Kardtrick Sasidharan & COVID self-sodomy.

Open Magazine- one of the few e-zines from which my comments are not banned- has been publishing articles by Keertik Sasidharan whose book 'the Dharma Forest' is due to be published by Penguin.  I have come to think of him as a younger version of myself- i.e. a verbose South Indian cretin indiscriminately indulging in a modish intellectual eclecticism- little suspecting that his hair will soon start to thin and his belly to bloat and that those near and dear him to will increasingly implore him to get rid of that horrible fungus disfiguring his face at the same time that Occam's razor renders such hypostatic prosopoi as populate his insurrection against Advaita as but the bare ass cheeks from betwixt issues the Hiranyagarbha of Middle Age's himmelfart.

Consider the following-

THE BUDDHA, FAMOUSLY, told his monks: “Cetanaa’ham bhikkhave kammam vadaami.” “Monks: intention, I say, is karma.”

Buddha upheld 'kshanikavada'- a momentary universe- with no past, no future, and no abiding self. A pure intention to 'Moksha' could, however, put you on the Buddhist path. Indeed, it might instantaneously liberate you because you might come to see 'Samsara' and 'Niravana' are one and the same. Thus 'right intention' could deliver instantaneous 'samadhi' or 'satori' or Suntory Whiskey which, I have to say, is fucking excellent.

What is meant by ‘kamma’ (or karma) is more complex: a theory amenable to modifications, a law of the physical universe or a particular way of thinking that solves some problems and no more.

This is not true. Certain actions are held to have soteriological consequences irrespective of their physical or sociological or other psychological effects or lack of any such effects. The Vedas repeatedly say 'such and such 'ritual' act used to have such and such bad effect if incorrectly performed- e.g. gathering the wrong type of fire-wood could cause you to be turned into a woman- but ever since this happened to such and such Rishi, the Karmic law has changed so that provided the intention was good, no evil result accrues.

But this has nothing to do with the 'physical universe' which is unimportant for Soteriology.

What is more important to recognise is that the Buddha’s view was a radical break from the earlier Vedic and Upanisadic literature, where karma was linked to actions performed or merits earned, and not necessarily the intentionality informing actions themselves.

This is nonsense. The Rg Veda depicts a community of ritual specialists who, in a protocol bound manner, are constantly issuing immunities on the basis of 'intentionality' against mistakes or necessary substitutions, or even 'apadh dharma' exigent circumstance based violations, of the prevailing deontics. But this happens with every deontological logic or protocol bound imperative juristic process. Thus, if I am caught pissing on the street, I employ a lawyer to show that my intention was noble- I meant to put out a fire and Bo Jo's straw coloured hair, in the light of the evening sun, looked like a fire and so I pissed on that sad sack of shit so as to prevent a repetition of that Great Fire of London which I remember from my youth. Anyway, the fucker has COVID and my urine is a disinfectant coz in my last life I was a holy Hindu Cow.

For all means and purposes, karma, like certain modeling assumptions in macroeconomics, had become the staple of Buddhist, Jain or Vedic religions.

Nonsense! These Religions- like all Religions- had a market because they were saying 'Soteriology has a way to neutralize karma or make it 'anything goes', not in this life, but after you die and can't sue us for fraud'.

It is not the case that there are any 'modeling assumptions' in MacroEcon (as opposed to, say, Modern Monetary Theory) which say- 'hey guys! Guess what! Everybody can be infinitely rich. Micro-Econ doesn't matter. Thrift does not matter. Hard work does not matter. There's a magical credo you can believe in which will automatically turn you, and everybody else, into a super-rich dude with yachts and penthouse apartments and Beyonce serenading you as you fall asleep on pillows stuffed full with the purest cocaine.'

It was during one of those days, that a wanderer named Moliyasivaka called upon the Buddha, who was then living in the Bamboo Grove in the city of Rajagriha. He asked the Buddha to confirm if it was true, as other monks had told Moliyasivaka that, ‘whatever a person experiences, whether it be pleasant or painful or neutral feelings, all that is caused by what was done in the past’. In other words, he wanted the Buddha to confirm that ‘karma’ causally influenced and affected all that we experience.

