Tuesday, 27 October 2020

Amartya Sen, Oikeiosis & Identity

Why do some British people want Faith based Schools? One answer is that they don't want their daughters to get pregnant at 12 or their sons to deal dope at 13. Fear of God and Hellfire, may postpone their children's delinquency. Anyway, if you can memorize Scripture so as to keep in the good books of sharp-tempered nuns , you can also memorize whatever worthless shite is required to get into Uni and then get a white collar job. 

Another answer has to do with 'oikeiosis'- a sense of belonging or ownership which is the foundation of an idea of justice which is embodied and useful in that it reduces strife and uncertainty as opposed to being worthless bullshit. Oikeoisis creates uncorrelated asymmetries which tell agents which role they have in a game. Without this, no idea of Justice can be operationalizable. This is necessary for economic activity. Suppose I buy your car. You keep your car because you aren't necessarily the person who has to hand over a car. Nor am I the person who necessarily has to hand over cash. There is no transaction. 

To be useful, Identities need to be stable, solitary, and involve a normative link to action. Multiple identities are bullshit. One can agree to anything without having to keep to the agreement. After all, you might be the party owed reparation not the one who agreed to pay it.

Ceteris paribus, people want their kids to go the School which teaches their own Scripture so that their sense of oikeiosis might burgeon and thus their agency increases. 

Sen didn't understand this. He  said, 'The move towards faith-based schools in Britain reflects, in fact, a more general and deeply problematic vision of Britain as “a federation of communities,”

The United Kingdom is the union of different Kingdoms. Scotland has a different legal and educational system to the Kingdom of England and Wales. This is not a 'deeply problematic' vision of Britain. It is the historical and constitutional reality.

Government funded Faith based schools already existed in the UK. Gandhi adopted the 'passive resistance' put up by certain dissenters to paying local authority rates so as to fund Church of England Schools. These nutters went to jail rather than support the 'Whore of Babylon'. Gandhi used similar tactics to oppose the Salt tax- which was brought back under Nehru.

Should immigrants have Faith based Schools? Yes, provided terrorists and pederasts are kept from recruiting there. But this is simply a matter of regulating supply. On the demand side, it is a fact that in certain sectors of the economy, there will be more 'in-group' transactions. This means a sense of Justice founded in an inherited oikeiosis, supported by Faith based education, will improve outcomes. 

In a democracy with subsidiarity, the move to faith based schools does not reflect some elitist 'vision' but is a response to changes in the determinants in the demand and supply of education.

 rather than a collectivity of human beings resident in Britain, with their diverse differences of which religious and community-based distinctions constitute only one part (along with differences in language, literature, politics, class, gender, location, and other characteristics). It is unfair to children who have not yet had much opportunity of reasoning and choice to be put into rigid boxes in terms of one specific criterion of categorization, viz, the religious divide.'

It isn't unfair at all because kids soon grow up enough to understand that the purpose of a Faith based education is to keep you from delinquency till you learn to master your hormonal urges. One may as well say it is unfair for baby to have this Mummy instead of that Mummy. This is an example of what game theorists call an uncorrelated asymmetry. Where such arise, Rawlsian or Sen-ile notions of fairness are foolish. Why? Knowing you are this Mummy's baby, or this Religion's devotee, creates an oikeiosis, or 'belonging', which can outweigh any other source of utility. 

Sen, it seems, thinks Gandhi was as foolish as himself. He said

Gandhiji was critical in particular of the official view that India was a collection of religious communities.

Sadly, Gandhi didn't understand that Religion was irrelevant to his own role which was purely political. India had certain economic interests. Britain had certain economic interests. His job was to convince people that everybody would be better off if Indians ran India in India's own economic interests. 

Instead, Gandhi thought there was some 'overlapping consensus' between Religions such that his own Satyagraha would be universally admitted to have the magic properties he claimed for it. In 1921, this may have been credible. In 1931 it was risible.  All the minorities- including Sikhs, Dalits, and the Justice Party- united against Gandhi. The INC was a high caste Hindu show which, however, plenty of high caste Hindus thought little of. The Indian Liberals, who were supposed to help Gandhi, did a separate deal with British commercial interests. Gandhi returned more naked than when he left. Viceroys stopped talking to him. They'd just roll up his network and put everybody in jail if Congress wagged its tail. Thus, the British dictated the pace and substance of the transfer of power and did it in a manner advantageous to themselves. Gandhi lost all down the line. 

