Alinsky’s Rule #4 is a one-way street
Excellent, excellent, excellent article by Jim Geraghty entitled “Unruly Progressives: why it’s so hard to make progressives live up to their own rules.”
First, a little review of Alinsky’s Rule #4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Note first the word “enemy” rather than “opponent” or “adversary.” Alinsky knew what he was doing when he used language: the opposition is the enemy, according to the left. No beating around the bush; this is war.
Now note the idea that the enemy has rules it aspires to live up to. But really ruthless enemies in real wars are the ones who don’t mind bending or even breaking their own rules, if they have any at all in the first place. With the left, it’s hard to discern what their rules are except that the goal is to win at all costs. For the right, it doesn’t seem quite that way. It’s hard to make an enemy play by its own rules if abiding by the rules is not very important to them, and the left is that kind of enemy.
That’s why Geraghty writes:
James O’Keefe, the activist and journalist behind the famous ACORN videos, articulated the approach directly: “The Left doesn’t care about the laws or the rules. They are hypocrites, and the only way to win is to make them live up to their book of rules. I have found that the only thing they care about is racism, sexism and exploitation.”
Not to take away from O’Keefe’s work, which generates must-watch videos and scandal-inspired resignations with metronomic regularity, but there may be a flaw in this strategy. Ultimately, not that many liberals care whether their brethren are following their own book of rules. They’ve demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another’s hypocrisy.
That is their secret weapon, one that fewer on the right have mastered.
Which is why Richard Nixon resigned and Bill Clinton held fast, even through an impeachment trial. The first was abandoned by his own party because he had violated their principles, and the second was supported by his own party even though he had violated theirs (the ones they professed to have, that is).
[NOTE: On reflection, I think this has something to do with my change experience. Even when I was a liberal, I applied the same rules to both sides. I didn’t like hypocrisy and I didn’t like lies, no matter who was guilty of them. Once I got enough information to decide that liberals were more often guilty of them than conservatives were (not that either side is immune), it helped tip the balance for me.]
Yep, leftists are tough to beat in the activist game. It’s not impossible, though. It’s been done.
The War on Women is my favorite. There definitely is one and Bill Clinton is a four star general in it, while the late Teddy Kennedy (actually all of the Kennedys) was a general of the army.
To be fair, the Democratic version means the right to have an abortion at anytime for any reason whatsoever. It’s actual effect is the practice of eugenics on the black population with half of all its pregnancies terminated, but we don’t bring that up in polite company, do we? Side effects like Kermit Gosnell and the British NHS using aborted fetuses as fuel are just unfortunate misunderstandings that will be corrected with better regulation, or not.
Legalizing illegal immigrants is also extremely important to right thinkers everywhere who can’t bear to have all those people living in the shadows. The fact that the blue collar workers and the poor, the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, are losing jobs to the undocumented is just unfortunate collateral damage. But the upside will be a permanent majority that can correct any injustices later.
Hypocrisy, there can be no hypocrisy if you’re pure of heart.
Leftists hold a straight flush when it comes to emotive ‘logic.’
They are selling ‘the cloud’ — the high concept.
They are delivering the mud…
The conservatives are selling blue sky — a lack of fetters.
This is a no-sale for the bulk of humanity.
Like Boxer (Animal Farm) most need blinders. They don’t have the cognition to plant or harvest. They crave the harness — and having the oat bag brought to them.
Most people are economically effective at only a few things — perhaps nothing in particular.
The thought of having to compete — every day — for table scraps — at the edge — is too much to endure. This is why most big money — life time savings — is lent out at interest — as against being put at risk as ownership capital.
%%%
Most teachers haven’t a clue as to how the economic world works. They communicate this vibe to their students.
Putting my old stock broker’s hat on, I can assure you that most teachers are terrified of investing. Their dream world is filled with economic daemons.
This goes a L O N G way towards explaining the Leftist bias of this era — the most over educated, over protected, ever.
Leftists don’t care about anything except power. Power, pure and simple. Racism, sexism and exploitation are merely tools for use in their quest. These pigs only root for the truffle of power, unceasingly.
Sure, the Right isn’t without flaws and errors. That is not the point (and it is a point that need not be made). But the Right is ultimately tethered to a code of morals and ethics, which is why a Pinochet kills a few thousand but a Pol Pot kills millions.
Leftists believe in no God but themselves. Non-leftists believe they are not God.
If you believe you are God, then the world is yours to do with as you please, i.e., it’s principally a power trip, reality be damned.
If you don’t believe you are God, humility tends to inhibit the scope of your actions (no utopias on earth for you!), you believe humans are fallible and act accordingly.
It goes beyond Alinsky; or probably more accurately, the entire liberal left establishment has become Alinskyite.
In that area where Eric and I have agreed to partly disagree, I still think it is critical to understand what motivates the left in terms of what they understand as “ethical” concepts.
This will not be reassuring; since confronting the postmodernist mentality and its definition of “liberalism” leaves one with the conviction that there is very little purpose to reasoning with people who’ve deliberately and consciously moved outside the circle of those who think that reason rather than sheer will, or the unconscious urge, or feelings, are morally defining or arbitrative.
But, if like the modern liberal you do not believe that the world ultimately makes sense anyway, it’s unlikely that the idea of trying to deductively derive ethical standards from premisses that cannot in principle [on their view] be established, would have much point anyway. And with the modern liberal, it does not.
Inconsistency, incoherence, and rank hypocrisy are only crimes against a reason and rationality informed universal human morality, one of logic, based on what are taken to be objective, common and indubitable facts; not against one based on subjectivity, sentiment, solidarity and a program of subversively evolving mankind into a less “cruel” species.
If talking of species makes any sense, that is.
Because although modern liberalism talks as if there is one humankind when “pleading on behalf”, it does not do so when describing what it takes to be “real” reality. Then the default nominalism of the modern liberal leaves them with NO objective basis from which to derive common standards; since there is thought to be neither basis nor natural kind in reality.
The Kinseyan view of sexuality and even species is just one well known and notorious example.
How can there even be “health” on such a view? “Health” is itself imbued with the notion of objective directedness, teleology and proper form.
