking Society in a kinder and more humane manner.

Just as appreciating the beautiful or the sublime has a value distinct from the value of knowing that something is beautiful or sublime, there might well be a value to appreciating the injustice of the world through one’s apt anger—a value that is distinct from that of simply knowing that the world is unjust.

So this anger is objective, not subjective, and has no necessary connection with anything to do with one's own person.

Imagine a person who does everything, as it were, by the ethical book—forming all the correct moral beliefs and acting in accordance with all her moral duties—but who is left entirely cold by injustice, feeling nothing in response to those moral wrongs of which she is perfectly aware. I don’t want to say that such a person has done anything wrong. But I do think it is natural to say that there is something missing in her; indeed, that it would be better, ceteris paribus, if she were capable of feeling anger towards the injustice she knows to exist.

The problem here is that people who claim to feel great anger at injustices in far away places or express indignation at undeserved suffering inflicted on lives remote from their own, also tend to be a fucking nuisance and to support entirely foolish and actively mischievous schemes.

It may be natural for Amia to feel differently- but then she is as stupid as shit. As witness the following

Of course, the sceptic about apt anger’s intrinsic value would argue that all that really matters is how an agent responds in action, not affect, to injustice;

Affect is an action because Amia previously admitted that emotions have a signalling  value. Indeed, they are a proxy for  preference intensity (provided preference falsification based on academic or  other epistemic availability cascades do not predominate) and thus can improve Social Choice.

However this means that worthless shite of Amia's stripe must be excluded from Public Discourse.

anger, the sceptic will say, is at best instrumentally valuable for its role in getting us to act as we should. Since our hypothetical person acts impeccably without the aid of apt affect, she lacks nothing—and our intuition to the contrary is just an expression of our fetish (the sceptic might say) for emotion. Notice that a similar argument can be run against the intrinsic value of apt aesthetic responses: our capacity to appreciate the beautiful or the sublime, the sceptic can argue, is only instrumentally valuable for its role in getting us to act as we should (that is, respecting what is aesthetically valuable). But I want to suggest that such scepticism should be rejected as simply that: a scepticism that can be broadly expanded to include anything that we intuit of intrinsic value, including epistemic goods like truth, justification, and knowledge. The sceptic is wrong to say that all we really do care about is correct action, and not apt affect— and he offers us no compelling reason to think that this is all we should care about.

Here's one. It is non discriminatory to autistic people or others with diminished affect. Amia is wrong because she has an unconscious bias against such people- even if the reason for their flattened affect is some horrendous and repeated trauma.

That said, apt anger is not perfectly analogous to aesthetic appreciation: to get aptly angry is not merely to appreciate the disvalue of an unjust situation or an immoral act. Anger is also a form of communication, a way of publicly marking moral disvalue, calling for the shared negative appreciation of others.

Which is why anger is strategic and gamed by unscrupulous or sociopathic Pundits or Politicians- more particularly with regard to anger of the vicarious, or- so to speak- aesthetic sort.

This is also the case when we experience anger as a stage in a bereavement process. It is misleading and a proper counsellor will be able to show us how it arises and what must succeed it.

That we can sometimes stew silently in our anger does not make this any less true. Consider Job’s anger, nursed over seven days and seven nights of silence, only to erupt in a demand that a judge find Job innocent of crimes against God.

Job had lost all his children. He was grieving. Anger is a stage in the grieving process. His counsellors were stupid and mischievous- the last accused him of unjust enrichment for which he was now paying the karmic price. Why on earth is Amia mentioning this good man whom the Lord restored to even greater prosperity?

Anger does not always succeed in this call.

It never does. A person who, while grieving suddenly becomes agitated and who accuses herself of having slain her beloved will not have that child restored to her even if some Judge were found who would be willing to bring her to trial for that supposed crime.

Sometimes, often, our anger calls for public recognition but is met with dismissal or retrenchment.

Because life is short and tempers shorter.

And sometimes it might well be that our best chance of doing good in the world is to rid ourselves of our anger as best we can: to stop appreciating and marking the world’s awfulness in order to be able to do something about it.

In other words, not writing crap like this, no- nor teaching it neither.

Perhaps, all-things-considered, this is sometimes a sacrifice worth making. But my point is that it is a sacrifice, one that lies at the heart of the conflict represented by apt counterproductive anger.

Very true! Abraham was called upon to sacrifice his son. During a War, parents are called upon to send their young men and women into the armed forces because dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. A person may sacrifice a kidney to save the life of a stranger. All this is comparable to the sacrifice involved in stopping appreciating the world's awfulness in order to do something about it.

I suggest that Amia's entire oevre consists in taking up a word which is meaningful and rejecting that meaning so as to write utter shite.

In such cases, victims of injustice must choose between making the world as it should be, and appreciating and marking the world as it is.

Wow! Who knew? People being lined up for the gas chamber or the firing squad MUST CHOOSE between MAKING the world as it should be- i.e. free of gas chambers or genocidal men in uniforms- and APPRECIATING those same gas chambers or murderous thugs.

This conflict is not merely psychically painful; it is a genuine normative conflict, a conflict involving competing and significant goods that often feel incomparable.

Amia is wrong. There are no willing victims of injustice who choose to appreciate being killed or otherwise fucked over. Something pyschically painful does happen but it has nothing to do with 'genuine normative conflict' which nobody but one or two stupid pedagogues in worthless Departments ever pretended existed.

No. I tell a lie. There was that scence in Schindler's list where Superman says to the Hulk 'listen dude, we gotta choose whether to just go on appreciating the whole, y'know, aesthetic gestalt of this gas chamber, or like, y'know, fucking destroy it and then beat up all them bad guys.' Hulk replies 'Hulk no Smash. Hulk suffer genuine normative conflict. Supes no get Hulk's pyschic pain. Also you should have said mise en scene not gestalt. Didn't you go to Collidge?'

Are there any circumstances at all where Amia isn't talking obvious bollocks? She began her essay with the famous debate between James Baldwin and William S Buckley which is easily accessible on You Tube.
Everyone knows Buckley was a racist and that Baldwin was on the right side of History. Not Amia, however. She says-

This first-personal conflict faced by the victim of systematic injustice has a second-personal counterpart. As I’ve said, proponents of the counterproductivity critique, like Buckley, often position themselves as well-meaning sympathisers.

