continued-
This is Babu English. Mehta thinks persona is a posh word. So he uses it twice in the same sentence. What he wants to say is simple enough. Modi is the biggest thing in Indian politics. So anything wrong with Indian politics must be his fault. This is bad logic, but stupid people do say things of this sort.The Cultural Politics of Reaction
The persona of Narendra Modi looms so large over Indian politics in its commanding and ubiquitous presence, his will seems so superimposed upon the destiny of the nation, that it is tempting to place the entire burden of the ascendancy of moral cretinism on his persona.
He certainly has a share of blame in the moral condition of the Republic.
It is easy, but immoral, to parcel out blame if, like Mehta, you are a fucking parasite who fucks up his own students so as to get a bit of publicity.
But there is a disquieting thought we need to confront.
Mehta is incapable of thought. What should 'disquiet' him is the fact that he is a fucking parasite who hasn't helped India at all. The result was that he could leave his students in the lurch though, I suppose, it could be argued, that he did so in the hope that they might not become as shite as himself.
Is Modi a symptom or cause? Most likely, he is both:
A symptom can't be a cause. This is actual cretinism, not moral imbecility.
a product of the times who also exacerbates some of the worst tendencies within it.
In which case, he is simply a product of his times. He can't exacerbate shit unless he isn't a product of his times.
But does his triumph, and continuing political hold, signify an emerging new social order?
No. The reverse must be the case.
Is the fate of this new social order tied solely to his electoral fortunes,
No. If he fucks up, someone better than him, in his party, will be appointed and will get the votes.
or has it seeded something more enduring, something that will outlast his political fortunes?
Social orders, in a Democracy, get reflected in Politics. This cretin thinks the reverse is the case.
This question is sometimes too difficult to contemplate because it is hard to avoid the deep misanthropy it implies: it is easier to project our moral smallness on our leaders than it is to contemplate the possibility that our own moral norms and sensibilities may be shifting for the worse.
Mehta's shifted for the worse- he resigned and left his students in the lurch. Modi will do nothing similar.
In order to understand the reactionary character of the present moment, it is important to confront this uncomfortable question.
In order to understand the reactionary character of Pratap Bhanu Mehta it is important to confront the uncomfortable question- why did this cunt think a small college in rural Haryana could replace the Center for Policy Studies in New Delhi? We understand why he resigned and abandoned his students. But why did he go there in the first place?
But let us first outline the sense in which India is in the midst of a reactionary moment and the conditions that have made it possible.
Mehta was predicting his own reactionary trajectory. We know he'll end up in the States now both the public and private sector have turned their back on him.
There is no doubt that India is in a full-blown reactionary moment.
Like in 1947, when Indians replaced the Whites whom Mehta worships.
It is hard to grasp the nature of this reaction because it wears the garb of deep democratic legitimacy;
No. Not garb. That is its skin. Democratic legitimacy is nakedly expressed by having a majority in the directly elected Lok Sabha.
it is an admission of despair described as the politics of hope.
Despair for Mehta's ilk as a Ghanchi with an external degree in Poli Sci proves better than the higher caste Oxford and Princeton alumni.
All the attributes of a reactionary politics are now gathered in one coherent form.
It is that of Mehta, not Modi.
The question is which elements of this politics transcend political lines.
Mehta's paranoid hatred of India transcends political lines.
The first element is open majoritarian politics. Hindu nationalism was, first and foremost, as Vinay Sitapati has pointed out, the idea that Hindus, qua Hindus should never again lose political power in the Subcontinent.
Pakistan and Bangladesh are 'in the Subcontinent'. Does Sitapati- who teaches at Ashoka- really not know that Hindus have no political power in either country?
This combined two deeply modern impulses: a modern democratic obsession with a majority in numbers and the quest for a Hindu identity that could paper over all other differences of caste and region.
These are not 'modern' impulses. They always existed. We know that Christianity and Islam, from their inception, were concerned to convert the majority of the population in areas they entered and moreover they tried to 'paper over' regional and class differences. The spread of Brahmanism has this same characteristic by the Second Century CE. Moreover it spread to South East Asia- indeed, as far as Vietnam.
