Sorry, this is probably not going to be a good idea for a diary.
But twice I came here to read a diary that I hear Armando posted here, or actually, more to read the comments which have been referred to. I’m burnt out on this too but I’m still sure that it’s important and goes beyond blogland and into the roots of our difficulties with keeping our progressive coalition strong the last few decades.
The second time I came I realized… oh yeah, I didn’t read that because it was deleted/missing.
Does anyone have a link… Armando’s Booman Tribune diary stack is empty, so I guess it may have been deleted? Is it under another user… or what?
Things don’t just go away when you forget them… so I only half apologize about asking, but I am fully sincere in that half of the apology! Sorry to those of you suffering exhaustion on the topic.
BooMan posted earlier today about this. Armando did delete it and terminated his account.
Goodbye Cruel BooTrib, eh? Things are getting weird out here.
This doesn’t need to be a fight.
The whole 3.1416 thing — and I haven’t commented on it anywhere yet — to me was only incidentally about gender. Markos has already replied, in essence, “love it or leave it” in response to a number of complaints back there over the last few months. It’s become a theme.
I remember, because I’ve been offended every time. I was around when they used that against us us in the 60’s, and I deeply resent those five words to this day. What more anti-democratic instruction could there be?
But in the blogosphere you can take a man at his word, and Markos having been visionary in his adoption of Scoop and ratings and diaries and recommended diaries, creating what could well be called “quantum blogging,” may also be visionary in his invitation to people to leave.
He’s been quite straightforward about it. He’s named and linked his spawned blogs in his “love it or leave it” posts. He’s literally told us where to go.
So I’ll take the man at his word, and I don’t see it as a fight. Perhaps he’s kicking his chicks out of the nest (if you’ll pardon the irresistable pun), as all parents must eventually do.
So, in that spirit, I’m brand new here at least in terms of posting, and I say Hello Kind BooTrib! What I actually hope for here is a less meta-, more innately respectful site than dKos… that does just as Important Shit.
Even the comments we made in the diary are missing. I usually can get back to them that way- but no such luck.
It was a head-spinner of a diary though.
for a moment I read your sig as a part of the reply… yike.
hmmm.
that’s too bad… I’m anti deletion… the record is expunged.
I don’t think you should be able to delete diaries.
Ideally, when you edit them it does a wiki-like revision thing and so you can see previous revisions and deletions are impossible…. while corrections and updates are still possible.
.
Sometimes I do copy diary and sent it by email to my own address. I just wonder if anyone did make a copy and could share by email?
Oui aka @dKos as creve coeur and new creve coeur
WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooTrib aka lost treasure of dKos
From my trip across the road in the early hours of the morning/night, Armando posted on a diary there that he had asked booman to delete it totally and to delete his user membership here as well.
The title of the diary over there was “As a Man, I am embarassed.” Sorry, I don’t remember the author’s name.
So that is why you can’t find it.
pyrrho, I read through about 100 comments on that thread and I can tell you this: you didn’t miss anything important. Armando was trying to find out if those who left dKos to move here had some sort of anti-Kos agenda. It was pretty ugly.
And people kept trying to be nice and to find out what he really wanted but nothing worked.
It especially creeps me out because its always the pickpocket that screams theif, theif. I’m glad the ugliness came to light now.
I see Armando’s point. There is a discussion about this over in MarkSF’s diary. The FBI used to infiltrate 60’s groups and tried to either radicalize them or play them off against each other. Given the success of Daily Kos and others in bringing the Downing Street Memo to the media in the US, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rove was launching some kind of an operation to discredit us and play us off.
But the problem is, the pie ad IS sexist and raising problems with it is a valid concern because it’s healthy to discuss our own attitudes. So, it’s a fallacy to conflate the pie ad critics with Rovian operatives.
The question for this community is, how do we identify people who create conflict as opposed to raising valid concerns so that we do not split like this ourselves sometime down the road?
I see his point too, but how he handled it was beyond bizarre and productive.
Either everyone who left was “in on it”, and part of the problem (his demand of “agree or disagree!”), or we were all unwitting dupes.
Dupes to what? As you say, the triggering actions were 100% Markos’s statements, and his inaction in changing the toxic atmosphere over there.
