StephenKMackSD's Blog

The title of ‘Hating Queerness Without Hating the Queer’ gives the game away. Hate the sin and not the sinner? I recall that self-congratulatory old cliche from my Sunday School and Vacation Bible School days. I was forced to attend Sunday School till my brother and I rebelled when I was 9 and he was 8. We had to put on our dress shoes, our slacks and an ironed shirt to attend. My mother thought it would tame our inherent heathenish ways. Besides there were five of us kids, they wanted time alone. Neither my father nor mother attended church. My sisters loved the dress up of church on Sunday, and rode the street car home, after stopping at the store right next to the church to buy candy. 1950’s America, but not quite Norman Rockwell.
You’ve got to be in awe of the great moral responsibilities that Christians bear, besides bearing the weight of their own inherent wickedness and sinfulness pioneered by those two self-hating Church Fathers Augustine and Jerome, they exercise the even greater moral responsibility of policing the beliefs and behavior of others: the Christian discovery and punishment of heretics starts with  Arianism, Donatism, Gnosticism and Manichaeism. So why wouldn’t Mr. Albert Mohler feel free to exercise his prerogative to police my sexual behavior, because that behavior is ‘sinful’ i.e. against the heterosexual creed of Christianity?  Here is an example of the application of Mr. Mohler’s hatred of the sin:

Headline: Mormons Sharpen Stand Against Same-Sex Marriage

Children of same-sex couples will not be able to join the Mormon Church until they turn 18 — and only if they move out of their parents’ homes, disavow all same-sex relationships and receive approval from the church’s top leadership as part of a new policy adopted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In addition, Mormons in same-sex marriages will be considered apostates and ordered to undergo church disciplinary hearings that could lead to excommunication, a more rigid approach than the church has taken in the past.

The new policies are an effort by the church, which has long opposed same-sex marriage, to reinforce and even harden its doctrinal boundaries for its members at a time when small but increasing numbers of Mormons are coming out as gay or supportive of same-sex marriage.

Political Reporter

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/hating-queerness-without-hating-the-queer/413587/#article-comments

I’ve read Mr. Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave, a frank and sometimes startling account of Cardinal Newman and worthy of any readers time and attention. I’ve also read James J. O’Donnell’s Augustine: A New Biography, also a refreshingly frank, not to say surprisingly candid biography of Augustine. As an atheist I find little in the Abrahamic Tradition to admire/praise. Look at the self-contempt shared by this trio of Christian thinkers/founders: Paul, Augustine and Jerome. Their self-loathing of their humanity has become a cornerstone of Christianity, allied to an obsession, from its beginnings, with heresies: Arianism, Donatism, Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Not to speak of the heretical devotion of both Augustine and Jerome, to the texts of the Greek and Roman thinkers and writers, that rescued Christianity from its provincialism, indeed parochialism. Both Plato and Aristotle played a decisive role in early and later Christan thought:

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

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

The whole of that Christian Tradition owes more to Constantine’s conversion, don’t forget  the emperors many religious affiliations, Sol Invictus being just one example. And the fact that baptism was, in these times, a sacrament that was taken near the end of life rather than its beginnings.

See Charles Freeman’s two books for a history of early Christianity:

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

https://books.google.com/books?id=CwafbUw5PTIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+freeman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBmoVChMImZ-FjNn-yAIVCzw-Ch2DhwYP#v=onepage&q=charles%20freeman&f=false

AD 381

https://books.google.com/books?id=vG8jCQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+freeman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6wEwBGoVChMImZ-FjNn-yAIVCzw-Ch2DhwYP#v=onepage&q=charles%20freeman&f=false

Critical Reader

https://next.ft.com/content/c5f4f936-823d-11e5-a01c-8650859a4767

Neo-Liberal Reform: Free Market Dogmas>Austerity(Pensions cut in half!)Strong Medicine!>Stagnation, with Poroshenko as US/EU front man :
http://wordlink.com/l/1eToV
‘Ukrainian News Service Says Standard of Living Is Plummeting’=The Economic miracle as child of Euromaidan!
Dempsey/Minakov =two bought and paid for Policy Technocrats, who speak in the same bankrupt patois, of the carefully groomed and vetted expert.

Poroshenko’s Political Schizophrenia:

Ukraine’s ‘anti-communist laws’ stir controversy:A raft of laws passed recently praise far-right groups that fought in WWII and ban the display of Soviet symbols.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/ukraine-anti-communist-laws-stir-controversy-150601054437645.html

Poroshenko cancels ‘special status’ law while EU leaders stress local elections in E. Ukraine

https://www.rt.com/news/313810-ukraine-elections-constitution-changes/

American and EU political meddling has brought chaos, death and destruction! The Dempsey/Minakov alliance has its benighted precursors: Joe Alsop and the Bundy brothers, the list is quite long.

