StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15380-5/the-scandal-of-reason

Interview with the author:

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/static/albena-azmanova-interview

Arianna Huffington has won a victory in court against Mr. Jonathan Tasini and ‘an estimated 9000 unpaid bloggers’. Read the story here at Thompson Reuters from Westlaw. From Mr. Tasini’s point of view it was right and necessary to bring the legal action, if for no other reason that to give focus to the practice of economic exploitation in the age of the internet, and probably to give Ms. Huffington some well deserved grief. The legal argument makes sense: that the bloggers had made a series of agreements, over time, that their work would be uncompensated, so legally that leaves Ms. Huffington vindicated. Although to engage in some speculation, one might want to share in the good fortune by distributing some stock in AOL, or some other reward to those people who helped build your ‘brand’, as a gesture of good will, or at the least, to indemnify oneself professionally and personally from the public relations disaster that Ms. Huffington’s intransigence wrought. It made her look small, greedy and utterly un-progressive: just another Capitalist. Although one would think that Ms. Huffington’s revered teacher Milton Friedman would have taken the same course. Is it possible to expect a different mode of conduct from a self-proclaimed progressive woman capitalist than from a Free Market male? Or am I engaging in an anachronistic gender bias? Just from the perspective of pragmatism this should have been handled with the adroitness that Ms. Huffington has demonstrated over time on so many other issues. To become proverbial: no need to make 9001 enemies when some careful thought,planning and investment could yield many more steadfast allies. 

Political Cynic

http://blackhistory360.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/a-kaleidoscope-of-hate/

In reading David Brooks’ essay of March 28, 2012 titled A Moderate Conservative Dilemma should the attentive reader ask some pertinent questions as to the rhetorical stance he takes to his subjects? In this context does he present himself as an objective reporter of historical actualities or as a partisan in the ideological disputes within the Party? The political career of Nathan Fletcher is an instructive and revelatory subject for exposition, but is Mr. Brooks the right ‘reporter’ for the job, or is Mr. Brooks constructing a modern political parable as a demonstration of a presumptive political prescience, exploiting to the full the notion of pundit? Mr. Brooks is one of the guardians of the ethos of Modern Conservatism and one of it’s foremost interpreters. Mr. Fletcher left the Republican Party to become an Independent in the face of the Republican Party’s unwillingness to engage in compromise, the very definition of the political, as a strategy to defeat the Democrats. In other words the Republican Party has become the party of no. How can government and administration function without political compromise? Unless you are Grover Norquist and your ‘political philosophy’ is the active subversion of the idea of governance through intransigence, i.e. non-cooperation. Mr. Brooks is the natural inheritor of the purge of the Moderates (Eisenhower Republicans) from the Republican Party that commenced in 1964, so his rhetorical stance as ‘reporter’, as ‘historian’ rather than self-interested ideologue resides in the realm of the dubious, except as an instance of self-exculpatory apologetics.

Political Observer

Here is a link to Walter Rhetts comment on the David Brooks column of March 26,2012 titled Step to the Center.

http://t.co/q3I0zuXm

Should any regular reader be surprised by Mr. Brooks’ enthusiasm for The New American Academy whose supporters are Met Life and a partnership with Pencil. For a list of the supporters of Pencil see here. Three of the supporters are : J.P. Morgan Chase, Bloomberg, Charles&Karyn Bendit/Taconic Investment Partners LLC. American Capital and Mr. Brooks have a common goal, to subvert, indeed to destroy, the notion of the commons, and in that republican sine qua non is the vital function of institutionalized public education. The Free Market obsession of modern Conservatism finds many battlegrounds in our politics and ‘Education Reform’ is one such sight of contention. Mr. Brooks opinionating is driven by a moralizing politics i.e. post Reagan Conservatism, it is the cornerstone of his essays. I have no quarrel with advances in public education and improvements in educational practice, for the benefit of students and their interests, not the interests of a demonstrably corrupt and self-seeking Capital. Public Education needs to remain independent of corporate money and influence, which in real terms means a healthy tax increase on the 1%, and other measures to protect children from predators, of all kinds. That reality is anathema to both Conservatives and their first cousins the New Democrats. So the Conservative politics of ‘Education Reform’ is driven by forces that seek to nullify the self- interested altruism of public education, within the republican milieu, with the imperatives of Capital, now matter how circuitous the route. Please see the informative, educational, lively and contentious replies to Mr. Brooks essay that exceed my comments by light years!

