StephenKMackSD's Blog

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Please see the TLS review by David Wootton in the October 21st 2011 edition, titled Traffic of the mind.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520254817

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631236163,descCd-tableOfC…

I attempted to comment on Paul H. Rosenberg’s latest essay, titled Fighting The Politics of Illusion, at AlJazeera this morning. The tweet of my comment was visible but my comment was absent. Was I ,perhaps, too pointed in my reply? My essay began with the question: Is Paul H. Rosenberg the last Freudian? Does he live in a time warp, in which the scholarship of Frank Sulloway, E.M.Thorton and Frederick Crews have yet to be historically manifest? Is Anna Freud, the author of The Ego and The Mechanism of Defense, on which he bases his essay, suffering from the effects of her ‘unresolved Oedipal strivings’ as intellectual heir and explicator of Freudian Science? Is Mr. Rosenberg intellectual curiosity and scholership mired in the year 1960? I am recalling what I wrote, rather than quoting directly. Mr. Rosenberg attempts to psychologize the the roles of political/ economic actors of the Economic Crisis of 2008 and the apologists for the aftermath. He offers no usable insights into the practice of wholesale thievery and the intellectual rationalizers of Free Market Economics: while one could hazard a guess at the idea and practice of greed, as a motivation for such conduct. That is following the Law of Parsimony, that the simplist explantion for any observed phenomenon is the best. Is Mr. Rosenberg’s use of the work of a prominent Freudian theorist, simply a manifestation of needing an intellectual prop and garnish to add a kind of luster to some not very original thinking?

Political Observer   

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http://jeffreyfeldman1.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/innovative-direct-action-key-…

Here is a revelatory essay on the OWS strategy of “Direct Action” by Jeffrey Feldman. Absolutely worth you time and consideration. Best insight and a forthright answer to all the opinionating,hysterical and otherwise on OWS.

Stephen

Leslie Gelb like so many of the adherents to Foriegn Policy Realism,(the once celebrated, but now politically passe ‘Adult Supervision’ of Scowcroft/Brzezinski?)never tires of proclaiming at a shout,”We are the sane ones. We are the rational ones.” Although you would not know that from even a cursory reading of his latest essay at The Daily Beast. He attacks the arch Neo-Conservative warmonger and bully, Mr. William Kristol. Although Mr. Gelb is not in any way a ‘dove’, witness his joy at the news at the state sponsored murder of Osama bin Laden,an e-mail from an anonymous, but ‘key’ White House aide brought the happy news; narrated in the hushed but respectful tone of the commited ‘Realist’. Or his genuflection in the direction of the FBI concocted plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone attacks on targets around the world.  I see no sanity or rationality here, in his stolid opinionating, I have joined with the many and the few, who wonder at the place this opinionator has attained, and his advocacy of policies, that are simply the faded reflection of the Neo-Conservative Ideology of perpetual war.

Political Cynic