Comment on Israel activists infiltrate Labor Party in 'grassroots' putsch to hit Greens - Michael West
Nath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
They’re putting a lot of weight on the word ‘infiltrate’, here. If I joined the local Labor party chapter, went along to meetings and participated in discussions, have I ‘infiltrated’ the Labor party?
The article spends a lot of time talking about these people and very little on the impact (if any) they had on the policy of the Labor party. It sounds like the guy tried to influence proceedings and was shot down. Did I miss something?
Yeah, theres definitely no point where you could say they had ‘X’ real world effect on internal policy.
But in terms of political access, and financial backing theres certainly lots there. And those combined have the potential to have big effects on policy.
I took it as a carrion call for the Labor party to be alive to an active campaign to influence the Party in a direction thats not necessarily in the best interests of the their Party, or more importantly the Nation.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
I would say “infiltrate” implies that:
For 1, “relatively large” merely means enough to create a highly visible caucus within meetings. 1 or 2 probably wouldn’t do it unless the group being infiltrated was very small. In a large meeting, even 10% would be relatively large. In smaller groups, a higher percentage might be needed (1 person in a group of 10 is easier to dismiss as a crazy fringe than 100 people in a group of 1,000).
2 may be very difficult to prove. 4 even more so.
4 could include voting 1 that party, engaging informally with them in social media or IRL, volunteer work, etc. But mostly it’s an internal feeling that would be literally impossible to prove.
You can’t necessarily prove it absolutely, but even proving 2 alone provides pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the rest of it is quite likely.