Attiya Warsi & the Nyayo Bus Company.

As a child in Nairobi, I often travelled on the buses operated by the Kenya Bus Service which was owned by a British Company -United Transport Overseas Services (UTOS). After Independence, the Nairobi City Council had given it a monopoly franchise to operate a bus service in return for a 25% shareholding stake. Sadly, UTOC pulled out of Africa in the Eighties & Nineties because of competition from other entities and the booming, unregulated, 'para-transit' (mini-buses) sector. Stagecoach- another UK company- took over but it too was forced out after a few years. One problem was the collapse of the insurance market. Self-insurance meant that claims would be offset against dwindling revenue which in turn meant that more and more buses would be seized in distraint and sold off.

When I moved to Delhi in 1974, I saw that the Delhi Government's DTC buses were good but, sometimes, it made sense to take a private 'mini-bus' though the charge was higher. Since then, of course, the air-conditioned Metro has come to Delhi and though the mix of transport facilities may look chaotic (In the late Nineties, I initially used to take a cycle rickshaw to cross the highway because there seemed no safe way to cross it. After a week or so I remembered I was a cow-worshipping Hindu and thus could safely cross the road in the manner of a particularly imbecilic cow.)

I was reminded of this today when I read an article, in Aeon magazine, which colourfully evokes the history of Nairobi bus transport. It is by Attiya Warsi, a Professor of Fiscal Law in Kenya. She is the author of 'Financing Africa. (2019)

This passage stood out-  

I was six years old the first time I understood that a bus could be something different from matatus and boda bodas. The Kenya Bus Service  still ran then (this would have been in 1980)  It was a real bus, the kind that could carry 80 people upright without requiring a conductor to shout or a passenger to fold herself into a space the human body was not designed to occupy. I remember looking out of the window at the same road and thinking, without quite having the words for it, that the world felt orderly. That there was a system, and I was inside it.

The Brits had only departed some 17 years ago. Things were still pretty good in Nairobi back then.

Warsi, strangely enough, isn't lamenting the departure of the Brits. She is parleying her British PhD in useless shite into a way of making money from Soros's Open Society Foundation.

Rights require money

They require incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. In other words, the obligation holder must have an incentive to provide the remedy for a right violation or entitlement failure.


If the Government is providing the right, then its fiscal solvency is what matters. It is a good idea to spend tax money to provide remedies for some 'right violations' (e.g. robbery, kidnapping) because otherwise the productive sector shrinks. Smart people run away. On the other hand, if Law & Order prevails, there will be more investment, higher productivity & thus higher tax receipts.


It is a bad idea to throw money into a bottomless pit. You will run out of money. Poor countries have to prioritise productivity raising activities. They can't mollycoddle the poor more particularly if they keep having more and more babies. 

Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformed

Sadly, global finance can only be reformed only once Galactic finance is reformed and the richer Solar Systems send us lots of cool shiny stuff for free. However, nothing stops a country from following sensible fiscal policies rather than saying 'there is a fundamental human right to getting lots of cool stuff for free'. 

The problem with the sort of shite this lady got a PhD in is that she can't give policy advise on how to raise the tax take without creating a disincentive effect. She doesn't know Econ. What she is doing is 'Grievance Studies'.  

I spent years thinking about Nairobi’s transport the way most people do, as a problem of

Kenyan politicians being stupid and corrupt? 

infrastructure. Build the roads, regulate the operators, fund the buses.

Which is what Dar es Salaam did with the help of the World Bank. Its rapid transit system is considered pretty good. However, private operators charge less & the Government has to provide a subsidy.  Some would say it benefits the better off who get quicker journeys but that fewer private operators can make a living and that the poorest can't afford the fares. 

But the longer I have spent studying how African governments raise money, spend it, lose it, and borrow it back again, the more clearly I see that what looks like a transport problem is really a question of political economy.

Which is about fiscal and monetary policy. How to pay for stuff & what happens if you just print money to pay for stuff.  

At the heart of political economy is the issue of human rights.

No. Rights only exist in the Law. The Court can say 'X has the right to this thing. Y must give it to X' but if Y doesn't do so, there is little more the Court can do. Getting the judgment is one thing. Enforcement is another thing altogether. If it is too costly, there is no effective remedy. Thus Madoff owes lots of money to his investors. But, there is no way for them to get it back. 

There is a conventional way of talking about human rights.

It is the conventional way of talking high falutin' bollocks.  

It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach.

But lawyers tell you not to bother bringing an action because the cost of enforcement will be too great. Even if you get 'title'. The other guy has 'control'. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.  

It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.

Everything requires money. Even this bullshit of Atiya was paid for by the Open Society Foundation.  

You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals.

Nor can you fund hospitals without protecting the right of the hospital to that funding. If some politician steals all the cash, there won't be no fucking healthcare. 

Sadly, even if you protect the guys running hospitals such that they get the money you allocate to them, the capacity of the hospital is limited. Healthcare will have to be rationed one way or another. Either the price is high or beds are allocated to those with power or there are long waiting lists. 

You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.

Thus poor countries should not guarantee rights. They should do sensible things to raise productivity and hence income and hence tax receipts.  

This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly.

Because they are all bullshit- 'Nonsense on stilts' as Bentham said.  

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’.

No President ever said 'I am doing the minimum for the poor'. They all pretend they are Santa fucking Claus.  

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.

So does bullshit. All the guys working on those Charters were getting paid.  

The problem is that the people who design global financial rules

None such exist. Global financial rules are not a single set of laws, but a decentralized network of international standards, treaties, and agreements. One may say such and such practices exist. Some subset of them are fully legal and represent 'best practice'. Others are 'grey market' while still others are 'black'. 

and the people who design global human rights frameworks

i.e. bullshit 

have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms.

No body cares in what rooms bullshitters are operating.  

Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.

No. If you say 'lend me a billion to set up a Gulag where I can rape kids', the guys from the World Bank is obliged to refuse. Say you need it for a rapid transport system & they may be more helpful provided you have a reputation for some basic level of competence and integrity.  

Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet.

No. This is a story about Africanization. Both UTOS & Stagecoach were British companies. There was a Government supported service but it was crap and ran out of cash.  

The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of

living in a country with a high fertility ratio. When I left Kenya in 1974, it was 8 kids per woman. It came down to about 5.4 in the Nineties and now be around 3. Fifty years ago the population was 14 million. It is now 57 million. 

a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.

Economic and Demographic causes. If the population hadn't tripled, real per capita income is likely to have quadrupled rather than risen by only 50 percent.  

When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we

are pretending to be more ignorant and stupid than we really are.  

enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.

African governments are not poor. They are made poor.

Just as I am prevented from becoming a billionaire because nobody will lend me even a measly trillion dollars.  

This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.

It is foolish and useless. 

The evidence is not subtle. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses an estimated $88.6 billion every year to illicit financial flows: money that leaves the continent through trade mis-invoicing, transfer pricing abuse, and the routing of profits through offshore jurisdictions designed to make them invisible to tax authorities.

When I was a kid, it was Whites & Asians who were blamed for this 'capital flight'. Once Africanization was achieved all that profit would be reinvested in the country. Uganda did get rid of the Asians. But then its tax base collapsed. Museveni brought them back in.

The truth is, Africans do capital flight same as other people. But they also invest in particular places in Africa where they believe they will get a decent return. 

That figure represents 3.7 per cent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP). To place it in context: it is roughly equal to the combined total of all official development assistance and foreign direct investment Africa receives annually. From 1980 to 2018 alone, sub-Saharan Africa lost a staggering $1.3 trillion to these flows.

Don't invest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smart peeps are getting their money out- even risking prosecution in order to do it. 

Every dollar shifted offshore is not an abstraction. In my work as a UN independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, I have said this in negotiating rooms in New York and in lecture halls in Nairobi: every dollar shifted offshore is a hospital unfunded, a classroom without a teacher or, as in the city I grew up in, a public bus network barely built.

In other words, for the guy who owns that dollar, it isn't money pissed against the wall of some imaginary hospital or school or bus service.  

Then there is debt. Most of it was not chosen freely.

Sovereign countries can renege on debt. The problem is that they may not be able to borrow. 

Some was inherited from colonial administrations at independence, when newly sovereign African states were billed for the costs of their own colonisation.

i.e. the assets that they were taking over. 

Some was pressed on African governments in the 1970s by Western banks recycling petrodollars,

Many African Ministers were raped by prostitutes. The Ministers did not choose to have sex with them. To add insult to injury, the prostitutes took money from them.  

then repriced sharply upwards when interest rates rose in the Global North – the so-called Volcker shock of 1979. Some was raised on international bond markets in the 2010s, when yields elsewhere were too low to satisfy investors hunting for returns.

Also prostitutes, who were unable to marry billionaires who looked like Richard Gere, raped a lot of African politicians.  

African countries paid approximately $74 billion in debt service in 2024, more than four times what they paid in 2010.

Really? In that case maybe it's a good idea to invest there.  

More than 30 African countries now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.

Lots of young people spend more money on servicing student debt than they do on their own health. Old people tend to 'dissave' because of increased health needs.  

