Another example is Christopher Hitchens, and it's Jonah Goldberg of all people supplying the interesting offhand remark today in the context of the Chavez UN speech

I like it for its nostalgic qualities too. It's old school, old world, old times stuff. Perhaps it's because I recently heard Christopher Hitchens do his Leninist the worse the better riff about the global conflict, but I also like how it helps clear the field.

I wonder if someone in the post office was twisted enought to gloat about his enemy being cancelled thousands upon thousands of times?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Of course he is a former Stalinist -- and he remained in that position for years.

A couple of years ago I confronted him on the Internation Relations History List on this matter over a couple weeks of messages, wherein he claimed that SDS was founded by Marxists. No -- SDS was founded by white college kids who were interested in participating in Civil Rights, and it was initially funded by Democratic Socialists. At least a third of the people who signed the Port Huron Statement of 1962 -- the founding SDS document -- were the leaders of chapters on Catholic Womens' College campuses. The Foreign Affairs language in the Port Huron Statement is lifted nearly word for word from the language of Pope John XXIII.

Horowitz cannot answer this kind of historical detail that is clear if you just read (or know) the history in detailed fashion. In fact if you know the detail and post it, he recruits people to smear you. I know.

My only contact with this kind of ex-Stalinist was back in my old AIPAC days when I had regular run-ins with the now indicted Steve Rosen.
It was 1984 and he was a Reagan lover while I was for Mondale.
One day he marched over to make amends (sort of) and said, "We are not as far apart as you think. You'll be surprised to know that my parents were Stalinists."
That didn't surprise me. His tactics were always out of the Stalinist playbook.
What did surprise me was that he thought that a liberal late 60's type like me was somehow a (fellow) Stalin admirer.
In fact, a liberal is about as far as you can get from a Stalinist except perhaps for old fashioned conservatives (the Goldwater kind) who are also pretty remote from the Stalinist mould.
But the neocons do indeed seem to have much in common with "Uncle Joe" and his fellow travelers.
It's crazy.
By the time I got to college, I don't think there were any real Stalinists anymore, just New Leftists who were about as undisciplined a bunch as you could find anywhere.
I think Horowitz is a vestige of the last Red Wave, having attended Stalinist summer camp and all. I love the idea of a Stalinist summer camp. My in-laws were in one, in Kazakhstan for four years. Actually, theirs was a slave labor camp for Polish Jews and other Poles. Horowitz's was, I think, up near Woodstock, NY. It was voluntary!

I've always thought of the Stalinists as the far Right of the Soviet Union. Liberals are always looking at ways to tinker with Government to make it work better. You can't say that about the Soviet Stalinists. Isn't it Grover Norquist who actually has a protrait of Stalin hanging in his house?

People like to call the current batch of "Unitary Executive" Republicans Neo-Conservatives.

I like to think of them as Neo-Stalinists.

Idea for a bumper sticker:
"Stalin was a Unitary Executive too."

-Dave Adams-

I don't think Horowitz has changed at all from his fundamental positions of the 60's. We had a mutual friend, whom he later went on to insult and denegrate quite publicly for no reason after this friend had been of tremendous help to him in publishing his magazine, except my friend kept to his leftist views and Horowitz turned to the right.

First off, I never really considered him a Stalinist, but more of a Trotskyite. Now he is a neo con hardline wingnut. Basically there's no difference. What is utterly consistant about Horowitz, and others of his ilk, is his authoritarian, despotic and anti-democratic nature. This includes a certainty that you are in receipt of the revealed truth, a demonizing of the opposition, an unwillingness to admit any wrongness or inconsistancy, a tendency towards violence, disregard for empirical truth, a willingness, nay, eagerness to destroy those with whom he disagrees and a self righteous surety of the correctness of his beliefs. Most importantly it includes, as Stalin and Hitler and Mao did, the willingness to start wars, cause upheaval and misery and death in the name of some theoretical greater "good."

It's a sick and twisted totalitarianism in love with jackbooted enforcement of the new order. It matters not whether that order is of the far left or the far right, what matters is that it is to be enforced and worshipped and compelled upon people regardless of their own wishes, and all in the name of some utopia to be achieved if only everyone would think like the totalitarian does.

