StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: The surprising rebound of Bernie Sanders

Sub-headline: The senator could harm Elizabeth Warren’s chances of grabbing the Democratic nomination

More of the same horse-race coverage of the debate from Mr. Luce, except for some back handed and maladroitly handled comments aimed at Anti-Capitalist Sanders:

…

The Washington Post revealed that Mr Sanders had also picked up the endorsement of the Democratic party’s youngest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If the 30-year-old Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s contrasting youth does not inject energy into the senator from Vermont’s campaign, the grassroots popularity of the congresswoman from New York will surely help.

…

There doesn’t seem to be a paucity of ‘energy’ in Sanders campaign , except for  his period of recuperation from his heart attack, Mr. Luce won’t let go of this, as the next paragraph demonstrates. Luce ought to know that Eisenhower had a massive heart attack in 1955, and went on to win the 1956 election. Some of us were alive in those years, and recall it with no prompting!  The Anti-Capitalist candidate needs to be stopped, and the operatives of the Corporate Press, Mr. Luce being one, are here to perform that  task!

…

The left field is less crowded. But the dynamics are similar. It is very hard to imagine that Mr Sanders could become the Democratic nominee. The odds are stacked against elderly socialist heart patients. But he is strong enough to make life difficult for Ms Warren. Having come close to depriving Hillary Clinton of the nomination in 2016, and wounding her in the process, Mr Sanders is threatening to make Ms Warren’s journey just as hard.

The real high point of the evening was Tulsi Gabbard calling out both CNN and The New York Times:

Headline: Tulsi Gabbard Calls Out CNN And New York Times At Debate Hosted By CNN And New York Times       

During the fourth Democratic debate on Tuesday night, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii attacked both CNN and the New York Times, calling them “completely despicable” for how they have covered her and other veterans.

Gabbard was initially discussing foreign policy and how the mainstream media praised the dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. She then pivoted, calling out mainstream media outlets that often attack her for holding isolationist views.

New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war. Just two days ago the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.

…

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/15/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-cnn-and-new-york-times-at-debate-hosted-by-cnn-and-new-york-times/

Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he is one of its many authors, and ex-temporizers on its themes. Warren is the anointed candidate, who has professed her Capitalist Faith and has paid her obedience to the Zionist State. And above all to the Clinton Coterie which holds the levers of power in the party. The first Super Tuesday will be March 3, 2020.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/6dbc4dbc-ef73-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195

Niall Ferguson’s column, of October 13, 2019, offered some rather cynical, not to speak of self-congratulatory speculations on the Warren candidacy, at the good grey Times:

Headline: Elizabeth Warren: the worse, the better for Donald Trump’s female foe

Sub-headline: The Massachusetts senator could win in 2020 if she surges and the economy stutters

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/elizabeth-warren-the-worse-the-better-for-donald-trumps-female-foe-c8k8htwt3

Lauren Fedor of The Financial Times and Mr. Ferguson rely on the RealClearPoltics polling data. But predictably for Corporate Media, Sanders is simply mentioned in Fedor’s essay as raising $25.3m to Warrens $24.6m: yet Warren is considered ‘the front runner’ via polling data. Ferguson however ignores the money raised by Sanders, as he hits full rhetorical gallop, from his aerie at the Hoover Institution.

Note too that  ‘Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who was press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign’ and ‘Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who served as deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012’ are integral parts of  The Democratic Party i.e. New Democratic loyalist, as is ‘Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic strategist’ . 

After Warren’s profession of faith in Capitalist Theology, and Sanders denial of any such faith , the Corporate Media  has now anointed a candidate that the Party can rally around, long before the first primary. That offers more of the same Neo-Liberalism, in the drag of ‘Progressivism’! Again, Sanders is rendered insignificant, by a media that simply ignores him, not just hoping he will go away, but by rendering him invisible. Or just call it Preemptive Stalinist Erasure?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/b6f4e026-eba3-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061

Headline: The EU needs to be a power project

Sub-headline: The emerging world order will increasingly be The emerging world order will increasingly be shaped by might, rather than law

The advocate/apologist for The Post-War Liberal Order, Mr. Rachman, and its rhetorical cognates, shares, not only with Guy Verhofstadt, but with incoming foreign affairs chief  of the EU Josep Borrell, as reported by Yahoo News, via The Telegraph newspaper, but signals a bellicosity, usually reserved for the context of the nation state, now writ large for the setting of the European Super State.

