Talk:Protest Warrior/Archive 3

message: I suspect this section was created and filled with duplicated material by accident.  Fixing would help all of us.  -- Antaeus Feldspar 21:43, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I hope I fixed it, if not check the history log and try yourself ;) Sam [Spade] 22:00, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: whats going on w the talk page?

message: i agree that the protest warrior entry is problematic and incomplete. that notwithstanding, there are a few things to discuss:
1) the notion that protest warrior's techniques can be neutrally described as "strawman". 
the impetus for the locking of the entry was the repeated vandalization of the page, featuring the conflation of protest warrior with stormfront. anyone who participated in this or failed to register like objections to these vandalisms, make their complaints from a position of much diminished credibility. 
the protest movement of the left is rife with the sort of affront attributed here to protest warrior. a recent and widespread example would be the proffessionally printed "no draft, no way" placards provided at no inconsiderable expense to rnc-protestors by united for peace and justice with the purpose of implying, falsely, that the bush administration seeks to reinstate a draft. an equally eggregious example would be directly stated assertions that supporters of the administration's policy in iraq procede themselves from a disregard  for the lives of iraqis. indeed, from racist and even genocidal motivations. such accusations emanate not from isolated and unnacountable members of the crowd, but from key organizers and ideologues such as katrina vaden heuvel. 
many of the more troubling messages of the protest movement of the left are so clearly hyperbolic, that they can be identified as humor. it is suggested that leftists calm their tempers and recieve protest warrior's message in kind. i propose that the signs in question would be most neutrally described as "satire", while noting that these signs are merely what protest warrior is best known for and not the sum total of it's activism. 
remaining is the question of whether this satire is predicated on s
trawman. it is clearly not. the main reoccurring target of protest warrior's counter-protests has been international answer. while varrying leftist sects organize underneath their umbrella, international answer is a communist organization. to address a demonstration sponsored by intl. answer as communist is not strawman, but revealing of an unambiguous truth. in chicago, nearly all large-scale activist initiatives are organized by the bob avakian cultists of the revolutionary workers party. indeed, they organized the busses that transported chicagoans to the rnc protests in new york. similarly addressing these demonstrations as communist is also fair. 
that "libertarian socialists", non-communist marxists, non-marxist socialists, and liberals, ranging from ignorant to this fact to expediently dismissive of it, march on a platform provided by communists is a small point and not at all a refutation. particularly in light of two points: A)that the conflation of republicans with nazis, the kkk and the like and other specious associations between moderates of the right and radical nationalists are staple components of even the moderate left's message. and, B) that conservatives, libertarians, republicans, et al, given the opportunity to march at a nazi sponsored and organized event under a broadly aggreeable message such as national pride, would refuse to do so. indeed, in protest warrior's case, radical nationalists are also an object of counter-protest. 
this seems to be a distinction non-communist leftists, often extremists in their own right, seem unwilling to make within their own movement. as illustrated in this discussion, they simultaneously recognize it as damaging to their credibility and seek to silence those who point it out. it is only reasonable to derive from this that they own their association with communists and communism. it is therefor not innappropriate to poke fun at least by addressing them as such. 
2) counter-protesting highly funded and organized demonstrations of the left's power is not divergent in form or character from the left's counter-protesting of international aid conferences and the like. in each scenario, an activist group utilizes their opponent's time and place to make their position known. 
it is sometimes asserted that free speech applies only to private/public intercourse and that private/private conflict is somehow "illegal". this is a comical stance. 
3) an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. it would be an unfortunate development if all entries on controversial organizations and ideas had to be locked because of vandalism. if the left maintains this program of poisoning the well of information, the reaction from freedom-minded netizens would be impossible to controll. civility and reasonability is advised.
:anyone who participated in this or failed to register like objections to these vandalisms -- anyone who participated in the vandalism, certainly.  But the notion that no one has credibility if they did not "register" their "objections" to the vandalisms is specious.  There are too many reasons why someone might see the vandalism and yet not register an objection, such as they see the very objections they would make already being made cogently by others, or they did not even discover the article until the page protection brought it to their attention.  There are too many reasons besides the 'too liberally biased to be fair' reason that you might be assuming.  It's very difficult to conclude anything significant from what someone did not do when you know nothing about them save through the Internet.
:the protest movement of the left is rife with the sort of affront attributed here to protest warrior.  That may be so; even if it is so, it is a tu quoque defense, which most of us learn doesn't fly by the time we leave the playground.  Should the entry on Michael Moore not say a word about his despicable half-truths because we can find a conservative documentarian who does it too?
:key organizers and ideologues such as katrina vaden heuvel -- such a key figure that a Google search on her name turns up just two hits?  I've voted delete on articles whose subjects got two orders of magnitude more hits.
:in chicago, nearly all large-scale activist initiatives are organized by the bob avakian cultists of the revolutionary workers party.  "Cultists".  Well, let me tell you, this is the point where I really start taking you seriously, yaknow?  I mean, clearly you're making an effort to look at this objectively.
:many of the more troubling messages of the protest movement of the left are so clearly hyperbolic, that they can be identified as humor. it is suggested that leftists calm their tempers and recieve protest warrior's message in kind.  It's all fine and dandy to say this should henceforth be done but that's a little irrelevant to the fact that now, a great many leftists feel that Protest Warrior is not putting a humorous, critical spin on their own positions, but on positions held by extremists that they are unfairly attributing to the left in general.  To suggest that the article should contain a Protest Warrior-friendly interpretation of their activities but exclude the interpretation taken by their targets is, as I have stated before, ludicrous.
:if the left maintains this program of poisoning the well of information, the reaction from freedom-minded netizens would be impossible to controll. civility and reasonability is advised.  If this is your attempt to show that you are not coming at this with a bias too big to be corrected for, it's a failure.  We do not know the vandals; we do not know their true motives; to falsely suggest that we not only know the motives but know it to be part of a large program of the left is simply abombinable nonsense.  -- Antaeus Feldspar 16:39, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: such a key figure that a Google search on her name turns up just two hits?  - Just a quick note, the middle name is actually "vanden". If you search using Google with the incorrect spelling, the correct name is suggested, and that brings up 13,700 hits.--65.161.65.104 21:39, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I wish it had done that -- brought up the correct spelling as a suggestion.  I wonder why it showed up for you and not for me; did you search for the name as a quoted group or did you search for the separate names?  -- Antaeus Feldspar 01:42, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  on "strawman" 

