Ismail Patel ‘Britain is de-civilising Muslims’.

One of the great and abiding pleasures of Religion is the chance to denounce everybody else as a blaspheming, heretic of an apostate who is going to burn for ever and ever in Hell fire because they are so evil and stupid as to pretend that it makes no difference if you say ‘God is really really nice’ as opposed to ‘God is like real real nice, dude.’ Clearly, it is totally Satanic to say the one whereas it is a sign of election to say the other.
This ‘takfirism’- i.e.denouncing all and sundry as apostates- is a perfectly harmless past-time and occurs within all nice, well conducted, households. Baby says ‘Mummy is takfir coz she won’t let me eat dirt, waahn!’ Mummy says ‘Hubby is takfir coz he refuses to buy a new dishwasher.’  Hubby says ‘wifey is like totally takkir because she beats me in her sleep.’ Cat says ‘Miao miao takfir miao miao’.
Essentially, the assurance that everybody else is going to burn in hell fire makes it that much easier to put up with their little foibles.
In every small town and village in India, brothers denounce each other as takfir, teachers denounce the Head Master as takfir, peons denounce their bosses as takfir, it’s a great social glue and enduring source of hilarity.

The U.K Chair of ‘Friends of al Aqsa’, Ismail Patel, thinks, however , that takfirism equals ‘Islamic’ terrorism.
He writes–The term ‘Islamist’ is a political ideology and is unhelpful when employed in this context. The more nuanced term of Takfiri is better suited, which is an ideology viewing liberal democracies as a challenge that corrupts, captures and exploits Muslim people and lands. However what sets them apart is that they view violence as the first and only choice to redress grievances. Historically, the Takfiris have posed violent threats to within Islam and Muslim leaders, and as early as the first century of Islam, they were responsible for assassinating the caliph. Being mindful of the disparity in power, the Takfiris today have relied on terror attacks with high visibility; something that has been termed ‘pornography of violence’. The idea is to entice the liberal states to address the attack with a maximum reciprocity that erodes the very basis upon which the latter’s ideologies are anchored. In effect the strategy is one of engineering a major implosion through a minor explosion.’

Is Ismail right? Was 9/11, ‘Takfiri? What about the 7/7 London attack & the Mumbai terror strike?
The reason given by the perpetrators for 9/11 was that American troops were defiling the holy land of Saudi Arabia. In response, America relocated its troops. 7/7 and the recent Greenwich attack are about British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first of which has ceased and the second of which will soon do so. The Mumbai attack had an I.S.I signature and was intended to derail warming Indo-Pak ties by showing that the Democratic elected Govt. of Pakistan could not control the lunatic fringe.
But this suggests that terror attacks are rational and similar to military operations. Essentially, their purpose is to 
1) drive the news cycle and thus gain salience as an obligatory passage point for ineressement
2)  change the Cost Benefit calculus for the adversary.  
Clearly, both objectives can be instrumentalized by
a) Nation States as part of a strategic notion of ‘force multipliers with plausible deniability’
b) Self important shitheads who enjoy talking shite.
If 9/11 was Takfiri, the demand would have been for the expulsion of all non-Muslims and symbols of non Muslim culture and life-style. Rather, it appears, 9/11 was motivated by the belief that the Saudi regime would crumble without American troops. Nothing of the sort materialised. The Saudis have successfully met the challenge and now appear to see themselves as champions of main stream Sunni modernising Islam rather than exponents of Ibn Taymiyya style Wahhabism.
It is true that in Algeria in the 90’s, there was a ‘takfiri’ type of jihad according to which anyone not killing everyone else was takfir and should be killed- but this craziness, even if not sponsored by the Regime, nevertheless is the reason it is still securely in place while Tunisia and Egypt have fallen and Syria and Yemen are tottering.
The truth is, some terrorists and killers believe those they kill are apostates but most don’t. In any case, tafkirism is only relevant when people belong to the same sect. It is irrelevant when the target belongs to a different religion. In the case of the first hundred years of Islam, all killing arose straightforwardly from a political power struggle. The Ridda wars were about which tribe would dominate and represented a return to pre-Islamic thinking rather than a development within Islam. The rightly guided Caliphs abhorred the shedding of Muslim blood by Muslims.  Caliph Uthman could have saved his own life if he’d ordered his supporters to slay the rebels besieging him. Hazrat Ali was killed by a Kharijite still angry that he had not given the order to slaughter those Muslims who opposed him. It is not difficult to say the single word ‘takfir’. The rightly guided Caliphs could have elevated themselves to the level of Emperors or Dictators just by pronouncing this word. Instead, two of them were killed because of their principled stand in this regard.
Nobody suggested that those who were cruelly done to death at Kerbala were apostates- it is ludicrous to think so. Caliph Uthman wasn’t killed because his assassin thought him an apostate- I may mention that Hazrat Hasan & Husayn were among those protecting the Caliph’s house-  the issue was purely political.
The reason there was no ‘takfiri’ bloodshed in the first century of Islam is because everybody knew the following story regarding Usama Ibn Zayd.
Despite his accomplishments in helping defeat the Roman army, he is best known as the person Muhammad admonished for killing a man who had got the best of the Muslims in battle and then when Usama approached him to take off his head, he pronounced the words one officially states to become Muslim. Thinking this was just an attempt to spare his life, Usama killed him anyway. When the news of this got back to Muhammad, he asked Usama, “Did you kill him in spite of his professing La ilaha illallah (There is no God but One)?” Usama replied, “O Messenger of Allah! He said it out of fear of our arms.” Muhammad said, “Why did you not cut his heart open to find out whether he had done so sincerely or not?” He continued repeating it until Usama wished he had embraced Islam only that day (so that he could be forgiven for whatever sins he committed before that). (Bukhari, Muslim, Ahmad, Tayalisi, Abu Dawud, Nasa’i, al-`Adni, Abu `Awana, al-Tahawi, al-Hakim, and Bayhaqi.)^[2]
 It may be that tafkiri terrorism is an issue for an avowedly Islamic state. However, it is not relevant at all to Britain except as a problem internal to the Muslim community.
A Muslim who believes- as most do- that only God knows who is or is not a hypocrite or a heretic or an apostate- i.e. there is no reason for internecine conflict- may still wish to wage war against the West because he believes that it is robbing Muslim countries of their wealth and spreading moral corruption. In fact, a non Muslim may join hands with the Muslim if they share the belief that the West is acting immorally and spreading evil ideas.
Takfirism is totally irrelevant.

