StephenKMackSD's Blog

 

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In the 1980 I began work for a computer start up in Orange County California as a production line worker, for some months. When the shipping guy, who was unreliable, didn’t show up for work for several days, he was terminated, or at least that was the word that made the rounds. I asked my boss if I could give the job a try; he said that he would talk to the supervisor of that department. She was pretty desperate and agreed, probably against her better judgment. In that job I had the opportunity to view up close the people and the mentality that fueled the computer industry, in its beginning stages. It took some time for my boss to trust me, and to relax about whether I was reliable and trustworthy. I was reliable, in the way of the people pleaser. After I established myself, I won the President’s Award two times in a row, and a promotion to shipping supervisor. This gained me entree to management: I dined and drank in the homes of the executives of the company, attended the 5 o’clock drink time in the Marketing Department, and the informal parties that the Big Boss held every couple of weeks at local bars, and the parties, in house, to celebrate the unprecedented growth of the company. As a valued member of the team, I viewed, up close, the engineers who ran the company in professional and nonprofessional contexts. The executives and partners of the company were all men, this was their second try at a startup, as the first had failed, so they were particularly cautious. There were layoffs at the company almost every six months due to business fluctuations. There were also changes in Materials Management executive staff almost every year. This was a particularly volatile environment for all lower level employees, layoffs could happen any time.

But let me discuss the politics, the interpersonal skills, and the rampant paternalism of the managers. Their politics were purely reactionary, wedded to a faith in the Free Market, a reflection of the triumph of Reaganism and its addiction to a basterdized Social Darwinist ethic. They were engineers who solved engineering problems brilliantly, but whose interpersonal skills were at the zero mark. They were, as individuals and in toto, utterly irascible, unyielding, in their rightness on any issue, which were not usually engineering problems, but problems of human interaction, that cannot be solved by intransigence. The Managers policy on wages was to  pay the lowest possible wage, this was a non-union environment, and that plus the fear of losing our jobs kept us, as employees, in line and uncomplaining. The notion of the Entrepreneur was just reaching it high point, as a matter of faith in the Free Market Ideology, so these men fancied themselves as part of a new class of Market Mandarins: some of them manifested an insufferable smugness, as the occasion of the celebration of successes led to many short but self-congratulatory speeches.

There was one vexing problem that plagued the company for some time, until the V.P. of Materials Management was taken out of the company in handcuffs. There was rampant drug use throughout the company. Cocaine use was rampant throughout the company, in fact one of the custodial staff was selling on the premises: one needed only to let it be known what was needed, tender the cash, and your drugs were provided.Secrataries would leave lines of coke, in the ladies room, in the Marketing Department, for each other.

The death of Steve Jobs brought all these memories back, as the media are filled with encomiums for him. A friend of a friend worked for Mr. Jobs and had a different opinion of him, which doesn’t quite meld with all the praise. This brought back my memories of working for entrepreneurs, whose self-concepts were probably very similar to that of Mr. Jobs. It’s probably best to entertain, enjoy the long view, as the close-up is problematic, even deeply troubling.

Political Observer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.newmansown.com/

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.