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Tea Partiers are a bunch of hippies.Follow

#1 Mar 08 2010 at 6:17 AM Rating: Good
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So says another another hippie, Dave Brooks from the NY Times.

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But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. **** Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.


We knew you had hugglz for us all along, you cranky anti-establishment radicals.
#2 Mar 08 2010 at 7:13 AM Rating: Excellent
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OMG ALINSKYITES!!!


Rush will be running around wavng his arms in the airs and scremaing like a little girl.
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#3 Mar 08 2010 at 7:52 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Rush will be running around wavng his arms in the airs and scremaing like a little girl.


Have another?
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#4 Mar 08 2010 at 8:34 AM Rating: Excellent
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Don't mind if I do! Smiley: laugh
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#5 Mar 08 2010 at 10:00 AM Rating: Good
At the risk of an early Godwin's...

It's no different than recognizing that the Third Reich approached the second world war with a very sound tactic (prior to their foolish push in to Russia). Adopting the tactics of your enemy is a sound strategy. Failing to do so is arguably what caused such massive failure in Vietnam, and by the British in the Revolutionary War.

The mouthpieces may rail against the tactic, but if they had any sense (or leadership ability) they wouldn't be mouthpieces. As to the likely ZOMG coming later, I'd guess it's more likely to come from Hannity (a bombastic, annoying son of a ***** if ever there was one).
#6 Mar 08 2010 at 10:50 AM Rating: Excellent
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True enough.

My only real amusement comes form the fact that certain people (as you say, "mouthpieces") have railed against Alinsky for the last couple years, making sure to link Democrats to his tactics again and again as proof that they must all be Socialist/Communist monsters bent on destroying America. First, demonize Alinsky (who actually held no love for either party) and then demonize everyone they can link to Alinksy. It would be akin to calling Churchill a "Hitlerite" who obviously loves ***** because he engaged in armor warfare in North Africa.

That the Tea Party is embracing Alinksy's methods is humorous for that alone.
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#7 Mar 08 2010 at 11:21 AM Rating: Good
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Yeah, what Joph said. I just love the lulz of people who rant and rave and scream about one view and then flip sides.
#8 Mar 08 2010 at 12:00 PM Rating: Excellent
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Adopting the tactics of your enemy is a sound strategy.


No, it always depends.

If your enemy is smarter than you, sure, barring that, build a counter.

Symmetry can occasionally be useful, but more specifically, it's useful when you know what to exploit, to break symmetry in your favor.

Mirroring tactics of a guerilla force is a decent idea. Mirroring their tactics when you have a sh*t-ton more dudes, better range, etc is better. Building a strategy that systematicly takes advantage of their non command and control structure is best.

But all are categorically exponentially better than using a strategy that their strategy is explicitly intended to counter.

If the US revolutionary forces had adopted the tactics of their enemy, which was to form up in lines and stand and shoot, as basically every european army had done for a great deal of time, they would have lost, and lost hard.

Edited, Mar 8th 2010 1:03pm by Timelordwho
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#9 Mar 08 2010 at 12:15 PM Rating: Good
Funny, Flea, Ayn Rand expressed a similar sentiment - I believe she referred to them as "hippies of the right".

There should be a Godwin's law equivalent for comparisons to Rand.
#10 Mar 08 2010 at 12:38 PM Rating: Good
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No, it always depends.

Very true. I forget my audience, sometimes. Inferences not being a strong suit here, I should have spelled out that occasionally, when you find yourself losing to a tactic that is proving considerably more effective than the one you are currently employing, adopting the tactic of the opposition can be effective.

Sorry to make you hack out such a comprehensive & well articulated response that was required for the nigglers out there who can't infer the general meaning in a post & get it in their heads that I'm somehow similar to gbaji.

Quote:
If the US revolutionary forces had adopted the tactics of their enemy, [...] they would have lost, and lost hard.

That's pretty much what I said. Re-reading it I fail to see how I could have been clearer & achieved my primary goal of brevity.
#11 Mar 08 2010 at 12:52 PM Rating: Excellent
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Timelordwho wrote:
If the US revolutionary forces had adopted the tactics of their enemy, which was to form up in lines and stand and shoot, as basically every european army had done for a great deal of time, they would have lost, and lost hard.

Not to derail, but the Colonial armies largely did exactly this. Lining up wasn't really some act of nobility but rather the way you made inaccurate muskets work -- massed fire. Yes, the Colonials used sharpshooters (as did the British) and guerrilla tactics but the plucky guys hiding behind trees have been greatly romanticized.
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#12 Mar 08 2010 at 12:54 PM Rating: Excellent
Jophiel wrote:
the plucky guys hiding behind trees have been greatly romanticized.

