More at The Official John McCain Flip-Flop & Gaffe Master List.

Hamas and North Korea know what they want.

[DPRK Studies]

Ah, but do we really know what Hamas and N. Korea want?

We know that supporters of McCain or anti-Obamites, whichever they may be, will try the 4GW method of impugning Obama’s character and policy statements via a type of guilt by association with these two regimes — even if, naturally, both Hamas and N. Korea, as with others making “endorsements”, may choose their own associations for their own reasons without a reciprocal choice coming from the presidential candidate. 4GW logic is often tortured, as a sense of normativity is pushed beyond all reason and made to conform with straight lines, i.e., is made normative. Bombs and kidnappings, as well as Internet missives, are the effort to make the peculiar normativity normative.

The desire for absolute certainty may inform the 4GW logic; but more importantly, the 4GW force wishes to create absolute certainty in the target, typically of some negative reality or consequence yet to fully emerge although many signs of the negative future emergence are created or spotlighted in the process.

The 4GW logic has two relationships to normativity;

1. It sees an absolute ought, should, etc.; or, moral imperative. The 4GW is fighting the morally superior cause.
   
2. It wishes to create in its target an understanding of absolute ought, should, or moral imperative. The target of 4GW, then, is made to believe it ought to give up because it is on the morally inferior side.
   

The 4GW force’s normative framework may be different, partly or greatly, from the normative assessment it would push for its opponent, but the two will be complementary in promoting the 4GW cause.

5GW logic is different. If a 5GW force decides to attack a 4GW force, the fifth-gradient war machine will see the 4GW’s normative assessments and framework (#1) and will use them jujitsu-fashion against the 4GW force.

So for instance, if N. Korea and Hamas were 5GW players, they might endorse Obama knowing how the domestic political 4GW machines will play that endorsement in their own domestic 4GW. That is, if either of those regimes preferred McCain to be president, they could endorse Obama knowing full well that their endorsement would be used against Obama. Those within the U.S. who oppose Obama’s candidacy will see the endorsement as a strengthening of their own normative assessments (the 5GW jujitsu taking effect against the domestic 4GW) and will continue to highlight those endorsements in order to create the complementary normative assessment for Obama supporters that their support for Obama is weak or lame (the domestic 4GW effect). Fence-sitters would also be targeted similarly by the domestic 4GW force.

As long as we in the U.S. continued to believe that N. Korea and Hamas were at best 4GW players or 4GW wannabe’s — even if many of us do not know those terms or warfare theory, but intuitively “know” those things about the two regimes — we would more likely believe that the endorsement expresses an honest preference for Obama. Hamas’ and N. Korea’s normative assessment leads them to build up the rightness of the Obama campaign when feeding the MSM memes for consumption. We might agree with DPRK, that they know what they want and thus “know” (somehow) that Obama’s foreign policy would benefit them.

As long as we ourselves have a tendency to operate from a 4GW framework, we might indeed “take them at their word” because we ourselves are used to pushing our idea of normativity until it actually becomes normative: not a conspiracy of dunces, but a conspiracy of like-minded operators. We say what we want and we want the MSM to reinforce it by transmitting it; just like them.

If on the other hand we began to suspect a 5GW framework in the operations of those two regimes, which also means that we ourselves began to think from a 5GW framework, we would be faced with a problem:

Those regimes might be using jujitsu as described above; they may actually want McCain as president.

Suspecting a 5GW maneuver, we might be tempted to support Obama even though they endorsed Obama. Knowing that they would try to hit our domestic 4GW buttons to influence the election toward promoting McCain’s ascendency, we might thwart them by picking their up-front endorsement.

But then, if they were 5GW gaming, they might know we’d try to thwart their circuitous support of McCain by voting for Obama; and maybe they wanted Obama all along.

But now my fingers are tongue-tied. So I’ll end this post with a more entertaining but related example:




Beyond the entertainment value: How did the Dread Pirate Roberts win in such a climate?

Soob tagged me with a meme nearly two weeks ago, and as I often do (this is not one of the seven btw), I allowed some procrastination to extend to the point when I might actually pass the threshold where “doing the meme” faded into the past unrealized. As I wrote in a Twit,

I don’t like being meme-tagged. Why? The ritual w/ fetishes and obligations. I don’t want to pass it on, either. I’m a grumpy bad-ass.

