Why the Right is Behind Online

by: Matt Stoller

Tue Feb 12, 2008 at 12:03


From Erick Erickson, Redstate editor and influential Republican.

Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online-though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives "have families because we don't abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism."

Now, being a doctor who performs abortions is in fact a job, so one might find conflicting narratives in Erick's quote.  And if the way to use the internet well politically is to up the number of abortions, then the GOP is kind of fucked.  

At any rate, Erick, keep those insights coming and above all, please stay classy.

Matt Stoller :: Why the Right is Behind Online

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Why the Right is Behind Online | 28 comments
We have orange-stained fingers because we believe in CHEETOHS!!!! (0.00 / 0)

aoei (0.00 / 0)
Dailykos linked to a study which shows that the liberal blogs link to, and "substantively" rebut conservative blogs less often than the reverse.

I don't doubt it's true, because this is the kind of thing we'd be "refuting" if we bother to read conservative blogs.

This is RedState, which is actually one of the more "reasonable" right wing sites.  As hilarious as that is.

I Spent Some Time Posting At Swords Crossed--A TOTAL Waste Of Time (4.00 / 2)
When you try to argue with wingers, you soon discover it's virtually impossible, because there's no there there.

I participated at Swords Crossed for a few months back in 2006, and could not for the life of me get the leading conservative blogger there to factually defend a single argument he made.

I spent hours and hours and hours researching and composing posts that he responded to either by ignoring, or by consulting his inner Rush.

But the real problem at Swords Crossed was the liberal gatekeepers--including one who used the term "islamofascist", tryin' to reclaim the term for the left, don'cha know!--who didn't like my confrontational tone.  It was, apparently, just fine for conservatives to slander liberals as a whole, but it was not okay for me to call them slanderous liars when I had specific evidence of their lies and slander documented right in front of them.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I debate right wingers (4.00 / 2)
at the somethingawful.com debate subforums (surprisingly good considering the nature of the site itself as a comedy/satire site).

My experience is the same.  The hard core conservatives make the most empty and specious arguments, use their cyclic link farms which all self-reinforce but have no basis as "citation" and are only beaten down by mob rule, they never admit error or concede a point made with references, empirical evidence and sound logical analysis.

It's not an ideology, it's a pathology.  Altemeyer nails these people.  The debate is only worth engaging so as to prevent the people amenable to reason lurking from the sidelines from being lured in.  

[ Parent ]
Love it. (4.00 / 1)
Your statement:

Conservatism: It's not an ideology, it's a pathology.

Now there is a bumpersticker.  

We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  

[ Parent ]
If only it weren't so true (0.00 / 0)
because arguing with a pathology is damn difficult. So many on the right have no real interest in debate, yet they can't really be ignored, either (since they have power). It would be nice if there were an alternative to shouting them down, perhaps there is? This is where we need slogans, unfortunately. It seems like the most effective means of getting the right to think. I say seems because I haven't thought about it much, it's just too ugly to think about. Daunting, too. How on earth does one go about convincing someone like the type Colbert lampoons? Honestly, I've had to deal with people like this (it takes awhile to come to the realization that what I'm seeing is real) and it's all I can do to keep from simply walking away without saying a word.
[ Parent ]
"Authoritarianism" (0.00 / 0)
is more like what most of these people who considers themselves "conservative" suffer from, and yes, it is a pathology.

A knee-jerk, fear-based primate behavioral tendency to cling tight to your coconuts and fall in line behind the chimp who bellows loudest. In individuals it's mainly just annoying, but in group situations it can be brutal and dangerous.

Hopefully evolution will weed out this sad vestige of  the reptilian brain but meanwhile looks like we'll have to suffer through circular arguments, Code Yellow Alerts, and Bill O'Reilly.  

[ Parent ]
Stanford Prison Experiment (0.00 / 0)
http://www.prisonexp.org/

this describes (through a slide show) an extremely interesting
and thought provoking experiment on human nature, with obvious implications for our present predicament.

[ Parent ]
Precisely! (0.00 / 0)
You are playing to the audience of lurkers.

Something related happened with me when I first joined AOL back in 1994 or so.  I'd moved to Long Beach from Venice and my ISP options were limited at the time, to say the least. So AOL it was.  I found the Rush Limbaugh forum, and it was pretty much what you might expect, a fact-free zone.  Though not that busy at the time.  Still, I decided it was worth cleaning out.  So I took FAIR's report on his "Reign of Error" along with his lame responses and FAIR's counter-responses, and I re-edited them into a straight, point-by-point format, organized by topic area, then posted one topic a week for however long it took.

Just shut the Dittoheads up completely.  They had nothing.

A little bit of whinning crept in the last couple of weeks or so, but I simply referred back to the already-posted record.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Sooo..... He's In Favor of Gay Marriage and Gay Adoption? (0.00 / 0)
That's larn 'em!  Let'em get married and raise kids, and keep 'em off the internet!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
Stephen Colbert on the Liberal Bloggers..... (0.00 / 0)
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/...

Brilliant Stuff! Much Smarter than ErickErick

We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  

redstate (0.00 / 0)
That Redstate site is in trouble. I have an account there, just so I can keep an eye on them and leave the occasional annoying comment.  I got two fundraising appeals from them in recent months, begging for money and whining that the lefty sites like Kos have all the technology and and money and smarts.  They were those most pathetic fundraising efforts I've ever seen.  Their participation rate is way down-- check out the number of comments in their threads compared to our far more active progressive sites.
I just got an account. (4.00 / 1)
We should all plan a day and swarm them with posts and comments. They'd be dazed and conservative.  