Ismail Patel says that ‘Britain is de-civilizing Muslims’. I don’t know exactly how de-civilized he has become but I bet I am more de-civilized yet. Ignorant of Islam he certainly is- but that isn’t Britain’s fault. He is stupid and his ignorant shite is published on ‘Open Democracy’- is that Britain’s fault? No. As I have repeatedly proved- David Cameron is a French Cambodian rent boy who took my online ‘English Elocution course’ back in 2002.  Similarly, Tony Blair (real name, Tarlok Singh Bedi) attended my Super Best Englis Klas in Ballimaron circa 1977.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.

The riddle of Rushdie- revenge of the Anima

Salman Rushdie, from childhood, stood out in three respects- firstly, verbal dexterity and linguistic prowess, secondly, outstanding logico-analytical left-brain skills  making him a good scholar marked for success in our ‘enlightenment’ day-time culture. Thirdly, Rushdie had a powerful anima, in other words a strong right brain, and ability to process information in this non-linear, visual /symbol dominated right hemisphere. This meant that his transition from childhood heteronomy to autonomy happened at both the level of submission/internalisation of the law (Kantian autonomy)- thus qualifying him to be a spokesman of the ‘Enlightenment’- as well as the level of the anima, the unconscious. My guess is that Phantasms of early infancy were what he mapped the powerful but unpredictable (his father appears to have had problems with alcohol) beings and forces around him onto. Thus following the non-linear, ‘magical’, adventures of these phantasms enabled Rushdie to achieve autonomy- not in the complete sense of having a fully predictive model of his milieu inside his own head- but a feeling of familiarity, a sufficient sense of security to be able to follow the adventures of those phantasms in the knowledge that ultimately wisdom would be gained, everything explained. In other words by putting himself in the hand of his anima, Rushdie would gain a intuitive type of wisdom.

If it is the case that left brain logic operates in a binary manner- good/bad, boy/girl/ etc- whereas the spandrels of the anima permit a more complex, multi dimensional ranking of judgements then it follows that Rushdie’s strong anima would give him superior tolerance, by making him less judgemental and moreover have further boosted his powers of observation by reducing cognitive dissonance. In other words, he, Rushdie, gets a comparative advantage as actor or novelist.
However there is a price to being anima ridden. The anima rebels strongly against changes in its milieu which cause the left hand side to impose a new ‘Universal Law’ to regulate cognition and therefore behaviour. The anima’s night time rebellion forces the individual into a manic protestation of ego-unassailability  against an abrupt and abject reversion to infantile heteronomy,which takes the shape of attitudinising, posturing, in other words turning into a prancing ninny. Now elite coteries have a soft spot for  prancing ninnies- they consider ninnydom a hallmark of authenticity, while prancing is a ticket to the inner circle . Indeed the Cambridge Apostles cult of Nous rapidly degenerated (or, if you actually went to Cambridge) achieved apotheosis as the cult of the prancing ninny.
Now the psychology of migration is actually (for most people) about a strenghtening of left brain autonomy- i.e. the emergence from the thymotic to the legalistic and contractual. Thus, though elite sub-cultures may encourage their ethnic college chums to represent the migrant as prancing ninny and ludicrously celebrate this as a reclaiming of authenticity, no actual migrant (i.e. a guy who moved for a better life) does this. Rather you see migrants focusing on legal and institutional matters. Nostalgia is a different kettle of fish- it brings on poetic or mystic reveries but, clearly, it is not of such stuff that prancing ninnies are made.

If Rushdie was to achieve ego-integration he would have needed to compartmentalise his life- the enlightenment part of himself working with others in a rational Weberian organisation, the prancing ninny- who at any moment (by the clemency of the anima) might turn into a real mime- like that Memphis who could communicate the whole of the Pythagorean philosophy with a twitch of his butt cheeks- the prancing ninny part of Rushdie could have been employed in experimental theatre or lunatic fringe politics or cult religion or something like that- while the anima ridden part of Rushdie could have had a night-time career as a fantasy novelist. In other words Rushdie could have followed his phantasms wherever they led and thus furnished the world with a topography of a lost continent of our own unconsciousness.

Rushdie, who I believe had a Jungian theory of himself coz that was the zeitgeist of the time, refused however to so compartmentalise himself. That was the way the pre-independence provincials had played things, greatly to the benefit of their vernaculars, but Rushdie was determined to be different. He felt he owed it to the spirit of the times to use all three parts of himself in his next book-Midnight’s Children- his big gamble. He almost pulled it of. He actually had all three qualities needed. All the information was available to him. Yet he failed. Why? His anima rebelled. It wouldn’t work to order. So powerful were the villains he conjured up, his power to make balanced judgements deserted him. He reverted to prancing ninnydom & thus made his name & sealed his fate. Ultimately he was the prancing ninny chased off the stage by the pantomime horrors he had himself cut out of garish coloured cardboard. Rushdie’s life became more fantastic than his books.
But was this inevitable? Not at all. Let us look at the concept for his Midnight’s children. It is based on Attar’s parliament of the birds. Now Attar shows how Spirituality and Social Reconstruction on the basis of equality of outcome are mirror images, two sides to the same coin. Thus, the book Rushdie is really writing exactly parallels  the Gandhian novels of Social Reconstruction of the late 20’s and early ’30’s- or the Marxist novels of the succeeding generation. Rushdie could have been doing something similar except in a New Age idiom which would provide a template for individual metanoia going hand in hand with mutuality and Social Reconstruction. Rushdie’s left brain was on the side of the angels. Yet his anima subverted the project, brought the roof down on him and condemned a whole generation or his sedulous apes to prancing ninnydom. Why? He had tried to force her and she will not be forced.Rushdie, as prancing ninny has to depict authority figures as Pantomime villains. That strain of vulgarity in Rushdie we would like to mistake for the joi de vivre of Mumbaikar untraumatised, unashamed of his ‘post-colonial’ status is actually nothing of the sort. Rather it  is the uttering of obscenities by a priggish child who is so terrified of the bogey man under his bed, he is trying to prove to the grown ups that he is actually a tough little street-urchin.

