Protests in India: The word 'andolan'

On February 8, 2021, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi coined the phrase ‘andolan jivi’ [professional agitators]. S.N. Sahu explains:

"The phrase ‘andolan jivi’ is particularly insulting to Ambedkar [B. R. Ambedkar, 1891-1956]. One of the key components of his legacy is embodied in his iconic slogan, ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’. Those three electrifying words were his concluding utterances at the All India Depressed Classes Conference held in Nagpur in 1942. Seventy-nine years later, when the Prime Minister of India denounced agitation and sarcastically said in the context of the prolonged farmers’ agitation that the protesters are “andolan jivis”, he denounced Ambedkar himself."
— S.N. Sahu, Modi's Phrase ‘Andolan Jivi’ Ridicules Ambedkar’s Slogan, ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’, The Wire, Apr 14 2022

Today, there are protests:

"Speaking as a proud andolanjeevi (Modi’s derisive name for people like me), I confess that when it all began, I was wary too. I worried that we were heading into another Anna Hazare moment – that so-called anti-corruption movement, which, regardless of its early intentions, eventually gifted us three terms of being ruled by a political party that has destroyed every institution in this country, one that sees no separation between itself as a political party and the government of India, one that respects neither the country nor its citizens, and one that has shamed us internationally and brought India to its knees.

But my suspicions about the Cockroach Janata Party were allayed when I saw the hostility of the mainstream media towards them. That, to me, was the first and most reassuring sign. I was thrilled that Abhijeet Dipke was from a Dalit community, and even more thrilled that that wasn’t what anybody was focused on." — Arundhati Roy, Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous: The student protesters who have swarmed Delhi are showing us a different future for India, Equator, July 23, 2026

The protests are about a lot of different things.

Protests are spreading across India demanding the resignation of the country’s election chief. Opposition parties and civil society groups want Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign over alleged voter list manipulation.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) October 8, 2026 at 5:45 AM

Insane story out of India

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) October 14, 2025 at 4:03 PM

The International Criminal Court still waits for Netanyahu

Shortly after Trump won the U.S. election, while Biden was still in office, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant to arrest Netanyahu.

"Today, on 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (‘Court’), in its composition for the Situation in the State of Palestine, unanimously issued two decisions rejecting challenges by the State of Israel (‘Israel’) brought under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute (the ‘Statute’). It also issued warrants of arrest for Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant."
Press Release: 21 November 2024
Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant

"Poland effectively wants to commemorate one genocide, and celebrate one ongoing - and the latter's architect - by inviting Netanyahu to Auschwitz memorial event and promising not to arrest him." Bluesky

"Among American Jews, 53% do not have confidence in Netanyahu... The only U.S. religious group to demonstrate confidence in Netanyahu is white evangelical Protestants." www.jta.org/2025/04/09/u...

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 3:11 PM

"...last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue [of starvation in Gaza]. ... Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population." The BBC's timeline "managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas. Verify's reporter asserted that in early March Israel "blocked humanitarian aid demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages". He then jumped to 18 March, stating: "Israel resumes military operations."" But, "in fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire" and it "broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza's civilians" which it is doing to prompt them to breach "the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt." ... Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” – in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades."
— Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong: The BBC's role is not to keep viewers informed. It's to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand, Jonathan Cook, Substack, May 7, 2025

On September 24, Jewish Currents sent this from Josh Nathan-Kazis:

"You couldn’t ask for a more fitting representation of Israel in the Netanyahu era than the scene that just played out on the floor of the United Nations: As the Israeli prime minister took the stage, most of the world silently fled the room while a few fanatics up in the rafters shouted “Am Yisrael Chai,” tunelessly, over and over again.

Netanyahu’s material was mostly rehash: He told the story of his martyred brother at great length, predicted the fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran, said Israel was fighting the “barbarians.” All the old hits.

What was new was a galling attempt to undercut world leaders’ growing discomfort with settler violence in the West Bank with astounding lies. Netanyahu said the violence was the work of “a handful of young juvenile delinquents who throw stones, who chop down olive trees, occasionally they light some fires,” and said that “the number of casualties per year, maybe two, three,” is nothing compared to the “thousands of attacks against the peaceful settlers.” These are immense falsehoods that, in their immensity, suggest that Netanyahu is not trying to convince anyone; he’s just playing to his tankies."

