StephenKMackSD's Blog

Always be aware when reading @RColvile that he is a Thatcherite in the 21st Century: think of this as a manifestation of Political Fiction, akin to Science Fiction, or a variation on that once genre of ‘Futurism’? Or have I gone too far? 

The ‘as if’ of his political existence, as apologist/propagandist for that misbegotten Austrian Economic Theology, still enjoys popular enthusiasm.  Recall Mrs. Thatcher passing out ‘Road to Serfdom’ like party favors?  What escapes Mr. Covile’s apprehension is the 2008 Economic Collapse! A delusion, not worth considering in the political present?  Mr. Colvile’s paranoia about the ‘Left’, manifests itself in real & conjured political occasions: noting that Thatcher-Speak’s newest iteration attempts to be more circumspect or more …

Given all this, a critical reading  Mr. Colvile’ essay of June 27, 2021 can offer some valuable insights, while carefully navigating through the obligatory ideological chatter! 

Headline: Brexit was meant to give us back control of our borders. They feel more porous than ever

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brexit-was-meant-to-give-us-back-control-of-our-borders-they-feel-more-porous-than-ever-5qtxrg29b

Old Socialist

The critical reader of Andy Divine’s latest essay, confronts his title and sub-title:

Our Very Catholic President

The strange miracle of Joe Biden

The first question is how long will Andy be so smitten with Joe Biden? But the second more complex question, that arises concerns the presidents attending mass at an Irish church, without fuss or fanfare. That produces this:

The anonymity was part of the point. At Mass, we are all equal; we are all sinners; there is no hierarchy among communicants; an American president has no more standing here than the old lady in a veil who has been coming for decades, or the homeless person who has wandered in, or the baby bawling in someone’s arms. Biden gets this in his bones, which accounts for this quiet but total adherence to Catholic norms. In this, his Catholicism is deep, even structural to his worldview. And, in my view, it helps explain a lot about him and his priorities — perhaps more acutely than any other lens.

He is immediately recognizable to many of us: the grandfather who carries a Rosary in his pocket, who prays sincerely and undemonstratively, and who has a big, open and warm heart, and a not-terribly-consistent mind. He is not pious outside of church: “I’m as much as a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic. My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion.”

‘At Mass, we are all equal; we are all sinners; there is no hierarchy among communicants…’

Here is what the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has to offer on the question of ‘We are all equal’ :

Homosexuality

“The Church seeks to enable every person to live out the universal call to holiness. Persons with a homosexual inclination ought to receive every aid and encouragement to embrace this call personally and fully. This will unavoidably involve much struggle and self-mastery, for following Jesus always means following the way of the Cross…The Sacraments of the Eucharist and of Penance are essential sources of consolation and aid on this path.” 
     – USCCB, Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination (2006), p. 13 

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” 
     – Matthew 11:28-30

https://www.usccb.org/committees/laity-marriage-family-life-youth/homosexuality

 Not content with just the three paragraphs I have quoted , Andy rambles but can’t help himself from speaking his Catholic conscious, to the neo-Marxism of Biden’s policies, while wishing for a ‘compassionate center’ as an alternative. What Andy defends is the status quo in theological finery, fueled by his careful, but maladroitly reconstructed, politics.

But I wish Biden could see more clearly that it is his Catholicism that could unite a political party around a compassionate center, rather than the neo-Marxism he has partly enabled. It offers a defense of greater support for the poor as a moral and not an ideological position; it provides a defense of environmentalism that could better appeal to non-leftists; it advocates inclusion not to undermine the fiction of “white supremacy” in the US in 2021, but to bring out the full capacities of every person, regardless of identity; it embraces sexual minorities by focusing on individual dignity rather than reducing them to sexual practices; it can make redistribution of wealth not a means to punish the rich but to enhance opportunity and dignity for the struggling; it can defend the police as essential to order, while tackling the abuse of some; and it can restrict immigration to better help integration of new Americans, while avoiding the cruelty that Trump deployed to such nefarious ends. Presenting policies in this rubric, without any theological language, also has the benefit of being far more consonant with Biden’s actual soul than his awkward adoption of woke mantras.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/our-very-catholic-president?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM3ODcwMjUxLCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MjQ3MjAxOTUsImV4cCI6MTYyNDcyMzc5NSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.8XfSs2UP23BnCSZ8XvAB9MbwTFnMHI6brb6Qz6Tabcw

