Wednesday 6 November 2024

Kamala lost. India won.

 A great day for America. A great day for India. This is the end of DIE (Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity). Biden's diversity hire- not Mindy Kaling but comatose Kamala- crashed and burned. Usha Vance, on the other hand, is the cat that got the cream. Sadly, it will take time to undo the damage Biden did. Meanwhile, the Dems must double down on Diversity. True, Kamala had shown tremendous courage because

1) she had to sit down to pee

2) wasn't of purely European ancestry

but she also wasn't a Lesbian. She did not put hamsters up her butt for recreational purposes. In other words, she wasn't really courageous at all. Sad.

Monday 4 November 2024

Aristotle's Apopsophiein

 A couple of years after the War on Terror commenced, in a paper titled 'Philsoophy and Democracy' Michael Walzer wrote this- 

The prestige of political philosophy is very high these days.

It is very low now. What changed? In 2003, we thought we'd win the war on terror. Iran and North Korea would meet the same fate as Saddam's Iraq. We would export 'Democracy'- i.e. rich kids from our new colonies would pay big bucks to come study 'political philosophy' at Ivy League and then work hand in glove with their frat buddies to loot their countries for the benefit of Wall Street. 

Sadly, we lost the war on terror. Iran and the Taliban and China were the big winners. Our politics was stupidity and our philosophy vacuous shite. 

It commands the attention of economists and lawyers, the two groups of academics most closely connected to the shaping of public policy,

This was written four years before the financial crash. Economists and lawyers were shown to be as stupid as shit. Whatever had 'commanded their attention' was mischievous nonsense. 

as it has not done in a long time.

It had been a long time since we went to war in the belief that we would make a profit.  

And it claims the attention of political leaders, bureaucrats, and judges, most especially judges, with a new and radical forcefulness.

The Rehnquist court is considered conservative. I wonder why Walzer thought otherwise. Maybe he thought 'States Rights' was 'communitarian'. 

The command and the claim follow not so much from the fact that philosophers are doing creative work, but from the fact that they are doing creative work of a special sort- which raises again, after a long hiatus, the possibility of finding objective truths, "true meaning," "right answers," "the philosopher's stone," and so on.

Religion does that. Philosophy doesn't. As Socrates observed, Philosophy is what you are doing if you can argue just as well for or against a proposition. The 'philosopher's stone' was pursued by alchemists not philosophers.  

want to accept this possibility (without saying very much about it) and then ask what it means for democratic politics. What is the standing of the philosopher in a democratic society?

It is that of Simon the shoemaker in ancient Athens. On the other hand, if you spent a lot of your time talking to young men and some of those young men were considered impious in their conduct, like Socrates, you might be executed or exiled.  

This is an old question; there are old tensions at work here: between truth and opinion, reason and will, value and preference, the one and the many. These antipodal pairs differ from one another, and none of them quite matches the pair "philosophy and democracy."

One can say that ancient Athens produced some good philosophy during a relatively democratic period in its history. One may then mention Cicero, and the long shadow he threw over the Post-Renaissance Europe before ending with salutary praise of the American founding fathers and the connection between a philosophic paideia and Republican institutions. 

But they do hang together; they point to a central problem. Philosophers claim a certain sort of authority for their conclusions;

No. Different philosophers claim different sorts of authority or else deny anything at all is authoritative. Chemists or Priests, by contrast, claim a single sort of authority.  

the people claim a different sort of authority for their decisions. What is the relation between the two?

Some philosophers criticize the popular view. Others find an arcane and erudite way to arrive at the same conclusion the vulgar do.  

I shall begin with a quotation from Wittgenstein

who had zero training in philosophy and who was too stupid to understand the revolution in mathematical logic which had occurred after the first publication of Russell & Whiteheads 'Principles'.  

that might seem to resolve the problem immediately. "The philosopher," Wittgenstein wrote, "is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher."'

That was what made the fool so utterly useless. He couldn't understand what Brouwer or Godel or Gentzen were doing. He wasn't part of any community of ideas. He was merely a ranter with a small personality cult. I suppose his 'private language argument' applies only to him because he wasn't communicating with a peer group. 

This is more than an assertion of detachment

it is derangement. If you don't understand and aren't understood by people in your line of work, you are a lunatic. On the other hand, I genuinely am the Queen of Iyerland and some day soon King Charles will pay me a State Visit.  

in its usual sense, for citizens are surely capable, sometimes, of detached judgments even of their own ideologies, practices, and institutions.

If they see others like themselves doing better because their ideologies and practices aint shite- sure.  


Wittgenstein is asserting a more radical detachment. The philosopher is and must be an outsider;

an odd position for a 'communitarian' philosopher 

standing apart, not occasionally (in judgment) but systematically (in thought).

e.g. thinking about cats while your colleagues are wondering if Godel's theorem could apply to natural deduction systems. The answer is yes, using hereditary finite sets. Apparently this was proved by a computer over twenty years ago. No one told me because I was pretending to be a cat and making miaow miaow noises.  

I do not know whether the philosopher has to be a political outsider.

Kant was a 'beamte'- i.e. a civil servant who could only be fired if he committed a felony. So was Hegel. 

Wittgenstein does say any community, and the state (polis, republic, commonwealth, kingdom, or whatever) is certainly a community of ideas.

Wittgenstein was a subject of the Hapsburg Emperor and returned dutifully to bear arms for him during the Great War.  It was his pal Russell who went to jail at that time. 

The communities of which the philosopher is most importantly not a citizen may, of course, be larger or smaller than the state.

Walzer is an American citizen. That's quite a big state. 

That will depend on what he philosophizes about. But if he is a political philosopher- not what Wittgenstein had in mind- then the state is the most likely community from which he will have to detach himself, not physically, but intellectually and, on a certain view of morality, morally too.

Nonsense! Plenty of political philosophers are strong supporters of the ruling party of their own State. In some countries, a Professor at a State University is automatically a Beamte or servant of it. Thus when Einstein was a Professor in Berlin he was both a Beamte as well as a German citizen by virtue of his employment by the State. That's why he was very careful about the legal requirements to shake off that citizenship on arrival in America. He had never wanted to be German and had secured Swiss citizenship. I must say, Einstein displayed greater political nous than most German Jewish philosophers. He detached himself from that country before it was obvious it would turn to shit.  

This radical detachment has two forms, and I shall be concerned with only one of them. The first form is contemplative and analytic;

you detach yourself from your country while taking a ruminative shit.  

those who participate in it take no interest in changing the community whose ideas they study. "Philosophy leaves everything as it is."

So does not doing the washing up. I suppose that makes me a Philosopher.  

The second form is heroic. I do not want to deny the heroic possibilities of contemplation and analysis. One can always take pride in wrenching onself loose from the bonds of community;

more particularly if it is trying to sodomize you.  

it is not easy to do, and many important philosophical achievements

none exist 

(and all the varieties of philosophical arrogance) have their origins in detachment. But I want to focus on a certain tradition of heroic action, alive, it seems, in our own time, where the philosopher detaches himself from the community of ideas in order to found it again-intellectually and then materially too, for ideas have consequences, and every community of ideas is also a concrete community. He withdraws and returns. He is like the legislators of ancient legend, whose work precludes ordinary citizenship.

There were no such legislators. Solon was a businessman and successful general and statesman before becoming archon. Lycurgus is credited with distant travels- even to Ind's coral strand!- but he either receives the constitution from a divine source or amends an existing model. Perhaps this nutter is thinking of Platonic guardians. But they don't feature in 'ancient legend'.  

In the long history of political thought, there is an alternative to the detachment of philosophers,

which did not exist 

and that is the engagement of sophists, critics, publicists, and intellectuals.

Which is like saying the alternative to the laboratory experiments of the chemist is dancing the can can at  the Moulin Rouge.  

To be sure, the sophists whom Plato attacks were citiless men, itinerant teachers, but they were by no means strangers in the Greek community of ideas. Their teaching drew upon, was radically dependent upon, the resources of a common membership.

If they were sophists they were not philosophers. Consider Isocrates' Antidosis. He doesn't say he is a philosopher. He says he is a dude who teaches young men how to speak well and gain a good reputation by displaying high moral character. 

In this sense, Socrates was a sophist,

There was only one sense in which you could be a plumber or a sophist or a prostitute. If you were getting paid for the service, that is what you were. If you don't charge for access to your rectum, you aren't a rent-boy. You may be a trainee accountant who has fundamentally misunderstood the concept of 'double entry'.  

though it was probably crucial to his own understanding of his mission, as critic and gadfly, that he also be a citizen: the Athenians would have found him less irritating had he not been one of their fellows.

They killed him because he was a citizen. They didn't think he was a philosopher or a necromancer or a Reki practitioner. 

But then the citizens killed Socrates, thus demonstrating, it is sometimes said, that engagement and fellowship are not possible for anyone committed to the search for truth.

Socrates was plenty engaged with fellows who liked talking to him. As for searching for truth, if you let people do it in your rectum with their dicks and don't charge for it, you aren't a rent-boy though you may be a trainee accountant who is genuinely stupid enough to study philosophy at Grad Skool. 

Philosophers cannot be sophists.

Sure they can. Teach rhetoric three days a week while doing mathematical logic the rest of the time.  

For practical as well as intellectual reasons, the distance that they put between themselves and their fellow citizens must be widened into a breach of fellowship. And then, for practical reasons only, it must be narrowed again by deception and secrecy. So that the philosopher emerges, like Descartes in his Discourse, as a separatist in thought, a conformist in practice

Woojin Lim & Civil Disobedience

The very young and very brilliant Woojin Lim wrote a silly article titled 'the success condition for protest' some four years ago. The fact is, protests are about self-assertion. They should occur even if bound to fail. Little kids realize this very quickly. Make a big fuss about not being allowed to stay up to watch 'the Exorcist' and Mum will decide not to try to make you eat your spinach. I suppose Woojin was made to eat his spinach though when he pleaded to be allowed to stay up late to finish reading the Posterior Analytic in the original Greek, his Tiger Mommy threatened to confiscate his collection of books on algebraic topology. 


One type of argument for the justification of protest activities

is just as shit as every other. Protest should be independent of any fucking justification whatsoever. It is a different matter that you sullenly acquiesce in what is inevitable. What is important is that you established a 'threat point'. If you could go so berserk about the demand that you stop shitting on the boss's desk, just think what you would do if he demanded you do some actual work. 

has appealed to pragmatic considerations.

They dictate when to concede. But protest itself is thymotic and about self-assertion.  

Guided by the principle ‘the means should prefigure the end,’ defenders of what I call ‘the success condition for protests’ have argued that protests—and particular forms of it—are permissible only by virtue of their success in bringing forth practical results in line with their movement’s objectives, be it social change or enhanced cooperation.

That isn't protest. It is being a boring arsehole. Nothing is permissible by virtue of success. It is so only if it is actually permitted by whatever authority one claims to recognize or whatever principle one claims guides one's actions. But this is merely a manner of speaking. There is no fixed 'extension' to the term. However, if the matter is justiciable, then there may be a 'bright-line' demarcation of what is and isn't permissible. 

