StephenKMackSD's Blog

https://www.ft.com/content/b29f5260-529c-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf-content=199904431:703885100

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Law and order said:

Your comment has been removed, but let me reply to it: Mr. Corbyn has been re-elected how many times? His political career began in the 1970’s, so he must have been of some appreciable use to his constituency? That doesn’t quite fit with your assertion:

It is relatively easy to snipe from the sidelines – he has made a career of it – and to have your lackeys turn up at scenes of tragedy to whip up the crowd to storm council offices. It is quite another thing, however, to hold and execute the prime office of state. 

Mr. Corbyn has only increased his share of the vote in the Cameron Referendum, and the May call for a vote. May is supported in this latest voting fiasco by Northern Ireland political reactionaries. The callous Mrs. May’s will suffer a further erosion of her ‘popularity’, that may lead the Tories to seek a new leader, without the cumbersome political baggage of Mrs. May, she not only carries, but adds too with each new crisis: or even just the changeability of the political weather!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

@Jonathan Story @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment.

Social policies

The DUP has strong links to the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, the small Protestant fundamentalist church founded by Ian Paisley. The vast majority of DUP members are evangelical Christians and, on average, 65% of its representatives since its founding have been Free Presbyterians.[81] The party also has links with the Caleb Foundation, a Protestant fundamentalist pressure group.[82] Matthew d’Ancona, writing for The New York Times, has described the party as “a hard-line reactionary party, devoted … to a social conservatism that directly contradicts the modernization of the Conservative Party in the past 15 years”.[83]

The DUP has opposed LGBT rights in Northern Ireland. Party leaders—as well as many prominent party members—have condemned homosexuality, and a 2014 survey found that two-thirds of party members believe homosexuality is wrong.[84] The DUP campaigned against the legalisation of homosexual acts in Northern Ireland through the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign between 1977 and 1982,[85] and the party has vetoed the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland since 2015, making Northern Ireland the only region of the UK where same-sex marriage is not legalised.[86] Former DUP minister Jim Wells called the issue a “red line” for power-sharing talks, adding that “Peter will not marry Paul in Northern Ireland”.[87] The party attempted to introduce a “conscience clause” into law, which would let businesses refuse to provide a service if it went against their religious beliefs. This came after a Christian-owned bakery was taken to court for refusing to make a cake bearing a pro-gay marriage slogan. Opponents argued that the clause would allow discrimination against LGBT people.[88]

The party maintains that it is “pro-life” and members have campaigned strongly against any extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland, unanimously opposing a bill by Labour MP Diane Johnson to protect women in England and Wales from criminal prosecution if they ended a pregnancy using pills bought online.[89][90] They have opposed extra funding for international family planning programmes.[90]

Some DUP elected representatives have called for creationism to be taught in schools,[91][92] and for museums to include creationism in their exhibits.[93][94] In 2007 a DUP spokesman confirmed that these views were in line with party policy.[91]

In 2011, the DUP called for a debate in the House of Commons over bringing back the death penalty for some crimes.[95]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Unionist_Party

StephenKMackSD

The headline above Mr. Stephens June 9, 2017 essay is ‘The Year of Voting Recklessly’ that purports to be a comment on elections in Britain, America and France. There is the usual political chatter, none of it outside the bourgeois mainstream politics of The New York Times, an amalgam of Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism, and its usual  accompaniment of Trump Hysterics. Mr. Stephens never enlightens the reader nor informs her, his real specialty is propaganda. And in this essay his animus is directed against Jeremy Corbyn, with the aid of a Report confected by Corbyn’s New Labour opponents. The foundation of the ‘Labour Antisemitism Scandal’ was founded on an editorial cartoon depicting Israel as America’s 51st State and Ken Livingstone’s recitation of the historically inconvenient facts. All this woven into a Scandal by New Labour apologist and Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. With added help from the  Bagehot columnist at The Economist. Here is a link to The Economist and Bagehot’s notebook of April 28, 2016 titled ‘By tolerating Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s moderates are complicit in their party’s shame’

https://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2016/04/labour-disarray

A screen capture of my comments:

Permalink to my comments: http://www.economist.com/comment/3108661#comment-3108661

Jonathan Freedland’s contribution to the Anti-Corbyn hysterics, of a New Labour Blair loyalist, not to speak of Zionist Apologist:

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 

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.

You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.

What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.

But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.

To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.

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

In this section of his comment Mr. Freedland provides his propaganda strategy in a less that succinct way: Anti-Zionism is in fact equal to Anti-Semitism: the rhetorical invention of ‘Anti-Semite/Self-hating Jew’ makes any critique of Israel/Zionism prima facae equal to Anti-Semitism!

The Key Findings that Mr. Stephens links to in his essay address the very question I have just raised about the equality of meaning of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism: (A screen capture of those ‘Findings’, and a link to the report follow.)