Now, Rushdie as prancing ninny, becoming the Solzhenitsyn of Islam is exactly what the doctor ordered as far as his Cambridge was concerned. But, how does it help us Indians? Prancing ninnies from Cambridge fucked up the economy, the polity, the legal system- and were richly rewarded for their pains. Even where their own Frankensteins rose up to strike them down- think Bhutto, Bandarnaike, Indira, Rajiv, Benazir- it was only so they could become immortal and fuck us all up for all eternity. In this context, why people  call Rushdie a great author is totally beyond me. In every book, he attempts something interesting and then totally fucks it up to incarnate the apotheosis of the prancing ninny. If Rushdie were serving himself (his real self, the object of his literary metanoia) fine. Praise him. A guy who is doing well for himself should be celebrated so that there is a template for others to follow. But if he’s fucking himself up- what’s the point? The only answer is in terms of the crudest sort of Girardian mimetic desire. 
The real tragedy is that the anima had actually given Rushdie a degree of prescience- like a great actor whose skills verge spookily on that of the Spiritualist Medium- except, like most Mediums, once attuned he channeled increasing silliness- still, that’s something no one else had. Take his novel ‘Fury’ – read the first few pages and you think ‘this was written just before 9/11- WOW!”- except it soon disintegrates into utter silliness.
So where’s the tragedy? Well it has to do with the Kashmir ‘intifada’ which- coz of the Gandhi-Abdullah poll fixing pact- started shortly after, the M.P, Syed Shahabuddin had written his infamous letter demanding the banning of Satanic Verses. 
We all thought Rushdie, being a Cambridge man, only wrote shite coz, being a Cambridge man, he knew we could digest nothing better. However, now his life was being threatened, he’d turn into the ultimate street-fighter and kick Shahabuddin in the goolies.
This was easy for him to do. Rushdie just needed to pick up the phone and talk to any Indian journalist here in London. He’d have found out that Shahabuddin was a former diplomat,  inducted into Politics by the B.J.P., who had visited , the previous year, the Sankaracharya of Kanchi (a sort of Hindu Pope) in company with, his friend, the infamous pro-Zionist, Dr. Subramaniyam Swamy (whom Harvard has sacked for his rabidly anti-Muslim views).

So all Rushdie has to do is play the Kashmir card.  He had good credentials. “Midnight’s children’ had attacked Mrs. Gandhi. He’d written his anti-American book about Nicaragua. ‘Shame’ had won a prize in Iran. Khomeini and Khatami were totally on side re. Kashmir- they had a history of allying with ‘secular’ lefties for strategic purposes. The Pak I.S.I would have got the Mirpuris in Bradford to demonstrate outside India House in favor of Rushdie- how dare an Uncle Tom Muslim M.P call the Religious faith of one of their own into question? They take our land, they humiliate and torture us- but now the Hindus have gone too far! They use one of their ‘token’ Muslim M.P’s- to utter a libel upon a true son of Kashmir, such that he may appear a blasphemer and an apostate! Take my life, spit on me, humiliate me, but do not impugn my faith! Just see, the cunning of the tyrannical Pandits  has overstepped all bounds! The want to continue humiliating and denigrating an innocent Muslim Kashmiri- even after he has escaped, even after he has got British Citizenship- why? What is his crime? Hubb al watan min al Iman. Love of country is part of Faith. But love of Kashmir is the crime for which this Muslim is being denounced as an apostate! But by whom? Nimrod! The tyrant, the idolator! How long shall we keep silent? 

In any case, plenty of academics would have come forward to show Rushdie had written a satire on Saidian ‘Orientalism’. 
Once Rushdie played the Kashmir card, he would have humbled Rajiv and emerged as the Edward Said or Noam Chomsky of the sub-continent. The Indian intelligentsia- once Rushdie had cleared himself of having written a ‘Rangeela Rusool’ type porn novel- would have fallen on their knees to Rushdie. Nobel Prizes rather than Bookers would have rained down on him.
Deservedly so. If Rushdie had been on Kashmir watch, the Centre would scarcely have sent Jagmohan there. Frankly, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. South Asian history might have developed very differently.
But, no. 
Rushdie was and is a prancing ninny and greatly honored for being a prancing ninny coz of where he comes from. Supply and Demand, I’m afraid. The Market knows best.

Optimal Migration & Nationality theory

What is Nationality theory? Well, urm… you know what Nationality is, right? Sure you do, you’re not stupid. So there’s bound to be some particularly silly way of talking about it such that paradoxical results are generated and suddenly you aren’t so sure but, because you definitely aren’t stupid, you just keep keep saying more and more stupid things till your gibberish qualifies as a full fledged Nationality theory.
The amount of harm this can do rises exponentially once you try to fit this Nationality theory into the existing pragmatics of the State. So obviously that’s the next thing on your to-do list.

A methodologically individualistic approach, building on insights from Aristotle through Aquinas to Leibnitz, might yield something like this-

In other words, in so far as Nationality arises by some more or less voluntarist social process- rather than the mind of a fanatic or the animating ghost in the machine of a brutal tyranny- that configuration of the State such that, within its territory, there obtains peaceful co-existence between resident nationalities could be said to pass a higher standard of freedom and to do so more securely- i.e. in a manner more robust to both endogenous and exogenous shocks. In the language of dynamic programming, such a State has ‘golden path’ Freedom.

Thus, the Ottoman State- with more or less autonomous Millats (Nationalities/ Sects)- could have had ‘Golden path’ Freedom if it had been configured to prevent or bounce quickly back from ethnic strife. It has been argued that its imperfect de-feudalization and Corrupt or Sectarian resistance to ‘Tanzimat’ reforms, put paid to its hope of ‘Golden path’ Freedom-as-coexistence and that, in any case, the ‘Balance of Power’ concept of the Concert of Europe was bound to instrumentalize divisive Nationalism within its territories as part of its own biased ergodics.
Something similar would be true of any multi-national State under a ‘Balance of Power’ equilibrium. Each would have an incentive to instrumentalize divisive Nationalism- albeit, perhaps, through the proxy of ‘Class'(some Nationalities might be seen to be ‘essentially’ more working or middle class) or Gender (some Nationalities might be seen as essentially more or less sexist) or the Environment (tribals are nice to the Environment whereas other people who look exactly like them and live in the same place are very evil)- outside its own borders precisely because of a similar buffeting it, itself, receives as part of a wider Brownian Motion. Divergence of Economic interests within a Nation- as between Bond Holders, represented, in England in the Twenties, by the Times and Morning Chronicle, and Manufacturers, whose mouthpiece was the Manchester Guardian- too, might militate to the same end.

