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"THE HIPPIE & THE FASCIST" - Spring 2012
Based on comments by "liberty4ever76" and "Roxannex0"

However, the conversation doesn’t go exactly as one would think. Gethard, as always, stays completely affable while, even more amazing, the commenter stands his ground. It seems that the guy (his name is Travis) really doesn’t like Gethard’s work and doesn’t need the anonymity of the Internet to say it.

Here’s a typically incredible exchange:

“GETHARD: When you said [my agent] should have hung herself, that stung because I have some anxiety about career stuff.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I can see that. Well, you’re with a cool crew, like this group and the different comedians that come out of here…

GETHARD: Out of the UCB Theatre?

TRAVIS: Yeah, just different things like that. You’re with a cool crew, you’ve got enough going on. But I can see why you’d be nervous.

GETHARD: Based on that show?

TRAVIS: Not to be a dick again, but just, y’know, comedy. I know a lot of comedians, I’ve read a lot of biographies, autobiographies, and I see it a lot. There’s just that nervousness that you all have. … I don’t want to say it’s ‘pathetic,’ because I that’s so harsh, but I think you’d all say that about yourselves.

GETHARD: I might say that.

TRAVIS: It’s just that neediness thing when you come to the biggest city and try your hardest and you’re average, I’m sure it keeps you up at night.

GETHARD: Yeah, this city will crush you.

TRAVIS: I bake. I bake cookies and bread so there’s not a lot of stress.

GETHARD: Would you say that you are better at baking than I am at acting?

TRAVIS: Absolutely.”

The whole thing is a fascinating look at a number of Internet issues of the day; how comments affect people, how they affect the person typing them, and the things you can discover about someone from just typing in your name. What will be really interesting is seeing if, now that the video’s out there to be commented on, Travis gets to feel the other side of the commenter/commented equation.

Check out the video below:

(h/t Splitsider)

Some of the knuckle-walkers insisted on blaming the victim, saying she was too blond or too female to be in a danger zone. Others sought to mete out their digital revenge by blaming all Muslims for the attack on Logan.

I, and other Mediaite writers, have covered the response to Logan’s horrible attack so extensively that our posts on this far outnumber posts about the incident itself. Everyone with access to a computer, it seemed, had something to say, and a whole lot of it wasn’t positive or particularly thoughtful or remotely grammatically correct. But it’s important to note that not all of the vitriol aimed at Logan – or, phrased more diplomatically, surrounding Logan’s attack – was hurled anonymously or by a nebulous mob of online commenters writing furiously from the suburban New Jersey basement in which they’re all thought to reside. For example, Nir Rosen stepped down from his post as an NYU fellow following the wave of criticism he received for his Tweets making light of Logan’s attack and poking fun at CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Rainey goes through several ways different outlets have dealt with the in-fighting, trolling, and barrage of racist / sexist / homophobic / ableist / you-name-it-ist comments frequently dotting their comments sections. The LATimes.com, for instance, “kicks off” comments that have been reported as abuse by two different visitors, and The Huffington Post employs a team of 30 people who monitor threads for abusive posts with the help of a special computer system – a system which is both necessary, given the millions of visitors HuffPost receives, and enviable to certain bloggers (working at, let’s say… oh, Mediaite) who have to manually comb through comments to clean away the muck. It’s no secret that dealing with abusive commenters is a job in itself, and not something a lot of online writers have the time or patience to deal with in addition to churning out content.

What Rainey’s article doesn’t mention, however, is that there’s a subtle but important difference between commenters that can easily be labeled trolls or spam – and, as such, categorized and swiftly dealt with – and those who are simply mean or wrong or incredibly stupid. And this is where the discussion about online anonymity grows murky.

Anonymous posting serves several purposes. For one, there’s the concern that one’s online life and commenting history may be at odds with the personal or professional life one leads offline (or in “meat space,” as a friend of mine once put it). Posting anonymously can help keep those identities separate and avoid issues about censorship or penalization for the beliefs and opinions one chooses to express online. Plus, as one LATimes.com commenter aptly pointed out, posting through personal online accounts like Facebook – which is increasingly working to unravel the cloak of anonymity so prevalent across the Internet – can reveal tidbits about oneself (such as one’s first and last names, or one’s picture) that not everyone commenting on a thread needs to know.

While forcing visitors to use their real names when posting online might curtail some of the more offensive or abusive comments, it won’t necessarily make people more civil to one another, not will it put an end to comments that happen to be downright inane. Telling xxxAngelBaby69xxx that she now has to go by Hortense Smith won’t necessarily help her produce comments that add to the discussion. Making NeoConHottie post as Filbert Filbertson or ComelyCommie post as Filomena Filomenez won’t help either of them stick to the thread’s topic, nor will it help them grasp the concept of sarcasm. And it’s precisely these sort of comments that swarm threads like so many horseflies on a dog turd, making them difficult to read and posts almost impossible to discuss intelligently or productively.

As I see it, posting anonymously is not the problem; in fact, it can be a beneficial way of allowing people to feel safe or comfortable enough to express themselves. The issue is implementing standards (something easier blogged about than done) on blogs themselves – standards enforced not only by editors, but also shared by those within a commenting community. In the meantime, I have no qualms about anonymous commenting. Your opinion, in this small slice of online real estate, is you identity. You are that Bieber fan, you are your political party, you are your undying love of Phish. It’s what you say with that identity, rather than the identity itself, that makes or break a comment thread.

(The first person who comments with TL:DR, gets a virtual roundhouse kick to the face.)

The two stand-out guests – CEO and President of Fox News Roger Ailes making his first appearance ever on This Week and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.

