Fidelity's plundered fruit.

Of Beauty bereft, now her tree is bare

At Eve's Sin we'd yet despair

 Did not Fidelity's oft plundered fruit

So wither & tempt to Ruth.

Creodes' Cannibal roads

Though my Thought was decidedly not a Daedalus too dazzled its own maze to escape

But such noble rot as- 'Dionysius' just deserts yet sweeten the grape.'

Even so, I dug my grave with fork and knife. Ah! it gapes for me now I sicken

How bitter to feed, life after life, a sole, self-staling, battery chicken!

Envoi- 

Prince! Value is Work's kinetic breeding turbulence in viscosity
As Creodes' cannibal roads sire Seigniorage on Reciprocity

Kairos/Christos

I suppose Mum must have picked up an extra shift

Or maybe the old Jew on the market stall had over stocked

Still, it was Christmas and as globed snow began to drift

In my new Chelsea Strip, Wembley rocked!

For a moment, Kairos/Christos, for a moment is all that Time is

Till the wally with the brolly passes on your bribe of orange squash

& Mum's green chutney sarnies; Ah! how English is this bliss!

To feel Blacks can be Becks tho' our spice isn't posh

Envoi- 

Prince! Memory is the question who asks begs it

Like thy Uber too abrupt, my hip flask's Brexit 

Dad's lads & Bad Dads- Andrew Sanchez's theory of the precariat.

'Dad's lads' was a term I came across when I was first studying Industrial Economics. The notion was that, at the margin, Craft Unions recruited only the sons of members, preventing unskilled workers from being able to move into better paid niches within the industry, thus entrenching mutual antagonism and a divisive stratification within the Labor pool. The plethora of Craft Unions, each jealously protective of its inherited privileges, contributed to the parlous state of Britain's declining industrial base. It also hurt the Labor party, because the better off skilled worker had begun to see any gain his Union could make for him would be at the expense of the unskilled workers who either belonged to a different Union or else were disqualified from entry into his own line of work by a sort of self perpetuating caste system. Thus 'Dad's lads' was part of the reason for Mrs. Thatcher's election victory as well as an explanation for the worrying survival of racist and communal sentiments (for example, in Northern Ireland) within the working class.

Employers reacted by favoring 'Company Unions' on the Japanese model because, during the course of the 1970's, it became clear that Government mediations- even the proverbial 'beer and sandwiches' meetings at Downing Street- were not able to curtail the 'Dad's lads' based Craft Unions opposition to rationalization and their insistence on maintaining or widening wage differentials.

However, as property rights in jobs became more and more financially salient- in particular with respect to ballooning pension obligations- Companies were forced down the road of casualisation creating duality within the Labor pool with new entrants increasingly consigned to 'zero hours contract' status who could be hired and fired at will. This phenomenon added a new term to our vocabulary- the 'precariat' i.e. precariously employed proletariat. Middle aged people, like myself, began to feel guilty for having secured our own economic security and affluence at the expense of the life-chances of the rising generation.

Previously, in Economic theory, the Enterprise was considered as the proper body to take on risk for which it earned the reward of profit. However, improved property rights in jobs as well as greater longevity due to affluence and better health care (which meant pension obligations greatly increased) made the risk/reward ratio, for providing permanent employment, untenable for globally competing Enterprises. Hence, the burden of risk was shifted onto those least able to bear it- viz. young, asset poor, entrants to the labour market.

The question arises, why did Enterprises not just reconfigure themselves to get rid of the inherited 'Dad's lads' permanent workers?

Andrew Sanchez, writing of Tatas in Jamshedpur, enables us to discern a wholly novel reason why such 'deadwood' might be retained.

In this context, it should be borne in mind that Tatas ran a paternalistic 'Dad's lads' recruitment policy. However, since property rights in jobs are better entrenched in India- people can't be fired- and also because Tata's blue collar workers are, on Sanchez's report, drug addled, 'proto-male Bihari ideal' type, hooligans with a negative marginal product- the question arises in its acutest form- why does a rational Enterprise not just surgically remove the 'deadwood' which permanent employees represent? Why do they not employ only casual workers?

The obvious answer is that it is a subterfuge required by India's bizarre Labour laws and thus has no universal significance. However, the puzzle remains, why not just pay these doped up hooligans to go sit somewhere else rather than let them run amok on the shop floor?

