What is the Magic of Freud that sends his apologists, explicators, defenders and even his cadre of worshipers, to such dross? Here is George Prochnik in the TLS:
The first time Sigmund Freud wrote of destroying his papers he was twenty-one years old. He was writing to Eduard Silberstein, an intimate friend of his youth and the sole other member of the Academia Castellana, a make-believe Spanish literary society anchored in Cervantes trivia, which served them as a secret forum for airing playful fantasies and precocious world-weariness. Freud invited Silberstein to help expunge the record of their relations by conjuring up a pleasant winter evening in which they could come together to burn their archives “in a solemn auto-da-fé”. The next occasion was eight years later, in a letter to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, during what he described as a “bad, barren month”, waiting for money from a chemist to finance further research into cocaine, doing almost nothing except browsing through Russian history and toying with two rabbits who continually nibbled turnips and messed up his floor. His only real accomplishment, he told Martha then, was to have nearly completed his intention of doing something that would dismay various unborn, unfortunate people – namely his future biographers. He’d destroyed all his notes from the past fourteen years, along with correspondence and the original manuscripts of his scientific papers. In 1907, he once again burned a huge trove of private documents. Finally, in 1938, just before escaping Nazified Vienna, he delegated to his daughter Anna the task of overseeing another bonfire of his letters, which she undertook together with his disciple Marie Bonaparte.
The Reader is put directly within the early Freudian milieu, as recreated in Prochnik’s vivid evocation, across a lifetime? It’s like a bad movie, or a thriller, though not like Graham Greens ‘entertainments’, or even like Eric Ambler’s beautifully realized novels!
But Prochnik can’t quite emancipated himself from his status of acolyte/apologist, in a minor key, tending to the imperative of the care and the maintenance, of his would be Historical Sketch, as a kind of apologetic? Think of each paragraph as a entry in a loose-leaf notebook.
Freud has often been approached by biographers not only as a subject whose life merits fresh exposition owing to evolving perspectives on psychoanalysis, but also as someone who masked and elided key parts of his story. His distaste for the very premiss of the biographical project is on record. When his friend the novelist Arnold Zweig told Freud that he wanted to write his life story, Freud retorted that he felt far too affectionately toward Zweig to permit such a misstep. “Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it.” Topping off the critique he announced, “Truth is unobtainable, mankind does not deserve it, and in any case is not our Prince Hamlet right when he asks who would escape whipping were he used after his desert”. In light of all Freud’s suppressive tactics and declarations, it seems fair to wonder what he was trying to keep under wraps.
In the last sentence Prochnik wonders of Freud’s motives. He offers this :
Freud’s standard biographers have typically fallen into two categories: those who believe his obfuscations are meant to cover up the fraudulence of his entire undertaking, and those who view Freud’s cloaked actions and emotions as either irrelevant or misunderstood features of his transcendent genius. Into this vexed arena comes Mortal Secrets, an accessible, fluent introduction to Freud’s life and work by the clinical psychologist and prolific author Frank Tallis. Tallis’s book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna’s golden age, retellings of Freud’s significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud’s principal theories. Interspersed throughout are brief discursions into Freud’s relevance to contemporary psychologists and neurologists, along with efforts to show how Freud’s ideas continue to reverberate through popular culture
But just rhetorical moments away lurks… I’ll place in italics the various attacks on the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ because Freud was its ‘inventor/practitioner’ over time. Yet a regular reader of its current partitioners, notices that they have completely eliminated that arcane Freudian vocabulary. ‘Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews’ Crews laid waste to the cult of Freud in the pages of the New York Review Of Books.
And in his Freud biography
George Prochnik next paragraph features more … I’ll put in italics this collection with the comparison of Freud with Isaac Newton. In sum for Prochnik there is an enlightened position on Freud, balanced by a collection of acolytes, hero’s and scoundrels!
In contrast to both the “Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews, and the dwindling tribe of dazzled, truculent hagiographers, Tallis aims for an even-handed portrait of his subject, and in large measure succeeds. The heat of the attacks on Freud’s legacy has cooled with the fading of his iconic status and the sheer passage of time. Tallis is thus able to acknowledge the justice of many specific critiques of Freud’s record – especially with respect to his problematic treatment of particular patients – without needing to suggest that these failures require us to jettison the entire Freudian project. “Dismissing Freud because of his shortcomings is like dismissing Sir Isaac Newton because he was a disagreeable misanthrope whose personal papers reveal a gullible fascination with alchemy and esotericism”, Tallis writes. Newton may not be the optimal analogue, since the scientific legitimacy of his core project is almost universally accepted, whereas the stature of psychoanalysis as an empirically verifiable scientific endeavour has been continually contested, but the general message is clear: when it comes to Freud’s contributions, our gains dramatically outweigh the deficiencies.