No. The guy was asking 'is everything we experience completely pre-determined?' Buddha says 'No. Some things, obviously, are. But not everything. Not most things. These guys are making an invalid inference.'
This is simply common sense- nothing more. But it does not justify Buddhism's 'kshanikavada' either. Just because most phenomena are not rigidly pre-determined doesn't mean there is no past or future and that the Universe exists only for a moment of sufficient duration for a 'cetana' to be formulated.

Keertik takes a different view.

This is the kind of question that the Buddha ought to have hit out of the park, by confirming the doctrine of karma and reasserting its immutable hold on all life.

But, in that case, the Buddha would have to admit that his karma had caused him to assert a doctrine which had signally failed to help his own people in their attempt to defend the source of their own prosperity.
It is interesting that Keertik's view of karma justifies the Hindu view that Lord Buddha was an Avatar specifically created to mislead the 'Mleccha' and get them to adopt non-violence. But, notice, it was the indigenous, but low caste, Mauryas who took this road. Who wants to bet this Keertik dude is not either a Malyallee- i.e. a 'manipravalay' prodigy combining the best of Aryan and Dravidian literary culture- or else, more boringly, of 'Aryan', Brahman, lineage?

But the Buddha did something else. He advised the wandering ascetic that some experiences or feelings in the body arise from disorders of bile, some from disorders of phlegm, some others from disorders of humoural winds inside a body, some from disorders born from changes in climate, some from careless behaviour, some from assaults. Hearing this, Moliyasivaka summarised the Buddha’s words and then told himself that karma then was merely one-eighth of the factors that can produce illness and discomfort. By some scholarly accounts, this dialogue is among the earliest explication of causes and diseases in Indian history—an eightfold division of factors that cause bodily harm which was subsequently internalised by more classical treatises of Ayurveda.

This magpie minded fellow may well have found some such academic 'availability cascade'. But it is foolish. The Buddhists deny it. They say that, as a mnemonic device, the following verse was added by later commentators-
Bile, phlegm, wind, a combination, Season, uneven, harsh treatment,
and through the result of kamma as the eighth.

Keertik is making out that Lord Buddha should not be revered for establishing a Soteriological path that countless beings have found beautiful and utile. Rather he was the progenitor of a type of medicine which we don't use anymore because its pharmacopeia includes things we know to be poisons. Mahatma Gandhi gave up Ayurveda, albeit very reluctantly, because, he said, it made him too ill to be able to faithfully follow it. Only when he was once again in the pink would he resume his experiments with it. 

What is often lost when reading this little excerpt that comes down to us in the Samyutta Nikaya (The Connected Discourses) is that in the face of bodily harm and disease, even the Buddha put aside his usual models of what made the world go around according to him—namely, karma—and instead adopted a different way of conceptualising human frailty.

This is hateful. I may make fun of Buddhist Ontology but I don't, I can't, cast aspersions on the rationality and compassion of Lord Buddha. The fact is no Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist Acharya or Avatara has ever said that Soteriology takes precedence over Epidemiology.  On the contrary, primitive 'pathogen avoidance theory' tended to gain greater, not lesser currency, under the rubric of Organized Religion.  Consider the Catholic 'cult of the leper'. Leprosy isn't particularly contagious. It takes years of living with one so afflicted to develop the disease. Thus it was safe for Bishops to make a big deal out of ministering to the leper. The notion of 'Christ the leper' is quite beautiful and soteriologically fecund. But,  to deal with the bubonic plague you have to have the 'Lazaretto'. There is a discovery process here but the equilibrium is the same. Everything depends on the reproduction rate of the disease.

Buddhism, which spread the notion of untouchability to distant countries like Japan, also spread civic codes of social distancing. Kerala, from where Keertik may come from (Keralites write better English than Tambrams like me) replaced caste-based pathogen avoidance with a medical model and, because those guys have a lot of bats, that part of India is now regarded as a model of how the authorities need to deal with this Crisis.

But Keertik, as befitting a particularly imbecilic interpreter of the Buddha, now lives in New York.

Setting aside our favourite way of thinking about the world—a mental model, if you will, that maximally confirms or addresses the empirical experiences we call reality—is difficult.

Nonsense! We do so all the time if it can make us a bit more money or improve public good provision. That's why our 'mental model of the world' is, at the margin, purely private and involves guilty pleasures.  I once had a red-headed g.f who was way to the Left of me. I thought she really liked me. Then I discovered her stash of Wilbur Smith novels. The reason she rode me so hard was coz I was a big black kaffir from whom she was determined to extract the glistening pearls of my sperm. Anyway, that's why I broke up with her but she went around telling everybody it was coz I gotta tiny dick and am as thick as shit and, anyway, it's not true that my gran had an affair with Mahatma Gandhi.

