StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Sikorski has a penchant for declaring nations indispensable:

‘At the depth of the European sovereign debt crisis in November 2011 Sikorski went to Berlin to “beg for German action”, in commentator Barry Wood’s later words. Europe, Wood paraphrased, stood at a precipice. “The greatest threat to Poland,” Sikorski said per Wood, came not from Russia, but from “a collapse of the euro zone,” of which Poland was not then yet a member. Sikorski labelled Germany as Europe’s “indispensable nation” and said it must lead in saving the euro.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rados%C5%82aw_Sikorski

Mr. Sikorski offers this example of his argument: of his advocacy of Britain as having that status of indispensability:

Fortunately, there is an area where the UK could shine, where the EU clearly needs British leadership and Britain is uniquely qualified to provide it — namely, foreign policy. Not so long ago a Briton, Catherine Ashton, the former EU foreign policy chief, created Europe’s diplomatic service, ordered a military strike on Somali pirates, initiated talks with Iran and mediated between Serbia and Kosovo.

But then in the very next sentence comes this compellingyet contradictory argument about political chaos in neighboring states :

‘Since then, neighbouring countries have collapsed into chaos — Libya and Syria in the south, Ukraine in the east.’

British indispensability works only in the countries which are direct beneficiaries of British leadership? Stabilizing the neighborhood was not accomplished in Libya,Syria or Ukraine.  The next sentence asserts that British leadership will be vital to stabilizing the EU’s neighborhood.

The EU needs the professionalism of British diplomats and the global outlook of its elites. The kind of EU worth belonging to needs to be able to secure its external borders and stabilise its neighbourhood.

One wonders at Mr. Sikorski’s muddled argument, as perhaps a clumsy attempt to curry  favor with the British, but the why of it is confusing- but if one thinks strategically, as a politician pondering his return to power; then the British indispensability gambit is wholly understandable, even admirable in a Machiavellian sense, of the Prince not of The Discourses.

All is revealed in the last paragraph, as Mr. Sikorski takes his cue from the most canny of emigre courtiers Isaiah Berlin:

Preventing the continent of Europe from uniting to the exclusion of Britain was a principle of British foreign policy for half a millennium. Wars were fought over it. The world would gasp in disbelief if the British now voluntarily excluded themselves, and this over social benefits for people who do not want them. Having lost an empire, the British have been at a loss for a new role. There is another nascent empire, just across the water, yearning to be led. If only the British would realise it.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/91ac6432-cbf5-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fcomment%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz3zFZwnz46

I can’t resist the temptation to comment on portions of  Mr.  Buchanan’s essay, which demonstrates his political myopia. This is quite a telling,almost witty, comment on the Clintons in Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan’s ‘Rubio the Remainderman’:

‘In the Democratic race, it is Sanders who has been getting the Trump-sized crowds, while Hillary and Bill Clinton have been playing to what look like audiences at art films in the 1950s.’

But what Mr. Buchanan utterly misses is the New Deal tradition in the following paragraph. Warren being the prime example of that wing of the Party, while Clinton is the apostate to that tradition i.e. a New Democrat.

‘Democrats would break apart along the lines of the Clinton-Sanders divide, with the neo-socialists becoming a raucous and robust anti-big bank, anti-Wall Street, soak-the-rich and share-the-wealth party.’

Mr. Buchanan’s ideological blinders are on full display: he is unable to perceive that New Deal tradition, as not just a part, but a discard of politically ambitious New Democrats, who became idiosyncratic Reaganites.

Almost Marx, with a thank you @DanielLarison

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/rubio-the-remainderman/

Does the use of the idea of ‘neutral scribes’ function as a self-description in Mr. Ganesh’s essay? If so it is not just wide of the mark but fictional. His essay sounds like a scolding memo from the head of Human Resources to a recalcitrant staff.

If the protagonists are as cynical as we believe, Britain is in trouble. Ambition can end up distorting the business of government, as rivals start to view policy choices as moves in a card game. The state becomes a venue for their frivolity. If they are not — and the stereotype of politics as a blade-strewn pit of intrigue is as exaggerated as I, Claudius — it says something that we would excuse them if they were.