Reader there are 2377 more words: I offer this synopsis:
Editor: On ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ : 113 words.
Editor: On the utterly preposterous the Oedipus complex: 504 words
Editor : On ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ : 34 words
Editor: On The Interpretation of Dreams’ : 363 words
Editor : Autobiographical Study: 178 words
The Reader confronts more of George Prochnik unimpressive attempt, at the marriage of Literary Pretention, and the moldering remains of Psychoanalyses!
Throughout his life, Freud famously suffered from acute anxiety about growing old and infirm, even going so far as to suggest that after the age of fifty psychoanalysis might no longer work since by then “the elasticity of the mental processes, on which treatment depends, is as a rule lacking”. Was that the secret he most longed to bury? Not some sensational personal escapade like the rumoured affair with his sister-in-law Minna, nor a shocking misrepresentation of a patient’s biography, but the skull hidden behind the defiant countenance in his photographs? This would mark the point at which what Freud describes as the psychologically determinative “instinct for knowledge” breaks down.
Whatever else, it appears that along with his Oedipal situation, Freud had a colossal Sphinx complex, and this remains unresolved.
Is there no end of the Freud Apologists and their project of historical revisionism, rehabilitation? Although Prof. Zaretsky offers Freud as ‘political’, that breaks new ground in Freudian Rehabilitation. But the Project remains the same. The chorus of respectable bourgeois apologists has grown since the reviews for Adam Phillips’ ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’. The ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, that once morphed into a metaphysic has once again been adapted to the needs of a political pragmatism, as the in order too of rescue from political/intellectual/moral irrelevance. Describe the journey from science to metaphysic to politics as a kind of map of the desperate acolytes. A sample of the reviews of the Phillips’ book:
Mr. William Geraldi’s review titled ‘Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller’ certainly takes first place in this collection of reviews of Mr. Phillips Freudian Revisionism: this review makes these astounding pronouncements on ‘psychoanalysis’ and the ‘ Freudian unconscious in particular’ was ‘was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’ Given this what can any reader make of the original Freudian claim of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and as Freud’s status as ‘physician’ ?
‘Phillips writes that “the modern individual Sigmund Freud would eventually describe was a person under continuous threat with little knowledge of what was really happening to him”—a Jew, in other words, as Freud himself admitted in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis. The paradoxes at the hub of Freud—the heaving dichotomies of life/death, sex/death, past/present, present/future, sickness/health—are human paradoxes, to be sure, but they are human paradoxes expertly manifest in Hebraic mythos. Phillips contends that “Freud’s work shows us … that nothing in our lives is self-evident, that not even the facts of our lives speak for themselves.” Consider how that assertion applies both to the Torah and to the indispensible modern Jewish writers, from Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka to Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you’ll begin to see how psychoanalysis in general and the Freudian unconscious in particular—that dark swamp of our minds—was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’
There is more:
‘In reference to every Freudian’s loving or bitter impulse to tackle the august founder, Bloom speaks of “the burden of the writing psychoanalyst, who is tempted to a battle he is doomed to lose,” meaning that Freud can be an oily, protean subject, whether approached from the logical, biographical, or pedagogical angle. The one angle not doomed to failure is the one that Peter Brooks takes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and that Adam Phillips emphasizes here (with no mention of Brooks): Freud the storyteller. Brooks calls psychoanalysis “not only narrative and linguistic but also oral, a praxis of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling.” Say what you will about the psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan, but Freud and his theory have always been about language, the language of the self telling stories, “this new language for the heart and soul and conscience of modern people,” as Phillips phrases it.’
For the surprising literary antecedent to Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic project’, Cervantes’ Quixote, see ‘Freud’s Paranoid Quest, Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion by John C. Farrell, Chapter 6 ‘Freud as Quixote’:
The analysis of Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory by Sir Keir Starmer’s personal think tank is not exactly an un-smug document. But perhaps the smuggest section of Labour Together’s election post-mortem comes when the public are asked for the first word that comes to mind when thinking about the Conservatives. The top answers? Liars. Corrupt. Useless. Rich. Rubbish. Incompetent. Bad. Untrustworthy. The report notes that 87 further respondents “used words that were unprintable”.