Headline: Incoming EU foreign affairs chief declares Brussels needs more troops and must be ready to intervene

https://news.yahoo.com/incoming-eu-foreign-affairs-chief-153231029.html?soc_src=community&soc_trk=tw

In a bellicosity, that reflects/refracts a belief in the usable myth of  Russian revanchism, forgetting the promises made to Gorbachev:  that finds the reader, with a verifiable historical memory within the  power project advocated by Mr. Rachman, that is familiar political territory: the signatories to the Statement of Principals of the American Project for a New American Century of 1997. Look at the signatories who were the architects of ‘The War on Terror’!

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld , Paul Wolfowitz

http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/pfpc/PNAC—statement%20of%20principles.pdf

The appetite for war is a danger, that now threatens the coal and steel cartel of Monnet, that metastasized into a Super State.  Whose members rarely meet the standards set by its own Eurocrats. Add a standing army to the list of burdens that this state faces, that is if NATO will willingly surrender its claim as the protector of Europe? The American Conservatives will, perhaps, find this ‘defense independence’ an agreeable evolution?  The ‘Liberals’ , the New Democrats and their  R2P fellow travelers, will find the loss of their European purchase, vexing, if not a betrayal of their raison d’etre?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/ff92106c-e8e0-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061

Instead of reading full time political hysteric Andy Divine on the Trump Impeachment, under this headline and sub-headline:

The first paragraph defines to political territory of Andy’s comment:

Remember that sultry July day during the 2016 campaign when Donald Trump went in front of the television cameras and asked the Russian government to intervene in the looming presidential election on his behalf? “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails [by Hillary Clinton] that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” We now know, thanks to the Mueller report, that Moscow responded by hacking Hillary Clinton’s server that very day. We also know that the Mueller report itself concluded, after exhaustive examination, that there was no prosecutable evidence of a “conspiracy” between Trump and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Yet we saw one in broad daylight.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/andrew-sullivan-trump-wants-to-be-impeached-so-do-it-now.html

Read the far more literate ,while still being well within the Conservative coterie, Niall Ferguson, at the good grey Sunday Times, on another pressing topic the Rise of China. Note that China became the sweatshop of choice of Western computer and cellphone manufacturers. In sum, Capitalists underwrote the rise of the Chinese, that is now the enemy of the Western Liberal Tradition!

What defines Mr. Ferguson as the readable, even more ‘clubbable’ in the parlance favored by Isaiah Berlin, and his yearning to be a literary critic, or at the least to frame his propaganda in more highfalutin terms, that the rhetorically flatfooted Andy. In which he employs- Mr. Ferguson speaks for himself:

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But maybe a more interesting answer can be found in Liu Cixin’s astonishing 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, which I read for the first time last week. The “problem” of the title is introduced to the reader — and to the nanotechnology scientist Wang Miao, one of the central characters — as a virtual reality game set in a strange, distant world with three suns rather than the familiar one. The mutually perturbing gravitational attractions of the three suns prevent this planet from settling into a predictable orbit with regular days, nights and seasons. It has occasional “stable eras”, during which civilisation can advance, but with minimal warning these give way to “chaotic eras” of intense heat or cold that render the planet uninhabitable.

…

Working backward look to Mr. Ferguson’s September 22, 2019 essay that was framed by both Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ as the singular distopian novel.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/science-fiction-has-become-dystopian-fact-mtbc5ss9x

His essay of September 8 2019 featured :

Friedrich Schiller, Robert Burns, James Hogg among others

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-a-bad-week-when-bojos-bro-jo-goes-dc7t79dgv

From September 1, 2019 he quotes from ‘Beyond the Fringe’

The challenge of millenarianism — as Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore pointed out in my favourite sketch from Beyond the Fringe — is what to do when the end of the world fails to happen.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/adapt-and-well-defy-greta-thunbergs-expectations-zccbnxskw

In his August 25 2019 essay he quotes from ‘Rebel without a Cause’

‘Hey, Toreador! . . . We head for the edge, and the first man who jumps is a chicken. All right?” In Rebel without a Cause, Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) play the most famous game of chicken in Hollywood history, driving their jalopies at full speed towards a Californian cliff. At the last minute, Jim jumps. Buzz, his sleeve caught on the door handle, plunges to his death.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from-trumps-trade-wars-to-brazils-fires-the-world-is-on-the-brink-nvq6ds90w

His essay of August 11 2019, ‘Seven Days in May’, both the book of Charles W Bailey and Fletcher Knebel, first published in 1962, and Movie of 1964.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-days-in-august-tell-us-were-not-rome-cmfz29cf7

At the least, Ferguson offers a more sophisticated frame for Conservative propagandizing, in distinction to Andy Divine’s – what to call it ? but his usual hysterical screech about a politician that he helped to birth, Trump. Respectable bourgeois capitalism, and its politicians, have enabled both Trump’s populism and its European variants,and  the rise of the dynamic economic engine of China.

