Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Is Tolstoyan Anarchism The Same As Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism?

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I smell more smoke…and mirrors..

Agora-affiliated  Jeff Berwick

[in an interview today with Agora-affiliated Daily Bell]:

“Tolstoy was an anarchist.”

Agora-afflicted Lila Rajiva

[in a monologue with herself over coffee as she looks over Tolstoy’s astrological chart – just kidding! – and recalls the millions of words of  Lev she actually read decades ago, if only in translation]:

Yes, Tolstoy was an anarchist.

He was also anti-capitalist and anti-property, and, by the end of his life,  he was also anti-sex, anti-church, anti-religion, anti-mysticism, anti-technology, anti-capital punishment, and anti-art.

He worshiped the Russian peasant.

He excoriated himself for having written “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.  He wanted to give away everything he owned, even though his children and his poor wife (who had slaved over his manuscripts for years) opposed him.

And most of this extremism came out of his own psychodrama (as Gandhi’s “issues” came out of Gandhi’s psychodrama).

Tolstoy killed a man in a duel in his youth, fought in wars in which he killed his enemies, and contracted an STD from an early experience of sex (perhaps his earliest).

He had such an enormous sexual appetite that he was always taking up with underclass women and then suffering bouts of self-loathing and revulsion toward them.

He often threatened his wife with a gun, while cussing her out.

Then he had a “dark night of the soul” and became a different man.

You know what happens. An alcoholic swears off drink. Then he becomes even more of a nuisance than he was before. He follows you around, a thermos of coffee clutched to his heart, the lingo of AA on his lips. You feel sorry for him. He’s off liquor. But he’s not cured.

Same thing with Tolstoy.

For the Mises-Agora-hard-money (gold-bug) libertarian circle of co-investors and co-thinkers (to which Jeff Berwick belongs) to pretend that Tolstoy’s anarchism is equivalent to the anarcho-capitalism of the gold-bug, secessionist, philo-Semitic-yet-Dixiecrat, finance-capital-friendly, anti-democratic, Rothbardian  wing of American political and economic thought is, frankly, nonsense.

But it’s terrific marketing if you want to neutralize the anger of a  whole bunch of  anarchist youngsters, oldsters, and hipsters,  by channeling it into anti-nation state ideology in the service of the new KKK – Korporatist-Krisismongering-Kleptocrats.

And make a few bucks doing it too.

Wink.

A Reader Writes About Going Off-grid

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I got a note this afternoon about an old article, “Getting off  the grid”:

Ms. Rajiva,
Your article Getting Off the Grid was excellent. I like your suggestion to
start letting go of things you can do without first. It is how I’ve
progressed and seems like a more natural path to getting off the grid.
Thank you for sharing your insight.
A.B

Thank you, A.B.   I’m replying here, because I’ve decided it’s not wise to reply to people I don’t know a bit, on my email.

Letting go of anything always sounds difficult when it’s proposed to you theoretically. When you run up against it in the course of living, it’s not that hard.

How many people worry about trivial blemishes in their appearance. And then cancer strikes and suddenly they don’t care about anything but getting the pain to stop.

People throw tantrums about a rearrangement of their office furniture, and then they’re fired and have to get used to a trailer or a basement apartment.

Instead of waiting for fate to take something away from you, just figure out what you can release on your own.  It hurts less when you do it yourself.

India’s Silent Scientists: G.N. Ramachandran

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From Shadow Warrior:

“Ask any scientist who acknowledges original research to give a list of Indians who should have got a Nobel Prize, and you will find the name G N Ramachandran (1922- 2001) there. Though trained as a physicist, Ramachandran’s greatest contributions were to biology, where he formulated the ‘Ramachandran plots’ which every biophysicist uses while studying proteins. His triplehelix structure of collagen is a classic discovery worth a Nobel.

“History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization’ says Ramachandran’s lesser known contribution was to three-dimensional image reconstruction , which redefined the way we look inside the human body without cutting it open. Some, like P M Bhargava, founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, believe Ramachandran should be considered the father of NMR and CT scan, though some others took credit for it. “Ramachandran was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society after some of us worked hard for it. He never asked for it,” says Bhargava . “He was neither elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, nor nominated for a Nobel Prize which he richly deserved.”

Comment:

Western prizes, from the Booker to the Nobel, have strong political biases and are heavily slanted to Westerners themselves, or to others whose agendas align with Western interests.

Scores of great scientists who should have won the Nobel, have continued Indian’s ancient and medieval scientific tradition – one that is unknown to most in the West and regarded as some kind of feel-good myth.

Instead, it is the Western narrative of European supremacy in cultural achievement that is the feel-good myth.

European achievements are tremendous, but they aren’t as unique as current history tells us. Instead, they accompanied the achievements of others.

Then, because of European imperial conquests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in many cases they supplanted those others, sometimes, after appropriating them for their own.

