Ah, the good ol’ days of “pet issues” and ideological purity… sweet sweet nothings in my ears…
Let’s see… Kostradamos* has spoken and we must all abandon our ships of principles and just follow the omnipotent ones down the path to glory and salvation that brings us a Dem majority for as far as a bi-focaled 80 year old who’s had 5 too many can see…
Now that I’ve been released of my burdens it got me thinking about “pet” or “single” issues or “ideological purity” and history.
What are some of the favorite pet issues of the past?
Well, let’s see… we’ve got:
1. No taxation without representation… now that was surely a pet issue as it was only the wealthy land owners who really gave a shit about what King George was up to… the slaves and Native American’s were just trying not to die. Too bad Jefferson & crew didn’t read the blogs…
Which brings us to…
2. Anti-slavery… see above but in the reverse…
Okay, moving on…
3. Civil Rights, equal rights & equal justice… now granted these issues only affect the entire human race since it’s all about EVERYBODY being equal which is surely the definition of the pet issue, but I did consider leaving this out since I’m sure MLK, Ghandi, Suffragettes, Che, etc. etc. would disagree… but what can ya do, the blogs have spoken.
What else, what else…
4. The destruction of the planet on which we live… aha, now we get to the good ones… this is almost the penultimate pet issue… the environment and conservation so we can actually all survive the 21st century… shh, don’t talk about it, we might upset the oil executives…
Nope, got a better one…
5. Anti-torture… surely this is the very definition of a pet issue by any standard… I mean, I’m not being tortured, it’s just a few people right… and they don’t even live here or anything & I’m sure there are some people who the dems would like to reach who are pro-torture so we can’t be taking a stand on such a trivial pet issue now can we…
Whew, this is getting long, I had no idea there were so many…
6. Anti-poverty… now this is a tough one too, but you know the drill, there must be some rich corporate voters out there that we can’t offend with our pet issues…
Okay, I swear I’ll stop soon but I have one more…
7. Separation of church and state… only those ACLU types care about this one anyway right… (quiet down President Jefferson you’re in the minority and need to worry about winning elections, not principles… haven’t you been reading the blogs like I told you to??)
Well I sure am glad we got all those pet issues out of the way and can get down to the serious business of electing people who don’t stand for anything… or for what the opposition is supposed to…
Wait, I forgot the most important pet/ single issue! How could I be so silly… it changes my whole argument in light of the above…
8. Abandoning your principles to (probably not) win an election
[*props to Egarwaen for the replacement of the N with the K… classic]
well that was a nice release… I haven’t ranted in oh so long… agree/ disagree/ throw a party, your choice. 😉
You left out my pet issue – Animal Rights!
Yes – put down that burger you terrorist.
but of course! you can’t have all those weak blooded veggies running around ruining it for the rest of us… 🙂
What’s really funny is that Kostradamos isn’t willing to abandon his pet issues. To whit, campaign regulations on blogging. Money trail disclosure laws among them.
I wonder what he’s hiding?
Okay, I am so updating it to read Kostradamos… that’s just priceless…
(more substative talk later… must update now 🙂
yes, the pet issues and the replacement DLC… all I see is a guy who wants to be a political player and got lucky he was one of the first to get in on the ground floor of blogging… but the success of the site has been the community and the technology primarily… unfortunately in the corp/ political world that matters not.
Thanks. 🙂 It seemed natural to me, but I’m glad you liked it.
The rest of your post is dead-on. kos himself has very little to contribute, and his posts have long been the least valuable thing on his site. Contrast this with the Tribune, where Boo’s posts are, if not informative, at the very least excellent and well-reasoned fodder for debate. The success of kos was the diary system, which allowed the massive and diverse community (well, okay, it used to be diverse) to contribute to the blog. Instead of having a thousand separate little blogs that sporadically updated, there was a central clearinghouse for news and opinion.
Unfortunately for kos, as his community grew, this meant two things became true:
The second point here is the important one. Having a single, massive clearinghouse for the Democratic Party will not work. There’s just too many people who have something to say. The technology and limited time of the readers make it impossible. Hundreds of individual blogs, the first solution the kos community tried to address this (and the original solution that DK was a response to), predictably failed.
Booman Tribune is a good example of the second generation of solution: a smaller spin-off community site without aspirations towards anything grander. There’s a small, fairly tight-knit, incredibly diverse group of people here who all read and post regularly. A few of them read a few other similar community sites, forming links between them and encouraging cross-polination of ideas. While, to some degree, it is just a “linear scaling” of the individual blogs model (one community blog per C people, for a total of N/C blogs, rather than one personal blog per N people), it also works.
