StephenKMackSD's Blog

Is it possible to write an essay on Kierkegaard without the mention of the ethical/philosophical monstrosity of the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’? Mr. Jeffrey Frank benignly characterizes it as ‘ a dazzling thought experiment’ with ‘somewhat frightening, especially when you consider its extreme, all-too-familiar modern-day applications’ . Might we call it by it’s real name? The rationale or philosophical permission of the religious zealot and or mass murderer? Or does that strain the bounds of respectable bourgeois intellectual/political discourse? Continue reading →

What can one say about the self-serving and purposefully obtuse Mr. Douthat? The fact that Obamacare is the product of The Heritage Foundation? The premier think tank of the, once, most reactionary strata of the Party. The New Democrats took that plan and made it their own. The Republican Party calls it ‘Socialized Medicine’ and other such epithets, yet it is not single payer, but wedded to the welfare of insurance providers and drug manufactures. The Republicans have no real alternative because Obamacare is their own. Continue reading →

“By now, everybody involved seems to be in a state of anxiety. Insurance companies are trying to put out new products, but they don’t know what federal parameters they have to meet. Small businesses are angry because the provisions that benefited them have been put on the back burner. Health care systems are highly frustrated. They can’t plan without a road map. Senator Max Baucus, one of the authors of the law, says he sees a “huge train wreck” coming. Continue reading →

How many times can David Brooks use the terms chaos and catastrophe in the opening paragraphs of his essay aptly titled ‘Health Chaos Ahead‘? And then beat to death the word cascade,in his gleeful policy fantasy about the coming failure of ‘Obamacare’,that un-enlightened,now, bastard child of The Heritage Foundation? The New Democratic agenda will be defeated by a concatenation of the failures of implementation; the Republicans will maintain control of the House and re-gain the Senate on demonstrable voter discontent. Mr. Brooks can’t seem to master his triumphalism before the fact! Or should we call it the most aggressive expression of  hope?

Political Observer

We have traveled a long road from Thatcher/Reagan to the world wide economic collapse of 2008. That Free Market failed, it was the intellectual mirage of political romantics masquerading as economists, succeeded by an equally failed Austerity. Continue reading →

Quite adroitly in his essay titled ‘Boston — and what hasn’t happened since 9/11′Mr. Matt Miller lets the recollected writing of Mr. Richard Clark do his work of fear mongering for him, masquerading as awed speculation in the face of the bombings in Boston. All of it resembles the film genre of apocalyptic science fiction, set not in the future but in the very dangerous present of the ascendant American Empire and it’s collection of enemies. The reader is gripped in the scenarios that Mr. Miller recounts, but one eventually asks the question, following a repentant Scrooge’s inquiry to the Ghost of Christmas Future, something like, can this future be changed?

America’s Enemies have the money and organizational abilities that can confound,indeed neutralize, the most militarized and technically advanced nation in the world. Is the psychological strategy to imagine the worst case to inoculate ones self against the potential reality?

Do we as readers need to recall the bombings of Atlanta of 1996? And the investigation that followed, featuring the case of Mr. Richard Jewell? Certainly a high point in the annals of American Justice? Or are we history-less pawns of near hysterical pundit chatter?

Political Observer

Here is David Brooks in The New York Times,opining on the death of Mrs. Thatcher, whose opening paragraph gives away the game of this Conservative chatterer:
‘The 1990 Tory coup against Margaret Thatcher was the most intense political event I’ve covered. The Conservative politicians who were trying to remove her from party leadership and the prime minister’s office knew they were toppling a person who was their political and moral superior. They knew she had earned the right to face the country in an election one last time, rather than be deposed by the supposed lieutenants in her own party. They sensed there would be some Shakespearean retribution for the act of disloyalty they were engaged in. They went around rubbing their hands like Lady Macbeth trying to expunge the sin even as they were committing it.’
Mr. Brooks plays it rhetorically at the melodramatic dénouement of the career of Mrs.Thatcher. How perfect to play it back as witness to the regicide of our heroine, so as to avoid anything but praise for her morality,steadfastness etc., in the face of the Socialist perfidy, and the betrayal by her own party: et tu Brute? Mrs. Thatcher as the exemplar of the ‘culture of rectitude’ vs the ‘culture of narcissism’. Does any narrative produced by Mr. Brooks ever vary from his  Conservative obsession and/or fantasy of decline?
‘She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.” ‘
Mr. Brooks’ rhetorical strategy pays off quite handsomely, he is disburdened of any real responsibility to discuss with any candor Mrs. T’s Hayekian faith in the Free Market and it’s failures. That we live with every day, as the inheritors of her policy initiatives. The Economic collapse in 2008 and it’s successor idea and practice of Austerity are her living monument.

Political Cynic

Mr. Janan Ganesh celebrates the inevitable decline of The Welfare State and it’s misbegotten, indeed mendacious origins, and it’s political/ethical defeat in terms of ideas and practice, a bit too soon. He invokes History as a political actor in a way that some, even he, might find uncomfortably Hegelian, even enlisting the geological ‘tectonic movements’ and Hobbes’ Leviathan in his arguments. His essay is cock-a-block with usable historical metaphors. The usual stance of Neo-Liberal apologists is to attack the proven failure of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Social Democracy’, while utterly and quite rightly ignoring, all in the name of self-serving political myth-making, the rather egregious failure of ‘Free Market Economics’ in 2008.

The empirical evidence of American and European economies still floundering after the collapse of the ignoble fantasy, of that self-correcting Market, are everywhere, except to ideologues. Five years of waiting for the mirage of recovery to manifest itself, aided by an enlightened Austerity is not long enough?

But Mr. Ganesh, true to form,chatters on about welfare and pension spongers and celebrates the Queen Bee of that collapsed mythology, Mrs. Thatcher, and her collection of Political Romantics masquerading as Economists. And in the process celebrates the inevitable victory of the Austerians as Mr. Krugman calls them. The victory of the Neo-Liberals in the politics/economics of America and Europe has been disastrous and it just continues to worsen. No answers from Mr. Ganesh, except a kind of loathsome political fatalism.

Political Observer