Problems, Ideas, and Solutions, a work in progress
Started by a comment from eschatonian Jennifer, joined by Wiley E Oddyseus and myself, a discussion of message, tactics, the roadblocks, and possible solutions to some of our problems with the media and the message.
Well, it looks as though at least one Dem knows how the game is played.Will update as necessary.
The Dem senators had a prime opportunity with this bill - they should have simply refused to vote for it until the offending section was stripped. Then, when the pukes started howling about it, which is the only time the media looks up from contemplating its own navel, the Dems would have been assured of airtime, and could have put out this message: that they were not about to ok puke invasion of people's privacy, and puke promises to go back and "fix it" were meaningless after the way the pukes have abused the Patriot Act and the dept. of Homeland Security. They could have gotten in three swipes for the price of one.
But no, they're more concerned about what the pukes might say about us.
Bravo for Pelosi. She may be the only Dem in Congress who really gets it.
Jennifer
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the Dems would have been assured of airtime, and could have put out this message
I like the idea, but there is little guarentee that "this message" would have servived intact and coherent, after they ran it through the media obfuscation machine.
In other words, one could expect them to go from navel gazing to an instant of perked ears and straight through to
glazed eyes while reaching for the faxes streaming in to give them their talking points.
"Democratic message is too hard to reduce to pithy soundbites"
"Republican message easy to propagate, and when are they gonna permanently cut my taxes, cause that's all I am really concerned about"
kent
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kent - well, what's the alternative? Doing as they've been doing and just rolling over and begging to have their bellies scratched? That's worked out really well for us.
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Jennifer,
I am trying to work that out. I don't propose rolling over and playing dead. Hell I have nothing to propose at this time.
I just think that it is important to understand the fact that as long as the media remains a bought and paid propaganda arm for the GOP, that getting the message out is not gonna be easy under the best of circumstances, and that the best of messages can be destroyed through manipulation and distortion.
It would help greatly if we had spokespersons who did not drink of the conventional wisdom or parrot GOP talking points, but then again these folks tend not to get re-invited, the talking heads don't like to leave the sets carrying their asses.
Jen, by no means was I attempting to jump on you, believe me I share your frustration.
I guess for a start, continue to hold our guys' feet to the fire and start a working the ref Program. if we cn find 10% of our numbers willing to channel fundy outrage-mode, and give them directed targets making sure that CNN et al recieve 5,000 emails a day would help.
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kent - yes, it would help. That's how the right did it - they mobilized all the aggrieved fundies, played into their martyr complexes and got them going. They've been writing letters and sending complaints and generally hogging the attention of the media and politicians for over 2 decades.
NYMary is right - I blame this latest outbreak on the 70's charismatic movement myself. That started a lot of the splintering of mainline protestant congregations into regular and charismatic groups. Some smart religious conmen saw the potential and grabbed it.
I didn't even know it was happening until the fundie revolution was already well underway.
Tena
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Tena,
my parents were sucked into the born-again movement for a couple of years in the late '70's (maybe a last ditch attempt to save the marriage) so I was fortunate to get a good biblical edumication (though I hated it at the time). I guess that if my parents, well educated and intelligent and liberal could get sucked in for a spell...{shudders}
During the rise of the Falwell and the MM during the early '80 the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
The religious right conmen, and Big Pharma Limbaugh fueling the fires of hatred, probvided the corps with new tools (revamped old ones actually) for the hard work of keeping the lower classes divided.
This game may have been over when the dems in the '80's did not have an answer for the "tax and spend" label, nor challenged reagans use of the term Welfare Queens, for the racist code that it was.
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...My big bitch is the capital class shifting the tax burden to the little guys. You know push the risk on us and reap the profits for themselves.
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"Privatized profits and socialized risk."
It's the mantra of corporate America.
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"Privatized profits and socialized risk."
ding ding ding, we have a winner.
It's short, pithy, true as the day is long, in short a perfect soundbite. This might not play with the rubes, but the reality based fiscal conservatives might go for it.
Fold this one into a broader theme, Fairness is a fundimental American Value.
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This game may have been over when the dems in the '80's did not have an answer for the "tax and spend" label, nor challenged reagans use of the term Welfare Queens, for the racist code that it was.
I agree with the gist of this, though not entirely with it's apocalyptic pessimism. I don't think the game is over, or, if it is, it is going to be followed by a new one centering on the '06 and '08 election cycles.
The Rethugs did start demonizing liberals over a generation ago. It will take a while to undo that, and meanwhile we are playing catch up ball.
As for Dems being too polite, I think it comes from having become the party of government during the New Deal era. Dems are susceptible to calls to come together for the common good, and Rethugs exploit this.
I'd also look at the preface to Krugman's last book, The Great Unravelling, where he likens the difficulty of the reality-based community in dealing with these guys to the difficulties the establishment had in dealing with French revolutionaries who ceded it no legitimacy whatsoever.
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Wile E. Odysseus,
Game over was not necessarily meant to be appocalyptic, just a demonstration of a starting point of having rediculous charges thrown in our faces and an inability to deal with them as we go "what the fuck? Thats just Bullshit" and of course the lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.
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Game over was not necessarily meant to be appocalyptic, just a demonstration of a starting point of having rediculous charges thrown in our faces and an inability to deal with them as we go "what the fuck? Thats just Bullshit" and of course the lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.