The condition holds that morally justified protests have a good enough chance of successfully achieving its ends,

But 'ends' may be strategically conceived or, in any case, unknowable because of Knightian Uncertainty. Thus 'achieving ends' may mean anything whatsoever. My flatulence is a protest against Neo-Liberalism. Sadly, the true end towards which I was working was shitting myself. This lost me my job. This weakened 'Neo-Liberalism' because I dropped out of the Labour Force thus reducing the 'surplus value' Capitalism can extract.  

thus rendering the risks they impose, all other things equal, morally acceptable.

Sadly, since 'ends' or even 'identity' are intensional or epistemic in nature, even if everything else is ceteris paribus, they are not so themselves.  You can't do comparative statics or Cost Benefit analysis. 

Since certain forms of resistance should be undertaken if and only if they are considered successful in achieving their desired set of objectives,

 'considered' and 'desired' and 'successful' are all 'intensional' and epistemic. They don't obey Liebniz's law of identity. The sentence given above is 'anything goes'. It can be equally persuasively affirmed or denied in any context. 

in converse, protest activities that are considered ineffective or counterproductive to the movement on the whole should not be pursued at all.

unless they may possibly provoke an even more counterproductive backlash.  Your nutters may so incense the nutters on the other side that they go too far and thus scare the straights. 

On this note, some have even argued that all protests are pointless.

But protesting can, itself, be fun. Also, there's always a chance you meet a hot chick who hates her father and fucks you so as to get back at him.  

In this article, I will examine this success condition and ask whether particular forms of protests—for instance, those that are violent, covert, evasive, or offensive, and perhaps “counterproductive”—should be reconsidered, if not avoided simpliciter.

Disavow them by all means- more particularly if there is a video of your identical twin brother (who was stolen from the maternity ward by the Doctor who also brainwashed your Mum into denying she'd had twins) bashing in the skull of Nancy Pelosi.  

Effective Nonviolence

is like effective not bashing in the skulls of frail elderly women. You can get a PhD in this from Harvard by spending a lot of money.  

This question concerning effectiveness lies at the heart of “Why Civil Resistance Works:

It doesn't. On the other hand, if a large number of people habitually commit a particular crime and the Police stop enforcing the relevant law, we could say 'Crime works'. But we would wrong. What has stopped working is the enforcement of the Law. 

The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan—two political scientists who aspire to figure out whether campaigns of nonviolent resistance are more effective drivers of change than their violent counterparts.

Their methodology was fatally flawed. What matters is 'threat point'. It is fundamentally counterfactual and can't be observed in any way. All that historians can do is quote eye-witness accounts by decision makers and draw conclusions from that. But those conclusions were unreliable. De Gaulle initially fled when faced by student protests. But did this have to do with his distrust of his own army commanders? Who can tell?  

“Our study therefore concludes that nonviolent civil resistance works, both in terms of achieving campaigns’ strategic objectives

Gandhi's objective was vast ethnic cleansing involving millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims- right?  

and in terms of promoting the long-term well-being of the societies in which the campaigns have been waged,”

India became a place where minorities weren't safe. Also it stopped being able to feed or defend itself. On the other hand, you could have an Italian lady running the country on the grounds that her hubby had ruled the country because his Mummy had ruled the country because her Daddy had ruled the country. What a wonderfully democratic outcome!  

they write. “Violent insurgency, on the other hand, has a dismal record on both counts.”

Very true. The American Revolution was a dismal failure.  On the other hand, the non-violence of the Lenape led to their ruling their own country.

Chenoweth and Stephan present a number of statistical findings from the research and analysis of 323 campaigns, both violent and nonviolent, which occurred around the world between 1900 and 2006.

Their thesis was wholly discredited when their optimism re. the Arab Spring and non-violent movements in Iran and Palestine (!) was shown to be utterly misplaced. The plain fact is, they didn't understand the countries they wrote about.  

After analyzing nearly 160 variables related to success criteria—number of participants, international sanctions, backfiring and loyalty shifts, etc.—they found that nonviolent action has a success rate of 57 percent (cf. 25 percent by violence), and a failure rate of only 20 percent (whereas violence fails over 60 percent of the time).

By contrast, not having any fucking campaign but just bribing or persuading politicians succeeds one hundred and fourteen percent of the time. Consider my refusal to campaign for the legalization of farting. The plain fact is nobody arrests me even though I fart all the time. By contrast, if I had launched either a non-violent or a violent campaign, I probably would have faced at least a Civil Suit filed by my posh cousins in Hampstead. This is because they want to counter my theory that Gayatri mantra should only be recited while farting vigorously. Bizarrely, they claim the Hindu Religion requires no such thing.  

To be coded a “success” the campaign must have met its stated objective within a reasonable period of time (two years), and have had a discernible impact on the outcome.

Like Brexit, which was non-violent. But that was because there was a referendum.  

If the campaign did not meet its objectives or did not obtain significant concessions, the campaign was coded a “failure.”

Sadly, the campaign to abolish death is coded a failure.  

Strategic nonviolent action, Chenoweth and Stephan claims, at times enhanced the campaign’s domestic and international legitimacy, attracting more broad-based participation and sympathy.

This is why Dalai Lama is ruling in Tibet and Aung San Suu Kyi is running Burma.  

The involvement of greater numbers of participants in resistance campaigns led to a number of factors that positively contributed to a movement’s success in creating desired change,

e.g. Trade Unions forcing Employers to close down their factories and run the fuck away 

including the appearance of openness to negotiation and bargaining, a larger social network, and allegiance shifts within security forces.

e.g. the Army telling the General to fuck off because it has sworn allegiance to the local tart.  

Building off of this work, other researchers have found that impact of public opinion on changing policy is substantial: the mobilization of sympathetic bystanders to perceive the status quo as illegitimate successfully instigated social change processes.

Why stop there? Why not have yet more researchers discover the impact of people on people? Moreover, when people walk or crawl, they are displaying mobility. This can successfully instigate processes of social change- e.g. people walking from one place to another place.  

Although Chenoweth and Stephan both acknowledge that “there is no blueprint for success,” tactical considerations of effectiveness bear significant weight on whether violent or nonviolent actions should be undertaken.

Tactical considerations are equally significant in deciding when and where to defecate. Hopefully Chenoweth and Stephan will focus on this in their next book.  

By no means do the authors call for a blanket of nonviolence, or nothing but nonviolence.

Sadly, they do call for more and more useless idiots calling for stupid shit.  

But all things considered, since nonviolent civil resistance is more successful in securing its desired political aims, Chenoweth and Stephan suggest that nonviolent forms of resistance should be preferred, given the circumstances, strategically, over less effective and possibly counterproductive, violent forms of resistance.

Nonviolent forms of resistance just means either bribing people or making a nuisance of yourself.  Both may produce a bigger backlash. 

Murky Metrics

While an excellent, well-researched book, Chenoweth and Stephan acknowledge that it is difficult to categorize campaigns in the binary designation of “violent” or “nonviolent” given that many strategic campaigns have elements from both approaches. Some of the civil resistance movements that they classify as nonviolent—for instance, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the First Palestinian Intifada against the Israeli occupation—often in fact involved violent flanks.

Even if they didn't, they imposed a cost. If that rose too high relative to the Benefit, policy was changed. Sadly, this meant things could turn to shit much more quickly. 

In their criteria, a movement is violent if it rests primarily on armed insurrection.

This may not be violent if the other side runs the fuck away. A bloodless revolution can occur if an armed group scares the shit out of the current regime.  Was the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, or the recent collapse of Hasina's regime in Bangladesh, violent or non-violent? In the former case, there was very little fighting. Government troops were happy to surrender to anyone who would give them safe conduct and maybe a bit of food. In the latter case, the Army commander said the soldiers might not obey shoot to kill orders. Hasina had just 45 minutes to pack and get on a plane.

“Characterizing a campaign as violent or nonviolent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods,” they write.

Some political movements consider that only violent means are legitimate in their own gaining power. This was the anti-Browder thesis of various Communist parties. The moment they said, 'well will participate in elections, and take office if we win', they were on a slippery slope to becoming non-violent. This is because instead of settling internal disputes through bloody purges, rivals within the party might rely on their popularity with the voters. There were some purely non-violent movements. But they could not hold power because this would mean condoning the coercive methods used by men in uniform

It is difficult to fully explore the implications of each of the 160 variables on social change despite efforts of operationalisation.

by a pair of ignorant cretins 

Provided the large number of moving variables, including the shifting global landscape of dissent and authoritarian adaptations, causation is difficult to establish through empirical observation.

It is easy enough for ordinary people witnessing these events. 

After revisiting her study in 2017, Chenoweth notes that the success rates of nonviolent campaigns have declined by a staggering rate since 2010.

The alternative is to admit that nothing had changed. Her book was stupid.  

The project of detailing all the relevant, collectively exhaustive outcome-mechanisms is itself a task that is very hard, if not impossible.

It is unnecessary.  

In the social sciences literature at large, how to measure the effectiveness of protests and social movements is unclear,

Nope. You look at how long it lasted and what proportion of the population was involved. Don't forget the desired effect may not be to change policy but to disavow it. 'Not in my name' just means that I'll pay taxes to kill innocent Muslims, I just won't say that I like killing Muslims.  

especially provided that all protesters’ notions of “perceived effectiveness” are not the same.

They differ for the same person over the space of a couple of drinks at the bar.  

To add, public attitudes and perceptions of a protest’s success may radically change as time passes.

You think the protest was great coz you got laid. Then you find out you have the clap. You now think the protest sucked ass big time.  Also, it turns out the hot chick was actually a dude.  My mistake for thinking the placards read 'Grannies against Trump' rather than 'Trannies against Trump'

The question regarding the nature of “success,” and the identification of all the important influences and dynamics which factor into this buzzword, remain fuzzy at best.

More particularly if you are getting a smelly discharge from various orifices.  

Chenoweth herself admits that even when civil resistance campaigns “fail” on her criteria in the short run, they have often led to longer-term reforms and changes that brought about democratization compared with violent campaigns.

Which is why it is important to protest against both Death and Taxes. The Grim Reaper should just , very kindly, take a fucking hint already, dude.  

Even if the metric of effectiveness

there can be no metric because there are no sets and thus no topology which might conceivably be metrizable.  

were straightforward, there are many more factors to account for than merely “effectiveness” when deciding what forms of protests to engage in.

more particularly if the hot chicks at the protest are likely to be elderly Trannies.  


Beyond Effectiveness

In a short interview with the Oxford Political Review, Candice Delmas

not all useless academics are women. Still... 

shared her thoughts on what considerations, possibly, lies beyond the effectiveness criterion. “There is need to question our ubiquitous and perennial calls for civility and nonviolence, which have been predicated on the idea that

your colleagues or students are serial killers who use the N-word and the C-word and Bob Woodward as a spittoon. 

anything else is counterproductive,” she said.

It would be counterproductive for this lady to try to do something useful. She is simply too stupid. She would end up trying to bite off her own head.  

