StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Jones writes an interesting essay, yet he confines himself to strategic questions alone, like the good policy intellectual, who seeks to avoid the ethical question of a protracted bombing campaign, against a country that is engaged in nothing that could be considered as beyond the norm. And the IAEA report is the empirical evidence, that renders Mr. Jones’ careful, yet ethically vacuous essay, irrelevant to a serious policy debate, but gains him high marks with his fellow ‘policy analysts’. But this is not a debate about policy approach but about The Party of War and it many advocates and rationalizers: see the latest essay by Edelman, Krepinevich,Montgomery in Foreign Affairs, dated November 9, 2011, for a more carefully framed set of arguments for an unprovoked attack on Iran, as necessary to protect us against the irrational Iranian Menace. The cliche is recast as needed ,with the appropriate actor of the moment. The cost of war are here irrelevant: in this debate human life is not germane, which should places a particular variety of strategic thinking under a rigorous ethical interrogation.

Political Observer

I found this article from Foreign Affairs in a tweet by Glenn Greenwald , a thank you to him. What is very fascinating about this opinion piece is that, for being so brief, it has three people credited with it’s writing. That must have presented some logistical problems about who wrote what, it sounds a bit like the old Abbott and Costello routine. As Mr. Greenwald pointed out in his tweet, this seems like the standard Party of War rationalizations for attacking Iran, but perhaps the authors Eric S. Edelman, Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. and Evan Braden Montgomery were attempting to demonstrate rhetorically that a consensus exists about such a policy. When, in fact, it doesn’t exist except argumentatively, as a postulate of the authors. Words are powerful, as we’ve all seen in the endless propaganda barrage before the assault on Iraq. But more important are the voices used to deliver the message; the men who deliver the messages must be public men with a certain prestige, a standing in the world of policy intellectuals, that lends weight to their case. Mr. Edelman, as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003) is such an establish figure, along with his companions Mr. Krepinevich Jr. and Mr. Montgomery. But these are the same people that led America to brutally attack Iraq, in the name of an impending ‘mushroom cloud’, a manufactured rhetorical mirage. So it’s the same old crisis, that demands immediate decisive action, against a foe that is beyond the reach of rational argument: this has become the brutalizing,destructive, shopworn political cliché of the Party of War, and it’s coterie of Liberals, Conservatives and Neoconservatives.

Political Observer

Should the zygote be granted the status of a person? This is the burning question of our present age, while millions of human beings,once zygotes themselves, go hungry, have no shelter and whose futures are, by any measure, utterly bleak. If the zygote is a person, then what of its constituent parts, ovum and semen, are they equally in need of a protected status? Should the spilling of semen outside the confines of the marriage bed , in the act of procreation, be punishable as a capital crime? Is menstruation and the expulsion of unused ovum another instance of the need to harvest these nascent life forms, to save potential persons? These are matters that need our immediate moral/political attention. The status of the zygote must and will take center stage in the right to life movement, whose followers trample on the living in the name of a theology, a belief about what human life is or might be. Civic republican actors need a bit more empirical evidence before the steps here described can enacted in good faith.

Ghost of Aquinas

The United States is a country that has received many blessings, and once upon a time you could assume that Americans would come together to take advantage of them. But you can no longer make that assumption. The country is more divided and more clogged by special interests. Now we groan to absorb even the most wondrous gifts.”

Please read this devastating review of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel. Very worth your time and attention.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/real-deng/

Please join me and a host of your favorite stars and political luminaries in celebration of the American National Security State’s first gay couple, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. We will be holding our festivities on the well kept grounds, and palatial buildings, of The Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda California on April 1, 2012. We will honor on this grand occasion the longest lasting gay relationship in the history of American Law Enforcement. It’s about time for this grand Coming Out Party for these two heroes, these pioneers of the love that dare not speak it’s name, unless the room has been debugged. Please RSVP by February 29,2012. I hope, like me, you are looking forward to an evening filled fond rememberances of these two pathbreaking law enforcement icons.

