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Alice Fishburn on Curtis Sittenfield’s new short story collection. American Writer comments & more!

Curtis Sittenfeld proved the nature of her ‘Feminism’ by her outrageous attempt at producing a political/personal apologetic for Hillary Clinton! The Sunday Times interview shows her, no just lack of judgement , but her obsequious political opportunism.

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Did she like Hillary more than when she started this book more than three years ago? “Yes, more, more! You know, for a lot of the last three years I’ve put on a pant suit and blond wig, metaphorically. I would never write a book from the point of view of a character I was unable to sympathise with. I feel very emotional about her. There’s this reflexively negative way of talking about her. Yet she’s such a hero and role model to so many people, especially many women, which doesn’t get acknowledged as much as it should.”

She says she ended up loving her. But she had also fallen for Bill during her research. She had read his big, swaggering autobiography, My Life.

“I mean, this is the thing; while reading it, I felt like I fell in love with him. And it was very surprising to me. But I think a writer needs to be able to feel the emotions her characters feel.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/curtis-sittenfeld-interview-what-would-hillary-have-achieved-without-bill-clinton-5swgw5stq

That has parity with Hillary’s argued ‘Feminism’, that exists on the same plane as Sheryl Sandberg Neo-Liberal Manifesto of corporate conformaty ‘Lean In’.

A generation of ‘Feminists’ ‘ remain utterly ignorant of their intellectual precursors: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Kate Millet etc.

What can the reader make of this quote from Alice Fishburn explication of one of Sittenfeld’s latest short stories:

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“White Women Lol” is perhaps the most topical of the stories: dealing as it does with Jill, who spots a table of five black people at her friend’s party and, assuming that they’re in the wrong place, tries to get them to leave. A covert recording of the encounter is posted on Facebook, goes semi-viral, sends shockwaves through her friendship group and sparks a variety of outraged online reactions: “a GIF of a fair-haired white man blinking (posted by a black man) and another GIF of a cartoon rat shaking his finger in disapproval (posted by a black woman) and another GIF of a baby spitting out what looked like pureed peas in abject disgust (posted by a white woman).”

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https://www.ft.com/content/4c8447d7-7309-4823-865b-27c5a8881fa0

Jill, her protagonist looks, about as clueless, as a chartable reader might find the author of this story to be. Or is that mansplaining?

American Writer

Headline: Meet the Proud Boys — Trump’s unofficial militia spoiling for a fight

Sub-headline: Sporting Fred Perry shirts and heavily armed, the American far-right group the president refused to condemn is on patrol at his rallies

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‘ I initially thought McInnes’s list of Proud Boy “degrees” of membership must be another one of his jokes. Initiates must swear allegiance to the fraternity, get beaten up until they can recite the name of five cereal brands, adhere to a “no wanks” pledge (so young men stop watching porn and meet actual women, Aaron explained) and get a Proud Boy tattoo.
It made them sound like a bunch of incels (involuntary celibates). Could this be for real, I asked Aaron, who, like Mike, is 33 and single. Yes, the rules were rules. He took my question about the ban on masturbation well — “It does wonders for your determination, energy levels and productivity” — but denied they were incels. “That’s just a cheap lowball insult,” he said.
Nor were they misogynists, he insisted. “We do venerate housewives, though we respect women who work. We want to put women back on their pedestal. They have a cherished role in western civilisation.”
In fact, he was off to see his girlfriend in Seattle this weekend, a black foreign exchange student from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I’m not a racist, 100%,” he added.
Aaron went on to remind me that there was a further “degree” for members — “getting into a physical altercation with Antifa”. He fulfilled that pledge in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in August when there was a violent clash with the far left. He sent me a video link. “It was wild,” he said. As he slugged it out with Antifa, he got hit in the face with a street sign.
If there is election chaos after November 3, as Trump has predicted, Aaron will be back on the streets with his Ruger AR-566 — all in the name of “self-defence”. If they are going to play at being Trump’s vigilantes, it will be a terrible joke on the American electorate.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/meet-the-proud-boys-trumps-unofficial-militia-spoiling-for-a-fight-9mjr8kccb

Sexual Puritanism & Violent Reactionary Politics, if the Freudians still enjoyed cultural/psychological currency they would … If only Eric Ericson and his clique!
Add to the ‘Proud Boys’ the ‘Bugaloo Boys’ and ‘The Oath Keepers‘ that represent an American political nihilism, that dwarfs ‘Antifa’ and ‘BLM’ that leads inexorably to the question: will America’s Second Civil War begin on November 4, 2020?

