http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/francois-hollande-becomes-french-…

 

Professor Johnson may be British but he is adept at a faithful ventriloquism of the Cold War American specialty of hysterical anti-communism. And the thoughtful reader only viewed Rep. Alan West as just another No-Nothing political opportunist in the mode of the paranoid ramblings of the bourbon soaked Senator Joe McCarthy. Rep. West of the list of 80 Democrats who are Communists, although letting his statement represent 'evidence' rather than any actual 'proof'. Rep. West and Professor Johnson are allies in the fight against the resurgent Red Menace.
Although Professor Johnson in his latest essay titled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion at his blog Ideals without Illusions at the World Affairs Journal manages to strike a tone of both respectable bourgeois intellectualism with a screeching nearly unhinged hysteria: this was no easy task but he managed to,somehow, make it work rhetorically. It is quite a feat and it is worth reading if only for an example of a specific kind of rhetorical pathology. A list of the culprits: Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou,  Michael Hardt,  Toni Negri, Gianni Vattimo, Alessandro Russo,Judith Balso, Alberto Toscano, Terry Eagleton, Bruno Bosteels , and the propaganda arm of the Communist Apologists Verso Books.
One must read it for his initial essay and his addendum in the comments section which for it's exhaustive intellectual completeness is stunning, for want of a better term. From my point of view Slavoj Zizek is the most visible of all the people that Professor Johnson names. He is both intellectually accomplished and in all ways the personification of the failed Communist Nostalgia that Professor Johnson rails against. Zizeck is polemicist, provocateur, intellectual gadfly even a stand up comic with a compelling intellectual dimension. He continually plays off the the concept of irony in all it's permutations and exploits to the fullest the practice of the dialectic.He is the most powerful in terms of public presence and he is utterly winning in his self-presentation.This makes him exceedingly dangerous as pitch man for the renewal of the political legitimacy of Communism.
Professor Johnson fails in his essay to address what might be the root cause of this destructive Communist Nostalgia that he inveighs against, which is so obviously the failure of Capital in it's unbridled Free Market iteration to deliver on it's own promised Utopia. And the Public Intellectuals that acted as apologists for that massive failure that has plunged the world, first into chaos and then to a bleak unending economic uncertainty.
Republicans, New Democrats, New Labor and the Party of Austerity are the real culprits of the political melodrama that has unfolded since the economic collapse of 2008, and the intellectuals who acted as mediators and explicators for an utterly corrupt political class, in hock to that very Capital. Read Professor Johnson's essay and meditate on the failure of Capital ,the rise of Zizek and his fellow travelers and the power of an exploitable hysteria.
Almost Marx              

  

   

The Ultramontane Catholic opinionator and Republican Conservative Ross Douthat , in his latest essay in the New York Times titled Incredible Shrinking Country, directs his attention to that once great engine of forward thinking and innovative Capital,Japan. An introduction is provided to the idea and literary practice of the dystopian novel, P.D. James' Children of Men: very descriptive of the key notion of decadence, that is the armature on which all else is built. The main protagonist in his fable is a Japan that was once represented, in America, as the ultimate in the possibilities of what Capital might become, within a neo-feudal context of the company man, at least in the stories that originated from the once fearsome, unquestionable propaganda machines of the Free Marketeers. Now that Japan is in decline, as Mr.Douthat constructs the tale, of an aging population and a declining birthrate, raises the question is it representative of decadence? Mr. Douthat finds a kindred spirit in the person of  demographer Nick Eberstadt to further his argument with apposite, and needless to say alarming, statistical data. Could it be that the Japanese have taken seriously the notion of a sustainable planet, as necessitating population control ? Mr. Douthat is addicted to the notion of growth as the sine qua non of Capitalism, and is incapable of a simple but necessary shift in intellectual perspective, from the model of growth to a model of development that might be the first step in the direction of thinking about the possibilities of the a new paradigm. Mr. Douthat is hobbled by his fealty to two ideologies that don't model creative path-breaking thought, but demand an uncritical conformity to authority.The possibility of the realization of a new paradigm remain for others to speculate and cogitate about: challenging his thinking about the need to continue an unsustainable birth rate, as indicative of Christian virtue wedded to a Capitalist imperative of an endless supply of new young workers. Is an aging population indicative of a loss of dynamism? Yes, if one is mired in the idee fixe of growth as the only measure worthy of serious consideration. Without appearing to be dogmatic, sustainable development appears to be the only rational choice at this moment.
Political Observer
              