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/home-affairs-committee/news-parliament-2015/antisemitism-report-published-16-17/

In a Parliament dominated by Tories and New Labour apologists for Israel/Zionism, what other conclusion could be reached in this utterly hostile political environment to Mr. Corbyn?

As an experienced editor of the Jerusalem Post, a propaganda arm of the State of Israel, Mr. Stephens understands the imperative that the popular press press played in the smearing of Mr. Corbyn. The ‘trail and conviction’ of Mr. Corbyn took place in that popular press followed by a Parliament Report that was dominated by Tories and New Labour Blairites.

Mr. Stephens’ search for bourgeois political respectability, his move to the New York Times demonstrates that career imperative, and his reference to the Parliament report is demonstrative of that search. While he ignores the concerted effort by respectable publications, like The Economist and The Guardian, and their ‘reporters’ to engage in a concerted smear campaign on the nascent revival of the Labour Party, in the person of Corbyn. In sum, Corbyn announced the end of  Blairism, as the dark shadow of Thatcherism, or more candidly expressed as an utter betrayal of the reason d’etre of the Labour Party. In sum Corbyn is the political end to Thatcher’s TINA and Blair’s obsequious echo.

Karl Kraus’ Ghost

The Financial Times has found the near perfect apologist for ‘Austerity’! A reading of the Wikipedia entry on Nicholas Ian Macpherson, Baron Macpherson of Earl’s Court, is impressive, to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Macpherson

In the wake of the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dogmas, in the Crash of 2008, what those Neo-Liberals offered was the political necessity of the wholesale dismantling of the Post War Welfare  State, as the means to the end of bringing back an elusive prosperity. This was part of the larger plan of the Mont Pelerin Olympians, of destroying the very fabric of the ‘West’: the shared destiny of the ‘Commonwealth’ and its replacement with the Social Dawinism of the ‘Almighty Market’, celebrated by the epigones of Austrian Economic Romanticism.

Baron Macpherson’s historically garnished rationalizations for more politically and economically sophisticated iterations, of the necessity of the ‘Strong Medicine’ of that Austerity, faces the real political end of this mirage, in the person of Jeremy Corbyn. With each twist and turn of Tory political desperation, Mr. Corbyn’s political strength grows. Real questions remain: will the Tories call for another ill-fated referendum? Another is where is Rovian political guru/technocrat Lynton Crosby?

The reader is presented, on the same page, a link to Martin Wolf’s intervention on the question of the viability of ‘Austerity’, which is his usual to and fro, but ends in this final  paragraph:

‘So should austerity be over? If we mean that it is safe to leave the fiscal deficit where it is, the answer is no. If we mean that it is possible to avoid lowering the share of public spending in GDP any further, the answer is yes. The argument that the UK has chronically underfunded public services is respectable. But higher spending means higher taxes. That additional taxation also needs to be well targeted and designed. The extra money raised needs to be well spent, too. Otherwise, the effort would be a huge waste. That would be quite senseless.’

https://www.ft.com/content/1b94c71e-5054-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/48b2f6f8-5270-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

Wolfgang Kowalsky maladroit attempt to lay the blame for the current political unrest and dissatisfaction: Populism of both Left and Right, as the product of the Prophets of French Theory, who were advocates of  a toxic ‘relativism’ expresses political desperation. Like the obedient Neo-Liberal apologist, Kowalsky needs a villain for his shoddy little melodrama, and those political/moral nihilists of that ‘French Theory’ will do just fine! Not to forget the title that reeks of a Left-Wing animus posed as a question: The Left And Science In LaLaLand?

As Francois Cusset’s 2003 book titled ‘French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States’ and its English translation in 2008, these thinkers had seen their day in France in the 1960’s. As the Ferry and Renaut book ‘French Philosophy of the Sixties : an essay on Antihumanism’ published in 1984 in France and 1990 in English helped to establish that the ‘French Theorists’ were of a past not a future. Derrida, who died in 2004, spent many years teaching in American Universities, as his intellectual stardom faded in France. But without the Master,‘Deconstruction’ and its American advocates/thinkers slowly faded as an intellectual vogue.

As Cusset’s narrative unfolds, the decline of the ‘New Criticism‘ in the American Academy, and the void this loss of status created, in fact helped set the stage for the rise of ‘French Theory’. The luster of that exotic ‘Theory’ has simply faded over time! But its ghost makes a perfect stand-in for the actual culprit of the Rise of Populism, which is the Collapsed Utopianism Of the Neo-Liberal Mirage. That began its political ascent with the rise of Thatcher/Reagan and is now in a protracted state of slow-motion collapse. Intellectual honesty won’t meet the needs of the Neo-Liberal apologist, so myth-making is the argumentative imperative!

