Underestimating the importance of Ideology

Left-liberals wear their identities as ablative armour. When they offend right-wingers, the latter assume the former are motivated by their micro-identities (ethnicity/religion/da joos) and lash out at those groups, leaving the Left-liberal Raj unscathed.

Some commie congressi chu did something anti H, it must be because he is hriday samrat of his own sub sub sub sub sub caste and because he hates my own sub sub sub sub caste, not because he’s a commie/congi

There is a reason Congress/TMC/DMK IT cell use females (or men pretending to be females) to attack Hindus.

The trick is to make you rant about feminists, women etc. and slowly lose half the electorate.

Just call them leftists. Only attack them for being leftists.

When Epstein was caught raping children, his longtime friend and associate Noam Chomsky sent him a heartfelt letter expressing his support, and empathizing with the difficulty of defending oneself against wild accusations. What was interesting was what he chose as an example of a wild accusation: “How do you prove that you are not a neo-Nazi who wants to kill all the Jews?”

This is why the idea that Jewish leftists are secretly executing a “Jewish agenda” (or equivalently “savarna secular”/hṛday samrāṭ of his sub-sub-caste) is so laughable.

Leftist elites of any tribe or ethnicity (or theoretically class, though modern LeLis are a bit inconsistent on that, i.e. they care a lot about LARPing as educated/experts etc.) have zero identification with their tribe.

Never attribute to big-brain sociological theorizooring what can be attributed to Ideology.

“Why are the youth zero-sum?”

“Why do women trust experts more?”

“Why do atheists oppose free speech?”

“Why do young people hate Israel and old people love it–is it because they see Israel being brvtal while old people saw Israel as the underdog? But wait, old people saw the USSR but are less likely to be pro-Ukraine...”

Psychological traits offered to explain political divides are really causally downstream of them.

God created the political ideologies; all else is the rationalization of man.

By and large, the President of the United States can order people to do things, and they will do those things. POTUS is often considered the most powerful person in the world. And yet, the president cannot order a virus to stop replicating. The president cannot order GDP to increase. The president cannot order world peace.

Are there orders the president could give which would result in world peace, or increasing GDP, or the end of a virus? Probably, yes. Any of these could likely even be done with relatively little opportunity cost. Yet no president in history has known which orders will efficiently achieve these objectives. There are probably some people in the world who know which orders would efficiently increase GDP, but the president cannot distinguish them from the millions of people who claim to know (and may even believe it themselves) but are wrong.

Last I heard, Jeff Bezos was the official richest man in the world. He can buy basically anything money can buy. But he can’t buy a cure for cancer. Is there some way he could spend a billion dollars to cure cancer in five years? Probably, yes. But Jeff Bezos does not know how to do that. Even if someone somewhere in the world does know how to turn a billion dollars into a cancer cure in five years, Jeff Bezos cannot distinguish that person from the thousands of other people who claim to know (and may even believe it themselves) but are wrong.

When non-experts cannot distinguish true expertise from noise, money cannot buy expertise. Knowledge cannot be outsourced; we must understand things ourselves.

I think that’s due to different priorities. Liberals and leftists, who dominate the discourse in the West, care very deeply about stuff like welfare state, feminism, climate change, anti-racism, LGBT etc.

Thus their discourse never revolved around stuff like industrial production, military industry might, history of medieval polities linked to their nation or ethnic group, celebration of religious conquests, war victories and the like—they really don’t care about nationalism at all in a way that third-worlders or any non-westerner (save for the Indian leftist) simply can’t comprehend.

The Chinese, by contrast, are not only uniformly nationalist but technology and industrial upgradation is at the very center of nationalist narrative. The legitimacy of the ruling party is arguably bound up with delivering on the sci-fi like mega project that would make China the pre-eminent power in the world.

To give an example, consider AI advances. Progressive commentators have responded with mockery and skepticism because they deeply dislike the social mileu of the tech people who created it—and prestige publications are concerned with whether the LLMs are “racist”, fair to “marginalized groups” and adheres to the party line (the irony). There was a recent article in MIT linked site complaining that ChatGPT answers are “casteist”. This is the kind of thing they care about.

The Chinese discourse meanwhile is concerned with instrumental use of tech, implications for great competition with US, it’s impact on China’s industry and power projection etc.

To sum up, it comes down to the fact that one side cares deeply, they *write* a lot about it and do so passionately publicizing every achievement while most others don’t really care.

How does India lose the game in Academia? A small case study.

Here is a book by Sher Ali Tareen, a US-based Pakistani scholar. It argues that the erosion of Muslim imperial power under British rule did not depoliticize Islam, but rather relocated sovereignty into social, ritual, and everyday life. Roughly speaking, he justifies political Islam as the only narrative in the Indian subcontinent.

So far as expected from a Pakistani.

Now this book is dedicated to whom? Sharjeel Imam, of course! Who writes the effusive foreword for the book? Faisal Devji, a Zanzibari-Canadian professor whose first big appointment happened at Oxford.

Who started the fund that has given Devji his first prestigious appointment?

