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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
D. James Kennedy cannot be linked to Rushdooney, because Kennedy always advocates peaceful, lawful change through the ballot box, not militant overthrow.
So the Bush administration hasn't rolled back civil liberties because it worked through peaceful, lawful change?
This is the point. Dominionists realize they can't overthrow the gov't. They've wanted to, for 200 years, and now they've figured out how.
They figured out that they care more than the average person, so they got really organized, started marketing itself, created a parallel world, and is trying to outmarket reality.
Dominionism and the conservative movement have the same roots ... they can both be traced back to the John Birch Society. The JBS was fringe, it was what Hofstadter wrote about.
That's why it needs marketing. That's why it attacks everything as "liberal" bias. Science, journalism, history, public schools, universities, ... any person who disagrees with the movement ... as "liberally biased."
For the movement to succeed it has to revise reality. That's what is going on. You don't think its working? Why did Al Gore, the man who took the lead initiative in legislating the creation of the internet, have that monumental accomplishment COUNT AGAINST HIM.
Why do more Americans not believe in evolution than the rest of the industrialized world.
What do you think is going on with the "liberal" media internalizing all the memes of movement conservatism.
You want to know how we got here ... this is it ... its a war on reality. Marketing is outmarketing reality.
Last year the number of people who believed Iraq had WMDs and ties to al Qaeda WENT UP.
That's why we shouldn't be all happy time, yet. The problem, they key essential problem, is that people believed all this bullshit in the first place.
How has the Intelligent Design movement been defanged? By 1. refuting its nonsense and
2. Showing via the Wedge Document that the ultimate goal was not to improve science but to destroy it
David Brock has demonstrated in the Republican Noise Machine that the goal of movement conservatism is not to improve journalisn, but to destroy it,
Science, journalism ... this is how we understand reality. Democracy does not work without them. They know that, intuitively.
Its the same reason why Nazis and Communists attacked science and journalism (vis-a-vis whatever their dominant hate ideology was)
That's what Hannah Arendt meant by the origins of totalitarianism being in the creation of propaganda that can cut the masses off from reality.
And that's what has been going on.
That's inner 'spirit' intoxicants, by the way.
It may be that we are all right too? The "wobble-shop" was a place in the olden days where we could come to sip inner 'psyche' thought that intoxicates. ---John Farmer's slang, "Slang and Analogues." 1890-to today?
Where is Glenn? Profoundly drunk, probably. (teasing). So, do what we may, and hope the bar/taverns/Salon, is loaded with ale, porter, ginger beer, root-bear, wine, gin slings, mint juleps, cocktails, and non-alcoholic cider and goat milk! Thomas Jefferson and many other 'elder' mother/father forebears who walked this way before us.....gave us good ideas (light) that makes me a believer in times of national intoxicates--wheeze all here.
The Salon is a good wobble-shop.
Oops. Silly me. I forgot that political discourse is just a basketball game.
Actually, you're mixing metaphors. "Winning on points" is more of a boxing term. But that's OK.
I would hope that the goal is to win arguments with people who can help you realize your strategic political objectives. That would be the American public, or the prospective voter, not just people in a like-minded chat room.
Therefore, it makes sense to pick your fights. This was a loser for the left. If you doubt it, turn on the TV. Look at the mainstream media and you can catch the score.
It'll happen. The right had the public-perceived high ground on this one, yet some chose to fight them anyway. Your call. I see it as weak strategy.
It's fun to debate, anyway. Still, winning fights is more fun. And more important.
It's only a total loss if you don't learn from it.
But I reject your fearful vision of the future, and I do it with my feet firmly planted in reality. Yours is not a message designed to motivate people, to bring people together or to move us forward.
What do you think George Orwell was trying to do when he wrote 1984: motivate or depress?
I think you're wrong that the biggest worry is the organized movement. It's the conditions that make that movement possible and successful. It's a question of framing, but I think an important one. You could imagine defeating the neo-cons, and having them reform as a new coalition, since the political conditions and structures haven't changed. It could be on the left or the right, even though the right is more likely (but they have been on the left before).
It's an important distinction because we (Americans) have a tendency to idolize our political order - the Genius of The Founders, the Perfection of the Constitution, etc, and so many of us are blind to the failures of our system. And the frustration dealing from that inability to openly recognize those problems, the need to project and disassociate ourselves in the face of the rational contradictions, is the basis of the mass-character of the threat.
What do you think George Orwell was trying to do when he wrote 1984: motivate or depress?
Hah! He was trying to sell books.
Thanks for the softball.
... if no one hears it?
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself ... The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda - before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's distrubing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world - lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the world
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Like the American and other Western Communist parties in their heyday, the American conservative movement has created a kind of alternative intellectual and political universe - a set of institutions parallel to and modelled on the institutions of mainstream society (many of which the movement sees, or imagines, as the organs of a disciplined Liberal Establishment) and dedicated to the single purpose of advancinga predetermined polictial agenda. There is a kind of Inner Movement, consisting of a few hundrer founders, senior organizations leaders, lawyers, and prominent media personalities (but only a handful of pracitcing politicians,) and an Outer Movement, consisting of a few hundred staff people, grant workers, and low level operatives of one kind or another. The movement has its own newspapers (the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Journal's editorial page), its own magazines (the Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, Commentary, and many more), its own broadcasting operations (Fox News and an army of Christian broadcast outlets), its own publishing houses (Regnery prominent among them), its own quasi-academic research institutions (the Heritage Foundation, the American Interprise Institute), and even its own Popular Front - the Republican Party, important elements of which (the party's congressional and judicial leadership, for example) it has successfully commandeered. These closely linked organizations (the vanguard of the consevative revolution, you might say) compose an entire social world with its own rituals, celebrations, and anniversaries, within which it is possible to live one's entire life. It is a world with its own elaborate system of incentives and sanctions, through which ... energetic conformity is rewarded with honors and promotions while deviations from the movement line, depending on their seriousness, are punished with anything from mild social disaproval to outright excommunication. - Hendrik Hertzberg, "Can You Forgive Him?", The New Yorker, March 11, 2002
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
