Madhu Kishwar's Modinama

 On 30th May 2008, Delhi Metropolitan Magistrate Manish Yaduvanshi passed an order that an FIR be registered against notorious Feminist Academic, Prof. Madhu Kishwar for attempting to murder members of the Basoya crime family. However, Kishwar- who terrorized senior political leaders like Kapil Sibal, L.K Advani, and even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh into supporting her- has not spent even a day in jail. 

Little surprise that Kishwar- who is widely rumored to be the lynchpin of the dreaded 'Manushi Sangathan' - a secretive cabal of social workers- is now brazenly flaunting her immunity from the law by freely publicizing and distributing an 'e-book' celebrating the most evil man in History- Narendra Modi.

We asked our intrepid roving reporter- Shree Vivek Iyer- to interview this sadistic harridan and pull no punches in exposing her vileness and genocidal tendencies.

Vivek Iyer- Madam, some have called you Durga Ma, because of your habit of wearing a necklace of skulls around your neck, others call you Hilary Clinton, for the same reason. Is it true that you carved the following highly incendiary words into the torso of Teesta Setalvad while laughing maniacally and massacring the Basoya crime family- wait, don't answer- I haven't yet read out the stuff you carved into Teesta Setalvad's living flesh as she writhed in hideous agony- no, I still haven't finished, please don't interrupt me- here it comes- I will read out your words in a hilarious Bengali accent- like the one Arnab Goswami secretly uses when off camera- while my own more measured and mellifluous comments will be voiced in bold by Shahrukh Khan doing his Rajnikanth imitation-

'The Englishmen who came as traders in the 17th century were befuddled at the vast diversity and complexity of Indian society. Englishmen were not fuddled save by drink. They were traders. Diversity and Complexity create arbitrage opportunities. Thus, rather than being befuddled, English traders made money because that's what traders do. Having come from a culture where many aspects of family and community affairs came under the jurisdiction of canonical law, they looked for similar sources of authority in India. After the Reformation, not canon but Common law and King's Equity was what obtained in England. The same was true in each part of India whose administration they took over. They assumed, for example, that just as the European marriage laws were based in part on systematic constructions derived from church interpretations of Biblical tenets, so must the personal laws of various Indian communities similarly draw their legitimacy from some priestly interpretations of fundamental religious texts. Rubbish. If they could turn a profit administering laws, that's what they did. They followed customary law and codified it in a manner that preserved distinctions just the same as what was happening back at home because there was a market for Law and that was the oligopolistic solution that maximized their rent. It is not the case that these Traders had a mania for homogeneity or that they could enforce it even if they wished.

 Scotland had a different law and still does. Similarly in India, some followed Dayabhaga, others Mitakshara and so on. Some non Church forms of marriage were upheld as part of Common Law in England, some were not or fell into desuetude.

In the late 18th century, the British began to study the ancient shastras to develop a set of legal principles that would assist them in adjudicating disputes within Indian civil society. In fact, they found there was no single body of canonical law, no Hindu Pope to legitimize a uniform legal code for all the diverse communities of India, no Shankaracharya whose writ reigned all over the country. Even religious interpretations of popular epics like the Ramayana failed to fit the bill because every community and every age exercised the freedom to recite and write its own version. We have inherited hundreds of recognised and respected versions of this text, and many are still being created. The flourishing of such variation and diversity, however, did not prevent the British from searching for a definitive canon of Hindu law.

To search for something is not the same thing as finding something or imposing it. What you are suggesting- viz. stupid Brits invented Hindu fundamentalism or Manusmriti or whatever- is nonsense. It didn't happen in Britain. It didn't happen in India. Though it is true that in both countries there was a secular trend towards Codification for reasons of Schelling salience.

Perhaps more egregiously, in their search, the British took no steps to understand local or jati based customary law or the way in which every community - no matter how wealthy or poor - regulated its own internal affairs through jati or biradari panchayats, without seeking permission or validation from any higher authority. Nonsense the Brits justified their 'nightwatchman state' by saying the villages and jaat/biradaris were all self-regulating and perfectly harmonious. Thus, for example, collective fines for individual failure to pay the land-tax wasn't a recipe for disaster. The power to introduce a new custom, or change existing practices, rested in large part within each community. Any individual or group respected within that biradari could initiate reforms. This tradition of self-governance is what accounts for the vast diversity of cultural practices within the subcontinent. What fucking diversity? It's the same shite wherever you turn. For example, some communities observe strict purdah for women, whereas others have inherited matrilineal family structures in which women exercise a great deal of freedom and social clout.  Some disapprove of widow remarriage, while others attach no stigma to widowhood and allow women recourse to easy divorce and remarriage. That's because women don't matter unless they stop having babies in which case you get a new evolutionarily stable equilibrium which itself doesn't matter because the stuff that matters- migration and technology- doesn't necessarily change.

You see, Madhjuji, all your writing and campaigning over the last thirty years has been sheer idiocy and a waste of time. First you are against dowry they you see there was an economic rationale for it and backtrack- but the damage has been done. The Black Economy has taken yet stronger root. First you needed black money to buy property, now you also need black money to get a son-in-law. Bravo!
 How does it matter whether Brits understood or did not understand India? A guy selling T.Vs does not need to know how the thing works. He just needs to know it works and sell at a higher price than he buys. Writing articles and getting worked up on T.V programs serves no fucking purpose at all.

Just recently, you've suddenly come out for Modi. Why? You were fed up with the hypocrisy of the anit-Modi camp. But they are getting paid. If they didn't do it, someone else will. Actually, it's a game with homothetic preferences- Modi needed to be painted as a Muslim killer to rein in his own lunatic fringe.

Everyone in India knows that talking nonsense won't change anything. Nor will pointing out that other liars are lying because the money is in preference falsification and Credentialism.

