Okay, here is the place to get it off your chest. If you have a problem with the ‘Orange Place’ post about it here. Get it out of your system. If you think it has been taken over by some DLC/NDN cabal of corporate interests, if you think that it been stripped of all intelligent life, if you think they are out to get you, if you don’t buy into the ‘New’ Armando, write about it here. Please, get it all out on the table. And if you think the virus is infecting this site, please say so. Get it all out. They hate progressives, they hate dissent, they are all about votes and not principle. Just say it!
And once you’ve said it, let it go. Help make this site better. Help us live up to your principles. But let’s not let this feud go on. I’m tired of this site being the outlet for anti-Kossackian activity. I’m a Kossack. I have my own issues and critiques. This site would not exist if I were not dissatisfied with Daily Kos. But I am about frog stalking, not Kos stalking. So, let’s have a bloodletting, and then let’s move on.
…instead. Enough of the circular firing squad. Kos for what Kos is good for, Booman Tribune for what it is good for. Et cetera.
And most of all, action to go with all our talk.
back upon Daily Kos when you were the second most prominent writer there, and it is no longer the same place. And yet, you have refrained from making commentary about the site and the changes it has undergone since you left. Even though I never front-paged there, I use you as an example. You brought your wisdom elsewhere but you never repudiated the site or bashed it to promote yourself.
I state my positions, I have my disagreements, but I am not going to make my site into an anti-Kos site.
You are still the best blogger there is MB. Hands down.
Agreed. Not to embarass you, MB. I remember when (pre-Scoop) Kos asked for nominations for new frontpagers, and it seemed like everyone mentioned MB (including me). Dkos had a community feel back then that is lacking now.
I think the behavior at DKos is an inevitable consequence of its size. And too many individuals who violate Booman’s rule – don’t be a prick.
My blog time is reduced these days, and I don’t do much but read. I read Billmon (best writer IMO), and Fafblog (most likely to make me smile), DKos (still the best place to scout out the widest variety of breaking news and unearthed stories, due to its sheer size. Also for Hunter’s superb rants).
And BooTrib, because it is the most human. I don’t say much, but I read every day, and I always go away feeling invigorated – even if the discussions are about outrageous or sad events. Thank you, all of you. :^)
I agree we should be focusing on the right, not each other, which too often happens. I want to thank Booman for this site. I come here and read for a more human perspective. But sometimes this place can get going. I go to kos for numbers, but again, sometimes posts can fly off the list quick here too, so the numbers here can’t be too bad. I do not put a daily post here, but I do come and read at least once a day. Thanks for being here.
I read DKos every day and have for about a year now. It is a good place to pick stories not found elsewhere, and. at times see what “action items” are hot.
I chose Boo Tribune to be “my blog” for comments (for now) because I appreciated the level of discourse, the wide international flavor, the smaller neighborhood community feeling, and the positive way in which front pagers discuss some very tough topics.
Ad Hominum comments turn me off. My belief is that its okay to disagree with an IDEA or POSITION, and then state your reasons WHY. My definition of a discussion. Attacking lowers the level of discourse and I tend to stop reading, and thus might miss some very valuable information or viewpoints.
I am just out of my 50’s. The anger tone and from a lot of what I see I am surmising that a lot of younger people are now involved over the orange place. Its great to see many becoming active and forming a large netroots drive. Passion is good, but I guess I personally am at stage where I need peace and harmony.
As to Kos, or Armando sometimes going over the top – yes, I think they do at times. However both are attorneys. If I ever get into deep doo doo, there are no two than them I would rather have in my corner fighting for me. I bet they would be awesome in a court room battle.
We, as progressives, are a large and diverse group of people. I post comments where I am most comfortable, as I imagine most do. Kos, Armando, Stirling Newbury and others are still on the same side as we here at B/T are. As Boston Joe’s “Yellow Feather” campaign showed, we can also work together for common cause.
If we all keep in mind the fact we are basically on the same team, and working for the same or similar goals, then perhaps we can express our disagreements, without the personal attacks.
My nickles worth!
“If we all keep in mind the fact we are basically on the same team, and working for the same or similar goals, then perhaps we can express our disagreements, without the personal attacks.”
Totally agree and do the same thing. Kos is my first stop every morning. Mostly for headlines and info. Seldom ever comment there anymore.
Am glad that young people are interested in politics, but feel that many are just there on the bandwagon of the biggest blog- Because there is a lot of junk diaries and mean commenters who think they are clever, smart and kewl..
Kos is too big now for good participation and I miss many who were there over a year ago.
I never read Armando’s or Kos’s diaries-just their headlines. Mostly cause I seldom agree or like their point of view. Too narrow for me.
especially from those who want the place to be a kind of public exhibit of a narrow view of sanity — which often takes the form of “centrism” or “conventional wisdom.” Suspicions of any of the deeper forms of covert subversion of democracy get short treatment there.
Here, the comity blends well with a foregone acceptance that darkness breeds corruption.
A distinctly non-McCarthyistic vigilance.
I think individuals on “the Left” care deeply as those on “the Right” about feeling morally right. The difference is that there is no unifying text or authority to rally around, or “enemy” to confront, on the left. Thus it tends to fracture and turn on itself because of the lack of unifying theme. Which is, of course, stupid, because the left has far, far more in common with itself than it does with the right, and always will.
Anyway, the best thing to do if you don’t like a site is to stop reading it. I have, at times, stopped reading Atrios, Kos, and Drum for content reasons. I’ve permanently stopped reading TPM and anyone who has been subsumed by Marshall’s empire. I keep trying to drop DeLong since I find him to be a condescending jackass, but he does know a bit about economics so I go back. And so on. The great thing about the blogosphere is there are always new sites popping up, and each and every person has the opportunity (if not the time and energy) to create the ultimate lefty website, home to eternal sweetness and light.
So don’t complain about Kos, just do your own thing, keeping in mind he is ally no matter how poorly he or other posters phrase things.
[/soapbox]
Not from Day One. He wanted to be a political player and professional consultant who would help take the Democratic Party in two parallel directions: to Progressivism and Victory. In the early days when Bush was sitting at 80% that meant changing the narrative, hence ‘Buck Fush’ and ‘Bush Lied, GIs died’. This drew a lot of non-institutional leftists in, dKos was burning white-hot in late 2002 and early 2003, and it with Atrios was the place to be for the anti-war left.