The problem here is that signals emanating from the ergodics of the Equilibrium between States interfere or contribute noise to signals from the Economic Optimal Migration Theory such that pathologies can develop though the appearance of ‘free movement’ obtains.
What is the free market solution?
Essentially, a signal extraction problem is going to change the Schelling focal points for markets such that ‘buffered’ local Tiebout models, yielding untaxable Manorial rents, gain salience in a manner that weakens the State for weal or woe.
From the Ideological point of view, it is impossible for us to know whether we inhabit a Tiebout or a Universal model and so, in so far as we blog about Optimal Migration & Nationality theory, we just add noise to the signal to create a confusion worse confounded.
So, no change there then.

Am I being sexually harassed?

Ever since I turned 50, I find my rate of self-induced vomiting has risen astronomically. Why?

This article in Science Daily provides a clue-

‘Men who experience high levels of sexual harassment are much more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics in an attempt to control their weight, according to a surprising finding by Michigan State University researchers.’

In addition to self-induced vomiting, I find I’m eating a lot more vindaloo (notoriously laxative) and taking black coffee (a diuretic) in the morning. What’s more, all this is happening in the context of my Doctor, a neat little blonde, telling me I have to lose ten kilos.

Clearly I’m being sexually harassed at the pubs and Tandoori restaurants where I continue a staggered celebration of my half centennial in company with such of my co-evals as are not dead or, in marginal cases, still contactable through Facebook.

The strange thing is I’ve always suspected that I was being subjected to sexual harassment- especially by big ass Nigerian women whose buttocks constantly stare at me in the street. However, big ass Nigerian women don’t frequent the sorts of pubs and curry houses I’ve been patronizing lately. So- as my Cockney friends are wont to say- what is occurring? My guess is that all them callipygian draughts of piping hot chocolate lurk outside the mini-cab office at which my friends deposit me, blind drunk, for my journey home- at which time they have a window of opportunity to sexually harass the hell out of me with none the wiser.

It’s a comforting thought for me, next time I have to tickle my throat before passing out on the bathroom floor so as to avoid choking on my own vomit during the night, that this distasteful proceeding is occasioned not by my own intemperance but the raging libidos of them big ass Nigerian women whose buttocks just won’t quit staring at me suggestively and like undressing me with their eyes and…okay, putting a paper bag over my head and maybe a big cardboard box over my pot belly and like photoshopping stuff over my junk and… well you get the picture.

Anyway, I’m not saying this to ‘name and shame’ big ass Nigerian women.

Clearly, it’s all David Cameron’s fault.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

That boy aint right.

Madam, your butt is sexually harassing me but don’t worry it’s all David Cameron’s fault.

Is Liah Greenfeld the stupidest Sociologist in the Universe?

No. That’s why, like Avis, she tries harder. She has just published a book which suggests that increasing levels of Mental Illness are associated with the Economically successful, Secular and Egalitarian Nationalisms of the sort  she thinks characterizes the free Societies of the West.

Her thesis, though not logically deducible from any possible combination of premises, is nevertheless associated in her writing with the following two assertions-

1)  Greenfeld’s theory of Nationalism as defining the modern culture which shapes how we think. According to her, the Nation was invented by the English in the Sixteenth Century because the Tudors employed Commoners in high positions. Nationalism means all members of the Nation are equal and so, since they can’t compete with each other for thymotic status,  they collectively engage in competition with other Nations in those fields where they have an absolute advantage.

Let us pause for a moment to consider whether there is any truth in what Prof. Greenfeld says.

Is there any type of Society which is not competitive? Did Athens not compete with Corinth and Sparta at the Olympic games? Of course not. Athens wasn’t a Nation, it was a Polis- a City State. Thus, it couldn’t possibly compete against some other City State. Pausanias tells us that City States didn’t always play fair to score over their rivals ‘“Sotades at the ninety-ninth Festival was victorious in the long race and proclaimed a Cretan, as in fact he was. But at the next Festival he made himself an Ephesian, being bribed to do so by the Ephesian people. For this act he was banished by the Cretans.”^[4]

 ^{However, Greenfeld might say City States, unlike Nations aren’t INHERENTLY competitive because…urm…well they just aren’t okay? Similarly, Empires aren’t inherently competitive, Princedoms aren’t inherently competitive- only Nations are because…urm… well, they just are, okay? Remember the U.S.S.R? It wasn’t a Nation, it was a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is why it wasn’t at all inherently competitive with the U.S.A- which actually is a Nation. Obviously, once the USSR was dissolved and Russia under Yeltsin became a Nation, it just got terribly inherently competitive with the U.S.A as I’m sure you’ll remember. Unfortunately, Yeltsin concentrated on being a bigger drunken buffoon than Bush or Clinton, which didn’t do the Russians any good, but Greenfeld, who was born in Vladivostok, can explain why-}

True, Kruschev, who was Ukrainian, did say he was going to compete with the U.S.A in the field of Consumer products but since he wasn’t the head of the Ukrainian Nation or any other Nation, but the head of something that wasn’t a Nation, it follows that though outwardly competitive, inherently, no such competition obtained.
Similarly, the fact that Communist States showed far higher social mobility, at least before Brezhnev style ‘stabilization of the cadres’ created a hereditary nomenklatura, shows that …urm… well, it shows something or other. Actually, come to think of it Afghanistan had more ‘Civil Society’ than British India coz. Faiz’s dad was just a barefoot shepherd but rose to a high position by ability alone…but, hang on, that sort of thing happened a lot in Islamic States, including purely theocratic ones which, by definition, weren’t ‘wataniya’- i.e. Nationalist….Oh dear. This is strange. The notion of what we call meritocracy turns out to have existed in Qin China, pre-Mauryan India, come to think of it David, in the Bible, was a barefoot shepherd…well, clearly, though many polities have operated just like Greenfeld ‘nations’, still ‘the form of consciousness prevailing in them did not allow for the existence of such political phenomena- though the noumenon corresponding to it did obtain- what actually happened was that when the Qin accepted the Mohtist argument for careers open to talent though people spoke and wrote as though they understood the concept, they didn’t really, they were actually thinking about dragons or chop suey or other Oriental stuff of that sort.
Similarly, when the English- even though they invented the concept of a secular and egalitarian Nation- continued to talk and write and make laws which implied that Women weren’t equal to men, Peers of the Realm remained entitled to a trial by members of their own chamber, Non Conformists and Catholics and so on suffered all sorts of Civil disabilities, workhouse kids were sent up chimneys or down coal mines- when all that was happening it was purely coincidental. You see, the English were preparing an after dinner skit all through the seventeenth and eighteenth and a long way into the Nineteenth century and so they habitually spoke or wrote or did things in a manner which gave color to the notion that they weren’t a secular and egalitarian people at all. Thus, when a Seventeenth Century English Queen turned a nice little profit selling English girls into slavery in America that wasn’t an example of  Slave trade. What Slave trade? We don’t got no steenkin Slave Trade here!