Anyway, I must say, I'm quite surprised that you haven't interrupted me even once or tried to slit my throat or carry out genocide against people of my caste. Are you sure you are a Professor? I mean a proper Indian Professor like Amaresh Mishra who would at least have tweeted some death threats against my mother and rape threats against my father while listening to me. Look, I only agreed to talk to you because I thought you were a genuine Indian academic with a long history sheet and a talent for extortion. The truth is I want some cousins of mine killed. I already asked Prof. Akeel Bilgrami but you know what those Muslims are like- lazy duffers I tell you always pleading excuse of Namaz or Ramadan or Hajj or Burqa Dutt to get out of a spot of work. Anyway, Madhu...OMG!...is that a huge beard sprouting on your face?....you aren't Prof. Kishwar at all are you...Aiyayo!

Sanjay Subhramaniyam- Ha ha ha ha, I am the ghost of Vasco da Gama, ha ha ha ha, come to kill you by order of President Obama, ha ha ha ha, that's right dude, your cousins are indeed cunningly disguised as Michelle and Barak, ha ha ha ha

Brahminical Central Banking buggers small businesses

The Reserve Bank of India has just tightened Capital Controls in a bid to stem the decline of the Rupee consequent to an end to cheap American money. This won't hurt the big boys but it buggers growing businesses merely for the sake of a short term political objective- viz. showing the sclerotic Center is taking action (however counter-productive) at at time when Modi has Manmohan on the ropes.

The outgoing R.B.I supremo, D.Subbarao,  had spoken of a new 'Holy Trinity' for the Central Banker as opposed to the well known 'Impossible Trinity' of Mundell (originator of optimal currency area theory)

In this context, in an influential paper, Subbarao, introduced a new term to the lexicon of the Central Banker- viz. a 'Brahminical' attitude. What did Subbarao mean?
A Brahmin belongs to the priestly caste. He is concerned with the correct performance of rituals. He has little practical experience of the world. He believes it to be more important to condemn perceived wrong-doing rather than to sort out problems as they arise.
Banking isn't brahminical. It's a business.
If it becomes brahminical then, though it can't fabricate Heaven, it can plunge us into Hell.
How? Why?
Well, Banking is about Credit- belief in the solvency of others. But solvency is a function of ingrained business-like behavior and widely diffused risk-management skills. Clearly there is an element of impredicativity in what we are looking at. This does not matter so longer as there isn't too much noise in the underlying Co-ordination game for the formulation of Muth Rational Expectations.
A more or less market solution to this is the evolution of a price leader who assumes a risk-pooling function which exigent circumstances of State will tend to formalize as a Reserve Bank.
This is fine so long as the Central Banker is still a businessman recruited from and answerable to the Market.
However, if Central Bankers become 'Brahmins' then there is no Muth Rational Schelling Focal point for the
market because 'the correct economic theory' held by the Governor might be a purely normative one. In any case, there is going to be a signal extraction problem because the Market is no longer being governed by one of its own and so a new language has to be learnt.
Given that Mathematicians understand Mathematicians, Musicians, Musicians and so on, we should not be surprised that Bankers understand other Bankers. Why would we ever want to have Central Bankers who aren't actually Bankers?
A simplistic answer is, policy makers think that businessmen are naughty school-boys and since Bankers are businessmen of a bigger kind, it follows that they are likely to be more naughty than most. Thus, perhaps, the Central Bank should function like a monastic order- the Christian Brothers who ran my alma mater come to mind- caning naughty Bankers and generally raising the tone of the School by delivering turgid sermons.
But what is to stop the Monks sodomizing their charges and getting high on their stash? Nothing. Probably do the entitled little shits some good to be buggered senseless from time to time. However, the problem is that not all Monks want to sodomise those in their charge. The non-sodomists among the Monks may well resent their happier colleagues. What, then, is to be done?
The answer, of course, is that the Monks should remain preoccupied with working out their own salvation with respect to the dark mystery of a Triune God. That way they won't notice, or get unduly worked up about, kids topping themselves coz they just can't take no more priestly dick.

Subbarao- himself a 'Heaven Born' Civil Servant, rather than a Banking professional- spoke thus to his fellow Central Bankers a year and a half ago-
'The global financial crisis followed by the euro zone debt crisis has changed the theology of central banking in a fundamental way. The orthodoxy of central banking before the 2008 crisis was: single objective – price stability; single instrument – short-term interest rate. Although most central banks deviated to different extents from this minimalist model, this came increasingly to be considered the holy grail. The crisis came as a powerful rebuke to central banks for having neglected financial stability in their single-minded pursuit of price stability. By the time of our first conference two years ago, a consensus was developing around the view that financial stability has to be within the explicit policy calculus of central banks, although opinion was divided on the precise nature of institutional arrangements for maintaining financial stability.
Fast forward to 2011/12. Even as central banks are grappling with balancing the demands of price stability and financial stability, there is now yet another powerful assault on central bank orthodoxy arising from the big elephant in the room – the euro zone sovereign debt crisis.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is being called upon to bend and stretch its mandate to bail out sovereigns who have forfeited the confidence of markets. Actually that is an understatement. In reality, the ECB is being challenged on why it is, to use an Indian word, being so brahminical about its mandate when the world around it is collapsing. The argument, in its essence, is that if a central bank is committed to financial stability, it cannot ignore the feedback loop between financial stability and sovereign debt  sustainability, and by extension therefore, it has to be mindful of sovereign debt sustainability concerns.
What do these trends engendered by the crisis indicate? In particular, is it the case that the mandate of central banks is set to expand from the single objective of price stability to multiple objectives of price stability, financial stability and sovereign debt sustainability? Can central banks simultaneously support all these three objectives and do so efficiently? That in essence is the new trilemma.'

Fuck off.
This isn't a trilemma and it isn't new and it doesn't have an essence.
Banking is a business. Central Banking is Banking's business.
Our business- and therefore the business of our elected leaders- is to ensure we get a good deal from the Bankers and pay them a declining portion of our Income. That doesn't mean Bankers must necessarily get relatively poorer over time. No. They can add value by giving hair-cuts or manicures while lecturing us on our overdraft. The technology already exists. We are all just one step away from ubiquitous banking.
As for Subbarao's Holy Trinity- fuck price stability, fuck debt default, fuck Demand management. Prices oughtn't to be too stable because the best future we can possibly have isn't the most stable. Debts ought to be defaulted on once it is clear everybody got their predictions wrong. There's no Moral Hazard coz the counterparty believed the same thing as the 'bad' debtor. Fuck Demand Management- Govts. should be figuring out ways to spend money such that voters get a bigger bang for their buck. When they can't think of anything or don't have the will or ability to manage the spending- let them come out and say so. Pretending people in top jobs are smarter than us when they aint don't help nobody.
What's the point of subscribing to a 'Noble Lie' in the age of the internet? Anybody, anywhere, can find out the truth just by tapping a few times on their smart-phone.

