Posted on by Gotamist

Bring back Globocop!

It is my belief that the US must maintain itself as the dominant military power in the world.  I mean, beyond a “muscular foreign policy”.  I think it should not just be strong but a threatening power.  Yes, to the rivals, of course.  These aren’t just rivals, but sometimes enemies and certainly are enemies of a world order that the free world takes for granted. 

But the US should also be a bit feared by its allies.  That the US will not tolerate their dalliances with their enemies and become dependent on them for some short term welfare.  That they need to shape up in their own strength so that they be themselves a deterrent and also be actual allies to each other instead of just expecting to run crying to the US in times of crisis while in non-crises times laughing at the US for being a gun-obsessed, war minded country to which the idea of focusing on welfare had simply not occurred.

This is distinct from the “earning the respect of our allies” that the some liberals often talk about.  This “leadership” involves following the Europeans on the climate agenda and whatever else they want to do collectively.  Most of them, welfare expansions that work for them while they enjoy the American security umbrella.  Those agendas simply view the US as a big pot of wealth that ought to make big monetary contributions to all the saintly causes or risk being judged by the Europeans. No, thanks.  The US doesn’t need the approval of Europeans and the label of virtuous.  It leads the world in charity and some other good deeds already, whether the Europeans agree or not. 

This doesn’t mean being involved in wars. But that threat is necessary to be able to stay away from war.  This may seem counter intuitive.  So, let me explain with the example of personal safety.   Petty criminals tend to target people they think are weak and unlikely to put up a fight.  So you’re most likely to be in a fight with a thug when you do not appear strong (and have fighting skills to back it up – it’s very visible to potential trouble makers).

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What should technologists do?/Is a liberal arts education better?

I was struck by a tweet from Sci-Fi author and engineer Devon Eriksen that a friend mentioned to me. I disagree with this Devon almost entirely (except for the fact that people need to learn to make their own judgements from data – even this I disagree that teaching it in school is the way to get there). 

This is the classic argument we have seen for some 70 years from (generally) leftists who have been vehemently pro college-is-the-solution-for-all despite being the party of the working class.  It’s part of their general pantheon – worship work-from-home, the 4-day workweek, ever more benefits, ever fewer hours and fewer demands on workers.  They mock professional education whether blue collar or white collar as code monkeys etc (and ask Elon Musk to stay in his lane as a technologist and out of politics) while glorifying art, literature, social work, poetry.

Here is a typical statement/wish/argument used as a criticism of AI, for example. It’s about what someone wants out of AI and technology.  The tweet forgets what that AI must be made – by human beings. And that the usual process for all products entering the market is that inventors /producers create the product and put it out on the market with people deciding only whether they want it or not.  While they try to tap into latent demand or long standing wishlists of society, it rarely ever starts with innovators being commissioned by “thought leaders” to go out and invent this or that. 

They want technical people to be workers who produce all the conveniences.  They, as the literary and intellectual class, will then appropriate all the goods of innovation using an equally-for-all argument.  Further, they will decide the direction of society by force because they can “critically think” while technologists need to shut up and continue working.

Back to Eriksen’s tweet, Harari’s point was just this – back then, you knew what skills you needed to be better off than without them, regardless of whether you conquered the Mongols or the Mongols conquered you.  Today, you don’t.  Devon Eriksen’s reading of  “servant” into this is wrong.  If you were a servant, you learned sheep-shearing.  If you were a lord, you learned horse-riding and archery (and you were decidedly not a servant).  

The lords were lords because they had coercive power (to inflict pain/death) and were thus able to make other people do the work for their basic needs while they had the luxury to enjoy fine things and also pursue arts and poetry. They did NOT become powerful through the pursuit of poetry and arts, but by the sword.

Those ages were decisively put to an end by the industrial revolution.  The new middle class were all people with an actual skill – the professional in a town lives better than a landlord in a village. As for the new lords, they are those who understood technology and were able to marshall others’ labor (own companies) or invest in them in a non-managerial capacity.

The warrior class is no longer wealthy and is not feared by their own population – still very much respected for their blood sacrifice, but only that.  All the richest in the world today are skilled technologists or business builders (descendents of these).  The only old guard members still rich are the ones investing in companies shrewdly (eg. British and Saudi Royal families).

Finally, to Eriksen, I say that one of the pieces of education that the unproductive leftist intellectual class says with great pride they impart to people in the humanities is “we TEACH critical thinking” while technologists don’t have that.

For some reason, all political science departments are full of leftist profs and students.  The only reason they can see why 50% of the population supports the other side is “well, they’re stupid”.  That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of critical thinking to me.