But I remember the day that one of the early fundraisers got Markos a call from Terry McAuliffe, he was proud as punch, he finally was getting some traction within the party, and honestly I was happy for him. Because I too am a Yellow Dog Democrat and however disappointed I am in the direction the DLC dominated leadership has taken it (and I am profoundly disappointed, I am an FDR Democrat) I would never abandon the Party.
It wasn’t easy being a dKos regular when ‘Doom and Gloomers’ roamed the earth demanding either 1) we just take to the streets because Karl Rove is a genius and Diebold has rigged the game so that we will never win or 2) we calm down and get behind the Bush-Lite agenda.
Well Kos and a key core of Kossacks refused to do either. He, and we, targeted key races, showed that you can indeed raise a boatload of money $20 and $50 at a time for the right candidate, and then showed that you can win on a down the line anti-Bush message.
Kos is a Progressive. He has chosen to harness that energy within a framework of winning races and gaining institutional control of the Democratic Party and dragging it back from corporatism to worker centered. And now that we have Bush where we want him, and DLC Democrats have stopped cowering in their Bush-Lite lit cave, the attention has turned to tactics and polls.
Markos, and by extention dailyKos, was never about taking it to the streets, though it is easy to see how some people could project their own inclinations into the rhetoric that was flowing freely. He was and is openly about recapturing the Democratic Party on route to recapaturing the House, Senate and White House. If that makes certain Greens and Socialist Worker types unhappy – well thanks for your help on the Buck Fush front, we left leaning Democrats were glad to have your assistance, but dKos is a big ‘D’ Democractic Party site. If you don’t like that there are innumerable blogs spun off from it where you can participate in ways that allow you to push a more radical course.
Here for example.
I think you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head.
The one area in which I might disagree involves kos and the DLC. I say “might” because you’re not clear on what you think kos’s objections to the DLC are. Kos, however, has been very clear. His disagreements with the DLC are 100% strategic. He has happily promoted other “New Democrats” who share the DLC’s ideology, but not its strategy (Simon Rosenberg being a prime example).
Finally, in what sense have “DLC Democrats…stopped cowering in their Bush-lite cave”? Most press reports following the Murtha speech suggest that only 70 members of the House Democratic Caucus (or roughly 1/3 of House Democrats) were willing to support Murtha’s actual resolution (as opposed to the farce the GOP threw up there, which all but a handful of Dems voted against). That means that 2/3 of Congressional Dems still support this war. Leading Democratic presidential contenders like Biden and Clinton are also aggressively pro-war.
On the other hand, I suppose I’d agree that this isn’t “cowering.” I’ve never bought the spinelessness meme as a description of Democratic militarism. The Democrats’ commitment to the military-industrial complex, and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy is deep, despite the party’s grassroot’s suspicion of these things.
Before I make some observations about this comment I’m inevitably taken back to the time in politics when there was no internet, no blogs, just the msm.
Remember? Remember how helpless one felt, the total bystander feeling of participation? All there was to do was watch, talk to a few people one knew, and vote. Nothing more.
How our expectations have changed–total strangers to the process with nothing in their hands suddenly think they have a chance or a means to really effect change in just 24-48 months.
As for Markos, I understand he hated consulting, that didn’t work out too well. He thinks he can be a good political author with Jerome; well, I’ll read it and see then. I suspect, but do not know, that Markos is finding out being a player on the inside isn’t much fun, and may even be distasteful. Markos likes being, and is very good at, being a political publisher. If you don’t think so, get over yourself. Look at his numbers and tell me he isn’t.
What Does All This Mean? Not one of us knows, as long as this nightmare feels, we are still very much in the germination of political blogs. Markos is flying totally blind–in case anyone here hasn’t figured it out yet, Markos deliberately sabotaged The Daily Kos in 3.0 to make the audience smaller. 450 comments? Who the hell has the timne to read all that? The blog has become far too big for such a limited software platform, yet it still thrives and exponentially grows. We shall see what happens.
I am going on far too long here, but I want people to understand something about me, blogs and Markos. Since 2000, for some reason I added it up, I have donated approximately $10,000 to blogs and their writers. I earn well and don’t spend, so I had it. Anyway, before blogs we had nothing as plain little people, absolutely nothing.
I still appreciate the miracle of having a thousand souls immediately read my work, I really do. I love political blogs–for me they are the only ray of hope in averting total disaster, for it appears the country is lost already. Sorry, it does.
I have been with Markos, and many others, since their very beginnings. The Daily Kos is an amazing place and the best thing that’s ever happened to me politcally in this lifetime. I love Markos Zuniga. I completely understand the thinking and motivation for the numerous statements said about him here, and in many cases I completely agree. I’d still like others to be aware how knifingly painful reading some of these comments are. I mean, we all have to be careful to how sensitive all humans are. Just understand there are still souls around who cherish The Daily Kos, watching patiently.
One other thing: I miss you. How many times have I watched new waves and members engulf The Daily Kos, only to eventually fade and leave? At least five times. I vividly remember reading Soto and Billmon as regular commenters. Huh, now here is yet another set of hotshots, gone forever from the mothership. You gotta do what you gotta do, I understand. It’s good thing, I’m sure. I still remember you and miss you.
I’m not much of a human, you know? I didn’t mean to talk down to anyone here, and I wish all of us peace. None of us knows where any of this is going, all of these judgments are far too hasty, and we are all among friends. Y’all can do what you like, God bless you for it, but you an always find me at The Daily Kos.
Makos a political publisher? Respectfully, what do you base that on? The front page posts by Markos are some of the worst you can find. Sure maybe in the earlier days he ‘took the time’ to be insightful but now he posts a headline, copy from an article, and a short paragraph of personal commentary that doesn’t begin to measure up to the most mediocre of diarists. In short he has taken the Atrios route by not offering much in content. There is far better commentary elsewhere (Booman, TPM Cafe, Huffington Post, TPM, for on going in depth reporting and commentary, etc)
What Kos has now become is an totally diluted unlimited community for all comers. And his NEW model is “advertising driven”.
Yes DailyKos is now a Business and not a political blog. One only has to go to Blogads to see what I am talking about. Once you look at the dollars involved you will see why Kos exercises no restrictions on who can post and what they say – no matter how offensive it is. It’s all about the ‘page views’ which bring in higher advertising revenue.
The problem for Kos is that eventually his original “draw” – serious progressives – is going to get so diluted that advertisers will figure out that there are more productive and less expensive places to spend their as dollars and get more bang for the buck. It is an obstacle that all publications face when they try to expand their readership (page views) by diverting from their original editorial format in search of more readers.