Howard Davies, a Professor at the Institute of Political Studies(Sciences PO), is the author of an essay in the TLS of April 27,2012 titled Triple A Trouble. A review of two books: Finance and The Good Society by Robert Shiller and Paper Promises by Philip Coggan. Not to spoil the fun, but Professor Davies has two obvious dislikes, Occupy Protestors and François Hollande, i.e. some unwashed hippies with no program, just youthful nihilism and M. Hollande who looks like a Socialist. But have no fear Professor Davies' contempt is palpable and he is democratic in his gift of that rhetoric. And he demonstrates an addiction to the bromides of the present received wisdom of the 'Now', in economics and politics, which is not quite 'Centrism' but is not yet a full scale apologetics for the failed Neo-Liberal Paradigm. Could it be Austerity or one of it's many permutations? An unanswered question. It is hard to follow this beautifully composed essay's inchoate political trajectory, but he has mastered the world weary cynicism that I thought was my exclusive territory, although he does it with such style and with just the right amount of intellectual garnish. The a priori remains unexplored yet makes its indispensable contribution. One can only feel bested by a practitioner of greater skill and imagination. He style lays bare the possibility of the very notion and practice of contempt, married to a winning yet acerbic rhetorical demeanor.
Political Cynic

             

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEv…

 

Thank you to leninology for link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/02/democracies-stop-predator…

 

At the utterly respectable Financial Times, Mr. Edward Luce's latest essay sounds the alarm at the possibility of the election of Mitt Romney to the office of President. It isn't so much the completely pliable politics of Mr. Romney, to put it most charitably, that worries Mr. Luce, but the political company he keeps :John Bolton, Richard Williamson, a former Bush official,Dan Senor, Cofer Black, the former CIA counter-terrorism chief and senior executive at Blackwater, Nile Gardiner, Walid Phares, Mr Zoellick, Steven Hadley. It looks like a collection of what an optimist or an unimaginative political centrist  might refer to as seasoned bureaucrats, with a high degree of experience in their respective specialties. But for Mr. Luce this collection of policy experts signal the return of the Neo-Conservative heyday of the Bush Restoration. One could view this alarm as an endorsement of the more modest policies of President Obama: not the failed policies of invade and conquer, that loot the treasury; make more enemies than friends and at a high cost of American life. But the exploitation to the full of our use of drone warfare, to execute our enemies at long distance. Wed to this policy the ability to assassinate at will using 'surgical strike forces' as in the murder of bin Laden. I don't think that I'm reading too much into the Luce polemic. While one can see the record of murder and mendacity of the Neo-Cons, one can also see, in a telling moment of candor, that President Obama is a New Democrat just two or three paces behind his political rivals: in the name of state security, of political pragmatism, or,even, in the name of Niebuhr's Christian Realism? 
Political Cynic            

   

Dear Lexington,

Your recent essay Are the Republicans mad? reeks of contempt and disdain: of an Olympian view of the great politically unwashed: Messrs. Mann, Ornstein and Norquist. How very clever of you to find a contempt and disdain that is utterly democratic in it's application. N'est pas? And the expressed virtues of your essay is that it is set in the most beguiling rhetoric of self-infatuation and the political omniscience of a master thinker, yourself. But to the question of the Republican Party's descent into 'madness' ,which you find as a change of basic philosophy and a strategic maneuver, one could point to the adoption by state governments in fourteen states of the union, that have passed voter suppression laws that limit the votes of the working poor and the disadvantaged : black,Hispanic, students, the elderly, all primarily Democratic voters. Here from the ACLU is a graphic that demonstrates the extent of the 'madness' of the Republican Party, that even you might find comprehensible. One could interpret this attack on the right to vote, of those you disagree with as a form of 'madness', even a betrayal of the fundamental right to vote in this Republic. In essence you have ignored the empirical evidence of 'madness', even of betrayal of the basic right to vote, in favor of your a priori political omniscience and it's rhetorical corollary.

A faithful reader,

Political Cynic

Here are the opening paragraphs that pass as arguments in David Brooks latest essay in the New York Times grotesquely titled Is Our Adults Learning. Is it humor?

"In 2009, we had a big debate about whether to pass a stimulus package. Many esteemed and/or Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Larry Summers and Christina Romer argued that it would help lift the economy out of recession. Many other esteemed and/or Nobel Prize-winning economists like Robert Barro, Edward Prescott and James Buchanan argued that positive effects would be small and the package wouldn’t be worth the long-term cost.

We went ahead and spent the roughly $800 billion. What have we learned?

