Making Crazy People Crazier
From IMAO
I kinda like how IMAO doesn't anger left wing blogs that often. We're a happy site, so who could be angry at us? Still, I sometimes envy the power of other people to enrage the other side, to get them screeching and jumping around like monkeys who just had their cage shaken.
I thought Jonah Goldberg's recent column was fairly innocuous. It's about that, while lefties dominate the web now, that's more due to them being on the offensive and things were different back when Clinton was president and will be different when a Democrat becomes President again. A simple, reasoned point with hardly an insult to the left thrown in it. Yet he got a giant post on the front page of Daily Kos dedicated to tearing him to shreds. Yes, a front page post; for the new "center" of the American pubic, there apparently is nothing more important than attacking Jonah Goldberg for pointing out the cyclical nature of political momentum. For about five or six paragraphs, Hunter writes, "I hate Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg is stupid. I hate Jonah Goldberg." over and over before even mentioning anything in the article he disputed (and his first objection to the article was a purely semantically one; Goldberg said writing professionally on the internet since 1998 make him old in newcomer years and Hunter says it makes him a "newcomer"). Actually, Hunter barely quotes any of the article and just rants for pages and pages. That's crazy hatred right there... near BDS level even.
That's almost like a superpower being able to drive the left into an irrational frenzy without even trying. What if Goldberg purposely tried to anger them and wrote something like, "Everyone at Kos smells and is ugly."? They'd go so crazy, they might miss that an election is going on.
5 comments:
I guess the attacks on Jonah are not much different from the right-wing blogosphere attacks on Salon’s article exposing Rudy’s frequent time spent at Yankee stadium after 9/11.
So I don’t agree at all with Jonah’s theory about left-wing Internet success, and of course he has no evidence to back his position (which is why it is an opinion piece). In fact, Jonah is very much out of touch with reality when it comes to the Web. For him to even make a statement that the pendulum of political internet activity has swung from right to left is ludicrous. It never was on the right. Certainly, talk show radio has been dominated by conservatism for years, but there was never any advantage of this on the Web. The real reason for a more liberal dominance now is that liberals in general do not listen to much talk radio so have gotten more involved with the Internet. Certainly there are some who listen to Air America, but most in the sector of the population tends to prefer NPR. It really has nothing to do with the current political situation (i.e., Bush, Iraq, etc.). For conservatism to gain a bigger foothold on the Web would require all those righties who spend hours upon hours listening to folks like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and Savage to sacrifice that time to the Internet. I don’t think that is going to happen and I know Conservative Talk Radio doesn’t want that to happen – too much money at stake.
I think you're missing the point. It's not the content of Jonah's article that's at stake here, it's the Kos hysterical over-reaction.
But to the points you raised: I agree that the net was never on the right. It was, early on, highly libertarian but not conservative. But I also believe it's not on the mainstream left as well. It's fringe extreme left dominated, IMHO, on Kos and DU. That's in itself interesting because most working class Dems are not that extreme and are not participating.
As to the right not participating due to being busy with talk radio, I have to disagree with that. In this regard Jonah may be right insofar as the right is not alienated and not as active on forums such as the net.
Gonz, keep telling us that Kos is a fringe site. We'll just keep laughing at you every election...
It *is* a fringe site. It is seriously out of step with the vast majority of Americans. It wasn't Kos who got Dems elected in November. Kos is full of bitter, cursing, far left raving lunatics. Don't see that as too mainstream.
Uh-huh. Right. You just keep thinking that.
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