When he came to London for the “Indian Round Table Conference” called by the British government in 1931, he found that he was assigned to a specific sectarian corner in the revealingly named “Federal Structure Committee.”

This was because India was a mix of directly administered and Princely States. The Conference would determine to what extent sovereignty would be pooled in a Federal Structure. Because the Indians could not agree, the Brits kept control of Defense and Foreign Affairs. This meant India financed the British War effort on tick. 

 Sen, cretin that he is, thinks the Brits, didn't understand that people could have multiple identities. A rich Hindu man could be a poor Muslim woman who could be a Holy Cow or a particular shade of the color purple. Instead of holding Round Table Conferences to decide the Constitutional future of India, the Brits ought to have just got everybody to gas on about their multiple identities and capabilities and ideas of Justice.

Gandhiji resented the fact that he was being depicted primarily as a spokesman of Hindus, in particular “caste Hindus,”

though that was precisely what he was. Anybody, from the King Emperor down to his footman's cat could claim to represent the entire multiverse. 

with the remaining 46 per cent of the population being represented by chosen delegates (chosen by the British Prime minister)

because the Indians could not agree 

of each of the other communities.

Gandhi suddenly demanded that Congress be given control of the Army. He was laughed at.  

Subsequently, his one achievement was to browbeat Ambedkar. But this meant giving the Scheduled Castes higher representation. This backfired because Ambedkar's pal, J.N Mandal swung Sylhet to Pakistan though he and many Namasudras had to flee Pakistan subsequently. 

Gandhiji insisted that while he himself was a Hindu, Congress and the political movement that he led were staunchly secular and were not community-based; they had supporters from all the different religious groups in India.

The more he said this, the more he was laughed at. Partition became inevitable though there was no Economic reason for it.  

While he saw that a distinction can be made on religious lines between one Indian and another, he pointed to the fact that other ways of dividing the population of India were no less relevant.

This is the sort of shite Sen specializes in. When only one thing is an uncorrelated asymmetry, there is no point harping on other things which are correlated asymmetries. It's like saying 'If you like Biden, vote for Trump because he is old and White and that's what you are into- right? Old White guys.'

Had Gandhi simply been a Jinnah type lawyer, there might have been some point to this. But he was in fact a bigoted orthodox Hindu backed by caste fellows of a similar type. So long as he represented the INC (he was their sole representative) it was a high caste Hindu entity. No doubt, like the British, he could claim to represent everybody else, but anybody can make that type of claim.  

Gandhiji made a powerful plea for the British rulers to see the plurality of the diverse identities of Indians.

No he didn't. He asked them to see the INC, which he dominated, as the sole representative of all Indians regardless of their diverse identities. That's why he had turned up alone though everybody else had a delegation.  

In fact, he said he wanted to speak not for Hindus in particular, but for “the dumb, toiling, semi-starved millions” who constitute “over 85 per cent of the population of India.”

Nobody believed him. They knew he wasn't from a poor family. He was just playing dress up. 

Gender was another basis for an important distinction, which, Gandhiji pointed out, the British categories ignored, there by giving no special place to considering the problems of Indian women.

Or Indian babies. Or Indians who liked cats.  

He told the British Prime Minister. “You have had, on behalf of the women, a complete repudiation of special representation,”

But Cornelia Sorabji was running around giving lectures on the vileness of Gandhi.  

and pointed to the fact that “they happen to be one half of the population of India.”

Jinnah would have no difficulty getting educated Muslim women to rally round the League. 

Sarojini Naidu, who came with Gandhiji to the Round Table Conference, was the only woman delegate in the conference.
Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz, who was from the Muslim League Radhabai Subbarayan attended both the first and second conference, so there were three representatives of Women. 
Gandhiji pointed to the fact that she was elected as the President of the Congress Party (this was in 1925, which was, as it happens, fifty years before any woman was elected to preside over any major British political party, to wit, Margaret Thatcher in 1975).

So what? Annie Besant, who- like Nellie Sengupta- was a Brit, had been elected in 1917. Gandhi pushed her out.

