Maggie's Farm

At vacation times, we like to re-post old material. The Dyl has proclaimed this week Gramsci week, so we'll re-post old Gramsci-related stuff daily. This from a couple of years ago -

It is difficult to understand what has been happening politically in the US and in Europe for the past 30 years without understanding the influence of Gramsci (1891-1937) on Western Leftist thinking and strategizing.

Gramsci was a clever Italian neo-Marxist who realized that the West, due to its prosperity, its increasingly-wide access to education and opportunity, social mobility, and its readiness to repair injustices (due to its Judeo-Christian morality), would never be amenable to a violent proletarian socialist revolution.

So he came up with Plan B, which is often termed "Gramscian tactics." These were based on the idea, as the good Wiki entry says:

Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

Thus Western "hegemonic culture" became the enemy - even more so than "the ruling class," which was simply a reflection of bourgeois culture. And defeating that enemy could not be done with guns. It required a "long march through the culture" to slowly discredit and undermine its institutions, values, and foundations. This was a brilliantly destructive idea. Eventually, the society would fall apart, opening the way to totalitarian socialism to rescue the mess. Thus the nihilistic flavor of the Western Left which is always seemingly-incomprehensively mingled with extreme Statism.

One might well ask why he wasn't satisfied with the remarkable outcome of Western regulated markets, the growth of the welfare state, unionization, etc. - but he wasn't. He was determined to remain true to Marx and to find a non-revolutionary path to economic totalitarianism.

A central component of the culture war he envisioned was the war on religion (also Wiki):

Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to Christianity and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses.

I hope I do not sound paranoid when I soberly say that much of the wacky, upside-down, right-is-wrong, black-is-white stuff we see in the news these days is directly or indirectly inspired by Gramsci: the attacks on Christianity, the family, individual freedom, morality and moral judgements; multiculturalism; the cult of victimhood, "tolerance," political correctness, the replacement of the roles of family, religion, individual responsibility and choice with government rules, laws, and regs; the expansion of the State and the Welfare State and the Nanny State; anti-tradition, anti-capitalism, anti-success, anti-nationalism, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, etc - all the stuff that makes me echo Bob Grant with "It's sick out there, and getting sicker."  I am sure Antonio never anticipated that a Green movement would emerge to become an ally of the slow, incrementalist and thus less-alarming Gramscian revolution.

Yes, it is all ultimately about suppression of the individual soul and spirit - his freedom, autonomy, initiative and self-definition - the highest and most noble notions of Western Civilization - in pursuit of a collectivist utopia run by "them." In short, it's about the location of power and money.

OK. This is getting too long-winded for Maggie's ADD writers and readers and Editor. This Town Hall post from last year, The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism is a nice little piece on the subject.

I am sure our readers have many more, better links and commentary.

Our News Junkie must have been working too early to catch this masterpiece from VDH today, of the above title. It's a prediction for 2009, and further. I don't have time to comment. One quote:

So all that will change for now will be the sudden absence of shrill complaints that we live in an America without a Constitution. Static, same-old, same-old government policy will, of course, be said to have altered radically ("hoped and changed"), but it will also be refashioned in the media as "sober" and "judicious", as the administration moves "in circumspect fashion" to probe and explore "complex" and often "paradoxical" matters of national security that "indeed at the end of the day have no easy answers".

Expect much of the same on the economic front. For all the campaign hysteria about greedy Bushites who destroyed the economy, Obama realizes that in fact the seeds of the current financial weeds were sown years ago, and watered and fertilized by an array of both Democratic and Republican facilitators in Congress and hacks in government-affiliated mortgage sinecures. So expect the bailouts to continue. We will see Wall Street in about 24 hours after January 20 transmogrified from Gordon Gecko's habitat into a sort of the old Robert Rubin/Warren Buffet-like necessary institution about which a Sen. Schumer or Chris Dodd can offer invaluable advice and consultation.

Socially, we will get a mix of Maya Angelou, Oprah, and Rick Warren, a rich diversity of therapeutics that appeals to everyone's popular feel-my-pain tastes...

Do me a favor and read the whole thing.

Quoted from Steyn:

“Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”

Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these last few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

Some people are impossible to please.

Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer this week. We posted on her performance on April 13 of this year, when she was in fine fettle. Here is our post:

I had the remarkable pleasure and privilege of being invited to a small fund-raiser gathering last night at which Eartha Kitt performed a dynamite set. At 81, she is in great shape, a wonderful and sexy performer, and she still can sing ferociously - and in Japanese or Turkish when she wants to. She has a gift for languages. She surely gives the impression of enjoying the whole thing.

