StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1023-the-impostor

Anderson continues: “It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?”

This book, based on a careful investigation comparing BHL’s words with his deeds, seeks to explore the remarkable persistence of this celebrity pseudo-philosopher since he burst onto the scene in 1977. Delving into his networks in the spheres of politics, the media and big business, Lindgaard and de la Porte suggest what the success of this three-decade long imposture indicates about the degeneration of contemporary French intellectual and cultural life.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/797-intern-nation

Every year, between one and two million Americans work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand newsrooms, congressional offices, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, build the human genome, and pick up garbage. They are increasingly of all ages, and their numbers are growing fast—from 17 percent of college graduates in 1992 to 50 percent in 2008. A huge and increasing number of internships are illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and this mass exploitation saves firms more than $600 million each year. Interns enjoy no workplace protections and no standing in courts of law—let alone benefits like health care.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/brooks-the-limits-of-empathy.html?ref=opinion

I am currently reading Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Susan James. She devotes 294 pages to exploring emotions and their influence on seventeenth century philosophers.  Enter David Brooks into my world via The New York Times in his latest essay titled The Limits of Empathy, in a brisk 812 words, deals with the vexing emotion of empathy.(Mr. Brooks has a penchant for quoting experts, in all fields of intellectual endeavor, that  add an intellectually concrete dimension to his propagandistic ramblings.)  Now, it is vexing to Mr. Brooks, even problematic, because Conservatism and its advocates find it an inconvenient stumbling block to their grand plan to model the world, the life world in Hus6serl’s term, on the Free Market.  Modern American Conservatism located in 2011 is fixated upon the notion of an unrestrained Capitalism, its demonstrable failure, our very real immediate concern, as the world still deals with the horrendous consequences of the Economic Collapse of 2008. But that very reality can only be ignored by Mr. Brooks as irrelevant, to the greater ideological endeavor, of remaking not just the economic and political world in the image of a stunted malfeasant Capitalism, but re-imagining, remaking ethics and morality into a mirror of that exalted Market. Please see his August 22, 2011 essay titled The Rugged Altruists for confirmation of my line of argument, or at the least, his argumentative consistency. Thinkers and writers all over the world have spent their lives cogitating, writing, arguing on the problematic of human emotions, it is not a matter of reforming the emotions, but of coming to some basic understanding, that is a lifetime in the making; certainly not in a hastily written essay, composed in the face of a newspaper deadline. Professor Derek Parfit has written his two volume study titled On What Matters, published by Oxford University press in May 2011, it is 1440 pages long and is a successor to his 1984 Reasons and Persons. Mr. Brooks is another fluent ideologue with a craving for political respectability, who courts the adulation of the cursory reader.

Political Observer   

        

 

 

Ever since my escape from the Best Seller list of 1968, I've been trying to catch up on my movie watching because I believe that movies, or as the French say cinema,are the medium and the message, to riff on the indispensable theorist of another age Marshall McLuhan. I have not read Dan Brown's rather thick tome so I found the opening of the movie rather unclear, confusing even mysterious, but not in a way that lent credibility to the story line.For me it was a rough start, cranking the engine of believability was a arduous task, it badly sputtered. Mr. Howard pitched the melodramatic level of this film to an audience of television watchers of several generations past. He favored superimposition of image over image, which lent to a muddied visual image and the tomb of Mary Madelene resembled something like Walt Disney would have produced, it lacked period authenticity, in fact most of the scenes of the past reeked a cartoonish quality. And one can only regret that it was much to long and rather boring, even the portentous, cliche ridden score couldn't rescue one from the wish that it might swiftly end. Even if Mr. Hanks and Audrey Tautou were left hanging in mid air, but as long as the wonderful Mr. Ian McKellen was present to enliven the melodrama with some much needed energy and panache, I muddled through. I can console my self with the knowledge that this was a box office smash. I can't wait to watch Angels and Demons. I marvel ,as a visitor from the past, at the DVD and Net Flicks not to speak of the sheer miracle of the Internet!
Truly Yours,
Myra Breckenridge
Film Critic at large    

         
 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/30/anwar-al-awlaki-and-why-president-barack-obama-is-right-to-kill-u-s-citizens.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/30/anwar-al-awlaki-killing-obama-must-explain-his-targeted-drone-policy.html

Tina Brown at The Daily Beast attempts to provide a rather proscribed debate on the killing of Anwar al-Awalaki, for readers without a certain political sophistication and even the barest minimum of basic investigative skills. First is Mr. Richard Miniter with his essay titled 'Was Obama right to kill Al al-Awalaki?'I went to Wikipedia for revelatory background on this self-described  'Investigative Journalist, Best Selling Author' whose Right Wing credentials appear to be flawless, except for a rather troubling litigiousness. As one might suspect Mr. Miniter is a voluble advocate, in principle and in practice, of this policy and defends with well chosen arguments, based in strategic, pragmatic thinking rather than any dubious ethical/legal arguments. This surely is about defeating an enemy, a fellow citizen, who seeks through his actions to kill his fellow citizens, although it  bypasses the practice of due process, completely. It is a rather pedestrian, but well argued defense, fully partaking of the American Legitimist party line.     