StephenKMackSD

I was quite surprised to look at my e mail this morning and find four notifications from your Comments Moderator. It has been weeks, or even some months since I’ve commented on you internet site. I find it a bit comic that it has taken this much time to find, and then remove my offensive comments from your web site. A sophisticated software application could be the solution!

I can imagine this scene: Oxbridger underling, a relative new hire, with a PhD in English Literature (her thesis was on the arcane topic of food in the plays of Shakespeare) with a minor in Hayek Studies, is assigned the task of searching and reading all my comments. My writerly ego isn’t so inflated as to wish that task on any one person, especially such a reader. Whose judgement as to the nuances of your Terms of Use has brought me to the point of four reprimands, at once, and even the suspension of my comment privileges?

Am I properly chastened by your e mails? Well, my ego, in this instance, comes to my rescue. I think your Moderator has missed completely my tart comments on Rahm Emanuel, which easily fits into the abuse category of the breathtaking pseudo-legalese of  your Terms of Use.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

It is perfectly appropriate that Mr. Ganesh should frame his comments on the ‘failed civil libertarians’ with reference to the latest Bond film.  Ian Fleming’s books were adapted to the screen using all the craft that the motion picture industry is capable : lush settings, alluring yet dangerous women, the crafty implacable agents of a terrifying secret organization, and British Übermensch James Bond in the lead, a proper misogynist in the mold of Mr. Fleming himself. All of it garnished by the latest in gadgets and utterly unattainable automobiles, appealing to the adolescent that is just below the surface of the  Male, in the age of the internet.

Mr. Ganesh elides from his attack on those benighted ‘Civil Libertarians’ the collective historical watershed of the Cold War, The Clash of  Civilizations and the War on Terror: this collection adds up to suspicion raised to the tenth power.  All this is not mentioned in Mr. Ganesh’s exercise in scorn, which has its it’s place in the armamentarium of the polemicist, yet in the political pundit looks, not just out of place, but appears as the absence of historical thought. Since the end of World War II fear of an unseen enemy has  replaced a politics based on rational evaluation of risk. Publications like The Financial Times and others have used and thoroughly abused this fear mongering to rationalize a host of  anti-democratic policies. Mr. Ganesh ignores that benighted history and replaces historical analysis and consideration with the trivializing word otiose, meaning serving no practical purpose or result. Mr. Ganesh defends the British National Security State with a variety of political thought, that takes its cue from the very Bond film he subjects to his wan analysis.

Political Skeptic

https://next.ft.com/content/a9bd2f9a-8152-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096

As the Republicans continue their self-destructive trajectory, Mr. Frum proves his talent for producing political bile, in place of something resembling incisive commentary, on The Republican horse race.
The line up of these tired old faces is a stand in for diversity, the ersatz, the cliched chatter of the No-Nothings. After the latest Benghazi hearings, Hillary campaign contributions jumped appreciably: Trey Gowdy, and his political confederates doing their best to trip up this old political fox Hillary fell flat. How long will the Republicans practice this self-destructive nihilism?
The election of Jacobin Paul Ryan as Speaker answers that question. The notion that Boehner was a political rationalist, and Ryan will be his successor makes the power of secret Freedom Caucus, composed of forty members, not just apparent, but that makes very clear that  a radical minority is in charge of the Party. A secret tribunal now clears all candidates for House Republican positions? Secrecy implies acting with an impunity that anonymity brings, and is antithetical to democratic process.

Mr. Frum takes too much relish in his portrayal of Mr. Bush as weak, a kind of echo of what many say of Obama. Neo-Cons put great faith in masculine bravado and bluster, even when Hillary talks tough: recall the Kristol/Golberg celebration of Mrs. C.’s toughness of last year?
Who can forget the dire warnings that the McGovern Radicals had taken over the Democrats in 1972? Call this one of James Pinkerton’s political obsessions, that he repeated as if it were a revealed truth. Except that the harsh truth that the Jacobins have taken over the Republican Party is beyond the ken of Mr. Frum. As Henry Ford observed, history is bunk. I’d add, even if it’s manufactured history.