Got my photo taken with her. She lives in Westport, CT and will be doing her usual gig at the Cafe Carlisle again this year, after a two-week stint in Paris - God bless her. This is C'est si bon from 1961:

An important essay: Obama’s Job-Creation Program Flunks Basic Math by Caroline Baum at Bloomberg. One quote:

From The Truth about Christmas in American Thinker:

Jesus Christ staked his whole reputation, without reservation, on the claim that his equality with God was firmly anchored on nothing but the truth. And the truth is not subject to one's preference; it is true, whether one believes it or not.  It is not contingent upon belief, but rather belief is only justified when that upon which it is grounded is the truth.

This is the context within which Jesus Christ made his rather astonishing claim, the truthfulness of which endows the story of Christmas with its enduring significance. And though he made it in a least intrusive and most gentle fashion, he did not seek - then or today - to indulge the neutrality or merely passive assent from his hearers, because like no one else, he fully understood the full force of its implications.

Excellent, in the WSJ. Final quote:

Politics is in charge -- in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.

Happy Holidays.

Dennis Prager. A quote:

...women need to recognize how a man understands a wife's refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens' natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a womans nature that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Apparently some, or many, women do not always fully appreciate what a special, deeply emotional (yet also physical) gift we sensitive fellows are offering to share with them when we seek their attention.

Photo: Scientificalistic research experts indicate the female Elf in the photo has an 65.6% chance of being in the mood at the time of this research photo, and a 34.4% chance that she is faking it. Computer models say that global warming, if consistent with IPCC heat predictions and mathematically scientificalistic computer models, would almost instantly melt the ice and snow and increase those odds to a heart-warming 92.3%, which explains the cars and trucks men chose to drive. It's only natural to want to warm things up in this cold world.

Hugh Hewitt is wrong about this. He seems to want the government (ie, us) to somehow subsidize a renewal of the unhealthy and artificial housing bubble.

Perhaps people don't see the bubble as having been a government-created market distortion, but instead see the bursting of the bubble as the problem?

Let's let the market determine housing values - as it is doing.

Sarbanes-Oxley, stock options, etc. WSJ.

An important article for anybody who wants to create or produce anything. I have no doubt that the Washington power elite wants to keep us all poor and stupid. And dependant upon them.

Their problem is that we are smarter than they are. We the people know how to make stuff happen, and all they do is take our stuff to try to get relected to their phony, no-heavy-lifting sinecures with their amazing benefits.

"Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters." I have always been impressed by doers and makers, but never impressed by political "leaders." Not even once. Including Reagan, who I liked very much.

A quote from Dalrymple's The Quivering Upper Lip, on how Brit culture has deteriorated (h/t, Driscoll):

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now—and the old modesty is scorned. It is as if the population became convinced of Blake’s fatuous dictum that it is better to strangle a baby in the cradle than to let a desire remain unacted upon.

Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

Good news from DU HQ this week:

Despite a global economic downturn, DU supporters rallied to raise the largest revenue in DU history: $261 million. Of that, Ducks Unlimited spent a record $231 million on its conservation mission. That’s an 88 percent efficiency rating, which sets another record for Ducks Unlimited and exceeds our long-term goal to spend 80 cents of every dollar on DU’s conservation mission. And that’s the bottom line – habitat conservation.

Last year, in the United States alone, Ducks Unlimited conserved nearly 300,000 acres of the country’s most critical breeding, migration and wintering habitats. This annual report highlights several of those habitats and key donors who helped make DU’s work possible. We tip our hats to the people highlighted here and to all the DU members, volunteers and partners across the continent. We’ve come a long way together.

It is gratifying and enjoyable to support this fine organization. Many of us at Maggie's are happy to be part of it.

Confessions of a Community College Dean addresses a debate: are teachers "workers" or "professionals"? One quote:

I’d argue that how one understands tenure will have a great deal to do with which position one takes. I’ve suggested before that it’s reasonable to have tenure or unions, but not both, and this debate helped me crystallize that sentiment. Tenure is a lifetime commitment by the institution. (Since the badly-misguided repeal of a mandatory retirement age, this is literally true.) To suggest that a lifetime commitment somehow doesn’t carry with it some sort of reciprocal obligation strikes me as narcissistic, if not laughable. Legally, tenure amounts to ownership of a job. Having tenure and a union amounts to negotiating against yourself, an ethically dubious proposition worthy of an Illinois governor. Being insulated for life against the vagaries of the economy is a privilege, and a rare one; for that privilege to bring with it a certain responsibility for stewardship of the institution is only fair.