The NDA government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee with the illusion that this will create narratives for India.

Money without diligence is money lost. And, this is not the only case.

Courtesy: Dr. Gautam Sen.

Medieval Indians designating Muslim invaders as “Yavana”, rather than understanding the ideology that motivated them, is exactly like modern Indians thinking of Left-liberals as “Anglos” or “Christian stooges”.

If nothing else, the Trump tariffs should put an end to this “corporations control everything” meme. The only players in this game are ideologies. MAGA does stupid things, Left-liberals let them do it to watch them crash and burn, and a small faction of principled conservatives sue to stop it.

Donald Trump’s point that “It’s a shame Iraq wasn’t actually about the Oil” is such an amazing point because as much as the Liberals wish American policy was driven by realist and corporate interests of natural resource extraction, the Truth is far more stupid.

As we saw in Afghanistan the American government’s first priority wasn’t even creating a functional meritocratic pre-liberal state, it was telling women they had rights and should fight their husbands and trying to convince the Average person that Graffiti on a Toilet is art.

Aside from certain extraordinary Secretary of States and Presidents, it’s just a cope deployed by the left to convince themselves their beliefs are corrupted by capitalism and aren’t fundamentally bad, and a coping mechanism by the right that “Reasonable people” and “Rational Actors” are actually at the helm of Foreign policy that can be explained with “Rare Earths” in Ukraine instead of “GAE must become larger”

You seem to think they’re all grown ups who care about geopolitics and money. Simply untrue for a religion with as high Asabiyah as Muslims. Stop confusing them with Hindus.

You guys are young: 18, 19, 20, 21 etc and seem to think there is some new hidden reality you have discovered of how the world is a cynical geopolitical chessgame and Indians are blinded by their “muslim hatred”.

You’ll eventually realize what Sanghis said was always right. Hating Muslim states is law.

It is under-rated how much poor theory was responsible for failure of right-libertarianism of 2000s. The rhetoric imagined a sultanistic regime which does not exist in West. The state/private distinction is inadequate when dealing with total social-cultural-political movement.

The State was (and remains) merely an instrument for the movement which is a complex network of spheres of interest that is constituted within the radius of every important institution—business enterprise, university, media and bureaucratic apparatus.

Focusing on the battering ram and not the weilders was a glaring omission. Taking out the central apparatus of coercion is much harder when it is buffered by such a consolidated shield. Talk of “what if it was used against you” only works if opposing forces are equally balanced.

The intelligence agencies in the West are not super savvy instituions that stand above society and cynics manipulating idealists or populated by a separate caste. They are recruited from the same stratum as “the Cathedral” subscribing to same fanatical civil religion.

Important principle: Attacking the weapon (deepfakes, guns, tik-tok) is near-useless: people will just use another weapon. Attack the people who do evil with them.

There’s a reason why the best airport security in the world, Israel’s, relies more on profiling people than on scanning bags.

Right-wingers center all their politics around elections like a student who centers all her learning around final exams. In reality elections are only a test of how good you have been at building institutional and cultural power.

People say that Democracy replaces (Civil) War. This is only partly true. In the sense of Sun Tzu’s “Every battle is won before the first arrow is even fired”, or Kautilya’s “The arrow shot by an archer may not kill a single man, but skillful intrigue devised by a brilliant man can kill him before he was even born” — the majority of warfare lies in the power-building and effort done before the bloody, violent warfare.

Democracy only replaces the latter iceberg-tip with elections; the former still remains the same, albeit with different incentives due to the different nature of the test at the end. The Left understands this: that politics is, and remains war.

RWs are unable to separate their own movement’s interests from “national” interest; while the Left has ultra-partisan loyalty with nation being means to that end. [...] It is now becoming increasingly untenable to talk of nation-states as the unit of analysis, because increasingly intra-national differences are now greater than inter-national ones in some ways

[...] RWs are obsessed with geopolitics and want to fight war against foreign enemies—Left-liberals meanwhile sharpen their swords to fight a civil war against the right; geopol only a means to that end.

[In reference to the perception that the previous Congress government’s negligent response and abetment of terrorism had been due to “uncaring/self-interested politicians” rather than ideological malice]

It is a very common normie rightist sentiment.

The non-response to terrorism by the previous governments is blamed on “uncaring politicians” (without regard for the parties) which is then attributed to their elitism and the fact that they are not generally found among the victims of those attacks. This “aam aadmi versus politician” framing is very stupid, braindead populism.

Left-liberal politicians and voters alike center the victims when the latter are from the groups they care deeply about. It just doesn’t include you!

Look at the rage and anger they express when the preparators are (or believed to be) from the majority community and the victim belongs to their holy constituency.

They stick to this even when they are *personally* victimized and suffer the consequences of their beliefs contrary to what many rightists imagine.

To give an example, think of the comments made by the Navy officers’ widow after the Pahalgam attack.

Some idiots attributed it to her being a woman rather than the political beliefs she subscribes to and the morality that flows from it. You have to challenge the core moral premises of this belief system that a large number of people adhere to for things to change.