(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
If you're referring to corporations like Google, where employees (until recently at least) were able to form groups and informal committees and have (sometimes) interminable debates, I think you're missing the important point that Google is not a democratic institution -- it has a strict hierarchy decided from the top, so it's pretty resistant to these tactics. It's the powerless, free-association, relatively democratic groups that are antagonistic to the hierarchy that are vulnerable to these tactics, and that are neutralized by them. I agree that representative democracies are definitely easy prey to these tactics though.
I think this manual is most appropriately understood as an early reference for the operations of the FBI in COINTELPRO, etc. State employed agents-provocateur and saboteurs were some of the first to literally use these exact reference manuals domestically, and their targets were the various social and labor movements of the day.
> It's the powerless, free-association, relatively democratic groups that are antagonistic to the hierarchy that are vulnerable to these tactics, and that are neutralized by them.
For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
"The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks."
That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage.
If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
Basically the same thing happened to the Tea Party.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.
> I understand that BLM prominence started with the Ferguson protests against cop Darren Wilson murdering Michael Brown Jr
Yes, it became prominent then because it was already well established with a network of activists, etc.; the principal triggering event (as your PS seems to acknowledge) was the slaying of Trayvon Martin.
> But that's also a cop-adjacent figure.
That may be a valid viewpoint, but it's not the fact that BLM organized around, which was the lack of accountability and the identity of the victim, not anything about the personal characteristics or background of the perpetrator.
What's the point of disagreement here? You're both saying that BLM was founded and organized around the lack of police accountability when killing black people
> You're both saying that BLM was founded and organized around the lack of police accountability when killing black people
No, “police” was not part of the founding focus. Events involving police just happened to be the ones that brought the network to mass attention, after it was founded in response to a non-police (even if some might see it as “police adjacent”) killing with a focus that was not in any way focussed on whether those responsible but not held accountable were police, or “police adjacent”.
Occupy Wall Street was the birth of the left in the US. The US hasn't really had a leftwing since the 1920s. It created a whole class of activists that went around couch-surfing and protesting at major events. A few years later #NoDAPL happened and a huge chunk of the people involved in that were also involved in Occupy. As someone who was really involved in union organizing all the way on the opposite side of the country, I can tell you how much these organizers had an influence. We saw a huge shift in attitudes towards labor organizing after that and a huge influx of energy from people who first got into organizing through Occupy. Occupy also gave us Graeber and so many strains of leftist theory related to eco-socialism, communalism, and many other "hot" leftist theories today.
I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing
what about seattle in 99? what about the alf and elf? what about EF!? bookchin, zerzan, cfd, i could go on forever. also, occupy didn't give us graeber, graeber gave us occupy. sounds like occupy was your first exposure to the left in the us.
Sure of course I'm biased to my own anecdata. Yeah sure you can find examples like ALF and ELF and even demonstrations like the 1990 WTO protests, but it doesn't change the fact that for basically the last 100 years the american "left" has been a pretty niche political movement mostly involving very academic post-marxist debates or sectarian conflicts about ml theorists. It certainly wasn't at the scale it was in the early 20th century and certainly not at the scale it's emerging to be now
Also saying Graeber gave us occupy is giving a lot more credit to him than I think is fair. And I think Occupy introduced a lot more people to Graeber than Graeber introduced to Occupy
Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss.
In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things.
There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.
> Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss.
This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry.
You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for.
If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
"Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage.
Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.
Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.
Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).
In my experience (having worked as a peon then a manager, then a senior manager) at one of the companies talked about here in the past?
These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar.
The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often.
And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.
In the specific case of the document, "citizen saboteurs" who were opposed to the Nazi regime, but who weren't in a position to, or didn't want to, take more active measures.
How do companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Jobs era Apple perform so well then? These companies are thousands of employees, multiple departments. Everything I have heard seems to indicate that amazing execution ability of these places. Either Elon knows everything that is going on top to bottom or he must be instilling some fear in managers that keeps them in line. I think its the latter. I hear if your name crosses his desk that means you screwed up/underperformed and that you will have severe punishment. I think this method is not performed as seriously in other organizations and it leads to middle management jockeying for power instead and slowly introducing bloat.
