StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/whats-race-got-to-do-with-i…

Lee Siegel proves his fealty to Modern Liberalism’s disdain of the Patriarchal Nostalgia of Mormonism and its addiction to 19th Century norms of free born white males: exercising power over all they control and own, the women and children and the chattel of biblical times. Yet Siegel’s attack fails to recognize that Mr. Romney is indeed a political chameleon, some would say a charlatan, who adapts his political position to suit his need,an opportunist to be blunt. But he misses the mind set and world view of modern day Mormons as a highly defined set of beliefs that makes the ‘sunny disposition’ and recitation of political cliches of Mr. Romney explicable, even credible. If you have ever associated with Mormons, you realize that that buoyant optimistic wold view is wedded to a belief system that is not just so much gloss, but part and parcel of a lived, communal practice predicated on a set of definable beliefs as the mainspring of action. And conformism, moral and intellectual, is the sine qua non of that system’s effectiveness.Mr. Siegel effectively paints a portrait of his idea of Mr. Romney as White Patriarchal Romantic,but also neatly defines the parameters of his own undisguised contempt in the process, which makes his essay instructive and morally useful.

Political Observer

If you subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times and you are a regular reader of both David Brooks and Paul Krugman, you will notice that their essays mirror one another,and share contiguous print space, in that they take as their subject Mitt Romney, or perhaps, more pointedly his ‘success’ as the CEO of Bain Capital as demonstrative of his ability, his singular qualification to run for President, as opposed to the other candidates whose corporate resumes lack that impressive experiential garnish. Brooks takes what might be judged a stand of dubious concern but favors- but let me quote one of his thoughts, here expressed as a telling aphorism:

“In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God’s hand on their every move.”

To utter a breathtaking tautology“Great Presidents” neatly fits into the frame Mr. Brooks has constructed.( I know that I am drastically foreshortening the sense of Mr. Brooks commentary.) But the reader must carefully examine the deeply equivocal rhetoric that he constructs to make his arguments: it seems almost Hegelian in the utterance of statement and near counter statement, which leads the apprehensive reader into exploitable intellectual muddle rather than into an anticipated and desired clarification. This could be argued to be the position of the regular reader of Mr. Brooks’ essays.

Krugman remains utterly skeptical,doubtful, not to say suspicious of the experience of Mr. Romney at Bain Capital as demonstrative of his qualification and aspiration to the Presidency and directly and cogently make his arguments: America Isn’t a Corporation.

Now, reading both of these essays in such close proximity, might in the mind of the respectable bourgeois reader of the Times, produce a cognitive dissonance that might be satisfied only by writing a letter to the editor, or perhaps even a goad to the birth of some independent thinking on the part of that very reader: one can hope.

Political Observer

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http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11052

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10948

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12833 (Cover not available)

http://www.versobooks.com/books/949

News for All the People is a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation’s system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/949

News for All the People is a sweeping account of the class and racial conflicts in American news media, from the first colonial newspaper to the internet age. It chronicles key government decisions that created our nation’s system of news, major political battles over the role of the press, and the rise of media conglomerates and epoch-defining technologies. The book reveals how racial segregation in the media distorted the news and unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence through their coverage. And it illuminates how Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative and democratic press and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/961-wittgensteins-anti-philosophy

http://www.versobooks.com/books/961-wittgensteins-anti-philosophy

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12582

“Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein–as an exile–that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein’s exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era–Oswald Spengler’s culture of the early nineteenth century.”

Bain Capital is an expression of a capitalism without a root in any community and most especially with no investment in the central notion of citizenship, of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, as basic, foundational to their endeavor. That civic context is rendered null in the light of the practice of the maximization of profit, without regard for its human costs. The well being of fellow citizens, as an ethical concern, is then of no relevance, it is mooted by a capitalism adrift from any notion of civic responsibility. That is the central ethical void, that Bain Capital and others like it, express as Free Market Capitalism.

Almost Marx