StephenKMackSD's Blog

With all the Marque Pundits on vacation, it falls the Mr. Ganesh to offer up his commentary on the Biden pick of Harris, as his vice-president. He mentions in passing Harris’ threat to jail the parents of truant children. The Los Angeles Times offers this: 

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-kamala-harris-truancy-20190417-story.html

On the de facto pardon of OneWest Bank’s Steven Mnuchin:

Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

Harris’ pandering, not to speak groveling address at AIPAC, in which she claims that she didn’t sell Girl Scout Cookies, but raised funds for Israel. How does one ‘fact check’ such an assertion? 

Here is a link to Joe Biden’s address to the Ukrainian Rada: 

Joe Biden worked hard, at obtaining that sinecure, for Hunter Biden at Burisma Holdings!

I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

The reader has to be patient, with Mr. Ganesh’s attempt at an apologetic for Biden, in its political meander, his History Made to Measure. But here, the Janan Ganesh the readers has no trouble recognizing breaks through: 

Just not, in part thanks to that vagueness of hers, unbeatable. In a reptilian passage of Tony Blair’s chatty memoirs, the former UK prime minister explains how to go about negative campaigning. The classic error, he says, with the sureness of the thrice-elected, is the lurid, over-the-top attack. Swing voters learn to tune these out. What moves them is the lesser charge, expressed more in sorrow than in anger.

https://www.ft.com/content/26d1649a-f127-4de6-a568-f34060ca348c

The ‘Literary Ganesh’ married to the ‘Political Ganesh’ is no more insightful, but it reads ‘as if’ it were insight, rather than political chatter in a more decorous key. 

Political Cynic 

______________________________________________________________

Mr. Stavridis’ rise to the top of the Military/Capitalist coterie’s Olympus is here made clear to the reader of his latest essay at Bloomberg Opinion:

Headline: Brent Scowcroft Never Hated His Enemies

Sub-headline: His realist approach to global affairs came straight from “The Godfather.”

That such a citizen, an exalted member of the American Technocracy, praises Brent Scowcroft, via a comparison to blood soaked Hollywood Gangster kitsch, doesn’t even qualify as faint praise. Or is this indicative of the Scowcroft ‘toughness’, and or ‘resolve’?  After some preliminary and obligatory funeral oration chatter, this paragraph resolves any doubt in the readers mind:  

A second quality was his unemotional, analytic approach to the world, sometimes called realpolitik. Scowcroft earned his spurs around former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and took Kissinger’s place the first time he became national security adviser. When he told me not to let the Russians get under my skin, he meant to stay calm and be the adult in the room. As Don Corleone puts it in Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather”: “Never hate your enemies — it affects your judgment.” 

In order to win, one must never be blinded by inconvenient emotion, it is offered as the sine qua non of the gangster and the political operative! Stavridis offers this admonition about the political present:

This lesson in realism remains a striking and necessary lesson for the U.S. today, from dealing with the dangerous adventurism of Vladimir Putin to the irascible behavior of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. 

In the world view of Gangsters and Technocrats it is about ‘winning at any cost’ via a strategic use of Adam Smith’s  Impartial Spectator, to dress it in undeserved intellectual finery.

Here is Stavridis’ anti-penultimate thoughts, the two that follow are simply History Made To Measure and more funeral oration cliche: 

Finally, the general advocated an international outlook. He was a keen student of history, and in that 2009 talk he pointed out to me that a century earlier, the world was on the verge of two global conflicts in three decades. His prescription was simple: to best protect the nation and serve its interests, America had to remain engaged in the world — not as the world’s policeman, but as a source of leadership when it mattered.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-10/brent-scowcroft-never-hated-his-enemies?srnd=opinion&sref=bfOwbK4O

America is the World’s Policeman! Its continuing Wars of Empire, and a World surrounded by its  military bases, and its not so secret military interventions, around the world, are facts that Technocrat Stavridis will never acknowledge!

