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Oct 24, 2024

Headline: Macron and the dangers of ‘bluster’ diplomacy

Sub-headline: Despite the many setbacks he has encountered, the French president claims to still play a key role in what he considers to be his ‘reserved domain:’ the international stage.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/24/macron-and-the-dangers-of-bluster-diplomacy_6730340_23.html

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“No bluster, please!” Michel Barnier’s advice to his ministers, as soon as his government was named on September 23, was obviously not addressed to Emmanuel Macron. Or was it? At the time, the prime minister was encouraging the members of his team to be “irreproachable and modest,” even if this meant breaking with the style of government previously placed under the direct authority of the president, himself renowned for his “performative” speech, capable of literally achieving an act by the very fact of saying it out loud.

The advice given by Barnier, busy with the difficulties of leading a coalition without a majority, opposed by the left and under the watchful eye of the far right, has a curious resonance when it comes to foreign policy, which Macron considers to be his “reserved domain.” If there is one area in which Macron has demonstrated this esbroufe – meaning, according to the dictionary, a “display of pretentious and insolent manners” – it is this one.

Editor: please excuse my rendering in italics of the final portions of the above paragraph, Macrons insolence is as usual comic, without intent!

The former investment banker cannot be blamed for having attempted a lot on the international stage since the start of his first term in 2017, in a world more brutal than ever. He has undoubtedly learned a great deal from his many failures, with Donald Trump, whom he tried to coax, without much success, or with Vladimir Putin, who used Macron’s attempts at mediation to buy time before invading Ukraine in February 2022. And let’s not forget France’s withdrawal from the Sahel, under pressure from Russia, in the wake of military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Often, the president has inflamed debates, as when he warned of NATO’s “brain death” in 2019.

Keeping a low profile on the domestic scene since July and his camp’s defeat in the legislative elections organized in the wake of the failed dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale, Macron has been redoubling his activity on the international stage. He belatedly decided to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September and followed this up with an official visit to Canada. From October 28 to 30, he will make a state visit to Morocco. He will then head for Brazil for a G20 summit in mid-November, less than two weeks after the election of a new US president. He may then travel to Saudi Arabia in early December. Not forgetting his many planned visits to Brussels, Berlin, Cyprus and Budapest, where he will be on November 7, for the fifth summit of one of his initiatives, the European Political Community, the future of which is still uncertain.

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Editor: If I were a Columnist for The New York Times like Friedman, Brooks or Stephens, I might choose a more low grade melodrama, that almost resembles reality, as my political instrument expressed as: ‘Is France in Trouble’ ! Or more aptly, a frank statement on Macon’s megalomania?

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Up until now, the prime minister has nevertheless been closely involved in decisions in what Macron considers to be a “shared domain.” Coordination between the two men and their advisers is real, but friction cannot be ruled out, particularly on the question of migration.

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On this front, Macron hesitated for a long time at the start of the conflict, before coming out increasingly clearly in support of the resistance and Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Some of his initiatives as chief of the armed forces, such as the possibility of sending ground troops to the Ukraine, have fallen flat, after provoking a resounding outcry from France’s allies.

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… Macron has gradually hardened his tone toward Benjamin Netanyahu over the course of the war being waged in Gaza, and even more so since Lebanon and Hezbollah have been the daily target of bombardments. The escalation on the ground is accompanied by a form of verbal escalation on the part of Macron, questioning arms deliveries to Israel, or urging him to respect the UN.

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After calling for a 21-day truce on September 25, Macron and US President Joe Biden were humiliated by Netanyahu, who cared more about pushing his advantage against Hezbollah. But with this kind of conference, which Macron loves, the president hopes to once again have a grip on international events and show that France still carries some weight in the region.

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As a regular reader of Le Monde, The Times, the New York Times, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, The Guardian and sometimes The Financial Times and The Economist, there is not much reporting on France, the French and their politics, and even less on Macron!

