Hacker News Books

"Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate voters against evidence of your own guilt"

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

I'm halfway through the prologue and I have to say, this is very insightful and relevant to today for having been written in 1971. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I recommend it. The story behind how I came across it is also pretty interesting.

He's been a video game developer for decades. Is that considered to be "outside tech" now?

> a playbook for sabotaging people with political views opposed to his own

How is that any different from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals?

subterfuge -> corporate/governmental entryism -> control.

Institutions are hard to attack, but people are not. By giving his interviews, Shkreli gave a face for people to villainize. By giving repeated interviews he made every PR mistake in the book.

"The undercover economist" by Tim Harford got me interested in economics.

"Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky on community organizing.

The book is unabashedly leftist in ways that are almost quaint, but it's also front-to-back pragmatic and filled with advice. It's my favorite marketing book ever.

Waving your hand and declaring "Fallacy!" isn't really a refutation. It's a cheap way to avoid actually addressing the argument.

   how do we know similar acts 
   did not take place?? 

   but that's still the case today, no?

So the fact that "that's still the case today" is a great success of not going whatabout-flu-and-traffic-deaths when AIDS arrived.

[1] E. N. Luttwak, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook.

[2] Võ Nguyên Giáp: People's war, people's army.

[3] S. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

>They know Trump is easily manipulated and will change his mind with the wind if it makes him feel more powerful and famous. Trump couldn’t care less about policy, a fact he’s made quite obvious.

This is a very strong claim to make about someone whose every move in the Office thus far has been promised and rehearsed during the campaign.

>The revolution has come and we are the resistance.

I find this claim funny given that the Left has overtook the universities, the media, and Hollywood, and did so quite often using the tactics outlined in Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky [2]. (Even Hillary Clinton wrote about Alinsky in her thesis [3].) Only with the rise of the Internet could this stranglehold of power be challenged, was challenged, and Trump won.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ln5bhcWcI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_senior_thesis

Here's an illustrative passage from Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky:

> Recently the head of a corporation showed me the blueprint of a new plant and pointed to a large ground-floor area: “Boy, have we got an architect who is with it!” he chuckled. “See that big hall? That’s our sit-in room! When the sit-inners come they’ll be shown in and there will be coffee, T.V., and good toilet facilities — they can sit here until hell freezes over.[1][2]

Their goal was to eliminate the pain their business experienced so there was no pressure to change behavior.

As to your second example, Ford raised wages because he had a problem with high turnover, because working conditions were bad.[3]

[1] http://www.mlsite.net/blog/?p=1665

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story...

The most fascinating part was probably that Tea Party individuals actually adopted and modified a lot of liberal tactics, specifically those from the book “Rules for Radicals”. Now we see a trend where liberals and people like the Democratic Socialists of America are adopting those modified tactics BACK INTO the Democratic Party.

The Neo-Nazis are not that upset by this. They want to use the same tools to boycott the Zionist and Jews. It's actually one of the many things the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right agree on.

In addition we're making them into martyrs. Banning and suppression was counter productive on the original Nazis and it is counter productive here.

This should be we'll know by those who read civics. It is even codified in the book Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It makes me wonder what books Antifa are reading as they are doing all of the wrong things.

I get that it feels like we're (non nazis) are winning but we're not and this is isn't helping.

As someone who is facinated by what is happening I spend a decent amount of time spelunking in the dark web.

The Neo-Nazis are not that upset by this. They want to use the same tools to boycott the Zionist and Jews. It's actually one of the many things the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right agree on.

In addition we're making them into martyrs. Banning and suppression was counter productive on the original Nazis and it is counter productive here.

This should be we'll know by those who read civics. It is even codified in the book Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It makes me wonder what books Antifa are reading as they are doing all of the wrong things.

I get that it feels like we're (non nazis) are winning but we're not and this is isn't helping.

An eerie look into the future from before the age of computers. The number of things about our lives now he got essentially right in 1969 is frankly stunning. Twelve interwoven short stories explore various residents in the Honeydew Condomiminium: how a computer managed network of telephone based services has affected their daily lives in sometimes nefarious ways. The novella's availability is limited in English, but there's a link to the Kindle store from the late author's webpage[1].

Non-Fiction: The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

I think this book remains the most useful and concise guide to understanding mass movements and fanaticism I've ever read. It pairs nicely with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Hoffer's book is more expository and cautionary where Alinsky's book is more enthusiastic and encouraging, while both books have a healthy dose of cynicism about mass movements themselves.

