Mike Lorrey looks at the PNAS skeptics paper and some historical issues related to it. – Anthony
My primary area of accomplishment in life, other than virtual worlds development, is in political activism. Despite my technical training, I am a very political animal, having helped Killington, Vermont vote to secede from that state in protest of excessive taxation, and having organized the effort to eminent domain the New Hampshire vacation estates of Supreme Court Justices Souter and Breyer after the Kelo decision, as political theater to “encourage” the two political parties these gentlemen hailed from to support my state constitutional amendment to restrict eminent domain.
I was a founding member of the Free State Project, yes, one of *those* libertarians, guilty as charged. I’ve managed the election campaigns of both libertarians and republicans, and treat politics as a sport or quest to improve our country’s “more perfect union” with principles couched in pragmatic use of political theater and holding petty fascists to their own standards. I’ve studied the Constitution and the writings of the founding fathers extensively, as well as their Enlightenment forebears, and a lot of the little known history of this country. I’ve also studied the history of various flavors of tyranny, in particular the various modern flavors, communism, fascism, islamism, and especially liberalist majoritarian tyranny.
So it is from this perspective that I approached the global warming issue, observing the players and how they act, trying to tease out their hidden agendas, if there are any. Originally I believed the dogma. I founded a company in Seattle focusing on energy conservation safety lighting, inventing new lighting products that were highly rated by the EPA’s Greenlights program. I was once the poster boy of Al Gore’s reinventing government campaign, getting government agencies to buy my new technology despite not having prior issued paperwork, etc. Eventually I was given access by the energy department to a lot of material that exposed to me how screwed up the energy conservation business is, and I started to challenge claims about global warming orthodoxy. I saw how Al Gore, in the early Clinton administration, sabotaged the proposed carbon tax, turning it into a BTU tax, so that coal produced by his home state of Tennessee would not be the most highly taxed energy source. So I questioned more, and was cast out by the ruling party from golden boy status. So I questioned global warming a lot more, online, publicly.
This caused a certain degree of conflict within my family. As some of you know, my cousin is a professional climatologist. When he was still working on his doctorate, certain persons of influence attempted to threaten his academic career before it really got started in order to coerce me into removing statements I’d made about global warming from certain influential email lists. This was in the 2000-2001 timeframe, so I got a pretty early taste of the sort of “tricks” that the high inquistors of the Church of Global Warming would pursue in order to enforce their orthodoxy against heretics like myself, and when I acted offended, about my first amendment rights, I was made to look like the bad guy.
This is why this recent essay about modern political correctness being merely a form of social marxism developed during WWI by a group of renegade marxists who sought to use Freudism to spread marxism through society struck a chord with me. It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents. This is not unusual, though. It has become standard practice in academia to engage in persecution of dissidents from orthodoxy.
This fact is illustrated quite clearly in the new National Academy of Scientists Blacklist of Climate “Deniers” this is the list that is online, referenced by the PNAS paper trying to make skeptics into media untouchables. At first glance, its pretty amusing that the author of this list ranks skeptics by the number of references in the published record to their FOURTH published paper, with the claim that anybody who has only published a few papers, even if they are “big papers” is clearly a lightweight. As if Einstein wasn’t immediately a rock star when he published his first paper on Special Relativity, eh?
Maybe I’m an ignorant heathen, but it seems to me that someone who can’t get their most important ideas on the same subject, with sufficient proof to convince the entire world of the truth of their writing, published in a few papers, is simply regurgitating the same old tired pap and really isn’t intelligent enough to have even one “big paper” in their lives. But I may be wrong. However, the ranking this guy does seems to rank a lot of the best skeptics at the top: Pielke, Jr., Dyson, Lindzen, Tipler, etc. It seems to me, though, that the number of cites should be divided by the number of years since their PhD to give an idea of their relative productivity in their field… However, when you shift the ranking to go on the cites of climate related papers, you get a more impressive list:
68: Roger A Pielke Sr, FAGU
446: James J O’Brien, FAGU
1649: Kirill Y Kondratyev
747: John R Christy
710: Reid A Bryson
278: Sherwood Idso
1562: Robert C Balling
1410: Patrick J Michaels
136: Richard Lindzen, FAGU
1198: G Cornelis van Kooten
1686: Sultan Hameed
954: Willie H Soon
1503: S Frederick Singer, FAGU
625: Petr Chylek, FAGU
1024: James A Moore
500: Roy W Spencer
1230: Nils-Axel Moerner
1651: George Taylor
These are the top 15. Sure, they don’t have NAMES like Dyson or Tipler, but we all know who most of these guys are from their climate work that tends to debunk the AGW garbage, and which tends to get published, and cited by others. I’ll try to post a link to the excel file I made from scraping the PNAS blacklist.