Old Socialist 

Andy Divine’s  essay of July 31, 2020 on the evolution/de-evolution of Post-Modernism, and its fellow traveler Critical Theory, leaves the reader with the realization that these conceptual and intellectual descriptions, have now been reduced to propaganda ‘catch phrases’  in the war between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. Has Mr. Divine read any of the writers that  fall under the rubrics of  Post-Modern, or Critical Theory ?    

Andy Divine has found his weapon of choice: ‘ Cynical reason How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody‘ by James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.
An excerpt:

Intersectionality: An Excerpt from “Cynical Theories”

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She lives in England.

James Lindsay is a mathematician with a background in physics. He is interested in the psychology of religion, authoritarianism, and extremism and is the author of Everybody is Wrong about God. His other books include Life in Light of Death and How to Have Impossible Conversations. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, and Time. He led the Grievance Studies Affair probe that made international headlines in 2018, including the front page of the New York Times. He lives in Tennessee.

Helen Pluckrose publishes a excerpt, of the book she co-authored, in the magazine she edits! ‘She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism.’ ‘Popular essay on Post-Modernism’ is indicative of propaganda, not scholarship.  

This is the perfect opportunity for Andy Divine to appropriate this  pseudo-scholarship, in his latest hysterical instalment against the ‘Left Juggernaut‘, that now rules the streets of ‘God’s Country’! Andy explains the value of the Lindsay &  Pluckrose polemic. 

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized. 

In Andy’s narrative ‘The Post-Modern’ and ‘Critical Theory‘ are a political/ethical singularity: propaganda makes its demands.  He features himself as its victim:

You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness

But Andy is unafraid, to inform the reader, that he missed the entire career of American Philosopher/Writer Richard Rorty, even the stolid George F. Will managed to take a swipe at Rorty. Andy was too busy preening his ego, to have noticed an American Philosopher, the equal or greater successor to James or Dewey.

As usual, Andy rambles on for paragraphs, before this section reaches its end. In ‘Andy World’ brevity gets in the way of verbose propagandizing.

Political Observer

Headline: Beirut explosion: France’s Macron warns Lebanon on need for reform

Sub-headline: International donors pledge aid in wake of explosion that devastated Beirut

There is nothing like the craven ambition of Macron! He covets the Leadership of the EU , even in the early stages of its slow-motion collapse. While his En Marche still faces persistent popular resistance.
The Neo-Liberal Project is being eviscerated by Covid, and its economic wake. That Project faces the rise of the New Intellectual/Political/Economic Triad of Keynes/Piketty/Marx!
Macron, ever in search for a ‘politically sexy’ Photo Op, this heart-wrenching catastrophe offers the perfect opportunity for his Neo-Liberalism, with an unsavory Colonial Accent. 

The above just introductory! But Macron speaks/riffs on Colonial themes, like he lectures the gilets jaunes, and then expresses his political contempt for them , via police violence.  

“The priority is unconditional aid and support for the population,” … “We will be there for you and won’t give up on you.”…  “If reforms are not carried out, Lebanon will continue to sink,” 

https://www.ft.com/content/8c7e38c5-7b56-4e95-a752-50c6652c12c9

It isn’t that Chloe Cornish in Beirut, Victor Mallet in Paris and Andrew England in London haven’t produced informative reporting. Its that this Newspaper’s Macron advocacy/apologetics is handled, indeed confected by the editors, although these reporters know the Party Line!

More of the same from Macron: 

“I will talk to all political forces to ask them for a new pact. I am here today to propose a new political pact to them,” …

The comments of ‘Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House.’ adds a bourgeois respectability to this ‘report’ except that Chatham Hose is Corporately funded: ExxonMobil Corporation, Chevron Ltd, AIG , etc:

https://www.chathamhouse.org/membership/corporate-membership/corporate-list

The IMF. the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen , nor Think Tank  Lina Khatib, whose comment…: 

‘ “without economic and political reform any aid given to Lebanon is only going to end up in the wrong hands”. ‘

Its ‘as if’ the Colonial Mentality is the parent of The New and Old Cold War. NGO’s , Think Tanks are the realization of politics by another means, via the ‘expertise’ of a class of well paid Technocrats. 

