In the movie Men In Black, there’s a scene where an abusive farmer gets killed by the villain, some kind of giant alien cockroach. The alien then possesses his body and walks around in comic fashion, like some kind of rotting zombie. The farmer’s wife exclaims “like an Edgar suit.”
This is pretty much what Worldcon looks like, these days.
Social Justice Marxists operate in the same manner. They take over institutions, groups, corporations, movements, whatever… and kill them. They then wear the skin of the destroyed, rotting institution like an Edgar suit, ambling around in comic fashion, expecting to be treated as if they were still the institution itself.
Only unlike the movie, there are a great many of these alien bugs on Earth. They are legion. And the thing is, most rightists suspect this is true, because the Edgar suit doesn’t act like Edgar. He acts like an alien cockroach. But they nonetheless give the benefit of the doubt, because they aren’t sure.
It is in that space of uncertainty that Marxism is permitted to spread, and infest every sizable organization. Once infected, forget bringing the organization back to life. It’s a rotting husk. It’s dead. You aren’t going to take it back, and even supposing you did, it’d still be a rotting sack of skin.
I think this is the greatest weakness of the political right. We permit Marxism to spread because we are not confident in our assessment that the people in question are Marxists. Most of them deny it, of course.
I remember when one leftist kept posting about how the border wall was racist, and how illegal immigrants ought to be able to come over, and how stopping them was bad. When I asked him why he was for open borders he denied it. Yet, his chosen policy would result in a de facto open border! Was he really that delusional… or was he a Marxist trying to say “I’m not a Marxist”?
One of the ways to tell if it’s really Edgar, or just an Edgar suit, is to prod the person with absolutes. Marxists are absolutists. A case in point. Another individual explained to me that healthcare ought to be a human right. Every human should have it upon need. I pointed out the usual inefficiencies of government bureaucracy, the long waiting lists, the poor quality of VA care, and the general lack of innovation and creativity in government-run healthcare.
The thing is, the guy agreed with me on many of those things. But he countered with “but if you don’t make it a right, somebody might not get the care they need, and I just can’t support that.” It doesn’t matter if the care would be better for 99.9% of everyone else. If one single person went without needed care, he would judge it a failure.
You see this kind of argument from Marxists all the time. You could destroy entire countries with mass immigration, but if one refugee child suffered, then too bad, too sad. You must do it. Get used to British citizens speaking Arabic, you racist.
It’s the same kind of argument you hear from gun control advocates.”If it saves the life of just one child,” they will say, “it will all be worth it.” Or, “even one shooting is too many.” Marxist absolutism, again. Somebody is wearing an Edgar suit.
MADD is a great case in point. Originally founded to combat drunk driving, an honorable pursuit, the founder wound up leaving a few years later, because the organization had become a group of tyrannical neo-prohibitionists, not merely a group concerned with reducing drunk driving offenses. Soon it was receiving government money, advocating for Traffic Safety Funds (more government cash), and arguing for everything from a rash of checkpoints, to mandatory interlock devices on all automobiles — not just those owned by those convicted of alcohol-related offenses.
MADD is an Edgar suit. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find a bunch of Marxists.
The thing is, if Marxists were open about their Marxism, that is to say if the giant alien cockroach were seen as a giant alien cockroach, every normie on the planet would be trying to squash it. It you saw the bodies of the Stalin regime, the starvation of Mao’s regime, the killings of Pol Pot… you would want to stamp this thing out with every fiber of your being.
Charming fellow, right?
But when attacked, when someone starts to suspect an organization is full of Marxists, they retreat into the Edgar suit. Hi. I’m Edgar. Nice to meet you. And my goal is just to try and help reduce drunk driving deaths!
Do you know why Marxists like absolutism so much? Why even a 99.9% success rate is not good enough for them? Because it gives them an excuse to continue to exist. No human society will ever reach 100% of anything. There will always be people who are poor, people who don’t get the care they need, people who die senselessly, idiots who get drunk and wreck someone’s life. Always.
Reducing the incidence of those things is a good and noble pursuit. But they can never be stopped completely. By saying that nothing is good enough unless it has a 100% success rate, the Marxist is giving himself power for life, and his organization power forever. Because so long as one person slips through the cracks, he can say “my work is not done yet.”
