Cross-posted on techPresident
I hate to agree with Jonah Goldberg on anything, but…
Okay, it’d be an exaggeration to say that I side with his recent LA Times op-ed about online politics, but I agree that the rise of the political Internet ought to inspire anything but complacency among progressives and liberals.
Ever since the explosion of progressive political blogs and the rise of the Dean (and later Kerry) fundraising machines, some on the Left have been patting themselves on the back. It’s the people versus the powerful! We’re crashing the gates! The populist Left has a natural advantage online! Josh Levy may call this argument a straw man, but I’ve been hearing variants of it from quite a few people over the last four or five years, and it’s always made me nervous. When you’re ahead, the other guy’s probably right at your back — and sharpening a knife.
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August 23rd, 2007
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Okay, this one’s weird even for me — scandal has gripped the Fishbowl D.C.’s Third Annual Hottest Media Types competition, with widespread vote fraud proven to have tipped the results. A vicious swarm of vote-bots, created and distributed by supporters of several candidates (supposedly without their knowledge), spread insidiously across the web, voting both early and often (oh baby). Farhad Manjoo of Salon’s Machinist blog, not afraid to face the grim facts, covers this travesty against the purity of online polling (ahem) extensively:
The bots were distributed on Unfogged, a humorously wonky blog and discussion site popular with D.C. types, within a day of the poll’s opening. If you downloaded and ran the software, your machine began tallying up votes for Capps and Andrews faster than a Diebold rigged for George W. Bush.
Just as in academic politics, when the stakes are low, the tactics are nasty. Some will draw conclusions about the get-ahead-at-any-costs mentality of much of D.C. professional culture; I’m too busy wondering where a few of the other competitors hang out.
August 23rd, 2007
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