The first 4 paragraphs were my comments and I was trying to be brief. The balance are excerpts from a chapter in Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals.’ It could have used a colon and quotations.

The book was published in 1971 and has had plenty of time to get around. Obama is of course someone who is well known to have taught from this very book. Hillary Clinton was offered a position working for Alinsky but went on to grad school at Yale instead. Apparently she disagreed with Alinksy’s premise that you cannot change society from within but only from without, which was the theme of her senior thesis at Wellesley.

From reading your article, some of Philip Ellis Jackson’s articles and his lightning rod attraction for certain detractors, I thought I’d read up on Alinsky, Ayers, and whoever I could find of the group looking for insight into the motivation of these predictable derailers.

I’ve wondered what motivates some apparently educated people who seem to try to get things off track, manipulate, and throw others off topic rather than honestly participate with the majority who write very intelligent and logical comments. I just couldn’t understand the mindset.

To me, it’s a gift to read most of the articles and thoughts. I suppose I read everything written on here whether I fully understand it or not.

Anyway, I think Alinsky and others with similar thoughts have permeated US education on all levels for a lot of time now.

When we’re dialogging with those of the modern left, we’re assuming we’re speaking directly, looking for clarification, assuming everyone is using the language honestly and fairly, etc.

I think what we’re up against today is cultural – it’s OK, accepted and admired on the left to speak merely for effect. Winning is everything, and intellectual honestly is for the weak; for those who are unnecessarily burdened by a commitment to methods (including dialog) of truth and principle.

You are confusing me (and, I suspect, everyone else). There is more than one construction we can be put on what you wrote, and it would be easy to misrepresent your meaning.

You start off by castigating liberals, but end by quoting Alinski’s ethics. Which position (conservative or liberal) are you defending? It is unclear from your positioning, what quotation goes with which actor; and, for that matter where each quote starts or ends (quotation marks help). We can’t tell from this which of these opinions are yours and which belong to someone else. Would you mind very much clarifying your comments before I comment, as I do not wish to impute something not meant.

You would have as much hope for a reasonable response to a better argument between prosecuting and defense attorneys in the middle of a court case.

The real power with conservatism lies in its commitment to the truth wherever that leads, and it is based on fundamental principles whereas communication for a liberal is purely for effect.

It is fundamentally a moral issue.

excerpted from “Rules for Radicals”, by Saul Alinsky: Of Means and Ends

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. – Alfred North Whitehead

That perennial question, “Does the end justify the means?” is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?”

Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it.

Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be corrupted by them. [...]

I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of the conflict …

The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment. …

The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means. …

The fourth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point. …

The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice-versa. …

you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments. …

goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” or “Bread and Peace.”

Your counter argument “They’re not conflicting if the personal freedom refers to homosexual living or premarital sexual relationships. Isn’t this confirmed in the conservapaedia entry for American liberalism ” …combined with a certain brand of individual libertarianism…” does not really address my point at all. It is a non-sequiteur, because it has no bearing on wealth redistribution whatsoever, and very little to do with personal-freedom because pre-maritals and homosexuals are nowhere near as threatened as they pretend and a good deal less (these days) than some whom homosexuals have themselves victimized. I realize you are trying to derail this discussion onto the homosexual agenda, but must caution you we know this ground.

A system of government that redistributes wealth according to some arbitrary and unverifiable standard of ‘fairness’ inescapably violates somebody’s personal freedoms. You cannot deprive a person of his labor without violating his private right of said labor (a type of theft) in some degree. That is a fixed principle based in experience, not a value or opinion despite a great many liberals think them compatible purely on a value basis.

Homosexual-living is a preference, not a right. Being secure in your person against unjustified violence or seizures is a right. Being able to weigh-in with your opinions of the direction government is going is a political right. Homosexual-living is not a right, it is a preference. Rights are things all people have in common, and homosexual preference simply cannot be found among the things we all have in common. When we elevate every preference to the status of a right, we just end up lowering our standards of what constitutes a right; thereby debasing our true-rights to the point few are still willing to defend them. Then, we all lose to tyranny.

I don’t agree with Conservapedia’s tone, and can find more than a few factual mistakes, but that was not my point in including them. For information, I am more apt to reference Wikipedia if for no other reason than Conservapedia is so sparse. I am more sympathetic to Conservapedia’s views and candor, but recognize they labor under a self-imposed disadvantage in the scholarship department. Be that as it may, they still serve as a counterweight to Wikipedia’s faux impartiality and, if nothing else, demonstrate just how partial Wikipedia is.

As to the liberal lexicographic bias, there has been no survey or study to show this is the case as there has been showing a similar skewing of the media and academia. Yet, lexicographers are drawn heavily from the ranks of academia and there is no mistaking the bias of academia. If anything lexicographers belong to that subset of academia termed ‘liberal arts’, and the liberal arts departments of our universities are swimming in self-proclaimed socialist. Why then should we suppose our lexicographers would differ significantly from this near-monopoly of thought or that a conservative voice among them could prevail against a super-majority?

As to some words evolving over time, they do indeed. However, that usually occurs over generations and epochs, rather than months, seasons and years as has been the case since WWII. It is unusual in the extreme that words would shift meaning this radically, eradically and misdirect us so thoroughly; and the rules I gave above serve to alert us when we are played the fool.

C’mon. Can’t Republicans have a few conspiracy theories of our own?

Despair not. When it does crash and burn, you can be sure the Democrats will have snookered a Republican to be in office to take the blame.

Despair not. The great Obama-socialism experiment is sure to crash and burn in, say, 80 years or so (just as the Soviets crashed and burned … eventually). After which, we can get back to the business of freedom and free-markets.

In the interim, we’ll keep the flame burning.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to understand [the science of] economics to function in a viable economy. If that were not the case, the whole history of markets would be one long disaster and we would never have developed any markets. Instead, we’d all be nakedly dining on grubs and fighting over scraps. Even leaky-brained socialists admit to the need for strong markets when they are starving or cold.