Newspaper Reader

Old Socialist speculates.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 24, 2024

The Reader has to wonder at the headline of this Bret Stephens political commentary, that seems to miss the very reason, the whole point of the Stephens essay: ‘There’s One Main Culprit if Donald Trump Wins’

Editor: Bret Stephens offers seven reasons after the opening paragraphs:

The Electoral College. White racism. Black sexism. President Biden.

Should Kamala Harris lose the presidential election next month, those will be among the more convenient excuses Democrats will offer for falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent. There will also be whispers that she was not the strongest candidate in the first place — that the party would have done better to elevate a more natural political talent like Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

There’s truth in all of it. But it lets off the hook the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today. Consider its main components.

Editor: Stephens identifies the culprits : ‘the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today.’ Mr. Stephens seems to have forgotten that the ‘liberal voices’ have entered into an alliance with the Neo-Cons:

Headline: Opinion

The emerging unholy alliance between hawkish Democrats and neoconservatives

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-unholy-alliance-between-hawkish-democrats-and-neoconservatives/2017/08/08/3c1c7676-7bb5-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html

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The neocons — led by the likes of Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Dick Cheney — were the ideological motor behind President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy debacle since the Vietnam War. The indispensable-nation crowd — personified by Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Michele Flournoy — were initial supporters of the Iraq War, championed President Barack Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan and helped orchestrate the disastrous regime change in Libya. Neither the neocons nor the indispensable-nation crowd has been instructed nor daunted by failure.

Illustrative of their emerging alliance, as Glenn Greenwald reports, is yet another Beltway foreign policy initiative: the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Alliance describes itself as a “bipartisan, transatlantic initiative” focused on Russia. Its purpose is to “develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter and raise the costs on Russian and other actors,” while working to “expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.” Consider this an updated version of Kristol and Robert Kagan’s 1997 Project for the New American Century, which fulminated for the invasion of Iraq. The Alliance’s advisory council includes Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, and Mike Morell, acting CIA director under Obama. They sit comfortably with Kristol, Mike Chertoff, homeland security secretary under Bush, and hawkish former Republican congressman Mike Rogers. With a record of catastrophic foreign policy fiascoes, the establishment comes together to strike back.

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Mr. Stephens offers these seven points to the reader: note that I will leave my ‘signature’, but will not comment on what I think is valuable and insightful in the Stephens’ seven arguments.

1: The politics of condescension

But perhaps those men are responding to something more mundane: Median weekly wages for full-time Black workers rose steeply during Donald Trump’s presidency and essentially stagnated under Biden, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. Why reach for the insulting explanation when a rational one will do?

Editor: Give Stephens credit for providing a more proximal reason, for the failure of black men to support Harris. Obama’s condescension was evident on the You Tube video

2: The politics of name-calling

Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly are people who think the Biden-Harris years have been bad for them and the country. Maybe liberals should try to engage the argument without belittling the person.

Editor:

3:The politics of gaslighting:

Now some of the same pundits are extolling Harris as brilliant and experienced, which may be true but is hardly evidenced by her seeming inability to move beyond a limited set of talking points or the fact that it’s difficult to think of a political or legislative accomplishment of which she was the prime mover.

Editor:

4:The politics of highhandedness:

A Democratic Party that claims to be defending democracy without bothering to practice it is not going to endear itself to voters it needs to win.

Editor:

5: The politics of Pollyanna:

Wouldn’t it be better to meet voter concerns rather than tell them they’re seeing ghosts?

Editor:

6: The politics of selective fidelity to traditional norms.

They decry Trump’s assaults on the news media while cheering the Biden administration’s attempt to strong-arm media companies into censoring opinions it disliked. And they warn of Trump’s efforts to criminalize his political opponents, even as they celebrate criminalizing him. Hypocrisy of this sort doesn’t go unnoticed by people not fully in the tank for Harris.

Editor:

7: The politics of identity over class.

Wiser liberals might want to press two questions: How did Trump still get so very, very close? And how can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?

Editor: The utter collapse of The Neo-Liberal Swindle, that birthed The Tea Party and its successor of Trump and Trumpism: the political watershed of New Democrats, Republicans and Neo-Conservatives Free Market toxin, that collapsed in 2007-2008 that impoverished the Working Class and Middle Classes!

