Eyeless in Gaza

Since Chetan Bhagat- all round nice guy and deservedly successful Indglish novelist- has tweeted on the bombing of Gaza, it falls to me- all round shithead and least successful Indglish novelist ever- to add my tuppence.
But, what can I say as Indglishly egregious or flatulently facile?
Recursively this- or so it might fractally appear.
'The Palestinians are bloody marvellous. As a people, again and again, they have demonstrated incredible resilience arising purely out of shared Human- not Ideological, not Eschatological- Commitments and Values.
'People kept saying- not the level, per se, but the fiendishly ironic type of injustice meted out to the Palestinian will turn them into a nation of psychopaths.
'As a case in point, take 'Black September' when (in an extraordinary display of Pan Islamic solidarity) Pakistani pilots flew Saudi jets to bomb Palestinian women and children, on behalf of the Hashemite King of Jordan (whose granddaddy had been chased off the throne of Mecca by the Wahabbis whose refusal to let Pakistani Hanafis recite Fatiha at the Prophet's grave remains a bone of contention).
'After so colossal a betrayal, nobody could blame the Palestinians if they'd simply gone nuts.
Some had already- Sirhan Sirhan's assassination of Robert Kennedy wasn't a real smart move- but Sirhan was Christian and his Dad had taken U.S citizenship- i.e felt obliged to talk hate mongering shite at the dinner table. Similarly, it was the Christian George Habash, but also Nayef Hawatmeh (both Leftist nutjobs) - who paved the way for the Black September 'Nakhbah'- not Arafat, who as Grand Mufti Husseini's nephew, wasn't interested in taking down the descendant of the hereditary Sharif of Mecca.
'Thankfully the 'Christian' Lefty fuckwits were not representative of anything. Palestinian Christians, though educationally ahead even before the Mandate, were just as loving and Human and Decent as their Muslim brothers and sisters and the evidence is this will always be the case.
'Yet how gainsay, the fact this same brilliant-too-brilliant Community produced the fuckwit retard, soixante huitard, Lefty gobshites who posed the worst existential threat to the Palestinians as an Ethical People.
'I know, I know. Arafat was far from perfect. He was, perhaps, more lachrymose than Lefty- but tears can heal even when shed by venal eyes- coz the Ethos of every genuine Ethne works in just such fashion and Barrister Gandhi, for in every other way disbarred, yet is not miscalled Ind's Mahatma.

'This is the true miracle of the ever-renewed Palestinian 'nakbah'- the rainbow at the end of the last Sixty years' Secular Flood of injustice- surviving every setback, this Deme ever demonstrates 'spontaneous order', 'euvoluntary', bottom-up, cohesion, organisational skill, tolerance, pluralism, etc.- and it's all just an expression of their Humanity and unproblematic day-to-day Social Being, nothing premeditated or 'Managerial' or  Ideological or intermediated by 'Poli Sci'- these guys are not and never will be 'Muselmann'- and that by itself is why, sooner or later, the 2 Chief Rabbis will decree that they are too, Jews.

'Till then, eyeless in Gaza, Samson brings down his own Temple not because- Borges' reading of Donne's Biothanatos- he prefigures the One who said 'Ye are as Gods' but rather because he was a Judge and none must save as All.'

John 21-22

 'And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.'

Be it Godel's Aleph or Ghalib's Arif or what Wine wastes yet of me

'If I will that he tarry till I come- what is that to thee?'

In sum,the Continuum is as chary of its own Inspection
As is Jamshed's cup of the Saqi's reflection

Only Unitittyarianism could have prevented Partition

Abstract- The Brahmo Samaj's Unitarianism did not just polarise the Hindu bhadralok into 'idolators' and 'True Brahmins'- it broke a previous cultural compact with the Muslims which granted the latter higher normative status- thus making the former's material success a mere 'majazi' (illusory) illustration of the futility of materialism because only the impoverished Muslim toiler, or Sufi Pirzada, enjoyed true (haqiqi) felicity, both now and ever-after.  Furthermore, since militant iconoclasm would have involved smashing up Granny's Puja-room and she'd slap you silly if you tried, both Brahmo Unitarianism and neo-Sanatan Univocity needed to go flex their muscles elsewhere- hence 'Tiger' Jatin & Jugantar, 'Baby' Aurobindo & Anushilan, not to mention the bespectacled 'Bose Bros' & Forward Block- which earned them the enmity of the British overlords whose avaricious Rule had permitted the Hindu resurgence in the first place. The result was that the Hindus became fragmented and subject to pogrom where they were in a minority- so much so, that they ultimately needed Nehru to protect them and permit them to continue to play-act a type of populist politics whose reductio ad absurdum would be either Pir Gholam Sarwar Husseini's 'creed equals class' ethnic cleansing in Noakhali or, amongst tribes too primitive for Islam to have even taken root, the revival of head-hunting a la Charu Mazumdar.

