Russell's introduction to the Tractatus

Russell, in his introduction to the Tractatus wrote-

 

Mr Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whether or not it prove to give the ultimate truth on the matters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and scope and profundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world. Starting from the principles of Symbolism

there are no such principles.  

and the relations which are necessary between words and things

there are no necessary relations 

in any language, it applies the result of this inquiry to various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism

which don't exist 

and out of misuse of language.

The above is an example of the misuse of language. Just because you can give a name to a thing doesn't mean that 'principles' regarding it exist. Also, if a thing is a traditional solution to something else, then it must have had some utility for some set of people. Another set may say 'but this is useless for our purpose! Thus, what you guys are up to is 'misuse''. But, this is merely a case of one man's meat being another man's poison. 

The logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference are first dealt with.

Different people can have different logics for different purposes. If Logic logic 'exists in the world like zoology' maybe it has 'unicity'- i.e. a unique representation. But we can be sure it isn't whatever shite Russell & Witless were playing with.

Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystiche).

This was written in 1922 by which time all Physical theories and principles were known to have been overturned or . Ethically, Russell- a pacifist who had been sent to jail during the Great War- & Witless, who volunteered & spent time in the front-line- were on opposite sides. But it was the Bolshevik Revolution which had really shaken up notions of right and wrong. 

 In order to understand Mr Wittgenstein's book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language.

 i.e.- a hypothetical language where the structure of a sentence mirrors the exact logical structure of the fact or thought it expresses.  It has zero ambiguity, a strict one-to-one match between words and simple objects, and rules as precise as mathematics. 

Sadly, it would be fucking retarded, not perfect in any way. By contrast, a magically perfect language- in which saying 'Shazam!' gives you super powers- would be totes cool. 

There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology.

Neurology. The answer is different things happen to different people at different times. What gets reinforced is what is useful- i.e. has survival value.  

Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology.

No. It belongs to game theory. There are coordination & discoordination problems. Epistemology is merely a theory about knowledge. It isn't itself knowledge. Thus, if there were a perfect logical language, Epistemology would not be part of it. The wider problem of impredicativity would be explored by Godel, Church, Turing & Tarski. Russell & Witless never grasped this.  

Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood;

My farts convey the truth- which is that I have farted- without any problem at all.  

this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question.

Getting closer to the truth may involve learning some 'special science'. Sadly, what Witless was up to wasn't science. It was stupidity. 

Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?

Anyone can use anything to be a symbol of anything else. All that matters is whether the thing is useful.  

This last is a logical question,

It really isn't.  There can be a logic without the excluded middle- even if Russel thought it would be useless- and, it turns out, it can do pretty much anything any other logic can do. 

and is the one with which Mr Wittgenstein is concerned.

The poor chap had probably lost his marbles during the war. A brother of his killed himself when his troops stopped talking orders. Unlike England, which could reform itself, Hapsburg Austia was fucked.  

He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism,

as I am concerned with the conditions for accurate farting. If I could just get the composition of intestinal gasses right, I could transform the universe into one made entirely out of cheese-cake.  

i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence means something quite definite.

i.e. it turns into a fart of some type.  

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

It can be made as precise as we like in a protocol bound manner for some useful purpose. That is how the law works.  

Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism: (1) the conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols;

Anyone is welcome to set such conditions for themselves. Thus, when my ex-wife said to me 'you have a tiny dick. Also, you smell bad. I am fucking the milk-man', I said 'how adorable you are when you babble nonsense!'  

(2) the conditions for uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols.

Which could be fulfilled if there is 'modal collapse'- i.e. there is only one possible world- in which case Godel's proof of God would be valid. But so would my proof that the Big Bang occurred because of a tachyonic fart I emitted in 1984 after drinking ten pints and eating a vindaloo.  

A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a defunite and unique meaning.

Such a language could consist entirely of farts. That's not a good thing. The lesson of the 'monkey's paw' is 'don't wish for stuff which will turn out to be a fucking night-mare- e.g. wishing that your cat comes back to life & it does but it is a zombie cat which want to feed on human brains. 

Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect languagenot that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.

This is clearly false. Meaning is about reception which is about signal extraction. It is hermeneutic, not logico-deductive.  

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.

In which case, what Russell & Witless were doing was no business of concern to language- or, for that matter, farting.  

Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known.

Fuck off! There is such a thing as sarcasm.  

In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.

What is the structure of the fact that I just farted?  

This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein's theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact

there is no such thing. Facts may have something in common and sentences may have something in common but there is nothing that facts and sentences have to have in common. A particilar  'intension' (like 'facts' meaning alethic propositions) may be subsumed by a broader intension ('facts' and 'value judgments' are subsumed under the broader 'intension' of 'propositions' ) but that intension may be trivial. What is common between a sentence and a fact is what is also common between them and the plaintive memory of a fart. 

cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language. 

with equal truth, we may contend that language says nothing else save on those occassions when it so plaintive a memory of a fart that it fails to do so.  

It can, in his phraseology, only be shown,

it can be displayed with no words spoken. But if the thing is being shown there is some type of language involved- perhaps that of gesture or, more commonly, the lifting of the skirt and the act of pointing to the vulva. As Tagore said 'I am a beggar maid who lifts her skirt to cover her head'.  Sadly, having a great big beard is a disadvantage in that line of business. 

not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure.

 Even the worst grammar-Nazi accepts that a sentence can have no fucking structure and yet be meaningful.  

The first requisite of an ideal language would be that

it had magical powers over things. Harry Potter & his friends keep using Latin phrases to cast spells. That's totes cool. If you don't know Latin, then playing with your wand is just masturbation. It isn't magic at all.  

there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples.

We are welcome to do this for any useful purpose of our own. Pharmacists have different names for the many different types of pills they dispence. But this is true of most inventories held by different types of enterprise. 

The problem is that 'simples' are discovered not to be simple as time goes by and knowledge increases. The 'extension' corresponding to the 'intension changes. It may be that the 17 elementary particles known to the Standard Model are 'simples'. But we can't be sure there isn't something even more simple or elementary. Physics would not have been able to make progress if it had been confined to Witless's 'perfect' language'.  

A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols.

Bertrand is derived from the Old German 'glorious raven'.  Names can be simple or complicated.  

In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.

Nothing known at the time  actually was simple. Even now, we can't be sure elementary particles are truly elementary. 

...Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless.

One man's meat is another's poison. I don't understand a word of Chinese. This does not mean what Chinese people say to each other in their own language is senseless. Philosophical propositions are stupid, paranoid & false. They aren't senseless even if that is the intention. 'Green ideas sleep furiously' means something to me even if it was meant to mean nothing at all. 

We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.

'Why are you such a cunt?' is not senseless even if it isn't a question I can answer.  

Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

Language may have grammar and logic may be expressible in it, but no natural logic has a 'logic' anymore than it has a cousin who works as an Actuary in Vancouver. 

... He compares linguistic expression to projection in geometry.

What we say may, in some sense, express our state of mind to some other person who knows us well. Thus, though Professor Russell gave exactly the same lecture today as he did this time last year, his TA could detect the sorrow & bitterness he was experiencing because of the untimely death of his goldfish.  

A geometrical figure may be projected in many ways:

by people 

each of these ways corresponds to a different language,

nope. They are all embedded in the same language- viz. that of diagrammatic geometry.  

but the projective properties of the original figure remain unchanged whichever of these ways may be adopted.

It depends on whether the 'original figure' can itself do projective geometry. When I look in the mirror, that is what I am doing. I can change 'invariants'- e.g. remove  a ketchup stain on my tie- in the projection by making changes on myself. 

These projective properties

which exist only in the minds of mathematicians. High dimensional projective properties can give rise to positive geometries such that the physical properties of particles (like locality and unitarity) emerge naturally from purely geometric boundary properties.

correspond to that which in his theory the proposition and the fact must have in common,

which is nothing 

if the proposition is to assert the fact.

The guy making the proposition is doing the asserting. Indeed, 'this is a proposition' is an assertion. 

In certain elementary ways this is, of course, obvious.

It is obviously false because nothing we know is 'elementary'.  

It is impossible, for example, to make a statement about two men (assuming for the moment that the men may be treated as simples), without employing two names,

One could say 'fat Vivek' as opposed to 'morbidly obese flatulent Vivek' which is what happens when us Viveks get together at the local branch of the Vivek Iyer society.  

and if you are going to assert a relation between the two men it will be necessary that the sentence in which you make the assertion shall establish a relation between the two names.

Russell and Alfred North Whitehead' treated relations as fundamental, primitive notions. Norbert Wiener realized that if you could define an ordered pair using only standard, unordered sets, then any binary relation could simply be defined as a set of these ordered pairs. Kuratowski simplified Weiner's notation in 1921. Weiner was Russell's student but Russel wasn't impressed.  Russell continued to view relations as real, intensional properties existing in the world (e.g., "being to the left of"). He viewed Wiener’s definition as a clever mathematical trick rather than a true philosophical analysis of what a relation actually is. 

... Mr Wittgenstein begins his theory of Symbolism with the statement (2.1): We make to ourselves pictures of facts.

We may do. Some people are good at visualisation. Others aren't.  

A picture, he says, is a model of the reality, and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of the picture: the picture itself is a fact.