When Apple was designing the original iPhone, they had about 10% as many employees as they do now. And this cruft accumulates over time and with size; there is less of it in smaller and younger organizations.
Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line.
Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss.
This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.
There may be things government bureaucracies can learn from industry. It’s a different problem domain though. Government institutions are large. Like DoD is 2.68 million employees and that’s only one branch of the federal executive branch. You’ve still got the judicial, legislative branches and all the hierarchies down to the municipal level. Then there’s the fact that many things a single person might try to do have laws around them. Also the leadership changes every 4 or 8 years and when that happens there usually a drastic idealogical shift in the direction to take the organization.
Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well.
Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.
You know sometimes I think that its amazing we have made any progress at all in this country. I think about the Civil Rights movement and how much resistance it got from both the population as well as internal government sabotage. So many people (including me) are so lucky that the movement managed to overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress.
I hate to bring this up but just think how differently things would have played out if the JFK assassination did not happen. I don't believe the conspiracy theories and so I consider it a black swan event. Where are we suffering from government sabotage today? Would BLM have turned out differently? Would we have even needed it in the first place if prior sabotage events didn't happen? Anyway this is leading into conspiracy territory but I just was wondering out loud.
> overcome all the attempts to kill it and make meaningful progress
Well it certainly didn't overcome all events. The FBI violently executed the leadership of the Black Panthers through local police that had 0 repercussions for their (very illegal) actions. Cultural groups in the south like the Daughters of the Confederacy really ramped up their culture war and made sure to filter all history textbooks, put up monuments, etc. Cops have been able to kill black folks and totally get away with it for decades now
Imagine where we could be if Huey Newton did actually get elected to local politics. Or if the South didn't ramp up their culture war
Oh yea absolutely. A lot of these things you describe have direct consequences that affect us today. I guess I was mistaken by using the word 'all' as we are still fighting for this cause today.
Psst! This document was created by the OSS to train saboteurs in Nazi Germany as part of the economic war. If you can find a stricter hierarchy than that, I'd like to hear of it.
nah, CIA’s greatest trick is making people look over their shoulders, sabotage themselves through paranoia.
All the things in the quote happen naturally, through people’s general incompetence. To put it in a field manual is very tongue in cheek, reads to me as irony. Corporations and political parties run themselves as poorly as if they were infiltrated by sabotagers, but they do it to themselves.
> nah, CIA’s greatest trick is making people look over their shoulders, sabotage themselves through paranoia.
My impression is completely the opposite. The CIA itself is a large inefficient bureaucracy and the people who wrote this are clever operators who have seen this in action themselves and can now point to this to accuse the perpetrators of being enemy saboteurs.
Think about what the countermeasures against this look like. Fewer bureaucratic rules, less rigidity, smaller teams, more individual autonomy. The behavior of the intransigent bureaucrat and the saboteur are the same, so institute policies in the name of defeating the one and you also take care of the other.
Delusions that "CIA did it" are of course common, but it's also true that it's extremely common for people to say you're delusional or paranoid when you describe things the CIA has admitted to in public.
Take a look at the findings of the Church Committee, or at Operation Condor, Operation Mockingbird, the coup in Iran (admittedly a CIA operation), the CIA fomented strikes and civic unrest in Chile after Allende's election, Gladio, the "Jakarta Method", etc.
Totally agree with this. I think the CIA is just doubling down here on the very obvious idea that bureaucracies naturally self-destruct without correction. This has been known since at least the Reign of Terror (if not the Romans or the Greeks).
The entire thing does look like a hoax. I would expect a guide to be full of detail on how to implement those things without anybody noticing. Whether it's intended to be a hoax or not, it's a very good joke, and a not very useful guide.
But anyway, the non-hoax better strategy for a saboteur is exactly doing whatever destructive acts come naturally to people. So a real guide would probably have those same topics.
And people do these things naturally all the time in large orgs and small. Visit a local PTA or a city council meeting with a copy and play bingo if you don’t believe me.