Old Socialist

Could this excerpt from Mr. Lessinoff’s essay, published in 1980, considering the political philosophy of Popper, offer the possibility of a telling critique of Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’?

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He does not, of course, deny that some generalizations hold only in certain
historical periods, but he does deny that historical epochs are so sharply divided from one another that there can be no valid cross-historical sociological laws.And of course he denies any necessary succession of historical epochs, and more especially the validity of absolute prophecies of future epochs, or even of future trends. In place of the total, but predictable discontinuities of the historicist picture, Popper sees history as a complex pattern of continuity and unpredic-table change, a process that can be partly influenced by deliberate human choices and interventions which however cannot themselves be predicted.

Popper’s objection to historicist prophecy, then, rests most basically on his
belief in human freedom, that is, on a difference between the human and the
inanimate worlds. Anyone who does not believe that this difference exists will not be convinced by that argument. However, Popper has also given another argument which rests on the difference between absolute prophecies and conditional scientific predictions.15 Scientific laws, we saw, have the form ‘All As are B’, from which can be derived the conditional ‘If A, then B’. Thus, one can predict that, if A occurs or is the case, B will occur or be the case; but one cannot, on the basis of a scientific law, predict absolutely that B will be the case. It is true that scientific knowledge does license what appear to be absolute predictions in certain cases – such as typhoons, eclipses, and the phases of the moon – some of which even relate to the distant future. All of them, however, are really dependent on the existence of some specific initial conditions. In certain cases, there may be good reason to believe that the initial conditions will exist: thus, one may reason, ‘If A is the case, B will be the case; but A will be the case; hence, B will be the case.’ The conclusion is an absolute, unconditional prediction. But such a conclusion from scientific laws can be justified (that is,the existence of specific initial conditions can be assumed) only in relation to relatively simple, isolated systems – isolated from interactions that might relevantly alter the initial conditions – such as the solar system (the main natural arena for unconditional scientific predictions). Even here the predictions should strictly be accompanied by a proviso that they are conditional on the continuing isolation of such a system. And a society, at any rate, is not such a system.

I believe this argument against historicism is somewhat confused. Popper’s
idea seems to be that scientific laws, by virtue of their universal form, always
license conditional predictions, but license absolute predictions only in relation to simple, isolated systems. However, the truth surely is that even the conditional predictions derivable from scientific laws can be made only in relation to relatively simple, isolated systems. These predictions really have the form, ‘If A occurs, B will occur, if other things remain equal’. In complex natural systems we cannot say whether other things will remain equal or not – whether some other new factor will affect the outcome. As Popper himself remarks, sufficiently isolated natural systems are rare, and hence, in general ‘it is only by the use of artificial experimental isolation that we can predict events.

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/193450

I find the fact that not any scholar, that I am aware of , used Michael Lessnoff’s insights, as an invaluable rhetorical frame, for constructing a critique of Fukuyama’s original essay, that metastasized into a Straussian World Historical Melodrama, not just puzzling, but offers clear evidence that American intellectual culture exists within what Daniel T. Rogers names ‘The Age of Fracture’.

Political Observer

As a regular reader of Mr. Luce,  I’ll just focus on one telling paragraph, in his essay suffused with doom and gloom, about the erosion of both the soft and hard power of the American Hegemon: all neatly wrapped in the Madison Ave. idea/practice of ‘Image’ and ‘Brand’, as key to any successful advertising campaign. ‘The Market’ and its imperatives rule all!   