There is, and can be then, nothing to do on their view but reduce “cruelty”; which is I suppose, though I have never seen them admit it explicitly, an activity which amounts to reducing the felt frustration of whatever urges it is that well up within any particular human organism with which they have feelings of “solidarity”. And among the people we call leftist, that usually seems to have something more to do with experiencing feelings of emotional fulfillment derived from “belonging” or inclusion, or physical comfort and pleasure; and something less to do with physical freedom, exclusive use of some portion of the material world, and liberation from suffocating and unsought entanglements.
Other than that, there is only population management and formation to the liberal program.
Danny Postel:
And familiar and well known excerpts from that most nonchalantly blatant of admissions …
Is there anyone still around who thinks that you can actually reason with leftists when their intellectuals take positions like these?
Remember Kolnai’s instructive little parable about trying to speak to Rorty about Plato.
It’s why I don’t waste my time pointing out the double standards. Bush never routinely ignored and rewrote laws for his political convenience. Had he, the left would have gone nuts. Same with the filibuster. Funny how when the Democrats are in the majority then the “nuclear option” isn’t so nuclear. Congressman Gowdy is a great guy, but when he gives his floor speeches quoting Senator Obama and President Obama and asks what changed, I have an answer for him.
All he cares about is what any leftist cares about; power. They’re not interested in a set of rules that applies equally. They’re interested in a set of rules that works against their enemies and to their advantage when they need them. Then the rules go out the window when the opposite is true.
It’s also why I’m never tempted to call them good people, with their hearts in the right place, either. They’re not.
They’ve demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another’s hypocrisy.
That, and they also seem absolutely immune to embarrassment. Just think of some of the absurd columns by Gail Collins. Or look at the piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker about the Hobby Lobby case — Althouse has a terrific post on it today.
George Will wrote, “Barack Obama has written that during his very brief sojourn in the private sector he felt like ‘a spy behind enemy lines’ “.
During a radio interview Obama encouraged Latino voters to “punish our enemies and reward our friends.”
The President took this lesson to heart. And he has weaponized the government, in the words of Catherine Engelbrecht, to target his enemies.
Leftists will use, throw away, and pick up later and use again anything that’s useful.
Their focus is on advancing the priorities of their movement. Rhetoric is adversarial for them, not inquisitorial.
Think of them as the worst stereotype of zealous-advocate litigators except unbound by court procedures, rules of evidence, and bar-enforced ethical rules of professional conduct.
DNW –
I’ll repost the story below, but before I do I want to ask (serious question, though given your situation, if you’re in academia, it may be ludicrous) if you’ve ever considered compiling your thoughts on the left into a book or a pamphlet or a blog? I myself considered doing it back in grad school and then nixed the idea because I’m a coward and too low on the totem pole – that, and I didn’t really think I had anything new to add. (I wrote some papers on totalitarianism from a phenomenological angle, interpreting it, at its ideological roots, as a hatred of time, but it never went anywhere.)
However, new or not, when you write things like this-
“There is, and can be then, nothing to do on their view but reduce ‘cruelty’; which is I suppose, though I have never seen them admit it explicitly, an activity which amounts to reducing the felt frustration of whatever urges it is that well up within any particular human organism with which they have feelings of ‘solidarity’…”
– it seems to me you’ve hit a sweet spot of accurate description plus what our pal Rorty might call an appropriate “vocabulary” in which to couch the observation; basically, using the metaphysically naked terminology contained in the leftist Id to unpack the twisted erotic charge of their seductive exoteric lexicon.
It’s the kind of thing that would have stung me back in my radical days – “Uh oh, do I really believe this?” (of course that goes to neon’s point about an intellectual conscience virtually guaranteeing a slide away from leftism, if not liberalism).
Anyhow, take that for what it’s worth. I find your descriptions of leftism potent; they pack a serious punch.
Now:
“Story about Rorty.
When I was an undergrad I drove up with some fellow philosophy majors to see him speak at the University of Florida. It was a surprisingly small audience, maybe 30-40 people, with Rorty standing up at the front.
He stood there, stiff as a board, and just straight up read something he’d written, in an extremely snooze-inducing monotone. It was one of the dullest speeches I’d ever heard — basically, ‘Hear Rorty read Rorty.’
Anyway, after the speech a friend of mine asked him a question about how he would square his dismissal of metaphysics starting with Plato with [h]is pragmatism, which was just a metaphysical conventionalism going back to Protagoras, if not further.
Rorty’s response? ‘I don’t see any value in talking about Plato.’ (or words to that effect — I’m paraphrasing from memory).
Silence.
End of response.”
It didn’t occur to me at the time that this was an important ideological gesture for Rorty, as I was still naive enough to think that all philosophers were just trying to get at the truth. Perhaps that’s why it shocked me so much. 2,500 years of debate vanishes with a kindergartener’s “I don’t wanna!” spoken by a reputed genius.
Since then, whenever I think about Rorty and the pragmatists of his stripe I’m always tempted to apply to them that hilarious line from Demodocus that Aristotle quoted in Bk. VII of the Nicomachean Ethics:
“Miletans are not stupid, but they do the things that stupid people do.”
Mutatis mutandis and you get my drift 😉
The original column, neo’s posting and the entire wonderfully thoughtful thread give hope. The understanding is out there. Will it manifest itself?
Paul in Boston: “The War on Women is my favorite.”
Coincidentally, I recently came across this revealing insight into the feminist movement:
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm
Leftists are not only vicious to the Right. They’re vicious to each other, which corroborates my observations as a Dems volunteer. It’s Darwinian stuff, and no wonder the winners who emerge from their internal struggles are effective in the larger social-political arena.
DNW at 3:19 PM:
Inconsistency, incoherence, and rank hypocrisy are only crimes against a reason and rationality informed universal human morality, one of logic, based on what are taken to be objective, common and indubitable facts; not against one based on subjectivity, sentiment, solidarity and a program of subversively evolving mankind into a less “cruel” species.
If talking of species makes any sense, that is.
Lovely.
Neo–I’ll take your word for it on Geraghty’s article. I haven’t had anything to do with him since he advocated banning “high-capacity” magazines in his newsletter right after Sandy Hook. Never will trust him again.