I always thought of teachers as professionals, but not since the unions seduced some of them. And I have never really understood the concept of tenure at all, especially in a world in which profs and teachers can be paid quite well, and receive perks and pensions that most other jobs lack. I happen to be a partner in a firm, but the Exec. Committee could let me go tomorrow if they wanted to and I would be on the street like every other working stiff. Nothin' wrong with that.

From Bill Gross in Fortune:

While 2008 will probably be best known as the year that global stock markets had their values cut in half, it was really much, much more. It was a year in which every major asset class - stocks, real estate, commodities, even high-yield bonds - suffered significant double-digit percentage losses, resulting in the destruction of over $30 trillion of paper wealth. To blame this on subprime mortgages alone would be to dismiss an era of leveraging that encompassed derivative structures of all types, embodying a belief that economic growth was always and everywhere a certainty and that asset prices never go down.

another quote:

The outcome essentially depends on the ability of the Obama administration to rejuvenate capitalism's "animal spirits" by substituting the benevolent fist of government for the now invisible hand of Adam Smith. Federal spending and guarantees in the trillions of dollars will be required to fill the gap created by the deleveraging of private balance sheets. In turn, lenders and investors alike must begin to assume risk as opposed to stuffing money in modern-day investment mattresses. The process will take time. Twelve months of the Obama Nation will not be sufficient to heal the damage ...

Hmm. I thought the "hand" was meant to be invisible. I think it's working now, slowly grinding away and doing what it needs to do to adjust and correct for excesses. I tend to be skeptical every time I hear people say "This time it's different..." We're in a corrective recession, and we'll emerge eventually. And America will emerge first, because we have the most dynamic and creative economy in the world.

The fantasy that somehow the government can spend the US out of a global recession is, I think absurd. But they have to appear to be doing something.

To put it all in context, I borrowed this 20 yr. chart from My Trader's Journal, up through Oct 3. Today the S&P closed around 870, so we have been below the trend line for a while. Whatever that means. To my eyes, this chart shows a double bubble, and when the next one happens, I'm getting off at the top.

We had the pleasure of attending a private showing of the Holiday Train show at the New York Botanical Garden yesterday, followed by a fine group brunch at the Cafe. As the Daily News says,

You want to get bowled over? You want to see something spectacular? Get to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where an only-in-New York holiday show opens..."

The highlight of the annual show isn't the trains - although they are set up wonderfully. It's the 140 architectural constructions of NY landmark buildings, past and present, constructed entirely from plant material collected in the woods by Kentucky  artist/designer Paul Busse. Even the windows are made of plant resins and saps. The rustic nature of the structures makes it more of a fairyland than slicker models would do.

Yankee Stadium of course:

 The Apollo Theater. See the acorn caps in the molding?:

 More below the fold -

From the piece on time we posted yesterday, which I felt deserved an enticing quote:

In Rovelli's scheme, a clock's hands do not point upright because the universe says it is 12 o'clock; they point upright because of the location of the pendulum. Therefore the notion of time is meaningful only in a small range of physical situations in the universe, such as human experience. In most cases, however, time is meaningless. "In general, there is no time at all," Rovelli says.

Though this approach might seem radical, many researchers share Rovelli's sentiments. For example, Harvey Brown, an expert on scientific interpretations of reality from the University of Oxford, has argued that we "construct" time from the physical properties of the things around us.

Newton and Leibniz debated this very point. Newton portrayed space and time as existing independently, while Rovelli and Brown share Leibniz's view that time and space exist only as properties of things and the relationships between them.

It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter. If the central property of space-time is the result of the existence of matter, how can we be sure that space and time exist on their own and are not convenient illusions? "Hence my hesitation," Norton says.

How can we be sure that time and space exist on their own and are not convenient illusions?

Battle by joystick. Ace quoted this piece on the use of CROWS (Common Remotely Operated Weapons Station) in the Middle East:

The remote control turret changed the battlefield more than you might think. It all began three years ago, when the U.S. Army realized that new remote control gun turret designs actually worked, and suddenly they could not get enough of them...

The main issue was that the enemy was no longer able to knock out the turret gunner, early in a firefight, and take away a lot of the vehicles firepower. Because of that, once the enemy opens fire, they are in trouble. The remote turret tends to begin delivering accurate fire right away, and is much more immune to enemy fire than a human gunner. If the vehicle is a Stryker, the enemy will soon find themselves dealing with half a dozen or so heavily armed infantry, who get out of the vehicle and come at the ambushers. Iraqis don't like that. They also don't like how some of the CROWS turret equipped vehicles will come after them. All those accurately aimed bullets coming their way, and no enemy soldiers in sight, is demoralizing.

Photo is from Defend America's 2005 piece on CROWS.