Andy Divine speculation on ‘Biden’s actual soul ‘ leaves the reader in awe of his powers of perception, or just an exercise in a would be Metaphysics Made to Measure, transmogrified into a Politics.

‘Presenting policies in this rubric, without any theological language, also has the benefit of being far more consonant with Biden’s actual soul than his awkward adoption of woke mantras.’

Queer Atheist

* On the question of ‘Paul’ read Karl Barth’s ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ page 51 vv. 25-7 on homosexuality. The usual hysteria!

What can an ordinary person, of whatever age or other demographic indicators, or even race, think of Bill Gates’ operation to circumcise the whole of African males, as the in order too of AIDS prevention. Along with his allies:

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-science/israelis-train-africans-to-circumcise-against-aids

Institutionalized Sexual Violence is the New Colonialism: all performed under the banner of  ‘greater knowledge’ by Western Political Actors, who want to ‘rescue indigenous populations’ from their own ignorance. Does this sound a familiar note?
Bill Gates attacks the foreskin as the enemy, and he and his religiously hysterical allies, will liberate the ignorant from their lack of knowledge, by coercion. ‘Africans’ are by definition, provided by Gates and his allies, will not engage in ‘responsible self-management’, to speak plainly, ‘they’ will engage in unsafe promiscuous sexual activity. This whole project is another form of Colonialism, that renders ‘personal agency’ null. In sum, ‘you can’t be trusted to make the right choices‘!

Queer Atheist

https://www.ft.com/content/c64a1a44-14ee-4597-9fe2-72083074e182

Headline: What the parable of Obamacare teaches Republicans

Sub-headline: The party can win a culture war but not a class war

The headline and sub-headline are the utterly preposterous recitations of political catch phrases!

The political hypocrisy, that both The New Democrats and Republicans have displayed , on the issue of ‘Healthcare’ over generations should not surprise. Does any other reader recall this?

Headline: Edward M. Kennedy: The Man Who Killed Health Care Reform

Sub-headline: Don’t cry for me, Martha’s Vineyard.

…

Over 35 years ago, none other than Richard Nixon proposed a form of “universal health care”. His final State of the Union address called for universal access to health insurance: His plan would have provided government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses, and build on existing employer-sponsored insurance plans. However, as one might expect, partisan politics provided the usual obstacles: It was difficult for Democrats to concede that the anti-communist Nixon had become a supporter of “socialized medicine”. Teddy Kennedy declared that the plan was designed to benefit the insurance companies; however, the reality was that the insurance companies were in for more regulation.

Nixon strongly believed that a national health insurance plan was crucial. In that 1974 State of the Union Address, he declared that “the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American”. Actually, this statement is not surprising considering Nixon’s personal history of poverty and family illness. (He lost two brothers to tuberculosis, the illnesses dealing a heavy blow to the family finances, and in fact proposed a national health insurance bill when he arrived in Congress in 1947.) Nixon sounds very much like Obama, when he said in 1974 that he did not want to see “other families of modest means…driven …to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type”.

However, the “liberal” opposition, spearheaded by the lobbying of the then-powerful AFL-CIO and United Autowokers, proved too much for an administration spending significant energy on defending against the rising tide of the Watergate affair.

Kennedy did begin secret negotiations with the Nixon White House, but he fell prey to the pressures of the unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payor system which they felt would be rather easily achieved once a Democrat was elected to the presidency in the face of the Watergate scandal. Many felt that Kennedy would be that Democrat, and therefore he had no business throwing a lifeline to the sinking Nixon administration.

