The OPM security breach: how bad could it be?
Bad.
It turns out that the breach of OPM security was much worse than previously reported. There are a bunch of good posts on the topic at Ace’s (see this, this, and this for some details).
For example, it wasn’t discovered for a long time:
The massive hack into federal systems announced last week was far deeper and potentially more problematic than publicly acknowledged, with hackers believed to be from China moving through government databases undetected for more than a year, sources briefed on the matter told ABC News.
“If [only] they knew the full extent of it,” one U.S. official said about those affected by the intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management’s information systems.
If only.
And it wasn’t the government that finally made the discovery of the breach, although we’d been led to believe that was the case. Apparently, it was actually discovered by accident by a private company:
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the breach was indeed discovered in April. But according to sources who spoke to the WS”s Damian Paletta and Siobhan Hughes, it was in fact discovered during a sales demonstration of a network forensics software package called CyFIR by its developer, CyTech Services. “CyTech, trying to show OPM how its cybersecurity product worked, ran a diagnostics study on OPM’s network and discovered malware was embedded on the network,” Paletta and Hughes reported.
Even the most elementary precautions had not been followed.
“We believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous,” Cox said in the letter. The [government employees’] union called the breach “an abysmal failure on the part of the agency to guard data that has been entrusted to it by the federal workforce.”…
Cox complained in the letter that “very little substantive information has been shared with us, despite the fact that we represent more than 670,000 federal employees in departments and agencies throughout the executive branch.”…
Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said last week that Chinese intelligence agencies have for some time been seeking to assemble a database of information about Americans. Those personal details can be used for blackmail, or also to shape bogus emails designed to appear legitimate while injecting spyware on the networks of government agencies or businesses Chinese hackers are trying to penetrate.
U.S. intelligence officials say China, like the U.S., spies for national security advantage. Unlike the U.S., they say, China also engages in large-scale theft of corporate secrets for the benefit of state-sponsored enterprises that compete with Western companies. Nearly every major U.S. company has been hacked from China, they say.
More here:
The OPM had no IT security staff until 2013, and it showed. The agency was harshly criticized for its lax security in an inspector general’s report released last November that cited its lack of encryption and the agency’s failure to track its equipment. Investigators found that the OPM failed to maintain an inventory list of all of its servers and databases and didn’t even know all the systems that were connected to its networks. The agency also failed to use multi-factor authentication for workers accessing the systems remotely from home or on the road.
Sort of reminds me of the Obamacare website debacle, only worse.
Remember when companies and governments somehow managed to be run without the aid of computers? When spies had to either enter the facilities, or worm their way into them, or use blackmail (or sex) on someone who worked there to get the information, and the amount of data was limited by how much they could carry? Those were the days, my friend.
The Bad News: All of my most personal details and relationships are open for exploitation.
The Good News: After months of unexplainable bureocratic delays, my security clearance renewal has been approved by someone named Ling Xiu.
The Bad News: All of my most personal details and relationships are open for exploitation.
The Good News: After months of unexplainable bureaucratic delays, my security clearance renewal has been approved by someone named Ling Xiu.
I suppose these days it’s news when there’s competition, however weak, for the White House’s dominance for the worst security threat to the United States.
And they said Snowden was bad for America.
I still blame the voters ….
Re: when spies had to enter countries and buildings and sex and blackmail were the tools of the trade-
Let’s not forget how boring spy movies will be for those of us who do remember. I can’t see shelling out ten bucks to watch a bunch of pimply faced geeks sitting around their computers hacking into servers. Or in the case of U.S. interests, small children with IPhones.
James Bond, R.I.P.
@G6loq: Yes, the voters are definitely to blame. The problem is that the kind of voters that would vote for Obama are not likely to be the kind that would make a connection between their guy and the problems he’s caused.
There’s one thing the Democrats do better now than any party in the history of the Republic and that is selling themselves. It’s all lies and deception, but they’re really good at it, and it works.
ConceptJunkie: The founding fathers never imagined that the peoples’ representatives would “sell” themselves to the voters. They thought the voters would value their freedoms sufficiently to choose their representatives. Of course, back then, the franchise was restricted to those who had “skin in the game.”
Hericlitus:
🙂
Heraclitus sounds like a Daoist.
The whole thing could be a false flag.
Hillary may not have lost her emails after all.
This is not new. The first publicly known instance of a hostile power (USSR, KGB) penetrating US government computers occurred in 1986. The government’s response then was the same as today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg
Book available on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/1416507787
The book is not technical and is a very good read.
Remember Scooter Libby?
How many people fell for that one.
And how many American patriots did the Left get killed with these leaks?
And they wanted to blame it all on Snowden, which was an obvious trick. He’s not really necessary for China or Russia to get state secrets, now is he.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-smearing-of-scooter-libby/
The Left has a certain modus operandi or SOP. 50 to 90% of their propaganda may be true, but that 10-50% adulteration is the issue. It’s enough to kill. It’s enough to wipe out a life.
Elections will do nothing to defeat the Left. Only something equally powerful in destruction can match the Left. Only something with greater, more permanent, destructive power can overcome the Left.
IMO, this counts as an act of war by China. We know the army building this is coming out of; we should hit it with a cruise missile.
Paul in Boston: Brilliant. I wonder what the street price is to retrieve them?
Schadenfreude:
The government employees described being in a “collective panic” about the hack of their personal data.
“You don’t understand how detailed the forms are. It’s over a hundred pages of you listing everything about yourself — who you are sleeping with, who your friends are — it’s like a cheat sheet to your life,” said a State Department employee in Washington D.C. “I just went and changed my bank password because part of it was my elementary school’s name, and that name is in my file.”
The 117-page questionnaire that all federal employees must complete upon being hired asks detailed questions about a new employees personal and private life. The questions, intended to insure that the employees do not have a conflict of interest and to allow the government to vet those around them, can be found online….
TWANLOC all of them ….
This is why some of us never filed petitions via the White House page. It’s just their way of hacking, cracking, and putting spybots on your life.
It’s contaminated. They’re all contaminated, it is safe to think of it that way. General people just don’t know about it or would have no real reason to suspect it years ago.
Obamacare, government aggregating information, electronic filing in hospitals, are part of the system. Whether that system is designed to leak or is merely doing so unintentionally to third parties, is hard to say.
As they fry like maggots on a red hot skillet will their last thoughts be, “What a fool I was to worship Obama”?
No, it will be “Bush fault …”
North Korea counterfeiting our money, and engaging in a half-dozen other activities, were acts of war. Hell, OPEC is an act of war. I think we should just keep rolling over till the nukes hit. Maybe once New York, Los Angeles, and DC are incinerated something worth preserving can be built up again.
You know, let the house burn down so as to take the vermin with it.
