StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: Alexei Navalny is a real threat to Vladimir Putin

Sub-headline: The fragility of the Russian regime is becoming clear

The publisher of this report may not be to your liking. Please, no dull-witted Anti-Russian catchphrases … But how can ‘you’ resist the bait?

‘Navalny is a convicted felon, found guilty of fraud and embezzlement by a Russian court in 2014. But his jail sentence had been suspended with the condition that he report regularly to Russia’s prison authorities. A normal condition.

For nearly five months, however, he had sojourned out of the country as a de facto. That’s a brazen breach of his parole conditions. And the Russian prison service was right in issuing him a warning at the end of last month that violation of his suspended jail term risked the sentence being converted into detention behind bars.

It’s a sovereign matter of Russian laws that on returning to Russia at the weekend Navalny was arrested and is now in custody awaiting court proceedings in coming weeks on whether to revoke his suspended sentence. The hue and cry from Western politicians and human rights groups over his arrest Sunday at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport is predictable.

High level officials from the United States, Britain, Germany and France, among others, have all made strident statements demanding Navalny’s release.
…

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202101191081814880-navalny-touted-assange-tortured/

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/570ebe7d-7f13-44db-a9fb-f17b24253d3d

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 In reply to Chris Fr

Chris ,

Thank you for your comment. Does the argument offered by RT have any validity : that Assange is a ‘dissident’ to use one of those ‘good old cold war’ terms?

‘Assange is languishing in a British torture-dungeon, for the “crime” of revealing to the world the truth about illegal wars and war crimes committed by the United States and Britain.

In all of the years of Assange’s barbaric detention, there has never been a fraction of the official Western public outcry that has been expressed for Navalny.

That’s because Navalny, unlike Assange, is a political asset for a Western agenda to undermine Russia.

Or is it a propaganda ploy to rationalize the arrest of Navalny?  What of his legal status as ‘convicted felon’, who broke the conditions of his parole?  Or is it like those Soviet sentences to Mental Institutions? Is this just the purest hyperbole? 
Should the reader look to the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, in which Victoria Nuland was one of the many ringleaders, of American/Eu/NATO Coup? These American controlled who was granted ‘leadership status’: who/what was legitimate leadership, in sum, determined who had political legitimacy. All this under the rubric of ‘might makes right’?
Regards,
StephenKMackSD

Headline: Twitter Bottom Feeder rattles Oxbridger?

StephenKMackSD

There can be no doubt who and what Robert Colvile represents, and the Think Tank that he heads, it presents themselves as unapologetic Thatcherites: 

The Centre for Policy Studies is Britain’s leading centre-right think tank. Its mission is to develop a new generation of conservative thinking, built around promoting enterprise, ownership and prosperity. 

The CPS does this both by producing its own policy papers – in particular on its core areas of tax and cost of living, business and enterprise, housing, and welfare. It also works with prominent policy thinkers to bring their ideas to a wider audience, including many Conservative MPs, as well as hosting events, debates and conferences. 

The CPS was founded in 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret  Thatcher, and was responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism. The CPS, Thatcher said, “was where our conservative revolution began”. And it was by implementing its policies “that we gradually restored the confidence and reputation of our country”.  

About

The reader need be in no doubt as to Mr. Colvile’s political ideology. ‘The Left’ in his febrile political imagination, is not the Left-Wing Social Democrats represented by Jeremy Corbyn, but instead is the political nihilism of the Bolsheviks. Or are these two representation, of ‘The Left’, in Mr.  Colvile’s fevered imagination somehow equal? Mrs. Thatcher, steeped in ideological fixation, like J. Edgar Hoover saw ‘Reds’ everywhere, except in the Mt. Pelerin Society.

For what might be a biography, of the Colville greed ridden mentality, the reader need only look to ‘Liberalism at Large:The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin

Liberalism at Large

The above is just the preamble to Colvile’s essay that points to the Tories as the abbetors of ‘The Left’ :

Headline: While the left plays a smart game to widen the welfare state, the Tories keep leaving the field

In sum, the Tories lack the will, determination or the balls to challenge that ‘Left’! Mr. Colvile confects a potted history of this crime against the old stand-by Austerity, the fools-gold of the Neo-Liberal Swindle.

Does Colvile express actual ‘concern’ for the welfare of others who are in need?