Currently, Subbarao, as a parting gift to the Indian Nation, is putting us on the slippery slope back to Capital Controls. The way this is structured creates a rent for 'insiders' and penalizes the much larger class of late-comers who have already taken a hit. This isn't Hicks-Kaldor efficient. Dynamically it's fucking fiscal hara kiri- you are buggering up small businesses and adolescent industries and many of them are gonna top themselves coz they just can't take no more priestly dick.
What's bad for the fiscal deficit medium to long term is still going to be brought forward as downward pressure on the Rupee so it isn't as though there's even a short term, expedient, gain.
I guess, the truth is, good soldier Subbarao is making things easier for his much hyped successor- an Economist, not a Banker, who has already signaled that he's a Deficit hawk- such that what he will call lifting Capital Controls will make a good sound-byte around election time to give the markets a cheap thrill.
Fuck. It will probably work.
The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope.
Small businesses, reinforce your underpants. Brahminical Central Bankers are on the prowl.

Dawkins, Islam & Trinity Coll. Nobel Prize winners

Hindus and Muslims have and have had equal access to Trinity College, Cambridge. Yet though 3 Hindus from there have won Nobel Prizes, no Muslim has. Why?
First four False explanations
1) Hindus were more open to the West whereas the Muslims still resented the Crusades and were further put off by the fact that Europeans didn't wash regularly and used toilet paper- which just smears shit evenly around the arse-hole, instead of sluicing it away- and thus stank to high heaven.
Actually Hindus were less open to the West. They lost caste if they crossed the 'Black Water'. Young Indian Vegetarian males found it very difficult to get nutritious and tasty food in England. Also they were incessantly subjected to intense racial harassment by anyone related to them or from the same agraharam.

2) Hindus were smarter.
Are you fucking kidding me? Have you any idea what them Hindus worship? It's all like gods with monkey heads or elephant heads or big ass Snakes or hot chicks with twelve arms and shit. I had this Hindu bloke live down the road from me once. The day of the eclipse he comes up to me and says we gotta get to Temple pronto coz Rahu or Ketu or some such demon is eating the Sun. Okay, he smoked a lot of ganja and was an English convert- but still.
BTW, 2 of those Hindu Nobel prize winners, both Science nerds, were Tambrams- not Iyengars but just bog standard Iyers. The third was Amartya Sen. 'Nuff said?

3) Hinduism, being territorially delimited, could ditch theology in favour of militant Nationalism of a Modern sort in which, to adapt a phrase from Francis Bacon, not Man but Nature is put on the rack so King's Equity at last achieve univocity as the headless, all devouring Kabandha tyranny of the Demoi.
My answer to this risible thesis comes in two parts
a) Hinduism is NOT territorially delimited. Hindutva is- which is why it poses no threat to us. But, Hinduism? No one's safe while it's prowling around. What if your son or daughter turns vegetarian and, dunno, like marries an elephant or a snake or something? In any case, think of the grand-children. I personally assured my mother-in-law, a censorious Piedmontese Catholic, that I was eating up all the surplus arms and heads baby kept spouting coz his Mom- probably some sort of Calabrian Hindu like her generous Dad, who treated me like a true Carnatic mapillai- worshiped the little poop-producing machine like it was some particularly repellent Deity from out of pillaitamil, Tanjore School of painting, iconography.
b) Fuck off. Seriously dude. I mean it. Listen, I know martial arts. Sumo. What? Well, sure we can have a throwdown sometime but my nappy is in the wash.  BTW my b.f.f on Twitter is Prof. Amaresh Mishra? And he can fuck you up big-time coz like he knows all these 'encounter specialist' U.P cops? So just don't go there Mom is what I'm saying and could you please stop reading my blog? It's so not cool.

4) Hinduism being a 'fossil religion' like Judaism, in which 'Sacred knowledge' had been Credentialised, followed a similar path in over-investing in Secular Science for the same resource rationing Credentialist purpose.
But, for Judaism this followed from a female preference for scholars whereas in Hinduism, female preferences determined nothing. Interestingly, there is less intellectual gender dimorphism amongst Hindus. Both sexes are rabid Credentializing fuckwits. But, that's because Intellectual activity for the Hindu really is a zero-sum game- who gets which Professorship, or, in the West, who gets to pose as the benighted Hindu deserving of Tokenist accolades. Science, for the Jews, however, was positive sum and linked to entrepreneurship in Knowledge based industries not bureaucrato-academic rent seeking. 

What positive arguments can be made in connection with Dawkin's tweet?
1) If we ask why are there 160 Jewish Nobel Prize winners- and there would have been many more but for the Holocaust- one factor stands out, Sexual competition. Initially, Ashkenazi women favored learned Rabbis as grooms- the autobiography of Solomon Maimon shows this. His wife ran a successful Tavern to support the young prodigy. Unfortunately he developed a taste for secular learning and booze- but he still wouldn't give her a 'get' probably because a wife who runs a Tavern is the dream of every true booze-hound. The other factor was that the Sacred obligation to finance Rabbinical studies became Secularized as providing Jewish Free Schools which rapidly developed as centers of Excellence. If one asks why Education is collapsing in many Muslim countries, we find that 
a) Credentialized Education rations rent-seeking opportunities amongst the elite who thus have no incentive to broaden in-take or who do so in a hypocritical manner by creating a two tier system with those trapped in the lower tier condemned to menial work 
b) Cadre based Islamist parties quickly lose any technocratic or meritocratic ethos they might have started out with and thus the educational institutions which they infiltrate or control soon turn into ghettos of paranoid political fantasy in which Physics Professors give lectures about djinns working for Mossad who sabotage their experiments.
c) Women's education is first instrumentalized- 'by educating girls to be true Muslims they will get rid of traditional superstitious practices and become good mothers'- but then demonized because the genie has escaped the bottle! Countries like Iran and Tunisia might have seemed the exception- but this particular battle is by no means over. The fact is traditional societies have a preference for female hypergamy- a man feels insecure if his wife is better educated than him- so the 'educational inflation' amongst, for example, Iranian (middle class) women, leads to a 'basiji' backlash not just against Women's education but also the Liberal Intelligentsia and their Political demands.