I have nothing against business or making money but when a blog becomes something other than what originally attracted me – I’m gone.
I am one of the old folks from Kos(am not using the same screen name.) I think I was within the first 500 to register when he went to registering. The place has changed – a lot. There are so many diaries that one cannot even follow the diaries. I don’t recognize any of the names except for the frontpagers. Once in a while I will run across a name from way back. There’s way too much neener-neener-didn’t do it-did too- comments. Yet I go there,must be from force of habit. I personally am pleased that Markos is getting non political ads. It mean s Marshall/firedoglake/Americablog can make a living off this. After reading this thread I probably will reduce my visits to kos substantially. When I actually think of my time online I probably get more info going to marshall/tbogg/americablog/hullaballoo/atrios/pol animal/tapped.
BTW whatever did happen to marisacat?
I do not believe for a moment that Kos is a progressive. He’s a Democrat. He’s quite open about it. And he’s openly hostile to many progressive causes, including reproductive rights, environmentalism, election reform and feminism.
Daily Kos, the site, I think is more progressive. Armando, for all his bile and venom, is much more progressive.
But the site feels like a riot mob now — a real-life, online version of the witch-burning mob in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where one person says something and everyone in the mob echoes it in outrage. It doesn’t help that diaries seem to routinely get deleted, while others magically seem to get rewritten — as if the provocative words that triggered a vigorous thread needed to be “cleaned up” for posterity. (While there’s no law against it, unmarked blog revisionism goes against blogging ethics and leads to mistrust.)
It’s been a good business model for Kos. The site’s traffic is self-fulfilling — people go there because that’s where people go, and all the action is in the comment threads, which makes for more traffic.
I think it’s great there’s a place like Daily Kos. But sadly you can’t have much quality discussion in what amounts to a football-stadium-sized crowd, not unless you can invest much much time in plowing through a gazillion threaded, slow-loading comments. (The site also crashes Firefox and Safari frequently. I don’t know why that is.)
I think, however, that the strife there is but a reflection of the greater conflict within the so-called “left” — between those who hold to progressive values first and foremost, and those who hold to party affiliation first and foremost. And I think that’s something that needs to be hashed out, if only to learn whether progressives really and truly can count on the Democratic party for much of anything.
Seeing that kind of conflict appear here on Booman, with more petty dramas and posings, is disappointing to me, and why I find myself less interested in participating here on a frequent basis. People can get nasty and territorial, fine, but it does not appeal … and its absence was what drew me here many moons ago.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to even respond here — the very nature of this diary seems rather petty in itself, to be honest. I’m not at a wedding, so I don’t understand the “speak now or forever hold your peace” sentiment.
Daily Kos, like it or not, is the #1 political blog, and as such what happens there will always be relevant to some degree to the greater political dialog. I have no personal beef with any of the principals there, but I have opinions about the topics raised and attitudes expressed there, and will not recuse myself today from responding to a topic that is raised tomorrow.
If Booman is saying that any topic discussed on dK must not be spoken of here, that’s fine with me. I have my own space to post in.
But nobody — especially in politics — is above criticism, and anyone who argues otherwise is either a would-be dictator or a fool. (And before the howling replies come flooding in, no, I am not accusing anybody of expressing that.)
wanted to make Daily Kos a taboo subject. It’s not. But every once in a while this site gets overrun with very personal bashing of people over there and it makes me uncomfortable.
Sometimes people forget that they are talking about real people and not some anonymous poster hiding behind a psuedonym. If some site out there starts obsessing about me and calling me horrible things and saying I am a bad person then that is going to be upsetting to me. It comes with the territory and I understand the risk.
But when a friend of yours is getting blistered on your site it not a very fun thing. It’s downright awkward.
All I ask is that people be sensitive to how I feel about these things, not that people censor themselves.
Greensooner: “The one area in which I might disagree involves kos and the DLC. I say “might” because you’re not clear on what you think kos’s objections to the DLC are”
I don’t know what his objections ARE. I know what they WERE. The DLC insisted that opposing the war was a losing political strategy, that it was folly to oppose a ‘popular war-time President’ and that opposing the war resolution in 2002 or supporting Dean or even Clark in 2003-2004 was a one way track to 49 state electoral blowout. Well the Party by and large went along in big numbers and managed to pull out two losses in a row anyway. The second one narrowly and during which a lot of people were just waiting for a Murtha moment. Whereupon a bunch of DLC’ers insisted that the proper political course was to embrace overt (and exclusive) religiousity and rally around ‘stay the course’. That just because a certain group of generally pro-military but staunchly anti-Iraq war folk were fully vindicated on the facts about minor things like WMD and the necessary force levels needed to successfully occupy Iraq (Shinseki was right, we didn’t have them) doesn’t mean that they had any obligation to listen to us, or even grant us credit for being right. Well in the immortal words of Kos “screw’em”
As for only 70 Dems being willing to vote for Murtha’s original resolution, well the last couple have days have been a political eternity. A lot of people ducked and found that not only weren’t people swinging they were actually applauding. I am not talking Profiles in Courage here, but the dialogue on the Democratic side shifted dramatically in the two days post Murtha.
Paradox “I vividly remember reading Soto and Billmon as regular commenters.” Quite the irony there. Because I missed that first great way altogether. My first tentative step on the dKos stage was just after Steve and Billmon left to establish their own places. I visited, and then after the hiatus continue to visit the Whiskey Bar, but for me their only real association with dKos is their presense in the Alumni blogroll. But it highlights a point I made on some other thread on this topic: except for a handful of veterans like Paradox there was a dKos before you. I remember what was probably a fourth wave ranter who demanded to know where dKos was before the war. He clearly had no idea that the center of anti-war speech in the blogosphere was pretty much right there. I suggested he was barking up the wrong blog, and in what is an odd coincidence was immediately backed up by Meteor Blades.
(Let me post this, and then unfortunately for some I will be right back)
Talex, unfortunately I have to admit that you in turn have hit this on the head. dailyKos at one time was a true blog. Pre-Scoop and for a time after Scoop he had his archives posted. A time or two I went back to the beginning. Markos would put up a post. Then a couple of hours later another post. And then he would get a comment, and maybe a comment on a comment. But in the beginning it was a blog like any other blog. And then what he had to say started resonating and with some cross fertilization from Atrios and a couple other places it started to cook. At a time when Bush was in the eighties in approval and you had few other places to go to vent your Buck Fushness this was the place to be. There were other liberal bloggers but for the most part they were getting the WMD piece tragically wrong (which for the most part they are freely admitting today). And then by stages it expanded and then exploded. And at some point during that process Markos stepped back and let it not really be about him at all. As you say it became a money making business which allowed all and sundry to post and vent.
