Paul Purged from Pajamas Poll
Radley Balko | February 20, 2007, 9:03am
Commenter "jf" notes in the post below that Pajamas Media has eliminated Ron Paul from its weekly online straw poll. This is odd, considering that Paul had a 2-1 lead over his nearest competitor in last week's poll, and came in the second the week before.
Pajamas Media says it's implementing a new policy where only candidates who garner one percent or more of the vote in the previous month's Gallup poll are eligible for its online poll. But Paul wasn't listed as an option in Gallup's last poll. I don't know Gallup's reason for not including him. But even if Gallup's people don't find Paul credible, he obviously does have quite a bit of credibility with Pajamas Media's readership.
The only other candidate eliminated from the Republican field by the new policy is former senator Fred Thompson, who hasn't even announced.
Seems like a strange policy that eliminates the previous week's top vote-getter. It's even stranger when you consider the fact that the only real use of a straw poll from Pajamas Media would be to determine which candidates might be resonating with the blogosphere. On the right, the blogosphere skews libertarian. So Paul's ascendancy makes perfect sense. Hiding the fact that he's popular with the Internet right robs the poll of its only real utility.
Taking Paul off the list of options I guess makes the unscientific poll look more credible, in that its results are vaguely similar to those of national, more scientific polls. But you have to wonder why PM's editors would even bother with an online poll if they're just going to switch policies when they get results they don't like.
NOTE: Some commenters have noted that some Paul supporters had cheated the poll with bots and artificial voting. True. But according to the PM post on the "ballot stuffing," those votes were deducted from the candidate totals, and Paul still did very well. What's more, it isn't as if PM purged Paul from the poll to punish his supporters for their malfeasance. Supporters of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney did the same thing, and both of those names are still in the poll.
grylliade | February 20, 2007, 1:47pm | #
I can't help it if site admin's of places like Pajamas Media, Grylliade or Inactivist.net are off their meds. Why should that entitle them to be arbitrary and try to micromanage people's opinions?
I don't know about the other places, because they're run for a different reason. But grylliade.org isn't run as a place for political discussions. It's meant as a community, a place for people to have fun. Discussion of politics is only tangential to the purpose of the site, insofar as people enjoy discussing it. Having you posting there wouldn't be fun for anyone except for you, and would indeed
decrease the fun of a great many people (myself included). Being as I'm the one paying for the site and spending my time running it, that's a consideration.
And don't flatter yourself that it's because I'm afraid of your mad debating skillz, that you would do too much to challenge my opinions. I've had that done quite a bit in my life; one of my philosophy professors did more to challenge my beliefs in a semester than a platoon of Dave W.'s could in a lifetime. I ended high school as a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and conservative Christian; I'm now very liberal in my social and religious beliefs. My friends are all Democrats; they challenge my beliefs every weekend. I've even come to believe that anthropogenic global warming has a sound scientific basis. So trust me, I'm not afraid of anyone challenging my beliefs.
As I've said before, it's nothing personal. I don't hate you, nor even dislike you. I dislike the way you discuss things online, but that isn't the same as disliking
you. But I'm fairly sure that, were you to actually want to post on grylliade.org, and were I to let you, you'd be banned in pretty short order. If thinking that it's some sort of conspiracy against you, or that you're the victim here, helps you get up in the morning, then feel free; it's no skin off my nose. But the fact remains that, no matter what your motivations are, you act like a troll, and so I'm going to treat you as a troll.
I'm well aware that you probably have no desire to post on grylliade.org; I don't flatter myself that it's the most happenin' place on teh Interwebs. But it
is a community, and you would be disruptive to it. And that's all there is to it.
Dave W. | February 20, 2007, 3:21pm | #
But I'm fairly sure that, were you to actually want to post on grylliade.org, and were I to let you, you'd be banned in pretty short order.
So, David, it is the "why" that I don't understand. The best clues I can find in your explanation are "disruptive" and "act like a troll." But I don't even know what that means.
In ordinary conversation, being disruptive means that you interrupt speakers or otherwise claim too much of the floor. But with typed conversation, you cannot interrupt, that is not how these boards work -- they don't work like verbal speech -- I cannot break into the middle of somebody's reply -- a person's reply starts when they start typing and ends when they hit "Submit Comment" and there is not a darn thing I can do in between. Even if being disruptive means too many responses in a single thread, there can be standards on that (applied to all of course), so that nobody falls afould of expectation. Frankly, when my comments are responsive to new things that other people said (and I think they generally are), then it would make sense that my comments take up a lot of the thread. Sort of like how Socrates questions take up a lot of his books. Was Socrates being disruptive because he commandeered half the dialogue?
"Troll" is even more mysterious to me. I want social security cut. A lot. I want the military cut. A lot. Ergo: I am a small-el libertarian, regardless of the fact that I may be sympathetic to some (and certainly not all) forms of government regulation. How could other people of a libertarian bent consider me a troll. It seems like you are using "troll" as a synonym for "contrarian" best as I can make out. This is considered a bad thing in libertarian circles?
Ultimately, I think that "troll" means that I draw a lot of complaints from a lot of other posters. It is like being voted off Survivor Island. the democratic majority decides who is worthy of posting and not. And once they decide, you get banned on that basis (or, in this case, pre-emptively banned).
