Rich Higgins NSC Memo - POTUS & POLITICAL WARFARE

[Speaker to Animals]

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

[kybkh]

I thought it was a train??

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

How very Ken Kesey.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test period? 'Cuz I'm signed up for dat.

Damn skippin'.

All I know is: Trump is the president of post-modernity, and Trump support is very post-modern... not a rejection there of.

[Martin Hash]

How very Ken Kesey.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test period? 'Cuz I'm signed up for dat.

Damn skippin'.

All I know is: Trump is the president of post-modernity, and Trump support is very post-modern... not a rejection there of.

You're going to need to run that by Jordan Peterson before I can comment. Sounds a bit NewSpeakish.

p.s. Trump's election was reactionary, specifically to Post Modernism.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test period? 'Cuz I'm signed up for dat.

Damn skippin'.

All I know is: Trump is the president of post-modernity, and Trump support is very post-modern... not a rejection there of.

You're going to need to run that by Jordan Peterson before I can comment. Sounds a bit NewSpeakish.

p.s. Trump's election was reactionary, specifically to Post Modernism.

It was indeed, which makes the irony so much sweeter. The Derridas and Foucaults undone by their own game.

Peterson's thinking doesn't thrill me. I look forward to when everyone turns on him for some minor disagreement, like they turn on everyone, in the end.

[Martin Hash]

Peterson's thinking doesn't thrill me. I look forward to when everyone turns on him for some minor disagreement, like they turn on everyone, in the end.

What don't you like about Peterson? He's a bit touchy-feelie: are you an engineer by any chance?

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Engineer? Lawd no. I couldn't math my way out of a paper bag.

What bothers me about Peterson is that the things he says that are true are pretty obvious, and that everything else is pretty unimaginative.

For instance, I liked his comment about humans being trapped between 'the hell of absolute order and the hell of absolute chaos.' It is a good way to phrase it, but pretty obvious.

When it comes to his biblical analysis and discussion of myths and symbols, it is fine, but far from being insightful on a very impressive level. Basically, the level of discussion one would expect from any competent professor in his field, nothing more or less.

Then when he gets to more fundamental questions he is incredibly boring. Tying morality to Darwinian survival is philosophically simple-minded, and one of the clumsier attempts to solve Hume's distinction. Which I would be happy to forgive, as he isn't a philosopher, exactly, but, like I said: it isn't thrilling.

The last thing that bugs me about Peterson is more a matter of taste. I don't trust skinny academics who pop their mouths off about the virtues of masculinity. It always strikes me as a feeble attempt to catch some of the reflected virtue of strength without putting in the work to be strong. I don't disagree with the claims of virtue, but I have to roll my eyes when people's mouths write checks that their character and bodies probably can't cash.

Peterson rocketed into public intellectual status by being trivially right about states and schools forcing the issue of gender pronouns, but the more I listen to him talk, the more he strikes me as having less than a stunning intellect. He just happened to fall ass backwards into an issue that gets peoples' hackles up.

Anyway, TL;DR version: Peterson is pretty meh, I give him about a C.

[Martin Hash]

Yikes! Have you ever passed a candidate through your PhD Advisory Committee? I'd hate for you to have sat on mine.

p.s. Ed Catmull was on my committee.

[Smitty-48]

I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this memo.
What do you agree with, what do you disagree with?
What do you think goes too far, and what doesn't go far enough?

I've converted the memo from the pdf to BBcode, for ease of discussion:

POTUS & POLITICAL WARFARE...

The memo itself was pretty run o' the mill as far as the assertions go, whether or not you think it's true, false, or otherwise, politically, it's in the mix all day everyday, nothing that's not being spun in the RW media round the clock, but the fact that it was generated by the National Security Council, that's the unusual part, it's not so much what it says, but rather who wrote it, where he was working while he was writing it, and then that he felt he was justified to dissimenate it to the NSC.

Political media rabble rousing wise, not that controversial, elevating it to the threshold of National Security, that's getting a bit more into the Deo Vindice zone then. The Dukes of Hazzard is one thing, but once you start going Reb on the National Security Council, you're pushing the envelope then.

[Smitty-48]

Mind you, it's fluffy nothings compared to the tirades that were going on in the Nixon Administration, but again, they never put pen to paper, Nixon was all smiles in front of the public, he rarely bore his fangs in polite company, and only just a slip here and there when some liberal reporter was needling him, but it wasn't until the tapes came out, that people got to hear them ranting and raving like a bunch of lunatics, which by the way, is high-larious, even to this day, particularly the ones where Nixon is three sheets to the wind.

People have been getting liquored up and going off on tirades in the WH, since they was tirading against the House of Hanover, it's just putting pen to paper, signing it, and then disseminating it as an official document, that, you don't see very often.

I haven't been tracking it too closely of late, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this Richard Higgins feller is not on the National Security Council anymore? Surely McMaster has purged him after that memo, no?