But no one was fooled then or now. Buckley thought the Whites could and would crush the Blacks militarily back then- but we know they couldn't if they also wanted the US to maintain a credible threat with respect to boots on the ground type conflicts in far away places.

They are concerned, they say, with the interests of those treated unjustly.

You say the same thing, but we don't believe you either.

But there is something morally insensitive in their rallying cry: ‘don’t get angry, it only makes things worse!’

There is more than moral insensitivity, there is downright imbecility in your claim that victims of injustice have a choice between preventing it or appreciating it- with both alternatives representing 'competing and valuable goods (coz getting to die in a gas chamber can be appreciated as highly educational, right?)

It suggests that the moral violation is not so bad, just a practical problem to be solved, rather than a wrongdoing to which its victim must bear witness.

WTF? It is moral to prevent moral violation- solving whatever practical problems arise in doing so. It is immoral to say that victims must bear witness to such preventable wrongdoing on some spurious psilosophical grounds.

It suggests that the primary locus of responsibility for fixing the problem lies with the victim rather than the perpetrator.

Only Amia has made this suggestion. Nobody else says that victims have a choice.

Indeed it risks obscuring the fact that this advice is good advice only because of unjust social arrangements in which the critic himself is often complicit.

But Amia is the only such critic here. Buckley wasn't saying to Baldwin- 'Blacks can change things but they have the choice not to which has this great benefit such that they get to witness and appreciate injustice perpetrated on themselves'.  He was saying- 'dude, we will slit your throats if you act up.'

In this it shares something in common with the advice delivered to women and girls about how to avoid getting raped (abstaining from alcohol, revealing clothing, and late nights out).

The same advise is given to boys and men at risk of being mugged or sodomised or mugged, sodomised and then murdered.

The problem is not that such advice rests on false empirical premises, or that there is not a genuine prudential reason for girls and women to avoid situations in which they might get raped. The problem with such advice—and the reason why it is condemned by feminists as rape apologism—is that it suggests that the moral responsibility for minimising rape lies with girls and women. It moreover obscures the fact that this advice is good advice only because men do in fact rape; the ubiquity of rape is treated as a fixed fact, rather than a contingency for which men bear moral responsibility.

As a matter of fact, though more men commit rapes than women, the most prolific rapists are all women. As boys we were warned of getting raped by these Aunties who preferred to service 30 middle school kids over recess at a low tariff  rather than avoid the crime of statutory rape by taking on more time consuming clients. They did this because they probably had kids to feed whom they were in a hurry to get back to.

No doubt, we were advised not to allow these diseased rapists anywhere near our person. However, this sort of 'rape apologism' was rightly condemned by Society. The Police would often cart these dangerous criminals off to the Thana where what happened to them was, I imagine, less remunerative and more arduous.

Women must bear moral responsibility for a Society which they and they alone repopulate.

Similarly, the counterproductivity critique treats the counterproductivity of anger as a fixed fact, rather than as a largely contingent feature of social reality.

Unfortunately, social reality is a largely contingent feature of killing bad people who would like to make it even worse. Anger doesn't make you better at killing such people in an efficient and professional manner. It is a work skill like any other.

The advice to abstain from drinking or not to get angry can sometimes be sincerely defended as ‘encouraging people to focus on what they have control over’, as a merely pragmatic or prudential counsel.

It can and is always so defended.

But that defence fails to understand how the insistence on people’s pragmatic interests—not to be raped, or not to be dismissed from the public sphere—can itself be oppressive, an obfuscation of the fundamental injustice at work.

In which case the advise not to take drugs and jump off tall buildings in the belief that you can fly is equally oppresive and an obfuscation of the fundamental injustice at work in the fact that Society has obstinately refused to genetically modify us sufficiently to be able to flap our arms and fly like birds.

And yet, there is also something morally troubling about the opposing rallying cry: ‘nurse your anger!’ In this we might hear a lack of care for the suffering agent herself; we might detect a threat that she will be instrumentalised for a political cause. Neither of these slogans is morally right on its own, and yet both contain some truth.

Nonsense! These are wholly imperative statements and contain no truth precisely for that reason. Suppose Trumpistas form a militia whose battle cry is 'Remember the Alamo!' ; it is not the case that anyone of their number who admitted to having forgotten the Alamo while shooting that dude who looked a bit Mexican- or like maybe he'd once eaten a Taco- would be considered to have failed  in his sworn duty.

We want to say both at once, and yet that will be to offer practically incoherent advice.

Incoherence does not matter when it comes to imperative statements. Indeed, such incoherence, as in Ross's paradox, increases the emotional and thus imperative valence of the statement. Dubya was as incoherent as shit. But his voters knew what he meant precisely because his speech was so garbled.

As experienced by the sympathetic bystander, this secondpersonal conflict does not carry with it the psychic sting of the first-personal conflict. But imagine its subject to be the parent of a child who is facing an occasion for apt counterproductive anger—say the parent of a young black girl who is regularly sexually harassed at school. How does the parent advise his or her child?

Advising the child is a separate matter. The parent has a duty of care to stop the sexual harassment.

Here the conflict is raised acutely, with all the sting (perhaps more) of the first-personal conflict.

No conflict is raised. There is a plain and simple duty of care.

I have suggested that occasions for apt counterproductive anger present victims of injustice (and sometimes those who care for those victims) with substantive and psychically costly normative conflicts.

Why have you suggested such a foolish thing? We have no reason to believe substantive and psychically costly normative conflicts exist. We don't believe your scenario about victims choosing to endure injustice because it gives them a chance to appreciate the world as it is. No other scenario you have mentioned would not involve a Isaac Levi type 'hard choice'- i.e. Uncertainty, or incomplete Preferences, or akrasia of some fluctuating type- which would create the same type of psychic cost even on a purely positive calculus. However psychic pain, like physical pain, can be alleviated by a medical professional. It is not the proper subject of philosophy.

I want to draw out two lessons from this. First, those who argue that one ought not get angry whenever it would be counterproductive to do so face an argumentative burden.

No. Counterproductive means the opportunity cost was higher than the value attained. This is a purely analytic result. There is no 'argumentative burden'.