Need I say that it is very dangerous? Horowitz is a deranged and dangerous man. And not very nice, either, nor loyal to his friends.

He, and those like him, need to be opposed and countered at every turn.

Who takes Horowitz seriously?

He's a wannabe Rush Limbaugh without the personality.

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

"How come former Stalinists can spout their crap without people dismissing anything they say as coming from a former admirer of a mass murder while Hitler's former admirers have no credibility whatsoever on anything."

Well, everybody's talking about one side of this argument. I'd like to point out that we take the children of Nazi sympathizers and elect them president.

dc

I would suggest one further point on which Horowitz is consistent - as when he was a Trotskyite, he still believes in a centrally inspired global revolution. Perhaps that is what attracted him to the Neocon movement, and if so you could easily see him hitch himself to the next bunch of idealists who think they can transform the world.

Not sure if this world-view causes authoritarianism or vice versa, but the issue for me is that these guys think they can deliver change on a global scale. They believe in silver bullets, not careful, detailed analysis, and I guess that ties in with the mindset of one convinced he is in possession of the absolute truth.

In practical terms, these people are dangerous and difficult argue against - dangerous, because they won't change their beliefs unless they are personally impacted by the consequences of their flawed policies, and difficult to counter because they won't accept information that undermines their beliefs.

Since no automatic conclusion-and frequently no conclusion at all- can be drawn from these "ex relationships" (cf Richard Crossman's The God that Failed ) I wonder how often they reward this sort of conjecture. Better perhaps to treat them as merely interesting footnotes -if that..

Stalinism of the right and Stalinism of the left are the same things.
David Horowitz is definitely the type who believes in lining his enemies up against the wall.
He would have been one of the commisars riding into Warsaw behind the Russian tanks to set up the "political" operation.

A far more economical way of making the point I sought to. I should have read yours first. :-)

When Horowitz was younger, didn't he just sense that the Leftist Revolution was where the action was, the limelight, the excitement, the place where he could make a reputation standing metaphorically beside the Panthers and war protestors, and then didn't he switch to Reagan b/c he sensed (correctly) that now the Right was where the action was? If he had stayed a communist who would remember him?

It's classic ambition in the Shakesperean/Latin sense. I don't think he really believes in anything except the vaunting of his own authoritarian vanity.

Much like Stalin (and Hitler too).

I am unaware of any marginalized because of a Nazi past, but hasn't that recently been used to attack the Nobel Laureate, Günter Grass, since it has been revealed that towards the end of WW II he served with the Waffen SS?

Not that the two individuals are in any way comparable, but the reaction to the recent revelation of Grass' military service with the Waffen SS would seem to be an appropriate example.

Nah.  Trotskyist is just another word for Talmudist, and getting a bunch of Talmudists on the same page is like herding cats.

Horowitz was a communist, he grew up in a family whose parents were active in the American Party. Alexander Cockburn provides incisive insight:

Merely from the whines and howls of his numerous enemies on the right, you can tell that Sid Blumenthal has drawn blood in his book The Clinton Wars

[. . .]

Prime among the whiners and howlers is David Horowitz who lashes out at "Sid Vicious", saying the guy has been beastly to him every since Horowitz and Collier staged a "Second Thoughts" conference in Washington in the fall of 1987, designed as a sort of ideological hospice for renegades in the same stage of transition from left to right as themselves. Horowitz charges that it was Blumenthal who urged left wing assailants such as myself to attend and then to deride the proceedings in print.

I can't speak for the others, but in my case Horowitz has it all wrong. I was visiting Washington and had better things to do with my time than go to the Second Thoughts affair but got dragged along by Hitchens. When I entered the hall Horowitz was delivering the keynote, and was visibly nonplussed at the sight of potential hecklers. He lost his train of thought, rambled inconsequentially, then plunged back into his childhood, recalling the upbringing of his sister and himself in a Communist family, where as so often happened the children observed and resented the long hours their parents spent away from them, doing "party work".

"My sister will never forgive them," Horowitz wailed to the audience of some 200, then depicted the abyss of his own deprivation. He had never been allowed to go to Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, but rather was forced to sit through uplifting Soviet features.

