Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Creating your own reality, Stephen Taylor-style.


How to build your very own fantasy world in three easy steps:
  1. Add the idea of abolishing abortion to the "Great Canadian Wish List."

  2. Freep the living shit out of the survey.

  3. Treat the eventual worthless results as if they meant something.

If you still have to ask why they call us progressives the "reality-based community," well, you just haven't been paying attention.

BONUS TRACK
: There's Stephen's fantasy world:

Since the topic of abortion has been one that hasn't been polled or discussed in any real public sense for years, ...

Then there's the situation for those of us who don't live on a flat earth:

In a Gallup Canada poll taken April 2005, 52% of respondents say they would like to see Canadian abortion laws "remain the same," 20% say they would like the laws to be "less strict," while 24% say they would like the laws to be "more strict."

Conservative Party of Canada Pundit Stephen Taylor: Depressingly stupid, or hideously dishonest? You make the call.

THE STUPID! IT BURNS!
No, seriously, what useful tidbit of information is noticeably missing here? Give it time ... it'll come to you.

AND THE TIDAL WAVE OF STUPID
just keeps rolling on.

7 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

Hideously dishonest...but only because he's too stupid to know that candour is a positive thing. Remember, conservatives value hypocrisy.

Mike said...

Can't he be both?

¢rÄbG®äŠŠ said...

He obviously can.

Ti-Guy said...

I'm sure Taylor knows that his punditry is really just an exercise in perception manipulation. It's all he does...from his silly little "buzz" graphs to this uncritical look at CBC's facebook experiment to that propaganda factory called The Blogging Tories where message discipline is the only thing that matters.

For Conservatives, all of that is smart.

Anonymous said...

Wait - huh? Basically, he's saying the same thing as you (CC): the results don't reflect reality, but the motivation behind the poll-jamming, in terms of social dynamics and adapting to new technologies, is interesting in its own right.

Anyone who had ever spent five minutes touring the online activist communities (whether pro- or anti-abortion, or anything else) could have predicted exactly what would happen with this Facebook experiment. But the story isn't just about the hijacking of the Wish List (which is basically just a self-selecting online poll with a few more bells and whistles), it's about how the pro-choice movement managed to get its act together relatively late in the game, and nearly pushed the Abolish Abortion wish out of first place. How? Using exactly the same grassroots email-tree networking as the anti-abortion folks had employed.

Talk about a fascinating insight into technology, politics and social activism - and, in the end, a far more thought-provoking story than had the Wish List simply languished in semi-obscurity, rather than finding itself a flashpoint for digital guerrilla war.

Anonymous said...

So now we're going to see a lot of people either leave Facebook or make it utter religious-right garbage, courtesy of a Freeper get-out-the-vote campaign.

Can we please ship these people to somewhere in the Bible Belt, so we can get on with our secular lives?

Ti-Guy said...

And rob the SoCons their God-given right be hissy, moralising, time-wasting scolds?

No way. I say we give 'em something to feel really persecuted about. Martyr Camp, anyone?