Wolf dens, not lone wolves, the norm in U.S. Islamic State plots

COL Ted Mc - I am so ashamed of myself. I, of all people, should have caught on sooner. I had to go to the bathroom to give myself a moment to think. You are mixing contexts to get away with the misuse of words.

Once upon a time when I taught computer technology classes, I used to warn students that I would be using a lot of words that sounded familiar to them but in the context of computer programming, they would have new meanings, meanings that they had never heard before. Context, I explained was everything. I even told them a story to illustrate my point. I began by asking them to describe a "frog". Then I explained how "frog" was an entirely different thing in different contexts: Biology, flower arranging, railroading, etc.

You are using the dictionary definition of a "progressive" in a political discussion. In politics a "progressive" is a member of the "progressive movement".

http://jackdurish.com/short-stories/whats-a-frog

CPT Jack Durish - Captain; You have probably noticed that I use a lot of terms in quotation marks. I do that since that is the accepted way of indicating that the word is being used in a specific sense.

A self-described "conservative" might well NOT be "conservative" at all. Canada's "Conservative Party" would qualify as "Wildly left-wing" in some segments of the American polity.

A self-described "progressive" who actually advocates retrograde changes is NOT a "progressive" person at all, they are the type of "arch-conservative" frequently described as a "reactionary".

(Admittedly, it is possible to make progress BOTH forward and backward so there is SOME [slight] justification for ANYONE who is not satisfied with the status quo to self-designate themselves as a "progressive", but that just makes things REALLY confusing. [On the other hand, I suppose that it all depends on your goals whether you are "masking progress" or not.])

Personally, I look at the desired goal as being responsible, responsive, reliable, reputable, and remote government. I use "responsible" to mean "actually does as much of what they said they were going to do to get elected once they get elected". I use "responsive" to mean "pays attention to ALL sectors of their electorate". I use "reliable" to mean "doesn't weasel word what it is doing so that it looks like it is doing something that it isn't doing and so that it doesn't look like it is not doing something that it is doing". I use "reputable" to mean "says what it means, means what it says, and doesn't flap in the breeze of a fickle polity". And I use "remote" to mean "keeps its cotton picking fingers out of my pocket as mush as possible and doesn't have people hanging around telling me what I am allowed to do, think, or say (generally accepted criminal activity exempted)".

In short, I try to conduct my thinking without the need for artificial definitions for terms because that way lies "NewSpeak".

COL Ted Mc - I'm not concerned with goals. Those are usually excused as "good intentions". I prefer results. Positive results. Those of the progressive movement have long acted on good intentions and excused results (such as the murder of millions) by claiming the moral high ground of their good intentions. I particularly hate "newspeak" aka "political correctness". It is an infringement on freedom of speech, an attempt to prevent us from discussing the bad results from good intentions. We should, after all, leave discussions to our intellectual superiors, shouldn't we? Thus, I use terms carefully. In political discussions a progressive and a Progressive is a adherent to the progressive ideology. Now people try to make up explanations of what the progressive ideology is. Many say, for example, it contains the word "progress", thus they must be for progress. Then they claim all worthy progress as their own work product even though they either had nothing to do with it or, in fact, stood opposed to it. When people attempt this, I will always bar their way with reality. Sorry if that annoys anyone, but we can't have honest discussions without using words honestly. Woodrow Wilson lectured the American people on progressivism and it remains unchanged from his original conception. European intellectuals escaping Nazi Germany then picked it up. They related to it because it appealed to their cultural background grounded on aristocracy and the veneration of intellectualism. They saw a new type of aristocracy, not based on birth, but rather PhD's. They wormed their way into American academia and have spread their ideology from there. There are many Americans who find an appeal in this ideology, even if they don't qualify to be a member of the intellectual aristocracy. They take comfort in knowing that their intellectual superiors are ready, willing, and able to take responsibility for making decisions. What they fail to realize is that when the aristocracy takes responsibility, they also take liberty.

CPT Jack Durish - Captain; You might find the term "SOMAN" useful.

As described by an old friend of mine - SOMANs (and in particular "educational theorists", "sociologists", and "criminologists") fear and distrust any theory that can be fully explained by resorting to words of less than five syllables which already exist in the English language without assigning previously unknown definitions to those words. (A "SOMAN" is a SOcial MANipulator.) - can be of any ideological stripe but the one ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL characteristic that they must possess is that

"They have to JUST KNOW what you 'should' do to get what you 'should' want because that is the way that society 'should' be run and if you do do what you 'should' do then everything 'should' turn out the way that it 'should' because their plan 'should' work and you 'should' completely ignore the fact that it has never worked before."

and if that isn't enough to send "shoulders" up and down your spine I don't know what will.