Eugène Drieu La Rochelle

https://www.socialeurope.eu/2017/06/left-science-lalaland/

Are the Jupitarian Politics of President Macron about to hit a shoal of his own making? Protectionism in the name of National Security. The mantra of the EU Cartel has always been ‘Free Trade’ but what to do with those wiley Capitalist Chinese? who seem better at the game than any Westerner.

President Macron’s Neo-Liberalism Lite, in this instance, deploys the notion of National Security as a motive for his very specific proposal. Do Western European states have an obligation to their populations to protect them from potentially hostile takeovers, of their key industries, by a potential hostile State or State Actors? The question, in this case, partakes of two unsavory aspects: the recrudescence of ‘Yellow Peril’ as motive for action, in sum a racist idea. And the very real threat that this State, or its Actors, may act against the best interests of the State in which this industry resides, and the states where it subsidiaries may be?

Another question arises: does a Capitalism, governed by the Economic Dawinism of the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Trinity, have any professed civic/political obligation except profit?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/73aadc3a-5118-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The first part of this paragraph is predicated upon the fiction that the rise of Thatcher/Reagan set two Western Economies on the right track : away from the Post War Welfare State, toward a Utopia predicated upon the the Free Market Myth and its Trinity Hayek/Mises/Friedman.

During the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the early 1980s, the two largest English-speaking democracies rebooted their growth machines and put paid to fears of enduring malaise. Both were right to chafe at the price controls and worker unrest of the 1970s. Yet they over-corrected.

The Financial Collapse of 2008 puts this in the category of self-apologetical fiction, that demonstrates that Neo-Liberalism was not ‘The Royal Road to Prosperity’ but ‘The Road to the Poorhouse’ for the 99%. Mr. Luce is a Corporatist, as if the regular reader of his essays needs a reminder!

In the second part of this paragraph is devoted to a brief cautionary tale: those canny French Lawyers and Financiers moved to ‘The Promise Land of The Free Market’ , only to inflate London Real Estate out of the purchasing range of  those Virtuous British Lawyers and Financiers!

Hundreds of thousands of French lawyers and financiers may have moved to London in the last generation. Many more British have been priced out of their own capital city.

The whole of Mr. Luce’s essay has about it the aura of  a rickety Fable, hastily written against a fast approaching deadline.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/58bf0c00-5052-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The reader just has to laugh at the assertions that M. Macron makes in the first paragraph of  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany essay!

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to open up Louis XIV’s palace in Versailles for Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the end of May made perfect sense for the newly elected French leader who once defined his future presidential style as “Jupiterian”.

Even if En Marche wins big in the coming election, the more the French people hear and see the hubris , no other word describes the hauteur of M. Macron, the less likely they are to support the Neo-Liberal Reform he has to offer. Allied to ‘More Europe’ meaning a closer alliance with the Merkel/Schäuble pretenders to an economic virtue that is belied by their history in the 20th Century. 

The hauteur  of M. Macron is on full display in the penultimate paragraph of  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany’s essay:

Even though his “Jupiterian” style needs perfecting (he was caught on camera making a distasteful joke about Comoran migrants recently), and even though it highlights contempt for the press, Mr Macron does get it. The French do not want a “normal” president, Mr Macron told weekly magazine Challenges in October. “On the contrary, such a concept destabilises them, it makes them feel insecure.” Leaders ought to refuse to be dictated by the news and they should have an ability “to enlighten, to know, to spell out a meaning and a direction anchored in French history”, he added.

According to M. Macron the French don’t want a President they want a paterfamilias, a concept not from The Sun King, but from Roman antiquity: a Patriarch who controlled the lives of every person in his household! Not former Vichyite turned Neo-Liberal Mitterrand, nor the bully boy Sarkozy, but de Gaulle to the second power. Welcome to President  Macron! and let the Street Demonstrations and political unrest begin, in earnest!

Committed Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/17f75282-4f61-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

Mr. Ganesh begins his latest essay with the sentence:

Emmanuel Macron can now expect control of the French parliament to go with the presidency he clinched last month.

Mr. Ganesh is too practiced, too glib an apologist for the benighted twins of British Politics, the Tories and New Labour, to make such a preposterous argument that Macron ‘clinched’ the French presidency. In America that descriptor has a decisive connotation, it does not apply to the Macron win. (Although it may or might apply to En Marche in the coming vote.) The presidential election was about the choice of ‘the lesser of two evils’, spoiled ballots and general dismay at the choice offered. The French election didn’t mirror the dismal American electoral choice of Clinton vs Trump, but was representative of the the declining standards of both elections, and the candidates offered in ‘Western Democracies’. A subject that Mr. Ganesh will never address!

