Quibus septem placuere colles, dicere carmen

Horace, thy Carmen Saeculare, invoking our ancient gods, to bless thy Eternal City

Has outlasted aught numinously natal, everywhere save seven-hilled Tirupati

 Baby- Balaji- burgeoning in strength- destroys Sin

Love is the battle all can win.

Clive James on Waugh's dangling bits

The late Clive James wrote

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1903–1966) was the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century,

Chesterton held that title while he lived. 

even though so many of the wrong people said so.

Waugh himself probably thought Beerbohm was better though, no doubt, he got his start in the Nineteenth Century. But it was to that period Waugh harkened back.  

His unblushing ambition to pass for a member of the upper orders

his wife, the mother of his children, belonged to the upper orders. There was no reason for him to pass for a chimney-sweep.  

was held against him by critics who believed that art, if it couldn’t be an instrument of social reform,

i.e. pretending to care deeply about chimney sweeps 

should at least not be the possession of a class that had enough privileges already.

because they weren't busy sweeping chimneys.  

Even so irascible a representative of that position as Professor John Carey,

he taught English to Chinese chimney-sweeps- right?  

however, felt obliged to enrol Waugh’s first comic novel, Decline and Fall, among the most entertaining books of the century. By extension, students should be slow to believe that Waugh’s most famous single book, Brideshead Revisited, is as self-indulgently snobbish as its denigrators say:

it is a marvellous satire on a prig- a stand in for Waugh himself. We are delighted when it turns out that  Catholicism prevents the nice girl from having to marry the awful prig.  

usually they have a social programme of their own, and almost always, against their inclinations, they can quote from the text verbatim.

probably because they are trying to pass for members of the upper orders.  

The same might be said for critics who can find nothing valuable in his wartime Sword of Honour trilogy:

It is very good at depicting a rather inglorious period in this country's military history. Still, we did better than the French.  

the comic scenes alone are enough to place him in direct rivalry with Kingsley Amis at his early best, and rather ahead of Anthony Powell and P. G. Wodehouse, neither of whom came up with an invention quite as extravagant as Apthorpe’s thunderbox.

Waugh had travelled in Africa and Latin America. Thunderboxes are no joking matter. Will Apthorpe supinely permit a superior officer to usurp his commode? An Old Etonian would scarcely have had the stomach. But Apthorpe's soul has been steeled by his frequent troubles with Bechuana tummy. 

Really it takes blind prejudice to believe that Waugh could not write magically attractive English.

He took pains to make his prose pleasing. 

But Waugh showed some blind prejudice of his own in believing that he wrote it perfectly.

Perfection does not please. It is either taken for granted or taken as a reproach.  

His apparent conviction that only those with a public school (i.e., private school) education in classics

translating dead languages at a young age trains you to lay out your own mother tongue with an undertaker's tact.  

could write accurate English was a flagrant example of the very snobbery he was attacked for.

He was merely repeating the conventional wisdom of an earlier generation. Having been a school master, he was bound to say foolish things of that sort.  

It also happened to be factually wrong, on the evidence that he himself inadvertently provided.

It was obviously wrong. The Classics were taught in England before there was any thing very much by way of English prose.  

In 'the Culture of Amnesia' Clive James wrote

THE DECAY OF grammar is a feature of our time, so I have tried, at several points in this book, to make a consideration of the decline part of the discussion.

 Even those with little learning know that grammars always decay as they gain wider currency and acquire a written literature. Inflectional complexity and irregularities tend to disappear. This is as true of Sanskrit as English. 

Except in a perfectly managed autocracy, language declines,

An autocracy may speed the simplification of the language in the interest of efficiency or to facilitate its spread to conquered tribes.  

and too much should not be made of the relationship between scrambled thought and imprecise expression.

Nothing should be made of it. Those who think most clearly see the advantage of speaking in a wholly meaningless manner.  

Hitler did indeed abuse the German language,

No. He had gone to a good school- the same one as Wittgenstein- and, for a Corporal, he spoke well. Indeed, he could understand and make himself understood in English. French, he knew slightly better. In Italian, he was fluent.  

and there was many a connoisseur of grammar and usage who was able to predict, from what he did to the spoken word, what he would do to people when he got the chance.

Is James thinking of George Steiner? But Steiner was a shithead who studied at the French Lycee in New York. He was faking his Europeanism in the best Yankee Doodle Dandy style. Still, at one time, it was the charitable view- one popularized by Thomas Mann- that the Germans had never wanted military conquest. Sadly, when they listened to Hitler sodomizing their mother tongue, they became so traumatized that they invaded Poland and Ukraine and so forth in a fugue state.  

But Orwell set his standard too high when he called for clean expression from politicians: it would have been sufficient to call for clean behaviour.

It would be equally useless and foolish.  

At the moment, the use of English in Britain is deteriorating so quickly that “phenomena,” after several years of being used confidently in the singular, is now being abetted by “phenomenon” used in the plural.

Thus has it always been. Jonathon Owen tells us 'The O.E.D has has citations for plural phenomenas dating to 1635 and singular phenomena dating to 1708, and many of these uses come from scientists and other academics who were well versed in Greek and Latin.' James published this shite in 2007. 

People sense that there ought to be a distinction.

Not if they have something important to say. Waugh didn't. He was a peerless observer and had a great ear for idiolect. But, as he says, he had little learning.  

Everybody wants to write correctly.

Unless they were avant garde and made a point of not doing so.  

But they resist being taught how, and finally there is nobody to teach them, because the teachers don’t know either.

Young teachers like Waugh- maybe. But if he had stuck it out in that grim trade, sooner or later, he would have made it his business to find out. 

In a democracy, the language is bound to deteriorate with daunting speed.

I suppose, that was the gravamen of the Proteus episode in Joyce's Ulysses.  

The professional user of it would do best to count his blessings: after all, his competition is disqualifying itself

if your competition is a bunch of Grammar-Nazis, you aren't likely to be making very much money.  

presenting him with opportunities for satire while it does so, and boosting his self-esteem. (When I catch someone on television using “deem” for “deign,” it consoles me for having found out that I have spent fifty years stressing “empyrean” on the wrong syllable.)

Stress the right syllable and you sound like a dick or, if that description is otiose, one so abruptly entered by a dick as to emit a high pitched yelp.

The most interesting aspect of the collapse is that the purist can do so little to stem it, and might even succumb to it himself, sometimes through a misinterpretation of his own credentials.

Even if this were true, it would not be interesting. But it isn't true. The purist can and does triumph by finding something important to say and saying it more simply and soundingly than those who jaw away in jargon. Also, nobody 'misinterprets' their own credentials. It is not the case that when you get a Batchelor's degree, you think you are prohibited from marrying.  

Evelyn Waugh was a case in point. Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English;

plenty did. That was the point. We grant no plaudits to one who wields a blunt scalpel.  

he stands at the height of English prose;

Nonsense! He is a comic master but Thalia stands at the foot, not the summit, of Parnassus. I suppose, had his war experiences ranked with those of T.E Lawrence, his prose may indeed have touched heights of sublimity inhospitable to the joyous Muse. Or, had the fate of the free world rested in his hands, he may have gibbered in the Gibbonesque manner of Winston Churchill. Alternatively, had he made his mark in the Mathematical Sciences, he, like Bertrand Russel, might have been thought worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sadly, Apthorpe's thunderbox- though, to my mind, equal and opposite in value to the discovery of the atomic bomb- was not an achievement the world thought worthy of condign acclamation. 

its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.

No. A particular, self-consciously facetious, late Nineteenth Century, style enjoyed, at his hands, an unnatural extension into our own age. But Logan Pearsall Smith died in 1946. Beerbohm died in 1956. Ronald Knox died the next year. E.M. Forster, who had known them all, died in 1970. 

But he was wrong about how he did it. In A Little Learning he pronounced that nobody without a classical education could ever write English correctly.

Foreigners write it too correctly. 

Only a few pages away from that claim, he wrote the cited sentence,

'A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, it was Tony who introduced me to my first publisher.'

which is about as incorrect as it could be, because he ends up talking about the wrong person.

Nonsense! There is a psychologically interesting elision which might look like slip-shod construction to a particularly stupid reader.  

He meant to say that it was he, Evelyn Waugh, who was very hard up, and not Anthony Powell. To make the lapse more delicious, Powell himself was the arch-perpetrator of the dangling modifier.

Perhaps this was deliberate. The modernist was studiedly lewd, not a prude, about dangling bits. 

At least Waugh had got over the influence of Latin constructions. Powell, to the end of his career, wrote as if English were an inflected language,

or as if it is not received analytically- which it isn't. A Hindu might say the English sentence is a 'sphota'. A pseudo-intellectual Hindu might speak of its fugitive, futile, flight from holophrasis. 

and at least once per page, in Powell’s prose, the reader is obliged to rearrange the order of a sentence so that a descriptive phrase, sometimes a whole descriptive clause, can be re-attached to its proper object.

Few readers have felt any such need. One might say that Powell doesn't read 'smoothly'. Was this by design? 

In a book review I once mentioned Powell’s erratic neo-classical prosody. He sent me a postcard quoting precedent as far back as John Aubrey. He was right, of course: our prose masters have always been at it.

English's analyticity is not innate. It is a heuristic device- nothing more. 

But our prose masters, now as then, ought not to prate about correctness while leaving so much of the writing to the reader.

Writing really doesn't matter. Do you have something interesting to say? If not, gas on about the decay of language or cultural amnesia or the fact that the country is going to the dogs now the whole place has been swamped by immigrants who will probably cook and eat my pussy cat.  

Correct prose is unambiguous.

Lawyers are trained to write in an unambiguous way. But what they produce is not prose precisely because it is correct. 