The entire list is essentially made from the names of any scientist who has ever signed a letter, petition, or public advertisement expressing doubt about the AGW orthodoxy, IPCC, or the Hockey Team. SO the list really ISN’T about whether their science is for or against the AGW orthodoxy, the list is meant to intimidate and damage the reputations of anybody who has dared to publicly question the absolutist “we have a consensus” political games being played by those who are intentionally politicising climate science to pursue their leftist agenda. This is classic Alinsky tactics. There is no valid scientific purpose for this PNAS paper or this blacklist. It is a political showboating that is going on under the guise of “science”.
The Leipzig declaration and Oregon petition also make public the views of Scientists on Global warming, are they also ‘Communist black lists’?
REPLY: I signed the Leipzig declaration. -A
I’ll give you $100 if you can post this at forums.treehugger.com and not have it censored. The censorship over there is unbeleivable. No wonder we can’t make headway when they won’t even publish opinion pieces. I dare you!
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
I remember the effort to take the SCJ’s fancy vacation homes under the eminent domain laws they found to be constitutional. Brilliant. Way to make an example out of them. I was way heated up at the thought that a city could come along and forcibly take my property from me and give it another private party who would use it to “better serve” the community. That’s SO abhorrent and SO against the strong private property rights enumerated in the constitution. If if I hadn’t seen the USSC decision with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed that could possibly get five votes in favor of it.
Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic. Your site does a fine job of disseminating scientific criticism of the AGW position, but when your posts tackle politics, not to mention the commenters, you veer off into self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, victimology. I find your continuous allusions to the the Nazi Holocaust increasing distasteful. The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, they are not being hunted down and imprisoned, and they are not likely to be anytime in the forseeable future. Get real.
AGW is an intellectual fad with routes in romantic environmentalism, and it suffers from all the pitfalls of close-minded groupthink, besides having some advocates who have really caught on to how to work the media. It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.
Statements such as this:
[REPLY: Thanks for pointing that out, I made an edit to the story earlier, at pub time, but somehow it didn’t take or I made a mistake. Fixed, thanks -A]
“…(though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist)…”
I think Fascist is the more accurate label as Marxism seeks state ownership whereas Fascism seeks to buttress private cartels. Mussolini stated that Fascism and Corporatism are synonymous and it is quite apparent that the AGW agenda which is the vanguard of the Environmental movement seeks to alter the laws of a given State to control the flow of energy. Of course Environmentalism has always been an Oligarchical position for which Reactionary Conservatism and Fascism are the cloaks used to advance the agenda.
Junk science should not be debunked by junk sociology IMO.
jcrabb,
The difference is that Leipzig and OISM are voluntary; the scientists decide for themselves if they want to be included or not.
But the PNAS list is an official blacklist endorsed by a quasi-governmental organization. The list is entirely political in nature, arbitrarily assigning names based only on someone’s perception [“My table lists all the names I’ve found who have signed any of the open letters or declarations expressing skepticism of the IPCC’s findings…”], and not allowing for any recourse if a listed scientist objects. [Note also that the blacklist compiler is a believer in Astrology.]
This blacklist is no different than Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List,” put together by the Nixon White House and specifically designed to destroy careers.
Fortunately for those Nixon blacklisted, Watergate intervened.
Think that’s outrageous? Try “Perfect Citizen” on for size. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704545004575352983850463108.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories
That’s a good write-up, there Mr Lorrey. I hope people take the time to understand their opponents – not so much to smear them for their motives, but to understand their modus operandi.
Otherwise you just make sincere arguments and leave perplexed everytime.
It took a lot of work to compile the list: as a Word file it is 63 pages long. The warmists are into this vendetta thing. Bjorn Lomborg was the first victim when he came out with his Skeptical Environmentalist. They established a web site that minutely criticized every page of his book. When he wrote another one they actually published a counter-book to tear it apart, page by page. NAS is now into it on a mass scale, apparently intent on selecting candidates for a Gulag. Or is it for an auto-da-fe? If I were a member I would simply resign. This organization is no longer interested in promoting science, just enforcing their own doctrines and stealing research money.
The NAS has always been an old boy network; however, it was (and I emphasize, was) a great honor to be elected to the Academy. If I were a member, I would resign in protest and I think all true scientists who are academy members should resign.
This sort of behavior reminds me of the school-yard bully who threatens to take his ball and go home because he the rules of the game don’t apply to him.
“It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.”
They aren’t blinkered. It’s deliberate.
