Editor: Iteration 1 :Reader concentrate your attention, on these three paragraphs of Mr. Friedman’s latest Foreign Policy Strategizing: of 10/15/2024
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Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former U.S. Central Command chief, who oversaw the 2020 killing of Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the elite Quds Force within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, agrees: “Iran may seem unpredictable at times,’’ he said in The Atlantic, “but it respects American strength and responds to deterrence. When we withdraw, Iran advances. When we assert ourselves — having weighed the risks and prepared for all possibilities — Iran retreats.”
That is why we need to confront Iran with an overwhelming, credible threat of force, coupled with a diplomatic survival pathway out, but one that this time addresses both Iran’s nuclear threat and regional behavior. Our job is to change Iran’s behavior; regime change is the job of the Iranian people. I believe the best way for that regime to lose its grip is to deprive it of the oxygen of permanent conflict with Israel and America — and all the excuses that Iran’s clerical tyrants give for why their people are so isolated and impoverished.
But I don’t stop there. We also need to sharpen the choices for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel: We must not be in the business of making Israel safe so that a radical messianic government can annex the West Bank. If we are going to keep resupplying Israel with missiles and even dispatch U.S.-run missile systems, Bibi needs to purge the settler lunatics from his cabinet, forge a national unity coalition and agree to open talks with a reformed Palestinian Authority — with a new technocratic cabinet led by credible leaders like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — on a two-state solution.
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Iteration 2: The Patient Reader has only to wait for this from Mr. Friedman :
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It creates the possibility not only of ending the Gaza war, returning Israeli hostages and bringing relief to the people of Gaza. It creates the possibility for the biggest step toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo, as well as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.
It’s that big.
But, but, but.
The death of Sinwar alone is not the sufficient condition to end this Gaza war and put Israelis and Palestinians on a pathway to a better future. Yes, Sinwar and Hamas always rejected a two-state solution and were committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish state. No one paid a bigger price for that than the Palestinians of Gaza. But while his death was necessary for a next step to be possible, it was never going to be everything.
The sufficient condition is that Israel have a leader and a governing coalition ready to step up to the opportunity Sinwar’s death has created. To put it bluntly, can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel live up to his Churchillian self-image and go along with something that he has previously rejected? That is the participation of a reformed West Bank Palestinian Authority in an international peacekeeping force that would take over Gaza in the place of the Sinwar-led Hamas.
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Iteration: 3:
Headline: A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big.
Jan. 31, 2024
There are two things I believe about the widening crisis in the Middle East.
We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel and the region — what I hope will be a “Biden Doctrine” that meets the seriousness and complexity of this dangerous moment.
And if we don’t see such a big, bold doctrine, the crisis in the region is going to metastasize in ways that will strengthen Iran, isolate Israel and leave America’s ability to influence events there for the better in tatters.
A Biden Doctrine — as I’m terming the convergence of strategic thinking and planning that my reporting has picked up — would have three tracks.
On one track would be a strong and resolute stand on Iran, including a robust military retaliation against Iran’s proxies and agents in the region in response to the killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan by a drone apparently launched by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.
Editor: Mr. Stephens abandons the Zionist Faschist State propaganda, for the moment, to offer Kamala Harris a speech she will never deliver: her Team would need to re-write it, to expunge from this pretentious analysis, into the wobbly cadences of the Harris campaign trail chatter.
My fellow citizens,
When the tumultuous history of this year’s presidential election is written, future generations will note that the choice boiled down to this: the certainty of division versus the possibility of unity.
Whether you love Donald Trump or loathe him, prefer his policies or mine, you can be sure of one thing: If he wins next month, we will be a bitterly, vocally, emotionally, exhaustingly divided country.
You know this because whatever you thought of his first term, you remember how that division became a part of your daily life. Thanksgiving dinners you stopped going to — because of Trump. Friends and neighbors you stopped speaking to — because of Trump. Topics you wouldn’t broach — because of Trump.
Editor: It’s hard to forget that Trump was the issue of the Tea Party Political Radicalism that metastasized: The New Democrats, The Republicans & The Neo-Cons all contributed to this rise, by their steadfast support of Neo-Liberal Free Market Swindle that bankrupted the Working and Middle Class’. Mr. Stephens is incapable of political honesty as a Neo-Conservative: the shopworn Noble Lie is his natural political inheritance:
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Summery
The Politics of Lying
Socrates’ introduction of the Republic’s notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3 (414b-c). “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody – including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” Grand lie? Noble lie? G. R. F. Ferrari has a good note on the issue: “The lie is grand or noble (gennaios) by virtue of its civic purpose, but the Greek word can also be used colloquially, giving the meaning ‘a true-blue lie,’ i.e. a massive, no-doubt-about-it lie (compare the term ‘grand larceny’).” This is not the only point on which there might be argument about the translation. Some prefer to “lie” the more neutral “falsehood” (which need not imply deliberate deception), others “fiction ” (perhaps trying to prescind from questions of truth and falsehood altogether). Cornford had “bold flight of invention.” I think “lie” is exactly right. But the argument for that will emerge later, in section II.
