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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.
[ref]
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 astroturf 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 LAST_EXIT_FOR_DEMOCRACY
the aftermath of the election I had
decided that the evidence for fraud
was shakey.
I now think it quite likely the
Republicans have 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") have
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"
(4) "you don't have any *evidence*, this is just statistical"
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, For example:
to avoid sounding grossly ignorant.
Or I would oversimplify on purpose, There's a popular factoid: "80%
to avoid complicating a rhetorical of the vote in 2004 was counted on
point. 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 -- and
while the later 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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