There is no danger of the clear becoming monotonous, because opacities will invade it anyway.

In which case, there is no danger of anything being clear. What is of no interest to us is monotonous even if it is conveyed by hideous shrieks punctuated by sonorous farts. 

Even the most attentive writer will have his blind spots, although deaf spots might be a better name.

Anyone can pick holes in anything.   

Kingsley Amis, who was an admiring friend of Anthony Powell, was nevertheless well aware that Powell’s grammar was all over the place.

That was the least of his weaknesses as a creative writer. 

(In a letter to Philip Larkin, Amis made a devastating short list of Powell’s habitual errors.) Amis himself was a stickler for linguistic efficiency.

The same could be said for the scriptwriter for the Carry On films.  

The only mistake I ever caught him making was when he overdid it.

James is mistaken. Anyway, a man so self-involved could not catch anyone at anything.  

In Lucky Jim, which is a treatise on language

it really isn't. The thing is one step up from a Carry On film. That's why it worked so well on screen.  

among its other virtues, Gore-Urquhart, Jim’s mentor in the art of boredom detection, unaccountably seems to approve of the paintings of the fake artist Bertrand Welch.

There is no such incident in the book. Jim claims to be a 'boredom-detector' to the rich old man. Clive was either senile when he wrote this or else was drunk off his head when he read the book as a teenager.  

“Like his pictures,” says Gore-Urquhart. Since he says everything tersely, the reader—this reader, at any rate—tends to assume that he means “I like his pictures.”

Nonsense! This is the passage James is referring to-

But what he means is that he considers Bertrand a fake, like his pictures.

Bertrand pictures aren't fake. He did actually paint them. That's why they are no good. But, Gore-Urquhart also thinks the man is no good. He doesn't want his niece to marry the fellow. That's why he has given a well-paid job to Bertrand's rival in love. 

The reader is sent on a false trail

No. The rich dude says 'Bertrand is no good- just like his pictures'. This is easy for the reader to understand because it is borne out by everything which has preceded it.  

by a too-confident use of the character’s habitual tone. The author should have spotted the possibility of a misinterpretation.

There really is none.  

But we, the readers, should remember that it is one of the very few possibilities of misinterpretation that Kingsley Amis didn’t spot.

James 'read' English at Pembroke College. Clearly it destroyed his ability to understand even a very simple, farcical, novel like 'Lucky Jim'. 

He spotted hundreds of thousands of them, and eliminated nearly every one. If he had written without effort, many of them would have stayed in. (Exercise: find a complex interchange of dialogue in Lucky Jim and count the number of times you are left in doubt as to who is speaking. You are never in doubt. Now try the same test with a novel by Margaret Drabble.)

Don't. Get a fucking life. 

The main reason a good writer needs a drink at the end of the day is

the same reason a bad writer does.  

the endless, finicky work of disarming the little booby traps that the language confronts him with as he advances.

Lawyers may have to sweat over such matters. Otherwise, you just edit your manuscript after having laid it aside for a day or two. Does it read smoothly? Are the main points leaping out at you or has decorative shrubbery rendered them invisible or indistinct? Should you take out that bit about shitting yourself in Swahili class? Is it a case of 'too much information'? Does it distract from the main thrust of your critique of German monetary policy? Such are the questions which face an editor. They are of no great concern to a creative writer- more particularly if it wasn't him who shat himself in Swahili class. It was Bakul Joshi. Lots of people confuse him and me- even Mum. Much of the blame for this must be borne by German monetary policy in the age of Adenauer.  

They aren’t really very dangerous—they only go off with a phut and a puff of clay dust in the reader’s face if they aren’t dealt with—but those aren’t the sounds that a writer wants his sentences to make.

Even Homer nods. Readers make allowances so long as you have something interesting to say.  

Evelyn Waugh didn’t really want this sentence to make this sound, but he relaxed his vigilance.

Or else, he was being 'psychological'. The defective syntax reveals  that he wants to expunge the humiliating memory of the penurious scapegrace he once was. If anybody should be thought of as 'hard up' let it be Anthony Powell. What was intolerable was the thought that he had taken to the pen for the same reason other Cockneys, failing at other trades, returned to their ancestral profession of purveying  cockles, whelks, and mussels, alive, alive, oh!

He knew what he meant, and forgot that the descriptive phrase was closer to the wrong person than to the right one.

The Psychological interpretation is more interesting than the notion that a professional writer suddenly 'forgot' what was, after all, second nature to him.  

If we correct the sentence, we can guess immediately why things went wrong. “A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, I was introduced by Tony to my first publisher.” But the correct order would have struck the writer as awkward, because the loss of “it was Tony” would have removed the connection to a previous sentence in which Powell had been talked about. In other words, it was Waugh’s sense of coherence that led him into the error.

He could have easily written, 'Later, when I was very hard up and desperate to get commissioned to write a book, it was Tony who came to the rescue, introducing me to my first publisher.' What is interesting, from the psychological point of view, is the elision of 'I' in the sentence.  

With bad writers it is often the way.

A writer is only bad if he is neither entertaining nor informative but insists on boring the shite out of us.  

In their heads, it all ties up,

Plenty of good writers don't have anything 'tied up' in their heads. What matters is whether they can entertain or inform.  

and they don’t fully grasp the necessity of laying it out for the reader.

Joyce should have taken grammar tips from James. Finnegans Wake might then rank with 'Lucky Jim'.  

Even good writers occasionally succumb. Waugh, who was as good as they get, hardly ever did: but he did this time.

No. We get that Waugh- perhaps because of his middle class, North London, background, had been psychically scarred by his youthful impecunity. Had his father been a Duke or a dustman, this would not have been the case. The thing would have been a lark. 

Antonio White on Kamala's 'Firstness'.

First published in 1970, Essence magazine is written for African-American women. Kamala Harris is West Indian on her father's side and South Indian on her mother's side. She may identify with African-American women but she isn't one herself. Her birth certificate identifies her mother as 'Caucasian' and her father as 'Jamaican'. I should mention, there were and are pure White Jamaicans. 

The Cost Of Being First: Why Kamala Harris’ Story Deserves Respect
Critics dismissed Kamala Harris’s new memoir as “cry baby stuff,” but her story reflects the lived realities of women—especially Black women—who break barriers and bear the burden of being first.

But Kamala benefitted from affirmative action all her adult life. A previous generation made sacrifices. What she had was entitlement inherited not from her own ancestors but those of actual African Americans. At no point did Kamala suffer by reason of her colour or her gender. True, being the daughter of a highly regarded Stanford Professor of Economics, helped her academically. But she did embrace African-American culture by her own volition. But so did lots of White boys in Britain. Back then, it was, as I still have to be physically prevented from saying, 'da shizzle'.  True, I am unusual in that I identify with Beyonce rather than Eddy Murphy, but have you seen my booty shake? I haven't. I'd dearly like to know if it is as good as I think it is. 

Antonio White, who isn't White, writes

Recently released excerpts from 107 Days, the memoir of former Vice President Kamala Harris, drew the ire of senior Democratic Party strategists last week, notably political commentators David Axelrod and Van Jones.

Because she has damaged the party. She has also laid to rest the vicious canard that she might have brains and integrity. 

During a Friday afternoon segment on CNN’s Arena with Kasie Hunt, the pair reduced Harris’ account of her historic, though brief, presidential campaign to “cry baby stuff.”

They didn't get that if you are a diversity hire who hopes to speak for diversity hires everywhere, then you must be a big fat cry-baby. Otherwise, people might think you had risen on merit. This might cause them to expect you to do useful things or, at least, speak in a cogent manner. This is totes triggering to the genuine diversity hire. People should understand that such creatures are utterly useless. It is everybody else's job to achieve things and then give the credit to the diversity hire.  

Jones declared Harris “did not have a political future,”

That was my first reaction. Then I realized that useless shitheads have a political future because they REPRESENT useless shitheads. We must respect such people for we too are they.  

while Axelrod called the passages “salacious” marketing to boost book sales.

Sadly, they were no such thing.  

Yet, millions of women who undergird the Democratic Party see Kamala as a mirror reflecting their very adult lived experiences on a national stage.

They have 'impostor syndrome'. They suspect they may actually be diversity hires even if they are doing all the work in the office and at home. Kamala represents their needy, narcissistic, 'inner child', no matter what genuine achievements they have to their credit. 

It must be said, in a country which has traditionally seen Black Women as smart, dedicated, hard-working and sociable, it is a relief to have so glaring a counter-example. The problem is, Kamala isn't really black. She, like Vivek Ramaswamy, is a Tambram on the make. But Vivek's USP is that he is a bright wealth-creator. Kamala's is that she is stupid and never held down a private sector job. 

Political commentators should be careful not to reduce the former Vice President’s personal account to merely petty political theater, lest they risk alienating a key Democratic voting bloc that overwhelmingly chose Democrats in the 2024, 2020, and 2016 general elections.

In other words, African Americans are stuck with Kamala. Those who diss her, diss us. The fact that she is stupid and self-centred means there is no point expecting anything of her or calling her to account. Either we say 'she isn't one of us- her parents were highly educated immigrants' or we have to slavishly adhere to her cult of self-adulation.  

Jones and Axelrod’s criticism stems from Harris’s account of events where she describes being on the receiving end of loyalty suspicions from President and First Lady Biden,

Which boss isn't worried his deputy mightn't be working against him? Not a senile, incompetent, boss- that's for sure.  

isolation from Democratic leaders in her role as Vice President

they wouldn't come for sleep-overs even though she promised she'd let them play with her Malibu Barbie.  Was this because she was bleck? No. It was because she has to sit down to pee. 

and party nominee, and professional undermining from internal White House staff. Her account is not gossip—it is testimony.

to her infantile narcissism- sure.  