Sarojini Naidu could, on the Raj's “representational” line of reasoning, speak for half the Indian people, namely Indian women;

No she couldn't. There was another woman there who was Muslim League. Incidentally, Radhabhai was refused an INC seat five years later. 

Abdul Qaiyum, another delegate, pointed also to the fact that Sarojini Naidu, whom he called “the Nightingale of India,” was also the one distinguished poet in the assembled gathering, a different kind of identity from being seen as a Hindu politician.

She was far less distinguished than Allama Iqbal. 

In a meeting arranged at the Royal Institute of International Affairs during that visit, Gandhiji also insisted that he was trying to resist what he called “the vivisection of a whole nation.”

We know how that turned out. Why did Gandhi fuck up so badly? The answer is that he had nothing to offer except his own nuttiness.  

Sen's nuttiness is revealed immediately

During the recent parliamentary debate on the judicial report on the killings of Sikhs that occurred immediately after Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguard, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Indian parliament, “I have no hesitation in apologizing not only to the Sikh community but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood and what is enshrined in our Constitution.” As a Sikh himself, Manmohan Singh's multiple identities are very much in prominence here when he apologized, in his role as Prime Minister of India and that of a leader of the Congress Party (which was also in office in 1984), to the Sikh community, of which he is a member (with his omnipresent blue turban), and to the whole Indian nation (of which he is, of course, a citizen). All this might be very puzzling if people were to be seen in the “solitarist” perspective of only one identity each, but the multiplicity of identities and roles fits very well with the fundamental point Gandhiji was making at the London conference.

Any puppet of Soniaji, Sikh or not, would- as Prime Minister- have apologized to the Sikhs at that time. Why? Because Sonia didn't want any more members of her family killed. To his credit, Manmohan Singh, while holding public office, has always had a 'solitarist' identity- that of a guy determined to do the best thing for the country. That's why he stood up to the Left on the 123 deal. 

Gandhi too had a 'solitarist' identity. That's why he was the INC's sole  representative.  

Much has been written on the fact that India, with more Muslim people than almost every Muslim-majority country in the world (and with nearly as many Muslims, more than 145 million, as Pakistan), has produced extremely few home-grown terrorists acting in the name of Islam, and almost none linked with the Al Qaeda.

The reason for this is that the Indian police arrest whole families and can generally break the recruits from lower socio-economic backgrounds.  

There are many causal influences here.

No. There is only one causal influence- viz. the countervailing power of the Indian police and intelligence agencies. Killing terrorists or torturing their families till they turn themselves in is very effective.  

But some credit must also go to the nature of Indian democratic politics,

which relies on extra-judicial killing to put down any real threat- if it is worthwhile to do so.  

and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea,

that most people are cowards. Kill the killers and lock up the mischief makers. The Brits showed how the thing should be done. That's it. Just do it already. If some nutter starts talking bollocks, pray a Godse puts an end to the nuisance.  

championed by Mahatma Gandhi, that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person's self-understanding and for the relations between citizens of diverse background within the country.

Identity does not matter. Belonging- oikeiosis- does. It is an uncorrelated asymmetry.  Sen might think that different Identities are associated with different 'circles of oikeiosis'. But this is not the case.  There is a single haecceity. One man can own many things or belong to many clubs. But he remains one man.

 If you find out that someone in your circle of belonging is also a member of another circle from which you are excluded then, clearly, that person is a potential arbitrageur. Equally, she may be a spy or become the subject of a repugnant type of cognitive dissonance. But it is not the case that the person has really split into lots of different identities. Economics is related to oikeiosis. There may be a 'cooperative' game in which arbitrageurs are useful. There may be zero, or negative sum, games in which it is safer to expel them. 

The disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity, and giving priority to the community-based perspective over all their identities, which Gandhiji thought was receiving support from India's British rulers, may well have come, alas, to haunt the country of the rulers themselves.

Not unless stupid cunts like Sen are listened to. Where you come from, or think you come from, doesn't matter. The question is are you going in my direction and can we help each other out along the way? Identity is singular and linked to this body we will only get rid off when we die. But 'belonging'- oikeiosis- changes and can involve multiple circles. 

In the Round-table conference in 1931, Gandhiji did not get his way, and even his dissenting opinions were only briefly recorded without mentioning where the dissent came from.

Sen immediately contradicts himself.