I hope Boo reads this and considers it, as this is also why his posts remain relevant, and are unlikely to become irrelevant any time soon. I think the main value of this site isn’t as a soap box or any other such thing, but as a place for people to get together and talk and debate. As such, it doesn’t need to be large, well-recognized, or journalistically sound. We just need to keep enforcing rule #1.
(Actually, I’d propose a second rule: no arguments from divine insight. Explain your reasoning or go away. But that’s just me.)
could become party-sized–but it has to segment into areas of special focus, each with its own staff of front pagers.
The problem with Kos is turning out to be the problem with the Dean blog and others–there’s some ridiculous insistence on it being A community. Let it become a community of communities and the sky’s the limit.
This is the greatest technology in the history of the people, and we’re using it like a gold shovel to dig for lead.
I think blogs could. But a single blog? Probably not. The technology’s just too limited to handle that. Either you give people very sophisticated information filters, so they can crop out most of the stories, which effectively partitions it into sub-blogs anyway; or you don’t, and the sheer volume of material drives readers away.
I definitely agree about the whole “a community” thing. Having a community is fine when you’ve got a small blog, like BT. It just doesn’t work when you’ve got something on the scale of DK, unless you resort to ruthlessly chopping off the people that don’t fit your vision.
has become a victim of success. I think there are some great writers that post there and, in addition, post on other blogs as well. And in that sense Kos has become a meta blog. But with a million log ins a day hitting the site it is becoming a bit unstable. Also, hijacking of the threads is rampant. I saw a great diary on Wilma and I wanted to go back to it cause there was a troll hijacking it, but it just up and disappeared!
So using Kos as a meta blog might be beneficial but smaller blogs like Boo gives us a better community feel.
Regardless, don’t you feel the turn that we are going through as something they will write about in the history books forever? (Assuming Gaia lets us stay on the planet, that is!) Wilma really puts the big lie about no global warming away and she is hitting the southern stronghold of all the folks who wanted to hide their head up their butts on this issue. Pakistan and India are having to bury some of their mutual animosity to deal with a horrific earthquake and horrific losses. That area will never be the same.
And, of course Fitzmas. Isn’t it a thrill to anticipate that glorious eve (if we can ever figure out WHEN the eve is coming up!) (Do you suppose Rove, Libby and Fitz are playing rock paper scissors?) I have figured out that if there are 22 people indicted, I may blanch when I figure out my pledge to Claire McCaskill’s campaign!
That’s basically what I’m trying to say. The problem here is that kos doesn’t seem to want to share the limelight. He seems to want to have his community, whose opinions follow his opinions, and everyone else is evil and bad. Turning DK into a meta-community means giving up on that, and realizing that he can’t shape the opinions of the entire netroots. That he has to sit back and use his blog as a meeting space and hatching ground for smaller community blogs.
I don’t think he’s ever going to do that. He seems too focused on becoming a player.
Only if we win. 😉
The Internet already falls into that category. Forget all the buzzwords that were flying around back in the days of the dot-bomb. Now we’re finally starting to see people explore the real potential of the technology. Both on the social/applicaiton side (blogs, Google’s assorted indexing efforts, and the like) and on the technology side (things like Ruby on Rails and TurboGears making developing web applications simpler, and Cocoon being… Big and powerful).
Hm. Over Christmas vacation, I might have to try and re-implement BT-site-software using TurboGears. That’d be a good learning project!
Then on the sociopolitical side, we have what is basically the collapse of conservativism in a massive disaster. Global warming, economic collapse, peak oil, failed foreign wars… All directly linked to the policies of a conservative government. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people.
As an addendum to my last post, this effect is also, I suspect, behind the calls for greater uniformity over at the Cathedral. kos and the early opinion-makers there want to retain their power, so they try to force the community to conform, and decry special issues other than their own in general, because it takes attention away from them.
I don’t really think kos has an Agenda, or is in the pay of the Republicans or DLC/NDN. I do think he’s having exactly the wrong reaction to his community hitting the limitations of his software. The right reaction would be to tolerate the diversity, and try and make his site a community of communities, as it were. This is, at this point, simply not going to happen. It has zero chance of making anyone a Political Playah, and would require peacefully encouraging a reduction in the number of posters at DK and the creation of competitor sites.
Become Republican…
Peace
I suppose if we point out the obvious ageism in Mr. Kdmos’ essay, we’d be accused of Age Warfare or some such. Maybe it’s a case of Icarus telling Daedalus where to get off?
Great rant, spiderleaf.
Hilarious, wonderful and potent! Thanks! and I just love the Kostradomos title. I found it ever so enlightening and ironic that Kostradomos defines us “old geezers” as those who just “followed what the bosses said”. . .when he in turn wants us to just follow what the Kosses say. . .sometimes it is just impossible not to laugh in the face of such terminally absurd reasoning.