The answer, according to Sanchez, is that the spectacle of these ganja smoking, glue sniffing, shitheads who get subsidized housing and higher wages and a ton of other benefits from the company, reminds the casual worker, who is himself a 'dad's lad', that his future was, if not ruined, then rendered precarious, by the greed and laziness of his own 'bad dad'. Thus Tata's retains its paternalistic image- it's just that a generational problem occurred and the sons have to pay the price for the worthlessness of their middle aged, workshy, drug addled, fathers.

Why does Tata keep the permanent staff around on the shop floor? Sanchez says the contribute 'only indirectly' to production. What is that 'indirect contribution'? Sanchez paints a vivid picture-

So there you have it. The young casual worker doesn't want to end up like the crazy, dope smoking, Nepali with a tumor the size of a golf ball bulging out of his cheek.
The message is clear- work hard and even if you don't get paid much or enjoy subsidized housing and job security and so on, at least you won't end up an utter degenerate like Sandeep. What sort of husband and father do you suppose he is? Is that the pattern you want your own life to conform to? Hasn't Jamshepur had enough of 'Dad's lads' turning into 'bad dads'?

Not that Sandeep is a bad man. It's just that the security of permanent employment has turned him into an undisciplined sack of shit. If he were truly evil, he'd have entered the Union racket and killed a few people by now.

Trade Unions and Property Rights in Jobs don't necessarily turn 'Dad's lads' turn into 'bad dads'. But, in 'sunset industries' in a criminalized, 'tribal' backwater like Jharkhand, that's what is bound to happen.

At least, that's what Sanchez's book is telling us.
But, this raises the question- could India have taken another path?
What if the greed of 'bad dad' permanent employees hadn't ended job security for their sons?
Well, older Indians already the know the answer to this question.
Consider the following item from the Times of India, April, 1997

It appears, casteist hiring policies- 'Dad's lads'- produces not just bad dads but murderous sons.

Andrew Sanchez & why Capitalism isn't the only antidote to endemic Criminality.

 V.G Gopal, like my maternal grandfather, was a Tambram freedom fighter, Parliamentarian and Trade Union leader. There the resemblance ends.
Gopal, came out strongly against the Communist attempt at fomenting unrest at the Tata Steel plant in Jamshedpur in 1958 and was notably conciliatory in his attitude to management thereafter.

In 1993, he was shot in so theatrical and public a manner that shock-waves of grief and anguish radiated out from Jamshedpur shaking up the entire nation. This Mafia style execution was carried out, it seemed, by an ethnically Bihari faction seeking control of the Tata Workers Union as part of a larger extortion racket concerned with rent seeking opportunities associated with scrap metal, sub-contracting, and other such activities in which leverage against the Tata Management might come in handy.

In a recent book titled 'Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in India', Andrew Sanchez gives prominence to his meeting with a Tata middle manager, named Ashok, who alleges that his employers were actually complicit in bumping off Gopal despite the latter's resistance to the use of the secret ballot in Union business which would have increased the chances of industrial action and thus cost the Tatas a pretty penny.

Andrew Sanchez is probably a white dude. What's more he's a Professor of some sort and thus probably as stupid as shit. If you're a brown dude, named Ashok or Jaslok or whatever and live in fucking Jamshedpur, it is entirely reasonable for you to pass the time of day by trying to sell any visiting gora the Taj Mahal or the secret to the rope trick or a pack of lies featuring 'Neo-Liberalism' prowling around killing innocent Trade Unionists and raping women and taking down the pants of Paleo-Liberalism and saying sarky things about the size of its genitals.

However, in this day and age everybody's got a smartphone and the wikipedia app on voice command. So, all you Ashoks or Jasloks out there reading this need to understand that one shouldn't say- 'Tatas haven't had a strike since the 1920's' coz the '58 strike is well documented and part of Commie folklore and the subject of plenty of books and articles.
Goras may be ignorant of how stuff goes down in India but fact-checking is now so easy you can't spin just any old yarn you like.
The other point is,  goras who write books- like this Sanchez dude- check their facts once they get home because they don't want to come across as illiterate buffoons. Unless, clearly, they are Professors of 'Social Anthropology' at Cambridge or else the bogeyman of 'Neo-Liberalism' features prominently in the text.