Funny a commenter would say ”It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe. ” with the present administration threatening to keep its boot on the throat of the BP CEO.
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
It is also possible that there are no such blinkers, and that they are engaging in these tactics with full awareness. They simply don’t care about being fair, – but in winning.
@ur momisugly lichanos
I hope you’re right. I’m not so optimistic. Perhaps I read to many of the comments on news articles and blogs and have too good a feel for what the 45% who support Obama think about the other 55% of us and think about the institutions the founding fathers established. I should stop taking that pulse because too much more of it is likely to stop mine.
“It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents.”
*********************************
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
*********************************
VILLABOLO:
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
——-
US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’
James Inhofe calls for criminal investigation of climate scientists as senators prepare proposal that would ditch cap and trade
[–SNIP–]
Senate Panel Holds Hearing on Climate Change : James Inhofe The Republican James Inhofe during the Senate Environment and Public Works hearing on global climate change. . . .
The US Congress’s most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.
Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body’s report or had communications with East Anglia’s climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.
Inhofe’s document ends by naming 17 “key players” in the controversy about CRU’s stolen emails, including the Britons Phil Jones and Keith Briffa.
“I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It’s guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago,” said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who is on the list of 17 scientists. “It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity.”
Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Rick Piltz, a former official in the US government climate science programme who now runs the Climate Science Watch website, said Inhofe and others were getting in the way of scientific work. “Scientists who are working in federal labs are being subjected to inquisitions coming from Congress,” he said. “There is no question that this is an orchestrated campaign to intimidate scientists.”
Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is on Inhofe’s list of 17, said that he had seen a sharp rise in hostile email since November.
“Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter,” he told the Guardian.
He said the attacks appeared to be a co-ordinated effort. “Some of them look cut-and-paste.”
A university investigation largely cleared Mann of misconduct for his connection to the East Anglia controversy. However, a rightwing group in Pennsylvania are demanding further action.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight,” he said. “These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”
He said Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation created an atmosphere of intimidation. “The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened,” he said. “The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down. That kind of intimidation is very reminiscent of other periods in US history where people abused their position.”
Other scientists on Inhofe’s list of 17 admitted they were disturbed by the threat of criminal prosecution.
“I am worried about it, I have to say,” said Raymond Bradley, director of the climate science research centre at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is also on the list of 17. “You can understand that this powerful person is using the power of his office to intimidate people and to harass people and you wonder whether you should have legal counsel. It is a very intimidating thing and that is the point.”
Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the Senate’s environment and public works committee, released a document last week suggesting scientists be investigated for breaking three laws and four government regulations.
[–SNIP–]
But climate scientists say the report takes the campaign to a new level by threatening criminal prosecution. The report calls for the inspector generals of all US government agencies touching on the environment to investigate the scientists as a first step to possible prosecution.
“The minority staff of the Senate committee on environment and public works believe the scientists involved violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws,” the report says.
A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt. But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 “key players”.
“We are not saying that there are 17 scientists we should be calling criminals,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe. “I’m not putting a number on 17.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/01/inhofe-climate-mccarthyite
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
“Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic.”
“AGW is an intellectual fad with routes in romantic environmentalism, and it suffers from all the pitfalls of close-minded groupthink, besides having some advocates who have really caught on to how to work the media.”
“It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.”
==========================================
Embarrassed? Really?
Maybe you should then check your “skepticism.” [GREAT post, Mike!]
And the dominant reason there is currently no big black boot on your larynx is because people like the author of the post DARE to stand up against it.
How is that self-aggrandizing? Give me a break.
Sure, Michael Mann or Al Gore or not necessarily evil dictators…but they ARE contributing to a larger system that becomes its own behemoth….larger than them…that takes on a life of its own.
Big Government, Big Academia, Big Corporacracy….they ALL have that in common.
[The power therefrom…is only greater in the whole…because the sum of its parts consists of many mindless individuals.]
I am sure there are plenty of decent people that work at the EPA but that doesn’t mean that the EPA has not lost its marbles when it comes to CO2.
Your legalistic [and rather shallow] interpretation of this brilliant post is not significant, other than it has caused me to react enough to set the record straight.
I do not agree at all with your assumption and you are definitely tossing out the the baby and the bathwater….as well as the tub, the plumbing, and half the house.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I find your continuous allusions to the the Nazi Holocaust increasing distasteful.
Well, so would I. If there were any!
The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, they are not being hunted down and imprisoned, and they are not likely to be anytime in the forseeable future. Get real.
Ho, ho! Unless it’s the Gulag it doesn’t count then? We could perhaps submit you to a range of ad hominens, threats and taunts and you would brush them off as mere trifles? I think not.
