StephenKMackSD's Blog

There is nothing so bracing as viewing David Frum’s carefully  posed snapshot of America’s political history, with the help of fellow traveler Rich Lowry. If Mr. Frum meant his quotations from Mr. Lowry to be edifying or even enlightening the notion of ‘executive intelligence’ falls short. Mr. Lowry’s pastiche of critical evaluation is another exercise of maladroit apologetics, for a Party that has since surrendered to nihilism in its many iterations.

On the pressing question of race and the Republican Party, Mr. Frum elides the fact of the Dixiecrat migration to the Republicans in ’64 and ’65, in protest of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passing,  at which time Mr. Frum was four and five years old: but being a student of American history this is an ideologically, not to speak of, strategically fueled myopia. The Dixiecrats have ruled the Republican stance on race in America since. The evidence: The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Nashoba County Fair speech that was the first speech of his campaign: I believe in states rights! Bush I and Lee Atwater’s  Willy Horton ads, the appointments of the Neo-Confederate/Originalists to the Supreme Court: Rehnquist,Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and even sometime ally Anthony Kennedy.

On Trump the ‘politician’: he is a Caudillo like Peron, with the baroque stage manner and bluster of Mussolini.With the spotty veneer of Mr. Lowry’s ‘executive intelligence’ perfected on his television show, based on the ‘principals of Vulture Capital’: which is enough to make Messrs.  Frum and Lowry politically tumescent.

Political Reporter

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/trump-poll-numbers-success/421824/#article-comments

Mr. Luce’s utter misreading of American history, past, present and political, framed by a title that can only be called what it is, a breath taking malapropism, ‘America’s clash of civilisations’. That leaves the reader fully convinced that David Brooks and Mr. Luce are of like minds. The Luce/Brooks view of American politics and history is marked by familiar events and persons, except that all is transmogrified into an incomprehensible but ideologically self-serving muddle. Which these thinkers attempt to unravel and explicate within that frame of the politically self-serving. Here is one example of the Luce iteration of that method:

‘Mr Obama has never been forgiven for saying poor white Americans are suffering from Marxian false consciousness:’

The ‘Marxian false consciousness’ is the purest form of pandering to the conservative reader of the FT, who is posited as anti-intellectual, that translates quite conveniently into anti-Marxist, and most probably Republican. The rhetorical framing is all important to winning what passes for argument, but is in fact a straw man.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f49b83dc-a59b-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58.html#axzz3usCXbRmf

@Olaf von Rein @StephenKMackSD

I usually thank those who reply to my comments, but in your case I’ll just say that part of your comment is well argued and coheres, even if I disagree vehemently with its content. The shouting is I guess, to be expected! The FT is a font of Capitalist Apologetics and the hunting ground for Communists ,Populists and other assorted political riff raff.   I found Mr. Varoufakis’ comments illuminating and worthy of attention, and a much needed reply to the Mario Montis of the EU, the first two paragraphs of your linked essay give the game away:

It is that rare thing: a policy made in Brussels that clearly works. The bold moves against Google and Gazprom over the past two weeks are the latest to be taken by a European institution that has, over half a century, become one of the world’s most formidable defenders of free markets. Yet in perpetuating this admirable tradition, competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager is doing more than challenging two corporate giants from afar. Perhaps without realising it, she is also moving against forceful political currents within the EU itself.

Whatever the merits of these two cases (and I am in no position to judge them), one fact is clear: when Europe speaks on competition policy, others listen to its roar. The words of the commissioner echo through the White House and the Kremlin; from Moscow to Silicon Valley, they are heard intently by the world’s boards. In so many areas — migration, economics, foreign policy — the EU convulses in a frenzy of statements. But in competition policy the EU never barks; when justified, it bites.

‘What concerns Brussels general attitude to free markets, here is a less biased take:’ Consider Mario Monti’s essay an EU press release awash in Neo-Liberal cliche: Free Markets etc. (The writer was EU competition commissioner from 1999 to 2004 and prime minister of Italy from 2011 to 2013). ‘A less biased take’?

The remainder of the essay is framed in the apologetics for the EU and does not address the question that Mr. Varoufakis raises of the Cartel as the antithetical to the values of the Demos/Demi. But what the reader gets is this:

These lessons are at odds with the political mood that is taking hold across Europe. La politique d’abord (“politics first!”) is the order of the day. It is felt as a moral imperative and a necessary corrective for the alleged evils of the rules and rigidities that have held sway for decades. These days, flexibility, discretion and compromise are the watchwords.

Not legally codified institutional democracy but ‘flexibility, discretion and compromise are the watchwords’. I’ll follow your brief, dismissive closing remark with my own: Not good enough!

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/1RxRowJ

Daniel Politi writes two essays on the lifting of capital controls in which he speaks to Neo-Liberal bureaucrats and brokers or spokesmen for brokerage houses: all this in anticipation of a flood of foreign investment to the New Argentine Economy, that embraces a portion of the ‘strong medicine’ postponed by the long reign of husband and wife (Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner)?

