Arundhati Roy as Macaulay's Brahmin daughter.

Age undoes us all. Turning 60, Arundhati Roy has become a ghastly waxwork depicting the hysterical lunacy that is the inheritance of one who might be termed Lord Macaulay's 'Brahmin' daughter. 

Scroll has published this speech of hers which will be delivered to a supposedly Dalit organization-

 I thank the organisers of the 2021 Elgar Parishad for inviting me to speak at this forum to mark what would have been Rohit Vemula’s 32nd birthday and the 1818 victory of the battle of Bhima Koregaon.

Vemula wanted to write popular books about Science in English- like Carl Sagan. But he topped himself because he wasn't Dalit and anyway his stipend had been suspended just coz he allegedly beat up another student. For some reason, this was considered very heroic- not the alleged hooliganism, but the hanging. 

 Bhima Koregaon was a victory for the East India Company which Lord Macaulay served. Roy herself has impeccably comprador credentials. Her father was a Bengali Brahmo- recall Raja Ram Mohun Roy & Dwarkanath Tagore spent a lot of their own money to lobby Westminster to permit unrestricted White settlement in India so that British power would burgeon- while her mother's ancestors were High Caste Kerala Christians who worshipped and lived separately from 'Pariah' Christians.  

Both sides of her family have a great love for Macaulay's English. Their contempt for 'natives' is not modified by their own dusky features. Perhaps they imagine they are lighter in color. Roy herself played an Adivasi girl in an art-house film- an adaptation of Joyce Cary's 'Mister Johnson' which, quite ludicrously, tries to project White racism against Blacks in West Africa onto the Indian scene with Tribals, who are the same color as us, being depicted as 'Black'. Needless to say Roy's Adivasi girl exists only to get fucked. She has no agency. 

Roy's people believe they are ersatz Whites speaking the Queen's English. But Roy's celebrity arises from her being seen in the West as an abject dusky whining away about the misery of her lot in an effortfully acquired parody of the Master's tongue.

Why has Elgar Parishad invited this shithead? The answer is that nobody else will come. The other guest is another Keralite (the Communists rule Kerala) who resigned from the Civil Service in solidarity with the Kashmiris. So, these cretins are still trying to advertise their anti-national credentials. They are objecting to the extension of statutory protection to Dalits in Kashmir Valley! What a wonderful own goal!  

Who else has been invited? One guy is an upper caste ex Judge who is pushing 80 and who lost his deposit in the last election. Another is a Wire journalist who was arrested for retweeting a doctored post by a Hindutva type about the Ram Temple. This so called journalist must have been very naive to believe that the Sanghis don't want low castes to enter that holy place! Surely he was aware that bakhts love Modi who is OBC? 

It is clear that actual Dalit leaders have given Elgar Parishad the cold shoulder. Still, why embrace a Macaulayite pseudo Brahmin? Why give her a platform? 

It may have been thought that Roy is 'intellectual'. She would say something interesting. But she is ignorant and stupid. What she says is highly damaging to the Dalit cause.

Not far from here, Mahar troops fighting in the British Army defeated the Peshwa King Bajirao II under whom Mahars and other Dalit castes were cruelly persecuted and ritually debased in indescribable ways.

But the British Army later decided to stop recruitment of Mahars. They preferred high caste recruits from 'Martial' races.  

Why advertise an anti-national feat of arms by Dalits? There are plenty of Dalit war heroes to celebrate from India's defensive wars.

From this platform let me join the other speakers to express my solidarity with the farmers

who treat their Dalit laborers like shit, which is how come Kanshi Ram's movement gained transaction in the Jat dominated areas 

protest that is calling for the immediate withdrawal of the three Farm Bills that have been rammed down the throats of millions of farmers and farm workers and brought them onto the streets.

which does mean they can't be back home gang-raping Dalits. Still, it is a sacrifice in a good cause 

We are here to express our sorrow and anger for the many who have died during the course of the protest.

Coz when people die of heart disease or if they are killed when their antics cause their own tractors to turn over crushing them to death, we feel sorrow and anger at...urm... the stupidity of a bunch of guys who exploit landless Dalits and migrant Biharis to do the actual backbreaking agricultural work on their farms.  Incidentally, the guy killed when his tractor turned turtle was waiting to re-join his wife in Australia. He wasn't a farmer. 

The situation on Delhi’s borders where the farmers have been peacefully camping for two months is becoming tense and dangerous. Every possible trick and provocation is being used to divide and discredit the movement. Now, more than ever, we must stand by the farmers.

But everybody Roy stands with goes to the wall. Sensible people wouldn't want her support.  

We are also here to demand the release of the dozens of political prisoners – including those who have come to be known as the Bhima Koregaon 16 – jailed on ludicrous charges under draconian anti-terror laws.

If Roy is demanding something, there is an immediate and much larger counter-mobilization demanding the opposite. 

Many of them are not just comrades but personal friends of mine with whom I have laughed, walked and broken bread.

But Roy hasn't joined them in jail. Laugh and walk with her by all means. Don't do stupid shit which gets you jailed because though she may still be walking and laughing and breaking bread all over the place, you won't.  

Nobody, not even their captors probably believe that they have committed the hackneyed crimes they are being accused of – planning the assassination of the prime minister, or plotting murder.

But they are believed to be as batty as Roy and thus probably were engaged in the sort of hackneyed Revolutionary conspiracies which the Law declares to be a crime. 

Everybody knows they are in jail for their intellectual clarity

No. If anybody thought those nutters had intellects they would have tried to get them to do something useful before they turned utterly senile. Even for the hard-core Naxals, these guys were 'useful idiots'- nothing more.  

and moral courage – both of which are viewed by this regime as a significant threat.

Fuck off! Manmohan said the Naxals were a big threat. But they aren't really. They are useful to the BJP because they drive the Tribals and Dalits they terrify towards their own grass roots movements thus building Hindutva 

To make up for non-existent evidence, the charge-sheets against some of the accused run into tens of thousands of pages. It could take a judge several years to just read these, let alone adjudicate upon them.

Like judges are greatly concerned with the fate of a bunch of senile tossers without either money or caste based support!

It’s as hard to defend yourself against trumped up charges

if you are a senile shithead who has been talking Seditious Conspiratorial shite to any and every other senile shithead in the vicinity for longer than anyone can remember 

as it is to wake up a person who is pretending to sleep.

a brain dead person whom you are pretending is asleep. 

In India we have learned that relying on legal redress is a risky proposition.

if you have no money and people think you are a stupid nuisance 

In any case where and when have courts ever turned back the tide of Fascism?

Or Communism? Or Democracy? What matters is if Courts can hold the line on Crime.  

In our country

like every other country 

laws are selectively applied

because Justice is a service industry. It costs money to investigate wrongdoing as well as to launch an effective prosecution or mount a proper defense 

depending on your class, caste, ethnicity, religion, gender and political beliefs.

more important than any of this is a person's personal attributes and resources. 

So, while poets and priests, students, activists, teachers and lawyers are in prison,

because of a deficit in attributes and resources 

mass murderers, serial killers, daylight lynch mobs, disreputable judges and venomous TV anchors

not to mention blathershites like Arundhati Roy 

are handsomely rewarded and can aspire for high office.

but not in India, in Roy's case. 

The highest, even.

Now, this casteist cunt is taking a dig at President Kovind. 

Nobody with even average intelligence

which, sadly, Roy lacks. Paranoia, on the other hand, she has in plenty.  

can miss the pattern of how the 2018 Bhima Koregaon rally, the 2020 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests and now the farmers protests have sought to be discredited and sabotaged by agent provocateurs in exactly the same way.

But they were discreditable ab ovo because they were anti-national. Bhima Koregaon celebrated the victory of a British multinational over indigenous people. The anti-CAA agitation protested the granting of refugees from Islamic persecution even though Inia is a majority Hindu country which has traditionally sheltered victims of Muslims violence. The farmers who are protesting get paid more for the same crop even though they are using migrant and landless laborers to do the heavy work. They are a relatively affluent class and appear to include Khalistani separatists who have mercilessly killed innocent Hindus. 

Why speak of 'agent provocateurs'? We can see that people with long standing anti-national ideologies turned up of their own accord at these events. No doubt, this helped the BJP and hurt Congress and the Left but both were already shit so this sort of stupidity makes no difference to anything. It is just a 'tamasha' to pass the time.

The immunity they enjoy speaks volumes about the support they enjoy with the current regime.

But Roy too is immune. Indeed almost everybody is. Nobody cares what retarded shite they tweet or blog.  

I could show you how this pattern has repeated itself over decades to bring these people to power.

No you couldn't. You are too stupid and ignorant. 

As state elections approach, we await with dread what lies in store for the people of West Bengal.

Fuck off! Mamta will win. She beat the Commies but good but since some good people will always become Commies, Mamta must remain in place so as to beat dem Commies but good. 

Over the last two years the Elgar Parishad as an event and an organisation has been relentlessly defamed and demonised by the corporate media.

But for whom nobody would have ever heard of it. 

Elgar Parishad: to many ordinary people those two words conjure up a

senile Ambedarite party paid a little money to split the vote in some dusty Assembly seats nobody gives a fuck about

shady cabal of radicals – terrorists, jehadis, Urban Naxals, Dalit Panthers – plotting to destroy India.

but doing so in an entirely ineffectual manner because they are all very very fucking old and have wasted their entire lives on fantasies.

In this climate of name-calling, of threat, dread and anxiety, just to have organised this meeting is in itself an act of courage and defiance that deserves to be saluted.

by those too deluded to ignore it. 

