StephenKMackSD's Blog

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…

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vote-florida-20111031,0,…

Should we be at all surprised about the stance of The Republican Party and their need to demonize their opposition, by useing the crudest of tactics of undemonstrated election fraud and the menace of Acorn? The political thuggery of notorious Right Wing hacks is the sum total of the politcal menace of ‘election fraud’. The need of a Party, that has surrendered to manufactured political hysteria, that has been it’s hallmark, since the rise of benighted Mr. Nixon has ,in fact, become the captive of the No-Nothings, the political nihilists, and the Neoconservtive zelots. The Noble Lie is its singularly usable idea, it can in its desperation,posit no other concept of its operational politics than the friend/enemy of Carl Schmitt and his sub rosa ally Leo Strauss. The Modern Republican Party has lost its way. When the icon of post war American politics, Dwight D. Eisenhower is judged to be too Liberal, too allied to the New Deal, we have reached a point at which we must enuciate, in all candor, that the leaders of this Party are menacing political psychotics, capable of all manner of destrutiveness, including the usurpation of Constitutional governance,in service to a ruthless power seeking.That is a regrettable but necessary, even bitter, conclusion.

Publius     

http://us.macmillan.com/cantstopwontstop/JeffChang

http://www.versobooks.com/books/957-white-riot

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/History/?view=usa…

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Mind/?view=usa&am…

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Religion/?view=us…