If only he'd been allowed to watch Pillow Talk ... And of course, among the ironies is that Horowitz and Hitchens are now ideological bedfellows.

Alexander Cockburn, "A Whiner Called David Horowitz Moans at Sid Blumenthal and Imagined CIA Slur", Counterpunch, May 31, 2003

This is an appropriate insulting critique. Horowitz was a part of the Ramparts editors, who took the zine glossy, onto the coffee tables of the middle and upper middle classes, and achieved it largely by altering the magazine's content into irrelevance, as a mover of the PolitiqueChic. Even one of his better known early works as a writer, "Sinews of Empire", Ramparts, October 1969, comes off as a castrati's flailing attempt to go balls out.

Davey has always been a poseur, never taking chances about his own personal injury or arrest, instead preferring the middle of the pack. His Ramparts were always imaginary, just as is the belief of his personal import in the Vietnam Antiwar movement. If anything, he was counterproductive, working in opposition to what many of the vets were trying to accomplish. Horowitz wanted revolution, we just wanted America to understand, to finish our duty to country and get on with our lives.

I was never a serial mass protestor by any stretch, and preferred dialogue to public action, but when I did participate, it was at the barricades, to find the Police Officers and/or Guardsmen who would at least be willing to listen, and see that I was much like them, an American compelled by duty, wishing them no bodily harm. Guys like Horowitz shrieked epitaphs of pig from deep within the security of the mob, and intentionally would try to escalate protestors into actions which had to be countered with force, always keeping a keen eye open for targets to heap blame upon from both sides, should events get too ugly.

Horowitz wanted to rip America asunder, whereas many like me, simply wanted to clean our country of its sepsis, enabling it to heal.

This isn't a screed against the left as a whole, but against the weasels who had become immersed in Hegelian dialectics, and knew how to game semantics, fashioning it into a coercive tool of societal change with the effectiveness of a Stalinist purge. The majority of the leftists I encountered cared about humans, and would without thought of remuneration give aid and comfort to those afflicted with the war sickness. Where the left failed, and still fails in my mind is in their tendency to endlessly proselytise, oftentimes advancing arguments which could be dangerous, if they actually possessed any connection to reality.

To understand Horowitz, read what he describes as 60's leftists, and comprehend what it truly is: a mirror into his own black soul.

Horowitz has also been one who arrogantly refuses to accept responsibility for his own actions as a free human. Consider what he claims is one of the experiences which caused him to turn 180-degrees from his days of lefty errancy. Well past the time when any rational person still considered the Black Panthers to be a political organisation, and had instead morphed into an ongoing criminal enterprise, Horowitz, using his contacts within the Panthers, got a friend employment within their organisation. The friend ended up dead, but Horowitz won't look into the mirror, and instead blames the left. Typically, he exhibits a recurring pattern of a NeoConniver's transmogrification into a righty from a former state of liberal, head in the clouds, face down in the pie in the sky, blindly walking into his own mugging, and then responding with a completely out of proportion call for vengeance, which transubstantiates their beingness into its inherent right-sidedness; attendant with a preponderate inability to be honest, and then to recognise the responsibility flowing as effect from one's past acts.

The instant reversed polarity of his political world view transparently exposes Horowitz for what he really is, a moral relativist. This was aptly expressed by a fellow Ramparts coworker of Horowitz's:

The phone rings and a guy in my office says, "It's David Horowitz." I haven't spoken to David Horowitz since the end of the '60s, when we both worked at Ramparts. Since then, with another former Ramparts editor, Peter Collier, this little creep has written a series of best-selling portraits of ruling class families--The Rockefellers, The Fords, The Kennedys--and boasted in print about voting for Ronald Reagan. Horowitz and Collier say they once believed fervently in left causes and institutions (from the Soviet Union to the Black Panther Party), and when they discovered these institutions to be corrupt and murderous they had to denounce them and come out for the other side.

There are many flaws in this "logic." For openers, there aren't just two sides in this world (the fake left and the cruel right). And sure it's demoralizing to learn that the party that supposedly stands for equality is run by opportunists and actually stands for privilege. But that wouldn't lead a real radical to endorse the all-out pursuit of privilege. It should lead you to call for a movement that's serious about establishing equality. Horowitz and Collier were never radicals for a minute. Their goal was and is personal success. It's no coincidence that they were "left" in the '60s and "right" in the '80s.