I mean would you really care if the same people using “democracy” in order to destroy liberty and yoke you in eternal political thrall to their pet dysfunctions and cherished neuroses were killed by some other crazies?
Trouble is the left-wing political class, would simply emerge from their caves, try and establish their rule by force and command, and it would probably result in a situation wherein a nation engaged in a civil war was attempting to fight a foreign war at the same time.
Must be another way out of this.
Still Michael Moore may have had the germ of an idea there.
So, thanks Michael, for putting an end to this “we” crap once and for all. It’s just that you were hoping the wrong people would be destroyed.
DNW:
I would very much care if those cities were destroyed. I find it astounding that you would not. Yours is basically the impulse of the gulags (or Breivik): destroy those who disagree rather than defeat their ideas, and do it while killing a huge number of people who are on your side, too.
As I’ve written before, the number of leftists is small compared to the number of “useful idiot” liberals. What’s more, New York, etc., contain plenty of conservatives (if you happen to care about them), as well. Plenty, in absolute numbers. Ah, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right?
Wrong. Not only would I not kill anyone, nor seek to have them killed, I have absolutely no impulse to herd, coerce, train, or command anyone. Nor did I suggest anyone undertake such activities.
You could, probably fairly say, I exaggeratedly predicted foreigners might do so, and shrugged at the “comeuppance”.
So I am not guilty as accused.
The flip side, which may seem hard, is that I have only a limited interest in the well-being of annoying and malevolent others who do have those social management aims and tastes which destroy political liberty in the name of “community values and caring”.
The question for me is: do you go to the Cross for their sake, or do you calmly gaze on the scene and let them reap what they have determinedly sown?
Others, operate out of a different interpretive framework, one in which our common humanity and interests are so emotionally unassailable, that the question of the associative or intrinsic worth-while-ness of a specific other never arises. They can never become alien, never become objects of indifference. Or so they like to say or pretend. Their behaviors seem to demonstrate otherwise.
It’s difficult, I understand to get the real sense of what is being said when confronted with material which is instantly perceived as offensive and immoral. A somewhat hyperbolic description of the pass into which “we” have declined and an exaggerated shrug at the consequences, becomes somehow the equivalent of a totalitarian impulse.
It is not that unusual a psychological reaction I think: the melding a contradiction; the seeing in an offensive anarchist tinged sentiment, a revolting if contradictory, authoritarian one.
That said, you would likely disagree vehemently with even the most charitable reading of what I have written and said.
Just to clear up a couple of minor points however,
Allowing the insistently deconstructed to reap the consequences of their own activities, or experience the end result of their own trajectories, is quite different, logically at least, from breaking the eggs yourself, or even in assisting them to their own self-destruction.
The gulags and Breivik are therefore completely off base. I’m not into parades left or “right”.
You could I grant paint, if you wished, the hyperbole as representing, if taken literally, a preference for political liberty extreme enough to result in an indifference to the fate of the “other” ; as a trashing of the sacred notion of unconditional human solidarity, or even, from a socialist perspective, as a form of “depraved (from their point of view) indifference”. But, that is about as far as it could be legitimately taken on even the most extreme of interpretations.
You will recall that the paradigm itself is that which was constructed by Michael Moore soon after the 9/11 attacks: wherein he “wondered” why it was a bastion of lovely modern liberalism that had to suffer the destruction, rather than some Midwestern nest of conservatives.
I noted that explicitly.
I take Moore’s remark, as the defining moment for our own generation when it comes to “solidarity”. It is an illusion. Of course every generation has had some in its ranks who wished ill on others for what they are and who reacted to them by saying they wished these others would either submit to control or die. I am not one of the controllers though. I am not driven by an interest in “the details of the lives of others” (Rorty) or ending psychological pain and humiliation through the therapeutic regime of the ever encroaching state.
My response is to reply instead: “So be it regarding the moral otherness you have delineated. Have it your way. I grant you your insistent otherness, even if I respond to your homicidal hopes with a more reserved posture of calculated indifference, rather than active malice.”
Even for libertarian leaning types, it is a hard thing for them to accept that someone is indifferent to the salvation of those with whom they disagree but nonetheless care about. This is because, I reckon, they have an emotional investment in them despite their “faults”.
That said, for God’s sake, no one really wants to see New York destroyed. I’d probably even shout out “heads up” to Andrew Cuomo if I saw a radical leftist loosing a brick at his head.
Probably.
DNW:
You wrote:
In other words, you had no trouble with it happening. And you asked whether others “would really care” if it did. The “it” you didn’t seem to care about was the incineration and destruction of New York, Los Angeles, and DC.
I wrote:
Nowhere in there do I say that you would personally undertake the killing, or work to make it happen, nor did I mean to imply that you would. I was attempting to refer to your expressed indifference, your seeming lack of caring about it if it were to happen, and perhaps even tacit approval (that’s the shrug implied in the “omelet” remark). When I wrote “yours is basically the impulse…” the impulse to which I refer is the impulse to shrug at the destruction of the vast majority of useful idiots (not just the activist players) as well as the innocent and even those on your side.
You did in fact reject the idea of such destruction, but the only reason you gave was because you thought it wouldn’t work to counter their ideas.
By the way, that sort of reasoning was one of the main elements of the anti-Jewish propaganda by the Nazis during WWII. They kept hammering into the German people the idea that Jews=Communists, or at any rate that most Jews were Communists and had Wrong Thoughts that were destructive to the Reich and the German volk, so it would be best to kill them all (or actually, to send them to work camps where they would be “productive,” and certainly to take away their jobs and their places to live and even their pets) just to be safe. That was not the only element of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, to be sure, but it was a major and influential one that was part of the reason many German people looked the other way.
I am not saying you are a Nazi, by the way. But I have thought about these issues long and hard; my response was not a facile kneejerk one. The question is: when is it okay to kill the enemy? Who is the enemy? How do you decide how far to go? And if you don’t kill them, how do you effectively counter the thoughts of those who would lie and propagandize their way to power and tyranny?
The answers are neither easy, simple, nor obvious.
thx for publishing this article.. (as a non-partisan I have to say, it is pretty humorous to see your reader commentary immediately devolve into trite tirades…)
anyway, please use your blog and good research skills to continue to connect the dots on this breaking story.. freedom of communication is essential going forward
If you say so.
However, when you say this:
… it doesn’t look very much like it.
The “shrug” then, supposedly further implies an affirmation of some “break a few heads in order to make an omelet” program?
That does not stand to reason.
I’m not trying to make an omelet. Hypothetically I would be watching a group of liberty hating foreign omelet makers, leveraging the door opened to them by domestic liberty despising omelet makers, as in a supreme irony, they destroy their domestic benefactors and ostensible ideological and life-way allies.
Well, thank you for admitting that.