It’s incumbent on those of us up here on the stage to speak as candidly as we can.

so, they will tell stupid lies because that's as candid as they can get 

Roughly three weeks ago, on January 6, as we watched an outlandish mob storm through the US Capitol carrying Confederate flags, weapons, gibbets and crucifixes, wearing furs and antlers – the thought that ran through my head was, “My Goodness, in our country we are already ruled by the Indian equivalent of these people. They’ve taken our Capitol Hill. They’ve won.”

Roy seceded from India long ago. The nutters running amok in the Capitol were exactly like Roy and the Elgaar Parishad accused. They live in a fantasy world.  

Our institutions have been overrun by them.

No. Indian institutions have been run by the same type of people since Independence. But what is that type? The answer is that they are people who worked their way up through the law, the civil service, Party cadres and the Legislative and Ministerial posts, doing the boring day to day business of Governance and conversing mainly in Indian languages with ordinary Indian people. 

Lord Macaulay may not have approved of this but he would not be such a fool as to compare a class of dedicated professionals to an unruly mob. 

Our Leader appears before us in a different set of furs and antlers every day.

No he doesn't. He appears before us well coiffed and neatly dressed.  

Our favoured elixir is cow urine.

But it isn't the favored elixir of Q Anon. Cow urine is only important to people who consider the cow sacred. India has a Directive Principle in its Constitution regarding cow protection.  

They are well on their way towards destroying every democratic institution in this country.

No. They are the majority and thus democratic institutions express their views. But this has been happening from at least 1937.  

The US might have managed to claw itself back from the brink to some semblance of imperial “normalcy”.

Imperial? Fuck is wrong with Roy? America decided not to go down an Imperial route long ago. Why put normalcy in scare quotes? The thing has been accepted as idiomatic since the time of Pres. Harding. We Indians are scarcely in a position to throw stones at American usage.  

But we in India are being dragged back centuries into a past that we have tried so hard to escape.

This simply isn't true. It is a fantasy. Roy's casteist, comprador, anti-Hindu background and education may cause her to equate 'being dragged centuries backward' with the absence of European rule. But this extreme type of racism is itself considered reactionary by Europeans today. 

It isn’t us – it isn’t this gathering of the Elgar Parishad that is radical or extreme.

No. You guys are senile and stupid. 

It isn’t us who are acting illegally and unconstitutionally.

Because you are merely playacting.  

It isn’t us who have looked away from, or overtly encouraged pogroms in which Muslims have been killed in their thousands.

But it is you and your ilk who have lied that 'pogroms' against Muslims have been orchestrated by the BJP.  This has led to the consolidation of Hindu votes behind the BJP. Why? Hindus understand that the BJP gains, it does not lose, by punishing Muslims who attack non-Hindus or who kill policemen. In the context of rising Islamic militancy and terrorism around the world, this put Modi's India shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Israel and so forth. However, it is only Communist China which has concentration camps for Muslims. 

It isn’t us who benignly watch while Dalits are publicly flogged on city streets.

Yes it is. Roy's ancestors have been doing it for thousands of years. This silly moo took a long time to become aware that such a person as Dr. Ambedkar ever existed. Before that she was exercised by things like nuclear weapons, big dams, Enron and the 'War against Terror'. Her first novel features the custodial killing, by a Christian cop, of a Dalit. But only after she was chased away from every more modish type of activism did she finally settle on Dalit politics as her way to stay relevant.  

It isn’t us who are pitting people against one another, ruling through hatred and divisiveness.

It isn't you who is doing anything useful or alethic. 

That is being done by those that we have elected as our government and by their propaganda machine that calls itself the media.

No it isn't. The elected government of India wants to win the next election. The only way it can do this is growing the economy and improving Governance. It is not in Modi's interest for stupid shit to go down. It is in Roy's interest for people to believe stupid shit is going down because she herself is as stupid as shit and thus can only gain interessement in a situation where the other side is believed to be as stupid and sociopathic.  

Two hundred years have gone by since the battle of Bhima Koregaon.

which wasn't a Dalit victory at all 

The British have gone, but a form of colonialism that pre-dates them by centuries, lives on.

In so far as Roy incarnates it. But Modi and Kovind have a very different lineage. 

The Peshwas are gone, but Peshwai –Brahminism h– as not.

Roy's ancestors claimed Brahmin status. Modi's did not.  

Brahminism, I don’t need to clarify to this audience, but I do for others who many not know, is the term the anti-caste movement has historically used for the jaati-vyavastha.

It is true that Roy's maternal ancestors claimed to be Christian Brahmins and that they (on the evidence of her own first novel!) pitilessly killed Dalits and excluded them from their Churches, but Konkani Kshatriya Christians did the same thing. Muslim Pakistan still mistreats Dalits whether or not they have converted to Christianity. Japan has Untouchables but no Brahmins. Bali has Brahmins but no Untouchables. 

Brahminism was originally used to designate all votaries of Vedic Religion. It may have been used by 'anti-caste' activists- but, if so, it was used in a misleading and mischievous manner. There has been plenty of anti-Brahminism in Tamil Nadu. But Dalits have faced more not less atrocities from dominant OBC anti-Brahminists. 

The caste-system. It does not refer to Brahmins alone.

Why? Coz Roy is hoping to pass herself off as a Brahmin who has occult powers and thus who should be worshipped by these stupid Dalits. 

Brahminism has been to the workshop though, and has emerged fitted-out with a modern, democratic sounding vocabulary and a stream-lined caste-management manual and programme (not new, but overhauled) that has mounted an existential challenge to the Dalit-Bahujan led political parties that once offered some hope.

In Roy's fantasy world, her supposed 'Brahmin' genes giver her super-powers. Also she knows about 'workshops'. So the Dalits should listen to her. 

Sadly, Dalits aint stupid. Dr. Ambedkar married an actual Brahmin Doctor. But the Dalits didn't let her usurp any sort of political role. They have long known they are smarter than Brahmins. If the RSS offers them better opportunities to rise to the top, then they join the RSS and- like Kovind or Modi- rise up in the BJP. At one time it seemed that a Dalit headed party could cobble together coalitions but Mayawati's tenure as CM in UP showed that this involved keeping feudal Crime Lords in place. But this 'caste-arithmetic' ensured that 'maha-dalits' fell behind Muslims. Since Muslim Mafia families- some of which are descended from great Gandhians like Dr. Ansari- have always been comfortable doing deals with Thakurs and then Yadavs etc, the Dalits soon get squeezed out. Thus, to advance, they have to get behind the Party that improves Governance and permits the formal Economy to grow. 

Right now, the chosen vaahan [vehicle] of 21st century Brahminism is the far-right, Brahmin-controlled Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which, after a century of unceasing labour, has, through its best-known member, Narendra Modi, taken power in Delhi.

But Modi isn't Brahmin. Roy thinks she herself is. It seems this far-right Racist who has publicly seceded from India is jealous that her own Brahmin (for self) controlled vehicle of self-glorification is now considered the intellectual equivalent of a broken down pram pushed by a smelly old bag lady. 

Hilariously, the silly moo thinks she knows from Marxism!

Many, including Karl Marx himself, believed that modern capitalism would end or at least override caste in India. Has it?

Yes. Heritability of occupation breaks down under open markets and large scale industry.

Across the world, capitalism has ensured that wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

But people are still much better off than they would be under a command economy. 

In India, the 63 richest people have more money than the 2018-’19 Union Budget for 1.3 billion people.

No. They have much less money than the Union Government. Their total assets may have a higher valuation but that is because real interest rates are low so Wealth could be a hundred times multiple of Income. Indeed, because the 'richest people' own highly leveraged intellectual property of a strategic type the market valuation of their wealth might be thousands or millions times greater than the present value of whatever income stream  they actually produce. But such wealth may suddenly melt away. 

A recent Oxfam study has found that in India during the corona pandemic, while hundreds of millions lost their jobs during the lockdown – 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 – India’s billionaires increased their wealth by 35%.

Why? Because an exogenous shock changed expectations. But what has this do to with 'Brahminism'? In Roy's mind everything is connected. No doubt the RSS controls Wall Street.  

One hundred of the richest among them – let’s call them the corporate class – made enough to be able to distribute, if they wanted to, almost 100,000 rupees each to 138 million of India’s poorest people.

No they didn't. Roy is confusing income with wealth. You own a house worth a million. But your net rental income from it may be 50,000. If the richest redistributed their income, the poor would get too little for the windfall to make any difference. However, the poor might become worse off if the richest of the rich stop their role in switching resources to more productive uses.

Roy is welcome to divide her own income with the poor. It is what 'Brahminism' counsels. 

A mainstream newspaper headlined this news as follows: “Covid deepened inequalities: wealth, education, gender.” The missing word in the report as well as in the newspaper headline, is of course, caste.

Because caste inequalities did not deepen. Some forward castes lost out to some mercantile backward castes. 'Creamy layer' Dalits shot forward. Some maha-dalits lost out along with Brahmin migrant laborers.  

The question is, does this tiny corporate class – which owns ports, mines, gas fields, refineries, telecommunication, high-speed data and cell phone networks, universities, petrochemical plants, hotels, hospitals, food distribution outlets and television cable networks – does this class which virtually owns and runs India, also have a caste?

When it comes to marriage, yes- these guys have caste and religion and mother tongue (which is often Gujarati). But they tend to be of mercantile or peasant castes of 'middle' rank.  

To a great extent, yes. Many of the biggest Indian corporations are family owned. To name a few of the biggest – Reliance Industries Ltd (Mukesh Ambani), Adani Group (Gautam Adani), Arcelor Mittal (Lakshmi Mittal), OP Jindal Group (Savitri Devi Jindal), Birla Group (KM Birla). They all call themselves Vaishyas, the trader caste. They are only doing their divinely ordained duty – making money.