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Editor: Its hard to forget Harris jailing of the parents of truant students and laughing about it, her de facto pardon of Steven Mnuchin of OneWest Bank, or her groveling AIPAC speech, nor her support of the Gaza Genocide! Stephens shares in her unwavering support of this continuing crime!

Old Socialist

Political Cynic on ‘The Panic Of The Elites’, Financial Times style!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 22, 2024

Headline: What Croesus wants from Trump

Sub-headline: Rather than turning to Harris, US billionaires are again backing the man they once condemned

https://www.ft.com/content/1698fc6f-fc2d-49d9-afd1-84b33367fc98

I recall Mr. Luce’s ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ of 2017 , and it’s preface that chronicled his 1989 trip, to take part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. That quotes the mendacious political fraud Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’, Hegelian Historical kitsch as prescient. This a landmark of sorts of Luce’s particular brand of political commentary.

Yet his latest essay attacks the very core readership of The Financial Times: those Billionaires and their many allies, whose politics are based in the singularity of profit, that seems to be axiomatic, at the least!

Luce names the culprits that is reminiscent of a Papal Excommunication, yet the political historical distance of Croesus, takes part of the sting out of Luce’s veering into Anti-Capitalist territory? Luce Oxbridger education has it uses.

Editor: Luce’s cast of charters : Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Elon Musk, Nelson Peltz, a Florida-based hedge fund owner, Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oil billionaire, Timothy Mellon, scion of the Pittsburgh-based dynasty, never wavered on Trump, Miriam Adelson, widow of the late gaming magnate Sheldon Adelson, crypto enthusiasts, such as Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick. This paragraph is about the ‘Panic of The Elites’ exemplified by Luce’s question:

What, then, is driving the rich back to Trump? The missing piece is psychology. When you are as rich as Croesus, paranoia about losing it all takes hold. Your sense of reality changes. In 2010, Schwarzman likened Barack Obama’s plans to close the so-called carried interest loophole — which allows private equity owners to pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, in Warren Buffett’s words — to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Neither accounting expertise nor historical knowledge could explain his bizarre analogy. 

Editor: This paragraph makes clear that the ‘Panic’ is real!

Other billionaires and many executives have donated to Harris. Her near $1bn fundraising in the last quarter alone exceeds Trump’s tally since January 2023. Maybe her donors place more value on democracy. But they could also be motivated by asset protection. The inflationary effect of Trump’s planned global tariff war and his threat to the Fed’s independence would hit everyone’s bottom line. 

Political Cynic

Newspaper Reader comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 21, 2024

The first two paragraphs are steeped in the standard self-congratulation of Mr. Ganesh. He can’t quite get over his own cleverness, and wants The Reader to share in his self-revelation: ending in a superfluous question, that mimics conversation.

“A fight between two bald men over a comb”, was how Jorge Luis Borges described the Falklands war. What a line: somehow cruel and humane all at once. It has survived these four decades because it really is unimprovable in its Wildean economy.

What a shame it is nonsense. In that war, a junta was violently infringing the right of some islanders to self-determination. Or a faded empire was willing to kill over some faraway and ill-begotten territories. Or a little of both. At any rate, it mattered. Wider principles were involved. Defusing the whole subject with an epigram is a mark of high cultivation, but also of evasiveness. In the end — and this isn’t aimed at the late writer so much as at those who thoughtlessly quote him — where do you stand?

The Reader has arrived at the two imperatives Mr. Ganesh’s intervention liberals and woke-ism that evolves argumentatively into a kind of political miniature that lends itself to ‘Ganesh Analysis’.

Editor: Reader examine the evolution/de-evolution of the actors in this concoction!

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Not all liberals deserted. Malcolm Gladwell and others signed a Harper’s Magazine letter about creative freedom when that took some fibre

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But who led the resistance when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug.

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Editor: The full blossoming of his argument:

Woke is exaggerated by conservatives (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue), a distraction from economic injustice (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue) or the wrong way of winning people over (a piece of tactical counsel from Barack Obama that didn’t, quite, say where he stood on the issue). 