What do you have against romance? I mean, I know you get on better with jungle chicks who respond best to a clubbing and a vat of personal lubricant, but romance is not dead, sir.
#13 Mar 08 2010 at 12:57 PM Rating: Excellent
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Well, I guess if romancing plucky young men behind the trees is your sort of thing, you go rock that world, Moe.
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#14 Mar 08 2010 at 1:00 PM Rating: Good
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His Excellency MoebiusLord wrote:
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No, it always depends.

Very true. I forget my audience, sometimes. Inferences not being a strong suit here, I should have spelled out that occasionally, when you find yourself losing to a tactic that is proving considerably more effective than the one you are currently employing, adopting the tactic of the opposition can be effective.

Sorry to make you hack out such a comprehensive & well articulated response that was required for the nigglers out there who can't infer the general meaning in a post & get it in their heads that I'm somehow similar to gbaji.

Quote:
If the US revolutionary forces had adopted the tactics of their enemy, [...] they would have lost, and lost hard.

That's pretty much what I said. Re-reading it I fail to see how I could have been clearer & achieved my primary goal of brevity.


You could have gone the standard angle of "When change comes, adapt."
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#15 Mar 08 2010 at 1:02 PM Rating: Good
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Timelordwho wrote:
You could have gone the standard angle of "When change comes, adapt."
Why? What he said the first time made perfect sense to me, and I'm a waste of bandwidth.
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#16 Mar 08 2010 at 1:07 PM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Timelordwho wrote:
If the US revolutionary forces had adopted the tactics of their enemy, which was to form up in lines and stand and shoot, as basically every european army had done for a great deal of time, they would have lost, and lost hard.

Not to derail, but the Colonial armies largely did exactly this. Lining up wasn't really some act of nobility but rather the way you made inaccurate muskets work -- massed fire. Yes, the Colonials used sharpshooters (as did the British) and guerrilla tactics but the plucky guys hiding behind trees have been greatly romanticized.


Massed blocks of infantry is a great way to provide a target rich environment for your adversary, yes.

But in any event, the real losers of the American revolution were the French monarchy, whom crashed their economy and spurred their own happy little revolution.
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#17 Mar 08 2010 at 1:17 PM Rating: Good
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Uglysasquatch, Mercenary Major wrote:
Timelordwho wrote:
You could have gone the standard angle of "When change comes, adapt."
Why? What he said the first time made perfect sense to me, and I'm a waste of bandwidth.


I assume that you've also noticed that my previous couple of posts have been a similar sort of technical excercise to kill a bit of time between engagements. It's not like minor mathematical malfeasance is that pressing of a matter to me either. But 'Twas fun to excoriate via nuance.
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#18 Mar 08 2010 at 1:44 PM Rating: Excellent
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Timelordwho wrote:
Massed blocks of infantry is a great way to provide a target rich environment for your adversary, yes.

It's also a great (and pretty much only) way for your infantry's guns to have any effect on the other guy's army. Neither of which is here nor there towards the fact that the Colonial armies used the same technique most of the time.
Quote:
But in any event, the real losers of the American revolution were the French monarchy

The real winners of the French monarchy was the American Revolution who only had to fight Britain's 3rd string troops while the better armies were busy fighting France.
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#19 Mar 08 2010 at 2:01 PM Rating: Excellent
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Having already dragged Britain into a war with the French in Canada, for no apparent reason. Smiley: laugh

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#20 Mar 08 2010 at 3:04 PM Rating: Good
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Timelordwho wrote:
Uglysasquatch, Mercenary Major wrote:
Timelordwho wrote:
You could have gone the standard angle of "When change comes, adapt."
Why? What he said the first time made perfect sense to me, and I'm a waste of bandwidth.


I assume that you've also noticed that my previous couple of posts have been a similar sort of technical excercise to kill a bit of time between engagements. It's not like minor mathematical malfeasance is that pressing of a matter to me either. But 'Twas fun to excoriate via nuance.
About that, fuck you. I had all but killed that thread and you brought it back. Asshole.
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#21 Mar 08 2010 at 3:38 PM Rating: Good
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His Excellency MoebiusLord wrote:
a clubbing and a vat of personal lubricant, but romance is not dead, sir.
Not for people who know what to do with their club and lubricant.


/waggle
#22 Mar 08 2010 at 5:54 PM Rating: Decent
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The Glorious Atomicflea wrote:
So says another another hippie, Dave Brooks from the NY Times.

Quote:
But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. **** Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.


