I tend to read AlterNet a lot, mostly because I am highly amused about articles with titles like “Shocking Top Nine Republican Lies: The Disastrous Menace of Rampant Vampire Capitalism!” You know where you stand with articles like that. They lay their bias right out front. (Also I totally wrote for them a couple times and I’m generally fond of anyone who gives me money.)
Unfortunately, they believe a lot of things about Republicans that… really, really aren’t true.
The Republican Party accurately reflects the views of its constituents. See, there’s this recurring leftist meme (I remember seeing it when Clinton was president and when the Democrats took the house in 2006 and it happens a lot with Obama) about how the Democratic Party is totally weak! It won’t go after the big banks! Why is it giving in to the Republicans? Obama likes consensus too much! The Republicans are successful and getting everything they want and we get nothing! NOTHING!!!
The problem is that if you go look at conservative websites Obama’s bullies are getting everything they want and are, like, five seconds from taking away your guns and putting everyone into FEMA camps. The Republicans aren’t holding strong on anything– not abortion, not gay marriage, not the deficit, anything! Why do they keep giving into Obama?
I think the actual problem is that both Democrats and Republicans have to appeal to the center and to large donors, so they’re not going to do everything their base wants. Since the base is usually surrounded by other members of the base and thus overestimates the prevalence of its ideas, from the base’s perspective, it looks like the other side is getting everything it wants and our side is inexplicably weak.
Some random idiot reflects the beliefs of the Republican Party. Literally every five minutes on Twitter some idiot Republican says something dumb about abortion or rape or birth control and then we all have to hear about What This Means For The Republican Party, which apparently all secretly believes that you can’t get pregnant from rape and when you use birth control your uterus fills with little crystallized fetuses. Of course, if you go on Breitbart.com (I went on Breitbart.com to research this, I need a shower now), you’ll find out all about how Democrats believe Chavez was a good leader who understood the needs of the poor, rape victims shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, the sequester cuts should be as painful as possible, etc.
Okay, so none of those are quite as good examples as Mr. Akin. In my defense, I’ve been part of Leftist Internet for years and I could only bear to be on Breitbart.com for five minutes before I wanted to vomit, so my Leftist Internet sample is way better.
Note that I’m not saying that Republicans as a group don’t believe dumb things. They do (“evolution isn’t true!”). Just that you cannot take any random thing some random vaguely famous Republican says, possibly in context and possibly not, and claim that this is what Republicans as a group believe. (It’s possible that the Republican Party has a higher percentage of people that say really dumb shit? But again lefty media don’t tend to trumpet the liberals who say dumb shit, so I don’t know.)
Republicans are a totally united front. Guys, no. The Republican Party has libertarians and conservative Christians in it. I’m amazed they manage to get them to vote for the same people at all, given that in a sensible universe the libertarians and the conservative Christians would have literally opposite opinions about everything. That is some fucking amazing coalition-building there guys good job. The sex-positive vs. radical feminist war suddenly seems way less daunting.
Death threats. A few years back, when Men Call Me Things happened, I saw a lot of arguments that getting death or rape threats was uniquely a result of being a feminist blogger and proved how much anti-feminists hate us. That… kind of fell apart when feminists started sending death threats to Laci Green.
And the thing is… I only know about that because Laci Green is also a feminist. I don’t read conservative blogs; if conservatives got death threats, I would have no fucking idea. I mean. Maybe someone’s going to comment here and be like “actually I am a conservative blogger and there are none of the death threats!” in which case I’ll revise this, but my null hypothesis is that there are horrible people on all sides and sometimes horrible people send people death threats. (Anyway, a cursory Google suggests that lefty people have threatened death against Mitt Romney, Scott Fitzgerald, and Rush Limbaugh, so clearly some of us are willing to.)
Let me be clear: women are far more likely to get death and rape threats, as well as other kinds of horrific insults, online. (Just ask anyone semi-Internet-famous who switched from a male/gender-neutral to a female name, or vice versa.) That is an important conversation to have and one that I’m glad Men Call Me Things kicked off. The conversation about how leftists are uniquely victimized because only we get death threats? Nope.
This loosely reminds me of
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-spot-b.s.-political-story-in-under-10-seconds/ and of a statistical analysis of sex scandals I remember seeing somewhere (I think it may have been in one of Gwern’s essays). Specially the idea that that there are so many elected positions in the US (over 500 congresscritters, 50 state governors, 50 states worth of state legislators ect.) that at any moment an elected official of some kind will have recently said or done something completely beyond the pale.
I really, really hate Alternet.
I want to like Alternet. I like the concept of Alternet. They occasionally pick up writers I really like (Greta Christina!). But all of that is overshadowed by the enormous amount of mind-blowingly stupid stuff they post. And a lot of that mind-blowingly stupid stuff comes with an arrogant sneer that would be annoying in the best of circumstances, but paired with dumb arguments it’s nails on a chalkboard. A really, really stupid chalkboard.
“the liberals who say dumb shit”
Three words:
Tom fucking Harkin.
(This doesn’t aspire to add anything substantive; I just really fucking hate Tom Harkin.)