As with the old line about the Falklands, you could smell the desperation to avoid an argument. It is understandable. But it also ill-equips liberals for the protection of liberalism.

Editor: As if by prestidigitation Richard Dawkins appears, and dominates the remainder of Ganesh’s crowded, convoluted, confused attempt at a essay. I offer The Reader some samples: In Hip-Hop, the Sample is a way of adding other dimensions to a Musical Composition, and as an homage to that already existing work. Though Ganesh’s intervention exists in an alternative dimension!

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Most of us can recite the main tenets of his Enlightenment outlook. Religious claims about the workings of the universe are either wrong or unfalsifiable.

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What is the liberal line? The one that dogs him as much as criticism from clerics?

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And then the ultimate midwit dinner party cliché, the verbal equivalent of having a Banksy print on your wall: “Atheism has become a religion in itself.”

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The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalized niceness.

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Editor: Here are the final paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh political/moral ramblings that pass as informed comment:

I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it. (Dawkins would be awesome in a crisis.)

It has become fashionable to tease conservatives, such as the Tory member of parliament Kemi Badenoch, for pounding away at a woke movement that is now fading. Fair enough. But it isn’t fading because of what the sensible centre did. For the most part, their contribution was to stroll up to the pub brawl and tut just as it was petering out.

Where do we stand? At a safe distance.

Newspaper Reader

Political Observer comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 20, 2024

Headline: College Officials Must Condemn On-Campus Support for Hamas Violence

Oct. 20, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET

Underneath the headline is this :

By Erwin Chemerinsky

Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California and the author of the book “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

Editor: ‘How the Constitution Threatens the United States’ seems to be from the current political vocabulary of Hillary Clinton. Her latest attacks on Free Speech, as a clear and present danger, has now become the mantra of choice of a cadre of former defenders, in sum former Constitutional Essentialists, who now view that Constitution as politically toxic, in its Free Speech component. The question occurs what ‘Right’ will be next? Or will the Constitution be nullified in toto!

Mr. Chemerinsky also ignores the fact that the Genocide in Gaza has galvanized, radicalized the World : College campuses have become the epicenters of dissent: Chemerinsky’s self-willed forgetting of Mario Savio of 1964, Teach-ins, Chicago 1968, 1971 May Day protests, etc. does not surprise!

The Reader can access these two reports of violence at UCLA:

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/14/ucla-jewish-student-lawsuit-ruling

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https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-counterprotesters-invs/index.html

Editor: Some telling quotations from Mr. Chemerinsky essay:

The Oct. 7, 2023, attack was the deadliest on Jews since the Holocaust. Women were raped and sexually mutilated, babies were slaughtered, and whole families were burned alive. About 250 hostages were taken; more than 60 are thought to remain in Hamas’s hands.

Certainly, there is an important conversation to be had about Israel’s actions over the past year, which has led to so much devastation and loss of life in Gaza. However, these demonstrations on campuses were not that conversation. They were largely the celebration of the coldblooded murder and torture of innocent civilians. Regardless of one’s views on the conflict in the Middle East, the celebration of mass murder can only be condemned.

Editor: The rule for protected speech, was once no matter how abhorrent the speech… or should Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes be our guide?

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the specter of a man falsely shouting “fire” in a theater into First Amendment law. Nearly one hundred years later, this remains the most enduring analogy in constitutional law. It has been relied on in hundreds of constitutional cases, and it has permeated popular discourse on the scope of individual rights.

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1748&context=wmborj

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/skokie-case-how-i-came-represent-free-speech-rights-nazis

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Editor: The final paragraphs of Erwin Chemerinsky essay:

I understand the reluctance of university officials to speak out or take other actions. It is easier to do nothing than to say something that will upset some campus constituencies.

But silence, too, is a message. And it is more. In the eyes of the law, doing nothing can be viewed as deliberate indifference, which violates Title VI and can lead to action by the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education.

At the very least, campus officials must issue a simple message: “Those who have praised the terrorism of Hamas on this campus have the right to express their views. But we, as campus officials, have the duty to say that celebrating murder, rape and taking hostages is deeply offensive and fundamentally inconsistent with what this university stands for.”