But the single-minded focus of Marxists on power politics is a good tell. Absolutism can tell you if someone is a Marxist, but so can an over-reliance on the language of political power. Normal people might talk politics for a while, even rant about it as I do here, but there are also times when they just don’t care about politics at all.
Marxists want to bring politics into everything. Are you eating a plate of Chinese takeout? Cultural Appropriation. Do you drive a nice car? Privilege! Do you like your hair a certain way? Racism! Everything must involve politics with them. They cannot stop thinking about their obsession for even the briefest of moments. At some point, a normie is likely to talk about his dog, or his kid, or how much he likes beer, or something totally unrelated to politics. The Marxist, on the other hand, will find a way to steer that back.
Another Edgar Suit tell is an obsession with personal bias. Like the 100% success rate demands, the Marxist demands absolute objectivity on the part of others (while displaying none himself). Unless you can demonstrate proof of moral perfection and a completely unbiased, objective viewpoint, you can be dismissed because you’re biased. The data underlying it is irrelevant, because the collector is biased. For instance, if you said that black people in the United States committed a greater per capita share of violent crimes than white people, that is a true statement. The Marxist would say that you are biased against black people, thus your conclusion (whatever it may be) can be dismissed on that basis. Forget the facts.
The same standard, of course, is never applied to them. But again, it makes an impossible demand so that a permanent political bludgeon is created, which they can beat you over the head with constantly.
There are probably many more such tells (if you’ve got one, drop it in the comments), but those are the ones I’ve seen most frequently, and most obviously. And it’s very important to identify which groups and institutions are SJW-converged, which ones are Edgar suits filled with Marxist cockroaches, and which ones are not. Rightists have permitted bad actors to continue to be treated like good actors merely because they skinned an organization of good actors alive, and wore them like a suit. It’s both stupid, and disservice to the memory of those who created the original, non-converged organization.
(1) The “Nirvana fallacy” writ large;
(2) Even when you ARE being completely objective/unbiased/tolerant, they invent some concept like Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” because you don’t bias in the opposite direction. Their answer to electrocution is not to cut the power but to reverse its polarity.
1. Indeed. The Nirvana Fallacy is a perfect description of this behavior.
2. I’m to the point that if someone brings up personal bias in a debate, I don’t even want to talk to them anymore. Not, it should be noted, because I think I’m unbiased (I’m human, therefore I’m biased), but rather because it’s just an Ad Hominem, a way to avoid discussing the original topic, and to focus discussion on the individual, not the claim the individual made.
When people scream “racist” it’s more or less the same thing. The correct answer is not to defend against the charge, the correct answer is to say “fuck you” or, more charitably, “that’s an Ad Hominem attack, sir. And I’ve no time for it.”
I think most Americans who loosely identify as small-s socialist, aren’t malicious. They’re simply ignorant, regarding socialism’s history. They don’t know about Uncle Joe and the Red Terror of the 30s and 40s. They don’t know about Uncle Mao and the Cultural Revolution. They don’t know about Uncle Fidel’s political prisons. They aren’t aware of the fact that Venezuela experienced the most dramatic and alarming economic collapse, of any nation in the Western hemisphere, of the past 25 years. None of this is on their radar. Because the schools do not teach it, the media does not teach it, and Hollywood most certainly does not care. Because all of those “Edgar Suit” institutions are absolutely rotten with bona fide Marxists who do know history — they simply choose not to care. Because the masturbatorial daydream of the socialist utopia, is worth all the blood and treasure we can spend.
“Lord forgive them for they know not what they do” may be Christlike but I’m not a “turn your cheek” Christian either.
How do We Know history and they do Not? or Ignore it? or Promote the Evil itself?
I’m happy the Lord may forgive them, for I will not forgive either their ignorance or their culpability because their practical results are the same.
A basic truth is that We are Totally Responsible for the Condition we find ourselves in.