In her most recent book, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil,”

e.g. calling Mum a Lezza ho-bag and telling her to fuck the fuck off if she suggests we study something useful at Collidge.  

Delmas challenges Chenoweth and Stephan, arguing that the empirical argument for the superior effectiveness of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience in the context of large social movements does not at face value establish the ineffectiveness or counterproductivity of uncivil forms of disobedience.

The superior effectiveness of scratching your arse with your hand does not, at face value, establish the ineffectiveness or counterproductivity of using your toes to do it.  

In some cases, Delmas argues that recent protests in Hong Kong have been popular and remarkably effective due to tactics of uncivil disobedience.

That shite failed miserably. How fucking stupid does a Professor have to be not to see the outcome was inevitable?  

In other cases, violent groups often work to strengthen the bargaining position of their nonviolent counterparts while protecting more moderate nonviolent activists from repression (a concept known as the “positive radical flank effect”).

Sadly, the violent group may later kill the non-violent counterpart. As for 'moderate nonviolent activists' either they give you money or you beat them till they do.  

Delmas takes a further step. “More generally, effectiveness may not be measured solely in terms of contribution to a mass civil resistance campaign,” she writes. “Individual actions may be socially beneficial (“effective”) whether or not they lead to reform.”

Indeed, they may be socially beneficial whether or not they occur. In particular, actions involving fellating flying unicorns may cause rainbows to stream out of their arses.  

For example, the Lavender Panthers’ organized use of self-defensive violence to fight violence in San Francisco in the 1970s can be justified,

because self-defence is justified 

for it can directly frustrate injustice and benefit people in dire need through ways that are not available to nonviolent, civil disobedients.

Similarly, chopping off your dick can directly frustrate injustice- e.g. the fact that you don't have to sit down to pee whereas trillions of disabled Lesbians of Colour do. This strategy is not available to non-violent civil disobedients coz they got no dicks or balls but are simply a vast and vacuous vagina. 

Uncivil protests can be just as “effective” in other ways besides contributing to the objects of select social movements. Incivility draws attention to injustice.

So does shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your faeces at members of the clergy while shouting 'Fuck the Police!' 

Apt Anger

is like apt shitting. There's a place and a time where nothing else will do.  


Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that a movement’s (uncivil) tactics are strategically ineffective, there may nonetheless be intrinsic, non-instrumental reasons to engage in those sorts of protests.

Or to engage in the relevant actions without bothering to protest anything whatsoever.  

Uncivil disobedience, however prudentially irrational or counterproductive, might still be the best way for the activist to express one’s well-grounded disrespect and even contempt for a broken, unjust society that does not care about one’s life, well-being, and equal standing.

How shit do you have to be if the best thing you can do does not involve doing or studying anything useful or worthwhile?  Still, it is a fact that Society is very cruel for caring nothing about my marvellous farts even though most of them protest vociferously against this utterly reprehensible lack of interest on the part of Society and Humanity at large. 

There is intrinsic worth, immeasurable by social scientific tools, that comes with expressing and affirming one’s agency and dignity in the face of threats and denial thereof.

Only if there is intrinsic worth in my farting.  

In “The Aptness of Anger,” Amia Srinivasan develops an account of “affective injustice,” that is, when victims of injustice must withhold expressing their apt feelings and emotions because of other prudential considerations (i.e. outcomes and effectiveness).

Daddy has to repress his instinct to say 'that's hideous! Our daughter is deeply deeply disturbed!' when shown the drawings his little Princess had made.  

Alas, forcing agents to shut up adds an affective injustice that compounds the initial arms of oppression.

Very true. People don't mind being beaten and sodomized. What get's their goat is being told to shut up about it by tele-marketeers. At least, they describe themselves as tele-marketeers who need to know your Bank Password and pin number and sort code for some mysterious reason. They get very angry when I say, my password is... just one sec...I remember I changed it when I was being raped by your mother... what was it?...Donkey-fucker? No. That was her pet name for you.' 

“The counterproductivity of one’s anger is often seen as dispositive reason not to get angry, whatever the circumstances,” Srinivasan writes.

It is never seen in that way. People may say some such thing to you but getting angry is like farting. It occurs whether or not it is counter-productive. Srinivasan is as stupid as shit. Nothing regarding a non-justiciable issue can be 'dispositive'.  

A long thread of literature dating back from Seneca to Martha Nussbaum

why not say 'from Shakespeare to Farty McFartypants'?  

pits anger against sanity and civility.

This is fine if you think, as the Stoics did, that it is a result of a defective belief. We know better. Emotions are Darwinian algorithms of the mind.  

The opposing twin of the counterproductivity critique, long rooted in the tradition of Black and feminist political thought,

i.e. whining about White dicks.  

in contrast, challenges the empirical presupposition that ‘anger is at best a weapon for self-harm.’

In Sanskrit there is a saying 'anger is a small pleasure'.  

Srinivasan quotes the powerful words of Audrey Lorde, “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”

Farting expressed and translated into action- e.g. shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your faeces at members of the Clergy while shouting 'Death to the Police!'- is a liberating and strengthening act iff you are a fucking chimpanzee.  

Getting angry is a means of affectively “appreciating” and “marking” the injustice in the world.

Just like farting.  

Hence, the metrics of effectiveness and aptness can be pulled apart.

Nope. There are no such metrics to start off with.  

There is more to the justification of anger and uncivil protests than its mere effects.

Indeed. Anger and uncivil protests may cause flying unicorns to shit out rainbows composed entirely of tiny leprechauns.  

Anger, however unproductive, might still be a fitting emotional response to the unjust world as it is.

In the view of a turd. Sure. 

By condemning anger, Srinivasan concludes, “we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither the state nor the sword.”

Some slaves and some women had the power of the State and the Sword. Most men didn't. Still, it is true that we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to turn into pussy-cats. Do you think Uncle Tom, sitting in his cabin, was permitted by Simon Legree to turn into a cat? I tell you, Legree would whip him mercilessly if he so much as made a miaow miaow noise. As for women- did Queen Victoria turn into a cat? No! Disraeli and Gladstone forcibly restrained her from so doing. This is the reason that it is apt for injured and oppressed peeps- e.g. those who lack a penis and have to sit down to pee- to make miaow miaow noises even if they personally have no inclination to turn into a pussy cat and chase after mice. 

Marching Forward

rather than backward across the Irish Sea 

The success condition for protests places a constraint on every protester’s actions.

Only in the sense that the becoming a cat condition for slaves and women places a constraint on peeps who have to sit down to pee and who feel that baby is totes enslaving them.  

Provided empirical backing, this qualifier could limit the realm of justifiable protests to only peaceful, public, nonviolent, respectful, and civil forms of resistance.

No. A success condition is a feasibility constraint exogenous to the underlying 'realm'. 

On the other hand, by solely relying on this bendable, oft-oversimplified threshold of effectiveness, we fail to adequately capture the complexity of movements, the diverse standpoints of victims and activists, and the apt affective states involved.

But no one can adequately capture anything. One may as well say 'by solely relying on our arsehole to defecate we fail to adequately capture the complexity of our bowel movements and the diverse standpoints of the activists upon whose heads we would like to shit.'. 

Perhaps this calls for more interdisciplinary work

If this is work, what is wanking?  

to bridge empirical and non-empirical work on political protests and forms of civil and uncivil disobedience.

I suppose the kid is being sarcastic.  

For, when interviewed about the role of analytical political philosophy in face of the social sciences,

 that role is to examine normative questions while 'bracketing' empirical issues. The problem is that genuine schizophrenics are better at it than those who traffic in the warmed-up sick of the Seventies. 

Delmas explained, “its role is to contest the common sense in society

lunatics do this better 

and in scholarship,

It is common knowledge that non-STEM scholarship is worthless shit.  

changing the outlook and what to look for, how to understand success and failure, violence and nonviolence, and so forth.”

The problem here is that either what is 'political' involves what is 'endoxa'- conventional wisdom- for the polis or else it is elitist, Straussian, and deals in 'Noble lies' or utterly ignoble paranoid drivel- i.e. screaming hysterically because of the horrendous epistemic self-abuse you have suffered, just because Mum & Dad sent you to a Liberal Arts College rather than enrolling you in the ISIS training program at a young age. 

She added, with a laugh: “the empirical question is not our job?”

Her job is stupidity. What is utterly scandalous is that she is White. This is a terrible affront to trillions of disabled Lesbians of colour. She should at least paint some black stripes on herself. If Kamala becomes POTUS, her first executive action must be to ensure this outcome.  

Sunday 3 November 2024

Iqbal, Pakistani logic & Love vs Power

The Punjab has produced the most sublime spiritual and religious poetry from the time of the Vedic Rishis. Though the Punjabis have a great martial tradition, in Punjabi poetry- as in Milton's Paradise Lost (which features canons!)- Love is always a stronger force than military might. But this is also the case with the grand tradition of Arabic poetry. Who remembers the philandering Imru' al-Qais? Who doesn't know the virginal Qais Majnoon? If the majority of Punjabis are now Muslim- it is because the Prophet Muhammad, before entering on his Divine Mission and the death of his beloved wife, was as wholly monogamous and faithful as Lord Ram. This is not to say he lacked in martial or virile qualities to fulfil God's plan.

Yet, like a Mother's plan for her beloved son or daughter, it is one which unfolds without any display of power- or 'shock and awe' or the sort of Imperial power the British displayed in Iqbal's Punjab.

Yet he writes-
Christianity describes God as love;

Because there is the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus who is consubstantial with his Daddy, God. This 'Love' is Vatsalya or the natural mutual love between Baby and Mummy/Daddy. Nothing wrong with this at all. This is 'oikeiosis'. But, no Punjabi Muslim does not feel that, as a baby, he or she too was not of the 'family of the cloak'. We all cuddled under that blanket. 

Islam as power.

God is all powerful in all religions. The question is, does desire for power or love for his Creation cause him to reveal Scripture and send us Prophets and Saints? Aurangzeb wanted power though he claimed to serve God. Iqbal has the Saint, Ali al-Hujwiri, speak from the tomb denouncing the Emperor as one motivated by 'zamin bhook'- hunger for land.  

How shall we decide between the two conceptions?

Aurangzeb failed though he had 4.4 million men at arms. Saint al-Hujwiri's single heart prevailed because it was filled with love and devotion.

I think the history of mankind and of the universe as a whole must tell us as to which of the two conceptions is truer.

Hitler failed. Gandhi succeeded.  

I find that God reveals Himself in history more as power than love.

Iqbal thought the Crusades were lovely. Come to think of it, he first praised Lenin before deciding that the Sun shone out of Mussolini's backside- even though Mussolini was massacring Muslims in Libya at that time.  

I do not deny the love of God; I mean that, on the basis of our historical experience, God is better described as power.

The problem with this view is that even if Stalin and Hitler were Gods because of the huge power they wielded, such Gods might fight with and annihilate each other. Power Gods were displaced by the Single God of Love, Mercy and Compassion. 

