Goes To Twelve: Catching Up On My Other Favorite War

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Catching Up On My Other Favorite War

Drugs: still winning. From Reason On-Line

• A member of the Kuwaiti royal family has been sentenced to death for drug trafficking.
• The Atlanta Journal Constitution delves into the culture of the city's narcotics policing, and finds a system rife with perverse incentives. The paper finds that the raid that led to the shooting death of Kathryn Johnston promised a kilo of cocaine -- a one in 1,000 bust. The paper found that pressure to make arrests and the lure of the professional esteem that comes with a big bust encourage police to take shortcuts and manipulate the facts to secure a search warrant. None of this is new or unique to Atlanta, of course.
• GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has hired Mel Sembler as a top money man for his campaign. Sembler, you may remember, is a fierce drug warrior, and in the 1980s and 90s ran Straight, Inc., the string of "tough love" teen rehab centers frequently accused of child abuse.
• Outstanding piece attacking the drug war in the NY Times over the weekend from guest columnist Orlando Patterson.
• A new report comes to the striking conclusion that -- surprise! -- Canada's war on drugs is an "utter failure."

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Alinsky's Rules For Radicals

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Goes To Twelve

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Catching Up On My Other Favorite War

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