“they” don’t know because the don’t want to know. And because they intend to be running the .gov corpse-factory not in it. I got an intense (((Marxist))) brainwash in college, but noticed a few, ah, inconsistencies. So I spent years reading and researching and re-educating myself. On the larger issue, the reason the nominal “Right”, that is, Cucks, have been losing to the (((Left))) for decades is because they cannot name the Jew. Largely because they too are on the (((neocon))) payroll, and partly because OMG Rayycissssism!!! And we you cannot even name the essential enemy of White Western Civilization, you are going to lose to that enemy.
Are you claiming the Jew is the enemy of western civilization or did I miss something in translation.
I suspect we’ve encountered a member of the “Alt-White” here. As with Tom Kratman’s column, they occasionally find their way here for whatever reason. The amusing part of their focus on scapegoating Jews is that the sort of Jews who are Marxists are the ones who are most likely to be non-practicing. I.e. Jews in name only. I mean, does anybody think George Soros is devoted to God? Pull the other one. So they’ve identified the wrong enemies.
The enemy remains, now as before, Marxism. Take mass third-world immigration. It’s being done because native first-worlders didn’t want to embrace full socialism. Note that I say “first-worlder” and not “white”, because countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan follow the same line of thinking. They were willing to embrace some socialism, but not the full program. So Marxists decided population replacement was the only way the workers’ paradise utopia could come into being. Fortunately for the Japanese, at least, they weren’t so stupid as to go along with it.
The insidious part is that the Alt-White doesn’t realize that they are being used by the Edgar suits (indeed, it is entirely possible they are an Edgar suit themselves — and they just don’t realize it. I wonder how many Marxists have infiltrated Stormfront and use it to embarass their enemies). Whenever a Marxist is forced into a corner by a rightist, he tries to escape by claiming that we’re all Nazis. Then he points to an Alt-White guy and says “see, I told you so!” Every time a Stormfronter does a heil Hitler, a Marxist gets a “get out of jail free” card.
You’d think they would have learned when even Vox Day said they were being stupid and told them to knock it off.
You missed something in translation. ‘Name the Jew’ is a term referring to collaborators who would turn in Jews in Nazi occupied territories. IOW: They don’t want to be accused of being associated with Nazis or other ‘bad’ people by pointing out the accusers on the left are in a minority.
The flip side comes back to one word: Honor. There are many problems with Republicans/conservatives/libertarians. We’re all human. But we still ascribe to the old fashioned code of honor. Which means we have to uphold it. The Left continuously uses that against us, targeting members for being ‘hypocrites’ because they are, well, human and have human foibles.
I’m okay with that. The occasional person cut from the herd by leftist ‘hypocrite’ or ‘bad person’ attack is worth remembering that we really ARE better then they. And I’m one they’ve tried to cut from the herd many times.
(You have no clue, and I have rather lost count, of when ad hominem attacks have been thrown at me by the Left trying to make me ‘unacceptable’ to the ‘Right’. Pedophile, racist, misogynist, xenophobe, homophobe, I’ve had all of them thrown at me to try to cut me out of professional events.)
If that’s what he meant, then I will retract my reply. I thought we were dealing with an Alt-White sort.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with the notion of honor. Marxists have none, but they certainly like to use honor as a bludgeon to beat us with.
Haven’t you ever wondered WHERE the philosophy of Marxism came from? Good God. Marx was the son of a Rabbi. Lenin was a Jew.Trotsky was a jew, and on and on.
“We cannot state that all jews were Bolsheviks; But without jews there never would have been Bolshevism. For a jew, nothing is more insulting than the truth. The blood maddened jewish terrorists had murdered 66 million from in Russia from 1918 to 1957.””
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
You are misunderstanding the nature of the blow and the nature of the strategy. The marxists want to give me “the back of their hand”. That’s the blow a permanent superior gives to a permanent underling. Turning the other cheek forces the abuser to admit they aren’t superior. They have to strike with the blow meant for equals, the front of the hand.
If done correctly, turning the other cheek is getting the bug out of the edgar suit. If you’re meeting christians who are not using it that way, they’re doing it wrong and not being a very good follower of Christ. Oh, and telling them that they’re not following Christ correctly will be more likely to improve their behavior than saying that Christ’s strategy was wrong.
