Progressives are showing their true colors this week. They want to protect the rights of terrorists, and they see productive Americans who generate CO2 as the real threat.
It took generations of brainwashing to produce this level of insanity, and we need to work tirelessly to remove these lunatics from government. They are time bombs programmed to destroy western civilization.
These ticking Progressive mind bombs must have been on Nikita Khrushchev’s mind when he said this to Western ambassadors in 1956. The Soviet Commies knew how to manipulate and control people. They understood that no idea was too stupid for Leftists to believe and endorse. He took the long view. He knew that every generation will produce these morons and they will work towards his goals long after he was dead.
That is what Kent Clizbe’s book, Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America, is all about. The KGB planted Willi Muenzenberg’s message in our Universities, Newspapers and Hollywood. Once planted the message took on a life of it’s own and has grown into the demented monster we call The Progressives.
Of course that message had the help of the Fabian Society members like the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and John Dewey, Father of American Education. It is interesting that Stalin tried Dewey’s teaching methods and tossed it because it produced uneducated brain dead adults.
Seminaries too apparently.
Not so much. I’m a progressive (by which I mean a fair deal for all certified US citizens, no special privileges to the rich or to corporations, especially foreign-based ones), but I don’t see CO2 as a threat. It’s a benign and beneficial component of the Earth system, and it’s definitely NOT the cause of the TEMPORARY global warming caused by CFCs damaging the ozone layer in the last 3 decades of the 20th century. As for the rights of terrorists, I think it’s important to protect the rights of ALL citizens (EXCLUDING illegal aliens, who have NO rights!) while maintaining high vigilance against any who would cause harm to others. For those, swift detention and justice, but THROUGH DUE PROCESS. Any deviation from this could harm you and me if we should be falsely accused of wrongdoing. I’m not sure what neat category, if any, all this puts me in, but I hope I’ve made my point that it doesn’t do much good to put people in categories. It really isn’t an all-or-nothing, black-or-white world. There are some things we agree on and others we don’t. Let’s work together on the former and forget about the rest.
How about an intelligent human being who can think for themselves. It is the blind lemmings who follow without thought that are the problem on both the right and the left.
I consider myself a ‘civilized human’ and come out somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum.
“If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” ~Winston Churchill
Having a heart and feelings is great but it must be tempered by the use of our brain or we leave ourselves open to every scam artist and conman who comes along. The news media/ politicians use that and mostly for ill.
If you want a level playing field, that does not make you progressive (they do not). Nor necessarily a democrat or republican (neither do they). What it makes you is a free marketer – and perhaps even a libertarian. What precludes you from being one is your use of the word “fair”. It is a childish term that has no use in the adult world as it is totally subjective. Thus why I did not use it.
Most of what you have written is NOT in the Progressive agenda except as propaganda points. The Progressive movement is centered around an Oligarchy run by an intelligentsia who makes all decisions for all people and is simply a Socialist twist on feudalism with a very, very dark core usually only seen in evil mad scientist stories. The “fairness” or “equality” is to be forced on the populations in line with what the oh so intelligent elite believe is in our best interest. It’s just another Totalitarian scheme, but far more insidious and evil than most. Population controls, eugenics, complete lack of moral foundation are just surface of the sinister garbage it’s built on… Stalin’s USSR was a paradise compared to what a Progressive world would look like.
David, I disagree.
We make sounds and assign them to things, concepts and ideas. When enough people agree on the meaning of a sound, we call it a word and when we have a few of them, a language. Most words can be understood as categories—if I call someone a liar or a Nazi, I assign him to the category of liars or Nazis.
It’s impossible to stop using categories and still speak a language.
It’s normal and natural that individuals constantly invent new sounds, mispronounce and misunderstand existing ones, or assign them completely new and frequently arbitrary meanings. If accepted, they become part of the language. It doesn’t matter where they came from or how idiotic their origin may be. It only matters that enough people agree.
You and I cannot carry on this conversation unless we agree on the meaning of the words we use. Like any other English speaker, you have an absolute right to claim the word “progressive” for yourself and for what you believe. All that’s left for you to do is to convince others to accept your meaning. I suspect that you know it’s an uphill fight. At the beginning you call yourself a progressive and towards the end you basically say it doesn’t do any good to do so.
I think I understand your problem. Just during my life, the American collectivist Left renamed itself several times. It’s a standard operating procedure—they rename themselves every time their nom du jour becomes unpopular. Right now, they call themselves Progressives. They have no problem with “the rich” or the “corporations”, as long as they toe the line. They will trample our civil liberties at will, as long as it serves their long term goals. They say that our Constitution is obsolete and has to be replaced. When allowed, they apply laws and due process selectively. They define “fair deal” as taking other people’s money and giving it to someone else. They live to create “special privileges” for their favorite groups and corporations. And they want a government powerful enough to be able to do all these things.
Unless you subscribe to their ideas and goals, you may want to pick a different moniker. You are one and they are many. They win. That’s how language works.
