In his 810 word essay Mr. Luce identifies “critical race theory” that acts as the in-order-too, of diminishing the importance of this confrontation, with a pervasive and institutionalized practice, by placing it in lower case letters. Race has shaped a belief system that defines the American Experiment, no matter how vehemently the denial is politically articulated. The pose Mr. Luce adopts is that of ‘Reporter’ on the American Political Landscape, but the practice of ‘diminishment’ renders that stance null !
I have read the first three chapters of Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s ‘Critical Race Theory An Introduction, Third Edition’, and can see why this expressions has raised the ire ‘Conservatives’. The Neo-Liberals will follow, if they haven’t already joined in the usual political hysteria. Critical Race Theory places the onus on each political actor, to examine their presuppositions, assumptions, prejudices about the ‘Other’! Yet in The America of the myth of ‘The Melting Pot’ that ‘Other’ is ubiquitous!
At its core Critical Race Theory is based on an critical examination of the self, and its relation to the polity, the civic space all of us occupy: even those who aspire to be citizens of America, known as ‘illegal immigrants’ , who are entitled to the full protection of law! This last sentence articulates an uncomfortable truth to the Conservative and Neo-Liberals, who celebrates ‘Traditional Values’ steeped in the care and maintenance of white male power as a political/moral sine qua non!
What might the reader think of the continuing failure of the de Kirchners, Macri and now the Fernández/de Kirchner alliance, to address a seemingly perpetual economic crisis? A description of the problem, and a diagnosis is offered by Lucinda Elliott and Michael Stott.
Inflation was 52.5 per cent in the year to September, one of the highest rates in the world, and economists fear it could go higher still next year. The government insists its policies will bring prices under control.
“We consider that inflation is being attacked with consistent macroeconomic policies which allow Argentina’s net exports to grow in a sustained way and that monetary issuance can be reduced to a speed which is compatible with the state playing a countercyclical role to underpin the recovery,” economy minister Martín Guzmán told the Financial Times in an interview.
“We believe that prices and incomes policies are a necessary element in an economy which is resolving its problems of macroeconomic co-ordination.”
But economists say that such recipes have been tried and failed numerous times before.
Which ‘economists’ are the writers paraphrasing in this paragraph?
“Needless to say, in our view, this policy is unlikely to curb inflation,” Citibank said of the price freeze. “We believe that the announcement of price controls by the authorities is evidence they have run out of tools to fight inflation.”
To drive the point home Lucinda Elliott and Michael Stottoffer this ‘proof’ :‘More than 20 leading figures’ have ‘voted with their feet’. Embellished by this:
Amid the economic chaos and political uncertainty, more people are opting to emigrate. A recent study by the consultancy Taquion Research found that eight in 10 working age Argentines would leave the country if they could. Despite coronavirus border restrictions, 130,000 people departed the country to work or study abroad in the first nine months of the year.
I have rendered in bold face this rather dubious assertion, notion, of ‘if they could’! Where is the data? Perhaps ‘to work or study’ offers a clue?
My TLS print edition, is always a week behind, the edition that is posted online. I read this review last night, before turning out the light, but this breathtaking paragraph I had to mark, because it was the fastest rhetorical ride of recent memory!
But are “we” still postmodern? Nearly thirty years ago, I did an English MA course on the subject. The authors we studied – Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, John Barth, John Fowles, Italo Calvino – no longer feel like our contemporaries. In 2007 the critic of postmodern fiction, Brian McHale, asked, in an essay title, “What Was Postmodernism?” and the journal Twentieth Century Literature published a special issue, “After Postmodernism”. In The Postmodern Condition (1979; translated 1984), Jean- François Lyotard defined the postmodern era as one of “incredulity toward metanarratives” – in other words, as one disinclined to believe in overarching, totalizing explanations of how the world works. It would be difficult to argue that this applies today, in our age of entrenched positions and viciously polarized debates about everything from Brexit to Covid. If postmodernism was all hyper- reality and post-radical irony, the new millennium brought us back to earth with a bump, beginning with what Jeffries calls the “crushing literalism” of 9/11. The fallout from the financial crash of 2008, and a sharpened awareness of the resilience of patriarchal and racialized power, have energized critical thought. Cultural theory has again embraced real-world earnestness, in the form of neo-Marxism, fourth-wave feminism and critical race theory.