My favourite example of the pressure exerted on sceptics came with the Amazing Randi posted suggesting that he was a trifle sceptical of the extreme claims of AGW not long back. The sheer weight of criticism that came down – and his scepticism was very mild – was incredible. He ended up recanting, just to shut down the heat. (I bet he did a “and yet it moves” under his breath though).
So an icon of the sceptic movement cannot afford to be sceptical! It would be funny, if it were not sad.
Lord Oxburgh did pontificate
that nothng wrong was done!
Then good old Penn joined in the fight
to clear its favourite son.
Now Russel Muir has taken sides
and struck out with his cosh.
Another repeat, it has been said, of establishment peer whitewash
Now you may not believe me,
you may think that I’m a liar
But i’ll ask you this one question
whose side are you on?
The fish-fried or the fish frier?
When Juries are picked by the accused and the cries of the plaintiffs are dismissed as inadmissabke, then Climatology, like despicable one one crimes becomes unprovable!
The link with academic Marxism is spot-on.
It is Marxism as a science — the neo-marxism of Social Science academia — that legitimates this approach to science; that is, science-as-activism and science provided with permission to promote ad hom assessment of scientific opinion attacks due to economic class of speaker etc. Their methodology was an open attack on the normal bourgeois science ethics and protocol that have always tried to dampen these tendencies to stray from a discussion of the evidence.
The linked essay by Lind explains well the dark side to the new marxism of the Frankfurt school etc…but it might be a bit hard to follow for the uninitiated.
In this essay the affinity of Environmental Science culture with Marxism is explained in terms of Post-Normal Science (of Ravetz) and especially with reference to Mike Hulme’s use of it.
Finally, I think Lichanos (above) is right to ask us to keep the level of persecution in perspective – e.g., the black list was not made by state institution.
Graeme Rodaughan says:
They simply don’t care about being fair, – but in winning.
You got it. Ethics are for hobbling the sheep. Butchering sheep requires none and fewer than that is even better. One just wants the sheep to not struggle. Bleating is fine.
I bet the Westborough Baptist crew could do a brilliant vid on their take of ‘the suffering of science’. Omg… that’s too funny to contemplate!
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
‘Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight,” he said. “These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”’
======================================
Well of course this “public servant” on the taxpayer dole…is going to say this!
Wah wah wahh.
Poor NASA. They have to deal with so many FOI requests.
Sniffle sniffle.
James and Gavin, and other publicly funded scientists-turned-politicians…until you get off the public dole and work in a private venture….you’d better believe you are obligated to be under a 24-hour microscope!!
I know that makes you nervous because of what’s at stake: the millions and millions and millions of heard-earned taxpayer dollars that you have been able to divert toward a dying myth….but hell that’s the risk…
…when you use other people’s money!
Wah wah wah.
Eight FOI requests in a few months!
It’s OK….I understand, Dear….being removed from taking real world observations and doing science the old way….that such stress is too much for the air-conditioned, model-fantasy, smooth-handed “ideal”world in which you live.
Bless your heart, Gavin.
Let me pass you the recycled, green tissues.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
What you’ve described is the “Fabianism”. Unlike the Communists, who took you by force, the Fabians strive to take you over from within. The three pillars of influece that must be taken are 1) the Media, 2) the Education Elite, and 3) the Courts.
It is indisputable that the AGW crowd is operating through the Fabian model. The Media is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the agenda. The University system is nothing more than an “expert” witness to the agenda, and will exonerate any wrong doing associated with the agenda [just look at the “investigations” that have involved UEA and Mann]. Lastly, the Courts have been complicit in allowing the EPA to usurp powers of authority that are not designated to it in the Constitution.
Unfortunately, the American Public is too involved with the latest Iphone or Ipad to notice or care that their individaul freedoms and liberties are very slowly being dissolved.
Andrew W says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:25 pm
“It’s staggering that people can be so blinkered by their ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing that they’re practicing exactly what they condemn others of doing.
In a war, both sides insist that their opponents are evil incarnate and that “God is on our side.”
The CAGW war is being fought on three fronts; “religion” (sheer belief), politics (how can we use this to increase our power and influence), and science (there are many honest brokers trying to figure out the climate despite the requisite AGW or CC mention in every paper).
Go ahead, ask either side who is evil incarnate and who has science (or ‘god’) on their side.
Smokey: “But the PNAS list is an official blacklist endorsed by a quasi-national organization. It is entirely political in nature, arbitrarily assigning names based only on someone’s perception, and not allowing for any recourse if a listed scientist objects.”