It only reads like a hoax because it’s all in one place.
>Honestly, I would expect more of how to not look so stupid or incompetent that people won't want you near anything important.
If I wanted to convince most people I were not stupid or incompetent I would:
1. point out problems with their plans
2. argue about precise wordings as pedantry is seen as the sign of a precise intelligence.
3. be reasonable and urge reasonableness, surely the incompetent would not be reasonable.
4. talk about potential ramifications of decisions made going against organizational goals.
etc. etc. in short many of the methods that will allow you to shut down progress also help bolster your own reputation for intellectual rigor and understanding of issues from all sides.
Sure you won't be seen as a fiery genius, but a sagacious counselor - that's good enough.
Yes, but you can double down on this stuff or introduce it in places where it hasn't yet manifested. It's perfect precisely because these are natural inefficiencies.
This and the "Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies[0,1]," obviously a troll post from 4chan or somewhere similar given the language, which basically takes the normal activity of trolls and internet argument and tries to convince the reader that it's all the work of government agents.
Great way to stir up paranoia on a forum where people tend not to be able to grok humor, but also tend to believe in conspiracy theories.
But I've been ruminating on how to start a political and economic movement committed to dismantling the bureaucratic state by empowering individuals to be ever more autonomous.
Adjacent notions are participatory democracy (a la the Iroquois), banning usury, UBI, worker directed social enterprises, left-libertarian, and healing the world. More to be added as my whimsy and imagination permit.
But I've ruminating on how to start a political and economic movement committed to dismantling the bureaucratic state by empowering individuals to be ever more autonomous.
Trouble is, one of the things that empowered, autonomous individuals always seem to do is organize themselves into corporate, governmental, religious, academic, or other institutional bodies that then proceed to behave indistinguishably from the targets they were reacting against in the first place. At each iteration, only the in-group beneficiaries and out-group victims are different.
The larger problem is the nature and regulation of human organization, which isn't so easily tackled.
We have a method for tackling this. Competition. If one company's management is incompetent and as a result their products lose quality or become overpriced, people switch to another supplier. If a state government's laws impose more burden than benefit, people and businesses flee to other states.
The problem comes when markets become consolidated and uncompetitive, or bad regulations get applied at the national or international level and there is nowhere to flee. Which persists when upon it happening people say "eh" and do nothing, instead of taking it for the threat that it is and fighting it with all they've got.
That's great! You might enjoy Ernest Hancock's work at freedomsphoenix.com and pirateswithoutborders.com
I think starting small is fine, the main thing is to do it!
FWIW, I'm fine with recruiting disciples from right-libertarians circle. I'm totally onboard with "freedom from coercion". And that's a pretty good place to start from.
As an activist, I spoke to anyone and everyone who'd have me. Socialist, Green, Libertarian, Democratic, Republican, and all sorts of nonpartisan orgs.
At the time, I felt everyone's core values were more or less the same. Opinions started to diverge over priority. More so with implementation. Then game-over once the dialog drifted into personalities.
I gotta believe that the way forward is flipping the script from nitpicking over differences to emphasizing our agreements.
And I sense that one of our shared, unifying, omni-partisan values is our mutual hatred of bureaucracy. Of any kind. Corporate and governmental.
Ya. I'm trying to subtly encourage you to not write people off based on their labels, self identified or otherwise. Because you seem reachable somehow.
I'm no smarter or better than any one else about this stuff. I have a history of getting really spun up. I do feel my efforts have helped my own mental state.
One thing that has helped, for instance, is figuring out that we're all a little bit crazy. Another is realizing that my "own the libs" siblings don't actually believe the stuff they say; it's just sport for them. So I try to not take the bait.
I don't write people off on labels. I have a high degree of suspicion that I share with others when they publically and openly signal adherence to a damaging set of certain lies, like antivax advocacy. In this case, they write themselves off.
I am classical liberal and know what it is like to have a minority view that is in reality held by everyone when you get past the barriers.