In more than half of African countries, debt service now exceeds public spending on health. This is not the consequence of reckless borrowing. It is the consequence of a global credit system that

is based on wanting to get repaid, with interest, for loans.  

prices African sovereign debt at a premium that reflects not economic fundamentals but accumulated assumptions about African state capacity that colonial history produced

Kenya has been independent for 50 years. If it was ruled by White people, it would be rich.  

and financial markets have never found a reason to revise.

Smart Africans emigrate. You want to be the next Elon Musk, don't stick around in the continent of your birth.  

Zambia waited three years for debt relief after its 2020 default,

Copper prices are booming. Zambia plans to triple output over the next few years.  

three years during which austerity cut into the services its most vulnerable citizens depended on. Ghana’s adjustment programme has pushed deep into the social sector.

Had Nkrumah listened to Arthur Lewis, Ghana would have continued to be richer than South Korea.  

Kenya faces rising repayment pressures as the cost of living climbs. These are not isolated cases. They are the predictable, structural outcomes of

Africans running things?  

a debt architecture that places the greatest fiscal burden on the governments with the smallest fiscal space.

No. Governments with the smallest fiscal space couldn't get loans. Still, we understand that this lady is saying that African leaders were stupid. They fell into the clutches of usurers. They wasted whatever money they got on white elephant projects. White people should have intervened- not by recolonizing Africa- but by paying off the debts of their former wards and letting them make a clean start till, once again, they fell off the wagon. Afterall, there is a human right to inherit billions from some nice White dude which darkies are being cruelly denied.  

Beneath both illicit financial flows and debt repayments lies the long shadow of structural adjustment.

i.e. having to stop pissing money against various walls & start to pretend that you mean to pay your creditors back.  

The conditionalities attached to IMF and World Bank loans through the 1980s and ’90s prescribed privatisation,

 Because stuff run by the Government turned to shit. Take the Nyayo Bus Service, the state-owned public transport system in Nairobi, Kenya. Launched in 1986, it collapsed by the mid-1990s due to mismanagement and fleet degradation.  The initial fleet of green buses was donated by the Dutch government. They were primarily managed and operated by the National Youth Service (NYS) before transitioning into a distinct corporate entity.  At its peak in 1988, the corporation boasted a fleet of 89 buses and reported a profit of 9 million Kenyan Shillings.

 By 1995, the service had virtually collapsed. Massive looting of spare parts, siphoning of funds, and a lack of proper internal controls ruined the corporation.

fiscal contraction and the withdrawal of the state from public goods provision at precisely the moment when African governments might have been building the infrastructure their populations needed.

Sadly they were shit. If you can't run a bus service, how the fuck are you gonna do 'infrastructure'?  

Those prescriptions were the product of economic theories that have since been substantially revised or quietly abandoned.

Because guys who work for the IMF or IBRD don't want to be harangued by woke harpies. Back in the Nineties, there was a notion that 'tough love' could get rid of dictators like Suharto. Anyway, if a country defaulted, a profit opportunity was created for vulture funds. Let smart people make money while mediocrities earn their much smaller salaries doing nothing because the activists won't let them.  

But the infrastructure they prevented from being built has not been quietly constructed. The matatu on the Limuru Road is its memorial.

Very true. World Bank economists looted spare parts from the Nyayo Bus service. They smuggled them out of the continent and sold them for 5 trillion dollars- which is more than the entire GNP of the continent! 

When I say the system was designed, I mean it precisely. The global tax architecture that governs how and where profits are taxed was constructed largely without African input, to serve the interests of wealthy states and the multinational corporations domiciled in them.

There are national tax architectures and bilateral or multilateral agreements re. double taxation etc. Kenya has such an agreement with UK and some other European and other countries.  

The foundational rules were written in the early 20th century,

There are no such 'foundational rules' 

at a time when most of Africa was under colonial administration and had no voice in international governance. They were updated periodically by the OECD, a club of wealthy nations, and handed to the rest of the world as settled matters.

No. Kenya negotiates its agreements with some other countries or else sets its own rules unilaterally. 

The basic principle that profits should be taxed where they are generated,

if a firm in London buys sisal from Kenya and fabricates sisal carpets in Bangladesh before selling them to a Department Store in the USA, the profit is generated in London and taxed there. Everything else is a cost of production. Kenya taxes the sisal producer. Bangladesh taxes the value added in Dacca. If the London firm does merchandising of sisal carpets in US through a subsidiary, then US tax would be payable. 

rather than where they happen to be booked through accounting arrangements, sounds obvious. The rules have historically ensured something rather different.

What she means is that there may be 'under-invoicing' in Kenya or Bangladesh or even London. The lion's share of profit may be booked to a firm in a tax haven. 

The result is that more than half of African countries still mobilise less than 15 per cent of their GDP in tax revenues, below the 20 per cent threshold the UN itself identifies as the minimum necessary to fund basic public services.

No. The reason this happens is because low productivity means low income means low tax revenue. On the other hand, it is true that many hobos are not billionaires because of 'accounting arrangements' made by people who aren't hobos.  

The IMF estimates that low-income countries lose more than $200 billion a year to corporate tax avoidance alone.

Sadly, they might lose more if they crack down on it. Still, for the moment, there can be no doubt that tax revenue is increasing. Some say that, longer term, there will be exit or a failure of SMEs to scale up. However, if the Government spends money on stuff which raises total factor productivity then there is a virtuous circle. 

These are not the symptoms of poor administration or weak governance. They are the outputs of a system that was designed, at the level of its foundational rules, to produce this exact outcome.

In which case, it is pointless to do anything sensible. The system will fuck you over one way or another. Prostitutes will continue to rape African officials. Even the African worker will be tricked into stealing spare parts, smuggling them out of the country, and selling them for trillions of dollars.  

Consider what digitalisation has done to this dynamic. Companies can now extract enormous value from countries where they have little or no physical presence: advertising platforms, data processing, subscription services, streaming. A country like Kenya is obliged to look on while profits generated from Kenyan consumers are routed to the Netherlands or Mauritius and taxed there, or not at all. The arrangement is no longer economically credible. It is barely politically sustainable.

Which is why Kenya should shit itself and scream hysterically.  

The SACCO

Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies. There are several such for private mini-bus operators. 

on Nairobi’s roads illustrates this same logic at a micro level. When a public function is left unfilled long enough, private interests move in.

Some Kenyans are greedily growing vegetables in their shamba and selling them for profit. The Government alone should be permitted to grown vegetables.  

Once installed, they develop an institutional stake in the gap remaining open.

Bastards! Why do they want to feed their own families? How can they be so greedy!  

The SACCO does not want a rationalised public transit system because such a system would make its bus routes less valuable.

These voluntary associations of hard working people are very evil. Government should fulfil everybody's human right to education, travel, health etc by taxing evil Capitalists in America or Europe or Japan.  

Multinational corporations do not want a reformed global tax architecture because it would mean paying more.

Who wants to pay more?  Corporations make useful things and want to get paid for doing so. 

The structural logic is identical;

people who work hard doing useful things, want to get paid.  

only the scale differs. This is not, in either case, a conspiracy. It is rational behaviour within a system constructed to reward it.

We reward those who work hard and are useful to us. We tell bullshitting shitheads to fuck off. Soros may pay you but that's the reason we hate Soros.  

Changing the behaviour requires changing the system.

which involves conquering Europe, America and China.  

I said at the outset that rights require resources.

Not bullshitters.  

The argument runs equally in the other direction: resources – the capacity to raise them, spend them, and distribute their benefits fairly – require rights.

If there is no right to private property, it won't disappear. Those who can kill with impunity, will have it. Those who don't will need to come under their protection. This is how 'Stationary Bandits' get their start. The Government is the ultimate 'Stationary Bandit'.  

The fiscal systems of many African countries suffer not just from a lack of

Whites?  

money but from a lack of the conditions under which money can be governed legitimately.

Whites.  

In Financing Africa, I drew on the work of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African scholar whose analysis of states, taxation and legitimacy remains the most penetrating framework I know for understanding why some fiscal systems endure and others collapse.

Khaldun is a Muslim. The author is a Muslim. He wasn't stupid but he was writing about warlike tribes create Kingdoms and enslaving lots of folk. Sadly, Africa is no longer allowed to export slaves.  

His argument was that justice is not one principle among several in a fiscal system.

No. He said it was a fundamental prerequisite for the societal cohesion ( 'asabiyyah ) of the ruling caste. Even if they inherit the old fiscal system or impose some new and very unjust one (e.g. taxing infidels more); even if they enslave or commit atrocities on indigenous populations ; their cohesion will be maintained provided the ruler treats his own people with justice and mercy. Otherwise, they will rebel or seek to ally with an invader- or even indigenous insurrectionists. 

It is the bedrock. Not a pillar to be traded off against efficiency or pragmatism, but the foundation without which nothing else holds.

Khaldun was wrong. The Ottomans did well even though they kept killing on incarcerating their male siblings. Islamic jurists decided that such fratricide was justified on the grounds of public policy. Incidentally, within a few decades of Khaldun's death, his ancestral home came under Ottoman rule. It turned out, he was wrong about everything. Social cohesion does not matter if you kidnap Christian boys from the Balkans and turn them into soldier-slaves.

A debt architecture built on opacity is a debt architecture built on injustice.