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[1]: https://shinichihoshi.com/voice_net.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals#The_Rules

Alinsky's ideas --- which are extremely relevant to marketing --- mostly involve adapting your message to the realities of your audience. That means listening to them, understanding their problems, and being prepared to spell out how their lives would work out after you've changed them.

Here Stallman stipulates that it's self-evident that unfree software is bad, and that your personal well-being is less important that the principle of freedom. It's not even a 'wrong' point; it's an overtly hostile and stupid one. Free software has answers to that problem ("design your application differently, run your business differently"), but Stallman's idealism keeps him from understanding those answers, and so all he can do is bloviate.

Rules for Radicals isn't just a good book, it's also a fun one. As the Tea Party people are showing, it's also not inherently left- or right-. It's short and cheap, and if any part of your life involves wanting people to change anything they're doing (from how they vote to what flavor of ice cream they buy), you should get it.

One of his major principles is that the community organizer has to help people see why it's in their best interest to organize or make change. According to Alinsky, arguing that people should agitate and work for change because of the common good or because the change is the right thing simply doesn't work.

I believe the OP is saying that Stallman isn't doing a great job of incorporating that aspect of Alinsky's principles and in doing so is setting back the free software movement.

EDIT: I just read a little further down in the thread and saw this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559283 : "The problem with Free Software is a marketing problem." That's similar to an Alinsky comment, although in different language: if you can't "market" the change you're trying to encourage by making people realize why it benefits them, you're not going to make that change happen.

"....In a similar situation in Los Angeles four staff members and I were talking
in front of the Biltmore Hotel when I demonstrated the same point, saying:
"Look, I am holding a ten-dollar bill in my hand. I propose to walk around
the Biltmore Hotel, a total of four blocks, and try to give it away. This will
certainly be outside of everyone's experience. You four walk behind me
and watch the faces of the people I'll approach. I am going to go up to
them holding out this ten-dollar bill and say, 'Here, take this.' My guess is
that everyone will back off, look confused, insulted, or fearful, and want to
get away from this nut fast.

From their experience when someone approaches them he is either out to
ask for instructions or to panhandle — particularly the way I'm dressed, no
coat or tie."

I walked around, trying to give the ten-dollar bill away. The reactions were
all "within the experiences of the people." About three of them, seeing the
ten-dollar bill, spoke first — "I'm sorry. I don't have any change." Others
hurried past saying, "I'm sorry, I don't have any money on me right now,"
as though I had been trying to get money from them instead of trying to
give them money. One young woman flared up, almost screaming, "I'm not
that kind of a girl and if you don't get away from here, I'll call a cop!"
Another woman in her thirties snarled, "I don't come that cheap!" There
was one man who stopped and said, "What kind of a con game is this?"...."

https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals...

"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"

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

From Saul Alisky’s Rules for Radicals.

These are precisely the tactics being used against climate skeptics. Rather than actually caring about debating the science, the alarmist side instead uses phrases like “virtually none of the climate-change deniers have a clue about the underlying science.”

The whole debate stopped being about science years ago and it has instead become a battle of economic ideology. It’s impossible to have a rational debate when the leadership of the debate engages in ad hominem attacks as a matter of tactics.

We talk about “science,” yet hold up an Inconvenient Truth as some sort of inflatable prophesy, as if Al Gore were Moses holding the Ten Commandments. Despite all sorts of debunked aspects of that film, to call it into question means we are somehow intellectually inept. One would be intellectually inept to not call it into question! As far as realizing how we have been manipulated — that manipulation cuts both ways: many people actually think the debate is still about the climate. It’s not. It’s about economic systems and the means of production.

I’ve stopped caring about the debate and just quietly vote for candidates with whom I agree. There is an expression about wrestling pigs that comes to mind when I think about the climate debate..

2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals

⬤ "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

⬤ "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."

That's the problem with "defund the police". "We'd all love to see the plan", as John Lennon once put it.

Camden NJ did do this. They fired their entire police department and started over. Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you just need to fire the bottom 1-10%. Maybe give randomly-chosen civil grand juries the power to fire cops. Not just for criminal offenses, just for being subpar at being a cop.

You don't have the right to an attorney. You don't have the right to know the charges against you. You don't have the right to face the accused.