What do I think gets one ahead? – producing things or services that other people value, that you can trade in a consensual market.

Whether they are high art or basic necessities.  Kids learn math, grammar, sales (persuasion) or be excellent at entertaining (singing, painting, sports), learn to build things that people want to buy or employ you for.  These are hard enough that character building is an automatic side effect from the failures and restarts you’ll inevitably have to do.

Posted on by Gotamist

Living with uncertainty and fear

I’ve been noticing in recent years that a lot of the extreme polarization (and a warlike enemy-making in the mind) on certain public topics comes from fear.  More specifically, the unwillingness to tolerate risk and fear.

An example is the vaccine debate during COVID pandemic. Those who were on the side of the vaccine feared getting COVID and got the vaccine and since the vaccine is imperfect, they also wanted everyone else to get it to minimize the chance of getting COVID. On the other side were people who were afraid of the vaccines – that they might have adverse health consequences or even death from it.  But some pro-vaccine folks wanted a mandate (or at least something that was effectively a mandate by denying services to unvaccinated people).   They mocked the fears of the other side because they weren’t their own fears.  They felt that they needed to eliminate all chance of having to risk COVID and be free from their fear.  So, their solution was to force the other people to live with their fear.  Likewise, in the case of the anti-vax/anti-mask people, they did not want to deal with their fear of the vaccine or their fear of the government taking over their freedoms by wearing masks etc.  And so they walked around in a manner that forced the elderly/frail (or just scared) people on the other side to live with their fears.

The current Israel-Palestine conflict is another example.  It’s well-known that each group in the conflict thinks the other side poses an existential threat to them.  Furthermore, they feel that the only way to feel secure is to exterminate the identified enemy on the other side (and destroy a lot of innocents on the other side if that’s a by-product).  This desire to be entirely free from a fear of the other (given beliefs about the other – no doubt in the mind well supported by numerous pieces of experience) is a root cause of why each side poses an existential threat.

I also see this in the politico-social polarization into echo chambers in the my own country – with more and more people viewing people who adhere to opposite viewpoints or values as a threat by their very existence/thinking.

The dhamma suggests that living with what is, is a fantastic inner weapon for achieving peace. And that includes living with certain risks and fears. Pema Chodron even has a compilation of teachings on this topic, aptly named “Living with uncertainty”. These teachings show us a way towards fearlessness that is through allowing certain fears rather than seeking to eliminate them entirely.

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Caste, cows and curry

A large part of the lack of knowledge about social stratification in one’s own country comes from some myths learned from childhood, some even systematically taught in schools.  While I was not at all surprised to find a wide range of familiarity with India among Americans, when I first came to this country (after all, it is a far away land), I was surprised to find that everyone’s perception included “caste, cows and curry” (maybe the stereotype in the opposite direction is sex, fat, gun-happy, maybe even irreligious).

The cow situation (so radically different from other countries) and “curry” (btw, there is no such dish in India, you know that, right?) being widely known were quite understandable to me, but the caste bit was puzzling to me because many societies are strongly stratified, many of them on by-birth criteria and professions too – so many examples of caste on every continent [“caste” is a European word to describe something that was seen in Europe, for example].  I can see that India’s is the largest and most current application of the term and there’s a good argument for it being currently the paradigmatic example because of it’s slowness of change but it’s hardly unique. (And India has been slow in all aspects of modernizing, anyway).

Not that any of this means India’s caste system is “not so bad” or anything. It was and remains (despite vigorous attempts by many to rid society of this scourge) horrible. But I hope people across the world can stop using other countries’ caste mechanisms to willfully avoid looking at what’s right around them. Because, everyone’s strongest sphere of influence is first their own mind, then their immediate circle of people, then their own broader network, then their own societies and much further along is some society far away. So it’s worthwhile thinking about our own situation.

Nor is it the case that Isabel Wilkerson’s explanation is going to find an exact one-to-one mapping of the stratifications in the two countries that all of us here have become closely connected with. I’m drawing attention to the fact that while it’s easy to find some difference to hold up, why did it take so long for the glaring similarities to be brought to the surface?

Another seemingly misunderstood aspect is the idea among many people that Indians are for the caste system. It must be, right? Why else does it exist? That’s poor logic. It’s like saying Americans support racism. Why else does it exist? (and it certainly does exist). For more on how caste and race are analogous, I have to refer you to a different post. Let me state clearly for those unfamiliar with India (obvious to most Indians already) – from the day India became independent (1947), successive governments have worked tirelessly to end this scourge – obviously with the support of large swathes of the population.