After reading Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity, I read Norris’s ‘William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism’ and Edward Baring’s enlightening The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968and just started to read Norris’ ‘Derrida’, one of two books, that John Sturrock had recommended, in The London Review of Books. About Derrida. The other being ‘The Tain of the Mirror : Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection’. My reading program can’t quite keep up with my unslakable intellectual ambition, and my continually evolving interests.
In the final paragraph, of his review, Joe Moran expresses my own dissatisfaction: the book, the author, and the reader deserved a review that more fully explored Jeffries’s arguments, about the status of ‘Post Modernism’ in the ‘post truth world’!
In keeping with Jeffries’s argument about the persistence of postmodernism, the book covers an impressive if slightly exhausting range of material from the past fifty years.
Kyrsten Sinema is recycling Madonna’s old wardrobe, on a the body of a dumpy middle aged women! Sounds like misogyny, or just an attempt an candor? How many male or female Senators appear riffing on the stylistic themes of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Dandyism’? To see her celebrated as some kind of ‘fashion trailblazer’ @FT takes political comedy to new lows!
Sinema isn’t ‘fashion forward’ but exemplifies the utter collapse of America’s Political Class into comically expressed non-conformity : a signal that that collapse is realized by another political opportunist dressed for the 1980’s MTV!
The New Cold War has been a fact for almost ten years, or even longer in its nascent stages: enthusiastically advocated by this newspaper and its hirelings!
In the political present ‘The Great Man’ now becomes the voice of reason instead of ‘the grand consigliere’.
Just select a paragraph, of Mr. Luce’s essay, for the current cast of heroes and villains:
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that whoever led in artificial intelligence would dominate the world. Kissinger, who, with Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, is co-author of a new book, The Age of AI, says we have not yet begun to grasp the impact it is having on future warfare and geopolitical stability. The FT recently reported that China had tested a hypersonic missile, which could enable it to evade US missile defence systems. The Pentagon this week estimated that China planned to quadruple its nuclear arsenal by 2030. Nicolas Chaillan, the former head of AI at the Pentagon, told the FT he had resigned because he could not stand to watch China overtaking the US. “It is already over,” he said.
Note this Luce sentence – a retrospective apologetic for The Great Man’s’ murderous past.
Yet Kissinger’s analysis should be separated from moral evaluations of his cold war record.
The reader needs to steel herself for the final pronouncement, from Mr. Luce, on ‘The Great Man’:
At 98, he is among the few living figures to have played a leading role grappling with the last century’s existential threats. Each side eventually acquired an intimate knowledge about their nuclear capacities and doctrines that may be impossible to match on AI, he argues. There are no spy planes that could take pictures of China’s AI. There is no clear way of deterring attacks, or of knowing where they come from.
“With nuclear weapons it was possible to conceive of principles of deterrence in which there was some symmetry between the damage on each side,” he said. “If an unrestrained [US-China] arms race goes from nuclear to AI, the dangers of dramatic escalation would be very great.”
Its not ‘The West’ that is under threat! It is the American Empire and its murderous incompetence, which is not collapsing, but is crumbling from the inside: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema hold the fate of The Republic in their trembling, but greedy, hands!
Next question: Recall those 37 million refugees?
While Mr. Rachman riffs on Chicken Little and breathlessly predicts that ‘Doom‘ awaits ‘us’, like Niall Ferguson? If the ‘West’ doesn’t ‘circle the wagons’. My cliché mongering almost matches that of a Financial Times pundit?
This is a howler :
America’s ability to play the role of honest broker is complicated by Aukus
Though I must admit that Thomas Friedman wins hands down with his latest essay at The New York Times:,
Would Russia or China Help Us if We Were Invaded by Space Aliens?
Political Radical explores the political fixation.
Who can forget this ‘review’ published Sunday February 24 2019 in the venerable Times?
Headline: Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac
Sub-headline: If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history
This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.
It is the story of a man who does not appear to have gone to the cinema or listened to music, takes no interest in art or fashion and refused to visit Vienna’s magnificent Schönbrunn Palace because it was “royal”. It tells how he bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, deeply regretted the fall of the Berlin Wall and praised the men who attacked New York on September 11, 2001, for showing an “enormous amount of skill”. In some parallel universe, this man would currently be living in well-deserved obscurity. In reality, Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition and the bookmakers’ favourite to become our next prime minister.
Call this political hysteria mongering, made to measure. Mr. Sandbrook presents his CV, and the details of his employment as a writer on politics.
…
I have written for almost all major British papers, as well as some international papers. I now write exclusively for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. I was nominated as Critic of the Year in the National Press Awards for 2018.