They must explain why it is that in cases where one’s anger would be counterproductive yet apt, prudential considerations must overwhelm aptness considerations.

It is never apt to do what is counterproductive because a superior alternative is available. Again, this is a purely analytical result.

It is not obvious, in these kinds of cases, that the normative demands to better one’s unjust situation trump the normative demands to appreciate the badness of one’s situation.

It is self-evident, unless one is a Circumcellion or has a Martyr complex or is mentally ill.

We are due an account of why, in such cases, counterproductivity considerations trump all else.

This is because a better alternative trumps a worse alternative- by definition.

Without such an account, one might well be suspicious that the counterproductivity critique—as in the case of Buckley’s response to Baldwin—is more often an attempt at social control than a manifestation of genuine concern.

Why be suspicious? It was obvious that Buckley was saying 'us Whites will kill you Blacks. Our rage counts more than yours. There are more of us and we are better armed. Suck it up.'

The second lesson is this. During a radio interview in 1961, Baldwin was asked to elaborate on comments he had made in a review of the poems of Langston Hughes. He said: [T]o be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time ... [T]he first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you ... You have to decide that you can’t spend the rest of your life cursing out everybody that gets in your way. As a writer, you have to decide that what is really important is not that the people you write about are Negroes, but that they are people, and that the suffering of any person is really universal. If you can reach this level, if you can create a person and make other people feel what this person feels, then it seems to me that you’ve gone much further, not only artistically, but socially ... I talked about Langston not being the first poet to find these responsibilities all but irreconcilable. And he won’t be the last, because it demands a great deal of stepping out of a social situation in order to deal with.'

Where is the lesson? Baldwin and Hughes were writers of a particular type. Few people want to be writers and fewer still would have wanted to be Baldwin or Hughes type writers because the thing had already been done.

There is no lesson here at all.

For Baldwin, both he and Hughes best served the world ‘not only artistically, but socially’ through the sort of writing that transcended raw anger against whites in order to achieve a hard-won universality.

So what? That was Baldwin's opinion- or at any rate what he said was his opinion about a specific problem facing specific writers at a specific moment in History. It may be, that both Langston and Baldwin could have chosen to write atrocity stories. Perhaps they were asked to write the sort of stuff the Soviets could use for propaganda purposes. They chose another course and it scarcely matters very much to anyone now living what that choice was or how they felt about it.

On Baldwin’s view, not only art but justice demanded the setting aside of their justified daily rage.

Baldwin does not say that. He was not such a fool as to believe that Art or Justice or Nature or Humanity or Americanism or any other such abstraction could or should make any sort of demands on a writer. Instead he expressed his own personal opinion that he and Langston had made the choices that were right for them as writers of a certain type.

In this way he accepted the empirical presupposition at the heart of Buckley’s counterproductivity critique—that black anger didn’t best serve the interests of black people.

Where is the evidence that he accepted any such thing? If that was what he believed, why did he not say to Buckley? Was he a liar or merely a poltroon? Amia has invented an absurd belief and attributed it to Baldwin because she herself is very stupid and believes that a counterproductive action can nevertheless be apt.

But unlike Buckley, Baldwin knew all too well that this generated a profound conflict for black Americans.

Buckley never said 'Blacks are happy being oppressed.' He said more or less openly that they'd get their throats slit if they showed signs of anger or rebellion.

Everybody at some time or other has been bullied or been made to feel impotent. This generates profound conflict. But this is something universal. Some people avoid any interaction where this might happen. Others have no choice but to visit the parent who makes them feel like a piece of shit, or take orders from the boss who enjoys humiliating them and so forth.

Does Amia really not understand this?

Indeed Baldwin here is speaking, I want to suggest, of two kinds of injustice. First is the daily oppression of being a black person in the US—impoverishment, ghettoisation, threat of physical attack, political and social marginalisation, psychic degradation.

Some whites would have had similar experiences and some blacks would not.

These are the things that cause a ‘relatively conscious’ black American to be in a rage ‘almost all the time’. And second is what I want to call affective injustice: the injustice of having to negotiate between one’s apt emotional response to the injustice of one’s situation and one’s desire to better one’s situation—a conflict of responsibilities that are ‘all but irreconcilable’. Affective injustice, I take Baldwin to be suggesting, partly constitutes the injustice of the black American situation

as it does of every other human situation. Surely, if there was something wholly unique to the African American experience, Baldwin would have told us what that is. Why read something foolish into the writing of an intelligent man who knew what he was talking about?

The answer, I suppose, is Amia has to produce a paper and anger has to feature in it and because her discipline is wholly worthless she had to write the most counterproductive shite possible.

Has she succeeded? Let us look at her concluding remarks-

I have argued that occasions for apt but counterproductive anger present victims of injustice with substantive normative conflicts, conflicts that themselves plausibly constitute a form of second-order injustice.

A victim of an injustice may feel anger and fear and a number of other emotions while being victimized. We can not say there is any 'occasion' for anger, or anything else, on the part of the victim iff they know of no means to avert it. We can say there is an occasion for anger for any person who comes to know about this injustice because that anger may cause them to put an end to the injustice. We may also say that there is an occasion for pity, horror, and grief for those who come to know of this injustice but who are unable to avert it. We have no business telling the victim what to feel because her victimization is not an occasion for anything deontic at all, unless of course the injustice is merely delusional or effervescent. Thus a Theist may demand, on the basis of Scripture, that the victim be cheerful because suffering in this world is briefer than a second compared to eternal bliss in the bosom of the Lord. However, we rightly think such Theists or Philosophers are fucked in the head.

A lawyer representing a victim of injustice is of course welcome to find grounds for an award of punitive damages. However, in this case, affective injustice would still be first order because it arises directly from the commission of the injustice. Thus, a lawyer may say 'because my client was dumb, or mentally impaired, or belonged to such and such particularly abject community- e.g. she was a trafficked woman and thus an illegal immigrant unable to speak our language- higher damages should be awarded because of 'affective injustice'.'

Unfortunately, in the specific case Amia has in mind, this argument fails. Nobody believes that African Americans over the last fifty years are so cowed and abject as not to have emotional integrity. We also don't believe any one of them is as stupid as Amia and thus we know they would not waste a second pondering some wholly incompossible and absurd 'substantive normative conflict' of the sort only Chidi, in The Good Place, would make a meal of.

