StephenKMackSD's Blog

Newspaper Reader’s critical anlysis of The Financial Times’ propaganda!

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Feb 13, 2025

War in Ukraine

Headline: Donald Trump opens the door to Vladimir Putin’s grandest ambitions

Sub-headline: Russian leader wants a new security architecture to give his country a sphere of influence in Europe

https://www.ft.com/content/2bf263a0-9768-4049-8f7d-239940a49efb

Editor: Max Seddon in Berlin and Christopher Miller in Kyiv write on the Putin Victory that is almost certain?

Vladimir Putin’s initial plan to capture Ukraine in a few days ended in disaster. But after Donald Trump set up direct peace talks with Moscow, bypassing Kyiv and European allies, the Russian president is now closer than ever to getting what he wanted from his three-year-long invasion.

Putin’s main ambition, said people who have spoken to him during the war, is to establish a new security architecture that gives Russia a sphere of influence in Europe — much as the Yalta conference did for the Soviet Union at the end of the second world war.

Now, the US may be open to letting him have it. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed Ukraine’s aspirations to join Nato and reclaim its territory from Russia. Putin and Trump discussed “bilateral economic co-operation”, suggesting that the US was prepared to roll back its sanctions against Moscow.

And Trump appears intent on rolling back the US’s commitment to Nato and leaving to European countries the job of sustaining a peace.

“The situation looks much more favourable for Putin than at any point during the entire war over the last three years,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “If the US just unilaterally ends its military and diplomatic support, as well as intelligence sharing, then Ukraine will be in a very tough position. And it’ll be hard to get out of it even if the Europeans get more involved.”

In Moscow, there was palpable joy following Wednesday’s call between Trump and Putin.

“A single call can change the course of history — today, the leaders of the US and Russia have possibly opened a door to a future shaped by co-operation, not confrontation,” said Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian sovereign wealth fund chief involved in back-channel talks with the US over prisoner exchanges.

Editor: Note the source in the above paragraph : said Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian sovereign wealth fund chief involved in back-channel talks ! The Reader must wonder at the insertion of the photograph of Churchill, Stalin and FDR at Yalta… as a mispaced mood setter, toward what purpose? Reader save yourself from the agony of this propganda and procede to the the final paragraphs of this 1,290 word diatribe!

…
Zelenskyy told reporters on Thursday that it was “not very pleasant” to know that Trump spoke to Ukraine’s adversary first. He insisted he “will not accept . . . any bilateral negotiations about Ukraine without us”.

What was imperative, Zelenskyy added, was to “not allow everything to go according to Putin’s plan”.

Kyiv had hoped it could convince Trump to work out a common position on bringing Russia to the table, and had offered access to its reserves of rare earth metals in return for US support.

For now, Kyiv and its European allies are looking on, aghast, from the outside, fearful the US will strike an unfavourable deal with Putin to end the war — and stick them with the bill.

“Trump is proving to be as bad as we feared. He is willing to make a deal with Putin at the expense of Ukraine, and still wants Ukraine to pay him in mineral resources,” said Volodymyr Kulyk, a professor of political science at the Kyiv School of Economics. “The question is what Ukraine and Europe will do.”

Editor: Recall that Victoria Nuland and United States Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt along with NATO, the EU, George Soros , The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Neo-Consevetive front group, while Obama remained at a safe distance? On The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Muhammad Sahimi has written a revelatory essay at Lobe Log:

Behind the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Embrace of Authoritarianism

July 17, 2019

Guest Contributor 8 Comments

Behind the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Embrace of Authoritarianism

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 10, 2025

Editor : For those of us who have not read this Stendahl novel, here is Penguin Random House to the rescue:

The Red and the Black Reader’s Guide By Stendhal

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298093/the-red-and-the-black-by-stendhal/9780140447644/readers-guide

In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a book that is never far from me, the colours refer to two careers. The first is the army. The other is the priesthood. The setting is Bourbon Restoration France but it could be almost anywhere in the west, at almost any time until the dawn of industry, such was the importance of these vocations to the national order.

Editor: Ganash swithes registers to current men’s fashions ‘T-shirt and the Gilet’ that is attached to ‘tech & finance’ to this assertion ‘London, an ancient financial hub too, is a useful place from which to assess these distinct clans’

In our world, the two ruling careers are no harder to name. It is tech and finance, The T-shirt and the Gilet, that have first refusal on the ablest graduates. It is tech and finance whose executives are interviewed for their musings on politics and life. As the Google office in King’s Cross nears completion, London, an ancient financial hub too, is a useful place from which to assess these distinct clans.