Never forget we are commanded to “expose evil” in Ephesians. No, God is not a pacifist and He never commanded that of His followers. Turn the other cheek referred to shallow attacks not war against God. As for me and mine, we will serve the Lord with the whip to defeat evil intent on destruction.
Some aren’t malicious, that is true. I don’t know if it’s most, these days, though. The thing is, you’d have to be living under a rock at this point to not see the damage. Yes, the media and the academic establishment (Edgar suits nearly to a man) do damage control, and try to hide it as much as they can… but it’s leaking through the cracks everywhere, now. The inconsistencies are becoming very obvious, even to the casual normie.
We’re fast approaching the time when sitting on the fence and/or saying “I don’t know” will become impossible. At that time, I do hope the remaining small-s socialists wake up.
Ignoring the problems is already impossible. The SJWs will see to that. You no longer have the right to be left alone in this country. They claim to want ‘tolerance’ but really demand validation. You will be made to agree or you will be forced to be silent.
Yes, this is true. But some still believe they can ignore the problems — they are unaware that this is impossible. I don’t imagine they will remain unaware for much longer, though.
I immediately recognized the reference when reading the title. The theme you developed around is is one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the corruption of organizations via cultural Marxism. Bravo.
Thanks! It just popped into my head for some strange reason.
Where Feminism in it’s original form may have been about equal opportunity Modern Feminism is a Prime example of the Edgar Suit. Two examples: The comet guy and the shirt and this week Stan Lee. Trashed for posting the cover of a 1960s comic showing female super heroes in honor of National Women’s day. Stan invented the genre for crying out loud. Nothing satisfies these Marxist types.
Feminism is definitely an Edgar Suit. It is, quite possibly, the most egregious example of the phenomenon.
Sanger was the evil that put on the righteous suit of feminism. When she was done and had destroyed its goodness, she discarded it and moved on to another. I documented it here…
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1537666269608534&id=219367258105115&fs=0
Sorry…wrong link…
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155256550058189&id=794173188&fs=4&ref=bookmarks
An observation:
Those who advocate ‘progressive’ stances and positions stridently are NOT interested in discussion or debate, no matter what they may say about it. Their only interest is in winning the discussion and placing themselves above you morally and/or intellectually – at the very least, in their own minds. There is a part of them that must always be defining their own self-worth in relation to how much they can pretend to look down on you.
You CANNOT change their minds using logic, reason, empathy, evidence or anything at all. Their very existence is based on leveraging ANY verbal trick to figuratively proclaim their superiority to you. Truth, facts, figures, rationality – all are irrelevant unless they can be twisted to that purpose.
The best thing to do is cut such people out of your life, of course. But should you have the misfortune of being compelled to deal with such individuals, you can defend yourself only if you go fully on offense. You must have no mercy whatsoever and must stop at NOTHING to win, using fair means AND foul. It is a zero sum game in such encounters.
Drawing from an example provided above: you mention a particular chinese restaurant in a conversation and praise the fare they offer. A nearby SJW/Progfascist proclaims “Your eating chinese food is CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!”
Response: “Hey – I am one who PRAISES chinese cuisine. By trying to prevent me from showing my respect and deference to its awesomeness, you are REPRESSING their culture, YOU FILTHY RACIST PIG!!!”
Any denials or objections by the target must be met with deliberately spiteful rejection and further attack. “Don’t tell me you can’t be racist! YOU ARE! SCUMBAG! What’s next, asshole? You want to bring back slavery and specifically pick ethnic Chinese people? And this isn’t the first time you’ve shown yourself to be a KKK sympathizer!!! What the hell is WRONG with you, you NAZI ASSHOLE?”
Give up on being reasonable or civil with such people. They don’t deserve any kindness, sympathy, politeness or forgiveness. They are an enemy, and the only way to deal successfully with an enemy is to crush them spiritually.
Treat it like a street fight. If you break your opponent’s spirit even before fists fly, you’ve essentially won. That is, in fact, the most important thing. Beating someone down with your fists will prove insufficient to guarantee you peace unless you’ve also broken their spirit.