Political Cynic

Mr. Luce repeats ‘The Party Line’ on the Trump impeachment. The ‘as if ‘ that Mr. Luce operates under is that his readers don’t go elsewhere for ‘news’ and information.

On the vexing question of the change of the rules governing whisteblowers, see this from The Federalist, which has escaped Luce’s attention, and or does not meet with his ideological requirements?

Headline: Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Sub-headline:Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

Or this from zerohedgefund.com:

Headline:“I Am With Mueller”: Newly Released Rosenstein Emails Reveal Crusade To Investigate Trump

“I am with Mueller. He shares my views. Duty Calls.  Sometimes the moment chooses us.” –Rod Rosenstein, one day before Mueller was appointed as special counsel

New emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveal the details surrounding communications between Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the former FBI Director’s appointment as special counsel in the Russia probe. Mueller would go on to assemble a team comprising “13 Angry Democrats” as Trump called them, due to their obvious animus towards the president.

…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-am-mueller-newly-released-rosenstein-emails-reveal-crusade-stop-trump

Or this from 2014 from nakedcapitalism.com:

Headline: From 2014: R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/from-2014-r-hunter-biden-should-declare-who-really-owns-his-new-ukrainian-employer-burisma-holdings.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Add to the above:

Headline: The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’: The Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy

Sub-headline: The impeachment offensive against Donald Trump is another symptom of a partisan disease that ignores an even greater malignancy, writes Joe Lauria.

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.

But what’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States.

We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.

That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government.

As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

…

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/26/what-isnt-mentioned-about-the-trump-ukraine-scandal-the-routine-corruption-of-us-foreign-policy/

There is in this collection ample clues that there is a concerted effort to impeach Trump from within, by branches of the American National Security State: the political alliance between  Clapper/Brennan/Clinton whose Russiagate collapsed, has now been replaced by another dull-witted ruse, confected by the same culprits. With the added bonus that the Ukraine Scandal will render Biden’s candidacy null, making way for Hillary Clone Warren.

Mr. Luce repeats the carefully laundered Party Line, reminding this American reader of Arlen Specter’s ‘Single Bullet Theory’ that turned the Law of Physics into an irrelevance, as the in-order-too of maintaining the lie that Oswald was the ‘Lone Assassin’ ! And the CIA’s use of ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ as the enemy of State Sponsored Truth. While the Church Committee in the 70’s found that there was more than one assassin.

On the question of the deference that the Mueller Investigation paid to the CrowdStrike ‘investigation’ of the Clinton servers and computers constitutes incompetence, or the careful exercise of ideological conformity.

The political present, in regards to the Trump impeachment, and its many political tributaries is highly complex, indeed its is a thicket of political motives, machinations not to mention mendacity: I offer some snapshots of and commentary about this political present.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/ef0e41f2-e58e-11e9-b112-9624ec9edc59

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JOHN KIRIAKOU: What was this CIA Officer Thinking?

Mr. Rachman having been born in 1963 has no actual memory of Malcolm X, yet some of his readers do possess that memory. Could the fact that Rachman spent part of his childhood in apartheid South Africa have any bearing on his mention of Malcolm X? As a touchstone of ‘ends justify means’ mentality, that plays a part in his latest essay? The political ghost of Malcolm X is strong political medicine, of a kind!

Once you have asserted that the end justifies the means, then any tactic is logically permissible. It is telling that “by any means necessary” was a slogan originally adopted politically by Malcolm X, the African-American activist of the 1960s, who was frustrated by the non-violent methods of the civil rights movement.

Mr. Rachman’s latest polemic in favor of ‘Liberalism’ and against the ‘Populist Menace’, and  its  two villains Trump and Johnson – Mr. Rachman hasn’t read Liberalism, A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo published by Verso? Populism is a long American Tradition: William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt (Bull Moose) , Huey Long, Father Coughlin , Benjamin Spock, George Wallace, Ross Perot.