While Roy is doing her divinely ordained duty- talking stupid paranoid bollocks. The fact is guys like Gates, Bezos, Musk etc. have made our lives better. We want them to have pots of money. In India the Ambanis and Adanis and so forth make stuff we need and also create good jobs. That's why we want these guys to continue to make money by providing goods and services we value. We don't want Roy to continue making money by saying 'India is a Nazi shithole' because that harms us. Still, the silly old moo has to do what silly old moos do.  

Empirical studies about the ownership of corporate media and the caste breakdown of their editors, columnists and senior journalists reveal the strangle-hold of the privileged castes, mainly Brahmin and Bania, on designing and disseminating the news – real as well as fake.

But the media is shit. So what if some Bengalis- related to Roy- made money there?  

Dalits, Adivasis and increasingly Muslims are almost absent from this landscape.

Muslims are present on the billionaire list as is one Dalit. However, unless they are Gujarati speakers they tend to have thrived abroad though no doubt they may have big investments in India- especially if they are from Kerala.  

The situation is no different in the higher and lower judiciary, the upper echelons of the civil services, the foreign service, the world of chartered accountants, or plum jobs in education, health, publishing, or in any sphere of governance. Between them the population of Brahmins and Vaishyas is probably less than 10% of the population. Caste and Capitalism have fused to create a peculiarly lethal, peculiarly Indian alloy.

But this alloy is what has permitted the population to grow while experiencing some increase in material living standards. 

Roy found a money-making niche and worked hard to maintain herself in that niche. She followed the logic of the globalized market in the same way that others who have acquired wealth did so. The difference is we need the stuff the Adanis and Ambanis are selling. We don't need Roy's shite. 

Dalits want to rise up in the same way as others have done- i.e. through education, thrift and enterprise. But people like Roy subscribe to a 'Brahminism' which holds wealth creation to be evil. The job of Dalits is to protest against other people doing well. Their existence is a standing reproach to the powers that be. Thus they mustn't be allowed to climb out of poverty and alienation.  

Prime Minister Modi, so relentless in his attack on the dynastic politics of the Congress party, is entirely dedicated to supporting and enriching these corporate dynasties.

No he isn't. He prefers the newer entrepreneurs to the dynastic sort. So do we all. Why? They work harder and are more innovative. 

In Roy's world, a politician supposedly the tool of 'Brahminism' feels it necessary to attack a Brahmin political dynasty while dedicating himself to enriching non-Brahmin corporate dynasties. Why? What is the logic to this? 

The palanquin in which he is showcased, for better or for worse, also rests on the shoulders of mostly Vaishya and Brahmin family-owned corporate media dynasties. To name a few – The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Hindu, India Today, Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran. Reliance Industries has a controlling share in 27 channels. I use the verb “showcased” because Modi has never directly addressed the press in his nearly seven years as prime minister. Not once.

Because the press is shit. Modi is smart. He went on Twitter in 2009 and never looked back. 

Incidentally, Scroll.in is owned by Pierre Omidyar- an Iranian-American billionaire who knows a lot about advanced technology

While the rest of us are having our personal data mined and our irises scanned, an opaque system has been put in place to allow the corporate world to repay the unflinching loyalty that has been shown to them.

An opaque system keeps Roy in comfort and the semblance of political significance- that is true enough. 

In 2018 an electoral bond scheme was introduced which allows anonymous donations to be made to political parties. So, we now have an actual, institutionalised, hermetically sealed pipeline that circulates money and power between the corporate and political elite. Small wonder then that the Bharatiya Janata Party is the richest political party in the world.

That would be a great wonder- if it were true. It isn't. The Chinese Communist Party is not just the wealthiest, it is also the most powerful, political party in the world. It is also pretty much the only real party in China.  

Smaller wonder then, that while this tiny class-caste elite consolidates its hold on this country in the name of the people, in the name of Hindu Nationalism, it has begun to treat people, including its own voters, as an enemy force, to be managed, manipulated, waylaid, taken by surprise, attacked by stealth and ruled with an iron fist.

Why does Roy not mention the notorious fact that Modi Sarkar has performed cranial surgery on millions of people like her completely removing their brains and replacing it with shit?  

The fact is, in thinking to patronize the Dalits, Roy has met her Waterloo. Dalits know that their own thinkers are smarter than Macaulayized 'Brahmins'. They also know that Religion is not about Caste, it is about God. Dalits are perfectly happy to ally with Muslims or any other productive group of people so as to raise up living standards for all. But this can only be done in the way Dr. Ambedkar- who had two PhDs in Economics, one in Fiscal policy from Columbia, the other in monetary theory from the LSE- laid down. This means some Dalits will become Billionaires by producing things of better quality and cheaper price than anyone else. After all, the Dalit millionaires of Kanpur helped Ambedkar. Other Dalits may rise in Government service or Medicine, Law, etc. However, agriculture can't contribute much. That was Ambedkar's own prediction. Give the farmers a 'soft landing' by all means but don't pretend that the Government can pay a large percentage of the population to ruin the environment. 

It may be that the Dalits come to the top in both the RSS and the Christian Church thanks to their merit and determination. Nothing wrong in that. Every avenue of advancement should be pursued. Look at the Jews. At one time so greatly stigmatized as 'Killers of God' that they were subject to genocide, they came up both in Left wing parties as well as Right wing parties and Centrist parties. You could see them in the Trade Unions as well as in Big Business. They were the best comedians as well as the best romantic movie stars. Excellence in one field does not preclude excellence in another. 

It is true there are substantial differences within the Dalit community but this is true of every other large collective. Just by fostering a sense of pride in the accomplishments of those who are rising by merit or conquering adversity, the entire community can come up. 

Roy has worked hard to nurture her own career and niche position in the publishing world. Having been chased out of other fields- even the Naxals and Kashmiri separatists don't want her support- she is trying to do what Mahatma Gandhi did- viz. create a platform for herself by pretending to represent Dalits. Gandhi was stupid enough to believe most Dalits had 'only as much sense as cows'. But Roy has read Ambedkar. She knows Ambedkar was intellectually much superior to Gandhi. Still, she is hoping that Dalits will let her glom onto their movement so that she can continue to pretend she is still relevant. Since Dalits are kind hearted, they may not chase her away. But one consequence is that their Elgar Parishad will come to be seen as a foolish piece of theater designed to project some third rate or senile hacks. 

Come to think of it Macaulay- once considered a promising British politician and quite a good writer- is now remembered more for his brief Indian sojourn. Roy is a suitable daughter of this sort of second rate anglophile 'Brahminism'. 

Agnes Callard's stupid anger

Can anger exist without a provocation? Can a provocation exist save by some omission in your own plan of self-protection? Yes. In its essence, anger is- as the Sanskrit proverb has it- a 'small pleasure'. To indulge in it is to betray your littleness. There may be a 'day of wrath' but God is essentially impassable. Still we can take a small pleasure in the prospect of the Eschaton so long as our labour sustains the Katechon and thus averts the Apocalypse.

Agnes Callard, taking a different view, writes in the Point- 

 Racism doesn’t tend to make me angry. You might think this is because I don’t belong to a marginalized race, but sexism doesn’t tend to make me angry, either. Nor am I reliably angered by elitism or abuses of power, despite the fact that they seem to rankle many around me. My decidedly Holocaust-centric childhood failed to instill in me hostile emotions toward Nazis, or anti-Semites generally.

This is perfectly reasonable. The truth is we don't take abstractions personally. So long as our own comfort or career is not in jeopardy, our emotions aren't greatly engaged by narratives of old, unhappy, far off things and battles long ago. 

And yet I would not describe myself as blessed with a peaceable temperament. I can become furious over what others perceive as trivialities, and am liable to see profound betrayal where the other sees a simple misunderstanding. In the context of public speech, I am hypersensitive to rhetorical coercion, capable of experiencing even well-meaning generic advice as an attempted use of force.

So, Callard is much like you or I. She isn't a professional virtue signaler.  

When your anger won’t play well with the anger of others—when it turns down invitations to surface, and persists despite the absence of company—you frequently find yourself on the receiving end of attempts at anger management.

Which does chop your onions and pours mustard on top.  

Sometimes these conversations can be settled by the introduction of new information or the correction of a misperception,

in which case the cause of anger disappears 

but when those strategies fail, they often devolve into a pure emotional tug-of-war in which you hear that your anger is unproductive; that it’s time to move on; that we are ultimately on the same team. Or, alternatively—for this, too, is “anger management,” though it isn’t usually called that—you hear that if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention; that unless you’re with us, you’re against us.

in which case anger is evaluated for its instrumental value 

“If you don’t stop being angry, you’re irrational.”

“If you don’t start being angry, you’re immoral.”

Neither of these speeches tends to go over well—at least not with me.

It seems Callard understands that anger is something which has evolved in the same way that pain has evolved so as to alter decision making in a manner which could endow 'survival value'.

Could it really be that Callard, a professional philosopher- i.e. a cretin- could write an entire article defending the common sense view?

Of course not! Don't be silly. 

●

After Cain, having murdered his brother, lies to God about Abel’s whereabouts—“I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”—God explodes at Cain: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.” God can hear Abel’s blood crying out, but Cain cannot.

Coz God has got super-powers. 

God’s anger substitutes for the hole where Cain’s love for his brother should be:

No it doesn't. Anger doesn't work that way. Your g.f's anger at your dick's failure to rise to the occasion does not substitute for the cheating asshole who is now loving up her sister instead.  

if Cain can’t fully grasp the wrongness of murdering his brother,

But Cain, in the Biblical story, does get that fratricide is wrong. That's why his isn't running around boasting about it and trying to sell the movie rights.  

someone must.