I don’t believe the statement was qualified in that way. The paragraph preceding indicated that I thought it would result in evil consequences all the same; that it would be futile and not play out as a favor of any kind after all.
I’m not sure I am following you here. I thought that I had been consistent and clear that I have no interest in the kind of collective identity movements to which you are referring. My interest is in practical liberty and the preservation of it in the face of the collectivist’s demands that the state function as a redistributive social solidarity agent.
I’m not interested in wrong-thoughts or who has them. I am reacting to attempts by some persons within the polity to use the agency of the state in order to effect the collectivist and redistributive aims they desire.
I am stating my supreme indifference to their fate; equal in measure to their lack of deference to the liberty interest of anyone who finds their neurotic hot-house masochism, not to their taste.
Well, thanks for small favors. There’s an old joke that goes: “I’m not a racist, I’m a misanthropist”. In my case I am neither. Do you think that I care what happens to Swedish socialists or fascists, just because they are “Nordics”?
Yes, that is all fine and good, but I am not killing the enemy. Neither domestic nor foreign. I am hypothetically, in a hyperbolic scenario watching them interact with each other.
In the context of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms debate, I once had a left-wing activist and provocation specialist ask me the following question in so many words: “Don’t those who refuse to defend themselves, deserve to be defended by others?”. His insinuation was that they did.
I thought long and hard about that question too. By trying to figure out whether the son-of-a-bitch could possibly have been serious. I concluded he was, but that I was incapable of understanding how he arrived at his deduction. He was never able to explain it himself.
I’m not talking about killing anyone. At most, about giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
One way, potentially, to make them aware of the path they are treading would be to explicitly withdraw your commitment to them and let them know that if push came to shove you are prepared to let nature take its course. For what little that is worth.
That approach, you don’t seem to like, and I don’t think it would work anyway if it were to play out.
The first reason for my skepticism was already stated. In practical terms the real fallout is unlikely be be what was imagined. The left would never be chastened by the redounding effects of their own folly, but merely seek to offload the costs onto the backs of whoever was within reach. Essentially the same program and strategy they now employ. Or they would join the enemy outright. They have no shame because they have no honor, and they have no honor because they have reconceptualized what it means to be a man.
The next reason threatening to “go Galt” would not work to place them on notice, is because they are paranoid and have been predicting this for years. Their antennae are out and quivering for any signal no matter how slight that someone somewhere is indifferent to their fate. You would not believe how obsessed they are with Ayn Rand; an author most of us have never read nor taken very seriously. But they are constantly arguing with her in their heads, and imagine that anyone not interested in them is part of her army. Thus they are prepared for, and actively engaging in slo-mo preemptive action.
Rorty admitted it years ago. PC gone wild is just the further ratcheting down of their ideology in order to prevent even the chance of escape.
As a first step en-route to intellectual clarity we might make distinctions between the obvious and the emotionally palatable.
Unconditional solidarity is at best a mug’s game, and more likely an example of a self-destructive if politically sublimated sexual perversity.
Why play along, unless you have a metaphysical conviction that you think will provide eternal rewards?
It’s always enlightening to hear from a non-partisan.
Those who have definite opinions on matters of liberty and responsibility just don’t seem to have the Olympian distance and perspective of the non-partisan.
The non-partisan knows that questions of who, when, where why, and how we came to this place are less important that the question of what we do , together, as non partisan non-partisans, to accept joint responsibility for things as they are; regardless of how they came to be this way.
And thence, to move forward together: without recrimination, finger pointing, or blame. To ensure an outcome favorable to everyone; one without partisanship or favor; in the best non partisan tradition of non partisan non-partisanship. Amen
Do they even have the self awareness that they are too weak and cowardly to speak of Islamic true believers with that term, “trite tirades”?
Does it take hacking people’s heads off to turn a “trite tirade” into a Holy War of Social Justice, is it now.
If so, perhaps you may see it sooner than you think.
97% in DC for Hussein O 2008.
So every city has collateral damage, but nuking foreign cities and plastering their highways with death, was that good enough for other enemies? If so, they are good enough here, collateral damage wise. There will always be some, but certain places have more targets concentrated.
There are emotional and cultural ties in the US to US cities, but that is why it is better for their own people to place the axe on the neck.
As for Nazi indoctrination, that is the System making sure the slaves are properly indoctrinated to kill targets convenient to the System. When a person conditions themselves according their own purpose and goal, that does not always conform to the social trends.
Ymarsakar:
First of all, it was 92.46% in DC for Obama in 2008, 90.9% in 2012.
But the fact that your figures of DC Obama voters are high isn’t really the point, is it? Even if the figure had been 100%, that hardly merits the death penalty.
Nor is the analogy to wartime bombing casualties valid. Your reference to “nuking foreign cities” as having been done to “other enemies” is a reference to Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I assume. Those were not “enemies” in the metaphoric sense, they were enemies in the technical sense: a declared war that had gone on for many years, that began with a sneak attack and featured millions of deaths already and probably milliions more to come (not speculative, but a near-certainty), and a bombing that effectively broke the will of the enemy and ended the war. There is no comparison to destroying our own capitals during a time of peace, and justifying it because the majority of people in the cities are our political opponents. In wartime, the goal of such bombings are to break the back of the enemy (the declared, government enemy) and motivate a surrender and therefore victory.
Contrast that with looking the other way, or approving, the destruction of our own cities, the killing of our own fellow countrymen/women and fellow citizens, our friends and relatives (in my case, virtually every relative I have in the world)—and for what? To what purpose? Some apocalyptic notion some people have of a political cleansing , one that IMHO isn’t even remotely likely to occur as a result?
Also—I assume that by the phrase “plastering their highways with death” you might have been referring to the famous “highway of death” at the end of the Gulf War? That was an even more different situation, and didn’t involve collateral damage at all. The people on that road were military people, and the vehicles military vehicles (and in addition some stolen civilian vehicles). They were retreating from a war they had instigated by attacking Kuwait, and some of what the were taking back with them was stolen, as well. What’s more, the death toll on that road was far smaller than most people suppose (unless you listen to Robert Fisk, the man who gave his name to the expression “to fisk”):
Also see see this:
And thence, to move forward together: without recrimination, finger pointing, or blame. To ensure an outcome favorable to everyone; one without partisanship or favor; in the best non partisan tradition of non partisan non-partisanship. Amen
Please! Every “non-partisan” I know and have known ends up siding with the oppressors through omissions or sly commissions.
Some things are unacceptable, some compromises are impossible and that’s that.
Enough already with the non-partisanship bromide.
It’s the Fanatics, Who Rule.
Neo Please!
You know perfectly well that the voters are to blame and that their dwellings will have to be obliterated for, they never stop, they never tire, they never rest, they never sleep, they never give up.