In the past, I was a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard and the New Statesman. I have written a monthly column for BBC History Magazine since 2006.
Being an Oxbridger, his political conformity to the imperatives of advantageous political positions, is amply demonstared by his attack on Corbyn:
‘a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.’
Mr. Corbyn is/was a once illiterate brother to Satan himself , or maybe just a run of the mill sociopath? Think of what Mr. Sandbrook could have accomplished, in the days when Psychoanalysis was the favored psychological methodology, for demonstrating heretical thought?
In the TLS of October 22, 2021 Keith Kahn-Harris reviews two books:
Headline: What went wrong
Sub-headline: Assessing the fallout of antisemitism in the Labour Party
HOW THE EHRC GOT IT SO WRONG
Antisemitism and the Labour Party Verso. ebook. gratis.
Jewish Voice for Labour
LABOUR’S ANTISEMITISM CRISIS
What the left got wrong and how to learn from it 230pp. Routledge. £120 (paperback, £19.99).
The last paragraph of Mr. Kahn-Harris’ review points to the utter lack of candor/honesty of the critics of ‘Corbynite Left’ :
In any case, as Renton himself argues, it is difficult in the age of social media to know how political education and reasoned discussion can counteract the slew of turbocharged online hate. But then, this isn’t just a problem for the Labour Party and it would be unfair to have expected the Corbynite Left to solve it on its own. It was, however, fair to expect the party under Corbyn to have acknowledged the challenge and taken its share of responsibility for addressing it. David Renton’s call to do just that makes his book a valuable contribution to the debate on left-wing antisemitism, while JVL’s refusal of responsibility makes theirs nothing more than a continuation of the conflict that perpetuated the problem.
The ‘problem’ with Corbyn and the ‘Corbynite Left’ is that they campaign, without apology for Palestinian Rights! In response to the Genocide-On-The-Installment-Plan of the Zionist Faschist State. So the Bespoke Suited Victimologists, like Mr. Sandbrook and Mr. Kahn-Harris, can parade their political virtue as moral/political courage, instead of reflective or unreflective political conformity!
What the reader should know about Mr. Keith Kahn-Harris:
‘the project director of the European Jewish Research Archive at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.’
Mr. Ganesh basking in all that relished L.A. sunshine– has he missed Andre Bazin’s ‘What Is Cinema’volumes I and II, or the ‘Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950sNeo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s’ or the more assessableand readableFilms in my Life by François Truffaut? Not to forget the part that Andrew Sarris played in practicing/promoting the French New Wave and the ‘auteur theory’. For one so enamored by all things American, Mr. Ganesh seems out of his depth. The influence of the French New Wave and the ‘auteur theory’, argued for and practiced by critics like Sarris, was about the legitimatizing of the practice of Film Criticism, as essential to the evaluation and ranking of popular entertainment.
Mr. Ganesh grouses about having to waste his ‘L.A. sunshine’ seeing a movie that he is being paid to review.
The grandiose silliness of Dune cost me 155 minutes of LA sunshine. It might be the handsomest thing committed to screen since Lawrence of Arabia. I even detected one smirk in its po face: characters liken fear to a “little death”, which director Denis Villeneuve must know is French slang for orgasm.
Absent from this essay is Mr. Ganesh’s talent for producing beguiling aphorisms!
Back, for just one moment, to Bazin’s ‘What is Cinema’ volume I and its opening essay that mentions the ‘mummy complex’
Mr. Ganesh points to an intellectualisingof popular culture. The books mentioned, offer film criticism, that are the successors to Bazin: although some may be attached to Bazin’s concepts, Truffaut transcends Bazin’s ‘gaudy intellectualism’ and is a devotee, an enthusiast, and finally a practitioner of the cinematic art of story telling.
Let me speculate a bit Mr. Ganesh’s travels in L.A.: he never goes further south than Pico and Western, even though there is some great Barbecue down La Brea and/or Crenshaw! Surely Mr. Ganesh stays within the parameters of West L A. ,Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, with side trips up to Santa Barbara and Montecito?
If the reader is patient she eventually arrives at the ‘why’ of this ‘intellectualisingof popular culture’ :
I can also venture a guess as to why this is happening. In the America of 1990, 24 per cent of men and 18 per cent of women had four years of college education. The numbers are now 37 and 38. The spread of higher education (a British trend, too) is an emancipating force. But no social change is without its perverse consequences. The academic Peter Turchin traces “woke” culture to the rage of a generation of underemployed humanities graduates, for instance.