In a gentle complaint addressed to the British Prime Minister, Gandhiji said at the meeting, “in most of these reports you will find that there is a dissenting opinion, and in most of the cases that dissent unfortunately happens to belong to me.” Those statements certainly did belong only to him, but the wisdom behind Gandhiji's far-sighted refusal to see a nation as a federation of religious and communities belongs, I must assert, to the entire world.

The entire world knows that when you go to a Conference, you should try to come back with something advantageous to your people. This may involve making concessions. Sometimes, no deal can be made. But talking  bollocks is not wise.  True, the rules may be different for academic Conferences. But Gandhi wasn't an academic. 


Perhaps it is fitting that Gandhiji's dissenting views from the 1931 meetings are preserved in the records located exactly in London.

As opposed to where?  

I fear London has need for them now. One does not have to be an Indian chauvinist to make that claim. For Gandhiji and his ideas belonged to the world, not just to us in this country.

Fuck is this nutter getting at? Will Britain be partitioned? Will there be massive ethnic cleansing? No. The Brits are allergic to endless bullshit. They will make mutually advantageous deals. Why? Identity is singular and embodied. Oikieosis is on the basis of identity and is of an economic nature. It represents endowments and things bought or sold. This means that mutually advantageous deals can be made or else mutually assured destruction is on the table.

Sen has a paranoid theory that everybody is identity fluid but then some Evil force imposes identities so as to get people to kill each other. He says-

"People have been made to fight each other to serve the imagined demands of their allegedly single identity, effectively along the lines of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, expressing itself in ways like communal slaughter, political butchery and wars."

He thinks getting rid of 'imagined demands' regarding 'a single identity' would be a salutary thing. Many kids would agree. 'Yes Mummy, I promise I will tidy up my room' they say, with the mental reservation that it will be their secret alter-ego Spidercatman who will do the actual tidying up. Mummy very unfairly punishes the kid because she imagines it has a single identity. The police behave in the same unfair way to one's innocent identity when in fact it was an alter-ego which robbed the bank. 

The only reason people can be made to do anything, or can be trusted to do anything, is because they have a single identity. If you know a person has multiple personality disorder, you should be wary of lending them money.  The borrowing personality will never have the money to pay you back, while the financially solvent personality will never acknowledge the debt. 

Race, Religion, Nationality etc are expressions of oikeiosis arising out of uncorrelated asymmetries which represent 'bourgeois strategies' in 'hawk dove' type games. They are eusocial signaling devices. It is a bad idea to pick a fight with a squaddie if you can see his fellow squaddies are thick on the ground in that particular pub. Slink off home while you have the chance. This reduces the burden on the Public Health system. 

Sen thinks that anybody can take any role in any game. Thus all we can have is endless Symposiums, not any useful Conferences.

This single identity is currently "increasingly taking the form of containing a hard and allegedly impenetrable division along the lines of religion or religion-based understanding of civilization," he explained.

This is an Islamophobic dog-whistle. Yet, the truth is, Islamic countries are themselves keen to crack down on the nutters. At one time, the West would offer refuge to those nutters. Now they have become more cautious. 

But, Sen noted, that has not always been the case. At the beginning of the 20th century, in World War I, the Germans, the British and the French were all Christians. Nationality, not religion, was the great divider at that time.

But this had been true in every previous Century. It is still true now.  There is no need to remember something which is wholly irrelevant.

Sen criticizes "the presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partition."

Yet, it is a fact that people can be uniquely partitioned on the basis of the spatial location of their bodies. Without this presumption, there can be no law, no economics, no Government and no Universities. Harvard may be my neighbor's cat and Amartya Sen a flea on that cat.  

"The newly popular singular view of identity

as opposed to the old and unpopular view that Beyonce was also Boris Yeltsin 

is not only incendiary and dangerous. It is also astonishingly naïve," he said. "In our normal lives, we consider ourselves as members of a great many groups. We belong to all of them."

But have only one body. We also own a lot of shit. But we can sell or otherwise lose that shit. Our membership in various groups may lapse or be repudiated. But when we quit our bodies we die.  

Sen then cited a variety of ways one person can be identified: "The same person can be — without any contradiction — a U.S. citizen, of Asian background, of Indonesian ancestry, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a movie fan, an environmental activist, a tennis player, a sprinter, and someone who believes that extraterrestrial beings should be taught how to write graceful sonnets, preferably in good English," he said, drawing laughter with the last identity.