Think Carthage. It happened for good reasons and more than once.
Remember “unconditional surrender”?
Si vis pacem parabellum, rinse repeat for they’re nuts:
CNN Anchor Refers to Dallas Gunman’s Actions as ‘Courageous and Brave’
Nuts!
“G6loq Says:
June 13th, 2015 at 10:03 pm
Ahem … was there something in what I wrote in that passage that somehow failed to covey an obvious sense of parody and mockery?
Geez what do I have to do … dress these passages up in clown costumes? Use emoticons?
Calling it a night here …
… dress these passages up in clown costumes? Use emoticons?
Yes!
Up is down, slavery is freedom … Obama will undergo a sex change operation and run for a third term and the Onion will be out of business ….
Remains, non-partisants and independents in the mushy middle stink.
Neo,
For the record I agree that hoping for the death of millions is obscene. I don’t figure that “Y” actually endorses such a thing.
But, let’s try a different tack here.
You write, “Contrast that with looking the other way, or approving, the destruction of our own cities, the killing of our own fellow …”
Let’s take “Fellow” as the operative word here. What does it mean? What does it imply? By what standard or action do we know or gauge who is a fellow and who is not; and what is owed to a fellow, and under what if any limiting conditions?
As for me, that is the question underlying more superficial questions.
I don’t what to see anyone killed. That should be obvious enough by now. But the conditions of moral fellowship, mutuality, and self-sacrifice are rather more perplexing matters.
What if your so-called fellow has made it their life project to reduce you to a state of political thralldom in aid of servicing their neuroses and needs? Needs which you do not share?
If you have trouble grasping the issue, or if the question of “Marxists among us” is too vague to serve as a useful angle of attack, let’s pose simple and specific questions.
You know who David Brock is, and what he is up to, and something of his character? You know who Sidney Blumenthal is and what he is about and something of his character? They are not naifs are they? They know exactly what they are doing, don’t they? They are waging “war by other means”, are they not?
Do you consider them fellows, in the sense that you owe them unconditional moral solidarity? If so how did you arrive at that conclusion?
Can you think of anyone who you would place beyond the moral pale, not in the sense of seeking their harm, but merely in the sense of being completely indifferent to the collapse of their projects of malevolence upon their own heads?
If you say “no” I could probably understand to some degree. Mortimer Adler for example, astonished an interviewer by valuing the preservation of the life of an Adolf Hitler above a masterpiece of art. His Aristotelian-Thomistic reasoning regarding the intrinsic and categorical value of human life as a major premise, would however be rejected I think by the very persons I have cited.
Certainly their activities give every indication that they would reject it.
I’ll look in tomorrow if I can.
But the fact that your figures of DC Obama voters are high isn’t really the point, is it? Even if the figure had been 100%, that hardly merits the death penalty.
Those are two different issue. How much collateral damage will be taken already assumes that there is some. But the decision to nuke Hiroshima or Nagasaki isn’t based on collateral damage, it’s based on necessity. What will end the war sooner or more effectively vs what will create a better peace.
Nor is the analogy to wartime bombing casualties valid.
It’s not an analogy to begin with. It’s about what it takes to push a button or to fight in a war. Doesn’t matter whether people think foreign wars are different from domestic ones.
And to bring us to the domestic situation as it stands, people are already dying in DC’s Democrat patron system with their gun control and execution of black mothers driving around the capital.
They are already dying. The only difference a mass casualty event does is to speed things along at a faster rate. Whether that’s good or bad, is a separate decision. But people are already dying due to the Left in DC. Just as they were dying in Japan, under the military junta that ruled in Hirohito’s name.
Japan had already indoctrinated the vast number of their subjects into a cult of death and obedience. The nuclear bomb wouldn’t have changed anything by itself, the firebombings certainly didn’t and those killed more people. Emperor Hirohito could no longer go on watching his people suffer, for the dream of liberating the Asian sphere from Western imperialism. Propaganda can extend very far, but the people at the top will eventually not be capable of using propaganda to attach heads back to bodies once again. A nuke makes that attempt even more futile.
In this domestic climate, there’s no way to make the enemy leadership surrender by hurting people. That’s like bombing Iraqi markets will make terrorists and AQ sympathetic to American causes. That’s not how it works.
Military necessity is not generally about breaking the will of the leader, but of the people. And that takes something different.
Japan had indoctrinated their people to obey power, wealth, and orders above all else, not even their own lives. Only the Emperor was higher in authority, because his name was what the liberation wars were under. Without the enemy opening a way for their own people to break, external enemies cannot conquer successfully.
In this domestic case, the Left has indoctrinated the people to obey class divides, aristocratic fetishes, sumptuary laws and castes, but above all else, they have commanded the people to obey the cult of death, the power of killing, and the nerve of the true believer.
The enemy often seeds the beginning of their own demise. One must merely trigger it.
DNW I gathered that G was supporting your post, rather than criticizing it.
DNW:
I know tons of “Marxists among us.” I have no problem imagining the concept—none at all. I’m not advocating killing the entire population of a city to get the Marxists in it, either, particularly when that city is the one in which I grew up, and where virtually all my relatives live. You can’t kill an idea, you have to combat it. If the Marxist (or anyone else) has a gun pointed at your head, that’s different.
Also, see this on the idea of caring whether innocents are killed.
And yes, there are people who are beyond the pale (Hitler is always the one who comes to mind, for whom most people would favor a death penalty, perhaps even those who are against the death penalty in general). But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking (or at least we were) about caring or not caring if New York, LA, and DC were to be destroyed—which is about as different from that as it can be.
DNW:
re “non-partisan”—
Parody always runs the risk of not being recognized as such.
Karl Popper:
re “non-partisan”–
Parody always runs the risk of not being recognized as such.
Specially at times that beyond parody!
*that are beyond
Mitsu, because of the way his technocrat career advanced in Silicon Valley and software development, thinks that Hussein O’s centralized planning is feasible. If the right people are organizing it.
Then again, if the right people are organizing it, a utopia, a democracy, and a dictatorship would be equal in efficiency and desire.
So the idea of ordering code and software around, to make them compatible, from a ground up or top down perspective, allows the technocrat, by their own words, to make something like national healthcare workable. Under Hussein O of all people, workable.
Most programmers are not worried about Skynet or the code rebelling and killing them. Most software technocrats cannot imagine their programmers using cracks and hacks to take over the company. It’s a human deficiency, not a code deficiency. Experience in running a software company does not compare to playing the Royalty Game where the stakes are much higher for dynasties, nations, and cultures.
To sum it up, Mitsu and other technocrats like him prefer to believe in a Smart Man like Hussein Obola, merely because Mitsu’s own intelligence and capabilities are flawed and in need of improvement. They are not as smart as they believe. They are not as wise as they would wish. They are not superior to me. And they don’t even realize it.