For certain, nothing. The economists who supported the stimulus now argue the economy would have been worse off without it. Those who opposed it argue that the results have been meager. It’s hard to think of anybody whose mind has been changed by what happened.

This is not entirely surprising. Nearly 80 years later, it’s hard to know if the New Deal did much to end the Great Depression. Still, it would be nice if we could learn from experience. To avoid national catastrophe, we’re going to have to figure out how to control health care costs, improve schools and do other things."

Mr. Brooks then introduces Jim Manzi a contributing editor to National Review and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a man identified by Mr. Brooks as a 'reformer' in the Republican Party, in 2009. But for this essay Mr Manzi is the author of Uncontrolled and an expert on the use of 'creating big pattern-finding models and then running simulations to see how proposals will work.' But there is a caveat:

"The problem is that no model can capture enough of the world’s complexity to yield definitive conclusions or make nonobvious predictions. A lot depends on what assumptions you build into them."

Mr. Manzi's computer modeling is by nature flawed, in that it cannot be an accurate simulation of the complexity of the world. The next question might be: but can we extrapolate from the model to somehow move us forward in pursuit of some much hoped for information and needed probabilities? But Mr. Brooks quickly moves the argument to interesting but seemingly irrelevant conjecturing:

"In “Uncontrolled,” Manzi looks at two celebrated model-building exercises. Larry Bartels of Princeton produced a model finding that presidential policies exercise the single biggest influence on income distribution. The authors of “Freakonomics” produced a model showing legalized abortions subsequently reduced crime rates.

Manzi argues that by slightly tweaking the technical assumptions in these models, you eliminate the headline-grabbing results. He also points out that regression models that try to explain crime rates have not become more accurate over the past 30 years. All this model-building hasn’t even helped us get better at understanding the problem.

What you really need to achieve sustained learning, Manzi argues, is controlled experiments. Try something out. Compare the results against a control group. Build up an information feedback loop. This is how businesses learn. By 2000, the credit card company Capital One was running 60,000 randomized tests a year — trying out different innovations and strategies. Google ran about 12,000 randomized experiments in 2009 alone.

These randomized tests actually do vindicate or disprove theories. For example, a few years ago, one experiment suggested that if you give people too many choices they get overwhelmed and experience less satisfaction. But researchers conducted dozens more experiments, trying to replicate the phenomenon. They couldn’t.

Businesses conduct hundreds of thousands of randomized trials each year. Pharmaceutical companies conduct thousands more. But government? Hardly any. Government agencies conduct only a smattering of controlled experiments to test policies in the justice system, education, welfare and so on."

My thought is what is the political point Mr. Brooks is trying, in his circuitous way, to come to and where is the evidence of the failure of The New Deal?

"Why doesn’t government want to learn? First, there’s no infrastructure. There are few agencies designed to supervise such experiments. Second, there is no way to conduct a randomized experiment to test big economywide policies like the stimulus package.

Finally, the general lesson of randomized experiments is that the vast majority of new proposals do not work, and those that do work only do so to a limited extent and only under certain circumstances. This is true in business and government. Politicians are not inclined to set up rigorous testing methods showing that their favorite ideas don’t work.

Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation. Set up an F.D.A.-like agency to institute thousands of randomized testing experiments throughout government. Decentralize policy experimentation as much as possible to encourage maximum variation.

His tour through the history of government learning is sobering, suggesting there may be a growing policy gap. The world is changing fast, producing enormous benefits and problems. Our ability to understand these problems is slow. Social policies designed to address them usually fail and almost always produce limited results. Most problems have too many interlocking causes to be explicable through modeling."

My question is answered: The Government will not learn. Mr. Brooks cannot resist his imperative to public moralizing. Decentralization of policy experimentation is the answer, government wide. While we are mired in the failed Free Market paradigm and it's failed successor, the program of Austerity, which can be laid at the feet of our thinker. Let me leave the last cliched thoughts to Mr. Brooks:

"Still, things don’t have to be this bad. The first step to wisdom is admitting how little we know and constructing a trial-and-error process on the basis of our own ignorance. Inject controlled experiments throughout government. Feel your way forward. Fail less badly every day."

Political Observer

The Creative Monopoly is the title of the David Brooks essay of April 22, 2012 a title that speaks volumes about the inflated yet prosaic thought of Mr. Brooks. He can take the subject of creativity and render it almost lifelike. The filter that he puts his ideas through seems to take away the spontaneity from any subject and renders it flat, insipid. This is a talent that seems to afflict so many at The New York Times Opinion pages. Mr. Brooks takes as his starting point the career of Peter Thiel, the founder of Pay Pal.