Well, frankly, if that is what you are really about here (hang on, I am about to sound like your old professor): you are wrong and should change. People's speech shouldn't be suppressed because they are unpopular -- not by the government and not by you. Sure, you have the power to suppress my speech. I don't question that. I am just saying that you are exercising your admitted power in a bad way here. Since neither of us dislikes the other, it is not too late.
grylliade | February 21, 2007, 1:42am | #
Ultimately, I think that "troll" means that I draw a lot of complaints from a lot of other posters. It is like being voted off Survivor Island. the democratic majority decides who is worthy of posting and not. And once they decide, you get banned on that basis (or, in this case, pre-emptively banned).
And see, this is why the signal-to-noise ratio is so low in most places on the Internet. Trolls think that they have as much right as others to post on forums; bad commentary drives out good. If the majority of people on grylliade.org are happier without you there, then I think that constitutes sufficient justification. We're weighing the happiness of one person (you) against the happiness of about fifty people.
How could other people of a libertarian bent consider me a troll. It seems like you are using "troll" as a synonym for "contrarian" best as I can make out. This is considered a bad thing in libertarian circles?
OED definition of a troll: "A person who posts deliberately erroneous or antagonistic messages to a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response."
I would personally leave out the "deliberately." I'm more concerned with results rather than motives. You are constantly posting erroneous messages, to which you will brook no correction. Whether you intend it or not, your posting style is quite often antagonistic. And it often elicits a hostile or corrective response.
Maybe you're the innocent victim in all of this. Maybe you don't
mean to be a troll. But considering that you know what bothers others about your posting, and yet you refuse to even take under consideration that they might be right (this despite your oft-repeated mantra of "teaching" us) — this suggests to me that you would be more trouble than you're worth as a poster.
Trolls often play the "I'm a victim" card. They try to appeal to a moderator's or admin's sense of fairness, in pointing out that others often provoke them or somesuch. I don't think that you're doing this deliberately (if you are, then I commend you on your skill). But I don't much care. If it's innocent, it's still not going to change.
People's speech shouldn't be suppressed because they are unpopular -- not by the government and not by you. Sure, you have the power to suppress my speech.
Really? And how am I doing that? I'm restricting your ability to speak wherever you please, which is not the same as restricting your speech. You can't come into my house and start yelling at me, calling my wife a whore and telling me that you're going to kick my ass. Even if I invited you in, I would be well within my rights to boot you out on the street without a second thought. Likewise, you have no right, legal or natural, to come to a site that I maintain and set the standards for (however loose they may be) and start posting whatever you like. The fact that you're arguing with me here suggests that if I were to allow you to post, you would try to play the "free speech" card if I told you to play by the rules. I'm not interested in semantic games. I'm interested in running a site where people can joke around and have fun, and discuss things that are important to them, with a high signal-to-noise ratio.
If you haven't noticed, I don't ban people just because I disagree with them. There are a number of atheists there, with whom I disagree strongly about the existence of God. I'm probably a little less blasé about corporate infringements of rights than some others there. I disagree with Jennifer about Peak Oil. I could go on and on. If all you would do is challenge my beliefs, there'd be no problem. But for all intents and purposes you are a troll, and have proven yourself so on several sites. I'm not interested in trying to reform you, and I doubt I could anyways.
I think the First Amendment applies legally in the public skewlz, but only teleologically to D. Watz
So you think that I have some sort of obligation to curtail my enjoyment and that of others in a site that I pay for and run so you can have free speech?!?
Steven Crane | February 21, 2007, 9:44pm | #
listen grotius.
grylliade is my playground and you know it. nobody mixes irrelevancy, good cheer, and the occasional actual point with as much
elan as me.
And, on the subject of Dave W:
I've said before, in various venues, that I actually -like- Dave W. Then again, I've said this about many posters that the H&R crowd loves to hate (Dan T. being a current one, and Jersey McJones being one from the past); I think that it can often get to be a bit of an echo chamber around here; and a bit of status-quo challenging from people other than joe is a good thing.
I also think that the ad-hominem pile-ons that H&R commenters treat (particularly liberal) contrarians to tends to generate bad feeling and push what would be ordinary, polite, garden-variety dissenting voices into troll-territory. If you think Dan T. is a troll, he is at least partly a troll of your own making; you've given the guy so much shit that I'm surprised he hangs around at all anymore.
That said, I think Dave W. is an odd case. I like a lot of his posts - he asks questions that may not get asked enough. Not to go all Cathy Young here or anything, but on the other hand, he's a little too quick to get a bit unnecessarily personal with his questioning (see Ron Bailey in the past, and occasionally thoreau still) which makes him no friends. Still, though, we've forgiven (mostly) Monsieur Gunnels for his personal squabbles, so why not Dave W?
Then, of course, there's Dave W's strange typing style that occasionally appears; you know, the one where he starts typing like a fourteen years-old boy with the omission of letters and substitution of numbers. I'm not entirely sure what prompts it - maybe you can "shed sum lite" on the subject, Dave W?
It could be that I'm overly charitable, but I think a lot of semi-regulars who are too-quickly derided as trolls have something to offer. These aren't people who drift in from NRO around convention-time; they're people who can be engaged with, if a little contentiously at times. But for the most part, I'm willing to give Dave W. the benefit of the doubt as long as he doesn't do anything -too- screwy (which sometimes seems like a tall order, i know).