“Ultimately, not that many liberals care whether their brethren are following their own book of rules. They’ve demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another’s hypocrisy.”
In fact call them on one of their many inconsistencies and they’ll fire back “What about Bush?” To them its OK if they break the rules. They assume their enemies have always done so, its a war and they have to win it because ultimately they own the greater truth.
Tonawanda: “Will it manifest itself?”
It’s a big big leap from talk, including and especially smart talk with a panoramic scope, to gritty micro activist action. During my activist days, I was around a lot more people who talked a big game than people willing to commit a simple afternoon a week to man an information table.
kolnai: ” I myself considered doing it back in grad school and then nixed the idea because I’m a coward and too low on the totem pole — that, and I didn’t really think I had anything new to add.”
You ought to do it anyway. Repetition and mass do count. Adding more words to set adrift in the cacophonous sea of words is not sufficient to make a difference by itself, but out in the public space, your words might become a building block for an activist who will make a difference.
Harry the “Extremist”,
See http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-profile-03-02.html
Excerpt:
Qouth Rorty:
Definition of a bigot: someone who has the effrontery to disagree with a “liberal.”
Progressives don’t have any principles except expediency.
To buck the throw-our-hands-up-helplessly tenor of the OP and this comment thread, I disagree with Geraghty that:
Is O’Keefe’s suggestion a guaranteed, foolproof strategy? No, because there’s no such thing as a simple guarantee in real-world competition, including the activist game.
But O’Keefe is correct. The strategy has been shown to work.
Here’s my favorite example where a version of the strategy that O’Keefe suggests did, indeed, defeat radical leftists on what was supposedly their home turf:
Press Release: Anti-Military Discrimination at Columbia University
Remember when Columbia University was considered to be inveterately, virulently anti-US military?
Not anymore. Today, Columbia is rated one of the most military-friendly universities in America. And, by overwhelming vote of the University Senate (which originally was formed in part to guarantee ROTC was kept out of Columbia), Columbia has re-normalized the formal Columbia-ROTC relationship with the military.
How did this radical change happen to Columbia within a short span of years? Activism.
It’s important to note that while the campus leftists were the direct opponent, the primary target audience of the Columbia student-veteran activists was the Columbia community and particularly University officials.
Did the campus leftists change their minds about creating a nurturing environment for military-related students at Columbia? Of course not. They fought it.
However, the liberal University officials did respond positively to the student-veteran activism by changing their minds. The University codified a policy change that became a critical jumping off point for the subsequent normalization of civil-military relations at Columbia.
So. Will O’Keefe’s suggestion always work as thoroughly as it did in bringing about civil-military reform at Columbia University? Probably not always, but the recent Columbia civil-military reform shows that the strategy definitely can work.
The fundamental difference between left and right boils down to being a free, singluar person or being a member of the mob. Leftists ony feel comfortable in a mobe fueled by emotion, They are incapable of standing up as an individual, they need the feeling of approval from the mob, the mob nutures them and tells them they are righteous and that all outside the mob are stupid, greedy, evil, etc. For the most part we on the right side operate as individuals. We tend to stand on our own and are leary of becoming a part of a mob mentality. This is our strength and our weakness.
“Ray” has the right of it. Having only goals, the Left has no principles or values to betray. Goals are either achieved or not via any and all means.
parker: “For the most part we on the right side operate as individuals. We tend to stand on our own and are leary of becoming a part of a mob mentality.”
If that’s true, then how do soldiers and Marines who slant Right and are notoriously individualistic in their own person do it?
A large part of the incentive for returning military recruiters and the ROTC to elite campuses was not Alinksy-type activism, but good, old-fashioned legislative work by U.S. Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon (R-NY), the man responsible for the Solomon Amendment, which “denied federal grants from 8 federal agencies, including research grants, to colleges and universities that prohibit or prevent the U.S. armed forces from recruiting on campus in a manner “at least equal in quality and scope’ as other employers or that fail to allow for ROTC programs as part of their academic programs subject to the same standards as other academic programs.”
Eric:
“parker: “For the most part we on the right side operate as individuals. We tend to stand on our own and are leery of becoming a part of a mob mentality.”
If that’s true, then how do soldiers and Marines who slant Right and are notoriously individualistic in their own person do it?”
Eric, are you confusing “mob mentality” with being part of a team? The two are NOT the same.
A team is one in which the various members all work towards the same goal; sometimes against their own individual interests. This is what marines do.
While “mob mentality” is one in which members do NOT think, they just act and react with emotion without thinking about right or wrong. There is no goal; just a reaction to how they FEEL. This is often how folks on the left behave.
Neo seems to have considered herself “being on the left” at some point in time. But, I suspect that she was a “thinking leftist” and therefore didn’t give in to the left’s “mob mentality” as so many do. This is, as she says, what enabled her to move to the right.
My favorite passage from Geraghty’s article is one I posted here last night:
They’ve demonstrated a remarkable acceptance for one another’s hypocrisy.
It doesn’t apply against the neutrals or dupes though. Many of the dupes actually believe in the propaganda, so shattering the authority of their religious faith in the propaganda really hurts.
Like most groups, Democrats/liberals are not monolithic. The kind of person that Rules for Radicals appeals to is the hard core of the left. These people, for one reason or another, have had much of their humanity removed.
But there are varying degrees of sincerity (naivete?) among the lower ranks. These people can be reached, especially by evidence of their own side’s hypocrisy. Others among them can be reached by arguments, if they are stated in the right way.
Fellow travelers like left-leaning libertarians can be reached by targeting specific issues. Rand Paul does this better than anyone else on our side.
Forget about the hard core, since you will never reach them. Or, to put it another way, “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turning upon you, they tear you.”
In fact call them on one of their many inconsistencies and they’ll fire back “What about Bush?” To them its OK if they break the rules.
A lot of this “reflex” action is programmed zombie virus stuff. But they also do it because they think we operate like them, where a leader like Bush is our God and what Bush does and commands, is somehow binding on us.
But that’s only true for the Messiah Hussein and his Obamacans. So throw the issue back in their face, Bush is not our God, his commands are not Divine writ, but the Left’s Dogma is Divine Writ for the Left’s fanatics.