No. The fact that I don't want people to know how much I've borrowed doesn't mean the loan is unjust on unconscionable. 

On the other hand, if this lady doesn't shit in public, it must be because there is something unjust about her shitting.

Opacity is precisely what characterises the current system. Parliaments in debtor countries are frequently excluded from the negotiations that determine their sovereign debt terms.

This always happens. In some countries, a loan has to be approved by parliament. But the negotiation is separate.

Citizens cannot see the contracts under which their natural resources are extracted.

That is a matter for their Government. 

Creditors – bilateral, multilateral, and private – face no consistent obligation to disclose the conditionalities attached to their lending.

People are allowed to do anything legal with their own money. 

The secrecy is not incidental. It is functional: it protects the interests of those with power to set terms against the scrutiny of those who must endure them.

Why is this lady not allowing everybody to watch her shit? Is it because she is shitting gold & diamonds? These Asians are very cunning you know.  

Transparency, accountability and the participation of citizens in decisions about how their money is raised and spent are not soft supplementary virtues.

They are a waste of time.  

They are the rights that make all other rights possible.

In which no rights have ever been possible.  

Without them, you can change the numbers in a debt restructuring agreement without changing who bears the cost of adjustment.

The lender. Debt restructuring is another word for 'write off'.  

You can reform a tax treaty without changing who captures the benefit.

Governments get tax money. That's not going to change.  

The architecture looks different; the outcomes remain the same.

This stupid lady just said the architecture is occulted. Who can say what it looks like? 

This is why the negotiations currently taking place at the UN matter so much.

The UN simply does not matter.  

Writing from New York between sessions of the fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, I find them genuinely remarkable: 110 member states have signed on to the Terms of Reference. The fault lines are visible and contested in public: developing countries are pushing for taxing rights based on where customers are located and where value is genuinely created, not on physical presence alone. That is not a technical nicety. It is a question of whether countries like Angola will ever be able to meaningfully tax the multinationals operating within their borders.

You can present anyone with a tax bill. The problem is that if they have no assets you can seize (because they are not in your jurisdiction) then there is nothing more you can do. 

There is a separate problem with digital services. I want to charge porn tax on people on my country who watch porn on the internet. The problem is that only Porn Corp located in LA knows who watched porn and for how long. I demand they tell me their names and addresses so I can send them a tax demand. They say 'sorry! Digital privacy.' I then ask them to collect money from viewers and send it to me. They tell me to fuck off. What's my next move? Get the Chinese to build me a separate internet system? That costs money. Will the World Bank lend it to me? No. For some reason, they thinking I should be focussing on growing peanuts or extracting copper from the ground.  

The talks are moving forward because the alternatives have run out. Governments across the Global South have watched the OECD minimum tax agreement get hollowed out before it was even implemented. The United States carved out its own companies of the global minimum rate, and the incentive for others to follow is growing. The lesson is clear: when the rules are written by and for wealthy states, developing countries are handed the costs and denied the benefits.

Did you know Kenya used to export a lot of slaves? Guess who stopped it from doing so? Whitey. Them kuffar want us to be poor!

A convention negotiated with all member states, in the open, on the record, is different in kind, not just degree.

This is why it is important for Kenya to join Iran in declaring war on the US. Only after the US is conquered can we all follow the precepts of Ibn Khaldun  and enslave kaffirs & establish asabbiyah.  

It is a human rights project. The money that a fair tax convention would allow governments to raise is money that could fund hospitals, schools and public transport systems.

Nairobi did have a public sector bus company. It went bust because everything got stolen.  

Every year the convention is delayed is a year in which those things remain unfunded. Rights and resources are not parallel tracks. They are the same track.

This lady has a one track mind. Sadly, it is transports nothing but shit.  

The first time I saw a tram was in the Netherlands. I remember the feeling: not wonder, but something like recognition. The vehicle was articulated, two carriages joined by a concertina spine, moving along a dedicated track through a city that had simply decided, at some point in its history, that this was how its people would move. There was a schedule, and it was kept. I had a similar feeling in London, watching a double-decker pull away from a stop, and again in Buenos Aires, where the Subte, Latin America’s oldest metro – imperfect, overstretched, but genuinely transformative – has done more for the mobility rights of the city’s poorest residents than a generation of microfinance programmes.

These are countries where Whites are still in charge.  

I am not romanticising. London’s transport is expensive and exhausting. Buenos Aires’s system strains at its seams. Addis Ababa’s light rail, opened in 2015, demonstrates that African cities can build rail infrastructure; its financing challenges show the importance of getting the terms correct in the beginning. Singapore invested in mass transit when it was far poorer than it is now, because the decision preceded wealth rather than waiting for it.

Kenya's GNP is 118 billion dollars. Singapore has invested  $111.4 billion in its new mass transit system. This crazy lady thinks Kenyans have a human right to something equally good. Whitey should pay because of Colonialism- right?

What these examples share is simple: a political decision that public transport is a public good and that the state is responsible for financing it. Not because the market cannot fill the gap – the SACCOs are proof that markets are extraordinarily creative – but because market logic, operating alone, cannot guarantee the equitable, reliable, dignified movement through a city that ought to be every citizen’s right.

Abolishing death would greatly help families around the globe. It is a public good. Sadly 'market logic' is not abolishing it at all. Fuck you 'market logic'! Because of you my beloved pussycat can no longer say meow! 

A tram line is the materialised form of a state that has decided its people deserve something.

No. It is merely something which it costs a certain amount of money to build. Amsterdam built one and it made a decent enough profit for many years.  

Building one in Nairobi would require fiscal sovereignty: the ability of Kenya’s government to raise and spend its own revenues

it already has this. The problem is that Kenyan incomes are only 2 to 3 percent that of Singapore. I

without the constraints imposed by debt conditions and a global tax architecture it did not design.

Singapore didn't design it either. Nor did South Korea or Taiwan. To be fair, Kenya was underpopulated and thus was able to greatly increase its population. If it follows sensible policies, it will rise rapidly.  

As a Swahili proverb has it: wealth, if you use it, comes to an end; learning, if you use it, increases.

Sadly this lady used wealth to learn stupid shit. If Kenya follows her Gospel, it will sink.  

The bus we never built is a record of what happens when rights and resources are separated. Every morning on Limuru Road, I watch the accumulated cost of that separation pass in a cloud of exhaust. I also watch, in the people who board those matatus without complaint and arrive late and exhausted and still manage to build something extraordinary, evidence that the will is not lacking.

This lady was 12 when the Government launched the Nyayo Bus Service. Initially it was good. Then mis-management took its tool. I suppose this lady was studying in England when it perished. Still, it is odd that she praises a British owned company set up during the Colonial era but fails to mention an example of the very thing she is advocating. 

Is this intellectual dishonesty? No. She has shit for brains. Shit can't be dishonest. It's just shit is all. 

Michael Parenti on the Third World

Back in the nineteenth century, Indian Nationalists developed a 'drain theory' such that the Brits were creating poverty in India. But the Brits provided security and protected minorities. In 1947, many Indian Nationalists found they had to flee from their ancestral homes because the Nation they had been fighting for was on the other side of the border. 

Over the course of the Fifties and Sixties, Indians realized that the 'drain theory' was nonsense. The Brits were gone but the country was getting poorer. By some calculations, material standards of living for the vast majority were no better than they had been under the Mughals. India would need to do sensible things rather than focus on historical grievance. 

Michael Parenti, who passed away recently at the age of 92, was a champion of the 'drain theory'. Sadly, his ideas have not perished with him. The following is extracted from his book 'Contrary Notions'.  

The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World" to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states.

Why? The first two worlds were technologically advanced and had great military power. The Third World was technologically backward and militarily weak.  

Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original and inherent historic condition.

The meaning was that they had a lot of potential for 'catch up' growth. One may say of a person who does little exercise, this his muscles are underdeveloped. If he takes up weight training, he might soon become a fine figure of a man. We may equally say that a person who watches TV rather than reading good books is mentally underdeveloped. If they turn off the TV and start reading good books, they will soon find their mental powers have increased. Similarly a country with too few roads and schools and factories may quickly become richer and stronger by emulating what has been done by advanced countries.  

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources.

Some did. Most didn't.  

That is why the Europeans went through so much trouble to plunder them...

Why occupy them? Why not just keep returning every few years to plunder them again?  

The Third World is rich.

Hobos are rich. Billionaires keep stealing all their wealth which is why they are homeless.  

Only its people are poor-and they are poor because of the pillage they have endured.

Very true. A friend of mine was mugged when he was 18. Everybody thinks he is now a millionaire, but actually he is very poor because he was mugged 50 years ago.  

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago.

Rich countries can kill invaders or looters of any type. If the Third World was pillaged, it must have been underdeveloped relative to those doing the pillaging.  

First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, and ebony; and still later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium.

Why were those colonizers not killed? Was it because the colonized were very rich and technologically advanced? No. It was because they were poor and technologically backward.  

Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.

If your own people enslave you and sell you, the guilt lies with them.  

