I have NOT missed any election since I was 18! Now, for the first time in my life, I am actually giving very serious thought to NOT voting! I've had it!
BTW, not your comment, all of these damn articles re: election/vote theft.
Ah, brave troll, I am so glad you spoke up. It is indeed a point that needs to be made:
the fact that the Republicans appear to have a finger on the scale does mean that they totally
own the outcome. The first defense against electoral corruption is a strong turn-out, so
get out there and vote.
Also, the election activist types are encouraging everyone to bring video cameras and so on with them,
to make an attempt at recording anything strange that's going on (just don't point it at someone
over in another booth, eh?). You might think that there wouldn't be anything at all to video tape
(electronic fraud at least in principle could be totally invisible), but weirdly enough there have
been reports of visible "vote-flipping" on touch screen machines, and so on. Further, you might expect
some of the more conventional voting fraud to be in use (as it was in Ohio in 2004) -- the video
of insanely long lines stretching around the block on a cold, rainy night is far more effective
than any description of the situation could be.
In the middle years of America's history, elections were rigged by parties like Tammany hall through voter coercion and having supporters vote several times in several different districts (or multiple times at a single poll). Now we can rig elections without having to force anyone to do anything. No one is under threat of pain or death for failing to 'vote early and often'. Rather, it's all kept behind the scenes inside microchips that don't care one way or another who wins as long as they run their programs correctly.
You may say you want 'fair' elections, but you don't really want a return to the bad old days, do you?
No, not really, but returning to those bad old days might very well be an improvement on the bad new days.
Wholesale, undetectable election fraud has become a possibility using the types of electronic voting machines
that are currently in use ("DREs", "direct recording electronic" machines that have no paper trail being the
worst offenders). These electronic voting machines allow attacks on the Democratic process that are much less labor intensive, and hence
much more likely to be attempted, than the old fashioned approaches.
Establishing a re-countable, auditable paper-trail is certainly not a guarantee of secure elections, but it is the first
step that needs to be made. It's a pretty obvious step, really, recommended by everyone who understands the problem.
How about you drop the spin? "All" of the cases are a total of three that are mentioned, and TFA is actually a rather poorly written FUD taken from a Miami Herald editorial: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/editoria l/15889697.htm [miami.com]
Oddly enough, I think this is a case where both sides are talking past each other.
Yeah, the Miami Herald story is really light-weight, but the reason it's of interest
is the same behavior was widely reported in the 2004 election, where this odd "vote switching"
behavior favored the Republicans. And yeah, my understanding is that it always,
not sometimes favored the Republicans.
you're first presupposing a brilliant conspiracy to defraud tens
if not hundreds of millions of voters
I think there's evidence of a functional conspiracy, the main smoking
gun being the patterns in exit-poll discrepancies in the 2004
election, though the widespread reports of more conventional
irregularities in Ohio are good too.
Like I said, functional. I don't know if this would count as "brilliant".
And I wouldn't "presuppose" this if I didn't think there was evidence
for it.
in order to steal an election. A conspiracy that would require
the complaisance of at LEAST hundreds or thousands of people,
The difficulty with the electronic voting machines in use is that
the size of the conspiracy you need to do the job is much
smaller. They allow wholesale fraud.
none of whom have slipped up even ONCE. Then you're presupposing that the masterminds behind this giant conspiracy are so flabbergastingly stupid that they'd implement their master plan so catastrophically badly that a 3 year old could see it?
Hm, well which do you think, am I claiming that they've never
slipped up, or am I claiming that they have slipped up?
The transparency of this particular exploit is indeed pretty
peculiar: that's what I'm commenting on. If the bad guys have
to work like this, then they're definitely not invincible.
If you want a wild-ass guess: maybe the programmer's were being
incompetent on purpose, because they wanted to sabotage the
effort?
Alternately, it could be just stupidity, or crappy machines, or
any number of BENIGN explanations and not an evil plan at all.
Well, it could be an IslamoMartian conspiracy to make the Republicans look
bad.
But then I guess that tinfoil hat would look pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
Note: your "tinfoil" is past it's expiration date. Please
upgrade your rhetoric dispenser.
Slashdot alone has run numerous stories that make it clear that U.S. elections are regularly stolen. We will never have a real presidental election again. Because of human nature, people are oblivous to this and will deny the problem until it is too late.
Now now, I sympathize, but don't fly off the handle. It is at
least possible that while the Republicans have a heavy finger on
the scale, they may not be able to always tip the balance completely.