As my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank show in a briefing note today, the flat £20 increase has plenty of flaws. For example, it did more proportionately for those claimants who needed it least — rather than providing more help for those with children or those most affected by the pandemic. The same amount would go a long way towards fixing social care, the most obviously broken part of the welfare system.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/while-the-left-plays-a-smart-game-to-widen-the-welfare-state-the-tories-keep-leaving-the-field-23dzt0n3r

He is more interested in the politics of the situation, rather that the actuality, or possibility of human suffering. What the reader gets is more bloodless Oxbridger Policy Chatter, from someone who never experienced want! A Technocracy steeped in the second hand Political Theology of Mises/Hayek/Friedman, can best be expressed in the notion of ‘I can look with equanimity on the suffering of others’ . The rest is mere self-apologetic in the guise of an utterly unconvincing attempt at ‘concern’.

These last two paragraphs demonstrate that ‘The Left’ is going to be permanently reshaping of the State, it already is ,to the consternation of Mr. Colvile. This reader is surprised at the complete absence of Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer from this essay. The political maneuvering described takes place outside the Leadership ? Stamer is New Labour, so Neo-Liberal political bromides are not beyond his ken! As the Labour Party hemorrhages membership, a ploy to address that crisis?

The left is skilfully using the pandemic to campaign for a permanent reshaping of the state, and has become expert at assembling coalitions of the outraged to that end. The government either seems not to see these problems coming, or cannot decide between fight and flight — and so tries the first before falling back on the second. In the process, it cedes not just the argument but the moral high ground. And it contributes to the ratchet effect by which it is always easier to say yes than no to extra spending. The constituency for fiscal discipline on the Tory benches is already at its smallest for decades.

With every jab, the end of the pandemic’s acute phase comes closer. The key thing, at that point, will be to ensure a rapid and robust economic recovery.

Note Mr. Colvile’s use of catch phrases:

assembling coalitions of the outraged

cannot decide between fight and flight

it cedes not just the argument but the moral high ground.

the ratchet effect

fiscal discipline

With every jab

a rapid and robust economic recovery

The final sentence follows suit :

The more the state swells, and the more the debt grows, the harder that will be to sustain.

Mr. Colvile has not read Keynes, nor his epigones, the time for Fiscal Discipline is when an Economy is well into its recovery phase.

Political Writer

When I first started reading Andy Divine’s latest essay, a thought popped into my mind: What would the long forgotten Freudian coterie-how could/would they have critiqued The Proud Boys? As a telling object lesson of ” sexual sublimation’ wedded to reactionary politics. The old saw of ‘young,dumb and full of cum’ doesn’t apply to all these men, but its a useful place to start?

Andy in one his favorite roles as iconoclast critiques Biden’s Inaugural Speech:

Chris Wallace of Fox News called Joe Biden’s Inaugural address the best he had ever heard. John Heilemann almost likened it to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It wasn’t, of course. But in celebrating this country’s liberation from a uniquely delusional, malevolent sociopath in the White House, and his violent mobs, they may be forgiven for a little hyperbole. And Joe Biden’s speech, the most important he has given in his life, was definitely a good speech. It did what it had to do. It wasn’t “some weird shit” as George W. Bush is reported to have said about Trump’s. But equally, it wasn’t fresh or eye-opening; it had none of Obama’s rhetorical genius; or Reagan’s. There is not a line in it that we will be able to remember for very long. 

As if Obama’s and Reagan’s ‘rhetorical genius’ breaks new ground! Those with patience and forbearance read this paragraph:

But Biden has also shown this week that his other ambitions are much more radical. On immigration, Biden is way to Obama’s left, proposing a mass amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants, a complete moratorium on deportations, and immediate revocation of the bogus emergency order that allowed Trump to bypass Congress and spend money building his wall. Fine, I guess. But without very significant addition of border controls as a deterrent, this sends a signal to tens of millions in Central to South America to get here as soon as possible. Biden could find, very quickly, that the “unity” he preaches will not survive such an effectively open-borders policy, or another huge crisis at the border. He is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

The notion that Biden is ‘Left’ of Obama, or almost any other New Democrat is a ludicrous assertion. For Andy to lecture anyone on ‘Immigration’! And those ‘tens of millions in Central to South America‘, reads like Samuel P. Huntington’s paranoid ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ and that Mestizo Hoard about to dilute the purity of Anglo- Protestant Culture.  

