The speakers include . . . David Almacy, the Bush White House’s former Internet director . . .

I suppose he’ll be talking about how to delete e-mail—otherwise, I can’t imagine a topic on which such background qualifies him to speak

RightOnline, sponsored by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, planned it this way.

A big conglomerate sending people to a conference. . . sure, that’s just like the netroots.

Hmmm, 1/5 the attendance (500 vs. 2,500), 1/10 the press (30 vs 200), Nancy Pelosi vs who? ooooh, the rightwing blogger conference is soooooooo scary.

Well, at least it gives Fox News somewhere to go this weekend, although it will confuse their geezer audience mightily:

“Telford knows the right is at a disadvantage online. At the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee in February, for example, he remembers how confused many middle-aged and older Republicans were by the job title on his business card: “New Media Manager.”

“They thought I was the new hire, you know, the new manager coming in,” Telford says. He subsequently changed his title to “Manager of New Media.” “It still takes some explaining,” he adds.”

<<To Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident, a bipartisan group blog that chronicles the Web’s impact on politics, the bloggers on the left are “maturing from rambunctious teenagers to young adulthood,” while the right-roots is “still in its infancy.”>>

That about sums it up: the right roots are wah-wah titty babies, only able to parrot what the old and big conservatives tells them.

There are certain forms of media which can be quickly adopted and effectively used by Democrats, and certain forms of media for which this is true of Republicans. They are both going to dominate in their respective media.

The Republicans simply aren’t going to manage to make effective use of blogs and other forms of grassroots-organizing new media in the same way that the Democrats have.

In all likelihood, in the future, some other kind of medium or technology will spring up that is well-adapted to the Republican culture and mindset. For now, that seems to be the Republicans’ utter dominance of creepy “Obama is a secret Muslim” chain e-mails. But I’m sure something else will come up, too.

Well, I recently heard that Rush Limbaugh got a 400 million dollar contract to spew his garbage.  That’s gonna buy a lot of pills and underage male prostitutes.  Seriously, talk radio, where the listener is told what to think and get mad about is probably always going to be dominated by right wing authority lovers.  They dont’ WANT to think for themselves. 

Have you ever noticed that right wing websites rarely have comment sections?  And if they do, they are heavily moderated.  Authoritan mindset.

I’m a threadjacking bastard, because I’m too lazy to send an email to Amanda, but here’s a story that Pandagonians shouldn’t miss:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1732581120080717

Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women in the most populous Arab country, and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their maltreatment, a survey showed Thursday. ...

The survey of more than 2,000 Egyptian men and women and 109 foreign women said the vast majority of Egyptians believed that sexual harassment in Egypt was on the rise, citing a worsening economic situation and a lack of awareness or religious values.

It said 62 percent of Egyptian men reported perpetrating harassment, while 83 percent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed. Nearly half of women said the abuse occurred daily.

Only 2.4 percent of Egyptian women reported it to the police, with most saying they did not believe anyone would help. Some feared reporting harassment would hurt their reputations.

Some 53 percent of men blamed women for bringing on sexual harassment, saying they enjoyed it or were dressed in a way deemed indecent. Some women agreed.

“Out of Egyptian women and men interviewed, most believe that women who wear tight clothes deserve to be harassed,” the survey said. It added most agreed women should be home by 8 p.m.

The survey said most of the Egyptian women who told of being harassed said they were dressed conservatively, with the majority wearing the Islamic headscarf.

Fucked up shit. I’d like to hear more from the women who cited economic problems.

Mark B, is your point that semi-anarchic interactivity <u>itself</u> is the true nature of the blogosphere?  (Otherwise it’s just “electric newsletters”?)  And that THAT makes it ungainly for RWA mindsets?

... because that rationale completely baffles me.

Mark B, is your point that semi-anarchic interactivity itself is the true nature of the blogosphere?  (Otherwise it’s just “electric newsletters”?) And that THAT makes it ungainly for RWA mindsets?

I think I’d agree with that. Several of the polling points on Altemeyer’s RWA test are centered on who should be forced to shut the fuck up and why:

It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds.

The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.

Erik Telford LOOKS like a prototypical College Republican…hahahaha.

“To be fair, the right-roots has had some successes, among them derailing Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court and battling immigration reform. “

I’m surprised they didn’t include the setup of Dan Rather…the Powerliners are going to be bragging about that sole accomplishment all the way to the retirement home while the rest of us are out doing other things with our lives.