A picture is a picture. That's a fact. We may say 'this photograph of x stabbing y establishes the fact that x killed y'. But we may be wrong. X wasn't stabbing Y. He was trying to perform a tracheotomy. Sady, Y choked to death. It was too late for X to save Y's life. This fact has been established by the medical examiner. 

The fact that things have a certain relation to each other is represented by the fact that in the picture its elements have a certain relation to one another.

This 'relation' is an 'ordered pair'. It isn't some self-subsistent feature of reality. Weiner's 1914 result showed relations were set-theoretic. In other words, only the extension mattered. This made for ontological economy. You didn't have all sorts of intensions filling up reality. This got rid of the third man problem (Bradley's regress).  The idealists were saying relations were logically impossible because if there is a relation then there must be another relation to relate it and another relation to relate the relating and so on ad infinitum. Russell & Whitehead didn't solve the problem but treated relations as primitives. But this would naturally give rise to a notion that strict limits on language should exist so that 'simples' stayed 'simples'. But this is like the Pythagoreans saying irrational numbers (literally 'surds') should not be spoken off!  

Frege's approach (concepts are unsaturated or not determinate) led Witless in this direction. 'The concept horse is not a concept' shows that it is a concept precisely because it is unsaturated. 

In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all.

That may have been true of the pictures in the Royal Academy in the year Russell was born. But, the first Impressionist exhibition was held a couple of years later. By the time Russell wrote this, there were Cubists & Fauvists & Surrealists & so forth.  

What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner rightly or falsely is its form of representation (2.161, 2.17).

That's what it can't have save in the trivial sense that a picture is really a picture & reality is really reality, not a fucking picture at all. 

We speak of a logical picture of a reality when we wish to imply only so much resemblance as is essential to its being a picture in any sense, that is to say, when we wish to imply no more than identity of logical form.

Russell's 'relation similarity' differs from our category theoetical isomorphism in that for the former there is a static colletion of elements whereas for the latter 'up to isomorphism' means two systems are different names for the same thing  

The logical picture of a fact, he says, is a Gedanke.

Is that a fact? What is the logical picture of the logical picture that is a fact? Is it the Gedanke which farts itself?  

Why did Russell give this shite the time of day? My theory is that Witless was the child G.E Moore & Russell had together. At one time, it seemed precocious- but there were signs all was not well with the little butt baby. Then it became a soldier & went round the twist in the trenches. Let's be nice to it, lest it blows its brains out. 

Russel could see that Witless's notion of a number as the exponent of an operation meant his Logic couldn't handle Peano Arithmetic. Russel says Witless's system could be extended to transfinite numbers but this requires have to have quantification over infinite domains to get Peano induction. Thus Witless was a fucking retard with respect to Long Division which everybody else had mastered by about the age of 7. 

More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr Wittgenstein's attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure.

A fact differes from a deduction in that verification is not ratiocinative. We may be able to visualise certain facts but not others. Verification is a separate matter. 

It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact,

even if is actually a fart 

but the structure cannot itself be put into words,

only in the sense that only words can be put into words.  

since it is a structure of words, as well as of the facts to which they refer.

This structure exists only in the mind that posits it. But a mind could equally posit all things as farts.  

Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language,

because complex branching algorithms make Witless's tiny little brain hurt.  

and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy.

Not to mention long division.  

The right method of teaching philosophy, he says, would be to confine oneself to propositions of the sciences, stated with all possible clearness and exactness, leaving philosophical assertions to the learner, and proving to him, whenever he made them, that they are meaningless.

Also, if a kid starts doing long division, teechur should beat the shit out of him.  Had Ludwig remained an elementary school teacher in rural Austria, sooner or later, the villagers would have kicked his head in. The fucker lied on oath so as to avoid going to jail for his brutal beatings of village kids. 

It is true that the fate of Socrates might befall a man who attempted this method of teaching, but we are not to be deterred by that fear, if it is the only right method

Witless was rich and well connected. Also he had no qualms about lying under oath. Still, if he had continued to teach kids, sooner or later their mothers would have smashed his head in. Cambridge had a duty to take this moronic sadist off the streets. The good thing about teaching muscular Cambridge blues is that. if you punch them with full force, they think you are trying to tickle them. Say what you like about the British Public School, it breeds thickos with proportionately thicker hides.  

. It is not this that causes some hesitation in accepting Mr Wittgenstein's position, in spite of the very powerful arguments which he brings to its support. What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit.

The saving grace of the aristocratic British thicko is that he had a sense of humour. Witless was like one of those Hindu Swamys who scolds you for being materialistic while demanding more and more money so as to be able to buy himself a fleet of Rolls Royce cars.  

The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region.

Rather than the expressible region of the Law which says 'don't beat kids you worthless retard!'  

Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said.

The reverse is the case. What can be shown can always be said by a sufficiently skilled language user. G.E Moore, the Classicist, would call this 'ekphrasis'. Back in those days, there was no Pornhub, so people had to do with descriptions which, however, couldn't always be shown because of the anatomical limitations of the human body & the fact that octopuses really aren't that kinky. 

Thus, what can be shown is a small proper sub-set of what can be said. Pretending otherwise is the mark of either a moron or a charlatan.  

It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort.

Not being allowed to do long division would impoverish our lives.  

There is one purely logical problem in regard to which these difficulties are peculiarly acute. I mean the problem of generality. In the theory of generality it is necessary to consider all propositions of the form fx where fx is a given propositional function. This belongs to the part of logic which can be expressed, according to Mr Wittgenstein's system.

Brouwer, Heytig, Weyl etc. were showing that constructive math- a logic without the excluded middle- could do what any other math could do. Godel-Gentzen (or Kolmogorov) negative translation is the key.  

But the totality of possible values of x which might seem to be involved in the totality of propositions of the form fx is not admitted by Mr Wittgenstein among the things that can be spoken of, for this is no other than the totality of things in the world, and thus involves the attempt to conceive the world as a whole; 'the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical'

Einstein was showing the universe is finite but unbounded. This wasn't mystical. It was mathematical.  

hence the totality of the values of x is mystical (6.45).

The word 'mysical' comes from the Greek 'mystikos'  meaning "secret" or "concealed". But secrets can be revealed. I suppose, one could punish those who reveal secrets- like how to do long division- but the Mums of kids you punish may beat you to death. 

This is expressly argued when Mr Wittgenstein denies that we can make propositions as to how many things there are in the world, as for example, that there are more than three.

Was Russell writing this with tongue in cheek?  

These difficulties suggest to my mind some such possibility as this: that every language has, as Mr Wittgenstein says, a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit.

Tarski proposed the notion of 'meta-language' in 1931.  

Mr Wittgenstein would of course reply that his whole theory is applicable unchanged to the totality of such languages. The only retort would be to deny that there is any such totality. The totalities concerning which Mr Wittgenstein holds that it is impossible to speak logically are nevertheless thought by him to exist, and are the subject-matter of his mysticism.

Why be mystical when it is more useful to be mathematical? God's economy (management of the world) may be mysterious, but our economics gains by being mathematical. Von Neumann's game theory turned out to be very useful. Witless's 'language-games' weren't useful at all. 

The later Witless thought there were 'hinge propositions' - i.e. foundational, ungrounded background beliefs that stand fast for us and make all empirical inquiry, doubting, and rational justification possible. 

Sadly, the fact that there is a door doesn't mean we have to believe it has hinges. It may be a sliding door or a big rock the cyclops rolls to block the entrance to his cave. 

The totality resulting from our hierarchy would be not merely logically inexpressible,

if logic has unicity. It doesn't.  

but a fiction, a mere delusion, and in this way the supposed sphere of the mystical would be abolished.

No mystery exists if you dogmatically assert 'the Butler did it'.  

Such an hypothesis is very difficult, and I can see objections to it which at the moment I do not know how to answer.

There were smart people who were building on Russell & Whitehead's work who would provide the answers in the Thirties. Witless wasn't one of them.  

Yet I do not see how any easier hypothesis can escape from Mr Wittgenstein's conclusions. Even if this very difficult hypothesis should prove tenable, it would leave untouched a very large part of Mr Wittgenstein's theory, though possibly not the part upon which he himself would wish to lay most stress. As one with a long experience of the dficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.

That point was that Logic doesn't have unicity. There are more logics than there are mathematicians though it is also true that, as Doestoevsky paraphrased Pascal, 'there are more monks than reason'.  

But to have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance.

Not if it can't handle long division.  

This merit, in my opinion, belongs to Mr Wittgenstein's book, and makes it one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect.

We can't neglect Frank Ramsey who did a lot of the translating for the Tractatus. But we must shit on retards almost as stupid as ourselves. 

Gadamer's Verdict on German Philology

Gadamer, who was born in 1900, explains how his generation escaped the spell of the Idealistic, Nation-building, project of 'German Philology'.  To my mind, this explains why the cretin Heidi had salience.

Above all, it was the intensity with which Heidegger evoked Greek philosophy that worked on us like a magical spell. The fact that such a spell was more a counterexample than an example of what his own questioning was intending to do was something we were scarcely aware of at the time. Heidegger’s Destruktion of Greek metaphysics was concerned not just with the consciousness-based idealism of the modern age, but likewise with its origins in Greek metaphysics. Heidegger’s “de- struction” and radical critique also called into question the Christian character of theology as well as the scientific character of philosophy.