Fred Gardner, "Hollywood Confidential: Part I", Viet Nam Generation Journal & Newsletter-V3, N3, November 1991, The Sixties Project

To fully understand Horowitz's depravity requires that one keeps firmly within their conscious thought, Horowitz's screeds, his accusations of traitorous lefties' acts, and his continuing slanderous misportrayal of Jane Fonda's Hanoi stupidity, while they read Horowitz's own confession of Conspiracy and Treason. It is also wise to remember, while reading his arrogant and unapologetic description of a premeditated violation of the Secrecy Act, not for any stated higher purpose, but motivated it seems, only by his desire to harm America, and his admission that the treason directly aided two foreign nations, one the USSR, that there is no statute of limitations for treason.

Trotsky was a revolutionary and communist and both he and Stalin rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat just as Lenin did. The first thing Lenin did when he began to consolidate his power in the October days was to announce his rejection of the proletariat. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Soviets were parties of the proletariat, but the Bolsheviki were not.

I'll even go so far as to suggest that when the authoritarian right says that "Democrats have no ideas" they are complaining that the Democrats offer no overall simplified template that an ideologue can enforce.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if not, as a casting of aspersions, I like it!

I showed my appaling biases against Continental philosophy in another thread, a while back, when I suggested that some of the problems of the 20th century had their roots in the differences in the history of philosophy in Continental Europe and in the Anglophone world.  I think it is relevant, in large part because of the divide you describe.

Marx and the thinkers that inspired (partly) Nazism, say, had their roots in system-building philosophy, writing huge books that tried to offer universally explanatory theories.  Building from Hume and the Empiricists, Anglophone philosophy has gone in the opposite direction, offering perhaps suggestions of grand theories, but focusing in largely on specific problems.  Today, almost all the important philosophical work being done in English is in the form of articles, rather than books.  

Not to say that therefore the English-speaking world has a lock on rational, tinkering-based approaches to governance.  Far from it (plenty examples of such in other traditions; plenty of counterexamples in our recent history, too).  But I do think that there is something about the stance - careful, focused on detail, suffused with skepticism - that is to be admired wherever it is found, just as the tendency towards system-building - it's all over the place in the world today - should be greeted with doubt, and just a little fear.

George Soros explained, in his recent book, his philosophy of social advancement and democracy promotion. It is based on a humble acknowledgement that, because we have only partial information and understanding, all plans will yield unexpected consequences and need tinkering. This supports his emhasis on local action and grass-roots organizing, since understanding will be greater among those closest to the situation.

Obviously this is exactly contrary to our recent democracy transplant.

Never heard of him.  I suspect I'm not alone.

The accepted "theory of the 'Doctors' Plot'" is that it was a typical Stalinist plan for a show trial based, as usual, on knowingly false charges. Cf. The Baath Party of Iraq hanging nine Jews falsely accused of spying in 1969.

But what does the "Doctors' Plot" have to do with "deportations in Russia"?

Irving Howe v. Tom Hayden!  Which side are you on, boys; which side are you on?

Charles Lindbergh was a credible candidate, too (for a celebrity).

So link us all to that peer review.  Or are you the peer who's doing the review?

That's because in the U.S., the sins of the father are not visited upon the children. Unless of course, you're Irving Kristol...

First off, I never really considered him a Stalinist, but more of a Trotskyite. Now he is a neo con hardline wingnut.

To the panthers, Horowitz probably probably came across  like an ambassador from white Stalinist America and so when he recommended a respectable-seeming white bookkeeper for them they probably assumed the fix was in and he was sending them a fellow Stalinist who would toe the line and not ask the group's leaders hard questions about where the funds being donated for "public service" programs was really going.

But of course in the 70s in Berkeley there were not really that many Stalinists left and of course  Betty van Patten certainly was not one, so they had to kill her.  It really was David's fault for being such a poser and playing around with guys who were more like Stalin than the most hard line American Communists ever were. 

But I don't think that is why he jumped to the right.  The story just provided another way to dramatize himself.