The obsession with majoritarian power makes modern Hindu nationalism obsessed with demography in all its forms.
Every type of nationalism- ancient or modern, secular or otherwise, has been 'obsessed' with 'demography'. Why? Demography means the people living in an area. Nationalism is about creating a sense of unity and cohesiveness amongst a people living in an area.
Every single cause it champions
just as every single cause championed by any Religion, Ideology or Political Party- but also every single large marketing campaign of a commercial sort
has demography at the heart of it: conversion is an attempt to alter demography;
because conversion involves people and people constitute demography.
marriage outside the religion is an attempt to alter demography;
No. It is an attempt to fuck and have babies with someone of a different religion. Of course, it may be that the real purpose of the marriage is to get a person to convert. But that could be the real purpose of a padre sodomizing a kid. Or so he might claim.
differential birth rates in communities are not symptoms of uneven development, but a vast conspiracy to alter demography.
If particular religious leaders say to their flock- 'have more kids so that we become the majority'- then this is certainly the plan. It is only a conspiracy if this is not said openly.
Any special rights given to minorities, no matter how slight the burden they impose, are a violation of the laws of demography.
This is not Modi's view. Unlike Mehta, Modi's background is not privileged. The need for affirmative action is especially strong in a country like India where one member of a family who gets a Government job almost invariably helps all the other members of that family who in turn help their caste fellows to whom they are tied through marriage.
It was not the BJP, but Congress which decided that Muslims and Christians would be denied affirmative action. Furthermore, Congress was in power when a great ethnic cleansing of Muslim- retaliatory, it must be said- occurred. Muslims who had fled across the border to save their lives were not permitted to return and claim Indian citizenship. In other words, the situation vis a vis Pakistan was symmetric.
They suggest the giving of power to a community beyond what its numbers warrant. This was the intractable dilemma in the negotiations leading up to Independence, and the BJP has consistently peddled the charge that minorities are given a veto over domains of national life.
It was Congress- which took 90 percent of the Hindu vote in 1946- which steadfastly refused to share power with Muslims precisely for this reason.
The affront in this is not about the moral claims in the rights thus given; the affront is that these rights violate the demographic laws of politics.
Why speak of 'affront'? It is not in the interests of the Hindus to give anyone a veto over the manner in which they wish to govern themselves. This was equally true of Muslims and, where they were the majority and powerful enough to do so, they chose to create an Islamic Republic.
As BJP leaders are fond of saying: minorities had a veto, now we will make them irrelevant in all aspects, from political representation to cultural significance.
It was Congress which took away reserved seats from Muslims and ensured that their representation in the bureaucracy and the Army and so forth declined precipitously. What happened to Urdu? It was crushed under Congress- as Sahir and numerous other poets and writers were wont to grieve over. Thanks to Bollywood, it revived as Congress's vice like grip was gradually relaxed. In the Fifties and Sixties, Muslim actors had to take Hindu names. It wasn't till the late Seventies and Eighties that 'Khans' began to rise. Previously, such 'Khans' were 'Kumars'.
The year 2014 was a watershed in this respect, for it showed that minorities could be made electorally irrelevant.
1946 was that watershed. Minorities had been electorally relevant only in the sense that they had to vote for Congress or risk getting ethnically cleansed.
While other political parties may not go so far, making minorities invisible will become the default mode, the common sense of Indian politics.
Muslims became invisible for the excellent reason that they were killed or chased away if they made themselves too visible, after 1947. There was such a thing as a Custodian of Enemy Property.
This would not have been a bad thing if it had made for a political world in which the rights of citizenship and identities of citizens were not so closely allied.
Rights are meaningless unless incentive compatible remedies exist under a bond of law. But this means building State capacity. India remained too poor- and too bureaucratic- to do this on any great scale. That is changing. The reason the BJP now prevails is because of better 'last mile delivery'. This means Rights are now getting linked to remedies. One reason this can happen is better 'mechanism design'. That's the sort of thing Mehta & Co refuse to do. Instead they write paranoid nonsense.
In other words, if it made the distinction between ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ irrelevant to the rights that individuals enjoy.