…

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/overcoming-pain/201002/edward-m-kennedy-the-man-who-killed-health-care-reform

Or this on The Heritage Foundation Healthcare, that Neo-Liberal Hillary Clinton used as ‘her plan’. Read this Forbes essay: 

Headline: How the Heritage Foundation, a Conservative Think Tank, Promoted the Individual Mandate

James Taranto, who writes the Wall Street Journal’s excellent “Best of the Web” column, put forth a lengthy and informative discussion yesterday on the conservative origins of the individual mandate, whose inclusion in Obamacare is today its most controversial feature on the Right.

This came up at Tuesday’s Western Republican Leadership Conference Debate, where Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich tussled on the question:

…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/?sh=4dcbf5d16187

‘Obama Care’ began its political life as ‘Heritage Foundation Healthcare’ ,in all its Free Market finery, that made it so popular with Neo-Liberals, like Hillary Clinton and eventually Barack Obama. It was an ‘evolution’ over time, like Obama’s ‘evolution’ on Gay Marriage. The Republicans opposed both plans because it was part of The Democrats surrender to the toxin of Neo-Liberalism by the Clintons, whose political opportunism was awash in Reaganite sloganeering e.g. ‘that government is the problem’. The Democratic Party’s Liberals surrendered en mass, after the Clinton victory: the acquisition and eventual care and maintenance of that power was primary. This was favored by Obama because it resembled a ‘kind of reform’, that his Wall Street Financers could see, as still based on the primacy of the profit over people, and almost but not quite canny public relations. That is why ‘Medicare for All’ was never a choice in a Party controlled by The Clintons, and the eventual successor of Trump, Joe Biden

Its regrettable, that Mr. Ganesh lacks the necessary historical knowledge, and or just journalistic curiosity to make anything resembling a valuable contribution to the Healthcare question! Medicare For All just won’t go away!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/230b1803-b15f-49c4-8a57-06d768d545d3

This has all the appeal of thick slice of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake! Macron did not ‘He proved it by winning the presidency convincingly in 2017.’ This is the Financial Times Party Line, endlessly repeated as ‘political truth’! According to CNN the ‘white’ and ‘spoiled ballots’ amounted to 33.4 % of the votes cast! 

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/08/europe/french-voters-spoiled-ballots-abstained/index.html 

‘Presenting himself as the best-placed politician to defeat the far-right has been a core part of Macron’s political strategy from the outset. He proved it by winning the presidency convincingly in 2017. But after four turbulent years at the Elysée, and with French politics in a febrile state over perceived threats from lawlessness and Islamist terrorism, the menace from Le Pen is as strong as ever. Opinion polls consistently suggest she will win the first round of the presidential election in April next year and run Macron uncomfortably close in the second. They also suggest that Bertrand, a former conservative health and labour minister, would defeat her more easily than Macron.’

https://www.ft.com/content/2e1604a1-9d88-4159-943a-48fd039796be 

The “gilets jaunes” continue to demonstrate every Saturday: See twitter for the latest video of French Police abusing their authority. Of course un-reported in this Corporate Newspaper. The “gilets jaunes” plays their part in Mr. Hall’s melodrama: ‘…with French politics in a febrile state over perceived threats from lawlessness’… . The Financial Times’ writers view Macron as the beginning of the end of French Socialism: that has coddled the French People for too long. A strong dose of ‘Market Discipline’ is in order. The prescriptions of Neo -Liberalism never change! Look how well it worked in Russia, Poland and Hungary!

Note that the man who attacked Macron, from a crowd of people, slapped his face, an attack on the masculinity, of this clueless enarque. And also a measure of contempt for his long discarded ‘Jupertarian Politics’, the code language for Neo-Liberal Authoritarianism.