Saying so should not take courage.

Editor: This final sentence is not just shocking in its political/moral myopia:

But we, as campus officials, have the duty to say that celebrating murder, rape and taking hostages is deeply offensive and fundamentally inconsistent with what this university stands for.”

Editor: If ‘we are to take the moral high ground’ ‘we’ must understand what ‘The Hannibal Doctrine’ means!

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/3/whats-the-hannibal-directive-a-former-israeli-soldier-tells-all

Political Observer

@jpremylemonde did not become ‘Jerusalem Correspondent’ for Le Monde, without being able to recite the Party Line, in all its various expressions!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 20, 2024

Headline: Yahya Sinwar’s death opens a new phase in the war in Gaza

Sub-headline: The elimination of Hamas’s leader by the Israeli army is unlikely to bring an immediate end to the conflict, but his death has increased the pressure on the two sides to agree to a ceasefire.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/10/18/yahya-sinwar-s-death-opens-a-new-phase-in-the-war-in-gaza_6729772_4.html

Editor: The Melodrama Unfolds , imagine this in exquisitely tailored French!

The hunt lasted a year – an eternity. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack, was eventually killed by the Israeli army, which announced his death on Thursday, October 17. This victory was not achieved due to readings from the Israeli radars that probed Gaza’s subsoil, in the hope of locating the Islamist movement’s leader under the immense network of tunnels he had helped to build. Nor was Israel’s public enemy number one eliminated in one of the Israeli army’s commando operations, which are based on their intelligence and had, at times, missed him by a hair’s breadth. The fugitive, who was thought to be holed up in underground bunkers, where it was believed that he was keeping a group of Israeli hostages around him to use as human shields, was killed in an exchange of fire with an Israeli patrol in Rafah, in the south of the enclave.

The soldiers didn’t know they were shooting at their country’s most wanted man. On Thursday evening, the Israeli authorities released a video supposedly showing Sinwar’s last moments, filmed by a drone. It shows a wounded man, sitting in an armchair in a ruined house. In a last gasp, he throws a stick toward the camera filming him. An Israeli army strike then blows the whole scene up. Three bodies were pulled from the rubble, including his own, which was partly recognizable. Analyses of his DNA and teeth, which the Israeli police had kept since his long stay in Israeli prisons, made it possible to formally identify him. Sinwar’s death means the trio behind the October 7 bloodbath, and the devastating war that followed, have all been killed: Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, was killed in a strike in July, and Marwan Issa, his second-in-command, was eliminated in March.

Editor: It does not seem to occur to our would-be Hemingway, that as fast as these leaders are ‘eliminated’, the command structure of this Army of Resistance, has not led to an awareness that the continuing acts of Resistance, need to be predicated, underwritten by an utter flexibility in the command structure: in sum no one is indispensable! @jpremylemonde lacks the thought and experience of generations of an Army of Resistance! Reader this 1599 word commentary is blatant political propaganda!

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Editor: The only defence against this melodramatic propaganda, is to engage in a critique of a ‘news story’, that is in fact it’s leitmotif !

Will his death, that of a leader and symbolic figure, put an end to the conflict, which has almost entirely destroyed the enclave and resulted in the deaths of over 42,000 Palestinians – according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, a figure confirmed by international organizations – the majority of them women and children? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered this question in the negative. “Yahya Sinwar is dead,” he rejoiced, in a video message broadcast on Thursday evening, but immediately warned: This did not mean the end of the war in Gaza, “but the beginning of the end.” To the hostages’ families, the Israeli leader stressed that he would not change his approach, which favors the use of force over negotiations: “This is a very important moment in the war. We will go full force until all your loved ones, who are our loved ones, return home.”