The truth is, Educational success goes hand in hand with the Rule of Law. At one time, we thought the Religious parties could check the idiocy of the Leftists but the cure was worse than the disease.


Hindus, speaking generally, have experienced a decline in both Religious belief and Ideological fervor since about the 1920's (with the failure of Mahatma Gandhi's Non-cooperation Movement) whereas Political Islam, after a shaky start, has grown from strength to strength. 

Though many Hindus subscribe to orthopraxy they no longer give theological reasons for so doing- Vegetarianism might be justified as Ethical or even 'Scientific'; Astrology might be justified by some specious argument developed by Nobel laureate Kary Mullis; visiting Temples may be linked to 'bio-rhythms' or crystal vibrations from the surrounding rocks- and this has been a secular trend discernible for over a hundred years now. Indeed, the crack-pot Theosophical Society of Madam Blavatsky and Col. Olcott found eager Hindu converts from its inception. Annie Beasant, who took over, was elected President of the Indian Home Rule League before being roughly shouldered aside by the lithe and limber, loin cloth clad, Mahatma. By contrast, Islamist parties based on the cadre system used by the Communists, were able to function as a vanguard infiltrating Educational institutions so as to mold young minds. Islam benefited greatly from Stalin's decision to back the creation of Israel because Communism languished ever afterwards for contributing to the humiliating 'Nakba' (catastrophe) that still haunts the Muslim mind. Whether we speak of 'Ikhwan' or 'Jamaati' or 'Salafi' or 'Wahhabbi' or now 'Takfiri'- the influence of such cadre based organizations do impact negatively on young people, especially those attending elite Institutions or studying abroad, because they are steered away from 'fundamental' research in favor of technical skills+ activism- with a view to making them more useful to the Party. In one sense, it may appear to be a good thing if smart young people return to their home country (or emigrate to a Muslim country) to work with the young people there, but, sadly, the Sciences don't work like that. Skills degrade quickly, Intellectual curiosity is dampened, and the political horizon overwhelms everything else- you have a recipe for increasing anger and frustration venting itself in quixotic adventurism- including of a terrorist kind. By contrast, Business studies is a safer course and many Muslim countries now have first rate financial services industry manned with 'rocket scientists'- but, this isn't actually a good thing. Intellectual talent is being diverted into an overblown and fundamentally unstable financial system while Technical education gets neglected and politicized. Admirers of Prof. Dawkins book 'the extended phenotype'- a masterpiece of English prose in which the familiar Sufi trope of the moth and the flame is given a new and more beautiful meaning- should take heed. The activities of cadre based Islamist parties- even though they have had a technocratic image and recruited doctors and engineers- now militate against Human Capital formation in Science and Technology not least because of the ignorant and populist denunciation of Evolution. As a case in point, take the Indian Salafi preacher, Dr. Zakir Naik- a medical doctor who denounces Evolution as an unproven hypothesis. When he first emerged, many Indian Muslims welcomed him as an articulate and moderate voice who could inspire the youth. However, if the result of his preaching is that young people lose faith in Medical research and Epidemiology then the very basis of progress and advancement for millions of young Indian Muslims is destroyed.

Landsburg vs Dawkins- a self inflicted debacle.

Steve Landsburg, a man who has made a profession of being cleverer at stupidity than anybody else on call for Fox News, is seeking to square his own extreme Mathematical Platonism with the Creationism of the great unwashed.

With typical fatuity he attempts to take down Richard Dawkins with a wholly specious, seemingly mathematical, argument.

'Here is a quote from Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion”:

Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I  said, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name….The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present existence.

I could provide additional quotes, but this one should suffice. Dawkins believes, unless I have misunderstood him completely, that he has a quite general argument, not tied in any way to biology (because the above quote, for example, has nothing to do with biology) to establish that complex structures must have simple causes. That argument, whatever it might be, cannot be correct because the natural numbers stand as a counterexample.

Obviously, Landsburg has misunderstood Dawkins completely because that's his metier, it's what he does best, and moreover he has worked hard at it- devoting a whole chapter to doing so in one of his worthless books.

Just to be clear, Dawkins views are summarized thus-

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane," not a "skyhook;" for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that—an illusion.
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.  

Dawkins doesn't say what philosophy of mathematics he subscribes to. Suppose he is a constructivist. Then the complexity displayed by the natural numbers has evolved along with the minds that do mathematics but otherwise has no independent existence.

Suppose, on the contrary, Dawkins is a Platonist of some sort. Then, since the Platonic idea of Complexity pre-exists, he could scarcely say that 'complex structures must have simple causes'. Thus we know Dawkins isn't a Platonist. It is simply not credible to attribute to him the  belief that  individual horses participate in some Platonic idea of the horse.

