Political Cynic.

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Nov 13, 2024

Legal

Jury awards Abu Ghraib detainees $42M, holds contractor responsible

The three plaintiffs testified that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/12/abu-ghraib-detainees-awarded-00189058

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By Associated Press

11/12/2024 01:42 PM EST

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A U.S. jury on Tuesday awarded $42 million to three former detainees of Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, holding a Virginia-based military contractor responsible for contributing to their torture and mistreatment two decades ago.

The decision from the eight-person jury came after a different jury earlier this year couldn’t agree on whether Reston, Virginia-based CACI should be held liable for the work of its civilian interrogators who worked alongside the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004.

The jury awarded plaintiffs Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae $3 million each in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.

The three testified that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison.

They did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment.

CACI’s lawyer, John O’Connor, did not comment after Tuesday’s verdict on whether the company would appeal.

Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuit on the plaintiffs’ behalf, called the verdict “an important measure of Justice and accountability” and praised the three plaintiffs for their resilience, “especially in the face of all the obstacles CACI threw their way.”

The $42 million fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs, Azmy said.

“Today is a big day for me and for justice,” said Al-Ejaili, a journalist, in a written statement. “I’ve waited a long time for this day. This victory isn’t only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation. This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse.”

Al-Ejaili traveled to the U.S. for both trials to testify in person. The other two plaintiffs testified by video from Iraq.

The trial and subsequent retrial were the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors in the 20 years since photos of detainee mistreatment — accompanied by smiling U.S. soldiers inflicting the abuse — shocked the world during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

None of the three plaintiffs were in any of the notorious photos shown in news reports around the world, but they described treatment very similar to what was depicted.

Al Shimari described sexual assaults and beatings during his two months at the prison. He also said he was electrically shocked and dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. Al-Ejaili said he was subjected to stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. He was also deprived of sleep, forced to wear women’s underwear and threatened with dogs.

CACI had argued it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse. It said its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case, and CACI questioned parts of the plaintiffs’ stories, saying that military records contradict some of their claims and suggesting they shaded their stories to support a case against the contractor. Fundamentally, though, CACI argued that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government.

As in the first trial, the jury struggled to decide whether CACI or the Army should be held responsible for any misconduct by CACI interrogators. The jury asked questions in its deliberations about whether the contractor or the Army bore liability.

CACI, as one of its defenses, argued it shouldn’t be liable for any misdeeds by its employees if they were under the control and direction of the Army. under a legal principle known as the “borrowed servants” doctrine.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that CACI was responsible for its own employees’ misdeeds. They said provisions in CACI’s contract with the Army, as well as the Army Field Manual, make clear that CACI is responsible for overseeing its own workers.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2008 but was delayed by 15 years of legal wrangling and multiple attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed.

Lawyers for the three plaintiffs argued that CACI was liable for their mistreatment even if they couldn’t prove that CACI’s interrogators were the ones who directly inflicted the abuse.

The evidence included reports from two retired Army generals, who documented the abuse and concluded that multiple CACI interrogators were complicit in the abuse.

Those reports concluded that one of the interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, lied to investigators about his conduct and that he likely instructed soldiers to mistreat detainees and used dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.

Stefanowicz testified for CACI at trial through a recorded video deposition and denied mistreating detainees.

By Associated Press

Political Cynic !

Political Observer comments.

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Nov 12, 2024

Editor : The Reader must recall the auspicios debut of Francis Fukuyama?

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What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?

By James Atlas

Oct. 22, 1989

…

In Fukuyama’s interpretation, borrowed (and heavily adapted) from the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, history is a protracted struggle to realize the idea of freedom latent in human consciousness. In the 20th century, the forces of totalitarianism have been decisively conquered by the United States and its allies, which represent the final embodiment of this idea – “that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words, we win.

Within weeks, “The End of History?” had become the hottest topic around, this year’s answer to Paul Kennedy’s phenomenal best seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” George F. Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama’s photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to “The End of History?” The BBC sent a television crew. Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was “outselling everything, even the pornography.”

…

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Editor: Or the evolution of Fukuyamism!

