Slashdot Mirror
Internet Effects on Presidential Campaigns
nickdog writes "The upcoming presidential election will probably be the first to be significantly influenced by the Internet. According to a study by Media Quotient, Bill Bradley and John McCain are in the best position to win over voters who rely on Internet news sources."
Being won over by internet presence? WTF? How about we choose a candidate based on their politics and principles? Internet or no internet, my vote goes to Harry Browne.
http://www.lp.org
http://www.self-gov.org
MoNsTeR
That could work.
Frustrating for the legitimate cowards, but it could work...
Another idea is to make anonymous cowards even less visible than they are - but let registered people "sign" cowards posts and take responsibility for the content.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Well, I agree in general that the models suck, but I'm not sure about the whole "just coming out of the ice age" thing. Temperatures in Europe now are significantly cooler than they were during the dark ages. For instance, when Leif Erikson discovered Greenland it had a habitable coastal strip, which vanished as temperatures cooled. It was also, at one point, possible to make wine as far north as Yorkshire. Anyone who has ever tried British wine will tell that you can't do that now.
On the other hand, the middle ages were substantially colder than the current period. The Thames used to freeze over every winter. This has not happened for more than a century.
"Bush", vulgar term for the female pubic region: pornographic, block it.
"Gore", vulgar term for visceral matter released by serious injury: violence, block it.
"Bradley": inoffensive, let it through.
"McCain": inoffensive, let it through.
Face it: the Internet changes *nothing*. Sure, it allows the faster dissemination of knowledge and better communication between voters, but it doesn't affect the main problem which seems to strike at the presidential race: the candidates, for lack of a better phrase, suck.
In America, anyone can become president, so long as you are a middle-of-the-road white male 'republiocrat' who is willing to base both your campaign and administration soley on opinion polls. So we must be content with what the two parties are willing to give us: either a former crack addict who is adamant about tougher sentances for drug addicts (among his many other hypocracies and past failings) and bland party men such as Gore who, together with his wife Tipper, would censor anything which offended their delicate sensibilities.
The only way out is to truly bring America into the mult-party system. Break the monopoly of the GOP and Democrats on political power.
Ok. I'm done ranting.
For now...
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
But in fact, it's hardly just one "we" anymore, at least compared to the Net culture of old (and not to imply that the old days were one big happy family or anything...).
What I find much more potentially interesting about certain internet forums (Usenet groups, things like Slashdot, other chunks of the web) is that they are automatically archived, and reasonably searchable. In that kind of environment, it is
All in all, it's very possibly a politician's worst nightmare. :-)
Babar
Oh, and for future reference: don't support anyone who thinks the flat tax will solve all of your problems. They're morons. All it does is change the current (progressive) bracket system with a simpler, flat/regressive one. A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
*sigh* it's amazing how uninformed people are. You don't want a flat tax beacuse it's regressive (not true) but you think a sales tax won't be? Are you crazy? Think about man, the less people have, the more % of there money they spend. Poor people want to buy more then food/clothing/books. A national sales tax, and suddenly getting computers to inner-city students just got 20%-30% more difficult. Talk about tech stratification. Meanwhile, Mr Rich spends a little of his (untaxed)money, and puts the rest in stocks and intrest berring bank acounts. He'd probably end up only spending about 2% of his income in taxes, wheras a low income person will spend almost the tax rate % of there income.
Oh, and no Flat-tax plan actualy flat. in general, the first $20,000 is not taxed. (plus $5,000 more per dependend). So a family of making $38,000 a year would only pay 17% of $3,000 -- $510. Not $6460.
A flat tax is by definition nither progressive or regresive. All flat tax 'plans' are progressive. A sales tax will certanly be extremely regressive.
but that said, I'm glad to see that you felt you could critize something that you obviously never even bothered to look up. I mean, why would you want to actualy know somthing, when its just as easy to spout of without knowing anything at all!?!?!
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Remember just how small a portion of the population actually bothers to vote. I think internet-users tend to be better informed and more likely to vote.
Perhaps a more important effect of the internet is the way news and rumors get around. I've heard talk show hosts bring up rumors and facts they've gotten from the internet often enough. We're a minority, but we're an influential one.
I can't remember ever seeing that kind of blatant abuse on slashdot before. Coincidence? I think not.
I doubt we'll see him again, I think he's made his point. Nonetheless, I imagine some other fLamer will take up the torch.
The best way to deal with these is never to mention them (well, the best way is to have a trusted and ever-vigilant deleter, who deals only with extremely blatant repeat posts, but this works too). They always get bored and move on.