The appeal of the left to most of their followers is: use the force and violence of the state to extract wealth from other and give it to me. Given that, why should we expect principals, rules or honesty?
I wonder how people will react of O’Keefe dies in a convenient manner, such as a heart attack. Again.
However, the liberal University officials did respond positively to the student-veteran activism by changing their minds. The University codified a policy change that became a critical jumping off point for the subsequent normalization of civil-military relations at Columbia.
Why wouldn’t they do so, knowing that these individuals would be put under Hussein’s control, to be homosexualized and diversified?
Before they were anti war, now they are pro war for Libya, Regime Change, and Egypt Regime Change.
The Left is very chameleon like and their campus activists are merely the lowest of the low in terms of tools and hierarchies.
Eric:
As a student at Columbia in the spring of 1972 I led the anti-Leftist forces on campus and we succeeded. It was an actual battle. I have a scrap book which documents. And many more memories which few people have.
It does not count because I was not a Leftist. I opposed the totalitarians. You will not read about this successful battle because the Left controlled that culture in the 70’s as it does now.
Mark Rudd was a “hero” for what he did there. A few years later, a much more heroic battle took place, if success in the face of overwhelming odds counts as heroic.
I completely sympathize with you, Eric.
Maybe it is my age. But I do not believe non-Leftists have the understanding or inclination to defeat the Left.
If that’s true, then how do soldiers and Marines who slant Right and are notoriously individualistic in their own person do it?
The military is an institution designed to condition and train individuals out of their former civilian habits and vices.
The US military, however, was never designed with training in mind to exterminate the Left’s insurgents. Insurgents in general, but not those in the US.
There’s a fine line between reckless endangerment of self and rebellious attitudes, to individuality vs group think. The older Marines have it, because they had time to mature. The younger ones are still lacking. It’s not that the younger ones are individuals that also function as part of the military hive, but that the younger ones are reckless and think they know better when they don’t. That can express itself as individual opinions or mandate, but it’s merely the process of forming individual identities, not the effect itself of already having formed one.
Side stepping to next topic. Neo is part of the 3%, an internally motivated from birth kind of natural mutation. Thus she can’t be used to model what other Leftists or Leftist cannonfodder thinks. After all, if people thought like Neo, they would already be another Neo. And another Neo. And another Neo. But there aren’t. Individuals are rare and unique, else they are not individuals.
But I have to say, I am totally in favor of the Eric pov, totally.
Mark Steyn is a genius who has understood how to confront the Left: be unafraid and continually point to their shallowness. Mann is a Leftist; that is how to treat him.
Pat Condell is the perfect example of how to talk about anything at all. It is high information stuff, which the non-Left needs.
Ann: “A large part of the incentive for returning military recruiters and the ROTC to elite campuses was not Alinksy-type activism, but good, old-fashioned legislative work by U.S. Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon (R-NY)”
That would be news to these folks:
http://www.advocatesforrotc.org/columbia/
The Solomon Amendment wasn’t a factor at Columbia.
When the ROTC campaign reached the University Senate for the 1st time, Columbia’s (I assume) lawyers asked DoD whether the Solomon Amendment would be triggered if Columbia rejected ROTC. DoD responded that SecDef would not invoke the Solomon Amendment at Columbia.
My understanding is that DoD might use the Solomon Amendment to prevent losing an ROTC program, but it wouldn’t be used to forcibly install an ROTC program, eg, at Columbia.
Keep in mind that the request for ROTC at Columbia didn’t come from the military. The request came from a campus activist movement. The military only became involved and interested when Columbia approached the military about restoring Columbia ROTC.
Re-norming Columbia ROTC was an activist achievement all the way. It turns out that Columbia student-veterans bring formidable skills as activists to the only social-political game there is. Now, I wouldn’t call them ‘Alinsky-type’ activists, though like any effective activists, they did what was needed to accomplish the mission, and what was needed wasn’t always polite.
Activism is a workshop of tools for different settings, audiences, purposes, etc.. Alinsky’s rules are just 1 set of tools.
Tonawanda: “As a student at Columbia in the spring of 1972 I led the anti-Leftist forces on campus and we succeeded.”
So you know. Left activists are not some irresistable social-cultural juggernaut. It only seems that way because the Right refuses to compete in the activist game, the only social-political game there is.
“Maybe it is my age. But I do not believe non-Leftists have the understanding or inclination to defeat the Left.”
It’s frustrating because it’s doable. The Right can compete. They choose not to. It’s not the Left’s fault that the Right would rather forfeit than get dirty in the arena to battle for the soul of America.
Charles,
I interpreted parker’s comment as talking about disadvantages of the Right against Left activists, not the zombie flock. See Matt_SE’s distinctions.
Left activists aren’t a mindless mob. They make effective teams.
I question the idea that the people of the Right are too individualistic to form Right activist teams that can compete seriously against Left activist teams.
Matt_SE: “Forget about the hard core, since you will never reach them.”
I agree that converting them is a low-probability goal. However, you may be able to make progress by engaging them in a way designed to appeal to target audiences that you can convert.
In a Left-dominated arena where Right activists are the asymmetrical guerilla insurgents, you do what you have to do to reach your target audience to flip them. If your opponent is useful to you, then use them.
Please go and read this essay post on what Leftists are and why. It is brilliant. I promise you, you’ll be really, really, really glad you read it.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/the-unified-field-theory-of-madness/
Eric and all you guys will find it answers a lot of questions, and sets the stage for more effective engagement against the Left.
John C. Wright is brilliant!!
What made me leave the Democrat Party (I was never a Leftist) was that the troika they claim to care about was nothing of the kind.
They USE those issues, rather than OPPOSING them. In fact, if those issues were ever solved, they’d be as helpless as a beetle on its back.
Racism? These are the guys who constantly clamor that the pitiful blacks and hispanics are too stupid to pass “white man tests”!
Sexism? These are the guys who have made absolute pets and brothers-under-arms of hardcore moslems, the most misogynist men on the planet!
Exploitation? Which of their client groups have they NOT exploited to the hilt, and left in even worse shape than they found them?
And “don’t you question” their nonexistent Patriotism!
And “weed is great, and anyone opposed to it is a joykiller,” but E-CIGARETTES have to be banned.