Something else we know is that Dawkins is an Evolutionary Biologist. This doesn't force him to be nothing but a Constructivist in the Philosophy of Mathematics. He could be a Piercian Instrumentalist or a Heytig type Intuitionist or even a Formalist of a certain sort. What he can't be is a Mathematical Platonist of an extreme Tegmark type- believing 'All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically'- because that implies 
a) either accepting Godel’s proof of God, because mathematical structures would have what Godel calls ‘positive properties’- i.e. match to real world objects and so a principal ultrafilter of the St. Anselm type exists at least in some possible world- and if we are in the wrong world that’s just tough titty- we’re foredoomed to damnation

b) or denying mathematical structures can have positive properties- but this means minds have no way to ‘match’ with mathematical structures and so the human claim to be able to apodictically differentiate orders of complexity- P, NP, exponential etc- fails as these may be phenomenological artifacts.
What is true of Dawkins is true of each one of us.
In other words- though all the facts about the world don’t change, admitting Tegmark’s proposition alters what we can good faith affirm as being our own rational beliefs arrived at in accordance with best Public Justification practice.
Suppose we lower the bar and limit ourselves to what Quine & Putnam call ‘indispensable arguments’- i.e. stuff it makes sense to believe exists because our technology is based on it- is it unreasonable for Dawkins to a priori reject extreme Tegmarkism in favour of Constructivism (in which case the complexity of mathematical objects co-evolves with the minds that construct them)? Not at all, because currently there’s no way around ‘Beenakker’s boundary’. (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0702072v1)and there’s no Instrumental reason to counterbalance this objection.
Indeed, the reverse is the case, and what’s more Tegmark knows it.
What about Landsburg?
In this post, he writes ‘I claim to have explained in The Big Questions exactly how the first cause of our Universe could be a mathematical structure that is far more complex than the Universe itself; of course others, like Max Tegmark, have demonstrated this possibility in far more detail than I have. Whether or not Tegmark and I are correct in our beliefs, I claim we’ve at least demonstrated that (as far as we can tell) those beliefs could be true, which, once again, refutes Dawkins’s position.’

The problem here is that Computability puts a limit on the Complexity of what can be believed, other than by a leap of faith, about a mathematical structure . Either we have to believe things we can never prove or else there is a limit to the complexity only of mathematical but not of physical objects in Tegmark’s world (in which only computable mathematical objects are considered to be as real as physical objects ). Since we know the Red Queen effect drives co-evolved complexity for living things but not for mathematical objects considered as existing outside living minds and since we know some minds can grasp some complex mathematical objects but don’t know if the reverse is the case, it follows that it is impossible to demonstrate that a mathematical structure can be more complex than some currently living thing. Put another way, we know that some complex mathematical objects are ‘reducible’ for living organisms (otherwise we couldn’t say a living brain knows that a given object is complex) but we don’t know that the reverse is also the case- otherwise we’d have a proof that P equals NP.
For Economists, as opposed to philosophers, there is a big penalty involved in failing to grasp the central insight of Complex Adaptive Systems theory- viz. free agents, even with zero intelligence, create the Math that describes their behavior-that’s why we see real time polynomial complexity in price determination but not Walrasian fixed point algorithms running in exponential time (Axtell).
Mathematical Platonism is a bad habit for Econ, because it lets us off the hook for showing real time tractability for fixed point computation (necessary for things like the assumption of Ricardian Equivalence). True, one can adopt an an Austrian praxeology but the risk is of being ignored or sidelined by the mainstream.
The problem with Platonism is that it can cash out as faith in propositions known to be Mathematically unprovable. This is something worse than what Philip Mirowski decries- viz. neo-classical Econ’s tendency to take dis-confirmation as deep confirmation- it is a refusal to update the neo-classical Research Program in line with developments in Maths and computing and thus running the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Returning to Landsburg's post- first he makes a bizarre claim about what Dawkins is saying- viz. Dawkins isn't actually rebutting the Creationist 'argument from design' instead he's a mathematician working in Descriptive Complexity Theory who claims he has a proof that everything mathematicians call complex evolved from something simple. 
 Then Landsburg, by bringing up Tegmark, gives us the ammunition to prove, not Dawkins case (he wasn't talking about Tegmark universes) , but Landsburg's  Strawman-Dawkins case. At the same time, the atheist Landsburg, all unknowingly shows a way to save (or at least not destroy) the Creationist, Michael Behe's 'Irreducible Complexity' thesis. This is like Robin Hood aiming an arrow at the Sheriff of Nottingham and ending up killing Maid Marion and Little John and Good King Richard and Little Bo Peep.  But this is typical of Landsburg. His blog is pure intellectual slapstick.

Time and again we see Landsburg destroy the cause he claims to be defending with his weird logic and general air of illiteracy.  

Landsburg's wish to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds makes him a dangerous friend- in this case, he hasn't helped level the playing field for the Theists- only Narada's veena plucked by many fingered Time can do that- but he is a suicidal enemy. Aiming a blow at Dawkins he cuts off his own Tegmarkian head.

What is the moral of this story?

Survival of the fittest?

No, it is-  'more sex is safer sex when your name is Steven Landsburg and you are pleasuring the one great love of your life while typing up your blog with your other hand.'

Update

Landsburg latest comment is as follows- (my remarks are in bold)

Dawkins makes the statement that everything which is complicated arises from something that is simple. Dawkins does no such thing.  Dawkins doesn't say that Evolution always goes from the simple to the complex. The reverse happens if selection pressure eases up- for e.g. with Spiegelman monsters.  However, he does say that we human beings have evolved from relatively simple life forms. We weren't created by a more perfect, unimaginably more intelligent and complex being in the manner suggested by Genesis. Dawkins fails to define “complicated”, “simple” and “arises from”, so we have to guess what he means. Dawkins is a Public Intellectual writing in English. To find out what he means, you don't HAVE to guess, you can just ask him. In order to construct a potential counterexample to his statement, I have to come up with something that is complicated, but did not arise from a simple precursor, and the thing I have to come up has to satisfy this condition for a broad class of possible interpretations of Dawkins’s language. Dawkin's statement was domain specific. To refute him you have to come up with, not a potential, but an actual counterexample from that very same domain- viz. evolutionary biology. A

I claim that if the set of all true first-order statements about a structure X (in some appropriate formal language) is non-recursive, that’s a pretty good definition of complex — in the sense that no matter what everyday interpretation Dawkins intends of the word “complex”, anything that satisfies this definition will probably also satisfy his. See below

So: Dawkins says that the current state of the universe is complex, hence  must have a simple precursor. I observe that he hasn’t told us what he means by complex, but we can almost surely capture it by the difficulty of axiomatizing the set of true statements about the state of the universe. Therefore the right analogy is: No matter what you mean by complex, the natural numbers are almost surely complex by the same definition, and therefore the natural numbers — not any individual natural number, but the natural numbers, must have a simple precursor.