Mr. Hall continues his tedious political handicapping, as coda to his informative essay, if carefully and critically read. Call Mr. Hall’s essay Premature Political Prognostication? While reminding the reader that the political contest, looming in the future, might be a three way race between Macron, Le Pen and the ‘Center Right’ Xavier Bertrand.

Old Socialist  

How appropriate that my favorite Thatcherite @RColvile, in his latest essay, his reportage awash in self-infatuated political bathos, if that describes his retrograde politics: so fascinating is his self-presentation in its game of reporter/ideologue.  His careful, and to speak hyperbolically, ‘loving reconstruction‘ of British politics, in situ. Mr. Colvile, while not like @JGaneshEsq in the use of almost breathtaking apercus, to garnish his political commentary. And sometimes rescue his political banalities from it’s poverty of imagination, in deference to following an ideology… 

Read Mr. Colvile’s informative essay, while keeping your critical attention focused,  and then look to Chris Hudson reply that enunciates a reply to a Technocrat’s Intervention. 

There’s a lot of wishful thinking in the commentariat that this was about HS2 or nimbyism. Or Brexit. But it runs much deeper. My mother lives in the area, voted for brexit and has the Daily Mail and Telegraph hard wired into her psyche. She loathes HS2 and the new planning laws, but she’s as disappointed that the conservatives wanted to close the desk at the local police station. And that they have made such a mess of the pandemic (her dear friend died after being released into a care home). And in an area proud of its schools, that the conservatives have ruined the education of so many children with the ongoing exams fiasco, and her granddaughter’s university learning (9k per annum for the last 18 months for the privilege of having zoom lectures). She is also furious that the government is so incompetent and corrupt that they have turned us into a ‘ banana republic’ of cronyism. But most of all, as a regular churchgoer, she is simply appalled that the PM and his ministers lie with such impunity. As she said today at lunch ‘This is not who we are.’

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/this-was-not-a-lib-dem-victory-it-was-the-anti-tories-wot-won-chesham-and-amersham-cj63nnk3n

Old Socialist

Why should it surprise the reader that David Brooks would resort to the economist Mancur Olson, and his ‘ interest groups’ as the bad political/economic actors, holding back innovation and excellence, two concepts that marked the Reagan Era Free Market propaganda.

In 1982, the economist Mancur Olson set out to explain a paradox. West Germany and Japan endured widespread devastation during World War II, yet in the years after the war both countries experienced miraculous economic growth. Britain, on the other hand, emerged victorious from the war, with its institutions more intact, and yet it immediately entered a period of slow economic growth that left it lagging other European democracies. What happened?

In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Olson concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted. The devastation itself, and the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away. The disruption opened space for something new.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/covid-economic-boom.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Economist of May 5, 1998, offers a more honest appraisal of Mancur Olson’s economic thought, in their obituary. Mr. Brooks writes a ‘History Made To Measure’ in service to ideological ends!

…

The conclusion was striking. Narrow, self-serving groups had an inherent, though not insuperable, advantage over broad ones that worry about the well-being of society as a whole. How might that insight explain the fate of nations? In 1982, in “The Rise and Decline of Nations”, he offered an answer. 

In any human society, he said, parochial cartels and lobbies tend to accumulate over time, until they begin to sap a country’s economic vitality. A war or some other catastrophe sweeps away the choking undergrowth of pressure groups. This had happened in Germany and Japan, but not in Britain, which, although physically damaged in the war, had retained many of its old institutions. Surely there was some less cataclysmic route to renewal? Yes, said Mr Olson, a nation’s people could beat back the armies of parochialism, but only if the danger were recognised and reforms embraced. Make these points to a student of economics or politics today and he or she will say, “Of course.” But the ideas were obvious only after Mr Olson made them.