You want to watch out for that kind of defeatism: a heavy turnout
is the first defense against attempted fraud, so don't go around
telling people voting is useless.
Here's a fantasy for you: while the Republicans will barely
maintain control of the house (due to a few surprisingly
strong wins in races that had looked close, possibly, oh,
Tennessee and Virginia), the House will go overwhelmingly
Democratic. Emboldened by this victory, the Democrats may
miraculously develop some spine and begin pushing for authentic
election reform, like say
The Paper Ballot Act of 2006. The Republicans, seeing
that the Democrats have some serious momentum, choose not to
block this effort -- which after all is a push for fair
elections, not for any particular Democrat advantage.
Like I say, a fantasy. You got anything better?
I don't have time to put up all the stories about election fraud now, but I'll give you my favorite: Gore's negative vote tally in one county. What are your favorite voter fraud stories?
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, when did a couple of anecdotal reports lead to 'always'?
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there were widespread reports of the same visible "vote switching"
symptom back in the 2004 election. I was referring to the documentary: Stealing America Vote by Vote..
This current story would not be of much interest if the same thing hadn't happened before.
I know that many hard-right blogs were full of accusations of
Democratic voter fraud. Not necessarily with vote-switching,
Which is the subject at hand, but why stop there?
but with intimidation, encouraging illegal immigrants and felons to vote, etc. There was also that bit in 2000 with Gore trying to stop Florida from counting late-arriving military absentee ballots. So I'd be surprised if there weren't accusations of actual vote-switching as well.
Not trying to take a stance against Democrats here; I'm a
Democrat myself.
Oh right. Just a reasonable Democrat, repeating unsubstantiated
smears. And making up new ones as you go.
If you want to believe that some massive right-wing conspiracy
Allow me to trot out a Paul Kruman quote (from the yet-another article "The
Smoke Machine", collected in The Great Unraveling):
"In a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's
Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an
ex-conservative is about the private lives of our
self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will
sell books, but they may obscure the important
message: That the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' is not
an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality,
and that it works a lot like a special-interest
lobby."
has all voting machines wired to somehow vote republican, be my
guest,
No, no, not all. Just the DRE (direct recording electronic) machines
pushed into use over the objections of anyone who understands
them (e.g. some absurd percentage of the ACM... 90%?).
but even the most tinfoiled crazies must know how
ridiculous that sounds.
You know, that "tinfoil" line has really jumped the shark.
Almost as badly as the "jumped the shark" line.
Is there voter fraud with voting machines? Yes. Was there more voter fraud back in the days of paper ballots hand delivered by men on horses (and hand counted by the people who weren't smart/skilled enough to have real jobs)? Of course.
One more time: the trouble with the electronic voting machines in
use is that they allow wholesale fraud. Back in the good
old days fraud was a much more labor-intensive business.
If I wanted to read biased FUD all day long, I would watch network news, or the latest Michael Moore movie. Get real.
It has and was a little strange reading comments on Slashdot NOT advocating the use of computers for something...
Personally, it's always seemed weird to me that this is strange. How long do you have to work with computers before you notice that they're a fucking
pain in the ass?
All of the complaints were about Democrat votes being switched to Republican, none went the other way.
Does that say more about the nature of the political parties, or about the nature of the people putting together the documentary?
As I remember it they were working with stats based on complaints to
the national Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), but I'm sure if you
try hard you can work up a hypothesis about how Republicans would never complain
about such a thing (remember, not "less likely", you need "not ever").
This is great news. Seriously. I think it's really encouraging that one of the scams in use is so goddamn clumsy that
people can actually see it in action. I figured the exploits would have gotten more slick by now, but maybe they
haven't progressed in the state-of-the-art since 2004.
You seem to have never used a touch screen in your life. Allow me to explain: They are always poorly calibrated peices of shit due to the seperation between the display and the sensors.
Ah yes, a mere misalignment problem. That always favors the Republicans. Oh no, it's not the misalignment, it's the press bias that favors
the Republicans. Oh wait, in 2004, it was only Democrats who called the hotlines problem... well it must be a respondant bias (Republicans
never complain about anything. Or no one told them where to complain? Or something like that).
If you can get into sardonic amusement, election season need never be glum.
Given how much that we still hear bitching about the validity JFK's election, it's likely that we will hear those cries loud and long.
No one was talking about the JFK election until the Republicans felt the need to blow some smoke about the RFK articles in Rolling Stone. "The Democrats do it too!" is one of their talking points... or it was before it
became clear how lame that sounds.