It’s also worth pondering why exactly are children in American schools (and in those of allied countries) are taught about the caste system? In contrast, children in Indian schools learn about the marvels and good qualities of other societies, not their ills. They do get an education on social ills, but those of their own country, not other lands. This question is not a trivial one and is related to American introspection.

Posted on by Gotamist

Guns, Liberalism and Conservatism

There is an infinity of articles out there about the right and wrong of gun rights and people tend to come down for or against the topic in a stance that is highly correlated to where you stand on in the political left/right dimension. [I’m well away that not everything falls into this dichotomy, but it’s a decent first principal component ]

It was hard to see what abortion or gay rights or tax cuts/hikes had to do with guns – were people taking positions just from tribalism?  It’s dawned on me, though, that the stance on guns is not incidental but central to leftist or right wing ideologies and where they stand on the role of the state and state power. Allow me the liberty to use broad-brush (and somewhat ridiculing) choice of language to describe what the groups want.

Liberals believe in the state being a major actor, making itself wealthy and powerful and cramming down “the right things” (high taxes, mask mandates etc) onto individuals who do not support whatever great social project that the right people have decided.  Individuality is not a desirable quality and individual rights stand in the way of achieving “the greater social good”.  Well, guns in every household is quite a hindrance for a government forcing people to do things.  So, to achieve leftist goals, it’s natural to not want easy availability of guns.

Now, think about a situation where everyone has a gun: Suddenly, your safety depends on what people all around you think of you.  You can’t behave wildly and have to observe certain social norms. The state is not able to effectively protect your rights to do what you please.  Suddenly, it’s like the old societies where everyone is involved in everyone’s affairs, people “give respect to get respect” and other such macho notions, women have to dress based not just on what is allowed under the law but based on what everyone in the neighborhood thinks, the beliefs of the majority prevail and minority values have a hard time. In other words, conservative values will rule the roost automatically by the mere fact that everyone has lethal power with them.

So, in a gun-carrying community,  the state can’t force anything on you, but it also can’t effectively protect you from your neighbors.

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Father’s day and Mother’s day are for all

As Father’s day approaches, I’m reminded that every year, it’s common to hear people say things like “For those of you who are fathers, Happy Father’s Day!” or “Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers I know).  And of course, we hear similar things for Mother’s day.  It’s become a day to celebrate someone’s (often one’s own) fatherhood. 

This is not the spirit in which these holidays were instituted.  When Anna Jarvis campaigned for Mother’s Day and Sonora Scott Dodd created Father’s day (yes,  both days were created by women), they meant it to be a day to honor one’s mother or father. Not to celebrate one’s own motherhood or fatherhood.  In fact, Anna Jarvis did not even have children of her own!

Jarvis specifically noted that “Mother’s” should “be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.”

So, what happened? The church happened.  Some strains of conservative Christians saw it as a way to push their agenda that the path that women should take is motherhood and not other pursuits.  So they used the holiday to celebrate motherhood instead.  And they were successful.  This irked Anna Jarvis so much that by the end of her life, she started campaigning for the holiday to end, now that its meeting had been so perverted.

To summarize: Happy Father’s Day to you if you have a father (or had one or had a father figure).  Appreciate your father and celebrate him! 

It’s not about your fatherhood. There is only one holiday in the year to celebrate yourself. And that is your birthday.  Every other holiday is to honor and celebrate someone else in your life.  Don’t bend it to suit your own purposes.

Posted on by Gotamist

This really stings

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is upon us and I am truly hating the self-flagellation among 1st generation Indian Americans in the form of laughing at the fact that South Asian kids dominate the winners list.  It’s claimed that what is tested in the Bee is a “completely useless skill” and that Indian parents (unlike other parents) pressure their children into competing.

I do point out that white kids also participate and have won many, only to be told that “white kids do it out of their own interest” while Indian kids are “forced by their parents against their wishes”.  I can’t see how this is not a prejudiced statement.  I didn’t cartoon anything. What’s in the quotes above was actually said.  With such supporting evidence as the fact that in the documentary Spellbound (2002), some Indian children are shown starting the day at 4 am to study for the Bee (with parental support, of course). 

Further assertions are that Indian parents in the US do this just for competition amongst themselves.  So that they can say to each other “my kid is the champ”, similar to the Tiger Mom trope for East Asians. And…somehow this doesn’t happen among white people?  

I see the media in general routinely admire the kids who win the Bee each year.  Only Indian immigrants are ashamed of it.