From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe certainly was "ahead" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings,

as opposed to human sacrifice? 

murders, and other violent crimes;

Europeans invented rape and murder. Such things were unknown elsewhere.  

instances of venereal disease,

Syphilis originated in the Americas 

smallpox,

believed to have originated in North East Africa or India 

typhoid,

we believe it originated at some early date in Africa 

tuberculosis, cholera, and other such afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); and frequency of famines,

England's last famine was in 1623. For the Indian sub-continent, it was in 1974 

slavery,

Europe got rid of slavery a long time ago. True, there was serfdom but it began to breakdown in the middle ages in most parts of Europe.  

prostitution,

which seems to have existed everywhere 

piracy,

see above 

religious massacres and inquisitions.

This is a feature of Abrahamic religions. But there have been religious massacres for political reasons elsewhere.  

Superior firepower,

based on superior technology 

not superior culture,

a culture favourable to scientific discovery is superior.  

has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.

it has also raised up Japan and now China.  

What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries.

Very true. The reason I have no muscles to speak of is not because I am lazy. It is because King Charles is forcing me to watch TV and stuff my face with pizza. Left to myself, I would be working out in the gym.  

With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were set back in their development sometimes for centuries.

If they hadn't been underdeveloped, they wouldn't have become colonies.  

British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India.

But England started to substitute water power and then steam power for human muscle power. 

By 1830, the trade flow was reversed.

because Indians wanted cheap cloth.  

The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods

So what? They were a tiny island far far away. The fact is British ships were transporting Indian textiles to new markets around the world. Indians started opening British style textile mills in the 1850s. Sadly, they were a bit shit at manufacturing. But the Japanese weren't. 

and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force.

Who doesn't want cheap cloth? Poor people. They say 'ban cheap cloth! We want to pay more money to avoid being naked.'  

Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns.

Dacca's decline dates back to 1717- i.e. before the Brits took power. There was significant depopulation in the early British period but Jute exports enabled it to rise in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dacca muslin disappeared after a particular type of cotton plant- phuti karpas (Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta) disappeared. Even if the Brits protected their own textile industry, Indian textiles could be exported to other countries. 

The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories.

No. The Brits bought cotton from the Southern States of the US.  

In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British investors.

Cows get milked because they are technologically backward.  

By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds.

It stagnated. It couldn't fall because it was already very low. But the number of very rich Indians increased. They enjoyed something their ancestors never had- viz security (save in some provinces during the Mutiny). The truth is the Indians paid the Brits for security because they couldn't trust each other.  

The value of the raw materials and commodities that the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers.

Thus, once India became independent, its per capita income doubled. What's that? India got poorer and less able to feed or defend itself after the Brits departed? How can that be? The answer is obvious. Evil Wall Street bankers secretly entered the huts of starving Indians and stole all their gold and diamonds. The Indians cried and cried.  

British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development,

It was so developed a handful of foreigners from a distant island were able to take over the country.  

then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.

Not as successfully as Nehru's 'licence permit Raj'.  

The massive poverty we associate with India was not an original historical condition that antedates imperialism.

But, being shit at fighting or- more accurately- being shit at coming together to oppose a foreign power- did not antedate imperialism. It was a sufficient and necessary condition for it to occur. 

Wealth is transferred from Third World people to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and later on Japan) by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices.

Similarly, the wealth of hobos is being forcibly transferred to Bill Gates & Elon Musk.  

The colonized country is denied the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, trade, and industrial capacity.

But colonialism ended long ago. It was Socialism which kept certain countries poor. Look at North Korea and then look at South Korea. Connect the fucking dots.  

Self-sustenance and self-employment are discouraged at every turn.

By Socialists. Communists were worse in that they collectivized land and created big famines.  

Hundreds of millions of Third World people now live in destitution in remote villages

which formerly had plenty of skyscrapers.  

and congested urban slums, suffering hunger and disease, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption.

This problem is even more acute in Scotland, where the UN rapporteur on food security has shown that lack of access to arable land is causing Scottish women to be unable to grow oats to feed their children.  

Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, with their mental and physical health severely damaged.

There is no fucking Imperialism anywhere- unless you count Putin's Ukrainian invasion as such.  

In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.

Whereas their distant ancestors used to attend fancy Prep Schools and Colleges- right?  

In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force.

by their parents.  

In the Philippines and Malaysia, corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment.

Whom have they lobbied? Their own governments.  

When we say a country is underdeveloped, we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve.

No. We are saying it doesn't have a lot economic development. That may be a good thing if we are speaking of a National Park or other protected landscape.  

The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street journal, and parties of contrasting political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as developing nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading.

We should refer to them as countries which are being beaten, robbed and incessantly sodomized by evil Wall Street bankers.  

I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" still implies that backwardness and poverty were part of an original historic condition

whereas the truth is the ancestors of today's Third World people all had private jets and superyachts and penthouse apartments with a view of Central Park.  

and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.

Also, they are being incessantly sodomized. Do you really think the Imperialist will just be content with robbing poor people? Why not rape them as well?  If you see a darkie, you should offer him rape counselling. He may beat you, but you should persist in tenderly inquiring into the state of his rectum. 

What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism.

Still preferable to Communism or Socialism.  

Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of corporate investment.

Also all the poor people have sore backsides which are dripping with the jizz of evil Capitalists.  

The problem is not poor lands 'or unproductive populations but self-enriching transnationals.

who incessantly sodomize poor people. That's the real story here. People may not mind your telling them they are being economically exploited. What gets to them is the suggestion that Bill Gates has been wrecking their rectum.  

The local economies of the world are increasingly dominated by a network of international corporations that are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan.

The parent companies are sodomizing trillions of Third World people even as we speak.  

Historically, U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without the bother of owning and administering the nations themselves.

But they do insist on fucking all the poor people in the ass.  

Under neo-imperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.

not to mention their jizz.  

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a similar strategy of neo-imperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule.

Very true. Hobos are being indirectly controlled by evil Capitalists who steal all their gold and diamonds and then fuck them in the ass.  

Though the newly established Third World country might be far from completely independent,

i.e. it was a client of Moscow or Beijing 

it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a foreign colonial power.

Which is why the smart people ran away from it to some place still ruled by Whites.  

Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on skimming the cream-which is all they really want.

No! They also want to fuck everybody in the ass.  

After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer

they have become habituated to anal rape 

and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere.

Coz they miss having sore bottoms.  

Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

US sodomizes poor people wherever they may be found. Also, they steal all their gold and diamonds.  

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global corporate orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and loans.

and anal rape.  

In many instances a comprador class was installed as a first condition for independence, that is, a coterie of rulers who cooperate in turning their own country into a client state for foreign interests.

Third World countries may well end up as kleptocracies.  

A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors.

Strangely, investors lose interest if you tell them they won't make any money by providing finance. You will steal the money and beat them into the bargain.  

In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, no minimum wage or occupational safety laws, no prohibitions on child labor, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

Why? Because the guys running the place are being paid off handsomely.  

The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.

Plenty of newly independent countries chose to ally with the Communist block. Look at Cuba. It is very rich now.  

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong social regulations, effective labor unions, and higher wage and work standards.

There is a risk premium associated with shithole countries. A change in regime or a fall in commodity prices can turn your investment into a 'stranded asset'.

Third World countries understood that whining about Whitey won't help them rise. They need to mobilize national savings to invest in infrastructure and 'merit goods' like Education, Public Health etc. Also, don't send your students to study non-STEM subjects in the West. Their brains will turn to shit. Stick to STEM subjects and try to rise up the value chain.  

Katsafanas on Fanaticism & Grievance Politics

 A fanatic is a person who does crazy shit which is counterproductive to the cause he or she espouses. The original meaning was of a person possessed by some God whose behaviour is excused by the devout for that reason. But it is not good behaviour. It must not be emulated even if it is a 'wonder and a sign'. 

Paul Katsafanas disagrees. He thinks fanaticism is a vice- i.e. something which can be controlled. He says 'Like other vices, it can be present in a person who is directed at good ends.'

No vice is directed at good ends. Consider the vice of drunkenness.  A person may be 'directed at a good end'- viz. driving the School bus- but, if he is drunk, what he is doing is very bad indeed. He should be sent to jail. 

Fanaticism is not necessarily a vice. Consider a fanatical vegan who makes a nuisance of himself at the dinner table by banging on about how meat is murder. But being a boring shit head is like being very flatulent. You commit a nuisance which falls below the threshold of vice or immorality. 

 'And it can even be connected to individual or social flourishing: 

No. In that case it would be merely a vociferous sort of 'enlightened self-interest'. We may say 'Churchill was fanatically opposed to Indian independence' in that his own colleagues in the Conservative party felt his speeches and other interventions were counter-productive. It was better for the colony to proceed down the path to self-run in a manner which was beneficial to the British economy and Imperial defence. By contrast, nobody says 'Churchill was fanatically opposed to Hitler' . After all, it was common knowledge that he could say nice things about Hitler when Germany posed no threat to the UK. Indeed, more even than Mussolini, there was a possibility that Hitler could serve British interests by gaining territory to his East in a manner which made Eastern Europe more secure, stable, and economically integrated. (Indeed, when Poland and Hungary took a bite out of Czechoslovakia, there was a possibility that a German 'corridor' would be ceded in return for a collective security pact). Thus, since Churchill's policies with respect to Hitler were highly productive, it follows that he was no fanatic in that connection. Later, it turned out he also wasn't a fanatic on the topic of India. He apologized to Nehru and made friends with him with the result that India remained within the Sterling Zone and retained a British Admiral after Churchill returned to Downing Street. 

there can be conditions under which it’s all things considered better, either individually or socially, to be a fanatic.' 

