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POLITICAL_ANIMALISM
November 10, 2006
In the weeks before the election I chose to
spend a lot of time on slashdot.org behaving
as a political animal.
http://slashdot.org/~doom
As for why:
o Slashdot, for all it's flaws, is a national
(actually world-wide) forum where I'm a "well
respected", experienced member. It may have
been my best shot at being influential.
o There are at least two different things that
"got my blood up", that made me ready to
fight:
(1) I'm pretty sure that the slashdot discussion
forums were under attack by hired gun
Republican sock-puppets (I call them "The THE_ROVERS
Rover Boys", with what accuracy I know not).
An astro-turf campaign on my home turf? I
was determined to give these guys a hard
time.
(2) I'd been reading up on the 2004 election
fraud issue, and I was convinced that
I'd been conned: in the aftermath of the LAST_EXIT_FOR_DEMOCRACY
election I had eventually decided that the
evidence for fraud was much shakey.
I now think it quite likely the
Republicans had stolen a presidential
election (if not two in a row), and
both the Democrats and the press
(including a large part of the
"liberal press") had just rolled over
and played dead.
Mostly the Rover Boys were pretty easy to deal
with... they seemed to have a list of a small number of
talking points on the election fraud issue, and the
points really just weren't that good:
(1) "polls are so *inaccurate*"
(2) "Democrats do it too"
(3) "you're just a conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truthies", and so on.
These guys also didn't seem to be very good at
dealing with follow-ups (I have a theory that
their political instincts are still tuned up
for Old Media where you can get in a jab and
not have to worry about an immediate
counter-jab).
But every so often, one of them
would say something that was a
little harder for me to deal
with, something that would
really require some research for A particular difficulty for me is the
me to deal with throughly to my Blumenthal site, mysterypollster.com,
satisfaction -- which has a lot of material that I'm
just not that familiar with, even now.
One of the great drawbacks of slashdot
is that everything moves *fast* there.
When a controversial story goes up, the
discussion board rapidly explodes into
hundreds of posts, none of which are
going to be read by anyone a day later.
You can't just let something sit and
reply to it tomorrow, the way you might
with a usenet discussion; if you're
going to do it at all, you've got to do
it *now*: so I made a conscious
decision to be a little sloppy and to EMPTY_HAND
fight a little dirty (by my standards).
For example, instead of checking to
make sure I had it right, I might bluff
and write a response first, and *then*
back-up and check, and possibly write a
second response later if it seemed
needed.
Yes, I care about truth, but having
gotten a strong impression of what I
thought was true, I was willing to
exaggerate my case, because there
were election deadlines looming, and
the slashdot dynamic was pressing
down on me to move quickly...
There were times where I would dance
around blank areas in my knowledge,
to avoid sounding grossly ignorant.
Or I would oversimplify on purpose,
to avoid complicating a rhetorical
point.
For example:
There's a popular factoid: "80%
of the vote in 2004 was counted on
electronic voting machines",
which I passed on once or twice.
But that conflates the stats for
the Diebold Accu-Vote machines
with the stats for the ES&S
optical scanner systems -- those
are certainly not perfect, but at
least they *do* have a paper trail.
That "80%" figure is probably
quite correct, and yet also,
in all honesty it could be
that it overstates the
magnitude of the problem.
But I didn't feel like
I had time for that kind
honesty at the time --
I played along with this
"talking point", but in
retrospect I think that was
a mistake -- that's the
sort of "cute" maneuver
that makes me angry when I
find out someone has pulled
it on me.
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