Editor: Colvile reaches beyond the preceding paragraph in the guise of an ‘objective observer’ , a riff on Adam Smith’s ‘The Impartial Spectator’, D. D. Raphael’s book is the indispensable source:
Following the Conservative Party leadership contest, however, you might well get the impression that such a word cloud would contain only two words: “immigration” and “ECHR”. The question of whether to remain in, reform or reject the European Convention on Human Rights has become the most significant (and rancorous) policy difference between the candidates. And now, like Tennyson’s Kraken rising from the deep, Boris Johnson has pronounced on the issue, arguing that there is “a strong case” for — and this may sound familiar — a referendum.
Personally, I am genuinely undecided on the issue of the ECHR. I am struck by how often friends in the last government, working in the Home Office in particular, came to believe that the terms of our membership — or rather the constant reinterpretation of those terms by the left-wing legal establishment — prevented us from deporting foreign criminals, blocking illegal migration and thwarting dangerous terrorists.
I also take the point that it may be better to have, and settle, the fight as part of the leadership contest than see it gnaw at party unity for years. And that, given the salience of illegal migration to those voters lost to Reform, a firm statement on the ECHR is about the only way to show that you’re actually serious.
But there are also strong arguments on the other side. Promising another European referendum would look, to many voters, like a scraping of the Brexit barrel. In policy terms, the ECHR interacts precariously with the settlement in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, as one senior Tory argues, building up the ECHR as a silver bullet means that you really do need the boats to stop coming once you leave. But there’s no way to guarantee that, given where our own lawyers are. Yes, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the Rwanda plan — but so did British judges, using both British and international law. And politically, no matter how hardline their position, the Conservatives will always be outflanked on migration by Reform.
Editor: Colvile interviews Tom Tugendhat, who was another Conference attendee & and fellow ‘Conservative’. The paragraph ends with noxious Neo-Liberal cliches.
When I interviewed Tom Tugendhat at Conservative Party conference, he argued that Britain was a country built on the rule of law — but that increasingly we are living under the rule of lawyers, which not only results in debacles like the surrender of the Chagos Islands but restricts innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. It is a sentiment that all three of his leadership rivals would share — not least given Starmer’s former profession. On-stage interviews with James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick by me and others were studded with references to a smaller but more effective state, to cutting regulation and letting enterprise bloom.
Editor: In quick succession is Kemi Badenoch, another fellow traveler:
Kemi Badenoch went even further, using the conference to publish a 40-page essay called “Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class”. It argued that the central division in our society is now between those who are answerable to the market and those answerable to the state. In other words, the growth of government isn’t just about tax and spend — or public sector headcount or state control of industry — but the countless private sector compliance officers and diversity consultants who ultimately dance to the progressive tune.
Editor: There are 503 words left in this essay. I’ll just engage in some self-serving reductionism, of these final paragraphs:
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But the primal fault was in the laws and lawyers, the rules and regulators. The Tories merely failed to fight hard enough, or argue convincingly enough, against them.
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Talk to anyone running a business — of any size, in any sector — and they will quickly start ranting about the scale and stupidity of their compliance burdens. You hear the same from many in the public sector.
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In fact, not only were the roles themselves completely different, but the market for warehouse staff was so tight that the company had to beg its retail workers to move over to fill vacant jobs.
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As I’ve argued before, voters will definitely not be offering more polite alternatives to the eight words at the top of this article if it seems as if the Tories are picking fights with Brussels or the “wokerati” purely for the sake of it. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” works in Shakespeare. It may work equally well in government. But first the Tories need to get back there.
I was wrong about the absence of Elon Musk’s near disappearance from corporate media, his appearance in Le Monde proves that ‘The Billionaire’ is always worthy of investigation. Think of the ‘strike-breaker’ Andrew Carnegie, or the Lawyered up Jeff Bezos!
Headline: Musk’s all-out crusade, from buying Twitter to actively supporting Trump
Sub-headline: In the space of a few months, the multi-billionaire seems to have partly tied his fate, and the future of his companies such as Tesla, to the outcome of the US presidential election.
