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Wednesday 6 May 2020

Vinay Lal's biggest fan

I had commented, in my usual mordant style, on an article by Vinay Lal in 'Open Magazine'. Some days later my comment drew forth a response from a gentleman whom I daresay is Lal's biggest fan. I copy and paste our interchange here because I find this fan of Lal's to have a remarkable quality. He thinks being accused of being a member of the RSS- the voluntary organization to which Narendra Modi, the very popular and widely respected Prime Minister of India, belongs- a worse insult than being accused of being an incestuous pedophile pimp.

In the context of the Left's eclipse in Indian or American politics, I suggest that Lal take a paternal interest in this fan of his and make him his protege. The fellow has all the qualifications needed to be, if not Sonia Ji's bahu-rani, then the next Mani Shankar Aiyyar.





windwheel  11 days ago

Vinay Lal is a Professor of History. Yet he thinks that the emblem of the Red Cross, which everybody knows to be the inverse of the Swiss Flag and which represents neutrality, is actually the sign that a house has been visited by the plague! This crazy fellow thinks that the inhabitants of such a house have 'inviolable sanctity'! The truth is they die like flies.
Lal does not seem to understand that Seventeenth Century bureaucrats were versed in 'Political Arithmetic'- they were responsible for the compilation of National Statistics. The reason the Parish registers weren't keeping reliable track of the number of dead was because many of the poor had come from outside London and were not registered with a particular Church. Furthermore London had a large population of Dissenters. Still, bureaucrats were making estimates of the death toll because Mercantilist states considered larger populations to be a source of greater wealth and revenue.
Why does Lal write 'Should we be surprised that, in Wuhan and New York City alike, the number of those dead from the virus has been revised upwards, and that the bell will not toll for the poor when they drop off like fleas?' The suggestio falsi here is that we are not concerned with the death of the poor. But, even if we are rich, we can get infected by the poor. We need to know the 'R' or reproduction rate of the virus. The reason mortality rates get revised upwards in the early months of a pandemic is because of misidentification of cause of death especially amongst aged or infirm sections of the population with multiple health issues.
Lal thinks reading Peyps is helpful. It may be if the thing is done intelligently. But Lal is not intelligent. The fact is seeing one coronavirus epidemic- e.g. Kerala's experience with Nipah a couple of years ago- means much greater alacrity in response to a different outbreak of a similar disease. Lal repeats the misconception that the Spanish Flu hit the young harder. Actually, this depended on which class of virus had been circulating during a particular cohort's infancy. This varied much more by continent then. In India more women died than men- probably because they were malnourished.
Why does Lal keep talking about 'herd community'? Does he mean 'herd immunity'? Why is he taking offense at BoJo's joke about free-born Englishmen? Nobody in this country does that- probably because we have a sense of humor. The fact is BoJo thought, as many of us did, that the threat was overblown. He boasted of shaking hands with COVID patients. Then he became very very ill. It was a graphic illustration of the lethality of the virus. One may blame British epidemiologists for having faulty models. But that has nothing to do with National culture or notions of identity or what Peyps observed or Defoe wrote. Stupid Historians can add no value here. Instead they can only burble fatuously about 'herd community'.
What can we say about Professors of History who don't know any History but go in for a puerile type of politics? In a crisis, they add noise to signal by talking fatuous nonsense about 'Political Epidemiology'. One might as well speak of 'Fashion Epidemiology' and seek to correlate what the supermodels are wearing to the progress of the pandemic.
A medical problem must be handled by Doctors and Public Health Professionals. If you let stupid Politicized History Professors talk all that happens is that those Professors come across as utter cretins. We feel contempt for their disciplines. This article demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the Left. There was a time when Marxist economic historians had better Mathematical tools at their disposal. Now we have Vinay Lal talking of 'herd community'.





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      900Patch41  windwheel  2 days ago  edited

      Windbag: You're worse than a troll slumped over a laptop because you don't have any original idea whatsoever, let alone a defensible critique. Your singular talent is to write with the inertness of a deadly virus looking for fertile cells to infect. Let me guess—you're a nasty leech lustily waiting to attach yourself to every stimulating conversation, the more intelligent the better to latch onto. And after you've had your fill of blood, you drop to the floor, delirious as lesser leeches cheer, wishing you had the ability to strut s(h)itting down.
      Have you never crawled out of your dark, dank jungle? Oh, wait, the light would kill you, wouldn't it?





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          windwheel  900Patch41  a day ago

          Your stupidity causes you to write badly. Every single sentence you have written contains a non sequitur or a malapropism. A person 'slumped' over a laptop would not be able to type. The word you are looking for is 'slouched'. Why do you believe that trolls must have 'original ideas'? Nobody else does. You are being original in this respect. But you are a cretin.
          An 'inert virus' can't infect anything precisely because it is inert. Why are you so obsessed with leeches? I suppose you write about what you know. But you do it badly because you are as stupid as shit.





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              900Patch41  windwheel  17 hours ago

              Ha! You prove your point with every puking quibble, Tesco prime cut jackass—just like your 1/2-Turk Blow-Jo. Now go hang on another fetid branch and take a nap.





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                  windwheel  900Patch41  16 hours ago  edited

                  You say that I prove my point. That means you concede it. No doubt, ratiocination of any alethic kind strikes you as a 'puking quibble'. But then anything which strikes you- other than a double decker bus- is wasting its time.
                  Why are you so obsessed with leeches? Do they figure in erotic reveries in which you get all smoochy koochy with Vinay Lal? Why do you bring up BoJo's Muslim ancestry? Are you Islamophobic? No doubt, the explanation is simpler. Like Vinay Lal, Boris features in your mental spank bank. Not that your organ can get engorged- unlike the leech which so excites your envy. Still, it warms the cockles of my heart to think of your sullenly fisting yourself as you read this lapidary riposte.





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                      900Patch41  windwheel  4 hours ago

                      Pity poor England where such a despicable abortion s(h)its in a sewer. Send him back!





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                          windwheel  900Patch41  4 hours ago  edited

                          Once again, your poor command of the English language has let you down. What you mean to say is you envy, not pity, England because its sewers receive and bear away my shit- a task your eager upturned face, disfigured as it is by a gaping coprophagous mouth, yearns to perform. As for despicable abortions, it is you, not I, who depict them in your profile picture. Still, at least you have stopped babbling about leeches, now that I have explained the psychoanalytic significance of your fixation on them, and you have resigned yourself to never yourself having an engorged organ. It seems you have gained by the COVID lockdown in an unexpected manner. In normal times you could never have hoped to profit from my wisdom.





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                              900Patch41  windwheel  2 hours ago

                              Hey, Windbag! A word of advice: If you had to live your life over, don't do it, you pathetic chaddiwallah (yes, I know who you are). As for psychoanalytic explanations, your projections of everything from your deep inferiority complex to your homophobia are seeping like septicemia from your hilariously verbose sentences. And guess what—you wouldn't know Islamophobia if Modi personally stripped you naked for a circumcision search while his goons ravaged you and everyone in your family to death.
                              So, you think I have "a gaping coprophagous mouth?" At least I'm not hiding anything. What does your profile photo show, beyond a leech perched on a mountain of turd? I bet you dare not post a photo of yourself for fear of being outed as a cross between an aardvark and a gutter rat.





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