No Secret Place
Whether the 1959 movie, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, really referred to the Communist infiltration of America is a subject of debate. But the fear of “Pod People”, aliens who take over earth by masquerading as humans, appeals to a primal fear of secret beings among us. And it is this atavism which is partly behind the reaction to the existence of the JournoList posting group, to which Dave Wiegel, the Washington Post reporter covering “conservatives” belonged. Weigel had one persona in public and another persona in the Journolist posting group. The question is: what’s wrong with that? Politico described Journolist as a facility where “for the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space.” Was it:
Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?
Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”
Walter Shapiro makes the case for a private place where people can ‘let their hair down’ and dare to be offensive. Without this freedom, people would be funneled too early into the consensus view. They would weigh their words prematurely at a time when every idea must remain on the table. Without this secret space there would be no forum for draft concepts, where arguments could be advanced without fear, taken to extremes and examined for absurdities. Once upon a time, Shaprio says, people understood that what counted was the formal utterance, not the confidential thought. “In another era,” he wrote, “Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed the State Department’s code-breaking office in 1929 because, as he quaintly explained, ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’” Alas, some blackguard has read Wiegel’s mail and told the world what was in it. Shapiro pined for a more genteel age.
How laudable, how naive, how early 20th century. The zone of privacy these days stops at the edge of your thoughts. It is impossible for any group (and this means liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-road vegans) to share off-the-record ideas online without running the risk that someone will breach the bonds of trust to score cheap political points. Every time someone like Weigel is humiliated because of quickly typed off-the-cuff comments, it moves us closer to a world where we all communicate in predictable homogenized phrases because who knows where they might end up.
The weakness of Shapiro’s argument is that it lacks context. Not all privacies are equal. In important public matters very little is excusable as personal. Stimston’s bureaucratic heirs want to know the secrets of Julian Assange, the Founder of Wikileaks, not out of idle curiosity about Assange, but to find out who gave him the trove of secret State Department cables which he has threatened to publish. Because the Climate Research Unit‘s secret emails cooking up data to support Global Warming are bound up with public funding they are different in character from a private exchange between scientists trying out novel theories on each other. We should not be interested in people’s private opinions about public policy, but we have a vital interest in discovering private efforts to manipulate public facts.
The distinction turns on the subject of the secret communications and the nature of the parties involved. When secret forums can materially effect vital public interests or when they involve persons in positions of power they should be judged by a different standard than a debate between two friends over drinks. What makes the JournoList group different from any other Internet forum is precisely the claim that journalists are different. They assert a special role and enhanced First Amendment rights just as news organizations argue they have a unique role in society distinct from corporations or unions engaging in political speech. These claims bring with them a corresponding burden of power. The corresponding price of claiming public trust as a qualification is an obligation to live up to that claim. Whoever asserts an objective’ and ‘truthful’ viewpoint would be unwise to engage in conspiratorial behavior — at least not without embarassment. Spiderman understood the tradeoff perfectly: “with great power comes great responsibility”.
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But the more practical problem with crafting the narrative from a secret place is that the public begins wonder if places like the JournoList aren’t the forges of the sudden changes in contemporary stories that might called the ‘Turn’; an alternation in narrative so sudden it provokes astonishment. There have been enough Turns of late to make the new audience start to look under the shells for the pea. Recently Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted by his own party after they ‘discovered’ that he was a thoroughly unpleasant man. According to press reports the Labor party collectively realized in the space of 24 hours that ‘this was not the Kevin Rudd they used to know’ and decided to replace him with Julia Gillard who was conveniently available. How a politician in his 50s, long known to Party leaders and for so long in journalism’s gaze could remain an unknown quantity for so long beggars explanation. But it is no more astounding than Peggy Noonan’s confession of her realization that the President, far from being a genius, might actually be incompetent. It is one among many reversals of story line. When Global Warming fades amid the worst winters in memory; when one discovers after many years that the uber-tolerant Helen Thomas actually wants the Jews to go back to Germany and given the repeated failure of the press to discover political scandals before the National Inquirer or the Drudge Report then it is natural for people to wonder whether things are all they are cracked up to be. The real problem with places like JournoList is that it very conveniently confirms the worst suspicions. And that bodes ill for the press.
The real challenge before the 21st century press is not to create private spaces in which to craft public facts but to create ways through which public facts may be privately confirmed. The world needs fewer secret clubs and more ways for ordinary people to verify things for themselves. The Internet has accustomed millions to the possibility of unintermediated knowledge, raised the expectation that it shouldn’t require a privileged point of view for a fact to be believed. People are beginning to demand this. The power of open source knowledge (and of the scientific method for that matter) is that anybody can confirm the essentials of the claim for himself.
We believe in Google Maps because when we go to the direction indicated, we find the address there. We believe in Amazon.com because when we order a book from it it usually arrives in the mail after some days. We can do business on EBay because the trading cards we buy eventually show up at our doorstep. Whether it is code that claims to add two numbers or a formula which describes the acceleration of objects falling under gravity we could in principle reproduce it ourselves. Stories whose truth relies upon the acceptance of a privileged point of view will be increasingly harder to sell as time goes by. People tended to stop believing in Robert Fisk — no matter how eminent he was — after his descriptions failed to square with the observed facts. Facts which come from a Black Box — whether the dictation of a supernatural being, or a birth certificate only the elect can see, or files of no known provenance dropped off wherever Julian Assange is– must overcome the modern requirement for direct inspection. News from a Black Box will be increasingly regarded as doubtful even if it is true. This doesn’t necessarily mean that news can’t start from a Black Box, but like a preached faith, the news requires eventual revalidation before it gains final acceptance.
For this reason the utility of closing secret Left Wing forums only to reopen them under other names may be of doubtful utility. Shapiro says that JournoList is closing because its archives have “become a weapon” against its members, though it will rise again in some presumably secret place, “with a different name and a renewed sense of collective trust.”
Friday afternoon Ezra Klein announced on JournoList and his Washington Post blog that he would be shutting down the online conversation pit because of the security breach. As he put it, “Insofar as the current version of JournoList has seen its archives become a weapon, and insofar as people’s careers are now at stake, it has to die.” The last few hours of JournoList were devoted to its members (including me) expressing the hope that someone would reorganize the bulletin board with a different name and a renewed sense of collective trust. It is that final ingredient that will be hardest to replicate.”
But what is the point of that? It is still a secret fountain from which the unwashed will be barred. Once upon a time it might have been useful as authority when trust was founded on secret knowledge. In the future trust will be built on expressing a set of verifiable facts that anyone can take the trouble to check. Edward Guest expressed it perfectly a long time ago.
To have no secret place wherein
I stoop unseen to shame or sin;
To be the same when I’m alone
And when my every deed is known;
To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or shame
Exactly what men think I am.To leave some simple mark behind
To keep my having lived in mind;
If enmity to aught I show.
To be an honest, generous foe,
To play my little part, nor whine
That greater honors are not mine.
This, I believe, is all I need
For my philosophy and creed.
That’s a better way to gain credibility than calling people ratf***kers in private.
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So Journolist got purged. That’s what it is, isn’t it?
What Wretchard just said I agree with. What happens in a private forum becomes important to the degree that the power of the individuals who post there grows. Media still asks for a degree of privacy and deference that they won’t tolerate for anyone else.
I dunno wretchard, I can’t really buy into all this heavy thinking. Was it really a secret that the MSM is full of leftoids? Isn’t any *shock* at Journolist just as feined as what anyone is accusing them of doing? Piffle.
I don’t see how a private forum like JournoList can do anything but impose the conformity Shapiro claims to disdain. After college, many years ago, I chose to live alone in a tiny apartment so that I could avoid having my acquaintances approved or disapproved by roomates. I could invite all sorts of people to dinner and know that they would not edit their conversations with me for third-party consumption. It seems to me as if the Listees were more interested in establishing JournoCreds than exploring the world and reaching their own conclusions.
The real challenge before the 21st century press is not to create private spaces in which to craft public facts but to create ways through which public facts may be privately confirmed. The world needs fewer secret clubs and more ways for ordinary people to verify things for themselves. The Internet has accustomed millions to the possibility of unintermediated knowledge, raised the expectation that it shouldn’t require a privileged point of view for a fact to be believed. People are beginning to demand this. The power of open source knowledge (and of the scientific method for that matter) is that anybody can confirm the essentials of the claim for himself.
But that Wretchard would mean the end of the established press as we currently know it. That’s like saying to the dinosaurs that they need to learn to coexist with all those nasty little mammals that keep eating their eggs. Down that path lies extinction. Once the aura of sanctity around the priesthood of the Narrative is broken what shall become of them?
My own theory as to how the press became so pathetic is that it correlates with the growth of government. The more the government regulates us the more it is that politicians and bureaucrats become the most accessible source of information for the “news.” How many news stories do you see where some government official is not quoted? Even with local crime stories most of the time the information comes purely from the police or the prosecuting authorities, not from some journalist doing his own investigation.
And what happens if you print anything bad about your sources? They dry up. Its no wonder most modern journalists are cheerleaders for the powers that be. Without them they might have to go out and work for a living.
There is an asymmetry between the Secret Clubs of conservative culture and those of the Left. For conservatives of a type the ideal is the Gentleman’s Club, redolent of tobacco and whiskey and sure to welcome you with a good fire and deep carpets and dark leather chairs. That is a place not only of comfort but of trust and deep mutual respect. That follows from the conservative view of life that the most moral and the most efficient method for dealing with the world is one of honesty simplicity and reliability for the common as well as individual good. The purpose of power, or the potential for force, is to protect the property that is used to improve and nurture the better aspects of human nature. The ideal activity is agricultural as patient husbandry is considered a proper model for government that seeks to emulate the care that a beneficent but distant Providence has for all of Nature and Man’s place in it.