Old Socialist 

Its always rewarding, at my breakfast time, to do some exploring of the morning newspapers. What caught my attention today, with the proviso that all the Big Name’s of political comment are on vacation? was Janan Ganesh’s latest essay in The Financial Times: 

Headline:A defeat for Donald Trump is not a defeat for autocracy

Sub-headline: Voters are rejecting the president’s incompetence, not his authoritarianism

https://www.ft.com/content/889e5d1b-4e71-4fb5-bdc8-c9e0621906e1

Here is what passes for political thought: rhetorical hair-splitting, name dropping,  political yarn-spinning, self-congratulation, and an absence of the application of brevity. That might have rendered his essay to a couple of more insightful paragraphs? My patience level at the breakfast table is dependent on my coffee consumption. 

I made the mistake of going to the New York Times web site. And Bret Stephens’ essay on that  Conservative Monument Edmund Burke. 

Headline: Why Edmund Burke Still Matters

Sub-headline: He reminds us it’s hard to respect democratic political institutions while disdaining the founders of those institutions.

The political virtue of Burke, as presented by Stephens,  is that he is the antidote to the active Rebellion against the established order.  The New Democrats, Neo-Conservatives  and a Republican Party, that surrendered to the Tea Party Reactionaries, that produced Trump and Trumpism, are by means of Stephens’ political necromancy the stand-ins for a Rational Political Order?  

Burke is then presented, in his usual guise, as the Great Crusader against The French Revolution, as an expression of its inherent murderous political nihilism. Is their not just a troubling bit of inconsistency, in Stephens self-presentation, of being Burke’s representative in the political present. When he was an active member of the Neo-Conservative Coterie’s hysterical war mongering, in both Afghanistan and Iraq? What were the costs in lives, of these two baseless attacks on sovereign states by the American Military Juggernaut? 

Read Stephen’s last two paragraphs. The notion that the American political provincial  George F.  Will could write, much less conceive, a magnum opus, ‘The Conservative Sensibility’ is comic. Also featuring some critical caveats , that ‘we’ haven’t quite reached the very point of crisis, but ‘we’ are close to its edge.   

Because Burke champions a different concept of liberty than the one most Americans cherish, it may be easy to dismiss his teachings as interesting but ultimately irrelevant. George Will, in his magnum opus “The Conservative Sensibility,” speaks of Burke as a “throne-and-altar” conservative of little relevance to American experience. Whatever else might be said of events in places like Portland or Seattle, it is not the storming of the Bastille, and wokeness isn’t Jacobinism — at least not yet. The time to write “Reflections on the Revolutions in America” is still a ways off.

A ways off — but ever more visible on the horizon. To read and admire Burke does not require us to embrace his views, much less treat him as a prophet. But it’s an opportunity to learn something from a man who saw, more clearly than most, how “very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.”

Political Cynic 

The reader quickly realizes the ‘why’ of the Jerusalem Post hiring, of the 28 year old Bret Stephens, to be its editor. This newspaper is the propaganda arm of the Zionist State. And Stephens regurgitates the ever evolving rationales for this European Settler State, he knows it by wrote, but is also able to extemporize, at will, on its themes.
Mr. Stephens is given to impugning  his opponents, like the anguished Liberal Zionist Beinart. Reminding this reader of Paul,  in the commentary by Karl Barth, of  ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ or of Luther’s ‘1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology’ and his ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’ . Stephens is a zealot, that shares that commonality with the Protestant Reformation and its Biblical precursor.. 

The last two paragraphs of his essay is about the waning power of Jewish Identity, where such a concept appears as ineluctable, as conceived by Stephens, being the sine qua non of the Zionist State’s survival.

It used to be that Israelis depended on a secure and thriving American Jewry to help stand up their fragile state. Today it is American Jewry that is fragile, threatened by dwindling cultural influence, stagnant demographic trends, increasing alienation from the Democratic Party and abiding discomfort with the G.O.P., and rising anti-Semitism — sometimes masked as anti-Zionism — from across the political spectrum.