Biden has also signaled (and by executive order, has already launched) a very sharp departure from liberalism in his approach to civil rights.

…

But Biden’s speech and executive orders come from a very different place. They explicitly replace the idea of equality in favor of what anti-liberal critical theorists call “equity.” They junk equality of opportunity in favor of equality of outcomes. Most people won’t notice that this new concept has been introduced — equity, equality, it all sounds the same — but they’ll soon find out the difference.

 

The subject then shifts from Immigration to ‘Critical Theory’ and its Devils: Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. Andy is by nature an Inquisitor and these ‘Marxists’ are the Apostates of choice, of long standing. Except they remain in the background, in his long description of their crimes. In this iteration James Lindsay ‘explaines’ to the reader what ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ mean to the un-named, but politically toxic bearers of ‘Critical Theory’.

In critical theory, as James Lindsay explains, “‘equality’ means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, while ‘equity’ means adjusting shares in order to make citizen A and B equal.” Here’s how Biden defines “equity”: “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” 

This reader weary of not just inept, but history-less propaganda, reaches Andy’s final paragraph, steeped in the notion and practice of ‘gradualism’ or at the least what appears to be it. ‘Identity Politics’ is the catch phrase that ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Neo-Liberals’ attach to a politics not immersed in the Colonial Mentality.

I want Biden to succeed. I want Republicans to moderate. I want to lower the temperature. I want to emphasize those policies that really do bring us closer together, even though many may still freely dissent. Biden says he wants to as well. But none of that can or will happen if the president fuels the culture war this aggressively, this crudely, and this soon. You don’t get to unite the country by dividing it along these deep and inflammatory issues of identity. And you don’t achieve equality of opportunity by enforcing its antithesis.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMxNjQ4OTIxLCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MTEzNjA0ODAsImV4cCI6MTYxMTM2NDA4MCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.yo3q_k0iEYPrT3APVcoXVm5Eqs_ptktRx3wxbCQASz8

Political Reporter

P.S. See Amartya Sen’s book ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny’ that presents ‘Identity’ as a shifting set of imperatives within the person.

Watching Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address, a collection of cliches, and labored metaphors- perhaps he is sincere, or as sincere as an old pol can be. His appointments of Blinken, Nuland & R2P zealot Power offer, not hope, but demonstrates the utter persistence of a toxic American Exceptionalism. And a Technocracy, in thrall to an etiolated mythology, of the indispensability of American Leadership, as the placeholder for a ruthless, violent hegemony.

American Writer

The reader of Mr. Ganesh beguiling collection of aphorisms, that frame his History Made to Measure, has to admire its style, yet its measure of not the ‘world’s authoritarians’, but that of China, the featured player in this paragraph. (There is so much to choose from, I’ll be selective.)

It is not as if the world’s authoritarians need the reputational boost. New data confirm that China’s economy did more than merely avoid recession last year. Its Covid-19 vaccines have takers from Indonesia to Hungary via the Gulf, neatly inverting the Sino-Soviet split of the 1970s, Beijing has struck an investment deal with the EU. Those sounds you hear are the first notes of transatlantic discord over the emergent superpower.

Next to be featured in the Ganesh Melodrama:

Such is the world that confronts Joe Biden as he takes office on Wednesday. Not since 1945, when Harry Truman felt the weight of the “moon, the stars and all the planets”, has more rested on a new US president.

What really weighed upon Truman? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And Joe Biden is the almost last gasp of the New Democrats, Harris is the Second Generation, waiting in the wings.

Mr. Ganesh then presents two hypotheticals :

If he governs well, mending the economy, dispensing vaccines, and calming the home front, he can stem the trickling away of US (and by extension western) credibility since the millennium. What started with the US’s “forever wars” and worsened with the 2008 financial crash reached a negative apotheosis with the still-raging pandemic. The west needs a success story for its own morale as much as its outward reputation.

If, on the other hand, Mr Biden fails, the sense of Chinese momentum will start to feel less like form and more like destiny. Countries with systems somewhere between multi-party democracy and absolutism might come to see the second as this century’s strong horse. Within the US, the soil will be fertilised for a populist comeback — an abler Donald Trump — in the 2024 election, with all that implies for domestic peace and intra-western comity. There is a circularity to decline.

Is this is the ‘where’ and the ‘what’ that Mr. Ganesh was aiming for?