…

https://www.economist.com/obituary/1998/03/05/mancur-olson

Note that Mr. Olson’s negative economic actors, is a larger field, and more descriptive than Mr. Brooks’: Narrow, self-serving groups, parochial cartels, ! Even Mr. Olson fails the mention the favorite target of Conservative Thinkers, and propagandists: Unions are these un-mentioned negative economic actors, who placing themselves as advocates for a fair wage and working conditions, hold in abeyance the desired excellence and innovation that an unfettered Capital can produce?

All this to frame the Covid-19 Melodrama as the impetus for an American Revival under the leadership of Joe Biden and his pastiche of the New Deal?

Here is a sample of the Brooks’ cliched boosterism;

Millions of Americans endured grievous loss and anxiety during this pandemic, but many also used this time as a preparation period, so they could burst out of the gate when things opened up.

The last three paragraphs of his essay are testimony to his iteration of that ‘cliched boosterism’:

In 1910 the educator Henry Van Dyke wrote, “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.” That energy seemed to be fading away in recent years, as Americans came to move less and start new businesses less frequently. But the challenge of Covid-19 has summoned forth great dynamism, movement and innovation. Labor productivity rates have surged upward recently.

Americans are searching for ways to make more money while living more connected lives. Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban studies at Chapman University, points out that as the U.S. population disperses, economic and cultural gaps between coastal cities and inland communities will most likely shrink. And, he says, as more and more immigrants settle in rural areas and small towns, their presence might reduce nativism and increase economic competitiveness.

People are shifting their personal lives to address common problems — loneliness and loss of community. Nobody knows where this national journey of discovery will take us, but the voyage has begun.

Is it the ineluctable fate of Americans, to own a business, and make more money? Commerce is the lifeblood of this once Republic? What of the Teachers, Social Workers, Nurses, Doctors and whole of the Helping Professions. Or the Gardeners, Bus Boys, Dish Washers, Waiters & Waitresses, Hotel Maids, Trash Collectors, Street Maintenance, Flood Control, Fire Fighters etc. etc.? Where do these valuable citizens of this nation figure in this Brooks pronouncement on the American Fate?

Almost Marx

Patrick M. Cronin is a member of The Hudson Inst. :

The Hudson Institute is a politically conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation

https://www.hudson.org/

Herman Kahn was the man who thought the un-thinkable. Here are the first three paragraphs of Louis Menand’s 2005 book review ,essay about this monster. A Kissinger, before the ascent of Kissinger.

Herman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war—how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it. The collective combat experience of these men was close to nil; their diplomatic experience was smaller. Their training was in physics, engineering, political science, mathematics, and logic, and they worked with the latest in assessment technologies: operational research, computer science, systems analysis, and game theory. The type of war they contemplated was, of course, never waged, but whether this was because of their work or in spite of it has always been a matter of dispute. Exhibit A in the case against them is a book by Kahn, published in 1960, “On Thermonuclear War.”

Kahn was a creature of the rand Corporation, and rand was a creature of the Air Force. In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, the Air Force was still a branch of the Army. The bomb changed that. An independent Department of the Air Force was created in 1947; the nation’s nuclear arsenal was put under its command; and the Air Force displaced the Army as the prima donna of national defense. Whatever it wanted, it mostly got. One of the things it wanted was a research arm, and rand was the result. (rand stands for Research ANd Development.) rand was a line item in the Air Force budget; its offices were on a beach in Santa Monica. Kahn joined in 1947.

In his day, Kahn was the subject of many magazine stories, and most of them found it important to mention his girth—he was built, one journalist recorded, “like a prize-winning pear”—and his volubility. He was a marathon spielmeister, whose preferred format was the twelve-hour lecture, split into three parts over two days, with no text but with plenty of charts and slides. He was a jocular, gregarious giant who chattered on about fallout shelters, megaton bombs, and the incineration of millions. Observers were charmed or repelled, sometimes charmed and repelled. Reporters referred to him as “a roly-poly, second-strike Santa Claus” and “a thermonuclear Zero Mostel.” He is supposed to have had the highest I.Q. on record.