What about Greenfeld’s notion that Economies with sustained growth- countries which have transformed themselves in my life time like Singapore, Qatar, Kuwait, Mauritius – can’t exist without Nationalism?
Surely that must be true?
Take the 2 Koreas. North Korea was more advanced Economically that is why it chose to compete by turning into an Economic powerhouse producing the best big screen T.Vs and mobile phones in the world. South Korea, being mainly agricultural, concentrated on folk dancing. This is why North Korea is a far more secular and egalitarian Society than South Korea- which is doomed to backwardness. The same thing happened with East and West Germany- the latter concentrated on building cathedrals and staging passion plays while the secular and egalitarian East concentrated on heavy industry.
What’s that you say? There was a woman called Irma Adelman and she advised the South Koreans on how to industrialize and lift themselves out of poverty? Adelman you say her name was..Yes, no doubt about it. Typical Korean name. Clearly an out and out Korean Nationalist. She fucking Tae Kwan Do’d the Military Junta till they implemented her plans.
But what if some other country- like India- had invited over this Adelman chick and followed her advise instead of listening to shitheads like Kaldor and Joan Robinson? The fact is, Economists know absolute advantage means shit. Comparative advantage is what determines what you concentrate on. But you need smart people to spot where comparative advantage, acquired or otherwise, arises. Suppose smart and greedy people get their hands on Govt. policy. What is to stop them doing the economically smart thing even absent any sense of nationalism or entity which could be classed as a Nation? Can oligarchies never gain control of a Polity? If so, might Nationalism not be fabricated later on to get the masses to fight to protect the oligarchs’ gains?
Greenfeld thinks not.

This is very interesting. It turns out that once a guy has made enough money he quits Business and does something else UNLESS Nationalism stops him by ‘ennobling’ his pursuit of yet further wealth. This proves that America isn’t a nation. Lots of rich dudes- Herbert Hoover, Ross Perot, Bloomberg, Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Gates etc- quit business after they’ve made their pile and go in for something else. True a lot of other rich dudes don’t quit but keep at it coz they like what they do or coz it’s the only way they know to occupy their time meaningfully- but that happens in traditional societies too. Wealthy businessmen stick to business because it’s all they know how to do. A Caste society, like India, can turn into an oligarchy if the merchant caste can hire better soldiers and that oligarchy can disguise itself as a Nation entrenching Caste privileges behind a camouflage of  Property and/or Credentialist Rights. Indeed, for Anglophone countries, the suspicion has always been that this is the true explanation of how things worked out and this have driven political struggle and ideological debate in a manner that, occasionally, has actually improved Social Equity.
How is this fact compatible with Greenfeld’s thesis? I suspect she has a novel answer. People living in English speaking nations are all totally mad. That’s why they think she is talking shite. If they weren’t mad, they’d see she was totally in the right- being a Nation means you get advanced economic growth which drives you mad so you don’t get how clever this girl from Vladivostok really is.

2) Greenfeld’s theory of the Human Mind
Animals are born knowing their place in the world and their place in the pecking order. That is why two animals of the same species never fight to establish which is dominant. David Attenborough faked all his Nature Documentaries. Why? He’s English- thus totally mad. Incidentally, God is an Englishman. Why? because he invented Evolution and Evolution is totally unnecessary coz animals automatically know their place in the social order and so don’t have to go in for sexual competition through things like dominance or mating displays which only exist coz like animals are not just Cartesian meat-machines simply but also windowless monads going through the motions of a pre-established harmony choreographed by a lunatic God with a Michael Caine type accent.

Greenfeld’s idiocy is in assuming that stuff about Identity is incompossibly cloud sourced and ‘crowd forced’- in the sense that it is both downloaded from some cloudy ‘Culture’ detached from the agents you interact with and also that the crowd you actually interact with can force a synchronization upon you such that you become what they say you are leaving you no buffer. If this were true, Identity faces a Race Hazard and becomes glitchey in a noisy environment -i.e. the computational burden of maintaining identity would require a huge amount of logic redundancy. As a matter of fact, this is a possible way of thinking about schizophrenia- occupational therapy can be a bit like building Karnaugh maps, or finding an alternative neurological locus to do the sort of stuff, which kind of builds up a general purpose module that restores noetic function to a widening sphere of life supporting operations.

However, Greenfeld isn’t interested in helping Schizophrenics have a better life. She believes there is something called ‘the Symbolic Imagination’ which is uniquely human and if you don’t have it you’re fucked. Why? Well, it turns out, instead of pattern recognition, Karnaugh map type solutions to Race Hazard, Greenfeld wants substantive logic redundancy on the basis of the Symbolic Imagination- i.e. you’ve got to imagine all possible worlds and build a huge number of logic gates all over the place and once you’re done, turns out you’re not done at all coz in addition to this uniquely human ‘Symbolic Imagination’ there’s also a uniquely human ‘Will’ which has to go sit at each of those fucking logic gates and arbitrage everything while constantly worrying whether it’s a ‘strong’ enough Will to do its job coz it turns out, Greenfeld tells us, them logic gates are context dependent and keeps changing as the System changes- so basically the Will is fucked. Sisyphus had it easy. Hand me the fucking Vodka, lady from Vladivostok- Russian Roulette is the only sane game in town.

The question I asked at the beginning of this post was whether Greenfeld is the stupidest Sociologist in the Universe. Did someone take her by the tail and twirl her around in the air? Something went wrong, that is clear. Overwork? But what work has this woman ever accomplished which wasn’t vanity? She speaks of insanity, not to ameliorate the condition of those who suffer it, but to castigate, under the pretense of praising, those democratic nations which have provided her both education and advancement at the price, certainly, of a crushing sense of anomie inflicted by her own dismay at the Western Academy’s abject failure to spot her worthlessness.

I’m not making this up. That’s what the woman actually said at a Public lecture at the LSE.