Iqbal also said ' “Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.' Sadly, Pakistan was born in the heart of a poet who, with Pakistani logic, thought that though power is merely the means by which Love brings about existence, it must exceed that which uses it as its tool. Thankfully, Iqbal did not actually act on this belief. Thus if his girl-friend sent him a passionate love-letter, he did not promptly have sex with the postman. Firaq Gorakhpuri was less fastidious in this respect. 

Mukul Kesavan on why abortion is wrong

 Mukul Kesavan writes in the Telegraph of 

A moral void
During the last US election, it was possible to see Biden as the good guy because

he and Obama had killed plenty of Muslims and helped displace tens of millions more in Syria, Libya etc.  

Trump had been so performatively wicked.

He hadn't killed a lot of Muslims. Also, he made peace with the Taliban and was preparing to pull out US troops. 

It is impossible to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt again

Why not? Biden did end up running the fuck away from Afghanistan. He is cowardly. That's a good thing because, as Obama said, American foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit.

For an outsider, it’s hard to see how a Donald Trump win would make a difference to American foreign policy.

No it isn't. Iran will become more cautious. Trump will try to prise Putin apart from Xi. He will force the Europeans to speed up the creation of a European Army capable of sealing its borders. Zelensky will have an excuse to concede 'peace with honour.' 

Kamala Harris has been careful not to depart from Joe Biden’s policy of giving Israel the weapons it needs to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank.

If she wins because of Gen Zee, she may abandon Israel. After all, she wants to be a two term POTUS.  

America has continued to arm Israel through its Gaza-style flattening of Lebanon.

Which is why it still has a role in the MENA. As Nixon realized, if Israel goes its own way, America will be seen as a paper tiger. The Saudis have already shown their contempt for Biden. Qatar will suddenly find that hosting American troops can make it a target.  

Harris’s campaigning proxy, Bill Clinton, recently made a speech in Michigan where, addressing that state’s Muslim voters, he declared that the slaughter in Gaza was down to Palestinian intransigence. Just in case they didn’t understand, he explained that the number of Palestinians killed made no difference to the rightness of Israel’s war: “I am not keeping score that way,” he said, speaking on behalf of Israelis who might have lost family during Hamas’s October 7 attack. He’s right; the vibe might be different but neither Trump nor Harris is interested in counting the Palestinian dead.

Nor, more importantly, are Hamas and their Iranian backers. It is hilarious that Hanafi Arabs are dying for the greater glory of Iran.  

A European acquaintance I met earlier this year was unmoved by the slaughter in Gaza on two counts: one,

we killed way more Muslims during our war on terror 

Hamas had started it

just as Al Qaeda started the war on terror 

and two, Gaza wasn’t the most important issue in the world.

It is important even for the Ikhwan. Let the people there die or starve or try to cross into Egypt.  

For Europe (and implicitly the West), Ukraine was the existential battlefield du jour.

Only after Putin's troops turned out to be crap while Zelensky turned out to be Winston fucking Churchill.  

Since the ‘axis’ powers that opposed the West in Ukraine included Iran, the patron of Hamas and Hezbollah, Gaza’s claim on European and American empathy was small. In this latest civilisational conflict, the Palestinians were on the wrong side.

When were they on the right side? In Jordan when they tried to kill the King and take over the country? General Zia helped the Hashemites slaughter Palestinians during 'Black September'. Arafat had pissed off Assad so he declined to help. The Palestinians then moved on to Lebanon which they very quickly wrecked. A Palestinian refugee in Lebanon is barred from 39 high paying professions- e.g. Medicine. They are welcome to clean the streets. 

This person is a liberal, viscerally hostile to both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the world as it is, it isn’t unusual for Western liberals to both disapprove of ‘populists’ and be unmoved by ethnic cleansing.

Kesavan is Tamil on his father's side. Name me one White 'Liberal' who was 'moved' by the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Even my appeal to Rishi Sunak to assist the return of Iyers to their ancestral homeland- Ireland- fell on deaf years even though I spoke to him in tet Punjabi.  That sly bastard pretended he was an Urdu speaking Muslim running a takeaway establishment. Same thing happened when I rang Sir Keir Starmer. 

The two positions are, in fact, connected; the liberal centrists who run Western countries — Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz — would prefer a non-Likud leader helming the slaughter with the right mix of handwringing and havoc than Bibi and his ghoulishly genocidal cabinet colleagues.

If we lost the war on terror, why can't the Israelis lose one or two similar wars? Would that be too much to ask?  

Through most of the first year of the war on Gaza, The Economist, the house organ of Western liberalism, tried to make the case that Israel’s murderous war was sanctioned by international law.

If the war on terror was so sanctioned, so is Israel's.  

It was a just war that couldn’t be delegitimised by the number of Palestinians killed. It has stopped making this case explicitly ever since the guardians of international law, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice,

The UK seems to be disengaging with both. Still, it would be nice to see Starmer hand Blair over to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.  

began taking allegations of war crimes and genocide against Israel seriously,

with the result that no one now takes it seriously.  

but, as with my European acquaintance, it continues to see dead Palestinians as collateral damage in a necessarily drawn-out war.

Just as it saw dead Muslims in that light. Don't forget we were bringing Democracy and Human Rights to Afghanistan and Iraq and so forth. We didn't mean to make a gift of those places to the Taliban or the Iranian Ayatollahs.  

The threat that Trump will give Netanyahu a free hand to finish off the Palestinians is premised on the claim that Biden has reined Bibi in.

He reined in himself. He should have blown the Houthis to kingdom come the moment they attacked a US flagged ship in the Red Sea.  

This is a grotesque piece of special pleading:

Nobody is pleading with Kesavan- though, no doubt, people hold their nose and move away from him anytime he farts. His mother was Punjabi. Thus his already very powerful TamBram farts must be truly lethal.  

the United Nations secretary-general and the chiefs of UN agencies have warned that the entire population of northern Gaza faces imminent death from starvation, disease and bombardment.

If the UN says so, the reverse must be the case.  

Apart from some performative tutting, the US government has done nothing to curb Israel’s now-explicit strategy of starving and bombing Palestinians out of north Gaza.

Worse yet, they have done nothing to curb Kesavan's farts. Did you know they are so powerful that they can reach London? That's what you are smelling. It wasn't me who tooted.  

The mass killing in Palestine and Lebanon is happening with the blessing of Biden’s government.

Biden is also repeatedly blessing Kesavan's arsehole and encouraging it to fart in a very smelly manner. 

Israel’s usefulness as a strategic US outpost in the Middle East is obvious from the excitement generated amongst Western pundits by Israel’s strikes on Iran and its proxies. The reason there is no ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza is that America hasn’t been able to broker the total surrender that both Netanyahu and Biden see as the appropriate outcome of this year-long investment in slaughter.

Nor has it brokered Kesavan's farts. Biden is truly useless.  

The difference between Trump and Biden on the issue of Palestine is hard to see.

Nope. He will say 'fuck all dem rag-heads to death!'  

The Abraham Accords were negotiated by Trump and taken forward by Biden and Antony Blinken.

But they didn't include Hamas. Only the Chinese recognized that entity. We hoped they would broker a peace deal. But this wasn't possible because Hamas doesn't give a fuck about Gaza. It is concerned with the wider political fortunes (not to mention financial fortunes) of the Ikhwan and its billionaire leaders.  

Finessing the Palestinians and helping Israel produce the conditions that make a Palestinian State impossible have been unspoken tenets of American foreign policy for a quarter of a century and more.

No. American policy since the time of the Rodgers Plan has been to push Israel back to its pre '67 borders. Clinton seemed to be succeeding in this. But Arafat was as crazy as a shithouse rat.  

A Democratic administration will dress up ethnic cleansing in Gaza as humanitarian relocation while Trump will be more explicit about Palestinian losers taking their medicine, but left to the American State, no other outcome is likely.

The American State is on its way out in the region.  It is directly responsible for the rise and rise of Iran. 

Ironically, the existential conflict in Ukraine that my acquaintance was concerned about isn’t likely to be materially affected by Trump’s election.

Yes it is. If Trump wins in November, there will be peace by Christmas. Hopefully, Putin has learned his lesson and won't be greedy.  

The scare-mongering about Trump withdrawing support from Volodymyr Zelensky ignores the fact that even the most hawkish Western commentators now accept that Ukraine will have to negotiate an end to the fighting that will involve surrendering some part of its territory to Russia because the US and Europe can’t bankroll the war indefinitely.

The greater threat is that Putin is replaced by somebody who isn't shit.  

Trump represents Americans who don’t want to pay to police the world. The sooner Europe comes to terms with a parochial America, and the quicker this erstwhile hyperpower comes to terms with its relatively diminished standing, the better it’ll be for the rest of the world.

This happened in 2016. Hilary was more hawkish than Obama. 

During the last US presidential election, it was possible to see Biden as the good guy because Trump had been so performatively wicked. The trashing of the nuclear deal with Iran,

coz what the world really needs is Houthis with nukes- right?  

the anti-Muslim rhetoric,

he was happy enough to cuddle with Imran Khan- whom Biden refused to even talk to by phone. The result was that Imran went to see Putin rather than attend the 'Democracy Summit'. Currently, two Muslim leaders- Imran and Hasina- say they were toppled by Biden's dark arts.  

the bad faith of the so-called Abraham Accords,

a sound enough commercial proposition 

the anti-immigrant xenophobia

if Trump wins this time, it will be only for this reason 

and the misogyny made foreigners like me root for the Democrats.

Kesavan also tooted for the Democrats. The stench was indescribable.  

We live in a small world and the character of the American State matters. It is impossible, though, to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt again.

Nobody gains any sort of benefit from Kesavan. Even if he acknowledges my superior flatulence on Twitter- as I have repeatedly urged him to do- nobody would notice.  

Not only did the Biden administration follow Trump’s lead in every substantive foreign policy matter (including China),

Nonsense! Trump would cuddle with anybody who looked popular or whose country had pots of cash. Biden would scold them till, like the Crown Prince, they told him to go fuck himself.  

but it also literally embraced Netanyahu’s violence in Gaza.

No! As I have previously observed, Biden did not embrace Netanyahu. He just let him come on his tits.  

He went along with the demonisation of the anti-war protests on US college campuses.

A gift to Trump.  

Kamala Harris made no attempt to distance herself from Biden’s complicity in slaughter.

Because she wants to get elected POTUS not Chairperson of the Disabled Lesbians of Colour Support Committee for Hamas rapists.  

She couldn’t even summon up the courage to allow a Palestinian to address the Democratic National Convention.

Nor did she even stab her Jewish husband a couple of times in the chest. Why was she so cowardly? Is it coz she is bleck?  

Her calculation was that pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan and the rest of America either didn’t matter or had nowhere else to go.

Why don't they want to go settle in Gaza? Is it coz Gaza is a shithole?  

We’ll know on election day if she got her math right, but we know already that on the great matter of our time, she got her morals wrong.

She should stab hubby repeatedly. Also why did she not personally perform gender reassignment surgery on Joe Biden? Is it because she is bleck?  

