MacCruiskeen wrote:The second most destructive effect of DU is that it conditions people to being endlessly polite and patient towards lunatics, timewasters and right-wing reactionaries, who will never be persuaded by any argument or any evidence, ever.
I don't see how anyone could come away from reading and posting on DU without realizing that trying to have a dialogue with lunatics, timewasters and right-wing reactionaries is a totally pointless and all-consuming waste of time. It's laid right out there in front of you, a tutorial if ever there was one. I think our people who do try to engage in debate at that level are genuinely well-meaning people, but I don't think it's a useful practice.
HamdenRice wrote:Someone came up with the idea Gannon/Guckert was the grown up Johnny Gosch. Thousands of posts, some quite hysterical, were entered into DU analyzing the evidence. It turned out, however, that Gannon/Guckert's school records were inconsistent with a Johnny Gosch connection, but the mainstream media picked up on it and DU got one of its first mentions in the New York Times as the crazy place where people thought that Jeff Gannon was a long ago kidnapped Nebraska paperboy.
At that point, it seems, the mods decided that DU would never again be identified with "crazy conspiracy theories," and that's when it's very harsh treatment of 9/11 skepticism started.
There was a lot about the "Gannon Wrinkles" threads that was good distrubuted research. In part it was successful in disproving the Gannon=Guckert=Gosch speculations, by doing things like going to the public library and confirming the context of high school yearbook pictures, though that was not independently verified further and was taken on trust of the poster who went to the physical library. That's always been a problem -- we just don't have sufficient numbers of smart, dedicated people who can do the tedious stuff involved with verifying claims and doublechecking them, even just to fact check and confirm the research the people on "our side" are doing. In addition, I think the thread attracted a number of newbies who tended to get off topic.
There was still some very weird synchronistic shit involved there that never was resolved. It was scandalous that an "8 inch, uncut" male prostitute posing as a journalist was being checked in and out of the White House far more than any legitimate journalists, and there was never any accountability asked for or pursued further by mainstream journalists.
As far as the New York Times dismissal goes, maybe you don't have a basis for comparison. I do.
Around the same time I was involved in doing some online research in a very different field, one that is as deeply polarized and contentious as these political ones. The New York Times got wind of the iissue, and it was covered with the same blithe superficiality the Times employs whenever it is dealing with the internet.
I wrote to the author of the hit piece using addresses I'd found on the net, I wrote to the person in charge of that section of the paper. I wrote to the ombudsman too, I think. I pointed out threads in the forum they'd just covered where posters were talking about how the were trolling with silly stuff using other handles, and pointed out that the owner of the forum was a personal friend of the journalist. I pointed out that those with the opposing views were posting their research with their real names, but the NYT chose only to give coverage to the positions of anonymous posters. I was never able to get anyone to respond.
The long and the short of it is that the New York Times is never going to give a thoughtful and insightful look at the ideas we espouse. It's nothing personal about 9/11 or other non-mainstream perspectives. it's just that they are not equipped to deal with dissenting opinions in any way but that which reinforces their foregone conclusions.
It's okay to feel that we should get something better from the New York Times. But I've been reading the New York Times since 1968, and I don't have those illusions.