'Teal society' structures (e.g. holacracy) are probably an appropriate addition to the list. Could you share a link to what you men by 'healing the world'? It's an interesting turn of phrase that I hadn't heard before outside my own coinage.
"Heal the world" is something I gleaned from Reform Judaism. I'm trying to learn about misc philosophical traditions.
I'm a cultural Christian (Presbyterian) and a treehugger. "Shepherds of the Earth" and all that. I currently like the "heal the world" framing better. Somehow it feels less like proselytizing, maybe more like gnosticism.
Like most of that list! I would love mandatory voting. Can always write in 'i hate the system.'
I would add higher government pay scale with rules you can't just outsource to consultant markups. + more nimble technocratic management in government.
> Adjacent notions are participatory democracy (a la the Iroquois), banning usury, UBI, worker directed social enterprises, left-libertarian, and healing the world. More to be added as my whimsy and imagination permit.
How does the old quote go? ‘The worst tyrant is the one who thinks they are doing it for your own good, because the evil ones at least take a break, where the do gooders are tireless’?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? It leads to tedious internet threads and we're hoping for the opposite here.
Drop the illusion that you are living in a spy novel. Realize the far more boring yet terrifying truth that people are doing their best and muddling through. Learn examples of clear communication and practice them to help clarify reality.
Nope. I've had this exact page printed out an posted on my office cube at Navy military HR headquarters by 2018, and independently a separate Navy office had also been introducing this into innovation briefs they give.
But complaining about this has not helped us fix things quite yet either :-/
Well what if all that we can do is run interference on entropy. By executing perfect uselessness at a higher order the local councilman fights against the gnawing maw of the HOA.
In particular, it took me a long time to a realise that for a lot of people communications is parsed by treating a series of requests or pieces of information as a FIFO. If you're lucky, it's fairly deep, but for some people it can only hold 1 or 2 entries at the time.
But when it's an e-mail or other interaction that they understand as "conversational", these people tend to not start acting on the output until the end.
So ask for 3 things, and chances are only the last one will still be in the queue by the time they've read your whole message. The rest will have just popped out of their mind and no longer exist in their world until they're prompted to re-read your message.
For people who act like that, seemingly the only way around it short of drip-feeding them questions one at a time that I've found is to present them with a document attachment and only one request: "Please follow the procedure in the attached document." And make them sign off. And provide a checklist if they're particularly difficult.
You basically need to make it clear that the list is not conversation. You can find people who are pathologically unable to process a list of instructions in an e-mail who are at the same time completely OCD about processing lists of instructions in a document, because they context-switch completely.
Of course in this context of "sabotage" this can be exploited to: Mercilessly attach all information in a bunch of separate documents, and add checklists and signoffs to everything. Especially to unimportant stuff.
So much so that I can't help but wonder if this is a bit of an inside joke.
Having at one time worked for the Federal Government I know me and my fellow employees created surprisingly similar documents (though nothing as formal) chronically the absurdity of our daily life.
This type of "sabotage" reminds of the Onion's FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States[0]. For most large organizations these techniques are already widely practiced.
While I think the article is submitted with that kind of irony, in fact that the CIA* just studied what stymied or frustrated any common hierarchy/organization and formalized it into a process.
I resonate with it because I can name persons who, intentionally or not, do these exact actions within our org; I can even name a few I know do it intentionally as they said as such. Their goal isn't to get fired or to cause "real" trouble, but instead to cause frustration without getting in trouble.
There are similar guides, or were anyways, on how to effectively troll/create chaos online; it's not that the authors of the articles are geniuses that created this stuff in a vacuum, they just had a need for such a specific outcome and turns out humans have been doing this ever since we started making hierarchies.
* (or any other intelligence organization across the globe really)
FWIW, the counter to this though is to just ignore such "saboteurs" as much as you can. Most of the time their ability to frustrate relies on consistently being in places where they can frustrate or by participating with persons who are drawn into such distractions.
If you cannot avoid working with them, the same tactics that are disruptive in this manual (documentation, etc), can be used against the saboteur also. Establish documentation procedures that even if only you are using it, you can define time sinks and inefficiencies.