Editor: Ganesh at near full gallop appears!

And to learn to prefer, on average, the company of finance. There is a client-facing side to that business — the dinners, the silver-tongued sales calls — that instils a minimum of suaveness. In much of tech, the “client” is a vast and remote public. So no such practice.

Editor: Ganesh embroidery: ‘the dinners, the silver-tongued sales calls — that instils a minimum of suaveness.’

Note that, while the world’s financial centres are almost all urban, tech often chooses a low-density setting, such as the Santa Clara Valley or the Fens. Even Bengaluru is India’s Garden City. Some of this is historical accident. But it is also the result, and perhaps a cause, of tech’s social diffidence. I needn’t dwell on the sector’s ultra-individualist political turn here. Or the Andrew Huberman-led zeal for health, whose logical endpoint is a scandalised recoil from bodily contact. Even on the warmer side of tech, that of effective altruism and people aching to do good, there is a trace of Beatrice Webb about the approach to humankind, as something to help rather than like. Tech’s real or potential achievements on behalf of us all might dwarf those of finance. But over a drink? Give me the FX sales-trade bod.

Editor: What can this mean: ‘But over a drink? Give me the FX sales-trade bod.’

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Editor: Ganesh embroidery makes way for his cast of characters. Ganesh in his earlier self, had a singular talent for the telling aperçu. That talent continues to assert itself , but in more muted retorical tonalities: I will put in italics some of those examples. Yet he manages to provide too many examples of his interpretation of a/the zeitgeist?

Another thing. Finance has more — don’t laugh too hard now — humility. Precisely because banking in particular has a bad name, at least post-Lehman, at least outside America, its practitioners have to tread gingerly these days. People whom the world is disposed to hate tend to learn a sort of pre-emptive charm. (Which is why the biggest snobs in Britain are almost never Etonians.) Tech hasn’t had its 2008 yet, and might never. It is high on itself to a degree that can be easier to respect from a distance than to be around.

“Humble” doesn’t mean interesting, of course. Nor does “suave”. Because I have to come up with ideas for a living, I will put up with a lot for a conversation that throws up a eureka moment. So, which side is more stimulating company? The raw processing power of the tech minds I encounter leaves me standing. But my test — am I still thinking of the discussion on the Tube home? — is met no more often by them than by bankers or hedgies or less gilded professions. One problem is the tech world’s impatience with history, which is inevitable when the grandest companies don’t much predate the millennium. The result is a fixation with transient events and “trends” that someone with a wider lens might recognise as froth.

The other conversational glitch is that undergraduate contrarianism you see all the way up from the local crypto bore to the billionaire class. Your finance bro is hardly immune. (“Putin just wants a warm water port.”) But something about belonging to an establishment profession will tend to take the edge off. The archetypal tech genius — fabulously credentialed, but somehow as overeager to impress as an autodidact — must be peculiar to a young industry.

All ethnographic observations about these two tribes have to be qualified, of course. For one thing, tech and finance can be hard to tell apart. (Where should we file Sam Bankman-Fried?). Still, much the biggest change in the world of work since I entered it is the relative decline of the one against the other as the prestige industry. If all finance retains is the social edge, tech will find it a trivial deficit, next to pay and power, if also much the hardest to overcome.

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 07, 2025

As usual Janan Ganesh has a lively and insightful conversation with himself -its like a fast moving current in a river of ideas, speculations, and just plain political chatter – some call this free imginative variation, that somehow touches reality , if that seems coherent? The Reader is in ‘Ganesh World’!

Headline: The deceptively negotiable Donald Trump

Sub-headline: The tariff row is further indication that he is quick to quarrel but also quick to settle

https://www.ft.com/content/f0d86285-e98e-4aee-8179-7edb6e3499ae

Editor: some samples are in order.

The markets were fools on Saturday, and shrewd judges of character on Monday. When Donald Trump announced tariffs against America’s neighbours last weekend, investors who had talked since November of a misunderstood, deceptively pragmatic US president were exposed as naive. For 48 hours. Then he more or less vindicated them. The tariffs have been put off in return for Canadian and Mexican assurances about cross-border drug traffic and other Trump bugbears. Investment banks can postpone the sheepish client calls until March.

The world would be silly to relax, of course. Trump has the potential to shatter the trading system in the coming years, even if he does so in fits and starts. But if nothing else, the past few days have been an education in the art of dealing with him.