In his search for villains Mr. Rachman ignores the fact that Liberalism capitulated to Neo-Liberalism long ago: New Labour and the New Democrats! These two political hybrids were the midwives of Trump and Johnson!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/a8cc15d8-e35a-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc

@-jswift @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment. “State of the Union” is one of Capra’s better movies, as opposed to his usual American Kitsch. Its one of my favorites, its political realism is one of its charms, seeing Hepburn playing Hepburn is always like viewing a one of a kind personality in action- she is fascinating to watch! She thinks so too! She’s an America Yankee Aristocrat. But a young Angela Lansbury, as the conniving political adviser, seducer, to Spencer Tracy almost steals the show! Kudos for using  “State” to frame your insightful, not to speak of  devastating comment.

‘Incessant rants about populism just reveal an unlimited ignorance of history.’ 

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

Some sobering statistics put the Democratic Party  ‘horse race ‘ , as presented by Mr. Luce,  for its presidential nominee into perspective (As of September 27, 2019) :

129 days until the first Democratic Primary

209 days until the Democratic Convention

402 days before Election Day 2020

The first paragraph of Mr. Luce’s latest installment of his ‘horse race’ handicapping is no surprise:

It was coincidence that Elizabeth Warren took the lead in the Democratic presidential race on the first day of the Donald Trump impeachment process. It was nevertheless a poetic one. Ms Warren is running against a “rigged system” that serves the wealthy elites. She warns that the global marriage of “authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism” is pushing America down the slippery slope to kleptocracy. The fact Mr Trump could be impeached for exactly what Ms Warren is running against is something of a windfall. It is pure bonus that Ms Warren’s chief rival, Joe Biden, is also caught in the cross fire.

Like the good corporate journalist Luce  then recites the latest polling data about Biden: ‘campaign is faltering badly.’ Biden’s campaign is collapsing because he is like Reagan, when he went off script, a telling example of political non compos mentis! That Biden obtained a  a ‘job‘ for son Hunter was a known fact in 2014:

Headline: Joe Biden’s son gets job with major Ukrainian natural gas company

May 13, 2014

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/joe-bidens-son-gets-job-with-major-ukrainian-natural-gas-company

Polls have proven, in the past, to be not just unreliable, but full of holes. But the corporatists  continue to rely on them to give weight to their Political Metaphysics, as an act of prescience that won’t stand against the unpredictability, the ineluctable march of time. These political interventions by pundits have a very short shelf life – they rely on the fact that its readers live in The United States of Amnesia, but that same old party dress just looks shopworn after so many outings!

Mr. Luce proves that Warren, in her New Democratic guise, is not the same Warren that shamed the Bankers to their faces. Although she trades upon the remembrance of that discarded self ,in the political recollection of her supporters. Warren has made alliance with the very powerful Clinton coterie that controls the party. But not to the extent that it can control the Sanders Insurgency.

The problematic avoided by the corporatist ‘horse race’ view of the political is that its practitioners fail to engage with the vexing, not to speak of unmanageable questions of  values!  As related to policies of the Sanders campaign, based upon  the values of Left-Wing Social Democracy: a renewal of the New Deal,  that is antithetical to the Neo-Liberalism of the Clinton coterie, and its newest recruit Warren.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/033ae3d6-e028-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc

Mr. Rachman rightly identifies Life and Fate as a great novel , which he then scavenges , in the most cursory way, as somehow relevant to the present Age of Trump, and various  Populist Bad Actors .

Of inestimable value, that provides a record of  Grossman’s  reporting, published and unpublished , from various fronts of World War II, that was the raw material for his novel, is A Writer at War edited and translated by Antony Beevor and  Luba Vinogradova. This book offers telling insights to both the writer’s life, and the political obstacles he faced. Chapter 24 titled ‘Treblinka July 1944’ is very hard to read, it must have been angering, anguished and sorrowful to write for Grossman! 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/72422/a-writer-at-war-by-vasily-grossman-edited-and-translated-by-antony-beevor-and-luba-vinogradova/9780307275332/

Mr. Rachman identifies the real demon of the present ‘Identity Politics’ a term of derision used in retrograde defense of the utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Experiment: that proved to be, not just a misstep, but a world historical  catastrophe. That birthed the Populist Menace, that Rachman attempts to slay, with his use of a great novel as his weapon of choice, to wage bourgeois political holy war.

That is because political ideas that emphasise group identity, rather than individual rights, are back in fashion — as both the nationalist right and the progressive left slide towards identity politics.