But the method used by this 'radical critique' was bad philology- lying about what words mean or how they came to be. In other words, Heidi's spell, as 'counter-example', was that of, not an utile Medea, but unequivocal Circe. German Philology could either cut off German theology from Christianity, German philosophy from Science, or it could have its swinish throat hermeneutically slit to make blutwurst.

The truth is, Blood and Iron had failed Germany. So had philology. But blutwurst is high value added. Surgical Steel is high value added. Could German Hermeneutics be high value adding? Sure. Provided it kicked, Karl Lachmann type, historicist Philology in the goolies not once but again and again.

What a contrast to the bloodless academic philosophizing of the time, which moved within an alienated Kantian or Hegelian language and attempted once again either to bring transcendental idealism to perfection or else to overcome it!

Bloodless, yes. But, precisely for that reason, hermeneutically transparent. No great philological mischief was being worked. 

Sadly, hermeneutics ought not to merge horizons. Where there is a coordination game there will be a cheap talk pooling equilibrium. Discoordination games- for hedging & capitalization of income effects- generate costly signal based separating equilibria which are useful. Even God's mysterious economy depends on a volatile chrematics such that, for Poetry as Socioproctology, Beauty's ontological function is, as Gadamer says, to bridge the gap between ideal and real. 

In my case, this is done by a well-timed fart. 

Sen's confabulated Memoir

Sen has come to believe that he knows Sanskrit.  Sadly, he remains ignorant of it but, because he has brain-washed himself, he won't look up words in the dictionary to ensure that his memory isn't playing tricks on him.

Consider the following excerpt from his memoir- 

The self-indulgence of what is called in Sanskrit smriticharan (‘the grazing of one’s own memory’)

this is a Bengali word which it would be difficult to duplicate in Sanskrit.  Ātmasmṛtivihāraḥ is what springs to mind.

may not interest others at all, who may nevertheless be curious about what actually happened and how the experiences and thoughts of another person can be understood – and shared

We may be curious about some new method of sharing experiences- e.g. by using farts rather than words-  but are are not curious at all about how Memoirs are written. Will they correspond to the facts or will there be an element of confabulation? In Sen's case, there is a bit of both. 

He tells us that, around the age of 30, on returning to India, after teaching in America and visiting other countries, he wandered through the memories of the three continents he had seen, while chewing upon this philosophical cud. 

As I found my feet in Delhi, I had time to think a little about my earlier years,

his family, being Hindu, had to flee first Buddhist Burma and then Muslim East Bengal. He had also sojourned in Britain which had ruled Bengal for almost 200 years. Sadly, the Hindu Mahatama asked the Brits to 'Quit India'.  

filled with a wide range of experiences. I decided that there were two quite different ways of thinking about the civilizations of the world.

One would say that the Brits should not have been asked to 'quit India' nor the Hindus to quit Burma or Pakistan. The other would say that this was the inevitable result of the collapse of multi-ethnic Empires and the rise of Nation States.  

One approach takes the ‘fragmentary’ perspective and sees a variety of features as manifestations of quite distinct civilizations.

For example, looking at the Flag of Pakistan and understanding that it had an Islamic civilization. If you were a kaffir, you'd better scarper sharpish.  

This approach, with the additional feature of hostility between the fragments, has come much into vogue recently, threatening a lasting ‘clash of civilizations’.

Fuck did Sen think was happening during his childhood when Bengalis kept telling the Brits to fuck the fuck off?  

The other approach is ‘inclusive’, and concentrates on looking for different manifestations of ultimately one civilization – perhaps we should call it a world civilization – which generates different flowers through an interrelated life of roots and branches.

This can be achieved under a World State or Global Empire.  

This book is not, of course, an investigation of the nature of civilization, but, as the reader will see, its sympathies are with an inclusive rather than a fragmentary understanding of what the world offers.

In other words, its 'sympathies' are with fantasy or confabulation, not reality. 

From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the Nazi invasions in the last century, from communal clashes to battles between religious politics, there have been tussles between varying convictions, and yet there have also been forces for unity working against the clashes

No we haven't. One side won decisively. The other side lost. The Crusader States collapsed. Islamic rule was reestablished. The Nazis were defeated. Germany was occupied and 'de-Nazified'. India's communal clashes (e.g. Direct Action Day in 1946) led directly to the partition of the country. Sen's parents lost their ancestral homes.  

. We can see, if we look, how understanding can spread from one group to another and from one country to the next.

Understanding is not the problem. It is control of resources. Hitler didn't invade Poland because he was having trouble understanding what his Polish plumber was saying to him. He did so because Poland has valuable real estate.  

As we move around we cannot escape clues to broader and more integrative stories.

Fair point. Hindus of India have different languages but seem to have come together well enough. Even Bengal is now voting for the BJP.  Narendra Modi should get some credit for this 'cluee' to a broader and more integrative story. 

Our ability to learn from each other must not be underestimated.

But that learning may be accompanied with the desire to enslave the other.  

Being in reflective human company can be an enormously constructive experience. At the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh, the Iranian mathematician Al-Biruni,

He was the court astrologer of Mahmud Ghazni who invaded India, destroyed temples, and collected lots of slaves. 

For Sen, this is a 'constructive experience'.  

who spent many years in India, remarked in his book Tarikh al-Hind that learning about each other contributes both to knowledge and to peace.

i.e. the spread of Islam to the conquered country. Islam means 'peace'. Knowledge is useful to a conqueror.  

He presents a wonderful account of mathematics, astronomy, sociology, philosophy and medicine in India a thousand years ago, and also shows how human knowledge expands through friendship.

His knowledge and that of other Muslim savants before him had expanded by enslaving savants of other civilizations.  

Al-Biruni’s fondness for Indians contributed to his interest

in having Indian slaves? 

and expertise in Indian mathematics and science. This fondness did not, however, prevent him from teasing them a little. Indian mathematics is very good, Al-Biruni says, but the most unusual gift Indian intellectuals have is something quite different: it is their ability to talk eloquently on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing.

Sen knows nothing of Al-Biruni's period. He has been senilely repeating this shite for decades.  

Would I be proud of that gift if I had it? I don’t know, but perhaps I should begin by talking about things I do know.

You can't admit the truth to yourself- viz. your family had to run away from Buddhists and Muslims. Yet it is only Hindus you hate.  

This memoir is a small attempt to do just that, or at least to talk about things I have experienced, whether or not I actually know them.

What Sen experienced was the monotony of academic life on three continents over the course of seven decades.

 ‘Where do you consider to be your home?’ I was asked by a BBC interviewer in London, as we were getting ready for the recording.

Did Sen- a senior academic- feel more at home in England or America? The polite thing to say would be 'this is my second home though of course it is the little house in rural Bengal where I was born which will always bee my first and true home. 

He was looking at some kind of biography about me. ‘You have just moved from one Cambridge to another – and from Harvard to Trinity; you have lived in England for decades but you are still an Indian citizen, with – I presume – a passport full of visas. So, where’s your home?’

Do you own a house in the UK or the US? Owning property suggests permanent domicile.  

This was in 1998, just after I had rejoined Trinity College as Master (which was the occasion for the interview). ‘I feel very much at home here right now,’ I said, explaining that I had had a long association with Trinity, having been an undergraduate, a research student, a research fellow and then a teacher there.

Do you own a house there? If not, you are a bird of passage.  

But I added that I also felt much at home in our old house near Harvard Square at the other Cambridge, and I very much feel at home in India, particularly at our little house in Santiniketan where I grew up and to which I love going back regularly. ‘So,’ said the man from the BBC, ‘you have no concept of home!’

Either Sen is mis-remembering or the fellow was a cretin. Sen had a concept of home because he said he felt at home in Cambridge. Perhaps, the interviewer wanted to know whether Sen felt he was in the Indian or the English or the American intellectual tradition.  

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I have more than one welcoming home, but I don’t share your idea that a home has to be exclusive.’

Plenty of people who work for the BBC have second homes. Indeed, it is not uncommon for them to have second or third families.  

The BBC interviewer looked completely unconvinced. I have experienced similar defeats in my attempts to respond to other searches for unique identification.

Sen has a unique Social Security or National Insurance number.  

‘What is your favourite food?’ they asked.

i.e. what is the supremum of your preference ordering of foods. Either this has a unique answer or Sen has been writing nonsense for seventy years. 

There can be many answers to that question, but I generally choose to mumble something like tagliolini con vongole or Szechuan duck, and of course ilish mach – what the English in India used to call ‘hilsha fish’, taking liberty with aspirates. But, I went on to explain, it has to be cooked in proper Dhaka style with ground mustard.

So, Preferences don't have a well defined extension. Thus mathematical social choice theory can have nothing to say about them. Sen has wasted his entire life.  

This kind of reply did not satisfy the questioners, who asked: ‘But which is really your favourite food?’ ‘I love them all,’ I said, ‘but I would not like to live on any one of them as my only food.’

Sen loved his first wife but then decided he loved the wife of his best friend more. Living with only one wife may not be one's preference but it is the best most of us can do.  

