politricks and other distractions

I must be spending too much time on the computer and in the DailyKos site because I'm starting to see a breakdown in realities. This weekend, I wrote a diary about a female soldier in Oregon who'd gone AWOL because she said she'd been sexually abused in her service and had PTSD. Not being in any position to research the claims, I read what I could and put up a post that gave her the benefit of the doubt (and my reasons for giving them).

During the course of the comment thread, somebody logged on and said he was a doctor in Iraq and that if she's a soldier she should suck it up and do her duty (or words to that effect). I had one or two responses he may have read. It's hard to tell as the thread goes. But I took him seriously and addressed him as someone in the field.

I told a friend this story today and she asked how I could be sure the guy really was writing from Iraq. I said I didn't. You know that troops have access to computers and lots of them are blogging, so it's not a stretch for me to believe that I was conversing with a soldier in the field. But I had realized it could all be a lie. I still gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Last weekend, my half-brother in Vegas suggested I get a gun to protect myself from burglars. I said statistics show that you're much more likely to die from the gun yourself (from the bad guys, a friend or suicide) than to use it in self-defense. His response, "Oh, you're just listening to what the gun control lobby says."

I did do a lot of writing for gun control groups in the 90s, but their stats were from reliable polling and government studies. The fact is, I can't quote bibliographical references but these are numbers that are accepted public knowledge. And if I could quote a government study, the argument against it would be, "well, that's just the government. They don't know shit."

The Administration has regularly questioned accepted scientific facts (global warming, evolution) and has shown everybody how to act indignant or condescending when your opponent in a debate says the sky is blue.

So we get to the key dilemma facing media and communications today: how do you talk to anybody when we have no common reference point for truth? We've all gotten so used to thinking in terms of liars, spin, and self-interest (follow the money) that nobody trusts anybody anymore.

In the blogging world, sites like DailyKos have developed extended communities of diarists, commenters, and lurkers. I jumped in with both feet - characteristically - and have been writing diaries and comments. But the first diary I put up (about the auction to benefit YearlyKos) had the first comment: who is this person? Why should we trust them? How do I know where my donation really goes?

I had others on the auction go in and vouch for me, so I "got some mojo," as it were. But therein lies the only validation people have in blogs: the building of community that makes everyone accountable for the honesty of the public square. There are "troll-hunters" zapping commenters who are just schilling for the other side, trying to disrupt reasonable debate. And with enough time on the site and mojo built, you too can become a "trusted user (TU)" and get to troll-rate people, which hides their comments from plain view.

I don't know how the site or Markos figured out all these rules, but I see that they're the only answer to give the skeptics. How do we know anything about anyone writing there? How do you know anything about your spouse? All we can know is what people choose to tell us.

In the sphere of public commentary, we are dividing into self-selecting groups of like-minded people. There's a chance blogs will bring people together in some kind of bridge but it's not happening much yet.

In this new public square, we only have each other and our better instincts to rely on. Getting back our trust in truth will take a long time. We'll see if this experiment works... or else.