And in telling it, Harris is doing what Firsts have always done:

e.g. Obama 

narrating the lived reality of being in a seat where no one like her has sat before

So, not like Obama. He didn't have to sit down to pee. Kamala, on becoming Veep, was jeered at because she couldn't use the urinal the way Pence had done. She hoped Biden would show her some empathy and chop off his own dick in solidarity with her. He refused to even mention the idea.  

and validating the experiences of millions whose experiences she reflects at the highest levels.

Unlike Antonio who doesn't have to sit down to pee. Also, the dude can grow a really cool beard. What a bastard! It's like he is rubbing it into the faces of his own mothers and sisters. Fuck you Antonio! You are just as bad as Joe Biden!  

The Broader Pattern

Broader economic and career patterns illustrate that Harris’ experiences reflect more than her own reality—they are consistent with what women

who slept with Willie Brown to gain political advancement 

and minority “firsts” encounter across society.

Monica Lewinsky had it worse. On the other hand, maybe she wasn't the first to be on the receiving end of Clinton's cigar.  

Those who rise into new ground-breaking roles report widespread pay gaps, fewer professional advancement opportunities, and harsher penalties than peers.

But not Kamala. She was the beneficiary of affirmative action and political patronage. Also, she only worked in the public sector. Will her book make her a lot of money? Yes, if African Americans are foolish enough to buy it.  

Increasingly, many are turning to entrepreneurship not out of indulgence, but out of necessity in the face of shrinking opportunity.

Kamala is being entrepreneurial. She hired a white woman to help her write 107 days.  

Black women working full time, year round were paid only about 64 cents for every dollar paid to White men in 2023.

But Kamala changed that- right?  In 2019 she was talking of a 'Pay Equity Punishment Plan'     requiring Companies to get certified that they were paying men and women equally. It may have been a hare-brained scheme, but other countries have passed laws on the issue while Biden-Harris did nothing. In 2024, there was no mention of the issue. 

Earlier data placed the figure closer to 61 cents. White women fare only slightly better, earning 77 cents. Even former President Barack Obama, whom by most accounts Axelrod and Jones owe their relevance to, also noted this reality during his presidency, even signing into law the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

This removed the time-bar previously placed on such claims by the Bench. Sadly, the British city of Birmingham was bankrupted by claims brought under the 2010 Equality Act. 

At the same time, Black women are leaving the workforce at staggering rates. This year alone, nearly 300,000 Black women have stepped away from traditional labor—

so, it's not just Kamala who lost her job. Still, the good news is 300,000 Black Women can write their own 107 days and make a lot of money.  

a “stunning reversal” of hard-won gains. Economists estimate the drop is costing the U.S. economy tens of billions in GDP.

Because DEI hires in the Federal Bureaucracy bring great benefits to the economy- right? 

In a single month, more than 100,000 Black women lost jobs, the sharpest decline of any demographic group.

The problem with getting a zero marginal product job is that you are the first to be laid off when the Federal Government tightens its belt. It is deeply unfair that useless employees are not retained while the useful are let go.  

Even when women do rise to the top, the rules are different.

No. The rules are the same. Outcomes are different.  

Women CEOs average 5.2 years in leadership, compared to nearly eight for men.

Though women are likely to become CEO at a younger age. On the other hand, they may have higher 'transfer earnings' or, if especially competent, can cash out quicker as stock prices rise.  

Too often, they are appointed in moments of crisis—the “glass cliff”—when conditions are most precarious, like Harris found herself following a jaw dropping dismal first debate performance from former President Biden in the summer of 2024.

She started well but then declined because she was shit.  

Yet, boards scrutinize their decisions more harshly, and media coverage frames their departures more negatively.

So what? Higher scrutiny keeps you up to the mark.  

Academia and public service tells a parallel story.

It is a story the American public has got tired off. You can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse even if sow's ears have been historically underrepresented in Academia, public services, and the higher ranks of the Judiciary.  

Black women leaders are often brought in during crises, under-resourced, and then swiftly removed when problems persist.

Nonsense! They are brought in because nobody expects anything of them.  

Their exits are magnified without mercy and underreported without context. Look at former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

A Political Scientist who was shit at politics 

Look at how Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook

A Biden appointee. She brings nothing to the table. Still, the accusation against her appears prima facie false. On the other hand, nobody really believes the Fed is independent. It's best to let sleeping dogs lie. What if she is replaced by somebody smart?  

was nearly stripped of her seat as the first in her role

she wasn't the first useless person in that role. 

without due process just weeks ago. These are not isolated incidents. They are patterns.

Did you know that Trump is President? He is White and has a dick. There's a pattern to these things is all I am saying.  

The First Person’s Burden

Step into Harris’s shoes. You are the first woman Vice President.

Because Geraldine Ferraro & Sarah Palin were on losing tickets. Also Biden had committed to appointing a Black Woman. Who was the most useless person he could find? People were on the edge of their seats.  

The first Black Vice President.

There had been a two term Black President. People thought Hilary could have been two-term. They were wrong. Women don't necessarily vote for women. They may even vote for a 'pussy-grabber' if they think he will do a better job. 

There is only one true 'first' in recent American politics. It is Donald Trump. He never received a Government pay-check before getting the top job.  

The first South Asian Vice President.

The first Tambram Veep. The first Tambram Veep whose Mum came from the right side of the Cauvery. The first Tambram Veep whose Mum came from the right side of the Cauvery who was named after the first Konkan widow to marry one of Sarojini Naidu's brothers.  

You carry centuries of aspiration on your shoulders.

The aspirations of Jamaicans and Tambrams- not to mention half Jamaican Tambrams.  

The media questions your every move.

Especially your bowel movements. That's as it should be. Biden never asked Kamala if she had gone number 2. This is because Kamala was dark skinned. Also, she had to sit down to pee.  

Allies hesitate to defend you.

Worse yet, they don't ask if you have done potty and don't pat you on the back if you have.  

And when you finally choose to tell your story, you’re told to be quiet—or worse, ridiculed.

First they refuse to compliment you on going potty. Then, when  you finally choose to tell your story about being emotionally scarred and psychically raped, sodomized, decapitated and fat shamed, they tell you to be quiet or, worse yet, write mean things about you on their blog.  

In that position, wouldn’t it be common sense to reclaim your narrative?

Not unless you can make money by it.  

To monetize it?

There it is! Kamala wants stupid African Americans to buy her shitty book. She will laugh all the way to the bank.  

To make it not just about your experience, but about the millions of women whose lives look like yours?

Nobody's life looks like Kamala's. She was the diversity hire par excellence. Sadly, for 300,000 African-American women, she has killed off DEI. Still, if she makes a lot of money out of her shitty book, she comes out of this as a winner. 

Harris is not simply selling books. She is leveraging her position, her history, her firstness.

to sell books. It's not as though she is a good writer. If she doesn't 'leverage' her position, she is just an unemployed lady who cooks pork for her Jewish husband.  

She can be both Shirley Chisholm

who was of West Indian heritage. She benefited from the good, British style, education in Barbados and retained a West Indian accent to the end of her life. 

and Madam C.J. Walker,

the first in her family to be born free 

truth-teller and entrepreneur.

The first self-made female millionaire in American history.  

If felony convictions don’t stop men from holding the highest office in the land, why should Harris telling her truth discredit her legacy and place in history?

Very true. Trump and Harris are on an equal footing in that respect. Both paid the price for being 'the first' of their kind.  

Kamala Harris is not a pundit’s punchline. She is a precedent.

Only if more DEI candidates end up at the top. Sadly, if that happens, the US will end up at the bottom.  

To honor her story is to honor the stories of millions of women who are doubted,

some doubted Kamala could win against Trump. In honouring her, we are also honouring Hilary.  

underpaid,

she was a public sector employee. She was paid what men were paid.  

undermined, and pushed out, but who rise anyway—to meet the demands of their jobs,

her job was to lose to Trump. So was Hilary's. Biden's job was to win against Trump. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to do it for a second time.  

to get out the vote at polls,

Kamala helped get the vote out- for Trump.  

and to lead movements on the front lines.

Kamala was often seen leading Ukrainian troops into battle.  

She’s not a crybaby.

She is a crafty opportunist who hired a white woman to churn out some worthless dross which, she hopes, Black peeps will be stupid enough to buy.  

She’s a First.

She's the second woman to lose to Trump.  

She’s a mirror.

Not my mirror. I'm as ugly as shit. Kamala is beautiful.  

And she’s using her story the way Firsts always have to:

coz Firsts like money 

as proof of what’s possible,

an empty pant-suit can become Veep even if she is stupider than Selina Myers.  

and as a blueprint for those who will come next.

Kamala will launch her own line of hair straighteners and skin lighteners. Also, she will take over the role of Madea from Tyler Perry. Obama will cry and cry when Madea says mean things about him and farts noisily.  

Put some respect on the former Vice President’s name.

Because nobody else will.  

Gautam Bhatia mulling over mulligans

Gautam Bhatia, in a recent post, writes

In golf, there is something called a “mulligan“: that is, a “second chance shot when a golfer has hit a poor tee shot that they would rather forget!” Needless to say, mulligans cannot be used in competitive golf, but only in “friendly” games.

How is the mulligan relevant to this blog? It is because the Supreme Court, in its recent hearing of the Presidential Reference in Re: Assent, Withholding, or Reservation of Bills by the Governor and President of India, looks set to establish a previously unheard-of concept: a constitutional mulligan, which is granted solely to the central executive.