This is foolish. Rights are specified by the majority. I live in a Christian country and so can only take one wife and can't divorce her by saying 'talaq, talaq, talaq'. Had I the good fortune to live in certain Islamic Republics, this would not be the case- provided I changed my religion.
Instead, this project seeks a different kind of invisibility: one that retains majority cultural privilege and naturalises its idea of the nation.
But this is true of every National 'project'! Why is Mehta getting his knickers in a twist over the fact that India is just like every other nation? What will attract his ire next? The fact that Indians have two legs and two arms just like Africans? Will Mehta begin to see something very sinister in this fact? Will he say 'Modi, though a symptom of this terrible disease, is also its cause. He is covertly ensuring that the third arm and fourth leg of most Indians atrophy quickly or never come into existence. As for me, my penis is so big, it's like a third leg. This is because I studied at Oxford and Princeton. Sadly, under Modi, I find my penis has atrophied. This is political interference! The Trustees of Ashoka should have protected me from penis diminishment! I should stand proudly as a tripod! For this reason, I must leave my 'super-hero' students in the lurch. You just wait, once I get a suitable Chair or Hammock in a prestigious Amrikan University, my penis will once more appear as thick and long and substantial as my other two legs'.
But a demographic imagination is, always, at its core, reactionary.
Nonsense! Progressive politics motivated the refining of the arts and techniques of modern demography. The reason I tick boxes revealing my color and religion in the Census form is because I know this information won't be used for a 'reactionary' purpose- e.g. deporting me or sending me to a gas chamber- but rather to improve things for people like me.
It is no accident that it is fuelling a reactionary politics in America, Europe and India.
Fuck off! In Europe and America, demographers are challenging a xenophobic narrative by pointing out that migrants aren't really 'swamping' the local population. They aren't taking away jobs from the locals.
Consider what happened during the backlash to Black Lives Matter. Statisticians were at pains to point out that African Americans didn't really represent 30 percent of the population. Their share of the population was less than half that and it was tending to fall.
If Mehta had attended the LSE, he would know that the Fabians- who were progressive, not reactionary- contributed greatly to the demographic sciences.
For its concern is not with freedom and mobility, but with the political privilege of a community and the fixity of its identity.
No 'political privilege' obtains if you are as poor as shit and your life-chances are dwindling. Demography is about finding out why mobility is low and doing 'mechanism design' so that elasticities of supply and demand increase. This automatically reduces the scope for rent extraction. It also dissolves trait based identity in favor of a dynamic conception of mutuality without any 'fixed' traits. It is because Mehtas and Iyers are more mobile and have higher elasticities that we can no longer identify them by their caste marks, clothes (or, in the case of Iyers, the lack of them), occupations, typical places of domicile etc. etc.
Its moral psychology is the imagined or potential victimhood of the majority.
No it isn't. The majority can act cohesively to improve life-chances and elasticity for the people in the country. Why be a victim when it feels so damn good to kick the shit out of any internal or external aggressor?
In India, this politics often finds its hook in the obvious fact that liberal establishments often like to position themselves as noblesse oblige protectors of minorities—often at the risk of empowering the most reactionary amongst them.
In India, the liberal establishment is shit because cunts like Mehta represent it. They haven't any noblesse oblige whatsoever. They are Drama Queens. Look at what happened when the Trustees of Ashoka pulled up Mehta for his paranoid and foolish articles. The cunt immediately shat on his students and their alma mater. He hopes to be taken for a victim of Modi's persecution and thus to gain a cushy sinecure in America.
It tells you something about how reactionary Congress politics had become in relation to minorities that the BJP is able to run away with the social reform agenda when it comes to minorities. But the demographic anxiety is something that transcends debates over what rights people should have and how best to liberate individuals from the tyranny of compulsory identities. It shades over into the idea that particular communities are a threat by their very being, by simply being who they are. This sensibility has cast a dark shadow on Indian political and cultural life since Partition; it ebbs and flows. But the question is: has it now been given open legitimacy to the point where even other political parties will adapt to it?
