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Mr. Douthat defends blasphemers as necessary to the ‘liberal order’ of the West, using the attack and murders at Charlie Hebdo as his eventual point of reference, although the first order of business is a statement of principals.

1) The right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order.

2) There is no duty to blaspheme, a society’s liberty is not proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces, and under many circumstances the choice to give offense (religious and otherwise) can be reasonably criticized as pointlessly antagonizing, needlessly cruel, or simply stupid.

3) The legitimacy and wisdom of such criticism is generally inversely proportional to the level of mortal danger that the blasphemer brings upon himself.

Then comes this unsurprising comment, not on the situation in Paris, but an extended rant on the corrupting influence of political correctness in American life : propagandizing is the first order of Mr. Douthat’s scribbling, not to speak of his utter American parochialism :

The first point means that laws against blasphemy (usually described these days as “restrictions on hate speech”) are inherently illiberal. The second point means that a certain cultural restraint about trafficking in blasphemy is perfectly compatible with liberal norms, and that there’s nothing illiberal about questioning the wisdom or propriety or decency of cartoons or articles or anything else that takes a crude or bigoted swing at something that a portion of the population holds sacred. Such questioning can certainly shade into illiberal territory — and does, all-too-frequently — depending on exactly how much pressure is exerted and how elastic the definition of “offensiveness” becomes. But our basic liberties are not necessarily endangered when, say, the Anti-Defamation League criticizes Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the Sanhedrin in “The Passion of the Christ” or the Catholic League denounces art exhibits in the style of “Piss Christ,” any more than they’re endangered by the absence of grotesque caricatures of Moses or the Virgin Mary from the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. Liberty requires accepting the freedom to offend, yes, but it also allows people, institutions and communities to both call for and exercise restraint.

He also mentions Tony Barber’s essay at the Financial Times among others: on the political schizophrenia at the FT, as that Party Line coalesces, I have written about in this post, which I insert here:

‘A significant number of those who have joined jihadi movements from France have been converts to Islam, including a number of women.David Thomson, a French journalist and author of Les Français Jihadistes, a book on the rise of Islamist militantism in France, says the rise of jihadism goes beyond the issue of simple alienation of Muslim youth. “Many of those I have made contact with are people from well integrated families, including those not from an immigrant or Muslim background,” he told the Financial Times in a recent interview.’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e3ccd058-9663-11e4-a40b-00144feabdc0.html#slide0

‘The English author Andrew Hussey, who lives in Paris, published a book last year called The French Intifada, in which he described France as “the world capital of liberty, equality and fraternity . . . under attack from the angry and dispossessed heirs to the French colonial project”. The murders in Paris throw down a challenge to French politicians and citizens to stand up for the republic’s core values and defeat political violence without succumbing to the siren songs of the far right.’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9f90f482-9672-11e4-a40b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3O9IG8WJL

What is the emerging political orthodoxy on the question of this ‘terrorist attack’ ? This essay/report hints at the riots of 2005, but the first news story quotes an ‘expert’ on the ‘mirage'(well integrated members of Muslim families as jihadist candidates) of the blaming the complete lack of attempts to integrate immigrants and their children from the old empire.

See this Wiki entry on those 2005 riots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots

If Jews had been the subject to such merciless attacks, as appeared in this French ‘satirical’ publication, the rightful exercise of opprobrium and condemnation would have been perfectly appropriate. But Europeans and Americans look upon Islam as the definition of the execrable other, rather than as part of the Abrahamic Tradition as our common inheritance, no matter what one might think/feel about this tradition, pro or con! The riots took place ten years ago!

StephenKMackSD

There is much more to the Douthat essay as the critical reader will find as she/he reads it to it’s end. Brevity and succinctness are strangers to Douthat’s thought and rhetoric, allied to a pernicious American political/cultural parochialism.

Queer Atheist

Perhaps,Mayor de Blasio sees Broken Windows Policing as failed i.e.both in terms of the legacy of Stop and Frisk and possibly as the back door for making up municipal budgetary shortages by means of issuing of tickets with hefty fines. Not to forget the Mayor’s lack of a faith in what the Economist swears by, the Neo-Liberal license to steal from public funds: Charter Schools. The price tag 136 million, as of May 5,2014!

Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste

This essay, heavy with political melodrama:’The blue thread frays’ was an opportunity not to be wasted by The Economist, about a mentally ill man with a gun, who made a readily politically exploitable statement about police, that could/did serve many ideological purposes, not the least of which was to attack a Mayor with whom The Economist has issues. To protect and to serve does not empower a policeman or a police force with the right to take a life for selling single cigarettes, nor to defend by the back door Stop and Frisk and it’s mendacious legacy! This essay wasn’t Journalism but ideologically fueled political polemic, against a mayor who The Economist judges to be a Leftist: the most loaded word in the American political lexicon. Call this essay a shameful exercise in political pandering, to an audience carefully attuned to the political crimes, real and imagined, of that Left.
Political Skeptic

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21637418-bill-de-blasios-first-year-city-hall-ends-turmoil-blue-thread-frays

Mr. Strauss needs a much better lawyer! Mr. Rosen, opening his essay on Strauss, with his long and ennui inducing comments on Mr. Bellow’s novel Ravelstein was cunning literary padding. Mr. Bellow wrote the same novel many times, Ravelstein being one of the many iterations of his literary practice. Call Ravelstein by it’s rightful name, the fictional biography of a arch manipulator/propagandist.  With a guest appearance by a fictionalized Strauss. But a much more aggressive defense should be mounted: because Mr. Rosen leaves out of his collection of book titles the work of German scholar Heinrich Mieir , a Strauss specialist and editor of his collected works.
Carl Schmitt and Leo StraussThe Hidden Dialogue:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3637206.html

Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/political-philosophy/leo-strauss-and-theologico-political-problem?format=PB

These two books don’t deal specifically with Mr. Strauss’ politics per say but offer insights into the esoteric/exoteric reading of the philosophical tradition: a reader might see this as intellectual permission to ‘read’ that tradition ideologically? and his defense/advocacy of the authoritarian Plato’s Noble Lie ( The City and Man). Perhaps the crux of the Strauss debate situated in it’s American context, rather than in philosophical/theological milieu of the Strauss/Schmitt rapprochement: although both had decided authoritarian political sympathies/allegiances. Enter stage Right the Neo-Cons, more than willing to exploit the concept of the Noble Lie in positions to wield influence on the powerful.

Almost Marx

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/athens-the-midway-defending-leo-strauss-11859?page=show

C.R.’s whole thesis is that things weren’t so bad in the Thirties, and provides the carefully massaged, relevant statistical data to prove it. Yet why is the collective memory of that time so suffused with anguished recollections, thoughts of want,hunger and political desperation? Mr. Orwell’s reportage being just one instance of that collective memory. This being The Economist should we immediately surmise the worst: Left wing propaganda?
Economics is really Political Economy not the self-reifying statistical models identified as ‘science’ in this essay and comments section, as the only valid form of commentary on the abject failure of the Neo-Liberal economic model: the long march toward The Road to Serfdom was led by Thatcher the Milk Snatcher.
For some valuable background on that Political Economy see Amartya Sen’s introduction to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments the 250th anniversary edition published by Penguin Classics ISBN 978-0-14-310592-3.
The Free Market was part of the model constructed by Hayek that was based on four cornerstones:Freedom, Free Markets, the Entrepreneur and Risk, that was supposed to replace the notion of the commonwealth: the shared fate/destiny of a set of political/ethical/economic actors. Hayek’s ‘philosophical quartet’ collapsed under the weight of the absent virtue of that Entrepreneur! See Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste by Philip Mirowski for a revelatory, unsparing examination of Neo-Liberalism :

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
From the rise of Thatcher/Reagan to the economic collapse of 2008 is barely a generation, succeeded by another political/economic mirage called Austerity, as answer to Hayek’s Economic Theology gussied up as ‘Science’.