I feel that their is a much better interpretation of their data...
They have the strongest positive and negatives for Bush and Gore, and then strong positives for Bill Bradley and John McCain.
The reason for this, is that the strong criticism of either side, are likely from those with opposite political idealogies, who, for lack of information about the other side, focus on the most predominate individual in the other parties campaign, hence Bush and Gore. Essentially, Bradley and McCain are ignored by the naysayers because they aren't considered politically important.
Just a thought...
LetterRip
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
The average AOL'er will be influenced by webpages. People that read /. probably will not as we are generally not mainstream and the canidates that are mainstream are not targeting us.
/. will not be swayed by canidates cheap website buying and such, but you must remember that the 10 million AOL'ers will be.
/.er. This is because we are informed of canidates views on specific issues while AOl'ers are generally not (They get what they know from TV ads).
The article states, "On the eve of the first series of primaries and caucuses in the 2000 presidential campaign, Democrat Bill Bradley and Republican Sen. John McCain are in the best position to win over a critical group of potential voters: Americans who use the internet for news."
I do not think that this means us - or highly advanced users. It means people that might get on and visit msnbc.com or do a little bit of Online trading. - We as a whole on
If I was an AOL'er, I would care about the candiates view on the Net somewhat and would visit thier page...
Also note that the average AOL'er is far more likely to vote for a mainstream canidate than a
TV and News is fading... and probably will be gone sooner than you think, even though net voting doesn't exist - it is very popular for people like Gov. Ventura of MN to host virtual forums. - Internet voting will appear soon... even though people may/may not trust it.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
i think a lot of the media hype around the role of the internet in the upcoming elections has a lot to do with the decreasing participation over the last few decades.
:)
some people see the internet as a means of reaching out to otherwise discontented and apathetic voters by providing more customized and relevant fora for discussion of electoral issues.
whether or not this actually occurrs is a whole other issue, cause much of the media coverage of the election itself is comparable to canned laughter: entirely predictable. will the internet be that much different?
personally i'm curious to see how slashdot covers the elections. so far i think its just fine
John Locke was a liberal thinker in his day. The U.S. use of 'liberal' seems to go through a remake every decade or so. In the fifties and sixties, you were a liberal if you voted 'black' or anti-war. In the seventies, you were liberal if you weren't in the pocket of some corporation. In the eighties, it adopted the 'tax-and-spend' connitation.
At the moment it seems to be thrown at everyone who ever spoke against one of the bullshit 'Protect our children from', 'protect Medicare from', 'protect BigCorp from' proposals. Microsoft lambasts the DOJ as liberals for prosecuting them, Buchanan calls everyone a liberal because they won't go for his form of state-sponsored religion, Gore calls Bradley liberal because he once *talked* to a gay-rights group, etc.
Ironically, 'conservative' is used much the same way among liberal circles, usually with 'bible-thumping' as a prefix. Unfortunatly, the public opinion polls shopw us a 'conservative' nation at the moment, so those circles are smaller and smaller.
.sig: Now legally binding!
At the moment gasoline is running about a $1.40/gallon. 41 cents of that is tax. It's a 30% tax already! I drive a 1979 Camaro at 12mpg 500 miles a week. That means that I gave the government $900 in gas taxes last year. What did paying the tax do for me? Less than nothing. I've replaced two shocks, a tie-rod and a tire because of their misuse of the tax.
And sin-taxes? Take smoking. In 1997, the total governmental cost of smoking related-illness was $20 billion. That very same year 24 billion packs of cigarettes were sold. I pay over a buck a pack in tax; Where else is the government mis-spending the money they said was to repay them for smoker's expenditures? And what about the untold billions they stand to make from the tobacco settlement? It certainly isn't being spent properly!
I vote we just toss all the bums out of office and start over. There's gotta be a more cost effective way of doing it!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Humanity can deal with the worst that 'Gaia' can throw at us; With little effort we survive in the hottest deserts. With slight effort we survive underwater, at the South Pole, and in the heatless vaccuum of space.
If it can't be positively shown that we are causing the effect, who are we to screw with it? We are not gods, and we shouldn't be able to dictate the how earth deals with climatic variation. You would agree that selective extermination of 'harmful' plant or animal species is wrong, how is selective tinkering with the mechanism that produced them different?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Oh, you mean the copy of 'Abbey Road' they listened to whilst smoking pot at Harvard??