The Decay of American Political Institutions

Published on: December 8, 2013

Francis Fukuyama

We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

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Editor: Or its Evolutionay twin:

America in Decay

The Sources of Political Dysfunction

By Francis Fukuyama

September/October 2014

Published on August 18, 2014

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-decay

Editor: It takes 1369 words before Fukuyama mentions the name of fellow Neo-Conservative, Samuel Huntington of ‘The Clash Of Cilizations’, and the xenophobic ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity!

WHY INSTITUTIONS DECAY

In his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies, the political scientist Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II. Huntington argued that socioeconomic modernization caused problems for traditional political orders, leading to the mobilization of new social groups whose participation could not be accommodated by existing political institutions. Political decay was caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Decay was thus in many ways a condition of political development: the old had to break down in order to make way for the new. But the transitions could be extremely chaotic and violent, and there was no guarantee that the old political institutions would continuously and peacefully adapt to new conditions.

This model is a good starting point for a broader understanding of political decay more generally. Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.

The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.

In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.

…

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Editor: Even the stogey Financial Times opened its journalist space to Fukuyama:

Headline: Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America

Sub-headline : The Republican president-elect is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole

November 7 2024 ( retrived November, 12, 2024)

https://www.ft.com/content/f4dbc0df-ab0d-431e-9886-44acd4236922

Editor: I will supply some selective quotation from the Fukuyama’s essay:

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But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.

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When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.

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Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives.

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Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights.

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The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity.

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The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

Editor : How might the reader interperate ‘woke liberalism’ as a new catch phrase? Though Fukuyama is not Eric Partridge!

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The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals.

Editor: The New Demosrats: the Clintons, Pelosi, Obama and Biden abandoned FDR’s New Deal, reader look to that, as a major factors for the New Democrat’s well deserved defeat! Fukuyama rambels on and on, his facinaion with ‘decay’ is compulsive, not revelatory!

Political Observer.

StephenKMackSD

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 11, 2024

Here are Alex Pleshkov and Jan Surma interviewing Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison on ‘Objectivety’ :

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eHvSV4-BCQ0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

• Philosophy

Objectivity

• Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison
• Zone Books

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781890951795/objectivity?srsltid=AfmBOopZZd8highLnjuQiW_nbaUCDTFqe5CPz9e-KFAiZA-poYDtJXZU

StephenKMackSD

Old Socialist comments.

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Nov 11, 2024

Headline: Michael Shellenberger: Californians Finally Get Serious on Crime

Sub-headline: On Tuesday, voters decided to trust their own eyes. What took so long?

By Michael Shellenberger

November 8, 2024

Mr. Shellenberger rabble rousing attack on ‘progressives’ is hardly surprising as these three paragraphs demonstrate, even his book title reeks of contempt for these amorphous politics, and the title of his book reifies such ‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities’ Neo-Conservatives engage in the useful hyperbole of toxic Political Enemies: It’s etiolated, bastardized Leo Strauss!

…

Over the last quarter century, progressives argued that we should decriminalize drugs, stop enforcing laws against nonviolent crimes, and radically reduce the number of people in prison. This softer approach to crime, addiction, and homelessness was demonstrably more effective and compassionate than tougher models, they said. Hundreds of articles, books, documentaries, TV segments, and fact sheets all buttressed this worldview. 

We all needed more empathy for those committing crimes, more empathy for drug dealers, the activists said, and soon the politicians did, too. In that frenzy of compassion, it wasn’t the criminals who were demonized, but the victims.

Blue states across the country—especially California, Oregon, and Washington—spent the past decade as real-world laboratories of these radical theories. The result has been one of the worst humanitarian disasters in American history. And nowhere was it worse than my state: California, where soft policies were implemented first and most forcefully.

…

Just look at the results:

• Proposition 36, a statewide measure to undo Prop 47, passed by 70 percent. The new law turns some misdemeanors into felonies (for example, shoplifting if it is a third offense), lengthens some felony sentences (i.e. smash-and-grab thefts involving three or more people), and requires some felonies to be served in prison (like fentanyl dealing). Notably, Governor Gavin Newsom opposed Prop 36. And Kamala Harris—who, recall, was California’s attorney general before becoming vice president—simply refused to comment on a bill that every single county in the state passed. (Even the former Sacramento district attorney who led the campaign to crack down on drugs and theft was shocked by the margin of victory. “I was expecting great numbers,” said Anne Marie Schubert, “but the 70 percent was amazing! It sends a powerful message to the rest of the country.”)
• In Los Angeles, voters took the unheard-of step of electing an actual Republican as district attorney, ousting from office a George Soros-funded DA, George Gascón.