Almost Marx

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/public-spending-britain#comments

Imagine the temerity of a mere waiter attempting to arrest Oxbridger Tony Blair for war crimes: it almost has about it the kind of Beyond the Fringe comic brio! The estimable Jonathan Miller and crew could have done it handily.
Poor Tony! his life is one extended political/ethical melodrama. Never has the political opportunism at the center of rise of New Labor been so amply demonstrated by a paradigmatic figure than by Tony Blair. He’s not a character from Dickens but rather from the political novels of Disraeli or even the high political melodrama of the Palliser novels. Yet he does not win the sympathy of the readers, of this almost even-handed essay, when it descends to a regrettable although predictable political bathos:

That is a shame, for his mission to fight against fundamentalism needs all the resources and energy it can get. He has considerable talents, which he is prepared to devote to his cause, just as he energised a moribund Labour Party and made it a more powerful political force than the largely retrograde instincts of Ed Miliband, its present leader, could have done. Yet the main asset that any former politician has is moral sway, and because Mr Blair has forfeited so much trust, he has far less credibility than he should have. Some contrition or regret among those ironclad certainties would serve him and his cause better. The late Mo Mowlam, an outspoken minister in the Blair government, was on to something when she observed early in his reign that “the trouble with Tony is that he thinks he’s fucking Jesus.” Mr Blair has plenty of the Messiah’s self-belief and sense of mission. He could do with a dash of his humility as well.

Political Cynic

http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636603-celebrated-abroad-and-reviled-home-former-prime-minister-struggles-fulfil

Mr. Douthat’s augmentative attack on the monster of Political Correctness is carefully embellished for maximum effectiveness? Note that he places the cyber-attack on Sony in an American political context: one might ask how is the presumed attack by Korean hackers, in retaliation for making their dear leader and North Korea the object of ridicule, related to Mr. Douthat’s straw man argument. Call him the political/literary stepchild of Mrs. Malaprop?

OF course it had to escalate this way. We live in a time of consistent gutlessness on the part of institutions notionally committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, a time of canceled commencement invitations and C.E.O.s defenestrated for their political donations, a time of Twitter mobs, trigger warnings and cringing public apologies. A time when journalists and publishers tiptoe around Islamic fundamentalism, when free speech is under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic, when a hypersensitive political correctness has the whip hand on many college campuses.

Followed by the bathos of a carefully calibrated exercise in self-pity:

As a conservative, you take for granted that these institutions are often political monocultures — that the average commencement speaker, like the average academic, will be several degrees left of center, that Silicon Valley isn’t the most hospitable place to be a religious conservative, that when Hollywood gets “edgy” or “controversial” it’s usually a right-wing ox that’s being gored.

Political Skeptic

Mr. Luce in his race to meet his deadline simply appropriates/reinterprets Mr. Niall Ferguson’s decline of the West political fatalism, decline/degeneration, and places it within the rhetoric of a question framed by glib yet vacuous pop psychology: is the west clinically depressed? He practices armchair psychology with a quick succession of metaphors: Today’s pessimism, miserabilism, technological revolution,personal freedom the west’s creed, our gloom that he posits as the pervasive psychological condition of the west. It’s simply not a maladroit description of the present quandary of the west but a defense of the utterly failed western experiment with Neo-Liberalism. From the rise of Thatcher/Reagan to the economic collapse of 2008 happened in less than a generation. All this chatter about the return of prosperity is so much window dressing. A quote from the essay is instructive:
‘It would be tempting to say yes. The average westerner lives far longer, is far less affected by war and has vastly greater choice than any people in human history. To be alive and free ought to be a giddy privilege. Perhaps we are so historically ignorant in our bliss that we do not appreciate what we have. Maybe something deeper, the continuous distraction of technology, perhaps, has so altered our neural wiring that we are less capable of appreciating what is under our noses. Or perhaps we are so unimpressed with the quality of public life nowadays, we suffer that misery that can come only from self-knowledge. All are types of depression. Each, in one form or another, has been suggested as an explanation for the west’s gloom. None strikes me as a killer diagnosis.’
After this praise for the ‘west’ and cynical dismissal of ‘self-knowledge’ as the crux of misery, it is quickly followed by the rise of others e.g. China and India,then comes the assertion that the west is growing old i.e. the onset of political sclerosis. In the Free Market mythology equaling shrinking risks brings shrinking rewards, for the risk averse pool of entrepreneurial actors, if any. The ‘grey lobby’ enters as anti-political actor: Tea Party,UKIP, National Front i.e. ‘western gerontocracy’. And mercifully enters the final player in this shopworn psychodrama, the greedy, the selfish ‘baby boomer’. The reader realizes more of Mr. Luce’s political/moral concerns than of the clinical disposition of the west in this essay.
Political Skeptic
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e6fa9024-86b6-11e4-9c2d-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Mdic2ZRn

Mr. Ash is adept at glibly articulating the American/E.U. Party line on Ukraine. Garnished with a bit of cheer leading for the Coup Government, combined with a misbegotten wish that Putin will some how come round, this is pure fantasy! Mr. Ash’s piece resembles the essays of Mr. David Brooks at the New York Times, in that some of the historical markers are recognizable but it looks like a territory re-imagined in service to ideological ends.