Rarely has this been seen more vividly, with extraordinary consequences, than during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, as we see revelations and evidence pour in that major governmental bureaucracies and financial markets were entirely blindsided because such an eventuality was never paid enough attention in their calculus.

Where has this happened? Taiwan? Kerala? No. This is a problem which Kerala's 'governmental bureaucracy' was well able to deal with. Why? Because it had just coped with the Nipah virus. It wasn't 'blindsided' at all. Kerala has a lot of bats. Thanks to the vigilance of its own people, it has unleashed nothing very terrible on the rest of humanity.

Keertik, judging by his second name, may well be South Indian. Why is he writing this deracinated tripe?

Cognitive blindness was then preceded by policy paralysis—as if the world had suddenly revealed, like some alternative reality in a Haruki Murakami novel, two moons dangling on the horizon. This simply was not supposed to happen. Countries don’t shut down; large financial firms with billions of dollars in assets aren’t supposed to be scrambling to meet margin calls on their leveraged portfolios.

What is this shit? Everybody has to 'scramble to meet margin calls'. That's what's supposed to happen if you mis-price risk. Countries have always had to use quarantines and 'cordon sanitaires' and so forth to deal with epidemics. WTF does this have to do with two moons appearing in the sky?
The answer, of course, has to do with Keertik's own moon like ass cheeks separating so that his fundament can emit its himmelfart.

The irony, of course, is none of this is all too unexpected.

How is that an irony? We know that this risk existed. We also know that a particular epidemiological model- which was utterly shite- had salience only because the Colonialist West's 'gut instinct' re. 'herd immunity' was valorised. We also know that the present lockdown may be reversed.  The Swedish 'trade-off' may become canonical.

At least since early 2000s, the Center for Disease Control has been warning about flu-like pandemics; in the late 2000s, researchers at the University of Hong Kong warned about a ‘ticking time bomb’ because of Chinese wet markets, presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus among bats in the Wuhan area and the rise of international travel. Some others, like the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, have written about the increasing presence of ‘white swans’—transmission of predictable shocks with outsize consequences—due to the changing nature of our social arrangements where interconnectivity bears gifts, but also viruses.

But Kerala- or any other place with a lot of bats- could have been the epicentre of something worse. On the other hand, Kerala- described as  'mad-house of caste' by Vivekananda- defeated Caste by advancing rapidly in Medicine and Scientific Rationality. Yet, the old pathogen avoidance reflexes remained culturally hard-wired. Thus, Kerala's response is world beating.

Despite these assorted warnings and signals, much of our intellectual discourse continued to rely on models where previous iterations of reality are often deemed as the best predictors of what was to come.

Nonsense! It didn't happen in Kerala- coz they have a lot of bats and just a couple of years ago one particularly nasty bat virus- so it didn't happen anywhere.  Why? How do we know? It's coz Kerala subscribes to the same sort of rationality and 'mental models' as everywhere else.

Keertik, despite looking like a South Indian fuckwit, cheerfully ignores evidence from his own part of the world to talk worthless, not eclectic, but imbecilic, shite.

It is as if a creed of eternal growth and optimism about the future were the bedrock assumptions upon which this worldview was built.

But Kerala has that same credo. That's why it did well in containing this pandemic. But its 'bedrock assumptions' are wholly empirical and associated with a Scientific Structural Causal Model.

By contrast, Keertik simply wallows in Politically Correct pig-shit.

From the mainstreaming of laissez-faire economics

Which happened three hundred years ago

to the evangelical zeal to bring Democracy to foreign states

which never existed. Evangelicals did bring anti-Communist Dictatorships to foreign states. There is not one single example of their fostering Democracy anywhere. Keertik comes from the Indian subcontinent. Does he think America fostered Democracy in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Myanmar or Afghanistan? How fucking stupid is he?

—the presumption that nature, climate and pathogenic fellow travellers would play along was a convenient and useful fiction.

but only to Keertik for writing krap.

The rise of world-altering technologies like the internet, the human genome projects and the decisive victories of free-trade economics only burnished the sense that the future is golden, if we engineer it right.

but Keetrik was not one of those engineers. He was a kretin who thought the Buddha discovered that, like, dude, the reason you got the clap is not coz of your karma but coz you keep banging ho's whose noses had fallen off.

