Posted on 06/16/2017 7:03:42 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
In a general sense, Alinsky makes it easy to criticize him and his ideas. This is because the starting point of his philosophy is to first wipe all moral substance off the table, yet in interviews he speaks of “right” and “wrong,” and so on.
What I hate is lying. This includes the act of claiming to care about the poor while caring more profoundly, as evidenced by his statements, about power for its own sake.
To follow Alinsky is ultimately the same as Slim Pickens enthusiastically straddling the nuke all the way to ground zero.
>>In a general sense, Alinsky makes it easy to criticize him and his ideas. This is because the starting point of his philosophy is to first wipe all moral substance off the table, yet in interviews he speaks of “right” and “wrong,” and so on.
OK. So we are having two discussions. You are discussing the man. I am discussing the ideas. The man is dead and burning in hell. He was a Humanist, an Existentialist, probably a Post-Modernist. So, he does not “wipe morality off the table”. He, like all Existentialists, redefine it. They redefine morality in the only way that a non-theist can define moralist—they define it according to the highest form of life they accept, which is Man. But, it is Man the Animal, a creature of instincts that obtained reason by way of a random accident and the desire to propagate DNA.
Alinsky, and all Existentialists, will tell you that man’s purpose is to propagate his DNA and all civilization is created to preserve the DNA
So, in their worldview, morality exists to give DNA a better chance to mature to be able to propagate more DNA. When this is true, morality becomes conditional and personal. There can’t be absolute Right and Wrong, because “while it is bad to murder me, it may be good for me to murder the person who threatens me, or my success”. When he talks of “right” and “wrong” because his definition of the two is different than ours.
In other words, the Humanist (Existentialist, Progressive, whatever) is Man left to his own nature, the sinful nature described in the bible. In “Mere Christianity”, CS Lewis even notes that everyone has a morality. He states that even the worst criminal understands that stealing is bad, when you steal from him! So, morals are DEFINITELY not wiped off the table. Only the absolutes of morality are wiped off it. But, you have Christian churches that accept homosexual clergy, abortion on demand, and casual divorce and fornication as acceptable, so you don’t even have to be a Humanist to wipe away absolute morality, do you.
>>To follow Alinsky is ultimately the same as Slim Pickens enthusiastically straddling the nuke all the way to ground zero.
I truly hope that you haven’t convinced yourself that I “follow” Alinsky. I understand him and his followers. I educate myself on the mind of the enemy. I do not close my mind in the irrational fear that Alinsky’s little book can override the power of the Holy Spirit because, if he could, then he is proven right.
Why not just say let’s fight the good fight? I think we can fight it without paying homage to, or even making mention of the various deceptive men from history who don’t really deserve any credit for anything good.
>>Why not just say let’s fight the good fight? I think we can fight it without paying homage to, or even making mention of the various deceptive men from history who don’t really deserve any credit for anything good.
Because that is intellectual cowardice. I will not allow myself to be that ignorant.
Even the Old Testament lists the bad kings so you can know why they were.
It might be that I’m not articulating clearly. If that’s the case, I apologize. And it could be I’m misunderstanding you, perhaps in truth I agree with what you believe.
Put it this way. During the campaign, Trump fought dirty. But he did it the old fashioned way with an honest heart, the way people have always fought since long before Alinsky thrust his dishonest heart on popular culture. This is how we should do things. The old fashioned way with an honest heart.
>>Put it this way. During the campaign, Trump fought dirty. But he did it the old fashioned way with an honest heart, the way people have always fought since long before Alinsky thrust his dishonest heart on popular culture. This is how we should do things. The old fashioned way with an honest heart.
I agree that something is getting lost in the translation. From the very beginning, I have been saying again and again that we need to use tactics that win and, as you put it, “with an honest heart”. Remember that I used the examples of unrestricted submarine warfare and blitzkrieg as ways that tactics can be used for good or evil. Alinsky tactics are literally the political version of unrestricted submarine warfare.