Suppose Sanchez had done a spot of Googling before writing his book, what would he have discovered about Gopal's murder?
1) Gopal was shot on the same day that a Court was due to give a judgment on 'voice votes' vs 'secret ballots'. Killing Gopal so publicly sent the message that it didn't matter who got elected or whether or not industrial action was resorted to. Power lay with the 'Dons'. In the jargon of incomplete contract theory, 'appropriable (as opposed to residuary) rights of control' of a certain type had been asserted.

The Tatas, already weakened by their spat with Russi Modi (like the current contretemps with Cyrus Mistry), were being put on notice that their market cap was in danger unless they increased 'disintegration'- i.e. subcontracting- and soaked up excess 'black' liquidity with scrap metal and other such auctions.

2) It was, the C.P.I MLA, Kedar Das who had taken up the cause of the non-permanent workers and adivasi laborers, not Gopal. But Das died in 1981- a year Sanchez memorializes as featuring 'the violent suppression of a contract worker's strike'. This is not to say that no voices were raised against the injustice being done to the 'temporary' workers or that the same basic problem was not found elsewhere. On the contrary, Labor learnt some very bitter lessons during the Eighties. So did we all.

 Gopal, quite properly, wanted a better deal for his members but, being politically very experienced, would never have called a strike in '93 because the State Government, under Lalu, would have broken it with great enthusiasm so that the Bihari clique could pick up the pieces. On the other hand, once Indrajit Gupta became Union Home Minister, Gopal- had he been alive- would have extracted his full pound of flesh.
There is a 'meme' going round that both Gopal and Prof. Abdul Bari were killed by the Tatas. This is quite ridiculous. Trade Unionist/M.LA's of their caliber were vital for the Tatas to fight off local politicians keen to plunder them. I recall hearing the story of Jaganath Mishra trying to get Russi Modi indited on some false M.I.S.A charge to extort money from the Tatas. People like Kedar Das (i.e. pro-Moscow Communists who supported the Emergency) were in a position to protect this 'Capitalist oppressor'! Why would they do so? The answer is simple. If the Capitalist hands over his profit to the Mafia/Politician, only crumbs will be left for the workers.

My grandfather started off as a demagogue, like Prof. Bari. The fact is, workers were able to make quite substantial advances at that time and, strangely enough, even Scottish mill owners got on side because they found that their own profits could go up because there were efficiency gains to be made from having a well fed work force free of the twin evils of the grog shop and the usurer. It was entirely rational for Capitalists to want to build 'model' company towns. Capital and Labor have to co-operate, not try to destroy each other. Gopal was of a younger generation and got his first job with the Tatas. He really was a Company man in that sense.

 He well knew the story of the first Parsi trade unionist- his name has been airbrushed from history- who organized the Bengalis to protest against the vastly superior treatment given to White employees. Unfortunately, Subhas Chandra Bose intervened and so nothing came of it. It was politicians who first fucked up the Unions by pretending that workers were weak and need protection.
But such soi disant Protectionism prevented both Indian Capital and Labor from coming up through hard work. Instead, corrupt Rent Seeking became the only game in town.

Sanchez tells the story of what happens to the son of a permanent employee who gets an 'apprenticeship' as part of the Tata in house hereditary caste system. The young man is stuck on a low salary. He will never be made permanent and given housing and so on. Why? Because he'll stop working the moment he gets that coveted status and it will be impossible to fire him. Still, there's a 'Coasian' solution. His supervisor hints he can start sub-contracting. The young man draws up a business plan and goes to the Bank for a loan. He is turned down because he has no business experience or collateral. 'Boo to you, Neo Liberalism! Oh woe is me!- the whole system is corrupt- fucking Tatas, they are all gangsters. Don't you know Ratan Tata held down Cyrus Mistry and fucked him in the ass till he agreed to resign? I bet he also threatened to rape my Bank Manager and post the video on You Tube if I got my loan. What's that you say? Oh. I was supposed to go touch the feet of my local Don was I? By borrowing from a guy who will break my legs if I don't pay up, I send a signal that I've 'skin in the game' and am gonna work my ass off.  Makes sense. Wish they'd taught this stuff in my Poli Sci class! Fuck the Professors. They talk bollocks continually. Oookay, just ran the numbers... Hey! this actually works out even better! Once I'm under the Don's wing, I get no Labor or Landlord problems and can soon get all sorts of sweet sweet soft loans and business development grants and fucking environmental awards and shit. Sorry, Sanchez dude, it was swell talking to you, but I've got places to go and people to meet!'