It is a measure of America’s reduced expectations that the alternative to Mr Trump is a 77-year-old man who is past his prime. Mr Biden is a fundamentally decent person. His victory would be celebrated in most of Europe and liberal America. But he is a far cry from much younger predecessors, such as John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who so skilfully channelled American dreams. His candidacy is an admission of shorter horizons. It is about damage limitation rather than hope. 

https://www.ft.com/content/294e5ca8-d977-4e88-bac9-20ab072c6318

The reluctance of Mr. Luce to confront the utter corruption of Biden is no surprise, it is the Party Line of the respectable bourgeois pundit class, its shared political baggage that renders their pronouncements null: ‘Mr. Biden is a fundamentally decent person’ 

Headline: Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.

He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.

There’s just one problem.

 

What follows is the triad of what represents American political virtue according to Luce ? Kennedy, Clinton and Obama. But what of Reagans Morning in America? Or was that just a misapplication of political nostalgia, for an imagined political past? 

Given Mr. Luce’s  essay, that places Biden in the ‘decent person’ category’, the question arises what can the reader make of Martin Sandbu’s September 28 2020 essay: 

Headline: Atlanticism will remain in retreat, whoever wins the US election

Sub-headline: Public opinion in Europe is cooling towards the US while Americans’ ties to the old continent have loosened

Many European leaders may quietly nurse a hope that a Joe Biden victory in November’s US election could herald a new era of Atlanticism after Donald Trump’s diplomatic rampage which threatened trade wars and cast doubt on his commitment to Nato. They may have to ask themselves if their own people agree.

Last week, the Clingendael Institute published a survey of public opinion in the Netherlands. It showed rising Dutch scepticism about the reliability of transatlantic co-operation. When asked whether the US represented a threat to European security, 29 per cent answered yes — not far below the 35 and 36 per cent who said the same about China and Russia. A whopping 79 per cent expect the US to reduce its protection of Europe in the next five years and demand that the continent takes more responsibility for its own security.

“The Dutch population expects the policy challenges of the day to be solved primarily in a European context rather than a western, Atlanticist context,” said Rem Korteweg, a Clingendael senior research fellow and co-author of the report. Indeed, 72 per cent of the respondents said the Netherlands should collaborate more with France and Germany, including 53 per cent saying so when asked about military co-operation.

“That is surprising — the transatlantic reflex is super strong traditionally,” said Mr Korteweg.

The Dutch are not alone. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that in France, Germany, the UK and Sweden, as well as in the Netherlands, the share of the public with a favourable view of the US was at or near its lowest level in the two decades the poll has been run. Perceptions have not been helped by the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, which all national respondent groups rated as worse than their own country’s, the EU’s, the WHO’s or China’s.

As Europeans cool towards the US, Americans are distancing themselves from Europe, said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, director of the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Paris.

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https://www.ft.com/content/09f95f8f-c718-4cb0-a2a4-dd3cbcdd7d62

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The American National Security State needn’t fear Joe Biden is a New Cold Warrior: 

Mr. Trump’s endless  political tantrum, in the first debate, demonstrated his only real power, that of producing political discord, with alarming consistency,  ignoring any possible notion of debate, as an exchange of ideas and/or political positions. It was alarming , but consistent with his closing monologues on his television series ‘The Apprentice’ ,in its various iterations, that ended with his tag line ‘You’re Fired’ . The only problem for Trump, was that Mark Burnett could not carefully edit a live television performance. 

Political Observer 

Robert Shrimsley gives the game away in the first three paragraphs of his essay of September 29, 202o.  

Headline: This Land by Owen Jones — Corbynism beyond Corbyn

Sub-headline: A critique of Labour’s election defeat seeks to give life to the manifesto without the man

The harsh fact about the Corbyn project is that the only one of Labour’s hard-left MPs able to win the party leadership was the person least suited to lead.

While others in his faction — most notably John McDonnell — made enemies and were feared, Jeremy Corbyn was sufficiently liked that even people who disagreed with him signed the nomination to get him on the ballot. With hindsight, this lack of enemies should have been a clue.