For the Left none of that is true. The paradigm for the Socialist is the Bolshevik Cell or Jacobin Club. Those were places that cultivated deceit, manipulation and the enforced alteration of conditions through conspiracy. The ideal activity is industrial with Nature coerced into submission to a human will.
A Gentleman can have a Scotch after a long week and say “I take comfort in knowing the other team is even more screwed up than the idiots we are working for” and get only a smile and an offer of a lift home. For the Leftist words like that by some Lt Colonel or Major are a tool to destroy a General and bash History into obedience to their or, in their egoistic channeling of Rousseau, the General Will.
What got me thinking about the problem of JournoList was Wikileaks. How do we know secret knowledge is true? If somebody tells you he has classified information there’s a secret Nazi base on the dark side of the moon what is the comeback? Assange showed a film from secret sources showing civilians supposedly being massacred by the US military. Bill Roggio says it is edited. So is a Wikileaks report always true or always false; partly true or partly false and what is the basis for choosing any of these assessments.
Imagine one of the “secret” US diplomatic cables Wikileaks has asserts Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Does that invalidate the whole lot or just the inconvenient ones? Ultimately we need collateral to start deciding these claims. Bob Woodward cites Deep Throat as one his sources in All the President’s Men. But to this day, despite Fred Fielding’s confession and Woodwards confirmation there is still some controversy about whether Woodward the author composited him with someone else. And yet on such things does modern truth turn.
With information already so uncertain, with data lineage already so vague, what kind of role do secret forums play? Arguably they play some positive role in classified situations like Intellipedia because they broaden the number of eyes that see the claimed facts. But in the case of the Press, which supposedly deals with unclassified facts there is no a priori need to impose secrecy; indeed the wedding rule imperative should apply — “if any man knows why these two should not be united in matrimony …”. That’s why we don’t have secret weddings. The possibility of confirmation bias may outweigh the benefits of secret sharing among a closed group. Just saying.
Ultimately the best metric for judging the performance of the press is its predictive power. A well functioning open source intel system shouldn’t experience too many shocks, too many surprises, too often. I think the press as constituted is bedeviled with altogether too many Turns for there not to be an obvious problem. One reason for the decline in the prestige of the Press has been precisely due to its relatively poor track record. It needs a solution, but that fix is probably not another secret forum.
So JournoList was simply the keeper of the “Narrative”? If it weren’t so sad it would be hilarious, The greatest failure in our nation’s history of a class of individuals, the forth estate en toto, and the perps are still trying to wiggle out of the political nightmare they created. When folks would rather trust a used car salesman than a reporter, Pulitzer should be rolling over in his grave.
Begging wretchard’s pardon for seemingly ignoring his Deep Thoughts and instead turning on the snark:
Because Lord knows that the JournoList people would never succumb to the Gotcha temptation.
It’s not about Deep Thoughts at all. It’s about something a simple as “Bait and Switch” and “Truth in Packaging”. In Kevin Rudd’s case the Labor Party sold the Australian electorate someone they now say was damaged goods. But the admission was made only when it became evident that he was a loser and the opposition was leading in the polls; now there is sudden outrage and a rush to name someone who we are now told is as good as Kevin Rudd was supposed to be … and this time it’s true! So vote Labor once again boys, because the second time’s a charm.
The gatekeepers are in the business of telling the public what’s inside the box on the shelf. From a distance the packaging is mighty fine. But since not everyone is allowed up to the display case we rely on the few who are authorized to peer into the box on our behalf and pronounce on its contents. It is declared to be the finest pate de foie gras from France for only $4.99 a pound. Naturally we buy it. But when we take it home we find it to contain dog food.
This is the process that is used to sell Global Warming, immigration reform, engagement, health care reform, financial reform, etc. And maybe this time the products are good, but our suspicions are aroused by the gatekeepers passing around these secret notes coaching each other about what’s in the box. And when the audience reads one and finds itself reviled in these secret missives, well it looks bad doesn’t it? It sounds like a setup doesn’t it? So the solution to the credibility problem isn’t to pass around more secret notes, but finding a way to let the buyers look inside the box for themselves.
Although it sounds funny now, Gov. Blagojevich was supposed to be the reform candidate for Illinois, the guy who was going to clean up the system. And guess what? He’s not the Blag we used to know any more. To solve this kind of problem we don’t need any more secret forums. We need better ways to look inside the box of pate de foie gras.
For me 08/08/08 was when this heretofore mainstream conservative got mugged by reality, and I realized the paleocons were right while the Anglo-U.S. ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ got that one wrong, big time. Georgia started the war, and the most potent spin machine in the world only managed to obscure that fact for just a few weeks until almost everyone moved on to the election of The One. But even so, unlike Iraq the facts being debated could be observed, and contradicted, in real time – as opposed to shadowy contacts that may or may not have taken place and WMDs that might have been disposed of years earlier in Syria.
I have no real problem with restricted email lists or private cabals. What really gets me is the claim of journalists to be objective and unbiased when it’s now clear they are anything but.
For the media to survive the coming storm is actually very simple – just declare their biases up front, inform their potential readers that they’ll be approaching issues from a certain ideological perspective. When you’re honest about your motives and biases, people will cut you more slack, AND they’ll be certain to take your biases into account when trying to figure out the truth. Same thing with stuff like Journolist. Sure, it’s a left-biased association. Nothing wrong with that, as long as its members, when working in whatever media outlets, are honest about who they are and their own slants.
The media outlet that can accomplish this sort of honest declaration will survive. Those that can’t, won’t.
The gatekeepers are in the business of telling the public what’s inside the box on the shelf.
What does it say about the “gatekeepers’” mentality when, by the hundreds, they attend a gated party which is the cool idea of a 24 year old wunderkind?
Mr.X, lame, lame bait.
Breaking News:
Sen. Robert Byrd has died. My sympathies to his family.
Secret societies will always exist. They exist to share a gnosis among the enlightened which must NOT be shared with the world at large as well as to reinforce the sense of superiority and control it gives members of the fellowship. In a world in which the PC Wardens police the public expression (and thereby the thoughts) of the public, people who do not wholly share the PC Worldview will be forced to seek out like minded individuals on the QT. PC forces the compartmentalization of knowledge which in another age would have been honestly shared but which, if shared today, would result in condemnation and reprisal.
The greater the pressure to conform to the Official Current Truth the more divergent opinion will be forced underground, thereby diminishing the level of trust among members of society. As pressure to conform increases distrust grows. It grows in two ways. First, those who accept the Official Current Truth will be mistrustful of those who express dissenting views. Second, among those who hold dissenting views will distrust those who promulgate Official Current Truth as well as those who have been taken in by it.
It can be argued that PC Wardens do no more than what every society already does: define and guard the bounds of shared ideas and values. This is not the case. Any society is defined by its shared ideas and values. If it is to remain coherent there must be norms which define what makes ‘us’ who we are and what is beyond the pale. These ideas and values exist as an organic consensus within society and define it from within. We are
Americans precisely because we share a common set of ideas and values. What the PC Wardens are doing is deliberately impose by violence (lies, intimidation, misrepresentation, threats and brute force) a set of ideas and values which are not only alien to American society, but inimical to it.
And still they want us to trust them.
#14 kaba
Justice Ginsburg’s husband Martin died earlier today of metastatic cancer; they recently celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary.
You know … I doubt that Climategate would have happened via Wikileaks.
As for Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers – every time I see Senator Hanson-Young (Green party) on the TV that title comes to mind, or some sci-fi b-grader that involves aliens posing as humans.
#9 wretchard – We need better ways to look inside the box of pate de foie gras.
not to worry, the One will shut down the Internet sometime in August and with one fell swoop make it all nice again. We’ll have the old media and the .gov domains still up to tell us what’s in the box so we can do the same thing we did for decades while the foundation for our current mess was laid down. We can believe the “authoritative” sources rather than the trash on the Internet.
have a nice day
Of The Box and the Cat(s) in the Hat Box:
“Organized Gnosticism”.
…-
“15. Tamquam
Secret societies will always exist. They exist to share a gnosis among the enlightened which must NOT be shared with the world at large as well as to reinforce the sense of superiority and control it gives members of the fellowship.”
…-
Thomas F. Bertonneau:
“Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad or crusade, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/
#18 may or may not be right about the deed, but he is definitely right about the longing.
A former friend who went over the edge to the left used to talk about users of the term “MSM” with dripping contempt in the early W years. The idea that someone, anyone, would call into question the MSM’s intent and competence and objectivity or provide a conduit for an information stream that might give facts to undermine his precious leftist narrative was highly fear-inducing. In one of our last conversations, I told him that what was really bothering him was that his side had lost their hegemony on the information stream, and that the day of Cronkite declaring the war lost and having 98% of the populace say, “Oh well”, was over.
You cannot imagine his anger and consternation at my words. If this guy could turn it back, by any means, he would. And he voted for Obama. “Nuff said?
A Byrd has died. Let’s have a moment of silence.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/28/robert-byrd-longest-serving-senator-dies/
“If somebody tells you he has classified information there’s a secret Nazi base on the dark side of the moon what is the comeback?”
As a point of logic, if somebody knows about it then it isn’t secret. So tell me, on the splash page of that site was there a sign saying “No girls or conservatives allowed?
IIRC, P-shrinks have a term they use to describe people with low self esteem that form groups that they call exclusive in order to boost their egos.
Most people grow out of that stage of development. Why am I surprised that soldiers of the MSM don’t? My theory is that predators need to be just a little smarter then their prey. Any more is wasted. Since journalists prey on politicians, there is no real need for an IQ greater then a turnip. A boiled turnip.
JournoList = Democratic centralism?
10. Mr. X
13. twobyfour
Mr.X, lame, lame bait.
………….
Wait. Lame, thy name is John McCain.
