Sen. Mark Warner talking about broadband business opportunities.
Sen. Mark Warner is taking aim at moveon.org, comparing it to the Tea Party. This is good because it starts the discussion about the hard left's failures and its need to move on -- out of the party it can't keep hijacking, into its own third party.
I'll be watching closely to see if Warner gets back to spouting nonsense about "net neutrality" and the pretense that congestion of a scarce resource is somehow about "freedom of speech". Moveon could get him on board before in this kind of campaign -- will we be hearing from him again about this go-nowhere issue? After all, as even -- especially! -- Nancy Scola of TechPresident admits, this entire concept of "net neutrality" is an *invention of the wired left and the netroots*. Yeah, the "series of tubes" are filled with WoW patches and Lost episodes, Nancy, and I can't search my Yahoo mail again. Thanks!
Moveon.org predictably and defensively replies that they have 5 million people and 100,000 in Virginia. See, that's the problem -- that "progressive" fetishizing of masses, numbers of people, etc. and not real democratic process, and not freedom of individuals. (If you have to say that an individual needs "empowering" by you or some piece of software, you've just explained the actual source of his oppression.)
I think it's a fruitless discussion to try to see if these extremities of the right and left are "the same," morally, or tactically. Certainly both use the tactic of hate-tubing, but I actually have the impression that discussion and debate is more tolerated among the Tea Party types than among the progressives.
As I never tire of explaining, moveon.org is a seven-lane highway going out, and a cowpath coming back.
It has no true interactivity, as its purpose is to serve as a machine of highly-ideological and energized -- and funded -- cadres to put over propaganda on the masses. It has the look and feel of Bolshevism at every turn in that respect -- the presence of an "avant-garde" that thinks it is leading the masses, and manipulating them.
There are no forums on moveon.org But other sites on the right like Liberty Calling does have such forums, so that imagine, someone who doesn't like the campaign against the Ground Zero mosque and Fox's portrayal can say they "left something out". To be sure, those geeky MMORPG legacies of the "flag" and the "vote up and down" are there to chill speech, but those are prevalent on leftist sites, too.
I don't know if you could say the Tea Party has a centralized moveon.org organizing site (I haven't studied it much), but the comments are open on a lot of blogs. I don't mean to portray the Tea Party as some kind of bastion of tolerance and pluralism -- it, too, is a home for the fiercely like-minded.
But what I do want to point out that for all its talk of "community" and "progress" and "empowerment" and all the other progressive propagandistic terms, moveon.org has no democratic interactivity on the site. These millions invoked are mailing lists. I'm on it myself and I feel no spiritual kinship.
There's no place to vote on moveon.org -- on anything. There are no "likes". But frankly, even if there were, I wouldn't "like" much of anything on there, anyway. Even if moveon.org was to open up a free comments page, and even if it allowed bloggers like Daily Kos does to use its site, and even if it gave me a guest column or some other dissenter, I'd be uninterested -- because it is what it is -- a highly organized sectarian smuggling operation whose task is to work in memes and Google ads and viral concepts everywhere and "manipulate the masses". Like Lenin, it has taken over the telegraph station, and as with Leninism, the workers' councils are a decoration, not substantive.
Moveon.org sponsors something that sounds totally down-home and all-American -- potluck suppers. But the way it works is, you sign up, and "We'll give you everything you need to have a successful potluck!". You can't discuss the agenda with the organizers at the Central Committee. That is, no doubt they have their internal wired advance cadres who work these things out, but it's not something the members of the general movement or public ever get a chance to comment on -- it's propaganda which disciplined ranks are supposed to absorb and pass on.
You can "form a Moveon Council" and become one of 680,000 such soviets. I'm not shown the slightest thing about the agenda when I click through the menus -- I just join, and they will send me materials after that. No discussion.
The recruitment and organizing tools are the class tools, updated with social media goodness, for community organizing the hard left has used for decades. The update includes "the story" -- story of self, story of now, story of the community, etc. It's all about "story" these days, remember?
Everything is about mechanism, and not content. It's just assumed that you will understand what the "progressive' agenda is, and articulate it, using these tools -- and you will, because if you are in the wrong pew, you'll be quickly moved on out, and if you are a blank slate, they will quickly fill it.
Moveon.org must be aware of the democracy problem, because it takes care to simulate it:
"Every member has a voice in choosing the direction for both MoveOn.org Political Action and MoveOn.org Civic Action. Using our ActionForum software, you can propose priorities and strategies."
I didn't find the ActionForum software, sigh. But if I did, I can be sure it will be pre-cooked and progressively-framed before I can click.