Bend the rules a little and continue projects without the problematic person, finding a replacement that does help, and when you report on the project, document the saboteur not as a problem, but instead that your chosen replacement was an improvement on them.
These workplace saboteurs thrive on creating confusion, chaos, and disruption, and working in channels that aren't easily observable, and most importantly, by exploiting our tendencies towards good faith interpretations in all things (which is what we're taught is correct and polite).
Businesses live by hard numbers and profit.
It's a sometimes tense experience, but discipline and resistance to getting drawn into the saboteurs chaos can and eventually will get the desired results. If the business truly doesn't respond or the saboteur has such sway/pull that their lack of output/efficiency doesn't prompt some action from the business, then truly the business is not one you want to be in.
Quite a few workplace saboteurs have been removed from my workplace doing this (either by threat of firing that resulted in resignation or outright firing). The end result of a few weeks of just practicing brevity in meetings, taking the time to make a chain of documentation for interactions with such persons, and avoiding getting wrapped up into "games" helped a ton. Follow-up emails from conversations the saboteur wants to keep "just in chat" or "just on a quick call" are extremely useful, just a quick high-level summary and suggestion for next steps and a request to update the thread showed a reluctance of these persons to participate (add in little messages like "hey I pinged you in our chat also and didn't get the response either" to just cover your tracks)
In fairness, that's a part of the point - it's a sustainable sabotage manual, for people who want to see retirement, which necessitates things that are hard to identify as malintent. Yeah, you could blow up the plant once, but your next action should probably be a plane out the country, and even with a ready supply of saboteurs, the vulnerability may well be patched.
Kind of like the Coventry problem (actually, identical to the Coventry problem).
> (3) Using a very rapid stroke will wear out a file before its time. So will dragging a file in slow strokes under heavy pressure. Exert pressure on the backward stroke as well as the forward stroke.
i'm learning more about proper technique than sabotage from this
Maybe the post is a "Parable of Lightening / Kolmolgorov Complicty" trap, but I would like to say what I think this is being used as source material for, and I won't directly because there isn't an easy way to make a comment on it without being antagonistic, but it's important to recognize that there exists a manual of these organized tactics, produced by an organization that employed Herbert Marcuse, whose work is taught in every humanities undergrad in the western world, where their graduates largely go on to work in organizations appendant to the public sector.
The Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS employed more than a thousand social scientists (including Marcuse) as information analysts, people who came out of academia for a while to aid the war effort vs. the Nazis. Many later went back to academia.
Implying without further evidence that therefore academic social scientists are secret saboteurs, part of a spy agency conspiracy, is defamatory nonsense. Whatever anyone thinks about Marcuse per se, this kind of cheap anti-intellectualism is deplorable.
This comment is the least bizarre and unhinged accusation on the thread so I will respond to it.
There is nothing anti-intellectual about pointing out the tactics used within organizations today, learned in the universities, resemble this sabotage manual, especially since the tactics I am referring to are nihilistic and totalitarian, and come right out of what Arendt (as it turns out, a contemporary of members said school mentioned downthread) described as the necessary conditions for a totalitarian movement. There is zero controvsery that academia and its appendant institutions, and now big tech, and even finance has been compromised by a totalitarian movement whose members are trained that power is the highest good, that there is no truth, no God, no consequences, and other downstream effluent of what appears to be a strain of Heideggerian Marxism.
One hopes you apply the same standard of intellectualism to your fellow travelers whose best responses reduce to hysterical canards that are so absurd as to be beneath a denial. I encourgage you all to please, do better.
> There is zero controvsery that academia and its appendant institutions, and now big tech, and even finance has been compromised by a totalitarian movement
Even ignoring the rest of your description, yes, there is considerable controversy that any, much less all, of those three things have been compromised by a totalitarian movement, and if you think that that view is uncontroversial you need to at least glance outside of the far-right fever swamp occasionally.
«Everyone agrees that (((Marcuse)))’s secret cabal and those (their “downstream effluent”) they have compromised who control academia, tech, finance, and government are godless totalitarian nihilists» (slightly paraphrased) is not really the kind of response most people were hoping for....
