Brian Wong- stupid fool or cunning tool?

Aeoin has a crap essay by Brian Wong on Anger which claims that the fury of Hong Kong's protesters against the extradition law is 'nihilistic'. This is a bizarre view. The people of Hong Kong value their freedom. They don't want to be arrested for sedition and sent off to a prison Camp in mainland China. But Liberty is a positive value. It is not 'nihilistic'.

Perhaps Wong means- 'Hong Kong is doomed. The anger of the protesters is futile. They are 'increasing their qi' (shēngqì 生气) for no good reason. They will be killed. Hong Kong will become a prison camp. Everybody knows this. That is why the only people protesting are those who have given up all hope. They want to die because they find nothing valuable in Life.'

The problem here is that the protesters haven't yet been killed. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that many of them might not slip across the border or jump on a plane in the wake of an invasion by the Red Army. Furthermore, even if some of them are killed, they may be immortalised as martyrs for Liberty. Thus there is something positive for which these protesters are battling. Their anger is not nihilistic at all. It may be that some of them will have improved life-chances as a result of their actions. They may be welcomed by the West and may achieve a level of social and political prominence that would otherwise not have been possible for them.

Is Wong stupid or is he a tool of the PRC? I think 'they' (it seems Wong is either woke or no longer identifies as a bloke) are stupid. Afterall, the fellow gasses on about Amia Srinivasan and Martha Nussbaum. That is the mark of a cretin. Still, the fact remains, Wong is a useful sort of idiot for the Communist regime. Yet, cunningly, it is making noises of a sort associated with the bleeding heart Academy.

Consider the following quotation from Wong's essay- ' From the righteous, worldwide anger that launched the 2017 Women’s March, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, to the nihilistic anger propelling the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong...'
I don't recall the 2017 Women's March. Nobody does. It was large but had no effect. The thing soon turned anti-Semitic which is why its initial sponsor, who was Jewish, abandoned the project. Trump grew stronger and now he is going to face Biden- who is accused of inappropriate touching of women- if not pussy grabbing.

By contrast the Hong Kong protests succeeded. The extradition law has not been passed. Thus, the verdict of history is clear. The Women's March was stupid, not righteous. The Hong Protest was effective not 'nihilistic'. Brian Wong is a 'Rhodes Scholar elect' from Hong Kong. It seems 'they' know which side their bread is buttered on. By pretending things like Occupy Wall Street and the Women's March were epistemically righteous exercises in anger- though they failed miserably and were as stupid as shit- but that Hong Kong's successful protest was 'nihilistic'- Wong ingratiates himself with both the Western Academy- as represented by shitheads like Nussbaum- and the PRC. This is the political equivalent of a highly utile gender ambiguity.

I will now go through Wong's essay line by line, to try to read between them.

In her speech at the United Nations summit on the impending climate crisis, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg spoke with passion and anger, calling out those who have been apathetic towards bringing about global warming.

Greta was Swedish. If her country had swapped Volvo shares for a share in Norway's oil, Greta would have been a lot better off. If I were Swedish, I'd be as mad as hell with those fucking Norwegians continually increasing oil production so as to have a yet bigger Sovereign Wealth Fund. Fuck you Norwegians! Fuck you very much!

Her speech was criticised by many for Thunberg’s bellicosity, which allegedly put off potential sympathisers to the movement.

Are you kidding me? The girl was seriously weird. The sight of this little poison dwarf glaring balefully at Trump's broad rump was kind of reassuring. Both want higher oil prices, but only Trump can twist the arm of the Saudis to bring this about. In other words, Greta- twisted little homunculus that she is- nevertheless represents a Trumpian horcrux.

Anger is alienating, upsetting and even exclusionary under particular circumstances – yet one can’t help but feel that Thunberg’s anger is at least partially justified.

because one is like totally Gay but not in a good way.

After all, it is decades of unbridled carbon emissions and industrialisation that have led us to the mess we are in today.

What fucking mess? We have a fantastic life-style. It is those with low per capita carbon emissions who are living in shit-holes and dying like flies.

Thunberg’s speech – and what we make of it – epitomises an age-old conflict between those who oppose anger for its seemingly counterproductive consequences, and those who find anger a natural and appropriate human emotion with value in both public and private spheres.

This is silly. An angry 16 year old smashes stuff. She does not give speeches. Rhetorical wrath is not an emotion. It may claim to represent an authentic emotion. But the thing could be pure play-acting. There has never been any conflict at all regarding whether rhetoric should express wrath. Even Supreme Court judges, in their ratios as much as obiter dicta, can express anger. Indeed righteous wrath is quintessentially judicial.  Wong is wrong.

On the other hand, had Greta smashed stuff and shat herself, though her anger may have been 'justified', it would have been counter-productive. She'd have been banned from the rec-center. This would not have helped her cause any. Also, her parents would have had to buy her a new pair of pants.

From the righteous, worldwide anger that launched the 2017 Women’s March, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, to the nihilistic anger propelling the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, to the fearful anger emanating from the ongoing anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests across India – the question is the same: what is the value of anger?

Anger is not fearful. Fear represses rage. The two may alternate, but- if there was a genuine cause for fear- the result, stochastically speaking, is distinctly sub-optimal.

Anger is, according to a Sanskrit saw, 'a small pleasure'. It serves a signalling function. That is its value. Political movements are valuable not in terms of the emotions they seek to capitalize on, but the political outcomes they secure. The Women's March fucked up because it degenerated into anti-Semitism. The Hong Kong protests seem to have succeeded. The anti-CAA protests flopped but did marginally help the Ruling Party while further harming and marginalizing the Left.

