A larger issue surrounding the "progressive"-Ron Paul affinity is "statements of manipulation".

[LoZoccolo]

I posted a big post on DU2 about "statements of manipulation" and how they are employed on the Internet. I think that what we are seeing as far as a "progressive"-Ron Paul affinity is reflective of that. I say "progressive" in quotation marks because not all progressives support it - I think this is reflected in the fact that the majority of liberals support President Obama.

When "progressives" use Ron Paul as a prop to antagonize Democrats and supporters of President Obama, they are doing so to manipulate people, perhaps by trying to "shame" them due to the fact that a right-winger supports policies that the further left does, but more moderate liberals at least tolerate in their support of Obama. I think what's happened now that Ron Paul has been employed this way, is that we've seen how far this segment of the "progressives" will go in an effort to make a "statement of manipulation", and we're seeing some pushback over this use of theatrics.

For some reason I'm having trouble retrieving the old post via a link, so I'm taking the body of the cached version and posting it here:

So we've got a post endorsing Rick Perry for President at the top of DU right now, and the justification is that we have to let the Republicans to injure and/or kill so many people that they come running to progressive Democrats in the future. The only thing I really have to say to these people is that it's been tried before and you can look up "nach Hitler uns" if you're serious about it, and see if you really want to take responsibility for this course of action. I wouldn't.

The thing is, I don't think that they're particularly serious about it. There's a class of people who want the power of being activists with little or no effort. There's this tool that's come along in the past fifteen years or so to let them do that, and they're enamored with it, spend an inordinate amount of time playing with it, and that's the reason you see a disconnect between Obama's real-world liberal Democrat approval and the impression you would get by reading Internet posts.

I've been seeing political posts on the Internet fall into two categories: statements of assessment and/or prescription, and statements of manipulation. A statement of assessment and/or prescription seeks to tell the facts as they are, in order to inform the best course of action. A statement of manipulation seeks to fabricate the facts in order to misinform other people into the misinformant's desired course of action.

An example of the latter is the Republicans' actions to "work the refs" and get the media to give time and serious consideration to any ridiculous thing they might want to say, by accusing the media of a liberal bias. This is not an assessment, this is a statement designed to have an affect to manipulate another's behavior. As such, they will keep saying it no matter how untrue it eventually becomes, because it's not being said in order to be true, but because it gets people to do what they want.

Likewise, we see these tired canards about Obama doing nothing, that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans; these aren't being said because they're true (they are objectively and verifiably not true; there is testable empirical data which shows them not to be true), but because they are supposed to have an effect on the elected Democrats and try to get them to enact more liberal policy. It is the liberal netroots version of "working the refs". If these were statements of assessment and/or prescription, then their refutation with empirical data wouldn't be met with blanket dismissals; in other words, when we give them the list, they just go "oh, that list again". Like the statement that the Republicans make about the media having a liberal bias, they will assert their canards no matter how untrue they are, because of the affect they think they will have.

The problem is that the people making statements of manipulation are pissing in the well of our discourse as we try to assess and/or prescribe. At best they are a distraction; this question of whether or not we should work for Democrats has now become the #1 discussion on Democratic Underground and all sorts of other topics become soiled with this dirt. They are wasting our time. And at worst, they are bringing people to believe their manipulative lies, and steering them away from political responsibility, from assessing and prescribing, and making a difference.

I think as people who want honest political discussion, we'll have to think about how we approach this phenomenon now that it's become pretty clear to us what's going on. I'm inclined to just ignore it and try to build something bigger and more prominent, but as the pragmatists are out doing real work, the manipulators have much more time to try to dominate the Internet discussion, so they will always have an advantage in this venue, so I'm not completely decided on it.

And I don't give a fuck that only maybe a third of the people here agree with me, because if you go out into the real world, to meetings like the ones listed in my signature line, they don't do this bullshit. They're people who've seen what needs to be done in order to get what they want, who participate in Democracy. They would see no sense in tearing down what they worked so hard to get so far.

And can this "oh you're being divisive against liberals, you better be real nice and not be rude to me if you want me to vote for the Democrats!" response; you made the threat first by using the Republicans as your attack dogs, against me and everyone else in this country - the world, really - and while I might be telling you you're wrong or even calling you names, I never threatened to hurt or kill people. Don't be a hypocrite, and hypocrisy is commonly a sign of manipulative and histrionic behavior to begin with.

If the link starts working, you can see it here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1783078

[Enrique]

1. some of that does exist

at the same time, people are FALSELY accused of that, when they are not doing that at all. That really pisses me off, and people that do that don't live up to all that grand talk about pragmatism and Democracy.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. "trouble retrieving the old post via a link"

Apparently DU archives have been moved and all posts from 2007 to 2010 have been truncated to 20 pages!

See page 20 and note how few posts dated before Dec 10 2010 have survived. I wonder whether this is going to be fixed:

"Democratic Underground - General Discussion (1/22-2007 thru 12/14/2010) Page 20"
at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=389&page=20

[LoZoccolo]

4. Hmmmm, this might be a separate issue.

My post was from 2011, but you bring up something interesting. The 2007-2010 posts are probably still searchable.

[cthulu2016]

3. It's not all about you

Some people believe things because they believe them, not as a means to "antagonize Democrats and supporters of President Obama"

Also, a fuck of a lot of "progressives" are Democrats so the "antagonize democrats" thing appears to be you marking out your turf as the only "real" Democrats.

Whatevs

[LoZoccolo]

5. Yes, but their targets are almost always Democrats in these types of attacks.

So the statement would still be true. It is not meant to demarcate "real" and "fake" Democrats.

[Whisp]

6. excellent - right on point.