Fred in Vermont

I am bemused by the discussion of who was a more barbaric mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler.  Yglesias did a thread about it a couple months ago vis-a-vis the Indian eatery named in "honor" of Hitler.  And my position hasn't changed in the interim...I find no moral difference between Hitler and Stalin, and if Horowitz (or anybody) "admires" the mass murderer Stalin, there is no moral difference between that and admiring the mass murderer Hitler.  They are equally reprehensible examples of the potential of mankind's depravity...  

I don't "have a hard time" believing anything - however, that doesn't mean I choose to disregard historical fact and Stalin had nothing to do with Hitler and the nazis' holocaust. Do you think there were not any Jews in Germany? No Hitler/no holocaust maybe, but Stalin/Hitler no holocaust? No, it didn't work that way.

Rated up for being not too snarky and a good point.

Robert Byrd is candid about his past. He does not try to hide it, but does repudiate it. It is a great shame of the Democratic Party that so many of its members were racists until Johnson got the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. After it passed he is known to have said "Well, I guess we lost the South" or words to that effect.

Now the KKK guys tend to show up in GOP primaries.

Now, don't get testy. Yes; I read your comment. And I still haven't the slightest idea why you believe that the Doctors' Plot was manufactured for the purpose of "justifying" the deportation of Russian Jews to Siberia or even, that there ever was such a planned deportation.

In fact the Soviet secret police never needed public trials -- or their associated massive propaganda campaigns and mandatory party meetings with their two-minutes hate -- to meet their labor camp quotas.  If they had, the camps would have been empty.

I actually prefer to keep the Stalinist/anti-Stalinist conversation in the context of US political history. There are several critical breaks when not so strong American Stalinists broke from the CP -- and we need to comprehend that matter. Pre-history is when the Lovestoneites were expelled from the CPUSA in 1929. The second was during the time of the Moscow Trials, 1937-38. The third was at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Fourth was in the mid 1940's in the wake of the Duclos letter. Fifth was the Secret Speech by Khrushchev in 1956. These are the internal events that moved CPUSA membership up and down, but you'll note that in none of them did any Americans actually have much influence or skin.

This in my mind is the great fault of leftist outfits that were influenced by (negatively or positively) the Soviet Revolution and its aftermath. It was simply not built up out of elements of America that Americans can understand, and reasoned out on ordinary American's interests and preferences. Marx is always useful for concepts and a frame of analysis, but the social systems he understood (Mid 19th century Germany, middle late British 19th Century) are not anything like American Systems. Combine that with the Soviet-interest driven American CP history, and you frame the problem.

Horowitz is essentially a none-too-bright and/or not well read opportunist who knows how to read the current wave, and sell himself to the guy who will pay the best. With Ramparts, it was Progressive Catholic thought in the early 1960's. When that gig wore out, he was ripe for the dollars of Richard Mellon Scaife. In between he fell into the clutches of the Trots who were in the process of becoming Neo-Con's.

In his last volume of his bio of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch got it perfectly pitched. The Michael Harrington Democratic Socialists of America resisted as long as they could the membership demand to oppose the War in Vietnam. They fostered Civil Rights and SDS up to the mid 60's, and then both went their own way. This left them confronting the gobblin, that Vietnam matter. Eventually they voted to participate in sponsoring Martin Luther King's speech in 1967 at Riverside Church against the War -- and that is when the Kristol gang parted company. It was Michael Harrington who coined the term "Neo-Con" as a way to comprehend them.

Horowitz frightens because he does smear jobs if he can figure a way to do it -- particularly in his link up with Lynne Cheney and their organization they founded with Lieberman, who has, apparently left it. Those who are sufficiently independent and able ought to pay attention to him -- because yes, he is a Stalinist, and he would like nothing better than founding a gulag for Humanities and History Teachers and Scholars.

You need to hit the books.
Read about the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Read about the secret annexes in which Stalin and Hitler agreed to divide Poland between them.

No Stalin. No Holocaust. Had the Soviets had a leader who fought the Germans rather than make deals with them, Hitler would never got his hands on the Jews (or Catholics) of Poland. The majority of Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish and died in Poland.