I do not discuss this with a morbidly gleeful anticipation. I am utterly disgusted with this malaise of progressive tyranny and find myself wanting to withdraw from the world as much as I possibly can without actually turning into a Ted Kazynski. I just wish all the madness would simply go away. But it’s here to stay for the time being, and always proves worse than I imagine it to be. Case in point:
https://pjmedia.com/faith/2017/03/08/transgender-man-identifies-as-alien-plans-to-remove-genitals-adopt-kids/
Until society changes to the point that public manifestations such as theone in the above link become impossible and creatures like the one in the article are simply not found anywhere except in an insane asylum, our society will continue to be a gravely diseased one.
I think you are onto something with the street fight analogy. Effectively, you are holding them to their own rules, which, of course is one of Alinski’s Rules For Radicals. The Rules work. The Filthy Racist Pigs are exactly that, and haters as well.
Aside: President The Donald is an adept at street fighting. Witness the Republican primaries. He tore out his opponents guts, spit them out and stomped them into the mud. I doubt that any other Republican could have beaten Clinton, because like Romney and McCain, their primary was was not winning. Their primary goal was to be and remain gentleman. Trump’s goal was winning. The difference between a leader and a pack of nice guys aka losers. Doesn’t matter what your policies are if you don’t win.
Long read, but to your point and VERY worthy or your time and effort.
http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/touching-the-raw-amygdala-an-analysis-of-liberal-debate-tactics-preface/
Oh my! An impressive find. I will read it thru to the end. Thank you. 🙂
You cannot persuade a proggie with logic or evidence, true, but you can stop them short with ridicule. They do not engage in discourse to learn, but to virtue-signal. Showing them as the ridiculous creatures they are hits them where it hurts. That’s why they have no sense of humor, and why the field of entertainment may be the biggest Edgar suit of all. The Devil cannot bear to be mocked.
Kill em all, let God sort em out….. Then have drink beer, while we clean guns for the next protest…
There’s also an element of “Motte and Bailey” in there, like the Feminists who go on and on about all men are rapists, and the male population should be reduced to 10% kept in camps for breeding and hard labor, and when you call them on it, they say “How can you be against Feminism? It’s all about equality of the sexes!” They have one rational argument they hide behind when all the extreme, irrational crap on the fringes gets challenged.
Green Peace is a perfect example of a group wearing an Edgar Suit
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/kevin-libin-environmentalists-admit-you-shouldnt-believe-what-they-say-but-they-want-your-money-anyway
Most definitely. Most environmentalist groups are this way, now. If they care about the environment at all, it’s a distant second to Marxism.
Marxists are easily identified by any action or ’cause’ that treats ‘fellow humans’ as a disposable commodity. i.e. outrage at a couple thousand shootings of blacks in Chicago but in favor of the 10s of thousands aborted.
Google “Motte Bailey Slate Star Codex” for a couple of cogent articles on some of the mechanics of this process at an intellectual level (from a centrist Left point of view). It doesn’t just happen at an institutional level, it happens at a conceptual level.
For example, sexual assault is a heinous thing, everyone agrees, and nobody would want to be falsely accused of sexual assault. But sexual assault has verifiable/falsifiable criteria based on properly liberal principles of individual rights – i.e. one can in principle demonstrate that one has NOT sexually assaulted someone.
The Marxist utilizes the general animus against sexual assault (which is based on properly liberal principles, individual rights) but surreptitiously broadens the definition of “sexual assault” so that eventually anyone can be accused of sexual assault for (e.g.) a clumsy pass at a woman, and the criteria for sexual assault become deeply enmeshed with non-individualist, collectivist theoretical assumptions that are never demonstrated.
But the term retains its strong negative connotation.
The results is that people unwittingly spread the Marxist mind-virus by implicitly assenting, by default, to the broadened, theory-based Marxist definitions of terms, for fear of social shaming: i.e. they virtue signal.
But more than that: the accusation becomes a “kafkatrap”: because the criteria are now entirely collectivist and theoretical, it becomes impossible to demonstrate that one has NOT committed sexual assault. The accusation can be leveled by anyone at any time, on a whim, and the sheer accusation is enough to condemn.