For Aristotle, anger was ‘a desire accompanied by pain for perceived revenge caused by a perceived slight, of the sort directed against oneself or one’s own, the slight being undeserved’.

We can see Aristotle was wrong. Anger has no necessary connection with Thymos. It is merely a protocol bound 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'. Entelechies don't actually exist. We evolved through Natural Selection on an uncertain fitness landscape.

Anger is thus reactive towards a perceived violation, and embeds within it a vindictive yearning for revenge.

According to Aristotle, who knew from shit.

Think about that time your best friend lied to you, or when your cherished bike was stolen – it hurt, but it also made you feel as if you were owed answers.

Nonsense! I felt happy when I realised my best friend had lied to me to protect my feelings. I blamed myself when my bike was stolen.

On the other hand, I got very very angry with Amartya Sen for writing worthless bollocks. When I was 16, I genuinely thought he was a smart guy and that his work could help India become less poor. But Sen didn't lie to me. He didn't steal from me. He didn't owe me any answers.

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits.

But she is as stupid as shit- as I explain here.  I'm not angry with Amia for being an Iyengar precisely because, unlike others of her ilk, she is Iyer level stupid, but I do feel that she ought to mention that her oeuvre has the purpose of securing all TamBrams not just 'Educationally Backward Status' but also Affirmative Action on the basis of being fucking retards. My own Socioproctological investigations are dedicated to no higher end.

Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology.

No it doesn't. Her work isn't itself filled with inarticulate rage. In this instance, stupidity of a bland, apple-polishing, sort can be no substitute.

Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding.

But, precisely because Amia wasn't herself angry, her own essay wasn't epistemic at all. It was puerile and part and parcel of a wider movement within her discipline which sought to secure its place in the Academy as a type of 'Special Needs Education' for the utterly moronic.

It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation.

So, it is a type of rape counselling for morons who spent their youth lying naked in gutters and thus being taken advantage of by smelly homeless dudes. Anger at this outcome may be the first step in frustrating smelly homeless dudes by not lying naked in gutters all the time.

Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault.

But Clinton took that 'choice' of the table. He was very popular with African-American women. As for those 'languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong', Wong is their oppressor, but they are not angry with him. Why? Being a drug addict or an incompetent criminal is a matter of choice- at least if you want to stop being either.

Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless.

Nonsense! Nobody bothers with them.

Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’

More especially, if it is your fucking fault. Emotions are strategic in the same way Language is strategic. But Emotions are also plastic and can be easily displaced in accordance with an Economic Law of Substitution.

What Wong is doing here is seeking to arbitrage to his own advantage a Capitalized Resentment which does not belong to him. He does not live in a 'cage-home'. He is a gaslighter by profession and will continue to do well out of that particular gig- though, if he were genuinely smart, he could make a lot more money and generate tax revenue for the State, by starting a business and employing people at good wages.

It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings.

This is precisely what does not happen to the genuine under-class. This is 'extractive introjection' on the part of moral entrepreneurs and arbitrageurs of a despicable kind.

Anger is epistemically valuable not just for the individual, but also for those around them.

Very true! Einstein got real mad at Newton. That's how come he invented Relativity.

The philosopher Alison Jaggar at the University of Colorado Boulder observes in Just Methods (2014) that ‘anger becomes feminist anger when it involves the perception that the persistent importuning endured by one woman is a single instance of a widespread pattern of sexual harassment’. It is an emotion that both transcends and unites people by providing context for an individual’s grievances.

Absolutely! Young people may think it is their own fault that creeps harass them. They need to get together and fuck up those cunts but good. Anger does not matter. Fucking up those who are trying to fuck you up is what counts.

But, the same thing goes for College students being gaslighted by worthless Professors. Just recently, a group of trainee Hindu Priests at Benares Hindu University put their foot down. The administration had tried to saddle them with a Muslim Professor who knew nothing about Hindu priest-craft. The strike by the Hindu trainee Priests succeeded. Even the Left Liberal Establishment could not pretend that a Muslim knew how to conduct Hindu ceremonies. Moreover, to do so was contrary to Islam. Thus, there was a danger the Liberals could get fatwaed if they forced the Muslim to teach Hindu priest-craft. All was well that ended well. The Muslim got a job in the Literature Dept. - which is what he wanted- and the trainee Priests got a teacher who, even if he didn't know from Hinduism, nevertheless had a Hindu surname.

Those on the 2017 Women’s March found solace and reassurance in their shared anger, in knowing that they were not the only ones outraged by the country’s decision to elect Trump as its president.

Because they were too stupid to read the newspapers and see for themselves that more had voted for Clinton than Trump.

When co-opted skilfully by just causes, anger enables victims to identify similarities in their lived experiences, overcoming the superficial differences that drive them apart.

Why is Wong mentioning this in connection with the Women's March? Does he not know that the thing fell apart because the anti-Semitic nutjobs took over?

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre

who isn't yet a philosopher and may never be. He may end up on a Politics faculty.

at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations.

But so can a well timed fart.

For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers.