Y’all get the idea. Jesus said it all in John 8:44. (And it’s no mistake that Alinsky dedicated his evil book to the Devil. Yeah, they know what they do.)
Oh, how I wish the garden variety Democrat would cough them up like a hairball.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot! they are the most perfervid proponents of SCAB LABOR in the en-tire history of the United States!
What else can you call it when they are humpin’ to import millions of cheap illegal aliens to take away the American working class’s jobs?
What else can you call it when they are humpin’ to import millions of cheap illegal aliens to take away the American working class’s jobs?
Colonizing the natives by exterminating the natives first and replacing them with a more compliant work force.
Obama’s Mean Girls strategy for Putin is to make him unpopular – Krauthammer
thats alinsky ju jitsu…
The Russian “Woodpecker” Returns
The International Amateur Radio Union’s Region 1 Monitoring System is reporting the return of over-the-horizon radar signals originating from Russia on the 20, 15 and 10-meter bands. Similar signals disrupted the ham bands during the Cold War and at the time were dubbed the Russian “woodpecker” because of the rat-a-tat-tat sound the signals make.
WAPO March 14 2014: Russia sends [Nuclear] bombers on 24-hour Arctic patrol
Hey NEO..
want to know why no one sees it coming?
cause the ones who could say soething, focus on it, etc.
spend a lot of time self distracting and avoiding it.
just think… its like hitler, or mao, or stalin, or a lot of people are ligning up as before in history, and rather than focus on it, lay it out, make sure the things like bombers are not ignored… they do what?
Bout the same thing they did the first time to stop the Shoa. nothing much.
Tu-95MS strategic bombers: First flown in 1952, the Tu-95 entered service with the Soviet Union in 1956 and is expected to serve the Russian Air Force until at least 2040
of course americans say… look at that old junk.
but they know something americans no longer are smart enough to think of as they mix fantasy too much with realty and cant tell them apart..
that once a nuke goes off, those non computer planes and such will work perfectly fine.. not even a hiccup… old style stuff is by nature: nuclear hard!!!
we do not know ourselves
and we certainly do not want to know about this opposition without violating the PC worlds pronouncments that we should fawm over the first workers paradise
i dont know if you guys realize it, but the country with the most developed nuclear weapons for war is Russia.
we have no actual idea of how many they have, as they have not let anyone check if they are really being destroyed. they have spend all this time building UP their nuclear defenses.
Mount Yamantau
it is suspected by the United States of being a large secret nuclear facility and/or bunker
The closed military town of Mezhgorye is situated nearby. As late as 2003, Yamantaw was not yet fully operational
Two garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, were built on top of the facility, and possibly a third, Alkino-2, as well, and became the closed town of Mezhgorye in 1995. They are said to house 30,000 workers each. Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Mount Yamantaw.
They have said it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war
i say its a floor wax AND a desert topping!
Mount Yamantaw is near one of Russia’s last remaining nuclear labs, Chelyabinsk-70, raising speculation that it already houses nuclear weapons. Russian newspapers reported in 1996 that it is a part of the “Dead Hand” nuclear retaliatory command structure.
Perimeter (Dead Hand): is a Cold-War-era nuclear-control system used by the Soviet Union. General speculation from insiders alleges that the system remains in use in post-Soviet Russia. An example of fail-deadly deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors. By most accounts, it is normally switched off and is supposed to be activated during dangerous crises only; however, it is said to remain fully functional and able to serve its purpose whenever needed
set off a bomb too hard… and you get nuclear war automatically… cute…eh?
“a very large complex — we estimate that it has millions of square feet available for underground facilities. We don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing there.” – U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Gen. Eugene Habinger
“The only potential use for this site is post-nuclear war…” — Rep. Roscoe Bartlett
“Yamantau Mountain is the largest nuclear-secure project in the world… They have very large train tracks running in and out of it, with enormous rooms carved inside the mountain. It has been built to resist a half dozen direct nuclear hits, one after the other in a direct hole. It’s very disquieting that the Russians are doing this when they don’t have $200 million to build the service module on the international space station and can’t pay housing for their own military people,” —Rep. Bartlett.
remember, Nuclear Winter was a soviet active measures disinformation campaign… they have no problems with nuclear, just so long as they win… otherwise, big problem.
“And what is interesting was that President Yeltsin and Russia’s new democratic leaders are using those facilities, and the same service is still running the same facility, like it was 10, 15 years ago.” — Col. Oleg Gordievsky (defector)
note that we have been sending a few billion a year to russia to help dismantle the nukes. others think that the money was used to upgrade yamentau and store the nukes rather than take them apart.
then surprise… like hitler, weapons that shouldnt exist do
Robert Buchar’s documentary: The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story
http://www.collapseofcommunism.com/home.html
As Yuri Andropov once explained to Ion Pacepa, the Muslim world was a Petri dish in which the Russians might “nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.”
KGB General Alexander Sakharovsky once said to Pacepa: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Americans and Europeans no longer remember the past and don’t realize that history is now repeating itself.
No effective counter-strategy is likely to emerge from Washington because a regime predicated on economic optimism cannot accept the negative implications of ongoing Russian enmity. People will simply believe what they wish to believe.
More people indulge their own ideas of the world rather than deal with its realities…..
Our belief in entitlement has corrupted us. We now assume the victory of freedom is automatic. We assume that dictators and “bad guys” always lose. Democracy is entitled to win. But the yappy, toothless, little dogs are not entitled to freedom because they lack nature’s prerequisite. And this is not some fault in nature, but is the way God made the world. If anyone should think this perverse, they should imagine a world in which the yappy dog has sway over everything — of a world in which the weak rule over the strong, and entitlement serves as a blank check upon ability; a world, in short, where the lamb eats the lion, where everything is decided by sheep in sheep’s clothing, and the more despicably weak and contemptible you are, the more honored you shall be J R Nyquist
if one does not listen to me..