Verdict on Thatcher

I was a 15 year old in Finchley, Mrs. Thatcher’s constituency, when it became obvious that Denis Healey’s mix of monetary policy and Income’s policy was going to fail. Nixon had tried a Wage freeze but failed. Healey and Callaghan, both Monetarists, understood that Incomes Policy couldn’t work but still thought it might impact on Expectations and give the Economy a soft landing. But, there wasn’t a single Trade Union leader- let alone City analyst- who was in any doubt that this simply could not be the case. Labor would have been better off appointing a Witch Doctor to perform Voodoo rituals if they wanted their policy to be credible. As a matter of fact, there were a couple of Witch Doctors- sorry I mean Economists- who thought a tax based Income Policy could work even though there was already plenty of evidence of ‘wage drift’- i.e. actual Income differing from taxable Income- and the upshot of a Tax based Incomes Policy would have been to create a parallel black economy with permanently debilitating effects on the tax base.
This fact should be borne in mind when discussing Thatcher’s ascent. Essentially, Labor didn’t have a policy (or had a saner version of Tory Monetarism which they could not admit to) so the Tories had it all their own way.
 The Tories saw their chance to capture the upper working class- Essex man who worked for Ford- leaving Labour with the low paid dregs which meant that a militant fringe got disproportionate play time. However, what did for the British working class was  the precipitate Tory abolishing of Exchange Controls, for which they exculpated themselves by saying they didn’t know about ‘overshooting’ and like how North Sea Oil would inflate the real exchange rate and cause massive de-industrialization, coz urm Hayek never mentioned it and didn’t Friedman once say something about this and…oh, anyway Markets are efficient don’t you know. Thatcher’s Govt. did a complete U turn on Monetary policy but what really helped was the ridiculously low real exchange rate which obtained by 1985- itself a result of Reaganite profligacy.
Friedman had spoken of the signal extraction problem re. Inflation but what destroyed British manufacturing was crazy Ecxhange rate based uncertainty. This is because manufacturing is more tradable  and price elastic than services. Thatcher herself was insulated from all this- indeed, probably quite ignorant. Whatever her convictions, they were irrelevant to the manner in which history happened by default.
I suppose Thatcher will be remembered for defeating Scargil and Gen. Galtieri. But, Lawson tells us, Thatcher was initially wet on Coal- but this meant that Scargill got uppity and went too far thus making a terrible conflict inevitable- whereas, w.r.t the Falklands, it is not clear that Thatcher’s diplomats had been sending Galtieri unambiguous signals in the first place.
Other policies which were genuinely dear to her heart- the Poll tax, staying out of the E.R.M- led to her downfall. Still, it was she who promoted John Major who somehow endeared himself to the voter and gave the Tories another innings- albeit by way of follow on.
What then is Thatcher’s great legacy? Surely, it must be Privatization. McMillan might moan that it was selling the family silver, but Thatcher showed it was sound house-wifely sense. The pity of it is that many working class people who bought their Council House, took windfall payments from their Mutual Societies, invested in specious Financial products, ended up mis-allocating resources and will face a poorer retirement. Educationally, as well, Thatcher’s years disadvantaged Engineering and Science based Professions while enriching Lawyers and Accountants and Estate Agents. In the long run, this might represent the true ‘opportunity cost’ of her period at Downing 10.

Overheard at the Sauna

Bradford/ Pakistani accent- ‘Yerr, me Mam used to say ‘ you don’ huv a prettttty face. But keep it tight down there & you’ll land a millionaire!’

Gurus in Indian Politics

In ancient times, the foundation of Dynasties was closely associated with Spiritual preceptors- even if the policies of the Dynasty markedly diverged from what those preceptors might have counselled. An example is the Bahmani Kingdom about whose founder Wikipedia has this to say-
Early historians, Tabataba and Nizam-ud-Din Ahmad believe that Hasan was descended from the Persian king Bahman, son of Isfandiyar. But Firishta emphatically asserts that this genealogy was fabricated after Hasan’s accession to the throne by the flatterers and poets though he has seen the same genealogy in the royal library at Ahmadnagar. He believes that his origin was too obscure to admit or being traced. He thinks that Hasan was an Afghan by birth. He was a servant of an astrologer Brahmin named Gangu (Gangadhar Shastri Wabale) of Delhi and was blessed by him because one day while working in his master’s fields, he found some buried treasure which he returned to Gangu thus securing his blessing.  Some experts think, based on sources available at the main library of Ahmednagar,  that, being an astrologer, Gangu had already read his servant’s chart and since he was very sharp and shrewd, he started giving him instruction and also used his influence within the Delhi Sultanate to get his protege appointed Sirdar (Governor) of the Deccan .

Nationalist politics in India, perhaps self-consciously, adhered to this pattern but with one novelty- viz. the emergence of the politician-saint hybrid. Why did this occur? 
When we look at Hindu Revolutionary movements of the last decade of the Nineteenth and first decade of the Twentieth Century, we find shadowy God-men in plenty operating behind the scenes. Bankim Chandra’s novel, Anandmath, resurrected the ghost of the Sanyasee rebellion and explicitly linked it to Young Bengal’s determination to throw off the fetters of British bondage.
 The legend of Tibeti Baba – who, by mystic means, could enter the body of others and thus achieve functional immortality- and that of Soham Swami– gifted with prodigious strength- alarmed the British by giving a sinister twist to the Theosophist doctrine of Higher Beings on the Astral plane directing events down below on Earth. For their part, the British realized that to target seditious Hindu Godmen would be to lend substance to the notion that they possessed supernatural power- after all, a Hindu Godman is indistinguishable from a beggar- and thus give currency to the myth (most damaging because true) that their own power was built upon quicksand; the whole gaudy pageant of the Raj was the most childish of illusions, and that some Sadhu in a remote cave or mountain-top could uproot the foundations of British power, purely on a whim, and do so as easily as a child blows away the gossamer of a thistledown. Thus, the safer course for the Imperial Police was to highlight the activities of Western returned intellectuals and the restive young students in the Govt. schools and Colleges who were assumed to be either deracinated, and thus devoid of of that Antaeus like strength that arises from contact with the soil of the motherland,  or else were mere College drop-outs or delinquents eking out a miserable existence at the boundary between petty Crime and conspiratorial politics. 
Still, it is noteworthy that the authorities steered clear of charging professional (as opposed to self-professed) ascetics with sedition, preferring to bring lesser charges- cheating, rape, sodomy. etc- which had the double purpose of causing respectable people to recoil from what after all are the habitual activities of Godmen in this godless world.
In this context, the Revolutionary-turned-Godman – people like Sri Aurobindo or Niralamba Swami- raised up the Social position of the Hindu Godmen and rehabilitated Yoga and other ascetic practices as being something more than pious frauds or a cover for pederasty. Thus, by a historical irony, the Sanyasse-Faqir rebellion, which the British put down with salutary force at the dawn of their rule, was reclaimed by Nationalists in a manner such that the obnoxious aspect of the Sadhu Sangh, or indeed the Dervish community- viz. their extortionate monetary demands backed up by both physical force as well threats of Black Magic- was removed and the Godman stood substantially rehabilitated, indeed rendered almost respectable and, after Independence, even, by a polite fiction, not automatically disqualified for some small Political role within the Secular State, especially seeing as Rape, Sodomy and the slaughter of their own Priests and Gurus was ceasing to be their exclusive monopoly.

