Dilip Simeon's blog

How conservatism turns to fascism In the 1980s, Trump was already famous as a billionaire who articulated the philosophy of  look out for your own profit and don’t care how much you hurt anyone else in the process.  However, no one would imagine he would eventually become president. Long before he entered politics, Trump  called anyone who challenged him a loser . With that vocabulary, he perpetuated the idea that victims are weak and lazy and don’t have the stuff to prevail. They deserve their fate and must submit to the triumphant. As a landlord, Trump brutally intimidated his tenants - cutting heat and hot water, refusing to maintain and repair his buildings, which sometimes became rat infested - in the hope of  driving them out of rent-controlled apartments that he planned to convert into condominiums . Trump’s presidency has been treated as a fluke, but it actually represents a very old ideology of capitalism. When Trump became president, the media and lib...

The whistleblower system is designed to alert the top brass to abuses inside the bureaucracy. But what happens when the top brass are themselves the wrongdoers? Politicians who lie, obfuscate, or dodge the rules for strategic reasons are nothing new for us, or for you... But Trump is a different story. Not only does he crash through the guardrails of law and common sense, he may no longer understand what they are. As David  pointed out  recently, the most telling part of the infamous call with the Ukrainian president came when Trump demanded that Volodymyr Zelensky look into an utterly bizarre conspiracy theory that holds that Russia did not hack the DNC’s servers David wrote: It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s BS as, well, just BS. After all, Trump will publicly say anything to escape responsibility, change the subject, or cover up misconduct…But when he was speaking to Zelensky, he was not in front of an audience. In private, he was expressing a priority and making a spec...

Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) is now the most powerful criminal organization in the country, with a confirmed presence in 22 Mexican states as well as the U.S., Central America, and South America.    A  study  this year determined that Mexico was home to 1.13 million people displaced by violence. Guerrero, long among Mexico’s  most dangerous states  and the nation’s top heroin producer, is also a leader when it comes to  internal refugees , many of whom flee north to seek asylum. The U.S. border patrol  deports  more residents from Guerrero than from anywhere else in Mexico. There are two main factors driving the flow of refugees from small towns and villages like Vallecitos, and they are both tied to seismic changes in the cartel universe. The first has to do with an ongoing power struggle in the wake of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s capture and extradition to the U.S. The second is related to a profound shift in the habits of th...

Helen Mirren  can do it all. Here she is, at the age of 74, playing a woman half her age, in HBO’S  Catherine the Great , and she is on fire—a woman seizing absolute power in a nest of male vipers, the Russian court of 1762. Make no mistake: Nobody could better carry off the audacity of the casting. We’re so used  to Woody Allen Syndrome —old male actors partnering with far younger women—that it’s a revelation to see the roles reversed as Mirren’s Catherine works her way through a series of muscular young lovers. And this scenario raises another challenge to long-established sexual prejudices. After her death, Catherine was subjected by her successors to a smear campaign that has shown surprising stamina -that her life was one long banquet of inventive sex culminating in a scene where she dies attempting to mate with a horse. That never happened. Catherine certainly had a healthy sex drive and, as we see in the opener of the HBO drama, she employed a kind of sexual...

From producing artificial meat to using renewable energy, businesses seem to be driven by concern for our planet. But are they really? Or is this all an attempt to gain a sense of credibility for a project otherwise driven by the mundane, old profit motive? In this age of misinformation, it can be difficult to distinguish between green and greenwash.  In Mumbai ,  despite a sustained and widespread citizens’ campaign, the Aarey forest has  been chopped down. Despite a number of alternative available sites for the Metro car depot, the agency has remained stubborn on the forest land. The push for the capital-intensive Metro has come at a time when the city’s bus service is in tatters. Still, it is argued that the Metro is the only option to improve the city’s public transport. Addressing the ecological crisis:  Amidst the grief over the felling, there are some who are justifying the move. Their argument is that building a Metro will prevent an increase i...

The use of hate in society is a complex phenomenon, but psychologically, who and why we hate is much clearer. The motive of hate is to eliminate the other, whether that be real or symbolic. Hate evolves out of both real and imagined threats. When we hate another, we don’t just hate what they do, we hate who they are: we see them as inherently bad, morally inferior and we believe their intention towards us is malicious. What we hate about the other is their imagined innate nature. Once we come to hate, the hatred persists. Psychologically speaking, hate has much more currency as a group feeling than an individual one. Hate is the great social glue that binds people together. Research demonstrates that socially, once unleashed, hate can permanently destroy relationships, and that misconceptions and biases once formed against an outgroup don’t necessarily change on meeting people from that group. Hate, like an emotional injury, leaves scars, not just on the hated, but also the hater...

NB : A very well thought argument. Congress is also ceding ground on the reverse side, by sanitising Savarkar ; and totally ignoring his central role in Gandhi's assassination. All this is not surprising, given that the mass murder of 1984 in India's capital took place under Congress aegis.  Indian social democracy never took root, due both to its own weakness and certain iniquitous aspects of social traditions and social practice. Given the attractions of Marxist-Leninist authoritarianism, the Indian Left was unable and unwilling to confront the issues raised below. The most important of these was communal politics about which it still lacks a coherent analysis. A liberal-democratic, secular politics has to redefine itself not tactically, but philosophically. At this point in human history, nation worship is not a good place to begin this work.  DS The next few months may turn out to be crunch time for the institutional formation of Indian secularism. The Ayodhya judgme...