Left In Lowell

Unbelievable. So someone creates a new user over at BMG, “proudlib,” and within five days, puts up three posts (two on Feb 4) trying to push support for casinos. He neither links to the people he rants about nor quotes them.

What makes me think he may not be a professional paid plant is some of his very poor rhetoric. Surely, there are better arguments for casinos than some of his statements. Like this: “…after reading Rep, Dan Bosley’s almost infantile statement regarding his opposition to resort casinos…” I mean, you can argue whether or not you think Bosley’s arguments are right or not, but infantile? Not only have I always found Rep. Bosley a passionate, engaged pol on this issue, but his arguments are very mature and thought out, and backed up by data he has studied.

On the other hand, in the same thread, someone named “cbrillo” backs up proudlib’s attack on Rep. Bosley. “cbrillo” created their account on Feb 6th, and has commented exactly twice - once on proudlib’s “infantile” anti-Bosley post, and once with a fairly nonsensical pro-casino response elsewhere.

Yeah, that sounds like a grassroots swelling of support for casinos, alright.

In the latest post from Feb 9th, proudlib makes a lot of assertions about how many jobs, etc, the casino proposal would create, but no citation of where those numbers come from and who asserts them. In fact, they are asserted by the casino lobby and trickle down from there, and therefore are highly questionable, as many commenters in the post point out.

Why do I care about this? Because that last post got frontpaged on BMG. Now, I’m all for a fair and balanced discussion on this issue, but at the same time, a poorly-cited dubious post by someone who only recently created a user account and whose language appears, at best, shrill and unhinged at times…well, don’t we bloggers complain all the time about the mainstream media and its lazy habit of citing the he-said, she-said debate without parsing out the context or the facts of the matter? I’m not calling out the BMG editors (well, maybe just a smidge) as they are constantly front-paging all sorts of things and the blog moves fast, but I wanted to notate it to caution all readers of blogs that not all commentators, or even those of us who write on front pages, have earned the sort of credibility to be taken seriously. Please always use your best judgment when reading on the internets.

And I include readers of this blog in that. I am not immune to scrutiny, and won’t object to it either, so long as it’s fair scrutiny.