A quite separate trend, centering on the Madras and Bombay Presidencies- as opposed to Bengal- was the development of what Morris Jones has called the ‘the saintly idiom’ of Indian populist discourse whereby the supernatural claims and esoteric doctrines of the Godmen came to take a backseat to concrete, or seemingly concrete, demands which could become the object of a popular agitation. Annie Beasant, though steeped in Occultism, suddenly re-invents herself as a Home Rule campaigner. Mahatma Gandhi rises to this challenge by turning the tables on the Hindu Reformists by firstly seeking out the peasants and then, inexplicably, making common cause with the Muslim fanatics. His ascent is dizzying. For a moment, it seems, he has made himself the master of India- a Luther who hasn’t yet broken faith with the peasants- by being willing to sluice the British out of their bastions- to sweep them away into the Indian Ocean- on a tide of blood, internecine blood, Caste against Caste, Creed against Creed, Co-operator agains Non-cooperator, Father against son, brother against brother- but, thankfully, Gandhi drew back from that precipice. 
From that moment on, the Godman and the Politician became interchangeable. Everybody- including the Marxist, including the Capitalist- had become a Godman of some sort- in that such ‘virtu‘ as the possessed was now purely ritualistic or doxological. 
Thus, even if History cut short Subash Chandra Bose’s life, legend has endowed him a posthumous life as ‘Gumnami Baba’.
True the Nehru’s- Motilal and Jawaharlal- kept a little aloof from the Godman tag- but only by their ineffectuality, thus, without wishing it, ending up founding a dynasty- since dynasties exist only by the blessings of Godmen- not, thank God, vice versa.
There are two trees, in the Mahabharata, one which grows upwards from Earth to Heaven, and the other with its roots up in the sky whose tropism is towards the ground. Be it the tree of the dynast, or that of the Godman, cut it down, says Krishna. With the axe of non-attachment- which is a fancy word for boredom- cut it down.

True greatness of Motilal Nehru.

What was Motilal Nehru’s greatest achievement? The answer is that he created a new Political Party- the Swaraj Party- which put forward a revolutionary ideology- viz. that the best form of non-cooperation with the Government was to cooperate with them so as to ensure that non-cooperation was truly effective. Thus Motilal led the Swaraj Party to continually defeat Govt. bills in the Legislative Assembly so as to show that the Bills would be passed anyway on the Viceroy’s say so. Since everybody already knew that this was the case, the question arises as to why it was necessary for the Swaraj Party to try so hard to frustrate the wishes of the Govt. when it already knew in advance that the Govt. would always succeed and so its own only reward would be its own frustration? There are three possible answers to this question-
1) to show that something already obvious to everyone is in fact the case might have some real world consequence over and above the epistemic value of the demonstration. Let me take an example. It is obvious that if I take my pants down then a highly unseemly spectacle will be afforded anyone in the vicinity. However, by showing that this is in fact the case a nuisance is created which would not otherwise exist. Thus Motilal Nehru, great lawyer that he was, was responsible for a nuisance as stupid as anything dreamed up by the Mahatma and this, by itself, endows him with a stature at least equal if not greater than that of the other founding fathers.
2) on the assumption that resources are scarce- including cognitive or information processing resources- to demonstrate the truth of something already known to be the case diverts resources in a manner which could have non-linear dynamic effects. The rationality of highly irrational beliefs- i.e. the survival value of believing things which are totally bonkers- is, on plausible assumptions, greatest precisely for very very smart people or programs or parties who depend on being on the right side of a cognitive gradient to assert power or corner resources. One way of seeing how this work is to think about the oligopolist’s ‘spare capacity’ or the Nuclear Super power’s ‘over kill’ inventory of ICBMs. A little thought would show that such spare capacity or over kill simply isn’t Muth rational- i.e. it points to an intelligent type of stupidity which, nevertheless, it may be in everybody’s interests to maintain because, if it were replaced by genuine intelligence, then something destabilizing occurs.
In other words, Motilal’s parliamentarism to prove parliamentarism futile, though itself futile, wasn’t futile at all because it demonstrated India’s infinite capacity for  cooperation in the great cause of non-cooperation provided, of course, that non-cooperation failed completely and simultaneously undid the pretense that Indians were capable of cooperating with each other, even against the Govt.
Gandhi allowed the Swaraj party to seemingly swallow his own ‘No Change’ Congress and C.R. Das worked himself to death to ensure no work was done in Bengal. But the price paid by the Motilal and Das for their politics of futility was stupid concessions to communal parties- not needful things like Anti Untouchability Legislation- which paved the way for the beggar my neighbor politics which ultimately resulted in the partition of India. In other words, the clever lawyers, Motilal and C.R. Das deserve as much credit as the Mahatma and the Qaid-e-Azam for their contribution to the glorious history of Democracy in the Sub-continent- which, needless to say, is based on Hindu-Muslim unity.
3) the demonstration of an obvious truth may create new information of a very specific and metaphysically bizarre kind.
Consider ‘the father, the son, & the Holy Ghost’s’ commitment to Swaraj. Clearly Swaraj meant the same thing as Dominion Status which in turn meant the same thing as Independence. Now, one may argue that this is not the case. Perhaps Gandhi wanted the British to stay on and rule India in exactly the same manner that they were already doing. Perhaps Gandhi was using the word Swaraj to get the Indians to accept British rule and concentrate instead on working for Hindu-Muslim unity, abolition of Untouchability, Basic Education, Handloom weaving etc, etc. But, is this a reasonable belief to hold with respect to Gandhi? How can we square it with his actions without also convicting him of arrant hypocrisy?
 What about the difference between Dominion Status and Independence which divided Motilal and Jawaharlal? On the face of it, the one appears weaker than the other. Yet, British lawyers and lawyer-politicians- and the Nehrus were British trained lawyer-politicians- had spelled out the substantive interchangeability of the two terms with the former having practical legal consequences making it the natural transition point for the latter. The only other manner to effect the change would be by a Declaration of Independence followed by a Treaty with the former Colonial Power, as happened with the U.S.A. There were solid legal and diplomatic reasons to prefer an intermediate situation of Dominion status so as to allow an orderly divorce. In any case, neither Independence nor Dominion status were on offer because the Indians had not demonstrated that they could take over the administration of British India (Congress kept out of the Princely States) let alone fight their way to freedom. In this context, whether the term Swaraj or Independence or Dominion Status was used made absolutely no difference. What would have made a difference would have been things like Anti Untouchability Legislation, Anti Usury legislation, the proper study and framing of policy recommendations with a view to reform Fiscal and Monetary policy, similar study and recommendations with respect to Defense, Transport, Food Security, Education and so on. Gandhi’s own views are well known- we don’t need laws or money or schools or defense- and once the English see that they will simply leave or quietly retire to their Clubs to get drunk and cease the pretense of running a country which did not want to be run, preferring instead to be run over by the Juggernaut of Spiritualized imbecility.
 But what were Motilal and Jawaharlal’s own views? Both, in their different ways, showed that representative Government could and should be futile, both thought Independence might only come long after they were both dead and buried. So why was the issue of Dominion Status vs. Independence a source of anguish and discord between them?
One possible answer has to do with the different manners in which both very sedulously and repetitiously demonstrated the futility of something it was prima facie futile to demonstrate- viz. that never being constructive is not very constructive. For Motilal, dedication to demonstrating this too obvious truth arose out of a lawyerly duty to try an impossible case simply so as to have the verdict read into the body of the Law. Put another way, we might say that Motilal was a rigid constructivist who had to actually physically run the algorithm to establish the result which intuition had already divined. Jawaharlal, on the other hand, who had been bred up to the profession of I.N.C politics, far from being a constructivist, was a wholly ontologically dysphoric windbag for whom the Stallnaker-Lewis closest possible sphere of worlds were radically unconnected and impossible to weakly order or metricize.
If such indeed is the case, then what light does it throw upon the split between the Nehrus on the obviously meaningless issue of Independence vs. Dominion Status? Conventional wisdom would have it that by demonstrating the futility of this debate father and son were engaged in strategic signalling which served some arcane political function. But what was that political function? One might say- Jawaharlal was a closet Leftist, Motilal a closet Rightist. But this begs the question- why didn’t they ever come out of their respective closets to some good purpose? The truth, I suppose, is that the real subject of their debate was not Dominion status or Independence but the death of the father- a meaningless debate for, in the event, only their mutual love triumphed and that love is commemorated to this day by the vacuity and political incompetence of succeeding generations of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Therein, it may be, lies the true greatness of Motilal Nehru- a man who loved his son, so Gandhi said, more than he loved his country, for his love of his country sprang from his love for his son.
Shame his son loved talking shite.