Can one speculate in the pages of this house organ of Capitalist Apologetics, what will be the political picture a year or two years from now? After the settlement with Paul Singer, how will Mauricio Macri numbers look after that ‘strong medicine’ takes hold and trickles down? A political revival  featuring a de Kirchner epigone or even a more charismatic Peronist?

Two reports of interest:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-08-07/argentinas-vulture-paul-singer-is-wall-street-freedom-fighter

Vulture Capitalists Are the Real Winners of Argentina’s Elections

One wonders what the electorate will think, but more importantly what they will do politically in the wake of these ‘economic reforms’ and the effects on the life of the citizenry? Not to speak of the falling value of the Peso! Which seems here an utter irrelevance! The political blindness of the economic/political ideologue?

The Neo-Liberal Utopian Hayek offered the Market as the only real viable form of knowledge, while ignoring the central place of a vibrant civic/political life, as the cornerstone that made Capitalism a possibility/actuality within that indispensable civic/political frame.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/556d51b4-a447-11e5-873f-68411a84f346.html#axzz3ugKkUgaq

On the fall of the Argentine Peso:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2979e8be-a4e8-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58.html#axzz3ugKkUgaq

Political Observer

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StephenKMackSD

‘But there’s not much upside to getting a raise if the cost of living goes up too. There are many things to do, but most urgent is to repeal and replace Obamacare. When people ask me what’s wrong with the law, I usually say to them, how much time do you have? But if I had to point out one thing, it would be the mandates, the restrictions, all the red tape. How do I know they have failed? You notice we don’t talk about lowering premiums anymore. We’re supposed to be happy if they don’t go up by double digits.

This is the problem: The other side thinks that to lower costs for some people you have to raise them for others. Life is a zero-sum game. They know people won’t buy pricey insurance. So their solution is, don’t give them a choice. We say lower costs for everybody by giving them that choice. Instead of forcing you to buy insurance, we should force insurance companies to compete for your business. Let people find a plan that works for them. And yes, help people pay for health insurance.

I’ve long believed we should offer an individual tax credit to help people pay for premiums—giving more to the old and sick. There are a lot of other ideas out there, but what all conservatives can agree on is this: We think government should encourage personal responsibility, not replace it. We think prices are going up because people have too few choices, not because they have too many. And we think this problem is so urgent that, next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare.’

Here, in essence is The Republican Party Platform for 2016, knowing that the myth of Obama’s ‘weakness on ISIS’ and the Iran Deal will be the Foreign Policy component of their attack. Although Hillary has won the admiration of both Jeffrey Goldberg and William Kristol, in the recent past, for her ‘I’m tougher than any man in the room’ foreign policy stance! And if Trump is the presidential candidate, the Republican Nihilists will either self-destruct as a Party or win, not by a landslide, but by an undeniable plurality, as the result of a domestic terror attack with its actors tied ,by evidence, to Islamic Terrorism of some identifiable variety.
 ‘And we think this problem is so urgent that, next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare.’

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/full-text-speaker-ryans-remarks-library-congress#sthash.kWNqsIy9.dpuf

Political Observer

Ms. Weaver has shown, with this essay, that she is not a ‘reporter’ but a fully fledged member of the Western Press, and its construction of the Myth of Putin The Terrible. Following the Party Line relentlessly ballyhooed by the FT, The Economist, The New York Times and Victoria Nuland,The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the other co-conspirators in the Ukrainian Coup.  American/EU NGO’s NATO, and  the chorus of Neo-Cons and R2P zealots/propagandists:  Samantha Power, Michael Ignateiff , Timothy Snyder, The New York Review of Books and Eurozine. These and many more political actors helped to construct The New Cold War!

Ms. Weaver puts to question this among other inquiries:

‘In his campaign, Mr Trump appears to be taking chapters out of Mr Putin’s handbook. There is the creation of a perceived external threat (in Mr Putin’s case, the US and its encroachment into Russia’s sphere of influence; in Mr Trump’s, it is Muslims and illegal immigrants);’

She compares Trump to Putin in terms of decisive action so much admired by her two protagonists is this political vignette: Tal Wollschlaeger and Duane Ernster. The utter failure of the Neo-Liberal Dogma to bring that Free Market Utopia into being, has brought forth the political monster of Populism, and its infatuation with the Caudillo, in the mold of Peron! Trump has had many years on television to perfect his personae as just that.