Editor: Trump is nothing more than a petulent child who loves to shock and dimay, he is a changeling. Ganesh provides a kind of ‘oppreative diagnosis’?

Because Trump is so quick to quarrel, people tend to miss that he is also quick to settle. He almost never drives as hard a bargain as his belligerent manner seems to promise. In 2020, China bought some peace with a vague and hard-to-enforce pledge to cut the two countries’ trade imbalance. (“The biggest deal anybody has ever seen,” he called it, with telling emphasis on external perception.) Likewise, he didn’t abandon Nafta so much as pass off a revised version of it as a personal coup. Being an egoist, not a fanatic, what he cares about is his reputation as a maker of deals. To keep it going, he needs a regular flow of them. And so their content becomes secondary. We can mock, but the lesson here for countries faced with Trump is an encouraging one: give him something that he can call victory. The concession needn’t be huge, and he will in fact co-operate in talking up its significance.

Editor: A portion of Ganesh’s commentary rings true: I’ve placed those sentences in italics. Some time’s, even Ganesh, manages in his commetaries, to brush by someting of value: An Egoist recogconises his brethren?

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Editor: A selection of Ganesh aperues: At this he excelles, wedded to evocative Name Dropping!

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The concession needn’t be huge, and he will in fact co-operate in talking up its significance.

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Trump is open to what Henry Kissinger called “linkage”.

…

…the smallness of their concessions (Justin Trudeau is appointing a fentanyl “czar”) or the fact that economics and drug policy are mixed up like this in the first place.

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In that sense, he might be easier to defang than Joe Biden, who didn’t think Nato was a club of free-riders or the EU a conspiracy against Silicon Valley.

…

Instead, I suspect, he would just rather have the slow-burn pleasure of someone submitting to him over years than the one-time high of destroying them. There is something of Caesar in his belief that the ultimate emasculation of an enemy is to spare them.

…

(For where is the sense of conquest with them?) If so, David Lammy and Peter Mandelson, far from being awkward choices as Britain’s foreign secretary and ambassador to Washington, make perverse sense.

…

If being a Trump stalwart from the beginning were a guarantee of anything, Nigel Farage’s place in the Maga court wouldn’t be so uncertain.

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The outlandish ugliness of his statements make this hard to see. When a US president wants to “take over” Gaza and develop it into a Levantine Cote d’Azur, throwing him a bone — on trade, on anything — seems pointless.

…

For anyone who recognises that trade and internationalism have raised the lot of humankind, there isn’t good news to be had about the next four years, only least-bad ways of operating in the storm.

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Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 06, 2025

Europe | Charlemagne

Headline: Meet Europe’s Gaullists, Atlanticists, denialists and Putinists

Sub-headline: As Donald Trump returns, so do Europe’s old schisms over how to defend itself

https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/01/30/meet-europes-gaullists-atlanticists-denialists-and-putinists?utm_content=ed-picks-image-link-7&etear=nl_today_7&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2/5/2025&utm_id=2059762

Editor: The first two senteses are vintage Wooldridge/Micklethwait Oxbridger dullwitted slur, against a long gone caricature of Left Pariaians, like Sartre?

Can a country still call itself an ally of America if America is threatening to annex part of its territory? Such a question might once have seemed ripe for a Gitane-puffing philosophe to ponder in a Saint-Germain-des-Prés café circa 1968.

Editor: Too bad some of their readerhip will miss that wan little gibe. But the parade of caricatures in the headline continues, they cleaned out the rhetorical closet with ‘Gitane-puffing philosophe’ chatter ? The aways servisable anonimous source appears on cue! ‘Channelling his inner Jean-Paul Sartre, a European diplomat quipped: “With allies like Donald Trump, who needs enemies?”

The Economist Actors appear:

The Gaullists: in 145 words.

The Atlanticists: in 209 words

The Gaullists & The Atlanticists tagteam it: in 191 words

Editor: The final paragraph under the rubric of ‘How many divisions does Europe have?

All countries contain bits of the four factions in their political establishment. (Germany, set to get a new chancellor following elections on February 23rd, is hard to place in any camp for now.) Even if Europeans were to agree on an overarching defence plan, the thorny question of how to pay for it would then need to be resolved. Some cash-strapped countries could afford to spend more on defence only if funding came through borrowing the money jointly at EU level, a non-starter for fiscal hawks. That would open up another can of divisions for future summits to ponder.

Editor: After all the evocative word play, and a large cast of characters: Gaullists, Atlanticists, denialists and Putinists topped by : ‘Gitane-puffing philosophe to ponder in a Saint-Germain-des-Prés café circa 1968’ the final paragraph sinks into – the end of that train ride into the office, seems a welcome respite from Ecomomist vacious political chatter!