The obvious argument to why we shouldn’t let terrorists nuke DC or New York or Los Angeles is a purely tactical and strategic one, of apparent obviousness.
Hussein and the Left would utilize it to crush domestic dissent, now that they are the ones with power and able to put un Americans into concentration camps, they will do so, at rates exceeding what they accused Bush’s imaginary war crimes of being.
But casualties, collateral damage being suffered, that will not be the reason behind why such an attack can be stopped or shouldn’t be stopped. The pros and cons are a different matter than what the price is.
However, this stipulates that people have a choice about it. The Left and their ally Islamic Jihad will not allow anyone to stop them, and that includes anyone that might be motivated to stop the destruction of a US city. They, in fact, will be the loyal henchmen obeying orders, orders of the Left. The FBI in charge of counter terrorism? They work for CAIR now, ironic that. Of course they don’t know that, presumably. They are ignorant, but that will not guarantee innocence. The ATF is even worse from one stand point. At least the FBI had a track record of competence after the bureaucrats got put down by Richard Nixon (which they did a coup de tat in return for, bloodless).
Neo
If the Marxist (or anyone else) has a gun pointed at your head, that’s different. …
They’re smarter than obviously using guns these days, although it’ll come to that in one guise or another …
when that city is the one in which I grew up, and where virtually all my relatives live.
Relatives? Really?
Have they ever showed up for you at a cost to themselves when it mattered ….
Problem is: when you consort you condone.
At the very least you give them social cover for their undermining activities and, probably aid and comfort ….
The French, Communist and Nazi revolution didn’t erupt out of nowhere. There were “relatives” involved.
It took the crap going on during the Weimar Republic for the German National Socialist movement to crystalize ….
C6loq:
We’re not talking about relatives who have committed some heinous act or other, or who espouse points of view that are beyond the pale. For the most part, we’re talking about garden-variety liberals, and people whom I love.
I find the arguments that I’m somehow supposed to applaud or at the very least be indifferent to their imagined deaths in a fireball to be an obscene point of view. It is, as I said before, the very same impulse that leads to the gulag, the killing fields, etc., just approached from the other side.
Real memories of child molestation is different from memories implanted from an Authority, at the top.
It’s not the same impulse, although it often leads to similar outcomes.
We’re not talking about relatives who have committed some heinous act or other, or who espouse points of view that are beyond the pale. For the most part, we’re talking about garden-variety liberals, and people whom I love.
Are people under the impression that the Nazis, Germans, Islamos, Christians, and Japanese subjects America bombed, didn’t have people who loved them?
Do they feel guilty for a concrete example in front of them, when they do not for abstract humans. They are all equal, on the same level playing field, after all. But they aren’t treated as equal.
That is not a principle, it is merely a subjective preference. It is in no way superior to other people’s subjective preferences.
Garden variety followers have often suffered the consequences of what their leaders and kings have decreed. Robert E Lee suffered the comforts of war, merely because some Southern Democrats wanted more political power via slavery, not because Lee himself liked slavery. Yet war pits one side against the other, few with if any neutrals or exceptions.
If the argument is that the US is not at war, that has little to do with whether Democrats are Democrats. If the US is already at war, then who started that war and who is responsible for the war guilt?
Ymarsakar:
I’ve already explained the differences between bombing a population in wartime in a country with which a nation is in a declared war, and which has invaded other countries and tried to subjugate them (plus, if you had relatives there, you would still CARE about them and feel bad about them, particularly if they weren’t rabid Nazis), and what people are talking about here. My goodness, is this so hard to understand? People here are talking about our own liberal cities, and not caring if people there are indiscrimininately killed by bombs? I would not think I’d have to explain the difference to anyone.
And of course garden-variety supporters have OFTEN suffered the consequences. I am well aware of this. We are talking about not caring, or supporting, the fact that this happens, not about whether it doesn’t sometimes happen.
And no, we are not “at war” with each other except metaphorically or ideologically, and it is a difference that is actually a real difference.
Neo,
In response, I’m going to just ramble here …
I read it, and I don’t get the point. A 13 year old girl has an emotional reaction to the Exodus story wherein the first born among the Egyptians were slain because Pharaoh would not let Israel go.
The author then goes out and finds an “exculpatory” commentary on the Torah; one which, while apparently pretending to no historical veracity whatever, nonetheless spins a likely tale which may then be applied in order to salve tender – or immature – sensibilities. A contorted and conveniently legalistic fiction, for what it is worth.
Frankly, I however, don’t get the initial problem. It’s like listening to one of those people who whine, “Why can’t dogs go to heaven too?”
You want to say, “What in the world are you talking about?”
And your quote below is a nice segue into the question which explains the bafflement of people like me.
And I reply: Are you quite sure the collectivist impulse and all it morally entails, is based upon an “idea”, i.e., a purely intellectual conviction, in the first place?
Here is a liberal woman speaking frankly about abortion as it relates to human life:
Quote from Salon.
The fetal life is she proudly admits, from her perspective, “A life worth sacrificing.”
You will also note that the “life” of the mother here refers not to continued survival, but to opportunities available to the woman once free of the child she carries: ” … the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families.”
In her judgement, innocent human life then, might well be “life worth sacrificing.”
So from a secular liberal point of view we often don’t see any real objection to taking innocent life in pursuit of goals, once they speak forthrightly.
What about a religious take?
A Christian’s view of course, is much different from the secular liberal take, but somewhat different from the Jewish take as well.
Both Christians and Jews say that men are not to take innocent life.
However, when it comes to the acts of Providence,
On this note, one of the curious things that secularists do when indicting, that is to say morally impeaching the reality of the Deity from which transcendent values supposedly emanate, is to themselves rhetorically posit what is in effect an objective system of value which they can then leverage against this God. This however is a prospect which which their usual values nihilist assumptions (based on nominalism), if true, deny the very possibility of doing.
If no transcendentally rooted values, then no transcendentally rooted (or objective) leverage point for impeaching any outcome as “bad”. No realist universal categories, then no real categorical propositions.
Now of course, such persons can still attempt to establish a mere literary contradiction between what they see as the implications of any supposedly good God’s acts in the actual world, and the ostensible Scriptural propositions concerning His justice and mercy … insofar as they are able to understand them.
However this is where the Christian view of the fall and of a darkened if not completely extinguished natural light and virtue – a view apparently not shared by Jews – comes in.
The Christian believes that left to his own devices, man is likely to get the whole context wrong.
One need not accept the extreme Calvinist doctrine of the utter moral depravity of natural man, in order to see that given some notion of a seriously darkened moral sense, that what men are prone to conclude regarding the way the world “should” work, and regarding and just deserts, is likely to be seriously deficient in some way.