No. If a thing succeeds then it was not a case of fanaticism. It was a case of foresight. 

Katsafanas contradicts his previous assertion that fanaticism is a vice. He says it is a type of devotion.

We should reserve fanaticism for a pathological form of devotion,

just say it is obviously counterproductive and be done with it. There is no need to speak of pathology. It is not as though the thing can be cured.  

which couples devotion with a problematic stance.

Everything is 'problematic' to some shithead or the other. 'Counterproductive' is objective. Look at the outcome. Consider the Circumcellions. They were a Christian sect with left wing views. But zeal for martyrdom caused them to attack soldiers with wooden swords in the hope that they would be killed for  the greater glory of God. But this gave their sect a bad name. It caused 'scandal'- i.e. it created a stumbling block to faith in the new Religion.  

Insofar as devotion to some end is good, fanatical devotion to the end will also be in certain respects good.

No. If you attack a soldier hoping to achieve martyrdom, you aren't a 'witness' to a great Truth. You are crazier than a shithouse rat.  

But it will still be a pathology, involving a problem with the person’s psychology. 

Not necessarily. There really are people with nothing to lose. Why not die doing crazy shit if the alternative is cholera or leprosy or just remaining a half starved prole? 

Distinguishing fanaticism and devotion, while treating fanaticism as a vicious form of devotion, clarifies what is at stake in the debates about whether fanaticism is bad.

No. The devout get to say what is or is devotion and what is crazy shit. The Catholic Church condemned the Circumcellions along with other Donatists (who believed the Church must be a community of Saints, not flawed human beings.).  

There are three important points. 

If by 'important', you mean 'stupid'- sure. 

First, in ordinary discourse we typically treat fanaticism as bad. There should be at least a minor presumption in favor of accounts that match customary usage. Treating fanaticism as a vicious form of devotion enables us to do so.

No. Farting at the dinner table is bad. It isn't 'vicious'.  

Moreover, it enables us to do so while still recognizing that many praiseworthy forms of devotion resemble (but are not identical to) fanaticism.

The word comes from 'fanum'- a temple or sanctuary. Such places might have a 'fool for God'- i.e. a crazy, drooling, naked dude shrieking obscenities. The congregation says 'he is touched' or possessed by the tutelary deity of the shrine.  

Second, one underlying disagreement in these disputes about the badness of fanaticism is whether every case of resolute, doubt-free dedication to costly ends constitutes fanaticism.

If it is counter-productive, it is fanaticism. Otherwise, it is foresight. Some years ago, I'd have said the Taliban was fanatical. But, they are now in power and appear better able to do deals with other powers- e.g. Russia, China, India etc.  

Many forms of political and social activism involve the three core features of fanaticism (high degree of commitment, 

Nonsense! A fanatic who shuts the fuck up if beaten sufficiently, is still a fanatic just as a crazy person who behaves while the eye of the muscular orderly upon his remains crazy.  

high degree of certainty,

This is not required at all. Self-confidence is one thing. Vociferousness is another. But degrees of certainty have to do with some sort of epistemological calculus. True, there may be highly educated fanatics but what is more common is ignorant nutters doing stupid, counterproductive, shite.  

         high degree of willingness to sacrifice

Some fanatics are the first to turn tail and run away. Sacrifice requires self-control. Impulsive shitheads may lack it entirely. 

Consider someone like Nelson Mandela,

sentenced at the Rivionia trial in 1962. Significantly, only Xhosa, Sotho, White & Indians were involved. There were no Zulus. The big question was whether South Africa would be dominated by Boers or by Zulus. The Xhosa needed to play their cards cleverly.  

who devoted himself in a wholehearted, unbending manner to his cause and was willing to endure extreme costs to sustain it.

After McMillan's 'winds of change' speech and increasing Soviet and Chinese aid to African leaders, a rapid transition to majority rule was expected. The Apartheid regime lasted longer than expected at least partly because African leaders turned out be utterly shit. Still, by 1985, the writing was on the wall. Mandela's genius was to stay in jail while Govan Mbeki went free in 1987. What really mattered was the attitude of Buthelezi, leader of the Zulus. 

It was obvious that after Buthelezi became critical of the ANC in the Eighties, that some sort of deal would have to be done once the Soviets and the Americans came to an understanding and the Cubans were withdrawn. No fanatics featured is the politics of the period. After the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Ian Smith had to commence negotiation. In South Africa, a corruption scandal (Muldergate) had a big fallout at the end of the Seventies. The incentive matrix for White politicians had changed. But African politicians too understood that what really mattered was money. Majority rule was the only safe way to loot the country without, like Eschel Rhoodie, being extradited and sent to jail. 

More generally, the champion of civil rights, the environmental activist, the person struggling against oppression might all display these three features.

That display may be a pretence. What matters is whether they actually achieve anything.  

Katsafanas does not see that fanaticism may be strategic. Indeed, the ability to delude yourself that you are fanatically devoted to a particular cause may have survival value. 

A person counts as fanatical to the extent that: 

1. Sacred values: she adopts one or more sacred values.

One may go to the 'fanum'- e.g. Church- without adopting any sacred value. Indeed, one may 'speak in tongues' or handle snakes or experience conversion hysteria one day and be back to your usual self the very next day. A lot has to do with suggestibility and vulnerability to 'engulfment'. 

Katsafanas clarified what he means by a 'sacred value'. Strangely, it isn't what religions have meant by it.  

1. Inviolable: if V2 is an ordinary value, then it is prohibited to sacrifice V1 for V2, regardless of the quantities of V1 and V2.

Not in any religion known to us. Everybody sacrifices VI for V2 and then expiates their sin by saying a couple of Hail Marys or whatever. As the Greek Orthodox Church teaches, Economia is better than Akreibia.  

2. Incontestable: It is prohibited to contemplate trading or sacrificing V1 for most or all other values.

There's always a workaround.  

3. Dialectically Invulnerable: The agent insulates her commitment to V1 from the effects of justificatory reasoning. That is, while the agent may think about V1’s justification, consider objections to V1, consider alternatives to V1, engage in thought experiments with respect to V1, and so on, the agent does not stake her commitment to V1 on the outcome of this justificatory reasoning. There is no dialectical move that would disrupt the agent’s commitment to V1.

Because it is meaningless. Philosophers don't seem to get that 'commitment' doesn't mean shit.  

2. Fragility of the self: she needs to treat the value as sacred in order to preserve her identity.

No. This 'engulfment'. Her identity has been compromised by the bat in her belfry.  

3. Fragility of the value: she takes the value’s status as sacred to be threatened when it is not widely accepted.

That's just cognitive dissonance. But if the thing relates to God- i.e. what is genuinely sacred- there's always a workaround.  

4. Group identity: she identifies herself with a group, where this group is defined by shared commitment to the sacred value.

Groups split up all the time. So do couples- including married ones. Many commit. Few stay the distance. 

 Both the fragile and nonfragile agent can see a core commitment as an essential component of their identity;

Anybody can see anything as an essential component of their identity. They are always wrong. There is no component of identity which is true in all possible worlds. 

both can attempt to secure that commitment against certain kinds of threats.

but 'securing' a commitment doesn't do shit.  

But the fragile agent has an exaggerated sense of threat, seeing threats where there are none, and seeing mere disagreement as threat.

A robust agent may do so. A fragile agent might simply run away or take a lot of drugs.  

Empirical research supports this point:

Sadly, empirical research in this field is crap.  

fanatics tend to display a heightened sense of threat,

Guys who work as bodyguards do so. OMG! The US Secret Service is staffed entirely by fanatics. By contrast, a religious fanatic may handle poisonous snakes oblivious to the threat they present.  

seeing themselves and their communities as facing “intense trouble, difficulty, or danger” (Jensen et al 2018: 7).

Or they may fanatically believe that their community is invulnerable. Why is Churchill making such a fuss about Hitler and the so called 'Battle of Britain'? It is well known that Krauts are stooooopid. They can't fly planes. All they can do is eat sausages and drink beer.  

Importantly, these individuals typically take mere disagreement or mere non-acceptance of their sacred values as constituting a threat.

Do they shit themselves? If so, they genuinely think there is a threat. If they aren't shitting themselves, chances are they don't feel threatened. They are merely jelly or grumpy or angry coz they feel their dick isn't getting the acclaim it deserves.  

For one example, consider Anders Breivik.

Nazi nutter. He didn't really feel threatened by the guys he shot. But he probably did feel his dick was tiny. Apparently, his mother had been an utter loony toons who 'feminised' him. His best friend was Pakistani and thus he was not forced to pay jizya to the Muslims gangs who ruled much of Oslo. 

Breivik carried out a bombing and mass shooting in Norway in 2011 and was widely characterized as a fanatic.

He was a loser with delusions of grandeur. We might compare him to Herostratus who burnt down the Temple at Ephesus so as to gain immortal notoriety.  