Of course, Sanchez didn't really point out to this young guy that people needed to see he had skin in the game. Instead, he nodded his head as this native informant burbled on about how like Capitalism is a crooked conspiracy dude and there gonna be a Revolution real soon coz the Bank Manager didn't just hand me a sackful of cash even thought I'd like printed up this Excel sheet which showed I was so gonna be a billionaire.

In other words, Witchcraft is real provided it is called neoliberalism.

The fact that no one lends money without taking collateral or verifying properly audited Accounts demonstrating exceptional commercial acumen- except a guy who will break your legs if you don't pay- is irrelevant here. Why? Because the native informant is speaking of a type of black magic only the learned foreign Professor is foolish enough to believe in.

That's the problem with Western Professors who actually do field work in the dirty old East. If they are smarter, less gullible, in their verbal interaction than even the stupidest of the 'native informants' they meet, then they defeat their own purpose by ameliorating the picture of dirt and sloth and stupidity which makes their study 'Ethnographic'.

So Sanchez is saying that Indian workers think that Trade Unions are run by gangsters. Since there will be no Trade Union if the factory shuts down because the people running it have all been killed or have run away or don't have any money left, it follows that Indian workers feel that spending all their time agitating rather than doing what they are paid to do will provoke an 'implicit disciplining' which might well take the shape of 'coercion' because gangsters will fuck you up if you thoughtlessly set fire to a cash cow of theirs.

Do Indian workers also think that Capitalists- not Trade Unionists- are all a bunch of gangsters? No. If they did, there would never have been a Trade Union in the first place- that's Gangsterism 101 dude.
When Gabbar Singh said 'kitne aadmi the?'  Kaliya did not reply- 'Management is totally out of line to ask how many opponents we faced. This is a blatant provocation and denial of fundamental rights of the worker. We will now gehrao Management till our legitimate demands are met!'

Nobody really believes that the Tatas are a bunch of gangsters. Why? Because they produce things that are of obvious utility and do so in a highly rational manner. Ratan Tata did not really punitively sodomize Mistry. He didn't even go on Twitter threatening to kill his mother. No doubt, both sides have retained lawyers and tempers are heated but nobody expects to see anyone involved being actually gunned down in the street.
Sanchez mentions Vadim Volkov's notion of Capital as having a 'enforcement partnership' with organized crime but, clearly, no Indian thinks the Tatas or Birlas or Ambanis actually have such partnerships because otherwise they would settle their own internecine disputes with gun play as happens in movies about Russian oligarchs. Where the rule of law has been vitiated by opaque or unenforceable property rights or contractual obligations; yes a rent opportunity for Mafia style intermediation exists but this is not and has never been the case for the top end of the Industrial sector- which is well served by top notch lawyers and a storied and sophisticated legal code.

No doubt, some of our current big players started off on the shady side of the street but no physical coercion was required or involved in their burgeoning. Once such players go public, India's well developed system of commercial law is the Schelling focal solution all gravitate to and no amount of political clout can muzzle the wrath of the market or prevent the Courts delivering their, no doubt very dilatory, doom.

Sanchez argues that Indian working class discourse- which accuses Trade Unions and populist politicians of greed and gangsterism- also indicts 'economic liberalisation'.
This is fantasy. Indian workers don't sit around gupshupping about 'Neo-Liberalism' or 'Repressive Desublimation' or 'False consciousness vs Gramscian hegemony' or any other such academic availability cascade. Sanchez himself, even when talking to a worker with an M.A in Politics, can't produce any evidence that this happens. He does, however, provide evidence that Indian workers share the oft stated view of Right Wing nutjobs everywhere that Trade Unions are actually a Mafia style conspiracy against Labor and that Socialism- even in its home-grown 'Naxal' incarnation- is just another word for a Hobbesian state of Nature. Moreover, since Jamshedpur's workers are often third or fourth generation 'wards', everybody knows that Union officials & Communist agitators have always been either rabid murderous nutters or greedy murderous cunts or rabid murderous nutters who are also greedy murderous cunts.