And, yes, I have served in submarines and I know exactly how we would have sunk an enemy troop ship just as willingly as we would have launched nuclear missiles to destroy the world.
Alinsky’s great error was to merge good with evil. Traditional Americans don’t do this. Neither does President Trump. It’s one of the stupidest things a person can do.
Trump voters put Trump in power because they understand the roles of good and evil. This demonstrates the superiority of their collective intelligence relative to that of Hillary and Bernie voters, who for the most part sympathize with Alinsky’s views on morality.
>>Alinsky’s great error was to merge good with evil. Traditional Americans don’t do this. Neither does President Trump. It’s one of the stupidest things a person can do.
>>Trump voters put Trump in power because they understand the roles of good and evil. This demonstrates the superiority of their collective intelligence relative to that of Hillary and Bernie voters, who for the most part sympathize with Alinsky’s views on morality.
Whatever. Progressives (not just Alinsky, who you seem to obsess over as a super-villain) do not “merge” good and evil. As I already explained in detail, they redefine it according to Humanist principles. Like many FReepers, you paint the other side as cartoons or just as these simple one-dimensional people who know that they are evil.
Benjamin Franklin (a great American, right?) would have agreed with Alinsky in his basic Deism (the literal slippery slope towards Humanism). Yet Franklin rejected regeneration through the Holy Spirit and believed in a form of human perfection that Alinsky would accept as true but you would certainly say is the merging of good and evil. This was in spite of the fact that Franklin was friends with the great preacher, George Whitefield. Whitefield pleaded with Franklin to accept Christ, but Franklin wrote that Whitefield’s efforts were fruitless and Franklin was proud that he has resisted.
Richard Dawkins invented the theory you referenced about “propagation of DNA” after Alinsky died. The founders of existentialism were also dead by then.
The merging of good and evil is exactly what Alinsky does. Hegel is known for a prominent form of this sort of thing in his dialectic, which in my opinion is merely an idea he borrowed from ancient Chinese philosophy. It’s an occult practice. I don’t know whether or to what extent Alinsky was involved in the occult, but I do know that many in his vein are so involved.
My advice, not necessarily to you because you probably don’t feel you need my advice, but to anyone trying to understand Alinsky, is that he was under the influence of things very evil. Possibly without his conscious awareness, although this question is a very complicated and difficult one.
>>My advice, not necessarily to you because you probably don’t feel you need my advice, but to anyone trying to understand Alinsky, is that he was under the influence of things very evil. Possibly without his conscious awareness, although this question is a very complicated and difficult one.
My advice is to understand that humans do not need to be “under the influence of things very evil” to be evil. It is our natural state. Those who seek true morality are the ones under the counsel of someone very good and just. People become Humanists because they do not know God, because if they did, they would choose differently. Alinsky is nothing but a famous example of a human who pursues his own non-purpose. For every Alinsky,there are thousands (tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Who knows?) of unknown Humanists who are creating their own morality based on what is right in their own mind.
If you have a better name for Alinsky’s Rules that can be used in conversation so that others will understand what I’m talking about without description, then please tell me. Proper nouns exist to specifically name something.
Frankly, I don’t think I’ve really disagreed with any of your philosophical or theological statements. If my zeal to discard anything Alinsky has caused strife in our discussion, it’s wrong, it’s my fault and I ask your forgiveness.
I don’t know any particular name or phrase. But I’d like to bring attention to something Trump did during the election. It’s a spectacular example of how we should proceed. It was holding a press conference with Clinton’s victims and inviting them to the debate. And I think it brings to light the Achilles’ heel of Alinskyism, one for which there is no remedy: in any given moment, for that moment alone, Alinskyism pretends to have accountability. As do all branches of humanism. So for any given subject of the moment, they can be held accountable. This is their Achilles’ heel.
>>I don’t know any particular name or phrase.
Neither can I. So, I have to keep calling them Alinsky’s Rules. Doing so does not make me a disciple of Saul Alinsky, or a Humanist, or a Progressive. It doesn’t endorse Alinsky the man.
