Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Sunday, March 1, 2020

STRATEGY OF THE LEFT

The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America

NEW REPORT: Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America©

By Stephen Coughlin and Richard Higgins
February 2019
UPDATED: July 2019

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Report is 8.5″x11″, 253 pages in full-color

“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” — John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961
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“We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” — Mao Zedong
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“The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies, has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.” —Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power, 1974
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“The American people have got to stop fooling around with just fighting communism in the abstract. They have got to know what the thing means, why they are against it, and how to fight it.” —Bella Dodd, Testimony to the HCUA, 1953
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“And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” —Machiavelli, The Prince, 1552

Executive Summary

When associated with rising factional discord, the increased hostility from the Left resonates a violence that is becoming a clear and present danger.
This paper will provide an estimate of the current situation that transcends well-travelled two-party political narratives. The objective is to provide a strategic understanding of the Left that baselines the current situation to enable directionality, predictability, and actionability. To that end, the estimate will use a political warfare analysis to reframe the political environment in order to provide timely anticipatory situational awareness in support of decision-making.
National policy has come under the influence of constructed narratives that mainstream and conservative leaders neither understand nor control. Lacking situational awareness to recognize the operational nature of information campaigns directed against national policy, responses tend to be tactically limited and predictably reactive along scripted action-reaction cycles built into the operational sequencing of information campaigns controlled by the Left. These powerful but misunderstood narratives drive policy.
At their core, these narratives are not American. Rather, they are dialectically driven Neo-Marxist memes that infuse mass line efforts operating at the cultural level intent on powering down into the political space.
This furthers the Left’s political warfare effort to impose conformance resulting in the non-enforcement of laws by those tasked with their oversight and enforcement. As these narratives transition into prevailing cultural memes, non-enforcement becomes institutionalized and enforced by an opposition that increasingly comes under the control of those narratives.
As such, for the Left, political organizations like Congress become vehicles to execute lines of effort in an execution matrix along which information campaigns are executed from outside and above.

Key Findings & Observations:

  • The political rhetoric driving American politics runs along well-trodden paths sustaining a political framework from a by-gone era incapable of coming to terms with the political movements threatening our constitutional system today.

  • Constrained by this archaic rhetoric, mainstream and conservative players are outmaneuvered in an information battle-space they hardly perceive; responding to current threats in under-inclusive manners.

  • The “otherism” strategy developed by Marxists to destroy America focuses on the systematic destruction of identity leading to the systematic disenfranchisement of Americans from America. It manipulates the issues of the “other”, yet it has nothing to do with the “other”. Rather, it forces a classic dialectical negation along Hegelian lines. This activity presents a clear and present danger that will succeed if not countered. As such, this analysis does not suggest that this is a way to understand the left, it argues that it is the only way to understand it; recognizing that it is 1) Marxist, and 2) dialectically driven.

  • The dominant cultural narratives of our time can best be summarized by the saying; “Political correctness is the enforcement mechanism of the multicultural narrative that implements Neo-Marxist objectives.” It is through these narratives that the left drives policy.

  • Narratives that conservative leaders neither control nor understand drive national policy. When Republican leaders shrink from Constitutional principles for fear of being accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., they are subordinating those principles to neo-Marxist narratives designed for that purpose. Though these narratives may have been initially imposed, Republicans will adopt them over time through usage. Subjective awareness of the role one plays in such a process is neither necessary nor require.
    • By submitting to these narratives, establishment Republicans first become pliant, and then obedient to the Left, accommodating it through “words that work” that create the illusion of opposition while actually signaling surrender in the information battle space. In that role, regardless of the mandates that got them elected, establishment Republicans will defend the issues that got them elected in deliberately under-inclusive manners that conditions those issues for dialectical negation while demoralizing their base. What Republicans demoralize, the Left then disenfranchises. In this role, establishment Republicans become the defeat mechanism of the Left. (“Defeat Mechanism: The method of defeating the opponent.”  Joint Publication 5-00.1, Joint Doctrine for Campaign Planning, January 25, 2002).


  • A strategic understanding of the Left recognizes that it is dialectically driven. As such, the Left is a teleologically informed movement that executes through history and thought, along an arc, with a trajectory. It is Hegelian. It defines everything that “is” as fuel for “becoming” in a dialectical process that compels it to negate. — “Change” “Perpetual Revolution” — Analysis of the Left that does not account for the dialectic will fail.