What can one think of the above,  garnished with a clever, not speak of telling literary reference to Robert Garves’ novel of Roman imperial machinations, when in his introductory paragraph, he uses the name and career of Winston Churchill: the very embodiment of unalloyed political ambition, not to mention naked self-promotion, that embraced not just the political but the literary, as part of his project?  The ‘project’ that is of central concern of Mr. Ganesh, acting as ‘neutral scribe’, is the dismantling of the Welfare State and the construction of the institutions of Neo-Liberalism e.g. The Academies, and the auctioning off of state owned assets. As the in order to of a permanent dismantling of the institutions of Socialism, even in the face of the near total collapse of the Free Market Mythology, Austerity and the dismal economy of the present.

The ‘rolling farce’ of Labour, as characterized by Mr. Ganesh, refers to the untidy character of democracy, that offends his Tory sense of order, or the political lock step of both the Tories and New Labour.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/def1756a-c8d1-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html#axzz3z7ANSApA

In a Democracy there are NO outsiders! There are only political actors biding their time, awaiting political opportunity and or making one. The Elites Mr. Wolf seems so attached to is in reality an exercise in the self-exculpatory. The ascendancy of Neo-Liberalism and its crash in 2008 are the fault of the advocates /apologists for the predations of the ideas and practices of that Free Market Mythology. Mr. Wolf and The Financial Times were in that vanguard. The rise of the Populists, both Left and Right, are the issue of that collapse, no matter how vehement the denial, it has the character of the axiomatic!

This is Mr. Wolf’s second try at a ‘Defense of the Elites’ followed by an attempt to describe a series of remedies to address the excesses of Robber Capital. An act of political desperation? A maladroitly exercised mea culpa? One has long since lost patience with Mr. Wolf’s explanations, for the current crisis of ‘The Elites’, who have fallen into disrepute by the record of their actions toward their fellow citizens. Its elementary civics!

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/94176826-c8fc-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html#axzz3z7ANSApA

For a corrective to this political chatter read Daniel Larison’s reply to a Ross Douthat column, that also praises the lackluster campaign of Rubio, backed up by reports from Leonid Bershidsky. A long quotation of Bershidsky’s report:

‘I saw both Rubio and Cruz in action on Monday and Tuesday, and I came away doubting that either of them could be a big winner, even if they do well in the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

I heard Rubio at a Des Moines auditorium, where about 200 people gathered to see him. His Iowa campaign is sedate compared with those of most of his major rivals. Before he came onstage, his campaign staff went around offering Rubio signs to the audience, careful not to distribute any in the middle so as not to obscure the senator from the TV cameras. They had trouble finding takers. There were some placards left over when they were done, though some people reconsidered and took them, probably to spare the volunteers some embarrassment.

Then Rubio gave his speech, and not a single one of these signs went up in the air, though the audience applauded politely.’

http://bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-26/ted-cruz-and-marco-rubio-try-too-hard

A long quote from the Larison’s essay:

‘The simplest explanation is that Rubio isn’t winning because he hasn’t put in the time or effort into campaigning in the early states that other candidates have, and he also hasn’t built up much of a campaign organization. (Contrast this with Obama’s 2008 campaign, which had a very strong ground game.) Rubio banked on building up support primarily through debate performances and television ads. One of Rubio’s latest ads inadvertently acknowledges Rubio’s weirdly lazy campaign for president by showing voters watching Rubio on television. That is probably how most people in Iowa and New Hampshire have encountered Rubio, and it helps explain why there isn’t much enthusiasm for him in either place. Rubio gives the impression of someone who doesn’t want to bother with the legwork of being a candidate, and especially in states where voters expect a lot more personal attention that just doesn’t cut it.’

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/page/2/

A link to the Douthat essay, the exercise of patience is needed to read this till its end! It appears that Mr. Douthat is paid on a by the word basis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/campaign-stops/why-isnt-marco-rubio-winning.html?_r=0

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3a848810-c871-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html#axzz3yvTAp2Jp

An attack on UKIP via Jeremy Corbyn? It looks like the star of the show is Mr. Ganesh’s unalloyed animus toward Corbyn, rather than the brief walk ons by UKIP. Those pointed  insults to Mr. Corbyn now enjoy the status of cliches of the Ganesh political commentary  on Labour. Or at least the Labour that looks to have discarded the Neo-Liberalism of Tony Blair, with a kind of finality that goes against the grain of Ganesh political sensibility. And the ordinary reader might draw the conclusion, with a certain reserve, that the Ganesh political  sensibility can be succinctly described as corporatist or neo-corporatist.