Keertik does not get that he is the stupidest export from his part of the world. That is the irony here.

There is a certain irony that among the various fatalities of the coronavirus pandemic will be this model of the world which advocated free trade, free markets and free movement of capital in the name of human welfare

There will be only one 'fatality' from this pandemic. Crap maths in Epidemiology. There is a certain irony in the fact that a guy whose surname sounds South Indian is writing stupid shite like this in a Magazine with a South Indian editor.  Us guys are supposed to be good at math.

So far Keertik's English has been okay. Now it turns to krap.

Interestingly, this moment we are now living through resonates the (sic) intellectual climates of 18th century Europe.

The following, being wholly violative of Aristotelian Unities is incorrigibly, canonically,  Babu-

As important theoretical discoveries by Newton, Galileo, Huygens and Snell began to roll in alongside inventions like Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes and powerful telescopes, savants like Leibniz and poets like Alexander Pope began to recast traditional theologies about the Biblical God’s perfection discernible by reason and science. (sic)

Amazing! I'm not saying I didn't write this sort of ungrammatical and ignorant shite when I was 14 in Delhi. But then I went to England. Teachers penalized you for writing nonsense back then even if u woz blick. This guy mentions Snell. But 'Snell's law' was known to the Arabs. He is early Seventeenth Century. But then Islam has a full fledged Occassionalist ontology three or four centuries before Descartes and Leibniz.

Why does Karteek mention Alexander Pope? Only deeply provincial Continental cunts or Kants thought him a philosopher. The man was a poet.

Even the distress and chaos following the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 1714 was for Leibniz an opportunity to extol it as a window to study nature more.

There was no eruption of Vesuvius in 1714.  Keertak or Kartick or whatever this fucker is called is simply lying. There was an effusion which stopped short of populated areas and an eruptive column of smoke and ash which likewise caused no fatalities. Liebniz was in the area. He did not say 'Gee! lots of 'distress and chaos' has occurred. Instead of helping the afflicted let us 'study nature more'.

 Why was this? The answer is that, like Lord Buddha, Liebniz was not as stupid as shit. Thus our Kardtrick has both beat.

The emerging fields of new sciences were merely means to directly discover the underlying rationality and order that was assumed to be the omnipresent characteristic of God’s creation.

That's what they did Kardtrik you fucking cretin. Ghosts and Demons and Curses and so on turned out not to exist at all.

This view, of a munificent god being slowly uncovered by science and reason, became the standard model for European intellectuals.

Fuck off! How Babu are you Kardtrik? Munificent? Really? That's your go to word in this context? What you mean is all-beneficent.
Any way, since when did a stupid cunt like you get to say what the 'standard model' of European intellectuals was or is? You know shit about India. Why should we trust you about 'Europe'?

Even the word ‘optimism’ arrived into the world in February 1737, in the Memoires de Trévoux, an influential journal on science.

The thing comes from Voltaire who was an influential poet popularizing Science- that of Newton- against the Occassionalism of Descartes and Liebniz. Why is Kardtrick telling us such a stupid lie?

In 1753, the Berlin Academy insisted that entrants to one of its popular public competitions answer with an essay on the topic of ‘All Is Best’. The entries were expected to burnish their answers with the ‘system of optimism’ that was widely known. But this emergent wave of progress, optimism and discovery found itself undermined dramatically by an ‘act of God’!

Eurocentric much my young Kardtrick? In 2020 the Iyer Academy of Fulham declared you to be a stupid cunt who must go fuck yourself because of Galileo and Science and Buddhism and so forth. Will you actually do any such thing? If not, why not admit that Academies and Essays and shite of the sort you indulge in is MEANINGLESS SIMPLY- save in so far as it accords us opportunities for ridicule or schadenfreude.

Like the 2020 coronavirus pandemic,

which affects people irrespective of where they live

the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon

only affected people who actually fucking lived in Lisbon.

How fucking stupid is this Kardtrick? There is absolutely nothing in common between these two events.

struck and destroyed almost the entirety of that most Christian of cities, full of cathedrals and solemn devotees, killing anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people. Add to it riots and mass deprivation that arose in a short order that shook the intellectual worldviews of European intellectuals.

