Peter Recommends LXXXII
A different angle on the other night’s arboreal adventure:
Mashable.com - YouTube-CNN Republican Debate Reflects Poorly on New Media
As you may recall, the Republican YouTube-CNN debate almost didn’t happen. Many Republican candidates were afraid that the response from the Internet would be goofy, degrading, and inherently biased. When I’ve made personal note of this fact here in the past, the flood of comments tended to support the notion that we in tech have a liberal reputation.
This debacle certainly isn’t going to help that perception, and it could set back significant engagement with conservative candidates for quite a time, if it isn’t rectified. Polls are saying, at least at this point, we’ll probably end up with a Republican president here in America. Do we really need another four to eight years of a disengaged government when it comes to issues important to the technology constituency? It may be that groups like the RIAA and MPAA could end up going away, and thus cease to set the agenda for issues that matter to us.
That doesn’t mean that AT&T or Comcast’s lobby couldn’t step up to fill the void, and influence even more dumb laws that set technology back significantly. By disenfranchising the conservative community from the tech community with hare-brained stunts like this, we’re virtually assuring ourselves that we’ll never get the government we want.
We are turning the disconnection of conservative and Republican leadership from the tech community into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That second link (about his personal note) I linked to as well at the beginning of the month.
December 1st, 2007 at 4:07 pm
I know plenty of conservative tech people - math based types like engineers who build stuff, in and oout of the Blogosphere, and especially those who shoot at my club/range. It appears he’s living his post-graduate “tech lifestyle” in a liberal echo-chamber and doesn’t get out of his cubicle into the real world much. At least the Republicans did attend a debate in which they knew they’d get hammered by Leftist plants, set-ups, and tough challenging questions - the Democrats all ran away in terror from the Fox debate opportunity. A debate in which if Fox had pulled the same liberal stunts and plants as CNN they would have been much more mercilessly hammered — CNN’s getting a total free-pass by the rest of the broadcast news, there’s not a mention of the planted questions and operatives anywhere on ABC, CBS or NBC. Nevermind PBS.