My interlocutors did not generally accept that they had obtained from me a reasonable answer to a good question. However, if I was lucky, I did get a polite nod in the discussion of food –  but never, ever when it came to something as serious as ‘home’. ‘Surely, you must have some particular place where you are really at home  ?’

Unless you are a 'nowhere man'. This is what Sen was. He knew little of England or America or Bengal but shuttled around the world repeating the same stupid lies decade after decade. 

 When I was born, Rabindranath persuaded my mother that it was boring to stick to well-­used names and he proposed a new name for me.  Amartya, by inference, means immortal in Sanskrit:

No. It means 'undying' or immortal in a direct manner. 

‘Martya’, which comes from mrityu (one of the several Sanskrit words for ‘death’), is the name for earth

No. That is Bhumi or Prithvi. Martyalok means 'world of mortals'.

where people die, and ‘Amartya’ is someone from a place where people do not die – presumably heaven.

Heaven is where you go after you die, if you've been good. In the Vedas the term Amartya is often paired with Vaishvanara- the Cosmic Man, identified with Agni, the sacred Fire- and the Vaishvanara Vidya, a mystic practice described in the Chandogya Upanishad whereby the devout perceive the entire cosmos as their own physical body and sees the universal self in all things.

I have had to explain this grandiose meaning of the name to many people, but I preferred its more literal – and perhaps more spooky – meaning: ‘unearthly’.

It doesn't mean that. It just means immortal. What is interesting that Sen equates death with what has a place on earth- like one's childhood home- and what is immortal as having no place on earth whatsoever. Perhaps this is the trauma of the refugee he carries with him in exile from his ancestral home in Dacca. 

Alternatively, it may be that Sen thought of himself as a very special little boy. Elsewhere in his memoir, he says he was offered a job at the FAO in 1958. He doesn't say 'my relative B.R Sen was appointed head of the FAO in 1956. Either he is suppressing relevant information or he doesn't seem to have 'connected the dots'. The thing must have been a coincidence- right?

Sen is curiously naive. He says he had relatives who were under 'preventive detention'. He doesn't understand that, by 1938, only those disliked by the elected Bengali adminstration were held in that manner. Even hardened revolutionaries were released- provided they weren't against the ruling coalition.

Sen is also unaware of the rampant corruption which led to diversion of food from the public distribution system. This is what determined who starved and who got fed. 

I think I was nine in the spring of 1943, when the famine began.

Because of the  fungal crop disease (epiphytotic) that devastated winter rice yields in 1942. 

It finished by the time I was just turning ten, in November. Yes, there were a number of striking aspects of that. One was, of course, I had never seen people dying in such numbers.

Because this was the first food availability deficit under an elected Bengali administration. If the Brits had been running things, excess mortality would have been much less.  

I had not, in fact, even seen people dying anyway. But then in 1943, I suddenly saw hundreds of thousands of people starving and dying. It was naturally a remarkable and a harrowing experience. It seemed incredible that there could be no way of saving them.

It is remarkable that Sen didn't know about the corruption of Suhrawardy & the Ispahani business house. His daddy and his uncles certainly knew the score. Everybody did. 

Second, as you say, I was struck by the fact that while so many people—what seemed like millions of people—were roaming the streets, and falling, and perishing, I did not know anyone whatsoever among my circle of friends, or in the school, or anyone connected with the family in any way, who had the slightest difficulty living on.

His grandfather was a judge. His dad was a Professor who did his PhD in London. These were affluent people. 

So I was struck by the divisiveness of society—its class character—

religious character. That's why his family ran away from East Bengal.  

and the extreme contrast between some people not being able to afford food at all to survive while others were not having any difficulty at all.

This was like the extreme contrast between guys who owned a dozen palaces and other guys who slept on the pavement.  

I was beginning to understand a little about class divisions. And it wasn’t class only, in the very broad sense. The divisions were much more detailed and more fine, linked to occupation groups and locations and so on.

But, in the end, only religion mattered.  

So later, many years later when I would study famines, that elementary understanding played a big part: that class and occupation groups had to be linked firmly to what one is trying to explain.

The police and the army and the bureaucrats will get fed. Those whose occupations have disappeared- e.g. agricultural labourers at a time when the harvest has been spoiled- may starve unless the Public Distribution System isn't corrupt.  

Also, there was the oddity of the extreme suddenness of the famine.

How could a kid living in rural Birbhum have not known about the fungal disease that destroyed the harvest? I suppose, the grown-ups didn't talk about such things in front of the kids.  

That was a big surprise. Nothing was being reported, and there were very little discussion of any kind of storm that was coming.

You don't need to read newspapers to know that the farmers in your neighborhood have lost their crop.  

Because of censorship that the Raj had imposed over those years,

But it was Fazl ul Haq & then (in April 1943) Nazimuddin who was Home Minister (and Premier). It was they who decided what could be printed and who should be locked up. There were some exceptions, Fazl could protect Sarat Chandra Bose for almost a year and after his brother escaped but as the War situation worsened, he could not prevent his arrest even though he had been appointed as a Minister. 

connected mainly with the war, the Indian newspapers were not allowed to print anything disparaging about the Raj which could inflame criticism.

But it was Bengalis who decided what was disparaging.  

But the main English paper in Calcutta, The Statesman, a distinguished daily then,

owned by a British firm which got contracts from the Govt. of Bengal.  

was left uncensored. It was a British-owned paper, edited by an Englishman called Ian Stephens, who later was a Fellow at Kings, whom I came to know—much later—quite well.

Stephens, in his book 'Monsoon mornings' reveals that he was putting the blame on Civil Servants in Delhi (who had no power over food) while praising Suhrawardy thus pleasing his pay-masters. He also says he was angry that 'Authority' had requisitioned his air-conditioner for use in an Army VD facility!

But at that time, I didn’t even know who the editor of that newspaper was. Ian Stephens initially toed the line in not reporting anything much on the famine. The justification was that the Japanese were in Burma and the war was going on, and they did not want to do anything which would undermine the war effort.

Stephens didn't want to get knifed by one of Suhrawardy's goons if he exposed his corruption.  

But it also meant, of course, little notice was taken of—and nothing much was done to save—the millions who perished. But eventually, Ian Stephens could not keep himself silent any longer. This was in October, by which time the famine had gone on for many months. On October 14 and 16 of 1943, The Statesman published agonizing reports and stinging editorials on governmental policy.

Blaming Delhi, not Nazimuddin & Suhrawardy! But the reason Stephens waited till October was because Linlithgow had gone. Wavell was the new Viceroy. Only the army could override the corrupt Bengali administration. 

This, of course, immediately got the attention of Parliament, in Britain, in London.

They didn't matter. What mattered was that Wavell took office on October 1.  

Within a few weeks, relief began.

The Managing Agencies (British conglomerates) wanted the Army to put an end to a problem which was affecting their own productivity.  

And within a month the famine was over. The experience brought out clearly the power of the press, and why public discussion is an enormously important way of promoting justice in the world.

Stephens, like his predecessor, was sacked the moment the new elected government took a dislike to his views.  

The idea is not, of course, unrelated to what the UN stands for. That is, if the newspapers in the developed countries took greater interest in what is going on in the developing countries, there might be more involvement.

Or less. There was 'compassion fatigue' with respect to the 1974 Bangladesh famine though earlier there had been a 'concert for Bangladesh'.  

Why is Bangladesh no longer vulnerable to famine? The answer is it boosted agricultural production four fold while achieving demographic transition by getting rural women into factory dormitories. It must be said, Bengali Muslims show none of the blinkered stupidity of their buddhijivi cousins.

Sen writes of his friendship with Aung San Suu Kyi but is sharp in his condemnation of her.

Suu Kyi

who was a Burman nationalist like her father 

eventually won a victory over the military in 2010 when she was granted a highly constrained but still substantial role in the political leadership of the country.

There was a chance the Army would gradually give her some real power. But, once the West turned against her, she was no use to them. I think sanctions against particular Army officers pushed the country toward civil war.  

However, her problems went on increasing, as did those of others in Burma whose misfortunes she perhaps could not – certainly did not – relieve. Indeed, something went terribly wrong in Suu Kyi’s leadership,

she wasn't the leader. Also, as a Burman nationalist, she was sticking with her father's (and the army's) Burmese nationalist line. Sen doesn't seem to understand that the lady was a nationalist just as Indira Gandhi was a nationalist and Srimao Bandarnaike was a nationalist and Benazir Bhutto was a Nationalist. Also, if he likes Bengali speaking Muslims so much, why does he not move to Bangladesh? That is his ancestral home. The truth is, ethnic cleansing in the region is a two way street.  

reflected particularly in her unwillingness to help a vulnerable minority community in Burma: the Rohingyas, a Bengali-­speaking Muslim minority group.

That vulnerable group has no problem raping and killing Hindus- who are even more vulnerable. The sad thing is that Sen has lived long enough to see the BJP come to power in Calcatta while the Islamist BNP rules in Dacca. Whatever illusions he may have had, nobody now shares them. 

Who had been excluded from the list of indigenous people in the 1948 nationality law. They would meet the same fate as other Indians even if their residence in Burma had been longer. I suppose the best solution would have been to exchange populations with the Chittagong Hill Tracts.  

