Ben Shapiro proves how out of touch he is on transgenderism

[C C]

Although the "activist's Bible" was originally intended for left movements, the tactics endorsed in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals are what defines the whole game landscape today.

That's why conservatives now engage in ridicule and parody, in contrast to the 1960s and '70s when they were lopsidedly the stodgy targets of counterculture or New Left lampooning. Scoring satiric points for mockery is an essential complement to arguments.

That's why there is no middle ground or "waffling in limbo" today -- you can't get anywhere without a choosing a definite target, and one that you don't mitigate with "but it or they are not completely diabolical or conspiratorial".

That's why polarization is king. In this era, stumbling around in a boundary between two sides or orientations without even the appearance of a solid and reliable commitment just means waving a flag to others that one is an indecisive and confused yokel.

IOW, be careful about making a celebratory ruckus about that tasty morsel (hipster bible) you found in your soup. Everybody else in the restaurant will be perusing it in the future, too.

Rules For Radicals (1971)
https://ia801202.us.archive.org/28/items...dicals.pdf

EXCERPTS: . . . The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

[...] In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.

[...] The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck.

[...] Obviously there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks...

[....] With this focus comes a polarization. As we have indicated before, all issues must be polarized if action is to follow. The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: "He that is not with me is against me" (Luke 1 1:23). He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple.

One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative.

He can't toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can't weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act.

[...] Many liberals, during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn't a 100 per cent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity.

Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as "He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband"? This becomes political idiocy...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE RULES

• "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
  
• "Never go outside the experience of your people."
  
• "Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy."
  
• "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
  
• "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
  
• "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
  
• "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
  
• "Keep the pressure on."
  
• "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
  
• "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
  
• "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."
  
• "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
  
• "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

[Secular Sanity]

You showed me a video once, where I think the interviewer was gay, and got the person so worked up that he called him a faggot I think. Maybe a British guy. Might have been during the Nixon era. Not sure, but it was one of the first videos of when political discussions started getting nasty. Do you remember, CC?

[Magical Realist]

You showed me a video once, where I think the interviewer was gay, and got the person so worked up that he called him a faggot I think. Maybe a British guy. Might have been during the Nixon era. Not sure, but it was one of the first videos of when political discussions started getting nasty. Do you remember, CC?

William F Buckley's interview with Gore Vidal maybe?

[Secular Sanity]

You showed me a video once, where I think the interviewer was gay, and got the person so worked up that he called him a faggot I think. Maybe a British guy. Might have been during the Nixon era. Not sure, but it was one of the first videos of when political discussions started getting nasty. Do you remember, CC?

William F Buckley's interview with Gore Vidal maybe?

Yes! That was it. 

Thanks, MR!

That was bugging me. He called him a queer and threatened to sock him the face. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/j6qW-ZKxZss

[Syne]

Although the "activist's Bible" was originally intended for left movements, the tactics endorsed in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals are what defines the whole game landscape today.

That's why conservatives now engage in ridicule and parody, in contrast to the 1960s and '70s when they were lopsidedly the stodgy targets of counterculture or New Left lampooning. Scoring satiric points for mockery is an essential complement to arguments.

Exactly CC! For decades, conservatives played nice, while the left insulted, ridiculed, and demonized them unilaterally.
Now that the right plays by the same rules, of course the pantywaist left can't take what they dish out.

If these are the rules, the right has no choice but to make it mutually assured destruction. The left tries to pretend that the right are the uncivil ones, but this is all reaping decades of what they sowed.

[C C]

You showed me a video once, where I think the interviewer was gay, and got the person so worked up that he called him a faggot I think. Maybe a British guy. Might have been during the Nixon era. Not sure, but it was one of the first videos of when political discussions started getting nasty. Do you remember, CC?

In addition to Buckley, Vidal also had some famous on-screen tiffs with other egos like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. During the '60s and '70s, The Dick Cavette Show was the go-to place for intellectual guests.

I recalled Cavette talking about the incident below ages ago on a much later PBS documentary, but until now it never dawned on me to track the episode down...

BACKGROUND: December 15, 1971: Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal

Moments before the episode with Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Janet Flanner... Mailer, annoyed with Vidal's less-than-stellar review of Prisoner of Sex, headbutted Vidal and traded insults with him backstage.

As the show began taping, a visibly belligerent Mailer, who admitted he had been drinking, goaded Vidal and Cavett into trading insults with him on air...

[...] He openly taunted and mocked Vidal (who responded in kind), finally earning the ire of Flanner, who announced that she had become "very, very bored" with the discussion, telling Mailer and Vidal "You act as if you're the only people here."

- - - 13:35 mark of the video - - -

MAILER: You know perfectly well that I'm the gentlest of the four people here.

CAVETTE: I just hope it lasts through the next whatever we have left.

MAILER: I guarantee you I wouldn't hit any of the people here because they are smaller.

CAVETTE: In what ways?