Though their partners first work themselves up into a rage before beating the crap out of them. Speaking generally, if you are the victim of a crime, it is better to give your statement to the Police in a calm and dispassionate manner. If you are fuming with rage they may suspect you are seeking revenge, not for physical abuse, but because the fucker refused to go down on you during your period. Not that I have periods. But, were it not for the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura, I could do so. That makes me real angry. Yet Boris Johnson has repeatedly refused to go down on my bleeding cunt despite my repeated phone calls to Number 10. Fuck you Boris! Claiming to be too ill with COVID to be able to come lick my cunt like you promised in your Election Manifesto! Frankly, you are no better than Jeremy Corbyn- and he had a beard could tickle my pussy- if the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura had permitted me to have one- like nobody's business.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class.

Oddly, African Americans were not motivated by anger but rational self-interest in seeking to better their lot.  On the other hand, like South Indians, African Americans get real mad at people who drink all the grape soda or empty the bottle of hot sauce on their fried chicken even though you know very well that I can't eat anything, that is not a phal curry, unless it is covered with Encona.

His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest.

Because he wasn't tearing his hair out and jumping up and down screaming incoherently.

Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious.

African Americans were showing that they were willing to take on the Racist nutters. The tax payer was off the hook. But this also meant that there was no need to pay the racists. Let them stop shtupping their sisters and move to the suburbs like normal people.

Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public.

Says a Wong who knows nothing of what actually went down. Malcolm X's great virtue was that he died before the Black Panthers became active. Thus he couldn't go the way of Eldridge Cleaver.

As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’

X died in 1965, killed- it seemed- by his own. He was associated not with armed resistance but separatism. White America embraced the vision of getting the fuck away from ghetto trash or trailer trash or hillbilly trash. Joe Biden got the message early and came out against busing or using race as a criteria for allocating teachers or students back in 1974.

Moreover, sustaining a social movement is difficult, especially if its constituents come from socioeconomically disenfranchised backgrounds and are cynical about their chances of success.

The reverse is true- provided genuine grievances are aired and feasible remedies are campaigned for. As the film Underground Brother II demonstrates, wokeness is a drug destructive of this possibility. Telling stupid lies helps nobody.

Attending marches and protests could be costly. The prospects of being imprisoned or persecuted are daunting. Against these obstacles, anger rallies people together – it transforms public, societal causes into intimate, personal reasons that you care about and are devoted to.

If enough people break the law, individual penalties are low. But so are the rewards. Anger at this outcome is what causes internecine conflict.

By providing the individual with the instinctive justification to keep believing and carrying on, anger spurs and sustains action, even if the odds of succeeding are slim.

So, the suicide bomber we will always have with us. That's the problem with anger. Someone else is always prepared to do more than just blow his top.

Common anger fuels the construction of an imagined community,

like the Caliphate- till it is bombed to shit.

held together by the joint repudiation of injustice. It was the anger towards the Wall Street establishment and its impunity in the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crisis that spurred the Occupy protests.

Which failed utterly. Instead we had the longest bull market in history.

It is the anger towards the ethnonationalist populism of India’s president Narendra Modi that convinces CAA protesters to set aside partisan or socioeconomic differences and rally to the defence of Muslim interests.

Sadly, the protests were all Muslim affairs- that too elderly female Muslim affairs. They did help ruling parties but hurt Muslim representation.

The truth is 'Occupy' or 'Shaheen Bagh' looked like Counter Culture love-ins, not expressions of public fury. By contrast, the Women's March may have expressed a more than menstrual moodiness. But it failed utterly.

More fundamentally, however, anger cuts across the layers of excuses and rationalisations that we regularly employ to shirk responsibility.

But, if we cultivate an explosive irritability of our own, then we gain immunity. However angry and vituperative you get at Trump, he can get angrier and more vituperative at you. Thus, he is bullet proof. Of course, if Biden starts actively pussy grabbing and biting off the noses of those who object, then he will beat Trump.

When people are told of the numbers of refugees drowning at sea after being turned away by wanton governments, they often grow numb to these routinised ‘tragedies’. Yet the rending image of a lone dead child, washed up on a Turkish shore, stokes a visceral anger.

But that didn't last. Merkel reversed herself. In any case, it was not anger but pity which was stoked by those images. The fact is the child's death was the fault of its parents.

We feel responsible for not having done more, because in our anger we come to the recognition that we possess the agency to have acted otherwise.

Nonsense! We don't recognise shit when we are steaming mad. Sorrow may do it. Remorse may do it. Not anger.

In turn, such sense of responsibility propels us to consider how and where we could make a difference.

But, being responsible means not getting mad. Instead, one must act rationally and dispassionately.

But anger also has its critics.

Who are equally stupid.

Despite its many advantages, it can be injurious, even detrimental. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles throws a tantrum when Agamemnon seizes his coveted prize of war, the slave Briseis.

How was this detrimental? Achilles withdrew from the war with just cause. He lost nothing by it. It wasn't his sister-in-law who had been abducted.

Achilles’ incandescent rage leads him to refuse to fight alongside his men, almost costing the Greeks a scorching defeat at the hands of the Trojan army.

So what? If the Greeks took losses, Agamemnon would have to swallow his pride and come begging to Achilles.
The death of Patroclus gave Achilles an excuse to get back into the war and win immortal renown. He'd have looked a pussy if he hadn't taken umbrage at being deprived of his just spoils. But what was important was getting a higher body count. Thus his b.f.f.l biting the big one was providential.

His anger later propels him on a killing spree – against all those who stood between him and the vanquishing of Hector, his nemesis.

Chill, dude. This is just a story. If the Iliad gets you so excited, don't watch Avengers Endgame for fuck's sake.