Perhaps Sanchez has a theory about how 'Economic liberalisation'- i.e. Manmohan's vaunted reforms after the I.M.F put a gun to our heads- causes the spread of greed and the dissolution of moral values and thus creates gangsterish Unions and Politicians. Unfortunately, he chooses to put all the blame on Indira Gandhi's Emergency which by some magic managed to completely change the Indian political landscape in less than 2 years.

During the Emergency, the Constitution was changed so that India became a 'Socialist' Republic.

Not 'Liberal', not 'neo-liberal'- Socialist.

After Indira fell, even the fundamental right to property was removed.

There was no 'liberalisation'- economic or political or cultural.

Gangsterism flourished under the Left Front in Bengal for 30 years and continues to flourish under Mamta. By contrast, crime and communal violence have fallen in Modi's Gujarat. 

Everybody knows this.

So what is Sanchez actually telling us here?

The only logical answer is that, Capital is the only antidote to senseless Violence because, by definition, it has both the means and the motive to interest itself in promoting the Rule of Law as opposed to the Law of the Jungle.

But this is true only of Sanchez's reception of 'emic' working class Indian discourse. 

 It is with shame that I must confess to you that Sanchez is wrong. You see, in India- not just Delhi or Patna or Jamshedpur- I look and talk like a very low class fellow- a black Madrasi to boot. I engage in 'emic' discourse with workers coz no one believes I've ever been abroad. Etic is not on the table.

True, if I show a modicum of intelligence, the other guy ups his game and I find out something interesting. Still, I'm not a real high I.Q dude. I can't calculate the Shapley value of a game while chewing paan the way any sharp operator from the boondocks can. Still, I do come away having learnt something about 'etic' economics. In this instance, it is that Labor needs the Rule of Law a lot more than Capital which can always hedge in a different jurisdiction or Tiebout model. Old fashioned freedom fighters- people like my mum's dad, but also Prof. Bari or, truth be told, the firebrand Kedar Das, knew this in their bones because those bones had been broken by policemen who later on, were great pals or poodles to the Politician/Gangster nexus.

V.G. Gopal was in a different league intellectually. If he hadn't been killed, maybe he could have done something substantial for 'contract' workers once Congress fell.

But, that's not what Sanchez's book is telling us. He thinks the Indian working class sees, not Capital, but the cash-nexus as inherently criminal. If Sanchez is right, they will vote for Modi not despite but because of all the pain his cackhanded demonetization scheme is putting them through.

Why?

The will see it as a 'vishodhana' a purgation of the life-blood of the local dons.

It is a remarkable conclusion to draw from the lucubrations of a politically correct Cambridge Don.

But then, it takes one to know one.

The price of Liberty

is

a) Eternal Vigilance which means staying amped- doing a coupla lines every few minutes just to stay focused- and thus displaying

b) Eternal Belligerence coz that little old lady tapping confusedly at her i-phone might totally be like a KGB hacker working for Trump or sumpfin. OMG, she's glancing up this way! You looking at me bitch?! Ka-blammo!

c) Eternal Negligence coz if you hadn't neglected to purchase a gun and load it with ammunition you'd be doing time right now. 

Aiken & Talisse go all post-truth.

Let us suppose I am a Trump supporter. Let us further suppose that I believe that many of Trump's statements are false but I still don't think Trump is a liar. 

Am I a 'post-truthist?'

Judge for yourself.

This is how I would respond to the following diatribe by a pair of Professors of Philosophy (My comments are in bold) 

In Philosophy, there is a familiar distinction between internal and external criticism.  In the real world there is a familiar distinction between Academic debate and stuff which actually means something . When a claim is criticized from an external perspective, the critic attempts to show that the claim fails to satisfy some criterion of success that he himself imposes. Why should he impose a criterion of success himself, instead of genuinely looking for the Schelling focal criteria likely to be consensual for all relevant readers of the text he is criticizing? After all, the critic wants to persuade others rather than just ride his own hobby horse to death without influencing anybody. In any case, David Lewis covered all this long ago. 

