Seriously, when my congressman begins intentionally acting like DanFromWaltham, can I please be disappointed with him? What more is it going to take for others to be as disappointed as I am with him?
Please share widely!
My Congressman jumps into the 2% tax nonsense with both feet.
this is exactly why we resist calls to ban Dan and others who like to regurgitate right-wing talking points. If we hadn’t had this big go-round with Dan about the alleged 2% tax, this Herald/Lynch article might have been the first you heard of it, and you wouldn’t be ready with such excellent rebuttals to what Lynch said.
We can all be grateful that your Congressman is not our US Senator.
then one of the editors could just as easily visit Breitbart.com and get them directly.
Who has time for that?
That takes much more work.
is a higher priority than visiting Breitbart.com. 🙂
Ghost of Breitbart – the gift that keeps on giving.
P.S. Doesn’t Bill from Portland on DKos do a better job of assembling a joke review anyway? That’s all he does. I’d never expect him to write a book on napalm.
This has been a right-wing meme since Christmas. It’s been on Fox. NPR covered it. It hasn’t completely broken out yet because we haven’t hit the New Year. This is a pre-emptive attack on Obamacare fees. Dan was just ahead of the mainstream media curve.
And the advantage to keeping bald-faced lies on BMG is that loyal BMG members have to spend hours sorting through crap to refute them?
To clarify a bit: remember that this site typically records something like 3,000 visitors a day. A small percentage of those visitors have user accounts, and an even smaller percentage regularly write posts and comments. But the work that you and others do to rebut things like the 2% tax meme goes way beyond your personal satisfaction with proving DFW wrong. It equips all those readers to counter the 2% tax argument when they hear it. So you’re doing God’s work. 🙂
One more thing: when we see “bald-faced lies,” we delete them, because they don’t advance the discussion. But the 2% tax claim isn’t that – as I think is obvious, given the wide play it’s getting in the mainstream media even beyond Fox News (as you note, NPR has covered it, and there are probably more reports to come). It’s a distortion of a real thing, namely, new fees on insurers, as you yourself have just documented. If we had simply deleted Dan’s post about the 2% tax, nobody on BMG would know anything about these new fees, and we’d all be the poorer for it.
start a better post to replace Dan’s a few days ago, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. Of course, he never references the actual law or tries to figure out where he might be wrong.
Every time I searched for what Dan was talking about, all I came up with right-wing noise. That’s when I got pissed. I’m pretty good at researching deeply and quickly, and I had to spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to figure out what Dan was talking about.
I agree that refuting others is beneficial, but in Dan’s case, the amount of time spent refuting him is multiplied by the fact that we almost always have to do his researching and fact checking for him. I don’t recall this ever being a problem with Peter Porcupine, JohnD, Patrick, or even Seascraper, whose fringe theories that could be identified. Dan has other annoying discursive habits, but to me, it’s the time spent getting him to know what he’s talking about that is particularly galling. In the free market of discourse, he’s a welfare case.
The man doesn’t do his own homework. So as a responsible debater, as mark-bail is and as I strive to be, you first have to work out the strongest, best documented version of his weak, ill-documented post, and then answer that.
I submit that visiting right-wing sites, Heritage, Breitbart, Red State, and Drudge, is less work.
My issue with this approach is the vulnerability to the “Gish Gallup” it creates.
From the above link:
In addition, such comments often suffer from “Fractal Wrongness” as well:
Perhaps I am overly optimistic — I remain confident that “given the wide play [the 2% tax claim is] getting in the mainstream media”, we would have had a substantive and accurate post about it from a more reliable contributor. In my view, adding to the flood of disinformation already published by right-wing outlets like Fox News does a disservice to ourselves and our audience.
Sorry, David, but I think you’re mistaken about this.
I agree that a “ban” is an over-reaction (and would, frankly, just encourage even more troublesome behavior).
I think the old mechanism for removing bogus posts and comments was about right. When a significant number of participants and subscribers explicitly mark a comment as objectionable, I think it should be removed.
It surely doesn’t take that much time. As others have observed, leaving DFW’s lies about Obamacare on BMG only further damages reality-based discussion — and hurts BMG along the way.
upthread.
The amount of digital ink (or pixels?) wasted on bitching and moaning about DFW would be better spent on creating interesting progressive content. That was part of the resolution I made to myself- post more and reply less. I often make elaborate rebuttals to DFW and then delete them. I think Bob is right that we can ignore him when he posts clear troll bait (the bit about the scientists in the Arctic or that he head with coal) and to refute the more insidiously ignorant stuff with more speech-more information-as Mill would have us do. I might add, EB3 has his followed but a lot of his critics have learned to stop bothering to engage with him-don’t see why the people that just can’t stand DFW can’t do the same thing.
I’ve encountered DFWs in my own family, co-workers, and I often encounter the type while canvassing. It’s important to learn how to engage-find areas of agreement-and walk away respectfully when progress can’t be made.
There’s not a right answer only preferences.
I will say that those of us driven nuts by too many of Dan’s contributions understand your thinking, but I don’t think you all understand our experience. That doesn’t mean you should or would agree with our perspective.
i’m not sure why we’re jumping on Lynch here. From the link.
So Lynch doesn’t say 2%, the Herald does.
But there’s a larger issue here. I don’t agree with Congressman Lynch on many things, but his independence is something we should appreciate. He is who he is.
One should keep in mind here that eliminating this fee essentially eliminates funding for the exchanges. This makes the exchanges depend upon Congressional authorization, and that, friends, is exactly what the Republican majority in the House wants: they want the ability to defund as much of the PPACA as possible. Repealing this fee, or even postponing it, hands them a weapon.
If we had background checks, this wouldn’t be a problem
Ironically juxtaposed with the NRA webads in the right sidebar.
I wonder if they know I am a lifetime member already and know my URL.
I think you mean IP address rather than URL, but the sidebar ads I think are part random and part tied to the content on the page, and then sometimes counterintuitively. Mention of a weapon and background checks in the comment might have been enough to trigger an NRA ad, but the computer can’t read context and doesn’t understand that those mentions implied positions opposite those of the NRA.