Lest we forget, Tipper is the one who brought music censorship into the spotlight, and is the reason my college freshman brother can't buy Sex Pistols albums at the local record shop.. Anyone who can laugh about smoking pot as a kid and then support the mandatory sentancing bills needs a Volkswagon enema.
.sig: Now legally binding!
And yet I burned less fuel than a 767 does taking off once. Why not just sit outside Dallas/Fort Worth airport and take 'em out with LAW rockets? You'll save a lot more inner-city asthmatics!
Fuel efficient? I get better highway mileage than most of the crop of Super-SUVs, and better city than at least one of them. Just because I could be driving a sub-compact hybrid doesn't mean I will.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Sorry. I was being a prick, and you just happened to be in my sights.
I apologize.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I agree. It still amazes me that the new GM SUV monster gets a 'low-emissions' cert because of its weight. Just under eight thousand pounds of steel. Thats two 1961 Lincoln Continentals, three 1977 Firebirds or 6 1/2 1970 Triumphs. I'd worry more about the safety standards though. The modern SUV's go through much less stringent safety criteria than passenger cars. Hitting a traffic pole at 15 mph is catastrophic in a new Escalade. I did roughly the same in a '95 Mercedes and barely dented the bumper.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Maybe 2008 or 2012, but not this year. Most of the electorate is still NOT online, and those that are have better things to look at than politicians website.
Even politically conscious folks such as myself probably won't be swayed by a website.
Television and newspapers will still be the forum of choice for the next few cycles.
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
I for one do not think that the internet will play a big role in the presidential campaign (at least not now). Consider that most of the people who vote are senior citizens. Also consider that most of the people who are 'in' with computers are usually young people. Now young people are often associated with a couple of character traits which can be easily demonostrated in any slashdot discussion forum on any issue that has a social context; namely this is being a mix of apathy and defeatism or liberterian thought.
All of these factors allow for the internet to play a role just not a very large one. I for one think both Bradly and McCain(sp) are total idiots. I watched a debate that was I believe from the major party debate on NH on PBS a couple of weeks ago. Someone like George W. Bush would make a better choice about freedom compared to some of those people who could have quite easily been the real life counterparts to Ned Flanders of Simpsons fame. The real thing to look out for is when one of those 'moral' people decide to get in the hot seat.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
No, I think there are legitimate uses for anonymous posting. Someone needs to put an end to that particular poster, though. Are there any hit men (or hit women) reading this? Want to help out?
Well I just couldn't resist this little tidbit!
In general you must provide the name and address of the individual. Failing that a good picture or anything that can allow for facial expression analysis to go on. Then I can procure a handmade high powered weapon with telescopic sight produced with a custom plastic die process. A single bullet to the head will usually do the trick fired from a concealed location in a secluded area.
However the best/most sadistic way is to use a deadly toxin. Most of the best fast acting toxins include potassium cyanide caplets or hyrodgen cyanide gas that is released in a confined space like an elevator or stairwell or even the vitim's car. If you wish to avoid detection however the best method by far is to use a little thing the KGB cooked up back in the 70s. A little case involving a Bulgarian dissident who displeased them met with a rather unpleaseant end when an unidentified agent "accidentally" stumbled into him on a city street. What then occured was a small fine needle jabbed into his leg cavity implanting a metal sphere containing a small ammount of a deadly nerve toxin. He incidentally died about 24 hours later. So yes it is possible. What is really troubling is that (at least for me). The text of the little SMARGLE posts are in fact particularly nasty when viewed in IE5 (I am in it right now). Has anyone else noticed this? Perhaps a little DoS attack directed at the httpd log acces files will obtain something.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Considering that 95%+ of online news is simply reprinted newspaper news (particularly from the associated press), what does this really mean? It seems to me that it's just an equivalent measure of positive stories in the paper press.
I will say that there is probably quite a bit of influence from the "new media" like Drudge. How much influence I think is impossible to say, and I don't think this study does anything to measure it.
I find the more interesting question is whether TV news is gaining less influence. The last 30 years has seen a huge surge in the power of national TV news. Are we seeing a return to people getting more information from printed sources? If so, I can't help but think this is a positive thing. I tend to think that people's brains are more engaged when they are reading something than when they have hysterical blow-dried anchors feeding information in just the right tone of voice.
---
Regardless of what the study has to say, I'm hoping that politics move to the Internet later than sooner. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician purchased an e-mail list? It's bad enough that I start getting political junk mail when I subscribe to magazines. The thought of getting stuff from the Republican party when I dump information into the Nasdaq or Forbes is pretty repulsive, or even from the Democratic national party when I submit something to a tree hugger's site. ::sigh::
Let politics stay in the physical world as long as possible so that it has the farthest to catch up when it finally does move online. If the Internet is really about change, then let's not bring dead weight from politics into the mess of things in the online world.
