For my friends on the right: the linked satirical article is both really funny and blatantly, unrepentantly partisan. Then again, if you claim suicide in a jail cell is a form of asymmetrical warfare, you’re begging to be made fun of.
3 thoughts on “Asymmetrical Warfare, Fafblog Style”
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You know, if you want to write a blog about the future, keep the damn politics out of it. No wonder you have no subscribers — now one less.
First of all, sorry to see you go.
Secondly, I have to admit I really don’t understand the vehemence of this kind of reaction.
One reason for the strength of such a reaction might be that the content of this blog is primarily, or frequently, of a partisan political nature. If that were the case, I can understand growing tired of what could be seen as an argumentative tone. I don’t read Little Green Footballs on the one hand, or Daily Kos on the other, for that reason.
But let’s look at the blog: you have to go back nearly 18 entries to find something that remotely smacks of politics prior to this one (“Smart Drugs on Campus”) and then another 10 before you find another (” Journalism Needs Opinion”). The political links are rare, and even rarer are political links like this one, that are out-and-out partisan.
OK, so maybe the commenter was surprised by the link. He was expecting a nice article about some new gadget, and was shocked to discover instead a viciously satirical smear on the good name of those who run the Guantanamo Detention Center. Um… the article started with a warning that it was going to be blatantly partisan. So I have a hard time expecting the commenter didn’t know what he was getting into.
So if politics on this blog is rare, and well telegraphed, why not simply skip reading the articles you object to?
The commenters reaction strikes me as insecure, although I’m sure he’d deny it. It seems to me like he’s not confident enough in his own world view to either ignore those with different opinions, or read them and move on without feeling threatened.
Or alternatively, maybe it’s a group membership thing. Maybe by publishing a link to an article like this I’m stripping away the comforting illusion of anonymity and revealing to the commenter my true political affiliation. Maybe we’ve become such a polarized society that we can’t even converse with people of opposing points of view.
I’m genuinely puzzled. Why is a link like this so upsetting that it requires someone to not only unsubscribe, but also leave an angry note about why he’s unsubscribing?
If anyone reading these comments can shed some light, I’d love to hear your opinions.
No, Jeremy; it’s that we’re sick and tired of patently adolescent hi-skool behavior.
We’re sick and tired of it from the monosource media’s consistent usage of such to drive advertising revenue through in-group/out-group adolescent self-definition, and when we see supposed members of the ‘new’ media engaging in the same sort of thing, we simply — in the words of a 60’s icon — prefer to ‘tune out’.
Unless and until we, as mature, grown-up centrists, who consider such blatant one-sidedness direct empirical evidence of politically blinkered and therefore fundamentally immature and unreliable character, see you criticizing and castigating ludicrous nonsense on the part of the leftist/pseudo-liberal political orientation as well, we’re simply not going to be able to take you seriously. Because you’re patently biased. And that means, for those of us adopting such modern forms of data assesment, compared to the basic six documented in Cialdini’s landmark work “Persuasion: The Art Of Influence”, that you are not a reliable source of information.
Rather, in fact, the opposite: we’re going, based upon our evolutionary model of source-assessment, to view you as just another example of closed-minded partisan hacks in serious need of genuinely balanced self-referential self-analysis.
I do not, in fact, have a problem with people questioning the ‘conservative’ characterization of the suicides at Gitmo as terrorist propaganda martyrdom.
What I have a problem with is people pretending that satirizing it, in an adolescent, ‘we-all-know-the-real-story-here, we’re-part-of-the-in-crowd’ fashion, as opposed to maturely discussing it and presenting their counter-characterization in an adult context, is some kind of meaningful political commentary.
Clue department: IT AIN’T.
And as I have pointed out to you previously, it is very much the opposite of ‘attractive’.
It is, in fact, repulsive. It is immature adolescent group-objectification, and I was sick of that crap before I started secondary usa education, and I have only grown more so since then.
And I am pleased and encouraged to see that I am not the only one.
That is the answer to your question: your blatant, patent political bias is fundamentally incompatible with the furturistic, optimistic, and above all MATURE point-of-view of some of your readers.
It’s not that we’re conservatives or politically-right-aligned.
It’s that you’re so blatantly partisan and one-sided that we, as mature, politically anti-aligned adults, being already so sick and tired of the same kind of one-sided partisan bias from the monosource media, find more of the same from someone in the ‘new’ media, who should expectably know and do better, even more repulsive and off-putting.
Not that I expect you to understand any of this.
To be honest, I don’t think you’re emotionally capable of establishing the needed distance from your personal feelings to be able to comprehend so different a point of view from your own.