Sunday, July 30, 2006
ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE
If you don't spend too much time reading the political blogosphere (like I do), then you may not have noticed a small but disturbing phenomenon -- the incidence of threats of presonal violence by a certain segment of the leftist community against those whose opinions they oppose. In the last few weeks there have been a number of cases like this. This post, at a fairly right-wing site, documents a couple.
If you have the time and stomach for it, you can look through the recent posts at this blog to see a related phenomenon -- so-called "sock-puppets." This is the practice of creating false identities on the net to source stories or create the false impression of a dialogue between two or more people, when in fact there's only one talking. It seems that exposure of some sock-puppeteering on the edge of the mainstream media was the spark that ignited some of the recent ugliness.
Now, the targets of these activities often express opinions I don't share. They tend to be part of the Ann Coulter wing of the cultural conservative, attack-dog element of the blogosphere. But what strikes me is the fact that this phenomenon of ugly personal threats against bloggers seems to be one-sided. I'm unaware of any equivalent kind of thing going in the right-to-left direction. Likewise, the use of fictional sources for news stories and sock-puppeteering seems to be largely confined to the left end of the political comentariat.
Naturally, I have theory about this. I think this is an outgrowth of the Bolshevist influence in the Western left, the revolutionary mind-set that there is an ideological elect whose correctness empowers them to transgress the bounds of civil discourse. People who idolize Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have no qualms about making death threats against those they perceive to be reactionary class enemies, and they certainly have no compunction about using lies and false sources to prove what they believe to be a higher truth.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:54 AM
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