Newspaper Reader.

https://buenosairesherald.com/

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 06, 2025

Newspaper Reader: Mr. Stephens, when he isn’t screecing, renders the jejune in it’s rancid state!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 05, 2025

Opinion

Bret Stephens

Is This the End of Pax Americana?

Feb. 4, 2025

…

In an intriguing guest essay in The Times this week, Rutgers University historian Jennifer Mittelstadt made the case that Trump was a “sovereigntist,” a tradition she dated to 1919 and the Republican rejection, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Sovereigntists, she noted, also looked askance at U.S. membership in NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and especially the Carter administration’s decision to relinquish the Panama Canal.

…

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Opinion

Guest Essay

Why Does Trump Threaten America’s Allies? Hint: It Starts in 1919.

Feb. 2, 2025

Editor: The final paragraphs of Jennifer Mittelstadt’s essay is to say the least bleak, that hallowed ‘Post-War Liberal Order’ is at its end?

…

There is little to be won predicting foreign policy in a second Trump administration. The influence of the sovereigntist movement may recede in the face of a president who is changeable and distracted. And some members of Mr. Trump’s coalition do not subscribe to a purely sovereigntist standpoint, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But sovereigntists will surely double down. “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” Project 2025 explains. “They should be abandoned.”

The most vigorous sovereigntists openly say they will seek withdrawal from the U.N. if necessary. They already oppose many proposed pacts and conventions, including the U.N.’s Pact for the Future, which addresses climate change and inequality. The Trump administration has said it intends to withdraw from the World Health Organization and has taken steps toward a near ban on immigration. It’s likely to weaken the European Union, enfeeble NATO and oppose multicountry trade agreements like the revamped NAFTA. And it will seek to regain a kind of Monroe Doctrine-era control of the Western Hemisphere, no matter what happens with the canal.

Mr. Trump’s embrace of sovereignty politics will only embolden similar regimes around the world. Brexit was a harbinger of other potential E.U. exits. Nearly every right-wing party across Europe would consider one if they came to power.

Look for other countries, buoyed by Mr. Trump’s scorn, to put the brakes on internationalism and instead build new, separate relationships with one another. What we would be left with is an unruly period for international relations, one that is less centralized and less governed by the shared principles and operating modes that lasted from the end of World War II until just a few years ago.

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Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 04, 2025

Editor: The Economist ‘thinks of itself’ in the most self-congratulatory way!

Briefing | Self-restraining Raj

Headline: Even in India, bureaucracy is being curtailed

Sub-headline: Many small steps could make a big difference

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/01/30/even-in-india-bureaucracy-is-being-curtailed

In offices that used to house India’s planning commission, Sanjeev Sanyal, an economic adviser to the prime minister, is pursuing what he calls “process reforms”—small tweaks to streamline government as opposed to big structural changes like overhauling the tax code.

Take the process of closing a business. In 2021 it took 499 days on average and involved placing advertisements in newspapers. By last year it took only 90. Applying for patents, too, used to be an ordeal owing to a shortage of qualified staff to review the claims. Hundreds have been hired and the number of patents granted has risen from 6,000 in 2015 to more than 100,000 last year.

Other agencies have been abolished or shrunk. Gone are the Tariff Commission, which was set up in 1951 but never set any tariffs (the commerce and finance ministries did that), the All-India Handloom Board, the All India Handicrafts Board and the Central Organisation for Modernisation of Workshops. Several film-promotion organisations, including the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Children’s Film Society, have become one.

There is much more to do. Despite heavy investment in India’s ports, ships often get stuck waiting for customs and security clearances for their cargo. It can be so hard to claim any money from the Provident Fund, the national pension scheme, that many workers see contributions as a tax rather than a form of savings. But at least there is now a process for process reforms.

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Editor:The Economist was the subject of Alexander Zevin’s revelatory Biography:

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/authors/zevin-alexander

Editor: Minding the business of the world is the Intellectual/Political/Moral high ground, that this last remaing figure of British Imperialism, The Economist: representative of the Oxbridger Cadre and their fellow travelers. The propaganda value of the reach of this publication began with John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: The Right Nation a convoluted apologetic for Bush The Younger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld & Karl Rove Mr. 1%!

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Editor: Where might The Reader look to for a critical analisis of British Imperialism?

Opinions|Conflict

How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

And lied about it.

Jason Hickel

Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.

How did this come about?