What Herbert Spencer actually believed

Like J. S. Mill, Spencer struggled to make utilitarianism authentically liberal by infusing it with a demanding principle of liberty and robust moral rights. He was convinced, like Mill, that utilitarianism could accommodate rights with independent moral force and yet remain genuinely consequentialist. Subtly construed, utilitarianism can effectively mimick the very best deontological liberalism.
That’s from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
 Spencer sound like a right ray of sun-shine doesn’t he? No wonder Shyamjee Krishna Verma admired the old man so much or that he came to be affectionately known as Harbhat Pendse in Marathi.
But this was his confidential advice to a Japanese statesman circa 1893-
1) Restrict political representation to elderly clan heads and then too only permit a right to petition- ‘You have, I believe, in Japan still surviving the ancient system of family organization. … Under this family or patriarchal organization it habitually happens that there exists in each group an eldest male ascendant, who is the ruling authority of the group – an authority who has in many cases a despotic power to which all descendants of the first and second generations unhesitatingly submit. This organization should be made use of in your new political form. These patriarchs or heads of groups should be made the sole electors of members of your representative body. … Several beneficial results would arise. In the first place, your electorate would be greatly reduced in number, and therefore more manageable. In the second place, the various extreme opinions held by the members of each group would be to a considerable extent mutually cancelled and made more moderate by having to find expression through the patriarch who would in a certain measure be influenced by the opinions of his descendants. And then, in the third place, and chiefly, these patriarchal electors, being all aged men, would have more conservative leanings than the younger members of their groups – would not be in favour of rash changes.
I suggest that, for three or four generations, the assembly formed of representative men elected by these patriarchal heads of groups should be limited in their functions to making statements of grievances, or of evils or what they think evils, which they wish to have remedied – not having any authority either to take measures for remedying them, or authority even for suggesting measures, but having the function simply of saying what they regard as grievances. 

2) Permit no free trade or foreign direct investment- Apparently you are proposing by revision of the treaty powers with Europe and America “to open the whole Empire to foreigners and foreign capital.” I regard this as a fatal policy. If you wish to see what is likely to happen, study the history of India. Once let one of the more powerful races gain a point d’appui [Online editor’s note: a base or secure location; a foothold. – RTL] and there will inevitably in course of time grow up an aggressive policy which will lead to collisions with the Japanese; these collisions will be represented as attacks by the Japanese which must be avenged; forces will be sent from America or Europe, as the case may be; a portion of territory will be seized and required to be made over as a foreign settlement; and from this there will grow eventually subjugation of the entire Japanese Empire. I believe that you will have great difficulty in avoiding this fate in any case, but you will make the process easy if you allow any privileges to foreigners beyond those which I have indicated.

3) Don’t permit inter-marriage with foreigners. To your remaining question, respecting the inter-marriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is “now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians,” and which you say is “one of the most difficult problems,” my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the inter-marriages of human races and by the inter-breeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is invariably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based upon numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This conviction I have within the last half hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well-known as an authority on horses, cattle and sheep, and knows much respecting their inter-breeding; and he has just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of different varieties of sheep, there is an inter-breeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one – there arises an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings – the Eurasians in India, and the half-breeds in America, show this.

So there we have it. Political Philosophy is about pretending to be all sunshine and roses and then, sub rosa, being a bigger asshole than the worst sort of elderly misogynist, red-neck, drunk.