We knew you had hugglz for us all along, you cranky anti-establishment radicals.


Hook, line, and sinker I suppose... The current tactic to discredit the Tea Party folks (which I find amusing btw) is to play the "they're just like the radical left!" card. This is just one of many oddly simultaneous media statements making that very connection. I'm sure it's just coincidental...

People on the left study Saul Alinsky, not because they like his methods or objectives, but so that they can better understand the tactics and techniques they have to oppose. Tactics just like that displayed in the Op-ed you quoted btw (yes. Irony abounds here).

Unless someone can find a more complete quote, here's what Armey said:

What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.

That's hardly "praising the methods" of Alinsky. Yet, the op-ed uses this incredible stretch of language in order to create the perception that Armey is somehow a fan of Alinsky, and the Tea Party movement is really made up of Alinskyites who may not even be aware that's what they're doing...

Um... No.
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#23 Mar 08 2010 at 5:56 PM Rating: Excellent
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Of course it is praising Alinsky's methods. It is explicitly praising Alinsky's methods.

Not a thing wrong with that. Adapt or die, etc.

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#24 Mar 08 2010 at 6:40 PM Rating: Decent
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Samira wrote:
Of course it is praising Alinsky's methods. It is explicitly praising Alinsky's methods.


Not in the "this is something I/we should do" kind of way. Which is *exactly* the implication given in the op-ed.

Quote:
Not a thing wrong with that. Adapt or die, etc.


What part of Armey's quote makes you think he wants to use the same tactics?
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#25 Mar 08 2010 at 6:44 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
This is just one of many oddly simultaneous media statements making that very connection. I'm sure it's just coincidental...

Politico pointed it out a year ago.
Politico wrote:
[T]he 1971 agitator’s handbook “Rules for Radicals” — written by Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis, and whose teachings helped shape Barack Obama’s work on Chicago’s South Side — has been among Amazon’s top 100 sellers for the past month, put there in part by people who “also bought” books by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck,and South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.
[...]
The left-wing rhetoric and symbolism are so thick on the right, in fact, that some conservatives have been taken aback by it: The logo for the Sept. 12 protest in Washington, which organizers called the “March on Washington,” featured an image that looked so much like those associated with the labor, communist and black power movements that some participants objected to it — until they found out that’s what the designers were shooting for.

“As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing,” explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of “Rules for Radicals” when he took his current job . Brandon describes the Sept. 12 rally in D.C. as the “culmination of four years worth of work” and says that organizers were “incredibly conscious” of the symbols they chose.
[...]
James O’Keefe, the activist and filmmaker who posed as a pimp for an expose of several ACORN offices in the Northeast, told the New York Post earlier this week that he, too, had been inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” which includes such tactical lessons as “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”
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#26 Mar 08 2010 at 7:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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Even more bluntly, a direct quote from FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon:
Adam Brandon wrote:
When we get our jobs in our organization, the first thing you do is you sit down with some of Saul Alinsky’s books, Rules for Radicals. And we read that book and we study that book, and everything that we've been trying to do here comes straight out of those pages.
(Bolding mine)

And Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks says...
Washington Independent wrote:
“We’re applying Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ here,” said Steinhauser. “We’re using methods that the Left has used, and that other movements have used, all the way back to the Civil Rights movement. First of all there has to be a real grievance, and that’s what Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had. That’s what we have.”


Tea Party activist Michael Patrick Leahy self-published his own version of Rules for Radicals so everyone could use Alinsky methods while pretending that they weren't really all using Alinsky's methods:
Washington Independent wrote:
Michael Patrick Leahy’s self-published conservative manifesto is coming off the presses this week, and not a moment too soon.

“The timing is crucial,” said Leahy, the Nashville, Tenn., activist who founded the Top Conservatives on Twitter hashtag and played another founding role in the anti-tax “Tea Party” movement. “I’m trying to get these principles out there for conservatives this month, as people attend these town hall meetings with their members of Congress. These are principles that conservatives need to know.”

Those principles are the ones that the late left-wing activist Saul Alinsky outlined in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” Leahy’s book, “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” boils them down and scraps Alinsky’s more “amoral” suggestions. “The problem that conservatives have with Alinsky is that, for him, the ends justified the means,” explained Leahy. “I’m suggesting that we take the successful Alinsky rules, we update them and apply them to new social networking technology, and we execute them in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”


I'm not sure what's so hard about admitting that the Tea Party folks are a bunch of Alinskyites. Well, except that then you can't worship at the Altar of Limbaugh when he says the same thing disparagingly about Obama & Co.

Edited, Mar 8th 2010 7:20pm by Jophiel
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