The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato’s good city: a myth of national or civic identity – or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other.
Editor: Mr. Stephens offers the Toxin of Trump and Trumpism as a well of mendacity. I’ll provide examples of the Stephens wayward attempt at political advice to Harris.
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Thanksgiving dinners you stopped going to — because of Trump.
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The noise is incessant. It’s in the ad hominem tweets, the nasty nicknames, the disparagement of anyone who disagrees with him as an idiot, a weakling, an enemy of the people.
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In a democracy, a certain amount of division is natural. Like the opposition of wind and sail, it’s the productive tension that drives a nation forward while allowing it to find its balance.
Editor: the above example almost resembles actual thought!
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When consensus reached through compromise is possible, we should prefer it to divisive, and reversible, partisan victories. That’s how progress isn’t just achieved but also secured.
Editor: Again Stephen’s actual thought.
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Can we be disunited against the challenge of a brazenly aggressive China and its new best friends in Moscow and Tehran?
Editor: Stephens abandons thought, for the toxic triad of China, Moscow, and Tehran : The New Cold War that is about to reach …
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Disunity leads to paralysis, and that’s where this country has been stuck for too long.
Editor: Stephens again resorts to more political cliche as wisdom.
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I, on the other hand, intend to depoliticize the cabinet, so that the men and women in charge of our defense, diplomacy, Justice Department and economic system will have broad bipartisan respect, whatever party they affiliate with.
Editor: Harris reappears: she seems to appear and disappear at the political will of Stephens: think of him as one of the actors, in a maladroit adaptation of Pirandello!
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Editor: the final paragraph of Mr. Stephens attempt at political impersonation, recites cliche’s as imperatives that exhaust the possibilities of the jejune!
The talent, the passion, the optimism, the capacity, the sense of a shared and greater purpose that united our states and must continue to unite our nation — it’s still there, all around us. With your help, let me bring it to the White House.
Let me state my prejudice forthrightly: I spent four years in Coming-out Group in Long Beach, California. What was so arresting was that so many of the attendees were Mormon, and for the most part College age, academic achievers. All were frightened by their parent’s negative reaction to their sexuality. That fear ruled their lives from the first sexual awakening.
So @JosephAddington identification with Javier Milei is utterly predictable given his matriculation from Brigham Young University, and its culture of strict political/moral/civic/sexual conformity. The first paragraphs exalts Milei’s toxic Neo-Liberalism in its most extreme iteration.
Editor: The first two paragraphs give the game away :
Since his election in December of 2023, Argentine president Javier Milei has permanently transformed the nation’s politics. In a show of political will and pure, unrelenting focus, Milei arrested a catastrophic inflationary spiral, drastically slashed government spending to produce a budgetary surplus for the first time in decades, and completely restructured the Argentine economy and government. The aggressive libertarian has more than proven that he was not just being theatrical when he wielded a chainsaw at his rallies to symbolize his political objectives.
Milei’s approach to political reform should be particularly instructive to leaders on the American right. A professed anarcho-capitalist, Milei approaches politics from the severe perspective of the economist. His theory of his political enemies is simple: they are parasites, dependent upon the largesses of the state provided at the expense of the taxpayer. They produce nothing of value to the public, they depend on patronage. The solution is equally simple—the chainsaw. Cut off the flow of money, dissolve the government ministries and departments, end the subsidies and the regulatory carve-outs and the board-room sinecures at state-run corporations, and they will starve to death.
Editor: The reader might think that even the Neo-Liberal Triad of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, might find both Milei & Addington’s celebration of political nihilism, a prescription for state violence as utterly toxic! Addington wallows in the warm bath of that nihilism. Note too that this triad were all academics, in which caution is an imperative! Addington is a propagandist, whose intention is about stirring the pot!
Chainsaw :
Chainsaw, chainsaw, hatchet , chainsaw. It’s time to take out the chainsaw.
Left:
Left, left-wing activism, Argentine left, the left, left-wing positions, Left-wing dominance , the American left, the left as essentially parasitic.
Editor : Addington’s essay is saturated with violent metaphors, and various derisive descriptions of the Left: there can be no doubt this is propaganda, that includes the American Left. In sum, it’s the voice of a Lynch Mob on a 21 inch black & white T.V. screen of 1952!
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!
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