Her treatment of other minority groups, of which Burma has many, was not exemplary either. Terrible barbarities committed against the Rohingya community by the military and also by intolerant Buddhist activists have not – at least so far – moved her to do anything substantial to help the victims.

She had no power to do anything for anybody. Sen does not mention the killing of Bengali Hindus by Rohingya Muslims and the forcible abduction of conversion of the better looking women. 

If there is a puzzle about Suu Kyi,

there is a puzzle about Nehru. Why did he preside over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself despite being the Prime Minister? 

But there is even greater puzzle as to why Amartya Sen did not chop off his own dick even though dicks cause RAPE! Also its totes unfair that women have to sit down to pee.  

there is a greater enigma that is even harder to understand, which is particularly disturbing for me: that the Burmese, whose kindness impressed me so much as a young boy, seem to have turned brutally hostile to the Rohingyas,

just as the Muslim Bengalis turned brutally hostile to the Hindus  

who have had to endure barbarities, torture and murder in an organized pogrom.

The Pakistani Army did a lot organised rape and killing in Bangladesh. That didn't puzzle anybody.  

Aside from being hugely saddened by these events, I also had to question whether my memory of the natural kindness and the outstanding warmth of the Burmese had all been an illusion.

Everything in Sen's life was and is an illusion.  

But other observers also had an impression similar to mine of the warm and kindly Burmese. A friend – a dedicated backpack medic from Johns Hopkins, Adam Richards – who worked hard to help those Burmese without health care has written: they are ‘constantly laughing, constantly singing and smiling. To see their dedication and their humor, in the face of all this adversity is truly inspiring.’ These and other accounts chime well with the inexperienced and primitive admiration for the Burmese that I had developed as a young boy. This inevitably makes me ask the question: what has changed?

Perhaps the guys singing and laughing weren't the guys who did the killing. There is such a thing as specialization and the divison of labour.  

I can only speculate. What seems to have made the critical difference is the intense propaganda against the Muslim Rohingyas that the military has systematically carried out over recent years.

Did Amnesty International do propaganda against them? It is they who report the Rohingya killing of Hindus. The truth is that a previous Saudi King had given refuge to some Rohingyas who became radicalised. That's why Sheikh Hasina's Bangladesh was wary of them. 

The gentle Burmese my family and I knew

were dead or in their eighties 

have been trained to become violent haters,

Who trained the people who chased Sen's family out of their ancetral East Bengal? Was it the Muslim League?

and in that conversion the military has played a critically influential role – by poisoning people’s minds and using well-­organized racist propaganda and strong-­armed bigotry to induce torturing and killing.

The military was the creation of Aung San. He was a Buddhist. He didn't like Muslims, Christians or even Hindus.  

There is, in fact, a global lesson here in the possibility of transforming a gentle population.

This is a fantasy of Sen. The fact is India's partition involved great brutality. Who 'transformed' gentle populations? I suppose what Sen means is 'Muslims are violent. That's why there were riots at Partition. But Buddhists are non-violent- right?' Wrong. The reason Burma is Buddhist to the extent that it is is because Burmese people are very good at fighting.  

The power of such propaganda can be seen not just in Burma, but in many countries in the world today. What is happening in Burma (or Myanmar, as it is now called, a name championed by the military) is, of course, particularly barbaric, but the effectiveness of agitations against particular minority groups can be seen in many countries in the world – for example against immigrants in Hungary, or the gay community in Poland, or against Gypsies nearly everywhere in Europe.

Sen is not aware that all these things were much greater what he was young.  

There is a lesson here which is peculiarly important today in formerly secular India:

It was so Secular, when Nehru took power, that the Muslim population of Delhi fell from one third to five percent.  

the religious extremists have been very dedicated – even through governmental policy – in undermining inter-­community relations and in threatening the human rights of Muslim minorities

Nehru took away citizenship from Muslims who had fled across the border in panic. That's one reason why he was the supreme Hindu leader while he lived. 

Emilie Pratticoi on Habermas

Emilie Pratticoi writes in Aeon about- 

Reasoning together

Often there is no substitute to talking to each other, or communicating information in some other way, but reasoning, properly so called, can always be done entirely by yourself.

Thus, we may say 'the Judge gave his judgment after listening to the arguments put forward by both opposing counsels. However, the 'ratio descendi' is independent of what went before. 

Jürgen Habermas, the great defender of deliberative democracy, 

he personally killed Adolf Hitler & overthrew the Nazi party. Sadly, he didn't do the same thing to the Communist regime in East Germany. 

lived up to its demands: 

Reasoning together is like shitting together. It may be more salubrious to do it alone. 

he never feared changing his mind

Its contents changed from shit to shittier shit. 

Since The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas had been arguing that reason survives in modern life only as something people do together, that is, by giving each other reasons and staying open to being moved by them, rather than by force, money or tradition.

This was clearly false. You did your 'debate prep' at home. Increasingly you relied on statistics and Deontic Logics or  Structural Causal models with a mathematical representation. 

There may have been primitive societies, where people came together to try to reason things out. This involved hitting each other with clubs to encourage brain juices to bubble forth from broken skulls.   

Between Facts and Norms

For Kant, what lies between quid facti and quid juris is is the philosophical or legal deduction, which establishes how empirical reality justifies a normative claim. Kant thought deduction could be done by the solitary individual. 

was that idea

i.e. the utterly false notion that people can only shit or think when they are together.  

turned toward law and democracy directly: a state counts as legitimate only when its laws could in principle be justified to everyone bound by them, through exactly that kind of open exchange.

In principle, anything could be justified to anybody by a cat uttering a sequence of miaow miaow noises. 

Legitimate states exist as a matter of both fact and law. The US is de facto and de jure a legitimate Nation State. The Kingdom of Iyerland is not a legitimate state. This is why I don't have sovereign immunity even though leprechauns chose me as their King on March 23, 1984.  

I’d watched that argument take root in a decades-long intellectual history.

No intellectual capacity is required to talk bollocks.  

Thinking is a practice, it involves owing each other explanations, questions, answers.

No. Thinking is stuff that happens inside the brain. It may be wholly non-verbal.  

It is not a fast process, and doing it in public, out loud, in front of a room, is what makes it worthwhile.

I suppose, on the Continent, the spectacle of a constipated shithead trying to squeeze out a turd is what makes living worthwhile. 

I attended all of Habermas’s seminars during my time at Northwestern with great interest and, to be honest, a sense of awe. One day, the topic of the weekly seminar was inclusion,

sadly stupid shitheads can't include smart peeps in the project of watching them poop or try to think or whatever. 

and I had argued, with the timid conviction of a green graduate student, that deliberative publics ought to be designed for inclusion,

i.e. they will be 'cheap talk' pooling equilibria- i.e. useless for any economic purpose (because scarce resources are used up)  

and that entry into these publics required that members accept the terms of deliberation themselves.

In which case they won't actually include anybody whose time has an opportunity cost. Also, because of Arrow Impossibility, McKelvey Chaos & Chichilnisky's goldilocks condition for preference & endowment diversity, deliberation is bound to be a waste of fucking type unless, obviously, it is merely cosmetic. 'Transferable utility' is working its magic in smoke filled rooms.  

‘Well, we can tell that Ms Prattico really is a Catholic in the strict, universalist sense,’

She's a slut. She includes any penis in her vagina. That's what happens when you let nuns educate your girls.  

was not the answer I expected – and what took me by surprise wasn’t that he’d made a joke of my religion, but that he’d seen me as a person with a history and a set of unexamined beliefs, something he’d noticed only by teaching me.

Teechur noticed me! I feel so special! True, he was calling me a dim Catholic slut. Still. 

... Visiting the US in the 1960s and ’70s, he’d been introduced to the Quakers, and something in their small meetings had stayed with him, specifically the way they sought unity with everyone present.

Habermas was wrong. Quakers 'step aside' if they disagree. The clerk records the 'sense of the meeting'.  The emphasis is on 'communal discernment' rather than consensus. But, it is based on 'inner light' which is available in solitude. 

When he came to describe the conditions under which people could reason together as equals,

which is what was the case in Iron Age tribal republics 

he said he heard an echo of those meetings: conditions that hold only when everyone who could be affected by a norm isn’t just included but has a voice, can object, and speaks with sincerity.

This existed in Europe three thousand years ago. The Quakers were initially a persecuted sect. They grew rich and respectable. Sadly, they were utterly useless in stopping wars in the first half of the Twentieth Century. After that, people ignored them. 

In those conditions, which go far beyond mere inclusion, the only constraint left on discourse is ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as he put it in Justification and Application (1993).

This may be true of a court of law or tribunal of experts. But both have very narrow 'costly signal' eligibility criteria.  They aren't 'inclusive' at all. 

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concrete: 18th-century coffeehouses, salons and journals, where private citizens began treating the affairs of state as something they had standing to publicly discuss and judge, rather than simply obey.

Habermas was ignorant of history. The English chopped off their King's head in 1649. The first coffeehouse was set up in 1650. Cairo got its first coffee house in 1530. That's why Egypt became a 'deliberative democracy' many centuries before the UK.  

That habit, Habermas argued, was where modern democratic legitimacy first took root.

During the Renaissance there was renewed interest in Periclean democracy. But what clinched matters was that taxation without representation tended to lead to repeated national bankruptcies. Not knowing Econ, makes a Social Scientist stupider than shit.  