I think a really common version of that is stuff like ‘idiocracy’ which lots of liberals love. “WE MUST STOP THE STUPID FROM BREEDING TO CREATED THE BLUE STATE MASTER RACE!”.
I can’t stand that stuff, and I’m totally liberal. Although I’ve seen libertarians identify with it a lot too, and many of them tend right wing. So yeah, shit’s complicated like it always was.
I’d add that in addition to the whole general thing with different factions/types of views there seem to be a lot of people who don’t have really strongly-held right-wing views, but who vote Republican for various reasons. They may feel personally under attack, but will probably empathize just fine. The people who loose their homophobia when their own friend or family member comes out.
On Idiocracy: I now feel ashamed of liking that. Incidentally, I feel that our society is breaking into smaller and smaller subcultures able to command less and less sacredness of emotion, (and liberals, frankly, are really exacerbating this, for all of how important their work is) rather than becoming broadly debased.
Some other things I find a little frustrating:
“This system or structure is based on and characterized by X, Y and Z, which we all hate, even though the people who run said system don’t talk about X, Y, or Z all that much, don’t like X, Y, and Z all that much more than we do, and even though the system is covered in X, Y, and Z, they don’t actually seem to play any role in how the system works”
“It is obvious that X is really really bad. Also, X is connected to Y. So Y can never not be connected to fighting X ever again!”
There are conservative christian libertarians, you know.
“There are conservative christian libertarians, you know.”
I think zie was referring to social conservatives, who (as a group) hold a number of positions that are fairly antithetical to the philosophy libertarianism (and in the U.S., are typically Christian).
@Hugh: Indeed. Being a conservative Christian does not mean that you think that your values should be enforced on others by force of law. There are a lot of strains of conservative Christian, after all.
@Ozy: Not all Republicans think evolution isn’t true. Possibly even not a majority, depending on how you phrase the question. It’s just something that the party and the elected politicians realize a fair proportion of the base thinks, and therefore don’t talk about if they disagree with that view.
The US being a two-party system means inevitably that a whole bunch of different incompatible political beliefs are encompassed by each party.
I think this is a common feature of the internet, the political stuff dosen’t seem much different than the goon/4chan raids.
There was a great quote from Alexander Cockburn, writing about Thomas Freedman (and his predecessor) he suggested that the role of the opinion commentator was…
“to fire volley after volley of cliché into the densely packed prejudices of his readers. He never deviated into paradox, never shunned the obvious when he had a chance to grapple with it. His work was a constant affirmation of received beliefs. ”
When you add the desire to form a community/common experience out of diverse readership, the tendency of people to form dehumanising ingroup/outgroup dynamics, the need to maximise add revenue through pageviews, the lack of adiquate pay and the time constraints of modern online journalism This could easily sum up 90% of political commentary on the internet (and off of it).
I would add that one of the best things about this blog is that it’s goal seems not to be creating a community but genuinely exploring ideas about gender and politics.
I would add to the list of people who got abused, the guy who filmed the ‘hot girls of occupy wall street’ video. the nerd rapper MC Chris, that lady from the good men project all the people who got doxxed in doxtober on reddit.
I think you’re right, Sasori: those kind of pieces are about in-group bonding, about affirmation.
@theLaPlace: Yeah, what MattJudeBrown said. In the USA at least, a lot of libertarian christian conservatives seem to believe that the only reason things like promiscuity or drug use exist is that the government actively encourages them, so in their libertarian end-state everybody would get married and nobody would take drugs.
I’m not saying it makes sense, but it’s a pretty substantial group. And I think the main reason it exists is because conservative christians and libertarians so often find themselves on the same side, they began to mesh.
I guess that was poorly phrased on my part. Let me try again:
By “social conservative” I wasn’t necessarily thinking about the people who believe, say, that gay sex is a sin – I was thinking of the people who support the political cause of banning gay marriage. I wasn’t referring to the folks you describe above as much as the ones who want DOMA upheld.
So I guess what I was trying to say is not that there is a contradiction between holding socially conservative and liberatatian beliefs, but there is a contradiction between liberatatian beliefs and advocating for much modern social conservative legislation.
Spellcheck fail. I meant liberatarian
Sorry for the offtopic comment, but I just have to put this out here…
Ozy, I hope you read this…. as a sex-positive blogger, I think this is something you might find worth commenting on.
There’s legislation being planned in the European Parliament that would ban all pornographic and erotic material within the EU. The report is called “elimination of gender stereotypes”, which is a nice goal, but the actual content of the report calls for banning all pornographic or erotic content in all media, including the internet. It would also not be limited to commercial entities or advertisement, the wording is so vague that it would cause all erotic material to become banned – from making slashfic drawings to sharing nude pictures of yourself.
More information: http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/next-tuesday-the-european-parliament-votes-to-ban-all-your-porn-yes-really-take-immediate-action/
Spread the word, take action, this must be stopped – censorship is never good.
One that I don’t think has been covered– the belief that being a Republican is a permanent moral reflection on a person. For a while there, I was collecting accounts by Republicans who’d decided their party had abandoned them to just to annoy– um, correct– anyone who said all the good people had left the Republican Party. Admittedly, I was buying into a bunch of stereotyped premises even so.