This is nonsense. Res Judicata means 'no do-overs'. Sadly, the Indian Bench is addicted to do-overs. Anyone at all can- and very frequently has- got a 'mulligan'. Consider the Sidhu manslaughter case. In 1988, Sidhu beat up an old man and ran off with his car keys so he couldn't get medical help. Eleven years later, he was acquitted of murder but in 2006, on appeal by the bereaved family, the High Court found him guilty of culpable homicide and sentenced him to three years. Sidhu approached the Supreme Court and got the matter stayed in 2007. In 2018, a two judge bench let him off with a small fine. The family of the slain man submitted a review petition- i.e. a do-over. Thus, in 2022 the Bench awarded him a one year sentence. Sidhu, being a Sikh and a gentleman, decided to do a spell of porridge to show he was a tough guy and felt remorse for a youthful error. So he did 10 months and emerged with a clean reputation. Otherwise, the game of mulligans- i.e. review petitions- would have gone on till the fellow died of old age. 

 May 2025, in State of Tamil Nadu vs Governor of Tamil Nadu, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court interpreted Articles 200 and 201 of the Constitution, and – among other things – set timelines on how long – under ordinary circumstances – Governors and Presidents could “sit” on legislative assembly bills.

Article 145(3) of the Indian Constitution requires a minimum five judge Bench to hear substantial question of law regarding the interpretation of the Constitution. If the two judge bench sided with the Governor, the State of Tamil Nadu would have submitted a review petition. 

Very soon after this, the President of India invoked Article 143 of the Constitution to refer fourteen questions to the Supreme Court of India, under its advisory jurisdiction.

That was her prerogative. But the State of Tamil Nadu would not have sat on its hands if the 2 judge Bench had decided against them. One way or another there would have been a 'mulligan' or do-over.  

Now, it so happened, that eleven out of these fourteen questions were the subject matter of State of Tamil Nadu vs Governor of Tamil Nadu. Consequently, they had already been answered by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court.

No. If they were constitutional questions, the two-judge bench had no authority to do so. It is a different matter that it could have given a judgment based on the facts. But the Supreme Court has no truck with Res Judicata even in such cases.  

Curiously, however, the entire Presidential Reference makes no mention of the judgment (which had been delivered a week before): it is as if the judgment did not exist, had never been delivered, and this was the first time that the Court was being asked to deliberate on these issues.

Gautam's 'curiosity' can only arise from ignorance. The President has acted correctly and in an apparently non-partisan manner. In any case, the ruling party at the Centre knows that tables may be turned on it soon enough. It makes sense to get a constitutional ambiguity thoroughly clarified. This means a minimum 5 judge bench.  

It should, therefore, quite obviously follow that if the President has put to the Court “questions” about what the position of law is, and the position of law has been declared by a previous judgment of the Court, then the only possible answer that the Court can now give is that these questions already stand answered, and refer the President to the precedent.

They can't because of Article 145(3). However, nothing prevents a 5 judge bench from amplifying the line taken by the 2 judge bench and, inter alia, dealing with a wide variety of possible scenarios.   

If the Court were feeling generous, it could even give some additional advice, to prevent such superfluities in the future: that if the President – acting on the aid and advice of the Union – disagreed with the outcome of a judgment, then the correct course of action would be to file a review petition, or – in a future case – ask for a reference to a larger bench.

The President is in a different position to Modi or Stalin or Sidhu or the relatives of the guy Sidhu killed. It is perfectly proper to get a Constitutional Bench to consider the entire matter.  

That is not, however, how the hearings in the Presidential Reference – which was argued extensively in August and September – proceeded.

Quite properly so. It seems the Bench understands Article 145 (3). Gautam does not.  

The bench brushed aside initial objections on the maintainability and propriety of hearing the reference,

what possible objection could there be? Does it have something to do with golf? Would Gautam be greatly surprised if he learned that the rules of golf have nothing to do with Judicial procedure?  

and then proceeded to conduct what can only be called a de novo merits re-hearing

it would only be called that by an idiot.  

(in its advisory jurisdiction) of the issues that had been decided a few months ago (by the same Court, exercising its regular, contentious jurisdiction). How did the bench justify this? During the course of oral arguments, two things stood out for how often they were repeated. First, the bench – headed by CJI Gavai – kept rhetorically asking if a “five-judge bench is bound by a two-judge bench” –

the answer was no. Sadly a seven judge bench is not bound by a five-judge bench. The Supreme Court's hatred of Res Judicata have turned it into a perpetual motion machine. That is why we feel respect for Sidhu. He preferred to go to jail like a man than participate in the farce that is Indian jurisprudence.  

and indeed, seemed to take affront at the possibility that the answer might be “in this case, yes.” And secondly, the bench kept repeating that it would “not look at the State of Tamil Nadu decision” while rendering its opinion.

Because that is what it was obliged, under Article 143. Gautam experiences great umbrage when Judges follow the law of the land, rather than the rules of competitive golf.  

Let us briefly look at both questions. The first – one almost hesitates to say – proceeds on a misunderstanding of constitutional law 101.

Indian constitutional law says only a 5 judge bench can decide on substantive issues involving the interpretation of the Constitution. Gautam does not understand this.  

Let us take an extreme example: five judges – or seven, or nine, or twenty-nine – go golfing together, and while they are taking their mulligans and trying to forget their bad tee shots, they start discussing the State of Tamil Nadu judgment. In doing so, are these five, or seven, or twenty-nine judges not bound by the judgment?

No. Nobody is bound by a court judgment save in some legal capacity. You are welcome to say, in private, and while engaged in a purely private leisure activity, anything you like about a particular judgment.  

Of course they are bound, because “5 judges >>> 2 judges” is not how it works.

How it works is that at least five judges are required for a ratio to be said to have constitutional import.  

Five judges are not bound by two judges

They may be if Res Judicata applies. But it can't in a constitutional matter.  

if and when those five judges are in a bench that is exercising the same jurisdiction as the previous two-judge bench was.

Speaking generally, it is a matter for the Judges presiding whether and to what extent Res Judicata applies. This, itself, may be a justiciable matter. But, then again, it may not.  The plain fact is Judges have powers in the real world which theorists don't. 

For example, if subsequently another two-judge bench, faced with a question about the interpretation of Article 200, referred the case to the Chief Justice, and a larger bench was constituted, that bench would not be bound by the two-judge bench judgment.

This is also the case with a constitutional bench howsoever brought into being.  

If, however, five judges are asked, in their advisory jurisdiction, for their opinion on what the law is, then they are bound to tell the President that the law is what has been settled by the previous judgments of the Court.

Only if this, in their considered view, is in fact the case. Gautam forgets that the constitutional court he speaks off may choose to uphold and amplify the 2 judge decision. But the Legislature may decide that the Bench has usurped powers it was never meant to have by the framers of the Constitution. The wings of the Supreme Court may be clipped. They may be forced to accept a capacious doctrine of political question. They may lose the 'Collegium' system. There may be root and branch judicial reform of the sort mooted by Sanjeev Sanyal.

The second proposition is even more astonishing.

There is no such proposition. Gautam is barking at some figment of his own fervid imagination.  

Because, in the example of the reference discussed above, the five-judge bench, even though not bound by the two-judge bench, would be required to take its judgment into account,

only if the lawyers of one side or another make mention of it. Otherwise they can ignore it. Still, best practice may be to refer to it in obiter dicta to clarify matters. 

engage with it, and only depart from it if it felt that there were very strong reasons to do so (not simply if it felt there were two views, and it was of a different view).

Stare decisis means a superior court's decision binds lower courts even if it gives no rhyme or reason for overturning what was previously decided. A five judge bench is superior and binding over a two court bench. True, if the Bench stuck with Rex Judicata, it would be saved the headache of constantly overruling itself. Sadly, it has chosen not to do so. 

But here, not only did the bench declare itself not bound by precedent, but also liberated itself from even looking at the precedent. In essence, as noted above, it is as if the State of Tamil Nadu judgment never existed.

No. It is as though its relevance must be established by argument of learned counsel or it must occur spontaneously to one of the judges involved. But this is how the law works. If your lawyer fails to mention a relevant precedent, blame him. It isn't the job of the judge to do your lawyer's work for you.  

Why is this seemingly technical quibble of vital importance?

Because Gautam says so. But Gautam has shit for brains.  

It is important because, through these two propositions, if in the future, the Union of India loses a case, it can

ignore the Bench. Fuck can judges do? They couldn't even throw Prashant Bhushan in jail. If they get too big for their boots they will meet the same fate as the Pakistani or Bangladeshi bench.  

make a Presidential reference that asks the same questions that were decided in the case, make no mention of the case itself, and get an entirely fresh, second bite at the cherry – a “constitutional mulligan.”

Gautam doesn't understand that his true grievance is with the Bench's aversion to Res Judicata.  

And most crucially, as only the Union of India can make a Presidential Reference,

but anybody at all can launch a PIL with the same result.  

what the bench has effectively done is to say that every litigant before the Supreme Court of India gets one shot at a fresh hearing,

to whom did the Bench say this to? Sidhu? The family of the elderly man he killed? No. Had Sidhu decided not to put in a bit of jail time to show he was a tough guy, the case would have continued to trundle along.  

except for the Union, which gets two. In effect, the bench has carved out a special privilege within the Constitution only for the central executive.

In actuality, the Executive can defy or wholly disintermediate the Courts. More to the point, an angry mob of 'students' can get the resignation letter of the Chief Justice as happened in Bangladesh. The alternative is to be beaten to a pulp while watching your daughters get raped. 

Gautam is getting his knickers in a twist over an imaginary danger.  

Indeed, while taking place within the formal “advisory” jurisdiction of the Court, there was nothing about these hearings that were even remotely advisory: these hearings were conducted like a full-fledged adversarial dispute between two contending parties, complete with even a rejoinder by the Union of India.