Mehta refuses to recognize that countries as different as France and Saudi Arabia are having to take measures against a certain type of Islamic threat. His big idea is that India is different from the rest of the world. If bad things happen it must be because some Hindus are being bad.
Mehta's scholarship lacks legitimacy. It is the bastard offspring of pedantry and paranoia. We can now see that, even as a teacher, the man is a fucking bastard who fucks over his students so as to advance himself.
The ultimate cretinism of the times is the kind of democracy we’ve become: we yearn for simplistic solutions for deliverance from its complexities
This is Mehta's ultimate cretinism. He does not get that 'mechanism design' is what he is supposed to be doing. Finding a simple solution for a complex problem does require mathematical ability. Look at Ebay or Amazon. They employ smart people with PhDs in a useful type of mathematical Econ- not useless Mehta type drivel- to figure out very simple but effective solutions to complex problems involving building trust between vendors and consumers who never come face to face.
Democracy works best when voting rules are simple and encourage 'single peaked' preferences. If you complicate them for high minded reasons, you get chaos and stasis.
The second element of a reactionary politics is an obsession with culture as a form of control.
Culture is not a form of control. Beating people is. Reactionary politics is not obsessed with talking like Oscar Wilde- who would go into raptures over the music of Dvorak without ever having heard his symphonies. It is obsessed with beating the fuck out of progressives who think mebbe homosexuals too deserve to be happy.
In their different ways early in the 20th century, both Nehru and Premchand had pointed out a curious feature of modern politics: the association of the politics of culture with reactionaries.
That was a feature of traditional politics. There is nothing 'curious' about the fact that traditional politics will continue even after some supposed 'modern age' has dawned.
Nehru and Premchand were not utter philistines but their appreciation of Urdu was somewhat plebian. At least, this was Maulana Azad's view. The fact is some very cultured people were progressives whereas some philistines were reactionary.
As Nehru asked of Iqbal, “Why is it that whenever such so- called cultural and similar matters are pushed to the front, political reactionaries take the lead in them?”
But Iqbal said of Nehru that his Socialism was bound to fail because it would run aground on the Caste system which, Iqbal, believed was an expression of the polytheistic nature of Hinduism. Pakistan was necessary so that Socialism could be achieved for the strictly monist Muslims.
The short answer is
Nehru was wrong. Maulana Azad was more 'cultured' than Iqbal. So was Hasrat Mohani who was an actual Ashraf, not the son of a tailor whose grandfather was a Hindu Kaula.
that the reactionary take on culture is driven by two related fears: a fear of freedom and a cult of identity.
Mehta literally shits himself with fear of imaginary 'political interference' and runs away from his students. Only cowards are driven by fears and only cowards think other people are as cowardly as themselves.
The relationship between culture and freedom in modern politics is a vexed one,
Nonsense! There is no relationship whatsoever between them. There may be some lowly Minister of the Arts or Culture or whatever, but Sports is more important.
but there is one particular space that makes propitious ground for reactionary politics: sexual morals and gender relations.
Nehru refused to believe that Indians could be homosexuals. He told Alain Danielou that the thing was brought in by Turks. Hindu India would soon be free of that vice.
Mehta, ignorant cunt that he is, does not seem to be aware that the 'Revolutionary Morality' of the Bolsheviks and Maoists and so forth, all rejected homosexuality and guys having affairs as examples of 'decadent bourgeois mentality'.
It is an understatement to say that India has handled this transition badly.
It is an overstatement. India hasn't bothered with something which has never mattered very much. Local customs were upheld- if anybody could be bothered. Otherwise you could just run away to some far City and do what you pleased.
If gender is often the site of cultural reaction,
in the minds of stupid academics who earn a little money by pretending this is the case
the way a society handles the question of gender will be a key to the possibilities of reactionary politics.
No it won't. Poor countries can't be bothered with such palaver.
There is some good news here: some of the worst performing states like Rajasthan and Haryana are beginning to see a turnaround in sex ratios at birth; enrolments in higher education are up even though workforce participation remains low. But for the cultural politics of reaction,
which only exists in the mind of a cretin
three things are important. First, the social order is often about channelling and restraining sexual energies, and perhaps more creatively sublimating it.
