Editor: The first sentence demonstartes Friedman’s utter Moral/Ethical vapidity!
I will leave it to historians to debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. But what is absolutely clear to me right now is that this Israeli government is committing suicide, homicide and fratricide.
It is destroying Israel’s standing in the world, it is killing Gazan civilians with seemingly no regard for innocent human life, and it is tearing apart Israeli society and world Jewry, between those Jews who want to still stand with Israel no matter what and those who can no longer tolerate, explain or justify where this Israeli government is taking the Jewish state and now want to distance themselves from it.
I was struck by this paragraph in The Times’s story from Israel on Monday about the Israeli strikes on a hospital in southern Gaza, killing at least 20 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry — including five journalists who worked for international media outlets, plus medics and several others: “The Israeli military said it had carried out a strike in the area of Nasser Hospital, without saying what the target was. The statement said the military regretted ‘any harm to uninvolved individuals,’ adding that its chief of staff had ordered an immediate inquiry.”
Obviously sensing that many around the world were appalled by this explanation — I mean, how many times have we heard this? — the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a rare statement of contrition, saying that “Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap.”
…
Editor: Reader only 1030 words left of this shit! But the final two paragraphs embraces, indeed releases all the toxic devils that Thomas L. Friedman helped to spaun: ‘I will leave it to historians to debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza’ Equivocation is the Master Key, employed by Friedman, that leaves himself without blame!
…
It is also going to rip apart the Democratic Party, between those who are afraid to defy the influential Israeli lobbying group AIPAC, for fear of losing campaign funding to their Republican opponents, and those who just can’t stand it any longer.
Alas, if this is geopolitical suicide, as I believe, it has become assisted suicide. There is one person who could stop it all right now, and that is President Trump. I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that — just as Trump was duped by Vladimir Putin into giving up on a cease-fire in Ukraine and opting instead for the chimera of total peace — Trump has been duped by Netanyahu into giving up on a cease-fire in Gaza in pursuit of Bibi’s fantasy of “total victory.”
Editor: This weak attempt at humor, wedded to a critical evaluation of ‘the British version of “The Apprentice”, uses an etiolated, vulgerised version of Bagehot! The Oxbridgers have reached a point of desperation?
Editor: An exploration of Bagehot is in order. Reader look at the available resources!
The ‘Greatest Victorian’ Is Largely Forgotten. His Biographer Wants to Change That
Posthumous illustration of Walter BagehotCredit…via W.W. Norton
By Benjamin Schwarz
July 23, 2019
BAGEHOT The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian By James Grant
…
Grant is a biographer of Bernard Baruch and John Adams, and the founder and editor of the cheeky and stylish Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. The characterization that the highbrow Labour Party politician Richard Crossman (another Bagehot devotee) bestowed on Bagehot’s writing — a “mixture of rollicking cynicism and cool analysis” — applies to Grant’s own brilliantly contrarian criticism in the Interest Rate Observer, The Financial Times and elsewhere of market recklessness, bankers’ irresponsibility and (to Grant) their concomitant, the expansive monetary policies of the Federal Reserve that have defined the booms and busts of the past 30-odd years.
This biography, though, takes wing only when it treats Bagehot’s role as a banker and financial journalist. That these are the very aspects of Bagehot’s work that have been relatively neglected by most scholars, who have tended to concentrate on his literary, political and sociological oeuvre, might be reason enough to commend Grant’s excellent if uneven biography. Bagehot scholarship, however, isn’t accretive, and the 1959 book “The Spare Chancellor,” by the worldly British journalist Alastair Buchan, remains the most astute, elegant and historically informed assessment of Bagehot’s entire life and work — including his participation in and analysis of the powerful and precarious world of finance.
Editor: Reader here are the final paragraps of David Brooks wan public moralizing of August 21, 2025. David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and cites Derek Thompson essay, as a source in his essay.
Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. Thompson spoke with an expert who cited a famous line from “The Dark Knight”: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
This may be where history is leading. Smothering progressivism produced a populist reaction that eventually descended into a nihilist surge. Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.
It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.
One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. ‘From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.’
Editor: I’ve highlighterd pargarph four where Brooks opines about the return to ‘countercultural churches’.Can these churches identified as ‘countercultural’ have or share a propinquity with Judaism, in the muddled chatter of Mr. Brooks ?
They don’t believe in what the establishment tells them to believe in. They live in a world in which many believe in nothing. But still, somewhere deep inside, that hunger is there. They want to have faith in something.
Editor: It never occours to Mr. Brooks that many humans live without faith of any kind or description, or simply play the game their parents played, to keep peace in the family. In sum Mr. Brooks is a political conformist, who writes dismal prose!
Mr. Ganesh demonstrates that the enemy of the political winner is the inability to conceive the possibility that the opposition can win. Call it the myopia of the winner.