Seriously, talk radio, where the listener is told what to think and get mad about is probably always going to be dominated by right wing authority lovers.

You know, I was thinking about that earlier today.  Except then it occurred to me.  The internet (and especially the blogosphere) is a new medium beloved of fresh young iconoclasts excited to be able to carve of a little piece for themselves, which costs, what $50 a year these days in addition to whatever you think your time is worth?  Talk radio is a moribund anachronism which only still exists because there are still a few people old enough to remember when it was the cutting edge new way of getting information, small-c conservatives who prefer to stick to their tried and true forms of technology rather than take the time to learn something new.  When they die, so will Rush Limbaugh’s career (and those of his wingnut protegees).

Of course this might not be particularly charitable to institutions like NPR.

Hilarious indeed.  I had no idea until I got here, either, and I pay attention to this stuff.  MM is a horror show in so many ways I’m pretty sure she smells like the Devil Himself has a bad case of the shits.

It was an honor and pleasure to meet you today, Amanda.  You and Jesse and Pam are true voices of sanity.  In general.  Most of the time. 

Your life-compass is fabulously calibrated.  Trust it.  And thank you for all you’ve taught me as an old dude, and even for the things I’ve said WTF? about and believe I can make a case for.  There aren’t many people I’ve ever met that I couldn’t learn from.

I love your writing, and I love this blog.

He should be in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda not sitting on his fat ass in Austin.

I love how there’s a picture of Reagan behind this guy with the quote “The Time Is Now.”

We here on the left do have our FDRs and JFKs and LBJs, historical leaders whom we admire and appreciate… even Clinton just as a charismatic democratic leader, but we’re a little more focussed on people that we can actually get elected rather than living in a past we were frankly too young to remember, or not even alive to experience.

“Skinny Tie doesn’t realize that no matter how defensive you get about it, the 80’s probably sucked if you weren’t a kid.” -Bis

He should be in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda not sitting on his fat ass in Austin.

maybe someone should give the local Army recruiting office a call and tip them off to this bunch of war enthusiasts

“Skinny Tie doesn’t realize that no matter how defensive you get about it, the 80’s probably sucked if you weren’t a kid.”

Well, a kid or someone living a charmed existence in the art/music/club scene in Downtown Manhattan, maybe.  I was a kid in the 80’s, and it was pretty cool, but I’d give every Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony in the world to have been doing lines in the bathroom with Debbie Harry at CBGB’s, circa 1982.

Oh, and I also forgot to add, in my cocaine and Basquiat romantic haze, that I think wingnut groups plan to hold their pathetic little gatherings at times and places where liberal confabs are also going on.  I remember there “coincidentally” being some kind of Operation Rescue type event in town the one year I made it to the NOW National Convention, and yes they did take the opportunity to picket the hotel where said convention was being held.

Well at least they are pouring money into a liberal city like Austin, doing their part to pump the economy. Can\‘t be all that bad right?

Of course this might not be particularly charitable to institutions like NPR

NPR is one of those things that I just… don’t understand.  Don’t get me wrong—I’d love to be the kind of person who listens to NPR and knows all sorts of crazy stuff.  But when the hell am I supposed to have time to sit and listen to the radio?  I guess it would be different if I had a driving commute every day but… I dunno.  I like it in theory, but in practice, it’s totally lost on me.

Opop:  Talk radio is a moribund anachronism which only still exists because there are still a few people old enough to remember when it was the cutting edge new way of getting information

IMHO the talk radio phenomenon—such as it is, gak—stems from the convergence of radio and car travel.  And probably road rage too, all merged into what Seinfeld called “one disgusting urge.” 

It’s going to be a lot harder to get people blog-reading while driving.

the convergence of radio and car travel

I get the idea that one is more likely to listen to talk radio if they drive around a lot (which is why I’m not much of an NPR junkie), but I lived in car world (AKA the entire rest of the USA) until I was 19 and neither developed the habit myself nor ever noticed my parents or most other adults I knew doing so.  Driving around is why oldies and classic rock stations exist, duh. 

Not to mention, of course, that most cars manufactured in the last 15-20 years come standard with a tape deck (through which all sorts of media can be played via one of those $9.99 CD or MP3 player-to-tape adapters you can pick up at any Best Buy), and even the folks I know who drive old cars consider some kind of music-enabling stereo system to be one of the first retrofitting priorities.

