StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is Jennifer Rubin singing the praises of Andrew Breitbart. Is it surprising that a fellow citizen of the ‘Conservative Counter World’, that has a problem with the establishment of historical actualities, should praise a fellow citizen of that ‘World’ as politically indispensable? Praise from one propagandist to another? In the American Political Melodrama the question of the hour: who will succeed the,now, eulogized Mr. Breitbart? The crimes of his manufactured antagonists are well documented, Shirley Sherrod,ACORN,NPR,Anthony Weiner. Mr. Breitbart played upon the most precious commodity of American Politics,perceived political respectability as demonstable of legitimately held power, and the subversive power of lies, truth and half-truths endlessly repeated with malevolent intent.

Political Cynic

In the ultra-respectable Economist of February 25, 2012 appears this essay entitled “Financial Infrastructure: Of plumbing and promises, the back office moves center stage.” Quite a mouthful! But have no fear, as I said, this is the staid house organ of an educated bourgeois readership, that places great store in their immediately perceived legitimacy, even though they are Capitalists to the core: without apology. The assumed virtues of Capital is the very moral/intellectual stuff of the readers of this periodical as of it’s writers and editors.This essay weaves a tale of the complexity of capital, it’s markets and the actors at various levels in the structure that make it function, or not function. Now as a witness to the collapse of the Market in 2008, and the subsequent unfolding as a story about Robber Capital, and it’s allies in government: Clinton, Rubin, Summers and their conservative allies, Phil and Wendy Gramm, who managed to pass Financial Reform, that rendered Glass-Steagall null and void, are here not mentioned, as vital background, to this cosmetically confected apologetics, rendered in the most sedate terms, using the self-serving rhetoric of rational political discourse, carefully removed from the context of the New Democrat’s political propinquity with Conservatism,in it’s post Reagan iteration. This is a striking example of glib, informed public relations, or more accurately, of rather transpaprent propaganda that meets specific editorial needs, but fails at the most basic level, to report the root cause of the World Market collapse of 2008.The arguement here is that the uninformed and unsophisticated underlings, the least cognizant of financial operators, in this civic melodrama, were, if fact, culpable because of the precipitating cause of that ignorance. The credulity of the reader is the operative assumption, that the writers of this essay are wagering on, as if we are ignorant of the size,shape and depth of the mendacity of American Capital, and their allies in the Democratic and Republican Parties. 

Almost Marx

 

Here is some well timed, politically useful, hypocrisy from the pen of Ross Douthat. What better way to distract voters in this time of the battle between misogynist, theocrats and jingos, that is the Republican Party of 2012, than with the Cult of Ike. The Republican Party has made it’s top priority, since 1964, to purge the Eisenhower Republicans out of the Party, and they have succeeded. But the celebration of Ike is handy for producing a usable nostalgia in service to a Party transformed by that highly successful purge. A question occurs to me: Did the Eisenhower Republicans come back as the Blue Dog Democrats? Here is a key passage from the essay:

“In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.”

How easy to overlook the facts that Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon as his Vice President and John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State, or is that a demonstration of his being ‘a ruthless master politician’. As a Modern Conservative,after Rove, Mr. Douthat can celebrate even admire the cardinal virtue of ruthlessness,perhaps the singular philosophical contribution of the Social Darwinism masquerading as Conservatism. I would venture to say, that a monument should be built to the Eisenhower Republicans, who were purged from the GOP.

Almost Marx

David Brooks is reeling from the effects of his colleagues reporting on the Radical Individualist’s in our midst. It seems that something like 28% of Americans live alone and half the births in America in women under thirty are out of wedlock and 50% of Americans adults are single. The continued existence of the comfortable bourgeois hetero world that Mr. Brooks treasures is somewhat in doubt, as the way of the American Tribe. 28% is, rather uncomfortably, almost a third! And women under thirty giving birth without husbands surly points to American Moral Decadence, although that was last week’s subject. But Mr. Brooks ambles around in this statistical data while contrasting it with some hastily constructed nostalgic asides. But Mr. Brooks cannot quell his moral panic about the Radical Individualists among us, and their subversion of his comfortable world view, that doesn’t have anything to do with the lived American actuality. That could be a description of Conservatism itself, as not in touch with the evolution of American lives.

Queer Atheist

Here is Niall Ferguson in the magazine Foreign Policy, the prestigious voice of American Establishment thinking, in an essay entitled We’re All State Capitalists Now. Mr. Ferguson or the editors have a way with this outworn cliché, it speaks of historical moments, well past. But Mr. Ferguson is an Economic Historian with many irons in the fire: full time apologist for the British Empire, a Free Market advocate, a Conservative of some political standing and, now, a full time resident of America, teaching at Harvard. We like our political reactionaries so much, we like to import the best of the lot from the mother country. State Capitalism is the newest description for the form of Capitalism that has evolved in China, I would say Post-Communist but that would be inaccurate. Mr. Ferguson assures us of his fealty to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations while leaving it’s intellectual companion The Theory of Moral Sentiments unacknowledged. The question arises, why might that be of import in a conversation on economics and it’s various iterations, of it’s models. Smith’s plan was to construct a ‘Science of Man’ with Wealth and the Theory as parts of that unrealized whole. Economics was once a branch of ethics (the Dismal Science has a past!),that might be a difficult burden for Mr. Ferguson to carry, even, perhaps too intellectually confining: Modern Conservatism’s economics has more in common with the thought of Spencer, than with the whole of Smith-the truncated version being more politically convenient. But in this essay we have a example of an ‘American’ public intellectual’s fascination with the slave labor camp of China, the ‘successful’ wedding of authoritarianism and capitalism. Even Žižek has commented on this phenomenon. For Mr. Ferguson and his political/economic allies it is a model that speaks to their aspiration of a nearly problem free form of political oppression, in service to profit: modern Conservatism’s obsession with the care and maintenance of the natural Capitalist aristocracy. Perhaps I have overstated the case, but most assuredly not by much. As recent reports have indicated the greatest expenditure in the Chinese economy is ‘internal security’, meaning a vast spying network that has been constructed to maintain the fiction of a nonexistent political harmony, with an eye to wining new customers. But the miracle of authoritarian capitalism is belied by the growing number of reports of worker rebellions,strikes and the wave of suicides: all very deleterious to attracting new business. Mr. Ferguson, true to Conservative form, is sounding the warning of the Yellow Peril, but in this iteration as a threatening challenge to the economic hegemony of the ‘West”.