For the inescapable conclusion of a new and sympathetic look at the period is that Corbyn was probably the worst prime ministerial candidate put before the voters in modern times. Leaving aside his political positions, he was temperamentally incapable of doing the job. For Owen Jones, the Corbyn project’s important media cheerleader and semi-insider, the drama of those years is almost Shakespearean. Jones’ own doubts about Corbyn appeared early but his enthusiasm for the wider project is undimmed. 

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https://www.ft.com/content/88370aa8-9d4f-4713-b0c6-3ea3e0d67f69

Its ‘as if’ Mr. Shrimsley takes for granted that his readers are somehow ignorant of the rise of Corbyn in the Labour Party hierarchy.  A revelatory survey of some of the commentary on Jeremy Corbyn, in the British Press, is revelatory of its Anti-Leftism , while the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal Project is the very reason for the rise of Corbyn, from within a Labour Party still enamored of the Thatcherism Lite of Tony Blair and his epigones.  

 

Headline: Backwards, comrades!

Sub-headline: Jeremy Corbyn is leading Britain’s left into a political timewarp. Some old ideological battles must be re-fought

‘BEFORE he had finished belting out his first celebratory rendition of “The Red Flag”, a hymn to class struggle, some of Jeremy Corbyn’s colleagues in Labour’s shadow cabinet had already handed in their resignations. A 66-year-old socialist, Mr Corbyn has spent 32 years as one of the hardest of hardline left-wingers in the House of Commons and a serial rebel on the Labour backbenches. On September 12th he flattened three moderate rivals (see article) to become leader of Britain’s main opposition party. Labour MPs are stunned—and perhaps none more so than Mr Corbyn himself.

Two views are emerging of Labour’s new leader. The more sympathetic is that, whatever you think of his ideology, Mr Corbyn will at least enrich Britain by injecting fresh ideas into a stale debate. Voters who previously felt uninspired by the say-anything, spin-everything candidates who dominate modern politics have been energised by Mr Corbyn’s willingness to speak his mind and condemn the sterile compromises of the centre left. The other is that Mr Corbyn does not matter because he is unelectable and he cannot last. His significance will be to usher in a second successive Conservative government in the election of 2020—and perhaps a third in 2025.

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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/09/19/backwards-comrades

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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.

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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-dangerous-hero-corbyns-ruthless-plot-for-power-by-tom-bower-portrait-of-a-monomaniac-8x0spp3d8

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Headline: Tom Bower on Jeremy Corbyn: he left for Jamaica an academic failure and came back a fanatical Marxist

Sub-headline: Throughout his career the Labour leader has used tactics learnt from the communist playbook. His biographer Tom Bower charts his cultivation of a ‘good guy’ image — and ruthless elimination of moderate rivals

Burning buildings, overturned cars and students rampaging through downtown Kingston, Jamaica, in October 1968 spurred Jeremy Corbyn’s switch from traditional Labour Party supporter to a Trotskyist dedicated to transforming Britain into a communist state. After his stay on the island he successfully concealed his past and his prejudices, even from his family and closest friends.

Despite scoring two grade-E A-levels and failing a third, Corbyn had landed a Voluntary Overseas Service (VSO) placement to teach geography at Kingston College, an elite school. Ever since, he has said those “two years were really a defining moment in my life”.

Close to the school, the clean-shaven Corbyn witnessed the raw struggle between Jamaica’s rich white people and impoverished black people. Paul Wimpory, another VSO teacher, heard Corbyn’s dismay about the “vast inequalities on the island”, the guilt of the British Empire, the capitalists’ exploitation of Third World countries, the horror of American interference across the continent and, above all, his desire to “rebel against his affluent background”.

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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tom-bower-on-jeremy-corbyn-he-left-for-jamaica-an-academic-failure-and-came-back-a-fanatical-marxist-csxbmcr7w

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Headline: Jeremy Corbyn: the man versus the movement

Sub-headline: Two books explore what a UK government under the far-left Labour leader would be like

If Jeremy Corbyn ever makes it into 10 Downing Street, he will have completed the most improbable rise to power in modern British history. The Labour leader is soon to turn 70 and spent the first 30 years of his political career as an obscure backbencher, on the far-left of his party. A change in the political climate and a chapter of accidents led to Corbyn being elected Labour leader in 2015.

