This duo in tharl to Star Wars and Tron, and its penchant for Futuristic Drag: Helmets. I watched their final video, that evoked something like Kubrick’s 2001 opening sequence, featuring a barren landscape. This video expressed in its way a kind of nihilism, as both of them blew themselves up. Fin, The End . How will they manage a possible Farewell Tour? Or form a Reunion Tour ? ‘Daft Punk’ is about the long forgotten Harold Rosenberg’s ‘The Tradition of the New’ , published in 1959. Action Painting and Techno are connected!?
Here Mr. Ganesh comments on a ‘political fact’
Headline: Joe Biden’s popular stimulus reveals a changed America
Sub-headline: In attitude, if not reality, the US has become a social democratic country
Its ‘as if’ The New Deal never happened: Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System in 1956 and a Tax Rate of 90%. Or that Kennedy and Roger Blough had a ‘disagreement’? Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been elided for American History. Nixon’s EPA of 1970 and his Health Care Plan of 1974. More examples of America’s Social Democratic Tradition, present themselves, as I just recall what comes to my memory!
The rise and triumph of Neo- Liberalism, Reagan’s catch-phrase of ‘Government is the problem’ & ‘I believe in State’s Rights’ , Bush The Elder of ‘a thousand points of light’ and Lee Atwater’s contribution to these ‘lights’, Willie Horton, The New Democrats, Bill Clinton of the willful destruction of Welfare & Aid to Dependent Children, and the economic catastrophe of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Bush The Younger who institutionalised Permanent War, built upon lies, and Obama and his adoption of Heritage Foundation Healthcare as his own, instead of Medicare for All. This is a partial history of the Neo-Liberal War against the Social Democratic Tradition, that now, in the face of The Pandemic, and its short and long term economic consequences, is reviving and remaking America, via one of its most valuable traditions.
One of the virtues of being Mr. Ganesh is that he needn’t worry about paying his rent, and the other imperatives, that bedevil tens of millions of Americans, in the face of The Pandemic: awaiting their $2,000 checks reduced to $1,400, Unemployment even after the ‘end’ of the pandemic, feeding themselves and their children, and awaiting vaccination, and the looming question of eviction or Foreclosure. Oh, I forgot School! All this while Mr. Ganesh address the hard problems!
Mr. Jones, you are the master of political equivocation, not to speak of political conformity. That the Blairite Coterie manufactured the ‘Anti-Semitism of Corbyn’ as the political wager to ensure what? That Labour would lose to Boris? It was a political dispute between New Labour, and what is/was the actual Labour Party of Democratic Socialism.
The henchman for this were Jonathan Freedland, political fiction writer, Anthony Julius: both at full Tribalist Cry! In the ‘Left’ Guardian. With help of perennial Jewish Victim Margaret Hodge: Apartheid Profiteer! What is of most interest is that Corbyn has formed the Project for Peace and Justice. The Institutionalization of Corbanism?
Jeremy Corbyn: Why I’m Launching a Project for Peace and Justice
Under the ‘leadership‘ of Starmer, Labour is hemorrhaging memberships at an alarming rate! Even Starmer’s call for a re-invigorated Patriotism, an echo of Posh Boy Cameron’s attack on Corbyn’s lack of ‘Patriotism’? has fallen flat!
Your wan attempt to steer the ‘middle course’ is hopeless! Yet you persist in an attempt to take the political temperature of the Jewish members of Labour, who are, if fact, the Blairite Neo-Liberals who long for a Restoration of this political toxin.
What can the reader make of this paragraph of Mr. Robson’s interview with Josh Cohen?
“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?” Cohen asked me recently, during a two-hour amble around Kensal Rise, near where he lives in north-west London. “She would think that it was both an absurd confection and so obvious that it’s not even worth remarking.” Cohen, who turned 50 last year, is compact and subtly scruffy. He has a boyish central parting, a salt-and-pepper beard, a serious mouth with mild guppy tendencies, and small dark eyes that project a tickled gleam from behind his black-rimmed glasses. His conversational style is at once forthright and soothingly sibilant as he expounds on the subjects to which he has devoted his life: post-romantic literature, 20th-century theory, the human mind. At times, he is reminiscent of his contemporary Louis Theroux, though he comes armed with a different sort of question, more searching, perhaps, or less confident about what it wants to provoke.’