This puts pressure on the counterproductivity critic to explain just why we should accept his inference from the counterproductivity of one’s anger to an all-things-considered prohibition on one’s getting angry.

There is no such pressure. Amia has just conceded that a better alternative than anger exists. She conceded the case in advance but was too stupid to realise it.

I can imagine the counterproductivity critic responding as follows: ‘My target isn’t anger as such, but common expressions of anger, like shouting, hyperbolic rhetoric or aggressive facial expressions

or filling your hands with your own feces and flinging it at your opponent

 When I say that one ought not get angry even when encountering injustice, what I really mean is: one ought not act angry in politics.

So Amia admits that she isn't really interested in victims of injustice. She is wholly concerned with vicarious anger on behalf of such victims displayed for a political purpose. However, there is a clear Agent Principal hazard here. The pain of the victim may be being used to extort a rent for their supposed champion.

Amia herself is guilty of extractive introjection- she is confiscating the genuine psychic pain of African Americans so as to capitalise upon it- trading perhaps on her complexion- despite the fact that she is of a High Caste Hindu background.

'One’s being angry isn’t counterproductive; only one’s acting angry is. For all I’ve said, being angry might be perfectly permissible on some occasions, precisely because (as you say) it is sometimes apt. Thus I don’t face the explanatory burden with which you charge me.’

As a matter of fact some methods of expressing anger- e.g. flinging your feces around or chopping off your own army so as to beat others with it- should never be indulged in. Amia is so stupid she has invented a straw man superior to her own argument.

Many counterproductivity critics would not be willing to endorse this line of response. In particular, the Stoics and their contemporary followers like Nussbaum draw a strong, constitutive connection between anger and its stereotypical expression. But are they right to do so? On what we might call a pure disjunctivist view of anger, there is no significant connection between anger and its expression; anger is a mere feeling, and that feeling must be sharply distinguished from whatever behaviour contingently accompanies it. If the pure disjunctivist view is right, then the refined version of the counterproductivity critique must be taken very seriously indeed.

Because you really must not fling your hands with your feces and fling the stuff about- unless of course you have Tenure in a worthless Department, in which case it is obligatory.

For it will be perfectly coherent to say that victims of injustice ought not behave in stereotypically angry ways, but that they are permitted—indeed perhaps even encouraged—to feel angry.

Unfortunately, feeling angry without appearing to be so is one particularly fearful  stereotype of murderously angry behaviour- hence the expression 'cold fury'. Thus it isn't coherent at all to say this.

The Stoics then will be wrong to chastise anger as such; their proper target will turn out to be stereotypical but non-constitutive behavioural expressions of anger.

Nonsense! The Stoics may have an esoteric meta-psychology such that the feeling of anger is poisonous in both a biological and a metaphysical way. Amia once again has displayed only her own stupidity.

Moreover, if the pure disjunctivist view is right, then the conflict I want to discuss—the conflict between instrumental and intrinsic reasons for getting angry—will turn out to be a chimera.

Nonsense! Either the disjunctivist view has a purely analytic method of distinguishing simulated, dissimulated and 'natural' feelings- in which case it can solve not just every preference revelation and incentive compatiblity problem but also any Transportation problem (by a theorem of Myerson's) and thus a lot of open problems in Maths and Physics- or else instrumental and intrinsic reasons for getting angry may conflict in more than a chimeral manner. Amia is trying to be clever, but her ignorance and stupidity have tripped her up.

For it will turn out that I have conflated reasons for being angry with reasons for acting angrily.

It may be perfectly reasonable to do so- indeed, by the Revelation Principle, there must always be some Social Mechanism whereby this would be the case for everybody.

I think we should be cautious, however, in accepting pure disjunctivism about anger.

You should be cautious, Amia, of using words you don't understand, because you have a gift for slapstick and trip up immediately. Other people need not- though they too will end up saying nothing of interest.

Empirical psychologists typically endorse what we might call strong functionalism about anger, the view that anger—as well as the other (putatively) basic, universal emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust—is at least partly constituted by its stereotypical expression. This is because anger, along with the other basic emotions, appear to possess manifestation and recognition conditions that are stable across human cultures, and that are shared in common with many mammals—for example, grimacing, raised voice, and aggressive staring.

So what? There is a Kafka's poison type problem here. Some of us are good actors and can 'turn it on and off'. Nobody with a Netflix account does not know this.

On the standard view within empirical psychology, basic emotions like anger are ‘affect programmes’, universal modes of complex, unconscious behaviour that have deep evolutionary roots. Such apparent universality constitutes some reason to think that anger’s stereotypical expression is at least partly constitutive of anger, and thus that pure disjunctivism should be rejected. But if we reject pure disjunctivism, what are we to make of cases in which people seem to get angry without exhibiting stereotypical angry behaviour? Must we conclude that those who are culturally trained not to display patterns of angry arousal are incapable of getting angry?

What is wrong with this woman? Did she not have a South Indian Mom who smiled sweetly in the drawing room as some strange Aunty forced food upon us, only to reveal her white hot rage in the car going home by upbraiding us saying 'why did you have to eat all the grapes? Do we not feed you enough at home? Just you wait. I will beat you so much, grapes will come out of your every limb!'

To take a specific case, must we conclude that Gandhi’s spiritual exercises left him devoid of anger, rather than radically re-shaping the behavioural manifestations of his anger?

Gandhi, poor fellow, was a beggar. Moreover his own people would beat him savagely if he wagged his tail too much. Thus to keep getting money and avoid getting beaten, the man had to spend a lot of time fasting and giving and receiving enemas and talking shite to other shitheads. Still, he was able to vent his displeasure on some harmless people because he had some power. That's what makes the difference.

Still, to answer the question, let us look at an instance when Gandhi got angry with the new ruler of a Princely State his Dad had served and whose previous ruler had been a big fan of his. Gandhi believed his going on a fast would bring the Prince to his senses. However, the Prince's Dewan was a smart guy and played the caste card against Congress. Gandhi got even more angry and so vented his spleen on some wholly innocent British officer. Finally, realising he'd failed and made a fool of himself, he went back to his Ashram and slept naked with some young ladies and had a lot of enemas and talked various stripes of shite.

