StephenKMackSD's Blog

‘We don’t need bigger government. We need more unified authority. Take power away from the rentier groups who dominate the process. Allow people in those authorities to exercise discretion. Find a president who can both rally a majority, and execute a policy process.’
The American Interest and Francis Fukuyama are hardly reliable sources for policy that one might call Centrist, or even Moderate.(Perhaps Right Wing Neo-Liberalism?) But Mr Brooks has found a spokesman who makes the Unitary Presidential political fantasy of Mr. John Yoo seem almost rational. If one, like Mr. Brooks, willfully erases the last thirteen years of American history, or at least the politically inconvenient parts. In Brooks World the persistent Republican Nihilism is elided from our collective historical memories, as inconvenient truth. What is left is the alignment of platonic ideas by Mr. Brooks, carefully arranged so as to make authoritarianism seem a rational political destination, as bulwark against ‘rentier groups’,’institutional decay’,and ‘vetocracy’ . Long live the Republic!
Publius
         

Gather round children Mr. David Brooks is about to spin a rather complex political fable with the assistance of Professor Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University and the Koch funded The Mercatus Center, and author of ‘Average is Over’! Be still for a moment as Mr. Brooks begins his little tale:

We’re living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you’re probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. As Tyler Cowen puts it in his relentlessly provocative recent book, “Average Is Over,” “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.”

So our challenge for the day is to think of exactly which mental abilities complement mechanized intelligence. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few mental types that will probably thrive in the years ahead. Continue reading →

Here is a paragraph, that is the central defense of the religious sensibility, from Mr. Douthat’s essay of November 23,2013 titled ‘Puddleglum and the Savage’:

In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth. Continue reading →

Mr. Frum’s essay of November 26,2013 titled ‘Hillary Clinton’s Iran Trap’ provides a perfect propaganda opportunity for attacking both the current Democratic front runner of 2016, and President Obama’s Iran agreement, not to speak of the gratuitous ‘Professor Obama’ dig. The charge of hypocrisy hangs heavy in the air.  Never let an ‘opportunity’ pass by, without thoroughly exploiting it’s political potential, rule number one in Frum World. Mr. Frum’s political allies like Ms. Jennifer Rubin equated a potential attack on Iran by Israel as a ‘Defense of the West’, while Mr. Krauthammer likened the Iran agreement, in the stark terms of ‘Munich’. Those kind of political hysterics -Mr. Frum is a more adept, even sophisticated propagandist, in locating his critique of the Iran agreement in a politically holistic way, by using Ms. Clinton’s past pronouncements on the Iranian Problem. While ignoring in the most blatant self-serving way, the situation as being fundamentally changed in the wake of the agreement. Political opportunities are manufactured by propagandists like Mr. Frum.

Political Cynic 

Jennifer Rubin’s column for November 22, 2013 titled ‘Who will Defend the West’ is a faint echo of  Cold War rhetoric. This was written before the Iran accords were reached a few days later. Here is a telling paragraph:

Whether or not a deal is struck few expect Iran to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions. It may be the tiny Jewish state (albeit one with a first-rate military) in a sea of Arab lands that steps up to the plate to defend itself, its Sunni neighbors and the West. Winston Churchill, in his 1921 visit to what was then Palestine, may have been prophetic when he said, “I believe that the establishment of the a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain. . . . The hope of your race [the Jewish people] for so many centuries will be gradually realized here, not only for your own good but for the good of all the world.” Israel would quite literally be doing just that if forced to strike Iran. (The man who pointed this out to me and wrote a definitive work on Churchill and the Jewish state, Michael Makovsky, visitedthe current prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is himself a Churchill buff, this fall.) Let’s pray it doesn’t come to that. Continue reading →