Editor: The Gaza Genocide has been perpetrated by Netanyahu and his relentless bombing campaigns, in sum a Genocide against a captive people. @jpremylemonde and Le Monde are parties to a criminal lie! Yet The Reader has just begun her reading of this text of near 1600 words, and in the quotation below Netanyahu makes his intent clear:

‘the Israeli leader stressed that he would not change his approach, which favors the use of force over negotiations’

Editor: As an exercise The Reader might select from this ‘essay’ the wordage of the paragraphs that most resemble Zionist Propaganda, and or quote from obvious political allies. But @jpremylemonde resorts to Melodrama :

Before his final moments above ground, Sinwar was thought to have spent a year underground in his maze of tunnels, communicating with the outside world through messengers, notably to pass on his instructions concerning ceasefire negotiations. He had made the end of hostilities conditional on a reciprocal agreement to release Israeli hostages (of the original 250 captives, 101 remain, according to Israel, half of whom would allegedly be dead) and Palestinian prisoners, and on the Israeli army’s complete withdrawal from Gaza. This is how he hoped to emerge victorious from the ruins of the coastal enclave.

The ranks of his messengers, some of whom had been close to him during his two decades in prison, had thinned as they were eliminated by the Israeli army. Sinwar had recently stopped sending out instructions, giving rise to speculation that he may have been killed by the army, unbeknownst to it, during a bombing raid on Gaza.

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Editor: There are still 1129 words of this ‘reportage’ remaining, yet is very clear that this ‘News Story’ is in fact a not very carefully laundered propaganda. The Reader confronts the cast of characters, that adds a kind of verisimilitude!

42,000 Palestinians , Hamas-run Health Ministry, Benjamin Netanyahu, “Yahya Sinwar is dead, General Israel Ziv, The West, US President Joe Biden, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Tal al-Sultan, a district of Rafah, Gershon Baskin, French-Israeli soldier Gilat Shalit, Lebanon, October 8, 2023, Hassan Nasrallah, Daniel Sobelman, a security expert, Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence.

Editor: Note this Editorial from Le Monde of October 20, 2024 . Consider it the companion piece to Jean-Philippe Rémy!

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/18/yahya-sinwar-s-death-a-military-success-a-political-opportunity_6729768_23.html?lmd_medium=email&lmd_campaign=trf_newsletters_lmie&lmd_creation=lemonde_in_english_NY&lmd_send_date=20241019&lmd_link=opinion-french-taste_titre_1&M_BT=123617693181350

Political Reporter

Political Realist concentrates her attention on three iterations!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 18, 2024

Editor: Iteration 1 :Reader concentrate your attention, on these three paragraphs of Mr. Friedman’s latest Foreign Policy Strategizing: of 10/15/2024

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Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former U.S. Central Command chief, who oversaw the 2020 killing of Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the elite Quds Force within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, agrees: “Iran may seem unpredictable at times,’’ he said in The Atlantic, “but it respects American strength and responds to deterrence. When we withdraw, Iran advances. When we assert ourselves — having weighed the risks and prepared for all possibilities — Iran retreats.”

That is why we need to confront Iran with an overwhelming, credible threat of force, coupled with a diplomatic survival pathway out, but one that this time addresses both Iran’s nuclear threat and regional behavior. Our job is to change Iran’s behavior; regime change is the job of the Iranian people. I believe the best way for that regime to lose its grip is to deprive it of the oxygen of permanent conflict with Israel and America — and all the excuses that Iran’s clerical tyrants give for why their people are so isolated and impoverished.

But I don’t stop there. We also need to sharpen the choices for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel: We must not be in the business of making Israel safe so that a radical messianic government can annex the West Bank. If we are going to keep resupplying Israel with missiles and even dispatch U.S.-run missile systems, Bibi needs to purge the settler lunatics from his cabinet, forge a national unity coalition and agree to open talks with a reformed Palestinian Authority — with a new technocratic cabinet led by credible leaders like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — on a two-state solution.

…

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Iteration 2: The Patient Reader has only to wait for this from Mr. Friedman :

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It creates the possibility not only of ending the Gaza war, returning Israeli hostages and bringing relief to the people of Gaza. It creates the possibility for the biggest step toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo, as well as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.

It’s that big.

But, but, but.

