|
The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-102
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
> Now the US has abandoned the Washington Consensus and decided to go all in with protectionism and industrial policy. And that’s because we supposedly need to do this to keep from falling behind. But weren’t we told that these policies slow economic development?
It’s annoying when you get lectured to by more successful countries. It’s especially annoying when the lecture comes from self righteous societies that don’t follow their own advice. Is it any wonder that developing countries have lost respect for the US government. <
—
Other issues:
Shameful:
Of interest:
Oil thieves:
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread …
@ Don Firineach | May 2 2023 5:48 utc | 131
Thank you for your comment, Don.
In reading The Postil essay you referenced about Carl Schmitt, it occurred to me that the garden and jungle metaphor employed by Robert Kagan and his acolytes, much to our ridicule, arises from the Schmittian thinking of “restraining chaos” and “the people are the enemy.”
Kagan, at a 2018 event discussing his new book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World,mentioned in the Q& A that his wife, the notorious Victoria Nuland, “was a gardener.” That explains a lot.
He described his book:
The analogy that is at the heart of this book is about a jungle and a garden…
We all understand first of all that a garden is an unnatural creation. It’s not something that produces itself; it’s something that human beings create, and they create it by cutting back the weeds and the vines and pulling up tree stumps and rocks and creating a place where you can have a garden.
We also know that you don’t just plant a garden, congratulate yourself, walk away, and expect to come back a week later and see the garden still there. We all know that if you aren’t constantly tending the garden, then natural forces—weeds and vines and all the other things—want to come back and reclaim the land…
In order to have a garden and sustain a garden, you’ve got to be constantly gardening. For me at least, that is a good analogy for this liberal world order, which itself is an unnatural creation which natural forces are always working to undermine.
As I mentioned, one of those natural forces is just the natural state of international relations, which tends toward chaos and conflict. It doesn’t tend toward peace and order. Peace and order are created; they’re not the natural outcome of natural forces in the international system.
Maybe even more troubling, but certainly I think we can see around the world how true it is, there are forces of human nature that also work inevitably against this liberal world order…”
Kagan seeds the concept of “gardening” the world according to “a rules based order” as the only solution to a chaos he sees as being created by human nature and natural forces. His vision of the good garden, “the good life,” requires weeding the world of everything deemed invasive.
I am starting to understand the fascism of liberalism. Neocon gardens, unlike the rich diverse ever changing growing wonder outside my door which I tend with discretion and care, eventually become sterile rent-seeking monocrops.
——-
From the Mendelssohn essay, relevant to the above:
“…the enthusiasm for Carl Schmitt expressed by the US Neo-Cons and their European hounds is perhaps the salient feature of political philosophy since the War. Dozens of articles both scholarly and for mass-circulation, point to the overweening impact of Schmitt’s ideas amongst those who did the thinking for Presidents Bush Sr and Jr and slammed down the Permanent State of Exception (“restraining chaos,” as Anastasia Colosimo chirps) which since 2001, has put paid to civilised life both in the USA and Europe.”
and
“To conclude, hats off to Professor Baumert who has twigged onto Schmitt’s modus operandi:
”Rather than ‘an art of writing’, one should prefer the term ‘rhetoric’ so as to emphasise the very practical aim Schmitt had set himself. His legal doctrine was designed, not as a science, which would have meant attempting to bring forth knowledge valid for some length of time, but as a form of struggle aimed at redefining legal notions along with the mental categories which enable one to apprehend them. Far from being a mere intellectual exercise, that struggle represents a full-out political ‘investment’. With that in mind, redefining concepts is of the essence, since it will likely allow one to win over to the cause, from within as it were, those who would otherwise reject it. That idea appears in Schmitt’s 1947 Glossarium where, under interrogation at Nuremberg, Schmitt addressed the following notes to himself:
“Take the measure of the power-holder who has got you in his grasp; against his moves, put up no counter-moves at the same level but let his power beat against your own power to conceive. He will seize upon your concepts. Let him but do so. He will soon slash his paws.”
https://www.thepostil.com/a-schittian-moment-minus-the-m/
Posted by: suzan | May 3 2023 6:15 utc | 216
|
