Edgley Park, Stockport

Edgley Park, Stockport
Originally uploaded by campdavemorecambe

Ideological Blinders

Against whom is the following comment directed?

It’s not intelligence, exactly, that’s the issue. I think it’s the lack of a moral compass or sense of guilt which allows them to use any and all means, including outright falsehoods, against their percieved [sic] enemies, and allows them to hypocritically do the same things their percieved enemies did (or vice versa, to accuse their opponents of wrongdoing for things which they themselves did). It’s a sheer instrumentality in which there is nothing but tactics.

They don’t even have an internalized sense of shame anymore, though they can still, at times, be shamed into some restraint if the right leverage is applied.

I've seen any number of examples just like it, on blogs representing all manner of ideological persuasions.  Sadly it's deeply paranoid and there's little chance that you could get ever get its author to give up the point, just as you would have little chance of moving his opposite number.

66/365 The one man who made us Equal

66/365 The one man who made us Equal

Originally uploaded by ▲Maria

Operation Mincemeat

You are a British Intelligence officer; you have an opposite number in the enemy Intelligence...  What you, a Briton with a  British background, think can be deduced from a document does not matter.  It is what your opposite number, with his German knowledge and background, will think that matters--what construction he will put on the document... In other words, you must remember that a German does not think and react as an Englishman does, and you must put yourself in his mind (Montagu, Ewen. The Man Who Never Was (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 39-40).