External critics hold their targets to standards supplied by the critic himself, external criticisms are commonly met with counter-charges of question-begging. An external critic of what you have written may denounce your writing as failing to hit the mark because it does not cause its readers to immediately apply for gender reassignment surgery- which is the only way we will get a truly equal Society. Here, the critic has himself supplied the standard by which you are to be assessed. Will you really combat this external critic by a counter-charge of question begging? Wouldn't it be safer and simpler to just giggle nervously and edge away from such an interlocutor? And this is surely the response to expect were one to offer an external criticism of post-truthism. To simply assert that indeed there are politics-free facts is to invite the counter-assertion that the very idea of a politics-free fact is itself a covert assertion of a political viewpoint, one that the post-truthist rejects. Oh dear! You think Trumpistas are exponents of Post Modernism. Joe the Plumber is constantly quoting Derrida to Jack the Dry Wall guy. Still, even if this were the case, so long as there is a Schelling focal criteria for the target audience which the author has not 'internalized', it remains the case that an external critic does have an Archimedian point from which to overturn whatever is persuasive in the 'post-truthist's' argument.

Let's take a concrete example-
Paul Gottfried has been described as the 'godfather of the alt-right'. His notion is that America is no longer a liberal democracy but rather a 'therapeutic managerial state' and that this works to the disadvantage of a particular coalition which Gottfried himself thinks is more worthy than any other and which probably excludes low IQ, monkey-god worshiping, darkies like me. 

I excerpt the following from an article on Gottfried in the Tablet-

'Today, we are ruled by a class of managers who dress like bureaucrats but act like priests. This technocratic clerisy justifies its status by enforcing Progressive precepts like multiculturalism and political correctness, which pit different groups against each other as if they were religious edicts. As Gottfried tells it he was banished from the mainstream of political discourse for rejecting this liberal catechism. Now, versions of the same ideas that Gottfried says got him banished will be gospel in Trump’s White House.'

This is not a philosophical but rather a socio-economic argument-  one which privileges a particular coalition in a manner adversarial to the existing 'core'. It can be formulated game theoretically and then empirical studies can be conducted o determine whether there really is some malign rent dissipation associated with this soi disant 'therapeutic managerial' clique.
Once some empirical work has been done, one can certainly have a sensible discussion about this- it just won't be a philosophical discussion except in so far as we hit open problems in Maths.

What remains, then, is internal criticism. The internal critic attempts to show that his opponent's view fails to satisfy some desideratum that the opponent herself embraces. Accordingly, the gold standard for internal criticism is self-defeat. That is, one ironclad mode of internal critique is to show that the opponent's view is inconsistent with itself. What if the opponent subscribes to Dialethia or multi valued logic or a particular kind of intuitionism? Then no scandal obtains. In any case, there's always problem of disentangling the quid juri/quid facti distinction so as to get clear of the Duhem-Quine thesis. 
 To get the flavor, imagine the simple-minded relativist who asserts that "no statement is objectively true." This claim is commonly offered as a critical maneuver against some proposed candidate for an objectively true statement. The trouble is that the simple-minded relativist's claim is self-defeating, as it itself purports to express an objective truth. It is simple-minded to suggest that it is objectively true that a self-defeating claim can be distinguished from any other sort for all possible affirmations of that claim unless all language is necessarily intensional. So if there is a version of relativism that is internally coherent (an open question in Philosophy), it can't be simple-minded.  Nor, by the same token, can there be any refutation of it which isn't simple-minded.
The trick for the sophisticated relativist is to figure out a way to deny objective truth while also preserving relativism's critical edge.
One way to preserve the 'critical edge' of a way of looking at the world, is to show that it generates propositions with some novel conceptual tie to a type of action which appeals to people on deontological, consequentialist, thymotic or virtue ethical grounds or some mix of such grounds.

A similar line of internal criticism can be launched against the post-truthist. Recall that those who embrace the post-truth phenomena tend to offer post-truthism as a critique of the status quo. As we saw, the denial that Trump's lying is objectionable substantially blunts the critical force of the claim that Hillary is "crooked." Not really. Trump has never held public office. The claim against Hillary is that she was a crook while paid by the taxpayer not to be so. We understand that it is one thing to 'blag one's way into a job' and another to commit a fraud once employed. It's a big theme in Hollywood movies and TV series and also in shows like the 'Apprentice'. The same goes for the tactic of denial; if Trump's unrelenting denials are exonerating, the same must go for any other persistent denier. Nope. Not if there is a Newcomb type dilemma in the one case but not the other. Tactics can only be judged against the broader strategic picture.  Mahatma Gandhi made a policy of pleading guilty to anything the British charged him with. Many Brits felt this, by itself, was 'exonerating'- a true seditionist wouldn't plead guilty to sedition; at the very least he would refuse to recognize the authority of the court.  Gandhi faced a Kavka Toxin type problem of a Socratic or Christ like nature and this was eventually the view that prevailed among the British establishment. Other revolutionaries, however, were not exonerated no matter what their plea.