…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man

Guilt by association! Patrick M. Cronin is a Neo-Con, and as such he shares in the mendacity of Leo Strauss’s rewrite of the History of Philosophy. And the leaders of that Political Sect led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz , of the notorious self-advertisement ‘Making It’. Two important books help to establish what and who the Neo-Cons are, and represent politically.

See Murray Friedman’s book ‘The Neoconservative Revolution :Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy’

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/american-history-after-1945/neoconservative-revolution-jewish-intellectuals-and-shaping-public-policy?format=PB

Also ‘Cloaked in Virtue :Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy’, by Nicholas Xenos

https://www.routledge.com/Cloaked-in-Virtue-Unveiling-Leo-Strauss-and-the-Rhetoric-of-American-Foreign/Xenos/p/book/9780415950909

In sum, Neo-Conservatism is a bellicose Ultra-Nationalism, in which Strauss acts as the philosophical veneer . Mr. Cronin essay is expressive of the Trump Era’s political rehabilitation of the Neo-Cons, and their embrace by the New Democrats, as partners in the shared goal, of a political rehabilitation the mythical ‘the rules based international order’. That ‘order’ is about American Hegemony, by way of the maladroit sloganeering of ‘building back better’

In pursuing cooperation from strength, there are at least five significant differences between Biden and Trump policies as both parties focus increasingly on China. 

The first two differences were on display in Europe: Biden is adamantly and thoroughly committed to working closely with allies and negotiating multilaterally.

The third difference in approaches between Trump and Biden is the latter’s genuine concern about improving the plight of the common man or woman.

Fourthly, the Biden administration seeks to differentiate threats from competition that can be managed by improving US capabilities.

The fifth and final area is that the Biden administration will, at the appropriate time and focused selectively on issues of mutual importance, seek to engage China in strategic dialogue..

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/joe-biden%E2%80%99s-transatlantic-bridge-indo-pacific-region-187781

To consider just the ‘third difference’ of ‘genuine concern about improving the plight of the common man or woman.’ With a sometime Economic advisor like Larry Summers, who equivocates, just enough to cover his ass, in this interview with Martin Wolf:

Headline: Larry Summers: ‘I’m concerned that what is being done is substantially excessive’

Sub-headline: Former treasury secretary criticises the scale of Biden’s fiscal policy and warns it could lead to overheating and wasted resources

…

Larry Summers: I’m going to focus on the American policy path and not talk about where responsibility lies for that path. I think, in important respects, it lies with the Republicans and with those on the more extreme left of the Democratic party.

If you look at the economy at the beginning of this year, prevailing forecasts were that Covid would reduce wages and salaries to American households by $20bn-$30bn a month, with that figure declining over the year. So, that would be a $250bn-$300bn hole in wages and salaries over the course of the year.

So, I look at this hole and then I see $900bn of stimulus in the December package, $1.9tn of stimulus in the recently passed package and $2tn in the savings overhang, which is also likely to be spent. I see the Fed with its foot on the accelerator as hard as any Fed has ever done.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/380ea811-e927-4fe1-aa5b-d213816e9073

Considering that Joe Mansion , not a Conservative Democrat, but a Dixiecrat, opposes Biden:

Headline: Joe Manchin is opposing big parts of Biden’s agenda as the Koch network pressures him

• The Koch network has been actively pressuring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose key legislative items linked to Biden’s agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation.
• The lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act.
• The Koch network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe-manchin-is-opposing-big-parts-of-bidens-agenda-as-the-koch-network-pressures-him.html

Biden’s political pastiche of the New Deal, and a the reinvigoration of the mythical ‘the rules based international order’ ,the cliché that acts as a cover for American Hegemony: that leaves Medicare For All, Student debt relief, the $15 minimum wage, Police Reform, and Federal Protections for Voting, Rights, and eliminating of all ‘Aid’ to the Zionist Faschist State, are left outside, the last acts of Biden’s inauspicious political career.