Two years later, he astonished his critics both inside and outside the party by putting in a strong performance in the 2017 election — depriving Theresa May’s Conservatives of a parliamentary majority. Now Corbyn is probably closer to power than he has ever been. May’s decision to reach out to the Labour leader in an effort to find a cross-party solution to Brexit has given Corbyn a chance to play the role of a statesman — and to shake off the accusation that he is too incompetent and too militant to be trusted with power.

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that most of the British establishment (including much of his own parliamentary party) remains both incredulous and deeply uneasy at the prospect of a Corbyn government. In the effort to understand what may be around the corner, many readers are likely to turn to the recent biography of Corbyn by Tom Bower, a veteran investigative journalist — just one of several new books promising to reveal more about the Labour leader’s life and opinions.

Still, those looking for an impartial account should be a little wary of Bower’s Dangerous Hero. Its sub­title, “Corbyn’s ruthless plot for power”, sums up its general approach, as does the jacket-cover description of the book as a “gripping exposé”.

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https://www.ft.com/content/aa144312-5b73-11e9-939a-341f5ada9d40

Not forgetting Jonathan Freedland’s notorious defamatory political fiction: 

Headline: Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem

Sub-headline: Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters

As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.

I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.

Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.

It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.

But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn

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For the reader of Mr. Shrimsley’s  essay, it becomes clear that he follows the Party Line, on Corbyn and his followers. The Political Center is in fact defined by Neo-Liberals like Tony Blair and his successor Kier Starmer, the natural political opponent of any actual ‘Left’. On the question of Anti-Semitism: BDS is not Anti-Semitism, but Anti-Zionism. Corbyn  has been, and still is a supporter of the cause of the Palestinians, but propagandists like Freedland, Hodge, Labour Friends of Israel and Shrimsley continue to parrot the Party Line of ‘Anti-Semitism’. It is employed, as an attempt to rescue a Neo-Liberalism in a continual state of slow-motion collapse, barely held aloft via continual Strong State Intervention, the sine qua non of Hayek’s economic charlatanry.             

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Like many on the left, Jones’ true target is the “centrists”, the moderate left who stand in the path of a more socialist option. For Jones it is essential we accept that the centre cannot hold. But this may be a counsel of despair. For one thing it misreads the voters, since the evidence is that confronted by hardline Labour and hardline Tories, they are more likely to tack right. Furthermore, the centre can move. It shifted from austerity politics but the beneficiary was Boris Johnson. 

Where Jones is strongest, and impressively so, is when he turns his analytical gaze on his own side. His dissection of the anti-Semitism issue is heartfelt and intelligent

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https://www.ft.com/content/88370aa8-9d4f-4713-b0c6-3ea3e0d67f69

Political Observer

To read the rhetorical evolution of Andy Divine’s latest essay, is to witness the flowering of his particular variety of political hysteria. It begins with Shakespeare’s Richard III via Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Tyrant’, and ‘a performance by Antony Sher of Richard decades ago’* with aid from Plato and Aristotle, on the notion that tyranny is ‘wrapped up in the darker folds of the human soul, individual and collective.’

What follows is a long exegesis of Shakespeare’s play and this conclusion about the Tyrant  drawn from  Mr. Greenblatt: But he has one key skill, Greenblatt notes, the ability to lie shamelessly. This followed by more of his narration about the play. His long description of the play interrupted by this insight : Denial. Avoidance. Distraction. Willful ignorance. These are all essential to enabling a tyrant’s rise. He then continues his exposition of the drama, the rhetorical frame in all its highfalutin melodrama has been set, Mr. Divine need only supply the vulgar dramaturgy that is his trademark. Note the sentence I’ve rendered in bold font!

This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.