message: I'm sorry anon, but protest warriors are aggressive and inflamatory. Thats what I like about them. I first learned about the concept when I saw a group of families of deployed US troops were counter-protesting near WPAFB on the local news. They showed a big, beefy redneck family member of a deployed soldier (someone I can certainly relate to) screaming in some raggedy old hippies face "You love Saddam, don't you? Don't you? Sieg Heil, right? You love anybody who hates america, is that right?" etc... I nearly fell out of my seat laughing, esp. when I saw the signs. I think their great, but they are aggresive, inflamatory, distressing, etc... Sam [Spade] 13:41, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, it's good to have a protestwarrior here helping out. Rhobite 00:07, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)
---
Gah! the actual article is being Crap and not updating. :S --Smegpt86 13:37, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: That's a known bug that's been showing up lately.  The easiest way to work around it is to go to the "history" tab and click the "last" tab on the first line.  Under the two-column comparison of the current version with the previous version, you should see the current version itself. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:07, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inflamatory, etc.. 

message: I pasted the content from Talk:Protest Warrior/temp into the article. Lets keep this page unprotected! I'm happy to discuss whatever needs discussing, Cheers, Sam [Spade] 14:35, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  unprotection 

message: Liberal, and Liberalism is one of the toughest subjects I have found on the wiki. The modern use outside the USA is the same as it ever was, anti-tax, anti-statism. Its essentialy US libertarianism, w/o the gun rights (unfortunately). In the USA however, the word "Liberal" is a synonym for "Left wing". Look into the political parties outside the USA who call themselves "Liberal". Cheers, Sam [Spade] 15:52, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Liberal