On the question, rather conjecture, of what Jane Austen might think of Freud, is a rhetorical prop for Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative project. On the vexing question of ‘what’ Jane Austen may have thought? in her time and political circumstance, is offered by Marilyn Butler’s invaluable ‘Jane Austen And The War of Ideas’.
Psychoanalysis was declared a ‘Science’ by Freud, that has been the subject to attempts at revisionism and rehabilitation: the Neo-Freudians, Psychoanalysis as Metaphysic, Jewish Emancipation, Jewish Story Telling. The whole of the rehabilitative project, sacrifices the rich vocabulary of The Master: Id, Ego,Super-Ego, The Oedipus Complex, Libido, Cathexis, Transference, Latent Homosexality,etc.. Trying to master this vocabulary was part of my young adult life, reading The New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-analysis , The Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo. When fist reading ‘The Lectures’, in the early 1970’s, I thought it was full of holes, yet I just kept that realization to myself.
For an example of the modish character of psycho-analysis on literary criticism, in an oblique, even almost a latent expression:
What is of interest in Mr. Cohen’s rehabilitative exercise, is that the ‘Literary’ is simply a garnish to his particular form of Freudianism, that remains out of reach of the reader, except for its Public Relations guise: the very point of this interview/review.
One final point: Frederick Crews of ‘The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute’ was published in 1995 as a New York Review Book, and subsequent essays on Freud in the tabloid itself ,and his biography of Freud was published in 2017: Freud:The Making of an Illusion. I read the TLS and New Statesman regularly, yet it appears that one of America’s important literary/political tabloids has not reached British readers?
Headline:Joe Biden can save global migration from the deep freeze
Sub-headline: Through example and sheer numbers, an open US could bring an open world
…
‘This criminally undersells it. Whatever their content, previous reforms were of national or perhaps regional interest. This one, by dint of timing, could nudge the world into openness at a hinge moment in history.’
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What can be wrong with this paragraph? Has Mr. Ganesh started reading John F. Kennedy’s ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ , probably ghosted by one of his Camelot Coterie? Recall ‘No Irish Need Apply’ ? Ganesh should read Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ in which the Mestizo Hordes are about to engulf ‘American Protestant Virtue‘. It’s focused his hysterical xenophobia.
Should the reader look to how America treated the Braceros, that picked crops beginning in WWII till 1964, as factual evidence of bad faith and mendacity. America still owes these workers $500 Million , not updated to reflect today’s accumulation of interest. Most of these Guest Workers are dead, or near it, such is/are the quioxitic nature of America’s Legal/Moral obligations?
Trump campaigned on the ‘fact’ that Mexico would pay the cost of The Wall, the realization of Fortress America, on the Southern Border. No Wall for the Northern Border, because Canadians are not Mestizos. Slavery, the Concentration Camps for Japanese citizens, the Supreme Court decisions in Korematsu v. United States, and Hirabayashi v. United States- this an historical record that demonstrates xenophobia even against its own citizens, of different ethnicities/races.
What sense can the reader make of this New York Times report?
Headline:At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.
The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.
That American Wars of Empire has produced a Refugee Crisis of World Historical proportions, in the last two decades, demonstrates what ‘Values’? Mr. Ganesh political intervention featuring Joe Biden as Political Redeemer will not do!
Thank you for your comment. Xenophobia is about Tribalism in its many iterations, permutations. The Reader need only look to Trump and Trumpism, and the Wall that never got built! Or in the world of respectable academia Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash’ and his ‘Who Are We’ are just examples of the toxic American Exceptionalism in extremis. ‘Often it is very rational and you ignore it at your peril.’ The fear and hatred of ‘The Other’ is the murderous toxin, that has infected ‘Western Civilization’ since the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle and his defense of Slavery: The Politics Chapter 4 Slavery under the rubric of the Association of the Household. Cicero and his xenophobia: ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ by Ann Vasaly and ‘ Romans and Aliens‘ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon Chapters 2 through 4
Read Mr. Colvile’s C.V. as posted at the Center for Policy Studies web site:
Robert Colvile is Director of the CPS and Editor-in-Chief of CapX, as well as a columnist for The Sunday Times. In December 2019 he took a leave of absence to work as one of the authors of the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, which also contained a range of policies advocated by the CPS. He was previously head of comment at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and news director at BuzzFeed UK, as well as an editor, columnist and leader writer with the Telegraph. His critically acclaimed book ‘The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster’ was published by Bloomsbury in 2016, and he was for many years a Research Fellow at the CPS alongside his journalism work.