The death of Sinwar alone is not the sufficient condition to end this Gaza war and put Israelis and Palestinians on a pathway to a better future. Yes, Sinwar and Hamas always rejected a two-state solution and were committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish state. No one paid a bigger price for that than the Palestinians of Gaza. But while his death was necessary for a next step to be possible, it was never going to be everything.

The sufficient condition is that Israel have a leader and a governing coalition ready to step up to the opportunity Sinwar’s death has created. To put it bluntly, can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel live up to his Churchillian self-image and go along with something that he has previously rejected? That is the participation of a reformed West Bank Palestinian Authority in an international peacekeeping force that would take over Gaza in the place of the Sinwar-led Hamas.

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Iteration: 3:

Headline: A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big.

Jan. 31, 2024

There are two things I believe about the widening crisis in the Middle East.

We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel and the region — what I hope will be a “Biden Doctrine” that meets the seriousness and complexity of this dangerous moment.

And if we don’t see such a big, bold doctrine, the crisis in the region is going to metastasize in ways that will strengthen Iran, isolate Israel and leave America’s ability to influence events there for the better in tatters.

A Biden Doctrine — as I’m terming the convergence of strategic thinking and planning that my reporting has picked up — would have three tracks.

On one track would be a strong and resolute stand on Iran, including a robust military retaliation against Iran’s proxies and agents in the region in response to the killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan by a drone apparently launched by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.

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Political Realist

StephenKMackSD.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 18, 2024

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/nietzsches-legacy-ecce-homo-and-the-anti-christ-two-books-on-nature-and-politics/

StephenKMackSD

Old Socialist comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 17, 2024

Editor: Mr. Stephens abandons the Zionist Faschist State propaganda, for the moment, to offer Kamala Harris a speech she will never deliver: her Team would need to re-write it, to expunge from this pretentious analysis, into the wobbly cadences of the Harris campaign trail chatter.

My fellow citizens,

When the tumultuous history of this year’s presidential election is written, future generations will note that the choice boiled down to this: the certainty of division versus the possibility of unity.

Whether you love Donald Trump or loathe him, prefer his policies or mine, you can be sure of one thing: If he wins next month, we will be a bitterly, vocally, emotionally, exhaustingly divided country.

You know this because whatever you thought of his first term, you remember how that division became a part of your daily life. Thanksgiving dinners you stopped going to — because of Trump. Friends and neighbors you stopped speaking to — because of Trump. Topics you wouldn’t broach — because of Trump.

Editor: It’s hard to forget that Trump was the issue of the Tea Party Political Radicalism that metastasized: The New Democrats, The Republicans & The Neo-Cons all contributed to this rise, by their steadfast support of Neo-Liberal Free Market Swindle that bankrupted the Working and Middle Class’. Mr. Stephens is incapable of political honesty as a Neo-Conservative: the shopworn Noble Lie is his natural political inheritance:

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Summery

The Politics of Lying

Socrates’ introduction of the Republic’s notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3 (414b-c). “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody – including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” Grand lie? Noble lie? G. R. F. Ferrari has a good note on the issue: “The lie is grand or noble (gennaios) by virtue of its civic purpose, but the Greek word can also be used colloquially, giving the meaning ‘a true-blue lie,’ i.e. a massive, no-doubt-about-it lie (compare the term ‘grand larceny’).” This is not the only point on which there might be argument about the translation. Some prefer to “lie” the more neutral “falsehood” (which need not imply deliberate deception), others “fiction ” (perhaps trying to prescind from questions of truth and falsehood altogether). Cornford had “bold flight of invention.” I think “lie” is exactly right. But the argument for that will emerge later, in section II.

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato’s good city: a myth of national or civic identity – or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-platos-republic/noble-lie/F04B78C5546C7FB5E331248F35068F76

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Editor: Mr. Stephens offers the Toxin of Trump and Trumpism as a well of mendacity. I’ll provide examples of the Stephens wayward attempt at political advice to Harris.

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Thanksgiving dinners you stopped going to — because of Trump.

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The noise is incessant. It’s in the ad hominem tweets, the nasty nicknames, the disparagement of anyone who disagrees with him as an idiot, a weakling, an enemy of the people.