When the real story of India’s scientific history is told, we are likely to find that the great medieval and early modern learning of India that was brought to the Western church via Catholic priests and missionaries over centuries, also fed the Renaissance and Enlightenment and scientific development thereafter.

It was not simply the Greeks.

But that is a story for another blog post.

Edward Feser On The Necessity Of Burke To Libertarians

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Edward Feser:

“It is the Burkean tradition – conservative, religious, celebrating deference and restraint and contemptuous of the “dust and powder of individuality” – to which Hayek points as providing both the true philosophical foundations of market society and the only hope of its renewal. Burke, along with Locke and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, represented in Hayek’s mind a “true individualism” which emphasizes ordered liberty and what the Catholic tradition would call subsidiarity, and has no truck with the radically autonomous self of contemporary egalitarian liberalism and popular libertarianism.”

I am not sure that I fully subscribe to this, but it would be an interesting project to explore strains in Burke’s thought compatible with libertarianism, understood as minarchist or anarcho-capitalist (a position that as it stands today I think an impossibility).

Sharukh Khan: Yeh Jo Desh Hai Tera

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“Yeh jo des hai tera” from the movie, “Swades,” (Motherland) directed by Ashutosh Gowariker.
The lyrics are by Javed Akhtar and the singer is A. R. Rahman.
H/T Mounir Nassor
(www.myindias.blogspot.co)

English subtitles can be seen by clicking on the left-most button under the video.

I’ve translated the poem a bit differently from the translation on the video:

Yeh jo des hai tera

This country of yours

Swades hai tera

It’s your motherland

Tujhe hai pukara
And it’s calling to you

Yeh voh bandhan hai

These ties that bind you

Jo kabhi toot nahin sakta
How could they ever break?

Mitti ki hai jo khushboo
The smell of that soil

Tu kaise bhulega
How will you ever forget it ?

Tu chahe kahin jae
Wherever you might go

Tu laut ke aaega
No matter what might happen, you’ll come back

Nayi nayi raahon men

With every new turn

Dabe dabe aahon mein

With every sigh

Khoe khoe dil se tere

To your lost heart

Koi yeh kahega

Someone or other will say this –

Yeh jo des hai tera
This country of yours

Swades hai tera
It’s your motherland

Tujhe hai pukara
Yeh voh bandhan hai
Jo kabhi toot nahin sakta

Tujhe zindagi hai yeh kahe rahi
Your whole life seems to  be telling you

Sabh to paa liya abh hai kya kami
You’ve got everything, what else do you need ?

Yiunh to saare sukh hai barse
Showered with riches and happiness

Par door tu hai apne ghar se
Yet so far away from home

Aa laut chal tu abh deewane
Come back now, crazy one,

Jahan koi to tujhe apna maane
To the only place you belong

Awaz de tujhe bulane wahi des
Listen to this call from your country

Yeh jo des hai tera
This country of yours

Swades hai tera

It’s your motherland

Yeh pal hai wahi
This is the moment

Jis mein hai chupi
In which is hidden

Puri ek sadi, saari zindagi
A whole century, an entire life

Tu na pooch raaste mein ka hai

Don’t ask what’s ahead

Ae hain is tarah do raahein
You’ve reached the fork

Tu hi to hai raah jo sujhae
You have to choose

Tu hi to hai abh to yeh batae
It’s for you to say which

Chahe to kis disha men jae
It’s for you to pick where to go

Aurobindo: The Only Law That Matters, The Only Freedom That Matters

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Correction: I should say that the western elites could not co-opt Aurobindo, because he taught an evolutionary spirituality grounded in individual spiritual practice, whereas the goal of modern gnosticism (of the anti-communist variety) is a technological paradise, in which most human beings become redundant, and the few who remain possess their power, not through traditional spiritual discipline and transcendence of the senses (as Aurobindo taught), but through the defiance of traditional religious training.

ORIGINAL POST

Aurobindo, the great Hindu polymath, and freedom-fighter turned yogi, whom the Western elites could never embrace  publicly as they did Gandhi, because Gandhi was a product of Western theosophy, Illuminist misdirection, and familial psychodrama, even if he was a remarkable man nonetheless:

“But all is not Law and Process, there is also Being and Consciousness; there is not only a machinery but a Spirit in things, not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit, not only a process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural creature. If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field for a law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and not mechanical, it must be ourself, our soul that fundamentally determines its own evolution, and the law of Karma can only be one of the processes it uses for that purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be greater than its Karma. There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom. Law and Process are one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer mind, life and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of Nature. But even here their mechanical power is absolute only over body and Matter; for Law becomes more complex and less rigid, Process more plastic and less mechanical when there comes in the phenomenon of Life, and yet more is this so when Mind intervenes with its subtlety; an inner freedom already begins to intervene and, the more we go within, the soul’s power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumanta, and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a witness and concede an automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the master of its nature, Ishwara.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 22, Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality.”