Perhaps, when the blessings of Austerity finally hit home: the slashing of pensions in half and an attempt by NATO to place ABM’s on the Russian border, this low level war with fully ignite, to the joy of Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan.

But here is the piece de resistance:

‘Putin Inc. needs a new and different model. But over his 15 years in power, the regime has appeared unwilling or unable to tolerate the kind of radical reforms now needed, because they likely challenge the very underpinnings of the regime itself.’

The positing of a volte face by Mr. Putin into the ranks of the Neo-Liberal Austerity fold out ranks his earlier exercise in wish fulfillment. I write this on Thursday December 18, 2014, President Obama has announced a plan, an agonizingly timid plan, to normalize relations with Cuba after a half-century of a destructive hold over from the Cold War. The lesson we might draw from this could include both sides in the low level war over Ukraine ( the dangers of imperial adventurism as practiced by America and Russia?), except that a low level banking technocrat with ‘skin in the game’ and an ascertainable ideological myopia seems to miss what might be most relevant,compelling in the question of Ukraine: how many human lives will the American/E.U. alliance sacrifice to their hegemonic ambition?
Political Skeptic
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/12/17/hello-2015-having-failed-in-ukraine-russia-will-turn-inwards/

I read with interest Mr. McCarthy’s review of The Power of Market Fundamentalism, as I had found the book on Amazon, and it was quite outside my price range. Even facing that impediment, my interest was still active, and I was happy to find a link to Mr. McCarthy’s review on my twitter feed. And this quite thorough indeed compellingly well written review will lead me to an eventual purchase of a used copy of this book.

I purchased instead a copy of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste by Philip Mirowski at the Verso web site:

http://www.versobooks.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=never+let+a+serious+crisis+go+to+waste&commit=%C2%A0

I’m on page 120 and finding it challenging and quite rewarding reading on the rise of Neo-Liberalism and it’s some thirty year dominance of the discourse of Political Economy in American politics. I came to this book after reading the issue of Critical Review volume 25 numbers 3-4 2013 titled Hayek: the Good, The Bad, The Ugly. An informative collection of essay on the ubiquitous epistemology/constructs/ideas/propaganda of Mr. Hayek.

As much as I enjoyed Mr. McCarthy’s review, I was struck by the comment or rather the near hysterical screeching reply of BMerker. It reads like a pastiche of the Cold War rhetoric of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarren/McCarthy political alliance wedded to the Tea Party Economics of Rep. Paul Ryan: the merging of Rand and Hayek scrubbed clean of it’s unapologetic atheism. It was quite a jarring experience to read the carefully considered and well written review against an obvious propaganda assault.
http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/michael-mccarthy-block-somers-market-fundamentalism-karl-polanyi

StephenKMackSD

Mr. Luce in his essay titled ‘Too big to resist: Wall Street’s comeback‘ his rhetorical mood is subject to some breathtakingly wide swings in assigning blame for the 2008 Financial Crisis, and what he predicts will be the next Crisis, enabled by the persuasive power of the redoubtable Mr. Jamie Dimon, aided by a supine, purchasable congress. A thoroughly complex story reduced in his essay to the mention of major economic/political actors, yet the dismal failure of Neo-Liberalism, of the Free Market hegemony is never even put to question: Hayek’s irrational faith in the ‘wisdom of the Market’, as guiding principle that rendered the idea,not to say the practice, of the institutions of the commonwealth and it’s civic,legal,political, ethical holism moot. The blind faith in that Market as historical/economic singularity and it’s manifold popular vulgarizations is left utterly untouched, as source of our present political/economic dilemma. Although Mr. Luce does his best at scolding the culpable, while adroitly maintaining his well established credentials as defender/advocate for that very Neo-Liberalism.

Political Skeptic