Andy then lets Barton Gellman do all the paranoid speculation, that he reports on, to his readers:

If you haven’t, read Gellman’s piece closely. It seems inevitable to me that, unless it’s a Biden landslide, Trump will declare himself the winner on election night, regardless of the actual results. Because most mail-in ballots will take more time to count, and several swing states have not changed their laws to allow for counting before election day, and mail-ins are easily challenged, it is quite likely that much of Biden’s vote will remain uncounted or contested — and could remain so for a long time. And after declaring victory within hours of polls closing, Trump will follow the script he used for Florida in 2018: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted, making shit up as usual. “An honest vote count is no longer possible — ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”  

Andy was/is one of the army of The Midwives of Trump, the historical evidence: 

Race, Genes and I.Q. — An Apologia

The case for conservative multiculturalism

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

 

Click to access andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

On Jonathan Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/andrew-sullivan-america-land-of-brutal-binaries.html

Andy’s  political hysteria is a product of his bad faith, to engage in a bit of armchair psychology, that is popular with the corporate political technocrats. That Trump is  Richard III,  is abandoned in favor of his usual screeching. The literary frame is abandoned, as not quite serviceable, to the personal affront that Trump directs to Andy himself. Call this what it is a toxic narcissism! 

Political Observer 

*I recall seeing an Omnibus television program, in the early 1950’s,  the movie of Richard III, as performed by Laurence Olivier, when I was seven or eight years of age. Richard scared my younger self, but it was considered to be a necessary part of a ‘cultural enrichment’ of another Age.  

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/yes-this-is-the-face-of-a-tyrant

There can be no doubt of the fact that Politics/Religion/Jurisprudence constitute the ruling triumvirate in American Civic Life, as the nomination of Amy Barrett make plain. Except to those who somehow think, that this alliance cannot be, in a vaunted secular nation.

The reader need only look to the rise of two Americans: Cotton Mather, of The Salem Witch Trials, and his use of ‘Spectral Evidence’  and of Johnathan Edwards of ‘Sinner In The Hands Of An Angry God’. And then trace these two themes, as they both evolved in American history, political and civic. 

I offer my historical sketch:  Brown v. Board I & II, The passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, and the concomitant Dixiecrat’s near total desertion of the Democratic Party, for the Republican Party , Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’,  The rise of The Religious Right,  and its militant anti-abortion cadre, The Federalist Society and the ‘Textualist’ and ‘Originalist’ interpretive stances, being the antidotes to the Judicial Overreach of Brown v. Board. The denial of a Supreme Court seat to Robert Bork, was the alarm that warned the Republican’s, that they must present candidates, for confirmation, who didn’t look and act like a caricature out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  William Rehnquist and Scalia were the test cases.

Much more to say on this question!

Old Socialist 

This New Republic essay, by Libby Watson, even quotes the Politico essay, excerpts of which follows this long quotation:

Headline: The Democrats Have a Dianne Feinstein Problem

Sub-headline: Some in the party believe the 87-year-old senator is ill-equipped to lead the opposition to Trump’s Supreme Court nominee—so why won’t they do anything about it?

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Which leads us to another problem: The Democratic charge will be led by 87-year-old Dianne Feinstein, the party’s ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. Feinstein is resolutely not interested in the idea of breaking any kind of norm to win. As recently as a week before Ginsburg’s death, Feinstein criticized the idea of abolishing the filibuster and refused to say whether, as chair of the committee during a Biden administration, she would continue a recent Republican practice of ignoring opposition committee members who object to judicial nominees from their home state. The long-standing “blue slip” process, she said, “fosters bipartisan engagement in the nomination process.” Truly, we are living in a golden age of well-fostered bipartisan engagement!