Shortly before carrying out his attacks, which left 77 people dead, Breivik distributed a 1518- page manifesto that described the various ways in which he saw traditional nationalist values, which he regards as sacred, as threatened by Islam, political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, and a host of other putative enemies.

In other words he was a MAGA fan avant la lettre.  

The examples of fanaticism offered at the beginning of this paper— the insurrectionist, the jihadist, the white nationalist—are analogous: there, too, we often find apocalyptic theories and a sense of widespread threat to their sacred values.

Trump or Musk or Thiel may have such theories. But they are very successful in propagating their beliefs- probably because they are as rich as fuck. 

Katsafanas has a well written essay in Aeon titled- 

Incandescent anger

Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged.

Sure they can. Trump's grievance was that he wasn't POTUS. His grievance has been assuaged. Now his grievance is that he isn't immortal. Maybe Musk can freeze his head. 

For democracy’s survival, we must grapple with this dynamic

Democracy will survive in places which have never been ruled any other way. It won't endure long in places where it has never existed.  

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.’

– from Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin

Baldwin knew about pain. Many of the guys who hated him didn't. That's why they had no empathy.  

Some people seem driven more by what they oppose, reject and hate than by what they promote, affirm and revere.

Some people are 'antagonomic'. They are against anything and everything. But they tend not to be fanatics precisely because they are also against fanaticism.  

Their political commitments, personal identities and emotional lives appear to be structured more by opposition, resentment and hostility than by a positive set of ideals or aspirations.

Women are fanatical. That's why they don't want to sleep with me. It isn't the case that they find me ugly, smelly and as poor as fuck.  

Tucker Carlson, a prominent Right-wing television host and former Fox News anchor, has no shortage of enemies. On his shows, he has condemned gender-neutral pronouns, immigrants, the removal of Confederate statues, mainstream media, the FBI and CIA, globalism, paper straws, big tech, foreign aid, school curricula, feminism, gingerbread people, modern art – and the list goes on. Each item is presented as an existential threat or a sign of cultural decay. Even when conservatives controlled the White House and the US Senate, he presented those like him as under siege. Victories never brought relief, only more enemies, more outrage, more reasons to stay aggrieved.

One could say the same thing about Noam Chomsky. The difference is that Tucker makes way more money.  

In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as US president. You might have expected a moment of triumph. He had reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. It was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, repeating false claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, ‘radical Left lunatics’ and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, unrelenting. Even in victory, the focus was on enemies and retribution.

In other words, he recycled his old material. If it aint broke, don't fix it.  

This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States. Leaders like Narendra Modi in India,

who has to keep pivoting because the country is growing rapidly and expectations have changed. In particular, it is now poorer women who are the swing voters. Look at Modi & Nitish's campaign pitch in the recent Bihar elections. It came down to bribing women while reminding younger voters of 'Jungle Raj' under the Yadav dynasty.  

Viktor Orbán in Hungary

he pivoted big time on the advise of Finklestein. He started off as a Soros-funded Liberal before moving further and further to the right. Again, this comes down to buying votes and ensuring his allies get rich.  

and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil

Who wouldn't have been elected if Lula hadn't been in jail. Now it is his turn to do porridge.  

have built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance.

The Left has its own Grievance Studies industry. Why do heterosexual men have dicks? Dicks cause RAPE! Chop them off immediately.  

Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege – from

Neo-liberalism, Patriarchy, Normative Heterosexuality, Misogyny, Homophobia, Racism, and the fact that heterosexual dicks haven't been chopped off.  

immigrants, intellectuals, journalists or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative, the mood aggrieved.

People get aggrieved about not being allowed to compete in Women's Athletics just because they have a long beard and a big dick. J.K Rowling is very evil for not supporting them.  

Figures like Carlson and Trump

and Kamala. Biden's job was to make her look good. He was very evil. Did you know he has a white dick?  

don’t pivot from grievance to resolution. Victory doesn’t bring peace, grace or reconciliation. Instead, they remain locked in opposition. Their energy, their meaning, even their identity, seem to depend on having an endless list of enemies to fight.

Trump & Sanders rose relative to Hilary because they opposed TPP. Trump went the extra mile. He promised to protect American jobs from low wage foreign competition as well as from immigrants.  Carlson is a successful TV personality who knows about 'focus groups' and what's trending on Social Media. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition.

Why do Political parties oppose each other. Democrats ought to campaign for Republican candidates. Also, how come the guys at Ford don't praise the cars made by G.M.  

When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Competition doesn't entail enmity.  

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention.

Why don't they just talk about their cat, Mitzi?  

Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation.

Yes it can. People are motivated by money and fame and power and influence.  

Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

We call them Feminists. Bitches be kray kray.  

And not all leaders appear to be calculating and strategic: Trump’s outrage is genuine.

It is tactical. He made nice with Mamdani because he could see the young man was popular with voters. Lots of Jews voted for him.  Trump needed to pivot to 'affordability' though he now seems to be turning away from it because he realizes that inflation won't go away in time for mid-terms. 

This pattern of endless denunciation and grievance has been noticed by many scholars.

Grievance Studies was a Leftist innovation. It is only with the Tea Party that you saw an organized back-lash. But it was Protectionism and Migration which gave them the edge. But for COVID, Trump would have got his second term. 

As a recent study puts it, ‘grievance politics revolves around the fuelling, funnelling, and flaming of negative emotions such as fear or anger.’

& using the right pronouns and saying 'Latinx' and not hiring straight White males.  

But what makes this oppositional stance appealing?

Competition works that way. We like to see athletes trash-talking each other. It lends drama to the proceedings.  

If it’s not just strategic posturing, what explains it?

Entertainment value. We pay more for what is more engrossing.  

We can begin answering that question by distinguishing two ways that movements or orientations can be oppositional.

Either the opposition involves something which actually matters or it is just 'trash talk'.  

Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s.

Young people genuinely didn't want to get killed by 'gooks'. Tax-payers too were unhappy.  

This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

In other words, 'rational self interest' was involved. That's why Carter granted unconditional pardons to draft dodgers.  

The anti-apartheid movement offers another example. For decades, activists fought to dismantle a specific political system in South Africa. The struggle demanded great sacrifice and long-term opposition, but these efforts were tethered to a definite goal. Once that goal was achieved, the movement largely dissolved. Its antagonism had a purpose and, when that purpose was fulfilled, the opposition faded.

There will still be people who want White farmers to fuck off. Actually, all Europeans and Asians and dudes from the other tribe should fuck the fuck off.  

The Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movements both involved forms of opposition and grievance, but their antagonism was in the service of positive goals.

Just as those who were getting rich of the Vietnam War or the Apartheid system were pursuing a 'positive goal'. They called it keeping Communism at bay.  

The movements discussed above – those led by Carlson, Trump, Orbán and so on – are very different.

Nope. Trump & Orban wanted and got power. Trump is hinting that he might change the Constitution to get a third term.  

Their energy, coherence and sense of identity seem to depend on opposition itself.

You can say this about anything. My sense of identity seems to depend on my spirited opposition to turning into a cat.  

Grievance animates their followers; hostility to enemies becomes central to how they think, feel and see themselves. Without enemies, the movement would unravel.

This dude's essay would unravel if he didn't hate Carlson, Trump & Orban so much.  

These examples indicate that hostility, anger and opposition don’t necessarily make a movement problematic.

Problematic is just a polite way of saying 'shitty'.  

On the contrary, they can be signs of moral concern, legitimate reactions to the fact that something precious is being threatened.

e.g. my personhood is threatened by the danger that I might turn into a cat.  

As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life

as can peeing and shitting 

by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action.

I wanted to piss upon Amartya Sen to express moral concern. Sadly, I was too drunk and ended up pissing on a cat. I think it put a hex on me. That is why I have to struggle so hard to keep from turning into a cat.   

Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values.

As can pissing and shitting. 

And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’

He got shot by an angry dude.  

But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake.

Shooting uppity niggers wasn't done for its own sake. It was done to benefit White males.  

Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point.

In which case there is no movement. There's just a group of antagonomic nutters. Exile them to some shitty University Department.  

That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations.

Neither term has a well defined extension.  

Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better.

Trump wants to change America. Kamala merely wanted to replace White heterosexual Males with African-American women. Homos were welcome to fuck themselves.  

Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

That's Kamala. She even expresses hostility to African-American women in Biden's White House.  Why can't everybody just dedicate themselves to praising Kamala? 

Grievance politics involves a constitutively negative orientation.

Why are White peeps so goddam White? Can't they at least have black stripes, like Zebras? Also how come some peeps don't have to sit down to pee? How is that fair?  

That’s what sets it apart from liberatory movements,

which are against the interests of the 'oppressors'. They may want to defend the status quo.  

struggles to realise ideals,

Ideals can clash with each other.  

or efforts to defend cherished values.

see above.  

If you value something, you’ll be disturbed by threats to it. You’ll be sensitive to people who might undermine it, and you may be moved to defend it. That’s normal. That’s part of what it is to value anything at all. But constitutively negative orientations are different.

Only if they amount to pathological 'antagonomia'. This may be treatable with medication. 

Values are just pretexts for expressing hostility.

