Sock puppets are for smacking

Have you heard of sock puppets?
I think they are fake people, invented by corporations to comment on blogs.
Can you believe it?

The other day, I was commenting on a telegraph site about a story on climate change and earthquakes.

Well, it wasn't a story, it was an opinion piece that attacked environmentalists.
I knew it was going to be basically a meeting place for people to bitch about people like me and to deny climate change. That was clear and it didn't faze me.

What WAS interesting, though, was a set of responses that laid out an attack of my thoughts on a totally different order of magnitude.

These responses compared me to a sociopath and claimed I wanted climate change to kill people.

The weird thing was, these responses all lacked spaces between the sentences.

A small thing, perhaps. But combined with the fact that they also gleaned many, many "recommendations" almost immediately pointed to sock puppeting.

Another note: my post, which was measured and not inflammatory, was cut down by more than half---AFTER it had already generated some response comments.

Why?

Because this is a war.

It's a war between progressives with ethics and conservatives who want to win at any cost.

Here is what Viking had to say:

"Well done Delingpole.With sickening predictability ,those advocates of human sacrifice ,the Greenies swarm in to scavenge and fill their blood-stained maws ,vulture-like ,on the still warm bodies of the earthquake and Tsunami victims.Their unholy and obscene delight at the death toll ,their shameless, ill-concealed and earnest desire for yet more disasters and more deaths to be heaped upon the suffering Japanese,reveals their deeply sociopathic nature.No other group glories quite so publicly in the loss of human life,or wishes for it with a fierce predatory desire to benefit from and exploit the suffering of the defenceless and the innocent ."

And Viking got 17 immediate recommends!

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The question is: How does a person like Viking get a paid writing gig like this?
Sounds like an out-of-work, half crazy poet.

Earthquakes and climate change

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/07/disasters

Loyalty, the Left and barf bags

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Maslow's Hierarchy.

Progressives are, by their nature, on the pointy end of it.

This is great for individual self-actualization, but not great for being loyal.

But guess what?

Loyalty is required in 2012.

In the U.S. elections.

Progressives who are "disgusted" with Obama's "lost principles" are going to have to take a Gravol and a barf bag down to the voting station and vote for him over their dry heaves.

They're going to have to show loyalty.

I know, I know.

It's such a clunker of a quality -- not genteel, even though old-fashioned, because it seems like an abdication of the real work that professional left-leaning pundits are so busy with: tearing down Obama because he isn't Christ.

But loyalty is exactly what's needed, right now and over the coming two years.

Perhaps if you just sort of squint your eyes at the bigger picture, instead of focusing a microscope on Obama, you will see that actively supporting Democrats in 2012 does indeed serve your stellar principles.

By supporting Democrats -- including Obama -- you will slowing the Tea Party takeover.

That is the most important work of all progressives at this time in history.