The group was rounded out by Paul Krugman and George Will, but it was Ailes who was the star. “This is rather unusual for us and I think for him,” said Sawyer in her introduction. “I was waiting for HD,” joked Ailes.

The roundtable started by weighing in on Brown’s interview. “I think President Obama misinterpreted his election,” said Ailes. “I think people could misinterpret this election, conservatives getting too excited about this guy being with them and find out he’s really a moderate. People tend to misinterpret elections.”

Ailes also talked about the White House vs. Fox News feud: “We’re fine. I mean, it was not as bad as it was played, and things are not as good as they should be, but we have a good dialogue. And I saw the President and his wife at the media Christmas party. They were very gracious, very nice, both of them. And we have a dialogue every day with them.”

But the fireworks came when Huffington squared off directly with Ailes. “Aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people?” she asked him. “He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don’t think it’s…I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be…”

Then Huffington jumped in:

It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstadter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there.

Ailes responded by citing HuffPo commenters. “I agree with you,” he said. “I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor…Then it really went nasty, and I thought, gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out.”

“Well, that was never by anybody that we employed though,” responded Huffington, but then the exchange was ended by Walters.

It’s certainly a valid point by both sides, but Huffington is right that the comparison is apples and oranges. Anchors getting paid millions of dollars are not comparable to commenters on a website an unpaid blogger.

Update: It was not a comment, but a column by Bill Mann that Ailes was referring to. So Huffington correctly said it was not someone “employed” by the site, since it was an unpaid columnist. But it was not a commenter.

Huffington turned interviewer again just as the roundtable was ending, asking Ailes why FNC cut out of Friday’s Q&A between Pres. Obama and the House GOP. “Can you explain to me why FOX went away from the meeting the President was having, why did you go away 20 minutes before the end?” she asked.

“Because we’re the most trusted name in news,” said Ailes. And that was it.

Here’s some video of the roundtable, Ailes advice for Pres. Obama, and below, the Huffington/Ailes discussion about language:

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Photo by Remo Casilli, Reuters (via Vancouver Sun)

Two high-profile stories about the intersection of racism and the Republican Party are exploding all over the internet. The flap over comments at Free Republic and the Young Republicans’ election of a new president make for a sour cocktail this weekend.

Most of the heat is being generated by this Vancouver Sun story about the comments on a Free Republic article featuring 11 year-old Malia Obama:

“A typical street whore.” “A bunch of ghetto thugs.” “Ghetto street trash.” “Wonder when she will get her first abortion.”

These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative ‘Free Republic’ blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.

You might think that this is the same as the lame attacks that Bill O’Reilly levels at commenters on DailyKos and/or Hot Air. There are key differences. The Sun report says that the offensive comments overwhelmingly outnumbered those critical of the vitriol, but the real problem is this:

After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender’s email address intact.

So, they knew about the comments, put them back up, and apparently made the complainer a target for harassment. Very ugly. Eventually, they took it down again.

As disgusting as this story is, it didn’t stand to hurt Republicans that much on its own. Freepers are not exactly considered the bellwether of mainstream conservative thought.

Then, even after an impassioned plea by very young Republican Meghan McCain, the Young Republicans elected a new president with serious racism problems.

The Young Republicans faced a stark choice at their convention in Indianapolis yesterday as they chose their next leader: a center-right twentysomething interested in greater outreach, or a self-described “true conservative” who is almost 40 and spent last week dealing with Daily Beast reports about her beliefs, which are, at best, often hateful, and at worst, downright racist. The delegates, in a vote of 470 – 415, chose the latter.

Fair or not, the effect of these two stories is devastating. Already on Twitter, I’ve seen comparisons of the Freeper story to the Letterman/Palin feud, with liberals asking where the conservative denunciation is. The Young Republicans story serves to neutralize the “few bad apples” rationale on the Freeper story.

As a liberal with a lot of conservative friends, I hate to see conservatives get painted, en masse, with this brush. While this makes them understandably defensive on the subject, that defensiveness can lead to tone-deaf handling of these situations. While some liberals’ idea of the GOP as the Ivory Soap of racism is way off the mark, many conservatives are also in denial about their party’s race problems. The truth, as they say, lies somewhere in the middle.

On the issue of racism, the truth can be elusive. I think there’s always more racism, in general, than white people think there is. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot less of it in the Republican Party than most liberals think. Part of the perception problem that the GOP has today is that the Democrats have a black President. Where else are the racists supposed to go? Just because most of the racists belong to one party doesn’t mean that that party is mostly racists.

Still, when your party stands in opposition to policies that are seen as benefiting minorities, this kind of thing can really be damaging.

I’ll tell my liberal friends exactly what I told conservatives who asked me where the liberal outrage was on the Playboy story: Give it a minute. This story broke on a Saturday afternoon. Two of my conservative friends who write for very influential blogs just heard about it this morning, from me.

To my conservative friends, I hope their reactions, and those of the Republican leadership, veer away from the kind of persecution complex stuff that Newsbusters’ treatment portends, and closer to this. This story is already drawing attention from media heavy-hitters like Jake Tapper, Major Garrett, and David Shuster. The conservative response can be a big win.

As for the Young Republicans, I think Meghan McCain’s got their number.

Update: The plot thickens. Gawker reports that Chris Parry, the Vancouver Sun reporter who broke this story, was also a blogger for Daily Kos, and has suggested, in the past, posting hate speech and blaming it on conservatives (Gawker repeats this claim by the freepers, but I haven’t found anything in Parry’s DailyKos posts to back this up). This does little to change the facts in this story, as Parry could hardly have pulled, then reinstated, the offensive thread. It might mean a rough week for Parry, though. Parry responds here.