God's job is to fuck up Cain for offing his bro. Whether or not God does this wrathfully doesn't matter in the least. Theologians are welcome to stipulate for an impassable God. Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides and so on took this route. On the other hand, those who want to cling to an emotional God have to accept that the dude seems to be cool with genocide.  

The story makes clear, with remarkable economy, both that there are real, objective moral facts,

but only if you believe Eve was formed out of some Arab's rib 

and that access to those facts is–even for God!—sometimes predicated on anger. Anger is a moral sense.

in a world where Darwin was completely wrong. Also dinosaurs never roamed the earth. The moon landing was faked. As for COVID- don't get me started.  

Among humans as well, at times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice.

But they can also apprehend that the entire Federal Government is just a pedophile ring. The problem with getting mad is that you begin to apprehend all sorts of shit. Drinking enough anti-freeze on a regular basis can do the same thing to you.  

For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric.

After which they storm Capitol Hill.  

When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids

blind peeps have eyelids but they can't see. If somebody chopped off your eyelids, your sight would not necessarily be impaired. However, eyes can't see into the future- whether they belong to the heart or are securely lodged in the skull. 

—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth.

The other guy is trying to change your 'synoida'. But, if we are paying her to teach us or cure us or give us expert advise, that's a good thing.  

They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry.

Believe me, they are calling you worse things- behind your back.  

On the other hand, there are also reasons not to be.

And reasons to both be and not be and to not be either or both or whatever the fuck 

Aristotle says that anger is a desire for revenge,

but it isn't. Wanting to fuck up them wot dun u rong is a desire for revenge. This may involve anger. It may not. 

and he is right,

no he isn't. 

though angry people will tend to call it by another name.

I'm fucking furious with my remote control which has disappeared once again down a wormhole to the fifth dimension. I don't want revenge upon it. It simply isn't true that anger is a necessary or sufficient condition for wanting revenge. The reverse too is true.  

Anger inclines people to apply exalted labels (“justice,” “accountability”) to acts of vengeance;

No it doesn't. Very few people, through recorded history, have ever applied 'exalted labels' to anything. But those who go in for that shite do so regardless of any emotions they might genuinely experience.  

it is a fog in which bad things look good, just because someone else did bad things first.

The fact is 'tit for tat' is an eusocial strategy. That is why we punish those who don't apply it. Stupid pedagogues and preachers may pretend otherwise. But their job is to say stupid shit.  

Consider, for example, how people who would otherwise think it patently immoral to mock others’ physical appearance often feel free to do so when the target has been deemed unjust.

In which case, they didn't think the thing immoral at all. They just pretended to for fear of sanction. 

Anger also leads people to see victims of injustice in a noble light

Empathy causes us to feel for victims. If we see ourselves in a noble light, we will see the victims in a similar way. This has nothing to do with anger.  

—as though being wronged morally improved a person, instead of distorting their psyche by reorganizing it around moral injury.

This is pure fantasy. Nothing of the sort has ever happened. We don't appoint Bishops or Judges on the basis of their having been kept in an underground chamber since birth being repeatedly raped and beaten. On the other hand, Judges and Bishops may go easy on an offender who had this unfortunate background. 

Even as a child, I was wary of this bitterness, and resisted the pull of the anti-anti-Semitism that my family and teachers presented as my Jewish inheritance.

It is likely that they presented something more to Callard. Still, whining about one's horrible family is par for the course for female academics engaging in this sort of vacuous journalism.  

Most of the people who would have otherwise been my relatives were killed by the Nazis, and so I can hardly call it irrational that those who survived kept saying “never forget”; nonetheless, I refused to always be remembering.

So did they. That's how come they had time to hold down jobs and raise families.  

There is something very puzzling in the impulse to resist both forms of anger management.

No there isn't. We resist any type of 'management' which does not make us personally much better off. If you find this 'very puzzling' I suggest you hand over your wealth to me because I'm real good at Wealth Management.  

Why don’t I hear the calm-downers as trying to dispel my bitter, vengeful fog;

coz what you want is ice-cream or cookie dough or cookie dough ice-cream. 

and why don’t I experience the call to anger as directing my moral sense to truths about injustice?

coz that's not how anger works. Everybody knows this. Kant wasn't always slapping his students silly till they worked up enough anger to have their moral sense properly directed. Mahatma Gandhi did- but that's another story.  

How can the question of whether anger is a form of ethical insight

and fear a form of scientific insight 

—a moral sense—or a corruption of moral vision—a vengeful fog—depend on whether one is currently angry?!

It can do so if you are as stupid as shit and are writing a stupid article for peeps wot want to have a good laugh at a stupid Professor of a shite subject 

This is the puzzle of anger management.

Which you'd have to be a fucking cretin to find puzzling. 

I believe the solution

to a fake problem 

requires us to acknowledge

something equally fraudulent 

a split in our ability to respond to justice:

we have no ability to 'respond to justice'. Food that smells and looks scrumptious- sure, we respond to that fast enough. It may be that we are genetically hardwired to consider certain 'cake cutting' solutions fair- but in 'repeated games' we soon adjust to 'Shapley values'.  

the more perfectly one attends to the gravity of the wrongs done, the less sensitive one becomes to the gravity of the wrongs one is poised to commit in response.

But, 'attending perfectly' to x means not attending at all to y for any x and any y. This has nothing to do with anger or fear or degree of sexual arousal.  

The perspective of the angry person is sharply divided from the non-angry one:

Nonsense! They may have the same perspective. One guy is angry coz he's an irritable sort. The other guy has developed professional detachment. 

On the other hand, two people in the same emotional state but whose interests diverge, may well 'see different sides of justice'

I'm against sexual harassment. You are against sexual harassment but are willing to ignore an instance of that crime if it means a guy you like gets a seat on the Bench. Anger won't change this outcome. Reason is about subordinating emotions to interests.  

each can see only the side of justice they are looking at. When it comes to anger, and the lack thereof, we have reason to resist others’ attempts to transfer their reasons to us.

Only in the sense that we have reason to resist any type of transfer which does not benefit us. 

This is why, although attempts at conversion may begin in rational discourse, they often devolve into bullying

anything at all can 'devolve into bullying' unless you possess a countervailing 'threat point' or, at the very least, can fart loudly or can vomit copiously over the other guy.  

in which the “convert” is pressured into pretending to see what they cannot, or into pretending not to hear the cries ringing in their ears.

more usually these things end in a demand for oral sex. That's a good reason to vomit copiously on the fucker the moment she starts trying to gaslight you.  

This anger divide lies at the heart of our political predicament,

Rubbish! Politics is about who pays for the Government and who benefits from its actions. Greed matters. Anger? Not so much. 

and structures our interactions with one another at the deepest level.

Our interactions with one another are structured by biological and economic imperatives. No doubt, emotions act as 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' to aid decision making and social choice, but they have no survival value in themselves.  

And yet, for this very reason, it is itself difficult to recognize.

It is difficult to recognize because it is entirely absent.  

To get it into view, I propose we

play just pretend 

reverse Plato’s strategy. Plato thought we would understand justice in the soul better if we first saw it writ large, in the harmonious, unified city.

So, we would never understand justice in the soul. A city which is harmonious and unified aint one that is innovating and adapting. It will soon be either depopulated or overrun unless it changes its ways.  

I think we will understand injustice in the city—our conflicts with one another—better if we begin with a study of the conflicted soul.

Why think anything so foolish? Where the fuck are we supposed to find a 'conflicted soul' to dissect? Why not begin with a study of the discombobulated aether? How about researching the Aeon when subject to irritable bowel syndrome?  

For there is an intrapersonal analog to the conversations that we cannot seem to have with one another, namely the conversations we fail to have with ourselves.

Conversations we fail to have with others may be an analog with conversations we fail to have with ourselves.  But conversations 'we can't seem to have' with others are a function of what can be said and this has to do with Language as 'being for others'. But we don't converse with ourselves in language though, no doubt, we may put some of our thoughts into words within our 'stream of consciousness'. 

Sometimes, the parts of a single soul speak different languages.

No. Some thoughts may be framed in 'different languages'. But Thought does not speak a language. This is because you need words to tell the Pizza guy what toppings you want. You don't need words to know that you want pepperoni and not pine-fucking-apple.  

●

A few weeks ago, I was mailing my friend a gift for his upcoming birthday when I recalled that he got me nothing for my birthday. I experienced a flash of anger, and was tempted to trash the package instead of mailing it. Being torn between these two options is not like being torn between two delicious-sounding items on a menu, or between a vacation by the sea or one in the mountains.

It is exactly like that. You remember you got diarrhea the last time you ordered sea-food instead of duck and so you don't order sea-food- well, actually, you do coz maybe you were unlucky the last time. Anyway, duck is fattening. Something similar happens when we chose to vacation, once again, by the sea and are body shamed till we gorge on sea-food in the hope of shitting ourselves thin. Still, that's better than hiking up a fucking mountain- I mean, who does that? It's super thin couples got up in matching goretex. You can't tell me they're not all swingers.  

In those cases, I can step back, survey my options and arrive at a preference-ordering that would, for instance, rationalize opting for my second choice if my favored dish or locale ends up unavailable. All the parts of me are ultimately on the same side.

As opposed to what happens when you get angry coz some dude forgot your birthday. In that case your asshole tries to swallow your head while your legs wrestle with your arms.  

The birthday quandary doesn’t work this way: if love wins out over spite, but the post office turns out to be closed, that doesn’t mean it makes sense for me to revert to my second-best option and seek out a nearby garbage can.

Because your second best option is returning the thing to Amazon for a refund. After all, the guy really didn't get you a prezzie. It's not like he can go around bad mouthing for failure to reciprocate. Anyway, you've cooled down so the thing aint no big thaang. 