Maz2 @ #19: wonderful “money quote” and link. Like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, we’ve been struggling to describe the uncanniness of the Age of Obama–it might be that Voegelin came up with the diagnosis half a century ago.
W says “A well functioning open source intel system shouldn’t experience too many shocks, too many surprises, too often. I think the press as constituted is bedeviled with altogether too many Turns for there not to be an obvious problem.”
It seems that the MSM itself is telling us this on an almost daily basis. Every new disappointing economic statistic announced by the MSM is predicated by the word “unexpected”. Obviously, the MSM is not very good at analyzing data to develop an informed prediction.
The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention could never be pulled off today.
It’s not just a matter of secrecy, it’s also a matter or relevance. Maybe Kevin Rudd or Dave Weigal participates in a on-line role playing game where he is known as Zelada, Mistress of Pain. Does it matter? It probably would to some people but you can probably argue that it should not unless it can be seen to not only influence what he does in real life but to do so in a manner that is the opposite of what he asserts publically. No one would object to fillmaker Michael Moore checking in with Journolist because it is obvious what he is.
Some months back it was revealed what a “Military Expert” for one of the cable news networks really thought about the individuals in our military, which was on the order of “Yeah, they are getting shot but I’m paying for it, so I’m better than they are.” That is relevant.
Several years ago Ann Coulter asserted that a convicted child molester should be tossed in jail for what he wrote in his diary. Now that is a tough one. Normally it should be secret and no one’s business but when it was revealed that he was fanatasizing about raping and kidnapping children then it’s relevant, because of what he has done in the past and the assumptions made in association with his release.
Re twobyfours’s snide dismissal of Mr. X’s use of the example of the misreporting of the Georgia/Russia war –
We don’t have to go back as far as that to see journalistic misreporting in plain opposition to the clear facts. We need only look at last weekend.
Obama was slapped down hard, and left isolated & ignored at the G8/G20 — the only “leader” of a serious country who is still begging for more unsustainable borrowing and more damaging big government spending.
Yet the alphabet networks didn’t quite report it that way. The usual suspects in the media simultanteously present Obama as King of the World telling everyone else what to do, while also praising his multi-lateralism. Logic is apparently not part of the curriculum in JournoSchool.
Perhaps slightly OT, but it would interesting to see some informed speculation on when and why Secretary Stimson stopped being such a prig. Yes, he closed Yardley’s Black Chamber in 1929, but he certainly had no qualms about reading Magic intercepts in the late 1930s.
This is the same thing as Climate Gate and the General McCrystal staff.
It almost has nothing to do with the content of the communication. It has to do with the hubris that anything said to a reporter or anything sent in an e-mail has any reasonable expectation of security or privacy.
“Kind sir, I am a high ranking official who has been deposed. To gain access to 10 million dollars that is rightfully mine, I need the SWIFT code on your bank account along with the Social Security numbers of all of your children . . .”
I always wondered what kind of person would even remotely be taken by such a scam, and now I know.
Wretchard @6: “Ultimately the best metric for judging the performance of the press is its predictive power.” Exactly. The “press” is a social instrument one of whose principal purposes is giving us all a report on the state of the system (news now) and its trajectory (near-past history/perspective in a story or columns/op-eds; and likely near-future in columns/op-eds). What we have seen is a replacement of honest historical/predictive work with Desired Narrative. And that leads us right to Orwell’s memory hole. The solution is, as you say, independent verification systems. Fact-checking their sorry behinds. It is tiresome and impossible to be one’s own news service but collectively people can network easily enough, and create/reference enough sources that are “objective” or at least biased in a different (non-correlated) way, that they can develop Version B (for baseline) of the narrative they’re being fed. Up to a point we can forgive errors and prejudice; but when the error rate gets too high, and when the errors turn out not to be errors but part of an organized (and secret) system of values (whether left, right or whatever), we lose our trust in the process. And trust is the hardest thing to regain. The MSM brand is done. What replaces it is a rough beast still slouching.
If i may poke nose in, i don’t think 2×4 was being snide –Mr X is determined to change minds on the Russo-Georgia war of 2008, and is sort of in the self-referential humor stage of that project by now (we’ve been through the drill so many times, it’s just ‘what we do’). 2×4 was just helping him with quality control.
***
SCOTUS just now –flash –backed the 2nd Amendment –5-4 again –the Chicago case –the old man can have a gun now, i think.
news of AZ case too –the employee hiring of aliens case –they’re gonna hear it.
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And Rasmussin just reported that 21% –that’s twenty-one percent –of Americans ”feel that the government has the consent of the governed”.
***
And Hayek’s ancient hoary Road to Serfdom hits #1 on the non-fiction bestseller list.
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In America, every election can be a (bloodless) revolution!
A helpful thing to remember is that going into 2004-5 there was a fearful/mysterious/dreadful symmetry by which the EU was supposed to incorporate Turkey and the USA was supposed to incorporate Mexico (into the NAU). (Both bush and mccain were open borders guys–as in the free flow of labor–in the context of a larger defacto union built up over time as was the EU.)
Symptomatic of the crack up of that agenda/plan/narrative was the turk’s involvement in flotilla and the ongoing problems in arizona–and everywhere else in the USA with illegal aliens.
[Éomer]: “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”
“As he ever has judged,” said Aragorn. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
The Lord of the Rings
Chapter ‘The Riders of Rohan’.
Ezra Klein is 24 years of age?
There isn’t a 24-year-old on the face of this planet who has
the wisdom, garnered from hard experience, to make a reliable
judgment on broad matters of public policy, morals, ethics or
anything else outside the narrow confines of his or her brief
time on planet earth. My son is 24 and far wiser than I was at
his age. He knows about a few things and is expert in the craft
of photography. His greatest reserve of wisdom resides in the
fact that he knows that he doesn’t know (a rare quality – even in
people who have lived much longer than he).
Maybe that’s the problem. Youth is too often extolled without
thought to the downside that young people simply don’t know very
much. They can have book learning but practical experience is
missing. This is precisely the most glaring shortcoming of our
current president and those around him. Having spent so much
of their time in academia and politics and so little in actually
butting up against the world their efforts to actually get anything
done come up short time and again because they just don’t know
how to DO things.
Why is anybody listening to these people? A kid like Klein may
have a good sounding idea every now and then and I am sure he
can craft an essay or turn a phrase so as to please the mind and
ear of those who pay attention to him. But beyond showing an
ability to manipulate words and ideas what has he or any of these
people ever actually DONE to make the world run even a little
better? It seems to me that a large majority of the people in
media and government know precious little about the things they
opine about. They criticize because they know the perfection of
theory and cannot reconcile this with the reality of living and
working and because they have little or no experience of working
with real people and real things and getting real results they
cannot understand how others come up short of theoretical
expectations.
Foont’s right –it’s idol worship –in the new world of now, the young are more tech savvy and are thus really the experienced, and the best to discern who should be president (an Obama sort), or if it’s 1960′s China’s Cultural Revolution, who among the elders must go into re-education camps. Or 1970s Cambodia, who gets the shovel to the head and dumped in the ditch.
Back in the nineteen eighties I told a liberal friend that the American people’s trust and confidence in the news media — which high school dropouts had labored for a century to establish — would be destroyed by Columbia School of Journalism graduates in less than a generation. By the 90′s the entire industry was pickled in leftist vinegar and likely beyond help.
with great power comes great responsibility
Power is like the “black hole” at the center of the Leftist galaxy — it is not accessible to normal modes of observation and measure. The physics of its operation is not well understood. You know it is there, but only through the observed effects on the visible parts of firmament. Meanwhile, the left tries to disguise the effects that The Power — and the longing to be one with it — has on them by talking about money. Basically, the subject becomes the money the rich are hoarding that the Left wants to use for the betterment of humankind (starting with the betterment of kind humans — themselves). This is why even Leftist who have money are down with the deception.
The Black Hole does have an event horizon. First, you will notice a warping of the individual. After a brief struggle most of these lost souls are sucked in and disappear, crushed into a state of non-being, which is a kind of leftist Nirvana without the nerve. Let’s call it ‘vana. Where was I?
Others who pass the event horizon are spewed back out as shiny bits of cosmic radiation. Is this to be the fate of our Mr. Wiggle? Wait. Mr. Waggle. Hold on. I forgot his name. Twaddle? Let me check Wretchard’s post.
Can’t find it. I’ll check again.
Still checking.
Found it! Is this to be the fate of Mr. Weigel, to be distorted and warped by the leftist power “event horizon,” and then be spewed out like some cosmic hair ball — not “known for being known” but rather known for being known for being distasteful (and what is worse, a distasteful conservative)?
Has he become another what’s his face? The guy who worked for the American Spectator and wrote all those stories about Bill Clinton’s Arkansas sexcapades, thus confirming the puritanical streak that runs like a river of sludge through the conservative movement?
I will remember his name. I will, I will, I will. Was it Will? No, his name begins with George Soros. Or is that the end? Wait. Media Matters? Rhymes with Crock. Ah, forget it.
Point is, there are jobs you can do after you service The Power at the Center of Leftist Becoming.
But enough about power, let’s talk about responsibility!
What’s the point of having great power if you got to take responsibility? I mean, when a leftist says “who is responsible” they mean “who can we blame.” The whole point of having great power is to be able to assign great blame — to someone else! And then force everyone else to go along.
Part of the left’s operation is a protection racket. They got to be able to protect some people and destroy others — without a conventional sense of justice getting in the way. You say the approach lacks due process? What’s-a-matter with you? They was due, and we processed it.
So maybe BP bought some protection, but the policy had a low limit and a high deductible. As for this Mr. Wiggle. Waggle? Weigel! He simply found his niche in the leftist echo-system. So if you are on the left, remember to ‘ho the line because they only give you a little wiggle room and then it’s off to the Weigel room.