• In Oakland, voters not only recalled the DA for all of Alameda County, they also recalled the mayor, Sheng Thao, who similarly hailed from the radical left and is being investigated by the FBI for possible corruption relating to city garbage contracts.
• In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was defeated by Dan Lurie, who ran, in part, on a platform to increase police presence, increase shelter beds, and fight corruption.

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Michael Shellenberger poses as a History-Less political naïf ? with no Memory of America’s political past, in sum a propagandist who attempts to erase actual History!

Retropolis

The ‘law and order’ campaign that won Richard Nixon the White House 50 years ago

Trump has invoked the same phrase as he campaigns for Republicans

The ‘law and order’ campaign that won Richard Nixon the White House 50 years ago – The Washington Post (retrieved November 11, 2024)

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August 30, 2008 | Clip Of Historic Convention Speeches: Richard Nixon

“Law and Order” in Richard Nixon 1968 Presidential acceptance speech

User-Created Clip
by CraigCaplan

July 21, 2016

Miami Beach, Florida (retrieved November 11, 2024 http://www.c-span.)

The utter failure of the Neo-Liberal ascendency, that collapsed in 2006- 2008, has created a permanent under-class of its victims. Of not just a debacle, but of both economic catastrophes, wedded to a cultural/political despair that Michael Shellenberger self-willed political ignorance cannot, will not confront!

The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology on JSTOR ( retrieved November 11, 2024 )

Old Socialist.

In my email this morning, November 10, 2024: Newspaper Reader

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 10, 2024

The Economist today

A Sunday edition of our daily newsletter ( November 10, 2024)

Adam Roberts
Digital editor

Hello from London,

I’ve just returned from watching a momentous week unfold in American—and world—affairs. Even in New York City, that redoubt of liberal cosmopolitans, the share of support for Donald Trump surged. Those who focus on the voting habits of various demographic groups can point to almost any category of voter—by education, ethnicity, geography, income or whatever—and see that the Republicans gained. This weekend the Republicans seemed poised to retain control of the House, giving them full legislative control for at least two years. I can see only one tiny disappointment for Mr. Trump: it appears that turnout dipped slightly lower than the 67% who voted in 2020.

Editor: this ‘dip’ hardly seems relevant to the repudiation of the New Democratic candidate Kalamala Harris: who managed to be a total disappointment as an alternative to the Trump windbag. Though Trump did appear on Joe Rogan, and Harris did not. Which is indicative of a kind of tone-deafness of the whole Harris Campaign! This the Hallmark of the Clinton Cotree!

Some ask if American voters are sexist. After all, the Democrats have now twice seen a woman candidate defeated by Mr Trump. I don’t buy it. Our new article on the topic sets out why other explanations for Kamala Harris’s loss are more compelling. My hunch is that no incumbent candidate, of either sex, could have won this election: voters the world over are in a surly mood and mostly want to throw out the ruling bums. The surest way for the Democrats to have won in 2024? They should have lost the contest four years ago and thus run this time as the real candidate of change. (My guess is that in that counterfactual world, we would today have been writing about the success of president-elect Gretchen Whitmer.)

Editor: Some did not ask ‘if America voters were sexist’ it was a politically desperate Barak Obama, who scolded black male voters for not being enthesitis in their support for Harris. She disappointed consistently, that takes real work as Trump’s Political Chatter riffs on free imaginative variation in its various keys!

Why are voters everywhere so furious? We are living in an era of grouchiness. When the German election is held, probably next spring, you will see the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz badly thumped. In France, Emmanuel Macron gets to preside for a couple more years yet, but he will leave office in 2027 with voters’ insults ringing loudly in his ears. Already, in Britain, voters are cooling on the new government of Sir Keir Starmer, just months after Labour won a landslide victory.

Editor: Adam Roberts ask one questions: ‘Why are voters everywhere so furious?’ that he does not answer, he places it as an aside. And then answers it with the utterly jejune ‘We are living in an era of grouchiness’ which sidesteps the issue that the toxin of Neo-Liberalism, that still holds sway in Western Democracies, is somehow irrelevant to the rise of Trump and the Tea Party as his political precursor in America.