As a pioneer in feminist philosophy and practical ethics, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum is one of anger’s most vocal critics.

You should hear what Anger says about her.

In her 2016 Aeon essay, Nussbaum argues that: ‘The payback idea is deeply human, but fatally flawed as a way of making sense of the world.’

But Nussbaum's own way of making sense of the world is even more flawed. The fact is 'tit for tat' is a successful strategy for iterated prisoner's dilemma. It is the sort of thing which a Freeman Dyson can further illumine. Nussbaum's shite is just plain retarded.

Drawing upon ancient Greek philosophy and the virtues it embodies,

Greek philosophy does not 'embody' virtue. It presents different conceptions of arete. But these were sublated by the Christian Religion.

Nussbaum sees anger as a primitive emotion that amplifies our worst tendencies and jeopardises tolerance in democratic politics.

What is the point of seeing anything so stupid? Why not simply say 'human beings are too primitive for democratic politics. Maybe mass castration will improve things.'?

She argues that anger has two components: the first is the recognition that a serious wrong has been committed;

No. This may be a justification or explanation for anger. But it isn't a component of it.

the second is a desire for the wrongdoer to suffer.

This is utterly false. The wrongdoer may be harming herself. Anger may be about getting the wrongdoer to stop shoving things up her arsehole. This will actually reduce her suffering. God's wrath has this quality.

We are angry towards what we perceive to be a violation of moral expectations, and – where there are clearly identifiable actors – we wish for justice to be served through their suffering the consequences.

No. We realise that the thing does not matter to us- unless it does, in which case anger won't help. On the other hand, if we are paid to express anger that is exactly what we do. The point about emotions is that they use up scarce cognitive resources. If it does not pay to have them, we don't have them. This is an economic, not philosophical matter. Emotions evolved. They weren't endowed by an Occassionalist God concerned with creating the preconditions for deliberative democracy.

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. 

But easily appeased by a bar of chocolate.

It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decision making, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice.

Or injustice, or just wanting to kick in the heads of Arsenal supporters.

At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions.

But terrorists need money too. Ultimately, only money matters. ISIS was doing well till fracking caused crude prices to collapse. Then they got the shit bombed out of them.

More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent

No. Not wanting to have our time wasted causes us to shut out dissent

and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others

Sadism has nothing to do with anger.

– it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted.

Does Wong start torturing people and laughing maniacally and jizzing in his pants every time he gets angry? No? Then he must know this is bollocks.

We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

But we will stop doing so if there is no incentive to persist in this type of mishegoss. 

Also, anger could be counterproductive in politics.

Coz you keep torturing people and laughing maniacally and jizzing in your pants. For voters, this is a turn off.

For activists, anger could spur irrevocable violence or conflict,

in other words they get their skulls smashed

exclude those whom it targets, and incite polarisation and vitriol to the point of dissipating mass support for particular causes. Take the extremism of some ‘Bernie Bros’, for instance, who have alienated many in the centre-Left through their angry tirade against Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016 and Joe Biden supporters in 2020. While their progressivism is perhaps understandable and reasonable, their anger arguably only pushed wavering and partially sympathetic individuals away from their movement.

This is the precise opposite of the truth. Their anger didn't matter. The fact that they were advocating crazy shit was the problem. By contrast, Clinton and Biden's problem was that they weren't advocating crazy shit despite being Democrats. Obama could carry it off because he was cool.

More generally, for democratic politics, anger has the intoxicating effect of polarising discourse

that's a good thing if choices are polar

– in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom was driven apart by vitriolic, partisan rhetoric of anger: Brexiteers were angry at Remainers meddling with Brexit’s democratic mandate, whereas Remainers were angry at Brexiteers for forcing the country into a historic mistake.

This was a good thing. The fact is the two choices before the country were poles apart. Politicians who pretended otherwise had to be disintermediated. Ultimately, the two big parties gained anti EU leaders. The stupider, more 'woke', won lost. The other gained. So 'no deal Brexit' prevailed and divisions disappeared. The whole process would have been much quicker had Cameron not introduced the 'fixed term' Act and if Britain had not been forced by the EU to create a Supreme Court. Anger played no part in this outcome. Economic interests did.

So anger is clearly a double-edged sword.

No. It is an emotion. Emotions have a signalling function. They express preference intensity and inhibit or disinhibit actions by changing response thresholds. It is the context which determines whether anger poses any sort of threat. As for swords, they can always be taken away from their wielder and used to slice them up. Samurai swords are single edged. I've seen numerous films where this happens.

The question becomes: how should we weigh up the usefulness and appropriateness of anger, against its potentially deleterious effects?

Like everything else which matters, we shouldn't do the weighing up by ourselves because we are as stupid as shit. Outsource the answer. If you can't hire a smart person to figure it out, then just try to imitate what smarter people than you are doing. As for Philosophers, laugh at them by all means, but don't be guided by anything they say. This is because they are stupid, ignorant, and get paid to provide 'Special Education' to really special little snowflakes in safe spaces on Campus.

Srinivasan argues that, even if anger undermines the victim’s ability to obtain better outcomes and is counterproductive at combating injustice, there are cases where such anger might still be an apt response to injustice – independent of consequential considerations.

This is obvious. Signalling preference intensity works that way. But preferences are not outcomes.

The concept of aptness

is anything goes because of agent heterogeniety unless signalling occurs within a protocol bound context.

tracks what is appropriate in light of relevant factors and norms guiding our conduct and thoughts – that is, in describing whether our attitudes fit reasonable judgments towards the past.