The seporation of the digital world from the physical one is something that I personally enjoy a great deal. Not hearing about Clinton (except when it comes to crypto) this, Bush that, or Gore bleah bleah bleah is almost comforting. Sure politics are important, don't get me wrong, I vote and like to think that I am good at educating myself about whatever is on the ballot before an election, but the absence of politics online... is nice to say the least.
I hope politics stay offline for as long as possible... well... until the day when we have a canidate that knows (or knew) how to program in C and knows the first bit about how networks operate (or even the Internet for that matter, but I may be getting wishful at this point). The sad part is that I think I may have to settle... There are choices in soft drinks, operating systems, but not in politicians...
-- Sean Chittenden
I'm a proponent of AC posting, but the multiple, identical posts eating up the page is pretty damn annoying. One is easy to skip over, but 4 or 5 pages gets kind of tedious. Possibly some sort of cap regulating the # of posts allowed during a certian amount of time could be implimented to prevent things such as this from happening (and prevent actual users from accidentally double posting). If the poster has to wait 3 minutes (or so) between each message, that'll probably cause them to become impatient and lose intrest.
I can't imagine any reasonable grounds to object to this on, since it usually takes 3 minutes or so just to read the relevant articles or posts. Saves users' time, prevents multiple trolls.
Just a thought...
-SaintAlex
Observe, reason, and experiment.
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
Al Gore's website at www.algore2000.com
is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) secured_by_Raven/1.4.2 PHP/4.0b3 on Linux.
Bill Bradley's website at www.billbradley.com
is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 on Solaris.
George W. Bush's website at www.georgewbush.com
is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
John McCain's website at www.mccain2000.com
is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.4 FrontPage on IRIX
When you say "classic liberal", you're very nearly using the exact terminology. There is a distinction to be made between what is now often called "classical liberalism"... the position of John Locke, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, and the "modern liberalism" of FDR and Ted Kennedy. The two share some positions, such as freedom of the press and sharp separation of church and state, but on issues such as gun rights and the free market classical liberals are aligned with today's US "conservatives".
The term "libertarian" was coined by people who saw themselves in the classical liberal tradition, but who found that in the US the term "liberal" had, oddly, become sturdily affixed to a populist, federalist position. From my understanding, the term "liberal" retains somewhat more of its original meaning in Europe and elsewhere... perhaps in Canada as well.
And IMHO, the real offense of income tax is against privacy. The 16th amendment needs to go.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
George W. Bush doesn't have a very good "online reputation" (I wasn't impressed with his buying up domain names--if people don't like you, they'll tell you, and if you buy the domain name they wanted to get, they'll just like you less.) and I've never liked Al Gore that much because of his stances on encryption, Clipper, and the like. (even if he did invent the internet... ;)
But... how many people out there get most of their political news from the internet? Maybe that would make a good slashdot poll, because I know I don't, but I'm sure other people do. I know the Starr report was a very popular download, so maybe this will start to make a difference. Heck, ever since Byte disappeared from the shelves, I haven't really supported dead-tree media at all...
Oh, and for future reference: don't support anyone who thinks the flat tax will solve all of your problems. They're morons. All it does is change the current (progressive) bracket system with a simpler, flat/regressive one. A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A little nmap in my life
A little portscan and I'm all right
nmap number five...
[root@athens jhaas]# nmap -sS -O www.algore.com -v
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.2.0-pre6 - 2.2.2-ac5
Wow, Al might be running Linux! Maybe he really did invent the Internet. OK, let's try Bill Bradley, my favorite..
Remote operating system guess: Solaris 2.6 - 2.7
Hmm... robust, enterprise level Solaris. OK, it's UNIX at least. I can respect that. It doesn't look like they're actually running it, which also makes sense.
I made the shocking (shocking!) discovery that George W. Bush laughs the same way as his dear old dad, that weird, stuttered giggle. Unfortunately he's probably going to win.
Initiating SYN half-open stealth scan against www-01.georgewbush.com (206.104.218.130)
It's going incredibly slowly, so I'll come back to that later. As you can tell, I am an 31337 h4x0r, and I own these b0x3s. Let's move on to the aliens from outer space candidates, Keyes and Bauer..
Woah! George W's just finished.. no wonder it took so long -- there's scads of ports open.