While I am glad to have provoked discussion, especially in the context of the original "Parable of Lightning / Kolmolgorov Complicity" essays which I highly recommend reading, and that this thread was one of its traps appears to be confirmed, but I defer to the moderators in regard to whether we're adding value with this kind of personal slander.
Kolmogorov was, however, not complicit with the very scary idea that one shouldn't spout anti-semitic nonsense, he was complicit in an actual totalitarian system. The systems in which Kolmogorov complicity happens are those in which you can't freely give your opinion. However, anti-semitism isn't an opinion, but an insanity, and besides, you are not Kolmogorov. Stop overselling your harmful nonsense.
Plus you are, as you notice, absolutely allowed to spout anti-semitic rhetoric, and will not be literally burned at the stake or shot for it. This does not free you from professional consequences, even in the academic sphere, because it is hard to take seriously the ideas of someone who seriously believes that the Jews invented Marxism as a weapon to do what-exactly?
It's not anti-intellectualism, it's rampant, straight-faced, rotten anti-semitism. Marcuse was Jewish, and the idea here is that (((they))), who already run the secret deep state, have taken over the universities, erstwhile organizations of pure, rational, white science (as evidenced by logical colonial era head measurements), and turned them into vile spaces intent on destroying the white race.
True enough (and thanks for being explicit). But “these inferior-race academics are leading our youth astray” is also anti-intellectual.
And it’s not like these fascists are only anti-semitic. They are also happy to whine incoherently about women, gays, blacks, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, schoolteachers, public health experts, organized labor, ....
And for that matter happy to complain about the straight male WASP academics who have "sold out their people". Etc.
I feel like people pushing your beliefs never actually argue for them.
All I ever see is guilt by association: Attempts to link ideas you hate to people you can label with scary words.
It's not a move of convincing, rationality, logic, or thought. It's a power move; a moral categorization, a demonization, a manipulation of loyalties and appearances to try to isolate and harm the person you want to shut up.
We see through it.
If you have a case, make it. We don't care who ideas are associated with; we care if they're right or wrong.
Your claim is that those who are “pushing the belief” that «baseless, sweeping antisemitic conspiracy theories are bad» never adequately defend that position?
You haven’t looked very hard then... Buckets of ink have been spent debunking specific ones, tracing their spread, analyzing their rhetorical structure and political uses, etc. etc.
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
You're moving the goal posts and assuming your conclusion.
"baseless, sweeping antisemitic conspiracy theories are bad" was never the question.
The question is whether cultural Marxism as a concept is in fact a "baseless, sweeping antisemitic conspiracy theory".
Don't just assume the answer is yes.
Don't just try to associate the words with people you've labeled as bad.
Make the actual case that the content of cultural Marxism, as it is presented by its fairest and best proponents (not the worst extremist fringe hangers-on), is itself antisemitic, baseless, sweeping, and a "conspiracy theory".
> question is whether cultural Marxism as a concept is in fact a "baseless, sweeping antisemitic conspiracy theory
When motohagiography’s direct (evidence-free) claim is that there is “zero controversy” in saying that the scholars (which he compares to liquid sewage) downstream of a (nowadays fairly obscure, 4-decades dead) Jewish scholar have secretly taken over all of academic social science – and thence the whole “public sector”, as well as tech and finance – and are sabotaging western culture/society as part of an OSS conspiracy, that becomes a baseless, sweeping, bigoted conspiracy theory.
Which is also, by the way, a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion; it’s comparable to replying to an article about the operation of the Swiss patent office with a theory that Einstein was trained by said office to subvert academic physics departments on the way to sabotaging American engineering and technology firms.
(This kind of nonsense is entirely in character for folks spouting anti-semitic conspiracy theories, who throw them into conversations whenever they can, however irrelevant in context. See that Sartre quotation.)
Whatever someone else’s more measured and careful claims about Marcuse (or the Frankfurt school, or Marxism, or social science, or the OSS, or ...) might be in some unrelated conversation is irrelevant.