Strong functionalism will require us to accept both these conclusions

Nonsense! Gandhi performed spiritual exercises. This made him vain. Vain people are prone to anger- more particularly if they think of themselves as Maharishis or Mahatmas. In the epics, they go around cursing people any time they feel inadequately flattered. Gandhi was no different as a matter of psychology. But he was financially dependent and also at risk of getting his head kicked in if his tongue got away from him which is why he had a lot of 'days of silence' and stuck to chanting hymns and grinning toothlessly when confronted by the rural masses.

It should be remembered that Gandhi was constantly getting his ego bruised by his disciples because of his various bad habits- like sleeping with naked women and talking utter bollocks.

 I take this to be an unfortunate cost. Where does this leave us? I want to suggest that a more moderate functionalism allows us to reject pure disjunctivism while leaving room for the possibility that anger’s natural expression can be altered significantly by cultural training. According to the sort of moderate functionalism I have in mind, the behavioural expressions that partly constitute a given individual’s anger  depends on that individual’s cultural training.

This is why all Americans behave in exactly the same way as do all Indians and all Chinese and so on.

Some forms of cultural training leave the natural affect programme behaviours associated with a basic emotion more or less untouched. Other forms of cultural training (or spiritual re-training) might suppress these behaviours to the extent that what it is for the enculturated individual to be angry itself changes. For someone raised in a culture that teaches children never to raise their voices or grimace when angry, it is possible to be angry without exhibiting those behaviours. But for someone not raised in such a culture, raising one’s voice and grimacing in part constitutes one’s getting angry. To tell the latter sort of person that she is free to ‘feel angry’ but just isn’t allowed to raise her voice or grimace is like saying that one can take a pound of flesh but no jot of blood. It might be metaphysically possible for someone to do so, but it isn’t possible for the person in question to do so.

This is probably untrue, but the converse isn't. There are some people who don't have 'normal' emotions and this has nothing to do with culture, which can change very quickly and, in any case, is never univocal. It is because Amia's theory excludes people of this sort that it is repugnant.

It is of course metaphysically possible for the person in question to become the sort of person who can do so— precisely by engaging in radical affective retraining. But the proponent of the refined counterproductivity critique claims to be saying that the angry person is permitted to feel angry (here, now), not that the angry person is permitted to feel angry once she undergoes affective retraining.

A proponent of any sort of counter-productivity critique would focus only on opportunity cost because that is all that matters when considering a production function. Some one who speaks of something being permissible or impermissible isn't talking about productivity at all. Affective retraining is a type of production. It is either effective or ineffective. If a person who underwent this retraining continues to feel angry then the training was ineffective. It is also counterproductive if at least one alternative retraining program could have been more effective. One may say it is not permissible to use an ineffective or counter-productive technique. One can't say the subject of such a technique acts impermissibly save to indite that technique as ineffective.

One might worry that this line of defence will not work to justify the use of angry political rhetoric employed by Baldwin or Malcolm X—the kind of angry expression that is often subject to the counterproductivity critique. For honed, stinging rhetoric might not seem to be part of what it is for anyone, constitutively speaking, to get angry. But is that right? For figures like Baldwin and Malcolm X, or for that matter Catharine MacKinnon and Angela Davis, getting angry just does seem to involve an enviably articulate verbal expression, a swift and often spontaneous conversion of sentiment into word. Indeed one might worry that the counterproductivity critic, in seeking to distinguish anger from its rhetorically sophisticated expression, risks mischaracterising figures like Baldwin, Malcolm X, MacKinnon, and Davis as simply shrewd political agents, rather than genuine victims of the oppression they argue against.

So, Eldridge Cleaver was right to rape African American women 'for practice' because he had a theory that raping White women was part and parcel of 'insurrectionary politics'. 'Enviably articulate verbal expression' may be a skill acquired in a repugnant manner. Even if it is not, it can be countered in this way.
Idolatory is not Philosophy. Special pleading for one's own personal heroes is merely adolescent schwarmarei. There is no line of defence here- merely something stupid and offensive.

Of course, this does not mean that angry political rhetoric is always all-things-considered justified.

It does not mean anything at all.

But it does mean that when normatively evaluating angry political rhetoric, it is not enough to think of it only in terms of its political efficacy. We must also think of it as an act in itself, an act that—when apt—registers and communicates the badness of injustice.

 Nonsense! We are under no obligation to take Trump's tantrums as 'registering and communicating' the badness of some injustice done to him by Comey or Mueller.
Amia is not doing philosophy she is seeking to justify an adolescent crush she has on a particularly mischievous type of 'activist'.

 In brief: the refined counterproductivity critique requires us to endorse pure disjunctivism about anger, which we have reason to reject on independent, empirical grounds.

Human beings show considerable diversity in phenotype. It is likely that disjunctivism is a useful description of some people but not others. That is why, we ought not to appeal to it in any philosophical context.

But rejecting pure disjunctivism does not require us to accept a strong functionalism that precludes the possibility of significant variation in anger’s expression.Instead I have suggested we embrace a moderate functionalism, according to which the constitutive connections between anger and behaviour can rest on particulars of cultural training, and indeed the particulars of individual personality.

Why embrace something which may not obtain in certain cases? What kind of universal argument can be made on that basis?

If we endorse such a moderate functionalism, the refined counterproductivity critique loses its bite. For then we find ourselves unable to distinguish sharply enough between anger and angry behaviour to vindicate the critic’s claim to be condemning only the latter.

This is one reason why a counterproductivity critique would be wholly analytical. It doesn't have to bite anyone. It just says 'by definition a counterproductive thing is never apt'.

Before I proceed to the next (and final) section, allow me a brief note on violence. In speaking about anger’s stereotypical expressions I have deliberately set aside the question of violence. Though of course associated with anger, violence is not thought to be part of anger’s ‘affect program’; indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, the function of anger is to avoid costly violent interactions while securing the goods that might be afforded by them.

Nonsense! A mouse may be very angry with a cat. The cat will still eat it. Perhaps, Amia believes that anger boosts one's fighting ability and thus, at the margin, may enable one to get a larger share of the pie. In that case, it would make sense for oppressors to cultivate anger.