Which means that the only drivers forced to deal with either silence or talk radio are those driving vehicles that only get AM (or maybe those who hate all forms of popular music likely to be played on the radio in any given area), and who are either too poor to add a better sound system or can’t be bothered to because they’re OK with just listening to talk radio.  Which definitely skews old.  Every. Single. Person I know who drives a car old enough or bare bones enough not to have any other option has put in some kind of stereo. 

While obviously you can’t blog and drive at the same time, you also can’t blog and do a great many other things at the same time, and yet that doesn’t seem to deter politically active young people (who often tend to be quite busy doing other things).  And I will personally fight anyone who thinks that people who listen to rightwing talk radio are as a rule either busier or more hard-working than people who read or write blogs.

I wonder if the popularity of in-car talk-radio listening coincides with something happening in music radio.  Did talk-radio listeners switch from music because they wanted talk or because they lost interest in music?  (Too much uniformity?  Too much rock and/or roll?  Too much hip-hop?)

I get the impression that talk-radio listeners think they’re being educated by what they listen to, that it’s a kind of offshoot from “the news.”  Maybe they think, as long as I’m just killing time, I might as well learn something.  It seems to cater to people who are especially credulous, but think that they’re informed.  And then there are the people who like (what they think of as) the “tell it like it is” attitude of the radio talkers.  The woman who cuts my hair was going on last time about how much she enjoyed Glenn Beck.  I wept a little inside.

I hate talk-radio as a format.  Perhaps the only thing I hate more on the radio are those morning shows, which someone must like because every two-bit FM outfit has one, and They.  All.  Suck.  Rocks through a straw.

Maybe they think, as long as I’m just killing time, I might as well learn something.

Are you by any chance French, or from some other country where the intelligentsia are actually considered celebrities?  Maybe you grew up in Cambridge, MA, or Berkeley, CA?

Because based on my knowledge of people outside of certain academically inclined circles in the USA, very few people think, “Alors, I have some spare time—I should learn something rather than engaging in idle entertainment!  Ah, c’est bon, Monsieur Limbaugh est arrivé!” 

And I certainly don’t want to participate in any idle smearing, but the demographic who listen to right-wing talk radio and the demographic who want to educate themselves in their spare time tend not to overlap at all.

Actually, I was in fact born in Berkeley.  No joke.

But my theory is that talk-radio listeners really do think of themselves as having been informed—to the point of superiority, because they now now what The Liberal Media Doesn’t Want Them To Know—by their radio-listening habits.  If you never watch the news on TV or read a newspaper, talk radio can become the medium for acquiring information about current events.  Of course, people who do this acquire spectacular misinformation, but they don’t know that, because they trust the messenger.

Driving while listening to talk radio is sort of like a different modality of the idea of watching the evening news while eating dinner.  People like to know what’s going on the the world today, even when they feel like they don’t have time to dedicate to the enterprise of finding out, and if the media outlet they choose purports to tell them What’s Going On, they feel improved by the experience.  If this wasn’t an aspect of contemporary American society, there wouldn’t be 3 (out of 6) TVs tuned to different cable news networks in the treadmill area of my community rec-center gym.  (OK, there’s also generally one on MTV.  Those Kardashians are awful.)

Ah, c’est bon, Monsieur Limbaugh est arrivé!

Yep, just snorted potato chips out my nose on that one.  Thanks a lot.

Are you by any chance French, or from some other country where the intelligentsia are actually considered celebrities?

I think that everyone likes to think that they’re more “in the know” than others. What talk radio sells is the feeling of being more well-informed than the intelligentsia, without actually making you well informed or forcing you to expend any effort in the process.

Flip, I think you’re ascribing a level of naivete to wingnuts that they really don’t deserve.  While I don’t doubt that people who listen to Rush et al are a bunch of know-it-all jackasses who think they have the real scoop, I seriously doubt that they discovered right-wing talk radio out of a genuine interest in being enlightened wrt the rest of the world.  I think people who fall for 90% of ‘documentaries’ on the Discovery Channel might fit that description (a group of people who also tend to be a bunch of know-it-all jackasses who think they have the real scoop, even though they’re glaringly ignorant, even flat out wrong, about virtually everything, ever).

think wingnut groups plan to hold their pathetic little gatherings at times and places where liberal confabs are also going on.  I remember there “coincidentally” being some kind of Operation Rescue type event in town the one year I made it to the NOW National Convention, and yes they did take the opportunity to picket the hotel where said convention was being held.

Yeah, just like their CPCs are always around the corner from the real Planned Parenthoods.  Hoping to get misdirected traffic and hijack the message.

