Hard to take an article seriously when it claims we were winning the war in Vietnam in ‘68. By what criteria can that assertion be made? Not any that I can think of, how about you?
on 10/28/02 1:20 PM, ab at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-Caveat Lector-
FYI to aid you in getting educated about our common Enemy..
The last paragraph of this Post refers to Antonio Gramsci.
Highly recommend you visit 'Gramsci for Beginners'
at http://www.charm.net/~vacirca/
Also, 'Gramsci Resources' at
http://www.soc.qc.edu/gramsci/index.html
and, 'An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and Thought, at
http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curric/soc/Gramsci/gramsci.htm
ab
----- Original Message -----
From: Howard Rothenburg <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.fan.rush-lim
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2002 8:14 PM
Subject: [piml] Slay the AOL Liberal Monster
© 2002 Rich Martin
Permission to repost in full, or in part, is granted.
By Robert Locke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
August 2, 2002
As a conservative columnist, it amazes me to get favor-
able e-mails from people whose addresses end in @aol.com. I
mean, don't they know that AOL Time-Warner is an evil liber-
al media conglomerate and that they are thereby putting
money into its pockets every month? Not to mention increas-
ing its influence by enlarging its subscriber base? Don't
they know that these things matter? Therefore, I urge all my
readers who use AOL to dump it and press politically sensi-
ble friends and family to do the same. CompuServe is owned
by AOL; dump it, too. Microsoft's MSN, whose search engine
describes FrontPage as an "extreme right-wing magazine," is
a just-as-liberal AOL wannabe and its profits get funded to
causes like defending affirmative action in Washington
State, so dump MSN and Hotmail accounts, too. (I've just
switched my address to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) You can take
your business to any ordinary apolitical ISP, or you can go
with the best people I have been able to find:
anonymizer.com, which provides full-featured and truly
private Internet access. Take their free test to see how
much information you are exposing right now.
Most conservatives realize by now that the key to the
liberal victory in the 60's was their control of the media.
The liberal media lied about Vietnam, which we were winning
by 1968. They depicted the vicious extremists of the New
Left as gentle flower children. They blacked out huge coun-
ter-trends like the vast Young Americans for Freedom ral-
lies. And all because they had a monopoly. Conservatives
have a unique opportunity now with the Internet to end that
monopoly, but we must seize the opportunity on our own
initiative. The underlying trend is in our favor, but will
not be properly realized without deliberate effort on our
part. What terrifies the liberal elite the most is not that
Matt Drudge will reveal the misdeeds of their presidents,
but that the Net will fragment the media market so much that
they can no longer control it. In 1980, five men in Washing-
ton and New York effectively controlled the media in this
country: one president each for the TV networks plus an
editor apiece at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
If get our act together, these days will never come back. To
take back this country, we must first take back our own
minds, and this requires a secession of conservatives from
opposition media, starting with AOL.
The opposition does have a counter-attack in the works,
and AOL Time-Warner is its spearhead. Their hope is to re-
centralize the media by buying up web sites and restructur-
ing them to a standardized content-production model which
will be simultaneously efficient enough to be profitable and
give them the opportunity to re-impose a political bias.
What makes this attempt to net the mercury of the Web plau-
sible is the fact that already, AOL and Microsoft's MSN
account for over 15% of total Internet traffic (source:
Forrester Research). Indeed, 80 percent of all Web traffic
goes to a relatively small core of only about 15,000 sites
out of the millions that exist. They are hoping to both
exploit and drive this consolidation. Frankly, they probably
think this web site's days are numbered, and plan, no doubt,
to replace it with a commercially packaged and defanged
product, a sort of placebo or baby-pacifier for conserva-
tives. (The existing co-optation to corporatism of a large
section of the "conservative" media will make this easy
enough.) They hope to leverage their existing position in
magazines and TV to provide web content that no-one else
can. They hope that such assets as Time-Warner Cable's
extensive cable network will enable them to force people
onto AOL when high-speed cable modems become the standard.
Serious business analysts credited their strategy with
enough of a chance to endorse AOL's purchase of Time-Warner
despite its being paid for with bubble-inflated stock. That
this strategy's profits have evaporated with the decline of
this stock doesn't mean it's going away; these Gramscian (1)
bobos are in it for the long haul.
To advance its conglomeration strategy, AOL is one of
the slimiest operators around when it comes to simultaneous-
ly demanding government deregulation when there is something
it wants while also pressing for government control to
hamper its competitors when convenient. This is, of course,
the classic behavior of big corporations that have found out
that they have a lot in common with big government and like
to mouth the rhetoric of free-market capitalism while actu-
ally practicing co-optative corporatism. For example, at the
same time that AOL was resisting government efforts to prize
open its messaging system on anti-trust grounds, it was
lobbying elsewhere to force AT&T to open up its cable tele-
vision lines to it. But then, when it bought Time-Warner and
suddenly found itself owning cable TV lines of its own, it
promptly reversed its position, and decided that "the free
market and not government" should decide who has access to
cable systems.