I saw a pre-release version of this documentary not long ago:
Stealing America: Vote by Vote
that talks about large numbers of reports of this vote-switching behavior
from the 2004 election. All of the complaints were about Democrat votes being
switched to Republican, none went the other way.
And speaking of documentaries there's another one making the rounds
of HBO right now: Hacking Democracy.
Myself, I think it's because we have no good system of evaluation of experts.
But we do have a system. Scientific articles are peer-reviewed, plus you can look at the consensus of the scientific community. This doesn't preclude error (nothing does, I fear) but if we can agree that, a) science generally works, and b) science's best answer right now on a given subject is such-and-such, I think we can trust the best science has at a give time to be the best WE have at a given time. Science of course addresses the physical world, and doesn't tell you why you should be a good person or whether or not you'll meet your loved ones in the afterlife, but when it comes to things like, say, the causes and impacts of climate change, the causes of genetic diversity (as in evolution), etc, I think we can trust that, at least better than we can trust anything else offered to us.
If you're asking my opinion on this, I would say yes, before you go against the scientific consensus on a given point,
you'd better think that through three times or more.
But then, scientific consensus (a) changes over time (b) is corruptible by the non-scientific concerns of the scientists (and as you point out, not all questions have or even can have a scientific consensus).
Points (a) and (b) are large enough problems (or are percieved as large enough problems by many),
that "scientific consensus" is not a popular standard among the general populace.
For one thing, how do you find out what the consensus is? The scientists don't have any sort of
official election process where they judge the issues and make statements -- in fact, many, perhaps
most seem to feel that it is not their job to make such statements (and perhaps they regard it as
politically dangerous to do so).
Let me expand on what I mean by point (b) with an example; let's reach back to the "nuclear winter"
controversy -- what you had going on there (in my opinion) is a group of scientists bending the truth just slightly
in hopes of convincing people that nuclear wars would literally be unwinnable, and an even crazier
notion than was popularly supposed. The "nuclear winter" hypothesis was certainly interesting,
and certainly worth talking about, but they made a concerted effort to convince the public that
it was the truth (or at least, a stronger theory than it was). They were doing this for the best
of reasons, and many of them may have deluded themselves (i.e. not consciously exaggerating the case),
but even so it was not a shining example of science in action. It was in fact the sort of thing
that casts doubt on the notion that you can just Trust The Scientists.
Now, let's step forward and consider the case of global warming: I'm not interested in arguing that anthropogenic
global warming isn't happening (my best guess -- though perhaps not a terribly well-informed guess --
is that the case for it is looking reasonably solid these days), but it is not at all unimagineable
that climatologists in general might have allowed their very laudable concerns about the future of the
environment to infect their scientific judgement, just as happened with the "nuclear winter" theory. Suggesting that
the climatologists may have a "religious" obession on the brain is unthinkable in some circles
(though quite the contrary is the case among conservative policy wonks, obviously), but the very
fact that it's so unthinkable helps create a sense of doubt about their conclusions, there's the
sense that they haven't had to face serious debate amongst themselves, because they all know how
important it is to come to the right answer.
This perception may be completely wrong, but it is not by any means an irrational thing to be afraid of.
Scientists are just folks. They're prone to group-think, they lack mental flexibility once committed to a
position ("science progresses funeral by funeral").
And so far we've only talked about the likelihood that the "anthropogenic" t
Sorry, back again: I missed what you were saying here.
The current government is not without its supporters -- even at his worst, over 30% of the country gives Bush a positive approval rating. I'll bet that a paid government propaganda-maker is more likely to sincerely believe what he's writing than a free Slashdot poster, who might find trolling to be good sport.
There's a few problems with this. The paid propagandist has time and resources at hand to dedicate to the problem of shaping the discussion, the troll is only a passing nuisance, and lacks the motivation to pass as Serious.
My claim is that a sincere thinker who happens to be conservative has much more
latitude to follow a line of discussion into different corners: the propagandist has
a list of talking points that must be followed, and is likely to duck out when things
start getting heavy.
Bush was elected and popular for most of his term. Does that mean he's immune to any criticism that his administration has taken a dictatorial path?
There's a difference in just calling him a dictator and pointing out that he's an elected official that may be involved in a power grab. Most people in the US have no knowledge at all of what's going on in Venezuela,
so a phrase like "Latin American dictator" plays into their prejudices, it's a serious smear that doesn't look like a smear. What do you think about people who go off ranting about how Bush is a Fasicist?
(It is, by the way, not at all clear to me that Bush was every really elected, but it is
true that post 9/11 he was popular.)
