Author Archives: stephenkmacksd

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About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

Books of Interest:Time for Outrage

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Age of Fracture: The Rediscovery of the Market

Here is Professor Rodgers stunning historical precis of the Mythology of the Market as idea, political,economic and legal practice, in our national life. The pernicious idea of the Market as metaphysical quantity,historical/political actor and household god is here treated to … Continue reading →

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I cannot read just one book.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5542.html I’m reading this in the morning and at bed time. I can’t read just one book. The confessions of a bibliophile, or just the result of my relentless intellectual ambition?

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Quotation : Age of Fracture, The Rediscovery of the Market page 47

‘Like Adam Smith’s pin factory, these were metaphors all. The timeless, placeless,self-equilibrating register of individual preferences that was now more and more often being called “the market” was an abstraction , as complex and intricately manipulatable a figure of speech … Continue reading →

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Current Reading: Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers published by Harvard University Press

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=30906   My current reading is Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers. I’m facing the challenge of self-doubt as a reader. I’m swimming against a rough tide of my own ignorance, although Professor Rodgers writing is fluent and it’s … Continue reading →

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Great picture of Nick Ashford

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In loving memory of Nick Ashford and much love to Valerie and their family.

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The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, A review By American Litterateur

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8358.html Are you weary of the literary critic who draws his inspiration, indeed, his reason d’être from the laboratory, as if literature were a specimen, to be dissected using the instruments of  a science that creates itself, as it proceeds … Continue reading →

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In reply to Shadi Hamid by Political Observer

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/the-major-roadblock-to-muslim-assimilation-in-europe/243769/ In reply to Mr. Shadi Hamid’s Atlantic article: Here is an excerpt from a December 17,2009 New York Review of Books article by Mr. Malise Ruthven entitled The Big Muslim Problem!: in it are reviewed Reflections on the Revolution … Continue reading →

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The Market: A jaundiced view by Political Cynic

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011816104945411574.html As we watch the historical unfolding of the Financial Crisis of 2008, to forget that the Financial Reform of 1999 is here the root cause of the crisis of 2008 is,of course, verboten in the language of the popular … Continue reading →

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