As opposed to what? Everybody fisting themselves incessantly?
But what happens in a society where not only is desire suddenly liberated but notions of self-esteem get bound in it in a new and insistent way?
You can find the answer on pornhub.
Eroticism rather than sublimation becomes the new mode of channelling.
This fucker has been watching pornhub when he should have been keeping up with the literature on mechanism design
What does it do to the identities of young men whose social location is a toxic amalgam of traditional entitlement, modern liberation and a culture that manufactures new ideologies of pleasure?
They wank a lot. Some like Mehta, shit themselves because they get frightened of 'political interference' - or so they claim. The truth is they get a frisson from shitting themselves publicly.
Second, there is the sheer fact of sexual violence—something always prevalent but now taking on new and brutal forms.
Mehta's anal cherry has only been preserved from 'political interference' by his practice of continually shitting himself.
And finally, there is the fact that modern freedom requires more discernment and responsibility rather than less.
Which is why Mehta left his students in the lurch. He had discerned that a threat to his anal cherry existed because of 'the culture of reactionary politics'. Thus he shat on Ashoka University and destroyed the life-chances of his 'super-heroes'.
But what produces the forms of discernment that can lead to fulfilment rather than the chasing of chimeras?
Writing shite like this. Mehta began to believe his ass was being chased by a chimera intent on deflowering his anal cherry. So he shat on Ashoka University and ran away from his students.
If it is ‘good riddance’ for traditional institutions, what are the new forms that will channel these sexual energies?
Shitting where you work. Try it sometime- it feels sooooo good!
In part, there is a susceptibility to the politics of reaction because of this triple crisis: the crisis of masculinity looking for an outlet to prove itself, the crisis of sexual violence, and the strange oscillation between a traditional politics of repression on one hand and an undiscerning freedom on the other.
Mehta's masculinity consists of shitting himself over fears that reactionary political culture may be intent on interfering with his anal cherry.
The anxiety over sex has become palpably central to our politics, and will provide a constant hook for the politics of reaction.
Mehta reacted pretty sharply to a threat to his anal cherry. He immediately shat all over Ashoka University and ran away from his students there.
BUT THE POLITICS of culture is not about free minds inquiring into higher values;
Yes it is. Culture is the product of minds which are free at least with respect to the art-forms which incarnate that culture. Art is concerned with higher values. Commerce- not so much. The 'Politics' of culture has to do with resource allocation and barriers to entry with respect to cultural activities.
it is about playing out expected scripts that flow from identities.
Nonsense. No such scripts exist. If they did, I'd know how to improve upon the melakarta system of Carnatic Music just by finding out what is written in the 'expected script' for my identity as a Tambram descended from udgatrs.
It’s a form of culture where identity colonises all inquiry:
Identity can't 'colonise' all inquiry because it is itself an inquiry.
what history we believe, for instance, is simply a function of what identity we have.
Rubbish! The same person may believe contradictory things about their own history at the same time. Inquiry may resolve the contradiction or make it productive if valuable new insights.
For example, a Jain may believe that Jain savants took up Sanskrit so as to maintain a clear distinction between commentary and Scripture while also believing that earlier Tirthankaras composed specific texts in Sanskrit which were incorporated in the Vedas etc. Clearly there is a contradiction here. Some Jain Upadhyayas have inquired into this matter. Their reflections on this subject are themselves a wonderful soteriological resource.
Mehta's knowledge of Western Paideia is half-baked. His ignorance of his own Religion is shameful. India needs to tell this cunt to go shit on some foreign College and let down students of some other nationality.
All aesthetic modes of articulation are reduced to the identity of who produced them.
Mehta certainly believes that if a guy is someone he thinks is 'reactionary' then that guys 'aesthetic mode of articulation' is very naughty and wicked.
Often even well-meaning defenders of pluralism fall into this trap where the significance of a piece of art or music or architecture is reduced simply to its political form: what is the identity of the person who produced it?
For Mehta, Nehru and Premchand- despite being second rate- are good guys whereas Iqbal- who was occasionally first rate- is a bad guy.
Considerations of meaning beyond identity, the ability of art to produce forms of transcendence, or the principles of composition, or the values inherent in a book, for example, all get short shrift.