‘The people around Mr Corbyn are less clear-eyed. They think of poor white Britons as improbably romantic heroes — the Jarrow marchers, the miners in the film Pride — if they think about them at all.’

Does the notion of ‘ improbably romantic heroes’ as described by Ganesh as a political delusion of Labour, as led by Corbyn have its corollary in the Neo-Colonialist notion that the Falklands belong to Britain. That sun has set! Except to those who cling to a past that no longer exists, except as a point of referral to past glory, in the dismal political present.

And then there is this:

‘Poor white Americans have their stories told faithfully. There are John Updike novels and Bruce Springsteen albums about the banality and frustration of the rust belt.’

John Updike was a novelist that celebrated the heterosexual obsessions, not to speak of the ennui of the American Middle Class male, not the poor. He spent his later years writing art criticism for The New York Review of Books. The waning of his sexual appetite/obsessions sparked his literary sensibility and his attention to the world of art. Mr. Spingsteen enjoys the status in America as a bard, for reasons not fathomable to Mr. Ganesh.

American Writer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/01fb068c-c348-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3ydyWRliU

Just a cursory search of the internet gives this result:

http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/the-right-and-the-welfare-state/

Titled ‘The Right and the Welfare State’ It examines the mainstream political parties on the European Right and their Welfare policies. The notion of the institutions/practices of the Welfare State are antithetical with the Right, Populist or otherwise, is null set!

Ms. Applebaum never misses an opportunity to inveigh against the Old Left, meaning Communism, its part of her credential as a Neo-Con/R2P fellow traveler. Which fits in well with the propaganda push against the dread Populists, of both Left and Right here at the FT. Just read Mr. Wolf’s political hysterics against ‘the great unwashed’ or ‘the revolt of the economic losers’ of January 26,2016: (Be sure to read the comments section, Mr. Wolf and the FT made no friends!)

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/135385ca-c399-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3ySCZNYUl

Ms. Applebaum writes as if the parties of Right she comments on live in a political bubble suspended, like she, in the glory days of the old Cold War, instead  of in the watershed of the collapse of Neo-Liberal dogma and practice. Politicians seek election with the welfare of both their constituents and themselves in mind- these fundamentals escape Ms. Applebaum’s grasp in her zeal to brand the ‘Populists’ on the Right, with an invidious comparison of their welfare policies with that of the failed communist regimes of another century. For a practicing historian of renowned, Ms. Applebaum, in her essay, fails to exercise those critical faculties that have brought her accolades. But instead the reader is confronted with unimaginative propaganda, at least Mr. Wolf’s screed was suffused with an almost engaging passion, an indignant, almost comic self-exculpation, no matter how suffused with an unseemly class bias.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cffc9686-c393-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3ySCZNYUl

This is Mr. Wolf in full panic mode! Too little too late? The ‘Elites’ that Wolf keeps referring to as some kind of political objects/persons worthy of veneration, were the hucksters who inaugurated the Neo-Liberal blight, that collapsed in the loudest economic thud since 1929. Occupy Wall Street and Thomas Piketty soon followed, with the news of the 99% and the 1% equaling  ‘Rising Inequality’ as populist slogan! Its hard to face the fact of that collapse, and that it produced the ‘populists’ of all stripes in Mr. Wolf’s cri de cœur. To complete the picture readers are confronted with the ‘populist rabble’ portrayed in an ominous cartoon, or at least two of their number reading a newspaper, do ‘they’ actually do that? Careful Financial Times your obvious and odious class bias is showing. Mr. Wolf is sinking into the mire of anti-populism: Right,Left and Libertarian. Taking responsibility for one’s catastrophic mistakes is not a trait of the Neo-Liberal intellectual/apologist!

Mr. Wolf sounds like a French noble on his way to the guillotine, in extremus he lets go of his rage and his sense of felt injustice, as he passes the peasants he once ruled over with his velvet gloved iron fist. A scene almost out of A Tale of Two Cities, starring Ronald Coleman as Sydney Carton, although Mr. Wolf’s performance doesn’t quite match Coleman’s eloquent final soliloquy.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/135385ca-c399-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3ySCZNYUl

Courtney Weaver’s essay never strays far from the confines of bourgeois political respectability, with her choice of ‘experts’, whose pallid political observations provide a counter point to her own pedestrian historical observations/speculations.

