Tea Party

[purejuice]

The Tea Partiers are not, as I deduced from a previous NYT story, boomers out of work. There's a new NYT poll which explains who they are.

I am ready to consign them to the scrapheap of history I shall dub The Racist Backlash Against the 1965 Voting Rights Act That LBJ Said Would Last 50 Years. Five years to go. Buh-bye.

I must say, I think the blogosphere pundits' Gotcha, argue with every word uttered by every asshole on the planet, attitude, is counterproductive. Ignore them, deprive them of a venue, do not repeat or listen to what they say, and they will go away.

Comments

[the-sikh-geek.livejournal.com]

As The Charm often points out to me, pro-wrestling has a bigger audience than Glen Beck. They are lucky, and probably thankful, to get all the attention they do (and don't deserve).

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

the charm is a very wise young person. comparitive numbers study is incredibly enlightening. and if i were a progressive politician, i'd be at every wrestling match that exists, working the crowd. those are my swing voters.

[the-sikh-geek.livejournal.com]

Figures can lie and liars can figure...

When you hear things like "5 MILLION weekly listeners to his radio show" you should immediately start doing the math: 5 million a week/ 5 shows a week/ clear overlap in daily listeners/ 300 million total people in the country= 0.33% of the country actually listens to said idiot. % of Americans that believe in UFOs? 34.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

all of this is begging the question of how the blogosphere gotcha discourse sets agenda for news judgment....i think that while monitoring hits is one way of keeping tabs on trends and fads, it is also very much contributing to the feeding frenzy pack news coverage. this, i believe, helps create the radio soundbite political agendas fascists batten upon, helps create the NCPAC/terry dolan/single-issue voter turnout contests which are political agendas foreign to everyone and against the interests of all voters, which fatally limits the political agendas of both parties such that the plurality does not turn out to vote, and ignores the modest and progressive political goals of the vast majority of constituencies.

[the-sikh-geek.livejournal.com]

Part of this, beyond the attention-grabbing gawking sideshow appeal of people in costumes carrying signs (but yet, never for the leftist demos), is the awful tendency of TV news to go for the "two-sides" angle on everything. "While most people believe that they need to breath in order to stay alive, SOME people hold a different view..."

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of the speaker at the Tea Party rally I attended today who cited a Newsweek poll claiming that 25 percent of Americans are sympathetic to the movement.

"So, it looks like Glenn Beck was right when he said, We surround them!" she concluded, not providing another example in which 25 percent of a group "surrounds" the other three quarters.

Or, as Custer said to his troops, "Don't worry, men - we surround them!"

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

the geek and i have been discussing your perspicacity in this statistical matter.
do you think the tps get too much coverage?

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely too much coverage. Especially because they aren't actually doing anything - wave a sign, draw a crowd of 400, make a speech. Super. But where are their candidates? Where - to use the 60s example - is their willingness to directly confront the institutions they consider corrupt/tyrannical? Where are their building occupations/wildcat strikes/sit-ins/boycotts/marches? All they do, as far as I can tell, is whine.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

what drives the coverage (news judgment) in your shop? or do you think all demos/photo opportunity/soundbite politics of zero agency get the same coverage?

goebbels was all about the soundbite. i have to go back and read my fascist tomes. (and i wish i could confirm the internet rumor that mick jagger and david bowie have see Triumph of the Will 43 times.)

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

In my shop, I think local factors determine coverage. My old chums in West Virginia handled their Tea Party story with a brief not exceeding 130 words, for example. We gave them a full-length story because we wanted to write about how they've become an arm of the state (and, in particular, the Wake County) GOP, despite constant claims of nonpartisanship. Of the dozen office-seekers who spoke, all were Republicans, and they were joined by apparatchiks from the Wake County party. It seemed like a good chance to point out how this movement supposedly formed in opposition to politics-as-usual is becoming, in North Carolina at least, a get-out-the-vote drive for one of the Big Two.

But in general, I think the press is attracted by the chance for pictures of people acting crazy and quotes from people saying stupid things.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

that's a good story, tp R us.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Depriving trolls of oxygen is very effective. Don't know why it is that Americans these days seem to feel that every fuckwit and assclown "deserves" discourse space.

And there's a difference between open discourse and entitlement. It's called discernment of worth.

An open discourse that actively strives to discern worth and pursue it can allow any idea but still get somewhere in the end.

Entitlement eats its own shit.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

ohhh grrrl.
i wanted to discuss feminism and the veil with you. i'm kind of exhausted now but i hope you will discourse upon it at greater length.
western feminism has a great deal to answer for. still, when i see pix of the women of RAWA being beaten by taliban thugs for -- whatever, for not wearing the veil, for learning to read and write -- i have to think that they're being beaten for not doing something that is rotten and fascist to the core.
and, i'm very interested in the frenchies' args on headscarves in the state schools.
finally, i do very much understand that there are many many points on which white people of good will should STFU. and the Ms feminists are just such an one.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Mostly, my view on all forms of hijab is that it is complicated and I don't thoroughly understand it and I have been paying a fair bit of attention to Muslimah feminists for about 10 years now, since I discovered Fatima Mernissi.

In light of this, I feel obligated to resist the tendency, on the part (mostly) of Western non-Muslims, to decide that they know everything there is to know about it and what it is and what it means and whether it is Good or Bad For Women.

What I do know, and what history knows, is bad for women: not allowing them to be autonomous human beings with meaningful decision-making power in their own lives.

Including how and whether they wish to cover their bodies or clothe themselves.

There are people, male and female, on all sides of the hijab issue who are more than happy to deprive women of their autonomy. Some want to make sure women wear hijab. Some want to make sure they don't. Either is bullshit.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

what of fatima's should i read?

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

The Veil and the Male Elite and Islam and Democracy, together, for starters.

After that, Dreams of Trespass and Scheherazade Goes West, also taken together.

The recent Les Sindbads marocaines, but I think it's only available in French.

And then anything else that appeals.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

oh yum. and yay. and thanks.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

Don't know why it is that Americans these days seem to feel that every fuckwit and assclown "deserves" discourse space.

Americans don't feel that every fuckwit and assclown deserves discourse space. I know that I'm preaching to the choir here, but we all know how hard it is to get a left-wing march, rally, cause et cetera covered in the media. It's the same phenomenon that we see in overseas coverage: you never heard anything out of Bolivia, say, until Morales was elected president, and then suddenly the NYT had relatively frequent stories about protests in the richer, whiter parts of the country.

My point is just that trying to explain the excessive coverage of the Tea Partiers through reference to the Interweb's "Gotcha" culture, without paying attention to the correspondence between the Tea Partiers' hatred of Obama and the people who own the country's hatred of Obama, misses much of the point.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

correspondence between the Tea Partiers' hatred of Obama and the people who own the country's hatred of Obama

not getting this. who are the people owning the country's hatred of obama? what does owning hatred mean? and what is the correspondence between that and tp's hatred of obama? gnomic, i'd call you!

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

I meant the hatred that people who own the country feel toward Obama. Rich people, not to put too fine a point on it. The other half of the Republican Party.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

ah, thank you.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Punditry is porn. People engage passively and in shallow ecstasy, like lab rats pressing a button for stims, through the desire to feel the flood of righteousness. Gushes of words in clever or bombastic configurations that disengage critical thought. Once I discovered that nugget of truth, I quit reposting-without-comment and thus hit a place where I write mainly in solitude, figuring out all over again what I think and why, and how and when it changes with the intake of new information. But so hard to find the data amid the opinions.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

ohhhh good one. punditry so IS porn.