The difference between the birthday choice and other kinds of choices is a deep one.

This simply isn't true.  Believing otherwise will cause you to say stupider and stupider things. 

Indeed, the split in the birthday case is deeper even than what we find in “tragic choices” such as Sophie’s choice between the lives of her two children.

 There it is! The Holocaust wasn't really tragic compared to shit I go through in sending birthday prezzies to some guy I don't even like or know that well. 

Being able to say 'I sent some rando a prezzie though he didn't send me one' is more important than genocide coz...urm... like that's what Plato said to Aristotle about Xenophanes and this caused Aristotle to give Plato a reach-around. 

What makes a tragic choice tragic is that

either way the outcome is a turd fest

the two values are incommensurable:

but values may be equally incommensurable in slapstick comedy 

the life of one person doesn’t compensate you for what you lose by way of the death of the other.

It isn't meant to. Sophie's Choice does not actually feature a cheerful game-show host saying- 'Aw! you lost your daughter. Bad luck. But guess what?! Behind door number two is your little son. Congratulations! You are our big winner this season! Lucky, lucky, you!' 

One intensely wants

not to be facing a tragic choice. A comic choice would be so much nicer. 

to have both, and is forced to choose between them. In the birthday case, by contrast, the difficulty is that one cannot want both—at least not at once.

Nonsense! One can want to both punish a guy for forgetting to get you a prezzie while also gratifying him. This could be done by an astute choice of gift. Incidentally, my books, available on Amazon, make excellent punishment gifts.  

The point of view on value that makes trashing the gift look good—the so-called “friend” is actually a thoughtless jerk who doesn’t deserve me as a friend!—is one on which mailing it doesn’t look good at all; likewise, when I indulge in imagining his enjoyment of the gift, that mental activity is incompatible with the impulse to destroy it from spite.

But, a smart person, can find another gift- or even a sarky way of penning the enclosed note- to satisfy all their objectives.

I can vacillate between these points of view, but I cannot really occupy both at once.

Yes you can. Spiteful gifts are a real thing.  

I can’t ask “all things considered, what should I do?” without begging the question as to what things are being considered: there is no “all” that includes both the spiteful pleasure of disappointing my friend and the joy of making him happy. These values are more than incommensurable, they are incompossible.

Says an academic with no emotional intelligence whatsoever.  

Now let’s shift from the soul to the city, by distributing these incompossible values over multiple people.

In which case, the Chichilnisky & Heard condition for 'Goldilocks' preference diversity is not met. There is no agora and therefore no polis. Callard is describing a prison not a City.  

Consider the conflict between the person whose sense of justice makes it impossible for her to give up on her anger, and the person whose sense of justice makes it impossible for her to become angry.

Why should there be 'conflict' between them? Either can walk away if the other is being a cunt.  

If we consider each of these people as the analog to one of the opposed ethical perspectives between which I vacillated in the birthday case, we can see why the interactions between the angry and non-angry turn into a tug-of-war.

No we can't. We often have conflicting impulses but move on to other stuff beneficial to us. Similarly, we sometimes get into an argument with a stupid cunt. But this does not entail mud-wrestling, or three legged races or tug-of-war.  

There is no rational way to adjudicate their conflict—the best a third-party mediator could do is flip back and forth between who they want to side with.

Fuck off! A third party would say, break it up, bozos. The rest of us are trying to enjoy this orgy.  

The anger divide is frequently experienced as a political disaster: How can we ever hope to get everyone on the same page?

By getting them to concentrate on the benefits that flow from united action rather than focus on the pleasures of what Obama calls a 'circular firing squad' of histrionic wokeness & virtue signaling 

Why are people so impervious to having their minds changed, anger-wise?

For the same reason they don't want you taking a hammer to their skull so as to change the shape and consistency of their brain. If brain surgery can save your life or restore your sight- okay. But you want a properly qualified surgeon to do the job.  

I have been suggesting an answer: it is because they are rational,

fair enough 

and care about justice,

fuck off! People who don't give a shit about justice still don't want their brains tampered with or their minds changed by stupid cunts 

that people resist the coercive tactics of anger management.

We oppose coercive tactics if possible because it is in our interest to do so. Even if coercion was for a purpose beneficial to ourselves, it would be rational to prefer to take the thing voluntarily- unless we were aware we had some sort of mental illness or dangerous addiction. But, in that case, the 'coercive tactics' would involve legal sanctions.

A case in point is Gandhi's deal with Smuts to voluntarily comply with the Pass Act. This failed because Smuts refused to withdraw the Act- i.e. the legal sanction remained. 

Those who stick to their guns are refusing to allow others to banish them from their property, the truth.

No. They are merely sticking to their guns. They may allow others to banish them from all sorts of imaginary shite in return for lots of money and a blowjob. But guns are cool. Sell them if you have to but stick to them if it is safe to do so. 

Perhaps justice really is something divine, something on the wrong scale to be taken in by a single human response.

Coz guys who work as judges can turn water into wine, right?  

Instead of lamenting our inability to arrive at a unified response, we

could do something not utterly stupid and useless 

should be grateful for the heterogeneity of human psychology: it affords us coverage of one another’s blind spots.

No it doesn't. It would be nice to think so, but isn't true. What affords us coverage of 'blind spots' is stuff like mirrors and cctv cameras and so forth. In other words, when we find there is an area we need more information about, then we find a mechanism to get that information. This may involve hiring a guy with a different psychological makeup but it is better to find an algorithmic solution which anyone can implement.  

If no human being is emotionally complete,

no collection of human beings can be emotionally complete. Why? For the same reason that if no human knows Kryptonian, no collection of humans can know Kryptonian. It is true that, by luck, or by obeying instructions sent by an E.T who does know Kryptonian, a guy or a bunch of guys might appear to know Kryptonian. But that appearance would be deceptive. 

We may say 'no human has the perfect physique'. We may further say 'by combining the ass of this Model and the torso of that Hollywood star and so on, we get to the perfect physique.' But that collection of Models or Hollywood stars would not have a perfect physique. They'd just be a bunch of people.

then real moral authority is collective,

Lots of people now living have 'real moral authority' for us. My Mum does and so does my Daddy and my Guru and so on. Moral authority derives from a track-record or a reputation for having made moral judgments which people found it highly beneficial to accept. There may be some 'collectives'- e.g. an Ecclesia or Sanhedrin or College of Cardinals- which had or have moral and legal authority. But the track-record of such things aint particularly good. In multi-dimensional policy spaces, McKelvey Chaos- an unedifying struggle for 'agenda control'- prevails. 

and we need—and need to learn to recognize our need—for those animated by incandescent, unquenchable, focused anger.

Fuck off! Nobody needs a guy animated by an unquenchable anger against his wife who really shouldn't provoke him into beating the shit out of her every time he feels his fists need a bit of exercise.  

They see what the rest of us cannot see, and we shouldn’t reflexively pressure them to calm down.

Angry people often see things which aren't there. Pressuring them to calm down may be less effective than medicating them or throwing them in jail.  

We also need to recognize the virtue at the opposite end of the spectrum, of those who are preternaturally calm and judicious, and to stop thinking of such a person as improved or humanized by being able to get a little pissed off.

Why stop there? Why not say 'we need to recognize the virtue of people who fart noisily while those who can clear a Conference room with a single 'silent but deadly' may be more valuable yet to public discourse. 

●

The story of the birthday quandary is true; it is something that happened to me just a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, however, it also fits the template of a fake example I constructed for my book years ago, of a bitter wife tempted to trash a letter that her thoughtless and demanding husband tasks her with mailing.

This too is an example of defective reasoning. The wife's best course is to alter her husband's expectations regarding how she will execute tasks he entrusts to her. Essentially, a marriage is an 'incomplete contract'. It is in the wife's interest to extort 'thoughtfulness' by creating the perception of a 'hold up' problem. Anyway, that's how marriages actually work till they really start working as God intended. 

But life didn’t quite imitate philosophy. My Bitter Wife was left to adjudicate her internal conflict solo,

why? This stuff is dynamite. It should be properly thrashed out at the hair-dressers. 

but when the thought experiment came to life for me, I was not alone. As I headed out to the post office, my son, who was bored from having been cooped up in the house all morning, asked if he could accompany me on the walk. He was by my side as I experienced the flash of anger—which wasn’t so much about the fact that my friend hadn’t gotten me a gift, but the fact that he had endeavored to explain it away, to make excuses for himself, and the larger pattern of behavior that was embedded in…—and that was when my eyes darted in the direction of where I knew the trash can was. 

It wouldn’t have been the first time in my life I destroyed something in vengeance. And I might well have done it again, if my son hadn’t been there. But under the circumstances, how would I explain myself?

“What’s in the package?” my son asked me as we walked.

“A birthday present for a friend.”

“Tell him happy birthday from me—or actually, on second thought, he might not be so excited to get a happy birthday from some kid he’s never heard of whose mom just told him it was his birthday…”

The kid is wrong. Any guy would be delighted to be wished a happy birthday by a kid- more particularly by a kid who has no reason to feel kindly towards him. This is because on our birthdays we become like kids again and kids like being liked by other kids. 

I told my son I would convey the birthday wish, in exactly those terms, and I did.

Good for you.  

The very presence of other people can make us better,

the presence of kids does make us want to be better and to use fewer four letter words in our speech. Why? Coz kids are meant to imitate and learn from adults. 

even when they don’t make us more like them, or change us, or even understand us. Sometimes other people help us exactly by not feeling what we feel, exactly by remaining resolutely who they are.

the presence of hardened ex-cons causes us to use more four letter words and to express aggressive and sociopathic thoughts. Why? Coz we  want to establish a plausible 'threat point' just in case.