Editor: The first paragraphs of the Damien Leloup and Alexandre Piquard report:
“If Trump loses, I’m fucked.” With his usual blend of provocation, paranoia and candor, this is how Elon Musk summed up his situation just a few weeks before the US presidential election. In an interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson broadcast on Monday, October 7, his phrase illustrates the new state of affairs. Since it was bought by the billionaire in October 2022, the social media network Twitter has changed a great deal, right down to its name – now X. The multi-billionaire himself has also completed a major, highly politicized transformation: Since July, he openly supports Donald Trump.
Musk’s account on X has become one of the campaign’s main mouthpieces. It’s where he delivers a daily dose of ultraconservative language and insults to Kamala Harris, who he regularly describes as an extremist or communist. Day after day, Musk also repeats a conspiracy theory claiming that the Democrats are “importing” illegal immigrants into key voting states to manipulate the elections. In yet another unusual step, Musk appeared on stage alongside Trump at a rally on October 5.
In the space of a few months, Musk seems to have partly tied his fate, and the future of his companies, to the outcome of the presidential election. If Trump is elected, Musk could enjoy enhanced power. The Republican candidate has promised that Musk would head a commission on government efficiency. This “genius” would also “advise” the White House on artificial intelligence, said Trump, defending a line rather opposed to regulation of this technology, in order to assert American power in the face of China
Editor: the vanity and hubris of the Trump/Musk political alliance represents a symbiosis. A selection:
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Musk could also count on maintaining or even increasing public orders for his rocket company SpaceX, and on a benevolent policy towards Tesla going forward. In early September, Trump claimed to be “for electric cars,” having been historically highly critical of electric vehicles. “I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice,” he added. His re-election would put Musk in “an unprecedented role: American oligarch,” wrote Politico magazine.
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“I’ve been trashing Kamala non-stop,” Musk laughed to Carlson, musing about “how many years in jail” he’d get.
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Harris’s platform also includes support for electric vehicles, from which Tesla already benefits, despite tensions with President Biden at the start of his term.
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Editor: Its ‘as if’ Musk were a candidate for office!
Musk has become a highly divisive figure among a section of the American population who are major buyers of electric vehicles in general and Tesla in particular. Among left-leaning Americans, the brand dropped from 39% to 18% of favorable opinions between January and July, according to another poll.
Editor : Damien Leloup and Alexandre Piquard present an analysis of Musk’s ‘failing businesses’.
Among the portfolio of Musk’s companies – he also owns satellite operator Starlink and tunnel-boring machine The Boring Company – X seems to be most at risk. The company is no longer listed on the stock market, but its value is said to have fallen by 80% since its takeover – from $44 billion to $9.4 billion – according to the sharp devaluation recorded in its accounts at the end of September by small shareholder fund Fidelity, reported TechCrunch. Revenues, meanwhile, have reportedly fallen from $5 billion to $3.4 billion between 2022 and 2023, according to Bloomberg, estimating losses of $500 million in the firsthalf of 2023, despite layoffs and the launch of a paid subscription. This decline has since been compounded further by advertising, according to the New York Times. The cause is an exodus of advertisers, particularly the large corporations that used to provide the bulk of X’s revenues.
Editor: Musk’s bad Corporate manners, and rude dismissals seem to take a cue from the Trump of ‘The Apprentice’ ?
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“Fuck you!” Musk responded uncompromisingly at the New York Times DealBook festival, pointing the finger at the boss of Disney and accusing advertisers of wanting to “blackmail” or censor him.
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In June 2024, at the industry festival in Cannes, he acknowledged that “advertisers have a right to appear next to content they find compatible with their brands.” He admitted that he did “shoot himself in the foot” sometimes with his “real” communication style.
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Like Trump, Musk is very aggressive towards left-wing governments, whom he describes as censors or autocrats. In Europe, X is also engaged in a tug-of-war against Brussels over the application of the Digital Services Act (DSA) regulation on content moderation, sparking the opening of several investigations.
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Is Musk willing to risk everything for his convictions? That scenario is too much of a caricature. While extreme, the entrepreneur is also mercurial and sometimes pragmatic.
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While he likes to refer to Harris as a “communist,” he has so far been careful not to attack the Chinese Communist Party: Tesla’s production and sales depend heavily on its links with China.
Like his enthusiasm for Emmanuel Macron, Mr. Stephens has found a new politician, that appeals to alleviating his fears of a Leftward tilt to politics, in America and the World. But note that its all very clubby in its opening paragraphs:
Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York.