This is why Marxism (just like dogmatic religions, which work on similar principles – consider witch trials, the rise of ISIS, etc.) always ends up in schisms and purges, with the result that the scum always rises; i.e. although the initial generations may be well-intentioned, those initial generations are weeded out by the very kafkatrapping toolset they used to gain ascendancy, as pure bastards use the same tools to weed THEM out, and they have no more defense than the poor liberal saps they replaced.
What universe do you live in where “Liberal” in its modern context means “individualism”? That is an absurd notion vended by indoctrinated leftwits.
Collectivists of the ctrl-left are not and never will be “individualists”.
He means liberal in the classical liberal sense. Modern Leftists appropriated the word “liberal” in much the same fashion as the Edgar Suit. They started calling themselves liberal, because they liked it much better than Communist, Marxist, Socialist, or any of those alternatives.
They’ve worn that suit for so long, now, that it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t this way.
Pretty much like they appropriated “democratic” or “democracy” or “republic”
Ironically, they called themselves “Progressives” until that carcass rotted away — and this is an example where they killed one on their own team.
Now that “Liberal” is pretty much rotted out, and people have forgotten what “progressives” are right, the Left is in the process of resurrecting “Progressive”. This might be a good time to reclaim the word “Liberal”…but only time will tell for certain.
So I was on the right track calling them Feminazi’s, Gaystapo and Econzi’s for the last 30 years, good to know.
The soft power of fundamental ideas really does set the course of history.
The most pivotal point of modern history is Jesus Christ. Think of the spread of the Christian faith by his disciples throughout the ancient world, shaping the Middle Ages and the extension of Anglo-Saxon Protestants fundamental to the founding of America – – the greatest civilization ever where common ordinary people have never enjoyed such freedom and prosperity in all history.
Consider how the rise of the Islamic faith and the fundamental ideas embodying the French revolution (man is free to develop his own answers)affected history. These fundamental ideas are still altering events in a very major way: the legacy of the French revolution is communism and democratic socialism.(generally hostile to Christianity)
Now, Think about the soft power of fundamental ideas that has yet to exert its influence: quantum physics and the discovery of the double helix of DNA – – cell biology controlled with incomprehensible amounts of stored information, not simple biochemical processes of organic compounds as originally assumed.
They both destroy the speculative foundation of that philosophy of science known as scientific materialism. The collapse of scientific materialism will create huge vacuum that will be filled with something.
Don’t underestimate the power of faith.
The good news: there is no reason not to expect a huge Christian revival in the West; Western Civilization can be saved
What is astounding is that it is over 75 years since quantum physics destroyed the speculative base of the philosophy of scientific materialism (foundational to secular humanism) and yet it remains so pervasive, but the cycle will change.
To those of you emotionally committed to scientific materialism review this — and discover the new flat earth people
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5pq7W5yRM
A shorter and more entertaining version by Terence McKenna (advocates shamanism for the coming philosophical/religious void) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ezv0cBO0xA
The genetic code is an utterly, bewilderingly vast and complicated system of information and production systems that designs and builds the proteins. There is not a scintilla of a hint of any sort of naturalistic cause that develops this kind of information. It’s not possible for a random chance to develop the simplest subroutine because, mathematically, random chance would take more time than the reputed age of the universe.
To believe in evolution is so totally anti-rational because that means accepting that blind, unintelligent random chance is vastly more intelligent than sentient cognitive awareness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWWFf8G3BKI
100% will not be enough. Under good old communism, we saw a ridiculous phenomenon, the Arbeitsnorm. Starting in the early 50s, the communist party raised their demands to the workers, and soon everybody who didn’t want to get in trouble figured out they better reported back that they had fulfilled their economic plan by 110, 115, 120 percent. You could get a nice award as ‘Hero of Labor’ if you were found to be among the 50 hardest working citizens.
Everybody in their right mind saw through this BS.
The most disgusting bunch of people I’ve met in my entire life are American college teachers. They will lecture somebody who actually lived under communism about how real communism has never been tried.
I just got done reading an article in the Washington comPost attempting to explain why people have lost trust in institutions. I thought the article over-generalized, missing the mark and really offered no insight worth the pixels. Then I came here and found everything the Washington comPost article missed! In case you want to see the comPost’s lame attempt, here’s the link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/03/americans-have-lost-faith-in-institutions-thats-not-because-of-trump-or-fake-news/?utm_term=.1e6631ca65e9
Yeah, I just posted a comment on Washington comPost linking to this article since their article misses the mark so widely.