You invented a lot of stuff here. I think you didn't do it intentionally; it's classic argument-hallucination, so I'll help you see where you are confabulating:
MotoH never said that anyone had "secretly" taken over academic social science; to me it seems clear MotoH believes that it's all out in the open.
MotoH never said they were 'sabotaging western culture/society', which would imply some extreme coordination and direct intent - only that the idea complex exists and is totalitarian and dominant.
MotoH never said they were doing anything in present tense "as part of an OSS conspiracy"; the OSS was only part of the origin story many decades ago.
MotoH never said the scholars were effluent; they compared their ideas to effluent.
The above are strawmen. You made up a caricature of what MotoH said and then jumped straight to your conclusion with no argumentation in between (which seemed justified because your caricature was absurd).
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I think it would be great if you reread the last line of my post above (argue against the strong not weak/fringe version of the belief) and tried that. I can help though. Here are the claims for you to oppose:
1. Social justice ideology has become dominant over academic/corporate/media/cultural instutitions.
2. Social justice is a deconstructionist ideology that seeks to dismantle major parts of western society/identity and/or capitalism.
3. Social justice descends from the ideas of thinkers decades back mentioned earlier in this thread.
Which do you think are wrong and what's your argument?
Again I'll remind you: I've never heard anyone argue against the idea that cultural marxism exists so it'd be a real contribution if you were the first to do so!
You provided zero evidence, argument, or any support whatsoever for claims (1), (2), or (3). I think all of these claims are somewhere between mostly false and abjectly absurd. But this general topic has been discussed at length elsewhere (if you want to know about it, you can go do your own research), and is entirely off topic in a conversation about the OSS or industrial sabotage.
It is a waste of time to make up pretend “stronger” (more realistically, just as weak but not quite as overtly bigoted) claims to replace a wild bigoted conspiracy theory with a slightly less wild, slightly less bigoted conspiracy theory in a public conversation, so as to have a debate vs. myself only loosely related to the original off topic nonsense. It isn’t going to convince the conspiracy theorist (who will say that replacing his claims with invented substitutes is disingenuous), and no one else reading along cares.
P.S. when you tell your interlocutor that they are “confabulating” and “hallucinating” (i.e. accuse them of mental illness), it is hard to see your comments as representing good faith conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
D) Spend as much time as possible alleging and arguing about Code of Conduct violations committed by the most productive members of the organization. Hire permanent staff to disrupt meetings and other work with these allegations. Accuse those who refuse to enthusiastically support these accusations.
This reminds me of the South Park where the kids had to become skilled at baseball in order to lose the game and go home sooner. The instructions are basically to be an incompetent manger at middle levels, inefficient bureaucrat high levels and a Karen at every committee. But instead of just being that archetype, you're doing it carefully and methodically as a sabotuer.
So I've seen this a couple of times and to me it make sense, but it also seems such a perfect indictment of organizational culture that I could see it being fabricated for laughs. Can anyone vouch for the authenticity of this?
> So I've seen this a couple of times and to me it make sense, but it also seems such a perfect indictment of organizational culture that I could see it being fabricated for laughs.
The similarity to actually observed behavior isn't a coincidence.
You can walk out to the factory floor with a sledgehammer and start smashing things right there in front of everyone. You might even cause quite a bit of damage before someone stops you. But then you're getting arrested.
You can cause just as much damage by wasting everybody's time with organizational politics and "safety first" hand wringing, but then what are they going to say? You're too diligent? So then you get to stay and do it all again tomorrow.
Imagine a manager firing someone for being too concerned about safety.
> You can cause just as much damage by wasting everybody's time with organizational politics and "safety first" hand wringing, but then what are they going to say?
I don't know the etymology of the use of the word dope but used in this document it either makes a strong case for its authenticity (or esoteric familiarity with language of the era by the hoaxer) or is a red flag.
> (7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
The Church Committee hearings (particularly some of the "family jewels" stuff) and Iran-Contra hearings pertaining to Nicaragua and Contras establishes to some extent which sabotage manuals are real and who wrote them.