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Miniter

Mr. Stephen L. Carter's essay is entitled 'Whats wrong with Awlaki's killing?' Again, I went to Wikipedia and found his entry not quite as helpful as Mr. Miniter's. I can say two things, that I have followed Mr. Carter's writing on The Daily Beast since he started and that I have read the first one hundred pages of The Emperor of Ocean Park. As for this essay I find it unconvincing, even half hearted. But I feel compelled to quote two paragraphs:

This alone seems to indicate that not much separates Mr. Miniter from Mr. Carter, except in terms of their mutual assignments by their editor. Let us simply look at the 'ethical issue' of drone strikes and the issue of 'collateral damage', i.e. innocent civilian deaths, and the felt political necessities of empire and imperialist. Professor Anderson will develop 'norms' for drone attacks not specific policies, that might hinder, arguably restrict, military action, in the national interest. We can now consign Nuremberg and the whole set of proscriptions and imperatives, that it entailed, into the dustbin. And celebrate the sophistry of victors who will write the History of America, in the Age of Terror. Mr. Miniter and Mr. Carter have helped to make permanent that Golden Age of Endless War: we have already secured our economic decline.     
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_L._Carter

Political Cynic
 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley-civil-liberties-2…

Thank you to Glenn Greenwald for the link to this very important editorial.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/opinion/brooks-the-lost-decade.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

          The Lost Decade is the latest intellectual entity to make for a cliché ridden column by Mr. Brooks. It is Plato with a heavy garnish of Hegel, not the most palatable repast.  But let us begin at the beginning.  Mr. Brooks speaks as if The Lost Decade came out of nowhere, as if the acts of legislators, policy advocates, pundits, political hacks and political conformists are wholly meaningless, when these acts of advocacy are played out in historical time.  The politics of the Free Market  has brought us where we are today, in economic terms, not the mired problem solving ideas of ideological pols, although that has contributed to our burdens. In this excerpt Mr. Brooks almost sounds like a radical while maintaining his Conservative credentials:

“Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less, but not halfway as it is now. Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.”

The world made new under Enlightened Capital has the familiar ring of the promise of the Financial Reform of 1999. Dare we trust a man and thinker whose policy advocacy, across many areas of concern, have ended in calamity?

Political Observer

Is Occupy Wall Street a harbinger of things to come? Social chaos is not good for business. So the mass arrests of protestors in New York City are probably not surprising. But the brutality of the police is being documented by the protestors using the new social media, and the spread of the news of these occurrences is instantaneous and utterly hard to control. But should we be surprised by these historical events? The Mass media are in their own disingenuous way trying to discredit the protesters, as fringe elements of discontent, in the vain hope that they will disappear. As if we are not subject to the dismal conservative governance of Obama and a Republican Party controlled by Tea Party Jacobins, whose stance toward governance is an unyielding nihilism. Add to that an economy that is headed toward an ever deepening recession and the failing Austerity Solution hailed as the only solution to our economic plight.

Americans believe themselves to be exceptional in all things: the notion that somehow the current course, that is failing, and is impeding a generation’s economic rise has only begun to work its way through the social fabric. American are also deeply conservative, but how much Austerity will it take to push a citizenry steeped in the dogmas of Free Market economics, and its political corollaries to rise up in revolt, no matter how seemingly inexplicable and unrelated they may first appear? The loss of hope for a better life can lead to destructive, seemingly irrational behavior, to constructive political action, or to a mix of both.

Almost Marx

Excerpt from a letter dated October 25,1940 to Alexander Woollcott page 397:

“…For while I want my friends to understand what I do, I have a fanatical conviction that columnists who undertake to interpret events should not regard themselves as public personages with a constituency to which they are responsible.

It seems to me that once the columnist thinks himself as a public somebody over and above the intrinsic value and integrity of what is published under his name, he ceases to think as clearly and as disinterestedly as his readers have a right to expect him to think. Like a politician, he aquires a public character, which he comes to admire and to worry about preserving and improving; his personal life, his self-esteem, his allegiances, his interests and ambitions become indistinguishable from his judgements of events. In thirty years of journalism I think I have learned to know the pitfalls of the profession and, leaving aside the gross forms of corruption, such as profiting by inside knowledge and currying favor with those who have favors to give, and following the fashions, the most insidious of all the temptations is to think oneself as engaged in a public career on the stage of the world rather than as an observant writer of newspaper articles about some of the things that are happening in the world.

So I take the view that I write of matters about which I think I have something to say but that as a person I am nobody of any public importance, that I am not adviser-at-large to mankind or even those who read occasionally or often what I write. This is the code which I follow. …”     

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fa9208f0-e480-11e0-92a3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YppvW0CO

 

Is it my imagination or does Mr. Christopher Caldwell, in his latest essay at the Financial Times web site titled ‘The president just does not get the American centre’, dated September 23, 2011, seem to be suffering from an acute case of political confusion or is his ideology just a bit askew? All during the campaign of 2008 the Right and its spokesmen and women continually reminded voters that Obama was not ‘one of us’. Coded or un-coded that was the central message of much of the rhetoric.  But today Mr. Caldwell discards that well worn trope in favor of making President Obama an ordinary American; but characterized as grinning and inscrutable and unwilling to help someone in need, an unflattering  description of Americans by an American. Is this the newest propaganda ploy of a desperate columnist needing to meet his word quota? Has this rhetorically pejorative description of the American character become the latest contribution of Neo-Conservatism to our national dialogue? Are Americans hypocritical, suspicious and unworthy of trust? Or is Mr. Caldwell striking a pose for arguments sake?

The crux of the matter is that Mr. Caldwell will, now, after this inauspicious but rhetorically useful introduction, begin his attack on the deeply conservative political practice of President Obama. Mr. Caldwell can’t resist larding his text with catch phrases, clichés and aphorisms that captivate the reader’s attention. After a catalogue of the most egregious Obama sins, and those are well known, even notorious to his critics, and indeed to most political observers. Mr. Caldwell comes to the point that Obama’s flaws are not ideological but personal. He is not one of us, even if he meets the definitional parameters laid out in Mr. Caldwell’s sketch of the American character. The question that remains to be answered: is Mr. Caldwell’s analysis of the American character correct?

Political Observer