In Mehta's oeuvre- coz the man is a cretin.
In this sense, a reactionary approach to culture where it is just about identity, not about meaning, has become a default common sense that transcends political lines.
Mehta takes the same approach to politics and economics. If Modi has a hand in the thing, it must be bad.
This paves the way for the majoritarian reactionary who simply says: ‘I don’t care about your culture.’
Nothing 'paves the way' for the truth. I don't care about lots of cultures. They are either inaccessible or unappealing to me. Mehta, of course, moves in a world of poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals. They may need fancy alibis for being thick-as-shit Philistines. We don't.
What makes this reactionary move possible is the view that what matters is whose culture it is, not that it is culture.
What makes Mehta's claims re. 'political interference' possible is his view that what matters is Pratap Bhanu Mehta not what use Pratap Bhanu Mehta is to anybody- including his own students.
In that sense, the question of culture in politics becomes a question of policing boundaries, not liberating thought.
Monitoring boundaries is cheap- if you happen to be situated in that vicinity. Policing boundaries requires the application of force- which uses up costly resources. Mehta himself was employed to 'police' a boundary related to academic credentials. But he shat himself. Thus less resources will be allocated to doing what he did. Soon the thing will fade away by itself. It is a nuisance. It does not represent noesis.
Third, a reactionary politics will use fear to underwrite technology and surveillance.
No it won't. Technology and surveillance have to be underwritten by budgetary allocations. Only if both yield a surplus of benefit over cost will they be deployed. Otherwise, sooner or later, they will wither on the vine. A cheaper alternative is to spread fear by beating and killing people in an arbitrary manner.
The Feds spend a lot of money on wire-taps and informers and so forth. The Mafia is more effective because they will kill you just to send a message.
It may be a ‘militant nostalgia’, as Mark Lilla observes in his book The Reactionary Mind, a longing for a return to an imagined world before the corruption of the present set in.
Lilla is an elderly Europeanist who is saying, in a coded way, stop banging on about hyphenated identities- even if you guys get disproportionately shot by policemen or urinated upon by elderly white men.
Biden has rejected this type of elitist, Eurocentric, stupidity. India should hope that Mehta relocates to Biden's America where the anti-India lobby will find him a cushy sinecure. Incidentally, Soros now thinks Modi is evil incarnate. This is good news for India. Those whom Soros attacks grow stronger.
A concern with culture in all its forms, aesthetic valuation and a sense of values that are higher and enduring, is healthy for any democracy.
Nonsense! A Liberal Democracy must express no preferences whatsoever with respect to a wide variety of issues. Otherwise, you get Sen's stupid 'Paretian Liberal' paradox.
Indeed, it can be a necessary bulwark against an easy moral cretinism.
No it can't. Moral cretinism, like other types of cretinism, involves 'unrestricted domain'. The solution is Type theory. In this case, the Rule of Law must set boundaries for Social Choice. Some matters must remain wholly private. 'Hard cases make bad law'.
But it is too simplistic
it is foolish
to call this present moment reactionary in the sense of trading merely in nostalgia. That nostalgia is too intermittent and farcical to have any potency. What the language of nostalgia misses out is a feature of the present form of reaction that is quite distinctive and anti-nostalgic in some respects: the fascination with technology.
Why speak of 'fascination'? Technology has changed in very useful ways. We act in a self-interested manner, not as a result of some atavistic 'fascination', when we seek to improve our lives using it.
The present moment is closer to what the historian Jeffrey Herf had once insightfully called a ‘reactionary modernism’,
there wasn't much 'modern technology' about when Herf wrote this. He had to rely on essentially nineteenth century technology- the phone, the telegram, the typewriter. His world wasn't much different from that of the Weimar Germany he wrote about.
one that is able to combine an affirmative belief in technological progress with fuzzy dreams of the past.
But this could be said of any country at any time! We feel sorry for Herf because his family suffered under the Nazis. Still, at least he wasn't a vicious anti-Zionist like some of his Mehta-level cretinously narcissistic colleagues.