“As a young man, Peter Thiel competed to get into Stanford. Then he competed to get into Stanford Law School. Then he competed to become a clerk for a federal judge. Thiel won all those competitions. But then he competed to get a Supreme Court clerkship.

Thiel lost that one. So instead of being a clerk, he went out and founded PayPal. Then he became an early investor in Facebook and many other celebrated technology firms. Somebody later asked him. “So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that Supreme Court clerkship?”

Mr. Brooks cannot resist an over-achiever, no matter the context. And Mr. Thiel fills the bill with some extras. He is a Libertarian, and a backer of Republican candidates. But take the opportunity to acquaint yourself with the full breadth of Thiel's career and political interests via Wikipedia. Here are two quotes from the Wiki entry that are instructive:

“In 2009, it was reported that Thiel helped fund college student James O'Keefe's "Taxpayers Clearing House" video – a satirical look at the politics behind the Wall Street bailout. O'Keefe went on to produce the ACORN undercover sting videos”

“In 2012, Thiel, along with PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek and Scott Banister, an early adviser and board member, put their support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, alongside Internet advertising veteran Stephen Oskoui and entrepreneur Jeffrey Harmon, who founded Endorse Liberty in November 2011. Collectively Thiel et al gave $3.9 million to Endorse Liberty, whose purpose was to promote Texas congressman Ron Paul for president in 2012. As of January 31, 2012, Endorse Liberty reported spending about $3.3 million promoting Paul by setting up two YouTube channels, buying ads from Google and Facebook and StumbleUpon, and building a presence on the Web.”

Mr. Theil doesn't appear to be just your ordinary millionaire or successful entrepreneur, but a rather conservative one, with ideas and opinions very close to those of Mr. Brooks. Perhaps even more radically conservative than our essayist might admit to.

“One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.”

Mr. Brooks argues that the canny capitalist will transcend the notion and practice of competition for the practice of Monopoly as argued by Mr. Theil, but can one simply observe that Monopoly is the end stage of competition, at least as part of the mythology of Capital as Social Darwanism. Even if your product is utterly unique that cannot last in competitive marketplace. Mr. Brooks makes that clear in his next sentences.

“Now to be clear: When Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.”

The already established hegemony of the victor of the struggle can be inventive in the maintenance of his dominate position : diversification of investments and strategies, etc. Mr. Brooks has established the parameters of the victor in his melodrama, so he begins his moralizing on the question of the seeming conundrum of the relation between creativity and capital, as key to understanding the victory of creativity in his argument. While the critical reader might find the notion perplexing, even indefensible, of a benign Capital and a benign Capitalist, in the person of Mr. Theil, too great a strain on the believable. Mr. Thiel is a contributor of $3.9 million dollars to support the candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul, via a superpac, a man dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. He named a son after her. And her mythology of 'drones' and 'producers' featuring the 'producers' as winners in a competition between unequals, mimics rather closely the philosophical imperatives of the Social Darwinist's dog eat dog social ethic of winner take all. Monopoly is the end product of competition in the world view of the followers of Ayn Rand and Mr. Thiel is a true believer in the notion of the natural inequality of himself, and the populous other. Mr. Brooks feeble attempt at a portrait of Mr. Theil as advocate of a benign creative monopoly is unconvincing. Read the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Theil it is instructive, even compelling reading.

Political Observer

Mr. Brooks has established the parameters of the victor in his melodrama, so he begins his moralizing on the question of the seeming conundrum of the relation between creativity and capital, as key to understanding the victory of creativity in his argument. While the critical reader might find the notion perplexing, even indefensible, of a benign Capital and a benign Capitalist, in the person of Mr. Theil, too great a strain on the believable. Mr. Thiel is a contributor of $3.9 million dollars to support the candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul, via a superpac, a man dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. He named a son after her. And her mythology of 'drones' and 'producers' featuring the 'producers' as winners in a competition between unequals, mimics rather closely the philosophical imperatives of the Social Darwinist's dog eat dog social ethic of winner take all. Monopoly is the end product of competition in the world view of the followers of Ayn Rand and Mr. Thiel is a true believer in the notion of the natural inequality of himself, and the populous other. Mr. Brooks feeble attempt at a portrait of Mr. Theil as advocate of a benign creative monopoly is unconvincing. Read the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Theil it is instructive, even compelling reading.

Political Observer