Some facts to recall:

Have you ever seen the amount of energy some white parents put into their kids’ sports? And the competitive yelling from the sidelines at kids’ games?  This is unmatched by Asian parents.  My point being – this is selective vision.

Speaking of useless skills – aren’t there films, even documentaries about the crazy competitive parents who put their kids through a lot for them to compete in children’s beauty pageants?  I am countered with the fact that this is only some white parents.  Whereas all South Asian parents are crazy about the spelling bee (except for those few enlightened ones who “get it”)???

As to the criticism of the Bee “robbing children of their childhoods”, all winners of the Scripps Bee before 1997 were white.  No criticism at that time. Most of the winners since 1998 are South Asians and the criticism starts. Even now, those very same people, when told of the black children who won in 1998 and 2021, celebrate this fact.  Then why the scorn and myth-making only for South Asian children?

As to the criticism for this being a “useless skill” – how useful are fencing, horse riding and water polo in the contemporary world – excellence in each of these is considered for college admission and white parents routinely arrange for their kids to excel in?  I don’t buy the “health and fitness” argument, because that can be had in much cheaper ways.

If the meaning of “useless” is simply that it’s not going to get you college admission, that is probably true.  Consider the skills that Asian kids can excel in – that is, things that Asian parents can help their kids with [math, SAT scores, chess, classical music, Spelling Bee]  vs what elite white parents (and yes, I am talking specifically about things that poor white people don’t have, just the elite) can help their kids with  [some elite sports like the ones mentioned above, public speaking and selling skills in the manner that is traditionally American, certain arts]. The college admissions process is continuously in the process of devaluing excellence in the first group of activities.  Why, is anyone’s guess, but I shall refer you to the reason that elite US universities changed their admissions criteria in the 1920s away from just academic excellence for some hints.

Further, notice there is a big movement in the public discourse to devalue academic excellence for college admissions and attack the parents who tried to get their kids to excel scholastically.  Remember these arguments are all for the purpose of justifying aforementioned college admissions – I just ask Asian Americans to recognize these arguments for what they are… and not to buy these stories and embark on self-loathing. 

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The rise of the extremist intellectual in India

People like Sai Deepak are scary.  He’s got the intensity of one who’s trying to arouse anger and hate in his audience, through invoking a sense of grievance, sounding so reasonable in the process.  Further it’s the humorless intensity that you can see in culture warriors (think Tucker Carlson/Tomi Lahren/Robert Reich/DeSantis for US equivalents). He’s the kind of intellectual that those who don’t think too much but fancy themselves to be intellectuals can easily fall for.  

He’s also twisting facts and using wrong logic to make his appeals in that very video.  The entire caste discussion there is a red herring.

Finally, it’s ridiculous to use Christian faith healing jokers to make any point about scammy conversions (as if there aren’t thousands of fraud babas who are nominally Hindus preying on the less fortunate and less educated).  To the extent these “charismatic” sects poach members from outside, they do so from all religions, including other Christians.  Most Christians in Kerala family members who ditched their ancestral Christian communities to go hang out with these evangelizing crazies.  

Deepak  starts out by saying that there is caste division among Muslims and Christians too, which is true.  This is not news to anyone except those who have never bothered to interact closely with Muslims and Christians (perhaps that’s nobody in his audience?). Then claims immediately that there is a unified Christian/Muslim community that sets aside this caste feeling unlike in the case of the Hindus who looked down on the “lower professions”.  There is NOTHING in the audience woman’s experience that suggests that the plumber, electrician, mason etc were bound by a larger religious identity. They were likely all from a single caste, perhaps going also to the same church (which also tends to be greatly caste segregated).  And Christians do, in fact, cling to these caste identities quite strongly, not transcending them. Read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_South_Asian_Christians including this example “a Christian Nadar would enter into a marital alliance with a Hindu Nadar but never with a Christian of another caste and that they would dine with their Hindu brethren but never with a person of their own faith who was beneath them in the social scale.”

The argument that “look at those other guys, they are doing it better.  We need to be more like them” using some tricks.  Note how he talks about the Muslim/Christian “communities” and the Hindu “sampradaya”.  Who has ever heard sampradaya used this way? There are hindu sampradayas, never once has the word been used in the singular to refer to some Hindu Ummah. This is a new introduction in the fundie project to use Sanskrit-sounding words to describe their favored themes and foreign language words to describe others. Eg. Rahul Gandhi is a “shahzada”, not a “rajkumar”. 

