The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Here Political Talk Is Cheap--But Rich

Just as conservatives seem to be ascendant in the larger political arena, I have a general sense that they’ve got the jump on cyberspace as well. Rush Limbaugh probably has a bigger following in cyberspace than all of his liberal counterparts combined, and if you use Yahoo’s search function (at www.yahoo.com) on the World Wide Web, you’ll turn up several entries for “libertarian,” but none for “communist” or “communism.”

Staking a further claim in this new ideological territory, the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank of conservative bent, and the possibly even more conservative National Review, William F. Buckley’s journal of opinion in New York, will shortly extend their CompuServe partnership onto the World Wide Web, where they will operate a kind of shopping mall of conservative ideas.

The conservatives hardly have a monopoly on cyberspace, though. There are plenty of liberal home pages, discussion groups and organizations such as Greenpeace and the American Civil Liberties Union with a presence on the Web. One of the best things about cyberspace, in fact, is the forum it provides for a wide spectrum of political discussion and ideas.

I admit that many of these ideas are insane; most of the time the really good stuff is published by somebody who will require you to pay for it. But there are still a lot of politics available on-line and I, for one, am fervently hoping for more. Skeptics might consider the on-line world to embody many of the excesses of talk radio, with people more inclined to spout off than to learn something, but I think practically any political discussion is better than none at all.

The first places to go for political discussions are the dozens of politically oriented Usenet newsgroups. (You remember newsgroups, those gigantic global discussion forums now accessible from services such as America Online as well as on the Internet.) In the “alt.” hierarchy, there are a number of alt.politics newsgroups, such as alt.politics.democrats.d, alt.politics.usa.republican, alt.politics.datahighway and alt.politics.media. You’ll also want to consider alt.activism and alt.society.anarchy.

There are also a host of newsgroups in the “talk.politics.” hierarchy, including plain old talk.politics but also talk.politics.animals, drugs, guns, medicine, space and theory. Other politically oriented newsgroups include talk.abortion, soc.politics and alt.society.revolution. Also of interest: alt.society.civil-liberties, alt.censorship, alt.privacy and ca.politics.

The quality of these discussions is uneven, to say the least. In recent visits to alt.politics.democrats.d and alt.politics.perot, for instance, I found a mixture of paranoia, irrelevance and cross-posting (messages posted to both groups). But there is also substantive discussion, if you root around for it, and at least a sense that a lot of people care about what happens in politics.

In one thoughtful posting in alt.politics.democrats.d, for instance, Sean Williams asked: “Why is the Republican party complaining about Hollywood, and in virtually the same breath claims that PBS, with Nova, Nature and Sesame Street is hopelessly left and subversive? In other words, why claim the free-market system is ruining America, and then say the government-subsidized version is ruining America.”

Among the commercial on-line services, one of the best places for politics, issues and so forth is America Online. The fastest way into the heart of the matter here is to use the keyword POLITICS, which takes you to something called Capital Connection. Here you begin to see how AOL plans to integrate itself with the World Wide Web; Capital Connection offerings are either on AOL or on the Web, but the distinction is relatively meaningless, at least to users of the new version 2.5 of AOL’s software, which is available for download on a “preview” basis.

Some of the best politically oriented material on AOL is from Congressional Quarterly, whose on-line presence is called CQ Online. It has interesting articles from Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report and a pretty thorough guide to Congress, including voting records, district profiles, and information on campaign finance. AOL’s Capital Connection also sports lists of political mailing lists and newsgroups and access to relevant World Wide Web sites.

As you might expect, the World Wide Web offers vast resources in this department. A good place for liberals to begin is The Left Side of the Web, at https://paul.spu.edu/sinnfein/progressive.html. Or try the Turn Left page, at https://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/cubsfan/liberal.html. Liberal activists will also want to check out PeaceNet, at https://www.peacenet.apc.org/peacenet/, which contains links to a host of resources of interest, including EcoNet, LaborNet and others. For conservatives, The Right Side of the Web is at https://www.clark.net/pub/jeffd/index.html.

Conservatives on CompuServe who’d care to pony up an extra $16 a month can congregate in the private Town Hall forum, jointly operated by the Heritage Foundation and the National Review. On June 29 the partners will unveil a free World Wide Web site, which will offer materials from the think tank and the magazine and also make space available to other conservative organizations; the kickoff ceremony will be complete with the physical (as opposed to the virtual) attendance of House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

On the other end of the spectrum, Greenpeace is at https://www.greenpeace.org/. The Progressive Labor Party is at https://world.std.com/plp. NewtWatch (which describes itself as the Web’s first “virtual PAC”) is at https://www.cais.com/newtwatch/.

The Libertarian Party home page is at https://www.lp.org/lp/, and Laissez-Faire Books, a seller of works by Hayek, Friedman, von Mises and others, is at https://www.xmission.com/legalize/lf/Laissez-Faire.html.

And if you’re convinced an awful lot of your elected leaders are bozos (no offense to any of the jesting professionals who might be reading this), you might want to stop by the Capitol Steps Web page at https://pfm.het.brown.edu/people/mende/steps/. The sound files are large, but the satire is irresistible.

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Daniel Akst welcomes e-mail at akstd@news.latimes.com.

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Politicians on the Net

If you want to contact your congressional representatives, use your Web browser to visit https://www.house.gov/, where you can find e-mail addresses, phone numbers and more. You can find Senate e-mail addresses by using your browser to visit gopher://ftp.senate.gov:/00h/member e-mail addresses. Prodigy users will find it easy to e-mail legislators by using the jumpword “politics.”