Cockeyed Platonist Addresses The Graduating Classes of 2011 by Political Observer

Ah, the pleasures of the unbidden commencement address! Here is Cockeyed Platonist (CP) delivering his own version in which he recites the virtues of a mindless bourgeois political and moral conformity,always addressed to those wily heteros and their backsliding ways: not to mention the personal note of bitter nostalgia about reliving life. But, here is a jarring political observation:'But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.' CP's constant companion is his irremediable bad faith: he simply can't shake his bad habit of lying by commission or omission and especially about the failure of the 'Free Market' experiment that went so wrong in 2008. And signed by Bill Clinton ,at that. The world of 21st Century Capitalism is fraught with dangers, but none that our thinker would care to focus upon, or even candidly access.
What is 'baby boomer theology' except a nasty aside about a generation of irresponsible,willful, selfish and self-indulgent monsters that is one of  the central themes of modern American Conservatism? Dare to dream the great crabbed hetero conformist dream of our petite bourgeois thinker, that he offers as antidote to the all the cliche ridden dreams and aspirations, that are expressed by the inheritors of that corrupt 'theology'. CP's great admonition is 'live as I have lived'! Do not aspire to anything else! Do not dream of something else, of something more noble, more fulfilling: even if the risks and rewards be great. Which brings us to the sad, the dismal nihilism at the center of this meditation, on the rightness of a lived life and all its leaden charms.
Political Observer            
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Israel’s PR victory shames news broadcasters | Greg Philo | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Ninety gaffes in ninety years – Home News, UK – The Independent

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American Likudnik on ‘What Obama did to Israel’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-obama-did-to-israel/2011/05/26/AGJfYJCH_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions


Here is American Likudnik in his carefully constructed and highly garnished attack, or even just a political tantrum directed at President Obama: he is either a knave or a fool; an incompetent or an Anti-Semite. No original thinking here, just the usual ideological spleen from a ‘thinker’ who specializes in agitprop.      

 

 

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Gil Scott-Heron

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Netanyahu’s border war – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

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Books of Interest:Front Page Economics, Suttles, Jacobs

In an age when pundits constantly decry overt political bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the highly sophisticated ways in which the media frame important stories. In Front Page Economics, Gerald Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashes—in 1929 and 1987—in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises.

Poring over the articles generated by the crashes—as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside them—Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine.

A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, Front Page Economics brims with important insights that shed light on our own economically tumultuous times.

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Books of Interest:Amazon.com: From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (9780860918608): J. G. Merquior: Books

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J. G. Merquior

From Arnaldo Momigliano. He published books written directly in French, English, Italian, and his native Portuguese.

Just re-reading some sections of From Prague to Paris; J.G. Merquior’s superior intellectual history of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist thought, very lively and full of wit. No hagiography here, which makes it worth time and attention.

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