  • The critical theory of the Frankfurt School is classical Marxism dedicated to penetration and subversion that relies on Hegelian processes to achieve its objectives:
    • It seeks the destruction of Western culture;
    • It is focused on an “aufheben der Kultur” strategy based on “otherisms” (and is nothing more than the targeted application of the dialectical principle of negation to a people)
    • It is fully integrated into larger political warfare efforts

  • Frankfurt School leader Herbert Marcuse concurred with the Gramsci Marxist plan to adopt a “long march through the institutions” strategy based on Mao’s “long march” political warfare strategy.

  • Political Warfare is a Maoist Insurgency concept that recognizes the role narratives play in overwhelming rule of law societies. It includes the formation of mass line movements and counter-state activities. It also uses cultural level narratives to power down into the political space where fidelity to the narrative will result in non-enforcement of law that, over time, becomes institutionalized.

  • In Mass Line strategies, political engagements meet the people where they are. Through gentle nudges over time, passive participants become active. At first, a target may only be asked to sign a petition or provide an email or mailing address. From that point, the subject becomes the recipient of sustained communications related to the issues of the originating petition. While an individual may not be politically active, that person—through the supporting consumption of mass market media—will become more susceptible to activist messaging and discontent. The overarching goal of this line of effort is the development and reinforcement of a mass line as it builds the counter-state within the state; complete with its own bundle of replacement legal, cultural, and social norms that operate in parallel with that of the host culture’s.

  • The reason America’s current toolbox of responses is perilous is because it accepts mass line concepts of America as the terms of engagement. When, for example, mainstream Americans are manipulated into responding to mass line narratives from within those narratives, a (dialectical) paradox sets in where the highly ideological thrust of the Left’s ambitions are made to sound normal while mainstream defenses of America sound shrill, rigid, and even ideological.

  • The Left focuses on cultural and institutional power by communicating its ideological initiatives in terms of “values” while targeting the placement of cadre throughout the mass line so they can enable those “values” by converting them first to norms, then to policy, and finally to law.

  • What is popularly called “fake news” and the “deep-state” are better understood as propaganda and the counter-state. Transitioning to a political warfare analysis, one begins to discern methods, processes and directionality that terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” do not capture. By their nature, media terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” ensure that analysis remains fixed on the surface of events.

  • Our national aversion to recognizing threats beyond the strictly military, especially ideological threats in the political warfare arena, has long been recognized by America’s foes as an exploitable strategic level vulnerability.

  • The Left uses dialectically determined political warfare concepts to drive a core set of narratives that inter-operate at the tactical level while integrating at the strategic. Narratives are associated with the pseudorealities (or second realities) they seek to establish and enforce. They are called narratives because they are stories—fictions—that seek to supplant the real with the unreal. These narratives are directional, they have velocity, and are always oriented on a target.
Saying that “the Left moves dialectically, through time, on a trajectory” simply recognizes that the Left is a movement in history defined by its movement through history; that its backward trajectory defines its forward movement; and that failure to recognize this arc leads to error. It is for this reason that this assessment emphasizes historical events, conditions and movements that have defined the Left from the Hegelian dialectic, to Marx, to Wilson’s progressivism, to the early Frankfurt School, to Mao’s Long March, to Marcuse’s thoughts on tolerance, to political correctness.
This is how the Left should be understood. Hence, it would be a mistake to treat the historical elements of this assessment as little more than background material. Assessing the Left as if Hegel and Marx simply provide interesting historical context to today’s events is the failure to recognize that for the Left, Marx was yesterday and Hegel the day before. Between the two, they are the source code of today’s Left. To emphasize this point, a recent Daily Caller article is included as Appendix E to demonstrate just how relevant historical awareness of the Left is to understanding today’s Left.
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Friday, July 26, 2019

LOGIC and RELIGION

A TEST OF LOGIC from Wm. BRIGGS.

How Can Any Religion Have A Monopoly On Truth?