Landsburg is making two different mistakes

1) A mistake about natural language- He assumes that the conventions determining the truth value of statements in English about a formal language arise from something intrinsic to the formal language and not to customary English usage. This is not true. By English convention, this statement is true-  'Number theory is simple.  Aesthetics is complex.' Arguments in Number Theory get resolved quickly with relatively short papers deciding the issue. Arguments in Aesthetics just run and run and involve vast and expanding universes of discourse. This is an example of a meaning of 'complex' which is in accordance with English convention. It suffices to refute Landsburg. 

2)  A mistake about formal language-  he says ' if the set of all true first-order statements about a structure X (in some appropriate formal language) is non-recursive, that’s a pretty good definition of complex.  A first order formal language includes the Existential Predicate, thus, it can feature impredicativity and hence non-recursivity.  But by the Godel's 'compactness' & the upward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem nothing relevant to complexity can be said in the first order language as opposed to the second order language.
Fagin's theorem is a result in descriptive complexity theory that states that the set of all properties expressible in existential second-order logic is precisely the complexity class NP. Thus Landsburg's claim that he has a 'pretty good' counter-example is refuted because we don't know if it is computable. We don't know if unicorns exist somewhere in the Universe. But referring to something which may or may not exist is not a 'pretty good' counterexample to a theory about what exists.

In any case, something whose descriptive complexity can be proved to be nameable in English by just two capital letters is pretty damn Kolmogorov simple if English is our universal descriptive language. 

In fact, as time goes by we all expect to see increased compressibility in model theory- i.e. proofs will get shorter and have more generality. However,  we don't currently expect to see increased compressibility in real world objects- e.g. I don't expect to see vat grown clones of myself which have the same biological age and memories and tastes and phobias. It may happen but there is no proof that it will happen. The same may be said about Landsburg one day speaking other than through his arse.

Manmohan vs. Modi

Manmohan Singh's difficulty with Hindi is puzzling. I suppose he speaks Punjabi at home. Still, this was pretty dire.



Not Modi's best but a  strong finish.


Who will Congress field to take on Modi to protect themselves in the Hindi belt? Rahul seems to have stalled at the gate. Digvijay is too old, Kapil Sibal too clever. Perhaps it will be Sonia- now the best Hindi orator in the Congress stable.

A.K. Ramanujan's grandmother's magical vag

An epitome of A.K Ramanujan's Parmenidean poetic universe is the pawky yet serenely pastoral image of his broad beamed Tam Bram grandmother, her face pressed impassively into a fishing net, being fucked in the ass by a refreshingly unfastidious fisherman- an event which occurred with some frequency. But why? My best guess is- in Akay's 'imagined-community' of a timeless. essentialist, South India- valetudinarian fishermen, fearful of sea-sickness, lounge around  Madras harbor pumping the broad backsides of passing Tambram matriarchs to protest a spiritually synoecist view of the Valmiki Ramayana.
What about the women sodomised towards this great Secular end? Sadly, it appears, they can't protest anything because they don't really have minds or hearts, just vast gaping orifices which is why- as Akay's good buddy U.R. Ananthamurthy showed in his novel 'Samskara'- they exist simply so as to get fucked and provide copy to worthless Careerist gobshites engaged on a PhD in Eng Lit at Birmingham or a Post Doc in Linguistics at Chicago or some other such crude Credentialist swindle.
However, Ramanujan goes on tell us, granny's twat has teeth- I'm not kidding, the shithead actually says this- and, for some unknown reason, patient bovine creature though she is, little discomfited by being incessantly taken from behind by an underemployed fisherman, she nevertheless suddenly sprouts vagina dentata and bites off the too trusting piscator's penis while yet it thrusts inside her.
Why does she do so? Is it because the fishermen were protesting against Valmiki Ramayana and her Vagina was of a, quod licet bovi, non licet Jovi, Hindutva tendency?
No. The truth is, it's all fantasy. Akay's granny wasn't actually fucked by a fisherman at all. He just made up the story to make himself sound interesting. Nor did granny really bite off the fisherman's prick with her razor sharp oyster shell snatch. Akay was telling lies.  But that's what poets do- right? Tell lies about Granny getting fucked in the ass and then biting off fishermen's pricks with her awesome Vag.
As Akay said about the Kuruntokai-
In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems. In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, leanness of line by richness of implication. These poems are not just the earliest evidence of Tamil genius. The Tamils, in their 2,000 years of literary effort, wrote nothing better. 
The problem here is that the Kuruntokai only exists in such sparse, paradigmatic form, because literary culture had already achieved an encyclopaedic scope and canonicity of reference. Furthermore, the 'stable marriage problem' of matching topoi, agents and events such that karmic obstructors (Umaswati's vighnyakaranamanatararayasaya) are colligationally conserved implies that this aesthetic encodes a rhetorical disputation of rival soteriologies in a characteristic and univocal 'centamil' manner.
Akay, worthless shithead that he was, believed that, in literature, Evolution works in reverse gear- Time moves backwards like his granny's vag devouring and biting off that poor fisherman's prick.
Ramanujan's own intellectual incuriosity and idionomic inedia did not make him a sort of living fossil magically revivified by contact with the Tamil Jurassic park he found in the Chicago library stacks- actually the books he stumbled upon were from the collection of Prof. Neelakanta Sastry and widely known back home- but perhaps his granny's magical vagina was prowling around down there and bit his head off which is why his bloodless shite is brainless also.