But I have to disagree with you on this one “The problem for Kos is that eventually his original “draw” – serious progressives – is going to get so diluted that advertisers will figure out that there are more productive and less expensive places to spend their as dollars and get more bang for the buck.” Advertisers did not come to dKos for “serious progressives”, they came here for eyeballs and clicks. They could care less that the real action among progressives has moved elsewhere, they have product to move.
In the world of “Enders Game” you had local and regional discussion groups where skillful writers and debaters would eventually be invited up to higher level and eventually world discussion groups. The model in mind was USENET newsgroups but some of the same principles apply here. dKos has become the minor leagues, a few big players rumble around on the main page, but other than that it is hard to be heard. So people move on to places where they can be heard.
I have been a lot more active on dKos in the last three months. Which translates to 9 posts in November. In the words of Yogi Berra, “no one goes there anymore, it is too crowded”.
Media Girl “I do not believe for a moment that Kos is a progressive. He’s a Democrat. He’s quite open about it. And he’s openly hostile to many progressive causes, including reproductive rights, environmentalism, election reform and feminism.”
I am not sure I agree, I haven’t seen the hostility on these issues, but then again I have not been around much.
For me the key issue was always the war and the fundamental will to power that characterizes the Bush Administration. I’ll agree that is not the entire Progressive agenda, but every bit of power the Administration has to roll back progress on all sides is the power he is claiming as a War Time President and it was important and remains important to challenge him on his home ground.
Kos is a Democrat, I am a Democrat. Anti-war Democrats and for the longest time the institutional Democratic Party insisted that fighting back against the war meant you were not a true Democrat at all. And so Markos welcomed all that were willing to take on the Republican war machine, and some people jumped on board dKos and helped us turn the tide around and then were shocked to find that Kos was neither a Green nor a Socialist Democrat.
I am saddened that you think that ‘progressive’ and ‘Democrat’ are somehow exclusive. I think you are going to see a counter offensive mounted next Spring that will being progressives back on board. I for one have plans but the proof is in the pudding and I don’t expect any disillusioned progressives to take anything on faith. Hope to see you then.
and I’m sad to say that a counteroffensive next spring will not likely change my opinion. It isn’t just the progressives who are tired and hungry for substance, it is well over half of the country. We want real change, we want real progress, not new and improved brand image.
Enjoy your time in the wilderness. If you believe that “well over half of the country” shares your views then you have the power to take over either party. Personally I believe that the FDR wing of the Democratic Party can wrest power from the DLC wing. But some people would rather bitch and moan from the sidelines and not recognize the effort it took to move Bush from 90% to 36%. Explain to me exactly how you would implement “real progress” given the real world, how you would package “real change” given the fact that the Republicans currently control both houses of Congress. We need to capture the center to elect Speaker Pelosi and yet true to the entire history of the Left you demand ideological purity.
Peoples’ Judean Front vs the Judean Peoples’ Front. It is not just a joke from Life of Brian it is a dead on diagnosis of the kind of splinter group manuevering that characterized the Left for most of the last century. FDR welded together southern bigots and northern machine politicians and put through the most progressive policy agenda in history. He even put Wallace on the ticket. And yet the far Left ended up turning on him.
Excuse me for living in the real world. And by the way Embrace your Inner FDR.
Excuse me for living in the real world. And by the way Embrace your Inner FDR.
Why is it that the party centrists – and I don’t mean the vast center of America – I mean a subset of a subset, the Democratic Party centrists – label progress as out of touch with reality? And then you go on to claim responsibility for Bush’s plummeting polls to boot?
The fact that you want real change “packaged” speaks for itself. The fact that you link real change with “ideological purity” sticks a fork in it. Progress means progress for America, the real America, not demographic subsets of subsets, or tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Progress:
He banned many progressives outright. He doesn’t want us on board. We are hippies, women’s studies nuts and conspiracy theorists to him.
He probably banned me out of ignorance. I recommended a diary that pointed out that some conspiracies have turned out to be real, like the Standard Oil conspiracy that created the Sherman Antitrust Act. He banned me as one of the conspiracy theorists. He banned me a second time for giving a one to a front page poster, who fucking deserved a one.. I don’t give a crap about him anymore and I prefer Booman.
Armando admits Kos is a conservative Dem, and not a progressive.
Kos burnt his own bridges.
Maybe it is a whole different world over there. But in my experience people who claimed they were ‘banned’ by Kos personally generally were just having their comments hidden by the community for being content free.
Blogs are private property, you are a guest. If you want to express yourself freely get your own free blog. The people at Democratic Underground tap into this best with their Hate Mailbag. Wingnuts for years have come on and complained about being deleted. To which the DU says “fuck you, what part of DEMOCRATIC Underground didn’t you understand” I have weeks and weeks of outraged wingnuttery to catch up on. But some people here might want to consider what distinguishes them from these wingers:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/mail/index.html
Well that isn’t true in my case. You can look up my record as Dameocrat and Noalterntive. I had very few comments hidden, and they in no way contributed to my banning. I was banned because of Kos’s attack on conspiracy theorists and for giving ones to dhinmi.
No other reasons.
I don’t like the guy and I don’t have to, I shouldn’t be expected too either. I don’t think I owe him anything.
It is really odd to enter this discussion out of context. I don’t even know the significance of “pie”. Silly me because it must have been the most importantist issue ever for a single person to spend so much time spreading “ones” about to the degree that it brought down the wrath of the Wizard of Kos.
“I sense a disturbance in the Force” “What does it mean Lord Bruceder?” “I am not sure but it smells like pie”
Or Kos has male pms and blatantly favors frontpagers even when they troll. Needless to say, I won’t recommed him. I think Du sucks too by the way. They eliminated war protesters left and right after Kerry was nominated that is why “The Dean Underground” was formed. They also completely massacred pro palestinian liberals. Nobody goes there anymore but people who used to be war hawks. They still make a point to kick off peace protesters and marginalize them even though they were the ones who were wrong. We’re not on the same page, and probably never will be. People on this blog are more forward thinking and less scared than duers or kossacks. I won’t consent to marginalization and won’t recommend my fellow liberals turn a blog that marginalizes me into a successful blog.