It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.

Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india

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Opinions|History

How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years

Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians#ixzz8zJ65PdFA

Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.

This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.

Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.

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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians#ixzz8zJ6lJMeZ

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Editor: Recall Zanny Minton Beddoes’s appearance on The Daily Show, in leather pants, to shill for the War in Ukraine. Beddoes’s was also part of Jeffrey D. Sachs’ army of Neo-Liberals:

Headline: Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist

By Peter Passell

June 27, 1993

…

And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”

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Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/ Sep 01, 2021

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Jan 31, 2025

Anne Applebaum’s re-published essay: ‘The New Puritans’ from October 2021. That is framed by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Note that brevity is not an attribute of Neo-Cons: exhausting the readers patience, and short circuiting critical thinking, via the exercise of a self-serving verbosity is central, in fact, the sine qua non of the Straussian! The word count of this essay is 7,896 !

Here are two telling paragraph on Applebaum’s that frame her report on a select number of the victims of ‘the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob’:

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I have been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned. In 1948, the famous Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik sent what he later described as some “rubbish” as his entry into a competition to write a “Song of the United Party”—because he thought if he refused to submit anything, the whole Union of Polish Composers might lose funding. To his eternal humiliation, he won. Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”

But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere. During a trip to Turkey earlier this year, I met a writer who showed me his latest manuscript, kept in a desk drawer. His work wasn’t illegal, exactly—it was just unpublishable. Turkish newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses are subject to unpredictable prosecutions and drastic sentences for speech or writing that can be arbitrarily construed as insulting the president or the Turkish nation. Fear of those sanctions leads to self-censorship and silence.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

Applebaum engages in an unsurprising use of historical/political hyperbole of the Soviets, while neglecting, the most proximate occurrence of Backlisting of the McCarthy Era in America!

The partial list of victims:

one academic told me.

A journalist told me

One professor

Another person suspended

Ian Buruma

One editor said

one academic told me

Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor

Daniel Elder, a prizewinning composer

poet Joseph Massey

Stephen Elliott, a journalist and critic

one of the academics I interviewed

David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department (suicide)

Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology

Robert George, a Princeton philosopher who has acted as a faculty advocate for students and professors who have fallen into legal or administrative difficulties,

Joshua Katz, a popular Princeton classics professor,

Mike Pesca, a podcaster for Slate

Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,

Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld,

This list of victims is interrupted by examples of ‘Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution…’.

Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.

Again no mention of that indigenous American Political Inquisitors, the McCarthy coterie , or its weapons, the in-order-too of maintaining one’s status were being a ‘friendly witness’, naming names, and the Loyalty Oath for those working or applying for jobs. And if in the Entertainment field being ‘cleared’ by ‘Red Channels’.

I have just reached page 14 of my copy of Applebaum’s essay. In total, there are 27 pages. Just from these 14 pages, its clear that Applebaum is writing propaganda of a very particular kind! ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned against an internal enemy: ‘that coddled students have learned to fear free speech’. Applebaum constructs a victimology, and the Inquisitors who seek to destroy what James Madison so prized! Applebaum supplies the answer to the besieged professors. Note that professors are the single class, of civic political actors, who qualify for ‘moral and legal support’!

Robert George has created the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group that intends to offer moral and legal support to professors who are under fire, and even to pay for their legal teams if necessary. George was inspired, he told me, by a nature program that showed how elephant packs will defend every member of the herd against a marauding lion, whereas zebras run away and let the weakest get killed off. “The trouble with us academics is we’re a bunch of zebras,” he said. “We need to become elephants.” John McWhorter, a Columbia linguistics professor (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has strong and not always popular views about race, told me that if you are accused of something unfairly, you should always push back, firmly but politely: “Just say, ‘No, I’m not a racist. And I disagree with you.’ ” If more leaders—university presidents, magazine and newspaper publishers, CEOs of foundations and companies, directors of musical societies—took that position, maybe it would be easier for more of their peers to stand up to their students, their colleagues, or an online mob.

This New York Times essay from December 16, 2009 should puts Prof. George into proper historical/political perspective:

Headline: The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker

…

At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker. Dressed in his usual uniform of three-piece suit, New College, Oxford cuff links and rimless glasses­, George convened the meeting with a note of thanks and a reminder of its purpose. Alarmed at the liberal takeover of Washington and an apparent leadership vacuum among the Christian right, the group had come together to warn the country’s secular powers that the culture wars had not ended. As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.