In fact, the characteristic danger of this kind of reactionary modernism is that it fetishises technology itself to the point of romanticism.
Talk of fetishization is so pre-War- not the Second, the First World War. How fucking reactionary is this cunt?
Both culture and technology are elevated to means of social control.
That shite was played out by the Seventies! It was fucking obvious that the transistor radio was about the Beatles, not Beethoven, and the world view they represented. Social control bit the bullet but good by the time of Watergate. Fuck is wrong with this reactionary cretin? Did he never listen to Punk or Death Metal- forget about Rap or Hip Hop?
The appeal of technology is not just the efficiencies it brings: it is also its anti-political character.
Some stupid Sociologists said that in the Fifties. Then the Sixties happened and they felt stupid for saying it.
Technology itself is presented as a neutral political choice, simply a calculation of means and ends.
The Sen of 'Choice of Technique' may have thought that. But even he could see he was being silly by the time the Sixties began to swing.
Technology spready by Tardean mimetics not 'neutral political choice' of a Cost/Benefit Analysis kind.
The hope is laid out that technology can solve the problem of political division, social fear and accountability by cutting out all intermediaries.
This stupid fucker keeps talking about 'hope' and 'fear'. Ordinary people have 'expectations'. They don't shit themselves from 'fear'. They try to fuck up anyone who tries to fuck with them. That's how come our species has survived and prospered.
But technology is also presented as the cure of our fears.
No it isn't. Technology is presented as shiny cool stuff which the popular kids have and which you need to get your greedy little mitts on so as to have a chance to make out with a cheerleader.
It is a commonplace observation
by people who commonly shit themselves and scream hysterically about 'political interference'
that our societies are beset by fears: it is a measure of the deep breakdown of moral trust in our societies, and a reflection of our experience of violence, that we now look to technology as modes of disciplining one another.
Mehta looks to his i-phone to discipline Modi- preferably in black leather bondage gear. He shits himself and resigns from Ashoka when he discovers the thing can't be done. You need an Android phone to download that particular app which, full disclosure, I have invested heavily in.
It is the pervasiveness of fear—always the sign of a reactionary age—that legitimises the idea that citizens be made totally transparent to the state and often to each other.
Nothing 'legitimizes' a crazy idea. People aren't transparent to themselves- there's a good reason we have no Momus window into our own souls or motivations. This serves to baffle predator and parasites and injects enough indeterminacy into Social Choice to preserve dynamic efficiency and global Hannan Consistency.
Mehta won't know what I am talking about because I'm invoking modern thinking in his field. That reactionary cunt prefers to stick his head, like an ostrich, in the sand of a long dessicated Eurocentrism.
All liberal democracies are struggling with this new technological age:
Nonsense! They are thriving.
our institutions of oversight, our legal vocabularies, our moral distinctions between what is public and what is private are struggling to come to terms with a new technological reality.
Struggling? Not at all. State Capacity is expanding thanks to new Technology- though, no doubt, cunts like Mehta represent road-blocks.
These questions will require complex answers.
Stupid questions require telling the stupid questioner to go fuck himself somewhere else.
But a characteristic of a reactionary age is
actual reactionary policies- stuff like women losing the vote and gays having to go back in the closet- not
an easy acceptance of state and sometimes corporate surveillance, the acceptance of new chains in the name of satisfying our own desires and satiating our own fears.
This is paranoid bullshit. Why not simply say that Amazon has cameras installed in toilets. They are watching your poop. OMG! Will no one think of the children?!
Technology promises to liberate us from fear,
No it doesn't. If your i-phone makes any such promise to you send it back to the manufacturer. Then make an appointment with your psychiatrist.
but in doing so, it permanently institutionalises fear in our politics.
Only for Mehta who is always on the point of shitting himself because he is frightened out of his wits
We will soon reach a point where the only answer we can give to the challenge of any social evil will be more surveillance: the ultimate triumph of a reactionary modernism, in which we have surrendered all powers to the state.
Mehta will soon reach a point where he will shit himself anytime he sees a cat. Cats are actually spies for Modi. This is the ultimate triumph of reactionary modernism. Even cats have surrendered all their powers to the state.
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