For some progressives, the prospect of Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution he’s ever been part of.
He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.
Mr. Adams regales Brett with his new earring, and Brett, in print, obliging swoons with ‘
For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.
Mr. Stephens then begins his column in earnest, after the preliminaries: the worship of his new hero.
That’s because Democrats are again becoming the party of urban misrule, just as they were in the 1970s. In Portland and Seattle, progressive mayors have ceded the public square to anarchists and rioters. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, to homeless encampments and addicts. In Chicago and Baltimore, to street gangs and gun violence.
And, in New York, the city that in the 1990s and 2000s led the way in the historic and nationwide reductions in crime, 981 people were shot this year as of Sunday. That includes two women and a 4-year-old girl hit by stray bullets in May in Times Square, in broad daylight.
“This stuff can unravel so quickly,” Adams says, referring to social order. His mission is not to let New York go the way of Portland or San Francisco.
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But here is something that Mr. Stephens has missed? Perhaps Mr. Stephens was dazzled by the Adams personae?
Headline: NYPD won’t release Adams’ disciplinary records
The NYPD has refused to release disciplinary records for Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams — despite a state law meant to lift the veil of secrecy around such documents.
Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was an NYPD cop for 22 years, retiring as a captain in 2006. The future mayoral candidate was one of the department’s most vocal internal critics and founded a reform group, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. He has spoken publicly about being the target of four Internal Affairs Bureau investigations.
The NYPD has not released any documents related to Adams’ time as an officer, though, denying requests by POLITICO under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.
The state Legislature last year voted to make police disciplinary records public, repealing a law known as 50-a that kept them confidential. Law enforcement unions sued to stop the release, specifically objecting to publication of unsubstantiated allegations. They lost in court in February, and the publication of some records began.
But the NYPD is taking the position that it does not have to release records related to any investigation that does not result in a subsequent hearing or disciplinary action, or complaints that are not substantiated.
“To the extent that any ‘disciplinary records’ could be identified, access to those records is denied because disclosure of the records would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” Sergeant Jordan S. Mazur wrote in a letter denying POLITICO’s appeal under the FOIL law.
They also say that because Adams is retired, even substantiated cases would not be released.
“Furthermore, the disclosure of any complaints that were classified as other than unsubstantiated would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy based on the individual’s status as a retired member of service,” Mazur wrote.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, by contrast, released a trove of records for the police veteran-turned-politician, showing he was never the subject of a civilian complaint. Adams was named as a witness in five complaints from 2002 to 2004, when he was a police lieutenant.
Adams was brought up on disciplinary charges and penalized 15 vacation days around the time he retired from the force in 2006 for giving an unauthorized TV interview where he criticized the NYPD’s response to a terror threat, according to his public statements and news coverage at the time.
By then, he had a long track record of speaking out against the department, and he said the charges were an attempt to smear him on his way out the door.
He was also probed twice over an NYPD rule barring associating with felons — once for acting as an escort to Mike Tyson after the boxer’s rape conviction. The other case involved a man with gun convictions whom Adams says he gave a ride to the subway after a rally.
Another probe targeted Adams and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, stemming from complaints by Black officers that they were harassed when they refused to criticize their unit. Adams’ group unsuccessfully sued the department alleging they were illegally wiretapped.
Adams says he did not face discipline in the latter three investigations.
The mayoral nominee declined to take a position on whether his disciplinary files should be released.
“The decision is the police department’s,” said his spokesperson Evan Thies. “There was, however, no reason for these politically motivated investigations decades ago, nor did they find any wrongdoing whatsoever.”
The CCRB has taken a different approach since the repeal of 50-a, releasing both substantiated and unsubstantiated complaints.
In the five complaint reports civilians filed against other officers, Adams was listed as a witness. None of those complaints were substantiated.
In one, a man alleged that he suffered cracked teeth, scraped knees and bleeding from the wrist during a run-in with police officers in Brooklyn. His complaints of excessive force and being denied medical treatment were either deemed unfounded, meaning the officer did not commit the alleged act, or exonerated, meaning the officer’s actions were legal.
Police officers were exonerated in another complaint in which a man said he was stopped and questioned in front of his home while entering his gate, and officers banged his face against the gate, scraping it and knocking him unconscious.
In a 2004 incident, a man complained that a police officer kicked him in the leg while arresting him for not having insurance on his car. The complainant subsequently would not cooperate with investigators, according to CCRB. Another complaint over a dispute around cab fare was also closed because of an uncooperative complainant.