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In a democracy, a certain amount of division is natural. Like the opposition of wind and sail, it’s the productive tension that drives a nation forward while allowing it to find its balance.

Editor: the above example almost resembles actual thought!

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When consensus reached through compromise is possible, we should prefer it to divisive, and reversible, partisan victories. That’s how progress isn’t just achieved but also secured.

Editor: Again Stephen’s actual thought.

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Can we be disunited against the challenge of a brazenly aggressive China and its new best friends in Moscow and Tehran?

Editor: Stephens abandons thought, for the toxic triad of China, Moscow, and Tehran : The New Cold War that is about to reach …

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Disunity leads to paralysis, and that’s where this country has been stuck for too long.

Editor: Stephens again resorts to more political cliche as wisdom.

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I, on the other hand, intend to depoliticize the cabinet, so that the men and women in charge of our defense, diplomacy, Justice Department and economic system will have broad bipartisan respect, whatever party they affiliate with.

Editor: Harris reappears: she seems to appear and disappear at the political will of Stephens: think of him as one of the actors, in a maladroit adaptation of Pirandello!

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Editor: the final paragraph of Mr. Stephens attempt at political impersonation, recites cliche’s as imperatives that exhaust the possibilities of the jejune!

The talent, the passion, the optimism, the capacity, the sense of a shared and greater purpose that united our states and must continue to unite our nation — it’s still there, all around us. With your help, let me bring it to the White House.

Old Socialist

Queer Atheist comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 16, 2024

Headline: Lessons from Milei

Sub-headline: Argentina’s hard-charging libertarian leader is an example for Americans on the right.

Lessons from Milei

Let me state my prejudice forthrightly: I spent four years in Coming-out Group in Long Beach, California. What was so arresting was that so many of the attendees were Mormon, and for the most part College age, academic achievers. All were frightened by their parent’s negative reaction to their sexuality. That fear ruled their lives from the first sexual awakening.

So @JosephAddington identification with Javier Milei is utterly predictable given his matriculation from Brigham Young University, and its culture of strict political/moral/civic/sexual conformity. The first paragraphs exalts Milei’s toxic Neo-Liberalism in its most extreme iteration.

Editor: Read the https://buenosairesherald.com/

Editor: The first two paragraphs give the game away :

Since his election in December of 2023, Argentine president Javier Milei has permanently transformed the nation’s politics. In a show of political will and pure, unrelenting focus, Milei arrested a catastrophic inflationary spiral, drastically slashed government spending to produce a budgetary surplus for the first time in decades, and completely restructured the Argentine economy and government. The aggressive libertarian has more than proven that he was not just being theatrical when he wielded a chainsaw at his rallies to symbolize his political objectives.

Milei’s approach to political reform should be particularly instructive to leaders on the American right. A professed anarcho-capitalist, Milei approaches politics from the severe perspective of the economist. His theory of his political enemies is simple: they are parasites, dependent upon the largesses of the state provided at the expense of the taxpayer. They produce nothing of value to the public, they depend on patronage. The solution is equally simple—the chainsaw. Cut off the flow of money, dissolve the government ministries and departments, end the subsidies and the regulatory carve-outs and the board-room sinecures at state-run corporations, and they will starve to death.

Editor: The reader might think that even the Neo-Liberal Triad of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, might find both Milei & Addington’s celebration of political nihilism, a prescription for state violence as utterly toxic! Addington wallows in the warm bath of that nihilism. Note too that this triad were all academics, in which caution is an imperative! Addington is a propagandist, whose intention is about stirring the pot!

Chainsaw :

Chainsaw, chainsaw,  hatchet , chainsaw. It’s time to take out the chainsaw.

Left:

 Left, left-wing activism, Argentine left, the left, left-wing positions, Left-wing dominance , the American left, the left as essentially parasitic.

Editor : Addington’s essay is saturated with violent metaphors, and various derisive descriptions of the Left: there can be no doubt this is propaganda, that includes the American Left. In sum, it’s the voice of a Lynch Mob on a 21 inch black & white T.V. screen of 1952!

Queer Atheist