We posted the other day about Yankee taxes and our general unfriendliness to business. Liberals and Lefties never seem to wonder where the money comes from for all of their plans and schemes.

Well, in my CT, it's not going to come from these folks, because they made a plan for their families, and they won't let the product of their lifetime of blood, sweat and tears be fleeced by the greedy pols in Hartford.

Why? Because there is no accountability, no escape, and nobody who bothers to understand you and what your life is about. You are as helpless as a Frenchman. Just look at Oceania, or the EU - or even at Washington. That's why I am a member of The Federalist Society. 

Freedom, not control, is our goal here at Maggie's. Mega-governance is Imperialism gone wild. Rachman at FT looks at World Government. 

Feds want a little friendly conversation with Jesse Jackson Jr.

Those little chats with the Feds rarely end up well for the chatee, because they are full of traps and snares - and they have a terrifying power to destroy you. Watch out for when they thoughtfully ask "Would you like some coffee?"

Everybody's guilty of something, and they know it.

Over the last four decades, various philosophical and ideological strands united to contribute to the decline of classical education. A creeping vocationalism, for one, displaced much of the liberal arts curriculum in the crowded credit-hours of indebted students. Forfeiting classical learning in order to teach undergraduates a narrow skill (what the Greeks called a technê) was predicated on the shaky notion that undergraduate instruction in business or law would produce superior CEOs or lawyers—and would more successfully inculcate the arts of logic, reasoning, fact-based knowledge, and communication so necessary for professional success.

A therapeutic curriculum, which promised that counseling and proper social attitudes could mitigate such eternal obstacles to human happiness as racism, sexism, war, and poverty, likewise displaced more difficult classes in literature, language, philosophy, and political science. The therapeutic sensibility burdened the university with the task of ensuring that students felt adjusted and happy. And upon graduation, those students began to expect an equality of result rather than of opportunity from their society. Gone from university life was the larger tragic sense. Few students learned (or were reminded) that we come into this world with limitations that we must endure with dignity and courage rather than deal with easily through greater sensitivity, more laws, better technology, and sufficient capital.

My temptation is to quote the whole thing.

By coincidence, we read today via Insty that Harvard is scrapping The Canon. I'm like hip to that. Groovy, dude. How advanced! How Progressive! Let's do Maya Angelou and Sting and cool shit like that! Can you dig it?

Photo: Harvard College

One good thing about Obama is that he smokes. Maybe he'll help make tobacco cool again. (I have read that Hillary smokes too, but I can't prove it.)

Mrs. O might consider some of these smoke-eater candles for the President-Elect's Christmas stocking. We don't want the Oval Office smelling like an ashtray...or do we?

Ancient joke re smoking: "Do you smoke after sex?"
"I don't know. I never looked."

From Weekly Standard's review of Yuval Levin's Science and American Democracy, a quote:

Levin shows that the Joe Friday ideal of science-"Just the facts, ma'am"-overlooks the woods for the trees. It ignores the reality that science, as we take it for granted, is a relatively new phenomenon in human history and was brought about by men who saw science and healthy politics as inextricably linked. Modern science came into being in the 17th century through the thought and action of a handful of great thinkers, foremost among them Francis Bacon and René Descartes. They successfully sought to change the character of scientific activity for distinctively human and political ends.

Ancient science was contemplative: It sought to understand nature, but was content to let it run its course. The scientific project founded by Bacon and Descartes saw nature as hostile to human prosperity, as penurious and arbitrary. Far from being a source of guidance on how to live, nature was something to be overcome or conquered. Science was, in Bacon's famous phrase, to be put in the service of "the relief of man's estate." A new order was to emerge in which science would progressively conquer poverty and disease and hold out the prospect of the indefinite extension of human life. Empirical science was to be the means of political reformation. Levin nicely sums up the less sober aspirations born of the modern scientific project in this way:

From the very beginning, the modern worldview has given rise to peculiar utopianisms of various stripes, all grounded in the dream of overcoming nature and living, free of necessity and fear, able to meet every one of our needs and our whims, and able, most especially, to live indefinitely in good health. This brand of utopianism generally begins in a benign libertarianism, though at times it has ended in political extremism, if not the guillotine.

We're far from the guillotine, but you only have to think about the relative capacities of smoking, on the one hand, and blasphemy, on the other, to generate indignation and see precisely to what extent this peculiarly modern moralism has taken hold.

To be sure, Levin is not the first to observe the hidden political foundations and aims of modern science, but you would be hard pressed to find a treatment that is equally accessible, engaging, and precise. What is new here is the manner in which he uses his scholarly knowledge to illumine the character of our contemporary (and future) political life.