This, just prologue to my comment to his latest essay at The Times of February 21, 2021:
Headline: Keir Starmer has every chance of becoming PM. There’s just one obstacle — the Labour Party
Mr. Colvile in given to self-congratulatory Oxbridger-isms. The first two paragraphs awash in that very patois, garnished with a miniscule witticism-he knows his readership!
When I was just starting out in Fleet Street, a veteran journalist explained how to write political analysis. Spend most of your word count on the government (usually, in those days, the exhaustingly pointless rows between Blair and Brown). Throw in a few hundred words on the opposition. And if you were running short, add a couple of paragraphs starting: “And what of the Lib Dems?”
Today, the priority list looks rather different. The pandemic is utterly dominant, and the government’s response to it crucial. The wider Tory party is newsworthy because its internal arguments feed into ministers’ decisions on the virus. Labour maybe gets those two final paragraphs. And the Lib Dems are completely off the page. (Pop quiz: name the party’s new leader. If you got that, name a single thing he’s said since being elected. I’ll wait.)
The point, of course, is that his leadership was never going to cut through. It’s not just that Starmer can’t do all the things a politician wants to: hold rallies, meet voters, be in the same room as his MPs. It’s that voters don’t care about politics in the pandemic, don’t see the pandemic as a party political issue and don’t like people who try to make it one.
Even when the virus recedes, getting a hearing will be hard. Outside elections, voters rarely notice the opposition. That gets worse when the government has a big majority — because, as the Blair-Brown years showed, what happens inside the ruling party matters far more.
This perhaps explains why, in an attempt to draw attention to his speech, Starmer’s team wildly oversold it. We were promised a “policy blitz”, even a “Beveridge moment”. As it was, an address entitled A New Chapter for Britain was barely a footnote. There were a couple of solid policy ideas — one, pleasingly, filched from the think tank I run. Yet even without Starmer’s adenoidal monotone, the contents would have rapidly drifted from the memory.
And the point of arrival for the reader, after the above, is this paragraph:
But then the boring truth is that Starmer is actually doing fine, especially given the depths to which Labour had sunk. There is a concept in sport called “value over replacement player”, to measure the worth of, say, Lionel Messi against that of a perfectly average striker. Starmer is the replacement politician, the perfectly generic leader. He thrills no one, and repels no one.
…
In short, Starmer’s problem is not that he is lacking in charisma — after all, John Major won more votes in 1992 than any British politician before or since. It is the party he leads.
The reader can quite easily identify ‘the depths that Labour had sunk’ as the leadership of Corbyn. Under attack from with the ranks of New Labour, by political fiction writer Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. Aided by another Zionist Anthony Julius and a cast dominated by Labour Friends of Israel. Not to forget the Anti-Corbyn campaigns in The Financial Times, The Economist and The Times. An image from The Economist is illustrative of the nature of the campaign of defamation:
Just as the reader escapes from one rhetorical thicket, she enters into the one that tells the tale of one David Shor. The proqunquity of one Political Technocrat for another? Here is a link and a excerpt from an interview with Mr. Shor of the July 17, 2020 issue of New York Magazine by Eric Levitz. That offers some valuable insights as to who Mr. Shor is, and what he believes. That might just offer some clues as to his theory and practice of politics.
David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain undisclosed).
But before Shor’s improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20, served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really stood.
This idiosyncratic combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S. politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three peer-reviewed studies.
Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be reelected, among other things.
What is a Second Generation Thatcherite doing consorting with a fellow Technocrat, who is a ‘an adherent of Leninist vanguardism‘? How is it that such a canny Oxbridger made such a blunder, after demonstrating his political savvy, with almost clever rhetorical questions? Mr. Colvile offers the wan ‘insight’ that the problem with Labour is with the ‘Corbyn Loyalists’.