I just find it incredibly funny that you kossacks can’t live with it if we thrive on another blog.
feminist, I have my issues with Kos (I’m betting you can guess what those issues are).
I’ve tried to go cold turkey on the site (particularly after the hairy-legged womens studies major crack) but haven’t been successful as of yet.
What strikes me as ironical is that Kos slams the DLC for clinging to their narrow interpretation of “centrism” (which hasn’t brought the party notable success in over a decade) and yet he seems to be promulgating a slightly different version of the same thing. The major difference is that it is stridently against the invasion of Iraq, and that it is markedly more friendly to labor. But the pro-choice plank in the party’s platform, as far as Markos is concerned, can be discarded.
Markos, like the DLC, seems to have inherited a fear of the Left (ie, I feel as if he buys into the stereotype of a leftist fringe where women don’t shave their legs, or wear lipstick, and dress like a convention of librarians and/or dykes — at least, when they’re not tearing off their bras and throwing them in flaming garbage cans — while the men have long hair, scraggly beards, and say things like “peace, dude” in an exceedingly, ah, mellow fashion.
Kos, IMO, wants to remake the public’s image of a “grassroots” Democrat into the existing image of a yuppie (the same image that the DLC wants to cultivate) while simultaneously pushing the frame vaguely leftward from where the DLC has mounted it.
In some ways, I get this and can sympathize it. I, often, felt like frothing at the mouth when my extreme opposition to invading Iraq meant people automatically categorized me as anti-war (ie, a peacenik) when, while I don’t think war is a “good”, I do firmly believe that it is, sometimes, necessary (I was, for example, for the invasion of Afghanistan).
Given that this is the internet, and none of you can see me, I can loudly declare that I am not absolutist in my anti-war stance, and furthermore inform you that I don’t wear peace signs, or beads (and do wear a bra), and am, in fact AM a (relatively) young urban professional who wears business attire on a regular basis. But none of this is provable, and I feel as if, when I assert my pro-choice stance on DailyKos, Kos relegates me (not me personally, perhaps, but the aggregate of others like me) to hair-legged feminists who overthink things and get hysterical at the least provocation.
Which, frankly, is the exact same dynamic that was at work when all of us who opposed invading Iraq were dismissed as peaceniks, ie, we were assigned to an easily dismissible (stereotyped) category, which meant that our arguments could be just as easily dismissed.
I created my messageboard for people who feel marginalized unjustly by the mainstream blogs and messageboards like DU, and Dailykos. That would include prochoice people, people who believe in two states in Israel and Palestine and actually want the Democratic party to act like it, instead of playing lip service, and people who are against the war. I won’t triangulate you out of the equation like kos, and you are free to bitch about messageboard marginalization on other boards. Invite your friends as well.
Just a brief reply since this thread is days old….
As you don’t even know to what the pie references refer, I’d say your “problem” is that you indeed haven’t been around much.
Progressivism is not defined at all by anti-war views. While I oppose the war, and how he’s conducted it, I do not believe that my position on the war is particularly progressive — just an opinion of an American very concerned about what this idiot leader is doing in the name of our country.
I ceased being a Democrat in the ’80s, when they started to abandon Democratic principles. I think Dukakis’ rambling “I am not a liberal!” statements in the debates with Bush the Elder sealed it for me. And while I could appreciate the intelligence and fiscal accomplishments of Clinton, he was destructive to many progressive causes and values, some by bungling, many by design.
I am saddened, too. But I blame the Democrats for thinking that we’ll just vote for them because they’re Democrats, instead of voting our interests. We voted Democrat because, once upon a time, they were the party that did mostly represent our interests. But since the Republicans went batshit crazy in their neo-fascist “revolution” it seems the Democrats have felt they don’t need to represent progressive or liberal values any more.
Not of the likes of Chuck Schumer have anything to say about it. They want to pander more to the radical right. It’s all gangbanger politics, fighting for territory to them, and to hell with the values or issues.
I will never ever vote party line just to vote party line ever again. I vote for people. Often they happen to be Democrats. But with the Democratic Party pushing ever rightward, while the Republicans are starting to run scared from their wingnutty social conservative special interests, I think the question of which party ends up being more progressive is looking less and less certain these days.
Jesus Christ (with apologies)
I just had to go over there and ask one of our own not to troll rate the whole goddamned place in effort to get banned. This shit is gettin real old, real fast.
I have some problems with the place and maybe I make a comment about it once a month. Whatever. But I ain’t overly bent about it. it’s a big world out there and sometimes it ain’t very friendly. Big deal. there was a (mostly) thoughtful discussion here about StarkRLR’s diary at kos that happened here today. That was fine for the most part but it got out of hand as usual.
and metajesus made a bukakke video.
I mean, please, it’s plain that some sites are aligned w/ the official party. They both deny and celebrate it. Money changing hands isn’t necessary. Lots of people do things b/c they BELIEVE in it, and I’m sure lots of people believe Reid, Schumer et al actually give a fuck about the rest of us.
So what?
That’s politics.
The Vichy Dems are imploding, the sites that support them are coming under increasing fire, and the sun rises in the East. Life goes on.
Plainly, our political culture needs to finish falling apart before some real change can come.
I still post there.
I think that I prefer to shy from some controversies and participate in others. Like Louisiana, New Orleans and Katrina’s aftermath. And still, some people in my mind Still Don’t Get It.
Frankly, I really don’t have time and energy to get too upset, because I’m writing a book. If I do focus too much on what I feel is Dissing, I have to go take another walk somewhere during the day to expel the steam…and get back on track.
Well, as I stated in my last comment to my own thread: I have been able to recover the deleted diary (with comments) and TU status is restored over there.
Good enough for me.
(Why bother even post over there? It’s a big fucking audience, that’s why; and no, that’s not related to egotistic desire for attention–but let’s face it people, do we write with the intention of no one listening? Do we write (on political issues) with the intent of reaching as many people as possible, not for the sake of ego, but for the sake of change?).
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned the pie fight is over.
Thanks to everyone here for the support, the intelligent and reasoned discussion, etc.
Sorry I blew up (the blog).
that’s why I still crosspost there … bandwidth.
I’d like to know how the diary was recovered.
Because censorship of your diary is at the center of what was going on over there tonight.
