From: Baijayant 'Jay' Panda
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Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Should RBI be independent?
Forwarding an opinion piece my an MP from Odisha. I'm relating this with the Federal Reserve problem in the US. There's no absolute thing as "independence" for institutions: Either they are accountable to the people via elected representatives, or they are accountable to a private oligarchy that can and usually does have vested interests that go against the best interests of the people.
An independent CBI, as is widely talked about in the Indian political dissent discourse, is another red herring for me: that would make it an intelligence agency that is truly rogue and can any day start undertaking clandestine assassinations of emerging people's leaders, whistleblowers, journalists etc with no place for the population to go to to stop it. Many times the cure being advocated for is much worse than the original problem.
I had a similar problem with one of the Jan Lokpal movement's core demands too : "Independent". Where effectively all destructive decision making powers, without any constructive ones, are put in the hands of a tiny tiny group of people. Thought up by "perfect" people in their own image, assuming that they will always find "perfect" people to fill the post. Sorry, but no.
In much of this I see a cop-out, a running away from a difficult collective responsibility. First we put rotten leaderships in power, and then we demand that all the institutions they are corrupting, be made "independent". Going further and further down that road leads to a situation where the people of a nation will have absolutely no say in how it is run - everything will be controlled by an elite class that can any day be corrupted. This is precisely what Europeans are rebelling against right now. It's not a sustainable path to go on. The more realistic solution is the more difficult one we were running away from : voting wisely.
How to lessen the burden and scope of disaster here? Simple : Decentralization of executive powers. As a federation, India is at this point way too centralized. Even at state level there's way too much powers vested in the hands of the State and way too less in the hands of panchayats and municipalities. Many municipalities are still practically run by the state government only.
On the other hand the idea that centralizing everything more and more will solve all problems, is a technocrat's (and I'll add, a Marxist's too) fantasy. Corruption will be there whether you centralize the decision-making or decentralize it. But what you destroy with centralization, is the people's ability to conquer corruption. You destroy the feedback mechanism. With decentralization, corruption is localized. The corrupt guy has only limited scope to do harm. When we centralize things, one person does something terrible and we all die. That's what happened under communism.
Perhaps using technology to efficiently share information between empowered stakeholders is what we could aim towards instead of using it to centralize authority.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Baijayant 'Jay' Panda
From: Baijayant 'Jay' Panda
Friday, December 14, 2018
Friday, November 9, 2018
Thursday, November 1, 2018
The lessons I wish the Left takes from their Brazil defeat
The lessons I wish the Left takes from their Brazil defeat
Stop encouraging violence.
Stop calling for assassinations.
Stop treating censorship as the best way to solve all your problems, and stop silently supporting it.
Stop thinking all those smooth-talking billionaires and war-mongering TV news channels are suddenly on your side. They're not.
Stop positioning anything and everything that disagrees with you as the end of the world.
Stop labelling people as misogynist / xenophobe / homophobe / racist / etc as the escape route from having to prove your case.
Stop treating criticism of any ideology as racism
Stop blindly believing allegations when they suit your goals.
Stop dividing the population into oppressor and victim classes, and stop seeing the world that way.
Stop hating white people so much. Oh, and straight men, too.
Stop judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
Stop worshipping noble-intentioned mass murderers. Their noble intentions didn't matter, their mass murdering did.
Stop worshipping noble-intentioned mass murderers. Their noble intentions didn't matter, their mass murdering did.
Stop blaming capitalism even for the messes your comrades created. Like the mass murdering, the elimination of freedoms, the crashing of economies through anally retentive top-down control.
Stop ignoring soaring crime and corruption.
Stop putting aside the law when the perpetrator belongs to your designated victim class.
Stop practising the soft bigotry of lowered expectations of decency and values and ethics from your designated victim class.
Stop pretending something is being done "by the people" when it's really just a bunch of cronies behind closed doors doing it.
Stop saying that everything is relative.
Stop saying that the messenger matters more than the message itself.
Stop pushing the lethally naive worldview that everything is only and only systemic/nurture and individual choices, values, responsibilities, nature don't matter.
Stop punishing the children for the sins of the parents and of people they have nothing to do with.
Stop ignoring soaring crime and corruption.
Stop putting aside the law when the perpetrator belongs to your designated victim class.
Stop practising the soft bigotry of lowered expectations of decency and values and ethics from your designated victim class.
Stop pretending something is being done "by the people" when it's really just a bunch of cronies behind closed doors doing it.
Stop saying that everything is relative.
Stop saying that the messenger matters more than the message itself.
Stop pushing the lethally naive worldview that everything is only and only systemic/nurture and individual choices, values, responsibilities, nature don't matter.
Stop punishing the children for the sins of the parents and of people they have nothing to do with.
It's all been backfiring on you spectacularly.
With Regards,
A highly amused spectator
Monday, October 8, 2018
SJWs hate comedy
Here's another interesting topic for exploration regarding the SJW phenomenon : Their hatred for comedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7gNIxEhsI
SJW vs COMEDY - Joe Rogan - Jim Norton - Bill Burr -Gutenburg, 2016-11-27
SJWs don't just "don't approve of" some jokes. They go out of their way to make sure NOBODY ELSE gets to hear any of the jokes that they deem are bad.