The tussle was over whether the required constitutional bench would be constituted. The answer was 'D'uh!' Still, lawyers got to perform some histrionics to the great titillation of Gautam fucking Bhatia.  

At this point, we may as well give up the mask of the “advisory” hearing, and agree that what happened was a full-fledged re-hearing of a decided case,

Judgment has been reserved. It may be that the Bench will take this view. Will the President pursue the matter? Probably not. The BJP had an absolute majority in 2023, when the original case began. Still, the Centre has other weapons in its arsenal. The really significant development is the postponement of the Census. It now looks as though the Hindi belt will get a lot more seats in the next General Election. Tamil Nadu will have bigger problems than a recalcitrant Governor.  

but under a procedure previously unknown, and one that can, in the future, only be initiated by the central executive.

But, it may turn out that this expedient is worthless. Better just send a mob to threaten Judges. They become very sweet and nice if the alternative is getting their head kicked in. 

A final, somewhat ironic point: the State of Tamil Nadu judgment was rendered in a specific factual contexts (as judgments should be), and the Court’s interpretation of Articles 200 and 201 was informed by the constitutional practice placed before it. However, during the Presidential Reference hearings, the bench refused to consider constitutional practice, and stressed that it would render its opinion on the abstract questions of law before it.

In other words, it said it would do its constitutional duty. Gautam thinks that's very ironic. Why didn't it dance bhangra instead?  

Why do I say this is ironic? I say so because in the history of the Supreme Court, its most landmark judgments have been re-interpretations of the Constitution based on its working over the years.

In which case those judgments weren't a 'landmark' of any type. They merely documented current practice.  

In Maneka Gandhi, the Court rewrote Article 21 based on experience.

No. It went against custom and experience. Why? Indira was out of power. But she might be on her way back to it. Moreover, Maneka's husband had a lot of chums who, if not gangsters themselves, certainly knew how to mobilize a mob to kick in the heads of Judges they didn't like. 

Did anyone, other than Maneka, gain by the Court's 'Golden Triangle' principle? Nope. Extrajudicial killing on an industrial scale remained the ultimate safeguard of the Republic.  

But even more ironically, the collegium system – under which all the present judges of the Court have been appointed – owes its existence to a sweeping reinterpretation of the Constitution based on the experience of executive interference with the judiciary.

It was convenient. The political class exists so as to 'facilitate' transactions which the dysfunctional Bureaucracy and the wholly useless Judiciary hinder.  

To this day, in fact, the judgment that established the collegium – which has no basis in the constitutional text – is defended on the ground that it was necessitated by experience. Suddenly, however, the life of the law no longer seems to be about experience. One wonders why.

Unless one is Indian. We get that Courts exist so as to defeat justice and create a nuisance. But so do people like Gautam Bhatia. 

Many years ago, during my clerkship with a judge, I too was taken to play some golf.

He was brutally sodomized by imaginary threats to the Constitution. Sadly, he has no recollection of this. 

I was terrible at it, and gleefully made use of my mulligans. I remember wistfully wishing that we were all given mulligans not just in golf, but in life. It would make everything so easy. In its Presidential Reference, the Supreme Court has granted the executive a lifetime of free mulligans. If only we all had it so easy.

The Executive can bring the Judiciary into line just by replacing their existing security details with known rapists with a penchant for homicide. The way they look at your wife and kids will soon have you delivering the sort of judgments the Government wants. The alternative is to send round a mob of 'students'.  

Michael Fuerstein on compulsory gender reassignment

 Michael Fuersteinis professor of philosophy at St Olaf College in Minnesota, US. He is the author of Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress.

He writes in Aeon-

The transformation of American public opinion on same-sex marriage is

inconsequential. Only 1.2 percent of marriages in the US are same sex. This does not affect anybody else though some people may feel that their Religion forbids them from recognising such marriages. But they may also not recognize all sorts of other things- e.g. the validity of Darwin's theory of Evolution

among the most remarkable and rapid shifts in moral consciousness ever recorded.

In moral matters, as elsewhere, de minimis applies. The thing is inconsequential. I suppose one could 'virtue signal' about this. But one can also 'virtue signal' about 'pro-nouns' or the Dalai Lama or whatever.  

Since the late 1980s, public approval of the practice climbed from 11 per cent to 70 per cent, where it has remained stable since 2021. What explains this?

TV- shows like 'Modern Family' & magazine articles about homosexual Rock Stars and other celebrities getting hitched in glamorous locations. Anyway, given that 40-50 percent of first marriages and 60-67 percent of second marriages end in divorce, it simply isn't the case that matrimony is seen as anything special. 

This is in part a puzzle about democracy.

It really isn't if the democracy in question has 'separation of Church & State'.  

On its face, democracy offers the promise of voice and foment, of revolution without war.

Or Revolution & War.  

And liberal democracies have indeed propelled just about every major social advance over the past 100 years or so:

They have propelled none. It was the Bolshevik Revolution which forced Democracies down the path of expanding freedoms. Interestingly, things like LGBTQ rights were a way of splitting off 'progressives' from an alliance with 'organized labour'. 

not only gay rights, but also labour rights, women’s rights, animal welfare, environmentalism and racial equality.

Identity Politics has been great for 'Globalization'. The problem is that rights without incentive compatible remedies begin by being rationed and end by being wholly unenforceable. Don't forget that the Bolsheviks started off by decriminalizing sodomy. Stalin recriminalized it in 1933.  

The latter notably encompasses the dismantling of formalised racial segregation in the United States, another stunning (if highly imperfect) turn in moral history.

Political history. Morality hadn't changed. Politics had. A curious reversal took place with Republicans pursuing a 'Southern Strategy' & Dems trying to pretend they'd always lurved darkies.  

Democracy isn’t the only factor that explains all this, but it is hard to tell a story about social progress in which it doesn’t play a key role.

Democracy plays a part in democratic politics. Politics is about shifting coalitions & pandering to different interest groups. However, politics has little to do with morality. It is not the case that Austrians are more or less moral than the Hungarians because they have same-sex marriage. It's just that their political trajectories are different.  

At the same time, recent events confirm what a large body of research has long established: democratic publics are largely ignorant and irrational, approaching politics in roughly the same spirit as bare-chested soccer fans contesting a foul.

If Kamala had won, he'd be piping a different tune.  

Most of us – and particularly those of us with broadly liberal intuitions

The fundamental 'liberal intuition' is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We don't think anybody- even the King or the Archbishop or the leader of the Party we vote for- should exercise power save under strict scrutiny and for a limited purpose.  

– carry around these dissonant ideas together: democracy is an open invitation to the ignorant

Which is why 'Classical Liberalism' thought there should be a property and educational qualification for the vote. The Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the project of only very gradually extending the franchise.  

and, at the same time, a vital instrument of social progress.

Governments solve collective action problems. This indeed is vital for society. But Liberals understand perfectly well that a Dictatorship could make more rapid social progress. The problem is that it might do extra stupid shit because there are no checks and balances upon it. That is why 'regret minimization' keeps us content with liberal institutions. 

Social history can help us make better sense of these intuitions.

Only if you actually know it. Not if you just make shit up.  

The case of same-sex marriage, in particular, provides an astonishing example of social progress at scale, propelled by democracy, among a public full of spite and misinformation.

It really doesn't. Nobody gave a fart about this. It's like how, in India, posh cunts speak of the 'landmark' High Court decision which decriminalized sodomy. But nobody had been prosecuted under that act in living memory. The thing was mere 'gesture politics' or 'virtue signalling'.  

Here, democracy’s special virtue was its ability to convert minority grievances into ‘experiments in living’: interventions in social life that gradually reshape core social emotions and identities.

Very true. In each neighbourhood, President Obama constructed a glass- house containing a Homosexual couple. Residents were encouraged to come and view this couple interacting. There were fears that this experiment would backfire. What if those peering through the windows were grossed out by two blokes kissing in between cooking dinner? Thankfully, up and down the land, this was not the case. Thus, thanks to Democracy, Obama was able to change attitudes to Homosexual Marriage.

Sadly, Biden did not undergo gender re-assignment surgery. He did not use Federal funds to cause heterosexual males to experimentally chop off their dicks to see how they liked it. Biden's failure to conduct this 'experiment in living' caused Trump to be elected. Fuck you Biden! Fuck you very much!

That, in turn, enables people to respond to the grievances of groups otherwise marginalised under systemic oppression.

I wish this Professor would respond to the grievance of groups who think he is teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

Democracy thus drives social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition.

There are no such 'background conditions'. Morality is the same regardless of background. Conventions or habits or norms may differ but that's why we don't equate morality with convention. 

Privacy Policy

The American gay rights movement first began to take form in the 1950s,

Why? The War had itself sparked a sexual revolution. By 1947, the use of penicillin to treat syphilis had become standard in the US. This meant the risk factor was reduced. Also, during the War, soldiers had been encouraged to use condoms.  

when hostility to homosexuality was the default, and a suffocating body of laws and norms forced homosexuals into a life of fear and repression.

The police preferred to shakedown Gays rather than go after violent criminals. Thus, the Mafia alone could provide Gay bars.  

The earliest gay rights organisations in the US, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, grew out of

the opportunity they provided to find partners. A lot of political action isn't about policy. It's about affiliation- including fucking.  

homosexuals’ increasing frustration with the status quo and, relatedly, a coalescing sense of homosexual identity itself.

The other side to the story is that the Federal Government realized it needed brainy Gays- like Frank Kameny- just as much as it needed brainy Women and brainy 'Negroes' and so forth. Otherwise, the Soviets would build a better bomb to blow up the Earth.  