The next paragraph is informative but not in the way its author intends:

Britain is not merely losing its head, then, but is doing so as the nations against which it measures itself find theirs. It is succumbing to relative, not just absolute, fiasco, “led” by a prime minister who is drained of all confidence after a botched election, governing at the mercy of 10 Democratic Unionist MPs from Northern Ireland, chased down by a rampant Labour opposition, one week out from talks to exit the EU.

Imagine that Mr. Ganesh is fulminating against the possible future Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn, with just a bit of deft editing this line of argument could apply to his defeat in a coming election. The argument is that Mrs. May needs to go, and go post-haste! Britain needs a strong leader in the Brexit negotiations.

What is left for Mr. Ganesh is recrimination and political anguish, in which he plays a small part:

A discredited prime minister (or an unelected new one) kept going by an ultra-conservative minority party, unable to do much other than Brexit: Labour could not design a more provocative spectacle, one more likely to irk the young, the liberal, the urban.

Mr. Ganesh is featured, in this paragraph, as ‘the young, the liberal, the urban’ . Mr. Ganesh is neither young nor liberal, except in the definitional terms of  Blairite New Labour. ‘Tory Hipster’ is a more appropriate epithet for Mr. Ganesh.

Mr. Ganesh then calls for Mrs. May to make the magnanimous political gesture of  announcing that she will leave at an appointed date:

If Mrs May were to say that she will leave by the time of the Conservative party conference in October, some of the rancour against her would ease. The DUP deal would be understood as a means of giving the country a government through some difficult weeks and not as a deeper compromise by the Tories.

Mr. Ganesh’s final thought is not about a misplaced Tory nostalgia for the 1970’s but about their nostalgia for the decisive leadership of Mrs. Thatcher.

The Tories must at least attempt a more lasting fix. A nation with a deficit to clear and a momentous Europe policy to shape needs one. And it is a strange day when Tories look to the 1970s as a time to recapture.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/19ad8aa4-4f4f-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

The political present and the immediate future look bleak for the Mrs. May, her only allies being those Northern Ireland political romantics, who think they can turn back time, and their belief in the benighted erosions that rule the modern world. Mrs. May’s backward looking politics is founded first on bourgeois respectable politics, that masks the ugly Oakshottian dimension of the loathing of The Political/Moral Other as utterly unworthy. Mr. Rachman chooses to ignore this part of the present reality and focuses on the one bright light in the political present: Macron and his En Marche.

We now have strong and stable leadership — but in France, not Britain. Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, will enter the Brexit negotiations gravely weakened after the UK general election. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, is poised to emerge from legislative elections with the huge parliamentary majority that Mrs May once dreamt of.

‘We now have strong and stable leadership — but in France, not Britain.‘: now substitute ‘we now have stable Neo-Liberal leadership’ in the above sentence and Mr. Rachman’s assertion would be a better reflection of his actual loyalties. Although the ‘Speed and Shock’ of Fillon would be Rachman’s actual choice, but he will settle for the Neo-Liberalism Lite of the Reformer, or is that Political Redeemer?

Those ‘legislative elections’ are about to cement the political victory of En Marche, at least according to The Financial Times. The Political Reform of Macron cannot happen without  legislative power. But what of the Streets? Those pesky ‘Leftists’ will fight Macron’s ‘Reforms’ with ferocity, if the political past is an indicator of the future.

What follows is a long and unsurprising apologetic for the EU comes this pronouncement:

Mr Macron needs to show French voters that leaving the EU will bring only pain. If, at the same time, he can rebuild the Franco-German partnership at the heart of the EU, he might be able to restore the popularity of the European project in France.

But the question remains will the Merkel/Schäuble alliance make way for a ‘real partner’ whose faith is invested in ‘more Europe’ : in a revitalized EU without Britain? Will Macron’s well deserved reputation as a personal and political opportunist eventually sour, a now, merely potential French power sharing  with the Merkel/Schäuble alliance? On the question of Macron’s opportunism, Simon Kuper provides valuable insights that answers some of the pressing questions:

https://www.ft.com/content/464df34e-3a48-11e7-ac89-b01cc67cfeec

Mr. Rachman’s penultimate paragraph is instructive as to his near trivialization of the possibility of a lasting French/German alliance that references  a book ‘That Sweet Enemy’:

Mr Macron is undoubtedly an internationalist. But he is also a president of France and therefore heir to an ancient rivalry with Britain, documented by Robert and Isabelle Tombs (an Anglo-French academic couple), in their 2006 book, That Sweet Enemy. As the Tombs tell it, the histories of both France and Britain have been profoundly influenced by their “love-hate relationship”

I will reference an comment by historian J.G.A. Pocock published in  The London Review of Books that addresses the actual nature of the EU:

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/1eae532c-4f49-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The mildly curious reader need only read your own description of  Mr. Palmer’s associations to realize exactly who he is in terms of the European Union:

Left-Wing Social Democrat