Soak this up (emphasis original):
By the time she turned up in New York, [Justina Walford’s] faith had long since unraveled, a casualty of overseas travel that made her question how any one religious community could have a monopoly on truth. But still she grieved the loss of God. “It was like breaking up with someone that you thought was your soulmate,” Walford told me. “It’s for the better. It’s for your own good,” she remembered thinking. Even though it no longer made sense to her to believe, she felt a gaping hole where her Church—her people, her psalms, her stained-glass windows—used to be.
We can see the usefulness of using emotions to judge truth, as young Walford has done, leads to grief—and error. If what feels good is true, then truth depends on your digestion (as subjective probability does). However, everybody, except magazine writers and feminist organizations, know this, so skip it.
Concentrate instead on this: could any one religious community have a monopoly on truth?
If you find yourself saying, “Gee! I guess it can’t!” then you have committed the One True Spartacus Fallacy. Twice.
The first time is implicitly saying “I now possess the monopolistic truth that my religion, that of myself being the ultimate judge of good and evil and of the truth and falsity of religions, must be true, because no one religious community could have a monopoly on truth. Except my community of one, or of the community of like-minded people who come together to celebrate their infinite perspicacity.”
You can’t say it is true there is no truth. Unless you’re an academic—in which case you could secure tenure with idiotic statements just like that. Given this is the internet, let me be painfully clear. You can’t say all religions are false unless you can prove it, which means, for a start, proving the necessary Being is not necessary. Best o’ luck.
The second time the fallacy is used is worse. It is to say there can be no true Spartacus because all the other men stood up and said that they were the one true Spartacus. And that because so many men said it, and were wrong, therefore there could be no one true Spartacus.
It would be like a scientist saying, “Because there are all these other rival theories purporting to explain this effect, each claiming to be the one true theory, and all are wrong except for mine; therefore, there can be no one true theory explaining this effect. Therefore I must be wrong, too. There is thus no reason to search for the one true theory. Science is a farce and a fake and a fraud. I’m taking up Yoga instead.”
Not only that, he would be applauded as being wonderfully aware. He’d win the Gold Fedora for having made this brilliant deduction.
There have been lots of scientific theories of effects, each claiming to be the one true theory, or a portion of it. Just as there have been lots of religions claiming to be the one true religion, or a portion of it.
Think! If any theory or religion said it was wrong, admitted up front that it’s so much bovine spongiography, who would follow it? Who practices a theory or religion that they knew is false?
Of course, mistakes have been made. But we don’t give up on science, because science, like religion, is self-correcting. We do think we can jettison religion, though, based on arguments as dumb as the One True Spartacus Fallacy.
What galls the modern mind is a religion with the temerity to say it is the one true religion. The stakes in religion are higher than in any science, so it’s natural emotions run hotter. But what’s really happening is that people making the Fallacy have already judged the religion under discussion false, and not only that religion, but all religions, and without the benefit of arguing why. Therefore they’re only rejecting “one more God”, as the internet-atheists say.
Tough cookies. There is one true religion, and all the others are either false or only approximations to it, containing, possibly, some truths and not knowing others, while, possibly, also containing falsities.
Naturally, some reject this one true religion for reasons other than the silly “all religions but my own are false.” But if it’s because this one true religion openly calls itself the one true religion, which you “feel” is an affront, then you have made the Effeminacy Fallacy.
Which brings us back to the beginning. You have rejected a religion because it has hurt your feelings. Suck it up, buttercup.

Friday, April 12, 2019

CROSSING THE JORDAN PETERSON

https://namnow.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/crossing-the-jordan-peterson/