What then is Akay's lasting achievement? Well, prior to the Sixties, Indian history and literature were perceived as being rich and exciting and productive of patriotic zeal and a passion for progress.
 Educated people writing in English- like Chief Justice Ananthanarayanan- were equally conversant with Sanskrit and Tamil and Telugu and so forth. This meant that there was no hiatus, no gap, between English and the vernacular languages. What was known to the one, was known to the other. There was no unspeaking Subaltern or voices shipwrecked by the very Siren song of their vernacular, and therefore supposedly entirely context-bound, language.
 Tamil, prior to Akay's idiocy, had no 'anonymous bards and alientated mystics'. On the contrary, everybody has a rich back-story in which encounters with Vedic Rishis and victories in Sangam contests were intermixed, not merely to spice things up, but to attest to an underlying univocity.
Tamil movies and English language articles weren't too different from each other. They both drew upon the same well-springs of scholarship and subscribed to the same pragmatics of Modernity.
This wouldn't do. If Indian history, Indian literature, is interesting and romantic and soul stirring- urm... that's bad, right? Coz that's like Hindutva? Or K.M. Munshi type belles lettrism? Coz Munshi was Right Wing, yeah? So, starting with Romilla Thapar, the project of turning Indian history and literature into the dullest shite on the planet began in earnest. That's where Akay- with his worthless, witless, transcreations- came in handy.

You see Modernism isn't about stuff like 'bijli, pani, sadak'- no, it's about some shite spouted by worthless cunts with PhDs in worthless subjects. It's a fucking Credentialist Ponzi Scheme is what it is. At one time it was supposed to be Marxist in some subtle way but even that pretense has been dropped. It now claims to be 'Secular'. Why? Coz it's shit, that's why.
Modernism, in India, means reliable Electricity, Water, Transport, Property Rights, curbing corruption, giving Manufacturing industry a chance, good governance, the Rule of Law....i.e. the same stuff we've always wanted. Some fuckwits once pretended we actually needed some particular sort  of Revolution- but we've seen through those fuckwits. Now, the same fuckwits, who, truth be told, didn't want a Revolution at all, are pretending they are a bulwark against Narendra Modi. Why?
If he's a bad guy, it's the Rule of Law you've got to get behind, not pretending Akay's essay on the Ramayana wasn't shit.
Or, perhaps, you believe Akay's Grandmother and her magic Vag will suddenly appear out of his essay and bite off all them RSS dickheads.
If so, have the courage of your convictions. Build temples for the worship of Akay's granny's magical minge. Compose Purnanas about the miracles performed by that aforementioned snatch. Shake Doordarshan out of its torpor an  resurrect Ramanand Sagar to make a T.V series about Akay's granny's wonder-working Vag. Launch a Rath Yatra on behalf of it. The Somnath Temple must be destroyed so Akay's Granny's Vag can be suitably commemorated.
You know you want to.
Just do it already.

n+1's stupidest article ever on World literature.

... in a sick, sad world, it’s hard not to be suspicious of anything as wholesome as World Literature.¹ The word literature itself has come to sound fake. Is there something the addition of world is making up for, a blemish it’s trying to conceal?

This much is clear: by the late ’90s, a new literary globalism had begun to flourish. In 1997, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, soon selling 6 million copies; in 2001, Oprah had her book club read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, an excellent 19th-century novel, published in 1995, about Indira Gandhi’s Emergency; in 2003, reading the bestselling Kite Runner, by the Afghan-born Khaled Hosseini, made some Americans feel better, and others worse, about our war over there. Literary scholars have focused on World Literature especially since 1999, when the French literary critic Pascale Casanova published her pathbreaking World Republic of Letters. In the ’00s, Franco Moretti, from Italy but resident (with Google) in Silicon Valley, instigated data-based debates about the world-system of literature in the New Left Review. 

Compare the late 1990's with the late 1890's- which featured best-selling books from India, Russia, Africa, smelly Continental dudes and America- what changed? The books n+1 mentions from the 1990's are shite. The books from the 1890's are classics- Kipling,  Tolstoy, the smelly Continental dude wot rote Quo Vadis, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Olive Schneider etc. So n+1 is simply wrong about 'a new literary globalism' beginning to flourish. Illiteracy maybe, gobar gas definitely, but not literary globalism.

N+1 thinks that vernacular language writing like that of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), is no longer possible. Thanks to the Lord's Resistance Army, perhaps this is true. But how is literary globalism at fault? The answer, of course, is that a secret cabal of top publishers and literary agents parachuted into Uganda and overthrew the military junta of Gen. Okello. Then they pretended to be Joseph Kony and recruited child soldiers to carry out massacres. 

Why is N+1 making such a ludicrous assertion? The answer is they've been reading Benedict Anderson- not the porn star but the idiot brother of the moronic Perry- 
'The spread of modern nation-states — carrying out central administration, within defined borders, of a population often linguistically defined — standardized national languages (sometimes slowly, as with Italian) and sometimes separated them (as with Swedish and Norwegian). Newspapers published in capital cities and written in the national language were decisive, as Benedict Anderson has argued, in establishing the “imagined community” of the nation-state; the same papers also published poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Literature’s audience came to be nationally constituted even where, as with the US and UK or most of Latin America, states shared a common language. Meanwhile the Bible, Koran, and Torah, no respecters of borders, dwindled in relative importance. '

India was an Empire ruled by British people. Yet, since Indian people formed real, not imagined linguistic communities, there was huge growth in vernacular language literature. Since Bengal, for example, was more stable and had a better economic base than Greece, Bengali literature developed farther and faster than demotic Greek and across an equally extensive diaspora.  Yet Greece gained Independence 110 years before Bengal. Did the Bible dwindle in importance in Greece because 'it was no respecter of borders'? No. Greeks aren't stupid. Sorry, but there it is.

N+1 tells us that ' Work addressing a smaller-than-national linguistic community — in Catalan, Kannada, or Welsh —very  rarely entered into World Literature. An exception was Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1913, who used, in Bengali, a “subnational” language spoken by tens of millions of people.'

This is nonsense. There could have been a Kannada Tagore- all you needed was a guy swanning around in robes making mystical noises and voila you have a Kannada  Khalil Ghibran or Tagore or Keyserling or Hesse or whatever.

N+1 thinks that a writer has to tackle a 'global theme' to get a global audience. Fair enough. But writing that goes global and stays global is writing which has universal appeal. This has nothing to do with how many people speak your language- Laxness is universal; I learnt my suspicion of the Co-op movement from his Icelandic saga as a 14 year old sweltering in Delhi- or whether or not your language has a nation to correspond to- many smart people were convinced that Hebrew would never match Yiddish- what matters is the dialectical concatenation of the  Revolutionary cathexis as mediated by the crepuscular prosopoi of the alimentation.