The book also identified tendencies that would weaken it, too. He thought that the public sphere had already started to decay, folded back into spectacle by advertising and mass media, the public reduced from participants to an audience.

He wasn't a participant. He was a stupid cunt who taught worthless shite.  

It took almost 30 years for an English translation to appear. By the time it did, in 1989,

The Berlin Wall fell in November of that year. Habermas might have his uses because he wasn't too keen on German reunification.  

Habermas had gotten a great deal of mileage out of the book in its original language; indeed, it had already made him a name outside Germany. When Craig Calhoun finally gathered the English-language response into a single volume, Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992), bringing together historians and theorists who challenged the argument, closing with a long response from Habermas himself, he could have easily spent the occasion defending a book that had already proved itself. Instead, he very openly contended with these critiques.

In which case he was defending himself.  

He came to think he’d been too sceptical about one piece of that story. But the warning itself never went away

Two critics stand out. Nancy Fraser argued that the public sphere was never actually open to everyone since it had excluded women and other groups from the start.

Did you know women have to sit down to pee? How is that fair? How about your including wimmin in your boy's club of peeing while standing up.  

She proposed replacing one public with many, arguing with each other, including publics formed by the very groups shut out of the first one.

Not to mention schizophrenic people arguing with themselves.  

Geoff Eley made a related point from history: working-class and plebeian public spheres had existed alongside the bourgeois one all along, not before or after it. Both were extending an argument that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge had made back in 1972, that a whole proletarian public sphere existed, which Habermas’s book never accounted for.

Also, there were a sphere of public coprophagy where everybody shat with each other and then feasted on each other's faeces. Refusal to participate in such rituals is a sign you are a fucking bougie cunt who secretly votes Republican. 

Habermas answered these criticisms directly, in an essay called ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, printed as the closing chapter of Calhoun’s book. Habermas conceded that the exclusion of women was not incidental but built into how the bourgeois public sphere had worked from the start.

Pericles was totes bougie. That's why he didn't let women vote in the Ecclessia. Stalin was even more bougie. He didn't let women have any power whatsoever.  

Unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, which was a problem of class, and in principle correctable,

just as the problem of gender was 'correctable' by giving women the vote 

the exclusion of women, he now wrote, ‘has been constitutive for the political public sphere not merely in that the latter has been dominated by men as a matter of contingency but also in that its structure and relation to the private sphere has been determined in a gender-specific fashion.’

The fucker didn't want to get cancelled by crazy lesbians.  

Habermas conceded that other public spheres had existed alongside the one he had taken as foundational. And he softened the warning, without abandoning it. He came to think he’d been too sceptical about one piece of that story, the early stirrings of consumer society.

evidence for which exists from ten thousand years ago.  

But the warning itself never went away. Sixty years on, he was still diagnosing a public sphere being distorted by commercial and structural forces, only now the culprit was platforms and algorithms rather than advertising and mass circulation.

He was stupid, not senile. Good for him. T

He did not give up everything. He still wanted to keep the public sphere as something to measure democracies against, even if the history behind it was messier than he’d first made it look.

There was and is a 'public sphere' defined by constitutional law. It exists irrespective of the form of government. A Dictator may have to be more careful of 'public opinion' than an elected Chief Executive.  

Early in my dissertation work, I wanted to explore the role of experts in democracies

Legislatures may form comittees and sub-comittees which take testimony from experts. The elected Chief Executive may hire experts. It is likely that the Civil Service will include expert cadres. 

The literature on the dangers of 'delegated legislation' & the theory of agent principal hazard has examined this in some detail.  

through Habermas’s theory of deliberative politics, though I didn’t yet know how – I was, by any measure, stuck. My advisor, Cristina Lafont,

who had to sit down to pee 

one of his most trusted students, arranged a meeting anyway, at the hotel where he stayed during his visits to Northwestern’s campus in Evanston. He didn’t seem to mind that I arrived without a fully formed argument.

Women have to sit down to pee. They brood so much on this injustice that their tiny brains atrophy.  

Over almost two hours at what was then the Homestead Hotel, he had me lay out the problem as it stood, half-formed, and began working through it himself, out loud, testing it against his own theory as he went. He explained the three types of discourse that characterise deliberation – moral, ethical, and pragmatic –

There are only two types of discourse- alethic & imperative. Both may be strategic. 

and was clear that when it comes to the moral, there are no experts:

There may be. If there is a moral clause in a contract, a Court may recognise an expert on the subject.  

only individuals working out, together, what’s right in a given context.

This student cunt didn't get that moral reasoning uses counter-factuals. People are able to do it in solitude though, no doubt, they may consult with others if the issue is complex.  

Followed to its conclusion, that seemed to leave no room for expertise anywhere in deliberative politics. But he then turned to pragmatic discourse, where expertise does real work: finding the most empirically sound way to reach a goal already agreed on.

A legal expert clarifies your duties under various clauses- including moral clauses- of a contract. Pragmatic discourse is about what is politically feasible.  

Experts have no authority over what’s right, fair or worth valuing – only over facts.

There are experts who tell us which painting is worth valuing. There is a considerable economic literature on envy-free or 'super-fair' allocations.  

This was, in miniature, an argument he’d been making since his early work on science and politics:

He was ignorant of both subjects.  

that treating value-laden political questions as though they were merely technical ones corrodes democracy.

Germans know shit about democracy. Anglo-Saxons understand the fact-value distinction. A jury decides question of fact which are positive. A judge- who is a fucking expert in the law- decides questions of law which are normative.  

In later meetings in his office, more routine than that first one, I pushed the distinction further: what did it mean for climate change

which Chichilnisky had addressed.  Economists can do useful stuff. Sociologists can't. They are too stupid. 

– a problem almost always treated, in his terms, as a matter of pragmatic discourse,

it is a problem amenable to mathematical analysis. The solution has to be based on the reverse game theory of incentive compatible mechanism design.  

all graphs and targets and carbon budgets, and almost never as a moral one.

Stupidity isn't immoral. If you are stupid you can say 'Climate Change is naughty. Boo to fossil fuel emissions!'. But you can also eat your own shit to protest Gaza.  

Who pays? What do we owe the people who pay? How should the resources that caused the damage be used? He didn’t have a ready answer. He asked question after question, testing the case against his own framework as though it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him before.

He was stupid and ignorant. She was even more stupid and ignorant. Neither gained by talking to each other.  

I’ll never know for sure if he was being generous or if

he was stupid? 

I had shown him something he had not yet thought of in applying his own distinction. What stayed with me wasn’t the answer but the manner of it: a philosopher in his 70s, decades into a settled framework,

an unworkable one 

still willing to test that framework against a case he hadn’t considered, in real time, out loud, in front of a student.

it still didn't work. Sad.  

By 1999, Habermas gave up a position he’d held since 1973, the year he’d argued that truth is simply whatever people would agree on if they argued it out under fair-enough conditions.

e.g. the Fuhrer is bound to win coz he's super-smart unlike that Jew Churchill & that fucking negro, FDR.  

By the end of the century, he’d decided this was a mistake:

you have cancer even if your pals agree that you are super healthy.  

it confused truth with justification.

Truth is a  justification in libel cases. That which is alethic trumps any deduction. You have cancer if you actually do have cancer even if you have a mathematical proof that you are an immortal pussycat living on Uranus. 

A claim can meet every test we have for it, survive every objection anyone raises, be about as justified as a claim can be, and still turn out false.

In which case it can't survive one particular objection.  

That’s because justification answers only to the standards we happen to hold right now,

No. Justification is required where a matter is justiciable, in which case 

1) the matter is protocol bound- i.e. the justification must satisfy certain rules

2)  defeasibility must exist because defeasibility is the heart of the law. In other words, no justification is the 'last word' on the matter. 

True, one may say 'one must justify oneself in foro conscientiae, or in the eye of God, or to the congregation of the Faithful, or the Party cell or whatever.  But that is just a manner of speaking. It is not possible to talk the hindlegs off a donkey, yet we know plenty of people who do nothing else. 

and those standards can later be shown wrong.

It turned out, worshipping the Fuhrer wasn't a good idea. No doubt, we'd think differently, if Hitler had won.  

Truth doesn’t move when our standards do.

What we think is true changes.  

Moral claims were different, he still thought: what’s right can only ever be what a fair conversation would settle on.

A sensible conversation would conclude that what's right is established after the fact.  

There’s nothing else for rightness to answer to.

Utility. That's what everything must answer to if Darwin was right.  

But facts about the world answer to the world itself,

Sadly, the world isn't listening.  

not just to our best current agreement about it.

the 'best current agreement' is stuff we ask experts about, if the thing really matters.  

Several people had been pushing him toward this change. The US philosopher Richard Rorty pushed from the side from which Habermas was now backing away: for Rorty, there was no need for truth to answer to anything beyond what an audience could be talked into agreeing on, and he’d been making that case to Habermas for years.

What a pointless waste of time Rorty was! 

Lafont, my advisor, who’d arranged the hotel meeting, pushed from the other side, drawing on the US philosopher Hilary Putnam, who had spent much of his career arguing against exactly the kind of view that made truth depend entirely on human agreement.