The neo-cons utopia is for their self serving goals that give them power, money & status or position in their vision of reality. Anything that speaks of community or pubic interest is a cover for their manipulations.

Their talking about states rights when they were not in control of the federal agencies was used to send to the states things that were well regulated at the federal level to be abused in the states.

Those things that the states oversaw and regulated to the determent of the powerful money interests were sent to the federal level where the regulations were diluted when regulations were averaged out over all of the states.

The neo-cons utopia or template is not and cannot be for the public interest of the citizens because the actual agenda is never shared.

The temple is rigid and defended as it is delivering the hidden agenda as planned.

The template consistently gives maximum returns to the powerful few and the propaganda says you will get this one-day also to the others.

The tinker is all about giving the population what they need
not giving everything they want.

Remember leadership since Ronald Reagan is consistently giving to your supporters and these guys learned their tricks under him.

With tinkers you follow the evolving situation and one never know who will profit.

Look at President Carter, he deregulated but did not consistently give to any one group and thus was criticized as not being a leader.

Besides our reality today is fantasy and fantasy is reality, so how can you bless fantasy by discussing it as actual reality,
but that is for another discussion.
-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

. . . huge books that tried to offer universally explanatory theories . . . .

Speaking of our English cousins what do you do with this one?

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. William Blake

Exception that proves the rule, of course. 

No I do not get it, but then you don't seem to get it either. You are justifying the right's embracing a self-admitted American traitor, because the left has embraced a former KKK member.

Again, what is that supposed to mean to me? I am a part of neither side in your flatworlder political ideological tug-of-war. I an presently allied with the Democratic side for several reasons.

First and foremost, Bush engages in tyranny, and waged war under false pretexts in Iraq.

The other significant reason is that I firmly believe it is not the party where the inherent threat to liberty resides, but in the hands of power's wielders, irrespective of partisan conccerns. Never should one party control the legislative and executive branches. Republicans have depleted the national treasury, have fomented sectarian animosity, both religious and political, bith domestically and internationally, they have covered up or have been complicit in the covering up rampant intelligencce failures originating within their own party, and now they even threaten habeas corpus, the foundation of western civilisation's juriprudence, and the very bedrock upon which the liberty possessed by the people is anchored into.

And your response completely ignored the difference between Byrd and Horowitz that i had stated, specifically, Byrd is actually remorseful about his past deeds, while Horowitz is assuredly not, and still engages in the very same immoral acts that he did as a lefty.

So you see, it isn't the mote in my eye bro, the persons afflicted with vision impairment are the persons playing tug of war in the dirt, trapped within their own self-contrived planar constrictions upon reality.

But ye have set at nought all my counsel,
and would none of my reproof:

I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your fear cometh;

When your fear cometh as desolation,
and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind;
when distress and anguish cometh upon you.

--Proverbs 1:25-27

I'm not "justifying" anything. I'm saying people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That's all.

Soros is explaining Herbert A. Simon's Bounded Rationality. The best explanation of it for the layman that I have read is Essence of Decision-making by Graham T. Allison. In that book he applied three different theories of organizational decision-making to the processes in the White House during Cuban Missil Crisis. Those are the rational, power-based, and sociological methods. The sociological one is based on individual rationality under assumptions of

* limiting what sorts of utility functions there might be.
* recognizing the costs of gathering and processing information.
* the possibility of having a "vector" or "multi-valued" utility function.

Once you have read Allison's book you will never question the stupidity of organizational decisions again. You will merely determine which theory applied best.

That theory also led to object-oriented programming.

I'll even go so far as to suggest that when the authoritarian right says that "Democrats have no ideas" they are complaining that the Democrats offer no overall simplified template that an ideologue can enforce.

The Right admittedly does an excellent job of marketing the ideas they have, and if you will, its in much the same way McDonalds markets their food (no surprise, since I believe they use a lot of the same people). The product may suck, it may be really bad for you, and the premises may seem to be devoid of all human warmth, but you know what you're going to get when you walk in the door. Conservatives will may quietly grumble and look at the nice liberal establishment across the street, but they'll still line up at the counter.

Liberals politicians don't seem to think of Liberalism as a brand in quite the same way, and even if they did I don't think Liberals would buy into it.