We act better than we are where our behavior will be imitated in a manner from which we personally may benefit. Thus, around your kids or employees or students, you act like you are smart and conscientious. But, to establish a threat point against people who may take advantage of us, we may act in a manner which suggests we are vengeful and highly irrational. 

Interests matter and emotions- as signals of preference intensity or as methods to break concurrency deadlock- are subservient to interests because only the proper pursuit of interests endows survival value. 

Currently there is an availability cascade re 'the aptness of anger' but it is worthless shit. Its premise is a stupid lie and what follows is pure ex falso quodlibet cretinism.  Callard amply demonstrates this. This doesn't mean she is a bad Mum. It just means she teaches a shite subject. That's what should chop her onions.

David Ludden & the invention of Hindu intolerance

In an earlier post, I showed how American academia's casteist interpretation of Sikhism precipitated a calamity for the Punjab. In this post, I will show that American academia had equally kind intentions towards Hinduism. But, clearly, they failed miserably in the latter respect. Why? The answer is simple. New Delhi, under Indira, bought the American story, which they considered 'Secular', 'Scientific' and genuinely 'Socialist' and, in consequence, fucked up Punjab with vim and vigor till, delightfully, Indira herself was killed and Rajiv's hands were stained with the blood of genocide. But, once Rajiv himself had been killed, Dalits in New Delhi have been able to prevent American, or any other kind of Stupidity from fucking up India. How come? The answer, sadly, is coz they iz smart. Where is the Dalit Mani Shankar Aiyar or Shashi Tharoor or Rajiv or Rahul Gandhi? Nowhere.  You may say- what about Kancha Ilaiah? He is OBC, not Dalit. True, there were some 'Dalit Panthers'- but their big discovery was that the Naxals were casteist. The Reds wanted to rise to power atop a big pile of Dalit bodies. Dr. Ambedkar, however, had ensured against this outcome by securing Reserved constituencies. In other words, a genuine Dalit can do something constructive for the country and her community. Thus, there was a moment when Mayawati was spoken off as a possible Prime Minister. But, U.P politics was too criminalized and Mayawati's moment passed. Still, the thing is only a question of time. Dalits have already occupied the highest constitutional offices to great acclaim purely on the basis of merit. But, even after we have a Dalit P.M, there will be American academics, and their Indian lackeys, hoping against hope that Hinduism will be plunged into a fratricidal conflict. 

Why? Because of the way 'citation cartels' operate, shite University Departments dealing with South Asia will continue to be populated by cretins who think the Muslim League strategy of coopting Dalits- which ended when J.N Mandal fled back to India- or the Communist strategy of promising to help Dalits and then massacring them at Marichjapi- can be revived in India by anti-Hindu bigots.

This is a quote from an essay in Caravan magazine-

 

These latter qualities of the vague and empty negative concept of “Hindu”

because Hinduism is not a proper Religion like Islam or Christianity or something fairer skinned people push down the throats of dusky folk they conquered 

were best suited for its political use to represent a nominal unity whereas in reality there was not only caste-based segregation but increasingly deep caste contestation. It was like claiming that American slavery was the religion of the Blacks because it kept them socially tied to the Whites in all aspects of daily life.

What was the religion of the Blacks in America? It was Christianity. It is Christianity though no doubt some have converted to Islam or the Ba'hai or other faiths. Is African American Christianity- which Shyamala Harris chose as the religion for her two daughters- inferior to White Christianity? Does anybody believe that? Billy Graham was, no doubt, a great evangelist. But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is martyr of the Church. There is a holiday named after him. Black Christianity is now the mainstream Christianity. Black Gospel Music is Gospel Music. Jesse Jackson and Obama and now Kamala Harris are proud to be Christian and Christians are proud of them. At least in this respect, there is no 'tokenism', no 'affirmative action'. 

I have read that the whaleship Essex- the original for Pequod in Moby-Dick- had a black crew-member who led the prayers. The year was 1820, but the thing was not uncommon even in New England. Why? When you are in danger of your life, you want the best preacher regardless of color or class. You want the spirit of God to come into you to give you strength to endure. 

But, it must also be said, from the purely aesthetic point of view, the pulpit's eloquence has never so soared, the Choir's sweet plangency never so plumbed the soul's depths, than in the African American section of the Church- at least so far as the English language is concerned

The Hinduism of the Dalit has this same quality. The Ramayana, composed by Bhagwan Valmiki, who was of the Balmik community, has this quality. The songs of Kabir and Ravidasa have this quality. Such was the divine family heritage of Dr. Ambedkar and Babu Jagjivan Ram. 

What is the religion of Divya Dvivedi, Shaj Mohan and P.J Reghu? The first two mentioned are 'socially tied' to writing or teaching shite English so as to make a living. Reghu is fluent in his own language and may be useful to the ruling Communist party there. Mohan may also be from Kerala. But what of Dvivedi? She is clearly not 'socially tied' to the religion of her ancestors. What type of slavery has she chosen for herself?

Random Googling led me to part of the answer- 

David Ludden wrote-

In 1993, it became obvious that scholars and teachers do not have the books readily at hand with which to address adequately the intellectual challenges posed by the recent history of communalism in India.

Rajiv Gandhi- whom people identified with Lord Ram- decided to open the birthplace of Lord Ram to year-round Hindu worship. Had he lived, he'd have built a big Temple there. The Muslims did sulk a little but they had no appetite to embrace the fate of the Sikhs. Anyway, they received sops in the shape of Shah Bano and Salman Rushdie and so forth. Anyway, the thing really was no big deal. Muslims had not worshipped at the structure since 1949. Hindu worship had been continuous (because a priest conducted rituals once a year) so, in Law, the place was Hindu though the Muslims were entitled to compensation. At any rate, this was the recent Supreme Court judgment.

With hindsight, the entire matter had nothing to do with 'communalism' and everything to do with the Law. 

Since smart Americans study the Law and get rich while stupid Americans- who can't understand the Law- become Professors of the sort of shite subjects where 'affirmative action' can burgeon- but only as a fucking nuisance- it followed that some American shithead would seek to fuck up India by getting the Ford Foundation & the Dept. of Education to finance some downright racist mischief.

When the South Asia faculty and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania resolved to address this need, we received generous help in planning from three experts in the field: Amrita Basu (Political Science, Amherst College), Sandria Freitag (History, American Historical Association), and Peter van der Veer (Anthropology, University of Amsterdam).

Basu was born and brought up in America. Like the other two, she knew shit about India.  

We then acquired funds from the Ford Foundation's International Predissertation Fellowship Program for an interdisciplinary social science seminar on "The Problematics of Identities and States." We devoted the 1993-4 South Asia Regional Studies Seminar, funded by our Title VI grant from the Department of Education, to the theme, "Exploring Communalism in South Asia."

So, these guys got money from organizations which just took their word for it that they knew what they were talking about.  

We designed Penn's South Asia Seminar program for 1993-4 academic year around the project of producing a reasonably priced, accessible book representing diverse disciplinary perspectives on communalism, written for a broadly defined audience of readers in the U.S. and worldwide. This volume is the result.

But what was the result of that volume and others like it? Did 'Communalism' in India decrease? Did Academia improve? No. What these stupid cunts had done was create a 'citation cartel'. They had pushed forward an Academic 'availability cascade' such that- for the next thirty years- postgrad 'scholars' (i.e. tossers who were otherwise unemployable) had to go on regurgitating madder and madder shite. 

During the 1993-4 academic year, we discussed twenty-nine papers, which covered a much broader range of issues that could be coherently addressed in one volume. As we boiled down the subject matter of the seminar in discussions, issues surrounding Hindu nationalism emerged as most critical.

The British Empire in South Asia broke up along confessional lines. Sri Lanka, as Buddhist majority, had always been separate. Then, in the Thirties, Burma went its own way with a Hindu majority Princedom choosing India not Burma on religious grounds. Next, the Muslim majority areas broke off. What was left was Hindu majority areas as the 'core' of the nation. Since States had to be reorganized on linguistic and other lines, it followed that loyalty would be to the Center. But that loyalty was Hindu. Non-Hindus were separatists, if there was money on the table for any such outcome. True, Communism once looked promising. But it was casteist and soon shat the bed performance wise.

Thus, for the Academy, 'issues surrounding Hindu nationalism' turned into saying 'fuck me, the fucking Hindus are trying to rule their own country! That is so like Fascism, dude!' 

What enabled this was the fact that Sonia Gandhi was seen as an Italian Catholic rather than the widow of a Hindu dude who looked like Lord Ram. But, it seems, Sonia was conflicted. She didn't really want Rahul to be P.M. Why? Crap Congress P.Ms tend to get assassinated so that the Party can win on a sympathy wave.  But this means, now Rahul is old enough to either shit or get off the pot- because he will do neither-  that Modi or some other capable and competent leader will run India. That's it. That's the whole story. 

This volume seeks (1) to represent the current state of research on Hindu majoritarianism in anthropology, history, political science, and religious studies;

Interestingly, that 'state of research' has neither advanced nor resiled from its stupidity. What it was, it is. But what it is is stupid, paranoid, shite.  

(2) to combine methods, theories, and data from these disciplines to form an interdisciplinary framework for analysis and interpretation;

but settle for just repeating stupid lies 

(3) to stimulate new research and collaboration among disciplines;

there actually were a couple of 'econometric' studies which revealed amazing things like where Muslims get a bit richer they start killing all and sundry till they are killed, robbed, and chased away after which they quieten down and start getting richer till they start killing all and sundry and are killed, robbed, and chased away. 

The authors of such studies tended to be Bengali Hindus.  I should mention, their methodology is for crap.