 

Political Observer

David Brooks

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/opinion/brooks-the-jeremy-lin-problem.html?…

“The odds are that Lin will never figure it out because the two moral universes are not reconcilable. Our best teacher on these matters is Joseph Soloveitchik, the great Jewish theologian. In his essays “The Lonely Man of Faith” and “Majesty and Humility” he argues that people have two natures. First, there is “Adam the First,” the part of us that creates, discovers, competes and is involved in building the world. Then, there is “Adam the Second,” the spiritual individual who is awed and humbled by the universe as a spectator and a worshipper.”

Immanuel Kant

 

“Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from it’s self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.”

An Answer to the Question:What is Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant

Translated by James Schmidt

What is Enlightenment

Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions

Edited by James Schmidt

University of California Press

 

 

 

Jeremy Lin is an NBA player who, at present, is having phenomenal success and is a person of deep religious faith. In his desperation to manufacture his latest column, Mr. Brooks takes Mr. Lin as his subject of a very unflattering and desperate attempt to nullify Mr. Lin's aspiration to serve god and to be a NBA player. It makes Mr. Brooks seem as small a person as he is. Please read Mr. Brooks condescending and pompous meditation on the world of major league sport, heavily garnished by the 'Great Jewish Theologian' Joseph Soloveitchik identified as 'our best teacher' in the matter of the incommensurable worlds of faith and worldly success, as determinative. Can the critical reader of Mr. Brooks take this as indeed serious? How quickly can we forget the long list of manufactured apologetics for The Free Market and it's natural supremacy in the moral and political world? But let me quote in full from the devastating reply by Matthew Carnicelli of Brooklyn, New York, whose understanding of Mr. Lin's actual world in the NBA and its imperatives is hard to rebut :

"David, perhaps you're not a basketball fan, inasmuch as you missed the most obvious connection between Lin's religious faith and his success with the Knicks.

Lin is a point guard. By definition, a point guard's role on the court is to selflessly yet skillfully distribute the ball, in the process improving his teammates' opportunity for success. Because Lin embraces the traditional selfless role of the point guard, and seeks to empower his teammates rather than merely himself (take that, Ayn Rand!), his teammates play harder – and their collective performance can literally transcend the sum of their individual talents. This is what has been happening with the Knicks over the last two weeks.

When the player manning the point guard, however, aims primarily at individual glory and attention, rather than selfless distributive transcendence, his can amass gaudy personal statistics and wealth – while his team inevitably sinks to the bottom of the NBA standings, as did the Knicks under a talented but less-than-enlightened Stephon Marbury.

Indeed, David, I would further argue that the greatest NBA talents, the true "franchise talents" all lift their teammates games in roughly similar fashion – and intuitively understand that individual glory is ultimately hollow, and often fleeting, unless collective glory ultimately accompanies it."

Political Observer
         

Here is proof that women in America no longer have to postpone their wish for children until marriage. Here, also, is proof that David Brooks’ obsession with out of wedlock births as a sign of American decadence is not about moral decay, but rather about the waning power of patriarchal values i.e. the Abrahamic Tradition of Judaism,Christianity and Islam in the United States, as arbiters of morality, ethics and the image of women and their place in a thoroughly entrenched secularized republican setting. Although that secular state, and its institutional safeguards, are under concerted attack from the most reactionary members of these patriarchal traditions, as unelected legislators and guardians of public morality . The waning of male heterosexual power to dominate the discourse that seeks to define the acceptable expressions of gender roles and morally permissible sexual conduct, female/male, gay/straight/ and intersex/transsexual are the uncomfortable realities that goad Mr. Brooks and his political/religious allies, Conservatives, who continually sound the alarm about the moral decay inherent in the free choice of existential/political actors, in a dangerous, out of control secular environment. This is the argument of first and last resort, always play this handy trump card, that sounds the well worn notes of a carefully cultivated political hysteria. The other is my enemy,even if it is my sister, brother, father,mother, friend or just a person I have not, nor will ever meet.

Queer Atheist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/06/usa.politics1
Here is what Isaiah Berlin celebrated as a man being clubable, in it's institutionalized form: our special relationship. You recall the paragraph in The Color of Truth by Kai Bird where Sir Isaiah celebrates the Bundy brothers as one of us, the enlightened elite of  the Anglophone world, of Imperialism reborn as active, but not too successful,Cold Warriors? Well, here, New Labor and New Democrats and various hangers on, with the help of Pew money, celebrate the virtues of themselves, as part and parcel of the active forgetting of their more radical political pasts, as opponents of Robber Capital rather than its apologists,sycophants or even it's active agents.
Political Observer       

http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/post/17881526195/issued-by-president-frankli…