Thats exactly right. Many of the names on that list are NOT persons who describe themselves as AGW skeptics, but they were unfortunately naive enough to think that being a public spirited citizen and putting your name to a statement urging objectivity and restraint against jumping to conclusions, would be met with anything other than condemnation and character assassination.
There should never be recriminations and reprisals taken against anybody of any political persuasion for expressing their opinion in an earnest and honest manner in a respectful mein. Those that seek to engage in reprisals ARE, in fact, fascists *using* marxist methods (for those who have studied political science, ideology and propaganda, etc know that there is not much difference between the practices of Goebbels, of Mao, and Alinksy. Alinsky never needed to use actual bullets in his “community organising” of urban leftist insurgencies because he found it was more effective simply to destroy the person in reputation, because such tactics have the added bonus of often times making one’s target behave badly in public, and occasionally end their own lives in private.
Many who think in the traditional political spectrum are very blinkered about how they define “fascist” and “marxist”, seeing fascist as being someone who uses the state to exterminate a given ethnic group, when that is merely one minor and nonmandatory policy, when in general fascism is any policy that seeks to use the force majeur of the state to dictate how private citizens live their lives and use their property. Land use zoning regulations are a form of fascism as much as directing industry what to produce and how much to produce. Economically, marxism is fascist in nature, in that it seeks an extreme form of central planning and regulation of economic enterprises to the point that the whole reason for having a private owner is rather superfluous and is thus done away with.
Where marxists and fascists tend to differ is in foreign policy. Fascists are nationalists because they seek to bolster and preserve the power of the state to achieve perfect order, their method of enforced ethnic homogeneity as a means of building nationalist loyalty is merely one means to an end, while marxists are internationalists who seek to tear down nation states through revolution in order to achieve global brotherhood of workers under The Party. Both use socialism as a means to an end, so the idea of defining one as right wing and the other as left wing is really only valid from a certain perspective of international politics. Both are totalitarian in nature and both are enemies of the individual, the concept of individual ownership of property, and the private acquisition of wealth.
That said, marxism as a social-historical theory, per se, is neither right nor left, it is a set of tools. It is a way of looking at history and society. Marxism in art is a progressive evolution of art away from the realism of the Renaissance masters and toward an avant garde academic movement of art commenting on art for the sake of promoting political orthodoxy. For instance, the Bauhaus School of art and architecture is decidedly marxist in nature because it seeks to empower the people to have “good art” and “good furniture and architecture” that is utilitarian and common. The Constructivist school is also marxist, as is Art Deco (now I love art deco design quite a lot, but this says nothing about my politics). Such avant garde movements arose as a means of establishing a new elite that was intent on telling people what was good art. Futurism, particularly of the italian variety, was closely aligned with Moussolini’s fascist movement, however it is also marxist as it attempts to define a progression of history of a person or thing through time as a more true definition of that person or things identity. So to, then, is the Cubism of Picasso that evolved out of Futurism.
Similarly, political correctness is social marxism as it uses softcore psychological methods to enforce orthodoxy and drive out dissent.
Now, back to political activism. A political group can be marxist in tactics without being marxist in agenda. Understanding that these two can be entire divorced from each other and still allow the group to be effective is of crucial importance. One important concept of marxism is dialectical conflict, the idea of creating opposing groups to polarize an issue, putting them in conflict, and dictating the progression of the conflict in order to manipulate the public into moving their perception of the “moderate middle” by alienating and disenfranchising a group that gets manipulated into committing atrocity.
Real marxists would use this method, for instance, to stage protests whose aim is to encourage police forces to brutalize peaceful demonstrators, in order to strip the state of its moral authority to govern and moving public sympathy toward the cause of those protesting.
However, my eminent domain activism, for instance, also utilized dialectical conflict. I behaved as a tin pot fascist, “victimizing” the poor supreme court justices, in order to motivate their allies in the two major parties into voting for the Eminent Domain Restriction Amendment that I was the actual author of. Thus I was a non-marxist using marxist tactics to achieve anti-marxist ends. Some might say it was unethical of me to do that, but in reality, since I, as a libertarian, was excluded from the electoral political process by rigged election laws, it was perfectly acceptable for me to use other means to get elected officials to do what I wanted even though they thought they were acting against me and not with me.
To conclude, marxist tactics are inimical to and corrosive of classical liberal representative democracy and republican individualism. They are intended to undermine a stable political system in order to establish a new political order. On the other hand, if a representative democracy is intentionally structured to alienate and disenfranchise some segment of society, using such tactics is the only option in order to achieve a more perfect union. This is true whether the disenfranchised are blacks fighting for civil rights, libertarians fighting for access to the ballot, or scientists fighting to reestablish scientific principles of skepticism, objectivity, and transparency.