As n+1 very justly observes- 'Modern literature also emerged in an atmosphere of threatened revolution to radically reorder — or, among colonized peoples, simply establish — the nation-state. The specter of revolution haunts modern literature, from Romanticism to postcolonialism. In the later 19th century (a time of advancing mass literacy and mass agitation both), naturalism shuddered at images of rising social classes and ruined individuals. Zola in France led to Gissing in England; Dreiser, Norris, and Wharton in the US; Verga in Italy; Ibsen in Norway; and arguably to Mao Dun and Lu Xun in China. As apolitical a writer as Henry James wrote a superior novel about anarchists; and even the infamous arch-decadent slogan from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890) — “Living? Our servants will do that for us” — revealed the unstable class structure underneath l’art pour l’art.'  

Revolutions happen- there were quite a few during the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century- however Modern Literature was haunted by the specter of Revolution coz that's how ghosts work, right? You're in the kitchen and I'm in the bedroom- so you come to haunt me. I walk into the kitchen so you have to stop haunting me till you quickly step into the garden and can resume the whole haunting shtick. No. It doesn't get real old, real fast. Not at all. Why would you suggest it?
The truth is- 'An older global novel was animated by an attempt to win for fiction not only a new language and form but a role in securing an entire realm of freedom. But the political liberation failed, or was botched or betrayed; to write as if third-worldism were still a source of promise would be an especially tedious kind of cant. ' I remember that older global novel. It sat next to me on the School bus. One day it said it could get us a copy of Playboy if we all kicked in a couple of bucks. But it was lying. It didn't really have an elder brother who was prepared to sell his porn stash. Instead it was trying to raise sufficient funds to win for fiction not only a new language and form but a role in securing an entire realm of freedom. Unfortunately, even if you write a novel in a new language and form it still can't secure an entire realm of freedom because Magic don't work.  Writing books does not bring about political liberation- nor does sticking pins into voodoo dolls. Either you are already liberated and haven't noticed or you get the fuck beaten out of you till you run far far away.
Were there ever people stupid enough to believe that if the goat herders of north west Guatemala can throw off the shackles of the non goat herding majority, then the starving masses of Belgravia and Bel Air will at last breathe free? Did these very stupid people actually read novels about gay Guatemalan goat herders because they were waiting with bated breath for the denouement where Marta the lesbian goat is revealed to be an Angel of the Heavenly Anti Capitalist Revolution and her tears turn into a fountain of redemption spraying the reader with the Chrism of a muttony messiah? 
Of course.  That sort of thing was pretty routine back in the early Eighties- a period so dull that if you can remember it  you automatically qualify as a Chartered Accountant.

'Uncompromising work across the world suggests the outlines of a thorny internationalism opposed to the smoothly global. A list drawn up by a few Americans incapable, unlike the offspring imagined by Leopold in Ulysses, of “speaking five modern languages fluently” can only be drastically incomplete and tentative. Still it’s worth naming a few names: in France, the polarizing works of Marie NDiaye, with her long sentences dividing into different strains of thought; in southern Italy, the feminist novels of the reclusive Elena Ferrante, the terrifying Days of Abandonment (2002) and the quieter trilogy beginning with My Brilliant Friend(2009). In Mexico, Juan Villoro and Álvaro Enrigue place themselves at a sharp angle to the history of Latin American literature; in Argentina, Pola Oloixarac’sSavage Theories (2008) is an extremely smart novel of the Theory Generation. In Russia, the poet Kirill Medvedev’s rejection of copyright, made in response to the depredations of the Russian publishing system in the 1990s, has turned into a gesture of international significance. In China, Yan Lianke, unlike the Nobel-winning Mo Yan, has moved underground and gained in creative power. In India, a host of English-language writers from Samanth Subramanian and Tabish Khair to Roy herself and, in the vernaculars, Girish Karnad and Mahasweta Devi, have been lending their efforts to a more combative public sphere.'
Dunno about the other dudes mentioned but Girish Karnad and Mahasweta Devi are very very very old. Roy is bonkers. Tabish Khair does not exist. Samanth writes Guha stripe shite. Fuck do this bunch of cunts amount to 'thorny internationalism'? 

'A developed internationalist literature would superficially resemble the globalized World Lit of today in being read by and written for people in different countries, and in its emphasis on translation (and, better yet, on reading foreign languages). But there would be a few crucial differences. The internationalist answer to the riddle of World Lit — of its unsatisfactoriness — lies in words never associated with it. These include project, opposition, and, most embarrassingly, truth. Global Lit tends to accept as given the tastes of an international middlebrow audience; internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create the taste by which it is to be enjoyed. The difference, crudely, is between a product and a project. An internationalist literary project, whether mainly aesthetic (as for modernism) or mainly political (as for the left) or both aesthetic and political, isn’t likely to be very clearly defined, but the presence or absence of such a project will be felt in what we read, write, translate, and publish.
The project can only be one of opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and politics. Global Lit, defined more by a set of institutions than a convergence of projects, treats literature as a self-evident autonomous good, as if some standard of literary excellence could be isolated from what writers have to say and how they say it. In its toothless ecumenicalism, Global Lit necessarily lacks any oppositional project of form (as, again, international modernism did) or of content (as international socialism did); the globally literary content themselves with the notion that merely to write or read “literary” books is to enlist, aesthetically and politically, on the side of the angels. Literary excellence aside, Global Lit makes no judgments. The work it favors is in consequence often a failure on its own narrow terms, good writing being, in a word, the creation of people trying to tell the truth, however slant, rather than to produce “literature.” Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance, is more like what we have in mind.
To summarize, existing writing is shite- no argument- so you demand a new type of writing which is also shite but makes you want to eat it. 
Why? 
Will you really get your Revolution if you eat enough shit? 
No. But your Career will be made.
And that's what you really care about- shit eating cunt.