The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies. I look at the lingering effects of covid lockdowns and of previously high government spending that must now be rolled back. Voters see they are paying high taxes but their public services, too often, are falling to bits. They suffer prices that have surged for years and remain high (whatever official inflation rates might say), especially when you factor in the cost of renting or buying property, or paying for education. Wages may have risen too, but every individual believes he or she earned their pay rise. That will never make up for prices being high.

Editor: Mr. Roberts resorts to a sweeping historical frame: ‘The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies.’ It’s a political history made to measure, of the effects of ‘covid lockdowns’ and its various political distensions!

Add to that the uneasy feeling among many voters (maybe small-town ones especially, and perhaps men and older voters more) that the world is moving too fast. Cultural change, such as having to face new ideas of sexual identity, or how to talk about race, or about climate change, is deeply unsettling for some. All of the above can then be summed up in a simple idea, such as that immigrants, especially illegal ones, are to blame for everything. And who is to blame for letting in those foreigners? Why, the government of course. 

Editor: Mr. Roberts political distensions become a psychological portrait, that really needs a Freudian pastiche to make it breathe as a functioning entity? Though its capaciousness renders it null…

So, welcome to the era of grouchiness. It, too, may pass. Let’s hope so.

Editor: An Inauspicious ending for this portion of Mr. Roberts essay.

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Editor: Mr. Roberts opines that the ‘pollsters flopped’ never ever a surprise. And the utterly boring ‘Last week I stuck my neck out’ dreck!

Once again, pollsters flopped. For the third presidential election in a row they underestimated support for Mr Trump. Polling companies know they have a problem: they can’t get enough of the people who support him to respond to their questions. Their answer had been to try clever ways of weighting poll results in his favour, but that’s harder to do than it sounds. As for those—such as The Economist—who build predictive models on the back of polls, there are evidently challenges, too. But predictions are incredibly hard to do well, and it’s all too obvious when they go wrong.

Last week I stuck my neck out and guessed that Mr Trump would win, but only narrowly, taking 281 electoral college votes. It appears he is set to collect 312, versus 226 for Ms Harris. Congratulations to Roberto Burgess and Douglas Aird, who both foresaw precisely that outcome. As for the collective hive mind of this newsletter’s readers, the median guess was for just 259 votes (and thus a loss) for Mr Trump. The modal average—as you can see in our chart—was for 268. That was close to our election forecast model. Its final forecast was that Mr Trump would get just 262 seats. You can’t win them all.

Newspaper Reader

Newspaper Reader: French Political Centrism meets a collapsed American Neo-Liberalism?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 10, 2024

Headline: In Harris’s defeat, French radical left sees proof supporting its strategy

Sub-headline: Members of France’s radical left see Donald Trump’s victory as a failure due to the Democratic candidate’s moderate stance. And they’re trying to draw lessons for the French political scene.

Published on November 8, 2024, at 10:18 am (Paris)

By  Sandrine Cassini

Donald Trump’s victory and Kamala Harris’s defeat in the US presidential election have resurfaced divisions within France’s political left over international but also domestic issues. Clearly keen to keep control of the narrative, France’s radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) was the first to react, on Wednesday, November 6. LFI lawmaker Antoine Léaument saw in the failure of the Democratic candidate’s moderate positioning a validation of LFI’s “radical” stance against a “soft” left.

In a statement, LFI argued that the Republican candidate’s return to the White House is implacable proof that “only a radical and popular left” could prevail against the far right. “You can’t mobilize people on a neoliberal platform and without social and geopolitical breaks” with the status quo, Manuel Bompard, LFI’s top official, wrote on X. in reference to Harris, the center-left candidate who was called a “communist” and a “total Marxist” by Trump, two disqualifying terms on the other side of the Atlantic.

Editor : Philippe Marlière offers this. Yet as American’s know, the Clinton Political Machinery doomed the Bernie Sanders campaign, via Party Regulars. Wedded to Sanders own will to political conformity!

“An American election can’t be won further to the left: In fact, that was Bernie Sanders’ limit,” explained political scientist Philippe Marlière, referring to this figure of the American far left, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.