A final complaint in which Adams was listed in a witness came in 2004, when a woman said several police officers entered her apartment during her daughter’s birthday party and arrested five people. Complaints including physical force, use of a nightstick as a club and use of pepper spray and a taser were either unfounded, exonerated, or unsubstantiated, meaning investigators did not have enough evidence to determine whether misconduct took place.
John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, said keeping the NYPD’s records confidential doesn’t square with lawmakers’ intent when they repealed the secrecy law amid police reform protests last year.
“The entire point is to release disciplinary records,” he said. “The courts have already ruled on this and the Legislature has clearly spoken to it.”
The state Committee on Open Government has taken the position that law enforcement agencies may, but do not have to, withhold unfounded complaints if they deem them an invasion of privacy. But they say an officer’s retirement status should have no bearing on the release of records.
The NYPD also said that it could not find some of Adams’ records.
“‘Disciplinary records’ from the time in which Mr. Adams was employed by this agency are not maintained electronically, nor are they compiled in one case folder specific to that individual,” Mazur wrote. “A diligent search was conducted for responsive records; however, many of those records could not be located.”
This came in my e mail this morning. Eliana Johnson, Bari Weiss & The Washington Free Beacon, can’t quite provide cover for The City Journal’s utter bad judgement about Eric Adams. Note the proximity to Halloween !
The Washington Free Beacon has played a pivotal role in American life by reporting stories that the media establishment chooses to misrepresent or ignore. Over the last year, the Free Beacon‘s bold investigative journalism changed the national conversation by exposing the crisis of antisemitism within our elite institutions and the failures of university leaders to uphold standards of meritocracy.
We can and should sympathize with Palestinian statelessness and Arabs in the West Bank living under the duress of Israeli settlements and restrictions, but to my mind, there is nothing that can justify what Hamas attackers did on Oct. 7 — murdering, maiming, kidnapping and sexually abusing any Israeli they could get their hands on, without any goal, any story, other than to destroy the Jewish state. If you believe, as I do, that the only solution is two states for two indigenous peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the Hamas rampage set that back immeasurably.
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So on this first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, I find myself most preoccupied with the fact that Israel is fighting a multifront war and Israelis still don’t know whether they are fighting to make Israel safe for a Jewish democracy or safe for the prime minister’s political survival, safe for the ultra-Orthodox to never have to serve in the military and safe for the prime minister to declare to the world he is defending the frontier of freedom in Gaza and Lebanon while sustaining a morally rotten and economically draining settlement engine in the West Bank.
The biggest threat to Israel today is not Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis. A united Israel can beat them all. It is those who are unraveling Israel’s steel thread — with a bad story.
Editor: The Readers of The New York Times consider Friedman a ‘Public Intellectual’ to be read at breakfast, on the subway or commuter train. Pure speculation on my part, yet he represents what Newspapers used to be, when Walter Lippmann was at his zenith? See Mark Thomas Edwards book on the political religious/evolution of Walter Lippmann!
Ever since Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7th 2023, violence has been spreading. One year on, the Middle East is an inch away from an all-out war between Israel and Iran. Israel’s skilful decapitation of Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia backed by Iran, prompted the Islamic Republic to rain missiles on Israel on October 1st.
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Iran is certainly a menace, and use of force against it by Israel or America would be both lawful and, if carefully calibrated, wise.
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As our special section explains, containing the Iranian regime requires sustained deterrence and diplomacy. In the long run, Israel’s security also depends on ending its oppression of the Palestinians.
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No one should shed tears for a terrorist outfit that has helped turn Lebanon into a failed state.
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It has made devastating use of intelligence, technology and air power, killing the militia’s leaders, including its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, maiming its fighters with exploding pagers and destroying perhaps half of its 120,000 or more missiles and rockets.
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Suddenly Iran’s regime looks too weak to help its cronies—and, perhaps, to defend itself. Even its ballistic missiles are no match for Israel’s air defences.
For Israel the danger now is hubris. There could be mission creep in Lebanon, with limited infantry incursions morphing into a full invasion, a mistake Israel made in 1982 and again in 2006.
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For now, Iran’s ability to hit back via Hizbullah is blunted, but in the next couple of years it has a strong new incentive to build its first nuclear weapon, to re-establish deterrence
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A one-off attack on its nuclear sites might destabilise the regime. But it could fail to destroy those facilities, which are deep underground, and embolden hardliners who might dash even faster for a bomb, perhaps aided by Russia.
