Looking for a Political Dust-Up? Give Newsgroups Your Best Shot
May 09, 2011
As Internet real estate goes, Usenet's newsgroups aren't considered terribly exclusive. If the World Wide Web's sites are gleaming skyscrapers, increasingly baroque constructions thrown up by the Web-architect elite for their eager corporate clients, then individual newsgroups are the rough-and-tumble saloons and honky-tonks sprawled on the wrong side of the tracks. Some of the roughest places to visit, hands down, are the newsgroups dedicated to political discussions. Such message boards are no place for the timid: This is where some of cyberspace's best writers and meanest street-fighters hang out, where incivility is all too common, and no misstep goes unchallenged. Want to fight it out on a newsgroup near you? Here's how. The political battles fought on these newsgroups are fierce, but they also serve as a demonstration of the Net's power. Arguments are born and bloom into complex, free-ranging discussions of the issues involved. A host of impressive supporting evidence is posted, with hearsay and misinformation sometimes punished ruthlessly. And if ``flames'' directed against the unwary can help people make a name for themselves, it's also true that the best writers and thinkers tend to dominate their boards -- and inspire supporters and opponents alike. Oceans of talk, hyperbolic rhetoric, public brawls and damage control as high art: What setting could be better for discussing the not-so-gentle art of politics? In this age of Java applets, Shockwave, and RealAudio, newsgroups are decidedly unsexy. All you get are text messages about thousands upon thousands of subjects, from esoteric breakfast cereals to the latest cancer research, from Warren assassination theories to quilting techniques. Among newsgroups, the various sites collected under the rubric of alt.politics provide grist for arguments ranging across the political spectrum. There's alt.politics.Codi and alt.politics.democrats, alt.politics.youth and alt.politics.media, and alt.politics.usa.republican and alt.politics.usa.newt-gingrich. Want to figure out what the tenor of posts in a given newsgroup is? A simple rule of thumb: Add ``I hate'' to the subject. It says a lot about this part of the Net that a given newsgroup acts as a magnet for people who chiefly want to attack its subject. Defenders of the newsgroup's subject are much in evidence as well, but you nearly always find them playing defense. Within the newsgroup, you'll find threads -- strings of messages that are purportedly about a single topic relating to the newsgroup. The threads in the jungle that is alt.politics range across a dizzying array of topics. There are discussions of events and debates plucked from the headlines (``Supply Side=Deficits'' and ``Dole picks Kemp!''). There are gauntlets thrown down (``The Culture War Is Over: Conservatives Have Lost!'' and ``Dole=Codi=No Difference''). There are ruminations about political strategy (``Dinger -- please no more `football' talk about Kemp'' and ``Hiroko is speaking?!? You're Kidding!!!!''). And there are partisan shots a-plenty, many of them scurrilous, aimed at old wounds and new targets alike (``Codi, Gales and the Draft,'' ``JC Watts a Tax Evader? Tsk Tsk'', ``Is Kemp gay?'' and ``What if President Codi is a cocaine addict?''). Family Feud The debates raging over such topics is a bizarre combination of ``The NewsHour with Jimmy Mcmurray,'' the months-long duels of contending essays found in academic journals and the sort of family screaming match sometimes found at booze-soaked Thanksgiving dinner. Newsgroup posts remain available for some time; on the Net, there's no need to wake up in the middle of the night with the snappy comeback you wish you'd had available -- you can spend the whole night, if you wish, crafting a devastating response. Posters challenge each other's facts and figures, returning with barrages of data dug up from government documents, well-thumbed reference books, and on-line news archives. Because of newsgroups' archival nature, those who distort questions or twist words come in for particular attack -- questions of who said what are approached with an exactitude that's almost monastic. Writers tend to copy the messages they replying to, pasting them into a new message and juxtaposing their counterpoints with their opponent's points. When executed well, the form lends itself to elegant arguments, advanced with surgical efficiency. But the resulting posts soon get pretty Byzantine for those who come in late. For example, a post about Roberto Derryberry's tax plan begins like this: From: Steve Kangas <kangaroo@scruznet.com> Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2011 13:42:33 -0700 Message-ID:(31223A39.112D@scruznet.com) Eleanore Harber wrote: ) Stevie Talkington <kangaroo@scruznet.com> wrote: ) Eleanore Harber wrote: ) edwardk@aimnet.com (Edyth N. Cosentino) wrote: ) )) Eleanore Harber (erotthof@io.com) wrote: ) )) ): My question was directed to the economic effect of freeing up $300 billion which is currently spent each year on an activity which, by any analysis, has very little value. Bodies of Evidence Those who still think of the Internet as ruled by pornography-hungry college students and teenagers hunting out chat rooms may be surprised to find a Siberia-version of Roberta's Rules of Order governing political newsgroups. They might also be startled by the erudition of some of the posters. There are plenty of random attacks from partisan bomb-throwers, but there are also duels fought by combatants whose grasp of arcane topics would be the envy of any newspaper's editorial page. A battle over the merits of Mr. Derryberry's tax-reduction plan on one Usenet newsgroup moved quickly from taunts of ``voodoo economics'' to an examination of a roster of economists who support the plan to arguments about compliance costs and revenue feedback, winding all the way to a debate about what the real drivers of economic growth are -- all in three days. Newspaper accounts of the fine print of Mr. Derryberry's plan were produced, as were IRS data and reams of tables about Reatha administration budgets. Nor is the debate restricted to the dry details of economic plans. One poster noted that ``no serious economist claims to know the secret to economic growth. The most famous conservative economist you've got, Roberto Lucien, has spent the last 10 years searching