Oh, and maybe it isn't clear the other reason why I brought this point up:
the way the government is spinning this is as yet-another "anti-terrorist"
measure against those damn ayrabs. By using the example of an al Jazeera story,
they can give most Americans the impression that there's nothing here that has
anything to do with them.
But here we are, it's election season in the US: do you feel good about
government agencies spending money on astroturfing campaigns?
And there's a further point: the prominent examples of "new media" in my mind
are wikipedia and slashdot, and while both have spent a lot of energy dealing
with the "thirteen year old vandal" problem, neither have even begun to contemplate
what to do about concerted attempts at subversion by well-funded organizations.
Now that the United States is coming out of the closet on this,
maybe it's time to start thinking about it.
There really isn't any truth anymore, only "truth". The Left fell
first, as we know from the Sokal hoax.
Sokal himself is a liberal who wanted to bring the left back
from the sciene wars to the class wars: to a large extent he (and
others) succeeded. Postmodernism is largely discredited anywhere
that you look.
You really want to avoid flying off the handle and getting
carried away by your ideas. "Truth is dead" has a nice ring
to it, but it just isn't supportable.
Religious faith, that hallmark of the modern American
Right, dovetails very well with Foucaultish solipsism, because of
their overt rejection of the objective world in favor of an
ostensibly "Godly" one populated by "gut thinkers" like
Bush.
This is another fine example of getting carried away with an
idea: I'm not a religious person myself, the style of thinking
of religious people certainly seems peculiar to me, but it simply
is not true that every Good Christian is a fundamentalist zombie
right-wing foot solider.
Possibly you've got problems with your own relgious obsessions, eh?
Cementing these two ostensible opposites together is our
optimimistic, populist belief that all ideas are valid, a
democractic principle that allows everyone to bring something to
the table. We listen to and respect just about everyone,
Yeah, and I'm arguing with Some Guy On Slashdot.
Much of that is just arrogance--we like to think that our
gut-feeling assessment of climate change, international
relations, biological evolution, or whatever, is spot-on, even if
a flat-out expert contravenes our superficial assessment.
Myself, I think it's because we have no good system of evaluation
of experts. This is an opportunity for the on-line collaborative
systems of the future, in my opinion: consider the possibilities
for a web-of-trust of expert proxies.
It's inevitable, starting from there, that we reach a point where
there is just no such thing as truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, brave troll, I am so glad you spoke up. It is indeed a point that needs to be made: the fact that the Republicans appear to have a finger on the scale does mean that they totally own the outcome. The first defense against electoral corruption is a strong turn-out, so get out there and vote.
Also, the election activist types are encouraging everyone to bring video cameras and so on with them, to make an attempt at recording anything strange that's going on (just don't point it at someone over in another booth, eh?). You might think that there wouldn't be anything at all to video tape (electronic fraud at least in principle could be totally invisible), but weirdly enough there have been reports of visible "vote-flipping" on touch screen machines, and so on. Further, you might expect some of the more conventional voting fraud to be in use (as it was in Ohio in 2004) -- the video of insanely long lines stretching around the block on a cold, rainy night is far more effective than any description of the situation could be.
No, not really, but returning to those bad old days might very well be an improvement on the bad new days.
Wholesale, undetectable election fraud has become a possibility using the types of electronic voting machines that are currently in use ("DREs", "direct recording electronic" machines that have no paper trail being the worst offenders). These electronic voting machines allow attacks on the Democratic process that are much less labor intensive, and hence much more likely to be attempted, than the old fashioned approaches.
Establishing a re-countable, auditable paper-trail is certainly not a guarantee of secure elections, but it is the first step that needs to be made. It's a pretty obvious step, really, recommended by everyone who understands the problem.
So where's your unbiased source? Point me at it, I'll read it.
Oddly enough, I think this is a case where both sides are talking past each other. Yeah, the Miami Herald story is really light-weight, but the reason it's of interest is the same behavior was widely reported in the 2004 election, where this odd "vote switching" behavior favored the Republicans. And yeah, my understanding is that it always, not sometimes favored the Republicans.
And just for the sake of saying something useful, keep an eye on electoral-vote for the current state of the polls.
Problem number one.
I think there's evidence of a functional conspiracy, the main smoking gun being the patterns in exit-poll discrepancies in the 2004 election, though the widespread reports of more conventional irregularities in Ohio are good too.Like I said, functional. I don't know if this would count as "brilliant". And I wouldn't "presuppose" this if I didn't think there was evidence for it.