Concerns about Feinstein’s role in the upcoming confirmation process are not some petty, factional whining of disgruntled leftists. As Politico reported, these fears—that Feinstein is not up to the task of grilling Trump’s nominee for Ginsberg’s seat—are “widespread” among Democrats in Congress, who fret that Feinstein “gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked” and appears “frail.” These are normal things for an 87-year-old to do or be; they are perhaps not the ideal characteristics for the person tasked with being the face of the Democratic resistance to another right-wing psychocrat being placed on the court for decades to possess. (The Los Angeles Times’ report on Feinstein’s love of the blue slip process included the detail that she “wasn’t aware” that “Republicans had confirmed judges without them.” Her office later provided a tally: The GOP has done so 17 times in the Trump era.)
…

https://newrepublic.com/article/159487/dianne-feinstein-judiciary-committee-opposition-trump-supreme-court-nominee

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This Politico essay by John Bresnahan and Marianne Levine:

Headline: Democrats worry Feinstein can’t handle Supreme Court battle

Sub-headline: Colleagues fear the oldest senator may struggle to lead Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

As the Senate prepares for yet another brutal Supreme Court nomination fight, one particularly sensitive issue is creating apprehension among Democrats: what to do with 87-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Feinstein, the oldest member of the Senate, is widely respected by senators in both parties, but she has noticeably slowed in recent years. Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic senators and aides show widespread concern over whether the California Democrat is capable of leading the aggressive effort Democrats need against whoever President Donald Trump picks to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Judiciary Committee is the critical battleground in the Supreme Court confirmation process. At stake, her own Democratic colleagues worry, is more than just whether the party can thwart Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in his rush to fill the seat. Some Democrats privately fear that Feinstein could mishandle the situation and hurt their chances of winning back the majority.

Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster — a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.

…

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/23/dianne-feinstein-supreme-court-battle-420357

Corporate media pundits feed upon each other’s commentaries, sometimes in the most unabashed ways, that leads to the construction of The Party Line, on any given issue. Some are more adroit, about the rhetorical constructions of an evolving Party Line, and some like Libby Watson, riff on the themes of other political reporters/commentators/pundits. 

At some point the reader that focuses upon the ‘evolution’ of that Party Line, in favor of what is the subject under debate/discussion, proves that that ‘evolution’ is an equally important component of the examination, of a political stance, that becomes a fixed point of argument, in sum, The Party Line.

Political Observer

Insights on the ‘players’ in Ms. Tett’s latest economic melodrama, and some commentary.  

Oxford Economics:

Oxford Economics is a leader in global forecasting and quantitative analysis. Our worldwide client base comprises more than 1,500 international corporations, financial institutions, government organisations, and universities.

https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/about-us

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Morningstar: 

Our exclusive research, ratings, and tools can help investors of every stripe create a financial foundation that helps them reach their goals. And taking a 14-day free trial of Morningstar Premium is the best way to sample all the ways we can help you find, evaluate, and monitor your investments.

https://www.morningstar.com/premium?referid=A4497&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=MORNP_General_Gen_Search_Branded_Exact_T1_National+Morningstar&utm_content=engine:google|campaignid:1338383161|adid:431089248176|gclid:Cj0KCQjwqrb7BRDlARIsACwGad5AbK7kw7g2nc-BTuoI1lZa9-b6SxAdzpTz5OM9CpLwQhnhtZovivgaAlMaEALw_wcB&utm_term=morningstar&creativeID=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqrb7BRDlARIsACwGad5AbK7kw7g2nc-BTuoI1lZa9-b6SxAdzpTz5OM9CpLwQhnhtZovivgaAlMaEALw_wcB

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Some insights on Lehman Bros.: 

Headline:  Ten years on, the Fed’s failings on Lehman Brothers are all too clear

Sub-headline: The key policymakers have always maintained they had no choice but to let Lehman collapse. That’s simply not true

In 2007 Fortune magazine ranked Lehman Brothers investment bank number 1 on its list of “most admired securities firms”. Just a year later, on 15 September 2008, the financial world was shocked when Lehman, with $600bn (£463bn) of assets, filed for bankruptcy, causing chaos in financial markets: stock prices plummeted, credit flows froze, and markets feared that even larger financial institutions – from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup – might fail.