The earliest arguments for gay rights centred on the premise of basic equality,

Many Americans had played a great role in the liberation of France. They noticed that the French (and, later on, the Turks!) had decriminalized homosexuality at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. It was absurd that, for religious reasons, the Anglo-Saxon world had not done the same- more particularly in the US where 'separation of Church & State' is a fundamental dogma. 

and drew on parallels with the movement for racial equality that was taking shape.

Civil Rights does not mean 'equality of outcome'.  

Through the 1960s and ’70s, the movement grew into a larger and more vocal social force, achieving a progressive series of important cultural and legal changes: the formal revocation of the government’s ban on homosexual employees,

if you can hire and promote women, why not guys who might use a touch of lipstick or eye-shadow from time to time?  

the election of the first homosexual representative to the Massachusetts state legislature, and dozens of ordinances barring anti-gay discrimination at the county and municipal level.

In many cases, this was advantageous to the business-owner. If his Vicar or Rabbi said 'why are you serving homosexual customers?' you shrug your shoulders and say it is the law.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought greater attention to the movement and catalysed highly effective activism, and this is when public support for gay rights first begins to tick upward.

Gays are smart. Since they have higher motivation to find a cure for this disease which also affects heterosexuals, let's get behind them. Also, by being behind them, there's less chance they can bum you.  

The 2000s saw continued advances as sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality spread more widely through the culture. Hate-crime protections were extended to homosexuals, anti-sodomy laws were struck down, and same-sex marriage was legalised for the first time in several American states. In 2015, the push for same-sex marriage culminated with the landmark Obergefell v Hodges Supreme Court decision, which secured the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of US federal law. Remarkably, in spite of the Donald Trump administration’s reactionary push against transgender rights, there has been no widespread movement to walk back same-sex marriage rights.

SCOTUS may say it is an issue for the States.  Still, the plain fact is- save for religious reasons- few men ever had a problem with homosexuality. Women too couldn't get too worked up about what penises were up to, provided those penises weren't up them. 

The dominant theoretical accounts of democracy don’t offer a good model of this trajectory.

Because they don't bother with trifles. There was and is some religious opposition to homosexuality, but religious people also think poorly of gluttony or sloth. It is not true that Lord Jesus Christ said, in his Sermon on the Mount, 'binge-watch Netflix while working your way through a stack of 15 inch pepperoni pizzas'.  I know it is the sort of thing you'd expect the 'good shepherd' to say. But it wasn't what he actually said. I checked. Anyway, that's the reason I gave up on my dream of becoming Pope. 

Going back (at least) to the fourth US president James Madison, the traditional liberal account of democracy focuses on the idea that, by distributing power widely, it is difficult for any one group to dominate.

With Andrew Jackson, you get the populist account of democracy- which is what actually prevailed till giant post-war bureaucracies spread their tentacles into every facet of social, or, indeed, private, life.  

Beyond the reduction of domination, this thinking goes, power-sharing also tends to encourage compromise as smaller factions seek coalitions to gain power. But the same-sex marriage case illustrates the limitations of this model.

No. The plain fact is local democracy meant that there was wide latitude when it came to which laws were enforced and what illegal practices were allowed to flourish. 

Sometimes the logic of power-sharing favours minority groups, particularly when they provide a ‘tipping point’ vote.

There were places where Gays were an important 'single issue' voting block. But we don't all live in the San Francisco of Harvey Milk.  

But often – as in the case of midcentury homosexuals or African Americans – it entails structural marginalisation from power.

No. People were cool with closeted homosexuals most of the time. Darker complected African-Americans couldn't 'pass'. The 'one drop rule' could become the bane of their lives.  

Majorities thereby become tyrannies, systematically ignoring the concerns of groups perceived to be unnecessary or harmful to the winning coalition.

They may tyrannize over minorities but they aren't tyrannies with regard to the majority. A genuine tyrant might recruit his secret police force from specific minorities.  

In part because of this concern, ‘deliberative democracy’ has been the more influential model for contemporary theorists.

This was cool when candidates for high office did 'debate prep' and pretended to care greatly about all sorts of virtue signalling shite. Trump has upended such ideas.  

This approach envisions democracy, in the ideal, as an inclusive conversation among equals, in which decision-making proceeds based on ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as Jürgen Habermas put it, rather than power alone.

In other words, it was stupid shite which only a fucking German Professor might believe in.  

Here, democracy aspires to an ideal in which the arguments of all are heard and

compulsory rape and bereavement counselling is provided to all- including cats and potted plants

guide the public use of power.

In other words, doing nothing while everybody virtue signals like crazy.  

Political decisions thereby show respect for the will of everyone (even minorities) and resort to coercion only as a necessary fallback.

Just as Jack the Ripper only resorted to slitting his victim's throats as a necessary fallback to their refusal to show respect for his tiny todger.  

As the same-sex marriage case reveals, however, democracy functions through a variety of mechanisms that don’t easily fit the model of ‘deliberation’: voting, protesting, activism, the arts and so on.

So, the thing is useless shite. However, it must be said, in one-party states run by technocrats, the deliberations of the Politburo or the State Planning Commission can be highly consequential. But, the thing isn't Democratic in the slightest. What we have is Plato's Republic run by an erudite 'guardians'.  

This wider spectrum of cultural factors influences moral reasoning, not directly, but instead by reshaping the psychological background of emotions and identities against which reasoning takes place. A large body of social psychology confirms that our attitudes towards other social groups are guided by our tendencies toward in/out-group sorting and, relatedly, a repertoire of identity-linked emotions that determine how we respond to their concerns. The same-sex marriage case nicely illustrates the fact that, if we want to understand changes of moral mind, we need to attend to this wider psychological context as it shifted over a period of decades.

No. This was a case of 'cognitive dissonance'. I like 'Modern Family' and the music of Elton John. I also like weddings. I see people I like having wonderful weddings and decide I am for homosexual marriage because the people involved happen to be homosexual. 

The single most important social change wrought by the gay rights movement was the (open) social presence of homosexuals themselves, both in mass culture and in day-to-day personal interactions.

You may initially get a shock when you find out that Elton John or Freddie Mercury is gay. Will you stop listening to their music? Fuck that! Their music is good. I don't care if you call me a faggot, Mummy.  

The first step occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, as homosexuals gradually made the shift from invisibly to visibly oppressed.

In Britain, a film starring Dirk Bogarde had changed public opinion. But it was an aristocrat in the House of Lords who brought in the private bills which 'stopped the badgering of buggers and the butchery of badgers'.  

Several openly gay candidates ran for local public office, and a number of major protest events – such as the landmark Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969 – drew media coverage and wide public attention.

It created a backlash helpful to the Evangelicals. 

Popular films and fiction, such as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), began to bring homosexual characters and their interior lives into public view. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s provided a turning point, when images of the sick, dying and grieving helped to transform homosexuals from an imagined radical fringe to real human beings with relatable vulnerabilities. The AIDS crisis also organised a highly visible and effective activist campaign by groups such as ACT UP.

Again, this was manna from Heaven for the 'born again' Right Wing. True, your favourite TV evangelist was bound to be caught with a 14 year old rent-boy and a big bag of cocaine- but, obviously, Satan tempted him. We must all 'pray the Gay away' more particularly if we just spent the kid's college fund on a Fire Island orgy. 

That, in turn, helped inspire increasing numbers of homosexuals to come out of the closet, a trend that continued steadily upwards for decades.

Sexuality is income elastic. If you are as poor as shit, you don't have much of it. Rising affluence meant there could be a distinctive 'Gay life-style'. This caught on. Everybody wanted to be 'metro-sexual'. It showed you weren't getting by on Food Stamps.  

In the mid-1980s, polls show that only 5-20 per cent of Americans had a personal acquaintance who they knew to be gay. By the end of the 2000s, that number was about 70 per cent.

In the 1990s, Homosexual couples became the most sought after market segment. In those days, they had the highest disposable income. Everybody tried to jump on the Gay bandwagon. 

Survey research confirms that the single most important factor in causing people to change their mind about same-sex marriage was personal contact.

We want to be in personal contact with people who smell nice, have great clothes, and have high disposable income. We don't want personal contact with smelly homeless peeps regardless of their Harvard degrees and skill in fellatio.  

This rise in personal contact was matched by increasingly sympathetic exposure to homosexuality through mass media. Through the 1990s and 2000s, network television showed growing numbers of sympathetic and/or normalised gay characters. By 2010, the network sitcom Modern Family, whose main characters included a gay couple with an adopted child, was among Republicans’ most popular shows. In 1994, IKEA ran a television ad featuring two men buying a dining table together, marking a new and normalising acceptance of homosexuality among the corporate mainstream. This trend was matched among elites, as increasing numbers of gay politicians and celebrities made their identity known. By the time Pete Buttigieg ran for US president in 2020, his sexuality attracted little attention in major press outlets.

TV matters. We watch a lot of it. 'Deliberation' does not matter. It causes us to fall asleep. The question is why TV started portraying Gays? The answer is advertisers wanted to know that Gays would tune in. That's why 'Will & Grace' & 'Modern Family' portrayed Gay characters not as saintly folk but as bitchy, irresponsible, and endlessly entertaining.  

Overall, we can observe a virtuous feedback loop here: social progress arises through interventions in social norms that, over time, transform the emotions and identities that govern the reception of moral arguments.

Nonsense! Only money matters. Gays had money. Advertisers wanted to use music Gay people listened to and to back shows which Gay people found entertaining. Plenty of heterosexual artistes benefitted by being taking up by the Gays. This was also true of political candidates. 

