Organise, and pissing off the right people

Yer ORGANISE project. Right. There's been some activity lately; specifically, there's a new and more detailed spec (available here), a separate and improved section on the design philosophy (here), and some embryonic requirements/notes on implementation (here). Thanks to contributors.

Meanwhile, something interesting; you look at stories like this and this with suitable awe. As Mark Kleiman says, it's somewhere between Booz Allen Hamilton and Saul Alinsky. A few weeks back, I had the impression that there was an emerging rightwing meme that field organising itself was suspect and trrrist; the association chain went something like hippies/Weathermen>scary black people>cellular structure>Obama is a terrorist!!

Here we are; note that he's defining all kinds of things characteristic of the campaign as "terrorist".

My view is that the community organizing was actually kind of sham event that really Bill Ayers was testing him. Because the way these radicals work, they don't give you a big project until you pass muster with a small project. And so they sent him out to Chicago to see what he would do. He passed the test.

It's been softpedalled since then, but it's worth watching. This kind of anti-politics politics has been a keynote of the Bush years. For example, look at this Crooked Timber thread, specifically the quote from Jonah Goldberg.

He's not arguing against redistribution; he's arguing against the other side by simply mentioning it. It's not that their argument is wrong, it's that they have an argument. He's working the false consensus bias for all that it's worth.