Given the rise of Corbyn, or someone like him, Mr. Cameron puts his political capital behind Austerity, but an Austerity that only affects the poor. How perverse must your political judgement be, to attack the very people who can deliver political victory to the ‘un-electable’ Mr. Corbyn?
‘And David Cameron has an embarrassment of riches. Since renewing his premiership in May, he has already revised or delayed legislation to satisfy his own dissenting MPs. His plan to cut tax credits, income supplements for the low-paid, is being resisted by colleagues and newspapers, including proudly rightwing ones.’
What is relevant to the future of the Tories is to recognize that Neo-Liberalism is a spent force, and that the attack on the poor is an invitation to defeat. No amount of internal dissent can save a Party, that is still invested in Austerity exclusively aimed at the disadvantaged. Again the myopia of the winner!
‘…Conservative squabbles can deprive Labour of any relevance it has left after electing the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn as leader.’
‘There is such a thing as an optimal level of dissent: too little and the official opposition fills the vacuum, too much and things fall apart.
This last pronouncement truly demonstrates the myopia of the winners. Look at the American election of 2008 as a telling counter example!
‘People do not vote for hope and vision, but for the lesser evil.’
I can say that what appears most puzzling about Mr. Ganesh’s style of argument is that he appears to be a student of Derrida!
Editor: Bret Stephens World is just like David Brooks World? Though David somtimes forgets he’s JEW, but Stephens was trained by being the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, the political arm of The Zionist Faschist State! In the following paragraphs Stephens applies weak white-wash to Neo-Conservatism! Prerfectly attuned to the New York Times readers prejudices!
Although the term “neoconservative” has fallen into disuse — except as an occasional slur used by the MAGA right, the progressive left and social-media antisemites who really mean to say “Jew” — I’ve never been shy about describing myself as one. In Donald Trump’s whipsawing performances with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies in Washington on Monday, I’m reminded of why.
Neoconservatism emerged in the early 1970s as a loosely coherent movement of disenchanted liberals who were critical of the welfare state and turned off by the anti-Americanism of parts of the antiwar left. But the movement also took a dim view of the Nixon administration, particularly in its pursuit of arms control with the Soviet Union, its relative indifference to human rights issues behind the Iron Curtain, and its realpolitik approach to foreign policy in general.
I learned this the hard way 14 years ago, when Henry Kissinger nearly kicked me out of his Park Avenue office for having the ill grace to ask him about China’s brutal treatment of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident. The former secretary of state, then 88, was still too concerned with currying influence in Beijing to say anything nice about his fellow Nobel Peace laureate.
Little wonder, then, that many of Trump’s most ardent conservative opponents in recent years are, or were, old-school neocons. Like President Richard Nixon’s, Trump’s politics are a mix of statist economic impulses, populist grievances, the conceit of being above the law and a transactional approach to foreign policy that discounts the moral force of American ideals. What Trump lacks in his predecessor’s intellectual sophistication, he makes up for with his gifts for crude showmanship.
Editor: Mr. Stephens can’t quite match Barry Gewen’s essay of 2010 in The New York Times,
Leave No War Behind
By Barry Gewen
June 11, 2010
…
This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.
Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.
But skepticism about the effectiveness of particular programs soon mutated into broader disenchantment with almost every kind of government intervention and into the conviction that the free market alone offered acceptable solutions to social problems. As neoconservative pragmatism calcified into laissez-faire dogma, some of its godfathers defected. Daniel Bell, a self-described “right-wing social democrat,” for one; Moynihan, who, Vaïsse writes, “contended that he was the modern incarnation of a Wilsonian Progressive,” for another. By the time President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” neoconservatism was a spent force in domestic policy, hardly distinguishable from the libertarianism of the American Enterprise Institute.
In the second and third ages, as Vaïsse describes them, neoconservatives turned their attention to foreign policy. This wasn’t surprising. The original neoconservatives were devout anti-Communists for whom opposition to Stalinism and the Soviet Union was as much a left-wing as a right-wing position. This is why the neoconservatives of the second age reacted against what Vaïsse calls “the conquest of the Democratic Party by the forces of the New Left,” begun in 1968 and completed in 1972, when George McGovern won the presidential nomination. The McGovernites, strenuously opposed to the Vietnam War and distrustful of American power, struck more hawkish Democrats as naïve about Communism, even isolationist. The neocons rallied behind Henry Jackson, known as Scoop, a Democratic senator from Washington who, though a supporter of the Great Society’s domestic programs, was the most unrepentant of cold warriors. He nurtured the careers of many young men later known as the toughest of the tough-minded — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Douglas Feith.
…
Editor: Stephens presents his arguments:
What would a traditional neocon say about Trump’s latest diplomatic efforts between Russia and Ukraine? A few points.
.
First, we’d note that dictators who are contemptuous of the rights of their own people tend to be equally contemptuous of the rights of other countries.