(4) to provide a multivocal, informative, and coherent book for college and university teaching and for the concerned public, which presents top quality scholarship to readers with minimal background knowledge about India;

The problem was that these 'top quality scholars' had minimal background knowledge about India. Actual Indian scholars, who wanted to get the fuck out of that shithole before they started getting more background, or back passage, knowledge of India, eagerly embraced this avenue of escape. If they got their Green Cards, good luck to them. Indians wish them well. 

and (5) to formulate a responsible intellectual intervention by a substantial group of scholars from India, Europe, and the U.S. into the understanding of communalism by people who influence public policy and debate.

There was, what appeared to be a quite spectacular 'intellectual intervention'. Modi was banned from the US and Europe. Then...not so much. 

David Ludden, whom I quote above, is guilty of penning the following purely Orientalist screed. I translate into non-Orientalist prose, his hysterical assertions. 

Ayodhya: A Window on the World

Ayodhya; a part of the world where there has been a long running property dispute with some religious overtones and wider political significance.  

Holy men declared Monday, December 6, 1992, auspicious,

Only Astrologers speak of auspiciousness. Holy men speak of what is Holy or Righteous. There is no agreement that 'Holy men' or 'Astrologers' said something had to happen on a particular date in Ayodhya. However, it is a fact that there was a political agitation which capitalized on the killing by police fire of Hindus at that spot some months earlier. The destruction of the disputed structure avenged that blood letting. 

What was at stake was the question of whether the Administration would shed further blood to simply protect a ruin.  

and more than 300,000 people gathered that day in Ayodhya, a pilgrimage town north of Varanasi (Benaras). Most wore the saffron color of Hindu nationalism.

Saffron is the sacred color of Hindu renunciation. There is no Hindu nationalism separate from Indian nationalism quite simply because India is an overwhelmingly Hindu country from which Muslims and Buddhists split off and from which some Christians, too, would like to split off.  

At mid-day, a vanguard among them broke down police barricades around a mosque called the Babri Masjid, built in 1528 by the first Mughal emperor of India, Babar.

Why? Because the police would not repeat the mistake of firing on the Hindus to protect a mere ruin. 

Cheering men swarmed the domes of the old mosque

a mosque is not a mosque unless it is used for Islamic worship. Muslim prayers there had stopped in 1949. But the place had been opened to Hindu worship.  

and in five hours they hammered and axed it to the ground. Video cameras hummed. Eye-witnesses took notes for news reports around the world. Hindu leaders, who had mobilized for this event since 1984, watched with satisfaction. For they and their followers believe that god Rama was born here and that Babar had destroyed Rama's temple (mandir) to build his mosque (masjid).

This is Orientalism- and cheap journalism- gone mad! How the fuck would Ludden know what 'Hindu leaders' believed? Why does the cunt think he himself will be believed by 'scholars'? Is it coz Whitey has magical powers to understand the minds of dogs and cats and Hindus? Fuck does Ludden think he is? Rudyard sodding Kipling?  

The construction of the new Rama temple was begun that evening on the rubble of the Babri Masjid. Government officials looked on ineffectually. Violence triggered by the demolition killed 1,700 people and injured 5,500 over the next four months.

Yup. Muslims got stroppy. But they were killed disproportionately- save in Bangladesh where they monopolized the violence- and so they ceased to be stroppy.  But this is an old story. 

Supporters justify the action at Ayodhya as the liberation of a Hindu sacred space to unify the Indian nation.

No. What they said was that 'Mullah' Mulayam Singh must be taught a lesson. The blood he shed must be vindicated. Also, fuck the Courts. They will take thirty years to decide this.

In the end the Courts did take 30 years but by then the Hindus had realized this was a good thing. The Bench should decide on issues of property. Different Hindu sects may have had rival claims on the spot. The last thing the country needs is Sadhus fighting in the streets. 

Critics call it violence against Muslims and Indian civil society.

Except there was no violence against Muslims save by way of retaliation. As for 'Indian civil society'- you can't beat up something which does not exist, as the Emergency had amply shown.   

In this volume, we explore the mobilizations, genealogies, and interpretations

all of which were shit 

that locate this one very emotional and symbolic day in the struggles that are underway to redefine India politically in the age after the Cold War.

But Indira had already seen that the Communists were crap. India resiled from that shite before even the fall of the Gang of 4. The Soviets were cool with that. They could see that Atal Behari was just as enthusiastic for the Defense Pact as his Congress predecessors and successors.  

Still, it must be said, Indian Communism needn't have just curled up and died. It could have embraced Chinese style export led industrialization without pissing off the peasantry too much. 

Ayodhya is a window on a world of conflict inside nationalism, which came into being in the 1980s,

Not really. Rajiv fell because of corruption. He was on his way back to power because of his charisma- or 'karishma'- as a guy who looked and sounded like Lord Ram. Sonia, Sita to Rajiv's Ram, was the 'pativrata' Regent to Rahul whom we all wanted to see on his father's throne. But Rahul refused to step up to the plate, probably for the excellent reason that, in India, assassination has habitually tempered autocracy (at least when it comes to people whose surname is Gandhi).

and also onto the global staging of national politics and cultures in the late twentieth century.

fuck is that supposed to mean? 

Ayodhya symbolizes Hindu-Muslim conflict in South Asia

No. Killing, raping and ethnic cleansing symbolizes Hindu-Muslim conflict in South Asia. But it also characterizes conflict in places where there are no Hindus.  

and conjures the nightmare of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

Utterly mad! Massive ethnic cleansing on either side won't cause nuclear war. Territorial aggression may do so. 

Like other communal conflicts, communalism in India is also international (Midalarsky 1992).

 No it isn't. Nobody cares.

Not only in India, but also in France,

what fucking communalism in France was 'internationalized'? None at all. 

(the former) Yugoslavia,

that was a military conflict of a Nationalist type, though no doubt this sub-Nationalism had a religious dimension.  

Turkey,

Does this cretin mean Kurdish separatism? But that has nothing to do with religion. 

Germany,

Germany? Why not add Ireland and Iceland and Canada?  

the U.S.,

 Very true! Communal violence and ethnic cleansing in the US has led to UN intervention. The Chinese Army has established zones of safety for Jews and Blacks in China Towns in Red States. 

Sri Lanka, Russia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Iran -- anywhere that minorities face hostile majoritarianism -- minority conditions worsened in the 1980s (Gurr 1993).

But this did not change anything unless there was actual military conflict. The fact is, when Imperialism fell to Nationalism, majoritarianism triumphed. Nobody gives a shit about minorities- though they may pretend otherwise if there's a little money in it. 

Since the late 1970s, nationalist movements based on the assertion that only one majority ethnic or religious group defines a nation have emerged with new cultural force and creativity --

fuck off! This happened much before the Seventies. Either an Emperor protects minorities- because it pays to do so- or Nations overthrow Emperors and tolerate minorities- if it pays to do so. 

with new rituals and spectacles, including televised violence -- to revalorize old emotions and symbolic resources.

Where did this happen? India? Nope. Confessional Nationalism triumphed at the ballot box in 1946. At a later point there was some talk of Socialism but that was dead in the water by the late Seventies. 

As we will see, the men who destroyed Babar's mosque

Which was not a mosque- Muslims had ceased to worship there in 1949, though- since 1937, they could only do so on Friday with a police escort. Also the place was not built by Babar. 

marched to a cultural movement

which dates back to the foundation of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915. Incidentally, Mahatma Gandhi turned up at that conclave.  

whose ideas, images, media, organizations, and resources are transnational in form, scope, and influence.

Nonsense! They aren't even fully National. But, because the RSS isn't corrupt or useless, the BJP has prevailed in the North. 

Ayodhya is a refraction of "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia,

Then how come no fucking ethnic cleansing- except of Hindus in Kashmir Valley- has occurred? There was no 'refraction' at all. Yugoslavia was bound to break up because Croats hated Serbs and, Bosnians, Slovenes and so forth, too, wanted to go their own way. The Balkans like being balkanized. Hindu India doesn't.  

the "moral majority" in the U.S., and other movements that define nations by ethnicity and religion.

So, guys like Reagan, the Bushes, Condaleeza Rice, Mitt Romney etc. are all just as good or bad as Milosevic!  

It now becomes clear that stupid American academics hated their own country and considered it the site of 'Race War'. But they couldn't say so without risking their jobs. So they pretended to be fighting Fascism in far off places. Some worthless academics from those far off places where anxious to earn a little hard currency and maybe a teaching gig and a Green Card in America. So they talked this type of tripe. Thus, a citation cartel was created. But, politically, the thing was counter-productive. Furthermore, the entire availability cascade became adversely selective intellectually speaking. There was a time when people with decent English piled on to it. Now you have illiterate cretins like Mohan and Dwiwedi bleating this nonsense. It is difficult to see how the thing could degenerate even further. The answer, I suppose, is that Rahul Baba could take it up- unless he has and nobody noticed coz the guy is hysterically unintelligible in any language.

 

Thy Eris Apple

That the Crones of Learning, Lucre & Moral Luck

Are cunts wot simply don't give a fuck

Thy Eris Apple has Testified

Tossed between them- Crucified 

Aikin & Talisse on deep disagreement

A disagreement is interesting where- rather than being the predictable  consequence of heterogeneous preferences or interests- it represents a departure from the conditions for Aumann agreement- i.e. a situation where two or more parties have Bayesian rationality and share common priors and posteriors. The question arises, why do they have different types of rationality? Can they do better by changing their heuristics? Alternatively, why are their priors or posteriors different? Knowing this may help expand the common information set.