We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  
[ Parent ]
they'll just ban you (0.00 / 0)
which they excel at.  One of their problems is that they banned too many disloyal Republicans.  I don't think swarming them is a good thing, but it would be pointless anyway.



New Jersey politics at Blue Jersey.

[ Parent ]
I don't know (0.00 / 0)
not that I really think it would be worth while, but you could probably get 10-20 people together, spend a bit of time making not-offensive comments and recommending them, and then using trusted user status to troll rate the hell out of everyone before they figured out what's going on.

Obviously, moderators would easily repair the damage even if you could get TU status without them noticing, so I don't think there's much point.  But it does seem to me a built in danger on any user-moderated site.

I'm assuming here that RedState operates on the basic Scoop model, is that right?

I support John McCain because children are too healthy anyway.

[ Parent ]
well, (4.00 / 9)
between smoking pot and having tons of freaky sex, I really don't have time for these internets either.  
why doesn't Hucklberry get more small donor contributions? (0.00 / 0)
that has been perplexing me for awhile.  Clearly there are many, many middle or low income voters that will pull out a few bucks for an inspired candidacy as shown by Ron Paul.  But why haven't more of the christian right voters open their wallets for Huckster?  Even if he only snared say $25 from 100,000 hard right christians that still should have netted him $2.5 million but I see no evidence of that. Or is it trickling in just recently like his "boast" that he snared $250k on Friday?  
What I ponder is, are hard right christians wary of making online donations on the internet?  Do they shun the internet to the point that it has been giving us on the left a gigantic fundraising advantage?  are the christian right so cheap that they refuse to contribute to candidates?  I mean, they give heavily to their church so why not to their preferred candidate?  I know that Ken Copeland has been passing the plate around for Huckabee so have they figured out a way to launder that money into Hucklberry's campaign?
Either way, totally glad that thier online operations are atrocious  
The Intertubes are tools of the devil!!!! (4.00 / 3)
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!!!

((((someone snaps a picture))))

AAAARGH!!  You stole my soul!!!

Thanks,

Grandpa Simpson

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

[ Parent ]
Left-Wingers Don't Have Jobs (4.00 / 1)
Because they don't believe in capitalism... and because magical dKos technology allows them to conjure money up out of thin air...  
That's Precisely Why That Socialist Al Gore Invented The Internent! (0.00 / 0)
He just knowed they'd be a conjurin' money like it was goin' out of style...

See what happens once you go off the gold standard?

spooooooky Danny Elfman music

    ((((someone snaps a picture))))

    AAAARGH!!  You stole my soul!!!

    Thanks,

    Grandpa Simpson



"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Erick the RedState has an excuse... (4.00 / 1)
Suppressing votes in Georgia does take up a lot of time.
Classy? I'll show you classy (4.00 / 1)

Smile for your closeups, GOP online gurus!

the dour -- er, four -- amigos

[Erickson's the one on the left -- followed by David All, Patrick Ruffini, and the Heritage Foundation's Robert Bluey.


You have befouled and besmirched Star Trek. (0.00 / 0)


We won the Battle. Now the Real Fight for Change Begins. Join MoveOn.org and fight for progressive change.  
[ Parent ]
No no, I forgot to tell the good part (0.00 / 0)
That was a photo illustration of them prepared for a published article. In Campaigns and Elections magazine. I sh*t you not.
[ Parent ]
No, The Good Part Is (0.00 / 0)
that Gene Roddenberry was one of the most explicitly liberal producers in the history of American TV (the original Star Trek was the only program Martin Luther King would allow his kids to watch, for example) and the only actual position for these wannabe losers in the Star Trek universe is not even as imposters wearing the uniform, but as the alien bug parasites who try to take over Starfleet in "Conspiracy", TNG Episode #25.

Oh, and, BTW:

According to Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, the parasites were originally intended to be working for the Borg. The destruction of the colonies in the following episode ("The Neutral Zone") would then have led into the Borg's introduction in the second season premiere. However, due to the writers' strike of 1988, the Borg storyline was pushed back several months, and divorced from any relationship to the "Conspiracy" storyline. There was no further on-screen connection or reference to the conspiracy until its mention in passing in The Drumhead in the fourth season.

So, yup, not even worthy to be called "Borg."

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I know you're just joking (4.00 / 1)
but perhaps we should tone down the hillbilly accents/references. It just makes the objects of this 'humor' even more convinced that the left has no real concern for their lives. And if I've tempted any of you to lapse into the 'white trash' name calling, it might be worth remembering that, were it not for these people, we would not have a country. It's in the history books.
Being Democrats (4.00 / 2)
...my wife and I were going to abort our kids (and, in their early teen years, it was sometimes a grave temptation!), but instead sent them to Carleton and Swarthmore to major in Liberal Fascism.
Christ (0.00 / 0)
This guy probably cranked Highway to the Danger Zone, and fist-pumped after typing, "...we're capitalists." Yeah, so what if they can't compete and need a subsidy to keep Redstate afloat? That dude is Ice Man.  
Why the Right is Behind Online | 28 comments
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