Political Reporter

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/jeb-bush-struggles/413014/

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https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

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At what point do the Neo-Liberals come clean about the Neo-Liberal/Austerity/Economic Doldrums theology as a demonstrable failure? Asking for honesty from a grifter is probably like believing in the a fore mentioned theology. Mr. Ganesh is a political fabulist who inhabits the literary husk of Calvino, tellingly absent the charm and metaphysical whimsy, which makes our author’s essay seem like an exercise in what? I once in these pages compared Mr. Ganesh to Derrida, but after reading his Psyche, and pondering the question, I find that Kierkegaard as the vexed, even perverse, yet worshipful acolyte of Hegal, seems a more apt characterization of Mr. Ganesh. He is the ersatz philosopher and practicing writer/politician.

Does the notion that Austerity needs to applied with due regard for equality of distribution, among an economically diverse population, and with dispassion not to speak of equanimity -how does the failure of this trio as practiced since the Crash of 2008 make anything like political sense, or even approximate political rationality? Mr. Ganesh answers none of these pressing questions, but supplies the reader with points of argument that can lead to a political pragmatism that is a simulacrum that mimes political fairness, almost.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3873525a-7997-11e5-933d-efcdc3c11c89.html#axzz3piMkkTNY

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Thank you!

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Call this essay a collection of political cliches of the present political orthodoxy, stunning the reader with the ability of a Think Tank pundit to confect a history of the Present Declinism. Not to be confused with that stolid German Spengler, but with the historically tarted up writing of Niall Ferguson, with just a tantalizing bit of Samuel P. Huntington’s cultural pessimism not to speak his rampant xenophobia, to add just a bit of zest to the proceedings.

Here are some of these gems taken out of the argumentative context. The very first paragraph is an exercise in argumentative self-serving myopia. Title this paragraph ‘The West is innocent of any blame’.

‘Russia’s deployment of forces to Syria is its most significant direct military intervention in the Middle East since the end of the second world war.

This assertion can’t even stand the most cursory examination i.e. America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most glaring example of the ‘most significant direct military intervention in the Middle East since the end of the second world war.‘ !

The next assertion is again a ludicrous pseudo-apologetics, for Western imperialism, not to speak of American catastrophic political meddling:

It will further destabilise a region that is characterised by misrule, sectarianism, regional rivalries and four civil wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

President Putin’s ‘gambit’ in Syria is the proof of Western i.e. American power in decline, using the stand in of ‘the postwar international order’ :

President Vladimir Putin’s gambit is only the latest indication that, after 70 years, the postwar international order is fraying. The US, the country around which the postwar order was constructed, still has a strong hand but it often plays that hand poorly.

The American invasion of Iraq then becomes the focus of this made to measure history:

In the past 15 years, its global approach has fluctuated. President George W Bush pursued a muscular grand strategy aimed at imposing America’s will on the world. His invasion of Iraq is one of history’s finest own goals

The last sentence of this paragraph is astounding in it’s reckless ideological reading of the Bush Administration’s catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq! Read it again:

His invasion of Iraq is one of history’s finest own goals.

The next part of this paragraph is as astounding as the quote from above:

By contrast, President Barack Obama has run a reality-based foreign policy. But he did not merely learn the lessons of the Bush presidency; he overlearnt them. His unwillingness to act forcefully at crucial moments has weakened the deterrent effect of US power.

The not so subtle idea of Obama’s Foreign Policy weakness, lack of resolve, and other such such maladroit locutions, is the continuing theme of this essay. The whole of the argument represents the fact that the Neo-Cons,Liberals and the R2P zealots have philosophically merged into the Party of War: of endless war using ‘The Middle East’ as its proving ground, for a ‘new  international order’ predicated on the argued weakness, indeed the fecklessness President Obama, made concrete in the following:

By contrast, President Barack Obama has run a reality-based foreign policy. But he did not merely learn the lessons of the Bush presidency; he overlearnt them. His unwillingness to act forcefully at crucial moments has weakened the deterrent effect of US power.

Then Mr. Fullilove adopts the rhetorical role of Cassandra with this admonition that turns into an exercise in prescience:

The recent history of US policy — both its mis-steps and its changeability — raises questions about whether Washington will continue to act as the global hegemon. To those who relish the prospect of a more modest American presence in the world, I say: be careful what you wish for.

His attempt to play Cassandra falls a bit flat as he echoes the tone of the hectoring schoolmaster.

If you’ve been a patient reader up to this point in your reading, you are rewarded with this homily:

Now, when European leaders come upon an unpleasant scene, for example, a neighbour set upon by an aggressor — like the priest and the Levite with the Good Samaritan — most of them prefer to pass by on the other side.