Almost Marx

David Brooks, in his March 19,2012 essay, When the Good Do Bad a meditation on the Robert Bales massacre in Afghanistan, cannot resist the moment’s potential for taking the moral/intellectual high road, as he interprets it. Brooks regularly entertains the notion that he is public moralist and his readers are his pupils. Pupils that need the guiding hand of his superior intellect wedded to a keen moral sensibility. It is larded with pithy observations on the human condition and the inescapable sinfulness of the human person, when you sweep away the moralizing rubble: Mr. Brooks is a Puritan through and through.

I write this just after the publication of some startling and potentially revelatory information regarding Mr. Bales published by the Huffington Post and featured on Democracy Now of March 27, 2012. Here is the link to the Democracy Now video:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/27/pentagon_stays_silent_on_whether_suspect

Mr. Brooks does not allow himself the humility, the luxury that a cultivated silence could bring, in the face of seemingly ‘random’ acts of violence. An observer can sometimes only wait in silence for empirical evidence to manifest itself. The admission of a demonstrable ignorance is the bane of the pundit?

Political Observer

Mr. Brooks in his column of March 15,2012 is at his comic best, describing the ‘cagey’ President Obama. But it isn’t so much a moment of political revelation, as perhaps, a parable about how the president will lose the election of 2012, as narrated by Mr. Brooks. He describes the political journey of President Obama in the most self-serving cynical terms. And all the usual rhetorical actors assume their places in a narrative that is always consistent, even predictable: tax reform, entitlement reform, debt reduction,grand project,government reform,debt crisis. And just to indicate that he isn’t exactly duplicating or recycling his past essays he injects a telling bit of prescriptive political analysis:

“Leading the country through this will require the intelligence, balance and craftiness that Obama has demonstrated. But it will also require indomitable inner conviction and an aggressive drive to push change. It will require a fearless champion who will fight all the interests that love the tax code the way it is. It will require a fervent crusader to rally the country behind shared sacrifice. It will take an impervious leader willing to spread spending cuts everywhere and offend everybody all at once. There will have to be a clearly defined vision of what government will look like at the end.”

Mr. Brooks can’t help himself, he inflates his commentary with overblown melodrama and heavy moralizing, two more mainstays of his thought. But the patient regular reader of his commentaries is rewarded near the end of this essay by the appearance of the notion of ‘All In’. This astounding metaphor is defined quite glibly by our writer:

“He has never displayed an inner passion, a sense that these projects are his life mission, or a willingness to bear the pain that taking on these challenges necessarily entails.”

Surely Mr. Brooks qualifies as the Agnes Nixon of American punditry.

Political Observer

Here is Michael Tomasky’s latest essay at The Daily Beast on the subject of the political viability of President Obama endorsing gay marriage. Mr. Tomasky assures the reader that he is on the right side of this issue, a quote from his colleague Peter Beinart on ‘America’s moral destiny’ as related to gay marriage, as exemplary of his support for marriage equality, rings hollow as he habitually repeats a riff on Augustine, but not right now. Bourgeois hypocrisy makes it possible for President Obama to publicly sympathize with the family of Trayvon Martin, while the blood of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki has been recently washed from his hands, for reasons of state: the ‘pragmatism’ that Mr. Tomasky advocates share that common root. There is in this essay a great deal of recalled history, a vulgarizing blend of kitsch and realpolitik, that speaks to the politics of the admonition of ‘not right now’, but the demonstrations of history, of morality, of American legal precedent more broadly viewed, less rhetorically, ideologically proscribed, point inexorably in another direction. Will President Obama provide the answer to Mr. Beinart’s idea, indeed question of ‘America’s moral destiny’? Which in the strictest terms could be named leadership: the president could consider the advice of Mr. Tomasky as valuable, in terms of political realism, but incomplete and historically indefensible, and more importantly as an expression of a politically exhausted gradualism?

Queer Atheist

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ClassicalStudies/AncientReligio…