Over at Slashdot (the huge blog for geeks that is for tech what Daily Kos is for politics), they're discussing the secret telco cartel PowerPoint presentation describing how they're fighting Net Neutrality by hiring the astroturf orgs that started and perpetuate the Tea Party "movement". Here I point out why you, Daily Kos reader, should go engage the Slashdot crowd on this issue of critical mutual importance...
As seen on Slashdot today:
"The political blog ThinkProgress lays out big telecom's plan to attack net neutality. The blog obtained a secret PowerPoint presentation from a telecommunications industry front group (PPT) that outlines the industry strategy for defending against regulatory attempts by the FCC. The industry plans to partner with two conservative 'astroturfing' groups, best known for their work seeding the Tea Party movement. Today's revelation from ThinkProgress comes as Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) joined various telecom-funded front groups to unveil an anti-net neutrality bill."
The Slashdot discussion features that geek site's disproportionate number of "libertarians" and other mostly theoretical "small government" types (who vote Republican and get massively bigger governments, but less governance). Net Neutrality there would seem a natural value, since Slashdotters breathe the Internet (that the government created and grew into puberty). But the astroturf that the Tea Party breathes has lots of victims over at Slashdot among its politically (and otherwise socially) naive nerds. Slashdot is a hotbed of Ron Paul followers. It could really use people from Daily Kos to engage them and discuss this issue of critical political and technological consequence.
Indeed, when I first started posting Slashdot stories on Daily Kos several years ago, in the middle of the Bush years, Slashdot's overall political position was much more "libertarian", willing to believe Republican lies, and not very interested in Democratic or organized progressive politics. But after a couple years, Slashdot's atmosphere had headed more towards a progressive center that you'd expect from educated, networked and largely young people interested in facts and logic, even if often packaged in videogames and other worlds brought to them by large corporations. Obama is popular overall (though subject to criticism and plenty of bashing), Bush is now widely understood to have been catastrophic. Slashdot's politics is still a good subject for progressives to influence with engagement and persuasion.
So head over and engage the discussion. I'd love to discuss the revelation that the Teabagger astroturfers are working for the telco cartel to derail Net Neutrality directly in this diary, but perhaps an even more interesting and productive subject here would be how to organize the large and very influential community that Slashdot serves into support for the progressive politics that it has naturally in common with the Daily Kos community.