Indeed, most adult humans appear capable of getting angry without becoming physically violent. (Consider how many supposedly ‘violent’ protests involve only physical damage to property, not other persons.) Yet I grant that some people might well be such that for them getting angry just is (in part) getting violent. If so, then telling such people not to be violently angry is equivalent to telling them not to be angry. I think we can and should accept this implication. If someone has been raised such that she cannot get angry without getting violent, then when we tell her that she cannot be violent we are also saying that she cannot get angry—at least not without radical affective retraining. But I want to suggest that such a case is importantly different from the cases I have been so far discussing.

This is nonsense. No Society would last very long if people were raised such that they could not get angry without getting violent. It is sufficient for there be to some variation in phenotype for such people to exist. But, this also means that there will always be cases where 'radical affective retraining' would be ineffective.

In the standard ‘counterproductivity’ case, anger is said to be all-things-considered prohibited because of its bad consequences, because of the weight of instrumental reason counting against it.

This is not true. The counterproductivity case is that a thing can't be apt if it is counterproductive. Suppose there was someone stupid enough to say 'anger is all-things-considered prohibited', we would immediately reply- 'dude, you just violated your own prohibition! What you just said was prompted by your anger at people behaving in a counterproductive way!' The other may reply- 'that is not true. I was completely serene when I said it'. You reply 'but you can't deny you just got hot under the collar just now'. "No I didn't!'. 'Whoa dude! Keep your hair on!' "I really am not getting angry!' 'Sure. Whatever. Jeez. Just calm down okay? You're gonna get us thrown out of this bar'.

But when violence is wrong, it is presumably wrong not because of its bad consequences, but rather because it is categorically wrong, a violation of a moral prohibition, perhaps, against needless physical harm.

Either violence has an intensional, and thus categorical definition or it doesn't- in which case what Amia said is nonsense. If Violence has an intensional definition, we would be able to say that a particular action would always class as 'violence' in any possible universe. Suppose I stab you in the neck. In this world, this is violence, but in a possible world, where I'm not a homeless bum, but rather a skilled surgeon, it is not violence but an emergency tracheotomy of a wholly salutary type. It may be that, in this instance, I misdiagnosed you and caused needless physical harm. Still, I have a defence in law. It may be that any physician would have made the same assumption as I did. Indeed, the entire medical community may testify that what I did was perfectly proper.

When an instance of anger constitutively involves violence, such anger would be allthings-considered prohibited not because of its bad consequences, but rather because it involves a violation of a moral prohibition. Thus a defence of the possibility of anger’s aptness need not yield a defence of angry violence. 

There can be no instance of anger which constitutively involves violence in all possible worlds because we can imagine an air-gapped 'brain in a vat' world where the thing is not possible.

My focus here has been a type of conflict frequently faced by victims of injustice, conflicts that I have suggested might themselves constitute a distinctive form of injustice.

We have no reason to entertain your suggestion. It is wholly foolish.

What should we do when faced with such conflicts?

What do you do?

There is a standard philosopher’s way of hearing that question, and a standard philosopher’s way of  answering it.

Utterly false. Philosophers display more not less diversity in reception and response.

We hear it as a question about what, in general, agents facing these conflicts ought to do, and we answer it by saying: these agents ought to do what they have all-things-considered reason to do, or what they practically ought to do, and so on.

A philosopher may be the victim of injustice. If Amia genuinely believes what she says, then if she is a victim of injustice, her own behaviour is the answer to her question. If Amia is genuinely interested in victims of injustice- let us say the sort that trafficked women suffer in the very City where she teaches- she could, in seeking to rescue them, herself become such a victim. Perhaps, a corrupt cop- in the pay of the brothel owner- will arrest her on a bogus charge- say that of aiding Terrorists. She may be incarcerated or deported in an unjust manner.

What would be her response? Obviously, she will shout 'Death to Whitey!' while standing in the dock and announce her decision to join ISIS and kill a bunch of kindergartners. This won't be counterproductive at all. It would be highly apt and reflect the ontological reality of the sort of 'affective injustice' only she believes in.

There are of course philosophers who resist the idea that there is a fact of the matter about what we have ‘all-things-considered reason’ to do, or who resist the idea that there is some normatively supreme ‘practical’ ought that resolves such conflicts. Such resistance is often motivated by phenomenological considerations: these conflicts just feel too hard, too irresolvable, for there to be such an easy way through. Indeed, talk of what we have ‘all-things-considered reason to do’ perhaps risks making the choice between apt anger and self-preservation sound no more fraught than the choice between going to the theatre or to the cinema; some might think it sits badly with Baldwin’s observation that such conflicts involve responsibilities that are ‘all but irreconcilable’.

Who are these people, Amia? Name and shame them by all means.

I do not wish to take a stand on this question. For either way, we are left wanting to know what those who actually face such situations ought to do.

Why? It is easy enough to actually fight injustice and thus become a victim of it.

This is the pressing political question.

Really? If it is so pressing, how come no voter anywhere gives a toss about it?

Heard as a request for political guidance, and not just a theoretical question about the metaphysics of normativity, it is hard to know how to respond—except to say that agents should be guided by both a concern for appreciating the world as it is, and making the world as it ought to be.

Could there be a more foolish response? Suppose Amia is walking to her lecture hall and a woman of sub-continental origin approaches her and speaks to her in her mother tongue. The woman reveals she is being held prisoner by her employer, a diplomat, and that she is being raped. Her family back home have been threatened.
What would Amia do? It appears she would say- 'Akka, you should be guided by both a concern for appreciating the world as it is- for example when you are being raped, or your children back home are beaten and threatened, you should appreciate it- but you must also show concern for making the world as it ought to be.'