This is rule 12 from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." - Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

That's from 1970: "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's not just a problem with feminist groups. It's made other protest groups ineffective. Most notably, Occupy Wall Street. They got national attention, but then had no process for deciding what they wanted and pushing for it. The Portland protestors ran into that, too.

"Rules for Radicals", by Saul Alinsky: RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”

Black Lives Matter is hitting this now. This is the agenda of Black Lives Matter.[1] "Page Not Found". The "Toolkit for Social Media", though, is available. The result has been way too much focus on PR, statues, and renaming stuff. Not enough about how to stop cops from killing people. (There's a straightforward solution: have the FBI investigate all killings by cops, immediately. There are about 1000 a year. The FBI has the authority to do this under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but does so only about once a year. They usually wait until the local authorities haven't done much, and by then the case is cold. Requiring an investigation by an outside agency is a basic first step. This doesn't require new legislation; that battle was won over half a century ago. So that's something to push for.)

What goes wrong when your group doesn't focus is that eventually you either fail, or end up with a Strong Leader, which creates the usual problems. These are the usual failure modes of revolutions.

[1] https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe

One of my mother's former law partners used to help get Martin Sheen out of jail whenever he arrested protesting. He actually has a quick cameo in the first season of the West Wing. He's a state judge now, but still has a bit of that radical streak in him.

He once described the whole elaborate choreography of activist arrest and release. You want the media to be present, both at arrest and release. You want the use of force by the police to be both disproportionate and highly visible.

There are a whole series of elaborate rules to make the state's use of force work for you. Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is the traditional primer in this sort of thing, but it's always interesting to hear the stories of those that lived that type of life.

Isn't it the opposite - he hasn't been a video game developer for decades? I think the last project he was involved with was The War in Heaven in 1999, which I can only find negative reviews about, both in terms of storyline and technical quality.

And even if he were still involved, I think an indie video game studio is still in a relevant sense outside the tech industry - I don't believe he's e.g. interviewing at Google or any other tech company. I take voice lessons and sing at churches and so forth, but I'm certainly an outsider to the music industry, even though I can sing pretty well. If I were trying to push my politics on the music industry, that would be pretty different from someone who has a recording contract doing the same.

> How is that any different from Saul Alinky's Rules for Radicals?

As far as I know, nobody is saying "I'm following Alinsky's playbook to disrupt this tech company I don't work at." (There might be conspiracy theories that people are doing that, but that's rather different from someone outright saying as much, which is what we have here.)

I do agree that if someone were doing that, it would be equally worth criticizing.

I disagree that this is the reason for cancel culture. This isn't about misinterpretation. It's typically about bad-faith interpretation. There's a very deliberate effort to destroy anyone who disagrees in the slightest from an ideology. When you disagree, anything you do or say will be construed, regardless of how tortured the reasoning, as meaning what the cancel-mob wants it to mean, in an effort to destroy your life.

This is straight out of the revolutionary playbooks. "Rules for Radicals", Lenin's brand of Marxism, Mao's Cultural Revolution...

This is not "oops, they misunderstood." It would be a much smaller problem if it were that.

buckles seatbelt

More like produced generations of social warriors who push critical theory and oppressor/oppressed dynamics wherever they can to disrupt society much like what has been happening visibly in the US for the past 15 years.

The globalist media corps of today are literally doing this to a T with their viewership in lock step with Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", wedging and destroying any semblance of unified culture in the US in the name of ...social justice? Does anyone here really think these multinationals or their political operatives give a single f*ck about whether we have due oversight into our secretive branches of govt or tangible social equity and mobility in the US?

Soviet infiltration is a boogeyman, but if anyone wants to read about actual university infiltration, much of it can be credited to academics from the Frankfurt School who immigrated post-WW2 - Marcuse, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Adorno - individuals that set and grew awareness of an ideological framework that is actively dismantling cultures and societies all over the Western world.

E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.

Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.

In other words, Wikipedia is not an unbiased source. Rather than throw links at you, suffice it to say that there are other criteria by which political spectra may be defined. Let the reader understand.

"The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root), during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, identified proponents of democratic reform, in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radical Movement."

"The term political radicalism (in political science known as radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary or other means and changing value systems in fundamental ways. "

And of course the classic Rules for Radicals book about community organizing and starting grassroots movements.

Let's not label all radical things bad, it can become a way to suppress dissent and societal change.