Loved the snark!
that’s what absolutely kills me about the whole thing, the twisted logic… only my narrow pet issues matter, the rest of you be damned.
and yet I’m younger than him and I get it… probably not so much the arrogance of youth as just plain arrogance 🙂
Kos, unfortunately, reads his own press and his own press releases, and BELIEVES them.
That ain’t good.
It’s standard practice in the MSM and most serious press to pick a person or a very small group and make them standardbearers for a trend or movement, because the readers/viewers will go for biography or hagiography a LOT easier than they’ll go for straight history or quantitative analysis. Faces grab, numbers don’t.
I do the same thing when I’m shooting a story… one person becomes the example, the center of attention, because it’s much easier to tell ONE story and let it be representative of many than to try to tell the broad sweep and get it all right…
The problem is that, well, we pick our representative individuals for a lot of different reasons, mostly having to do with logistics and practicality and not necessarily having much of anything to do with actual representational standing.
“Why’d you pick HIM?”
“He was on the front row.”
There’s no more to it than that, but sometimes you just can NOT convince the subject of that. All you can do is try, and hope you don’t get someone with self-esteem problems which you just made worse.
Sometimes you don’t get lucky.
Great comment.
“Kos, unfortunately, reads his own press and his own press releases, and BELIEVES them.”
Worse still, he has a number of fawning sycophantic TUs that line up to worship his meager offerings. He would do well to vet his treatises before a real court before spouting off irresponsibly.
How many more groups under the Democratic umbrella will he alienate today? Kos may single-handedly drive more Blacks away from the Dems and into Ken Mehlman’s hands than any wedge issue the GOP attempts to exploit next.
marched in lockstep could be expressed in any known western language. It certainly doesn’t fit into any known logic.
I have serious pet issues — the kitten, now full cat, that my son got last year, has taken to be a shithead to my elder cat, and the dog, who grew up with him (and under a severe cat rule) has taken to siding with cat the younger — it’s a mess I tell you!
Great diary, spider!
Pet issue?
My dog got loose this morning and rolled in a dead wallaby! (probably because I washed her yesterday – after she ripped apart a bag of sheep poo I bought to put on the garden).
Top That!
lol!!
Dunno, but it seems to me that YOUR pet issue must be swept aside, as mine includes 3 petsand yours only one, therefore, we win…and that’s all that counts. Sheep poo notwithstanding.
/pompus ass
My three cats voted for Bush. And when they determined that I was out (yes bad mother here) of canned food today AND the grocery delivery was delayed… I know they discussed killing me.
Til it occurred to them, ooops! we kill her, no more treats and no more 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 squares a day.
I must pat them down for weapons tonight as they sleep. And check them for sequestered pocket money.
Rolled in a dead wallaby after ripping apart a bag of sheep poo?
You win, lol! And stay right where you are, don’t come any closer. We’ll mail you the prize.
(Brilliant rantorama, spider.)
what a lucky dog!
It’s been quite a good week.
I don’t dare tell my dog, or she’ll get depressed.
“A dead what?” she’ll ask, “I didn’t even know they HAD those. And why don’t I ever get any sheep poo?”
He’s an idiot. He became more of an idiot when he started getting access to actual legislators. Now that he’s on the NDN payroll (is that true?)…
David Sirota got it right Partisan War Syndrome – A Disease Afflicting Progressives. Too many on the blogoverse are totally missing the point. Spiderleaf gets it. Most of us here do.
I mean, the goal is to win (or so they tell us)…
So how did the Right win? Is it because they have great candidates? Umm…. no. Republican Congressmen are interchangeable parts, Senators not much better.
So, are the voters voting Republican on the issues? Unlikely.
So why do people vote Republican? Because they believe in the ideology. Vote Republican, and like it or not, you know what you’re getting.
And Dems have…?
According the know-it-alls, they’re the ones who’ll WIN, on a campaign of “I’m not at all like him– well, not in the bad ways. I’m just like him in the ways you like. Just don’t ask for specifics. We don’t do agendas in the New Democratic Party. We’re your dream candidates. Just believe in us.”
Wow.
Stunning.
The political equivalent of using “I dunno, what do you want to do?” as a pick-up line.
You have to give kos props for this quote: “I don’t have a clue”.
He should have stopped there.
Kos sure does a lot of speaking for us modern progressives. But it’s a common enough fallacy. Everyone in my group thinks just like me! Oh well, I thought he was a little smarter than that.
And he isn’t going to vote for any of these crooks, either!
Wish I could say the same.
Damn!!!!
I wish I had seen this earlier today. What a wonderful treat for the mind and soul.
xoxo thank you!