But I’ve had the meme on-mind anyway, so here it goes:

The Rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. In light of Ortho’s post I’ve added this bit to the meme. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

I’m going to break rule #’s 3 and 4, however.

[Joseph Warren] was appointed a Major General by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress on June 14, 1775. His commission had not yet taken effect three days later when the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. He served as a volunteer private against the wishes of General Israel Putnam and Colonel William Prescott, who requested that he serve as their commander. Taunting the British, he uttered his famous quote: “These fellows say we won’t fight! By Heavens, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!” He fought in the front lines, rallying his troops to the third and final assault of the battle when he was killed immediately by a musket ball fired into his head by a British officer who recognized him. [Wikipedia]

My 7:

1. The first person I ever “came out” to in person was my platoon sergeant while I served in the U.S. Army. First person bar none, since I had not actually met an openly gay person, even (at least not open with me.) My service did not consist of much but training, first basic and then later at the Defense Language Institute, where I studied Korean in late 1989/90, until I was honorably discharged. This was before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” My platoon sergeant gave me a weekend to “think about it,” or to make sure I knew what I was doing — I was young and young people sometimes were confused about sexuality, he said — and warned me that our company commander, an ex-MP officer, would be suspicious because young service members sometimes claimed to be gay just to get out of the service. After the weekend, I trudged back into his office and said, yeah, I was sure. But surprisingly, my platoon sergeant was the only negative reaction I received. In fact, the base commander, once I reached that level in the process, lectured me on being “safe” once I left the service and commented approvingly on my decision to study psychology afterward (as a path toward figuring myself out even better, he said.) My record to that point had been pretty good, hence the honorable discharge.
2. I did not study psychology, beyond one class. In fact, I did not study much of anything afterward, at least not in any structured, formal way. After two semesters in a state university, I was booted for poor grades. I’d skipped way too many classes. (I went to a philosophy class once and never went back, never dropped it. For instance. But that was the worst case. And, paradoxically, it bored me.) This is despite the fact that, in the final weeks before being discharged from the Army, I’d earned a year’s worth or so of credits via CLEP tests. I received no warnings or anything else of the sort from the university, and was told that my ACT test scores and high school record were so good, as well as those CLEPs, my poor performance displayed an unwillingness to try; so they booted me. I have never earned a college degree.
   
3. Weird fact: I have read Wystan Hugh Auden’s poem “A New Age” to a small group of Wiccans, who did not like it; particularly, there was a rumble of disgruntlement and disagreement when I read line 9:
   
   

   A New Age
   
   
   So an age ended, and its last deliverer died
   In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
   The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf
   Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.
   
   They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
   A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
   But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath:
   A kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.
   
   Only the scupltors and the poets were half sad,
   And the pert retinue from the magician’s house
   Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad
   
   To be invisible and free; without remorse
   Struck down the sons who strayed in their course,
   And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.
   

   
   
   —but they did not understand the poem; they were a loopy lot. I once ran with Wiccans though.
4. Weird fact: I once told a therapist, who told me she was doing a survey shortly after 9/11 to see how people (clients) were handling the attack emotionally and mentally, and who asked me how I felt about 9/11, that, “I felt relieved.” This shocked the poor woman quite a bit I saw and must have been non-standard. She asked what I meant, and I said that the attack could have been so much worse (thinking nukes and other nasties) and that now finally we might be able to stop, or at least be motivated to stop, or to preempt, far worse in the future. In truth, the week after the attacks I had walked around in a daze, actually became physically sick, and could hardly bring myself to be in the public around others — but by the time she asked me, I was in a different frame of mind.
5. I actually believe: That each person is responsible for his own mind. This has freed me quite a bit. However, self-identified members of a common community persist in trying to be responsible for my mind or, on the other side of the equation, grow rather frustrated when I do not exhibit much effort to construct their minds for them. Incidentally, I could devote an entire blog, by which I mean an entire site, to nothing but this #5.
6. I have never quite found my perfect medium; but then, I don’t know if one exists.
7. I chose my full 3-word name for my online identity because I thought:
   1. “C.G.Weeks” was too pretentious
      
   2. “Curtis G. Weeks” was useless; why include the middle initial? And too corporate.
   3. “Curtis Weeks” was too generic. Believe me, I’ve ego surfed.
   4. I decided that my full name was me, as given at birth, and I didn’t like a-c above for reasons given.
      