Editor: The Reader now enters the real political territory of Le Monde’s Anti-Leftist exercise in self-serving diatribery:

Driven by visceral anti-Atlanticism, LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wielded “confusionism,” believes Marlière, by equating the Democrat and the Republican. “The USA couldn’t choose the left: there wasn’t one,” reacted Mélenchon, a three-time presidential candidate, after Trump’s victory on Wednesday morning. Two days earlier, he said that the two contenders for the White House were “similar but not identical,” referring to their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and support of “capitalism.” “The lesser evil is always evil,” he concluded, while conceding that he would have voted for Harris if he had lived in a swing state.

Editor: Jean-Luc Mélenchon manages in his own political meander, to identify the very convoluted nature of the Trump/Harris campaigns. What dominates both candidate’s politics, is a very real flimsiness! Add to this that Polling Data provided by the Technocrats, was utterly and completely wrong! The argued ‘Dead Heat’ or ‘Political Parity’ between Trump and Harris, were a fiction that ensured that these ‘Technocrats’ could continue to profit, against the Myth of a Political Knowlege that has never been realized!

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Editor: some selective quotation from the remainder of the essay:

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On these two issues, the party risks swimming against the tide. “It could be very complicated for Mélenchon,” said political scientist Rémi Lefebvre. Eurosceptic, LFI has always wavered on the war with Russia, advocating “peace” and calling for a “conference on borders,” a way of calling into question those of Ukraine.

…

On the question of strengthening Europe, which LFI does not mention in its press release, the party would prefer France to “develop a non-aligned international policy,” in contrast to the Socialists and the Greens, both pro-European.

Editor: ‘a non-aligned international policy’ reads like the intellectual orphan of the Cold War?

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Editor: The Myth of ‘Europe’ will never die! Jean Monnet is the pioneer of the European Myth of a Common Political Destiny

Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | SpringerLink

Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | Springer Link;

On 9 May 1950 French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman — reading formally from a text inspired and drafted by Jean Monnet — proposed to pool the heavy industries of his nation with those of her neighbors in order to form what would later be called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).¹ In April 1951 negotiations for the proposed organization concluded. Its executive organ, the High Authority (HA), began operations in August of the following year. Monnet served as President of the HA until June 1955 when his resignation, initially submitted in November 1954, officially took effect. The ECSC was Monnet’s greatest accomplishment: it set in motion the process that transformed Europe from a continent historically divided by nationalism into an emergent civilization formed by common economic institutions and animated by a common political spirit.²

Jean Monnet and the European Coal and Steel Community: A Preliminary Appraisal | SpringerLink (Retrieved November 10, 2024)

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Glucksmann posted on X that “Trump’s election is one of those tipping points that shape history. We are now, in Europe, alone to face our destiny.” This provoked an impassioned reaction from Antoine Léaument. “How can you be so out of touch that you can’t see that it’s the political position you hold in Europe and France that has led to defeat at the hands of Trump?” he challenged.

Editor: Glucksmann vs. Antoine Léaument!

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Appalling! Pathetic!” reacted Green Senator Yannick Jadot, anticipating a return of tensions amongst the left.

Newspaper Reader.

Political Observer received an email from ‘MI Weekly’.

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Nov 10, 2024

It takes some brass for Rafael A. Mangual to opine about ‘The decaying state of public safety’ here is its final paragraphs:

…

The decaying state of public safety didn’t immediately deliver the backlash against soft-on-crime policies many expected. During those years, mass outrage over various policing incidents that went viral on social media seemed to override whatever reservations Americans had about the hundreds of legislative and administrative criminal-justice reform initiatives of the 2010s and early 2020s. It’s now clear, though, that many voters have reached their limits with respect to how much crime and disorder they were prepared to tolerate.

The progressive argument about crime and justice has always been based on lies and half-truths. Yes, America is an international outlier on incarceration, but the vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are violent, chronic offenders who have squandered more than one “second chance.” Yes, police are imperfect and sometimes abuse their authority, but the sorts of fatal encounters that drove public outrage are statistically rare. Meantime, the public began to associate large-scale pullbacks in policing and concurrent declines in incarceration rates with deteriorations in public safety. And while certain minority groups have indeed been overrepresented in enforcement statistics, those same groups wound up bearing the brunt of the crime spikes that resulted from the “progressive” reforms.