This is an example of 'akrebia'- seeking for greater precision than the subject matter allows. The fact is, outside protocol bound juristic contexts, 'relevant factors' and 'norms' are unknown or essentially contested. 'Aptness' can't track shit.

She argues that getting angry ‘is a means of affectively registering or appreciating the injustice of the world’, comparable to our exercise of aesthetic judgment.

But who is doing the registering? Anyone who matters? A Theist may say 'God notices'. A hippie may say 'The Cosmos appreciates our grokking its sublimity or getting as mad as hell coz cosmetic companies are testing their products on kittens'. But, when a Credentialized pedant on the make says it we understand that the thing is an exercise in shitting higher than one's moral arsehole.

We react to beautiful art with appreciation of its value, not because such appreciation is instrumentally useful, but because the positive judgment fits with the high quality of the art.

But this is instrumentally useful. Being known to have sound judgment in one field has a spillover effect. Furthermore, Art Collectors can get very very rich.

Similarly, we should care about reacting to injustices with anger, independent of whether such reactions promote better outcomes, because anger is the appropriate response that registers the wrongness and severity of the injury.

But we can't get very very rich by doing so. Indeed, 'virtue signalling' of this type now appears to disqualify a person from the perks of elected office. As 'Underground Brother II' discovers, 'wokeness' is the toxic drug which the 'The Man' is using to poison the ghetto and establish a Racist Reich.

For Srinivasan, social structures and routines preserve a fundamental conflict between appreciating and recognising the world as it is – and making it a better place.

But Srinivasan has shit for brains. She has no idea what the world is like or what its 'routines' are. If she did, she could make a lot of money on financial markets and thus gain the resources to change things in the world.

This is what she terms ‘affective injustice’, where victims of injustice are naturally told to suppress their authentic, natural reactions in exchange for achieving better outcomes.

This is crazy. Nobody wastes their time going around telling the insulted and the injured to suppress their rage. Some moral entrepreneurs and public intellectuals may make a little money talking shite. But they can't force their opinions on anybody.
No doubt, one can make a little money lecturing people on how it is okay to be angry at bad shit in your life. But it is a crowded market. The big money is in the merchandising of Anger Management dolls which you can take a baseball bat to as a matter of stress relief.

This tradeoff is itself unjust, for it requires the individual to suspend true sentiments to navigate the quagmire of injustice that’s reality.

Amia is making a ludicrous argument. She is saying 'having to repress your desire to shit into your hands and to fling your feces about in order to relieve your feelings is a terrible injustice.' But this is not really true. Thus, if you are guilty of repressing yourself in the aforementioned manner, you can't gain revenge by using some other arsehole to shit into some other pair of hands so as to fling about those feces so as to relieve your feelings which were injured by your own repression of yourself.

Individuals are forced to choose between feeling what they’re most naturally and justifiably inclined to feel, and suppressing these emotions to make practical progress.

Because individuals want to shit into their hands and fling their feces about. Society, very meanly, forces individuals to repress this urge. Fuck you very much Society!

By extension, victims are often negatively judged and policed by others for feeling angry about their circumstances.

Why won't Society encourage and reward shitting into one's hands and flinging one's feces about? Doesn't Society understand how unjust it is being? What it should do is get mad at itself and shit into its own hands and fling its feces about.

An act of retaliation by a victim of female genital mutilation could trigger condemnation and even a rollback of gender equality interests.

A kid who chops off her granny's nose may 'trigger condemnation' but what 'rollback of gender equality interests' would ensue? This atrocity is committed by women on little girls.

Or consider, for instance, members of the Gulabi Gang, an Indian women’s group against domestic abuse, who are told that their vigilante acts instigate backlash towards the feminist movement in India at large.

But they beat up anyone who told them that. That's why they were successful and the reason their founder made a lot of money.

The choice between retributive justice and preserving other women’s interests is a clear case of affective injustice,

No it isn't. Affective injustice does not exist. Either you can beat up and chase away anyone who tries to repress you or you can't. If you can, then there is no affective injustice. If you can't, the injustice arises from the fact that the other party is stronger. This injustice could be redressed if you have a knife and they don't, or you have a gun and they have a knife. In other words, the structure of the injustice has to do with threat points. It has no 'affective' element whatsoever.

for it coerces victims into suppressing their anger, to which they are entitled.

Coercion can only occur if threat points are unequal. The remedy is raising one's threat point.

When these individuals’ actions are justified, then simply experiencing and not acting on anger – which is, if anything, a milder and less intense reaction – could also be justified.

Justification doesn't matter. Any shithead can justify any shit. Philosophers may think justification is a big deal but everybody thinks they are all a bunch of poopy heads.

If pursuing justice – with both anger and manifested action – can be warranted,

as can shitting into your hands- or writing an essay for Aeon- and flinging your feces about. Anything at all can be warranted or justified any which way. That's why the thing is a waste of time.

it seems only reasonable for individuals to feel, while not acting upon, their anger.

This is foolish. We don't know if some action may not result from the feeling.

What Srinivasan perhaps misses, however, is how we should weigh up these two considerations – feeling what is apt, and feeling what is conducive towards future betterment of the current state.

What sophomore mistake is Wong making here? The answer is that he is using the word feeling to mean three different things, firstly emotion, secondly intuition, and thirdly calculated judgment. How can an emotion coincide with an intuition re. what is apt? How can the intuition be independent of a calculated consequentialist judgment? If we evolved by natural selection on an uncertain fitness landscape, emotion, intuition and judgment can never coincide save stochastically. Why? They are separate faculties. We might as well demand that we should see through our nose or hear through our eyes.