   And, I chose it long ago, when I first began spending online time, typically at poetry forums. Circa 2000AD.
   

Title of this post is from Today We Choose Faces, a blog I found via Soob’s sidebar blog/rss listing. (Pretty decent selection.)

Looks like Dan tdaxp has finally gone off the deep end.

It’s bad enough that he demands answers while avoiding the majority of points one raises while in dialogue — those points are merely opportunities for him to ask another question, or two, or three (almost always merely rhetorical ploys, i.e., rhetorical questions, and not always related to your points), or else opportunities for him to offer a counterpoint without also offering any kind of citation or factual evidence (they are opinions in line with his dogmatic stance) while demanding his interlocutor offer citations or evidence.

No, much worse is the fact that he has learned the art of appearing blameless. For instance: given the last paragraph, he is likely to ask another rhetorical question: “Should a person ask questions during dialogue if he doesn’t understand what his interlocutor is saying or needs clarification? Doesn’t this advance the dialogue and understanding between both sides in a conversation?”

What he means is, Why won’t you play my game? But what he is now saying is this:

They don’t help me catch contradictions in my thinking. They waste my time.

Two particularly annoying classes of troll comments are those that celebrate crime and those that engage in monologues. By far, the most common of the criminal trolls are members of the Black Gangster Disciple Network, whose comments are normally some variation of “Hoover is my King!!!” The monologues were rarer because the presidential election started, but seem to be taking the form of raising points and then refusing to answer questions on those points. So, to take a recent example, a troll commentator may assert that a particular form of polling is the best, and then when asked why, refuses to answer.

The claim in bold is referenced twice in the post. Oh! Poor Dan of tdaxp! Victim of trolls! But anyone who has read tdaxp for longer than a few weeks will notice a pattern: Dan is not a Pyrrhonist or other form of skeptic, but a dogmatist through and through. He can be shocked out of a wrong opinion or idea, certainly, although the threshold is high; but he always has the answers, in any given moment, and rarely seeks information or analysis which would upend his dogmatic stance. He is far more open to the kind of “contradiction” that will expand his previously held idea or make it better, even if different; but contravention is nearly impossible and certainly not allowed.

The claim in italics is the direct result of his refusal to address with good faith any points which contradict his own dogmatic stance. One either has to refuse to answer more questions (knowing full well that 90% or so of previous points have been largely ignored; so why give more?) or write a novella hoping that Dan will at least notice that you have written a novella-length response and respond to some points.

Dan does not have to prove any of his points; your job in commenting on his blog is to prove them for him.

So now he is lumping those who disagree with him with the Black Gangster Disciple Network.

Interestingly, this factionalism bears a strong relationship to the memetic warfare found in 4GW. Dan is the victim, and anyone who opposes his viewpoint is a troll. Dan is the inspired dialogic Socrates trying to find his own internal contradiction; trollish monologuers are top-down tyrants of dialogue similar to those who would use violence to tyranize. Dan’s constant refusal to play on a common battleground — er, which would be authentic dialogue — in favor of constantly diverting the conversation with senseless rhetorical questions, that is, avoiding responding to the majority of any points his opponents raise or demanding authentication of those points ad infinitum while offering none for his own, bespeaks a 4GW effort to control the battlesphere. Any force an opponent can bring to bear is utterly ignored or caricatured as Dan moves around it; indeed, his opponents themselves have just been caricatured as “trolls”.