Likewise, I suspect that the real message of this lecture is not really about caste at all, but just that “we Hindus should stick together” – other than small sloganeering, he isn’t talking about the ills of caste at all, but mainly how it stands in the way of Hindus being more powerful as a unified block, which he claims at these points in the argument other “communities” are.


What is sadder than the presence of these manipulative  hateful intellectuals is to see the large number of highly educated and smart Indians easily buying these messages.  Increasing numbers of Hindus (self identified) are embracing these messages, expressing concern about the “unfair advantages” given to all religions [note that this would have meant that the majority of the levers of power would be held by non-Hindus today.  In fact, the move was in the opposite direction].  It is positively Trumpian for so many of the elite to start believing they are the aggrieved class, just as increasing numbers of white people in America believe they are being oppressed.  Do they understand the side effects of the “India is for the Hindus” line of thought? If true Indianness comes from being a Hindu and it gets codified into law, what is the lot of those who are not Hindus? Are Christians and Muslims simply to be expelled from the country? Or worse things than that? What is the solution to the “Christian problem”? Of course, an ordinary middle class Hindu professional really doesn’t have to worry about this.  Whether to choose a secular or fundamentalist standpoint is an intellectual exercise for them.  For Muslims and Christians, though, it is an existential question! The average Hindutvavaadi follower need so think about and answer this question – what is to become of the Christians and Muslims in India in the endgame?

Posted on by Gotamist

Why do liberal places want me to…hold it in?

Why is it that the most liberal towns and cities are the ones where it is hardest for me to find a bathroom?  Aren’t they the places that profess the most compassion? Many will say “Restroom are for customers only/No public restrooms”.  Some will have “restrooms out of order” signs permanently (clearly a lie since the employees do use something). Some even have no sign there is a restroom at all and if you ask them, they’ll even tell a customer, “Sorry, we don’t have public restrooms”.  Restaurants where you have paid are an exception.

This is very different from most other towns in America where I can walk up to pretty much any place and find a restroom.

You know who I am grateful towards in this regard? Walmart, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, Albertson’s – these will always let me use a restroom.   In addition, Walmart has made a commitment for decades now that if someone wants to park a car in their parking lot overnight and sleep there, they will not prevent that.  I have taken them up on that once when there were no motel rooms available one night during a long road trip and the hotel rooms were way too expensive for me and the Mrs.  We slept in our car at a Walmart lot in Paso Robles…and used their bathroom in the morning.

By quite a coincidence, these very companies are targets of liberals for vilification.  What’s the deal? What do liberals have against me peeing?

Posted on by Gotamist

Hinduism as a foil

Ever notice how Hinduism/Indian culture is brought up in American Buddhist circles in the context of Buddhism and India only while discussing some aspect of Buddhist belief that is not readily digestible or palatable to a mindset with “Western” cultural baggage?

For example, rebirth concepts, the presence of spirits like tree spirits, guardian spirits and anything else that feels uncomfortable can be addressed like this: “You see, the Buddha used this language because that was the culture of that time in India and he wanted them to be able to understand the teaching” . 

Has it occurred to minds that the Buddha himself could have held those beliefs?  He was himself a product of that culture. He wasn’t born in the Yankee Stadium, you know?

On the other hand, concepts of karma, nirvana as well as practices of generosity, such as dāna supporting spiritual seekers of any tradition and more generally, a long-standing commitment/respect from society at large toward spiritual seekers – these are all practices of that time and place as well and very important in Buddhism.  You don’t hear appreciation of India or the Hindu context.

Meanwhile, all ideas that we love about Buddhism are described by terms such as “so logical” or “compatible with Western/modern science” (though they too might be identical to Hindu beliefs/practices)

Not that in liberal Buddhist circles, there isn’t the standard bashing of “our culture” (America bad, Western culture bad) vs the “spiritual East”.  I’m just talking about the invocation of Hinduism in particular, not “Eastern Spirituality” or “Eastern culture”.

You can also hear other comments born of people’s cultural baggage.  For example, those of Christian backgrounds might say things like “Buddhism was a reformed version of Hinduism in the same way that Christianity was born out of a reformation of Judaism”.  The  implication here is that Hinduism and Judaism are the flawed primitive versions.   These aren’t people who care for Christianity at all (they’re rejected their “religion of birth”), but the feeling of “mine” regarding Christianity is strong while they’re happy to throw Judaism also under the bus. 

Those of Jewish background – you never hear them say this.  Instead, they talk about the many similarities between Buddhism and Judaism.

This image is typical. I don’t know the author but see how the description of Hinduism is negative – shallow, all about caste and rituals and as a “religion” while Buddhism is a “way of life” focused on ethics and philosophy.