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge     

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/merchants-of-doubt/?smid=tw-Nytim…

If you are at all interested in the further exploration of the technique, the rhetorical subterfuge masquerading as argument, that Mr. Chait and Mr. Krugman have been discussing,although it might seem far of field, read Minding The Law by Amsterdam and Bruner published by Harvard University Press. They present through the critique of selected Supreme Court decisions, an holistic critique that embraces Rhetoric,Narrative Theory,Hermeneutics,Critical Legal Theory and an analysis of the law to produce a complex, deep analysis of legal reasoning :that is nothing less than devastating to the Justices, that engage in arguments that seek to promote an ideological position, and expect that their  authority, as members of the Supreme Court, will indemnify them against criticism. The various strategies of argumentative styles are systematically exposed:  Amsterdam’s and Bruner’s methodology is something I attempt to use in my own thought and writing, because I think that the use of public reason is part of a continous inseperable process of reasoning,in service to an achivable act of claification, not an act of ideologically rationalized obfiscation. Amsterdam and Bruner’s great critical work inspires an aspiration to critical honesty exercised within the frame of the cultivation of civic republican virtue.

Polititcal Observer      

One of my favorite ‘media people’ is Tina Brown. I’ve spent a lot of time catching up, after my escape from the Best Seller List of 1968, and my girl Tina has put her finely manicured hand on the pulse of what ever is most current. Imagine my surprise when going to The Daily Beast( so clever of her to get the title of her site from Scoop by that old curmudgeon Evelyn Waugh) to discover a video starring one of my favorite Imperial Apologists Niall Ferguson. He’s so cute and you know my penchant for violating pretty straight boys, old G.V. dropped a dime on his girl! To use the wonderfully current parlance.Well, the sexy Mr. F. has produced a spectacularly vulgar video. Can it be that the revolution that MTV wrought so many years ago has finally come to the manufacture of political opinion,all tarted up with animated graphics and closeups of our hero, while he plays to the camera in the distance,rendering his performance slightly comic? The  political crux of the matter is that our hero,gesticulating a little too broadly, makes the arguements of both the Keyenesians and Friedmanites have their ideas in the wrong place, about how to address our economic,the world economic fix, and that he has the answer. All that in four minutes and seventeen seconds of animated fun.Sort of like Walt Disney meets The Dismal Science with your genial host Mr. F.: I wonder who they will get to do the pitch for the Networks?

I haven’t read a David Brooks column since the Milquetoast Radicals of October 11,2011. It was so much hysterical chatter by a frightened bourgeoise conservative, as he confronts the great unwashed hordes,all very typical of a self-aggradizing public intellectual sounding the alarm: the barbarians are at the gates of the city,etc. I grew tired of commenting on the carefully framed and argued, but totally transparent propaganda and needed a respite from this showy intellectual vulgarity. I found my respite, my spiritual refreshment, in the pages of Susan James’ book Passion and Action, The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. This book provided an intellectual place of repose and learning, while reactivating my response to ideas, not divorced from historical time and place, but active, alive, to the currents of the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes,Spinoza,Descartes,Malebranche, and other relevant thinkers of that time. It was beautifully written and argued and well worth the time and attention it deserved.

Now, I am back to the task at hand, a reading of Mr. Brooks column of October 31, 2011 titled The Wrong Inequality. Here is David Brooks as Platonic Storyteller, a role that he has a particular talent to bring to life. It is a tale taken out of our recent political history, but abstract enough to be easily manipulated toward conservative ends. And it pertakes of the frame of current political cliche masquerading as thought i.e. Red State vs. Blue State, the educated and the un-educated i.e. the college graduate vs the non graduate, the political popinquity between OWS protestors and the media that reports on them. The sum of his thought is to portray the Blue Inequality as less important than Red Inequality, with the usual conservative chatter about out of wedlock births, with the additions of social stagnation, stagnant human capital,and disorganized social fabric, to boot. The failed Free Market Experiment of 1999- 2008 is not even given an honorable mention, as an apprehendable cause of this fracturing, but that is no surprise.The political dishonesty in located in the abstraction from historical time and place, political actors shorn of those parameters and reassigned to the Platonic Realm: a fictionalized, ersatz collection of metaphores, masqurading as portrait of our current poltitical quandries. Mr. Brooks has the ability to construct these narratives and make them them a felt echo,a highly embroidered simulacre, of political actualities.

Political Observer      

http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745648354

Podcast interview of Professor Held on his book: 

http://podularity.com/polity-podcasts/david-held-cosmopolitanism-ideas-and-re…