But that is merely a pleasant way of re-describing a vexing problem. Let me suggest a different way of thinking about what we might do about such conflicts. The conflicts I have described are of the kind that particularly interested Hegel—that is, conflicts that are the result of our contingent social and political arrangements. For Hegel, the political utility of tragic spectatorship lies in tragedy’s ability to dramatise the conflicts to which such contingencies give rise; the canonical case is that of Antigone’s conflict between her filial and civic duties. Tragedy calls on us to achieve reconciliation: the re-arrangement of our political circumstances so that such conflicts no longer arise, or at least do not arise quite so often. In a Hegelian spirit, we can ask: what would need to change for there no longer to be occasions for apt counterproductive anger? Given what I’ve said about the relationship between such occasions and first-order injustice, two options present themselves. First, we could make it the case that there were no longer any occasions for apt anger—in other words, that there were no injustices.

Very true! Neighbour's cat should stop jumping through the window and coming and sleeping on my tummy. Also, it is very unjust that everybody calls me a fat and smelly retard. I'm not really fat- my arms and legs are very thin.

Such a moral utopia would certainly offer a resolution to affective injustice, but it is not a resolution that offers much hope in the actual context of our thoroughly non-ideal politics. Alternatively, we could push the other lever at hand: not anger’s aptness, but anger’s counterproductivity. What would it take, we might ask, to lessen the counterproductivity of anger? Seneca wrote that anger is ‘closed to reason’, that the mind ‘if it plunges into anger ... has no power to check its impetus; its very weight and the downward tendency of vice needs must hurry it on, and drive it to the bottom’. 

Anger is presumed to be the enemy of reason, threatening to corrupt and degrade it. Insofar as we cleave to the liberal aspiration for a rational politics, it seems that an angry person must be unsuitable for political community. It is little wonder, then, that defenders of anger tend to be suspicious of the liberal enchantment with the idea of a rational politics. If a rational politics has no room for anger, then it has no room for one of the few weapons available to the oppressed.

A weapon is something which is effective. I may say that my making cat like noises is a weapon against Globalised Neo-Liberalism. The neighbour's cat disagrees and comes sits on my chest till I stop.

Thus the invocation of ‘rationality’ (like the invocation of ‘civility’) becomes an invocation of the status quo.

But this is only true is Anger is not actually a weapon at all but rather something as foolish and ineffective as making cat like noises so as to bring about the downfall of Capitalism.

Insofar as a rational politics has no place for anger, I am tempted to think: so much the worse for rational politics. But we should query the premise. If anger is rationally evaluable—if it is something we do for reasons, good and bad—then it has at least a prima facie place in a rational politics. Opponents of anger, like the Stoics or Pettigrove, might respond that even if anger is evaluable in terms of reasons, its downstream effects on epistemic rationality are so grave that it should be, in the final analysis, excluded from politics. But this is an open, and indeed largely empirical question. As I have already mentioned, many philosophers argue that anger can be a source of moral and political knowledge.

Who are they?

If so, then the knowledge delivered by anger must be weighed against its negative epistemic effects. Moreover, if apt anger is itself a cognitive good, like true belief or knowledge—not a mere feeling, but (when apt) an appreciation of the facts— then, whatever its negative effects on rationality, its intrinsic value must also be totted up against them.

Why? How? The thing is impossible. Economists have found no way to 'tot up' the intrinsic values of even things like bread and water. How can it do something similar for Anger or Serenity or that vague feeling you get when passing by a hot dog cart on a cold February morning?

It also remains an open normative question whether we are ever obligated to sacrifice one cognitive good in the interest of acquiring others: whether we are obligated, for example, to sacrifice an instance of apt anger for an increased ability to evaluate the evidence neutrally.

This is not a normative question. It is a positive one. If there is one situation where we would all agree that we are obligated to sacrifice x so as to acquire y, then the answer is 'yes' and the subject is closed.

A normative question would be of the form 'should we sacrifice x to acquire y in all possible worlds?' It is certainly entirely possible and reasonable to affirm this for some x and y, if both have an intensional definition.

For it is not at all clear that we are obligated to maximise the value of our total cognitive economies.

It is absolutely clear that, if we evolved by natural selection and our fitness landscape is Uncertain, then we should never maximise any function. Rather we should minimise 'regret' at least at the statistical, macro, level.

Like the claim that the one should always be sacrificed for the many, epistemic consequentialism has a whiff of repugnance about it, a seeming failure to register the non-fungible value of certain goods.

The claim that the one should always be sacrificed for the many is easily rejected. A particular person may have a valuable genetic mutation or some other uniqueness such that the many should be sacrificed for the one for reasons of evolutionary Hannan Consistency.

Failing to register something which can't exist is not a failure. Any good which can be discriminated can create a market. True, the fungible value may be zero- for example no one wants to pay for my cat like noises- but fungibility only means whether a thing could be turned into cash. There is a possible world where I could go viral on You Tube for my idiotic cat impersonation and thus the underlying good turns out to be not just fungible, but quite valuable in cash terms.

For my part, I find it not implausible that apt anger is such a good: that it is an intrinsically worthwhile thing not only to know but also to feel the ugly facts that structure our political reality.

If something is apt, it is good. Why say you don't find it implausible? If I am wearing a saree, I am not naked. Would anyone say 'Since Vivek is wearing a saree, I find it not wholly implausible that he is not naked' ?

Is it 'intrinsically worthwhile' to feel as well as know something? If it is true in all possible worlds. Suppose, unknown to you, a sadist has attached some sensor in your brain such that your anger at an innocent person being tortured causes even worse torture to be inflicted on that person. In this case, we would all agree that your anger was not 'intrinsically worthwhile'.

We are all familiar with the Champagne Socialist who works himself into a lather over the oppression suffered by the poor but who does nothing to ameliorate the condition of his own rack-rented tenants or over-worked, underfed, employees.

If so, then a rational politics would not be a politics without anger, and anger would not constitute sufficient grounds for dismissing someone from the public sphere.

Rational politics takes account of anything that is effective. But Amia is looking at things which are counter-productive- thus not effective at all. They simply can't be 'apt'. Amia has tried, but signally failed to show otherwise.

I said above that, while true enough, it is not particularly helpful to say that we can alleviate affective injustice by removing first-order injustices. But perhaps it’s not any more helpful to suggest, as I just have, that we should make anger less counterproductive by dissolving the false dichotomy between anger and reason.

Anger is not Reason. Reason is not Anger. There is a true dichotomy here. It can't be dissolved. No doubt, Philosophers could agree to stop any semblance of reasoning and just get very very angry all the time. But, in that case, our opinion of them would fall even lower- if that is possible. Also they wouldn't get paid.