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P.S. This is obvious but it may be worth repeating: I don’t expect to agree on everything. The pragmatic thing is to work together in the sphere of common interests. That’s what political coalitions are for. The continuing existence of the industrial Western civilization seems like a good enough cause to me.
P.P.S. When I say “they win”, it means I expect them to win against you in this particular case. I am not giving up the fight to “claw back” the words they stole. I am a street brawler and the People’s Republic of Boulder is one giant language fighter cage. Kent Clizbe is right: We cannot win unless we win this fight first.
A fundamental quality of science done well is (respectful) skepticism. Error analysis is an integral part of science; and transparent, readily available access to that analysis is a first marker of science done well.
‘The Science is Settled’ is antithetical to almost any science endeavor and its proclamation was an immediate mark of closed door, gate-keeper, money and accolades to the chosen few because we said so, pathetic science.
Having a broad and balanced opinion on varying subjects is simply indicative of an open mind.
+1
Also true scientists are inquisitive about multiple subjects and only a lack of time constrains them.
“To me, it seems completely insensible that slapping [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is bad, but sending a Hellfire missile into a family’s picnic and killing and the children, you know, and killing granny” is acceptable. “You know, if you kill them, you can’t question them.”
-James Elmer Mitchell
Former Air Force psychologist (consider to be “the architect” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program)
Military tribunals for unlawful enemy combatants is DUE PROCESS.
Tony,
“It took generations of brainwashing to produce this level of insanity, and we need to work tirelessly to remove these lunatics from government.”
You’re completely right in the first clause–“generations” of influence messages crammed into our culture have been extremely effective.
But on the second clause–“remove from government” you’re treating the symptom, not the disease.
The disease, as Gail mentions above, is the insidious anti-Normal-American messages the transmission belts of our culture insert into our society: the media, Hollywood, and academia/education are cults of anti-Normal-America hatred.
Their message is monolithic, constant, and consistent.
We have no hope of removing Politically Correct Progressives from government, without first excising the haters from the institutions that transmit American culture.
Politicians reflect the views of the PC-Progressive “elite,” and the message that is constantly streamed into our culture. If you were to remove the current crop of politicians, while the Anti-Normal hatred from our elite cultural arbiters continued to flow, they’d just be replaced by the others of the same point of view.
It took them 80 years to destroy our country. We may have to figure on a long-term struggle for the soul of our country, to win back the transmission belts of culture.
Details: http://www.willingaccomplices.com
Gramscian damage.
Thanks for the pointer. It adds to what Kent Clizbe wrote in Willing Accomplices.
If we do not understand the ‘enemy’ we can not hope to prevent him from over taking our country from within.
A useful essay: The Philosophy Of Karl Marx, The Hegelian Basis
It explains the basis of twishful thinking and ‘consensus’ and why reality is totally ignored.
Lane,
That’s an interesting essay you linked to, blaming Gramsci for America’s committing cultural suicide.
The writer is in the right room, and has the right scent, but he misidentified the source of the scent. Which is surprising, because he also cited Stephen Koch’s book on Muenzenberg.
Gramsci was a pitiful hanger-on in the Comintern. He attended one Comintern session, acting as a secretary and scribe, in Moscow. At that session, it’s pretty clear that he was in committee headed by Muenzenberg, which dealt with covert influence operations designed to destroy the West, specifically America.
Gramsci went back to Italy from that meeting, was promptly arrested, and spend the rest of his life in prison. He ran no operations, and had no original ideas. Gramsci is only known because, during his time in prison, he wrote down everything he learned from the covert influence genius, Muenzenberg.
No one else ever wrote down Muenzenberg’s covert operational creed, planning, or strategy. That’s because those operations were the highest level of classification in the organization that was at the highest level of classification in the Soviet intelligence apparatus.
Gramsci’s receiving accolades as some sort of influence impresario is quite hilarious.
The clues to his genius that Muenzenberg left were his actual operations, and the smoking gun–Koch’s (see book above) interview with Muenzenberg’s surviving wife, a 90 year old Babette Gross, in the 1990s. Gross proudly recounted what could be called the Muenzenberg Creed:
You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.
You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.
You believe in open-mindedness.
You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country.
You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman.
You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.
You believe in peace.
You yearn for international understanding.
You hate fascism.
You think the capitalist system is corrupt.
For a quick overview of “Why Progressives Hate America” see this 13 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVPH_jCBEvA
Thanks for the clarification.
And if you want to see what Muenzenberg’s payload, after 80 years of growing in the fertile soil of anti-Normal-American organizations, looks like today, there’s no better example than this:
A project aimed at teaching Howard Zinn’s Muenzenbergian vision of hellish-Normal-America in every school:
http://zinnedproject.org/
This is Willing Accomplices burrowed into American academia/education spreading the hate-America-first message for all they’re worth.
Progressive Elites want to rule the country and the world AND everyone left are servants.
The Roman republic and later the empire conquered the known world on Roman virtue; Knowing the rightness of the Virtues and establish peace.When the virtues eroded the empire fell among warring factions. The Left is attempting to degrade virtuous behaviour because it does not allow for the centralization of power. But the undermining of virtue is the ending of our society and the power ends anyway.