The US had moral credit to spare, and such supremacy that it was neither easy nor worthwhile to identify the second mightiest country.

The closing paragraph, in all its historical/political obtuseness, of this Biden Apologetic, and its aim of ‘the shoring up of liberalism’s good name‘, as the most accurate descriptor of the Biden Project- the rhetorical guise of the aphorism, reminds the reader of the poverty of style over substance.

As a rule of thumb, a democracy is in good health to the extent that its politics do not matter. Ideally, the spread of outcomes from a new president should be a slightly better healthcare system or a slightly worse one. Mr Biden’s spread is nothing less than the shoring up of liberalism’s good name, or the extension of its malaise, until it hardens into fate. There is an air of the last chance about this presidency.

https://www.ft.com/content/8b807559-d69c-44c1-8219-89c927d33a94

Political Thinker

The Financial Times on the jailing of Alexei Navalny:

Headline: Russia jails opposition activist Alexei Navalny for 30 days

Sub-headline: Two EU countries call for bloc to impose sanctions if Putin critic is not released

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 30 days in jail a day after returning to the country, following threats from EU member states to impose new sanctions against Moscow if he was not released.

Mr Navalny was detained by police at Moscow’s main airport on Sunday evening after returning from Germany where he had recovered from an assassination attempt involving use of a nerve agent from the novichok group.

The attempt on his life in August last year was blamed on the Kremlin and sparked widespread condemnation from western governments. Moscow denied any involvement and has suggested Mr Navalny could have been poisoned outside Russia.

The anti-corruption campaigner, who has emerged as president Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, was found guilty of breaching the terms of a suspended sentence on Monday by a hastily assembled makeshift court set up in the police station where he was held overnight, according to his lawyer.

… https://www.ft.com/content/9c42f190-5ec2-4ad7-8bc6-f9e449200a9f

The designation of ‘a nerve agent from the novichok group.’ helps avoid the vexing issues that Novichok, itself, is immediately toxic. The Heroes and Villains, here are Duchamp’s Ready Mades, in rhetorical guise. The disappeared Skipals , now long forgotten, here is a reminder:

The latest example of alleged Russian perfidy – the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia – is yet another case of faith-based attribution. In accusing Russia of some heinous crime – in this instance, the murder of a former double agent working for MI6 – one needn’t present any real evidence: it’s only necessary to point the finger at the Kremlin. And of course we haven’t had any real evidence proffered by the British government: Prime Minister Theresa May simply declared that Russia is the culprit and gave a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how “its nerve weapon” – as NBC reported it – was used to attacked Skripal on British soil. She has since announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats. The absurdity of this was inadvertently underscored by the comments of Vil Mirzayanov, the Russian-born chemist who first revealed the existence of “Novichok,” the nerve agent developed by the Russians. Mirzayanov came to the United States in 1995: in 2007, he published a book, State Secrets, which tells his story as a chemist working in Russia’s secret chemical weapons facilities. Now 83, he gives the following explanation for the attack on Skripal:

… https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/03/14/russian-to-judgment-who-poisoned-sergei-skripal/

The reader wonders as to who wrote the final version of this ‘news story’: Henry Foy in Moscow, Michael Peel in Brussels, Guy Chazan in Berlin, James Shotter in Warsaw?

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Ben Hall on the arrest of Alexei Navalny in Moscow, under the rubric of ‘Opinion’.

Headline: Alexei Navalny is Russian for ‘domestic enemy number one’

Sub-headline: Arrest of opposition activist has only elevated his status as a symbol of repression

In 1976, a year after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being “spokesman for the conscience of mankind”, Andrei Sakharov was classified by the KGB as “domestic enemy number one”.

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition activist arrested on his return to Moscow on Sunday, may not possess the same righteousness as Sakharov, the most famous of Soviet dissidents. But there is no doubting his courage. Or that today’s Kremlin regards him as its greatest domestic enemy. As with the nuclear scientist half a century ago, Mr Navalny’s treatment by the Russian government has only elevated his status as a symbol of repression.

The cruel suppression of Sakharov came to symbolise the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet system and helped galvanise western, especially European, opinion against it. It would be naive to think Mr Navalny’s treatment will have a similar effect. The cold war is long over and most western capitals have other interests beyond countering Russian aggression.

