Rethink.

I’ve been sick the last few days and unable to focus on any­thing, but have been able to peri­od­i­cally drop in on Digg and vote up arti­cles and meet a nice bunch of con­ser­v­a­tives I hope will be friends.

Right now Digg is quite obvi­ously gripped by elec­tion fever. Every arti­cle has to do with Obama or McCain and why they’re per­fect or total sleaze. It looks like the con­ser­v­a­tive goal is to get one pos­i­tive arti­cle on McCain to the front page, or, bet­ter yet, one of those really nice juicy arti­cles about ACORN and vote fraud.

I think the strat­egy of “keep try­ing” is fine, but it is kinda get­ting redun­dant hear­ing the same stuff over and over again. And one thing I’m wor­ried about is, well — how did moon­bats become moon­bats? A lot of you want to say “it’s because they’re lib­eral,” but trust me, I know plenty of lib­er­als that can destroy me intel­lec­tu­ally: they’re Left-of-center, but they’re not wear­ing tin­foil. And while quite a few of you have been more than vocal about how much more you know than I do, I’d be care­ful say­ing that to some­one more objec­tive than me or you.

My thought is that if you depend on the news to con­firm why you’re right or why you’re wrong, you’re prone to becom­ing a moon­bat. Since the news can’t pro­vide a sense of value itself, and since val­ues must mat­ter more, what ends up hap­pen­ing is news you don’t like ends up get­ting dis­torted how­ever you like or ignored alto­gether. Our Lefty friends on Digg have man­aged to turn the fact there hasn’t been a ter­ror attack on Amer­i­can soil in years into a con­spir­acy the­ory, alleg­ing that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion cre­ated al-Qaeda, Osama’s just a fiction.

Can we be this nutty? Sure we can! All of us who’ve been online for a while have seen peo­ple say the exact same things we believe, then spout off about their visit from aliens and how Nos­tradamus was cor­rect about everything.

Just like from “Sein­feld,” with Newman’s expla­na­tion of why the mail deranges (“it keeps com­ing, and com­ing,”) we’re only read­ing the same thing over and over again for the most part — heck, if I didn’t have a dis­ser­ta­tion to write, I’d be a com­plete news-junkie. The nice thing about school is that it forces me to engage a dif­fer­ent set of books always. When I was an under­grad, I was a total news-junkie, since the books I read there weren’t that good for the most part, and I can safely tell you every­thing I read in the news then is the same stuff I read now, and I’m not any wiser because of that.

So my sug­ges­tion is this: while you’re dig­ging the elec­tion stuff, please make sure a good diver­sity of arti­cles about other things that are impor­tant to you get sub­mit­ted and dis­trib­uted. If you’re into bal­let, sub­mit that. If you’re into pro-sports, pass that around. Do stuff that makes you at least look like you’re not fix­ated on the elec­tion, like you have a life. Because at the end of the day, this is your life, and those of us using the Inter­net to change the world explic­itly have made a cal­cu­la­tion before­hand about how much we’re going to let the Inter­net change us.

• Links, Super Right-Wing Edi­tion, 7/18/09
• A Quick Guide to Right-Wing Extrem­ism on the Web
• I’m Over­due for a Right-Wing Rant, So Here Goes: Elec­toral Advice Fails When It Falls Into “Bush Eats Babies” Syn­drome, How­ever Subtly
• A Quick Note: Why Vot­ing On Com­ments Is Stupid
• Vet­er­ans Day, 2009

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