"El Marco" is the name of the asshole. I'm not going to link to it; you can find it without much trouble.
Short story is that I clicked on the link from a Fark article. It goes to a photo-essay of Zuccotti Park that he posted just before Thanksgiving.
I noticed immediately that the pictures targeted the people with the wildest tattoos or the grungiest beards or the most controversial signs or whatever, and he used this, along with unsourced alleged quotes from, say, Lenin to basically prove that the Occupy movement is all a bunch of Soros-funded Marxism-Leninism tools. And if they just got rid of their body piercings and shaved, they'd have a job magically appear before them. You know the usual drill of things they talking-point out to the corporate media.
But I noticed that there were liberal comments in among the mostly-conservative snark, so I take a shot at making a point. I type the following:
“Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.”
Yeah, Tea Partiers are very for the redistribution of wealth, and they are definitely an unrepresentative segment of the electorate. That’s why they support lowering taxes on the wealthy, and they’ll use their “2nd Amendment Solutions”, or so I’ve been publicly told by major Tea Party candidates.
Speaking of the Tea Party… could they have done this? Could the Tea Party have gathered hundreds or thousands of people per demonstration, in dozens of cities nationwide, who would be willing and able to stay there for months on end?
No.
Of course, they didn’t have to. The right-wing and corporate media machines were a major force multiplier. People like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin shamelessly promoted Tea Party events for days or weeks beforehand, showed up themselves to the events, then jabbered endlessly about how powerful, relevant, populist, American, and important the Tea Party movement was for weeks afterwards.
A few hundred, maybe a couple of thousand, people show up at a location with teabags dangling from hats. They stay for a few hours, a couple of Congressmen and major media figures speak at the rally, and then they go home. The event is treated as something close to the second coming of Jesus by the corporate media (who uses the excuse of “we don’t want to be accused of being liberal” to support pro-corporate stories) and the right-wing media machine for weeks on end.
Tea Partiers don’t HAVE to act like OSW does. They just need a seed of activism so that is can be blown up half-a-dozen orders of magnitude larger than it actually was.
However, OWS is not afforded the same luxury. Nope. They’re all Marxist-Leninist communists who need a bath.
Right.
Note that I was polite. I didn't call them Republic*nts or Teabaggers or fuckwads or anything.
Now at this point, I realized that the site
has to have a moderator approve of each comment before it is posted.
Okay, fair enough. Not good, not the way I would run a message board, but okay.
El Marco replies:
“Sean Hannity and Mark Levin shamelessly promoted Tea Party events for days or weeks beforehand, showed up themselves to the events”
What Teaparty protest did either man attend? I’m not aware of that happening.
Which is a bit jaw-dropping. I mean, if you don't know basics like this, then you really should limit the expression of your opinions to avoid looking like an ass. If you don't look at your own side, then you can't compare sides, right?
So I do a 30-second Google search and hit gold from April 15th, 2009
And there's a two-minute tea-party into, complete with an old white guy in a tricorner hat talking about patriotic Americans dumping tea into Boston harbor before cutting to a 4(!)-way shot of Faux News covering 4 protests, one of them being hosted live and on location by Hannity.
Okay, I've got him. Nowhere to go, right? Proven my point, right?
He replies:
Cool, I don’t own a TV so I didn’t follow all this. Love u-tube. So the Teaparty gets Hannity and the Fleaparty gets Castro’s friend Micheal Moore. Cool.
On cue, he drops right down into insults and false equivalency. And again... doesn't own a TV? Really? Anybody buy that?
Besides, not owning a TV doesn't keep you from watching TV... blogs have video clips aplenty, and the guy obviously has a computer.
Now, here's where it gets irritating. I replied at various times of the next day to his comment. And not a single thing was approved by the moderator.
No insults by me; I kept things civil. I even call him on his "Fleaparty" comment. But I point out facts such as when your one-day rally is having coach buses provided by Dick Armey to shuttle in the troops, you have a lot more control over the appearance of the people that get on the buses than a multi-week organic movement in the heart of an 18-million-person metro area with plentiful public transportation.
Not a single thing approved.
My third attempted reply to his post was basically "what the hell kind of moderation are you doing here? Either you allow people from the other side to comment, or you have a members-only side like DU or Kos or FR.
But he chooses to do option 3: once he can't insult his way out of his position, he just shuts down debate, giving him the last word.
And for that "El Marco" is an asshole.
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