Putin, in this iteration of the Myth, is, of course, subject to the paranoid delusion of an outside enemy, yet the fact of the Ukrainian Coup and the utterly corrupt and incompetent governance that followed, of what is left of that state, and our murderous proxy war, are the dismal proof of American/EU political machinations. Not to speak of the evolving role of Right Sector and Svoboda and their epigones in the national politics of that state. The West has seen fit to exercise its murderous, blundering, not to speak of incompetent political will on Ukraine. And attempts to deny its responsibility by blaming Putin as The New Stalin: this is now a part of the sham narrative invented and nurtured by American/EU apologists.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/76412252-a26d-11e5-8d70-42b68cfae6e4.html#axzz3uUf1SpBt

Is there no end of the Freud Apologists and their project of historical revisionism, rehabilitation? Although Prof. Zaretsky offers Freud as ‘political’, that breaks new ground in Freudian Rehabilitation. But the Project remains the same. The chorus of respectable bourgeois apologists has grown since the reviews for Adam Phillips’ ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’. The ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, that once morphed into a metaphysic has once again been adapted to the needs of a political pragmatism, as the in order too of rescue from political/intellectual/moral irrelevance. Describe the journey from science to metaphysic to politics as a kind of map of the desperate acolytes.  A sample of the reviews of the Phillips’ book:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-becoming-freud-the-making-of-a-psychoanalyst-by-adam-phillips/2014/06/27/240684e2-d4aa-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html

http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/the-freud-we-wish-for

Mr. William Geraldi’s review titled ‘Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller’ certainly takes first place in this collection of reviews of Mr. Phillips Freudian Revisionism: this review makes these astounding pronouncements on ‘psychoanalysis’ and the ‘ Freudian unconscious in particular’ was ‘​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’ Given this what can any reader make of the original Freudian claim of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and as Freud’s status as ‘physician’ ?

http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-criticism/2014/06/sigmund-freud-never-ending-storyteller

Some quotation seems in order:

‘Phillips writes that “the modern individual Sigmund Freud would eventually describe was a person under continuous threat with little knowledge of what was really happening to him”—​a Jew, in other words, as Freud himself admitted in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis. The paradoxes at the hub of Freud—​the heaving dichotomies of life/death, sex/death, past/present, present/future, sickness/health—​are human paradoxes, to be sure, but they are human paradoxes expertly manifest in Hebraic mythos. Phillips contends that “Freud’s work shows us … that nothing in our lives is self-​evident, that not even the facts of our lives speak for themselves.” Consider how that assertion applies both to the Torah and to the indispensible modern Jewish writers, from Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka to Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you’ll begin to see how psychoanalysis in general and the Freudian unconscious in particular—​that dark swamp of our minds—​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’

There is more:

‘In reference to every Freudian’s loving or bitter impulse to tackle the august founder, Bloom speaks of “the burden of the writing psychoanalyst, who is tempted to a battle he is doomed to lose,” meaning that Freud can be an oily, protean subject, whether approached from the logical, biographical, or pedagogical angle. The one angle not doomed to failure is the one that Peter Brooks takes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and that Adam Phillips emphasizes here (with no mention of Brooks): Freud the storyteller. Brooks calls psychoanalysis “not only narrative and linguistic but also oral, a praxis of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling.” Say what you will about the psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan, but Freud and his theory have always been about language, the language of the self telling stories, “this new language for the heart and soul and conscience of modern people,” as Phillips phrases it.’

For the surprising literary antecedent to Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic project’, Cervantes’ Quixote,  see ‘Freud’s Paranoid Quest,Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion by John C. Farrell, Chapter 6 ‘Freud as Quixote’:

http://nyupress.org/books/9780814726501/

And see this unsurprisingly hostile review of Mr. Farrel’s book in the New York Times by Sarah Boxer titled ‘Flogging Freud’:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html

Some of the Evaluations of Freud and Psychoanalysis:

Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank Sulloway

Freud Evaluated, The Completed Arc by Malcolm Macmillan https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/freud-evaluated

The Memory Wars, Freud’s Legacy in Dispute by Frederick Crews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Wars

Follies of the Wise, Dissenting Essays by Frederick Crews https://books.google.com/books/about/Follies_of_the_Wise.html?id=SKQGIZHuhW8C

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend by Frederick Crews http://www.amazon.com/Unauthorized-Freud-Doubters-Confront-Legend/dp/0670872210

Freudian Fallacy: An Alternative View of Freudian Theory by E.M. Thornton

The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason,3rd Edition by Ernest Gellner, Forward by Jose Brunner

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631234136.html

Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz

Philosophical  Apprentice

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161440

This essay proves, beyond doubt, that in that locked bottom drawer of Mr. Luce’s desk is a novel he’s been working on for years. Now, he worked diligently, in his younger years on that pet project, but the years and his career have consigned that nearly completed project, to that bottom drawer.

But Mr. Luce redeems his ambition with his fictive creation of Joe Biden’s letter to the president. Although Mr. Biden is,to be frank, a career politician, once a Liberal, who like most Democrats ‘evolved’ into a Neo-Liberal. But Mr. Biden had a talent of putting his foot in mouth, in his extemporaneous remarks, unlike Reagan he didn’t have a script writer and a staff that kept him ‘on message’. Some might call Biden an amenable political hack, a V.P. with a staff to control his need to opine on pressing political issues. Mr. Luce’s essays captures the politically managed ‘anguish’ of Biden, and its focus on the  Trump political phenomenon, an imagined Biden as conscience of a nation doesn’t quite ring true.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7c69dc5e-a020-11e5-beba-5e33e2b79e46.html#axzz3uJ2FP32v