But just as the KGB fretted about Sakharov’s impact, so Russian president Vladimir Putin fears that Mr Navalny can mobilise opinion against his increasingly autocratic regime. Russia is due to hold parliamentary elections in September and Mr Navalny and his fellow activists have been organising surprisingly successful campaigns in local elections. They are rallying support for any candidate able to beat incumbents from Mr Putin’s ruling party, which has suffered a fall in popularity ratings to record lows in recent months.

…

The Kremlin’s high-visibility persecution risks turning Mr Navalny into a rallying point for domestic opposition. He must be effective if Mr Putin fears him so much. The Russian leader does not seem to care that dispensing with due process makes Mr Navalny a symbol of the abuses of an authoritarian regime. But the west must.

https://www.ft.com/content/015bfcb2-1a75-4325-b1c3-76a26ccb6b49

Ben Hall focuses his History Made To Measure on Sakharov, yet forgetting Alexander Litvinenko, and the long-ago assassination of Soviet Dissident Georgi Markov, and the Skripals are again absent. The Heroes and Villains of The New Cold War narrative are the constants of the Financial Times’ writers.

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Here is Gideon Rachman making his contribution to the ‘Yellow Peril’ variant of The New Cold War, couched is a self-serving political nostalgia, in sum, more of the same History Made to Measure, the sine qua non of political fiction writers.

He watches the Kennedy 1961 Inaugural Address, focused on the American Political Present, in the waning days of Trump and Trumpism. And the looming threat of China, as America’s self-obsessions gives opportunity to its enemy. At least as Rachman presents them. Does this even make any kind of political sense? The reader need only think of the careers of James Clapper and John Brennan, and their long service to the American National Security State. The operatives of this Security Sate never sleep! Mr. Rachman relies on a serviceable rhetorical naivete, as to the how and why of American Intelligence Operations. Mr. Rachman insults his readers, with such a pastiche of dull-witted naivete, passed off as informed comment.

Headline: America’s disarray is China’s opportunity

Sub-headline: China’s economy is growing strongly while the US is mired in a political crisis

On January 20 1961, John F Kennedy, America’s youngest ever elected president, gave his inaugural address from the steps of the Capitol. Exactly 60 years later Joe Biden, America’s oldest ever president, will be sworn in at the same place — just days after it was stormed by a riotous mob.

Kennedy used the magisterial backdrop of Congress to proclaim that the “torch has passed to a new generation”. Mr Biden is the representative of an older generation — one that now fears the torch of liberty is in danger of being extinguished, even in the US itself.

Watching Kennedy’s address again, it is striking how much of it was addressed not to the American people, but to the leaders of the Soviet Union. JFK was speaking at the height of the cold war. Much of the American elite now believes that the US is on the brink of a second cold war — this time with China. But, unlike Kennedy, Mr Biden cannot promise to “pay any price, bear any burden” to ensure the “survival and success of liberty” around the world.

…

Mr. Rachman’s political/historic despair, flirting with nihilism, doesn’t quite match the Manchurian Candidate variant of 1962?

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America’s disarray is China’s opportunity. As part of a planned pushback against China, Mr Biden had planned to call a summit of the world’s democracies. But, after an attempted coup d’état by a sitting president, America may lack the credibility to act as convener of the free world. Mr Biden’s democracy summit is likely to be quietly shelved in favour of a D10 meeting of 10 democracies, brought together by the UK.

A large part of America’s emerging struggle with China will be a battle for economic influence around the world. When 2019 ended, 128 of 190 countries in the world already traded more with China than with the US. China’s centrality to the global trading system will increase this year — with the World Bank projecting the Chinese economy to grow at around 8 per cent compared to 3.5 per cent for the US.

The Americans are also in a struggle with China to shape the technical standards and regulations that govern the world economy. The US needs new tools that go beyond the coercive power of sanctions.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/5e63ea74-633f-4073-b9c2-90236b336a5b

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As presented by the Financial Times’ writers ‘we’ face the implacable enemies: Putin and China! Mr. Rachman expresses a deep pessimism:

…
America’s disarray is China’s opportunity. As part of a planned pushback against China, Mr Biden had planned to call a summit of the world’s democracies. But, after an attempted coup d’état by a sitting president, America may lack the credibility to act as convener of the free world. Mr Biden’s democracy summit is likely to be quietly shelved in favour of a D10 meeting of 10 democracies, brought together by the UK.