Desi Divas: Waheeda Rehman

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Classic Bollywood film actress, Waheeda Rehman (1936-  ) was born into a conservative Muslim family in Chengelpattu, Tamil Nadu, in British India and was a talented classical dancer in her youth. She originally intended to become a doctor, but bad health got in the way, so she turned to acting. Starting with Tamil and Telugu films, she went on to star as the leading lady in scores of Hindi films in the 50’s to 70s, many of which ended up as classics.  After a long absence from the screen, she revived her career with character acting in the last decade.

Gender Wars: A Word To The Wise

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Comment at A Voice Of Men.com

“If men were all that into how women look, why does she think that 99,9% of the men on the planet will shy away from the question: ‘Does this dress make my ass look fat?’
Besides the trouble you might get into if you actually dared answer the question truthfully, I find it really hard to believe that men give a rat’s ass to begin with. On a very basic level men will look at a woman and go:
‘Is she young and fertile?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ok, she will do.’
All you have to do is look at all the fat, bleached and self-centered women out there, that are some man’s wife, to prove this point.

If women spend half the amount of time they spend in front of the mirror, trivializing over petty details about their looks, on actually having sex with us, and doing something serious about what’s going on on the inside, there would be no shortage in men loving them.”

Comment:

Blog comments are often more enlightening than the blogs themselves. Digging around for more information about the crime of battery-acid throwing, common in some parts of Asia including India, I came across a masculinist blog, on which I found this gem of a comment.

I call it a gem, because although it’s ill-tempered and unfair (we women do spend time on fixing our “insides”), it manages to say more in one paragraph, intentionally and unintentionally, than many an essay in ten.

A truth that is uncomfortable to many women is that sex is more important to men than it is to women (we’re talking averages and generalities).

Despite all the media hype, beyond a few attributes signifying youth and health (which are both important for fertility),  a high level of beauty is simply not needed for male sexual and emotional engagement, as even men readily admit.

(See here and here and even here (Naomi Wolf: “The Beauty Myth,” Anchor, 1992), although Wolf’s other contentions are controversial and not something I want to bring into this blog post.

Then, what is important for male sexual engagement?

Evidently, the opposite of female self-involvement.

That would be a woman’s awareness of the needs, thoughts, and feelings of people around her.

Something your neighborhood padre would be happy to celebrate.

Women concerned about the raging gender-wars should chew on that.

Maybe Shakespeare was onto something, after all.

On Veracity As An End In Itself…

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A libertarian-turned-royalist explains why fudging for the sake of whatever you consider “good,” will leave you on the opposite side of the field, in the enemy’s camp:

“I see this Hitler-was-a-liberal trope catching on all over the right. Of course, it is a leftist trope – in two senses. First, the tactic of tarring all political adversaries with some abstruse connection to fascism in general, and Hitler in particular, is of course a characteristic tactic of the Left. Second, the tactic of disseminating a palpable misreading of history, for political purposes – etc.

To a Carlylean, Satan is the Lord of Chaos and the Father of Lies. When you lie – intentionally or unintentionally – you sacrifice a kitten to Satan. Satan loves you for this! And, since he is not uninfluential on this earth, he does what he can for you. Which is sometimes quite a bit.

[Lila: Disbelieving in the Judeo-Christian Satan, as popularly understood, but believing very much in Saturn (Shani), I translate this as follows:

[Clarification, July 25, 2014): I don’t mean to imply that Saturn/Sani is the equivalent of Satan.  Saturn is more akin to Shiva and Rahu/Ketu (the lunar nodes or Dragon’s head and tail) to Satan.]

The limitations of time and space guarantee that a very small error (intentional or not) will end by fetching you the very opposite of your intended goal.]

The Carlylean technique accepts only absolute veracity as the basis for any political strategy.

The fact is: by sacrificing the occasional kitten or two, by twisting the truth a bit for the sake of this quarter’s sales, libertarians and other rightists get nowhere. Their enemies are (a) in power today, and (b) operating an assembly-line rhinoceros abattoir for the sole benefit of His Satanic Majesty. Surely, sir, you had not thought to out-scoundrel such a bunch of scoundrels.”

Desi Divas: Dr. Vijayanthimala Bali

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Celebrated Tamil and Hindi film actress, classical dancer/singer/choreographer, and research scholar,  wife of Dr. Bali of Chennai, twice elected to the Lok Sabha (Lower house of Indian parliament) and appointed to the Rajya Sabha (upper house), Dr. Vyjayanthimala  Bali(VIE-juh-yun-thee-mah-lah Bah-lee). [born, August 13, 1936]

Since the Western media doesn’t educate so much as propagandize in favor of western state interests, and  in service of those interests misrepresents the cultures that get in its way as inferior or degraded, I decided that I would add a category to my blog – desi beauties  – to celebrate beautiful brilliant women who exemplify the best Indian tradition.