‘Baseless Lies Meant to Sanitize His Genocide’: Mamdani Hits Back After Netanyahu’s Attacks During UN Speech: “No lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” New York City’s mayor said of the Israeli prime minister. Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, Sep 24, 2026

Democracy requires underlying values and commitments

Thomas Zimmer yesterday:

"One prominent voice in the camp of those who opposed what they diagnosed as liberal or leftwing “alarmism” has been Shadi Hamid: After the 2022 midterm elections, he successfully leveraged his reflexive anti-“alarmism” into a position as a columnist and a member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post. Hamid declared that liberals should finally stop indulging the “great moral panic” of pretending that democracy was under assault from the MAGA Right. He offered what he called “democratic minimalism” as an alternative framework. “Democracy,” Hamid argued, “is a mechanism for regulating conflict through elections. It requires no commitment to specific substantive ends.” It should therefore be “de-coupled from the liberal and progressive outcomes that liberals and progressives think it should produce,” and instead conceptualized as “a system and means of governing and rotating power with no prejudice to substantive ideological outcomes.”

In essence, Hamid demanded we regard democracy as just a set of procedures, not as something that entails any substantive commitments. In practical terms, this would reduce democracy to, first and foremost, elections – and since there are, in this understanding, by definition no bad outcomes resulting from democratic procedures, any election result would therefore also have to be considered good from a democratic point of view. Put differently, if Americans make Trump president via an election or Germans put the AfD in charge of a state government, then that is not only something all (small-d) democrats need to accept, but they ought to consider it a normatively positive democratic outcome."

However, he says, democracy involves underlying values, not just a procedure that looks like you're taking a vote. (bolding mine)

"Democracy does not just mean elections. In today’s widely accepted parlance, this means a system of equality before the law, in which all citizens have a right to participate in the political process as equals; a system playing by majoritarian principles, in which all sides clearly renounce violence and agree to respecting the rules as laid out in the constitution; a pluralistic system seeking negotiation and compromise between differing interests in which the status of the individual is not determined by what they look like, what they identify as, who they pray to, who their parents were, or how much wealth they have accumulated. An election outcome that threatens that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to undermine it, that are at war with the very idea of a pluralistic society of equals and instead committed to a vision of a hierarchical ethnostate – is therefore very much not good for democracy. Can we please refuse to play willfully naïve?"

— Thomas Zimmer, Warnings and Lessons from the Struggle Against Trumpism, Democracy Americana, September 5, 2026

'But now the enemy is people' (John O'Hara)

"But now the enemy is people," John O'Hara wrote in a novel about the Pennsylvania elite in the early 20th century, people whom you'll find "trading...the ophidian [serpent-like] devious for the classic simple."

"A parent is sweepingly protective of his infant's existence; but after the baby days are over, the threats become single threats, calling for defensive measures singly, a measure to a threat; vigilance and defensiveness always, but each threat of harm dealt with individually. And, of course, each hope to be dreamed and planned over by itself. In the beginning years the father's fears are for bugs, and the less visible the worse the fear, but not much can be done about them. In the later years the bugs are still there, but now the enemy is people, and some of them no more visible than the most dangerous bugs, and as little to be done about them. But of course there are the good and the kind and the loving among the people, the serenely good, the impetuously kind, the continually loving, who trust their own goodness and kindness and loving without suspicious questioning or ultimately contemptuous analysis, or denying the positive, glorifying the evil, marketing the poison, or trading nothing for something, the gag for the joke, the sneer for the laugh, the fancy lie for the plain truth, the ophidian devious for the classic simple. But of course of the good, the kind, the loving, there are exactly too few, exactly, and among them are traitors as well as converts."

— John O’Hara (1905-1970), Ten North Frederick (1955)

Do children have essentialist beliefs about gender?

Researcher Kathleen Corriveau said [emphasis mine]:

"We asked questions about moral violations. When children form opinions, some things are moral—you shouldn’t hit people, you shouldn’t steal—and others are conventional: you shouldn’t wear socks on your hands. Our question was, how are children judging religious violations—as moral or conventional? We asked children about people who were part of their religious group who were doing some sort of violation—like, “You’re Jewish and you’re eating pork”—and [then asked] about someone that’s not Jewish and is eating pork.

What we’re finding—and this is hopeful—is when the person they’re making a judgment [about] is a member of their religious group, they’re viewing it more as a moral violation; it’s really bad. But if that same violation is by someone that’s not a member of their religious group, they’re more accepting. In some locations, children treat religion as a highly essentialized category, like gender, [but] in other locations, children treat it like a preference for a baseball team—not a big deal."

— Polarized Parents Are Raising Ideologically Divided Kids. How Do We Stop the Cycle? Boston University’s Kathleen Corriveau, who studies why children believe what they do, says social exposure may be the key to ending the transmission of polarized beliefs. Kathleen Corriveau, interviewed by Rich Barlow, The Brink (Boston University), August 4, 2026

She was talking about her previous "five-year study—spanning 18 countries from the US and Australia to nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa—that probed how religious beliefs in particular shape attitudes" of children ages 4–12, as Rich Barlow explained. (Separately, she has a new research project in the Developing Belief Network, "a global collaborative studying the development of religious awareness.")

My initial reaction is to wonder whether, in some locations, children treat gender as essentialized; elsewhere, as less essentialized?