then listen to the warning from the past that says much the same thing about the people of the US
Freedom, true freedom, can come only with the overthrow of Communism, with the destruction of the system, regardless of the language it uses.” It is of no account that the KGB is called FSB, or the USSR is called the Commonwealth of Independent States, or that Putin prefers to be called a Pot — but heat him not. Putin is a Communist and the Russian Federation is a Communist formation. The ruling structures in the former Soviet Union are Communist, their goal is still Communist, their methods are still Communist. The hapless counter-revolutionaries in America, facing the prospects of a domestic Communist imposition, have no idea what they are dealing with. Even if they know Putin is a dictator, they can hardly be expected to grasp the Communist trap into which they have all fallen. Mackiewicz
If you dont get your analysis right
Its worse than not having one
If you do not do so with rigor,
ejecting anything other than the real and known
You then can never have your analysis right
it would be like trying to navigate a country when all the signs had been switched around and still expect to be on time to where your going…
Minta Marie Morze Says:
March 28th, 2014 at 3:42 am
That is excellent. I will bookmark it and link it.
kolnai Says:
March 27th, 2014 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for the implied compliment, but it’s probably too generous. Yes, I’ve briefly considered it, and have made remarks much to the same effect as the ones here, on a blog I was invited to comment on elsewhere. That is to say, I left remarks exploring the implications of taking what the left says about the world and humankind seriously, and applying it as a thought experiment to them.
The difficulty there, was that these remarks tended to provoke extremely vituperative reactions from the self-styled left-activists also visiting there.
Now, anyone can perform a reductio, and we tend to do it automatically with regard to our own beliefs, I think … or thought.
Therefore when a political progressive embraces values nihilism, declares that there is no such thing as “truth”, that man is a “meat machine”, that we are no more significant ontologically than insects, and that the idea of having a soul (of any kind) is ridiculous, it’s – superficially at least – surprising that they react so violently to having these categorical statements applied to certain individual members of the covered class; i.e., to themselves in particular.
Make the assumptions of post-modern post-materialist physicalism and values nihilism, perform the reductions in the contexts provided, look at the residue … what do you see? Appetite things, transient coalescences of appropriative urges, manifest within a field of some ultimately inexplicable stuff; all meaningless on their own account. And nothing “real” within this unreality, other than The Urge.
And according to the left we are supposed to further infer “solidarity”? LOL
Anyway, my efforts weren’t productive in the end.
Neo’s blog, is a bit unusual, in that combox contributions seldom degenerate into distracting and wasteful flame wars.
Re. potential write-ups: I had the notion recently on going through old comments and seeing if a coherent thread of any interest would emerge or could be constructed, and posting it on a friend’s blog. So maybe I’ll do that.
I’d want to formulate it (probably) as a clear thesis, and the footnoting examples would no doubt turn it into a time consuming treatise.
As it is, most of what I have said has been in the form of an implicit hypothetical: if X is taken as true, then Y implication follows for the one asserting it …
I thought that by saying so outright and plainly, it might wake some people up to what they were themselves saying; if they had not fully “gone over”, so to speak.
Invariably though, it merely provoked howls of indignation and outrage.
What I am therefore being pushed toward as a result of prolonged thought about this “hypothetical”, is that given an evolutionary framework it need not necessarily be so much a hypothetical, as a reasoned-to description having some accuracy regarding some portion of the human population.
Who knows also, given the plasticity of the brain and the recent findings of neuroscience, what we might be able to make, or warp, ourselves into (in what used to be thought of as a moral or spiritual sense) during our own lives, as a result of our only partly genetically programmed choices?
I am not happy that Professor Haidt and “The Church” may be both right, but I am getting the feeling that they both may be; in their own ways.
That’s something you might want to revisit. I’d read it. It would be interesting to see how you dealt with the conceit of the descendents of the phenomenologists, i.e., the existentialist left: that it is primarily they (patting themselves on the back) who had accepted mortality and time, and thus entered into the field of authenticity. Of course the fact that this supposed entry seemed to invariably manifest itself as National Socialism or Communism is just, no doubt, a minor, ahem, historical point.
You know … have you ever gotten the feeling that someone should have just punched Sartre in the face … real hard?
“It didn’t occur to me at the time that this was an important ideological gesture for Rorty …”
“I was still naive enough to think that all philosophers were just trying to get at the truth …”
That encounter was, as you say, much more indicative of something quite fundamental than you thought at the time.
It also pretty much parallels where everyone on the conservative or libertarian right has until very recently been in relation to our “fellows” on left, eh?
http://www.occupation.lv/#!/en/eksponats/05VII.1
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/the-unified-field-theory-of-madness/
It’s good to see that people are studying up on the Left, the enemy. Rather than mere politics and popular topics.
For a practical demonstration of the theory, see this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JfnddMpzPsM
Art…
Everyone…
EVERY Soviet era atomic power plant is spewing out bomb grade plutonium 239 every day of the year.
That includes Ukraine, BTW.
Think about it.
Unlike Western atomic power plants, Soviet designs provided for weapons grade plutonium as their first consideration.
What this means in practice is that Russia is still able to rebuild its atomics at an astounding tempo — on no notice at all.
For the West, scaling back up requires building converter reactors from scratch.
We have even let our tritium production reactors fall out of use.
We are disarming our atomics with every passing day.
On present trends, Barry intends to go the full Baldwin.
(Stanley Baldwin, that is.)
Alinsky Schmalinsky. Let’s make our own rules.
Mike Rule #1: When we get the Senate we do what Harry Reid did but we do it 100 times worse. The Nuclear Megaton Option. We don’t do atom bomb we do Hydrogen Bomb and nothing else. Every day. All the time.We start impeaching people. We block anything and everything Democrat totally 100% on Principle.
When we take the WH we Executive Order every law we don’t like out of existence. We executive order liberalism in the USA out of existence. Day One, for example, the EPA is gone. Day two is the Education Department. By the first week half of Washington is unemployed. Forever.
That will show them what’s what. You don’t play with monsters. You defeat them totally.
DNW –
Not to hijack the thread… but it’s pretty much dead anyway. So…
My approach was taken from the more “conservative” lineage of phenomenology-inspired philosophy, principally Kolnai (the real one, who adored Chesterton as a “fleet street phenomenologist”), Max Scheler, and some of Strauss’s stuff (he was more influenced by the Husserlian/Heideggerian school, in terms of method, than people acknowledge).