Should American Jews start looking for the exits — just as every other Diaspora community in history has done, and continues to do — they will be grateful to find a Jewish state that resisted the siren song of “one state.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/israel-palestine-one-state-solution.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Isn’t the survival of this state predicated upon lavish economic support given by America? 

Headline: Key U.S. lawmakers want to boost Israel’s $38 billion defense aid package

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-israel-defense-idUSKCN1GB2NQ

Political Observer

America’s political Gossip Sheet supplies more of the Kamala Harris political melodrama. One of Senile Old Joe’s advisors, on his VP pick, is former Senator Chris Dodd. Political sclerotics rule the roost! Poor Kamala f’d upped when she attacked Joe on his school busing opposition, back in the day, with that ‘I was that girl’ merde! This featured the almost tearful, anguished accusation against a Party Elder, Great Television! It almost matched her AIPAC performance, when she declared that instead of selling Girl Scout cookies she raised money for Israel. How could that be ‘fact checked’?     

Read the list of California New Democratic supporters for Harris:

‘The conference call included several of the state’s highest-ranking elected officials and labor and business leaders, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, state schools chief Tony Thurmond, state Treasurer Fiona Ma and Chad Griffin, a Democratic consultant and former head of Human Rights campaign, according to organizers.’

The Biden loyalists:

‘Representing the Biden campaign were the four main members of his vetting team: Dodd, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; and Biden’s former White House and Senate counsel, Cynthia Hogan

‘https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/31/harris-allies-biden-call-dodd-389848

That Trump is vile is an understatement, but Senile Old Joe is just one step behind him, as are the rest of the benighted New Democrats, and their allies the Neo-Cons and the  Bush coterie’s ‘The Lincoln Project’ .The ‘Party of Lincoln’ was interred with him!

Old Socialist

In the Catholic Tradition the search for heretics dates from its beginning.  The reader could profitably start her inquiry with James J. O’Donnell’s Augustine: A New Biography that provides a record of his campaigns against sects that he identified as heretical:  Donatism, Manicheanism, Pelagianism. Note that Augustine was a follower of Manicheanism for nine years. Augustine lived from 354 AD to 430 A.D. and came of age after the First Council of Nicaea that is dated at 325 AD.

Andy Divine, as a devout Catholic, is steeped in that tradition of exposing these heretical sects. He transmogrifies that Tradition via his expression of  ire and contempt for political deviants, that exist in his over heated imagination. In this episode of his blog he features “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by  James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. The allusion to ‘Critical Theory’ is glaringly obvious.  

What is truly astounding about this paragraph is the ‘Critical Theory’ as advocated by Horkheimer and Adorno and ‘Post-Modernism’ are antithetical!  

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized’ reason whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness?r=17uk7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter

This abstract, and two page preview, points to this disingenuous attempt at the amalgamation of the utterly antithetical: 

During the 1980s Jürgen Habermas and other theorists associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School emerged as key critics of postmodern theory.¹ Habermas carried out polemics against Derrida, Foucault, and postmodern theory, while his associates polemicized against Lyotard (Honneth 1985; Benhabib 1984), Foucault (Honneth 1986), Derrida (McCarthy 1989), and other postmodern theorists. The polemics have often obscured some interesting similarities, in addition to important differences, between the postmodern theories and critical theory. Both critical theory and much postmodern theory agree in important ways in their critiques of traditional philosophy and social theory. Both attack the academic division of labour which establishes fixed boundaries between regions of social reality, and both utilize supradisciplinary discourses. Both carry out sharp critiques of modernity and its forms of social domination and rationalization. Both combine social theory, philosophy, cultural critique, and political concerns in their theories and, unlike more academic theories, some versions of both attempt to orient theory toward practice, and discourse toward politics. Both critical and post-modern theory have engaged in heated polemics against each other, and have been synthesized with feminist theory.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-21718-2_7

Andy Divine is first, as always, disingenuous, not to speak of intellectually lazy, but his strategy is self-serving, presenting himself as not just a writer, but a ‘pundit’. His  polemic, against the degrading of political/intellectual standards, is exemplary of his failure to meet anything other than the imperatives of propaganda.