This cretin is just making this shite up. How fucking ignorant is he? The Lisbon earthquake had a high death toll because Portugal had a fucking horrible economic model- viz. patrimonialism. Anyway, Protestant Europe had little love for Lisbon while, sadly, the Catholics turned up their noses at 'miscegenation'.  In other words, because some white people from that wonderful country did not behave like utter beasts towards vulnerable people of my dark skin color, Portugal was punished because, inevitably, the population would get crowded into the Capital, rather than going the way of the Confederate States.

The emptiness of that rhetoric of optimism was there for all to see.

But nobody was interested. Europe did not give a crap about philosophers then, nor does it do so now. Religions waxed or waned depending on what 'club goods' they delivered. 

They realised that all the clever preening about a compassionate god and ennobling scientific discoveries didn’t change the fundamental fact that there is great suffering in this world.

Nor the fundamental fact that shit smells bad. Fuck is wrong with Kardtrick? Does he really think there was a period when people did not know there was suffering? Did these guys never stub their toe and howl with pain? 

The rabble-rousing

Voltaire- rabble rousing? How fucking ignorant is this cunt?

but influential French philosopher, Voltaire, caricatured Leibniz devastatingly as Dr Pangloss, the ‘greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire’ in his satire, Candide ou l’Optimisme—for his seemingly intractable faith in the perfectibility of human history.

Voltaire favored Newton over Descartes but was still behind the curve. Occasionalism, however, need not be 'optimistic'. Still, because Evolution is true, it  corresponds to Hannan Consistent 'geodesics'.

Within three decades, before the 18th century ended, the old world order of Leibniz and Voltaire had been entirely decimated following the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon that burnt European countryside and cities alike.

Where did this cretin learn history? Within two decades of the 'ending of the old world order', it was re-established by the Concert of Europe.

The biggest casualty was however the models of the world that men like Leibniz and the British poet Alexander Pope held as true representations of the world.

Sheer nonsense! Kant thought Pope a great philosopher- unlike anyone in England. But then Kant was krap. Liebniz remained important because his math don't need 'synthetic apriori deductions' of a Newtonian, substantivist, type. Kardtrick is writing shite for stupid Indians- or so he thinks. Maybe Open Magazine is letting his waggle his tiny genitalia at us so that people like me can slap him down- for having slightly larger genitalia.

We too similarly now face a world where crises of unknown size and uncertain consequences sweep the world, potentially washing away with them all the cows that we were told are sacred: balanced budgets, small governments, economic forecasting, privacy of individuals, technical transnational bureaucracies like the World Health Organization, open border advocates.

Which fucking decade has this cretin been living in? All these things were 'washed away' before I was born. 

The political-economy models of the world, which came of age with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the early 1980s, are now in their middle ages; their intellectual arteries are clogged with interest-group politics; their body politic is no longer as nimble as their ideological rivals on the extremes of the left and the right; and their abilities to arouse the masses are non-existent.

Nonsense! Thatcher and Reagan won. The pretence that they hadn't has died a death.  God alone knows how this guy with microscopic genitalia thinks he is 'arousing the masses'. I personally have done so by sticking radishes up my ass. But, Trump and Bo Jo etc still got elected.

To this end, there is a certain irony that among the various fatalities of the coronavirus pandemic will be this model of the world which advocated free trade, free markets and free movement of capital in the name of human welfare.

Fuck off! There will be something called 'Tiebout sorting' which is what laissez faire Econ theory predicts. 
This cretin thinks things were done in the 'name of human welfare'. He probably also thinks his shit don't stink.

What set of models of political economy will come to dominate our collective consciousness in its stead, after this pandemic, is anybody’s guess.

No it isn't. Mimetics will ensure that best practice spreads to wherever that practice is possible. This is not rocket science. 

But if those new set of ideas insist on storming the Bastille and sharpening the guillotines, we ought to be not surprised.

Fuck is wrong with this cunt? There is no 'Bastille' save in places like China. Nobody is going to storm Chinese prison camps because, if they do, they will get shot.  Screw Guillotines. Forced labour and organ harvesting is the way to go.

What will this verbose, cretinous, Kardtrik suggest next? I don't know. I think it will involve self-sodomy for those with a Clinton kink in their dick. If we assume that Kardtrick is self-pleasuring, or self-soothing, himself in this manner when he writes this shite, we come to see his contribution to public discourse in an entirely new light.