As Biden’s deputy, she was complicit in the genocide.

as Biden was complicit in the killing of lots and lots of Muslims 

She crossed that line, not Trump.

Because she was Biden's Veep, not Trump. Still, at least she could have stabbed hubby.  

We don’t have to imagine the horrors that might come to pass under Trump;

Kesavan will be sodomized by Trump even if he refrains from farting- and thus drawing attention to his arsehole.  

we saw in hideous video clips the unending horror of Gaza on her watch.

It must be said, Hamas's rape and torture videos were better in that department. They understand their market.

Her best argument is that a MAGA presidency will deprive American women of their legal right to abortion.

Which is a matter for the State legislature.  

She’s right. But a liberal who reckons that the right of American women to choose can’t co-exist with an acknowledgement of the right of Palestinians to live

Kesavan is pro-choice. If his father rapes him and gets him pregnant, he will have the baby because of the 'right to life'.  

is a moral void, not a liberal.

Kesavan is a moral void or would be if he didn't quickly fill it up with his farts. Is he a liberal? No. He is too stupid.  

There is something clarifying about that. Whichever way this election goes, America will be a shabbier place once the votes are counted.

It wasn't shabby when it had Jim Crow and Indians found it nigh on impossible to get Green Cards. The fact is, if you keep out foreigners, the indigenous people have a higher incentive to make and keep things nice.  

Saturday 2 November 2024

Ens Realissimum & General Abstract Nonsense


Because when first we scraped a knee, Mum heeded our cry
& because, for elder to Thee, we let our Mums die.
Only the manger is as alive, kissy & cuddly as Mum
So, Thy but Ens realissimum drown in donkey cum.

Envoi- 
Prince! If Peace hath a Thou (who could have a Now)
Only General Abstract Nonsense shows how.



Friday 1 November 2024

Hafsa Kanjwal & the Kashmiri Colonization of Kamala's colon

A colony is a territory occupied and administered by people who originated from some other territory and who lack sovereignty (if they have it, they are a 'Dominion' not a 'Colony') even if they enjoy autonomy . Conquest of contiguous territory is not Colonialism. It is mere territorial expansion. The same is true regarding demographic change brought on by peaceful, even if illegal, immigration. 

A country or territory which is occupied and administered by another is not necessarily a colony. The US and its allies occupied, and later maintained garrisons, in Germany and Japan- and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq- but this did not mean any of those countries were colonized. It did mean that they had done evil shit which really pissed off a much stronger power which was now systematically kicking their collective ass and taking names. 

It is perfectly possible for stupid shitheads to describe something as colonialism even if isn't colonialism. Suppose a lot of immigrants move into your neighbourhood. Bigots may say 'we are being colonized by those savages. Did you know they eat puppy dogs and pussy cats?' However, we are not obliged to accept such testimony. We are welcome to tell such bigots to fuck the fuck off.

Equally, people in a portion of a country- e.g. a resource rich province or one which objects to liberal immigration laws- may think they would be better off if they separated from the rest of the nation. Such 'separatists' may claim that their province is being 'colonized' or 'plundered' or that vicious immigrants are eating their puppy dogs. But Separatism has nothing to do with Colonialism.  

Back in the Nineties, a pair of Kashmiri Doctors invaded the USA as part of the colonization of that once great country by evil Islamic fanatics. Hafsa Kanjwal, though only 6 years old at that time, was a member of the Islamic Occupation Army in America which triumphed when an Islamist born in Nairobi- Barack Hussein Osama- became POTUS. Hafsa was notorious for beating, sodomizing, decapitating and committing genocide on trillions of innocent, Christian, Americans. Also, she ate their puppy dogs. 

 To distract attention from her own Colonialist project of subjugating Christian America, Hafsa pretends that the Kashmir her parents fled- because of a rise in Islamist terror in the region subsequent on the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan- is a colony of India. This is not the case. There may be separatism there but there was no Colonialism. Consider the American Civil War. The South was separatist. It didn't say it was a colony of the North. It said the North wanted to get rid of its 'peculiar institution'- viz. slavery. Similarly, the Islamic fanatics of Kashmir- like the Islamic fanatics in America- were attached to their own 'peculiar institution' viz. jihad against kaffirs- and display hostility to democratic institutions as well as to alethic research programs in Higher Education. Towards this end, they publish stupid, mischievous, lies so as to gain influence over bien pensant shitheads. 

Hafsa Kanjwal, a Professor of stupid shite, writes in Aeon-

Colonies of former colonies
India’s ongoing subjugation of Kashmir holds portentous lessons about the nature of contemporary colonialism

But Pakistan's ongoing subjugation of Balochistan is worse as was their previous subjugation of East Bengal. If Hafsa's parents had to flee it was because Pakistan was backing Islamic terrorists in the Kashmir Valley. Sadly, they were not able to conquer it and impose Taliban rule. Hafsa was denied the opportunity to grow up illiterate. Unlike Malala Yousafzai, she was not shot in the head for the crime of going to school.

Though Islamist terrorism created a big problem in Kashmir valley, it was nothing the Indian Army could not handle. Thus Islamic terrorism has had a far more devastating impact on large swathes of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq and... actually, this problem exists even for UK and the US. But no 'portentous' lesson can be learnt from India or China in this regard. Why? They have unlimited military man-power to deal with a demographically very small threat.  The plain fact is, over the last 25 years, Pakistan, with a much smaller population has taken about 80 or 90000 deaths from Islamist violence- whereas India may have taken about about 20,000. Last year, Pakistan had 1438 fatalities from Terrorism. India had 84. 

In April 1955, at a closed session of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,

which followed the Baghdad pact where Pakistan signed up with the 'Imperial' powers- i.e. Jim Crow America and a Britain which would soon launch, in partnership with the French and Israelis, an unprovoked attack on Egypt. 

India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru

a blathershite 

spoke forcefully about the need for countries in Asia and Africa to refuse to join either of the two great powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – and to remain unaligned. Arguing that alignment with either power during the Cold War would degrade or humiliate those countries that had ‘come out of bondage into freedom’, Nehru maintained that the moral force of postcolonial nations should serve as a counter to the military force of the great powers. At one point, Nehru chided the Iraqi and Turkish delegates at the conference who had simultaneously spoken favourably about the Western bloc and the formation of NATO while lamenting the continued French colonisation of North Africa. Nehru said:
We must take a complete view of the situation and not be contradictory ourselves when we talk about colonialism, when we say ‘colonialism must go’, and in the same voice say that we support every policy or some policies that confirm colonialism. It is an extraordinary attitude to take up.

Nehru was as stupid as shit. Still, his pal Kidwai had pulled the rug under his other great pal- Sheikh Abdullah in Kashmir.  


A few years later, in 1961, along with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana

who wrote to the Brits asking them not to help India against China in 1962 

and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nehru became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. Having lifted the yoke of British colonialism,

Churchill was very evil. Did you know he prevented the Japanese from conquering India? What a bastard! 

India presented itself as poised to take on the moral and political leadership of the decolonising world.

It could show them how to become incapable of feeding or defending yourself. Also, how come Eisenhower is wiping his own bum but refusing to come and wipe Nkrumah or Nehru's bum? Is it due to Eisenhower is RACIST?  

This was perhaps to be expected, especially given that India was the largest and most populous country to become independent from European colonial rule.

It was the largest and most populous territory to prefer British to Indian masters. Sadly, the Brits slyly fucked off because the place couldn't turn a profit.  

The story of India’s anticolonial struggle, too, had been mythologised by the nonviolent resistance offered by Indian figures such as Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi. Nehru, too, was perceived as a charismatic and well-read leader who spoke for the people of Asia and Africa, and attempted to find what the scholar Ian Hall has called a ‘different way to conduct international relations’. The stature of both men played a critical role in establishing Indian dominance in the Third World order, and also in establishing ‘the idea of India’ as a secular liberal democracy that was built on the foundational idea of unity in diversity.

Nonsense! India had refused a seat on the Security Council and a larger role in world affairs. It doubled down on begging for food and 'free money' from Uncle Sam. However, it was very careful to keep biting the hand that fed it.  

Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir.

Nope. Back in 1932, at the time of the Second Round Table Conference, there was a revolt against the Maharaja of Kashmir in the North West portion of the Kingdom. The Maharaja got help from the Viceroy but that area was subsequently garrisoned by British, not Dogra, officers. At the time of Partition, the British officers were content that the territory go to Pakistan and there was also a tribal invasion assisted by Pakistani army officers. The Maharaja acceded to India and India sent troops to save the Valley whose people didn't want to be raped and massacred by the invader. The problem was that the Muslim majority of the Valley wanted to dominate Hindu majority Jammu (actually there was some ethnic cleansing there) and Buddhist majority Ladakh. Sadly, Sheikh Abdullah got a bit too big for his boots and was replaced by a capable administrator under whom Kashmir made good progress. That is why there were no support there for the Pakistani infiltrators who turned up in 1965. Meanwhile Pakistan's colonial policies towards East Bengal would lead to the partition of that country.  

In the middle of the 20th century, a wave of anticolonial and national liberation movements gained independence from European powers, by exercising their right to self-determination.

No. They got freedom because the colonial power felt the game was not worth the candle. Sometimes this was because of the high cost of defeating a native insurrection. At other times, it was because the place was a shithole.  

Nationalist leaders of the former colonies, however, remained committed to the ideals of the nation-state and its territorial sovereignty that derived from European modernity.

No. Nationalist leaders came in all shapes and sizes. Some were Communists. Others were theocratic. Yet others just wanted to get rich through corruption.  

Independence, it was widely accepted, came in the form of the nation-state,

No. You could have a multi-ethnic empire or confederation or collection of 'Soviets' or what have you.  

which outshone other forms of political organisation or possibilities.

No. Malaysia was a Federation where the Presidency rotated amongst various royal houses while Indonesia (which claimed Malaysia) went in a different, initially crazier, direction. Iran and Ethiopia had Emperors while, in some other countries, military dictators replaced monarchs.  

The borders of the nation-state became contested,

like the border between France and Germany of Austria-Hungary and Italy.  

as European powers often imposed boundaries that ill suited visions of what constituted the political community.

This was certainly true of inter-war Europe.  

This would have deleterious consequences for places where geography, demographics, history or political aspirations posed serious challenges to nationality.

e.g. Europe.  

In turn, newly formed nation-states asserted their newfound sovereignty through violence and coercion,

just as in Europe where newly formed nation-states- e.g. France- asserted their newfound sovereignty by chopping off the heads of lots of people and fighting a war in the Vendee.  

which had implications for Indigenous and stateless peoples within their borders

like the Romani in Europe or the Sami in Scandinavia.  

whose parallel movements for self-determination were depicted as illegitimate to the sovereign nation-state order.

Just like in Europe.  

Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski call this process ‘Third World imperialism’.