For those with the forebearance to read this transparent propaganda till its end, this is what awaits you in this vulgar melodrama: Russian Revanchism, the rise of a ruthless Nuclear Iran, a dull revamp of that old chestnut of The Yellow Peril, a favorite of Mr. Ferguson, a walk on by Global Warming, The European Refugee Crisis, all of this ended in the  celebratory mentions of Cold Warrior heroes Dean Acheson and Harry Truman. No need to look further for the ideological roots of this essay, nor it’s author. A grueling 912 words! Patience grasshopper!

Political Observer and Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1f9f9a-78b1-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html#axzz3paPyN6Zw

Please support my blog, if you can.

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

Thank you!

A reader has to wonder at Rep.Paul Ryan’s status at The Financial Times  as the least objectionable of the Jacobins. His ‘Budget Proposals’ are now consigned to the richly deserved obscurity of bad propaganda. The Rule of The Forty leaves 433 unaccounted for, and consider that in the American Republic the names of the Representatives that make up the Freedom Caucus are secret. How can doing the public’s business be done in secret?

Is Rep. Ryan the only viable candidate for the job? If so, the paucity of leadership candidates demonstrates a troubling fact about the Party. A Party that since 2008, that has not governed, but obstructed the president at every turn, the government shutdown being it’s political desperation move. Look at the Benghazi Hearings for how ineffective this Republican Circus has been: Ms. Clinton’s donations jumped appreciably after her appearance. One can only wonder what Rep Gowdy and his fellow Party members expected? Ms. Clinton gained in campaign contributions:

Donations have been flooding into campaign coffers over the past 13 hours since her testimony in front of the House Benghazi committee wrapped late Thursday night, thrilling Clinton fundraisers on the eve of a weekend-long finance committee meeting that couldn’t have come at a better time. According to communications director Jennifer Palmieri, the hour between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. last night was their best fundraising hour of the campaign to date.

Rallying in Virginia Friday, Clinton said her campaign had broken the 500,000 donor mark, meaning she has gotten over 100,000 new contributors in October alone. The campaign then added that over half of the donations it received on Thursday were from new contributors, and that 99% of them were less than $250.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/hillary-clinton-campaign-benefits-benghazi-hearing-215107

How can Rep. Ryan rescue the Party from it’s penchant for perpetual self -defeat?

For a refreshingly insightful essay on Rep. Ryan see Amanda Marcotte’s essay at Alternet, first published at Salon, the title and sub-title are instructive. ‘Paul Ryan’s ‘Family Values’ Are that Only Elite Families Have Value:Paul Ryan isn’t a hypocrite. He just sees a family life as a privilege for the elite, instead of a right for all.’ A telling paragraph:

But this whole incident is a reminder that what is wrong with Ryan’s libertarian-inflected conservatism goes far deeper than mere hypocrisy. In fact, I’d argue that Ryan isn’t really a hypocrite at all, but that this move to preserve his family time is a perfect distillation of the Ayn Rand-constructed worldview he has, where all the goodies are reserved for the elite and the rest of us can go hang. And by “goodies,” I don’t just mean NFL tickets and first class plane tickets every weekend. Increasingly, the Republican worldview is one where even basic things like love, connection, and other basic human needs are being reclassified as privileges that should only be available to the wealthy.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-ryans-family-values-are-only-elite-families-have-value?akid=13598.253719.b10X54&rd=1&src=newsletter1044574&t=4

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f01fc878-7197-11e5-ad6d-f4ed76f0900a.html#axzz3pPG8RzKR

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StephenKMackSD

@Cuibono

Thank you for your insightful comment!

Your name explains much: ‘cui bono: a principle that probable responsibility for an act or event lies with one having something to gain’ . I don’t think Cynic is the most applicable descriptor for you. Yours is a political realism, without the necessary  filter of bourgeois political respectability, that rules the hermetic world of  pundits, in print and on television.

The problem with Ms. Clinton engaging in a political attack on Sen. Sanders is that it will have to carefully crafted, so that it appears as a politically rational critique of his ‘populism’, in contrast to her more moderate gradualism, while cultivating her credentials as ‘tougher than any man in the room’ i.e. her bellicosity in Foreign Policy: while maintaining her status as the champion of a more restrained, but still politically potent Neo-Liberalism. If she is elected, look for an about face on the TPP born of an agonizing reappraisal. Americans are fed a steady diet of political melodrama. Look no further than the pages of The Financial Times!

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/1Ru69gG

If you can, please support my blog.

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

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