The difficulty with the electronic voting machines in use is that the size of the conspiracy you need to do the job is much smaller. They allow wholesale fraud.Hm, well which do you think, am I claiming that they've never slipped up, or am I claiming that they have slipped up?
The transparency of this particular exploit is indeed pretty peculiar: that's what I'm commenting on. If the bad guys have to work like this, then they're definitely not invincible.
If you want a wild-ass guess: maybe the programmer's were being incompetent on purpose, because they wanted to sabotage the effort?
Well, it could be an IslamoMartian conspiracy to make the Republicans look bad.
Note: your "tinfoil" is past it's expiration date. Please upgrade your rhetoric dispenser.
Thank you!
I quite reading the Economist when they referred to the CIA's complicity in kidnapping and torture "CIA shenanigans".
Oh yes, election integrity is so silly. Real nerds are apolitical. Where's my video game reviews?
Entropy? I thought it was the hired Republican sock-puppets.
Now now, I sympathize, but don't fly off the handle. It is at least possible that while the Republicans have a heavy finger on the scale, they may not be able to always tip the balance completely. You want to watch out for that kind of defeatism: a heavy turnout is the first defense against attempted fraud, so don't go around telling people voting is useless.
Here's a fantasy for you: while the Republicans will barely maintain control of the house (due to a few surprisingly strong wins in races that had looked close, possibly, oh, Tennessee and Virginia), the House will go overwhelmingly Democratic. Emboldened by this victory, the Democrats may miraculously develop some spine and begin pushing for authentic election reform, like say The Paper Ballot Act of 2006. The Republicans, seeing that the Democrats have some serious momentum, choose not to block this effort -- which after all is a push for fair elections, not for any particular Democrat advantage.
Like I say, a fantasy. You got anything better?
Well now, that's a tough one. I think I kind of like Chuck Harris, getting himself elected to the Senate with votes counted by machines from the company he owns, ES&S: If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting MachinesAnd as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there were widespread reports of the same visible "vote switching" symptom back in the 2004 election. I was referring to the documentary: Stealing America Vote by Vote..
This current story would not be of much interest if the same thing hadn't happened before.
Which is the subject at hand, but why stop there?
Oh right. Just a reasonable Democrat, repeating unsubstantiated smears. And making up new ones as you go.
Allow me to trot out a Paul Kruman quote (from the yet-another article "The Smoke Machine", collected in The Great Unraveling): "In a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: That the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby."
No, no, not all. Just the DRE (direct recording electronic) machines pushed into use over the objections of anyone who understands them (e.g. some absurd percentage of the ACM... 90%?).You know, that "tinfoil" line has really jumped the shark. Almost as badly as the "jumped the shark" line.
One more time: the trouble with the electronic voting machines in use is that they allow wholesale fraud. Back in the good old days fraud was a much more labor-intensive business.
Don't forget HBO!Hacking Democracy
Personally, it's always seemed weird to me that this is strange. How long do you have to work with computers before you notice that they're a fucking pain in the ass?
As I remember it they were working with stats based on complaints to the national Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), but I'm sure if you try hard you can work up a hypothesis about how Republicans would never complain about such a thing (remember, not "less likely", you need "not ever").
Well okay, so maybe it's not "great" exactly...
Ah yes, a mere misalignment problem. That always favors the Republicans. Oh no, it's not the misalignment, it's the press bias that favors the Republicans. Oh wait, in 2004, it was only Democrats who called the hotlines problem... well it must be a respondant bias (Republicans never complain about anything. Or no one told them where to complain? Or something like that).
If you can get into sardonic amusement, election season need never be glum.
No one was talking about the JFK election until the Republicans felt the need to blow some smoke about the RFK articles in Rolling Stone. "The Democrats do it too!" is one of their talking points... or it was before it became clear how lame that sounds.
I saw a pre-release version of this documentary not long ago: Stealing America: Vote by Vote that talks about large numbers of reports of this vote-switching behavior from the 2004 election. All of the complaints were about Democrat votes being switched to Republican, none went the other way.
And speaking of documentaries there's another one making the rounds of HBO right now: Hacking Democracy.
Essentially this is a fight between media giants, and as is typical of the "free market", it's a fight over the rules that define the market.
If you're asking my opinion on this, I would say yes, before you go against the scientific consensus on a given point, you'd better think that through three times or more.
But then, scientific consensus (a) changes over time (b) is corruptible by the non-scientific concerns of the scientists (and as you point out, not all questions have or even can have a scientific consensus).