The links to the tv ads are broken for some reason now, maybe being replenished after the elections.
Such discussion as there is on the blogs of the faithful are about how to make the debate more effective and how one can move the propaganda better in a place like Nevada, not about the substance itself. In vain will you find on these sites an honest explication of the actual program, because to do so would limit their wiggle room to trim their sails for this or that actual race.
We can learn what 3.6 million moveon.org members "accomplished" (while the rest of the 5 million claimed elsewhere sat at home or inactive on mailing lists, I guess) -- and no doubt many of those people in those "masses" feel they are in an enriching and powerful movement. But everything about it is a turn-off in style as well as substance -- which is going to be smuggled in later anyway.
I get the alerts from the Daily Kos, the Nation, CREDO, etc. All of them are smug, insular, shrill, angry, etc. Daily Kos is particularly offensive in style, but again, maybe it's ok for all of these hard-left outfits simply to sink of their own angry and sectarian weight rather than hoping that one might work with them or change their style if not substance.
But I don't want to be in a Potluck for Progress when I can't click on a screen, see what the actual issues are that are being promoted, *and debate them strenuously without censorship*. Eli Pariser came under attack years ago for providing form-letters for his cadres to dutifully send to local papers, and people objected that they weren't encouraged to use their own words -- since then the operatives have only more cunningly learned how to funnel and frame "people's stories" so they fit the agenda, through strenuous training sessions -- and pot-lucking, of course.
I don't want to be a cog in the socialist conveyor belt. I don't want ugly red hands to carry in a protest march as if someone I'm oppose literally has blood on their hands, instead of merely being a Republican that moveon.org doesn't like. I hate that sort of stuff, and obviously millions of other liberals and centrists do, too.
U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, Wikipedia
The General Petreus "Betray Us" ad controversy sums up everything that is unattractive about moveone.org and also their hypocrisy in the end in scrubbing their own ads from their pages the minute Obama appointed Petreus in his administration-- if you want to see the power of Wiki, note that the entire affair is spun on the moveon.org history.
For some, moveone.org stands in the way of what could be a moral anti-war movement of conscience, for others, moveon.org unnecessarily and unfairly charges a military leader as somehow deliberately harming his country -- a tactic that merely once again illustrates the Bolshevik credo: "the ends justify the means." But what *are* the ends? Merely power for moveon.org-backed candidates that they can manipulate (they are too extreme to come into power themselves.)
There's another thing that moveon.org depletes with its organizing tactics and stands in the way of with its hate-tubes, and that's a more mainstream liberal movement that would be critical even of Obama and certainly the Republicans and Tea Party, but would not employ the illiberal and undemocratic tactics that moveon.org and would be more democratic itself. Is there such a movement? No, because they are too hard to bring into being when the politically-inclined who lead them are usually people who want power. It's very hard to deliberately create a movement that doesn't seek power, but merely conscience.
Think about what was said about moveon.org 7 years ago on Wikipedia:
An opinion piece for the New York Times noted that MoveOn's "effort is more extensive than most - enthusiasts clicked on for the two-day primary that drew more than 300,000 voters. The virtual tally - results of which were not expected until today [Friday, June 27, 2003, at noon] - would top the combined turnouts in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in 2000.
"There were complaints about some of MoveOn's electioneering strictures, and this is but a baby step in field testing the Web's possible role for democracy. But it does provide a glimpse into politics of the future. After coming into being with an Internet petition against President Bill Clinton's impeachment, MoveOn has become an electronic precinct machine, steadily attracting more than one million enrolled members with criticisms of the George W. Bush administration and quietly raising more than $7 million for Democratic candidates. If a contender can draw at least 50 percent in the elbow-throwing field, the result will mean a formal endorsement with money and volunteers to follow.
It's a machine that cares more about influencing electoral races than building an authentic social movement, because it doesn't need to, in order to get millions to salivate and click. Even so, it fails, because the basic campaigns are so tendentious and shrill -- and wrong. The hard left has endlessly hammered on the topic of how Bush lied about the WMD in Iraq. Yet it never had an answer for what to do about the tyrant Saddam and the endless misleading of the UN inspections. It never has an answer for terrorists funded by Iran and Al-Qaeda who are responsible for most civilian deaths in Iraq. The endless obsession with the figure of Bush makes a caricature of the complexities of the issue, like the endlessly shrieking that the NYT and others somehow "sold out" to the Bush administration. By treating every skepticism and debate about the role of the Bush (and Blair) administrations in the war as a moral outrage, moveone doesn't succeed in political persuasion. Many would be happy to oppose Bush and the war in Iraq, but this extreme socialist caricature is not a narrative that they can purchase.
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