Indeed, there are good reasons to think that attaining better outcomes is not as important as responding aptly to injustice.

No. There are stupid reasons for all sorts of shit. But there is no good reason to think that responding to some imaginary shit is more important than staying alive- the 'better outcome' we strive for and which drives Evolution.

The reason why actions can be morally judged is because

some small fraction of available resources is devoted to this end

humans are moral persons capable of moral agency.

one may as well say 'humans are sparks of the Divine capable of God like compassion'.

Our moral agency gives meaning and value to our actions.

According to one bunch of shitheads. But, if Darwin was right, this is just virtue signalling pi-jaw.

It goes to the core of our interactions with one another.

No it doesn't. Economics does because scarcity is ubiquitous and Knightian Uncertainty prevails.

Humans, unlike machines, are broadly autonomous, responsive to a wide range of reasons, and constitute voluntary beings with our pursuit of what matters to and for us.

Humans, like machines, are made by other humans. They survive and increase in number if they are useful. But that depends on the fitness landscape. Talk of autonomy and heteronomy is bullshit. A Kantian appears heteronomous, not to say stupid as shit, to me. But I genuinely have a low I.Q.

‘We’ are not interchangeable because each of us possesses distinctive thoughts, intentions and characters, as separate moral persons.

Yet, for all practical purposes, we are wholly interchangeable. That is why we constitute a Species.

We are guided by a range of motivations – sometimes to bring about better consequences in the future, at other times to reflect upon and appraise our past, or to make sense of what is happening to us in the now. Picking and choosing from these motivations allows us to be fundamentally free – in determining the character of the lives we lead and our moral personhood.

But we can pick and choose motivations while shackled in a prison cell. This is an empty conception of freedom.

Of course, one can choose to be fundamentally egotistical or evil – while these choices are regrettable and condemnable, our choosing them nevertheless reflects the fullest extent of our agency; we are not, and should not without further reasons, be bound by narrow interpretations of how we should live our lives.

But this is itself a narrow, not to say boring and stupid, interpretation of how we should live our lives.

One way to exercise our moral agency is to behave in a manner that we believe brings about the best consequences. There are other methods, such as adherence to absolutist rules, as deontologists hold, or possessing the right dispositions or attitudes, as virtue theorists argue.

But it would be equally true to say 'one way not to exercise moral agency is to be a consequentialist outsourcing decisions to experts. Another way is to adhere to rigid rules, perhaps outsourcing guidance on how best to do so to specialists. A third way is to listen to some shithead gassing on about arete and doing what he tells us to do.'

Of course, there are times when such decisional methods overlap – a virtuous agent can be one that doesn’t break any absolute rules, or contextually brings about the best outcomes. Yet each of these moral frameworks is, at the core of their associated reasons and explanations, different.

Yet they are identical to the outcome of having no moral framework at all. Thus this is meaningless shite.

To bring about the best outcomes is only one moral outlook – among many alternatives – that we can adopt. Not all moral agents are bound to be consequentialists – just as it can be valid for someone to live life adhering to a strict rules-based morality (eg, Kantianism).

Wong isn't bright. He doesn't get that the categorical imperative is like an inaccessible Cardinal. It allows a calculus which must be univocal ex poste. Of course, this calculus may be difficult to find but easy to verify. That's not a scandal for Kant because of the role he assigns to intuition.

On the other hand, a necessary aspect of our moral personhood, cutting across individuals who adopt completely different moral frameworks, is our capacity for judgment of and appropriate response to what befalls us – including, of course, injustices.

This is not a necessary aspect at all- unless you think mentally challenged people can't have 'moral personhood'. Nor is it a sufficient aspect. Any protocol bound decision system may have this quality. But, it would not necessarily have moral personhood.

Our ability to react aptly to injustice is thus a core constituent of our being fully fledged and developed moral agents.

No it isn't. Wong was too stupid to see his argument was specious. This is not a real bright guy. I guess he'll end up in the Politics Dept. As the Chinese say 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Politics Students. Politics Students look down on their teachers'.

There could, of course, be cases where the desire to promote the best outcomes for society outweighs our interests in being well-rounded, comprehensive moral persons. However, we should be allowed to lead lives as dynamic agents who respond to a wide range of reasons, just as we can lead lives centred around pursuing personally significant pleasures and relationships, even at the expense of bringing about the best consequences overall.

So, the Party must be obeyed, but being Gay is okay.

Now let us take a step back, and reflect upon whether anger truly is as detrimental as Nussbaum puts it, particularly in instances of injustice. In her criticism of anger, Nussbaum argues that victims of injustice driven by anger

or driven by rational self interest

must confront a ‘fork in the road’

if they are as stupid as shit, but not otherwise

– either they focus on the perpetrator of injustice, treating the act as a personal violation, and thus demand payback from the wrongdoer;

No. Game theory has confirmed that 'tit for tat' is the best strategy here. Collecting reparation is costly and time consuming.

or they focus on the act of injustice itself, and seek compensation, because they believe that the offender’s suffering would in fact make them better in the act’s aftermath.

No. This is a stupid thing to do. 'Tit for tat' is the way to go. This is cheaper if done collectively. Moreover, 'risk pooling' permits cheap insurance. Thus, everywhere we look, the victim applies for 'tit for tat' justice while gaining compensation separately from an Insurance fund. No doubt, there may be sociopathic gangsters who track down those who injure them and force them to become drug mules or whatever. But that's the stuff of movies. It isn't cost effective in real life.

