The Subjective Stance

The New York Times reports that Auguste Pinochet, the ex-dictator of Chile and archetype for the worst kind of American interventionism and right wing terror, is dead of heart complications. I am sure there will be many many analyses of his regime, but the best evocation of those times is in Isabel Allende's (niece of the man Pinochet deposed) book, The House of the Spirits . It is interesting that the Times, which one would hope is against state terror independent of its ideological basis, highlights the economic acumen of Pinochet's regime in the same breath that it talks about his terror tactics. Here is a quote: Attempts at strikes or other forms of protest were ruthlessly put down by General Pinochet’s secret police. That repression gave the free-market policies time to take hold. Since the mid-1980s, Chile’s gross domestic product has grown an average of more than 6 percent a year, the most impressive performance in Latin America. Is this supposed to be a good thing? On ...

I have been away from my blog for a few weeks now. Since I was blogging quite frequently before this break, I feel like I need to explain my absence. I went away to a conference in Kolkata, which I visited for the first time and during that period I wasn't able to access the internet apart from checking email. Since I was away from the blogging world for a week, the momentum that had built up before that period disappeared and was replaced by its opposite, i.e., an aversion to putting my thoughts to paper. You could say that this is a psychological law of inertia, i.e., you are likely to keep doing things the way you did them in the past few days and so if your routine gets upended for some external reason, its going to percolate into your life even when the intrusion disappears. I guess that explains why privacy is important for any kind of creative work because constant intrusions can upset your inertial state even when the offending person goes away (as opposed to self driven in...