But hostility can be expressed even if values are shared. Also, it may be dangerous to express hostility.  

If one value is secured, we just need a new outlet and a new justification for hostility.

If you get paid to be hostile- that's what you do. Soldiers are meant to be hostile to the enemy. They shouldn't be blowing kisses to them.  

The driving need is not to protect or preserve, but to oppose.

In the UK, there is a person who gets paid to be the Leader of the Opposition. 

But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation?

If they get paid to do it, the answer is 'money'. But it may also be 'public esteem' or 'power & influence'.  

Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards.

Money has a very positive psychological effect.  

Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility,

Nonsense! You can't cure a migraine by shouting 'boo to Trump!'  

offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

Money does that. Being as poor as fuck while screaming your tits off at Neo-Liberalism doesn't provide shit.  

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms.

Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They are mechanisms which have been selected for because they have survival value. But suppressing emotions or running the fuck away may be preferable.  

Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed.

More particularly if they don't exist.  

They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Charlatans might make some money by helping you 'repurpose' your feelings of inadequacy brought on by having a tiny dick into a feeling of superiority because 'small is beautiful'. 

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have.

e.g. immortality.  

If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure.

Religion exists for this reason. It has high income elasticity of demand because even rich peeps die.  

In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks.

This tends to be true. There's an opportunity cost to a young person's time. The nerd may be on track to becoming a billionaire.  

Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

If you are as stupid as shit- sure. Otherwise you try to find out about crypto or day trading or becoming a distributor for Chinese electric cars.  

There’s a similar mechanism that transforms humiliation and low self-worth into a form of spiteful hatred. Philosophers call this ressentiment – a French word for resentment, but with a twist. It names not just a passing feeling, but a deeper emotional mechanism, one that transmutes pain, powerlessness and humiliation into condemnation.

Not in Germany. They went in for Science & Technology and building up industrial capacity and a kick-ass army.  

In the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that ressentiment is the emotional mechanism behind many of our values.

He taught worthless shit. Also he had syphilis and went mad. Smart Germans were doing STEM subjects.  

Modern ‘morality begins’, Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), ‘when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.’

In other words, Christianity sucks ass big time. Nietzsche's daddy was a Minister of Religion.  

Since then, a range of thinkers

shitheads who studied and then taught worthless shite 

have traced the way that ressentiment shapes social and political life. As Wendy Brown describes it, ressentiment is a ‘triple achievement: it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt, it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt, and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt …

In other words, bitches be kray kray coz they have to sit down to pee.  

’ Put simply, ressentiment is an emotional mechanism that transforms feelings of worthlessness or humiliation into vindictive feelings of superiority, rancour and blame.

People who teach non-STEM subjects know they are worthless. This makes them very vindictive and rancorous.  

We can see how this plays out in individual lives. Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town.

or who teaches imbeciles in a declining University department.  

She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life.

No. The stupid cunt telling this story thinks the woman is a failure just because she doesn't teach worthless shite to imbeciles. 

But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric.

As opposed to Professors of 'Grievance Studies'.  

The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering.

Only if they keep putting up immigrants in hotels while she can't make rent on her mobile home.  

They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life.

True enough.  

What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice.

Demographic replacement appears unjust. White peeps don't want to go the way of the First Nations.  

And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices,

e.g keeping out migrants and getting protection from low-wage competition.  

she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.

Just as these guys are energised by hating on this trailer trash woman from a fly-over state. I bet she is morbidly obese and smokes Marlborough Lights. 

Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins.

Coz he is poor. Money is honey my dear sonny & a rich man's joke is always funny.  

He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world.

He becomes a Marxist?  

Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him.

Why can't hot girls just suck me off already?  

In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice.

I suppose these nutters will get Chairs in 'Loser Studies'.  There is no shite too stupid not to be taught at Uni. What is interesting is that many younger White heterosexual men who have been squeezed out of tenure track positions by DEI have already take this road. It turns out Church going young men, can get attractive wives who don't beat them. 

These cases differ in an interesting way: the economic case involves a real form of structural injustice, whereas the incel case involves an ideology that invents a grievance.

If you punch me, I have a genuine grievance. If I punch you, your grievance is imaginary. 

But notice that beyond this difference, there’s a similar emotional arc. A person starts out with a positive vision of the good. But their life is full of hardship, disappointment and despair.

No it isn't. If you keep your faith in God, you are a winner.  

Initially, they might blame themselves. And that’s painful. It’s hard to sit in one’s own pain, feeling responsible for it, feeling like a failure. It’s especially hard when you see other people enjoying the life that you wish you had.

Just accept Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Lord God and Saviour and you are ahead of the game.  

In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame.

Socialism. Feminism. Atheism.  

Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive.

Communists ruled half the world not so long ago.   

It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth.

As does getting a pay hike.  

It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim.

Fuck that! Recast yourself as a winner. Victims tend to get fucked in the ass.  

It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup.

Just as this cunt is doing.  

The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies.

His enemies are Trump, Orban- even Modi in distant India.  

The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.

This cunt thinks he is fighting for the good by bad-mouthing Trump & Carlson. But his efforts are counter-productive. We feel he is shit at the subject he teaches.  

As the 20th-century thinkers René Girard and Mircea Eliade remind us,

you can leverage a PhD in Proust or Samkhya into any kind of charlatanry 

opposition can do more than divide – it can bind. Girard saw how communities forge unity through a common enemy, channelling their fears and frustrations onto scapegoats.

Girard was wrong. Scapegoats don't achieve shit though they may be part of some hoary ritual. What forged unity was good military training and capable generals. Otherwise, the people were conquered, enslaved, and shipped off to different parts of the Empire.  

This shared act of condemnation offers not just relief, but belonging.

It really doesn't. The thing was a spectacle- like watching criminals being hanged at Tyburn.  

Eliade, approaching these points from a different angle, examined our yearning to fold personal suffering into a larger, morally charged drama.

He too was wrong. Still, he did fuck the 13 year old daughter of his Sanskrit Professor.  

Grievance politics draws on both patterns. It doesn’t just vent rage; it weaves pain into a story. It offers a script in which hardship becomes injustice, and outrage becomes identity.

Like what Mamdani did in New York? The suffering of Gazans helped him immensely.  

These patterns aren’t just speculative. Scholars have traced how pain, disappointment and a sense of failure can be transfigured into grievance – how personal frustration becomes political identity.

This has never happened. There are economic and political issues which people have good reason to believe can be resolved in a manner favourable to themselves.  

In her work on rural Wisconsin,

Wisconsin was more reformist and Socialist because of the high number of Scandinavian and German migrants.  

Katherine Cramer shows how economic stagnation can give rise to resentment toward urban elites.

But Wisconsin flipped for Biden in 2020. Maybe they just didn't like female candidates.  

Arlie Russell Hochschild, drawing on interviews in Louisiana, describes a ‘deep story’ in which people feel passed over, displaced, left behind.

They keep voting for Trump.  

Kate Manne and Amia Srinivasan examine how narratives in incel communities convert rejection and loneliness into a sense of moral entitlement.

They make a mountain out of a molehill. There does seem to be a cult of the mass shooter. But there are also people who go in for 'suicide by cop'.  

And a wide range of research in psychology, sociology and philosophy explores how diminished self-worth can be redirected outward: into anger, blame and opposition.

I suppose Professors of non-STEM subjects have diminished self-worth. That's why Grievance Studies flourishes on campus.  

When movements are formed and sustained in this way, they are no longer organised around a shared vision of the good.

There never has been a 'shared vision of the good'. What people agreed about was that getting conquered and enslaved sucks ass big time.  

Instead, they are structured by shared animosity. Opposition isn’t incidental. It becomes the structure through which meaning, coherence and solidarity are generated.

Nonsense! There may be a political party or looser type of organization which offers individuals a method of self-advancement while pushing for a particular socio-economic agenda.  

Often, these narratives begin with real problems and legitimate grievances – the economic case certainly does.

That's the one that matters. Trump now has to persuade voters that the economy has gotten better under him. It's a tough sell.  

The most effective narratives are superficially plausible. But they tend to be exaggerated and simplistic.

Like this essay. Trump is bad. But who is good? Kamala?  

It may be true that economic opportunities are scarce and financial security is precarious. But the ressentiment narrative turns this into a story of blame and hostility,

like Mamdani banging on about billionaires?  

painting a simple picture of who is responsible and what can be done about it.

That's what got Mamdani elected. Trump was very sweet to him because he saw the lad was a 'winner', not a 'whiner'.  

It transforms genuine frustration into wholesale animosity.

Students of non-STEM subjects experience genuine frustration because their Professors are stupider than they are. 

And that’s why these movements need enemies.

No. They would prefer it if their rivals sucked them off and pledged allegiance to them. 

They define themselves through rejection.

Trump hasn't been rejected.  

Unlike contingently negative orientations – which are built around the pursuit of some good, some value worth realising – constitutively negative orientations draw their energy from resistance, antagonism and negation.

in the old days, when you said this, people understood you meant Jews or uppity niggers or peeps who have to sit down to pee.  

Their integrity depends on the persistence of something to oppose.

Bitches be kray kray because they have to sit down to pee. That is why they make such a fuss about getting promoted at work. Why can't they understand that they'd be happier sucking off the boss for half the pay of their male colleagues?  