Mr. Rachman has missed Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen, which posits the idea/reality that ‘identity’ is a field, in which the person  draws from in terms of appropriate responses to the sifting contexts of life.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/558/55882/identity-and-violence/9780141027807.html

In an American context, on the vexing question of ‘Identity Politics’ look to Jesse Jackson’s ‘Rainbow Coalition’ and  the modern Democratic and Republican Parties that are both collections of diverse ‘identity groups’ who unite to achieve agreed upon political ends.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/3cbf919e-ddd8-11e9-b112-9624ec9edc59

______________________________________________________________

My first reply @WMD

Am anxious to read the sourcing for your introduction of Berlin into the conversation? I read the novel ‘Life and Fate’ and ‘A Writer at War’, but perhaps not having read the new biography of Grossman, ‘Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century’ by Alexandra Popoff ,leaves me in a position of ignorance?

StephenKMackSD

 

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My second reply to @WMD

Thank you for your comment in reply to mine.

‘My introduction was very simply about the closeness of the defining ideas of the Grossman books to the philosophical ideas propounded by Berlin, helped by the fact that they were almost direct contemporaries, although I believe Grossman’s works were, for obvious reasons, unknown to Berlin.’

One could also make the same observation about the Grossman’s lack of knowledge of Berlin’s writings. Yet Berlin made a trip to USSR and wrote a celebrated essay about his visit to Akhmatova. Although, were these Berlin essay available in samizdat ? remains an interesting conjecture.

Perhaps you could have more effectively begun your comment with the revelatory quote from ‘Life and Fate’ rather that with the highfalutin rhetorical frame offered by Berlin. Or was that the point of your intervention?

Let me offer this caveat to your comment : should the reader take the evidence offered by David Caute in his ‘Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic’  as demonstrative of Berlin’s exercise of sub rosa defamation, not to speak of black-balling of a fellow scholar. This a demonstration of Berlin’s personal and civic commitment to the ‘Liberal Value’ of ‘…men and women declared enemies of the great and bright idea of public good.’ ?

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

 

______________________________________________________________

Mt third reply to @WMD

The point of my comments is/was first that Rachman engaged in the use of a highfalutin rhetorical frame, as not just a rickety frame for ‘Liberal Apologetics’ , but as the weapon of choice, by employing ‘Life and Fate’ as a touchstone of that defense. Which you embroidered upon, with the help of Berlin.

‘Academic back-biting’ does not begin to describe Berlin’s defamation and black-balling of Isaac Deutscher. Here is an insightful, revelatory review of Caute’s book from Los Angeles Review of Books of August  10, 2013:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-hedgehog-and-the-hedgehog-isaiah-berlin-and-isaac-deutscher/

Given that Herzen was Berlin’s paradigmatic hero-yet he was nothing like him, but just an academic politician defaming Deutscher as a coward with power would! See also Kai Bird’s ‘The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms’ for the insights offered on Berlin’s political romance with the utterly notorious Bundy Bros.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Color-of-Truth/Kai-Bird/9780684856445

My ‘animus’ toward Berlin, if it be that,  is founded, not in the irrational, but in the facts about how he conducted himself, in the secret confine of the Academy, if ‘animus’ be defined as the search for who Berlin was, and how he conducted himself outside of public view!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

 

 

Headline: Democrats in a fever over universal healthcare pledges

Sub-headline: ‘Medicare for All’ proposal risks alienating moderates ahead of 2020 election

The ramble through the thickets of the political schizophrenia, that describes the New Democrats, on the long overdue Medicare for all question: the reception here at the Financial Times, for even the notion of Universal Health Care, betrays the core religion of the editors and writers of the collapsed Free Marketism. The Market, and its profit motive, as being the sine qua non of the human endeavor, has been the proven to be utterly bankrupt. The editors and writes of this publication never let the empirical interfere with the imperative of self-apologetic propaganda.

But the patience of the reader is rewarded with the comments of Mark Bennett:

Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, called Medicare for All an “incredibly toxic . . . political killer” that would alienate many voters not only in the Democratic primaries, but also in competitive congressional districts in next year’s general election, where many voters are likely to prefer to keep their private insurance.

“The minute you start poking holes in Medicare for all, support collapses,” he said.

The ‘Third Way’ is subject of a revelatory Slate essay of July 25, 2018 by Osita Nwanevu. The last paragraph of this essay is instructive of where the Neo-Liberals, who believe in Schlesinger’s ‘Vital Center’ will lead the New Democrats.

Headline: Centrism Is Dead

Sub-headline:The left has already won the debate over which ideas should animate the Democratic Party.