In three previous posts, I have already documented the sleight-of-hand rhetorical practices Dan would pass off as an honest search for contradiction:

• ”The Audacity of Faith in Opinion”
• ”The Dogmatist’s Playground”
• ”TDAXP wrong again? Obama and the Latino Vote”

The last was on a topic which proves rather insightful for the topic of this post. Dan’s Declaration of Freedom from Trolls came as a response to a similar discussion, in which Dan asserted,

Obama definitely has a latino problem

— his proof for that? Why, he linked another of his posts in a solipsistic maneuver intended to shore up his statement! That post, btw, took the purported dissatisfaction of one Latino member of the U.S. House of Representatives (and much more vaguely, “some of her Hispanic colleagues”), who will not campaign for Obama because they were not asked, and extrapolated from that,

It’s thus not surprising that many hispanics are skeptical of Barack Obama

That is, Rep. Napolitano and possibly some other members of the House wanted to be approached by Obama, and were not, and that means……”many hispanics are skeptical of Barack Obama.”

Despite polls to the contrary, and despite the absolute and utter lack of any other proof supporting Dan’s assertion, he made his claim again, and Eddie of Hidden Unities called him on it. Dan’s response? To caricature those polls, in the way he has caricatured anyone who disagrees with him or even, incidentally, the way he has caricatured the report referencing Rep. Napolitano. All is fodder for the dogmatic campaign.

I think it strange that you view random-sample opinion polls as “facts,”

While it is true that polling is not an exact science, we must remember that Dan of tdaxp has not once, not ever, produced any evidence for his assertion that Obama’s Latino support in the general population is soft or lacking.

Dan’s game is simple: in 4GWish fashion,

1) to caricature, deride, ignore, or pontificate on his opponent’s general stance —

Though I’m sure many other supporters of Obama will agree with you, because it sounds like good news for Obama. (link)

The standard of belief for Obama pushed by his supports changes so often, it is hard to know what to believe of him! (link)

2) to constantly ask for clarification, proof, evidence supporting his opponent’s point, while offering absolutely none himself for his own,

3) to further caricature his opponent when his opponent doesn’t bow to Dan’s command for detailed analysis

4) and finally, as a last resort, but keeping in his habitual style, to ban said troll who doesn’t play by Dan’s rules:

Comment trolls in which someone is engaging in monolog by refusing to support or withdraw some assertion will be notified of this, and if after 24 hours trolling behavior does not stop, and comments from the troll in that thread starting from the trolling behavior will be permanently removed.

Notice that not once, not ever, has Dan attempted to meet his own standards in the whole process. Dan wins, and his arguement wins, not because he is proven correct, not because his points are proven correct, but quite possibly because they are incorrect. That is, all evidence offered against his assertions goes without refutation, from him, beyond ad hominem argumentation and rhetorical ploys meant to silence that evidence; thus, evidence contradictory to his assertion is not defeated. (Indeed, the censure which promises censorship is only the final culmination of the process.)

What happens in the odd case that one of Dan’s opponents offers more data, say a link? You can see how Dan treats opposing evidence:

What is the point of the link on the second comment? It demonstrates nothing. (link)

Hah, you see now why offering any point is useless, whether he asks you to or not, unless you are entirely a member of that faction by which he self-identifies. What doesn’t feed into his dogmatic stance is virtually ignored by him unless it is used as fodder for his 4GW campaign. Had he been anything other than a shyster, he would have made the argument that the single conservative Latino apparatchik unhappy with McCain’s flip-flopping on immigration would not translate into many Latinos unhappy with McCain on immigration — but then, omfg, perhaps he’d recognize his own previous attempt to say the same of Obama’s Latino support.

Factcheck.org took a look:

Summary

McCain has spent the week focusing on energy policy, making some surprising, and inaccurate, statements.

Among them:
He said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling “would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis.” But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn’t have much of an impact on supply or prices until 2030.


McCain tried to paint Obama as an opponent of nuclear power, yet Obama has said he is open to nuclear energy being part of the solution and has supported bills that contained nuclear subsidies.

He has soft-pedaled the “cap” portion of his cap-and-trade proposal for greenhouse gases, even denying that it would be a mandate. The cap is a mandatory limit, however, and McCain even says so on his Web site.

McCain’s new ad, running this week, rightly says that he bucked his party in supporting action on climate change years ago. But its images of windmills and solar panels are misleading in that he supports subsidies for nuclear power, which isn’t pictured, and opposes them for wind and solar energy.

McCain continues to say that a suspension of the federal gas tax will lower prices for consumers, though hundreds of economists say he is wrong.

Read more: “McCain’s Power Outage”