wedrifid comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 14 December 2012 11:57:39AM 0 points [-]

I hope to learn something from the "black arts" threads on LW.

You may be looking in the wrong place. I don't recall encountering any particularly impressive "Dark Arts" insights on this blog. You may be interested in, say, Robert Greene's The 48 Laws Of Power.

Comment author: HalMorris 14 December 2012 03:02:04PM 1 point [-]

That sounds a bit like a "how to" book of black arts - if so, not what I had in mind, except for the purpose of developing and spreading dark-art antibody memes, but you can't do that without taking a sample of the dark arts most prevalent at the moment, much as they must round up viruses every year to develop the yearly flu shot. So I wouldn't be looking for "the best" dark arts but rather the ones one is likely to encounter. E.g. a good source would be Newt Gingrich's "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" memo (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm) EXCERPT:

"In the video 'We are a Majority,' Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: 'I wish I could speak like Newt.' That takes years of practice ..."

This introduces the famous word list: a list of smiley-face words to use when describing your own positions, and nasty-face words to use when putting words in the mouths of your opponents (or do I say 'enemies'?). Or there is the Paul Wyrich farewell letter which did much to propagate the meme "political correctness is cultural Marxism", or the Weyrich-inspired "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement" (http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/02/integration-of-theory-and-practice.html), a document Lenin might have been proud of.

I'm all about blunting the effectiveness of certain tactics that reduce the possibility of our thinking clearly (and by "our", I mean not that of LW, or the Second Foundation, but of the whole mass of people whose votes determine who we get to have as President, etc.) ASIDE: One place where Thomas Jefferson was one of the least small-gov't-ish founding fathers was education, and he was also all about disempowering religion memes