Tony Blair makes a strategic walk-on, and so does the mythical, or should the reader call it fictional, or just a lie? : ‘Starmer has indeed accepted that the public were right to reject Corbyn and his poisonous dalliance with antisemitism.’ Mr. Colvile has ignored the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has launched his ‘Project for Peace and Justice’ . Corbyn plans to be a force in British Politics for some time, in or out of office. He managed to inspire hope in a generation tired of failed Neo-Liberalism, and its coterie of political zombies. Those Corbyn loyalists now have somewhere to go. Here is a link to a Jacobin interview with Jeremy Corbyn:
In California Uber, and its political allies, spent 22 Million Dollars to ‘invent’ a new class of Workers dubbed ‘Independent Contractors’. This via a Proposition on the 2020 Ballot. How can Uber, in Great Britain, replicate this feat of nomenclature, and Tax Bracket ? The burning question in the Age of The Pandemic. Uber is a Taxi Service, not a ‘Ride-hailing app’ , as this newspaper follows the Neo-Liberal Party Line.
StephenKMackSD
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In reply to MarkwasmydisplaynameuntilFTmademechange:
There must be some way, the chisling Capitalist Class, can maintain their stranglehold on Workers, still caught in the wake of the 2008 collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle? Regards, StephenKMackSD
Andy opens his essay with this sentence: ‘If there’s one core assumption shared by the two tribes of our culture, it is that America will soon be a “majority-minority” nation.’ The relevant question is glaringly obvious, who are these ‘two tribes’? It’s a trope to frame his speculation on ‘race’. He should be the last person to express any speculation on race, given his publication of an excerpt of The Bell Curve, in the New Republic in 1994 : that caused not just a rebellion within the staff but created a controversy that still resonates in the present.
This is pure speculation, does Andy ‘think’ that his history of animus toward black people, has been forgotten. Andy’s expression of that animus can be found in his relentless attacks on Black Lives Matter in his regular columns in New York Magazine.
This particular essay should graner the reader’s attention, in that he recognizes what black people face, although not fully emancipated for Andy’s need to engage in hectoring rhetoric, awash in self-congratulatory moralizing. This essay from December 4, 2020 demonstrates his ‘evolution’ on the question?
Headline: Do All Black Lives Matter? Or Just Some?
Sub-headline: On the soaring toll of civilian violence against African-American
One is Richard Alba, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” examines and, I have to say, largely detonates, the majority-minority myth. He does this simply by pointing out how the Census Bureau actually defines “non-white”.
The final paragraph of Andy’s polemic, presents himself as the mean, between two political extremes. Barack Obama of ‘Simpson–Bowles‘, the ever-expanding American Empire, and the extravagant bribery program of the murderous Zionist State, as the exemplars of a ‘mainstream multiracial future‘. Can all this be connected?
Demographics will continue to evolve and shape-shift whatever our understanding of them. But our understanding matters — because it shapes our emotions, our identities, and the policy choices we make. It’s way past time, it seems to me, to leave behind the race fixation of far right and far left, and to move back to a more fluid, multiracial, multicultural American identity that is not the same as the uglier, whiter past, and not some kind of anti-white triumphalism either. I’m referring to the kind of mainstream multiracial future that our first truly biracial president, Barack Obama, once hoped for, and represented. Maybe a little more distance from Trump and a little more understanding of how race in this country is deeply complicated can help.
Andy has an intellectual/political propensity for attaching himself to a single book, like ‘The Bell Curve’ and ‘The Great Demographic Illusion’, and treating it ‘as if’ it were descriptive of an ineluctable historical singularity. The ‘two tribe’ frame is a phenomenon of self-serving political transients! Wedded to this is the fact that Andy is part of a toxic Christian Moralist Tradition, that never fails to remind ‘we lesser beings’, that we are in need of their Leadership. Its as if Kant’s ‘self-emancipation from tutelage’ had never been written, or even thought!
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Why is it so hard for Conservatives, and fellow travelers, to come to terms with Rush Limbaugh? Coward, bully, buffoon,bigot and King of AM Radio. He produced a multitude of equally noxious clones. Limbaugh became the unspoken Leader of the Republican Party, after the defeat of John McCain. Here is just a portion of Andy’s Limbaugh comment. Its last paragraph almost lapses into insight.
He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.
Political Observer
P.S. Don’t forget that Limbaugh sent his maid to buy his Oxycontin.