Many people, or none at all, may answer to that description- but that description is not an identity. Moreover, anybody at all may fit that description save for a 'buck stopped' juristic decision process. I am a U.S citizen in the sense that George III acted unconstitutionally in making peace with the Colonies. I am of Indonesian ancestry in the sense that my ancestors were subjects of a King whose most valuable possessions were in what is now Indonesia. I'm a woman in the sense that I have man-boobs and a tiny dick which could easily pass for a large clit. I'm a sprinter who can run 100 meters in 3 minutes. 

"Each of the collective identities to which this person belongs simultaneously without any contradiction gives her a particular identity,

No. She has an identity by reason of having a body. That body may 'belong' and have belongings in a manner which incurs opportunity cost. But this just means this person is an economic agent. It is not the case that multiple identities coincide in one locus. One might as well say, 'each person is God, the Devil, all other sentient beings, yea verily all things imaginable and unimaginable are contained in this cock I beseech thee to suck'  

which can be, depending on the context and circumstances, extremely important for her behavior and priority," he explained. "And these different identities can co-exist without any battle among them."

There is only one identity which may experience 'cognitive dissonance' by reason of wishing to belong to contradictory groups- e.g being both an economist and a philosopher. 

The singular partitioning of the world population according to some overarching criteria of identity makes the work of terrorists and other instigators of violence who exploit the use of singularity much easier for them, he said.

But killing terrorists and fucking up their financiers gets rid of the problem. When the terrorists came for the people in the Taj hotel, suddenly discovering a bullet proof identity wouldn't have helped them any.  

"The ultimate issue is not only of personal choice and how we should approach our life and how we may think of our identity, but also of how we may see others," Sen said.

So, the ultimate issue is a whole bunch of issues of the sort that would exhaust the patience of even the most Sen-ile Symposium.  

He illustrated his point with the example of "the demand for expelling all illegal immigrants from the USA."

Certain people are liable to deportation by due process of law. This is not an 'identity'. It is a contingent fact of a mutable type. Some of those people may be able to change it. Others may not bother with no ill effects. It depends. 

"Illegal immigrants of course do have the identity of being illegal,

no they don't. A Court must decide whether or not this is or is not a fact about them.  A contingent fact is not an identity. It may change how you think of oneself, but that's the sort of thing you can get therapy for. 

Sen is committing the 'masked man fallacy'. Only Courts can decide what is or isn't the extension of 'illegal immigrant'. We understand the term but can't say who falls into that category. Consider a naturalized American who discovers that his papers were wrongly processed. He has become an 'illegal immigrant' liable to deportation through no fault of his own. Perhaps a superior Court may overturn this decision. Perhaps not.

as well as illegal in status, and this is significant for public policy," he said. However, propaganda can

spread bad vibes or good vibes. But one can't neutralize propaganda by saying 'we are as much part of the impugned identity as we are of the approved one', because the retort is 'this propaganda is encouraging us to repress our bad side and express our good side'.  

make many already settled Americans, "particularly those nervous about their jobs," be persuaded "to see the identity of an illegal immigrant as being just that, as illegal, the total description.

One immediate effect is that people spend money to regularize their status and that of their kids. That's generally a good thing. Another effect is that Labour laws may be more stringently enforced save in repugnancy markets. 

Sen is a pedagogue. He may have to worry about the 'impressionable minds' of his stupid students or senile colleagues and thus 'mind his language' and speak in an obfuscating manner. But the rest of us must not do so. The thing is foolish. It is mischievous.          

The fact is 9/11 was avoidable. The FBI should have been profiling the shit out of Islamic nutters. Political Correctness fucked the world in the ass to the tune of trillions of dollars. Europe should have cracked down on Islamic militancy twenty five years ago. Macron is right. Erdogan may be doing the right thing for his people, but his people aren't our people.                                                                                                               

Inclusive vs. fragmentary views of world civilization

Sen described two ways of thinking about the pitfalls of civilization in the world. "One is to understand the story in an inclusive form and to encompass the manifestation of world civilization in different parts of the globe, taking on the divisions as well as the interdependences between human lives across the world," he said.

Or one could just take ecstasy and start hugging everybody. 