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=85 (Medium)
Sequence numbers: 25507B62 25507CFC 25507F35 255081B8 255083EC 2550866D
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 465 seconds
Hah! Point for me. No surprise there that George W's campaign would probably be running NT or something icky like that. It just figures, you know? I suspect if Bradley's campaign was running their own box, it'd have Linux on it. And stiff old Gore would have Solaris or SCO or something like that. Anyway.. on to the space men..
Bauer doesn't seem to have a site up yet, according to bauer2000.com. nmap thinks it's running:
Remote operating system guess: BSDI BSD/OS 3.0
Hmm. Ok. Keyes... scan is going slowly.. maybe I'll do Hatch's for fun and giggles while that grinds away. Much better. Ooh, rail on the administration's abuses, Orrin. You go with your bad self.
Remote operating system guess: Solaris 2.6 - 2.7
No big surprise there. A buttoned down UNIX, if there is such a thing. Who thinks Hatch knows what a UNIX is?
Keyes server has shown us that port 80 is open (which I hadn't already figured out by going there with Netscape..), and is going about as quickly as Bush's. So we'll just ignore that, just like the voters will...
And last, Mr. Flat Tax himself, Steve Forbes. Solaris again. Hmm. Well, interesting. Gore and Bradley were reversed in my mind. Oh -- McCain.. nmap didn't know what to make of that one, so I'll be sending in the fingerprints. Hmm!
Amazing what you can learn while you're supposed to be beta testing something else.
-- haaz.
"The Internet will matter more in this election than any previous". Well, DUH! I mean, the internet has been growing at a prodigious pace for the last 10 years. Of course it matters more now than before!
Does it matter enough? Enough for what? To make a difference? Of course it will make a difference, it is one of the main news outlets (Smaller than TV and newspaper but larger than radio) for most of the US population. And we know media makes a huge difference in elections.
But, the nature of the internet (see what you want, at least more so than TV) makes it less helpful to candidates. So, yes it will make a difference in the sense it will be used like every other media outlet to spread propaganda. No, this isn't a revolution, just an evolution.
--Nick
A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle).
You do not neded to do away with capital gains tax.. just income tax. The money needs to go someplace. I guess investment firms could be forced to deduct the tax automatically when you sell stuff, so individual people would not need to fill out taxes unless they actually took possetion of the stock. I suppose you would also need to keep things like inheretance tax.
(1) It's much harder to evade.
(2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people. (3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes.
These are all good fine reasons, but you missed a very importent reason: people see how much they are paing every day (well companies may include it in the cost of the product, but prices go up when they rase it, so it is still better then the gov. hiding it via paycheck deductions and stuff).
Related to tax reform: It is also worth mentioning that we need to privatise social security, but not give some agency the power to effect the market by having lots of dollars to invest. I supposet he best way to do this would be to allow people to open up social security accounts with financial institutions. People would be allowed to transfer money they have paid to socail security in the past into these accounts. The social security administration would restrict how much money people could have in privatized accounts (you don't want everyone to take the money out now or we would have big problems), but there would be soo much preasure on them to let people have more of their money that they wuold need to keep raising the precentage every year. Eventually, we would have a nice mandatory private investment system which did not need to invest in gov. bonds. Medicare could be a mandatory inshurace attached to these private accounts.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I, for one, am voting for the man who invented the Internet! BTW, do the zeros after his name on the bumper stickers mean anything?
- SD
The Internet is a wild card. A lot of us aren't listening to what we are being told we will be doing. I've already considered McCain and Bradley. I won't bother to go into a lengthy discussion of them here. It isn't relevant.
I am not a statistic. I am not a number. I am a minority of one and so is each and every person reading this. Don't let the pollsters tell you what you are likely to do. Go out and read the candidates' web sites. Read the candidate comparisons that are going to appear all over the web over the next 10 months. And make an intelligent decision.
Too many media outlets pretend that nothing matters in a presidential race each the Democratic and Republican Party nominees and the photo ops. They don't dig. They tell the stories that will attract the biggest audiences. The net not only doesn't have to do that, there is really no way to constrain it to do that.
I suggested it here before, and I'll suggest it again. It would be interesting to see Slashdot polls about how Slashdot readers will be voting. I would be particularly interested if a few of us, and I'll volunteer, post links to useful web sites with analyses by a variety of interest groups of the candidates' positions. I'm as interested in what the people I wouldn't trust with a soggy match think of the candidates as I am in what the people I like think of them.
Let's give them participatory democracy and see what happens. I bet there are candidates who will love it. It will attract the underdogs, and probably the lunatic fringe as well... but what a show.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.