…

American Skeptic

Niall Ferguson in his search for historical analogies to the events of January 6, 2021, and the political phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism leads to – his rambling essay is chock-a-block with these examples: Plague and political irrationalism are twin political phenomenon

“History of the Peloponnesian War,” by Thucydides and the plague of 430 and 426 & the Oligarchy in 411

The Black Death in 1340 , Cross-Bearers, Flagellant Brethren or Brethren of the Cross,

The Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, (with walk-on by Winston Churchill and Herbert Hoover) explicitly referred to the “plague of Bolshevism.”

The plague metaphor still remains but ‘evolves’ into the biological .

Adolf Hitler — used similar biological metaphors (“racial tuberculosis”) 

Hitler had “saved all Europe from the red plague of Bolshevism,” in the words of the German-American poet George Sylvester Viereck.

This search for analogies is interrupted by three paragraphs of his own observations on the events of January 6, 2021. To speak bluntly, nothing like what might be considered insightful. Ferguson returns to the subject of historical analogies:

 Cromwell’s dissolution of England’s Long Parliament in 1653?

The dissolution of the French National Assembly by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851? 

How about Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922?

Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923

My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith draws a parallel with Japan in the 1930s,

Something similar goes for the Tejerazo, the storming of the Spanish parliament by 200 Civil Guard officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero in 1981.

Mr. Ferguson appears to have found his rhetorical footing?

There is another reason none of these analogies works: They all omit the peculiar conditions created by a pandemic. It is not coincidental that the nadir of modern American politics was plumbed last week just as the third wave of Covid-19 seemed to near its crest. 

A quotation that hints that Ferguson has given up his search for that ‘perfect historical analogy’? Or a rhetorical feint?

Pandemics, remember, are associated with religious and political extremism. The fear of illness, mutual suspicion, quack theories, hypochondria, hyper-skepticism and general mental dislocation caused by social distancing, lockdowns and unemployment — taken together, these things tend to generate outlandish behavior.

Ferguson is a pedagogue, by nature, so he instructs his readers, constitutive of ‘students’ , who must be shaped, molded by his superior grasp of History. That ‘History’ of the Peloponnesian War, The Black Death, the Spanish Influenza are the most instructive, and in terms of propaganda, more serviceable to his History Made To Measure. Yet there are 979 words left of his polemic, in which he explores, the ‘Left-Wing Mob’s‘ destructive record. While ignoring, that the modes of The American National Security State, in its Wars of Empire, has infected American Police with its toxic Colonial Mentality. That Ferguson is a Neo-Conservative, or at the least a fellow traveler, this stance is not a surprise.

To the historian, it was not altogether surprising back in the summer to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mostly white protesters take to the streets in processions of expiation for the sin of racism. The left-wing violence that turned parts of Portland, Seattle and Kenosha, Wisconsin, into no-go zones was more destructive than the right-wing invasion of the Capitol, even if the latter’s political significance was greater. 

Look, if you want evidence of pandemic madness, at the people who ran amok among the legislature last week. The idea that this was a false-flag operation by far-left Antifa in disguise is obviously absurd. Although the mob seems to have included a few retired military members or off-duty police who had the training and the tools for a serious terrorist attack, this was mostly the lunatic fringe of the American far right in an unholy alliance with the QAnon conspiracy cult. 

Mr. Ferguson can’t let go his pedagogic self, and the thickets that constitute the remainder of his polemic, still awash in those ubiquitous analogies. He tries the patience of this reader, he misses the imperative of propaganda, the exercise of succinctness is its sine qua non. The last two paragraphs of his essay are instructive about Ferguson’s one imperative, the care and maintenance, of a carefully cultivated bourgeoise political respectability.

This, at least, is my earnest hope: That, having once been infected by the virus of antidemocratic politics, Americans have now acquired some resistance to it. The optimistic view of the pandemic is that natural infection plus mass vaccination will get the U.S. to herd immunity by around May. The optimistic view of politics is that we can achieve herd immunity against Trumpism in a roughly similar timeframe. 