He contrasted the inclusive approach with the fragmentary approach, "which segregates the beliefs and practices of different regions into separated and self-contained boxes," he continued.

Which is what lawyers and diplomats and businessmen and sensible people do.  

"Recently, the fragmentary approach has come much into prominence, especially in the threatening form of the so-called clash of civilization," Sen said. "The entire subject has been elevated to the position of being of central concern in many Western countries today."

The fact is there was a small fragment of crazy nutters left over from the Afghan jihad running amok in Sudan and so forth. After the 1998 attacks, the FBI and CIA and European Intelligence Agencies should have ignored the Politically Correct Brigade and profiled the fuck out of such militants. They should have rolled up the 9/11 plotters, forced Pakistan to play ball and hired assassins to bump off Bin Laden and Zawahiri and so forth.  

He referred to the "dreadful events of 11 September 2001" having ushered in a period of awful conflicts and distrust in the world.

The thing was eminently preventable. Sudan offered to hand over Osama. That was a chance to build trust and do a deal which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  

"Indeed, many influential commentators have been tempted to see a firm linkage within the profusion of atrocities that you see around us today and the civilization of division primarily along religious lines," he said.

What he is getting at is the view that Muslims be kray kray. 

To categorize people according to an identity such as a member of the Western world, the Islamic world, the Hindu world, or the Buddhist world, is to reduce people to this one dimension, as Sen sees it, and to presume this must be the predominant influence in his or her mode of thinking — thereby ignoring all other identities related to economic, social, political, professional, cultural or occupational affiliation.

Sen is confusing 'trait' with 'identity'. Being a terrorist is a mutable trait which can quickly be expunged from a given population if it is linked to  a strong likelihood of getting killed or locked up.  

In his 2006 book, "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," Sen noted that he discussed the harm that is done by the implicit belief in a single identity

No harm is done by affirming that, absent multiple personality disorder, one body equates with one identity some of whose traits are mutable on the basis of effective incentives and penalties.  

and "how this intellectual confusion can be used to foment violence, as terrorists do to recruit people to fierce deeds against ‘those others,’ and how that intellectual disarray can make it very hard to resist violence or to win the so-called war on terror."

Sen can't release us from 'intellectual confusion' because, by his account, we have multiple identities some of which get confused by what others find clarifying.  

On the other hand finding ways to punish bad affiliations and reward good affiliations can improve things. 

Celebrating global interdependence

The West is suffering greatly right now

Nonsense! It would be nuking the fuck out of its adversaries if any great suffering had occurred. Even as things are, every Western death or economic loss has been avenged a hundred or thousand fold

from violence against it by those who want to exploit the divisions between civilizations and traditions, Sen said.


The anti-Western jihadists, including Islamic terrorists, like to promote the idea of a fundamental dichotomy between the West and the non-Western world, he said.

No. They aim to convert the West. 

They see themselves as rigidly-separated Muslims, concerned only with their divergence from the West, and not with pursuits they can share with others in the world, including mathematics, science, literature or music.

After conversion, they will be happy to share any goodies you may have. Sen should know. He comes from a part of the world where there has been plenty of conversion.  

Sen called it "altogether astonishing and truly tragic" that Western parochialists do not dispute the fragmentation of civilization and history.

Unlike Eastern shitheads who are astonishingly stupid and whose fucking up of their own Economies or Cultures is truly tragic.  Sen may not have noticed but Tagore's Shantiniketan is a shithole. 

"Rather than resisting the alienation that feeds the anti-Western violence, this adds further force to the terrorists’ segregated vision," he explained. "In this sense, Western parochialism and the belligerence it generates have been in an unstated and implicit alliance with Islamic terrorism."

While Sen's feebleness is what led that terrorism to think they could win in the first place.  

Sen concluded, "The need for recollecting and celebrating the richness of the vast interdependence within our global civilization has never been stronger.

And can be done by taking a tab of E.  

It’s a huge intellectual challenge that we face with increasing urgency, I believe."

This isn't an intellectual challenge. It is an invitation to a wank off.  Any senile fucker can do it. But a cute 8 year old could do it even better. There may be 'intellectual challenge' involving coordinating Global responses to viruses and things which act like viruses. But Sen can make no contribution to that discourse. Nor can Gandhi. David Icke, on the other hand, has emerged as the most prominent Public intellectual of the last two decades. 


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