Funny, I disagree with Nisbet, too. I've also posted about a zillion things on his blog saying that it's not always about suasion, and that sometimes what you want is a good orator to rile the base, which is basically what Myers does. Also, sometimes you want someone out there who's straining like hell at the Overton window, trying to broaden the discourse, which is also what Myers does, and very effectively, too, I might add.
In fact, I sometimes think he's some sort of right-wing counteroperative trying to discredit the concepts of framing and effective writing with left-leaning people, lest the vast majority of our people-with-mindshare get as good at catapulting our opinions as, say, Karl Rove and the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer. George Lakoff was gaining too much traction with people on the left, so therefore a Matt Nisbet had to come to exist.
I mean, the right has more meme-transmitters than I care to count: Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, William Safire, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Starr Miller, Matt Drudge, Michelle Malkin, George Will, David Brooks, John Tierney, Hugh Hewitt, William Buckley, Joe Scarborough, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Tucker Carlson, Alan Keyes, Bay Buchanan, Andrew Sullivan, Neil Boortz, Laura Schlessinger (hell, Oprah Fuckin' Winfrey's pretty conservative!), Debra Howell, Nedra Pickler, and all the rest. And yet, when someone dares to openly, vocally, and without reservations transmit out-of-the-mainstream left-leaning memes into the discourse, almost immediately some Nisbet-like figure is there, clucking tongue and wagging finger and urging submission and compliance to the (right-wing) status quo, lest someone be offended.
Yet, the guy who just shot up the UU church in Knoxville had a houseful of books by Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, and nobody's ever even asked them to apologise, whether they feel ashamed at having openly goaded a mentally-unstable person into committing a violent act (by saying things like "We want to grow the [Republican] party to the point where we'll be hunting Democrats with dogs" and that liberals are "fifth columnists").
Can you imagine what would happen if someone had walked into a megachurch and started shooting and the police went into their house and found books by Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Korten? Everyone from Barack Obama to a publicly-identified-liberal adjunct professor at the local cow college would be forced to apologise, disavow, and genuflect on (inter)national television, the entire right would be foaming and masturbating in victorious monkey-house frenzy, and anything to the left of Genghis Khan would wind up successfully discredited for another twenty years -- all this despite the fact that you can open up one of Ann Coulter's books to any given page and find her saying that she wants liberals dead, and no best-selling author on the left ever says that.
So, considering that the NRA put a mole inside gun-control activism groups, and we've known for years that paid Republican shills and trolls show up on high-traffic and liberal sites to push the talking points (Rustin caught one of these guys on Slashdot back in 1999, pushing the Bush line) and disrupt conversations, who're Nisbet and his fellow-travellers actually working for, and why?
(no subject)
In fact, I sometimes think he's some sort of right-wing counteroperative trying to discredit the concepts of framing and effective writing with left-leaning people, lest the vast majority of our people-with-mindshare get as good at catapulting our opinions as, say, Karl Rove and the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer. George Lakoff was gaining too much traction with people on the left, so therefore a Matt Nisbet had to come to exist.
I mean, the right has more meme-transmitters than I care to count: Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, William Safire, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Starr Miller, Matt Drudge, Michelle Malkin, George Will, David Brooks, John Tierney, Hugh Hewitt, William Buckley, Joe Scarborough, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Tucker Carlson, Alan Keyes, Bay Buchanan, Andrew Sullivan, Neil Boortz, Laura Schlessinger (hell, Oprah Fuckin' Winfrey's pretty conservative!), Debra Howell, Nedra Pickler, and all the rest. And yet, when someone dares to openly, vocally, and without reservations transmit out-of-the-mainstream left-leaning memes into the discourse, almost immediately some Nisbet-like figure is there, clucking tongue and wagging finger and urging submission and compliance to the (right-wing) status quo, lest someone be offended.
Yet, the guy who just shot up the UU church in Knoxville had a houseful of books by Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, and nobody's ever even asked them to apologise, whether they feel ashamed at having openly goaded a mentally-unstable person into committing a violent act (by saying things like "We want to grow the [Republican] party to the point where we'll be hunting Democrats with dogs" and that liberals are "fifth columnists").
Can you imagine what would happen if someone had walked into a megachurch and started shooting and the police went into their house and found books by Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Korten? Everyone from Barack Obama to a publicly-identified-liberal adjunct professor at the local cow college would be forced to apologise, disavow, and genuflect on (inter)national television, the entire right would be foaming and masturbating in victorious monkey-house frenzy, and anything to the left of Genghis Khan would wind up successfully discredited for another twenty years -- all this despite the fact that you can open up one of Ann Coulter's books to any given page and find her saying that she wants liberals dead, and no best-selling author on the left ever says that.
So, considering that the NRA put a mole inside gun-control activism groups, and we've known for years that paid Republican shills and trolls show up on high-traffic and liberal sites to push the talking points (Rustin caught one of these guys on Slashdot back in 1999, pushing the Bush line) and disrupt conversations, who're Nisbet and his fellow-travellers actually working for, and why?