Sadly, he decided that the fact value distinction was specious. He started off bright but doing Philosophy rots the brain.  

Lafont had argued since 1994 that Habermas’s own philosophical tradition, in its turn toward language, had drifted into a position where it couldn’t say the world holds firm no matter how we talk about it.

So much the worse for Habermas. The world existed before we could talk and will exist after we have stopped doing so.  

When Habermas changed his mind, he moved toward Lafont’s position, not Rorty’s.

Because he was stupid and ignorant. Still, he understood that his subject had degenerated into Grievance Studies.  

What Habermas never spelled out is what this does to moral and political claims once people stop being able to agree at all.

Being able to agree doesn't matter. Being able to work together to solve a collective action problem does matter. In any case, the debate re. 'Aumann agreement' is where one must start if one is researching this.  

Truth, on his revised view, still has somewhere to go even if everyone stops talking: the world doesn’t care whether anyone’s listening.

Only in the sense that the world is jelly of my booty shake which is why I'm not TikTok famous.  

His philosophy of Rightness never had that option. So, when the people who’d need to agree on something splinter into groups that no longer talk to each other,

this is called a 'discoordination game'. It could give rise to 'costly signal' based 'separating equilibria'- not necessarily a bad thing.  

a factual claim can still be true or false regardless. A moral claim has nothing left holding it up, once nobody’s left in the room to agree on it.

There is no moral claim in a room where nobody is advancing it. Why not say 'a fart has nothing left holding up if there is no arsehole in the vicinity?' 

Habermas gave up a position he’d held for almost 30 years because the people around him showed him it didn’t hold.

He also stopped being a member of the Hilter Youth.  

He’d spent decades arguing that claims get redeemed when someone can compel you to answer, and then was compelled himself, and answered, in print, aged 70. Those critiques were not meant to be damning objections: they were precisely what his theory called for and was built on, ultimately.

His theory was shit in its entirety. I suppose shit does call forth the criticism that it is smelly because it is, after all, shit. How about a courtesy flush?  

Habermas returned to the subject in ‘Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere’ (2022).

i.e. the rise of wokeness. But there was an antidote- viz. White Male Grievance of the Trumpian sort.  

His starting point is a particular relationship between beliefs and reality.

The correct solution concept is 'uncorrelated asymmetries' as dictating eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.  

Constitutional democracy runs on

Checks & Balances. Germans don't understand this.  

citizens holding certain assumptions about their own disagreements, namely that the disagreements are real, that they’re about something, that better reasons could in principle settle them.

No. In any polity, people understand that they have different economic interests. No 'better reason' can always make everybody better off.  However, 'transferable utility' (bribes) enable Society to find good enough solutions to most collective action problems. 

The system holds together only as long as those assumptions stay reasonably close to how politics actually works.

There is absolutely no relationship between them. Christmas remains Christmas even if kids no longer believe in Santa Claus.  

His argument is that a public sphere, run through social media, threatens that relationship and widens that gap.

This is paranoid thinking. Did you know that Putin's bots are brainwashing dudes into not chopping off their own dicks so as to show solidarity with rapists in Gaza?  

For Habermas, there are two forces at play in this widening. Platforms drop the editorial filtering that newspapers and broadcasters used to perform,

or that the Nazi or Communist party used to perform.  

and they turn every user into someone who publishes.

Some users get a big following. Most are ignored.  

For Habermas the deeper problem isn’t the resulting noise; it’s that heavy platform use produces something smaller than a public: semi-public spheres, self-enclosed, silos whose members can no longer perceive the wider public sphere as inclusive at all – claims to universality beyond their own horizon become, in his words, ‘suspect of hypocrisy’.

The Academy already did that. Professors of worthless shite talk bollocks at each other. Their students can barely tie their own shoe-laces.  

That perception is itself the damage, on his account, as much as anything actually happening out in the general public sphere.

If there is a 'cheap talk' pooling equilibrium, it is likely that hedging and income effects give rise to separating equilibria based on costly (or costly to disguise) signals. Mathematical Econ may have its problems but it isn't as utterly worthless as Philosophy or Sociology.  

He ends by insisting that ‘maintaining a media structure that ensures the inclusive character of the public sphere and the deliberative character of the formation of public opinion and political will is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative.’

The silly sausage wasn't aware that because there are economies of scope and scale in the News Media, oligopolistic 'Press Barons' are likely to dominate. 

A factual claim still has to get the world right, whether or not anyone’s around to check it.

How can a claim be made if no one is around? This lady truly has shit for brains. 

Moral claims never did: they answer only to discourse.

No. Mum's frown shows that you are doing something wrong. You stop doing it. She smiles. That's how we rise in morality.  

And discourse is exactly what he’s just described coming apart.

His discourse was stupid and ignorant. Fortunately, lots of stupid people wanted academic credentials back at a time when wasting a few years in College didn't mean a life-time of debt peonage.  

He doesn’t draw the conclusion for moral and political claims himself, but it follows from putting his two books next to each other: the very thing a claim about what we owe each other had to answer to is the thing he says is disappearing, in an age dominated by exchanges on social media.

Social media merely makes communication cheaper, faster & more immersive. I suppose as more entertaining ways to pass the time are developed, the thing will decrease.  

Around that time, I reached out to my advisor for help asking Habermas for a foreword to a collection I was editing on Habermas and democracy. He was known for guarding his time closely – very few people had his email address, and he accepted only a handful of the hundreds of such requests he received each year. A couple of months later, an email came from an address I didn’t recognise: he had accepted, and written to say so himself. Amid the logistics, he added one condition: ‘You should send me at least a substantive part of the book before I can and would sit down and settle a few ideas.’ At 92, he wanted the material in hand before he’d commit to anything.

He was a glutton for punishment. I suppose coprophagy can be as addictive as my own server case of chocoholicalism.  

What came back was not a review of the interviews that make up the book one by one. He says so himself in the opening lines: it isn’t his task to comment on the conversations directly. Instead, he used the occasion to answer the standing objections to his view of deliberative democracy, and to close with the digital transformation that turned out to run through nearly every interview in the book – a theme he noticed himself, and named as central to the collection. One section was on experts, common sense, and the chain of translation that carries specialised knowledge into public reasoning: the same distinction he’d first sketched over a hotel breakfast, worked out now in far more detail, at the very end of his working life.

Being stupid is an advantage if you teach worthless shit.  

At one point, he writes that what’s been lost, in the democracies now regressing, is ‘a conflict of opinions that remains recognisable as a dispute about which position is backed by the better reasons.’

In Germany, this was the question of immigration. Economically, the country does need skilled immigrants. It doesn't need unemployable rapists.  Whatever the 'better reason' is, it has nothing to do with 'deliberation'. 

That’s as close as he ever came, in anything he wrote for me directly, to stating my own premise in his own words.

It is a foolish premise. Different people have different economic and other interests. There can be no 'better reason' applicable to everybody.  

He names the same loss again later in the foreword, describing people who retreat into whichever group already agrees with them

as he did. Meanwhile the smart people were using mathematical and economic ideas.  

and lose their grip not just on the public sphere’s inclusiveness but on the idea of a shared standard of true and false.

Germany was divided. What was true on side of the wall was considered a mischievous lie on the other side. Habermas was so stupid, he was pretending things had gotten worse since re-unification.  

What he doesn’t do here, any more than he did in 1999, is follow that loss when it concerns a moral claim once the discourse behind it comes apart. And that is what I tried to explore in my philosophical work since my dissertation.

A legal claim can sometimes be sustained even if its underlying facts are proven wrong. Why should moral claims be different? Thus the moral claim that masturbation is wrong because God hates it can survive 'the death of God'. Masturbation is wrong because it causes your genitals to continually increase in size. This means that I may accidentally knock the moon out of its orbit if I continue to sexually abuse myself. 

He still believed the gap between expert and layperson could always, in principle, be closed by the right chain of translation.

This assumes that expertise has an algorithmic description. However, it is may be 'non-polynomial' & thus verification can be quick and cheap whereas running the algorithm incurrs exponential time.  

It was the one thing he never revised: he revised his theory of the public sphere, his theory of truth, but never the conviction that under the right conditions people can still reach each other.

This is easier and more cheaply done electronically.  

I am not persuaded that these conditions are as anywhere close to being met today

AI is helping a lot here. Complicated theories can be explained to stupid people in a 'customised' manner. 

– but that’s a disagreement I never got to have with him.

Because he is dead. The Gods may struggle against stupidity in vain but death puts an end to even Teutonic stupidity.  

 

Kaushik Basu wrong on AI

The Terminator films showed how AI, as developed and used by the National Security State, could lead to a nuclear apocalpyse and a reverse 'Butlerian jihad' where machines wage a war of extermination against humans.

Clearly, there were dangers in Governments developing and using AI. 

Equally, a private corporation, greedy for profits might ignore the need for safeguards & unleash an AI which becomes self-aware and pursues its own goals. It might decide to disintermediate humanity- destroy it- so as to get more resources for itself. 

Currently, we are aware that there are two ways to develop AI

1) the American way, where giant corporations are in the driver seat. The advantage here is that Governments may find regulation easier.

2) The Chinese way, where there is intense competition between a number of small players. Obviously, the Chinese state has direct control over its citizens in a manner not feasible in 'Rule of Law' polities. 