Those two shitheads don't get that a lot of 'Third World' countries had Emperors before they were colonized.  Still, it is a fact that after independence, people in many African and Asian countries displayed flatulence. This highlights the paradox that decolonization did not lead, as many have claimed, to the disappearance of the colon or intestines or anal sphincter. Consider what Nehru said in a closed session of the Bandung Conference 'I did not fart just now. Evil Viceroys were causing Indians to fart. Even now, Baghdad Pact is trying to get our Iraqi friends to fart. Only through Non-Alignment based on Secular, Socialist, Sententiousness sans Sexy Shenanigans can we preserve our new found freedom from flatulence. Don't point your finger at me and hold your nose! If anyone farted it was the fucking Turkish delegate. Did you know Turkey is a member of NATO? Fuck you Turkey! Fuck you very much!' 

Some anticolonial nationalists were real nationalists,

while others were pretending to come from the planet Uranus 

that is, they saw claims of self-determination within their imagined community of a nation as ‘separatist’, ‘secessionist’, ‘ethnonationalist insurgencies’ or ‘terrorism’.

Why America got so angry when some nice Arab peeps came to their country and killed lots of infidels on 9/11?  

Such framings, rife in Indian discourses on Kashmir, are ahistorical and dehumanising.

It is very ahistorical and dehumanising to protest against nice Muslim peeps putting kaffirs out of their misery.  

When we move beyond seeing these regions from the perspective of the dominant nation-state, we come to see how they are places with their own histories, imaginaries and political aspirations –

e.g the desire to kill kaffirs. Why can't Kamala Harris just stab her Jewish husband repeatedly? Is it because she is Islamophobic?  

some of which may reinscribe the nation, while others seek to move beyond it through understandings of other forms of sovereignty.

or lunacy. Still, this lady will get some nice reward for anti-India propaganda. But why bother? India is out of Quad in all but name.  The danger that India might ally with America has been averted. 

In popular and even scholarly discourses, colonialism is often seen as happening ‘overseas’ – from Europe to somewhere in the Global South.

No. It is not seen as happening at all. It isn't the case that people are upping sticks to go to some new continent currently only inhabited by penguins or guys with sticks through their noses.  

Many people see colonialism as something that we are past temporally, despite acknowledgement of its ongoing legacies.

Which only stupid academics teaching worthless shite whine about 

Forms of colonialism within the Global South remain more difficult for many to see because many of these regions are geographically contiguous to one another and, thus, seen as having some form of cultural or racial unity that would form a nation.

Colonialism and Emperors who wanted more and more territory ended a long time ago. You may as well gas on about the Spanish Inquisition. Did you know that many so called 'Protestants' nevertheless burn heretics at the stake? Look at Mike Pence.  

This results in what Goldie Osuri

a Telugu Christian and anti-India hack. She is also involved in 'Whiteness studies'.  

calls a ‘structural concealment of the relationship between postcolonial nation-states and their [own colonies],’ as well as the concealment of ‘the manner in which postcolonial nationalism is also an expansionist project.’ Contemporary colonies – like

Balochistan?  

Kashmir,  Western Sahara, Puerto Rico, Palestine, East Turkestan, among others

Puerto Rico? Why not Scotland? How about Wales?  

show the porous boundary between colonialism and postcolonialism, raising some difficult questions about the current global order.

No they show people who teach stupid shit are stupid shitheads. 


The Himalayan region of Kashmir, at the northernmost tip of the subcontinent, is surrounded by India, Pakistan, China and Afghanistan. Kashmir had long been a separate kingdom,

it was part of the Mughal and then the Sikh Empire. It was a British protectorate before the Maharaja acceded to India.  

at the confluence of Persian and Indic spheres – hard to simply mark into the Persianate or the Indic (themselves, as Mana Kia points out, somewhat amorphous descriptions). Starting in the 16th century, Kashmir came to be ruled as a province by the Mughal, Afghan, and Sikh empires. When the British ruled the subcontinent, they sold Kashmir to the Dogras, Hindu chiefs from the nearby region of Jammu, in the aftermath of the first Anglo-Sikh War in 1846. Under the Dogras, the newly constituted Jammu and Kashmir was

slightly less shite than previously. But it was plenty shite.  

one of the larger princely states within the broader ambit of British colonial rule. Its strategic significance in the north of the subcontinent was important for the British, especially during political competition with Russia for influence in Central Asia, known as the Great Game.

Not really. The place was very poor. Still, the Summers there were less horrible than on the Indian plains.  


Unlike most princely states, Jammu and Kashmir was one of the few where the religious identity of its ruler was different from those of the majority of its subjects.

There were about 24 non-Muslim majority states ruled by Muslims. There were two or three non-Muslim ruled states with a Muslim majority- e.g. J&K and Kapurthala.  

The Dogras were Hindu, while more than three-quarters of the people in the state were Muslim. This perhaps would not have been so significant had the Dogras not effectively run what the historian Mridu Rai has called ‘a Hindu state’, whereby the rulers privileged the Hindu minority and excluded ‘Muslims in the contest for the symbolic, political and economic resources of the state’. Kashmiri Muslims faced immense repression.

As they had from Afghan and other Muslim overlords 

Most of them were peasants or artisans, forced to pay high taxes to the Dogra authorities. While an anticolonial movement against the British spread across British India, in Jammu and Kashmir, an anti-Dogra freedom movement gained traction in the 1930s and ’40s, only to be sidelined by the sweeping events across the subcontinent.

Nope. It came to power when Sheikh Abdullah became Premier.  


During the Partition of 1947, the territories that the British directly (British India) or indirectly (princely states) governed in the subcontinent became the two new nation-states of India and Pakistan. Independence, and partition, ended nearly two centuries of British colonial rule. Partition was far from inevitable. Leaders of the Muslim League, such as Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, discussed a large federation with largely self-governing autonomous provinces to address the concerns of communities, especially Muslims of the subcontinent, who feared Hindu domination in a democratic India.

The problem was that Muslims liked killing kaffirs. Sadly, Islamists also like killing 'kufr' Muslims who aren't killing kufr Muslims because, obviously, they themselves are fucking kuffar! Kill them! As for the Shias, don't get me started mate.  

In 1947, when the British hastily drew the lines that established India and Pakistan, nearly 1 million people were killed and another 15 million displaced in the ensuing violence.

Sadly, Kashmir Valley was not turned over to the tender mercies of tribals who would have raped everybody to death- including the goats.  

However, the consolidation of India’s other territorial boundaries was not without incident. Junagadh, a princely state in what is today Gujarat, which had a Muslim ruler but a majority Hindu population, was annexed in February 1948; here, a plebiscite was held and an overwhelming majority voted for India. In September 1948, Nehru violently annexed the princely state of Hyderabad during what was called Operation Polo. Nehru crushed movements for self-determination in Northeastern India, in Nagaland

whose charming inhabitants liked head hunting 

and Manipur.

the insurrection began in 1964. Nehru was dead by then.  

In mid-1947, in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, the last Dogra ruler, brutally crushed a local Muslim anti-Dogra rebellion. The rebels wanted Jammu and Kashmir to join Pakistan and were afraid that the Hindu ruler would opt for India. The height of the violence became known as the Jammu Massacre and lasted from October to November 1947.

Hindus and Sikhs ethnically cleansed Muslims so Jammu remained part of India.  

The Dogras, supported by Right-wing forces in India, including the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the ‘National Volunteer Organisation’) ethnically cleansed Muslims from Jammu, changing the demographics of the region from a Muslim to a Hindu majority in a matter of weeks.

Dogras are smart. M.K Rasgotra was a Dogra Brahmin.  

After Pathan Muslims from northwest Pakistan joined their coreligionists in the rebellion against the Dogras and were threatening to take over Kashmir, Singh signed a contested Treaty of Accession with the Indian government. By the terms of the treaty, India sent its army into Kashmir in late October 1947. India and Pakistan subsequently went to war and, in January 1948, India took the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. The UN called for a plebiscite or referendum to be held in the region once hostilities ceased (with the options being India or Pakistan). In 1949, the UN brokered a ceasefire line, later renamed the Line of Control, that divided the region between the two countries.

The UN was as useless then as it is now. At the time the US thought Abdullah might be a Commie in disguise. That's one reason the rug was pulled from underneath him. Still, he had pushed through land reform. The Valley began to prosper.  

At first, Nehru agreed to the plebiscite, confident that the people of the region would vote for India. Yet, as it became clear that a plebiscite would not go in India’s favour, his commitment to it waned.

No. The Resolution was fatally flawed because it required Pakistan to remove 'tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not normally resident therein who have entered the State for the purposes of fighting, and to prevent any intrusion into the State of such elements and any furnishing of material aid to those fighting in the State.' No government in Pakistan, then or now, could stop tribals rampaging. 

While he ostensibly viewed the UN as an important international body tasked with promoting world peace, Nehru resisted a number of UN resolutions. He declared that Pakistan had joined military alliances with the US which made the plebiscite moot.

He was posturing for the benefit of the Indian Left. Still, Abdullah's supporters had started up a Plebiscite front in 1955.  

India used other justifications for its opposition to a referendum, asserting that Pakistan had not removed its army from Kashmir, which the UN had called for, and arguing that local elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly served in lieu of the plebiscite and proved that Kashmiris had opted for India. Nehru maintained that these local elections made a plebiscite redundant. In fact, UN resolutions had called for both countries to remove their troops, but there was no agreement about the manner of troop removal, or their number, nor about the entity that would oversee the plebiscite.

In other words, the resolution was worthless. Why not ask Cows to stop saying 'moo'? That would be cool.  

In 1951, the US also stated that local elections in Kashmir were not a substitute for a plebiscite.

Nor was sodomizing goats. But you can't prevent tribal militias from doing so any chance they get. 

Within the part of Kashmir that it controlled, the Indian government put client regimes in power that were in support of accession to India, promising them greater autonomy within the Indian union. This autonomy was enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which gave the Jammu and Kashmir state ‘special status’ within the Indian Union.

In other words, it would have lower rights. Sheikh Abdullah was cool with that because it meant, when he returned to power, he could push through draconian legislation to incarcerate his opponents.  

It ‘allowed’ the state its own constitution, flag and legislative assembly; in addition, the head of the state was called a prime minister, unlike Indian states where the head was a chief minister.

Under Provincial Autonomy, they were 'Prime Ministers'.  J&K's Premier turned into a Chief Minister after 1965. 

India was supposed to be responsible for defence, foreign affairs and communication. While India argued that Kashmir’s client regimes and local political leaders were ‘democratically elected’, this was not the case. The first election in 1951 for the local assembly was rigged as the pro-accession National Conference ran unopposed in 73 out of 75 seats. Those who opposed Kashmir’s accession to India were not allowed to run.

Pakistan did get around to holding a free and fair general election some twenty years later. It promptly broke in two. Incidentally, Pak occupied Kashmir is supposedly independent.  

Pakistan resisting its troop removal from Kashmir was also based on the argument that a plebiscite could not take place under a local government that was effectively put in power by the Indian state as that would influence the outcome.

Within a few years, India moved beyond the restricted mandate of Article 370, and started to intervene in Kashmir’s internal affairs. Kashmir’s first prime minister and client politician, Sheikh Abdullah, offered some resistance.

His grandson just won the assembly election. It looks as though statehood will be restored next month.  