It's precisely this over-stepping of boundaries, this invasion into other people's lives that makes an SJW an SJW.
If your're a person who doesn't like certain kinds of jokes, then the best thing to do is to vote with your (and only your) own feet. Merely switch off and walk away instead of trying to shut the other person down. If you feel like "something needs to be done", then make better jokes that people like more than the ones you don't like. Let the crowd move on their own towards the better options, don't make yourself their mommy. Don't make it your life's single mission to destroy another human being's career. That's not cool, dear. There's already enough suffering in this world, there's no need for you to go out of your way to cause unnecessary suffering.
I sure am glad Russel Peters had his glory days long before the SJWs came along.
Glossary:
SJW: Social Justice Warrior
Friday, September 28, 2018
Fwd: AHA Foundation files Amucis Curiae in first ever prosecuted FGM case, Bipartisan coalition urges Congress to add anti-FGM language to VAWA, McGill University professor sheds light on child marriage in the U.S., and more
Hi, Sharing work by someone whose courage under immense fire from all sides I greatly respect.
She is working on serious women's issues that are given a wide berth by the mainstream feminists, because these issues, like Sati, are endemic to certain non-western communities that have been designated as "protectorate" status by the wider social justice community.
I have no problems with the wish to protect oppressed peoples. But where I see a proof of brainlessness combined with narcissistic self-righteousness coming in is : Because you think so and so community is under racist attack and they need your protection, you start attacking all the minorities WITHIN that community that are objecting to bad practices within that community. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somalian and a victim of FGM: Female Genital Mutilation. For the "crime" of speaking out against harmful cultural practices in her community that she witnessed and suffered through herself, and linking them back to the source ideologies that she saw her elders using to justify these evil practices, she has been viciously attacked by privileged Western people who have never been in her position, and she has been hanged in the mainstream media's kangaroo courts of public opinion and labeled with pejorative terms so that regular people see those bad labels and don't bother to check out the actual details.
The people who claim otherwise to stand up for human rights, have had no objections whatsoever to the violence committed on this lady and anyone who supports her. Her filmmaker was murdered in broad daylight in Netherlands and a paper was pinned to his body saying that she is next. Imagine how that man's family must have felt : to know that their loved one was killed by people who didn't even know him, just as a "message" to give to someone else, just because he took up work on a documentary film, while living in the Netherlands of all places. Imagine what would you feel if people who disagreed with you, KILLED YOUR COWORKERS just to send you a "message". Since over a decade now Ayaan has been forced to live under 24x7 armed security since that incident and keep her whereabouts secret, because of the serious death threats and rape threats against her and large bounties placed on her head by well-funded terrorist organizations. You won't see the SPLC or The Guardian mentioning any of these details when they are taking great pains to portray her up as a hate figure. They twist their words to subtly make you think that if anything bad happens to her then she "deserves it". She and her work and anyone who dares to interview her are being actively demonetized, shadow-banned, blocked, deleted, de-platformed by Youtube, Facebook and Twitter because the SJW moderators in those companies fell for the labels and think they know everything and never bother to thoroughly examine what they just censored. The SJWs join in with the terrorists and openly call for violence to be done to her, and nobody takes them to task for it.
It would be ok to just ignore someone who's trying to do a good thing, but you have to be self-righteously delusional to actually go out of your way to attack and sabotage someone who wants to ensure that other girls do not have to undergo genital mutilation as she did. And that is what I see the mainstream media, the "progressive" institutions and tech giants doing today. However "noble" their declared intentions may be, I for one am going to judge them by what they are actually doing.
In India we should consider ourselves lucky that our British occupiers outlawed and got our society to rethink things like Sati and child marriage (we've still got work to do in this part, but thankfully our mainstream accepts that it is bad and should end) long before today's bleeding-heart SJW's came along. A famous exchange of words that is said to have taken place back then between religious leaders and British administrators : "But this is part of our culture." "Well, in our culture we hang men who burn women alive. So let's both follow our cultures, shall we?"
Compare that attitude, that clear moral stand free from cultural relativity, with the post-modernist, moral-relativist Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) of today. If these issues had come up today, the BBC and The Guardian and CNN and MSNBC and Huffington Post and SPLC and all the "progressive" people taking cues from them would be attacking anyone who spoke out against Sati or child marriage by alleging Hindu-phobia. We'd see them justifying their hypocrisy by proclaiming that "all cultures are equal" and since child marriage and Sati are "integral and inseparable parts of Hindu culture" therefore you shouldn't speak out against it, and if you do then you're a racist. We'd see Sati and child marriage being practiced in Hindu households in the West and the police officers in charge would turn a blind eye or at best react only long after the crime has happened and never take to task the religious leaders who recommended it, for fear of being fired due to protests by angry SJW Twitter mobs.
To hell with these SJWs and their collectivist mob mentality which is SO God damn easy to weaponize. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the real feminists of our times that we should be supporting, not the charlatans slandering and censoring her. Look up her interviews, check out her books and articles before the SJWs wipe them out forever.
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