She views the former path

which she invented

as unduly self-centred and obsessive over status

because she is self-centred and obsessed with her status

, at the expense of other more valuable goods that we can value intrinsically.

which is how come she doesn't teach something useful

The latter path doesn’t make sense, because retaliation does little to help recover those deprived goods.

So, Nussbaum is as stupid as shit. Why can't Wong say so? The answer is he is an apple polishing turd aiming at securing tenure as a diversity hire. Meanwhile, he keeps in the good books of the PRC by saying that China's bullying of its neighbors is actually a good thing for the region coz it enables the feelings of anger of ordinary Chinese citizens to find a target outside their own country.

Nussbaum thus concludes that anger, at least in the Aristotelian sense, is fundamentally undesirable.

Life her own oeuvre.

Let’s look at the first path. Nussbaum thinks that when we angrily react to someone who has wronged us, our sentiments stem predominantly (albeit not always) from feeling that we have been slighted and ‘down-ranked’ – that is, we are placed at an inferior or more vulnerable position relative to our wrongdoer, both within the shared perceptions between us and our wrongdoer, but also within the wider community’s perceptions. Nussbaum sees anger as probabilistically connected with the feeling that we have been unduly lowered in our status – not necessarily in the wider, social sense of status, but certainly in the interpersonal sense. As such, she rejects anger because it involves a narrow obsession over status, thus crowding out our ability to pursue alternative goods other than status.

But, in a Thymotic society, failure to react to a 'down-ranking' means it is open season on your live-stock and land and women and ultimately your life.

Think about the time when your anger towards a close friend compelled you to blurt out words that were deeply hurtful. Nussbaum would say that your fixation with reclaiming a ‘superior’ standing against your friend – by acting out angrily towards them – only precludes you from accessing greater goods, such as friendship and companionship.

But why would you want 'superior standing' with respect to a friend? Do Wong and Nussbaum have no mates? Is that at the root of their major malfunction?

Alternatively, by focusing on your being disrespected and ‘down-ranked’ relative to someone who, say, hurled racist abuse at you, you end up passing over the alternative paths forward in life that don’t involve confronting and fixating over a racist in anger.

The reason it is a good idea to react angrily to 'racist abuse' is because these are 'fighting words'. It is in your interest to establish a countervailing 'threat point'. The other may be able to beat you up but you have to convince her that you will do your best to scratch out at least one of her eyes.

Yet this view – while intuitively compelling – seems to gloss over the real lived experiences of many who undergo oppression or injustice. The apartheid regime that persecuted black South Africans was founded upon a status-hierarchy that privileged the white population.

No. The apartheid regime was about securing higher living standards for Whites while keeping the living standard for other Races as low as possible.

The Indian caste system was historically maintained through the continuous subjugation of ‘lower classes’, enabling the more privileged to derive profits and comforts off the backs of their less-fortune counterparts.

No. India was ruled by Turks and then by Brits. Neither had a caste system. Exploitation and subjugation was done by beating, robbing, killing and enslaving. The more privileged imposed taxes on the less privileged who in turn exploited those lower down. But, as in China, if a rebellion of the oppressed succeeded then suddenly the 'low caste' became the Sacred King by the Mandate of Heaven.

Underpinning such injustices is a systemic distortion of status – one that ranks individuals according to arbitrary, often self-serving metrics designed by those in power.

What underpins such injustice is guys with superior weaponry and military training who will descend on your village and kill or enslave everybody while they steal anything of value.  Status means shit unless it is backed up by a sufficiently scary threat point.

In these contexts, the reclamation of status by victims is not only important,

provided they don't get killed

but of paramount significance in the reparative process

because the fact that they haven't been killed means that the threat point of the ruling elite is 'a paper tiger'

– after all, anger directed at their former oppressors enables victims to regain their ranking in the social hierarchy.

The Chinese village, after Collectivization, did indeed see a reversal of the previous social hierarchy. But anger fizzled out as everybody starved together. Now, that craziness is a distant memory. The former 'bad element' was the first to flee to the Cities and so did better than the 'good element'. But, unlike in India, the Chinese village tended to be highly consanguineous. Thus Mao's 'caste system' has disappeared.

Nussbaum attempts to distinguish between ‘the injustice itself’, and ‘the way it has affected my [victim’s] ranking in the social hierarchy’, positing that we should focus on addressing the former and not the latter.

But 'social hierarchies' are fluid and depend on threat points outside their own ambit. There is no point focusing on something imaginary.

Yet this distinction neglects the empirical realities that some of the worst injustices in history are precisely the subjugation of individuals’ rankings and places within the hierarchy.

Fuck does this mean? Individuals can be subjugated. How can their 'rankings' be subjugated? It is not the case that the number 9 beats up the number 8 and steals the number 7's lunch. On the other hand 69 is a real thing.

More importantly, anger extends beyond merely the narrow desire to obtain greater status

Fuck off! Anger has nothing to do with wanting greater status- which is what everybody wants for purely rational reasons

– it also embodies the total repudiation of the normative order transcribed in the injustice, and the overwhelming desire to make things better in the future.

Rubbish! People get angry all the time. This does not transform them into Revolutionaries determined to secure the foundations of an Utopian future. By contrast, those who totally 'repudiate the normative order' tend to be mild mannered eggheads comfortably seated in armchairs conversing with colleagues about their failure to stem incessant masturbation in their classrooms or lecture halls.