And on a practical level, what is one to make of a race of people who literally destroy their own children in a sacrifice intended to ensure their personal gain?
How does one, given such a context, judge the objective moral status of a child in a culture, or population, which itself views the child as an expendable resource, even as an object of sexual exploitation and sacrifice, rather than as a life having intrinsic value and unalienable rights?
The Egyptians as far as I know were not sacrificing their own children to Moloch, Baal, or Ashteroth, but despite the charming images painted for us by historians who emphasize their positive aspects, they deemed Pharaoh a god.
But back to the point made five paragraphs above, as Jesus said,
I should probably make explicit here what I initially thought was well enough implied, through the repetition of the Salon article.
In answer to my question:
“Are you quite sure the collectivist impulse and all it morally entails, is based upon an “idea”, i.e., a purely intellectual conviction, in the first place?”
I present someone who has intellectually admitted what many deny in order to avoid the conclusion they wish to evade.
However, she acknowledges that in admitting the intellectual point, which is that a fetus is actual human life (and not just “tissue” ), her stance on the permissibility of the act has not changed.
Whether it involves scraping away mere tissue, or boldly admitting to the extinguishing of another human life for personal advantage, the conclusion remains the same to her: she will do it nonetheless.
Because it is what she wants; and the facts about the “victim”, while intellectually recognized, don’t really weigh or matter all that much in the balance.
neo-neocon Says:
June 14th, 2015 at 12:51 pm
G6loq:
We’re not talking about relatives who have committed some heinous act or other, or who espouse points of view that are beyond the pale. For the most part, we’re talking about garden-variety liberals, and people whom I love.
Heinous acts or others … At the moment that would be reductio ad absurdum … But, it will get to that as it has in the past.
Point is they will allow “heinous acts or others” to take place and victimize you and won’t lift a finger.
Think Wisconsin where they surrounded and light flooded privates homes in the middle of the night, separated parents from their children, ransacked and … gag ordered.
Did those people’s Libtard relatives object vociferously? No!
Cuomo-the-nitwit stating that Conservatives don’t belong in NY State. Did your Libtard relatives object vociferously? Nope!
As to your “love” for them … if not reciprocated in kind and through objective acts … it is a reflection of your own mental processes, no more.
There is no such thing as a run of the mill Libtard.
They will turn on you when the moment calls for it and watch you be led away.
It starts small, with words:
– here you go again!
– Ah, ah, such a Neo thing to say!
– Who has ever heard of that!
– etc… incipient disdain that cannot be alleviated or erased …
You won’t change them and eventually they’ll wear some kind of uniform.
It’s already a civil war and one side doesn’t even know what is happening.
G6loq:
I repeat—yours is the impulse that ultimately leads to mass killings of people because their politics disagree with you. In a less developed form, it leads to breaking off relations between children and parent, parent and child, brother and sister, because of political disagreements.
I have made the distinction between leftist activists and garden-variety liberals many many times on this blog, and so have many commenters, and I’m not going to waste time going into it again, because clearly you’ll never agree. Remember, however, that I was a “libtard” (or whatever you want to call it; I find that word trivial and silly) for many many many years, actually the majority of the years of my life.
Most liberals are, among other things, pretty disinterested in politics and get their news from the MSM and those around them, and that’s pretty much the genesis of their politics, rather than anything much deeper than that, or more well-thought-out than that.
How can that possibly be, with their being so much more intelligent, analytical, farsighted, perceptive, broadminded and better informed than everyone else?
And let us remind ourselves, so morally scrupulous and conscientious in their civic due diligence, as well. (You will never hear of a liberal blatantly transgressing common ethical principles)
We know all of this, because they have informed us it is so. And who could know better concerning their own moral and intellectual virtues, than the supremely virtuous themselves?
Maybe, if reality does have a liberal bias, (as the Bearded Lady of the New York Times assures us it does) there is a kind of glorious short-cut to moral and intellectual perfection available. Maybe all you have to do in order to be unimpeachably right, as well as incomparably righteous, is to be a modern liberal.
Certainly, anyone with those immense qualifications is deserving of a publicly funded sinecure as a reward?
I wonder what that conviction ultimately leads to? Heaven on earth and pure “Bliss”, I have been told.
I’ve already explained the differences between bombing a population in wartime in a country with which a nation is in a declared war, and which has invaded other countries and tried to subjugate them (plus, if you had relatives there, you would still CARE about them and feel bad about them, particularly if they weren’t rabid Nazis), and what people are talking about here. My goodness, is this so hard to understand?
That’s merely a human rationalization to deal with war guilt and killing people, even if indirectly. That justification and rationalization would work just as well on the domestic scale, there’s nothing absolutely preventing it from being effective.
So I can only conclude that the reason people hesitate to use that rationalization is because it isn’t enough now that the people they can target are people they know directly, rather than some abstract foreigners.
Whether people cared or not, didn’t stop the bombs. It didn’t stop the decision makers. Why should it?
Emotionally, humans can kill non humans, strangers, and Others with less cost, using rationalizations. It is much harder to kill, up front, people they know or people they respect or see as an Authority. But that’s merely on an emotional level, logically, there’s little difference between garden variety Germans and Japanese under a bad Regime and garden variety Americans under a bad Hussein regime. What difference would that even make, for the world? For us, the difference is obvious. They’re over here now. They’re not “over there” any more.
The Democrats successfully started up a civil war before in America, they are going to do so again. They have already done so on several class warfare levels. Baltimore can burn as many people as the decision makers wish, and people don’t need the abstract rationalization of war crimes to justify it. They got their own brand of domestic rationalizations, more powerful, more personal, more sociopathic even. Untouchable castes.
So the difference between a bomb policy and a class warfare policy is merely that the bomb accelerates the killing, whereas the class warfare policy kills people slowly over the entire decade or century of human life in a city.
Who is responsible? If it is okay bombing people responsible for war crimes and being a threat to human peace, then what should be done about those responsible and how much collateral damage is acceptable?
If there’s some other, magical low cost trick to this, I’m sure the proposal will be taken up. If it ever exists.
We are talking about not caring, or supporting, the fact that this happens, not about whether it doesn’t sometimes happen.
That’s another perspective, but it’s not the one I’m basing things on. Mentioned previously, I don’t think the majority will be given a choice, in advance, of whether to support it or not. I think the decision makers will make it happen, one way or another. I’m referring to how people will react to that kind of thing.
And no, we are not “at war” with each other except metaphorically or ideologically, and it is a difference that is actually a real difference.
Merely because the US refuses to declare war, doesn’t mean AQ needs to follow the same rules. The same applies here domestically. Lincoln didn’t want war, but war doesn’t need his approval. It only needs an instigator and someone who thinks they can win. The Left thinks they can win, and the Left’s targets think the Left is too much to take on, so they bend knee. Which merely makes war inevitable.