The thing about the lefty/Heideggerian phenomenologists (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty in his deep red phase, Kojeve somewhat, etc.), is that they never did abandon secular eschatology. Throughout Sartre and Heidegger in particular, despite their temporal reductionism, is a deep hatred of the past and worship of the future. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the gist of the starting point.
Now the next step is obvious. You take a gander at the totalitarian “eschatological” regimes of the 20th Century and include the French Revolution as a reference point – ground zero, as it were – and notice the same tendency manifesting itself.
Remove true transcendence and you’re left with time. The phenom.’s/existentialists saw that clearly. But you’re also left without an objective, immutable standard. They also saw that. The conclusion pretty obviously was that a standard, some standard, any standard, would have to be derived from temporality itself.
Temporality can’t give objective standards, and deep down they know this. This is the fundamental stimmung, the mood of the tribe we’re discussing. Craving guidance and hope, as humans do, and realizing that there’s nothing to ground it except the stream of things, and then realizing that the stream of things cannot provide what they crave – they actually resent it (read Scheler’s book “Ressentiment” and apply his analysis to the existentialists and see how it fits – it’s spooky).
In response, they turn to the only tense of time that resembles transcendence, with its mystery and promise – the future. The ressentiment towards time – towards purely temporal existence – gets cabined in the past, by and large, and seeps into the present. The now-dashed yearning for guidance is cast into the obscure future, which can then be treated as the “temporal-eternal,” the placeholder for eternity and transcendence in the city of man.
Now, there isn’t a lot that’s new in this – the idea of “immanentizing the eschaton” is familiar to most conservatives, borrowed from Voegelin. The only novelty in the above, I think, is the hypothesis that the immanentizing project is rooted in a mood of hatred for time and resentment at existence. (Then again, that was always something of the purport of identifying the utopians as Gnostics.)
Probably all I’d done in thinking that through is added some texture. Nothing wrong with that, but I felt like I was reinventing the wheel.
The upshot, the log line, is still pretty punchy though: Eternity is dead, long live eternity. You say you rejected eternity in order to better love life, but it turns out that life refuses your advances without eternity’s blessing. Existentialism, one might say, is the homage time pays to eternity.
Minta –
That Wright essay is excellent. Thanks for passing it along.
Minta Marie Morze,
Thanks. I agree with Ymarsakar.
Wright:
Wright’s base assertion that for Leftists “there is no truth” is only partially correct. The bolded parts are more accurate. For the Left, there is no objective truth in terms of the human experience. Their truth is a point of view, subjective, and personal. Their truth is narrative, and story-telling is elastic.
In place of objective truth in the human experience, leftists have identity-based social truths that are either dominant as winner-norms or discredited as loser-stigmas.
I’ve observed about the Left that they don’t want truth; they want their narrative. They don’t want peace; they want allegiance. And morality is plastic, as plastic as the narrative.
Related, see ‘identity-protective cognition’ at:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2012/10/29/the-science-communication-problem-one-good-explanation-four.html
The Left doesn’t accept empirical truth, but they accept dogma, doctrines of a religious zealotry authority, as well as truth of a metaphysical divinity like Hussein.
This is merely a different system of epistemology and is easily familiar to those of us who have studied philosophy 101 or in this case epistemology + metaphysics = ethics.
Ethics -> Politics -> Beauty
Thus Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is based around Aristotle’s own epistemology and metaphysics.
But on a practical level, people don’t really need to understand the theory so much. If they do, I would have been repeating the theory for several years now. What people need to understand more importantly is the practical consequences of the theory.
For example:
I thought that by saying so outright and plainly, it might wake some people up to what they were themselves saying; if they had not fully “gone over”, so to speak.
Invariably though, it merely provoked howls of indignation and outrage.
Let’s take that as a case study.
My origin point and context background is psychological interrogation, torture, verbal interrogation, psychological warfare, and propagandized weapons. Thus when I speak of advertisement, I use military esque lingo. When Eric here speaks about the same issue, he uses activist terms because that’s his background and familiar perspective. When Neo talks about the same issue, she uses local social experience, psychology, etc. as a framepoint.
Now with that out of the way, I would estimate that the indictments against the Left’s philosophy “provokes howls” due to the fact that every individual has their own identity that they wish to protect. For a patriot, it’s generally the strength of their country and thus family. For a Leftist, it’s the divine sanctity of their righteousness and religious dogma (reference Gaians and Obamacans). When a person’s identity is threatened or hurt, they defend it, not always to the death but with ruthless savagery, as any animal when cornered can do. When you peal away a Leftist’s moral sanctity by exposing hypocrisy or doubleplusungood on their part, it hurts. It really does. To those of us who use reason or individual identity, it doesn’t hurt because we constantly challenge ourselves and we take that to be a productive, not losing, proposition. A practical example might be Breitbart or O’Keefe. They are effective not because they have more money or influence than the RNC, but because they hit the Left where it hurts. The Left’s SOP was designed to destroy morally upright civilizations. Reversing it on the Left, would be to destroy the Left’s morality.
There are a few response an interrogated subject may present. If he doesn’t want to talk, he won’t talk or communicate. If he wants something, he’ll try to talk or negotiate. If he fears something, he’ll attempt to avoid it using force or negotiation. If a person begins to break down, their resistance to words and force both decrease until they go catatonic to evade self destruction or they break entirely and can be remolded. Examples of resistance breaking are terrorists agreeing to tell secrets in exchange for the waterboarding to stop. Also examples are the police interrogating teenage subjects, alone, for more than 24 hours without external contact. Historically, teenagers can’t resist that level of weak coercion and will break down crying, males or females.
The SDS and various other religious organizations often use brainwashing or sexual conditioning methods. This breaks through normal external resistance and the unwillingness to talk, by ensuring that there is a stimuli that cannot be ignored. The only defense to enforced captivity is catatonia or individual identity repression (such as amnesia, schizophrenia, or partial personality changes). The military trains individuals to escape and evade, since resistance to higher tier interrogation methods are not 100% over infinite time.
In order for a Leftist to cease defending their faith, they must give it up. But they won’t do so willingly, hence the howls of outrage and protests they will provide. In order to destroy their resistance and identity, you must kill their faith. In order to kill their faith, it requires breaking through the armor of their defenses. The more they howl, protest, use violence, or throw tantrums or break down crying, the more you must attack them until their personal resources are depleted. Then they can be reprogrammed or what other people here call “convinced”. That’s what happens when somebody other than your Soul “convinces” you.
