Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1988 Editor's Choice: 19
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No wrong reading RLE
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]David Brooks has been working this line for more than 6 months now, and you need to see this particular essay as more exposition of that working theory. His position comes from within AEI -- I'm thinking maybe different people than the panel you saw? -- and has everything to do with the workshop they convened on Neuromorality.
They use ideas from Brizendine and Steven Pinker to justify a Hobbesian world view. The belief that man's state of nature is short, brutish, and violent and requires the strong hand of a state to tame it is now "proven" by advances in the neurophysiology of neuromodulators and hormones.
This is then parleyed into a discreditation of the Enlightenment philosophers, whose thinking Brooks slyly attributes entirely to Rousseau, purposely forgetting Locke, and then says that every bad thing in modern history from the Paris Commune to those drug smoking free loving hippies and anti-war people, has been due to the mistaken belief in the noble savage.
More importantly, he has stated that nothing good has ever come of Enlightenment thinking. Note the strong hand of the state, mentioned above. The arguments are prelude to discrediting the Constitution (or claiming it doesn't mean what we always thought it meant). He has claimed that the Founding Fathers wrote checks and balances into the document because of their awareness of the natural violence of man, not because they distrusted strong government.
As for domestic politics, he frequently expounds on the neuromorality of the two parent family, supposedly proven by the discharge of oxytocin in male semen causing an irrevocable bonding by the female into a monogamous relationship as a state of nature. (Oxytocin is so persuasive that would outstrip cocaine by 3-1 if it were used as a drug). Most of us unthinking, unmoral types 'erroneously' think that it is in semen to facilitate sperm passing through the cervix, but we didn't study at AEI.
Mr. Brooks should not be dismissed as others (not RLE) have done on this comment trail, his views are trial balloons for a definite faction within at least the AEI. His and their undiluted reverence for Hobbes is found in the Vice President's office as well, don't underestimate their abilities. Nor should he be mistaken as only talking about domestic issues. For him, they have all become one and the same since Pinker supposedly proved that the monarchists of the 18th century were right.
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They have a sense of history, though
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So, once again, they've proved the rule: Every time these guys turn to science, they always get things horribly, horribly wrong.
David Brooks also advocates that the right drop their aversion to Darwinism, which he thinks provides an underpinning for their theory.
Couldn't their neuromorality be the 21st century reincarnation of Herbert Spencer -- Science bent to justify brutal social theory that otherwise would be rejected out of hand? We're still living with the effects of Social Darwinism.
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Between projectshave and Fraud Guy...
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...it all comes together.
Terrorism only works if you give in to the terror.
I can really hear it, Emperor Palpatine saying
Give in to your terror, boy. Feel its power. Take your nightmares and strike me down, and your journey to the dark side will be complete.
I got on a plane and flew across the Pacific Ocean in the fall of 2001, for a company that forbade me to wear company logo because I carried an American passport, and Americans were targets for terrorists. When I got there, I found out that someone else a few aisles away had been carrying box cutters (walked right through baggage check with two of them in his shirt pocket).
When I got home, I was gone over by MPs carrying M-16s, a gun barrel pointed between my nose and my upper lip while they checked my ID (she was trying to read my ID with her gun clamped between her knees).
Oddly, so many of the people found those troops in the airports comforting.
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Not to be too dark...
[Read the article: Your modern-day Republican Party]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If a Democratic candidate wins the presidential election, I wouldn't be surprised if all of the language, and rhetoric that the administraion has used since 9/11/01 will change.
Captain Paramedic
Several things to note...
Schwartz and Huq wrote in WaPo today that we need to be watching that we haven't got what we had when Frank Church and committee had when they last reigned in executive power. In fact, they quote Dick Cheney from Iran Contra as speaking in favor of "monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit [presidents] to exceed the law".
Joseph Rich, in the L.A. Times, notes continuous manipulation of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division to support disenfranchising of minorities in the elections from 2001 to 2006, and of political influence in issuing DOJ opinions on the redistricting in Texas.
Paul Krugman notes that twin tactics of disinformation and disenfranchisement have been used because of the increasing disparity between the super rich and the rest, with disinformation failing, resulting in disenfranchisement being the primary tactic.
The elections board in Cuyahoga county Ohio has been dismissed, some election officials in Ohio are facing or have been convicted in court over the 2004 election there.
Meanwhile, we have a media belief that somehow, in completely ahistoric fashion, random samples of deaths of next of kin suddenly produce unreliable estimates of war deaths (i.e. the Lancet study) and exit polls suddenly produce unreliable outcome predictions that no longer indicate voter fraud (Mitofsky tap dance, 2004).
You wouldn't be surprised if the rhetoric changed? Me either. But I also wouldn't be surprised if people who don't believe in the writ of habeas corpus also don't believe in a free and fair election on Nov 5th, 2008.
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e_five hit the nail on the head
[Read the article: Will National Review correct Cliff May's false Iraq claims?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We really don't know what the job is in Iraq. So how do we know when it's done?
As for Petraeus, if you read his history, he's really a lot more like a Powell or a Shinseki, and less like a Westmoreland or a Myers. I really think complaints ought to be addressed to his Commander in Chief.