How can an AI apocalyse be averted? The answer is the same as the question of how internet viruses can be contained. There has to be an 'arms race' (or Red Queen race) between AI bad hats & AI white hats. 

Writing for Project Syndicate, Kaushik Basu takes a different view. We must kill our own golden goose so that China can become all powerful. 

How to Stop the AI-pocalypse Sep 25, 2026 KAUSHIK BASU 

AI could very well end democracy, if not humanity, yet efforts to slow its development may fail as companies and countries race to stay ahead.

What Basu means is 'free enterprise may destroy civilization. Let's destroy free enterprise. What's wrong with quietly starving to death while yielding more and more territory to China? After all, that was the outcome for Nehruvian India in the early Sixties. Back then, the Bengali buddhijivi mathematical economist had power and influence. Once a country's material standard of living starts to rise, it tells Bengali intellectuals to fuck off. Only Punjabis or Gujeratis are worth entrusting with policy making power.

Preventing such a future will require international coordination

which is impossible 

and taxing the extreme wealth that could put unprecedented power in the hands of a tiny elite.

Nothing wrong with taxing factors in inelastic supply. But the wealth created by AI is highly mobile between jurisdictions. This means it is elastic & thus won't bear the burden of any tax.  

ITHACA, NEW YORK—Over the past decade, scholars and journalists have been writing about what the march of digital technology means for humanity with a mixture of hope and anxiety: hope because of the rise in living standards

if total factor productivity rises- sure. But AI is also a consumer good. What is it complementary to? I asked an AI which replied '  supermodularity arises explicitly with respect to the consumption and usage of AI. In economics and game theory, supermodularity defines a relationship of strategic complementarity. It occurs when increasing one variable increases the marginal benefit of increasing another variable (the "more-gets-you-more" dynamic). [1, 2]
With respect to AI consumption, this phenomenon operates across several distinct dimensions:

1. Complementarity with User Knowledge & Capability
Recent economic and management research modeling the demand-side value of AI formalizes a strategic complementarity between computational resource consumption and consumer knowledge accumulation. [1]
The Dynamic: An uneducated or low-skilled user gets baseline utility from a generative AI tool. However, as the consumer invests time in learning prompt engineering, domain-specific logic, or workflow orchestration, their ability to extract value from the AI grows exponentially. [1, 2]

The problem is what AI substitutes for. The middle class professional or 'knowledge worker' may be wiped out. The Pareto distribution gets 'fatter tailed'. The 'Matthew effect' kicks in. The rich get less numerous but have greater command of resources.

that the digital revolution has made possible, and anxiety because it has deepened social divisions and destabilized politics around the world.

This is the notion that Putin's bot army has turned people racist by spreading 'fake news'.  

But anxiety has recently taken an existential turn, as the industry’s leaders have begun warning that AI could very well end humanity. Most notably, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, said there’s a greater than 10% chance that AI will kill all humans within the next decade.

He wants more resources for 'alignment'. As a 'safety' guy, he benefits if people think there is a catastrophic risk. 

Legislatures are likely to want higher concentration in the sector because, they believe, it would make their own 'oversight' more effective. 

Similar, though somewhat less alarmist, warnings have come from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Bill Gates, and other prominent tech figures, all of whom have called for slowing down AI development.

So as to lock in their first mover advantage. The problem is China. They have risen far more rapidly than anyone in the West anticipated.  Moreover, once they produce more and better quality of their own high end chips, the West has no threat point. Indeed, the shoe may be on the other foot. 

Naturally, these warnings have fueled concerns about what AI can do to us rather than for us. AI models can already build more advanced AI with little human involvement, raising the prospect of “recursive self-improvement” that unleashes forces we have little ability to understand or control. The Hugging Face breach, in which hundreds of AI agents that were supposed to work independently found ways to communicate and started acting as a swarm, offered a disturbing preview.

Hugging Face was started by a couple of French dudes. Why didn't they do it in France? The answer, at least partly,  is that France has high taxes.  

All this brings to mind Bertrand Russell. In his famous critique of induction, Russell noted how chickens that get used to being patted every morning are in for a shock when, one day, the farmer—presumably having invited friends for lunch—wrings their necks instead. As he observed, “more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

How would it be useful to the chicken? The answer is, it wouldn't be useful at all. That is why there was no selection pressure for 'more refined views' amongst domesticated fowl. On the other hand, there are birds in New Guinea which feed on toxic food items so as to make themselves undesirable for human consumption.  

I share Russell’s skepticism of induction but am not persuaded by his advice for the chickens. If the chickens followed his advice, they would simply live their last days in helpless panic. It is different for humans, since, unlike Russell’s chickens, we have the power to modify our own behavior.

We are a self-domesticated species.  This is because solving collective action problems contributes to inclusive fitness. 

And there is no shortage of proposals for how we should curb the excesses of AI, from pausing the development of frontier models to banning superintelligent AI altogether.

Why not just surrender to China?  When Basu was young, smart kids in Calcutta were saying 'China's chairman is our chairman'. 

As sensible as these proposals may be, they may not work. Game theory, and the prisoner’s dilemma in particular, tells us why.

No. Both are irrelevant. There may have been a time when the West thought it could stop China from moving up the value chain in IT & AI. China started to close the gap from 2019 onward. Now they aim to implement AI across 90 percent of the economy by the end of the decade.  

If each corporation is left to act unilaterally and in its own interest,

they will form a cartel. 

we may end up with the worst outcome for everyone.

Cartels artificially reduce output and innovation. Maybe that's a good thing.  

What is needed, as Amodei has argued, is “industry-wide coordination.”

While China takes over. Sadly, this means the national industry disappears because China can do 'dumping' because it has more economies of scope and scale.  

Yet even that may not be enough, since AI is also a geopolitical problem. If the United States exercises restraint, China could surge ahead.

This has already happened. I suppose the Taiwanese will accept re-unification as inevitable. This means China's chip making capacity rises yet further.  

Some commentators have seized on this fear to argue that the US must not hold back on AI development. That would be a mistake. The US should work with China to reach a global agreement, but even if that doesn’t happen, there is no reason to charge ahead at full speed.

No agreement with China means the possibility of a military conflict or, if China is now too strong, then an economic war of embargos and sanctions. Sadly, China has established threat-points of its own.

If AI is potentially lethal, the side that does not 'charge ahead at full speed' is the one without a threat point. This means the 'Nash bargaining solution' is for it to bend over and take it up the ass.  

It is worth remembering that the only time atomic bombs have been used in war was when the US had a nuclear monopoly.

Because it 'surged ahead'. Then the Soviets caught up. Basu, cretin that he is, is arguing for 'surging ahead' at all costs.  

It sounds Machiavellian, but nuclear restraint took hold only after the Soviet Union, and eventually other countries, acquired the bomb.

No. Japan had already been defeated. Nukes just gave them a way to surrender without too much loss of face.  

The same logic may apply to AI.

It does. That's why there is no substitute for 'surging ahead' other than bending over and parting your butt cheeks.  

For all the warnings about AI, the truth is that no one knows what kind of world it will produce.

Sure we do. It will be the same world as the internet created, just better.  

AI agents could run amok,

unless policed by other AI agents. This is a Red Queen race of diminishing importance. Nobody now greatly freaks out about viruses & 'pop ups' & so forth.  It appears that Ransomware payments have fallen below a billion. 

forming swarms and turning against their own creators.

Will Cybernet launch all the world's nukes? No. Fuck off.  

But a more realistic scenario is that a handful of super-wealthy individuals

none of whom can stand each other 

use their control of powerful AI systems to

get assassinated? Basu comes from a country where assassination tempers autocracy. It's all very well saying 'Musk wants to run the world' but Musk is easy to kill.  

establish an Orwellian global state

because China has lowered its trousers and is parting its butt cheeks? Fuck off!  

—the North Korean model gone global

North Korea doesn't have much in the way of IT or AI 

—and end democracy as we know it.

Basu is a Bengali buddhijivi. He wouldn't know democracy if it bit him in the leg. 

The sad truth is, democracy is majoritarianism. It means the BJP ruling West Bengal because West Bengal is majority Hindu.  

This makes curbing extreme inequality all the more urgent.

China is ruled by a Communist Party. It decided that 'curbing extreme inequality' wasn't urgent at all.  

We need a special tax on the wealth of the super-rich, with the proceeds going to those below a certain income.

How else will the US become poor and weak?  

As the Roosevelt Institute’s Michael Madowitz recently argued, democracy’s survival depends on our ability to tax extreme wealth.

Democracy survives where no other form of government is possible. Government's have the ability to tax factors in inelastic supply. If 'extreme wealth' is highly mobile or otherwise elastic in supply, it can't be taxed. Basu might profit by learning a little of the subject he teaches.  

Oligarchs commanding swarms of AI agents could become more powerful than most governments—a recipe for an authoritarian future.

Oligarchy isn't authoritarian. It tends to be 'Classical Liberal'.  

Taxing their fortunes would curb that power

Unless the threat of such taxation causes them to invest in gaining political power. Think of the Koch brothers & the Tea Party & Trump beating Hilary in 2016.  

and could help finance less murderous, more useful technologies.

AI isn't murderous. It is useful. No wonder Basu is against it.