Points (a) and (b) are large enough problems (or are percieved as large enough problems by many), that "scientific consensus" is not a popular standard among the general populace.
For one thing, how do you find out what the consensus is? The scientists don't have any sort of official election process where they judge the issues and make statements -- in fact, many, perhaps most seem to feel that it is not their job to make such statements (and perhaps they regard it as politically dangerous to do so).
Let me expand on what I mean by point (b) with an example; let's reach back to the "nuclear winter" controversy -- what you had going on there (in my opinion) is a group of scientists bending the truth just slightly in hopes of convincing people that nuclear wars would literally be unwinnable, and an even crazier notion than was popularly supposed. The "nuclear winter" hypothesis was certainly interesting, and certainly worth talking about, but they made a concerted effort to convince the public that it was the truth (or at least, a stronger theory than it was). They were doing this for the best of reasons, and many of them may have deluded themselves (i.e. not consciously exaggerating the case), but even so it was not a shining example of science in action. It was in fact the sort of thing that casts doubt on the notion that you can just Trust The Scientists.
Now, let's step forward and consider the case of global warming: I'm not interested in arguing that anthropogenic global warming isn't happening (my best guess -- though perhaps not a terribly well-informed guess -- is that the case for it is looking reasonably solid these days), but it is not at all unimagineable that climatologists in general might have allowed their very laudable concerns about the future of the environment to infect their scientific judgement, just as happened with the "nuclear winter" theory. Suggesting that the climatologists may have a "religious" obession on the brain is unthinkable in some circles (though quite the contrary is the case among conservative policy wonks, obviously), but the very fact that it's so unthinkable helps create a sense of doubt about their conclusions, there's the sense that they haven't had to face serious debate amongst themselves, because they all know how important it is to come to the right answer.
This perception may be completely wrong, but it is not by any means an irrational thing to be afraid of. Scientists are just folks. They're prone to group-think, they lack mental flexibility once committed to a position ("science progresses funeral by funeral").
And so far we've only talked about the likelihood that the "anthropogenic" t
And foxes with weasels...
Sorry, back again: I missed what you were saying here.
There's a few problems with this. The paid propagandist has time and resources at hand to dedicate to the problem of shaping the discussion, the troll is only a passing nuisance, and lacks the motivation to pass as Serious.
My claim is that a sincere thinker who happens to be conservative has much more latitude to follow a line of discussion into different corners: the propagandist has a list of talking points that must be followed, and is likely to duck out when things start getting heavy.
There's a difference in just calling him a dictator and pointing out that he's an elected official that may be involved in a power grab. Most people in the US have no knowledge at all of what's going on in Venezuela, so a phrase like "Latin American dictator" plays into their prejudices, it's a serious smear that doesn't look like a smear. What do you think about people who go off ranting about how Bush is a Fasicist?
(It is, by the way, not at all clear to me that Bush was every really elected, but it is true that post 9/11 he was popular.)
Oh, and maybe it isn't clear the other reason why I brought this point up: the way the government is spinning this is as yet-another "anti-terrorist" measure against those damn ayrabs. By using the example of an al Jazeera story, they can give most Americans the impression that there's nothing here that has anything to do with them.
But here we are, it's election season in the US: do you feel good about government agencies spending money on astroturfing campaigns?
And there's a further point: the prominent examples of "new media" in my mind are wikipedia and slashdot, and while both have spent a lot of energy dealing with the "thirteen year old vandal" problem, neither have even begun to contemplate what to do about concerted attempts at subversion by well-funded organizations.
Now that the United States is coming out of the closet on this, maybe it's time to start thinking about it.
Sokal himself is a liberal who wanted to bring the left back from the sciene wars to the class wars: to a large extent he (and others) succeeded. Postmodernism is largely discredited anywhere that you look.
You really want to avoid flying off the handle and getting carried away by your ideas. "Truth is dead" has a nice ring to it, but it just isn't supportable.
This is another fine example of getting carried away with an idea: I'm not a religious person myself, the style of thinking of religious people certainly seems peculiar to me, but it simply is not true that every Good Christian is a fundamentalist zombie right-wing foot solider.
Possibly you've got problems with your own relgious obsessions, eh?
Yeah, and I'm arguing with Some Guy On Slashdot.
Myself, I think it's because we have no good system of evaluation of experts. This is an opportunity for the on-line collaborative systems of the future, in my opinion: consider the possibilities for a web-of-trust of expert proxies.
Oh my god, you're right. I give up. Bang!.