Fair enough. I certainly agree with you on that. I hear some crazy ass sh*t like, "liberals eat babies," and before I can even finish thinking, "Nah, no one's going to be so dumb as to believe that," everybody in the media is parroting the new talking point, and the journos are saying, "Some say liberals eat babies," and writing "analysis" pieces on whether Kerry (or whatever Dem you care to name) can overcome the strong "liberals eat babies" perception on the part of the American people and quoting anonymous Dems spouting defeatist stuff and wrining their hands about the strong attacks on Dems for eating babies.
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Wile EO-new poll on MSNBC: Is it true liberals eat babies?
bebe rebozo
And Wolf Blitzer nodding approvingly while Enron Eddie Gillespie or some other Rethug shill is spouting off about liberals eating babies.
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W.E.O, great handle btw,
You have done a perfect job describing how the media would respond to changes of dems drinking the blood of xtian babies, and slow roasting their flesh for a fantastic bar-b-cue. I'd laugh if it was not so true.
Uhm, I need another napkin to wipe the blood, oops barbecue sauce off my face.
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I'd laugh if it was not so true.
Well, kent, I owe the inspiration to you.
Sadly, it's going to take a while to counteract this, because, as you said upthread, the Rethugs have been playing this game for a while now.
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BTW, kent (or anybody else), any thoughts on how Dems can counter this sort of thing and even do some of it on the Rethugs?
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WEO,
Good question. I think the first thing we should remember that even if it wasn't stolen, the results are pretty close to a dead heat, in spite of everything going against us. So I am not thinking that we have to retool the whole situation.
As I suggested earlier, working the refs, by targeting progressive rage might actually bear fruit, something like the sinclair operation, except daily, using Fair, Media matters and the Daily Howler for direction.
next crafting nice soundbites, which is much more difficult for us reality/rational based folk. but Jennifer had a good one above.
"Privatized profits and socialized risk."
While working on reframing some of our message, we have to figure out ways to give our message a visceral emotional appeal, as many seem resistant to reason. Not that walking a mile in a fundie's shoes something I want to do or look forward to doing, but we have to understand the lizard brain in order to understand how to effectivly communicate with it.
implementation is for another day, but thats what I have for now.
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kent,
I like, I like.
Also the Rethugs have perfected the schtick of having the crazies like Coulter and Rush spouting off, "liberals eat babies," and the more presentable, button down types like Bobo Brooks and Bill Kristol furrowing their brows and saying, "Well, I don't KNOW if liberals eat babies, but there are a lot of troubling questions that need to be answered." That's another way of keeping the pot boiling, so to speak, and of getting the less ideological talkingheads and pundits to take up the theme.
I think we need to do something similar, so we get the benefits of demagoging the issue when we need it, but we don't have all our talking heads and talking points smeared as extremist, so they can be dismissed by ordinary folks who don't follow poitics that closely. (That's what happened inthe run up to the war, IMHO: only actors and other easily scapegoated and easily marginalized talking heads were put on the news networks to make the anti-war case, whereas there were a lot of people, including Republicans like Scowcroft, voicing their dissent who would have been less easy to dismiss.)
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IMHO: only actors and other easily scapegoated and easily marginalized talking heads were put on the news networks to make the anti-war case,
Oddly enough when I woke up this morning, I had visions of Sarandon and Robbins in my misty head. In fact I wake up most mornings with some or another vision regarding the failure to deliver our message.
My SO was watching Real world last night and I caught a small bit where one of the kids was lecturing someone in a restaurant about the evils of beef and replaying the X gallons of water for each hamburger line. While this may be true, this message does not work at all. Preaching to the choir to rile up the base is one thing, but using the same arguments on those we wish to see the light is another entirely, it just don't work.
Not as long as mother culture is continually buzzing in their ears.
But is has become clear that we can't rely completely on reason and must figure out a way to add appeals to emotion to our arsenal. I can not expect to shove reasonable arguments down the throats of people who distrust reason, as the fundies should
not expect me to be sold on their articles of faith, but there has to be a middle ground. It is however necessary for those of us that want to change minds to understand the minds we wish to change.
Anyhoo, I am gonna lift this discussion and post it on the blog for the purpose of being able to keep track of the ideas. Feel free to drop me an email and we can continue this conversation.
Thats all I got for now
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Kent is right. Appeals to Reason? Conservatives are unreasonable. Appeals to ethics? Conservatives are unethical. All we have left is appeals to emotions.
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cosmosis, another great nik btw.
Thanks, I hope that emotional appeals are just part of the quiver, and serve to make the rational arguments more easy to embrace, but I do believe that emotion is the battle ground where we are being beaten like red headed step children.
Damn shame really.
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What kind of emotional appeals? In the lexicon of Dr Suess, should we focus on Mad, Sad or Glad? Cons have cornered the market on Mad--rage really. Sad is for losers, as the last few elections show. So, liberals need to be the party of happiness, joy, feeling good. It doesn't matter if being "glad" is illogical, since people aren't logical. What they'll respond to is confidence and happiness.
Well, it's a nice thought anyway.
cosmosis
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Well, it's a nice thought anyway.
cosmosis
You know you might have stumbled into something there. Why not glad? The other guys are happy to push mad and sad. Glad can be couched in language of a happy future for the kids (of course)
and we would not neccissarily have to sell ourselves out.
I imagine that people will grow weary of the mad and sad.
Not sure quite how to manipulate glad, but I think it worthy of serious concideration.
~
kent
posted by Provider_UNE at 1:10 PM
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