…

The question of what direction the Democratic Party should go in as a matter of political strategy is, of course, different from the question of what proposals the party should advance as a matter of policy. Even if one believes that moderation is a safer path to victory for the party than a drive leftward, centrist policy ideas are very obviously inadequate to the task of actually solving many of the largest challenges facing American society and the world this century. There is no moderate, centrist framework for uprooting and transforming the energy economy in the amount of time that science tells us we must to address climate change, no easy and potentially bipartisan way to close the racial wealth gap. Between now and 2020, the Democratic Party is going to have to decide whether it is more quixotic and unserious to back left-wing candidates and policy minds who actually speak as though they understand the scale of these and other problems, or a cadre of old hands who believe, religiously, that there is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by the policy approach Democrats have taken for more than a quarter century. Centrists may well hold on and win that battle for the soul of the party, but they’ve already lost the plot

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/third-ways-centrism-is-dead-the-left-has-already-won-the-debate-over-the-democratic-party.html

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/3e5bcc84-d964-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17

When reliable Inquisitor Andy Divine isn’t making holy war against Middlebury College, he likes to keep busy. See this valuable essay from The National Review by Andrew Stutterford of March 11, 2017, that takes Andy’s New York Magazine essay on the Charles Murray/Middlebury controversy.  Note that Andy, as editor of The New Republic, published on October 31, 1994, this essay by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein titled Race, Genes and I.Q. — An Apologia, The case for conservative multiculturalism, so his political investment in Murray is of long standing.

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

Andy’s cultivated ignorance of American institutional, academic racism, brazenly expressed by his publication of this excerpt, that caused an open rebellion of the staff writers of this magazine, remains beyond the ken of this scribbler! Mr. Stutterford offers an ally to Andy in William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar ‘ form writing more explicitly from the left’ provides some Conservative perspective?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/middlebury-and-heretic/

Unmentioned is the hysterical intervention of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ that was published, in its essay form, in The Atlantic of September 2015:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Recall that old saw ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop’? I know that I must have heard this many times in Sunday School, at Youth Night and Vacation Bible School! Andy’s latest encyclical provides clear evidence that Andy, like the good Catholic, is a dedicated even hysterical exponent of the continuing project of Inquisition.

A long descriptive passage of the University of Chicago Press web site provides some needed context for Andy’s mania,  with its introduction to Karen Sullivan’s ‘The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors‘:

There have been numerous studies in recent decades of the medieval inquisitions, most emphasizing larger social and political circumstances and neglecting the role of the inquisitors themselves. In this volume, Karen Sullivan sheds much-needed light on these individuals and reveals that they had choices—both the choice of whether to play a part in the orthodox repression of heresy and, more frequently, the choice of whether to approach heretics with zeal or with charity.

In successive chapters on key figures in the Middle Ages—Bernard of Clairvaux, Dominic Guzmán, Conrad of Marburg, Peter of Verona, Bernard Gui, Bernard Délicieux, and Nicholas Eymerich—Sullivan shows that it is possible to discern each inquisitor making personal, moral choices as to what course of action he would take. All medieval clerics recognized that the church should first attempt to correct heretics through repeated admonitions and that, if these admonitions failed, it should then move toward excluding them from society. Yet more charitable clerics preferred to wait for conversion, while zealous clerics preferred not to delay too long before sending heretics to the stake. By considering not the external prosecution of heretics during the Middles Ages, but the internal motivations of the preachers and inquisitors who pursued them, as represented in their writings and in those of their peers, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors explores how it is that the most idealistic of purposes can lead to the justification of such dark ends.

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo10715485.html

Unlike some of these men , Andy doesn’t believe or practice All medieval clerics recognized that the church should first attempt to correct heretics through repeated admonitions… his first resort is to engage in an unremitting public shaming of those deviationists. It’s the rhetorical formula of choice for Andy, and his vilification of his identified apostates, that seek to find new ways of conceiving, thinking, behaving toward other persons, in and out of their care, both personal and civic: Andy can’t let go of his Patriarchal Attitudes, to use Eva Figes book title as descriptor.That we all share a common civic/political destiny is again beyond Andy’s ken!

And is the appearance of those dreaded ‘French Philosophers’ a surprise? Those evil ‘Marxist Post-Modernists’ the reliable straw-men of New World Intellectual Hick Jordan Peterson. The political ghosts of these thinkers/writers are a fabled repository of mendacious error. These reliable bad actors, a function of New World intellectual xenophobes!

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

Andy is given to verbosity, I have skipped over much of his rambling, as just that. Let me recommend three books on French Philosophy and French Theory:

Old Socialist