No, there is no shooting war at present. However you could also say the same thing if the Federal Government began seizing financial assets and real property for social management purposes, assigning people to occupations or prohibiting their pursuit, or regulating the economy completely – if there were no physical violence involved.
You have reminded us of the potential for these kinds of things yourself, and how the neither the predicate nor the precedent is new. So the commerce clause has been reined in recently. We had a defense of marriage act as well.
Finally, I would ask if you read very much left-wing material. I suspect it is only a very modest amount, as you are obviously quite busy both with your vocation and avocation.
But in order to get a sense of their no-limits homicidal and essentially totalitarian rage, you have to wade through it. It has become the default attitude of the modern liberal activist.
What’s it take to demonstrate that we do have an existential clash of culture and life-ways here. No matter what one side, i.e., the traditionalist freedom-affirming side yields, it is never enough.
The aim of the progressive is not as you well know about achieving mere political tolerance, but rather complete, unchallenged, and perpetual economic and social dominance right down into your living room.
They demand allegiance; and refusing to give it to them becomes a criminal act.
It may start off like this, very mild seeming
or this
And this,
Of course things escalate,
And go even further,
And eventually ludicrous crap like this,
And that is just the groundwork. Mild stuff. Happy warrior stuff. Yet their anthropological and political premises are clear enough.
But you are right. Henry Beecher isn’t sending “bibles” to Kansas just yet.
DNW:
I am well aware of the activist far left, what they intend, what they are capable of, etc. etc.. I’m not at all sure why you’re going on here at such length about them, as though I am unaware.
You may note that I have always been careful to differentiate between the far left and the garden-variety liberal. The latter are enormously more numerous than the former, and are completely different, although they are often the tools of the former. For most of my life, I was the latter. This thread has been about people who state they would be indifferent to the mass murder of millions of the latter in such cities as NY, LA, and DC. That’s what the discussion is about.
Just so we’re clear.
And by the way, that would also happen to constitute the killing of approximately half the Jews alive today in the world, and leave only the Jews of Israel left, except for a miniscule smattering here and there.
neo-neocon Says:
June 15th, 2015 at 12:13 am
G6loq:
I repeat–yours is the impulse that ultimately leads to mass killings of people because their politics disagree with you. In a less developed form, it leads to breaking off relations between children and parent, parent and child, brother and sister, because of political disagreements.
As is usual, one gets accused of that they’ve been doing. I, and those of my ilk have no interest in ruling other people’s life and never have herded people into cattle cars or gulags… and we are now drawn into the fray out of concerns for out ultimate well being.
Most liberals are, among other things, pretty disinterested in politics and get their news from the MSM and those around them, and that’s pretty much the genesis of their politics, rather than anything much deeper than that, or more well-thought-out than that.
Actually it should be “apparently pretty disinterested in politics” … I submit. In off guarded moments the venom unnecessarily comes out, always.
You’re right, we won’t agree. My position is that there are no innocent players and the “victims” somehow contrived to their predicaments.
I shan’t be a victim … I post here at the moment to fine tune my thinking and I appreciate the opportunity.
If/when I get caught in the machine I know my Libtard “relatives” won’t lift a finger and will rationalize away … till themselves get ground.
As to you having been a Libtard for many years my view is that there are deep … instinctual issues.
In boxing it is called a proclivity and when sufficiently physically exhausted it’ll resurface as part of our underlying animal nature. The processes of reason only papers it away … Big problem that when in the ring.
I was never a Libtard…
I was always Rabelais : do as you want.
My groan is deep for Orwell documented the whole process/circumstance in great details. When the exact same circumstances arise as they will, it won’t be pretty. Think Battle for Spain. Or Civil War 1 as Ymarsakar mentioned.
Which brings up this you wrote: And by the way, that would also happen to constitute the killing of approximately half the Jews alive today in the world, and leave only the Jews of Israel left, except for a miniscule smattering here and there.
It has become a matter of them NY JINO rather than the Israeli … due to their own petulant actions/inactions … Petulant they are.
Just as the last time ….
Groan …. And pray Pamela doesn’t get beheaded for then … hmmmm ….
My point in the last post was not that you are unaware, but that you might well be unaware of how mainstream the fundamental suppositions of the extreme left have become among run-of-the-mill liberals. What you seem to have difficulty granting is the principle of moral reciprocity as foundational no, ifs ands or buts. No special dispensations based on historical circumstances or being a rara avis. And what in this case the reciprocity entails the return of contemptuous indifference without discrimination or favor. Of course it all hinges on whether I am right about how prevalent that stance has become.
Perhaps if I had thrown in Austin Texas and St Paul as part of the rejoinder parallel to Moore you would have seen it as inhuman, but not in quite the way you apparently did.
And of course it might even be, getting back to the core issue, that when your friends have in their private moments unburdened or off-handedly revealed themselves to you regarding their views on the humanity of conservatives and their social value, your friends have been much more discreet or temperate than have been those liberals who have done the same before me – while mistaking me for a like-minded liberal.
But, I have also spent a decade debating leftists – informally, if issue boards or political campaigns are informal – on the subject of natural or inherent rights. And natural rights, our founding political and anthropological predicate, represents an interpretive principle which no modern liberal whom I have met recognizes or respects: no matter how rhetorically useful they or their intellectual forbears may have found it back during the early days of the civil rights movement
Yes, I have noticed that.
Well, in significant measure that is precisely what is in dispute, isn’t it. Whether, when it comes down to it, that nowadays the run-of-the-mill liberal has not consciously shifted away from making social claims against the lives of others staked on “our essential, common, and God-given humanity”, to one of an unvarnished program of “making the world over as we dream it should be”.
It seemed to be about whether a hypothetical reciprocal indifference [cite again Michael Moore – and innumerable others] was equal to Anders Breivik.
Clarity, above all else, is our aim.
“By the way”? There is something that is being left unsaid there, left hanging, and unresolved; or so it seems. Possibly, just as there was in previous exchanges on the permissibility of writing off a socially antagonistic other even if a cultural or ethnic background was shared.
I obviously, have no problem with a radical social estrangement from socialists or any other kind of collectivist no matter what their background. I don’t see that estrangement or alienation as involving any natural issues of world-historical significance.
Well, as Jonathan Haid observed: “Libertarianism has historically rejected the idea that the needs of one person impose a moral duty upon others. This is one of the major points on which liberals and libertarians diverged in the 20th century.”
As Lon Fuller observed: reciprocity in the underlying feature of natural law morality.
And as Haid also said: “This work suggests that one explanation for the unique moral profile of libertarians is that they feel traditional moral concerns less than do most other people …”
Diversity, don’t you know.