-Dave Adams-

But for assorted reasons. Throwing sandstone at bulletproof glass mostly gets sand in your eye. You see, I am quite capable of responding to a cliche with the conventional wisdom of my ear to the ground, my eyes on the stars, my shoulder to the wheel, and my back to the physical therapist.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Now the KKK guys tend to show up in GOP primaries."

Name two.

We know who the first one is, he last ran for office in 1999 and came in third. Now name another.

Your first and third bullets seem consistent with classical game theory, but the second is not usually there. I have seem the second take the emphasis in some exercises in budget development for intelligence organizations, as well as a fourth, which may go to the power-based method.

In both communications networking and intelligence collection, I'm thinking of the term "silo". As more about the National Reconnaissance Program (a phrase itself once classified TOP SECRET, where the National Reconnaissance Office was merely SECRET) is declassified, the program had long operated as three (later four) "silo" programs, basically Air Force, CIA, and Navy at first. A major reorganization recognized the programs were more properly functional rather than organizational: imaging (of several types), signals intelligence (COMINT and ELINT), commmunications support, and a few exotica under MASINT.

A new phase came when some bright person realized that individual missions in these programs needed satellites in specific orbits. More economies came when it was realized rather than building and launching one low earth orbit satellite for microwave intercept and another for "close look" imaging, both could go into the same launcher and orbiter. When launcher/orbiter price tags could be a billion or more each, as Proxmire said, "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Anyone who poses for pics with the Council of Conservative Citizens.
How many members of the congress would that be?
How many local politicos?

Cut the crap.

How about Trent Lott? A picture of him with CCC bigwigs was made public during the discussion of whether or not his support for Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats qualifies him as an unreconstructed racist.

In all fairness, I suppose that appearing before the CCC or other 'neo-confederate' groups doesn't make one a racist - if you're a politician, it might just make you someone who wants the racist vote.  I guess that being craven is a somewhat lesser sin. 

Identifying the hack responible for a production is a blacklist?

Bit of an exaggeration, wouldn't you say? 

No one is saying Horowitz can't work in Hollywood, only that he ought to admit it when he does, but then again, it's foolish expecting honesty from Davey H.

Byrd is no longer a "card-carrying" member of the Klan. He hasn't been for years. He has totally renounced that group and apologized for his involvement.

Now you are engaging in libel to excuse you pathetic apples and oranges "point?"

Just. Stop.

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It's been a while, but I think the days of grand social systems are over. Marx was a political-economist. As such he built a set of theoretical systems that academicly unified the Social Sciences of Economics and Sociology. He pretty much ignored government, and Lenin apparently added that to the doctrine.

But what happened is that the academic disciplines fractured partly along the lines of how mathematical their theories could become. Economics was reduced to a form of applied mathematics by Keynes and his descendents. This is the last grand overall theory that has really been presented, and in fact is so good that the so-called rebellion of Uncle Miltie (Milton Friedman) was little more than a disagreement on the priority to give to manipulation of the money supply ~within the system created by Keynes and popularized by Samuelson.~

Libertarians, it seems to me, have reduced their grand system to nothing beyond Keynsian economics, and wish to do away with all government. They can do this only by also ignoreing all sociology. The free marketeers are only slightly less extreme. They recognize that many markets exist only because government created them and enforce them. [See intellectual property. Without government there is no market there.]

Labor and socialists also recognize that not everything important in society has money-value, and tries to adapt the market system to such things as support of families and education and training of children and people for reasons beyond just making them into workers and consumers.

There are questions which are not considered by any overarching theory that I am aware of. One of those questions is which social functions and economic functions should be performed by free enterprise without interference of governemnt, which social functions belong entirely to government [such as military, police and justice functions]and which have to be bleneded [such as banking and insurance which cannot function reliably without government regulation, but operate best when the marketing is left alone but clearly has to be regulated to prevent the seller from using greater knowledge of the product to shaft consumers and using government to enforce the provision of promises for which the consumer is induced to prepay (insurance and financial reporting.)

Anyway, those are some ideas I have been playing with for a few years, and which your comments above suggested to me that you might also have similar questions.