Political Realist

If ‘Social Science’ is ‘sovereign’ then ‘The Bell Curve’ partakes of that sovereignty? When one of its underpinnings is ‘Mankind Quarterly’?

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

…

What sort of “stuff” could Murray mean? Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828). But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race. Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.” Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia. In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.” The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education; and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”

…
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/

As Peterson expatiates about the dangers posed by the tribe and tribalism of the ‘Left’, as a failure attributed to a dogmatism , a tribalist Mr. Shapiro, nods in excited approval! What is the difference between the ‘tribalism’ of the ‘Left’, and Mr. Shapiro’s belief in his own tribalism? Each are attachments to a closely held ‘belief’, not to statistically testable data. Nor Peterson’s fixation about women being the bearers of ‘chaos’.

Queer Atheist

Reading Mr. Colvile’s most recent essay, on the G7, conjured, in my political imagination, Mr. Puff from the Sheridan play, comic silliness, as cover for a self-serving manipulative cynicism. The reader might wonder at an utterly humorless Thatcherite resorting to ‘satire’ as his weapon of choice.  Read the first two paragraphs of his essay and wonder at his targets: ‘G7’, ‘those strange things that exists because it exists’, ‘the leaders of a slightly miscellaneous group of countries’, ‘not quite the richest or the largest or the most democratic, but pretty close on all three counts’,  and in the second paragraph ‘the royal family’, ‘Labour Party’    

The G7 is one of those strange things that exists because it exists. Every year, pandemics permitting, the leaders of a slightly miscellaneous group of countries — not quite the richest or the largest or the most democratic, but pretty close on all three counts — get together to solve the world’s problems. Their wives (and nowadays even some husbands) get a separate little outing, the modern equivalent of leaving the menfolk to chew the fat over port and cigars. There is plenty of awkward small talk and a profusion of awkward photo ops. If the press is lucky, there may be a fight.

All of which makes Britain a perfect host for this year’s summit. We lead the world in things that exist because they exist — institutions that you’d never invent today but that stick around because they’re already here. Like the royal family. And the Labour Party. And, you might say, our status as a global power.

In the following paragraph Mr. Colvile attributes this collection of toxic thoughts to ‘the two lines of attack made by the Brexit sceptics.’ Are they the villians in his collection of surmises? With the bit between his teeth, he is at full gallop! In an instant my Mr. Puff becomes Don Quixote, or should it be The Grand Inquisitor? Have I reached to point of rhetorical fracture? Our writer reaches deep for the ‘actors’ in his melodrama, a collection, at random, of Mr. Colvie’s telling one-liners.

“global Britain” as a blustering exercise in imperialist nostalgia, the diplomatic equivalent of the middle-aged man who buys a sports car after splitting up with his wife but loses the house.

 In the old days you might hang out with the same friends every day, a rigidly defined group that dressed the same, talked the same and listened to the same bands

Britain can stand with Nato on security and with the “D10” (the G7 plus Australia, India and South Korea) on containing China.

the freewheeling Boris Johnson. His vision of Brexit is not about bringing it all back home.

 On the economy as well as diplomacy, the Brexit gamble is that we can position ourselves to take maximum advantage of future opportunities; that we are better off dining à la carte than from the set menu. 

As The Economist recently pointed out, of the 43 firms worth more than $100 billion established in the past half-century, only one is from mainland Europe.

The great challenge of Brexit Britain to the EU is therefore not so much financial as philosophical — or even theological. 

What if it is better to be a solo act in small stadiums than part of the chorus — especially when no one can agree on what they’re meant to be singing?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/freewheeling-boris-johnson-spoil-g7-summit-afterglow-brexit-britain-trust-5cmjrc6qx

Don’t miss Mr. Colvile’s comments on Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken and the Northern Ireland protocol. 1,075 words that never approaches the succinct!

Political Reporter