Generally a Leftist feels the nature of the threat of personal identity dissolution, so they will band together in clans or groups in order for common and mutual defense.
In circumstances where individual persuasion is unfeasible, what people often wait for is the boot of reality to stomp on the subject’s head. People may call this being mugged by reality. The additional shock, suffering, or pain brought by reality may break through a subject’s defenses and motivate them to seek solutions outside the Left’s circle. But these are generally inferior products to directed, personal interrogation methods. Alcoholic’s Anonymous doesn’t cure every case, after all. A directed interrogation can go from 24 hours to 72+ hours, nonstop via shift changes in interrogators. A member of the Left’s religion, however, will usually be given breaks and time to commune with their divine authority. Thus their damaged morale and self will regenerate over time. That’s why slow dropping of hints usually isn’t effective. So long as the armor of the Left’s faith repairs itself, no internal change will result. A hint or factual contradiction may damage a person’s sense of self and belief, but humans are flexible and they regenerate damage if you leave them alone.
The only change that happens is due to internal pressure or external pressure. The Left uses rape and sexual deviancy as a way to convince people that the external force going into their body, is equal to their internal resolve. This is a process of conditioning if extended beyond the normal. Reference the case of Patty Hearst or the Left’s various child molestation cases, such as the Catholic Church’s so called “scandals”. It’s postulated as a hypothesis that children who are molested, will molest others in the future. The programming is effected through a physical act, that replaces a person’s reasoning with external stimuli. This is cruder than the more refined brainwashing processes. The more refined processes involve hypnosis or verbal mind control. Reference the case of various child molestation cases brought to court due to hypnotic therapy with Leftist psychotherapists. Study how that case evolved and why it was deemed false decades later, after several families were destroyed by the legal charges.
What people call reasoning or individual will is merely internal pressure. Something inside you won’t let you do something you know is wrong. And you know it is wrong regardless of what social authority says is right. The Left changes the world via using external force to reconfigure internal processes. Whereas human free will is designed to allow internal forces to reconfigure external circumstances. But since the Left thinks that external circumstances are due to human internal issues like racial division and unfair white advantage…
To put the conflict between the Leftist alliance and us into a broader historical perspective, imagine what it would take to convince Protestants that Catholics were right in the 100 year wars. What level of force, what kind of development, could convince the Pope to recognize the Protestant Reformation? Because when we look at the Left, we must think in religious terms, not political or rational terms. When the Left attacks Christianity, it is not because of skepticism or atheism. When you look at it in a broader sense, and stop believing the Left’s propaganda, it will look different. It will look, as it really is, a war between beliefs and faiths.
Ymarsakar,
It all ultimately goes to the mind. As you point out up front, the orientation and field of view differ.
For the activist, the focus is on manipulating the social cultural and political conditions of the social environment or ecosystem more than the individual directly, which is your entry point. The collective, the general will, We the People. The zeitgeist. Religion, including the secular kind, is a social phenomenon. Mass media. Normative education. Popular entertainment. The law is a social condition.
Activists think more in terms of sociology than psychology, ‘behavioral economics’ as termed in the 2009 Times article about Obama someone (sorry, I forgot the commenter) linked at Neo’s recently.
Add: For the activist, the social nature of a group encompasses but is distinct from the individuals of the group. Thus, manipulating the social conditions of a social environment or ecosystem is not the same as aggregating individual interactions.
As you also point out, social vs individual orientations are not mutually exclusive in practical execution. But it’s not the same game, either. While the person of the Right traditionally tries to reason, via explanation or debate, with individuals, the Left activist, oftentimes in apparent individual interactions that take the form of explanation or debate, is actually aiming for a broader social effect – the zeitgeist. Programming the Matrix.
Thus, T’s chess player and pigeon metaphor for leftists. The chess player mocks the pigeon for how the pigeon plays chess, but the pigeon isn’t playing chess with the chess pieces and the chessboard. Chess is a structured, bordered, rules-bound game between two individuals. Whereas the pigeon’s (Marxist-method activist) game surrounds the chessboard and is the only social-political game there is.
}}} They are hypocrites, and the only way to win is to make them live up to their book of rules. I have found that the only thing they care about is racism, sexism and exploitation.”
I believe this is true of the mainline. There are always quacks and charlatans for whom this does not matter, but I have won long, drawn-out FB debates by specifically noting that my feminist “(haha) “moderate” opposition had used some variant of “homosexual!” as a denegration. That is, she insulted me in a manner that made it VERY evidently clear that she was a “homophobe” by her own lights.
And not only did I note it, but the other liberal in the conversation noted it. She tried some lame excuses, but quickly retired to “chants” of “Homophobe!” which she KNEW were true (I don’t think she was actually a homophobe, but she clearly had “impure” thoughts about homosexuals, according to liberal dogma)
And, I have always maintained, she responded in a typical lefty fashion — she censored the evidence, by presenting a complaint to FB that the conversation itself was “insulting”.
I have no proof it was her, but FB noted the commentary within hours of its occurrence, and ripped out about 90% of the back-and-forth, including her inconvenient “homophobic” slur.
So, suggestion — if you’re ever in one of those on FB, and you win, such as I did, GET A COPY OF IT RIGHT AWAY. Because they’ll try and purge it if you let them.
Open up all the “abbreviated” comments and select-copy the entire thread. It’ll be gone by the next morning.
What IgotB noted is also true for the lower echelon fodder when people drop them hints.
If it bounces off their armor, it is ignored. If the evidence is too strong to ignore, they will make it disappear. So that it will never have existed in the first place.
Penetrating the Left’s armor takes a sustained armor piercing barrage, stacked on top of each other in a line.
“Which is why Richard Nixon resigned and Bill Clinton held fast”.
I do think Republicans take their principles more seriously than Democrats, but this is not necessarily proof of it. Republicans were a minority in Nixon’s time. They could have stood behind him and he still would have been gone. Democrats were a majority in Clinton’s time. If they stood behind him, he stayed. This may not be dispositive, but it is certainly a consideration.
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