In turn, this sets the stage for further interventions in practice, which further transforms social experience, which further reshapes the evaluation of arguments for equality, and so forth. The process begins with a small vanguard of the exceptionally prescient and courageous, who are willing to voice their grievances, or their support, at great personal risk.

Does the Professor mean Charlie Kirk? He was killed. What bigger risk can there be?  

As greater numbers add their voice, the costs of joining the movement decline, and previously radical ideas gradually take on a more moderate valence.

Or become more radical. We don't know whether MAGA will decide to strip citizenship from second or even third generation immigrants. Nigel Farage, in England, has raised that possibility. 

The key ingredient in this story is the role of lived experience in moral cognition.

Sadly, it has none. That is why two people with the same 'lived experience' have different 'moral cognition'.  

This idea was central to the political thought of the American philosopher John Dewey.

Within a particular, highly pragmatic, context. Dewey's cohort saw that many Americans' had reduced life-chances because there was no publicly facility for High School education of a type which would make them 'College ready'. Between 1911 and 1938, there was a massive expansion in High School availability. This is why the GI Bill could be so successful. Europe only began playing catch-up in the Fifties and Sixties. Otherwise only about one or two percent of young people attended the type of School which prepared them for University.  

In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey argued that we should think of democracy

if we were White and lived in America 

not just as a framework for decision-making or deliberation

sadly, this is what was lacking. Dewey should have been saying 'we need a strong Federal Government able to use fiscal and monetary policy in an anti-cyclical manner'. Instead, he was talking boring, obsolete, bollocks.  

but as a way of life centred on a particular ideal of community:

one without a strong Central Government able to implement anti-cyclical fiscal and monetary policy was bound to turn to shit. That's what happened after the Wall Street Crash. Dewey was useless. But, to be fair, so was Irving Fischer.  

'Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realisation of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community.

That's what the US had in 1929. Everybody agreed that 'Balanced Budgets' were good. But they weren't. They were a very fucking bad idea.  

The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy' 

Nope. The idea of democracy is that voters act self-interestedly. If they vote for a guy who says 'fuck the deficit! I will create jobs by spending money like a drunken sailor ', then that means there is a mandate for Keynesian policies.  The egg-heads can sweat the details as to how to prevent a 'crowding out' effect on productive investment. But if the country is in the trough of the Business Cycle, they needn't bother. 

Dewey’s key insight was that a

Professor could talk virtue signalling bollocks and not get called on his cretinism.  

democratic public needed, not just an intellectual endorsement of shared principles or formal institutional equality,

nobody needs this.  I have never intellectually endorsed the principle that one should shit in the toilet bowl, not one's own bed. Nevertheless, I do not shit in my bed. As for 'formal institutional equality'- it is meaningless. Formally, the POTUS is equal in dignity to a guy on death-row. But that's no consolation to the guy taking his seat in the electric chair. 

but a sense of common good and an ‘energetic desire’ to sustain it. That depended on the development of pro-social ‘habits’

don't shit on the streets. Kindly intellectually endorse this principle.  

– routine patterns of thought often embedded beneath conscious reflection – that would activate genuine care and concern across social differences. And this, in turn, required the cumulative impact of our day-to-day experience – our way of life – encountering diverse social groups.

like far-right militias or vaccine deniers or the good folk at Hamas HQ? 

When minorities experience profound frustrations that do not arouse the ‘desire and effort’ of others, societies need to experiment with new ways of living together in order to deepen the reservoir of community.

i.e. Socialist politicians should be able to force Christian families with kids to provide lodgings to paedophile Satanists. 

Because there are always new problems and frustrations down the road, Dewey argued that democracy itself required continual experimentation.

E.g. the experimenting of imposing Sharia law on Tuesdays? 

In the mid-20th century, the systematic marginalisation of homosexuals

'open' homosexuals- maybe. 

made it impossible for the average American to generate the kind of sympathy and identification required to address oppression.

The average American did fight in a Civil War which addressed oppression. So not worth it. Lets focus on getting rich. 

The gay rights movement

was a great way for older gays to meet hot young men from small town America 

effected an intervention in social life

no. It improved social life for smart peeps in big cities. Without Gays- more particularly Roy Cohn- Disco would have been confined to working class neighbourhoods. Studio 54 would have featured line dancing. 

that enabled Americans to develop new habits of moral cognition, thereby repairing (though still imperfectly) the democratic community.

Gangsta-Rap did the same thing. Sadly, Kamala did not take the hint and gun down a cop or two.  

We learned from an experiment in living:

we get it. The Professor spent the Seventies shacked up with a Lesbian goat.  

the experience of acting on a novel ideal.

like what? Taking it up the arse from Roy Cohn?  

How exactly should we think about the role of democracy in all this?

The Hindi film 'Disco-dancer' was a big hit behind the Iron curtain. That's why Putin is so democratic.  

The definitive feature of democracy is its radical egalitarianism about power.

No. Its definitive feature is the majority of voters choose the Chief Executive. If he were chosen by lot, we would say there was 'radical egalitarianism'. 

In particular, democracy involves the (nearly) universal distribution of fundamental decision-making powers without regard to merit.

Utterly false. The guy who consistently comes second in election after election has zero decision making powers no matter how smart or popular he is.  

That architecture means that the authority for political power lies with all those subject to it (‘the people’) and should serve ‘the people’ considered as equals.

Architecture doesn't mean shit unless you really are talking of insensate bricks and mortar.  

Egalitarian elections

i.e. one's where all candidates are given the same financial resources and media opportunities.  

are the most readily identifiable marker of the democratic approach,

There is no such 'marker'. Anglo-Saxon countries tend to have a two party system. France never did. A 'Plebiscitary President' militates for different dynamics. 

and this is perhaps why empirical research on democracy so often centres on the inputs, outputs and procedures of elections.

Nonsense! Empirical research relies on opinion polls and game theoretic 'structural causal models'. A good rule of thumb is 'follow the money'.  

But the formal distribution of basic electoral and civil rights is insufficient.

America has lots of very smart and well paid political analysts. A Philosophy Professor is bound to sound utterly retarded if he strays into their territory.  

Democracy thus depends on a wider range of norms and institutions.

No. It depends on the ability to prevent a military coup, a Civil War, or a foreign invasion. But this is true of any type of Government. What matters is whether there is an accessible, non-Democratic, way of doing things better.  Even if there is, Democracy can do the same stuff and thus there is no need to replace it. This is like the folk theorem of repeated games. 

One of these is a wider presumption against hierarchy as a justification for public action and, likewise, the idea that the spaces in which the use of power is being debated, decided and framed should be open and inclusive.

Perhaps the Professor wrote this before DEI was decisively rejected at the ballot box.  

A second and related norm is the presumption in favour of open and reasoned deliberative processes, which provide a critical check on existing hierarchies.

aka the rule of law.  

The battle for gay rights was fought in the public square, in newspaper columns, in scholarly societies, arts institutions and town halls.

It was won in boardrooms. When the Sales Dept says- 'we need Gays to like our product. Otherwise, our rival gains market share and our stock price collapses. That means lower bonuses. This concentrates minds.  

Gay voices were often unwelcome but, without a principled basis for excluding them, they became increasingly difficult to dismiss.

This may be true of principled people. But they are few in number.  

One notable example was the debate about homosexuality within the American Psychiatric Association.

Smart peeps understood John Maynard Smith's theory of evolutionarily stable strategies. It turned out Homosexuality was a prediction of the correct theory. It was a feature, not a bug. Trying to remove it was the medical equivalent of turning lead into gold or inventing a perpetual motion machine. 

In the early 1970s, gay psychiatrists joined activists to argue for removing homosexuality from the profession’s list of disorders. Many dismissed this out of hand,

more particularly if they were getting paid to de-gay patients 

but the opponents struggled to rationalise the existing state of affairs without resorting to brute dogma. The debate spilled over into a series of exchanges in The New York Times, where the old guard was forced into increasingly awkward contortions. Though it was succeeded by ‘sexual orientation disturbance [homosexuality]’, the term itself as a disorder was dropped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the profession’s official handbook) in 1974, a key turning point in the cultural change underway. Dogma gradually sank under the combined weight of open public scrutiny and the presumptive obligation to defend power with reasons.

No. Psychiatry has to pretend to be scientific. That's why they also got rid of 'neurosis' in 1980.  

For the liberal, the appeal of egalitarianism is so deeply ingrained that

liberals frequently join homeless people for dinner. John Rawls prepared a very tasty stew from road-kill. He was very disappointed when his daughter Anne refused to marry a hobo.  

it can be easy at times to forget its costs.

e.g. getting knifed by the hobo you are dumpster diving with.  

In settings where expertise is important, difficult to acquire and relatively straightforward to identify, there are considerable advantages to hierarchy. The community of policy researchers – economists, political scientists, ecologists, urban planners and so on – is to some degree internally democratic.

Nope. It is highly selective. Moreover, a Pareto Power law operates. A small percentage makes most of the important decisions.  

But the threshold for joining this community is extremely high and, without the requisite credentials, there is no prospect of participating in the conversation.

Nonsense! If you are right and people can make a lot of money out of your discovery, the experts are disintermediated or else fall into line.  

The policy world is an elitist institution.

No. It is one where money talks and bullshit walks.  

This is a highly effective strategy so long as (a) insight is highly unlikely from those without expertise and (b) the typical markers of expertise – a PhD and publications in the subject – are reliable and easy to identify.

Till people start to notice that guys with PhDs in useless shite are useless shitheads. Still, they may have important work-skills- like sycophancy.  

Meanwhile, the inefficiency of radical egalitarianism – welcoming everyone into the conversation without regard for any markers of expertise – would be enormously costly.