 Insofar as these varieties of post-truthism affirm anything, they lose their critical edge.
Anything novel that is affirmed can only have a critical edge if it coincides with a Schelling focal point with respect to dissatisfaction with the status quo. One reason Kennedy got elected was because he banged on about an imaginary 'missile gap'. This tapped into a feeling of dissatisfaction prevalent at that time which saw Eisenhower and Nixon as small town hicks who didn't understand how quickly the Republic had grown into a Global Hegemon endowed with limitless technological prowess. Sputnik was small potatoes. The Nation wanted a guy who could promise a moon shot.

Matters differ somewhat with respect to the alternative media and intellectual nihilism. If anything, the difficulty here is more severe. "Alternative" news runs centrally on uncovering and publicizing the biases alleged to be driving the mainstream news media. But this activity draws its critical force from the tacit presupposition that news media are supposed to be unbiased. Nonsense! Nutters who think everybody in the Media is a homosexual Jewish Free Mason bought and paid for by the Rothschild Lizard People of Planet X don't want an unbiased news media at all. Nobody with any sort of axe to grind wants an unbiased Media or an unbiased Judge or an unbiased Umpire for that Tennis game in which I will smash the Williams sisters at Wimbledon and get the money for gender re-reassignment surgery. However, if post-truthism prevails, there is no such thing as unbiased reportage. Consequently, it's not clear what critical force there is in exposing the biases of a mainstream media outlet. To put the point in a different way, the practice of exposing bias derives its critical edge from the implicit claim that the exposing party is itself offering an unbiased objective assessment of its target.  Nope. It is enough to say that there is some alternative narrative which is more biased in favor of whichever in-group is being appealed to. But if the post-truthist holds that there is no unbiased perspective, then her perspective is simply another expression of bias. It is not clear how the clash of biases amounts to anyone being exposed or debunked. Actually, nothing could be clearer. In so far as the Media affects 'agenda control' and policy space is multidimensional, the McKelvey Chaos theorem predicts that rational agents will want biased Media, biased Representatives, biased Judges etc. What matters in any incomplete contract- including the Social Contract- is 'residuary control rights'. It is perfectly rational to seek a rent from the creation of a coalition which can be decisive if it acts cohesively to block or otherwise change the 'core' of the political game.
The same goes for the intellectually nihilistic version of post-truthism, since the view is supposed to be that those who think that there can be proper inquiry and evidence are either naïve or shills for the powerful. The view has its critical force in unmasking something that had been hidden. But if the nihilist is right, it itself cannot be in any better position to make such a critical point. Unless it is urging the capture of a rent- i.e. has a superior instrumental value.

And there's ultimately the rub. Although frequently presented as a means for speaking truth to power, cutting elites down to size, and shredding the pieties and practices that serve the interests of Washington politicians, post-truth politics ultimately has no critical force at all. 
You say the term 'post truth politics' was invented by left liberals angry and bewildered at Trump's triumph as an explanation of how such an improbable event had come about. Surely that means, if  the term has a non paranoid acceptation, it does have 'critical force'? After all, Hillary was a Washington politician. Trump was and always has been a private citizen. Even now, he and his supporters have made certain gains, though he hasn't yet become a Washington politician. So, this 'post truth politics' turns out to have actually changed something very visibly in the real world. A non politician, a non public servant, has been elected to the highest office in the land for the first time in History. Was there really no 'critical force' at work here?


Or, rather, it renders us all defenseless against the will of whoever happens to have power.

Really? When Trump becomes President, we will all be defenseless against his will coz of 'post-truthism'? OMG, what if he wants us all to turn into leggy East European blondes! Lucky I've kept my Margaret Thatcher wig from my student days...

Oh! Sorry, I was being dense. This article is just an exercise in 'post-truthism'. Gee, you guys sure gave me a scare!