This distribution list explains how ideas and events get reinforced in the Echo Chamber. But what about Toyota? Heard any stories about uncontrolled acceleration lately? That was so last month. Or was it two months ago? Remember Alar and apples? Damn near ruined the apple industry. One of the enviro lobbies ginned that up from whole cloth. This list is how this sort of bogus story gets traction. And that explains why it it pernicious.
_____________________________
Curious as to the Gnosticism vibe and Mr Greene’s comment about the power black hole. I have marked the religious faith that the fascist left has in the ability of Govt to right any wrong, to correct any deficiency and to heal any hurt, despite the well documented incapability to do any thing well except to kill people and break things. The secret way to the hole and how to use that power without being destroyed by it is the real object of their faith.
Wretchard kicks butt again! Wow.
5. Lifeofthemind
In recent years, capital(stocks bonds derivatives) money has beaten out landed (agriculture,manufacturing,) money and much of capital money has gone to the democrats.
I don’t think the use of the word “ideal” is a helpful conceptual model. I would rather repeat something that Wretchard has mentioned from time to time to wit conservatives strive for dominion over nature. Whereas liberals/communists/progressives are more interested in dominion over people.
The information offered is sometimes proffered by moles–people who appear to be one thing, but really are the other. Pod people. Is Peggy Noonan really a secret Clintonista? Who knows? But we’ll see that turn if it comes. I think there are many posers on the right, maybe whole media empires. Behavioral science has advanced since MadMen after all. We’re a battlefield and need to be shaped.
On August 8th and the South Ossetia War (re. Mr. X’s comment above): the South Ossetians bombarded Georgian villages with artillery on the 1st-7th; Georgia attacked them to stop the shelling (and last I checked, artillery fire is an act of war), and ran into pre-positioned Russian regulars who were already on the Georgian side of the Gori tunnel. South Ossetia, remember, is a puppet of Russia; this was about as much an attack on the innocent Russians as the Winter War was.
(And it was what made me realize that the paleocons were indeed out of their minds. You’d think I would have caught on sooner, given how fond Justin Raimondo is of Emperor Hirohito…)
Great post, great discussion. I think the observation that journalists need to learn that they are not in a privileged position but just another node on the network (Jeff Jarvis I believe)is relevant here. A liberal MSMer double masquerading as a conservative and a blogger attempting to undermine conservatives writing for a liberal newspaper. McLuhan called photography ‘the whorehouse without walls’. He was wrong. It is today’s media environment and both Weigel and McChrystal recently found themselves therein – not to mention the likes of John Edwards or the page turners and toe tappers from the other side of the aisle.
In reference to Herb’s comment @ 39 and Foont@36:
Ezra Klein is 24 years of age? There isn’t a 24-year-old on the face of this planet who has the wisdom, garnered from hard experience, to make a reliable judgment on broad matters of public policy…
My theory is that many on the left suffer from SAFES, Sensitive at Fourteen and “Enlightened” Syndrome. SAFES can strike at any age, but it usually manifest itself at a time of political naivety but dawning interest. What is required is for an intelligent person to see (or have pointed out) an outrageous wrong — and more, a list of outrageous wrongs. Then they accept a simple solution (a rather, a simple system of simple solutions) for these wrongs. But for full blown SAFES to manifest itself, the individual needs to incorporate the simple system of solutions into their self identity, and identify with those who have similarly acted. They become a group apart, and in their own eyes, above.
One of the leading symptoms of SAFES is a bifurcated intellect. In matters that effect a person’s everyday life, they learn from experience. For instance, they learn that if they fail to study and skip a lot of classes and not do the homework, they will do poorly on tests. But when “poor test scores” happen at the national level it is the fault of society — and the tests.
They realize that their own “debt financed” spending spree, where they buy expensive consumables for their friends, will produce financial distress in their own lives. When DC Democrats do it, it will produce prosperity. And so on.
The simple solutions remain unexamined and immature. In fact, when their “simple solutions” are challenged, a suffer of SAFES will react in an adolescent manner, become petulant and change the subject. They realize the “ends” are not shared by most outside the group. But discussion of the ends also causes dissension within the ranks, since the ends differ with every individual. This causes “the ends” to be unexamined lest it lead to schism.
This bifurcation allows them to be quite accomplished in their professional life (where they learn from experience) and quite competent and energetic in the choice of tactics in their political life. The means can be inspired while the ends are delusional — though the details on the projected “end state” are unavailable and therefore the delusion is not apparent.
This condition does not afflict everyone on the left (or other extreme movements). Sociopaths, for instance, are immune.
What I mean to say is that 24 is old enough to do leftist politics by about ten years.
The gatekeepers are in a tizzy. All these bloggers opining about things they don’t even understand! Or so says Kartik Athreya in an article entitled “Economics is hard. Don’t let the bloggers tell you otherwise” http://market-ticker.denninger.net/uploads/2010/Jun/33655771-Economics-is-Hard.pdf. This is relevant to Wretchard’s point that the ‘elites’, media or economists or otherwise, can’t abide the idea of the ignorant masses trying to figure things out for themselves. I would concur with Wretchard that the noisy environment of myriads of bloggers putting forth what they know or think stands a much better chance of getting at the truth than the previous regime. In that case, we were at the mercy of essentially a single source, which could be self-delusional at best,or deliberately suppressing the truth at worst.
By the way, Denninger slices Athreya to bits: http://7ax.de/1ekq
Thanks Elby, that was a hoot.
Economics IS EASY!
Buy low, sell high.
Anything else is BS.
Private groups, shared world views, etc. are in and of themselves not morally wrong if we do in fact have a functioning First Amendment. The views may be anathema to the rest of the world; but for so long as they are neither imposed on those who do not share those views by private means, imposed on others by the power of the State, or until there is an actual act committed that violates the legal statutes of society, one can believe what one wishes and share those beliefs with kindred souls.
I am sure that somewhere in the psyches of the membership of Journolist is a meme of themselves as brave fighters in the Resistance against the oppressors [all conveniently Conservative and Capitalist] that are holding the proletariat down. And that Come the Revolution they will be recognized for their bravery and rewarded with positions and power for all their “sacrifices”. That is part of their Narrative.
The most overt problem with Journolist, that in my quick scan of the comments I have not seen mentioned; is that the list was in daily contact with the White House and the DNC to make sure that the talking points for the day were consistent. Such was admitted when the first glimmerings of the existence of Journolist escaped. At that point, the power of the State becomes involved and the MSM [and particularly every member of Journolist and all their employers] become nothing more than glorified versions of the employees of Pravda, Izvestia, Völkischer Beobachter, and of late given the anti-Semitic tendencies of the regime the Der Stürmer. Their sole reason for existence is to serve the day to day purposes of the State. [#39 Herb, that is why the stories you cited are not big anymore. The White House has moved on to other targets, and having done what damage to what they regard as the enemy, they are using the thankfully not unlimited resources of the MSM against more time-urgent targets.]
A rational person [admittedly, there is a shortage of these in our society] would have to look at anything said by the MSM listed above, and by extension all of the MSM as being deliberate lies and propaganda. I note that a few times on BC, it has been noted that we have to develop the same skill sets as Soviet citizens in parsing out a version of the truth from what the official media says. Because we know that they are lying.
It would be a great service to the nation if some Patriot were to obtain and publish a list of the members of Journolist and their employers; or a similar list of those for the undoubted successor organization. And yes, it will be [and probably has been already] formed. Because the function served by Journolist is too useful for the White House to allow it to lapse even for one day. The irony of the MSM whining if there is such publication will be overwhelming. They were all for the hacking of Sarah Palin’s private email account and publication of not only her personal emails but of data that could be used to commit identity theft and financial fraud on her AND her family, including minor children. For them, that was a good thing.
The identities and employers [all of which are part of the MSM which will be doing the whining] who live to do the bidding of ‘Teh Won’ are somehow sancrosanct.
And once either the listed members [and their colleagues who do no more than pick up and pass on the daily "accepted truth" after it is decided by the members and White House] have gone over to the “Dark Side” of being covert regime spokesmen, they cannot come back; for who will trust them? I grant that those such as Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, etc. are trying desperately to hedge their bets by being mildly critical of the regime while not crossing the boundary that would return them to the status of Enemy of the State; but their coin was their credibility, and they went all-in with the nascent regime in 2008. They have no more coin to make a countering bet.
#23 Aristide
Democratic Centralism. A palpable and direct hit. It meets every technical definition, including ideological.
#6 Wretchard & #32 oMan
The very existence of an official Narrative that is based on other than reality carries with it the guarantee of an increasing divergence between the official Narrative and real world conditions. The rationalizations and “kludges” necessary to attempt to paper over this divergence will themselves eventually reach the point where the Narrative and those who create and support it will no longer be believed. The triggering point can be something grand like Pope John Paul II’s visits to Poland, which were attended by literally 1/3 of the Polish people who heard his exhortation of “Be Not Afraid”, and realized that the State’s lies about those of faith being a tiny minority were just that, lies. And they by extension realized that all the State said was a lie and how powerful the people really were. Or it could be something as small and simple as the dismal lack of linguistic facility by the overschooled and undereducated twits of the regime and MSM; who cannot come up with different synonyms for “unexpected” and “unprecedented”, which just draws attention to the falsified economic statistics released by the government.
Alternate means of confirmation does speed the process of the dissolution of the Narrative. That is why every totalitarian government from medieval times forward has tried to control the flow of information and preserve their Narrative.
The freedom of the common person to find out the truth behind the lies on a number of subjects, all through the alternative media [including places like this]is a dire threat to the regime. Pretty much every topic we raise contains links and sources of information that run counter to what our Political Class would have us believe. We are a mortal danger to them. They are acting to shut us down.