AOL is involved in even more sinister legal efforts
that could in the long run seriously undermine the rule of
law in this country. It has promoted a mischievous and self-
indulgent doctrine called the "choice of law" movement. This
asserts that consumers should be permitted to choose which
nation's laws apply to their Internet transactions. So you
could have Monaco's tax laws, Albanian medical-safety regu-
lation, Mexican food purity laws, and Dutch child-porn
standards. This comes dressed up in the hip garb of "cyber-
libertarianism," but is in fact a serious assault on nation-
al sovereignty. (To their credit, some intellectually rigor-
ous cyber-libertarians won't touch this irresponsible idea.)
AOL Time-Warner as a company is deeply enmeshed with
the liberal establishment. Most famously, Ted Turner, found-
er of CNN and the rest of the Turner Broadcasting Company
that is an AOL-TW subsidiary, is a major Democratic National
Committee donor, not to mention former husband of Jane
"Hanoi" Fonda. Other smaller examples: Deni Green, wife of
ultra-liberal New York City mayoral candidate Mark Green, is
a senior director of corporate philanthropy. Kathy Bushkin,
senior vice president and chief communications officer, was
Sen. Gary Hart's press secretary. Janice Brandt, head of
marketing, has been a major supporter of the animal-rights
nuts People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Green-
peace, Ted Kennedy, loony-left Congressman Ron Dellums and
the California Democratic Party. The place is littered with
connections like that.
By giving your business to AOL, you are in effect
feeding a giant liberal slush fund. AOL, like many leftist
organizations, is remarkably open about its aggressive
agenda if you know where to look. Its CEO, Gerald Levin, has
openly expressed its comically sinister power-hunger in
these words: "We're going to need to have these corporations
[media companies like AOLT-W] redefined as instruments of
public service because they have the resources, they have
the reach, they have the skill base, and maybe there's a new
generation coming up that wants to achieve meaning in that
context and have an impact, and that may be a more efficient
way to deal with society's problems than governments," (CNN,
January 2001)
In other words, AOL-TW isn't content to be a propaganda
adjunct to the liberal state; they want to replace some of
its functions. This is egomania.
As an actual online product, AOL's liberal bias starts
with its use of left-wing CBS News as its news partner. It
has prohibited pro-life subscribers from putting photographs
of aborted fetuses on their personal AOL web sites. It
prohibits anti-homosexuality arguments on its message
boards. It prohibits its subscribers from selling firearms
or ammunition they own on their web sites and has had a
running battle with Second-Amendment advocates. This is why
AOL is reputed by some of it dissatisfied subscribers to
stand for "Allow Only Leftists" or "Always Oppose Liberty."
In a shameless capitulation to the same people who hounded
Salman Rushdie, it has removed pages that were deemed
"offensive to Moslems," a delicacy of politeness that does
not seem to extend to Christians. AOL limits what outside
sites its subscribers' pages may link to. It has even been
suggested that part of the reason why AOL maintains its
enormously expensive censorship systems, which also expose
it to a legal liability that uncensored providers do not
face, is that due to its aspiration to become a worldwide
ISP, it wants to show governments like China that it can
provide Internet services on a leash.
AOL reads its users' e-mails and censors them. Last
year, it blocked the conservative e-mail journal The Feder-
alist for several weeks. As of this writing, AOL has con-
firmed that they blocked it, but has refused to say why. The
Federalist's publisher suspects it may have something to do
with the fact that on March 9th, 2001, they quoted Ted
Turner's comment to a group of CNN personnel observing Ash
Wednesday with an ash mark on their foreheads: "What are
you, a bunch of Jesus freaks?" AOL later lifted the block-
ade, but should conservatives, or any liberty-loving Ameri-
cans, be doing business with a company that behaves this way
in the first place? And remember, this is all coming from a
company that refuses to block pornographic spam, and despite
its heavy-handedness, still has user profiles and other
content littered with four-letter words and other filth. And
don't forget these are the same AOL censors who allowed the
Columbine killers to maintain a web site for a year in which
they announced their murderous intentions.
AOL's other offenses are legion. It has been widely and
plausibly accused of fraudulent marketing practices, in
which people are signed up for service without being told
this is what they are doing. It was recently caught selling
the names and phone numbers of its subscribers and then
apparently tried to lie about having done this. It doesn't
respect its users' privacy; there is a group called the
Electronic Privacy Information Center that documents this in
detail. AOL collects detailed information about what its
users click on, revealing personal habits and interests, and
although it claims it doesn't use it for anything more than
aggregate studies, one must wonder why they bother if this
is so. AOL lobbied against California legislation that would
have imposed standards for protecting consumers against
having intimate financial and other data shared by corpora-
tions they do business with without their permission.
Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that AOL holds
its users in contempt as sheep to be herded and sheared.