A certain someone left a browser window open on the diary sometime yesterday evening. It was just a matter of cut and paste from there.
When was it deleted? Do you know? And what actually prompted you to recover it?
I visited your site btw. Interesting stuff.
I don’t know any more about when it was deleted, since it came to my attention from your comment in my diary, and that’s dated 9:15 pm Eastern time. (For some reason the clocks on Kos and Booman are both on Daylight time which expired some weeks ago.)
As for why I recovered it – I’ve always reflexively tried to save things online that are of possible future importance from being deleted. There is a lot in that thread to chew on… exactly what, perhaps still needs to be figured out. A record of it should be kept.
Daylight time: you have to adjust to standard manually. It’s in the personal preferences somewhere.
as you can see, I’m still chewing!
Is there any way that you know of to find out who deleted it? Because that is bullshit. Stark’s diary was hardly that threatening, or so I thought. I just read through most of it again and all I saw was Stark repeatedly and mostly patiently trying to convey her sense of the offense. The attacks that came were stunning really, as were the attempts at moderation and defense by other commenters. To no avail. I guess the ugliness of it was too embarrassing for someone with the power to delete.
That’s something I wondered about too. Seemed highly irregular that a highly recommended diary would just go “poof”. I know that Armando is in denial mode, contending that neither he nor Markos had anything to do with the deletion of Stark’s diary. If Stark didn’t delete it of her own volition (as I understand it, she didn’t) then it would have to be someone who has access to the inner workings of DKos. I’m assuming that would include a very limited number of individuals.
I did not delete the diary. I only found out it had been deleted when cruz pointed it out here.
I suppose I could write Kos directly and inquire.
It is an interesting record of mob mentality, which is why I also found some of the stuff about “cult” behavior on Mike’s site interesting in this regard.
I figured as much. I am curious if the culprit will ever own up to it. Not to worry, I ain’t exactly holding my breath. 😉
Page says it wasn’t her.
I just went through it for the first time in quite a while (well, quite an internet while).
Pulled DarkSyde’s comments out — hadn’t seen them before. Those comments, coming from a dKos “big name” are really damning.
Check em out, then you tell me who’s drunk! lol.
My theory is that it was this which they wanted removed from the record. His comments are totally, totally over the top. All of them.
Just for the record: I agreed with the substance of Darksyde’s comments, if not necessarily the tone. I am really surprised the diary was deleted – the discussion was pretty tame compared to other stuff I’ve seen…
The point that you were too harsh with Cindy Sheehan was one worth making. You could have passed on your message to her by e-mail or as a comment in her diary, and she being the decent person she is, she would have listened to you and amended her diary so as to avoid the unnecessary hurt it caused you by inappropriately using loaded words. You chose to blast her in a highly polemic way, and frankly, that thread was pretty predictable.
Good morning to all of you. First thing I have to say is that the I am responsible of what happened “at the other place”.I do have the need to explain myself, and will use Jerome’s post because it goes to the hart of the matter. But first let me say that this has nothing to do with BT, nor Stark or anyone/thing here. This to me is personal. It is a matter of principles. Therefore I will not stop until I am banned or all my comments are removed. I hope all of you will understand.
At the center is the matter of censorship.That is something I don’t agree with and do not want to be part of. Not now, not ever.
I can understand people disagreeing with Stark. I can understand people troll rating inflamatory remaks or posts. We are all grown ups, and should be able to deal with that
But now lets change the scenario for a moment. Lets imagine that rather than comments by Native Americans on a sensitive matter we use the Jewish sensitivity about the Holocaust. lets imagine we find a diary in which a Jew is upset because we celebrate Hitlers birthday with a great feast.Would we ask for restrain and sensitivity? Or would you troll rate those whosupport/justify/accept those celebrating such an attrocious moment?
What if we found someone celebrating 9-11 in the same manner?
That is what offended me so much. Yes, things could have been said differently. And yes, Cindy is a great person and has all my respect. That said, thereis no way I can justify what happened there. Stark’s diary was not “inflamatory”, was pretty considerate towards Cindy.I can understand people disagreeing with Satrk. Troll rating Stark? A little to much, at least from my point of view. Deleting the diary? Way to much.
When I finally decided to totally dissapear from that place, after deliting all my diaries, I looked for a way to contact Kos. No e-mail available. Armando was there, so I asked him. And I asked nicely. Why do I want the last few comments removed? Cause I don’t want any association with such a place. They delete my comments, I’m gone, everybody is happy.
Now, I’m going to be away for most of the day,since I have to re-install my Windows, and that is very time consuming, but hopefully I will finish before the day is over.
Peace
Jerome, the latest installation in this ongoing drama actually began as my response to your statement that you agree with the substance of what DarkSyde said.
Tame? You consider this shit Tame? I consider it profoundly disturbing, and here are some reasons why.
Have a nice day, I really, really do need to get back to work.
We have a saying in Indian country: “Will the real savage please sit down” (and no, that is not to be seen as any reference whatsoever to Cindy Sheehan–(and btw we also have a bumper sticker in Indian Country that reads “You are on Indian Land”, but I suppose no one caught that “literary” illusion. Oh well.)
I will stand by what I said. DarkSyde was right to criticise you and to say your diary was inappropriately aggressive and nasty.
And he said it in an inappropriately aggressive and nasty way.
As I wrote in the thread, you get from dKos what you put in it.
You put harsh, confrontational, and frankly downright nasty words directed at someone popular on the site and to whom you did not give the benefit of the doubt – not once. You could have sent her an email or put a comment in her diary – she was around responding. She was so struck by your diary that she deleted her own diary completely because she realised she had hurt you. She would have responded to a kind request. Why did you need to blast her? And why should you be surprised that you get harsh, confrontational, and frankly downright nasty words directed at you?
You get from dKos what you put in it.
There is a public record, Jerome, and the proof is in the pudding.
To cite another of my now infamously polemical published works:
Dare to compare.
saying what needed to be said.
That diary was a political cheapshot at a grieving mother. One who is held in very high esteem by myself and the majority at Kos. I found it quite distasteful.
I do however believe in free speech and the diary should not have been deleted except by the author.
I’m also a bit puzzled to see your diary go away like that, at the same time I’m not all that surprised. I’ve been waiting to see if mine stays or goes.
I would also guess that the reason, if you were able to extract one from whoever pulled the diary, would probably have something to do with having given the “other side” more fuel to support their myths of what they think “liberals” are like. That the erasure of a diary is more damning to any notion of freedom of expression than anything posted in the thread might well be lost on them.
