Reply #18: oh, consider why your last GD:P thread was still preaching to the choir

[OnTheOtherHand]

You linked to your GD:P thread citing Bev Conover's article here, saying you hoped that it wouldn't just preach to the choir. OK, so let's check the content against your statement, "I think we win far more people by talking about the need for verifiable elections tha(n) by trying to convince them it was stolen."

The post opened (Bev Conover's words) -- "Writer after writer keeps talking about how we are just going to march into the polls come November and vote the monsters out. If only that were true." And a bit later it said, "Meanwhile, the Bushes and their criminal allies continue on their merry way, pulling off 'miraculous' win after 'miraculous' win. Hey, God is on their side and if the exit polls say the other guy or gal should have won, declare the exit polls erroneous."

Well, I think the first part of that is rank defeatism flying in the face of experience (Ken Salazar? Tim Kaine? Jon Corzine?), and the last part is just more "for I know whom I have be-lee-ved" exit poll fundamentalism. Which gives me the choice of jumping in, saying what I really think, and possibly starting a flame war, or just staying the hell away.

An unknown number of folks made the same calculation I did and reached the same conclusion. The thread sank quickly despite (maybe even because of) some K&R, much of it from the usual suspects, i.e., the choir.

It's not that I object to your posting that sort of article (to the extent that it is possible not to object given what I think of the article). But it's hard for me to figure why you thought the post wasn't preaching to the choir. If you wanted that particular article to spark some serious discussion, perhaps you could have prefaced it with some questions or issues that folks like me could have addressed. I dunno, you may have been doomed from the subject header on: "let's get real" is not exactly an invitation to honest give-and-take.

Now there seems to be an entire small genre of articles that basically say, 'Hey, it is so obvious by now that the 2004 election was stolen, let's not belabor that. Instead, let's offer psychological analyses of WTF is wrong with the people who don't agree with us.' Some of those get posted on GD and GD-P, too. Nice. Very welcoming. ;)

I'm not quite sure why I try to explain this to you. It remains to be seen, by me, whether you can interpret any form of criticism, disagreement, or factual correction as something other than "argument for the sake of argument."