Editor: From the comfort of their offices these Oxbridgers become prescriptive, led by the perpetually bellicose Zanny Minton Beddoes via credible threats to conduct repeated military strikes…
A more effective way to deter Iran might look like this. Israel, backed by America, should make credible threats to conduct repeated military strikes on its nuclear programme for years to come to prevent it from obtaining a bomb.
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Though President Joe Biden has signalled he does not support a hasty attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Mr Netanyahu may hope that a future President Trump will back a more hawkish approach. What Israel needs, however, is long-term bipartisan support from America, tempered with counsels of restraint.
Editor: Yet after all the bellicose, indeed war mongering chatter, the real point of this ‘enlightened view’ is about: ‘imperil the open values that undergird the country’s high-tech economy’, this is The Economist and its Politics are one with its Capitalist Imperatives!
Reader, see this excerpt, although Freud has passed into utter irrelevance, this might offer some clues to the inner life of Musk, and his unslacable need for the World’s attention and veneration!
‘The Madman in the White House Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow’ Wilson Patrick Weil
Politico Playbook reported Tuesday that when Mayor-elect Eric Adams flew to Puerto Rico for a New York Democratic Party confab this month, he and his longtime partner, Tracey Collins, hitched a ride on the plane of cryptocurrency billionaire Brock Pierce, who has been advising Adams on “all things crypto.”
Adams had said he paid his own way to Puerto Rico, remarking that the trip was “my dollar, my dime, and my time.” But while a spokesperson told Playbook that Adams paid for a seat on the private flight via a travel agent and flew commercial on the return trip, his team did not produce receipts.
The next mayor has already said he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily, though how that might work is a complicated question. And he’s been hanging around with some of the titans of the crypto world — and perhaps not the most savory of them.
Is Eric Adams trying to demonstrate his credentials as a Neo-Liberal Hipster with his saying that ‘he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily’. @realaxelfoley, in the rest of his essay points to the ‘character’ of Brock Pierce:
Elder millennials may remember Pierce for his roles in the Mighty Ducks movies and First Kid. But these days he is a leading Bitcoin entrepreneur and evangelist who makes his home in San Juan and has wanted to turn Puerto Rico into a “Burning Man Utopia,” as Playbook notes. He has also been accused of child sexual abuse — allegations he denies — and once lived in the house where director Bryan Singer allegedly abused underage boys. Pierce ran for president last year and is considering a Senate run in Vermont next year.
Associations with possibly shady characters? Opacity around expenses and travel? You can expect a lot more of both over the next four years.
Is Mr. Adams just an aspirant to the mantle of ‘Mike’ Bloomberg, without the billions? The Reader might recall Bret Stephens’ fawning essay, by way of Mr. Stephens gushing over Adams’ new gold earing, on July 20, 2021, in The New York Times:
Headline: Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York
Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York.
For some progressives, the prospect of Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution he’s ever been part of.
He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.
For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.
…
The City Journal, the propaganda arm of The Manhattan Institute, home to ‘Broken Windows Policing’, the precursor to ‘Stop and Frisk’, published this on June 7, 2021:
Headline: Is Eric Adams New York’s Best Mayoral Hope?
Sub-headline: Cops, in particular, are wary of the supposed law-and-order candidate.
Here is a paragraph that seeks to present an apologetic for the nefarious removal of Judge Shira Scheindlin from the ‘Stop and Frisk’ case.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin had a low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence, however. Her opinion, declaring the department guilty of unconstitutional conduct, cited Adams’s testimony to support her finding that NYPD top brass approved of racial profiling. Scheindlin referred to Adams’s testimony again in accusing Kelly of suggesting “that it is permissible to stop racially defined groups just to instill fear in them.”
That argued ‘low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence’ does not explain the why of Scheindlin’s removal. But seeks to mask the ‘perceived sympathy’ of the judge, for the victims of ‘Stop and Frisk’. Which renders her removal seem exactly what it is/was, the product of political expedience. This was/is about the Bloomberg EGO! Here is a selection, from an essay by Dan Wise, in the January 8, 2014 issue of The Nation:
Headline: Removing the Judge Who Ruled ‘Stop and Frisk’ Unconstitutional Is a Blow to Justice
Sub-headline: An appeals court’s unprecedented removal of Shira Scheindlin has sent a chilling message to other federal judges.