It’s hard to come up with the “primal scene” for how someone might get sucked into talk radio without knowing much about it.  I kind of imagine two types:

1, A dickhead commuter who’s irritatedly pushing buttons on his car radio to find something to distract him from his aggravation and road rage and finds a similarly obnoxious voice talking back to him, whereupon like Narcissus he falls in love with his own self-image.  Then he starts telling his dickhead friends about it, and the phenomenon spreads.

2, A gullible older person.  I have relatives who still believe just about everything they hear or see in the media has to be true; they have big trouble distinguishing open editorializing from (supposedly) straight information.  These are also the people preyed upon by all kinds of fraudsters.  They’re insufficiently skeptical.  They start telling their gullible friends about it, and the phenomenon spreads.

Or, you know, it could be that people with a right wing political bent know that talk radio catering to them is out there, just like people with a left wing bent tend to become aware of things like Naomi Klein books and the lefty blogosphere. 

The idea that these are just ordinary folks driving around, flipping through the stations, and either don’t understand that this isn’t an ordinary news broadcast or think “whoa, hey, I’m angry, that guy’s angry, I better listen to this!” is ridiculously naive, sorry.  Nobody would think that an ordinary moderate would pick up a copy of Utne Reader and think, “wow, this magazine has a much prettier picture on the cover than Newsweek does!  I think I’ll take this one!” and then be seduced into leftist politics.

I got over thinking that most conservatives were just ignorant of the real facts a very long time ago, mainly through talking to conservatives I know.  They’re not naive or sheltered, they’re either deliberately ignorant or simply don’t give a shit.

Well, yes, obviously people who self-identify as conservatives seek out conservative political products.  That doesn’t really require much of an explanation.  I’m curious about the people who start out with muddled political opinions, or who think of themselves as apolitical, and then get sucked in, gradually or suddenly, to the point where they may eventually self-identify as conservative.  People get recruited somehow.  I’m imagining some ways that might happen.  How do _you_ think it happens?

How do _you_ think it happens?

I don’t.

I have to say I don’t know anyone who listens to that stuff who doesn’t share those political leanings, any more than I know any moderates who read lefty blogs.  That’s kind of my point.  I don’t think it’s a matter of “conversion” or “recruiting”, any more than the left engages in such tactics. 

And if I were to speculate how righties came to be that way, and I had to pin it on media rather than any of a number of other reasons someone might come to a certain set of political beliefs, I’d be more likely to suspect Fox News, which at least pretends at being a real news channel. 

One caveat that I will give is that I think there are a lot of generally moderate or at least not that crazy conservative people who will happen upon this sort of thing, especially if it’s not Rush himself but someone like Hannity or Savage, and without thinking about what they’re listening to will be swayed for a moment by the rhetoric, and think something like, “yeah, the mexicans are out breeding us!  he’s got a point!”  Except of course, when called on it, they’ll admit that the blathering idiot on the radio is full of it.  But I don’t think those people are in the process of being “recruited” so much as just being desensitized towards this sort of thinking so that they’ll give milder versions of it a pass as they encounter it in their lives.  If you hear that sort of thing and think, “hmm, he’s a blowhard, but maybe he has a point…?”, the next time a coworker uses a racial slur you won’t say anything.  If you hear some ridiculous slander against Obama on the radio, you probably won’t say anything about the whisper campaign email forwards you get from supposedly “liberal” friends.

One caveat that I will give is that I think there are a lot of generally moderate or at least not that crazy conservative people who will happen upon this sort of thing, especially if it’s not Rush himself but someone like Hannity or Savage, and without thinking about what they’re listening to will be swayed for a moment by the rhetoric, and think something like, “yeah, the mexicans are out breeding us!  he’s got a point!”

OK, in case I wasn’t being clear before, this is more like what I was trying to describe.  A lot of these people never will get called on it, and they get slowly assimilated into the borg.

I have to think that there are some people who are now conservative talk-radio listeners who didn’t start out thinking of themselves that way, but came by it—either on a friend’s recommendation or on pure serendipity—and became fans.  That’s pretty much how music fandom works, or used to work:  listen to music, get bored, twiddle the knobs, hear something that catches your attention, and try to find out where you can get some more. 

Maybe these people aren’t exactly innocents but the experience catalyzes them into being in touch with their inner conservative, which they’ve been all along without giving it a name.  So they’d have to be the kind of person who _would_ like Michael Savage before ever hearing Michael Savage and liking it.  I don’t mean to suggest that the “conversion” is from one state to a completely contradictory state.