A 1953 coup replaced him with his deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The Indian government would replace him with the next prime minister, G M Sadiq. Meanwhile, Kashmiri resistance to Indian rule grew, as Kashmiris demanded the plebiscite

Abdullah's supporters did that.  

recommended by the UN and agreed upon by India and Pakistan.

Not really. There was some talk of Nehru letting go of Kashmir, but that ended when he died. Ayub Khan thought the people of the Valley would welcome Pakistan's army in '65. But they hated Pakistan even more than they hated kaffirs.  

In the 1960s, some organised political mobilisations began to speak of a third option – complete independence from both India and Pakistan. Eventually, in the late 1980s, a rigged election and the impact of international developments – including the first Intifada in Palestine and the Afghan defeat of the Soviet Union – sparked an armed rebellion against Indian rule, supported by Pakistan.

Which failed miserably. Pak sponsored terrorists decided killing Pakistanis was safer and more profitable than going across the border and getting slaughtered by the Indian army. Shooting Malala Yousafzai is just so much more satisfying than having some Indian interrogator shove a bumboo up your bum.  

India militarised Kashmir at this time, making it the most militarised region in the world.

Both countries need a place to park their soldiers.  

The 1990s were a harrowing period in Kashmir, with daily news of killings, massacres, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, torture, crackdowns and arrests.

People in Delhi or Islamabad laughed heartily at such news. But, the problem with terrorism is that spill over into your own backyard. Hindu India had less to fear in this regard. Islamic Pakistan has suffered greatly. It can't even protect Chinese nationals. the danger is that Chairman Xi will abandon that bankrupt failed state while forming an alliance with India. After all, Xi wrote the book on how to re-educate Muslim separatists.  I suppose after the Dalai Lama pops his clogs, Nehru's China alliance will be revived. 

Protected by draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Indian army had (and still has) impunity in its control and governing of Kashmir.

Just like Pakistani army in Azad Kashmir or Balochistan.  

As Amnesty International reported in 1995, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed in 2018 and 2019, there is a ‘consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights in Jammu and Kashmir’.

Scrapping statehood- thus bringing the police under the central government- turned out to be a great idea. The contrast between the freedom and security on the Indian side of the border and terrorism afflicted Islamic Pakistan has become stark indeed. Still, no doubt, this lady wants Kashmir valley can come under the Taliban so that people without penises are confined to their own homes.

Kashmir is India’s colony.

No. It is an integral part of the Indian Union. Pakistan occupied Kashmir is a colony.  

The exercise and expansion of Indian territorial sovereignty, especially in Kashmir, is a colonial exercise.

Only if Texas is a colony of the US and Fort Cavazos hosts an army of occupation. 

The exercise of Indian power in Kashmir is coercive, lacks a democratic basis, denies a people self-determination, and is buttressed by an intermediary class of local elites or compradors.

Only in the sense that the exercise of US power in Texas is coercive. Did you know that Islam is not the State religion of Texas? Women there don't even have to wear burqa! How can you say such a place is not the colony of the Satanic kuffar government of Amrika?  

But it is also colonial because India’s rule in Kashmir relies on logics of more ‘classical’ forms of colonialism from Europe to the Global South:

just like Joe Biden is relying on Jewish logic to befool the innocent Muslims of America so that they are not even knowing they are Muslim!  

civilisational discourses, saviourism, mythologies, economic extraction and racialisation. As with all imperial or colonial forces, India has sought to rule over Kashmir through subjugating its people and trampling their rights.

Just as Sir Keir Starmer is presiding over genocide of trillions of Muslims in UK while Joe Biden is personally sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos just because this irks Hamas. 

India’s status as a leader of a global anticolonial order

is like Britain's status as a leader of opposition to the Spanish Inquisition.  

has made it difficult for the world to see Kashmiris as colonised.

Just as it has become difficult to see that Britain is colonized by Sir Keir Starmer who is busy exterminating trillions of indigenous Muslims.  

It has obscured the anticolonial struggle of Kashmiris against India.

Which, sadly, isn't as lucrative as the struggle against the kuffar of Pakistan.  

So, there has not been much support for Kashmir’s anticolonial struggle among various solidarity and anticolonial movements around the world.

Support for the Tibetans was and is useless. The same goes for support for Baloch or Ahmadiyas or non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan.  

For decades, India insisted that the ‘Kashmir conflict’ was a territorial dispute to be solved between India and Pakistan; in recent years, it has denied that there even is a dispute or conflict in Kashmir. India instead maintains that Pakistan is interfering in India’s ‘internal affairs’.

It claims PoK. Pakistan may realize it was a mistake to pretend the place was independent.  

This claim completely erases the agency of Kashmiris who have been demanding their right to self-determination for more than seven decades.

Sadly, this lady's claims don't erase shit.  

Today, from Indian leaders on international forums to the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) IT Cell accounts on social media, you will hear that Kashmir is ‘an integral part of India’. The repetition is often supplemented by narratives of a 5,000-year-old Indian civilisation featuring a prominent role for Kashmir or claims that Kashmir simply belongs to Hindus.

How can anything belong to kaffirs? Next you will be saying that Biden has the right to rule US even though he does not have long beard and an Islamic name! Also, why hasn't he forced Kamala to wear burqa and to stab her Jewish husband repeatedly?  

In reality, Kashmir’s history is far more vibrant than that conceived of by exclusionary Indian nationalist history;

Sadly, because of the Indian army, its vibrant history could not end with everybody- including the goats- getting raped to death by Afghans 

Kashmir defies easy civilisational binaries.

Just like America which is actually contiguous to Mecca Sharif. Yet Joe Biden is pretending it is not now nor has always been an integral part of the Caliphate.  

Through the Silk Road, Kashmir was a pivotal part of East and Central Asia.

Nope. It didn't matter in the slightest. The place was very poor. Still, it could provide a refuge from Mongol or other invaders from time to time.  

Kashmiri traders and travellers journeyed from Srinagar to Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar and Tibet.

Also goats used to visit. This was very very important because vibrant goats were embracing Islam and saying 'death to kaffirs!' and 'USA is the Great Satan!'  

Just as Kashmir was home to vibrant Sanskrit literature like the Rajatarangini, it was also home to Persian literature, like the Waqiat-i-Kashmir

a chronicle of famine and death 

and the Baharistan-i-Shahi.

which was popular amongst goats.  

Kashmir does not exclusively belong to any community – it has been home to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims (including Sunnis and Shias) and Sikhs.

What about goats? Were they not very vibrant?  

Many Indian scholars, too, replicate the notion that Kashmir is ‘integral’ to India. Viewing Kashmir’s history only from the prism of Indian nationalist frameworks, scholars like Sumit Ganguly and Sumantra Bose are unable to move beyond the need to situate Kashmir firmly within the Indian nation-state.

Which is where it has remained for 75 years.  

Even the postcolonial scholar Partha Chatterjee, who, while critical of nationalism and a founder of the field of subaltern studies, conceptualises Kashmir entirely within an Indian constitutional or national framework.

Because Pak army is shit.  

Mainly focusing on the events surrounding 1947 in Kashmir, as well as the decades after the armed rebellion of the 1980s, an earlier generation of Indian scholars tried to find answers to the ‘failures’ of Indian democracy to better accommodate Kashmir within its federal structure, refusing to acknowledge the denial of self-determination and imposition of a colonial occupation.

Just like Joe Biden who won't even admit that US troops are forcefully subjugating trillions of Texan Muslim goats.  

More recently, the field of Critical Kashmir Studies has emerged to contest these statist framings, placing the study of Kashmir more firmly into anticolonial and anti-occupation epistemologies.

Sadly, the field of Critical Texan Studies has, as yet, failed to place the study of Tacos on a firmly anti-Biden footing. This is because relevant goats are lacking in vibrancy probably because they are not playing pivotal role in the Silk road.  

Scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies

are less vibrant than goats. Sad. 

examine how colonialism, settler-colonialism and occupation are all important aspects of India’s relationship with Kashmir, elements of which India has used to fortify its rule in Kashmir over time, and to manage Kashmiri resistance.

Just like the illegal American occupation of Texas.  


In truth, Kashmir was made integral to India in the aftermath of Partition.

India has a unitary constitution. There is no 'dual sovereignty' such as is enjoyed by Texas.  

Through Kashmir’s client regimes, as well as the type of state-building that occurred under those regimes, India was able to further legally, economically and politically integrate Kashmir into the Indian Union. In my book Colonizing Kashmir (2023), I examine the decade that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, was in power, from 1953-63. As a client politician, he was tasked with confirming the state’s contested accession to India, but also with ensuring that Kashmiris realised that being under Indian rule would benefit them.

He was a good administrator. The stupid Kamraj plan ousted him.  

The Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes initially supposed that, if Kashmiris were to see the benefits of Indian rule, alternative political aspirations, such as independence or merging with Pakistan, could be kept at bay. As Nehru is reported to have told his predecessor, Sheikh Abdullah: ‘India would bind Kashmir in golden chains.’

Reported by a liar. India had no fucking gold.  

I argue that Bakshi did this by utilising the politics of life, in which the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment and progress to secure the wellbeing of Kashmir’s population and to normalise the occupation for multiple audiences.

This proves he was very evil.  

In an attempt to secure the livelihoods of Kashmiris, the politics of life entailed foregrounding the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education and provision of basic services. At the same time, demands for self-determination were heavily repressed.

Not really. Kashmiris are a sensible people.  

Policies focused on land reform, building schools and increasing employment opportunities.

Bakshi was acutely invested in financially integrating Kashmir to India. He differed from Abdullah in seeing financial integration as important to development. Between 1953-1954, Bakshi renegotiated Kashmir’s financial relationship with the Indian government, placing certain fiscal demands on the Indian state with regards to grants and agricultural subsidies. The new arrangement also undermined Kashmir’s autonomy, ensuring that it would not be self-sufficient.

i.e. less reliant on medical and educational services provided by goats. 

In this way, Kashmir grew dependent on the Indian state,

i.e. it stopped being as poor as shit 

which gave the Indian government great leverage. Bakshi’s example is important to understand that colonial occupations are not a one-way process.

Similarly, the fact that Texans have a good standard of living doesn't mean they aren't actually starving Muslims who have been befooled by Biden into thinking they are kaffirs of some disgusting sort.  

They require native enablers, local collaborators who have agency in determining its contours.

and are respectably married to other goats 

In the 1950s and ’60s, India also turned to film and tourism in order to further India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir, especially for Indian audiences.

The TV series 'Dallas' furthered America's colonial occupation of Muslim majority Texas- especially for audiences made up of kuffar goats.  

Dozens of Indian films, including most of the leading blockbusters like Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) or Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965), were made in Kashmir during this time, and middle- and upper-class Indian tourists flocked to Kashmir throughout the year for fun and adventure.

Pakistan was much nicer that India in that it sent terrorists not tourists.  

Through their personal or cinematic experiences of Kashmir’s beautiful landscape – its rivers, lakes, forests and mountains – Kashmir became what Ananya Jahanara Kabir calls a ‘territory of desire’ for the Indian imaginary, consolidating colonial claims.