Two months later, at a Washington press conference to present the group’s “Manhattan Declaration,” George stepped aside to let Cardinal Rigali sum up just what made the statement, and much of George’s work, distinctive. These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”

Even marriage between a man and a woman, Rigali continued, was grounded not just in religion and tradition but in logic. “The true great goods of marriage — the unitive and the procreative goods — are inextricably bound together such that the complementarity of husband and wife is of the very essence of marital communion,” the cardinal continued, ascending into philosophical abstractions surely lost on most in the room. “Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man. Indeed, they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”

…

Anne Applebaum assumes that the reader will not do an internet search for Prof. George. As a reader of the New York Times, I recalled reading this news story.

Old Socialist

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jan 31, 2025

Headline:How popular is Donald Trump?

Last updated on January 29th 2025

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

FEW FIGURES have loomed as large in American political life as Donald Trump. Even out of office, the celebrity-turned-president has had an extraordinary capacity to set the political agenda, move popular sentiment and polarise Americans. Mr Trump’s return to power has underscored all this. But he is not impervious to public opinion. His second term will be shaped, and constrained, by the views and priorities of ordinary Americans. On this page, The Economist is tracking their opinions week to week, throughout his presidency.

Every week YouGov, an online pollster, asks 1,500 American adults how they feel about a range of topics. We have collated their responses to these surveys since 2009, including the latest data on the most pressing political issues—from immigration and the state of the economy to gun control and health care. The result is a snapshot of Americans’ shifting views on their politics and society over the past 16 years.

…

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Editor: Influence Watch supplies some enlightening information about the relationship with clients, and their particular needs, and the YouGov’s ‘points systems’ (see the italicised portions below).

YouGov is a British polling company founded in 2000 by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. YouGov has 20 million members worldwide whom it surveys, along with 1,600 employees across 39 offices. ¹

YouGov claims to be non-partisan. It is often accused of displaying bias toward the U.K. Conservative Party due to its founders’ associations with the party, but the company has had high-level figures who have supported the British Labour Party, ² and the firm worked with the left-of-center Voters’ Right To Know coalition. ³

YouGov creates and conducts polls for its clients around the world. YouGov attracts poll takers by distributing “points” which can be redeemed for cash and gift cards. Select poll takers can join YouGov Pulse as “panelists” for additional points. ⁴

While most polling companies survey random individuals to avoid selection bias, YouGov’s polling model is based on tracking the shifting of preferences of the same individuals over time. YouGov’s panelists are used repeatedly for polls, and polling data is correlated with a large amount of political and non-political information surveyed from these panelists. ⁵

…

Editor: Here is a link to ‘Influence Watch’ sight:

YouGov

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Editor: The reader might well speculate on the economic relationship of YouGov’s ‘points systems’ to The Economist! Or the fact that YouGov poles the same indivituals over time. Where might these repedative practices lead: in terms of questions asked that could be skewed to meet the political needs of Clients. Even given this assurence of ‘polling data is correlated with a large amount of political and non-political information surveyed from these panelists. ⁵ To call the relationship between The Economist and YouGov symbiotic is hardley an exageration !

Political Observer.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jan 30, 2025

Editor :The Frame:

Tulsi Gabbard grilled on Snowden, Assad and Putin in tense Senate hearing

Skeptical senators ruthlessly questioned Trump’s national intelligence director nominee ahead of confirmation vote

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/30/tulsi-gabbard-confirmation-hearing

…

Editor: Question:

“Is Edward Snowden a traitor: yes or no?” Gabbard was asked by successive Democratic senators, including Bennet.

“Snowden broke the law,” said Gabbard. “He released information about the United States … I have more immediate steps that I would take to prevent another Snowden.”

“This is when the rubber hits the road,” Bennet retorted, demanding a “yes” or “no” answer. “This is not a moment for social media. It’s not a moment to propagate conspiracy theories … This is when you need to answer questions of the people whose votes you’re asking for.”

Those questions were foreseen by Snowden himself, who wrote in a tweet on Thursday that Gabbard would be “required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation”.

“I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff,” he said. “In DC, that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance.”

The committee is expected to hold a closed session to discuss sensitive matters later on Thursday and then would move to a vote “as soon as possible”. said Tom Cotton, the committee chair.

“Obviously we didn’t select this nominee,” said Bennet, Gabbard’s most vocal skeptic. “But can’t we do better than somebody who doesn’t believe in [Fisa law] 702? Can we believe that somebody who can’t answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today, who made excuses for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?”

Editor: Can a Senate fully owned by @AIPAC represent American Interists?

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