Shorn of power, assailed by litigation, his finances tottering and his access to social media abruptly curtailed, Trump may fade as quickly as a virus with a reproduction number below 1 — to become no more than a seasonal malady, threatening only to those with the intellectual equivalent of comorbidities. The lesson of history is that pandemics eventually end — and so do political manias of the sort that briefly seized the Capitol last week. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-10/niall-ferguson-america-will-achieve-herd-immunity-to-trumpism?sref=uN6cur8D

Publius

Why it unsurprising to read a Capitalist warning, in this newspaper, about the danger of the Right and Left Extremes, as the threats to the business of profit taking! The fact of the Shoah frames this polemic, it is meant to evoke fear and revulsion, that features, at the least, one faction of those extreme political actors. The reader should consult Victor Klemperer’s ‘I Will Bear Witness‘ volumes I & II , he remained in the Eastern Sector of Germany, after the War.

In American the ‘Political Center’ is now defined as the Alliance of New Democrats, in sum Neo-Liberals, Neo-Conservative, and the now disappeared Lincoln Project. That toxic alliance evolved and produced the 2008 Depression, via the Free Market delusion: the wholesale destruction of the Welfare State and the rise of Robber Capital – all this is ignored in Mr. Moretz’s Morality Play. The watershed of 2008 was Occupy Wall Street, decimated by Oligarch Michael Bloomberg and President Obama, yet Piketty appeared as the vindication of that band of dissenters, in the heart of Wall Street Temples!

What did Obama offer to that 2008 Depression? ‘Let’s put it behind us’ and Simpson/Bowles, the apotheosis of an utterly failed Austerity. Is this what Mr. Moritz might opine as the sine qua non of his garlanded ‘Centrism’ ?

So, now, it’s up to all of us in the world of business to play our part and make sure the extremism of both left and right in America is seen for what it is: a menace to our future together. We are all culpable.

Some of us were ineffective with our warnings. Some provided support to forces of darkness. But all of us are guilty of not listening closely enough to the arguments of our opponents.

Mr. Moritz then self-reports:

Almost five years ago, I tried, in vain, to highlight for the business community Mr Trump’s past as a conman, bully, racist, failed entrepreneur and authoritarian. I also wrote about the differences between him and the people who start Silicon Valley companies, noting: “They are not nationalists who stir up dark memories of purges, pogroms, the 1930s, Latin-American strongmen or central African dictators.”

Those ‘Silicone Valley Companies’ : Google, Twitter, Facebook now determine who can use, and speak on their apps, as if the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are/were null and void. This does not register with Mr. Moritz. His penultimate paragraph is an instruction as to when ‘self-interest’ must yield to a moral imperative, which is hard to argue against. Except to the diehard followers of Mises, Hayek and Friedman, in which ‘The Market’ is the sine qua non of Human Knowledge.

The past four years have demonstrated there are times when it is best to set self-interest aside. Given the choice between appealing polices and a dark character, and objectionable policies and a respectable character, it is always safer to pick the latter. 

https://www.ft.com/content/143c7577-5e6a-4804-92ce-4b58f25a59cb

Political Reporter

Charters have increased the number of ‘extra days’ of instruction. That is all. The ‘values’ of ‘The Market’ has no place in Education ! This Charter School movement, has been corrupt from the beginning. 3 Billion lost to fraud. Charters are about destroying very powerful Teachers Unions. Charters are the product of the mendacious Neo-Liberals, and Mr. Chait is their advocate/apologist!

‘The increasing focus on charters’ financial effects inevitably leads to the question of their academic effects. But, much the same as charter schools throughout the country, California’s sector has yielded mixed results.

“The charter sector in California looks like a microcosm of the charter sector nationally,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard. “That’s not too surprising, since California charter schools make up a non-trivial segment of the national charter data.”

Indeed, a comprehensive 2014 study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attended California charters performed a bit better in reading, and a bit worse in math, than their peers attending traditional public schools. That nuanced picture dovetails with charter performance nationally, which is roughly as good, on average, as the public schools run by local school districts.

But tucked beneath the topline results, the data show that charters perform better for the state’s least advantaged citizens. Specifically, CREDO found that poor black students at charters gained an average of 36 extra days of learning in literacy, and 43 extra days of learning in math, than those in traditional public schools; poor Latino students gained 22 extra days of literacy and 29 extra days of math. In general, charter schools in urban areas, where many of those students are clustered, were measured as much stronger than those in suburban and rural areas.’
…
http://laschoolreport.com/research-shows-that-charter-schools-do-best-for-californias-low-income-and-minority-students-now-state-officials-are-considering-slowing-their-expansion/

StephenKMackSD