I’m seriously beginning to wonder if the GOP isn’t paying people to go from messageboard to messageboard to hack away at Kerry. A recent guest poster, who shall remain nameless, decided to post a bunch of material lifted word for word off of the Bush/Cheney campaign website. When challenged on any of his points, he just repeated the same mindless line.
I suspect he will move on to another board after he is done with his spiel, continuing on in a locust like fashion to eat away at Kerry’s crop of votes and spoil them into Nader votes.
If this is what the Republicans feel they need to do to win in November, I pity them.
Then again, we could always keep our suspicions to ourselves and engage our guests. Resolutely, then, we could actually build a direct pipeline to the Man Upstairs. Consider it your lips to God’s ear?
I’ve been wanting to just tell a lot of people that they’re total douchebags.
But they post in GD.
I don’t want to euphamise. I don’t want to be tactful. I want to tell it like it is: “You, sir, are one big motherfucking douchebag. DOOSH-a-BAG! Now fuck off.”
Paid? Naah, that’s dumb as well as uncharitable. Our political enemies are, for the most part, sincerely wrong. And motivated by the same civic passions as arouse us. If we do, in fact, surrender our private opinions to the collective, democratic will, we commit an act of faith. We believe that we can reason with our fellows and by persuasion bring about a more just nation. I bellieve our history shows this to be so, albeit with an agonizing slowness that grinds away at hope.
But this is dependent upon an almost fanatical devotion to free speech, that all be heard, if not necessarily heeded. If you have reason on your side, you welcome dialogue.
And, of course, could be wrong. Always that possibility, I was wrong once in '68m when I thought I had made a mistake.
No, truly. I am very much of the Conservative bent, but I have found a large number of the Liberals and their ilk on this board to be very dedicated, articulate, well-researched and passionate. They’re wrong, mind you. But you can’t fault their ideals. Keep up the good work. I truly hope that we can reach a place where your ideals can co-exist with mine in peace.
You’re beginning to wonder? Well, let me clear it up for you.
Yes, they are. So are the Dems. So is the intellectual property lobby. It’s called astroturfing (artificial grass roots, that is). If you go on Apple’s website and read 80 gazillion posts about how kick-as the new mini MacinIpod is, that doesn’t mean a lot of people think it’s great. Same for the reviews at Amazon, which are often either plagiarized reviews or ads for competing product.
And advertising isn’t the worst of it. Go into support forums sometime, software, hardware, cars, what have you. There will be dozens of people in there spamming threads to deny any possibility the product for sale has defects, saying that any defects can be solved by purchasing an unrelated product, telling you that only Motorcraft fuses are safe to use in Ford cars. People will get bullshitted into spending hundreds of dollars on stuff they don’t need to fix a problem they either don’t have or that they could best get rid of by dumping the product.
Hey, dudes, this is the pit! Let’s flame, for fuck’s sake! This is the second pit thread I’ve opened that degenerated into a polite conversation! You want polite conversation take it to GD!!! Man!
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Guests who appear to be paid shills for one particular line of political thought. Fuck 'em!!! Fuck 'em hard!!! May their loins burn with the fire of a trillion treponema pallida!!! But don’t ban them, unless they are blatantly going against the rules. I like reading the threads where they get chopped up into itty-bitty pieces!!!
Okay, I contributed to the thread that Truthmeister started, then I went out for the evening. All I had to offer in rebuttal was a pretty straight forward tu quoque, and pointed it out to be as much. Others were handily smacking him down, so I really didn’t put forth much effort. But I come back, and the thread has evaporated.
Can someone give me the condensed version of the thread’s demise?
Also, I really don’t think the likes of the recent guests are paid-for GOPers. If they are, we need to tip off the GOP that they are really not getting their money’s worth. The local right tilting denisons of the SDMB do a far better job of putting forth compelling and reasoned arguments than the guests have. If I were Sam Stone or any other well spoken SDMBer, I’d put in a formal request to the GOP that they stop sending those calibur guests our way, cause they certainly aint helpin.
Then again, in a Princess Bride kind of logical stream, maybe the guests are actually DNC plants acting as RNC plants. But then we’d recognize that as such, so they are actually RNC plants posing as DNC plants posing as RNC plants. But then we’d recognize then as such…
And I dispute the notion that these newfound GOP sockpuppets are paid; I’m sure they’ll be glad to do their stuff for free, in exchange for an autographed 8 x 10 from Dubya himself, and a chance for a night in the Lincoln bedroom.