One of the key takeaways of the 2024 election cycle may be that voters have learned a key lesson from recent history. When it came to progressive policies, they went along to get along—until the results hit them, hard and fast. If voters have wised up, however, it remains to be seen how much (if at all) this election cycle will affect the Left’s approach to these issues. The choices for Democrats are clear: moderate their positions to meet most Americans where they are, or stick to the playbook that brought them these election losses. Those hoping that they opt for the first course can enjoy, at least for now, some cautious optimism.

The Anti-Crime Election | City Journal (Nov 06, 2024)

Editor: With the Mayor of New York City under a 57 page indictment, what might that reveal about Rafael A. Mangual, The City Journal and the Manhattan Institute? Eric Adams was the favorite of the City Journal and the Manhattan Institute, not to speak of the New York Time’s resident Neo-Conservative Bret Stephens.

What’s in the 5-count indictment against NYC Mayor Eric Adams | CNN

By Eric Levenson, Celina Tebor, CNN

6 minute read

Updated 5:43 PM EDT, Thu September 26, 2024

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Editor: The Reader might ask what is the relationship between public safety, and the indicted Mayor of New York City? Not to speak of the relationship of Rafael A. Mangual, The City Journal and the Manhattan Institute to the Mayor?

Political Observer

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 09, 2024

Peggy Noonan’s war against ‘American Jacobins’! Political Observer comments

Posted on July 27, 2019 by stephenkmacksd

Ms. Noonan begins her essay by describing the French Revolution, based not in history, political history or its various expressions, but as a ‘a nationwide psychotic break’ ,that denies the very context of that revolution. Since the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ is a dead letter, call Noonan’s maladroit psychologization of that revolution a propaganda methodology: to render the political, into a trivialized modality, suited to the needs of  propaganda, against the contemporary ‘American Jacobins’.  That revolution marks the end of the  Ancien Régime, praised by both Kant and Hegel before the ‘Terror’. That ushers in the Age of Democratic Revolution to borrow from R.R. Palmer.

We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.

We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-were-robespierres-pronouns-11564095088

Any surprise here? Noonan is a political propagandist whose quoted text is and will be a touchstone for her political allies in the American Political Center, now defined as the alliance between the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservatives. The choice of Simon Schama whose ‘history’ of that revolution meets the demand for an historian who is   ‘heroically nonideological’ : consider this claim to be awash in ideology!

That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.

To move ahead in Noonan’s  psycholigizing polemic:

It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

For counterpoint to Noonan’s propaganda, read Hillary Mantel’s revelatory, not to speak of evocative essay on Robespierre:

…

The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The revolution speaks through him its most tragic and purest discourse.’ It does not matter where he lived or what he was like, or that he walked through this gate the day before his horrible death. His temperament is of no consequence, nor the will that drove his punitively controlled body through the all-night sittings. But this abstract Robespierre is not the one that interests you, as you stand inside the passage, sheltered from the street. After all, you keep his portrait on your wall; if Furet’s formulation convinced you, you would not feel so desolate, and almost panic-stricken. The passage itself is confined and dark. Your throat constricts a little, and you remember what Michelet said: ‘Robespierre strangles and stifles.’ There are closed doors on your left. You glance up to the first floor. The windows are dirty. You say: ‘it is only a metaphysical space.’ Metaphysical wild horses would not drag you into Robespierre’s room or any space that might have been occupied by it. You lean against the wall, expecting something to happen.

…

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/hilary-mantel/what-a-man-this-is-with-his-crowd-of-women-around-him

Now, from the French Revolution and its sociopaths, framed in her a-historical psycholigizing we come to Noonan’s idee fixe:  The reader can’t escape from the Party Line, so clearly enunciated by propagandists Jordan Peterson, Andrew Sullivan among other political hysterics !

So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.

The ‘enemy’ as defined by Noonan, exists in a political space, that shares a commonality with her psycholigizing: ‘ social and sexual justice warriors’ and their ‘speech codes’ that does not apply to Robespierre and the Jacobins. Who were purged/executed  from their own ranks in the Thermidorian Reaction. These political actors that are Noonan’s propaganda Straw-Men: sociopaths  . Noonan’s public shaming of American Jacobins ,who have not engaged in politically motivated violence. But are the subject of Noonan’s invidious comparison, that  has no merit on its face. Propaganda is simply about producing a politically exploitable negative emotion. Noonan’s next political target will be Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib?

