Posted on 08/17/2004 10:52:30 PM PDT by lowbridge
//2 How Conservatism Works
Conservative social orders have often described themselves as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that "the enemies of civilization hate bow ties". But what conservatism calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy. Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is not civilization.
The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.
***snip***
* The Destruction of Reason
Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought.
Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal.
Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.
The main idea of public relations is the distinction between "messages" and "facts". Messages are the things you want people to believe. A message should be vague enough that it is difficult to refute by rational means. (People in politics refer to messages as "strategies" and people who devise strategies as "strategists". The Democrats have strategists too, and it is not at all clear that they should, but they scarcely compare with the vast public relations machinery of the right.) It is useful to think of each message as a kind of pipeline: a steady stream of facts is selected (or twisted, or fabricated) to fit the message. Contrary facts are of course ignored. The goal is what the professionals call "message repetition". This provides activists with something to do: come up with new facts to fit the conservative authorities' chosen messages. Having become established in this way, messages must also be continually intertwined with one another. This is one job of pundits.
To the public relations mind, the public sphere is a game in which the opposition tries to knock you off your message. Take the example of one successful message, "Gore's lies". The purpose of the game was to return any interaction to the message, namely that Gore lies. So if it is noted that the supposed examples of Gore lying (e.g., his perfectly true claim to have done onerous farm chores) were themselves untrue, common responses would include, "that doesn't matter, what matters is Gore's lies", or "the reasons people believe them is because of Gore's lies", or "yes perhaps, but there are so many other examples of Gore's lies", or "you're just trying to change the subject away from Gore's lies", and so on.
Many of these messages have become institutions. Whole organizations exist to provide a pipeline of "facts" that underwrite the message of "liberal media bias". These "facts" fall into numerous categories and exemplify a wide range of fallacies. Some are just factually untrue, e.g., claims that the New York Times has failed to cover an event that it actually covered in detail. Other claimed examples of bias are non sequiturs, e.g., quotations from liberal columns that appear on the opinion pages, or quotations from liberals in news articles that also provided balancing quotes from conservatives. Others are illogical, e.g., media that report news events that represent bad news for the president. The methods of identifying "bias" are thus highly elastic. In practice, everything in the media on political topics that diverges from conservative public relations messages is contended to be an example of "liberal bias". The goal, clearly, is to purge the media of everything except conservatism.
The word "inaccurate" has become something of a technical term in the political use of public relations. It means "differs from our message".
Public relations aims to break down reason and replace it with mental associations. One tries to associate "us" with good things and "them" with bad things. Thus, for example, the famous memo from Newt Gingrich's (then) organization GOPAC entitled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control". It advised Republican candidates to associate themselves with words like "building", "dream", "freedom", "learn", "light", "preserve", "success", and "truth" while associating opponents with words like "bizarre", "decay", "ideological", "lie", "machine", "pathetic", and "traitors". The issue here is not whether these words are used at all; of course there do exist individual liberals that could be described using any of these words. The issue, rather, is a kind of cognitive surgery: systematically creating and destroying mental associations with little regard for truth. Note, in fact, that "truth" is one of the words that Gingrich advised appropriating in this fashion. Someone who thinks this way cannot even conceptualize truth.
Conservative strategists construct their messages in a variety of more or less stereotyped ways. One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly. An commonplace example would be taking something from someone by claiming that they are in fact taking it from you. Or, having heard a careful and detailed refutation of something he has said, the projector might snap, "you should not dismiss what I have said so quickly!". It is a false claim -- what he said was not dismissed -- that is an example of itself -- he is dismissing what his opponent has said.
Projection was an important part of the Florida election controversy, for example when Republicans tried to get illegal ballots counted and prevent legal ballots from being counted, while claiming that Democrats were trying to steal the election.
I am an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
* Rebut conservative arguments
This is my most important prescription. Liberals win political victories through rational debate.
***snip***
* Assess the sixties
Make a list of the positive and lasting contributions of the sixties. Americans would benefit from such a list.
***snip***
* Clone George Soros
George Soros is an excellent citizen.
The psychology of liberalism
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3020
I'm not surprised that this guy is a college professor. He is a self-congratulatory jerk that can't mount a cogent argument to save his life yet pides himself on logical argument.
Anyone on this board could eat this jerk for breakfast.
College Professor?
What is he, a social "Scientist" or Humanties teacher.
Reminds me of what one of my Chem professors said,
"A conculsion is not "what you feel, I had some fun, my parnter was an idoit",that's social science."/
Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Go ahead, parents. Mortgage your homes to pay for this tripe.
Go ahead and publish his email address.
On reading the first bit of the article, I had initially formed the conclusion that he was someone suffering from tertiary paresis who still somehow remembered how to punctuate a sentence.
Clearly, the prognosis is rather more severe than I'd imagined.
I can tell this little Marxist is a college professor.
Here's a typical quote: "Even more toxic is the notion that those who criticize the president are claiming to be better people than he is. This is authoritarianism. "
It's amazing this guy passed Bonehead English. It's bad enough we have social promotion in grade school. It's evident that we now have this problem in graduate school as well. And now he's a "professor".
Well, he is only an associate professor - presumably this means he's not a full professor...because a full professor should know that conservatism was actually "invented" after liberalism. It was essentially started by Edmund Burke in response to the liberal excesses of the French Revolution. To nutshell conservatism, it is an understanding that no person, or group of person, can attain enough knowledge and skill to sit in judgement upon society - the inherited norms of our society may, indeed, be modified over time, but no one can say that "x" should be immediately done away with because no one can have sufficient knowledge to see all the possible good and ill effects of immediately doing away with "x".
The next time someone asks me why I dropped out of college, I'll simply point this new piece of toilet paper.
This is simply a very young man with an advanced degree and a head full of cliches. He may grow out of it and become a real intellectual, but if he doesn't the university will be his playpen until he's back in diapers.
Morally straight, industrious and pro law and order = bedrock of conservatism. What does opposing these honorable concepts tell you about the left?
I cannot express how crazy this makes me! We all saw with our own eyes who was trying to get illegal ballots counted! I hasten to add this deceitful socialist is most likely referring to the military ballots they so shamefully tried to throw out! The leftists have totally become anti American, and I mean that with all that is within me! (drama queenish, but true)
I'm actually on Agre's email list. He puts out some interesting reading lists for my field (information science) and has had some thoughtful things to say about information policy with which most FReepers would probably agree. However, every now and then he comes out with this liberal crap.
When I got this email I just deleted it out of hand w/o opening. You learn to do that as a conservative academic, otherwise you'd go nuts.
Ha ha! Now they're projecting their own projection! Just amazing.
Can't this "college professor" show more tolerence to people that are different from him? Can't he accept us for what we are?
Booo Hooo. I have to go eat Chocolate ice cream now.
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