MAILER: Intellectually. Intellectually smaller.

CAVETTE: Let me turn my chair and join these three. Perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect?

[Applause]

MAILER: Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask a question? Hey, can I talk to the audience...

CAVETTE: Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine.

Vidal VS Mailer — A Battle of Wit ... https://youtu.be/Nb1w_qoioOk

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Nb1w_qoioOk

[confused2]

I think CC has found most of it. By accident I came across this which might explain where Syne (and maybe Shapiro) are coming from.

Apparently a form of debate practiced in American high schools..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2...ate_format

Lincoln–Douglas debate format

The debate format is known for spreading, a practice in which debaters speak quickly [Shapiro!] to squeeze as much argument as possible into a short time limit. The resulting speech sounds like a cattle auctioneer.

The following is the basic debate format-
Stage 1
The Affirmative presents a case outlining why the resolution is valid.
Stage 2
The Negative asks the Affirmative questions, in order to expose logical flaws in the Affirmative's argument.
Stage 3
The Negative presents a case and moves on to address the Affirmative case.
etc..

In particular participants aren't judges .. when Syne refers to 'voices' he may simply mean the introduction of points outside (what he regards as) the formal debate structure.

?

[C C]

Although the "activist's Bible" was originally intended for left movements, the tactics endorsed in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals are what defines the whole game landscape today.

That's why conservatives now engage in ridicule and parody, in contrast to the 1960s and '70s when they were lopsidedly the stodgy targets of counterculture or New Left lampooning. Scoring satiric points for mockery is an essential complement to arguments.

Exactly CC! For decades, conservatives played nice, while the left insulted, ridiculed, and demonized them unilaterally.
Now that the right plays by the same rules, of course the pantywaist left can't take what they dish out.

If these are the rules, the right has no choice but to make it mutually assured destruction. The left tries to pretend that the right are the uncivil ones, but this is all reaping decades of what they sowed.

In some respects, they really do border on having traded places. Although the Establishment is still stodgy and preachy or lecturing people, it's now of the opposite polarity since it absorbed the counterculture values over the decades that followed.

[Syne]

The "voices" are mostly mentioned out of annoyance with having him incessantly argue things never said, but as if they were. For most people it would just be intellectually dishonest straw men, but considering his ailment, it may be completely unintentional. Hence the mention of "voices" is actually giving him the benefit of the doubt. Since he says "It doesn't bother me abit," no harm, no foul.

---

The left's insults just fall more within the Overton window they've moved through the popular culture.

[C C]

I think CC has found most of it. By accident I came across this which might explain where Syne (and maybe Shapiro) are coming from.

Apparently a form of debate practiced in American high schools..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2...ate_format

Lincoln–Douglas debate format

The debate format is known for spreading, a practice in which debaters speak quickly [Shapiro!] to squeeze as much argument as possible into a short time limit. The resulting speech sounds like a cattle auctioneer.

The following is the basic debate format-
Stage 1
The Affirmative presents a case outlining why the resolution is valid.
Stage 2
The Negative asks the Affirmative questions, in order to expose logical flaws in the Affirmative's argument.
Stage 3
The Negative presents a case and moves on to address the Affirmative case.
etc..

In particular participants aren't judges .. when Syne refers to 'voices' he may simply mean the introduction of points outside (what he regards as) the formal debate structure.

?

Yah, many tweaks have been added since publication over a half century ago. In contrast to the formal and refereed debates in classrooms, the Saul Alinsky approach maybe borrows from unbridled street fighting. Especially since outdoor demonstrations were the primary habitat of activists going all the way back to the Marxist era of the early 20th-century. In that historic context, Shapiro is of course going politically against the grain of some Jewish forbears.[1]

- - - footnote - -

[1] Jews in Radical Politics: America's Communist movement owed a lot to Jewish support (excerpt): Even had so­cialism not been their family’s and their people’s tradition, it did not escape these embittered young Jews, blocked in mid-passage by de­pression and discrimination, that the Soviet leadership evidently had taken the lead in mobilizing resistance to fascism and anti-Semitism abroad and that the Communist party in the United States positioned itself in the forefront of every campaign for racial and economic jus­tice.

From 1934 on, too–reflecting Moscow’s new Popular Front ap­proach–the Communists abandoned the former anti-Judaist and anti-Zionist propaganda of earlier years and appealed directly to Jews on issues of major Jewish concern.

In 1937, the Yiddish Cultural Alli­ance, a Communist-front group established in New York, began issu­ing a monthly literary journal, Yidishe Kultur, that dutifully parroted Communist appeals for unity against anti-Semitism and “world reac­tion.” The Communists even could say a kind word now for Jewish workers in Palestine, while the American Jewish Communist leader Moses Olgin informed his bewildered Jewish comrades that “we must learn not to scoff at religion.”

So it was, during these years of communism’s resurgence, that the Jewish component surfaced even more vividly than it had a decade earlier...