Correction,
“And what in this case the reciprocity entails is the return of contemptuous indifference without discrimination or favor.”
There are other corrections that need to be made, but I think I am just about full up on this topic for now.
DNW:
We definitely disagree on the nature of liberalism and its extent, and how closely it coincides with leftism.
I don’t know where you live and how close you are to scads of liberals (as opposed to leftists), but I have pretty much always lived amongst many and have been very close to many, and my observations are very different.
neo-neocon Says:
June 15th, 2015 at 6:13 pm
DNW:
Near enough to a major University town featuring one of the very top public Universities in the United States. You cannot have a conversation across a fence about crabgrass without the subject of Bush lied people died, or 47 billion starving uninsured children being killed by heartless and moronic Republicans inevitably coming up. In the first two minutes or so.
I suppose I also have my spies. Including a woman I had seduced away from knee-jerk liberalism who told me I would not believe how all – absolutely all – of her friends dehumanized those lacking the proper progressive sensibilities. I had to assure her I would believe her since I had heard it all first hand. Feminized liberal males tend to reflexively imagine that you share their opinions, even if you are just as smart, taller, stronger, better looking to women and more manly than they are. Shows you how off base their own self-images are.
On a level involving less intrigue, my kid sister is a professor of medicine in the same institution, so I have some familiarity with how liberals think and operate, and how people like her have to keep their opinions pretty much to themselves, even though she is what most people would think of as pretty socially conscious. I guess she just doesn’t quite share their malevolent joie de vivre.
And since my last significant other worked in a hospital run by exploitative social justice peddling poseurs who didn’t give a damn about her welfare, the welfare of the people who labored on behalf of the “vulnerable”, well yeah, I know a little about meeting liberals “in the flesh” and socially, I think.
DNW:
Interesting that we know a very different population of liberals.
For most of my life I was a liberal among liberals. But we almost never discussed politics except in the most passing of fashions, and mainly just the day after election day, when if a Democrat was elected we were happy and if a Republican we were sad. We were more interested in talking about food, movies, books, children, husbands, love, weight, etc.. Even I (who often liked to bring up more philosophical or scientific topics) cannot remember bringing up politics hardly at all. Maybe a bit during Clinton’s impeachment, but that was more about what he had done—the infidelity aspect of it.
Since my “change,” the people who know me best know about my politics, although we rarely talk about politics because it only leads to fighting. However, I am often in larger groups where people don’t know my politics and assume I am a liberal, and so I hear their normal unguarded conversation. Sometimes politics comes up, but again it’s rarely anything in-depth, and I haven’t heard all that much venom directed against people on the right, it’s more against the politicians on the right (something on the order of “Mitt Romney wants to take away your contraceptives”).
Concerning the divide between New England Democrats and Leftist priests; much of the masses of believers in the Left are converts due to faith and heart, not due to intellectual conversion. They did not read the Left’s tracts and agree with the dogma or the Hussein bible. That was the communists in 1930s and 1960s.
Today’s masses of believers rely almost entirely on faith and emotion, social political tribal loyalties. That’s why it seems like their interest in politics is so thin and light. They aren’t interested in the Democrat or Leftist politics. They’re interested in the religion, the society, the domination of the totalitarian Authority.
They’re weak because they like obeying that kind of authority. They aren’t doing so due to some intellectual agreement with the Left’s cause. But they are still obeying the Left.
Places like Marin and New England upper crust, don’t utilize the social devastation techniques the Democrats used on victim classes. Either they’re hypocrites or they in fact don’t believe a single word of the Left’s purported social justice methods, as upper middle class and upper crust Democrats don’t use a single one of that shat in their own families. Their own families are patriarchies, stable two parent homes, utilizing traditional wealth creation and inheritance schemes. They are wealth and class and caste segregated, keeping out the riff raff. There is no “diversity” so to speak. The diversity is in who has the most money and bodyguards. That one may be a black like Tiger, a Mexican, or a Soros, but it wasn’t due to diversity quotas or affirmative action.
I haven’t heard all that much venom directed against people on the right, it’s more against the politicians on the right (something on the order of “Mitt Romney wants to take away your contraceptives”).
That hostility against Republican leaders is merely the trigger to condition them to treat the Other harshly, to make examples of them. How can you say you haven’t heard the venom, when you’ve reported how your neighbors and friends reacted to your change? That wasn’t venom?
So they are cohesive enough to follow orders when Together, they dump on Eich and Dynasty Duck patriarch. And they have proven capable of excluding, exiling, or ex membering Neo from the New England social circles. Their obedience of such caliber, that the personal is no different from the abstract. The more they obey, the easier it gets. People who have a natural tendency to disobey external authority, like Neo, demonstrate such traits early on in life, before or even during their Democrat co habitation period. If a person does not demonstrate such traits after decades of being under the Authority of the Left, it is safe to presume that they do not have and never will have, the individual strength to rebel.
In DNW’s case, the professor and the doctor fields tend to rely on Leftist funding. Or rather, Leftist controlled federal funding.
As such their careers are tied up in their loyalty quotient. For upper middle class Democrats, their jobs aren’t necessarily tied to their ideology.
Because the Left’s authority is closer and less abstract, there’ll be more apparent zealots vying for the favor of their superiors. There’s a concrete reward for it. Some people even change their lifestyles to match the job and ideology, from white to black.
Ymarsakar:
You write:
I have certainly heard venom directed towards me, but only from a couple of people. Most people I know are puzzled, startled, disapproving, but not the least bit venomous. The few who have been venomous tend to have stopped talking to me afterward, although in one case the venom was brief and that person has been friendly ever since, and has accepted my change although we haven’t spoken of it since that initial incident (which was in 2004). So the vast majority haven’t liked it, tease me every now and then or goad me a bit, but in general have NOT been venomous, just perhaps a bit cooler than before but often seeming just as friendly as before.
My theory is that the few who got very angry and cut me off were more politically oriented and intense than the others, and much more leftist.
However, one leftist I know quite well dealt with the situation by deciding not to talk politics with me, but she is still very friendly and treats me at least as kindly and affectionately as before. But she is a leftist more out of compassion than out of any sort of well-thought-out political philosophy.
So the “excluding, exiling, or ex membering” has only happened for me with a few people. Most of those were, as I said, much more politically oriented than the others. The ones who seem to have taken my political change in stride break down into two camps: those who seem every bit as friendly as before, and those who seem a bit cooler than before but who are still relatively friendly. What’s more, in that first category (the category “just as friendly as before”) there are two friends of mine who still will talk politics to me in a civil manner. I say “still,” but actually we never did talk politics before my change. We don’t talk often about politics even now, but it’s more than before. They are curious what I think and why. They seem rather unusual, though, but both are indeed liberal Democrats who as far as I know have never voted for a Republican in their lives.