Hello all.  I just found this place yesterday.  I was a long time poster and frequent diarist at DailyKos and MyDD (and frequent doesn’t necessarily mean good as you’ll no doubt soon learn), but I dropped off for a while.  I recently started posting again, and when I came back I found Booman Tribune.

I don’t know if this is my best work, but I guess if I’m going to do it I have to jump in somewhere, so here goes, cross posted from It Affects You:

Yesterday I wrote a particularly brief post drawing attention to what was at the time the top three headlines at WorldNetDaily.  (True story: the first time I saw an article on WorldNetDaily, I actually thought it was Weekly World News – that trashy “Aliens stole my turnips and impregnated my wife” rag next to the National Enquirer in checkout lines everywhere.)

Not long after, politica took me to task in the comments:

And posting them and giving them extra traffic for this is a good thing?

If you have nothing to write…don’t write.

Now, I understand exactly what politica was saying.  Admittedly my post was far from the most insightful, well thought out piece I’ve ever published on the site.  And I generally have subscribed to the philosophy that you don’t help sell the other guy’s story.  If someone is telling outrageous yarns, you don’t lend credibility or publicity by responding. But that doesn’t always work in the real world.

Is it better to allow these things to spread unchallenged, or oppose them and risk unintentionally aiding the filth dispensors?  I pondered this briefly as part of a larger post the other day, but it’s worth a closer look on its own.

Hate feeds on darkness.  Ignorance thrives in the absence of light.  Misinformation festers in isolation.  

There are a few things we know about the Republican Noise Machine, one of them being that it will continue to crank out noise whether we ignore or directly oppose it.  The Noise Machine is going to try to assassinate the character of people like Cindy Sheehan regardless of how we oppose them.  And their messages will spread ever wider until they begin to seep into the mainstream from seemingly a hundred directions at once.  Would we rather it grow in the darkness, or would we rather shine a spotlight onto their mechanizations?

Our potential responses fall under those two broad areas: we can ignore them, thinking any response will dignify their actions while helping their messages spread; or we can oppose them, worried about lies and half-truths spreading with nothing to counter their misinformation.

I used to be much more firmly in the camp which held it would be a mistake to dignify such tactics with a response.  But, whether we like it or not, some Totally Fucking Insane arguments are going to be taken seriously by more people than we realize no matter what we do.  The Noise Machine has grown too large.  O’Reilly will repeat the messages.  Maglalang will repeat the messages.  Conservative rags will repeat the messages.  And people will hear these messages and they will spread.  As I wrote yesterday, people who ought to know better will find themselves considering ridiculous arguments based not on the merits of those arguments, but based instead on the size of the supprt for those arguments.  (“Well, it doesn’t sound right, but so many people are saying it.”)  Allowing these messages to grow unchecked in the dark means they will be larger and more formidable by the time they reach the light.

Responding isn’t all good either.  The last thing we want to do is get into a serious debate on some made-up, outlandish point fabricated simply to prop one side up or take the other down.  A parrot can be trained to repeat the phrase “I know you are but what am I?” over and over.  If you suddenly found yourself in a debate with that parrot, and you grew angrier and angrier with each of his rebuttals, who is playing the part of the fool?  So clearly our goal should not be to engage these wholesalers of misinformation as one would engage a friend in a serious, spirited discussion on an issue where there are honest differences.  The goal should be to expose them for what they are and what they are doing.

I may not be wise enough to always recognize the appropriate method of response for every case, but when in doubt I will always err on the side of shinning a flashlight in the dark and watching these cockroaches scurry.