Presumably this dichotomy is sustained not because of a philosophical mistake, but because it is useful for the preservation of the status quo.

Is that what you presume? How stupid are you? Suppose we insist that our Courts acquit anybody who can't give a good reason why he should be acquitted, provided he gets very very angry. Would that alter the status quo? Yes, but in a retrograde manner. The Wealthy could hire people to kill or beat anyone who interfered with their unjust enrichment. No Court could convict them provided they had a great capacity to get very red in the face and scream incoherently.

Since it is oppressed people who have greatest reason to be angry, excluding anger from the public sphere is an efficient rationalisation for excluding those who most threaten the reigning social order.

Oppressed people get beaten and murdered if they try to stand up for themselves. Their anger is already excluded from the public sphere because it is ineffective. Suppose it becomes effective. Then they are no longer oppressed.

There is a philosophical mistake here (or so I have suggested), one that philosophers have no doubt helped to keep in place, and that perhaps philosophers can help to remedy.

Right! Saying Anger is not Reason is a philosophical mistake!

But the real mistake is an ethical one— except that ‘mistake’ makes it sound non-purposive, a mere accident or error. What I really mean to say is that we think and talk about political anger in the way we do because it serves those whom anger most stands to threaten, and that this is no mistake at all. ‘Rage’ (lῆmim) is the first word of Western literature, and in the Western tradition, it is the spectre of the raging Achilles that has haunted the debate about anger’s normative status. The Aristotelian defenders of anger thought that a man who failed to get angry at slights was slavish; such a man would never be an adequate fighter, for anger is, in Cicero’s ironic phrase the ‘whetstone of courage’.

Who are the people who 'talk about political anger'? They are Academics in worthless Departments. They have no power. Nobody gives a toss what they think.

There was a time when the Catholic Church- and thus Aristotle- had a certain amount of power. Those days are gone because the Church royally screwed the pooch- what? you think it was just little boys? how very naive you are!-  and is now on the run everywhere you look.

If there were no anger, there would be no Achilles: no men to risk their lives, defend honour, and punish wrongdoing.

Achilles did not matter. Odysseus did. Alexander most definitely did. Pedagogue or pederasts may have said otherwise but they were themselves fucked over big time.

The Stoics, anticipating a modern settlement in which legitimate violence is consolidated in the hands of the state rather than the hands of individual men, saw anger as destabilising and destructive.

Legitimate violence is nowhere 'consolidated in the hands of the state'. Everybody has a right to self-defence. It is a different matter that Courts can hold people accountable for their actions within certain jurisdictions. Anger can provide no defence in a Court of Law. Reason can.

What was needed was reason without affect; the Stoical ideal was not a vengeful Achilles, but a cool-headed judge.

Who wants an angry judge screaming filth? Judge Jeffreys and the 'Bloody Assizes' have been set down in the universal annals of infamy.

Everybody wants a cool-headed Judge- if, that is, they are interested in Justice, as opposed to persecuting innocent people on grounds of Religion.

But for the Aristotelians and Stoics alike, the question ‘ought one ever get angry?’ was implicitly understood to be about the powerful: free, wealthy men, with the capacity for unchecked violence.

Nobody has the capacity for 'unchecked violence'. Not even Hitler- which is why he shot himself. Even Stalin and Mao had to proceed with guile.

The Aristotelians and the Stoics don't matter. Some pedagogues can make a little money prattling about them but they have never mattered.

The question was whether such men should make themselves into a new kind of man, with the power of a civic ruler rather than a tribal warrior, but powerful nonetheless.

Such men- and women too- have always existed. They got the better of the stupid Ajax again and again till hulking idiots of that type turned to slaughtering sheep or battling the white horses of the Sea.

It was simply taken for granted that women and slaves had no business getting angry;

Utterly foolish! Mums have to get angry with their kiddies- otherwise they will grow up to be graceless retards like me. Most tutors were slaves. Part of the job was to get angry when the rich man's son made a mistake in his grammar or prosody.

the debate about anger was never about them.

There was no debate- just a bunch of pedagogues, many of them slaves, perpetuating an Academic availability cascade of a Credentialist type.

Christianity told the same men that they should be neither judge nor warrior, but instead forgiving and meek

in their relationship to each other. No Christian is forbidden to be a Judge or a Warrior.

Here women and slaves might have been the model, but they were only models; it was through a free choice to wilfully transfigure oneself into a submissive lamb that Christianity offered its deepest power.

Utter nonsense! Christ is the Paschal lamb once and for all. One may be an Emperor or a General or a hanging Judge and yet one's sins are washed clean in the blood of that lamb.

A recognition of anger’s aptness might seem to threaten a return to the petulant and vengeful Achilles, a backwards slide into a form of life in which justice is not the business of the state, but the personal lot of each man.

For whom? Does Amia actually know of any one who 'recognised anger's aptness' and then turned into a petulant and vengeful Achilles? No such person could exist because, firstly, Achilles stopped fighting when he got angry at being deprived of a slave girl, and only resumed fighting after his best friend, Patroclus, was killed.

We tell ourselves that we have set anger aside, that we no longer have any need of it.

Who tells herself or himself anything so obviously false?

Invoking the spectre of the raging Achilles, we condemn anger.

Ajax, maybe. Why Achilles? He stopped fighting because of his anger. If his chum Patroclus had not wanted to keep fighting, Achilles would not have lent him his Myrmidons. Otherwise, the whole lot of them would have left Troy.

But in so doing we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither the state nor the sword.

Really? So William Wilberforce and Harriet Tubman and Florence Nightingale and so forth all neglected the slaves and the women because 'they were never allowed to be angry'. Did Wilberforce not have a Mum who got angry if he shat on the sofa? Did Tubman or Nightingale think they were not allowed to be angry?

It is difficult to read Srinivasan's work- and she may be among the best of her sort- without feeling anger at our Credentialised Higher Education system and the complacency, no! moral imbecility! it breeds.

Our anger may be apt, but it is counter-productive. Philosophy now pays its way- like Junk Social Science- with clickbait designed to raise the blood pressure of elderly retards like myself.

I predict great things for young Srinivasan.