There is now a large slice of society that has been drilled in a certain kind of conceptual waffle. It has the tools to over-analyse and ultimately overrate what would’ve been enjoyed as Jurassic Park-style fun in the 1990s. It has coincided with the tech-enabled expansion of the media, with its endless space to fill. The very finitude of newspapers and TV culture shows forced critics to be selective in what they took seriously or covered at all. Now, Netflix can count on essayistic treatment of what its latest jabbering emission “means”.
With the bit between his teeth, Mr. Ganesh reaches full gallop: the villain is the over educated masses, the underemployed humanities graduates, per Peter Turchin, with too much time on their hands, and overactive Prefrontal Cortex:- this reads like a toxic amalgam of Jorden Peterson, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt! Not missing the fact that it is pima facie anti-intellectual !
What the patient reader discovers, is that in lieu of those polished aphorisms, they get this shadow, of what was the only compelling thing, of any of Ganesh’s essays, those arresting apercus!
“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve,” says someone in Dune, “but a reality to experience.” That wouldn’t make it past the quality-control people at Hallmark Cards. When the original novel came out, it would’ve been taken for what it is: a fine line within its genre, a breather in a dense plot. We are now invited to turn it over in our heads like a Montaigne gem. The point of an ever-smarter society was to popularise the intellectual. It was harder to foresee the intellectualisation of the popular.
An ugly duckling looking for dates, framed by an American Male’s causal misogyny of ‘rating women’ via a one to ten numbers system. With the help of the Winklevoss Twins. Epic! The Aaron Spelling, for the teetering Neo-Liberal Age, Aaron Sorkin, wrote the 2010 movie.
Don’t need to look too closely to see the Larry Summers protégé Sheryl Sandberg, the epitome of Corporate Geishadom, in her ‘Lean In’ manifesto, is the ‘brain’ behind this pathetic ‘re-branding’ comedy! To note that Mr. Zuckerberg’s completely out of his depth! But its his habit of being. Anyone recall that ‘Listening Tour’?
Oxbridger Edward Luce diagnoses the problem , in The Financial Times of November 15, 2017:
Headline: The Zuckerberg delusion
Sub-headline: Facebook founder is a digital superstar, but he has poor human skills
Fani Papageorgiou adds the ‘Theseus’s paradox’ to tart up this story, with a very necessary snob appeal, to render this back page ‘news item’ , for a readership that rates with The Economist, for its view through a lorgnette!
Note that the New Robber Baron’s of Silicone Valley could end the shame of homelessness in their ‘neighborhood’ with no problem. Yet its like a recrudescence of ‘The Shadow Of The Winter Palace’ , Neo-Liberal version!
The mendacity of The Times is always dependable: a review of ‘Red Knight, The unauthorized biography of Sir Keir Starmer’ by Michael Ashcroft titled ‘The mendacity of hope’ :Labour on the road back to electability’ by Donald Macintyre, his political credentials:
a former chief political commentator of the Independent and the author of Mandelson and the Making of New Labour, 2000
Mr. Macintyre knows the Party Line on Corbyn:
…
Much of the optimism that informed that decision has since eroded, and the disapproval goes well beyond the Corbynite Left, whose members rallied behind Starmer’s rival in last year’s contest, Rebecca Long-Bailey (the Beckett du jour).
…
Not only were May’s treaty negotiations with the EU persistently undermined by those same Tory MPs, Johnson foremost among them, but it is also far from clear that Corbyn, despite his own instinctive pro-Brexit leanings, would have been ready to provoke charges of sleeping with the enemy by making such a deal with May. Though the talks were led by Starmer, Corbyn was represented by Seumas Milne and Andrew Fisher, reporting directly to the Labour leader. Corbyn finally abandoned them on May 17, 2019, a week before May resigned.
…
The scale of the opposition leader’s main task in Brighton – to exorcize the spectre of Corbynism – shouldn’t be underestimated.
…
Abandoning an ill-prepared proposal to return to the “electoral college” of unions, MPs and party members, Starmer has instead concentrated on raising the number of MPs required to nominate a candidate, thus making it more difficult for someone from the Corbynite Left to throw their hat into the ring.
Mr. Macintyre’s manages, in a very long ‘review’ by TLS standards, to realize rhetorically, the fact that Starmer is out of his depth. An almost a perfect reflection of Mrs. May ? But who can match the lupine charms of Tony Blair ?