Most of these patterns appear everywhere, that's the point, to exacerbate the bad patterns within already existing structures and to do so with plausible deniablility in order to cause them to lose momentum
(6) A clean factory is not susceptible to fire, but a dirty one is. Workers Should be careless with
refuse and janitors should be inefficient in cleaning. If enough dirt and trash can be accumulated
an otherwise fireproof building will become inflammable.
you could apply this principle to information security/network security practices as well... just neglect to patch things, use out of date methods, leave cruft and half-finished projects laying around, etc.
I thought for a bit that the tactics were increasingly applied by many workers. sadly enough they aren't applying planned coordinated actions, they just are so fed up with this so well rigged system they've decided that, perhaps unconsciously, sabotaging all they can is the best pleasure they can hope for.
> sadly enough they aren't applying planned coordinated actions
If you have an organization, it can be attacked, both legally and extralegally. Cf. the history of labor organizing in the US.
And without it, distributed, uncoordinated action is less likely to lead to positive-sum outcomes, but is also a far harder-to-suppress tax on the corporate order.
Not sure whether that is a good thing, nor that it is a non organised but conscious effort to sabotage systems.
I think many workers have figured out there isn't much that can be done to improve their conditions, that they have meaningless impacts, and that they don't value their employment all that much anymore, that doing the minimum and even enjoying sabotaging what they can is the last measures they can afford to take, providing each individual the pleasure that nobody is profiting from them any longer.
Note: I think it's a world-wide phenomenon, not localised to the US where clearly, the workers have changed their relationships with productivity and contributions to making the system prevail.
This is why I'm completely disenchanted with tech companies. I've seen billion dollar companies fumble basic shit too many times due to infighting and too many cooks etc. Managers who prefer to destroy any good thing that's going on if it can't be observed by them and watermarked as their intiative. This in turn has made me less hopeful about government and human civilization in general. The progress we've made has been the work of a few, not the many
>(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the
management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the
management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation,
entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely
imaginary, and so on.
This is from the extended version.
Feels really strangely relevant these days...
Technically the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is from OSS--the CIA's predecessor.
The Manual is one of my favorite pieces of historical literature, but I think that people become too cynical about large organizations after they read the manual. It is important to understand how coordination can slow down or fail, but becoming cynical only makes the problem worse.
That was from 80 years ago, but it is the state of many engineers employed at Silicon Valley companies. I wonder what techniques CIA uses today that will be the norm in 2100.
These are excellent indicators of team negator type of employees. I'll be using this to find them and fire those depending how bad the committed these activities...
I also was wondering why this was posted under CACert, particularly a section called "CACert/Board". I never really payed much attention to the operation of CACert, but when it first came out I had high hopes for it to become something like what LetsEncrypt has become. I was a "SuperSigner" back in the day. But in the end, I never really found a practical use for it.
Now I'm wondering if there was internal resistance that caused things to fall apart.
I had read parts of the manual years ago, and I concede quickly enough got bored. All we need to sabotage a system is a little bit of imagination coupled with paranoia to sustain damage long term.
reading through this, and my tinfoil hat tells me this would make a more effective psyop than a manual. you create something like this, "lose" a copy where enemy decision makers can get a hold of it and bam, now the other guys are eating enormous resources on a slew of red-herring mole hunts.
I'm thinking about doing it out in the open and gifting a copy to each person in the local government with a note saying "These are the tactics that are being used to kill this city."
My favorite variation of this is the "Freedom Fighters Manual" that was supposedly used by the CIA to subvert the communist regime in Nicaragua back in the 80's, as it has some funny illustrations presented like a comic book.
how would an invading force defend itself against this form of domestic sabotage? is the only defense to make incompetence tantamount to treason and prosecute it as a crime?
I'm not it's its CIA sabotage. Mot to mention the longer full stream was immediately taken down by the organizers out for fear fear of mean words on the internet being said about them.
But the ideology inherently pushes towards so many of these listed (self-)sabotage tactics it almost doesn't even need it.
(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.