The Federal Trade Commission a couple of weeks ago put out a draft plan to functionally license news media and subsidized the MSM. The Democrats in Congress just passed a law granting the President power to shut down the Internet for 4 months [renewable permanently with the approval of Congress] that is all but an Enabling Act. It is telling that Senator Joe Lieberman [who is a staunch Leftist with the sole exception of not wanting to root openly for American military defeat; for which sin he was sent to Coventry.] in the debates deliberately equated the new law to the Communist Chinese “Great Firewall” which is used to control what information the Chinese people receive and to limit, control, and monitor political dissent. AND HE WAS FIRMLY IN FAVOR OF IT, SAYING ON THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE THAT THE UNITED STATES NEEDS THE VERY SAME THING.
The economic sequalae of a shut down of the Internet would be horrendous, when you think of how much of our domestic economy is dependent on its instant communication. That horror is preferable to the regime to having the American people question their power and Narrative.
On another Pajamas Media site, I was part of a discussion where, as side thread, there were questions of exactly how to render the phrase “The Rubicon has been crossed” in grammatically correct German in such a way that an English speaking audience would understand intuitively. Pick your language, and bugger correct grammar.
If the regime imposes any restrictions on the Internet [and do not be surprised if there is a "wag the dog" equivalent of a cyber-Tonkin Gulf Incident]; they are on the other side of that river.
We are, by the nature of our free discussion of events and seeking after the Truth of reality over Narrative, enemies of the state. We are also, in our own limited way, one of many modern Committees of Correspondence. We are the targets of the restrictions they would impose.
It is time, indeed “the time is ten-times overpast” for those who do not desire to merely keep their heads down in the dark times to come to be pondering and setting up alternative means of staying in contact. A study of cryptography and steganography might be rewarding, although it must be realized that the government has the means to crack pretty much anything given time and a large enough sample. They are a delaying tactic, not a barrier. Tradecraft might be another field deserving attention. For the more technically adept, study of the BEOWULF parallel processing method could help keep a technical edge. And deciding how to determine who can be trusted is always a priority.
#35 Josh
Just because it is so apt, I will repeat your quote:
[Éomer]: “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”
“As he ever has judged,” said Aragorn. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
The Lord of the Rings
Chapter ‘The Riders of Rohan’.
And once judgment and discernment have had their turn, there is another quote that might be applicable:
Duty is the most sublime word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.
Subotai Bahadur
Shapiro’s own “profession” has been in the forefront of publishing private communications.
Since the Journolist was only open to “liberals”, recreating it “with a different name and a renewed sense of collective trust” is going to be a real trick. it’s trust was violated by an insider, one of their own, how are they going to exclude the unknown leaker?
“the South Ossetians bombarded Georgian villages with artillery on the 1st-7th; Georgia attacked them to stop the shelling” show us the evidence pal. Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) doesn’t believe you and neither does the EU Commission Report. You have Misha’s interview with Michael Yon as your only reference “and ran into pre-positioned Russian regulars” those were UN approved peacekeepers. “Wait. Lame, thy name is John McCain.” Yes for standing by his BFF the Tie Eater ballot box stuffer and lobber of GRAD (cousin of Katyusha) rockets at sleeping cities.
No most Belmont Clubbers simply cannot accept the fact that an American ally attempted an act of ethnic cleansing under the cover of the Olympic Games and was repulsed by the Russians, or that U.S. policy towards the former Soviet Union was hijacked from the mid-90s on by Soros and his clique. Russki good guys just don’t compute for them, or Russia having the same rights to protect its citizens in its near abroad as we exercised in say, Grenada or Panama. Reciprocity does not exist when it comes to the late and current Evil Empire…
29. Kinuachdrach
You mention in your post that “Obama was slapped down hard… Yet the alphabet networks didn’t quite report it that way.”
The mind’s eye pictures a scene like the typical posturing U.S. Senator, gesturing and pontificating for the benefit of hometown viewers who will eventually see the edited videos, emoting recklessly for a gallery with only a paltry scattering of bored ushers whose presence (but not their attention) is mandatory. The C-Span camera operator, in a silky ballet of technology, pans the camera with its Academy-Award-Winning O’Connor fluid-head mount, letting the audience see the empty auditorium and appreciate for themselves the irony of the politician’s rehearsed simulacrum of sincerity. Sadly, at the G-20, the camera folk and editors are all in the pockets of the Administration. Of course; their employers are circling the drain, and their only hope is to throw in with the Big Dog, who is pushing to confiscate money from the little people using the internet, and GIVE it to the stinking parasites in the Mainstream Alleged Media.
So the Glorious Sphincter-in-Chief is artfully edited and depicted as if he is actually making Manly Speech, flintily-eyed, with Jaw and Pectoral Musculature in Full Intimidation CLENCH mode, lecturing the lesser leaders of their errors and the dangers of counter-revolutionary back sliding.
Amazing how heroic someone can look with a few tricks of modern technology.
They probably shot those bits with Obungle in front of a green-screen, with the Toronto G-8/20 logotypes dropped in with AfterEffects software. It would be interesting to have some media professionals examine the tapes and audio, to look for edge artifacts, and compare the room ambiance with audio recorded in the authentic location.
This is one of the good things about having ten-year-olds playing with professional-quality media software – in the fullness of time, someone is going to do due diligence and show the unmitigated fraudulence of these woodpeckerheads.
The words “AP”, “Reuters”, “photos” and “Gaza” come to mind for some strange reason.
“Kevin Rudd… Labor Party… Australian…” can be replaced by “Barack Obama… Democrats… American…” in the not-too-distant future. The reality is that Leftists are engaged in a marketing scam. They think the right pitchman can sell a defective product, but that’s only true for a little while. Eventually the public figures out the product sucks and stop buying. It isn’t the fault of the erstwhile pitchman, though the first reaction from the totalitarians is to dump him and blame the problems on bad Marketing instead of bad Engineering. Eventually sales crater badley enough that they go think up a new brand and a generation later – when new voters enter the market without enough experience to spot the scam – relaunch with a new name (“Progressive!” – now with “Social Justice” – 100% Organic). But it’s the same old defective, dangerous, crap.
Which is why:
doesn’t work for Leftists. The box always contains Dog Food, it never contains anything else. Poisoned dog food. Arsenic, lead, and selenium -laced dog food. Their entire enterprise is based on the assumption that the average person is too benighted, ignorant, selfish and foolish to make decisions and needs to be controlled by their betters. The percentage of the population who wants to live like that is too small to make a majority out of, so Leftists need to lie about the product. They can’t let people look inside the black box.
For the rest of us though, letting buyers look inside the box is more than just good advice. What we really need to do is “force” buyers to look inside the box. The boxes – ours and the Leftists. We need to get over the fear of acknowledging flaws in our own system (and it has flaws, some that can and should be fixed, and others of the sort Churchill meant when he said “worst system, except for all the others”) and embrace the idea of a fully informed customer.
I’m getting off into the weeds, so I’ll cut short now and maybe follow through later when I can better frame the point, or maybe someone else can better frame it for me. Good crowd here for that…
hdgreene #45
“One of the leading symptoms of SAFES is a bifurcated intellect.”
AKA the inability to resolve cognitive dissonance. This is the one of the classic problems on the left. It is why concepts like objective standards are so difficult for them.
Subothai Bahadur #48
“That is why every totalitarian government from medieval times forward has tried to control the flow of information and preserve their Narrative.”
NPR/PBS, anyone?
BTW, nice touch capitalizing the word “Narrative”.
it is no surprise that journo’s are lefties, but I assumed “the narrative” was reflexive, like fish swimming in a school and reacting to predators… now I learn that recently it has been crafted, coordinated in secret, not by scheming politicians, but by the reporters themselves.
Weigel has given his best effort to describing why he did what he did. And, in fact, he DOES expose himself: his entire ‘journalist’ career is of the college campus sort. Is it so surprising that he wanted to be invited to sit at the popular guys’ cafeteria table, overlooking the sweeping lawns of ‘campusry’. And, he fit right in, until his rants were outed (not by any member of that club, by the way), and the Journolist was purged.
The picture we now have of these ‘top journalists’ at the popular guys cafeteria table, is not really of ‘left’ or ‘right’, but of deep parochialism. They too have never left the college campus.
Kinuachdrach/24
Re twobyfours’s snide dismissal of Mr. X’s use of the example of the misreporting of the Georgia/Russia war
Actually, it is the other way around. Instead of using the case of G/R war to elucidate the misreporting, he is using the case of misreporting to “elucidate” the G/R war. That is his agenda, and he’d use any vehicle to push it.
Note his response in #50. Towards specific data, he offers generalities, innuendo and appellations to emotional processing (“tie eater”).
And Soros. Yea, I have a visceral reaction to Soros too, but in the case of Lebanon, Ukraine and Georgia, Soros lost a bunch of money–that was bound to happen. One may argue what was the purpose of starting these “color” revolutions… Maybe Soros thought they would make him a king or a money man later, who knows. Maybe what happened as a result was his true intent. One can only speculate, nothing more, nothing less.
Back to Mr.X. He won’t rest until he “turns” the BCers towards “his” concept of the G/R war, by any means.
In full agreement with Subotai’s #48 above, I refer readers to my comment numbered 163 in the stream following Wretchard’s Post “Holding the Bag.” (It enumerates a few of the vital functions of our country’s metabolism likely to suffer lethal harm from a promiscuous shutting down of the internet by our Fearless Lieder.
Subotai is being oblique, even a little coy, for good reason. Yeah, the government can pierce the veil of any code system an amateur counter-revolutionary might use in seemingly innocent posts. I know… in intemperate moments I’ve insulted the lot of them by posting my thoughts in Igpay Atinlay, implying that even that childish trick was beyond their powers.
But seriously, the difficulty for a government is not that people might create unbreakable codes, as that with so many ways of encoding messages within traffic that is not just innocent, but ESSENTIAL, the government cannot possibly control the bulk of such communication. The only option is to use intimidation and extreme forms of punishment to try to discourage and minimize the resistance when they do find some.