Just as 'Dallas' consolidated Kuffar colonial claims on the purely Islamic lands of Texas.  

Kashmir was also a place of religious attachment for Indian Hindus,

which is why Kashmiris like killing Hindus. Sadly, two can play at that game.  

and cultivation of Kashmir’s links with Hinduism was important to the early Indian colonial project.

Whereas killing Hindus and Sikhs was important to the early Pakistani colonial project. Sadly, they eventually had to settle for killing Bengalis, Baloch, Ahmadiyas and each other.  

Nehru and other Indian leaders would say that India’s secular ideals (as opposed to Pakistan’s religious ones) were proven superior through its only Muslim-majority state ‘choosing’ India.

Abdullah and his son and his grandson have chosen India. The last named is back in office as Chief Minister.  

Despite exploiting Kashmir’s ‘secular credentials’ for international audiences,

which is what America did when it represented pious Texan Muslims as 'cowboys' in films like 'Stagecoach' and 'Red River'.  

for domestic ones, India largely presented Kashmir as a Hindu place

Texans were presented as speaking English and going to Church whereas the fact is 1.5 trillion Texans are Arabic speaking Muslims.  

and the heart of Indian civilisation from ancient to present times. Muslim monuments, mosques, figures and histories were erased or toned down in tourism materials for Indian travellers.

Who were escaping from supposedly Texan 'cowboys'.  

In the dozens of Indian films made in Kashmir

they were typical rich girl loves poor boy or, more complicatedly, poor girl is actually rich girls who loves rich boy who is actually very poor because two babies were swapped at birth or some such hooey.  

during this time, it was rare to find a Muslim character, astounding given its Muslim-majority status.

Not astounding given the nature of the films. If the characters involved were Muslim rich girl can have temporary marriage with poor boy or, if things are the other way around, rich dude can have 4 poor wives and just keep divorcing them as fresh goods enter the market.  

Through educational institutions, school curricula and cultural reform, the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes have attempted to produce certain kinds of Kashmiris, in particular, good Kashmiri secular subjects.

Why not concentrate on churning out terrorists who will force women to stay at home?  

Yet, as a part of this secularism, historical and literary works have foregrounded Hindu geographies, imaginaries and histories, relying on British colonial and Brahmanical understandings of Kashmir’s history. For example, the ‘origin’ story of Kashmir (basically, how the region came to be) used in history curricula and tourism manuals relied on mythological Sanskrit texts like the Rajatarangini. It portrayed Hindus as indigenous or aboriginal to Kashmir, and Kashmir being a place of ancient Hindu learning.

Whereas, as with Texas, Kashmir was actually contiguous with Mecca Sharif. Its original inhabitants spoke Arabic till subjugated by Joe Biden.  

Muslims were depicted as ‘invaders’.

Whereas they were actually indigenous terrorists.  

Accounts of Kashmir’s past rely on Sanskrit texts (and also conflate mythology with history) while erasing other works in Persian that offer different narratives of history and belonging by drawing upon Kashmir’s significance for the Islamic world.

Sadly, that significance now lies in the fact that if you do terrorism there, your life will be very brief.  

In short, Indian nationalist history has relied on Orientalist and Brahmanical renderings of history to help enable anti-Muslim history.

Whereas this lady's history relies on stupidity and ignorance.  

This has then furthered the idea that Kashmir is ‘integral’ to India.

Not to mention a place that is lethal for Islamist terrorists.  

Bakshi’s decade in power consolidated India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir, but it still did not result in emotionally integrating Kashmiris to the Indian union. The year 1963, when Bakshi was ousted from power, saw the flourishing of large movements for self-determination in Kashmir.

If so, why were Pakistanis not welcomed in 1965? 

After the Indian government massively rigged a local election in 1987,

The Nehru dynasty and the Abdullah dynasty were playing silly games. Sadly, both dynasties have grown stronger over the past couple of years. 

Kashmiris took up armed resistance.

Nafsa and her parents invaded the US towards this end.  

The Indian state resorted to killings, torture and disappearances.

Nafsa and her parents became US citizens. Their taxes helped pay for the slaughter of 1.3 million Muslims and the displacement of tens of millions more in the so called 'war on terror'. No doubt, Nafsa is delighted that the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. If only India could be defeated militarily so Kashmiri girls can enjoy the benefits of Sharia law! 

This does not mean that the decades prior were peaceful –

It did mean the Kashmir Valley didn't turn into a Taliban training camp and US drones didn't keep slaughtering its people. Evil Indian Army was responsible for this tragic outcome.

state repression was high – but that various strategies were foregrounded in different moments, especially in response to Kashmiri resistance and international developments.

In August 2019, India revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status,

thus greatly curbing terrorism and corruption. Now the Abdullahs are back in charge, things will worsen.  

fully annexing the region, and advancing its settler-colonial ambitions.

Only in the sense that Nafsa is advancing her settler-colonial ambition to turn the US into an terrorist training camp.  

The government revoked laws that had previously restricted land, property and employment rights to Kashmir’s permanent residents.

They remain. Sadly, the Kashimri Muslims colonial-settler desire to dominate Ladakh has been frustrated. Will Jammu be split off or will it be left to the tender mercies of the corrupt Abdullah clan?  

These restrictions had been insisted upon by Kashmir’s earlier client regimes to protect the demographics of the Muslim-majority state. Jammu and Kashmir’s Muslims now fear demographic change and an accelerated settler-colonial agenda by which Indian (Hindus) can now buy land and property and settle in the region, undermining the movement for self-determination. Indian officials are already on the record calling for ‘Israeli-like’ settlements to be built in Kashmir for Hindus.

Christian Americans may equally fear Islamist settler-colonialism. Did you know Muslims are buying property in your neighbourhood? This is because they plan to eat your puppy dog.  

The Modi government’s removal of Article 370 was based on a

decision by the Supreme Court which said the place had 'no shred of sovereignty'. 

long-standing demand by Hindu nationalists

those evil bastards don't want Muslim girls to be shot in the head if they have the temerity to go to shcool 

who felt unhappy that the Indian state under the Indian National Congress was trying to appease Kashmir’s Muslims with promises of autonomy.

Indira Gandhi didn't offer anyone autonomy. She offered them forced sterilization. Still, it must be said, had she been alive, there would have been no ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits.  

This decision was immensely popular in India.

though the biggest beneficiary was the Kashmir Valley.  

Today, India is again using the politics of life, or the idea that it is benefiting Kashmiris through development and better opportunity to justify the abrogation, while also using film and tourism to declare normalcy.

India just keeps winning. Evil Indians in America may also prevent Islamist Colonialist in that country from properly slaughtering kaffirs there. Also, did you know many American girls go to school? Why is Biden not arranging for them to be shot in the head?  

In the current phase of Indian control, the Indian state has completely undermined civil society.

i.e. shooting school girls in the head.  

All possible modes of dissent – from pro-freedom groups

shooting shooting-girls in the head 

to journalism,

praising bearded dudes who shoot school-girls in the head 

academia and human rights organisations

shitty blathershites. 

– have been clinically silenced.

Not, sadly, with bullets in the head. Even evil Indian bastards understand that only school-girls deserve  this benefit.  

From internet shutdowns, to the arrests of journalists or human rights defenders, to the surveilling of social media sites and restricting movement by suspending passports, India has left no stone unturned to criminalise

terrorism. Indeed, they are even cracking down on corruption. Who will shoot school-girls in the head if this terrorism continues?  

political speech and project normalcy to domestic or international audiences. A new description of ‘white-collar terrorist’ is given to anyone who contests Indian sovereignty, and anti-terror legislation is used against all forms of expression, including for example, against students cheering for the Pakistani cricket team, as happened last year.

Cricket is un-Islamic. Shoot them in the back of the head- more particularly if they are female.  

Because Kashmiri Muslims fear losing their livelihoods or property, many have been forced to resort to self-censorship.

Whereas, in America, Nafsa's family didn't need to self-censor. They loudly condemned America's war on terror. Sadly they failed to shoot their daughter in the head even though she went to school.  

The United Arab Emirates and Israel have signed agreements with the Indian government, ensuring foreign investment for Kashmir. India has long exploited Kashmir’s natural resources, including water. During the cold winter months, Kashmiris face electricity scarcity and loadshedding. Yet India sells Kashmir’s hydroelectric power to Rajasthan and other states.

Sadly, it is refusing to shoot Kashmiri school-girls in the head. 

Kashmir could see escalating climate disaster; experts have long warned about its receding glaciers and other ecological fragilities, exacerbated by decades of military occupation.

by Pakistan and China. Incidentally Pak handed over some of its captured Kashmiri territory to China. 

With the Indian government giving contracts to Indian companies to mine for minerals,

like Pakistan, it should be giving contracts to Chinese companies. Also, why did India not host Osama bin Laden? Why is Pakistan alone having to provide hospitality to all sorts of Islamist nutjobs? Where is the Indian Malala Yousafzai? Why are Indians not shooting school-girls in the head? It is because they have 'settler-colonial' mentality just like Americans or Britishers.  

Kashmir is further vulnerable as these companies do not adhere to environmental regulations, nor do they have knowledge of the local ecology.

Islamists adhere to environmental regulations. To promote sustainability they shoot school-girls in the head. 

India’s contemporary colonisation is defined by surveillance technology, the arms trade, neoliberal resource extraction, criminalisation of all forms of dissent, and climate change.

All that is well and good but what about shooting school-girl's in the head? How is it that only Islamist nutters are bothering with this vital activity?

Many countries around the world have their own Kashmirs,

some do have budding Islamic terrorists who want to kill kaffirs. However, many Muslim countries don't tolerate any such people and kill them before they can start killing. 

places they have subjugated either through overt forms of violence or through assimilating forms of control, and at times both.

Hafsa and family were eager to emigrate and take citizenship in the country which, in this century, has killed more Muslims than any other non-Muslim power. Perhaps, she like Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai gets some cash from the Pakistanis. If so she needs to register as a foreign agent. Otherwise she may go to jail. 

Contemporary forms of colonialism exist across authoritarian and democratic governments.

No. The age of slavery and colonies and empires has passed. It was succeeded by an age of immigration from shithole countries to places still ruled by White peeps. If Kamala Harris becomes POTUS, she will be the first President both of whose parents were immigrants. This may cause some bigots to say that America has been colonized by puppy dog devouring invaders. Otherwise, such outcome would be impossible in a genuine democracy.

In the case of India, they exist in a country that claims to be the largest democracy in the world.

It is a democracy. Abdullah's grandson is back in power as Chief Minister in Srinagar. Perhaps Nehru's great-grandson will achieve something similar in Delhi. But this will only happen if his party gets more votes. As for terrorists or nutters like Hafsa, nobody gives a shit about them. If they kill, they are quickly killed. If they tell stupid lies, we denounce them as stupid liars who have invaded America and eaten everybody's pussy. 

The case of Kashmir not only challenges this claim but contests the idea of India altogether.