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THE_ROVERS

                                             November 27, 2006

                                 ... and determination against
                                     the rovers.
There's a new breed out
on the net now.

It's not just amateurs
and fanatics any more,
now we've got the
professionals.

    The hired guns;
    The astroturf brigade;
    Jammers and provacateurs...        PROVOCATEUR

This last election season,
I've started calling them the
"Rover Boys", though there's
no way to know if they're
really agents of Rove and not,
for example, members of the
Pentagon's new on-line propaganda
squad.
                                                 SURROGATE_TRUTH
   It's also, of course, not
   always that easy to distinguish
   a sincere advocate from a
   paid one -- but very often I          HUMANITY_METER
   think it can be done.


   The question might be raised, though:
   What difference does it make?

   Aren't you supposed to
   just address the words
   and not the speaker?

     Yes, that's the usual advice,
     and it's not a bad approach:
     even if you correctly
     identify a roverboy, it
     doesn't necessarily gain
     you anything to point it out--
     at best it's a distraction,
     at worst you may end up
     discredited as paranoid.

     The most important thing
     about it though is your
     mental model; your sense
     about what you're trying
     to accomplish.                  Against a Rover, you have
                                     no hope of "conversation"
        Once you get the             there is only "debate".
        sense that your
        opponent is failing          FULL_MONTAIGNE
        the Voigt- Kampf
        test, there's no
        point in trying to
        address them as a
        human being.

             It is not true, however,
             that there's nothing you
             can learn from a rover,
             however the things you
             expect to learn change...

             Instead of getting insight
             into the way a different
             mind thinks, you can start
             trying to identify the
             standard talking points,
             try to determine something         Walking back
             about their current strategy,      the scat?
             make inferences about what
             they're worried about...


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