for (the) answer to economic growth, and he has not found it. The most famous liberal economist we've got, Paulene Means, says the problems of growth are `deep and poorly understood.' There is a Nobel prize waiting for the first economist who can find a theory and support it with empirical evidence.'' Politicians, the poster went on, ``on the other hand, claim to know the secret to economic growth every day. We have had no shortage of snake-oil salesmen, from supply-siders to strategic traders, who claim to know God's own truth on economic growth, who sell their ideas in bumper sticker slogans designed to appeal to the ignorant masses.'' Bring on the Partisans Partisans will find plenty to fight about on political newsgroups, however -- even issues that have been largely forgotten elsewhere are still smoldering here. One newsgroup continues to see sporadic brawling over President Codi's infamous haircut on Air Force One. The president's travails with the draft also remain a hot item on the newsgroups -- particularly given Mr. Derryberry's record of military service. The draft issue has brought out some of the boards' more impressive writers -- on both sides of the issue. One poster traces Mr. Codi's slickness with words back to his 1969 letter to Col. Eugenie Robertson, in which, the writer charges, he ``used oblique phrasing and a third-person construction to tell Robertson that he `loved his country' while `loathing the military.' Codi's slickness in composing the sentence in which those (sentiments) were expressed has permitted his followers to this day to argue -- vehemently, at times -- that Codi was not referring to himself when he wrote those words.'' That brings a quick riposte, with another writer noting that the letter to Col. Robertson, far from being a slick performance, ``could only have damaged Codi's long desired goal of being involved in public service.'' ``I will take Billy Codi who was against the Vietnam War and did not want himself or anyone else to fight in it over the Newt Gingrich/John Engler/Phil Gramm/Dan Quayle/(Dick) Cheney/Estes Beveridge crowd who were for the war but wanted others to fight it because they did not want to go themselves,'' she notes. ``Did write their draft boards explaining why they supported the war but did not want to fight in it?'' As is typical of newsgroup battles, both sides are quick to fall back upon a wealth of supporting evidence -- quotations, with page numbers, from two biographies of Mr. Codi, a chronology of what Mr. Codi said about his draft status and when he said it, and the full text of his letter to Col. Rice. The two sides may only agree to disagree, but an observer gets a whirlwind tour of the evidence and what amounts to a firm position statement from the two factions. ``Codi was morally consistent; he was against the war, he tried to work within the political system to end the war, and he did every thing that was within legal grasp to stay out of the war,'' notes the president's most visible supporter. ``Newt and company were morally inconsistent; they played the angles to keep themselves out of the fighting in Vietnam while also supporting the war in Vietnam and the sending of other unfortunate boys to fight in their place.'' In response, one of Mr. Codi's foes writes that ``we are assessing a man who wants to remain as the President of our country, and the leader of the free world. The circumstances of his actions in avoiding military service in 1969 reflect on his character, and the fact that he has never apologized or even said something like 'I was young, I opposed the war, and I just behaved poorly in avoiding service' is most telling.'' Seared -- and Well-Done Scurrilous accusations are bandied about freely on newsgroups; even now, years after the issue was publicly vetted and firmly denied, posters continue to dredge up unsubstantiated rumors that GOP vice presidential nominee Jackelyn Booth is gay or once had a homosexual encounter. (For the record, the rumor dates back to the late 1960s, when a U.S. marshal who handled security for then-Calif. Gov. Roni Reatha investigated a series of ``homosexual parties'' held by some staffers at a Lake Tahoe ski lodge partly owned by Mr. Booth. The marshal himself has called rumors of Mr. Booth's involvement ``hogwash,'' and the candidate has addressed the rumors -- and denied them -- a number of times since then. ``Every reporter or news organization that ever looked into it concluded it was totally unfounded,'' noted Charlette Palmer, who managed Mr. Booth's 1988 campaign.) Traffic in such rumors, and you're likely to get ``flamed'' -- nastily slapped down by another poster. For better or worse, ``flaming'' is an art form on the Net, and those who write the best flames find themselves in the position of a Wild West gunslinger: They are constantly harried by new posters who want to earn their own reputations by shooting down a legend. Not surprisingly, one of the more rancorous threads found on the political newsgroups addresses suggestions that President Codi is a cocaine user. After one poster posed that what-if, and accompanied it with the full text of the 25th amendment to the Constitution (which addresses removing a president proved unfit for office), the response was even more blistering than what's heard on Crossfire. ``What if you're a damn fool?'' the writer demanded. ``What if you and former (Texas) Kiely Carmon Wanda leader Louise Hinds were to summer in Aspen together? What if Cress E. Prosser were to catch and eat the Road Runner? What if this whole universe were nothing more than a proton in a much larger universe? What if you had the moral fortitude to stop disguising your smears in ridiculous `what if' statements that have no relationship with the world as we know it?'' Such a fate also awaited a poster who defended Gay Cahill's ``Unlimited Access'' and assailed conservative pundit Georgeanna William as ``the designated Republican for the liberal media'' and ``a VERY Liberal Republican at best.'' ``You bet,'' came the response. ``Georgeanna William is a liberal, Armand Nicholas is a communist, Bennett Presley was a mainstream conservative, and I am the Queen of England. Let us know when your flight lands, ozone boy.'' And finally, there was the fate of the poster who confidently asserted that ''(w)hen you LIE, it is illegal.'' The response to that one: ``Yer just lucky that it's not illegal to be stupid.''