The Lehman bankruptcy was shocking, in part, because it was unique. Other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG, also experienced crises in 2008 and surely would have failed if not for emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve. On the eve of its bankruptcy, Lehman urgently sought similar aid from the Fed, but the policymakers at the time – Fed chair Ben Bernanke, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – said no.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/03/federal-reserve-lehman-brothers-collapse

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Some insight on Carmen Reinhart: 

Headline: The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics

…

Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two of the most respected and influential academic economists active today.

Or at least, they were. On April 16, doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released the results of their analysis of two 2010 papers by Reinhard and Rogoff, papers that also provided much of the grist for the 2011 bestseller Next Time Is Different.

Reinhart and Rogoff’s work showed average real economic growth slows (a 0.1% decline) when a country’s debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and this 90% figure was employed repeatedly in political arguments over high-profile austerity measures.

During their analysis, Herndon, Ash and Pollin obtained the actual spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff used for their calculations; and after analysing this data, they identified three errors.

The most serious was that, in their Excel spreadsheet, Reinhart and Rogoff had not selected the entire row when averaging growth figures: they omitted data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark.

In other words, they had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation.

When that error was corrected, the “0.1% decline” data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth.

…

https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646#:~:text=The%20most%20serious%20was%20that,%2C%20Belgium%2C%20Canada%20and%20Denmark.&text=When%20that%20error%20was%20corrected,average%20increase%20in%20economic%20growth.

Ms. Tett provides more of Reinhart’s insights.   

…

Big US banks have increased their reserves to cope with this. But Ms Reinhart fears that those in countries such as India and Italy are less prepared. Furthermore, ultra-low interest rates erode bank profitability.

Another issue is that it is hard to model future risks due to the lack of historical precedent. “Crises usually happen because of a boom-to-bust cycle and investors know what that looks like. This is different,” Ms Reinhart adds. As far more financial activity flows through the non-bank sector, via capital markets, nasty surprises can easily erupt.

…

And a concluding paragraph featuring Reinhart:

“Surveys [already] show a significant tightening of lending standards,” observed Mr Shin. Or as Ms Reinhart notes: “A credit crunch seems really very likely.” No wonder Oxford found that fears about finance were poisoning confidence; or that the chance of a V-shaped economic recovery seems increasingly low. 

This reader is given to a kind of nostalgia for another Tett: 

January 16, 2015:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed 

…

Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/c95e5a72-8322-4cfc-b36a-69e8998aea01

Here is the a news story, that just might have more political weight, than Mr. Luce’s collection of concerns, in his latest essay:

Headline: Senate report slams Bidens for conflicts of interest, flags possible criminal activity

Sub-headline: GOP-led investigation cites ‘glaring’ evidence of Burisma bribe, suspicious foreign money transfers and sex trafficking.

A year-long Senate investigation concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father’s vice presidency raised alarm among U.S. government officials, who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking.

The long-awaited joint report by the GOP-led Senate Homeland and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees delivered several blockbuster revelations less than two months before Election Day, suggesting Obama administration officials ignored clear warning signs about ethical conflicts and possible extortion risks involving Joe Biden’s family.

Perhaps the most explosive revelation was that the U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.

…

But the U.S. government’s worries about Hunter Biden’s globetrotting business pursuits didn’t stop in Ukraine.

“In addition to the over $4 million paid by Burisma for Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s board memberships, Hunter Biden, his family, and Archer received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds,” the report said.

Senate investigators flagged transactions in at least three other foreign countries:

• Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
• Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and Russia’s only female oligarch.
• Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
• Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and Russia’s only female oligarch.Hunter Biden opened a bank account with Chinese national Gongwen Dong to fund a $100,000 global spending spree for the Biden family.
• Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen, and other Chinese nationals linked to the communist government and the People’s Liberation Army. “Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow,” the report said.
• The report did not expand much on its sensational claim of alleged links to sex trafficking or prostitutes, reserving most of the discussion to two footnotes.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/senate-report-slams-bidens-conflicts-interest-flags

As long as the Corporate Media ignores this …

Political Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/76f35579-f58e-44eb-b984-18141d1bc3bb