Deep disagreements are particularly interesting. It may be that they represent  phenotypic diversity or confer survival value. This points to something else Aumann has looked at- viz. why 'regret minimization' militates against unanimity and its associated 'Bayesian rationality'. The existence of Knightian Uncertainty means that a 'deep disagreement' may be associated with an ambiguity in classification of states of the world such that something 'paradigm busting' is around the corner.

It is foolish to confuse mutual hatred, or the difference between sanity and lunacy, with deep disagreement. Predictably, this is what Aikin & Talisse do. They write in 3 Quarks-

Deep disagreements are disagreements where two sides agree on so little that there are no shared resources for reasoned resolution.

This is not a disagreement. There may be no contact at all between the two sides. If there is contact, there may be mutual hatred, not disagreement.

In some cases, argument itself is impossible. The fewer shared facts or means for identifying them, the deeper the disagreement.

Only in the sense that cats and dogs have deep disagreements. 

Some hold that many disagreements are deep in this way. They contend that reasoned argument has very little role to play in discussions of the things that divide us. Call these the deep disagreement pessimists – they claim that many of the disputes we face cannot be addressed by shared reasoning.

Shared reasoning is as ineffective with people as it is with cats snarling at barking dogs. By contrast, a change in the incentive system or conditions of life may be mutually beneficial. There are ways in which you can make your cat and your dog get along such that both are happier and your home is harmonious. This happy outcome is the result of a certain type of reasoning and application of mind on your part. But it isn't a process 'shared reasoning' in which Fido & Chairman Miaow have demonstrated their ratiocinative prowess. 

It is seldom the case that matters are resolved through 'shared reasoning' because uncorrelated asymmetries exist- i.e. it is in the interest of both parties to chose different protocols or principles. But, where utility is transferable, disagreement or disagreeableness can be mitigated by some rational, economic, process or mechanism. But this is transactional, not epistemic. It is foolish to think that what makes people get along is not mutually advantageous transactions but, rather, some sophomoric debate about values or categorical imperatives. Philosophy makes a fool of itself when it pretends Society works on the same principles as an idealized academic Symposium.

There are also deep disagreement optimists. Their view is that deep disagreements are intractable only for contingent reasons – perhaps we have not yet surveyed all the available evidence, or we are waiting on new evidence, or there is some background shared methodological principle yet to be uncovered. With deep disagreement, the optimist holds, it is hasty to give up on rational exchange, because something useful is likely available, and the costs of passing such rational resolution up are too high. Better to keep the critical conversation going.

But who will pay to keep it going? Talking has an opportunity cost. The potential pay-off from talking has to exceed that cost for rational people to indulge in it. 

Disputes among pessimists and optimists regularly turn on the practical question: Are there actual deep disagreements?

No- if some state of the world, one party affirms as possible, obtains.

The debates over abortion and affirmative action were initially taken to be exemplary of disagreements that are, indeed, deep.

They are not deep at all if the Sky turns as red and blood and the Angel Gabriel appears with a flaming sword saying 'I iz gonna fuck up all youse pro-Lifers! Also, Whitey, yore ass gonna fry sho nuff!'  

Later, secularist and theists outlooks on the norms of life were taken to instantiate a divide of the requisite depth. More recently, conspiracy theories have been posed as points of view at deep odds with mainstream thought.

If Q-Anon gets hold of cctv footage showing widespread pedophilia in Federal buildings then they win. There is no deep disagreement. 

This brings us to QAnon.

Here’s QAnon’s core doctrine in a nutshell: (a) there is a cabal of Satanic and child-sex-trafficking Hollywood and Washington elites who drink ‘adrenochrome’ from tortured victims to prolong their lives; (b) Donald Trump, along with select other patriots, is waging a secret war against this group; and (c) an insider with ‘Q-level’ clearance in either intelligence or military command is leaking information out to readers on internet message boards. So Q-believers think they have insider information about a monumental war of good versus evil that’s being fought right in front of everyone’s eyes, but is nevertheless largely unseen.

Till they get hold of all that damning cctv footage which is currently safely hidden up Trump's rectum.  

Conspiracy theories typically are based in accounts of secret dealings that not only run contrary to widely accepted views but are also evidentially sealed off from them.

No. Conspiracy theories have truth makers. Sometimes, they turn out to be true in some particular and, in the face of hard evidence, the 'mainstream' has to accept that the nutjobs were right. 

Because conspiracy theories are built around a contrast between what is widely believed and what is known only by those with special access to the truth, they can thrive only among a community of conspiracy believers.

Nonsense! A conspiracy theory doesn't start off 'widely believed'. It takes time for it to disseminate. Nobody has 'special access' to the truth, though there may be specific information silos which, however, some who have access to them, believe are of great and malign significance. A UFO conspiracy theory- or a theory about the Deep State- is likely to have some proponents who actually worked in some clerical capacity within a specific information silo. Similarly, conspiracy theories about supposed medical and technological evils generally have at least one credentialized 'expert' on side. Kary Mullins is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who endorses some truly crazy shit. But he's hella smart.

Accordingly, what outsiders present as evidence against the conspiracy theory gets explained away by those on the inside.

But this is true of any hypothesis- including the one that a [articular theory is 'conspiratorial'. 

Purported evidence against the conspiracy theory is often transformed into further evidence that those on the outside are deluded, duped, and gullible.

But this is also true of the anti-conspiracy theory. In some cases, suspicions about financial institutions or intelligence agencies have turned out to be correct. There really was a conspiracy. It was the 'insiders' who were deluded, duped and gullible. 

Was the Iraq War a conspiracy to unjustly enrich certain bad actors? Or was it necessary for the War against Terror? Clearly, if there was a conspiracy, not everybody was involved. Equally, if there was no conspiracy, some bad actors did exist. Still, it may be expedient for us to decide that the thing was a Conspiracy, not a Crusade.

In the end, conspiracy theories thrive partly because in adopting them, one adopts the view that all possible evidence confirms the theory.

No. Theism, of a particular mystical sort, may thrive for this reason. But so may a sufficiently sophisticated Structural Causal Model for a narrow enough class of evidence. That is why, for the research program to remain Scientific, the scope of observation must expand. 

We can say, then, that it is part of the nature of conspiracy theories to be epistemically sealed in this way.

No we can't. The nature of Scientific or Mathematical Theories is to be epistemically sealed in a protocol bound manner. But this is also true of legal arguments or opinions given by professional experts. Without protocols, nothing is epistemically sealed. Conspiracy theories are likely to be loosey goosey. We don't expect their exponents to be sticklers for protocol.  

So it is with QAnon. Observe some popular pairings of counter-evidence and correlate sealing strategies:

Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey have been arrested for child pornography, but they are still allowed to tape their respective shows, so as not to alert the others in the cabal.

Either this is true or it is not true. By and by, this canard won't be repeated because both women will continue their successful careers. So, there is no real 'sealing strategy'. There is just a rumor of a silly sort. 

Wayfair trunks are means for ordering and delivering abducted children to their abusers, but only select users may order them.

An urban legend is something less than a 'conspiracy theory'. It may be convenient to pretend one has fallen victim to a rumor of this sort rather than to have engaged wittingly in seditious conspiracy.  

Kamala Harris has a body double, but one cannot tell the difference on video.

This is true enough. I had to give up pant suits because I was afraid of being mistaken for her. 

Hillary Clinton was to be arrested for child sex trafficking in 2017, but she was allowed to continue her activities but under heavy surveillance.

I am not a child. Any sex trafficking which I have been subjected to since 2017 is of a reprehensible type. But it does not amount to pedophilia- though, no doubt, I wear diapers.  

These reports make no promise that there will be publicly available confirming evidence.

But, by lapse of time, they are rebutted. It's like the Mayan prophesy of the end of the World. When the world doesn't end, the thing is dead in the water. As I say, it may be convenient to pretend to believe in this sort of shit so that the quantum of punishment is reduced if your seditious conspiracy is prosecuted.  

Repeating a rumor is a type of 'cheap talk'. It is a fake type of 'common knowledge'. But it provides a sort of alibi. You can pretend you were just going with the flow- wishing to belong to a 'pooling equilibrium'. You weren't doing anything naughty or premeditated. The difficulty arises with 'costly signals' which establish a 'separating equilibrium'- in this case, one of greater culpability. An actual conspiracy may well feature a full fledged conspiracy theory. But, it would be wise to disguise it so as not to give away the conspiracy's plan of action. 

A prediction of a cataclysmic even on a given date in the near future has two effects. On the one hand it acts like a 'Kavka toxin' increasing current levels of belief. On the other hand, it will lead to 'cognitive dissonance' after the prediction fails to materialize. Some will fall away to reduce this dissonance. But those who remain will be far more deeply committed. Something like a Church is created whose members will be prepared to 'tithe' and to provide martyrs from time to time. This could be very valuable.

Aikin & Talisse don't get that a failed prediction can be a good thing. It creates a 'separating equilibrium' on the basis of cognitively costly signals. Cognitive dissonance now operates to create greater loyalty and a greater desire to win reputational advantage by a greater show of commitment to the cause. 

Thus Aikin & Talisse feel Q Anon, and- perhaps Trumpism- have been thoroughly vanquished.  

The fact that Inauguration Day has come and gone without incident is evidence that what was taken to be a deep disagreement with no shared intellectual resources for rational disputation was, in fact, a disagreement waiting for crucial testing. That test has come. Though the QAnon conspiracy theorists may elect to incorporate yet another epicycle into their worldview, that they recognize the need to regroup and revise is a minor win for reason and argument. 
It also suggests that the among Q-believers and those who reject the view is not absolutely deep after all.

The above suggests that Aikin & Talisse are as stupid as shit. There can be little 'deep disagreement' about that. Meanwhile the people who got into Q-Anon will find some other type of clickbait scam to engross their time.

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