.
Second, dictators who do not abide by the rule of law at home will not honor international agreements, either.
.
Third, Putin does not see Trump’s chummy manner, his effort to forge personal ties, as an invitation to be reasonable.
.
Fourth, neocons subscribe to a “broken windows” theory of international order: If disorder goes unchecked, or if aggression is rewarded, in one part of the world, it will encourage disorder and aggression in other parts.
.
Fifth, neocons believe that American ideals do not undermine American power; rather, they march hand in hand. When the United States lent destroyers to the United Kingdom in 1940, we created the conditions that allowed us to prevail in World War II.
.
Sixth, international guarantees are mostly worthless unless backed by credible and overwhelming power.
.
Seventh, the only way to guarantee an end to this conflict is steadfast opposition to Putin through sanctions, ostracism and military and economic support for Ukraine and every other country Russia threatens.
.
Neocons may have long ago fallen out of fashion. To watch Trump in recent days is to be reminded that some old fashions deserve to be made new again.
Editor: Reader see ‘Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss The Hidden Dialogue’ by Heinrich Meier Translated by J. Harvey Lomax, to guage the political mendacity of Mr. Stephens New York Times chatter!
The number of people who have signed up for Britain’s new left-wing party has surpassed 650,000: a figure that dwarfs the membership of every other outfit in Westminster. Preparations are underway for its founding conference, likely to be held in November, where registrants will decide on its initial platform and develop some of its democratic structures. As part of the ongoing debate on such questions, Sidecar recently published an interview with James Schneider, the former communications director for Corbyn’s Labour, in which he set out his case for an organisation that would avoid the electoralist pitfalls of the 2010s by basing itself mostly outside Westminster and striving to construct different forms of popular power.
For our next instalment in the series, we turn to Andrew Murray. Born in 1958, Murray joined the Morning Star as a lobby journalist at the age of nineteen. He moved sidelong into the labour movement in the 1980s, playing a key role in the foundation of Unite, one of the country’s largest unions, and later serving as its Chief of Staff. During the 2000s he was appointed to the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain and co-founded the Stop the War Coalition, set up to oppose the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. An early supporter of Corbyn’s leadership, Murray was seconded from Unite to assist with its 2017 general election campaign, before joining the team as a Special Political Adviser. He is also the author of numerous books on UK politics: a devastating indictment of railway privatisation, Off the Rails (2002); an account of the structural processes that produced the Corbyn project, The Fall and Rise of the British Left(2019); and an analysis of the political lessons to be drawn from that experience, Is Socialism Possible in Britain?(2022).
Murray spoke to Oliver Eagleton about the politics of the nascent party, its priorities at this early stage, the discussions about its leadership, and the attitude it should cultivate towards social movements and working-class institutions.
…
OE: How can the party provide that kind of political expression?
AM: Well, that is the main question. Debates about the organisation’s structure (federal, coalitional, central) or even its leadership (sole, joint, collective) are secondary to its political positioning. The new party needs to be absolutely, clearly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It needs to see itself as creating the space for a transition to socialism. Parts of its political profile can perhaps be assumed: certainly its position on Gaza and its opposition to austerity. But it needs to go further, in my view, by generalising outward from these two urgent issues and offering a systemic alternative.
This is, broadly speaking, what the party’s supporters want. It is also what millions of people across the country are craving, including many of those who are gravitating towards Reform. In the present political landscape you have a crumbling centrism identified with Starmer and with Rishi Sunak before him, which takes a managerial approach to the colossal problems that have accumulated since 2008, and then you have a right-wing pseudo-opposition which the FT’s Martin Wolf rightly describes as ‘plutocratic populism’, which engages in all sorts of demagoguery, including posing as pro-worker, when in fact it is the project of millionaire Thatcherites. With this as the current polarisation, the left has a unique opportunity to redraw the lines of division: placing the centre and the hard right on one side, and itself on the other. The issues that it can use to do so are clear: opposition to austerity, opposition to medieval levels of social inequality, and opposition to war. Our slogan in the Stop the War Coalition is ‘Welfare not Warfare’. The government’s might as well be ‘Make the Poor Pay For War’. It is right now embarking on a major military build-up while slashing social spending – and it is doing so in lockstep with the pluto-populists, who don’t even pretend to have the same non-interventionist inclinations as Trump’s national-populists in the US.
So, undoubtedly, there is a political space to be occupied. Corbyn’s leadership filled it from 2015 to 2019, but it was tethered to the Labour Party, which already had an entrenched position in the British status quo that many of its parliamentarians and staffers were determined to defend. The new party is in a very different situation. It will be unencumbered by these problems; it will be a novel and galvanising force. But at the same time it will not have the strength that comes from being a part of the political fabric for 120 years, nor the historic roots and power bases which, although they have massively atrophied for the Labour Party, have not disappeared entirely.