Queer Atheist 

Futurism is now in vogue, as a tool for Pundits to enliven their jejune commentaries, an ersatz touchstone predicated on the imagination, rather than demonstrable fact.
Read Bret Stephens’ latest New York Times essay, as a necessary proof of the popularity of this journalistic sub-genre:

‘If Donald Trump stages another come-from-behind victory in November — helped, in all likelihood, by the collapse of public order in American cities — the Republican Party will become an oddity for the Trump Organization: the only entity it owns but does not brand. Not only will Trump remain in office for another term, but the Trumpers will also dominate the G.O.P. for another generation.

Look for Tom Cotton to be the likely nominee in 2024 (with — why not? — Laura Ingraham as his running mate).
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/trump-2020.html

Mr. Luce’s iteration of that Futurism: 

It is late October and Donald Trump has a surprise for you. Unlike the traditional pre-electioIn shock — involving war or imminent terrorist attack — this revelation is about hope rather than fear. The “China virus” has been defeated thanks to the ingenuity of America’s president. The US has developed a vaccine that will be available to all citizens by the end of the year. Get online and book your jab.

It is possible Mr Trump could sway a critical slice of voters with such a declaration. The bigger danger is that he would deepen America’s mistrust of science. A recent poll found that only half of Americans definitely plan to take a coronavirus vaccine. Other polls said that between a quarter and a third of the nation would never get inoculated.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/89b90830-b301-4712-9655-49a1b5d94eee

Mr. Luce studiously avoids, in his pertinent, informative essay the part that Christian Fundamentalism has played. The Creationist Museum is a touchstone of the Anti-Science movement. But Mr. Luce also fails to factor in a very important component: the fact that Government has been guilty of the most egregious lies, to rationalize its actions. The reader need only look to the propaganda barrage, that preceded the ‘Iraq War’ , to see in detail that ‘Government’ is untrustworthy, to state it as blandly as possible. ‘Government’ had a very powerful ally in Corporate Media, which repeated these lies as if they were truth! 

Political Observer             

Headline:What Will a Post-Trump G.O.P. Look Like?

Sub-headline: And consider, what will it take for the Republican Party to begin to heal itself?

Whenever Mr. Stephens predicts the political future, its a signal, that he hasn’t got too much to say about our political present, that isn’t in need of his self-interested re-write, to reach his conception of cogency.

The first paragraph of his polemic is framed by ‘if’ , and what will happen ‘if’ Trump is re-elected, and a report on ‘ the collapse of public order in American cities ‘ in the present, as some kind of object lesson, instructive of not ‘a future’ but of ‘the future’ , and an actual ‘political present’,  that leads to an exploitable confusion: Neo-Cons specialize in fomenting exploitable chaos.      

If Donald Trump stages another come-from-behind victory in November — helped, in all likelihood, by the collapse of public order in American cities — the Republican Party will become an oddity for the Trump Organization: the only entity it owns but does not brand. Not only will Trump remain in office for another term, but the Trumpers will also dominate the G.O.P. for another generation.

Note the use of the word ‘brand’ one of the hallmarks of Neo-Liberalism’s toxic vocabulary. 

Future:

Look for Tom Cotton* to be the likely nominee in 2024 (with — why not? — Laura Ingraham as his running mate).

And if Trump loses? Then the future of the party will be up for grabs. It’s time to start thinking about who can grab it, who should, and who will.

Interpretive ambiguities in the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 could deadlock the House and the Senate. We could have two self-declared presidents on the eve of next year’s inauguration.

…

Continuing to read Stephens’ ‘Futurism’, in the political present, is to realize pessimism, at its most hyperbolic, or just call it by its name, fear-mongering.  About a future that none of us can know or predict. Mr. Stephens writes a carefully garnished History of A Future, made to measure, in the political present. As I said, Neo-Cons, specialize in fomenting exploitable chaos.

Old Socialist

*Tom Cotton is a student of Harvey Mansfield’s and protege of Bill Kristol! He and Stephens are fellow travelers!