“Because a percentage of Democrats are Progressives and their lies must be countered.”
That sure seems to be the prevailing belief, but I’m not so sure.
I like the idea of not participating - I stay away from Facebook and other leftist cesspools, and “vote with my feet” by choosing not to give ratings and viewerships to offensive media venues.
I feel our attention is what they are vying for, and I love depriving them of that.
Back in the ‘80s when I was raising my kids there was a theory in child behavioral psychology called “extinction therapy”, which held that the best way for a parent to eliminate an undesirable behavior was to ignore it to death.
The idea was that a child uses misbehavior (temper tantrums, disobedience, slovenliness, association with bad types, and all kinds of disapproved of behavior) in an attempt to gain control - a type of blackmail - “if you don’t give me my way, I will [fill in the blank].
With this emotional blackmail, any attention or intervention, whether punishment, anger, rebuke, pleading, negotiating, calm reasoning, positive or negative, is like paying ransom - it makes their blackmail a success. Paying attention is like oxygen and only feeds the flame. The remedy is to deprive them of that reaction, - to pay no attention.
This is why I wish conservatives on FR would stop reposting every leftist article and discussing it ad nauseum - I know the intention is good - to do opposition research, see what the enemy is planning, trade ideas on how to rebut leftist propaganda, or to express outrage or anger, etc..
But I think in the end, all we are doing is giving them ratings, giving them a voice, allowing ourselves to be used as a tool to pass on and repeat their words.
They probably laugh and say “look how easy it is to make up some disgusting lie about Trump, or some other conservative, and put it on FB or Twitter - and if it’s outrageous enough, then Hannity, Tucker Carlson, FR, etc. will repeat whatever we say word-for-word, and talk about it for the next week!”
>>which held that the best way for a parent to eliminate an undesirable behavior was to ignore it to death.
I remember that. Screaming, ill-mannered brats running around while “parents” ignore it to death. If you gave the “parents” a look or said something, they’d say something stupid like, “ be thankful you don’t have to deal with them all the time”.
Progs don’t need our attention. In fact, they want us to go away so they can create their socialist utopia. Do you really believe that they do what they do and think what they think to get our attention? Do you think they crave our approval or even our disapproval? They literally don’t care what we think and when you check out, you give them what they need most—free reign over the most powerful information tool ever invented.
Have we met before somewhere on FR?
I have been preaching this for years. I even begged how cool it would be of we could simply have a 30-day moratorium on posting anything from CNN and/or the WP. In 99% of all cases, it’s not news. for CNN, I’d bump that up to 100 percent.
However, I am seeing more and more comments here about folks discussion alternative media, and possibly creating their own. I don’t know how to do PINGs on FR, but perhaps someone should start collecting similar discussions like these. I predict multiple outlets WILL become necessary someday. For some background, folks might consider reading the history of the Committees of Correspondence in the founding of our country (probably the first example of the internet [networked communication] on this continent).
From that, I’d like to reference some comments from another thread related to this topic (something to get the brains working)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3620123/posts?page=39#39
Note to all: I am currently a software engineer (18 yrs), now beginning study for my AWS credentials. Someday, somewhere, someone will want to get something off the ground. No, not trolling for business. But who ever starts this new media venue will need all the help they can get.
I hope to see more discussions like this in the future.