But perhaps some point has been reached where free expression is no longer one of the more important values, if it ever was. My motivation for the response that I wrote comes from observing certain kinds of patterns in the behavior of the so-called “Christian right,” namely:
Which is to say that you and I have stepped on something I think is rather hard to describe, and it’s not just a mob mentality. It is something way down inside common expectations of how the modern world works. It is about what happens when others try to point out the impurity of a brand name (here that of “Cindy Sheehan”). It is about the bias against the nonconformity of whistleblowing, of pointing out the royal nudity, versus the acceptability of branding and corporate conformity. And as I started out with, the “flatness” of equating all traumas down to the same level for marketing purposes.
All of the above, of course, applies to a lot of what goes on over in the “Orange Empire.” Whether anything can be done about it, to get to the point that you’re talking about something resembling the “real world” as opposed to all this intervening nonsense remains to be seen.
Mike, I was glad to have gone to your site as a consequence of your “dramatic rescue” (lol). I hadn’t thought these things in that context before, and, since I am familiar with much of Lifton’s work, found it very, how shall we say, “enlightening” to think these things in this context. So thanks again.
This business of making individuals into “brand names” and, above all, burdening them with the responsibility of coming in and “saving” this society (we saw this with Fitz as well)….man….To cite the Austrian artist George Tabori: “the old hamletian ploy of dodging action by mindfucking”–and by “dodging action” I don’t mean “political” action, but rather taking a hard, honest look at the parameters of thought and the underlying paradigms that line the floor of the “big tent.”
We don’t need another fucking HERO. What we need is to change our collective minds.
Anyway. I seriously do need to get some work done here (can someone put a dKos/Booman filter on this machine!) LOL.
Thanks again. Unintended fallout from this fiasco has been that I’ve since gone to the blogs of many of those posters who attempted to bring some reason to the issue–good to know who’s really on the same page, ain’t it?
Lots of great stuff out there–and of course, without dKos or BooMan we would not know about any of it! However flawed the forum/s may be, I’m glad they’re out there.
Maybe this will give yu folks a clue: I was about to post a comment, and the page would not open. but the diary was still there. tried several times to go to the previous page, with no success. Then I asked Stark about it here at BT. when I went back the whole thing was gone.
No idea, here’s the link –it was Mike Doughney who recovered it.
http://www.barf.org/temp/dk/howdareyou.html
Wanna bet that your diary (and the others like it) was the end of political immunity for Thanksgiving among frontier progressives?
I just don’t get why anyone, here, there or elsewhere, gets off assuming someone’s motives based on a few words on a screen. That’s what always gets me angry in any of these flame wars.
I know what I’m about to say will sound terribly pollyannaish (is that a word or what!?), but I wonder why people can’t own their words as their best approximation of truth at the time and be curious about why others think differently.
Is that so hard to do?
Speaking from the congressional campaign we are running in Indiana, I think it because there is so much anger in our country. We are angry about being lied to. We are angry about the arrogance and indifference with which we are treated. We look for things to go off on, and it is growing in what I am seeing. Some people explode at the first thing they disagree with, and once it starts pouring out, it just keeps coming. It is growing online and in the real world. It is also not healthy!
Barry Welsh IN-06
http://www.barrywelsh.org
FWIW, looking at the US from a distance (Australia) I think you’re right. Those who are paying attention should be angry even though I also agree with you that it’s unhealthy.
Re Daily Kos, I read there a lot and post occasionally. I think maybe twice in the past year or more I’ve actually got a response to a comment I’ve made.
I joined in here a couple of weeks ago and bloggers have been far friendlier. I know perhaps that’s a function of size at DKos as compared to here, but nevertheless, as someone mentioned upthread, this is a more “human” blog.
There seems to be more humour here as well.
If we (Dems) are ever going to “get it”, then we are going to have to embrace the diversity in political thought that is inherent in a party like ours. We need to celebrate the differences between us, and focus on the similarities. Sell the similarities to the independent voters in this country, and WE CAN”T LOSE. Otherwise, 06 will be a replay of 02 in my opinion. There… I feel better already.
My only beef with the prog. blogesphere is that there can be a groupthink sometimes when people aren’t even aware of it (not to say that I am outside this phenomena). It’s like there becomes this specific way of interpreting each new piece of news… sometimes I think taking a step back can be useful.
For example, the lessons that we have learned about Paul Hackett are generalized to any Democrat in any campaign. This small sample size is even generalized outside of campaigns to pretty much how the Democrats should address any issue and act in general. It’s not that I disagree with these sentiments, I just think sometimes it’s not as simple as “fight, fight, fight.”
I’m very grateful to DKos for my introduction to the participatory blogosphere, and I’ll always remember the exhilaration I felt in those early days realizing there were so many others out there who felt so similarly to me about so many things and were able to articulate those feelings so well and so often.
I was mightily moved by the enthusiasm for debate I found at DKos, even when I sometimes didn’t agree with what might have been being said. It was the enthusiasm, the desire to express, the implied belief that discussing things mattered, that reinfused me with a measure of hope that maybe all is not lost in our seriously damaged society. (This is still a “maybe” in my book, but I’m not as resigned to the inevitability of darkness as I may have once been.)
For me, there’s absolutely no mileage at all in bashing DKos or seeking to compare it unfavorably with other sites. My own perspectives aren’t enhanced by such behavior and I don’t feel I’d be any more legitimate in my own mind for doing so. I don’t spend much time over there now, though I usually scan the diaries at least once a day in case there’s something that really grabs my attention. I had run ins with a few notables over there during my more frequent embrace of the site, but I can only say, So what? Life is always tricky anyway, and being thin-skinned about things just isn’t worth the energy.
I’ll always call bullshit when I think it’s happening, but I’m specific about calling bullshit in that I target the particular crap being spewed rather than including the site where it appears in my condemnation. (I don’t even go after the wingnut sites in this way unless I’m making a point about their serial distortions of the truth, distortions which I can enumerate when asked. We all know the wingnut sites are full of crap anyway, so I try not to waste my energy belaboring the point.)
As for speculation about whether the orange site has a stealth, paid agenda, I would be unhappy about it if such a thing were true because I’d view it like I view so many of the betrayals we are all enduring these days. But, I don’t have a lot of my current energy invested in DKos, and so I’ll not speculate too much abut such a thing unless and until actual evidence of such stealth arrangements is revealed.
