In regards to how conservatives are treated here, and in particular, the description of me having a “hardon” for Sam Stone, I think it’s instructive to reflect on the nature of these boards since I’ve been here.
Of course in the present day, all of the conservative world rather conveniently forgets that George W. Bush was ever president. A recent analyses of who gets mentioned during Republican debates found that Bush was rarely mentioned relative to Reagan and other prominent Republicans. This is of course because time will tell, and reality will curb-stomp. Sure, everyone now knows that Bush was a force of incompetent malignance.
Back in 2002, they didn’t. Not only were Republicans active cheerleaders, but everyone else subsequent to 9/11 was trying to maintain some sense of unity, and if they were not, the right certainly did their best to portray them as traitorous. Back then, there was no liberal blogosphere (even Daily Kos was just getting developed that year). Online media broadly speaking overall was really not very developed. Traditional media, as I recall things, was still the primary information source. So we were dealing with the early Bush days, post 9/11, with relatively few alternate sources of information.
This board was actually (for me anyway) a source of novel and important alternate information about what was going on. I remember a pit post entitled something about “I’m going to go out on a limb and say there are no WMDs in Iraq.” Posters like PatriotX and Mr. Svinlesha would provide eye-opening information about what was going on that I didn’t have much of any other source for. And they had to beat certain other posters over the head with this information. One guy whose name I cannot recall, even pretended to have some special forces type inside information that confirmed there were such weapons, and that the liberal pussies would be shown what was what eventually. To this day, some of those type of people still post here without ever having, to my knowledge, acknowledged that they were wrong.
(In fact, one of the moments of real frustration for me regarding XTisme was trying to point out that statements by Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, using the same words and phrases, made within a day or so of one another, represented a coordinated effort to get a message out about the threat of weapons in Iraq. Now, everyone recognizes this, and all that needs to be shown is Rice’s “smoking gun” video to convey the broader picture.)
This paradigm of many conservatives blindly defending Bush on essentially all topics persisted. We had Swiftboat discussions, where one had to go and get information even about the absence of navigable Vietnamese waterways to shoot down false assertions being made about John Kerry. Even the idea that the Swiftboaters were connected to Karl Rove and Bush’s political operations was originally a controversial assertion.
So, the same was true for defenders of Bush’s economic strategies. The difficulty there is that there is a lot more room for obfuscation when it comes to evaluating those sorts of things, and some posters here are very good at obfuscation. It’s only now in the cold light of reality that Sam Stone’s arguments in favor of Bush’s economic policies are easily seen for what they were.
Someone else pointed out that the change in the nature of the boards conservatives is due in part to those thoughtful ones being able to acknowledge the truth of things. Some of them probably regret the support they gave and perhaps drifted from the boards. Certain of them are unflinchingly unchanging, and will continue to defend the same practices despite their demonstrable failures. Shodan and Sam Stone are two examples of posters who have been here through the whole travesty of the Bush presidency, and would say the same things today that they would have been in 2002.
I miss Mr. Svinlesha and Patriot X.