This sounds similar to Pournelle’s “Iron Law of Bureaucracy”, which he says explains why bureaucracies go on forever. They take on a life of their own because if, for example, everyone on welfare got a decent job, then there would be no more need for a Welfare Department and all the people who work there would be out of a job. And we can’t have that…
I always enjoy stopping by, but this one is especially brilliant. Currently reading the Court of the Red Tsar. Bolshevik might be the word to take a new look at today given the escalating violence and violent rhetoric coming from the left.
Excellent elaboration on Iowahawk’s theme:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. Kill it.
3. Gut it.
4. Wear its carcass like a skin suit, while demanding respect.
I remember this tweet, now that you mention it. It is possible I was subconsciously channeling that.
E.g. virtually every so-called (or maybe, “formerly”) “Catholic” university in the United States.
Here’s a tell: “wrong side of history”. And of course “social justice”.
Quite so. They do love their ‘wrong side of history’ arguments, don’t they?
Marxism is itself an Edgar suit worn by lazy, undisciplined narcissists.
Excellent blog article. Been mulling this over for years. See the “long march” mentioned by others. When reading Gramsci, I was just struck by how evil his plans were to usurp society for his own ideological purposes. Such people presume to own and control the lives of everyone who falls under their control. Neither their property, their lives nor the lives of their children are anything other than resources to be plundered and consumed in order to bring about their Utopia.
I would add to also look up Buckley’s Law of Organizations. Named after William F. Buckley, who said that when any organization is not sufficiently committed to remaining conservative, it will surely drift leftward. I would add that maintaining a free free and liberty-oriented society requires eternal vigilance but someone already said that long ago.
Bucklet’s Law certainly holds up. As for the Long March Through the Institutions… I’ve yet to read it. But, perhaps like the Alinsky manual… I ought to make the time.
The Fawcett Society in London is an Edgar suit. Once upon a time, it was a prime mover for Women’s voting rights, and was founded by the Suffragettes. Nowadays it is filled with Left-wingers who kowtow to Islamic misogyny, and refuse to address issues which might upset the Islamists, like FGM or slavery,
They have a T-shirt, which has “This is what a Feminist looks like” written on the front. It is produced in Mauritian sweat-shops, manned by migrant workers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and Vietnam, who are paid less than a pound a day (around 1$).
I’m less familiar with politics across the pond, but it certainly sounds like an Edgar Suite, given your description.
Great post! Another tell: False equivalence and shallow thinking, e.g. “The US should offer free health care like they do in Cuba,” ignoring the horrific reality of health care in Cuba and the brutality of the regime. http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/20/shock-report-cuba-is-not-the-medical-paradise-advertised/
A small matter: the use of the term “Marxist” is overused. Today’s proponents of the ideas of Marx are called PROGRESSIVES here in America. A larger matter: The failures of Marxism and Progressive governance continue to increase, both in occurrences and costs, will altogether too little comment … and the proper lines of examination ought to emphasize the efficacy of government, with due acknowledgement of socialism’s failures and concurrent admission of the (admittedly few) successes of liberty.
.
Progressive is, itself, a bit of an Edgar Suit. They try to hide Marxism behind a name that sounds more friendly. After all, who could be against progress?
For this reason, I continue to use the term Marxist frequently — although I use Progressive, also, where suitable.
Greenpeace is another example: one of the Founders of that organization left because it had been taken over by a Left-wing fanatical group that has, at it’s core, the primary goal of stopping Progress by any means, even if it means perpetuating the greatest Hoax of our time: the Global Freezing/Global Warming/Man-made Climate Change myth.
As for above comments about Marxists and Progressives – I feel they are interchangeable; it is Marxists trying to hide their true identity as they do when they don the identity of “Greens” (perhaps not a coincidence that that color is almost as far removed from “Red” as possible, an additional subterfuge?).
Maybe we should try to lump them all, present, past, and future disguises of Marxists, under the term “Edgar”.
Probably the biggest tell I can find is an earnest seriousness – the death of humor is an excellent tell.