…
Should the panel’s removal order remain on the books, it would set a terrible precedent. The court’s removal of Scheindlin even before it decided the appeal was very likely unprecedented. Moreover, the ruling was so marred by departures from customary practices as to raise questions about the panel’s neutrality.
In a sign of undue haste at a court known for its attention to detail, the unsigned ruling contained a glaring error, which the three judges were forced to correct two weeks later. Further, the panel removed Scheindlin even though the city never sought her removal in the case; the panel then faulted her for taking a step the city had not objected to six years earlier—and it did so in a manner that precluded her from defending herself from the suggestion that she had been unethical.
Research by University of Virginia Law School professor Toby Heytens, soon to be published in the Stanford Law Review, underscores the aberrant nature of the panel’s removal order. Heytens found that appeals court replacements of trial judges have been highly unusual. More important, he did not find a single case issued by any of the nation’s thirteen federal circuit courts in which removal was required before an appeal had been decided on the merits.
Headline: Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case
…
The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”
…
The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.” …
What Mr. Adams misses, in his comments regarding what he paid, or didn’t pay is that he needs to be above reproach. Present the receipts!
The opening paragraphs of Mr. Stephens diatribe open with ‘American Jews were aware’ that become a momentary leitmotif ‘we were aware’ though that ‘we’ is so rhetorically inflated, as to be applicable to the ‘many’ lost in his diatribe…
‘American Jews were aware’ & ‘We were aware’ repeated seven times before Stephens resort to subtitles:
Awakenings
In a brief 809 words Stephen’s maps part of the political & moral trajectory of his diatribe, and it’s Cast of Characters, and the appearance of underlined texts and links alone as references. The Victimhood Narrative takes shape:
After Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.
It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.
Editor: a brief collection of those characters, actors salvaged from this section: the very notion that Labor Organizer, and the author of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, has anything in common with Stephens is not just disingenuous, but self-serving! And Harvey Milk was Gay! The Victimhood Deck is shuffled:
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Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.
…
Editor: ‘a Manichaean view on the left’ : in sum the ‘Left’ is not, nor will never be ‘one of us’ The Tribe! Then what of Marx, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida? Stephen’s possible quip, ‘Who are they’ ?
It won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism. And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.
Editor: The Reader now confronts the sub-topic of ‘Illusions’.
Illusions
Editor: 876 words and more of those sentence fragments attached dangling in paragraphs, I will post the most – this is propaganda the more hyperbolic the better, in ‘Stephen’s World’
…
There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.
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…Abe Foxman, who was then the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a 2014 news release. “The falling number of incidents targeting Jews is another indication of just how far we have come in finding full acceptance in society.”
…
But now we had arrived. We were Jerry Seinfeld and Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” and Adam Sandler crooning his “Hanukkah Song” on “Saturday Night Live.” We were Alan Greenspan, the celebrated maestro of central banking, and Rick Levin, the first Jewish president of Yale, and Nora Ephron, the country’s most beloved screenwriter, and Steven Spielberg, the most acclaimed director.
I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.
I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do
Reckonings
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Editor: ‘Ancestral Knowledge’ is another way of excusing the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on Lebanon, a potential attack on Iran, and WWIII?
…
Oct. 7 and the worldwide reaction to it began the jarring process of restoring that ancestral knowledge. Most of us still don’t quite know what to do with it.
Do we carry on more or less as before, on the Solomonic view that this too shall pass? Do we go on offense by withholding donations to the institutions that have harmed us or suing them or calling for congressional hearings or taking out Super Bowl ads to raise alarms about antisemitism? Do we reach out to communities (within and without the Jewish world) from whom we feel alienated so that they may hear from us, and vice versa? Do we invest more heavily in Jewish education, so that more Jewish parents can have good options for an affordable Jewish day school and more 18-year-olds can have meaningful gap years in Israel?
…
Editor: I’ll end my comment here, predicated on the utter ignorance of Stephen’s knowing anything other that what he experienced: except by a selfless act of reimagining one’s self as ‘other’!
To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a propagandist! And ignorant of Emmanuel Levinas, in this case, or like so many that cultivate ignorance, in the name of political advancement, simple opportunism, or constricting usable propaganda: that mimics the trapping of thought, without it’s underlying commitment to veracity, intellectual honesty and transparency!
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