The elephant in the room: The Republican Party has devolved, over the past eight years, into a Fascist Party, with its own strutting Caudillo, in Donald Trump, with the rest scurrying behind in a kind of caricature of partisan squabbling! Richard Lugar was the last of the Conservatives who had an allegiance to the idea and practice of governance: he was forced out!  Perhaps what Bloomberg is attempting, trying is to give what ever is left of the Eisenhower Republican wing an actual choice! Not too terribly difficult to figure out, if you focus on identifying the glaringly obvious problem, and stop trying to be historically sophisticated and newsy.

Now, Bloomberg is problematical is his support for the Manhattan Institute’s  ‘Broken Windows Policing’ and the utterly dubious ‘Stop and Frisk’, not to speak of his enthusiastic support for the national swindle of Charter Schools . But he might offer the front runners in both Parties a telling object lesson.  Or perhaps Trump & Co., who see collectively, the Republican Party as made up of Neo-Confederate Originalists, zealous Neo-Conservatives, and ubiquitous Theocrats in waiting- Bloomberg might just be the predictor of losing in 2016. Has the time come for a bit of political moderation, or have Trump and his allies no sense of political self-preservation?

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ca4244e4-c419-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3yOr7jGS9

Dominic Johnson in his book, ‘God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human’ simply rehabilitates a not so soft determinism,that keeps appearing in the intellectual life of the world in ever new guises, but remains in service of tribalist political conformity: the fear of a punishing god is a ‘useful evolutionary adaptation’ in the pseudo-scientific jargon used by both Johnson and the writer at The Economist, to review the book awash in such chatter. And then this howler, in this maladroit review:

‘ Raping your neighbour’s mate might once have made evolutionary sense—spreading your own genes at little cost—but “in a clever and gossiping species, knowledge of selfish actions could spread and come back to haunt us” in the form of a furious husband or a village mob.’

When did ‘raping your neighbor’s wife once have made evolutionary sense’ ?

An example of Determinism’s Past:

One of the many dogmas of the Psychoanalytic Mythology was that the Superego acted as a kind of gatekeeper, or as a more highfalutin kind conscience: Freud was a great borrower and adapter of ideas, to put it mildly. That Superego acts as a mere place holder, the internalized punitive god, in the wake of the utter collapse of the the Freud Cult, although the True Believers still propagandize!

The notion of moral conscience as possible rejoinder to the scientism of Johnson’s book: for those interested in the idea of the evolution of conscience through  history  might consult ‘Moral Conscience through the Ages,Fifth Century BCE to the Present’ by Richard Sorabji: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo18882802.html

Adam Smith’s contribution to Moral/Ethical conduct was ‘the impartial spectator’ as means to measure one’s conduct, against a possibly more objectified standard. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is quite long, so for convenience’s sake consult D.D. Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-impartial-spectator-9780199568260?q=impartial%20spectator&lang=en&cc=us

Mr. Smith’s is a centuries old methodology to ‘check’ your moral self-inquires , because we are talking about morality and ethics (an impossibility in the world remade using the Johnson Formulation, i.e. The punitive Deity is the sine qua non of ‘civilization’,rational calculation is beyond the reach of creatures determined by their ‘brains’, ‘minds’, ‘neural networks’, and the leaden cliche ‘hard wired’! )

We reach the end of the ‘review’ to find this rather unsurprising attack on Notorious Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris:

‘Mr Johnson does not seem a pious man himself. But unlike atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he is not out to embarrass religious belief and chase its subscribers from the public square. The religious instinct is too deep-seated, he thinks. Instead, critics of superstition are best advised to work with the grain of human psychology rather than against it, finding more benevolent ways to satisfy human yearning for something “out there”. What form such an atheist religion should take, though, God only knows.’

Yet unmentioned is another Atheist, Jonathan Miller whose ‘Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief’ and ‘Atheism Tapes’ places him in the front rank of nonbelievers, but he lacks the advantage of being a radical ripe for a bit of useful fear mongering!

Philosophical Apprentice

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21688835-belief-divine-punishment-may-be-inherent-and-useful-evolutionary-adaptation-helping?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/InthehandsofanangryGod