Indy Media Watch

This fellow has written of his experience when an Indy Media elder spoke to his university class:

In my last political science class a leader in the Indy media community was invited to speak on the “worlds greatest media outlet for the people”.... Independent media. He stood in front of me for 2.5 hours preaching nothing but anti-American, anti-globalization, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalism..etc.. I was almost violently sick in hearing such tripe. It was a realization that a hyper left extremist version of a liberal existed and was active...VERY active…and there are thousands just like him. They hide and entrench themselves inside this world of Indy media feeding off their own lies, deceit and hatred for anything and everything.

He reasoned that:

"my idea is not to try and convince them they need to be conservative...my intention is to start pulling them out of the depths of ultra liberalism and see ANYTHING and EVERYTHING from the opposite side wheatear they may agree or not…they need to see an opposite and reasonable view based on facts and reality. They need to understand that there is an argument and debate for everything. Truth comes through a reasonable debate on issues and thought."

He subsequently blogged of his experiences posting to Indy Media.Lordy Lordy....show these lefties the light.

Whilst his original article isn't shown, (Update: here it is, geez I can see why he got them heated up) the responses from Indy Media types are interesting. They vary from:

Succinct:

get bent

to Charming:

Fuck off already.

To well constructed:

We don't need you assholes on yet another one of our media outlets

and various derivatives of the above.

Seriously though, some of the replies were well-intentioned and I wholly agree with a point made by one of them:

Healthy conversation between the Left and the Right is a healthy aspiration and I, for one, appreciate having a diversity of opinions on the threads, as long as no one is using them to blow off steam when they come home from work, get drunk, or your team loses.

Fair enough too. I'm concerned though that other large sections of the freedom-of-speech crowd seemed determined to totally shut this guy up. It does tend to suggest a double standard where freedom of speech is encouraged (provided they agree with you). It's such a shame though as to some of the stuff they apparently seem to so often agree on...

Healthy conversation yes! And that's what I 've said all along...