Political Observer

Newspaper Reader wades through the Neo-Conservative muck!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 09, 2024

Headline: Peggy Noonan: On Loving America

Sun-headline: ‘We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement,’ says the star of our next Book Club.

By Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan: On Loving America | The Free Press (In my email November 9, 2024)

Peggy Noonan has never gotten over the worship of Ronald Reagan! After Nixon, Ford and Carter, Reagan and his the city on a hill phrase, that it derived from a 17th-century Puritan sermon. This was the politics that reflected a white middle and working class grown weary of an etiolated Civil Rights Era politics. Not to forget the bussing of children to achieve racial balance.

Let Reagan speak for himself:

Headline: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech

…

I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

I’m going to try also to change federal regulations in the tax structure that has made this once-powerful industrial giant in this land and in the world now with a lower rate of productivity than any of the other industrial nations, with a lower rate of savings and investment on the part of our people and put us back where we belong.

…

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech. (Following is the speech of Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair on Sunday, Aug. 3, 1980, as transcribed from a tape recording by Stanley Dearman, the now late editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat.)

The Reader might note that Noonan frames her commentary with Charles de Gaulle, to add a bit of historical verisimilitude, to her adulation for her Reaganite Nostalgia!

The famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs most happily translates as: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I first read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America.

What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history, I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance: How did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right, different but complementary gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.

The election of Donald Trump has unleashed a flood of toxic nostalgia, for something that bears no resemblance to that putative ‘city on the hill’, of Reagan circa 1980!

Newspaper Reader

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 08, 2024

Even the most the most incurious reader might wonder at the unintended consequences of the Zionist Porgram, against the Palestinians, that has metastasized into Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen?

Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

The Age of the Pogrom Returns

In April 1903 an antisemitic mob rampaged through the city of Kishinev, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is now known as Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. Nearly 50 Jews were murdered, women and girls were raped, and some 1,500 homes were destroyed. Among the survivors were my paternal great-grandparents Barnet and Bessie Ehrlich, who decided then and there to emigrate to America with their children.

This week there was another pogrom in Europe, this time in Amsterdam. “Barbarians on scooters are riding through our capital city hunting Israelis and Jews,” David van Weel, the Dutch minister of justice and security, wrote on X. He was referring to an orgy of violent attacks against Israeli soccer fans, who had come to the city to watch a match on Thursday between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam.

“They started hitting us. They broke my face, knocked out a tooth, cut my lip,” an Israeli fan, Yaakov Masri, told Israeli media after locking himself in his hotel room, with a table to block the door. He said that he and his son were set upon “by around 15 young Arab men, some of whom were armed with knives and clubs,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Some news accounts have pointed to provocative behavior by rowdy Israeli fans, including taking down a Palestinian flag and chanting anti-Arab slogans (in Hebrew), for contributing to the mayhem. They also noted heightened tensions connected to the war in Gaza.

Maybe. But that explanation ignores the many years of rising and virulent antisemitism in Europe that preceded the war, much of it within Muslim communities, along with evidence that the attacks were carefully and cunningly coordinated.

“Amsterdam authorities have contacted taxi platforms such as Uber and Bolt to discuss how drivers may have used the apps to screen Israeli phone numbers during the violence,” The Times of London reported.

To their credit, Dutch and other European leaders have been outspoken in condemning the pogrom, which came on the eve of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, compared Thursday night to the country’s failure to protect Jews in World War II, and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, wrote that “Jews must be able to feel safe in Europe.”

That’s a fine thought, though whether it will make any difference to the deteriorating situation for Jews in Europe remains to be seen. “Most of those arrested were later released,” The New York Times reported, and El Al sent planes to bring Israelis home. If a reminder were ever needed of why Israel, for all of its travails, came into existence in the first place, this latest pogrom was it.

My advice to Europe’s besieged Jewish communities: Remember what Kishinev foreshadowed — and please get out while you still can.

Conversations and insights about the moment. – The New York Times 11/7/2024

Newspaper Reader