>>And I think it brings to light the Achilles’ heel of Alinskyism, one for which there is no remedy: in any given moment, for that moment alone, Alinskyism pretends to have accountability.
It has no remedy, but there is also no defense when used against to affect the thinking of the average (+/- a couple standard deviations) of the typical 21st century, media-centric, post-industrial, mostly secular American adult. And when I say mostly secular, I include most cultural Christians.
But it does not “pretend to have accountability” at any time. This is its strength—the fact that Alinsky’s Rules have no accountability by design. That is their greatest strength when used in our present-day population and why it didn’t work nearly as well 30-40 years ago before MTV and Headline News destroyed our attention spans. They don’t have to create a narrative that passes the test of time. They are designed to create a narrative right now to generate an emotional response because emotions are all that people really remember.
I don’t protest your decision to use the phrase. But I will protest when it’s not used accurately, or if anyone uses it to promote Alinskyism.
I do maintain that to promote Alinskyism is to misunderstand it.
There is no person in the political world who doesn’t pretend to have accountability. Alinsky’s rules themselves might not pretend this, but the rules are useless until an actual person puts them into practice. Any person applying the rules pretends accountability. And this is their great weakness.
I would go as far as to say that in using language itself, Alinskyism, or any other postmodernism-like ideology, goes against its own precepts. This is the well-known self-refutatory property of postmodernism. You can’t use language without pretending accountability.
>>I would go as far as to say that in using language itself, Alinskyism, or any other postmodernism-like ideology, goes against its own precepts. This is the well-known self-refutatory property of postmodernism.
Really?? How?
There are several ways to explain the multifaceted conceptual structure defining Alinskyism and all other types of postmodern thinking. I’ll try metaphors.
Like the middle class neighborhood street gang who don’t have the name recognition of their urban counterparts. The desire for unattainable power.
Or the typical rock band groupies. Desire for lost authenticity.
An adolescent boy jumping onto a freight train, pretending he’s driving it and that it goes where he commands. A pathetic desire for authority.
The best parallel to self-refutation is a man disassembling his boat, planning to rebuild it the way he likes, but doing all of this after departing from the dock. The irrational, impossible desire to be creator.
>>...desire for unattainable power...Desire for lost authenticity...pathetic desire for authority...irrational, impossible desire to be creator.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. -Sun Tzu
Nice metaphors. But your use of unattainable, lost, pathetic, irrational, impossible demonstrates the basic problem that we have with the Progs. We underestimate them and wonder why every victory we make is followed by a dozen small defeats.
Their rank and file are a mindless herd of clowns. This is intentional, because it causes you to underestimate the movement. Their decision-makers are smart, patient, and have contingency plans. Their recent trouble is due Trump being able to get inside their OODA loop by turning their strengths against them. So, I call for us to use Alinsky TACTICS (not AlinskyISM, Progressivism, or any othe -ism) to force them on the defensive from their own tactics.
I prefer to use the tactics Trump used during the campaign.
This is the reason conservatives lose so much—we don’t do it the way Trump does. It wins elections, and it holds the enemy accountable.
>>I prefer to use the tactics Trump used during the campaign.
>>This is the reason conservatives lose so much—we don’t do it the way Trump does. It wins elections, and it holds the enemy accountable.
I prefer Trump’s tactics too. But, not everyone is an Alpha Alpha Male with billions in wealth to spend.
And, here’s the secret....Trump used Alinsky-like tactics anyway once it became obvious that he was actually speaking truth to power in both parties. The early-adopters who jumped on the Trump wagon back when almost all FReepers were rooting for the “consistent conservative” Whats-His-Name (rhymes with Lose) saw that. Search back a year or more and see how the “Trumpets” (as we were called back when the FR battle cry was “Cruz or Lose” were noting Trump’s effective used of Alinsky tactics to overcome the Left (in both parties).
Those were Trump tactics, not Alinsky tactics.
>>Those were Trump tactics, not Alinsky tactics.
Invented by Trump and never used in any form, whole or in part, anyplace any time by any one else? That seems to be your standard for giving someone credit for anything.
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