To avoid invoking Goodwin's Law I won't name the person who said - "repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it." But we see this approach used again and again, most recently in the constant stream of lies emanating from the White House on issues from Iraq to FISA to the U.S. Attorney firings.
The anonymous poster surfrider on the Daily Camera site seems to have made it his/her purpose in life to respond to every post of mine with two posts lying about me (documented here).
The quandary is how to respond to it. I don't want the Daily Camera comment sections to veer off-topic with surfrider's lies and my response as surfrider tends to respond to my posts with additional even more wild accusations. Yet if I leave the accusations unanswered, then they become accepted fact.
Why does he/she do this? My guess is that some of the powers that be here in Boulder find this blog a bit of a pain and are trying to drive people away from it. It's standard politics - if there is no legitimate response to the message - shoot the messenger.
So I am trying the following (and I am open to suggestions for a better way to handle the Karl Rove of Boulder). I will list his lies below and then the facts of the situation. And note, the issue here is not disagreeing with me, several commenters disagree with me, one even posted that "she doesn't like me" (and I appreciate that honesty). It's the lies I am addressing here.
- "thielen you were one of them. illegal delegate." [claiming I am a Republican elected as an Obama delegate]
You can look me up at the County Clerk's office. I am a registed Democrat and have been so since 1974 when I first registered as a voter and a Democrat, here in Boulder County. - "you tried to put 25 assorted cookies, trackers, referers and ads on my computer"
If you want to see what cookies my site puts on your computer, go to the directory (change dave to your username) C:\Documents and Settings\dave\Cookies and look at the contents of dave@davidthielen[1].txt where you will see 1 cookie. And that cookie can only be used by my site - it is not a cross-domain cookie and therefore is no threat. (This is what amazon uses to track your shopping cart.) The term "tracker" has no specific meaning technically so I assume that is another way of saying cookie. You cannot put a referee on a computer - a referee is the website that you came from when going to another website and every website does this - it is part of the http spec. And finally my site puts no ads on your computer - if it tried you would get the prompt from your browser asking if you wanted it done.
So 1 cookie, tracker is meaningless, referee is part of the http spec, and 0 ads. - "if you visit his site ensure after you do, to click on (in ie) tools, delte browsing history, and delete all."
This shows the technical illiteracy of surfrider. Your browsing history is a list of the websites you have recently visited. This allows the browser to auto complete urls when you type them in and show the history with the down arrow button. The thing is, that history is accessible to your browser only and has zero security implications. So even if my site did all the things surfrider claims, this action would not undo anything. - "Theilen[sic], you have aroused no passion in me. I just believe that using these forums for your own personal gain is not correct. Directing people to you website where your little "clicks and ticks" make you money is not what this forum is about."
No one gets paid for people coming to my website. Once someone is on my website, if they then click on the ads there my daughter gets paid and that payment is averaging $2.41/month.
On 2/16 surfrider posted the following:
Not true. Next time i visit i will make a list. It is 25 files, cookies trackers, referers etc. I will send them to you.
But to date, no supporting information from surfrider. I'll update here if/when I receive the info from surfrider - but I'm not holding my breath.