We are accustomed to think of authoritarian government as coming into power by a very public and violent revolution, such as that of the Bolsheviks or Mao in China. But though Hitler managed to undermine and supplant several European governments by use of the so-called “Fifth Column,” for some reason – maybe just the lack of historical awareness – few in the U.S. consider how effective the gradualist approach is. But it’s been going on here for decades, with a number of institutions accepting, then becoming dominated by Marxists, until finally we are now in the thrall of Revolutionary Marxist thought and goals.
They’re being presented as mainstream from the governing boards of long-established Christian denominations (Remember that the World Council of Churches was revealed to be funding communist-backed revolutionary groups in Central America in the 1980’s…) University Boards of Regents, the Ad Agency Council Public Service Messages, Charitable groups, Foundations, Public Television, the NEA, and PAID VOLUNTEERS of AMERICORPS!
I’ve known people to pose the question “Why didn’t the German people oppose Hitler when it became obvious he was a monster?” They haven’t studied history. There were a number of German citizens who resisted. From about 1939 to 1945, the NAZI courts executed over TWENTY THOUSAND German citizens for offenses as seemingly minor (to us) as passing out anti-Nazi leaflets. Most of those executions were by beheading, or hanging.
And of course, that excludes the tens of millions of people they murdered for simply being in the way, undesirable, actual threats, or otherwise troublesome.
We have been giving our adversaries the benefit of the doubt, assuming they must be civilized people, who can be expected to play fair when they have the ball.
It ain’t so. Look at the the way the Democrat party has used the rules of the Senate to utterly squash Republican dissent when they enjoyed just a simple majority. Look how they’ve abandoned any “rules” at all, and exuberantly trashed and ignored standing regulations, legislated procedures, and Constitutionally specified limits since the current resident of the White House was elevated.
I recommend that readers here study not just specific codes or cipher systems, but the whole idea of inventing new ways of transmitting information to friends, and concealing it from those who mean you harm, whosoever they may be. Anyhow, I think it would be bad form to be addressing specific methods here. One doesn’t need to educate one’s inquisitors, after all, nor give ammunition to those who would injure our host.
The main things to be considered at this point: whom do you trust, and how can you maintain trusting relationships in the coming times; how can you conform to the laws without obliterating your own conscience and abandoning your faith; how can you find ways to do what is right without placing yourself in conflict with increasingly contradictory, arbitrary, and capricious behavior by powerful people; how can you prepare for the moment in which no amount of subservience will suffice to protect your family and friends from tyranny; what preparations can you make for self-sufficiency and self-reliance against the likelihood of confiscation, martial law restrictions on movement, punishment for “hoarding” and other “counter-revolutionary” activities?
During the early centuries when Rome regarded them as dangerous, Christians who met and struck up a conversation with other people on the street found they could draw an arc in the dust as they talked – just a toe dragged idly through the dirt in an innocent meaningless gesture. If the other person eventually drew a similar arc, with a similar innocent meaningless gesture, that second arc creating a simple fish icon, this served as confirmation to each of them that they were both followers of Christ.
Of course, now you might find yourself denounced by a Darwinist.
Sad, because I don’t see evolution as any diminution of the transcendent wisdom of the creator of all space and time. Small thing for one who can order all the particles of the universe, sez I.
“Ten Russian intelligence officers have been arrested for allegedly serving as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States, the Justice Department said Monday.
Eight of 10 were arrested Sunday for allegedly carrying out long-term, deep cover assignments in the United States on behalf of Russia.”
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/The-Spy-Next-Door-Tri-Staters-Charged-wiith-Espionage-for-Russia-97334329.html
Mad Fiddler:
of these woodpeckerheads.
Hmmnph. You really think there’s any thing useful in those heads? But if you are referring to something else, they dont rise to that level of actual utility.
dan/58
Damn! They missed one!
Saakashvili turned a penny ante game into a high stakes game and went all in. The Russians called his bluff and he lost. His only hope from the beginning was that we’d step in.
Fortunately, we weren’t that stupid.
Mad @ 57
I love nobama too!
Mad Fiddler 57: You love him? Sick!
Subotai 48: I am not the scholar of the Third Reich which you appear to be, but I agree. In fact it came to me recently in a blinding flash of insight (yes, I am painfully slow) that the reason that the Jews were so important to the Nazis is that they were a handy supply of Other. Hitler may have hated the Jews for his own sick reasons; but his obsession with them (and the gypsies, the homosexuals, the “defectives”) was not a personal thing. It was a necessary component of the program of control. In any totalitarian regime, there is a critical and chronic need for a strategic supply of Other. Other is the cathode, the sink for the emotional and ideological energy –the hatred and fear– that is a primary circuit powering the regime. The regime needs the Other to absorb the the hatred and fear, but it also needs the Other as a practical, almost routine lesson-book for what awaits those who don’t toe the line. For the obedient subjects, there is the double frisson: of imagining the horrors that befall the Other, and of knowing that they have not befallen oneself. The best kind of Other, from a totalitarin point of view, is one that looks identical to the “obedient subjects” (which of course the Jews in Nazi Germany did: they were colleagues, neighbors, partners, friends, family). And the best way to use the Others is gradually: first, they are denied some rare privilege (working for the State in high posts), then more and more common rights (owning a controlling interest in a key industry; then any interest; then the right to marry whom they please; then the right to vote; then the right to keep their property). This provides a series of lessons to the obedient subjects, without ever having to raise the whip hand directly at them.
This need for the Other is a deep sick streak in our psyche, which is exploited by such regimes. Maybe they are antennae for it, generating massive signal gain. …The references to Tolkien and the apocalyptic struggle of good and evil are not at all remote.
I wish I could be halfway confident that we aren’t seeing a reprise today.
Mad Fiddler@57:
I’m sorry to learn of your not so hidden affliction. I’ll
keep that in mind when reading all your postings in the future.
I strongly advocate the use of one time pads and proper
COMSEC techniques between trusted friends. Remember,
everything transmitted electronically is subject to interception
and monitoring.
#63 oMan
This need for the Other is a deep sick streak in our psyche, which is exploited by such regimes. Maybe they are antennae for it, generating massive signal gain. …The references to Tolkien and the apocalyptic struggle of good and evil are not at all remote.
I wish I could be halfway confident that we aren’t seeing a reprise today.
The reprise is in progress. Antennae should be twitching madly. As always, the issue is in doubt, and the balance will always be teetering on the knife edge until victory or defeat. It is the actions, and inactions; the choices and refusals to choose, of the individuals who will push it one way or another. Those who reject the worth of the individual cannot contemplate this. They depend on an automatic reaction creating robotic, self-sacrificing analogs of the “Heroes of the Soviet Union”, but such a reaction is most common to an individual who knows that he has free will, and a belief that there is something worth protecting. It can be family, it can be country, it can be the god(s) of his fathers. It is rarely an overwhelming state whose benefits go to a self-selected aristocracy at the expense of the individual.
There are no Valar, no Istari to protect us in the absence of our own efforts. No Elbereth, Star-kindler; whose light repels evil. We stand alone, save for our Free Brothers and Sisters at our side. It has been enough in the past, though at times the cost is grievous. May it be so again.
Subotai Bahadur
A response to Mr. Shapiro’s worry about people not having a “private place”.
I am a member of a small mailing list. The list is basically allows a bunch of friends, some who’ve moved out of the area or out of the country, to remain in contact. We have a core group of about eight to ten people with about as many friends of friends that we’ve invited to join our list; I figure that we have something less than two dozen members, not even a fraction of Jornolist. We talk about almost anything on this list; news articles, jokes, rants and ramblings, and we even ask each other for help when we need it.
About five or six years ago a member of our list wrote some disparaging remarks about a person that we all were acquainted with (and a few of us didn’t care for). Another member forwarded the message, and followups, to this person. To say that these messages caused an awkward moment would be an understatement, and it took quite some time to make some sort of peace with this person. The thing is that the bad feelings weren’t directed at just the people who wrote the offending messages, but at everybody who was a member of the list. Once some of us realized what happened, we started reminding each other, and everyone else on the list, that although this is a private list, it is a public forum and we should never write anything to this list that we wouldn’t say, out loud, in public…or to the person we’re talking about.
So Mr. Shapiro, while everybody should be allowed to have a “private place” where they can speak their thoughts, without fear or favor, an email list is not one of those places; most of the conversations will stay private but, from time to time, it is certain that some conversations will be brought into the public. The larger the mailing list, the more certain that becomes.
Privacy and secrecy between friends is an essential component of human liberty; but government secrecy which influences our God-given rights to life, liberty and creative pursuit of happiness is a sign of tyranny.
“The method of engaging in trifles at public meetings and doing real business on the quiet justified itself brilliantly.” Friedrich Engels
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
Mad Fiddler @57
As a student of Russian History, I have something of an unfair advantage. Russia has had a long tradition of mental resistance spanning a variety of regimes. Much fun may be had with the use of Aesopian language, also popular in various parts of Europe. Then there is the samizdat tradition, of circulating forbidden writings via hand-copies. I recommend that all of us go back and study the writings and experiences of the major Soviet-era dissidents. Particularly Amalrik, Bukovski, and most of all, Solzhenytsin. it will also help us stiffen our spines for opposing the neo-Lenin.
Aris/61;
–mitigating against that leader-ego-contest theory of the R/G war, search “Russian passport offensive” -or just get the idea well enough from this.
In Georgia’s case, the passports had been filtering into the two now-annexed Georgia breakaways (there’s a balanced sentence for mr x) for some years.
Doctrine when the Bolsheviks annexed territory (modern Georgia had been conquered in 1921), populations were moved around –natives out, Russian-speakers in, in order to Russianize the new territorial takings.