AOL, despite its high-tech image, is an enemy of tech-
nological innovation. It resisted for years the next logical
step in instant-messaging technology, an open standard,
preferring to require people to stay within its own network.
At one time, it incredibly wouldn't even let non-AOL-e-mail
over its system! Its poorly-managed computer systems have
experienced several security break-ins, which have allowed
hackers to gain access to sensitive account information
including customer names, phone numbers and credit card
numbers. AOL's absurd control-freak arrogance extends to the
demand that, as stated in their Terms of Service agreement,
"you are required to follow our TOS no matter where you are
on the Internet" if you connect using AOL. They also block
sites simply for being critical of them; I will be very
surprised if this page doesn't eventually get blocked.
Just to encourage the reader to dump AOL, here is a
list of its non-ideological shortcomings, all of which can
be avoided on a plain-vanilla ISP or Familink (which in the
interests of full disclosure I will admit gave me a free e-
mail address for endorsing them.)
1. AOL prevents its users from using a proper, full-fea-
tured, e-mail client like Outlook Express.
2. Its e-mail system won't display graphic attachments in-
line.
3. E-mail cannot be sorted by name, date, subject etc.
like on other systems.
4. It doesn't use industry-standard e-mail standards MIME
& SMTP, resulting in garbled messages sometimes.
5. Most surveys of online connection quality show AOL near
the bottom.
6. It kicks you offline if you leave your computer unat-
tended for a few minutes.
7. It is noticeably slower than a plain-vanilla ISP for
surfing the web, as everything has to be routed through
their network after traversing the Internet.
8. When sending or receiving from non-AOL addresses, its
mail delivery is often much slower than a plain-vanilla
ISP.
9. It forces you to view annoying pop-up ads.
10. It has terrible customer service that puts you on hold
forever.
11. Its software can interfere with other software on your
machine.
12. Its main program takes up a huge amount of memory and
takes forever to load.
13. It often won't sign you off immediately when you need
to make a phone call, forcing you to wait while it
downloads this or that "update" to its system.
Some answers to anticipated objections: One, I realize
some people find the whole boycott thing a bit petty and,
well, leftist. Remember grapes? Let's just remember that if
the Left has gotten good mileage out of a tactic, this is
empirical evidence that it is a useful one. If the Right
doesn't learn to boycott companies on its own, the Left will
intimidate and dominate the entire corporate sector. Two, I
realize some people are attached to their AOL. Without
meaning to be rude,
I think this comes down to laziness. Switch and feel
good about fighting back. People will adapt to your new
address soon enough.
The most beautiful thing if a conservative boycott of
AOL succeeds is a great old saying from Russian chess: "A
threat is more powerful than its execution." We could poten-
tially have a magnificent chilling effect on the propensity
of the media to engage in political mischief. It's time to
show these people, who not without reason assume that con-
servatives will whine but put up with anything, that we can
throw our weight around too. The stunning out-of-nowhere
success of Fox News, which has surpassed CNN as the largest
cable news network, shows that conservative demand can
reshape the media landscape.
In truth, AOL Time-Warner is already doing its stock-
holders a disservice by gratuitously annoying the half of
this country that doesn't share its political views. If the
boycott has a meaningful impact, this could lay the ground
for a stockholder lawsuit against them for failing to uphold
their fiduciary responsibilities by compromising their
profitability to serve the political ends of management.
That would be a real nightmare for them which could oust
management, not to mention laying the precedent for lawsuits
in other industries against managements that indulge their
political hobbies on the job.
So please, please, make it a personal goal over the
next month to wipe out all @aol addresses among the people
you exchange e-mail with. If you control a web site of your
own, put in a link to this article so that more people will
see it and the boycott campaign will keep going. The number
to cancel your AOL account is 888-265-8008. You can also
mail the cancellation to:
America Online P.O. Box 1600 Ogden, UT 84401
Or fax it to 801-622-7969. Be sure to give them
your master screen name.
Note: Over the last year or so, AOL Time-Warner's
fortunes have declined gratifyingly. Its stock
has lost a total value in excess of $100 billion.
That's billion, folks. It is now under investiga-
tion for accounting fraud. It is losing the battle
to control the broadband market. Its palatial new
headquarters continues to rise next to New York's
Central Park, but it will be a diminished company
that will occupy it. The title of this article is
taken from the song, "MTV get off the air" by The
Dead Kennedys. But that's another article.
(1) "Gramscian" means pertaining to the philosophy of the
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937.) He
taught, in opposition to traditional Marxist-Leninists
who wanted to take over society by means of a violent
revolution, that the way to take over society was to
take over the institutions that create and transmit its
ideas. 99% of the American Left, which wouldn't know
one end of an AK-47 from the other, is Gramscian. In
truth, Gramsci wasn't original; he just rediscovered
Left Hegelianism, a philosophy from 100 years before.
Sometime when we both have a lot of time on our hands,
I will explain what that was about.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=2201
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