One could simply repeat the research to investigate that question, but, in today's propagandized climate, the researchers would be accused of "gender ideology" simply for asking children a "leading question" of whether man and woman might not be predetermined, fixed categories. Of course, there is no such thing as gender ideology; it's just something that far-right people accuse you of when you point out basic facts, like other people's beliefs and practices around gender. The far-right promotes the appearance of gender homogeneity, claiming that homogeneity is natural and diversity is ideology. This pressures people out of even asking questions about diversity.

Literature: Affect theory and autotheory

Affect theory (see multiple slides):

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Related: Dogmatic Positivity and the Terrible Neutrality of Hope, by Coyote, 2023

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Autotheory

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On reading

A couple centuries ago in North Carolina:

A white person who taught an enslaved person to read faced a fine of one hundred to two hundred dollars or imprisonment. A free person of color faced a fine, imprisonment, or a whipping of up to thirty-nine lashes. An enslaved person who taught another enslaved person to read got thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, no discretion, no alternative.

Think about that for a minute. A legislature convened, debated, voted, and made it a crime to teach a child the alphabet. They did not do that because reading is a nice hobby.

They did it because they had done the math and understood exactly what a person becomes when they can read a pass, read a map, read a newspaper, read an argument for their own freedom, and write it down for somebody else."

— Dr. Janine Bouey, Medium, Aug 9, 2026

Dr. Bouey says ideally we should spend less time decoding words (the early mechanics of reading) and more time thinking. "Attention you are spending on decoding is attention you do not have available for comprehension."

Thinking and learning requires some friction, says Anne Helen Petersen. It can't be automatic. Processes that are made automatic — too fluent — are hostile to thinking.

"I want to break things when I see headlines about people — of all ages — not reading, with no acknowledgment of how we have an entire information infrastructure that makes it difficult for us to read. I'm not just talking about the attention economy and the infinite scroll, either.

* * *

Reading is technology that’s full of friction. Settling into somebody else’s words is magic—their voice…inside your head! But it takes focus and, even more importantly, it takes time. Reading, for many, requires quiet or at least concentration. You can’t read while walking the dog or doing the dishes or in the car. Text doesn’t autoplay when you log into a news site and when you finish a story, most sites don’t throw another one at you like YouTube does. This will sound precious as somebody who writes for a living, but it’s not exactly a fair fight. What makes reading so vital, so fulfilling, is friction. And the internet is trying to eliminate friction in every way possible.

I don't think reading is ever going to die. But I do think that every generation is trained on a set of norms for how they receive, spread, and produce information. And the norms have shifted."

— Anne Helen Petersen, They Don't Want You To Read, Culture Study, Aug 9, 2026

How exactly to fit these two ideas together?

Meanwhile, A. R. Moxon writes (Thank You For Your Support: Sep 26, 2026):

"The billionaire idea behind these recent scandals seems to be not so much that we should keep human creativity in the hands of humans, but that those who own everything now get to say whose creativity is valid and whose isn't; to suggest not so much that some people are still being legitimately creative but that legitimate creativity isn't even possible anymore; not to get people to value the slop for its quality, but to convince people that there's no such thing as quality, or that it's no longer worth the bother of achieving it. or at least it's not worth the bother of trying to figure out the difference."

After people get out of the camps, they 'will just be walking around with that'

This is the beginning of a paywalled story on Flaming Hydra. I may decide to subscribe so I can read it.

"There is a weird thing that is going to happen, which is that once the Trumpists are defeated a huge population of people who will have spent time in American internment camps will just be walking around with that as a fucking thing that the country did to them.

I don't think America is ready for it."

— The opening of "1940, for Some," by J.D. Connor (Part I of III), "inspired by two recent exhibitions: Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum in New York, which closed July 26th, and Leonora Carrington at the Musée du Luxembourg, which closed July 19th.

Dragomans: Ottoman court interpreters

In the conversation Iran After America (with Jonathan Shainin for Equator, August 1, 2026), Vali Nasr says:

The scholar Bernard Lewis wrote an essay once about the role of ‘dragomans’ – the Ottoman court interpreters and diplomatic intermediaries. He saw himself this way, as the translator of the Arabs into Western languages. I believe his whole enterprise was ultimately based on such colonial assumptions.

Many of the academics of my generation saw ourselves as dragomans of a more authentic sort than Lewis – though he might accuse us in turn of bias. I’m not claiming to have a monopoly on truth. But increasingly I became convinced of these distortions. It’s difficult, because I do not have charitable views of the Islamic Republic and the way it has ruled over Iran. But to have value, my writing has to be level-headed.

Dragomans were typically Ottoman Greeks who communicated with Europeans. (as per Wikipedia)

Here's Bernard Lewis's book, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East

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Here's Vali Nasr's book:

Queer folks: Learn radical Yiddish about climate resilience: Thurs Aug 6, online

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