But when USSR broke up, some of these Russian-speaking newbies were left inside the borders of several ex-USSRs (now renewed as sovereign nations) and from there able at any time to suddenly appeal for help from Russia, against real, or imagined, or invented, or staged, who knows, hostility from the ‘territorial’ natives.
Russia –humanitarian as always, had pre-anticipated (*cough*) this possible future oppression, and had long-ago began to issue, unbidden, Russian passports to these citizens of foreign nations (hey, legal-schmeagle, could be humanitarian, who can complain?).
In Georgia, these passports had been coming to ‘picked’ Ossets and Abkazis for some years, and then became the reason, or cover, for the insertion of Russian ‘peacekeeper’ troops (because russian passport holders and ethnic Georgians were low-intensity fighting –you know the provocateur drill).
Then when finally the desultory arty fire, odd road-mines, and now & then sniping got too heavy and real fighting broke out, and the Georgian army went into S Ossetia to sort it out, those Russian peacekeepers became ‘the attack on Russia’ that Mr X speaks of, the attack instantly answered by a crack shock combat team (of a Russian Army and air force and navy outnumbering and outgunning the Georgians somewhere around 1,000 to 1) conveniently nearby on training maneuvers and quickly loaded and fired down the tunnel into the Georgian troop movement.
So, the war, on this ‘russian passport offensive’ hard evidence, seems to’ve been far from any sort of ‘meeting engagement’.
Then there’s the huge strategic game-changer re lodgement in a jump-off on the south side of the only-seasonally-passable mountains, on the open plain toward the BTC Pipeline, the Caspian Basin uberterminal at Baku –and the eastern and northern borders of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran –and another one of those ‘frozen conflicts’ (Putin’s term) involving an enclave (this time, iirc, federation troops at an old USSR miltary base) of Russian-speakers with Russian passports in-situ inside a critical geopolitical hotspot, Nagorno-Karabakh –of which you will doubtless be hearing plenty in a year or so (the late 1980s ‘unfinished’ war there already cost 40k lives).
Now, if that R/G strategic victory WAS in fact the Kremlin’s actual goal, then Russia would have been expected, post-war, to annex and militarize the two provinces.
And that’s precisely what Russia did; annex and militarize the two provinces.
(Rescued them passport holders, in spades, plus some, and more!)
Internationally, three nations have recognized these annexations: Nicaragua and Venezuela –better said, danny & hugo, the two Russian-weapons-hungry Western-hemisphere isthmus-straddling communist dictators, have backed Russia.
But I said three, right? The third (brought in to avoid solely-Communist support?) is a Micronesian island, in fact the UN’s smallest member: Nauru.
(snip) Reports suggest that this decision netted Nauru Russian aid of around US$50,000,000.[6] (close snip)
Anyway, here’s that EU Report mr X mentions as supporting Russia –you can be the judge of whether Mr x is a good reader or maybe ‘needs work’.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4746802,00.html
And i believe Dana Rohrbach roared back and recanted upon the annexation action. I’m sure there’s something somewhere on the topic –i’ll look some other time –if need be.
Anyhoo, isn’t he on the science committee, where having a cordial relationship with our space station partners is far more exigent an issue than any pol’s opinion of who hit who who first in the R/G war, anyway? The former being duty and policy and business, the latter being merely just one of 535 DC legislater opinions.
Rurik / 68,
Here are a few excerpts from two of the greatest Soviet dissidents. Igor Shafarevich is less well known than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but Shafarevich is one of the true geniuses (on par with George Orwell) behind the intellectual and moral arguments against Communism. Yuri Bezmenov refers to Igor Shafarevich in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VctBWelXt4
“The usual understanding of “equality,” when applied to people, entails equality of rights and sometimes equality of opportunity. But what is meant in all these (Socialist) cases is the equalization of external conditions which do not touch the individuality of man. In socialist ideology, however, the understanding of equality is akin to that used in mathematics, i.e., this is in fact identity, the abolition of differences in behavior as well as in the inner world of the individuals constituting society. From this point of view, a puzzling and at first sight contradictory property of socialist doctrines becomes apparent. They proclaim the greatest possible equality, the destruction of hierarchy in society and at the same time a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy which would engender an incomparably greater inequality.” Igor Shafarevich
“We have arrived at this view of socialism in attempting to account for the contradictions evident in the phenomenon at first glance. And now, looking back, we feel confident that our approach indeed accounts for many of socialism’s peculiarities. Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich
“There is, first of all, the profound experience of Russia, the significance of which we are only now beginning to understand. The question therefore arises: will this experience be sufficient? Is it sufficient for the entire world and especially for the West? Indeed, is it sufficient for Russia? Shall we be able to comprehend its meaning? Or is mankind destined to pass through this experience on an immeasurably larger scale? There is no doubt that if the ideals of Utopia are realized universally, mankind, even in the barracks of the universal City of the Sun, shall find the strength to regain its freedom and to preserve God’s image and likeness–human individuality–once it has glanced into the yawning abyss. But will even that experience be sufficient? For it seems just as certain that the freedom of will granted to man and to mankind is absolute, that it includes the freedom to make the ultimate choice–between life and death.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
“World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them–all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis…. The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct–also laid bare by Shafarevich–these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach…. The author also convincingly demonstrates the diametrical opposition between the concepts of man held by religion and by socialism. Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity…. It could probably be said that the majority of states in the history of mankind have been “socialist.” But it is also true that these were in no sense periods or places of human happiness or creativity.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
“Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger? How many witnesses have been sent to the West in the last 60 years? How many waves of immigrants? How many millions of persons? They are all here. You meet them every day. You know who they are: if not by their spiritual disorientation, their grief, their melancholy, then you can distinguish them by their accents by their external appearance… Coming from different countries and without consulting with one another…they have brought to you exactly the same experience; they tell you exactly the same thing: they warn you of what is already happening. It’s characteristic that communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement… We (in the Soviet Union) are slaves there from birth. We are born slaves. I’m not young anymore, and I myself was born a slave; this is even more true for those who are younger. We are slaves, but we are striving for freedom. You, however, were born free. If so, then why do you help our slave owners?… When they bury us in the ground alive – I compared the forthcoming European agreement with a mass grave for all the countries of East Europe – as you know, this is a very unpleasant sensation: your mouth gets filled with earth while you’re still alive – please do not send them shovels…” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://www.alor.org/Library/LegacyofTerror.htm
Anyone serious about establishing links with like-minded folks outside your own area need to consider how quickly checkpoints might be set up at all local intersections and highways between cities.
Even assuming an utterly benign and traditionally patriotic national government, any crisis involving a large portion of the nation might be expected to provoke imposition of martial law, restrictions on travel, vigorous confiscation of personal firearms, curfews, etc. It’s conceivable that troops might be ordered to conduct searches and confiscation of food supplies from private homes, to be warehoused and distributed from the local schools or such. In Disasters, personal property rights can be out the window.
In the first week after Katrina, I heard that the local authorities were confiscating firearms from the law-abiding citizens NOT from known criminals. They were NOT bothering to go after people who were looting, they were going into people’s homes and asking them if they had any weapons. They were stopping boats on Lake Pontchartrain and challenging the occupants while aiming their own automatic weapons at them. There had been reports – which were later proven to be planted fabrications – that looters were firing on police and the first arriving National Guardsmen.
Here’s a quote from the linked article:
“New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Police Superintendent P. Eddie Compass unleashed a wave of confiscations with these chilling words:
“No one will be able to be armed. We will take all weapons. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.”
Thousands of firearms were then confiscated from law-abiding gun owners. The police gave no paperwork or receipts for those guns. They just stormed in and seized them.”
God help us. We are already being treated as sheep.
I don’t know what the solution is for this, but in the first place, we need to make sure we have civilian police forces with a clearer understanding of the U.S. Constitution, and a better sense of precisely who their real enemies are.
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
p.s. to oMan and Armageddon Rx,
See, there are some quick folks here!
You do understand, don’t you, that I only threw that in to mislead the hired sleuths from the tyrannical quarter! >;-D
For two folks to notice and comment reassures me that it would be reasonable to embed messages in posts and expect that someone would pick up on ‘em, just hope they aren’t the adversary….
Just a little brainstorming, and more or less anyone can come up with a scheme for embedding messages in the most mundane and prosaic documents, without requiring any sort of high-tech. But most are dependent on somehow pre-arranging some signal with a confederate.
Switching schemes frequently is good, and sending nonsense messages intermittently can be useful for just wasting the energies of the inquisitors. But the most nasty aspect of all this is that the enforcers will see counter-revolution everywhere, insist that they have found messages where there are none, and viciously punish innocent folks for alleged crimes. But – Hey! – They don’t worry about that because they expect that will help intimidate the resistance, anyhow.
So, realizing that innocents are already targeted by the tyrants, and that the tyrants will brutalize innocents and resistance folks without any prick of conscience, you see you must go ahead and do what you think is right.
But more to the point, the likelihood of any of us who read and post in this forum of trying to “hook up” after the much-mentioned waste matter contacts the spinning ventilation rotor, is vanishingly small.
If you are concerned about surviving, several BC regulars have suggested it’s time to establish residence in locations far outside urban areas, that are either sufficiently remote, off the main roads, in rugged territory, or in communities where you would be welcomed by civilized and prepared folks. Strengthen your ties to trusted friends, congregations, relatives, etc.
Wish I could follow my own advice. We do what we can.
Maybe my last
pointramble for tonight.Let’s keep in mind that we are not building fallout shelters in which to cower until the radiation has fizzed to tolerable levels, meanwhile shooting anyone who approaches.
The point for most of us is that the U.S. Constitution is a document unsurpassed in defining a wholesome relationship between the government and those consenting to be governed.
Gee, that doesn’t sound very passionate. I mean the Constitution is freaking SACRED, dude!