Not really. It is easy to 'screen' for nutters or virtue signallers.  

Conditions (a) and (b) are reasonable assumptions so long as we stick to technical scientific matters.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Look at RFK.  

But morality is epistemologically different.

It isn't epistemological at all.  

Two things stand out in this respect. The first is that, historically, the individuals and groups who have offered the greatest moral insights have been distributed unpredictably across social categories.

Nonsense! The distribution is highly skewed to people who make a living by preaching or teaching as opposed to working in a factory or coal-mine.  

This makes sense given that our moral outlook is to a large degree shaped by the particularities of our identity and experience. Since moral problems are complex and heterogeneous, moral insights emerge across diverse social strata,

only in so far as those strata have some preachers, teachers, journalists etc.  

and typically only in partial, imperfect ways. Immanuel Kant was a white man who authored both the foundational ideas of modern liberty and equality,

No. He was a Prussian Beamte- i.e. a Civil Servant of a special kind- who believed that private liberties should be heavily circumscribed. If you were a Professor you could say certain things in that capacity to your peers which you would be remis to say to your servant in the privacy of your own home.  

and, at the same time, some of the earliest ideas in scientific racism. Margaret Sanger was a pioneering feminist voice but also, at the same time, harboured crude inclinations towards eugenics.

So did the Myrdals and the other Swedes who turned that country into a Welfare State.  

The second factor that makes morality epistemologically distinct is that there are no reliable credentials available.

Sure they are. If a big bunch of people follow the moral instruction of a particular dude, that dude has the required credential. A moralist whose sole audience is his cat, lacks it even if the cat gives up killing mice. 

If there were PhDs in moral insight, then its wide and unpredictable distribution would be a surmountable problem. But there is no recognisable form of training, education or experience that reliably marks those with most moral insight.

There is no evidence that anybody has more or less of the thing.  

So moral insight is both (i) widely distributed across the public in a way that (ii) is not linked to any reliable marker of its presence.

This is the theory behind the 'lamed wufnik' or the Sufi 'abdal'. There are some people, unknown to all and to each other, who are the hidden pillars upon which the World stands. But for them, God would have destroyed His Creation. These secret Saints justify Man to God.  

These two factors reveal the special advantages of democracy.

Very true. America has the great moral preceptor, Trump, for POTUS thanks to Democracy. He never got a pay-check from the Government till he moved into the White House. This had nothing to do with the success of his TV reality show. It just so happened that the President was going to be a hobo- because he was even more moral than the Donald. Sadly, John Rawls fed him some road-kill stew which gave him the stomach ulcer which finally killed him in 2015. After than, American Democracy had no choice but to elect the Donald.  

Under such circumstances, any practices we might use to filter contributions to public discourse would run too-great a risk of excluding critical insights.

You teach shit to shitheads. There's a critical insight for you, Professor.  

That risk is further heightened by what a number of philosophers have called the ‘epistemology of ignorance’: the perception of credibility on morality and other matters tends to favour the interests of the dominant group,

Diversity hires tend to be 'empty pant-suits' like Kamala. I guess, this favours the vested interests of donors. 

thereby laundering oppression through the operation of ‘reason’.

Why stop there? Why not say that it is the blood of innocent Palestinian homosexuals which is being laundered out of Kamala's hair?  

Under such conditions, we are therefore stuck with the inefficient logic of radical egalitarianism: wilfully ignore presuppositions about merit and hand out decision-making power indiscriminately.

Professors of useless shite may hand out diplomas indiscriminately. But they have no power to hand out.  

If we rewind to the oppressive environment in which the gay rights movement arose, it is easy to appreciate the importance of democracy’s radical egalitarianism.

It is impossible the moment we are reminded that the Ottoman Caliph decriminalized sodomy in 1858.  

Social power was tightly consolidated among a white male elite that was

welcome to sleep in the same bed with a chum as Lincoln was wont to do.  

thoroughly hostile to homosexuality, and the concept of moral merit was, indeed, explicitly framed so as to exclude homosexuals.

They were also supposed to exclude crooks.  

In a peculiar synthesis of bogeymen, the idea of homosexuality as a psychological ‘perversion’ was often closely associated with communism.

Not by Communists who associated it with 'bourgeois decadence'.  

In the McCarthyite fever of the 1950s, homosexuals in the government were seen as ‘moral weaklings’ whose sexual identity made them ‘easy prey for blackmail’ by anti-American elements.

The KGB did indeed invest in gay honey-traps.  

Democratic norms and institutions thus could not prevent the marginalisation of homosexuals’ pleas in the national debate.

Did you know sodomy causes earthquakes? Crack the good Book sometime! Why do you think California is so quake-prone? It's because of all the homos in San Fran bumping uglies incessantly.  

But they did provide enough of an opening to effectively press for social changes that accumulated over time.

What accumulated over time was money in the Bank Accounts of people who didn't have kids. Still, you might want to give a shout-out to Roy Cohn. His daddy was a Judge who got him his start in politics with MacCarthy. Kennedy and Nixon rose the same way. 

The success of the gay rights movement depended on

a change in the underlying Science. Neo-Darwinism prevailed. Lamarckian eugenics bit the bullet. Oddly, a former Communist party member, John Maynard Smith, did most for rehabilitating 'bourgeois strategies' (like deciding who owns what matters. Who deserves what doesn't) are eusocial. Once you have proved homosexuality is 'natural' (i.e. a canonical solution to a game theoretic problem re. evolutionarily stable strategies) the next step is to condone homosexual marriage as the most bourgeois thing possible. Sadly, this meant that homosexuals increasingly ceased to be 'dinks' (dual income no kids). Thus, there was a 'reversion to the mean'. 

a public deliberative culture that would enable its arguments to be heard and received, both on a small scale (within particular businesses and institutions) and by a wider public.

Social Media means any fucking argument whatsoever can get heard.  

It depended on a series of electoral victories.

At the local level, sure. But what was behind those victories? Economic forces- i.e. money.  

It depended on ballot initiatives across multiple jurisdictions.

Which cost money.  

It depended on the power of radical protest and civil disobedience, both of which gain their force, not only from formal rights guarantees, but also from the implicit threat of electoral consequences for officials sitting ‘on the wrong side of history’.

That's an argument which cuts both ways. The crazy guys who stormed Capitol Hill seem to have been on the right side of history.  

And it depended on a variety of court battles that culminated with the landmark Obergefell Supreme Court ruling. Though the US Supreme Court itself is a highly elitist institution, the Obergefell decision was made possible only by

the fact that Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, sided with the majority. Roberts, Thomas & Scalia dissented. The decision may be overturned.  

a decades-long democratic transformation in which arguments for gay rights could be heard, taken seriously, and ultimately enacted without public revolt.

Because nobody gave a flying fart. There is a proposal to let elderly siblings who live together to marry so as to gain financial security in the event that one of them dies. No harm in it at all.  

So there is a close link between the virtue of experiments in living,

like marrying your sister? What about your cat? Immigrants will think twice about eating your pussy if she is married to you.  

and the radically egalitarian architecture of democracy. Experiments in living play a necessary role in transforming our moral sensibilities

hopefully, his students will experiment with the hobo lifestyle.   

so that we are able to respond to the moral concerns of a diverse public.

Unless Trump deports them.  

But this requires a social technology that gives voice to the most aggrieved, and gives them a basis for making interventions in social practices.

DEI. Vote for Kamala. It turns out she had plenty of grievances against mean girls working for the Oval Office.  

Democracy is that technology.

It really isn't. DEI is DEad.  

It sacrifices the efficiency of a more merit-based system in order to maximise the odds that, over time, the complaints of the most aggrieved may get some traction.

The complaint of the most aggrieved is that they are going to die very soon because a homicidal rapist is sawing their fucking head off. Democracy is a technology which must abolish death though it may also legalize rape and decapitation so as to be inclusive towards diverse maniacs. 

The sense of doom that many of us feel right now reflects the unpredictable consequences of a system that refuses to gatekeep decision power. Democracy may have brought us same-sex marriage, but it also brought us Trump.

Virulent wokeness & virtue signalling, like insisting that muscular rapists should be sent to women's prisons because they have decided they are more comfortable in a frock, is what brought us Trump.  

Democracy is a vital source of progress,

Not in China. They may overtake America by 2035. 

yes, but also, as Plato observed, a potential amplifier of division and ignorance.

He was against Democracy.  

There can be no purely philosophical solution to

anything. Philosophy is stupid and useless.  

authoritarian populism. But philosophy can help us to diagnose our current predicament.

Our predicament is that politicians started to virtue signal in the manner of vacuous, woke, academics who teach worthless shite.  

The lesson of the history of same-sex marriage is

that nobody gives a shit about it. The thing isn't a 'wedge issue'. Abortion is. 

not that democracy somehow makes progress inevitable but, instead, to illustrate how it is that democracy might help us to protect and promote it.

Promote progress? That is done by raising productivity not talking bollocks.  

We are living through a moment when Americans seem particularly incomprehensible to one another,

But not to the rest of the world. We understand that America doesn't give a fart about anything save getting more money out of the rest of the world. Also, maybe Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal and Bagram Airbase should be handed over to the US of A.  

when our capacity for sympathy, empathy, mutual care

reciprocal tenderness and egalitarian propensity to go dumpster diving with hobos,  

and a sense of common fate across social differences is depleted. The path forward requires understanding that this is not a narrow problem that can be repaired through policymaking or education.

or anything feasible.  

It requires interventions in social life that allow us to experience one another’s concerns in a new light.

That is infeasible. Still, this is not to say that those who teach stupid shite should desist from demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all practicing heterosexual males. Not till such people have experienced penises entering them will they be able to see the concerns of their alterity in a new light.