I don’t think that anyone can doubt the failure of the whole of America’s Political Class! Trump is just the symptom. Neo-Liberalism’s Social/Political/Economic Engineering destroyed what was left of The New Deal, and in its place Free Market Utopianism gained powerful friends and allies: Reagan and then The Clintons.Except that in 2008 it Crashed ,with a resounding thud! We have yet to regain prosperity, or anything resembling it.
Eli Zaretsky’s watery emulsion of Freud and Politics, leaves this reader wondering about the time I spent reading its meander. After watching four days of the highlights, of this American Political Melodrama, without witnesses or evidence- it did not restore my confidence in that Political Class. After The Mueller Report, and the first ‘Impeachment Trial’, and this episode, the best I can muster is cynicism.
M. 37 % can’t govern his own country, as ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ keeps appearing every Saturday, like clockwork. While unreported in this newspaper! Here is Macron as he addresses the burning question facing the ‘West’:
“It’s an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it’s politically unsustainable too because it’s paving the way for a war of influence over vaccines,” Macron said. “You can see the Chinese strategy, and the Russian strategy too.”
A Neo-Liberal opines on ‘inequality’-has Macron been reading his Piketty? But quickly he returns to the ‘Free Market’ mainstream with this:
The concept of intellectual property was essential for innovation, but if vaccine manufacturers were not co-operative “inevitably the political question of intellectual property will arise in all our countries,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the right debate, it’s not helpful, but it will arise — this discussion over excess profits based on scarcity of the vaccine.”
Macron offers this caveat:
“It won’t change our vaccination campaigns, but each country should set aside a small number of the doses it has to transfer tens of millions of them, but very fast, so that people on the ground see it happening.”
Macron opines that ‘it’s not a power game’. Yet he announces it as just that, under the highfalutin rubric of ‘multilateralism’.
He said the plan would be a test of the reality of multilateralism. “It’s not about vaccine diplomacy, it’s not a power game — it’s a matter of public health,” Macron said, adding that he welcomed the global provision of Russian and Chinese vaccines provided they were certified by scientists for use against the appropriate variants of the virus.
Macron rambles on, yet, as usual, he fails to makes his case of actual concern for ‘Europe’s neighbors’. The gilet noir and banlieues, the continuing demonstrations against the Security Law and the gilet jeunes. The Financial Times reader is not likely to be ‘on’ Twitter where all this ‘kind of news’ is posted regularly. A surprise? All of these manifestations ,of resistance to Macron’s Neo-Liberal Agenda, unreported in this newspaper. Sometimes ‘Newspapers’ create Political Reality: The New York Times and the ‘War in Iraq’, confected by Judy Miller and fellow travelers.With the help of political naif Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 UN speech!
Headline: China targets rare earth export curbs to hobble US defence industry
Sub-headline: Beijing asks industry executives if proposed restrictions will harm western contractors
China is exploring limiting the export of rare earth minerals that are crucial for the manufacture of American F-35 fighter jets and other sophisticated weaponry, according to people involved in a government consultation.
Su Yu and Demetri Sevastopulo confect a ‘news story’ out of ‘leaks’ ?or should it more properly labeled ‘gossip’? ‘
After the first paragraph its ‘as if ‘ these ‘reporters’ had direct access to information, yet the reader is confronted with more anonymous sources, and surprisingly some actual sources:
‘Industry executives said…’
‘said a Chinese government adviser who asked not to be identified….’
Industry executives added
A Congressional Research Service report said
In a November report, Zhang Rui, an analyst at Antaike,
Some executives and officials are, however,
They argue that
Ellen Lord, the top defence official for acquisitions until last year, told Congress in October
said an executive, who asked not to be identified, at Guangdong Rare Earth Group, one of the nation’s largest rare earth groups.
“China’s economic planners have failed to predict the surge in rare earth consumption,” said an executive at Gold Dragon Rare Earth Co in south-eastern Fujian Province.
Industry executives, however, said China’s strength
This is not Journalism, but New Cold War propaganda! The reader need only look to Janan Ganesh’s essay of Tuesday February 16, 2021:
Headline: America’s best hope of hanging together is China
Sub-headline: Without an external foe to rail against, the nation turns on itself
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