If it were part of a plot, then it was a few ‘agents’ in the UID 50,000+ range who fanned the hostilities and hounded and vilified folks thinking of leaving. Yet Armando chose to focus on one long-time contributor who went off to work on a new blog focused on a womans perspective (as one of many on that blog), and chase folks around here and demand they sign a loyalty pledge (I guess) saying Markos was good and honorable and great and worthy of unquestioning respect. Er, except for his recent actions which were a trigger for many to leave…
I can believe some on the right are cheering this on, but I really doubt Rove is one of them. If following liberal blogs is his thing, he’d see this for the true threat it is.
The Right Wing has long identified that different groups need different movements. Dobson doesn’t do the Chamber of Commerce. It wouldn’t work. The tone of dKos of late won’t work with the majority of doubtful Republicans or skeptical Independents. Heck, it doesn’t much work with many of our own strong pro-choice supporters.
The exodus from dKos pushes strong voices out there, away from their echo-chamber training ground into the wilds. Some will fade, but some will grow. As long as we keep the backchannel lines of communications open, and coordinate or cooperate on shared agendas, we’ll be stronger than ever.
But if there is a conspiracy to disrupt dKos, I can guarantee the agents weren’t on the fleeing side. They’re still over there, where they can be the most disruptive.
And yet, Armando’s Inquisition does nothing about them. He’s still focused on the expatriots.
I understand that much about how an anti-dkos plot would work, and I’m not much of a conspiracy buff.
The simpler explanation is usually the true one. Markos brought this 100% upon himself. Any Republican agents could at best see the opening the ad discussion and Markos’ reaction created, and exploited it to cause dischord. And if that’s the case, time would be better spent analyzing who treated whom how, and what the consequences were. Agent or not, anyone who created a hostile environment pushing folks out would be banned. But that’s not going to happen.
But then, that’s not much of a conspiracy, either.
He is largely responsible. He doesn’t understand the characteristics of leaders and followers. If the leader talks a lot about something and thinks it’s important, other people will think it’s important. If he thinks feminism is not important, people will not talk about it as much. And if he uses inflammatory language to diss someone’s point of view, his followers will chime in as well. Just because he takes a hands-off approach doesn’t mean that people aren’t watching his actions and taking cues. And he doesn’t understand that.
That’s right and just as a woman who gets angry can sound “shrill,” a man who makes a fool of himself in the gross mismanagement of power looks like like the village idiot.
Markos is for the most part very quiet. The group had grown large and powerful and people, being people want to beleive that they are following someone smarter than they are, wiser than they are. For me prejudice is a sign of ignorance and ill breeding. When he made those remarks and then in Bushian fashion declined to admit that he had made a mistake, to me at least, he looked like a fool. And I don’t want to follow a fool.
Now the freeper trolls are crawling all over the place, but that came after Markos revealed his weakness, not before.
Some of the worst ones are getting 0’s and ending up in the hidden comments. But how do we tell who is a freeper troll and who isn’t? For now, my yardstick is that if someone sounds like Rush Limbaugh, they are one unless they show me otherwise. And anybody who uses the phrases “get over it” or “move on” are getting ones because it continues the conflict by blowing off the other person.
I don’t have a problem with people who have honest doubts that the pie ad is sexist or who don’t understand what the deal is or that there are other important issues out there that we can’t ignore. But the goal should be to disagree without being disagreeable.
And this has benefited kos immensely, because there is record traffic at the blog. Right now, there are so many people trying to get there that the server has crashed. I think kos will emerge stronger for it.
A lot of the comments in the thread were good, though. There was some metadiscussion about communication, online communities, different styles, and the various reasons that people felt like moving on.
I’ve thought that one of the positive things that came out of this whole flap is the we’ve had a chance to talk these sorts of issues over on this blog without the kind of noise that is increasingly present at dKos.
I want to thank Booman, SusanHu, Diane101, Shirlstars (I apologize if I got that handle wrong), and everyone else here for creating a warm and welcoming environment here. I get the impression that people here will listen and discuss substantive issues instead of getting into name-calling and put-downs. That’s really important to me in an online community.
I do think that it would be helpful if we avoid dissing dKos. Sure, a lot of people have trauma to work through, and there are definitely practices over there that are upsetting. Still, I think it’s important to remember the hard work those folks have done, the growing pains dKos has been having, and the fact that skillful moderation is difficult.
I sincerely hope that dKos grows through its current phase and comes out stronger and wiser.
very.