Defiance of imposed values, commitment to future progress – these seem to be not just valuable intrinsic goods, but also enabling attitudes that facilitate greater intrinsic goods to be obtained in the future.

To whom do they so seem? Will anybody pay me for the 'valuable intrinsic good' represented by defiance of imposed values and commitment to future progress? No? Then this is bullshit on stilts.

Nussbaum offers us a way out.

A way out of a wholly imaginary quagmire

She argues that such forward-looking ‘Transition-Anger’ should be taken as the exception to the norm, and concedes that such anger has value but must be separated from the ‘garden-variety anger’ most ubiquitous in everyday life.

But this 'Transition-Anger' does not exist. History shows no example of it. In contemporary politics, we see plenty of people saying 'Guys, we must get really angry about x. That's the first step to bringing about meaningful change'. But we have seen, time and time again, that getting angry about x didn't bring about any change. It was a waste of time.

On the other hand, doing smart stuff did bring about change. But that means disintermediating shitheads who tell us to get steamed about whatever bee they have in their bonnet. No doubt, the shock jock and the alternative comedian may be able to make a good living out of this shit. But so can any lying jackass.

Yet such a distinction doesn’t seem to be empirically tenable – it’s difficult to imagine individuals being motivated by anger to assiduously avert future injustices, without at least a tinge of anger in how they react to past and present events that have befallen them or their colleagues. Requiring victims to channel all their reactive anger into institutional reform appears to be steeped in affective injustice of another sort. This requirement is far too demanding and unsympathetic to victims’ often entangled emotions and complex situations. Nussbaum’s first attack on anger doesn’t stand.

Why not simply say 'Nussbaum is a cretin?' Is there some law against telling the truth in this branch of Academia?

So what of the second path, the alleged futility of focusing on the act of injustice itself? Nussbaum argues that when we try to regain what we have lost through anger, we never succeed.

This is false. I threw away my pen in anger. Then I found it under the table. Nussbaum is talking bollocks.

Anger is overpowering and dominant as an emotion – and renders reconciliation and healing impossible.

Fuck off! Mummy gets angry with baby or baby throws a tantrum. But, 5 minutes later, all we can see in reconciliation and healing. 

It also fixates upon the lost cause of attempting to recover the irrevocable.

No. That isn't anger. That's bereavement. Anger may be a stage in Grief. But Grief is what predominates. 

Only in the absence of anger, Nussbaum posits, could we move forward and work towards genuine self-betterment.

Complete bollocks. You can be as mad as hell- coz you didn't get a raise- but still sufficiently composed to circulate your C.V and get a better paid position with a rival firm. 

Here her argument once again falls short in instances of predicaments confronting most victims of structural injustices and systemic oppression.

The problem with Grievance Studies is that it has to picture victims as having had all their brains buggered out of them by incessant incestuous gang banging. 

Where their core goods and interests are stripped away, anger is the sole emotion that offers reassurance that such injustices are through no fault of their own, and that they ought to feel proactively involved in the restoration of goods to which they are entitled.

Philosophy Departments are nor remarketing themselves as safe spaces for the epistemically raped where they can at last articulate their anger at having had their brains buggered to buggery by Society and History and the fact that Men have dicks and I don't or I do but I don't have their dicks in my mouth right now. 

The alternatives to anger in these cases are unlikely to be sanguine hope or prudent optimism.

No, indeed. The alternative is drooling catatonia. 

We could hope for these alternatives, but they are likely to be despair, regret and blame – all far more defeatist and inward-looking emotions that sap the very motivation that propels victims to seek justice for their wronging.

The trouble with lecturing Social Justice Warriors is that you are the one oppressing them. As Chairman Mao said, Students are oppressed by Examinations and Term Papers and so forth. Mao got the Students to beat the teachers but then brought in factory workers to beat the students and chase them into the countryside to do manual labour.

While anger might not be the most practically useful emotion to have in all cases, its epistemic and motivational productivity makes it the ideal candidate in steering victims towards making appropriate claims to compensation or reparation.

So, if you are angry you don't need a lawyer. You will win your suit against a big Corporation all by yourself. This has happened never.

It is the anger towards losing what matters that enables victims to pinpoint the most important components of their restorative process – of course, we might not think that restoration is intrinsically most valuable, but this critique misses the point. Anger can play a crucial role in recovering lost goods.

Fuck off! Lawyers and Detectives and so forth can play a crucial role in this. Anger is no substitute for the requisite techne.

For far too long, anger has been maligned and rejected as having no role to play in mature politics.

Trump gets angry. Is this what Wong means by 'mature politics'?

Yet, in reality, injustice and failure often leave us feeling angry. And that’s quite all right. Anger need not be defeatist or destructive – it is productive, justified and an innate component of what makes us human.

Like having an arsehole and farting in a witty and apt manner. The problem with this sort of psilosophy is that you could replace whatever it is that is being discussed with the word 'fart' or 'farting' without increasing or reducing the truth value of the text.

That's not a good thing.

Of course, I may be completely wrong about Wong. He may be a genius who has discovered a way to turn his farts into Nussbaum type psilosophy. On the other hand, maybe 'Undercover Brother II' is right and Wong has been dosed with 'wokeness' by 'the Man' as part of a Racist Global Conspiracy. We must all fight back by farting angrily at Neo-Liberalism. That will teach it. That will teach it but good.