The result is a kind of political metabolism that requires enemies to function. If the enemy disappears, the orientation loses its shape.

Very true. That's why the USA collapsed once Mad King George fucked the fuck off.  

This is not simply a matter of having enemies, which is common to many political movements. Nor is it a criticism of all forms of opposition; many just causes require resistance and a focus on enemies. The key point is structural:

if I like it, it is good. If I don't like it, is a form of mental illness.  

in constitutively negative orientations, opposition is pursued for its own sake. Opposition is no longer a means to an end; it is the end itself.

That's antagonomia.  

Resolution becomes a threat rather than a goal, for resolution would rob the movement of the very antagonism that gives it purpose.

After the Revolution you have to kill a lot of antagonomic nutters. Stalin did a great job killing Old Bolsheviks.  

Viewed in this light, the Carlson monologues and Trump rallies aren’t simply strategic or performative. They’re sustaining a structure of belonging built around the rhetoric of attack. What the movements share is an inability to rest, to consolidate, to affirm. They live through negation.

Like Sanders & Mamdani & so forth.  

With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly.

We can see this man's bigotry.  

In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals.

No. It begins with injury.  

We have definite ideas about what the world should be like.

No we don't- unless we teach useless shite.  

We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices.

e.g. women having to sit down to pee.  

From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

Biden forced Kamala to sit down to pee. What a bastard! 

But grievance politics operates differently.

It may use class action suits or form coalitions to change political outcomes. Grievance Studies, by contrast, is stupid shite about how it's totes unfair that women have to sit down to pee.  

It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy.

That's how we all feel as babies. The solution is obvious. Ban babies. Everybody should be 30 years old at birth.  

Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame.

Guys who get laid off because the bosses have moved the factory to Mexico don't feel angry.  

Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances.

like this cretin mentioning Modi. Fuck does he know about India?  

The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much.

No. They are crucial. Trump will lose the mid-terms unless he brings down the cost of living. The fear is that he will get sucked into costly wars in Nigeria and Venezuela. True, they have oil but so did Iraq. That didn't end well.  

What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

In a Democracy, it is the rival party. We have competitive markets including a market for votes.  

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire.

These guys have no fucking engagement with anything real. That's why they teach useless shite.  

People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want?

Why not do your fucking job properly?  

Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Redress grievances and then go the extra mile by solving collective action problems in a manner which benefits them. Suddenly, they start voting for you.  

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears.

 No. People are rational. The question is why Western Governments did stupid shit on issues like migration. The answer was they were afraid of a vocal minority which would label them Racist or Fascist or whatever. That bluff has been called. 

The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies.

What sustained Grievance Studies and DEI was the need for jobs as administrators creating work for each other while the Chinese ate our lunch.  

Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation

is meaningless shite.  

– as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond.

It makes your response even stupider and more counter-productive. Just say, half of all American are evil cunts. They voted for Trump. Send them to concentration camps and then deport their sorry asses. Also make gender reassignment surgery free and compulsory for all heterosexual males.  

It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause.

In other words tell the Grievance Studies nutters to shove their Identity Politics up their own arses.  

If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain.

Very true. George Washington got so depressed when Mad King George fucked off that he topped himself.  

It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage.

Chamberlain appeased Hitler. But then became obvious that Hitler was just getting started. Thus Germany became England's enemy.  

The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

No. The Brits won. Then they focussed on rebuilding their own country.  

Seeing the dynamic in this way also clarifies what real resistance would require.

Churchill knew what real resistance required. This useless cunt knows shit.  

The aim isn’t just to rebut false claims, to condemn hostility or to attempt appeasement. The solution is to redirect the energies that grievance politics mobilises. To do so, we need alternative forms of meaning, identity and belonging, which satisfy those needs in a way that doesn’t depend on hostile antagonism.

Get angry white folk to turn into dope-smoking zebras.  

We need an orientation that is grounded not in grievance, but in affirmation.

i.e. virtue signalling 

One that draws strength not from hostility, but from commitment to something worth loving, revering or cherishing.

Mom's apple pie especially if she is actually your Daddy and performed gender reassignment surgery on himself while high on drugs at an 'Occupy Wall Street' encampment.  

What we need, then, are narratives that can sustain devotion.

The Bible has such a narrative.  

Devotion is a form of attachment that combines love or reverence with commitment and a willingness to endure.

No. A devout Buddhist may reject any form of attachment. A devout Christian may fear, not love, God. As for 'willingness to endure', some devout people have it. Others don't.  

It orients a person toward something they regard as intrinsically worthwhile

in which case that orientation pre-existed.  

– something that gives shape to a life, even in the face of difficulty or doubt.

No. Devotion may not give shape to this life. It may alter the after-life.  

Like constitutively negative orientations, devotion can provide identity,

or it can lead to the dissolution of personal identity 

purpose and belonging.

It may involve giving up both.  

But it does so without requiring an enemy.

But it can have an enemy. Even Lord Buddha had to face Mara.  

Its energy comes not from opposition, but from fidelity to a value that’s seen as worthy of ongoing care.

It may have no fucking energy. An unfaithful person may be devout. Great fidelity may coexist with complete nihilism.  

In my own work, I’ve argued that devotion can supply a stable sense of meaning, identity and purpose, without lapsing into antagonism and dogmatism.

Or it can do the reverse. There is no causal connection, or even any strong correlation, between these things.  

This picture resonates with Josiah Royce’s claim that loyalty – which he understands as a form of devotion – provides ‘a personal solution of the hardest of human practical problems, the problem: “For what do I live? Why am I here? For what am I good? Why am I needed?”’

Resonating with a useless tosser only means you are a useless tosser.  

It aligns with Harry Frankfurt’s claim that a person’s life is meaningful only if it is devoted to goods that the person cares about for their own sake, and with Thomas Aquinas’s observation that ‘the direct and principal effect of devotion is the spiritual joy of the mind …’ Devotion, so understood, is a steadfast responsiveness to what we cherish, capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy.

This is also true of enjoying a crafty wank.  

Of course, offering devotion as an alternative to grievance politics does not mean dismissing all grievances.

It doesn't mean anything at all. Wanking is an alternative to grievance politics. Monetize it by buying shares in Pornhub.  

Many forms of suffering and injustice – economic inequality, systemic racism, political exclusion – warrant deep frustration and sustained protest.

Sadly, sustained protest may cause smart people to run away. The economy goes off a cliff. China takes a technological lead. They get the whip-hand.  

To feel aggrieved in the face of real harm is not pathological; it is often morally appropriate.

Fuck that. If you are facing real harm, run away or call the police or buy a fucking gun.  

Anger, complaint and critique are vital political tools.

They are counter-productive is smart peeps run the fuck away.  

What makes grievance politics problematic is not the presence of complaint, but the constitutively negative orientation.

That is certainly the problem with Grievance Studies.  

Grievance politics is not rooted in a desire to repair or transform, but in a need to oppose.

This was the problem with the librards. Trump & Co. promised to make working people better off. Hilary & Kamala were all like 'vote for me coz I have to sit down to pee- which is totes unfair.'  

The problem isn’t the grievance itself – the problem is when perpetual grievance becomes the whole point, and opposition displaces aspiration.

That's why non-STEM subjects turned to shit. They couldn't raise productivity and thus focussed on whining about how it was totes unfair that smart peeps were doing well.  

Grievance politics offers coherence, energy and a sense of belonging.

Identity politics does that- but it can be counter-productive. 

But it does so by centring life around perpetual opposition.

This dude is perpetually opposed to Trump, Orban and even Modi in distant India.  

Its psychological and existential satisfactions are real, but profoundly damaging.

This guys brain was damaged by studying stupid shit.  

When identity is built through antagonism, it becomes dependent on conflict. And that means it can’t stop; it can’t rest.

It publishes essays in Aeon while schilling another worthless book.  

The deeper challenge, then, isn’t just to rebut its claims or counter its policies. It’s to offer orientations that can sustain identity, meaning and solidarity without requiring an endless sea of enemies.

Orient yourself to wanking. Please yourself without worrying about all the dudes currently ploughing your wife.  

That’s a harder task – but it’s the only hope for combatting the politics of grievance.

No. The politics of grievance is combatted by providing better solutions to collective action problems. When the underlying harm is remedied, the grievance disappears. People feel they have a stake in the system. They are willing to make sacrifices to preserve it from external and internal enemies. 

Political problems have political, not philosophical, solutions. In an advanced economy, this has to do with fiscal and monetary and trade policy. Trump is a Wharton graduate of the class of '68, back when optimal tariff theory, industrial policy, and closed economy Keynesianism were mainstream. He got elected because Clinton's NAFTA & Obama's TPP had hurt many American workers. Hilary did do a U turn because of pressure from Sanders (who had sponsored a bill revoking China's 'most favoured country' status in 2005) but it was too little too late. Trump's genius was to deliver for Evangelicals with his SCOTUS appointments. Still, we thought the reversal of Roe v Wade would hurt him but he wriggled out of it by saying 'State's Rights'. Kamala failed to capitalize on the issue. The truth, I suppose, is that she was an air-headed Diversity Hire.