We want to congregate with others who hold to this belief, and are ready to pledge themselves to defending the Constitution from enemies and traitors. The cynicism and determination of those enemies of Freedom pretty well guarantees there will be bloodshed and chaos.
The leaders who have so conspicuously profited from their scheming will not readily let go of the advantages they have so painstakingly accumulated. Their actions have shown that they are committed to a plan of testing the will of the population, even to the point of provoking armed resistance, which they can then use as justification for suspension of habeas corpus and, well, most of the Bill of Rights, but most particularly the ownership of firearms.
It’s important to remember that many of the original patriots who chose to break from rule by Britain lost their homes, businesses, families, fortunes, even their lives. Some were captured early and died of disease in British prison ships, where conditions were deliberately made atrocious for the rebels.
But the alternative to resisting tyranny is… (Ta-Dah…) accepting it.
And of this you can be certain: The tyrants will treat you with the same love, concern, and compassion they show for an infestation of cockroaches or Norway Rats. Read about Hugo Chavez striding around Caracas with his entourage and the suckup news bastids; he loves to point at shops along the way and pronounce them enemies of the state. Before the sun sets, the owners are without their businesses, sometimes their homes, always their fortunes and livelihoods. Barry is Hugo’s BFF.
Long ago, my wonderings about my faith lead me to conclude that this life is not meting out reward nor punishment, but opportunities to choose how we will respond to situations presented to us.
I can’t pretend I am always calm considering the prospect of evil and all the nasty things that may come my way. But I do believe in a destiny “beyond the grave,” and that we each of us moment by moment shape our immortal soul by the choices we make.
Lord, help me not screw this up.
Thanks for the nudge on Steganography, Subotai.
The link here is to a Wiki Article on the art/discipline.
Opening line of the article defines the art:
“Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity.”
fun stuff.
Mad Fiddler, sometimes you just take wing and soar up there far above us morttles –
Mr. Larsen, it’s a much-yew-all admiration society, is what it is.
My stuff is pure opining. You and Subotai and many others do solid research and offer facts and links and references, and I just spew bile and venom.
Aristide (#61)
Quite the ironic name you have.
Buddy -
Congressman Rohrbacher didn’t recant his statement to the UK Telegraph. And the German and French media blamed Misha the Tie Eater, as Marie Claude has made clear here several times.
Of course Subotai knows that’s because they’re either cheese eating surrender monkeys or modern day acolytes of Bismarck’s dictum to always make a good treaty with Russia, not because an American ally f- up and expected us to bail him out or at least let him into NATO. And remember Buddy, the borders of South/North Ossetia that you are defending as being violated by the Russkis doling out passports were drawn by Josef Stalin, who was born in Gori, Georgia and only recently had his statue removed from his hometown after it became an embarassment to Saako.
You suggest a good motive for his replacing Curt Weldon as perhaps the most Russia-friendly Congressman, though Orange County is also a long way away from the Fort Ross site that Vekselberg funded for several years and was in the papers again with Schwarzenneger gratefully accepting the Russki money.
I will avoid the other thread. Not because I’m typing this from federal custody as one wag wrote, obviously not, but largely due to the fact that I don’t want to get into that discussion from the flip side. Even being anonymous it is best to stay open source and not find one’s career ruined for mysterious reasons. Suffice to say, I have met once or twice smiling Americans who traveled in former Soviet Central Asia with no obvious means of support, who had front row seats in three bedroom apartments beyond their means for the Orange Revolution in Kyev…you get the idea.
And since I want to have a normal life where I can freely travel to both the U.S. and Russia, I avoid them at all costs.
Here’s what one Russian nationalist who had his 15 minutes of fame (cited on the Glenn Beck Show, no less) thinks is the American equivalent to what the 10 are accused of doing:
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2010/01/ngos-agents-of-us-empire.html
Mr. Stanislav Mishin (I have no idea who slipped him that list, no doubt the wags here will say it was Lubyanka) does have a point that a disproportionate share of the U.S. taxpayer grants to Russian NGOs occur in the Caucases, the most sensitive spot for our Muscovite friends. But discussing what Soros money does in the former USSR? Verboten, you won’t see it in either the ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ media. Does that make them patriotic, or meek mice who know where not to go to avoid a phone call from the State Department or an audit? I report, you decide.
Again, I do not make these points to trash our government or suggest that every NGO in the former Soviet space is just a front for espionage or ‘agents of influence’. I merely want to point out that if our government and George Soros have been doing this for years in Russia and possibly China why would we not expect Moscow and Beijing to mirror-image U.S. (I should not say our since foreign policy making in America is for the most part even in a democracy, a very elite driven thing, and who’s to say the transnationalists haven’t hijacked our Russia policy?) propaganda efforts at some point? And unlike the Soviet machine, as Buddy seems to be getting paranoid about, this time they won’t merely appeal to the Left.
You cannot put a powerful collaborative tool into the hands of a profession whose purpose it is to shape the thoughts of both the electorate, to deceive them about the methods and goals of the elected, and the elected, to deceive them about the nature and beliefs of the electorate, then expect members of that profession not to use the tool to further their power. The Internet, like literacy and print before it, enables cooperation: not all that cooperation will further humanity, democracy, and freedom. The conspiratorial, Bolshevik model of collaboration functions in the Age of the Internet better than in the Age of the Telegraph.
The habits of the 17th century have collided with the realities of power. The profession of journalism will not forgoe its new powers because of the tissue paper of tradition. The solution lies in two parts: to recognize that the First Amendment makes no distinction between citizens and journalists: the people have these rights, not employees of the Post and Times, and to subject journalists to the respect they deserve, that is, the same respect you’d give any other fool drunkenly spouting off at the family picnic.
Journalism does not meet the criteria by which to be considered a profession. It has no regulatory capacity, no ethical standard of conduct has been agreed upon nor recognized. What was once the provenance of the editorial board is now up for grabs among various op-ed, on line contributors as well as the influence of the few paying advertisers.
If a union of bloggers, independent of government, determined it was in there best interest to publicise and enforce such a code, the world wide web will either remain like the wild west it is now or reigned in by the FCC. It is too large a technological reach and too powerful an influential force to not be dominated by some governing body.
X, Tehag, & Whaddyamean, you speak with much wisdom.
Maybe some BC persons can do some rough drafts of an Internet Code of Responsible Blogging…
Whatdayameanitstoohot @80: agree but would suggest that “provenance” should be “province” in your third sentence. “Provenance” would mean “origin or lineage” but I think the sense you want is “turf or territory, area under one’s control”? Sorry if I sound like a word freak…
Reward: $100,000 for Full ‘JournoList’ Archive; Source Fully Protected
Big Journalism ^ | June 29, 2010 | Andrew Breitbart
I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.
(Excerpt) Read more at bigjournalism.com …
there is no honor among libs… data will hit the fan.
Mr. X (#77): “I will avoid the other thread. Not because I’m typing this from federal custody as one wag wrote, obviously not, but largely due to…”
No offense, Mr X, but I doubt I’m the only one who burst out laughing at the “obviously not”.
To what extent does the left simply pine for the days when a mass media directed the focus of our fattention on a national government in D.C. ? So that the suckers game could, and was played, with a multitude of suckers rooting for one side or the other as though it were the various players (or actors) in a miserable football match?
The means to pacification, then, was through an eternal unsatisfied tension between the two “partys”. Facilitated through the mass media as it was then. It’s still pretty much intact.
In Darwinian terms, this, or, in fact, that era would be considered a stepping stone on the way to whatever hamster wheel or treadmill they want us to ride next. Except that the logic breaks down as usual, because the left wants to have it both ways. They dread the internet, so that when they feel that it’ll be time, they’ll shut it down to put into play all their grandiose designs, facilitated, as it were, previously, on the internet. They won’t, of course, bite the hand that feds them, of course, they’ll simply restrain it, of course, for everyone’s benefit, of course, and then proceed to the old mass media template of the past, but with no more discourse, of course, no more opposition, just popinjays and wind up speechmakers to deliver pat propaganda from the media outlets in an endless one way street.
Sounds pretty banal, and pretty boring, just like they are.
And then balloon boy will likely win the Prix Nobel for journalistic excellence in the small, but not at all unappreciated and not mentioned subcategory of distraction.
48. Subotai Bahadur
“I grant that those such as Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, etc. are trying desperately to hedge their bets by being mildly critical of the regime while not crossing the boundary that would return them to the status of Enemy of the State; but their coin was their credibility, and they went all-in with the nascent regime in 2008. They have no more coin to make a countering bet.”
So well said.
Deep Throat (singular) or Deep Thoughts (plural). I think we finally found the source, and it was the latter.
This all reminds of the hubabubaloo over Dick Chenney’s meeting with some energy company executives. The left demanded the notes or at least a list of those in attendance. The admin argued that the executives should be able to seek counsel in private lest those giving counsel hold back. The left of course did not agree with that, but I have always thought a lot of people have conflated freedom of the press with an unlimited right to know that which is hidden.
A journalist or a blogger or whoever has no right to know all that goes on. Freedom of the press just protects us from the government interfering with publishing what we know, not revealing all. The argument that public affairs conducted with public dollars are automatically subject to publications is a strong one but does not trump all concerns.
The idea of having that private place where we can let our hair down is nothing but primal scream therapy and the problem with that is serves as practice for everyday settings.
Oman @ 82, nope I meant the history and philosophical leanings of a paper as determined by the Editorial Board. Your critique refers to reach, either as a function of circulation or other numbers.
I like a free and unfettered press, meaning full on capitalism and competition of ideas in a fluid market. Point being even if folks could agree on what makes for best blogging practices, who would or could there be to enforce it? Even if the web got unplugged, alternatives to pc mediums would find a way to get information out, whispers of some sort would abound.
I’d just as soon it were an open, than a closed system.
Breitbart just offered 100k for anyone who could get the journoList