Ultimately, though, I hope political conversion or recruitment really does work, at least long enough to get the squishy apolitical middle to come around to our side for a change.  I can’t comprehend apolitical people, really, but I think that there are a lot of them out there, and I would not at all mind counterprogramming them so as to stave off their being persuaded to the Dark Side.

they get slowly assimilated into the borg.

See, that’s where we differ.  I don’t think it’s any more possible to be “assimilated” into the Right than it is to be “assimilated” into the Left.  There are people who have been desensitized to far-right commentary, who now won’t think of those ideas as particularly dangerous.  But I don’t think many of them ever actually change their beliefs and come fully into the fold.  They just won’t think it’s particularly bizarre when someone else in their life spouts out with this stuff, or when politicians use these dangerous ideas as a justification for dangerous policy.

Maybe it’s a temporary assimilation rather than a lifelong one…

You really don’t think a person can be politically assimilated?  I badly want it to be the case that homophobes and sexists and racists can be, if not fully broken down and re-programmed, at least ratcheted back.  And I think the “organizing” model in general is about teaching people that their irritations and struggles are political and collective, not just private and personal, which to me suggests either that people have quiescent political ideas waiting to be switched on, or that apolitical people can be persuaded into one ideology or another.

(BTW, thanx for this exchange.)

And I think the “organizing” model in general is about teaching people that their irritations and struggles are political and collective, not just private and personal, which to me suggests either that people have quiescent political ideas waiting to be switched on, or that apolitical people can be persuaded into one ideology or another.

Oh, I think someone can have a latent political consciousness awakened, if for instance they weren’t particularly politicized to begin with.  But I think that ‘organizing’, in general, is usually done with a purpose of finding already likeminded people to educate and get involved in your cause, rather than changing the minds of people who already disagree with you. 

For instance I got a phone call this week from Planned Parenthood, who are organizing various activities to raise awareness of the differences between Obama and McCain on reproductive rights.  I was super excited about this, thanked the caller for being a part of this phone drive and PP for getting together on this, and informed her of my willingness to help them out in whatever way I could.  This is because I’m already a liberal, and in fact via previous donations, former membership in NOW, and current membership in the ACLU am already on their radar.  Planned Parenthood was not just flipping open the phone book and calling everyone in order to try to convince them, one by one, to vote for Obama, or to become pro-choice, or to switch teams from conservative to liberal. That would be a waste of time and money.  Similarly, I never get calls from conservative groups—it would be a waste of their time and money. 

The existence of right wing talk radio is due no more to “recruiting” attempts than left wing media is.  The assumption is that there’s already a core of like-minded individuals out there waiting to be appealed to.  Just as very few leftists get that way by happening on a copy of Utne Reader, very few rightists get that way by flipping the dial past Rush.

Another example:  I used to be far less radical, politically.  Both in the degree to which I was politically engaged, and where I stood on particular issues.  However, I’ve always considered myself a liberal, and never identified at all with the right.  I was predisposed to agree with liberals and distrust conservatives.  I wasn’t recruited or converted by the left, and even the degree to which I’ve moved left on my own has coincided more with life experiences that radicalized me than with reading blogs.  Blogs came later, when I’d already found my leftist identity through scholarship and activism.

But I think that ‘organizing’, in general, is usually done with a purpose of finding already likeminded people to educate and get involved in your cause, rather than changing the minds of people who already disagree with you.

I agree with that, but I think there’s a third option, which is getting people to move their location on the continuum, and possibly discover that they already are of like mind, when they might not have even been aware of that themselves.  So the goal doesn’t have to be to change polarity dramatically from negative to positive; it can also be to go from lean-positive to strong-positive, or from “meh” to lean-positive. 

Political blogs have IMHO virtually no investment in nudging people from the muddled middle a few steps over to the left.  But I think talk-radio, in addition to preaching to the choir, aims to turn people who are disaffected or crotchety but un-ideologically so into loud-and-proud conservative foot soldiers and meme-spreaders.  They’re trying both to rally true believers and to make people who start out thinking things like “All politicians are a bunch of crooks” and “The whole world is going to hell these days” think instead that conservative Republicans are some sort of solution to their complaints.  That’s either radicalizing people with latent conservative tendencies (they start out conservative, they get more conservative) or catalyzing people with incoherent tendencies (they start out apolitical, they get more conservative).  I think they’re trying to do both.

My experience with conservatives is more the New England variety, and those aren’t really the same as true-blue (or deep red) movement conservatives, so that might be where my sense of their persuadability comes from.