Prof. Jordan Peterson, psychologist, has become flavor of the decade for the conservative political right with his arguments of reason and logic that decimate the wooly theories of the prog-libs and cultural Marxist post modernists. The catalyst for his rise to prominence on social media was his refusal to indulge in the enforced terming of pronouns for the gender fluid. While in reality there are plenty of such sensible commentators about, it is to his good fortune that he has broken through into the public arena where others remain in relative obscurity  –  it’s not as if reason and logic have just been discovered  –  and those others are considered by the mainstream to be far right nutters or even religious nerds who are not willing disciples of the god of Cool. And that,  – Cool  – is the light in which Peterson is apparently being seen by, of all demographic groups, generation Z. A good thing as far as it goes.
The reasonable average Joe and even your mildly activist keyboard warrior knows bullshit when he or she sees it, but articulating their position so often falls short. Enter the appealing person of Jordan Peterson who has taken up their cudgel. Up to very recent times his crusade on behalf of the bourgeoisie has concentrated on social mores and public policy such as free speech, feminism, gender theory, culture, migration policies etc. But, of late, the revered professor has begun to make public his personal views on religion. He gives every appearance of being on a spiritual journey without defining his beliefs dogmatically. And it would appear that he is taking his cult following with him [and this is not to imply that he is aligned to, or starting a cult, for I could well have said his ‘fan base’]. Should these followers travel the whole journey with him and enjoy the benefit from a resultant truth which is Christian [for he is touted as being a Christian], then that ought be a good result. Peterson believes in God, in Jesus, the resurrection conditionally, and the bible for a start. Why then should I express concern?
Co-incidentally, I posted a YouTube video on facebook just yesterday of Peterson talking with Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin and my comment displayed a concern that I had. As I put it, “He appears to be trying to re-invent the metaphysical wheel, and has not yet found his own answer to the perennial question of ‘Why Is There Not Nothing?'” I would have thought a champion of reasoned thinking might have come to some basic answer, albeit that he already is said to have faith, notwithstanding that, as I am too aware, faith and knowledge are developmental and beg to grow. I suggested too that he appeared to be much influenced by Jung and de Chardin.  As circumstance would have it, last night my reading material included articles from The Federalist, and this article was one:
I quote:
“This, combined with his rhetorical approach and that his Canadian accent affects just enough of the exotic to tantalize Americans who assume profundity in such things, is exactly the stuff of a YouTube sensation. If that makes Christianity cool again, or helps skeptical Christians feel good and intellectual about the faith, that can’t be a bad thing. I guess.
More likely, however, Peterson is fostering our cultural Gnosticism. Consider his understanding of God, what he calls his first hypothesis: God is the abstraction of a human ideal formalized over millions of years of human development in the myths and teachings of any religion. Does an actual transcendent deity exist? Peterson leaves this “floating up in the air” (his words, in lecture one), something unfit for rational investigation.”
[The article itself, and the author, begs for critique. But I will leave that for now].
The article is lengthy and I found it disturbing as Gnosticism is antithetical to Christianity. Peterson is also an evolutionist of the type that denies the Catholic Christian doctrine that God created two sentient beings who sought the “knowledge” to be as gods and their sin bastardized the perfection of all things that God had created and so required redemption to be restored as a New Earth as we find in Christ. I fear that Peterson is going the New Age road of the “proud” who ignore the tenets established over thousands of years through Tradition, Revelation and the Bible and embarking on Teilhard’s road of “knowing the essence of God” as Adam sought to do, via the Cosmic Theology of either or both the collective unconscious or collective consciousness that culminates in the “Omega Point”. He is entitled to ruminate and embark on his journey but it is of concern that he is taking many thousands down a dubious road to a belief system that leads away from the very God being sought. I do wish he would stick with social commentary and not publicize his esoteric beliefs.
The substance of Gnosticism and the theories of Jung, of whom he is a devotee, are too much for this article but I refer readers to search the personalities and beliefs mentioned, and I recommend the article link above from The Federalist. Should a reader do so then I also refer him to look at the bio of Richard Noll too. Noll was a critic of Jung’s theories and wrote a relevant book. Prof. Peterson launched an attack on Noll, claiming that the book cover had Nazi images. It did not, and Peterson later issued an apology, so our hero is very touchy about his affinity to Jung.
We can know God here and now in various ways, experientially, by Grace, from Jesus words and actions, through prayer and so on. But, the Divine essence is indeterminate for humans, and were it not then there would be no need for faith or even maybe free will. Traditionally, theology concerning the knowability of God has been to define Him by what He is not, and somewhat by what He is, and it is only pride that thinks God can be discovered through esoteric knowledge. The temptation to eat of the tree of knowledge was too much for Adam, and it is still insistent for us. My hope is that a seemingly good man finds joy and peace for his soul in the truths of Jesus, and comes to know the efficacy of God’s Grace in his life because cosmic theology and Gnosticism denies the personal Father-God who has a real and tangible love for every soul he has created. I leave readers with just one of Peterson’s videos with his esoteric theories.
Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

THE ONE CHURCH ESTABLISHED BY CHRIST: Does it "subsist in" or "is it" the Catholic Church

  POSTED BELOW IS THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF Fr. MINCINELLA'S VIEW AS RECORDED IN "RADIO SPADA" The theme of  subsistit in  is...