Was there any way for all this to be avoided? Yes. Raja Ram Mohan Roy should have rejected Unitarianism (silliest sect of Xtianity ever) & embraced Unitittyarianism-  i.e. the belief that 'though nipples are many, titty is one'.  This is the one mahavakya of true Upanishad. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.

Peter Singer's drowns in his own shallow pond.

Peter Unger summarises the essential features of Singer's shallow pond gedanken thus-

'The path from the library at your university to the humanities lecture hall passes a shallow ornamental pond. On your way to give a lecture, you notice that a small child has fallen in and is in danger of drowning. If you wade in and pull the child out, it will mean getting your clothes muddy and either cancelling your lecture or delaying it until you can find something clean and dry to wear. If you pass by the child, then, while you'll give your lecture on time, the child will die straightaway. You pass by and, as expected, the child dies.'


Suppose the lecture you are about to give is not shite. Suppose, furthermore, that someone attending that lecture isn't just a Credential-seeking swine but someone with power to do some good in the world. If you are a Utilitarian, you should go give your lecture and after ensuring that you have convinced the one guy in the audience who isn't a Credential-seeking swine you should make an emotional confession of your crime and hand yourself over to the police. Suppose no Police or Judiciary exists. Then, if you believe yourself to be bound by some implicit or unstated Social Contract, you should administer to yourself the extreme penalty for culpa levis in concreto.
Alternatively, just fucking get your shoes dirty, save the kid and take him along with you to deliver your lecture. It will go over big. 
Singer in devising his gedanken, and Unger in quoting it, don't get that their lectures are shite. Not wearing dirty shoes while giving your lecture might matter to Credential-seeking swine and the sort of Rent-extracting Institutions that cater to them. But both are shite. So are you.

More generally getting paid to be a great big fucking gobshite aint Ethical, it aint part and parcel of 'Philosophy' or 'Public Justification Discourse' or any such thing.  The way Singer sets up his gedanken and the manner in which Unger comments on it shows that doing Ethics in the Academy turns your brains to shit and makes you a deeply unpleasant person.

Should we get our shoes dirty wading in to prevent Singer or Unger or whoever else has succumbed to this witless academic availability cascade from drowning in the ornamental pool of their own infrahuman stupidity?
Purvapaksha- Yes, but only to kick them in the teeth coz, heck, the pool is shallow, they're gonna drown anyway, so like the least bad person to kick in the teeth is a Singer or Unger and, anyway it will give your pleasure, but them gobshites will scarcely even notice coz of the massive amounts of faeces protecting their dentures.
Uttarapaksha- What's really important is starving babies. Clearly, kicking Singer or Unger in the teeth has an opportunity cost coz while you are doing so some one or other of the women you have kidnapped and forcibly impregnated could get loose and go get an abortion. But, at the margin, the loss of a single starving child might trigger the tipping point of your own salience in the Rent-seeking Charity racket which arises out of everybody else's obligation to send money to starving children. Look at what's happening in Kerala, a State which Unger mentions lovingly. 
You simply can't afford to take time off raping women and kidnapping kids to go kick Unger and Singer in the teeth.  If you aint holding a sufficiently large number of starving kids hostage, the Utilitarian calculus suggests that it is worthwhile to beat you and throw you in prison rather than let you carry on adding to the number of starving children, thus creating a corresponding fiduciary obligation on the part of those who haven't been raping and kidnapping like crazy and thus have no starving kids of their own.

Siddhanta Mahatma Gandhi said 'Health is the only Wealth- not Silver...or Goooooooold'.

For bandage, let the World yet rage

Burn the Battlefield's Cross of Blood

Un-weave the Rainbow's Universal Flood

For bandage, let the World yet rage

Poets dream o'er an empty page

Impossibility of cats

At the Student Union pub, the evening after our first Social Choice theory lecture with Amartya Sen, the Teaching Assistant lowered his voice to a whisper and told us the terrible story of 'He who must not be named'- a brilliant Bengali whose fundamental research extended Arrow's impossibility result to prove the non existence of cats. Like Godel's proof of God, it relied on the theory of ultrafilters which we ought not to mess with lest we meet a similar fate.
Just recently, the neighbor's cat has been jumping through the window and making disparaging meowing noises- possibly of a racist or sexist nature- and this has got we wondering. Is there a simple way to derive the same result as the too brilliant Bengali?
 How about this?
Suppose there's a cat whose meows are always decodable as equivalent to the results of a perfect Social Choice rule. If the rule is impossible so is the cat. However, it is a plain fact of cat-person phenomenology that any cat offered the right incentives- tummy rubs and treats- produces a string of mewing noises decodable in the desired manner. Therefore all cats are impossible. Q.E.D.

Mrchhakatika

I'm thy little clay cart- not Sarasvati

Immerse thy Heart! not Art in me

What must, on casters, roll from its Wedding night

Are Wit's disasters droll ere Kali smite.