On with the show, I say!
Eh.
While we’re at it, lets just open a diary and get this whole ‘republican bashing’ out of our systems. We have an America to run, and its going to take all of us together to make it work.
Or we can acknowledge that in politics, there are ongoing conflicts, and sometimes people who attain some level of ‘power’ are going to work against our interests in favor of their own, all the while claiming some sort of ‘mandate’ to do so. The more often they do so, the more important it is that we take a critical look at what they’re doing.
I simply don’t see the problem with criticising any group when you disagree with what they’re doing. Done is done, but doing is ongoing.
The idea that we should cut any blog, like the big orange mess, some sort of special slack makes absolutely no sense to me. We don’t cut any news outlets slack, even if we agree with them 80% of the time. We don’t cut our political parties slack even if we agree with them 80% of the time.
So why should anyone expect us to put a lousy blog off-limits for criticism, especially one that so eagerly claims the mantle of “netroots”, or “progressive”, or “reality” while actively working against many of the beliefs that are the foundations of those very things?
I’m all for making the frogpond a better place, but I think taking a more active role in cutting short member-on-member conflict, removing the insult ratings of 2 and 3 from the pulldown (a trivial coding change), or making members feel productive and welcome would all be far more effective in improving the frog pond than worrying about the feelings of the frontpagers over at the arrogant orange place.
yaright, Yaright.
Precisely right.
Couldn’t say it better myself.
So I won’t.
AG
Please never say the words “a trivial coding change” again. As a professional (well, academic right now, but eh) programmer, they make me cringe. Nothing more complicated than “Hello World” is ever trivial.
As for the ratings, they definitely need to change. Frankly, I’m amazed that they’re still around. As far as I can tell, the 1-5+0 rating scale was originally used on Kuro5hin because that’s what Slashdot used, and that’s what most of the people there were used to. There was no good reason for it. Taco has, if memory serves, admitted that the rating scale on Slashdot was effectively arbitrary.
A much more sensible idea would be to just be able to give ‘thumbs up’ (what is now a 4) or ‘thumbs down’ (between what is now 1 and 2) to a post. Or, for trusted users, ‘rules violation’ (what is now 0). Probably more meaningful to boot. Unlike kos, where there appears to be a compulsion to rate every comment, people here tend to just hand out 4s, unless someone is being very obviously trollish or stupid.
And even then, we often just don’t rate them at all.
As for kos, it’s an interesting study in a failed blog and political movement. Like Slashdot, the signal-to-noise ratio there has degraded to an unacceptable level, and conformity is prized above insight or rational discussion. (Though conformity in neither place is what you think – Slashdot, for example, tends much more towards pro-Microsoft conformity than pro-Free Software!) The front pagers are largely irrelevant, and most of the diarists worth reading cross-post here or have their own blogs. I have no interest in political conformity, or selling out principles in favour of misguided, ineffective pragmatism. Nothing positive will come from that place, though we may see more than a few Republican-lite Democrats elected because of their efforts.
Though I find the revisionist history of kostradamus’ goals and predictions almost as amusing as the blog itself.
About changing the ratings: I’m a hardware/chip designer by trade, but have done quite a bit of web/db/forum/etc coding both in my job and as a hobby. Yeah, I hesitated to write ‘trivial’, but I think in this case its warranted. Ideally, I’d love a system like the one you describe. But what I proposed really is a matter of a few minutes to a few hours, and roughly accomplishes the same thing.
How many screens allow you to enter ratings? One, two, maybe three. If scoop is half-way well written (a large assumption), there is just one piece of code that is reused to generate the pulldown contents (the select options) for ratings. Find those 1-3 places, and simply remove options 2,3. That’s all. All the existing ratings, all the processing code, all the validation code can stay the same. But simply removing the (easy) ability to enter those insult ratings will give 90% of the benefits of a new system, at a very very low coding cost (since most likely the ‘coding’ is simply deleting a line or two of boilerplate code which adds the offending ratings choices to the pulldown).
As for your commentary on blogs and bloggers — well said.
Ideally, though, you’d be wanting to change the comment rating interface entirely, to support the thumbs up/down concept. And you’d want to adapt old comment ratings to match the new scheme.
It still doesn’t look too hard, but it might be time-consuming. I really don’t see a practical use for ratings 2 and 3 that isn’t better served by a 4, a comment, a 1, or simply not rating.
is that it provides a buffer when you accidentally click the wrong rating, and prevents you from giving someone a 2 by accident.
I know it sounds trivial, but it does have a hidden purpose.
well, i’m going to install scoop tonight and see if i can figure out how the ratings work …
my own opinion on ratings, is that they cause more trouble than they solve. you should really only need something to deal with real trolls and pricks. the 0-4 ratings deal with that, but they open a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Reading Egarwaen’s comment, I was thinking: Yes! That’s really wise. So I gave him a 4. Then I realized he was the same asshole who troll-rated me a while back for posting a pro-religious comment. LOL.
thanks to Real Life…I never have any fun. 😉
I don’t spend much time there anymore…but I’m not rushing out to get banned either. I spend much more time here and at Street Prophets. And I’ve been trying to take more interest in Real Life — I have a book in my head that’s trying to make its way to paper, and once the spouse is back to his regular schedule, I plan to get on a regular writing schedule.
Truth be told, I don’t have time to worry about what’s going on at the Orange Empire…but I do worry that what’s going on there is going to dilute the hard work of the netroots trying to rebuild the Democratic Party one progressive brick at a time. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I hear the term “electability” bandied about, remembering last year’s primary races. And what good is it to elect Democrats who are going to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans on judges that will cripple a woman’s right to make a medical decision?
‘Nuff said for now…
Man that just gave me a bad vibe. I’m from Socal originally, and somehow unconflated your term into “Orange County” and “Inland Empire”, two places I am glad that I am now very far away from 🙂
Actually, “Orange Empire” is the name of a very good transit museum down in Perris CA (near Riverside); the spouse gets their “Red Cars/Yellow Cars” calendar every year — when the pinup of the month in this household is a Pacific Electric trolley car, I know I don’t have to worry about him running off with another woman. 😉
It just seems that it fits “the other place” at times, especially when Markos makes his weekly appearance on Air America’s “Majority Report”. The spouse is still in awe of Kos, and maybe it’s justified…I’ve just learned that everyone’s human, and that means a few warts…
I have fond memories of hunting in the Perris area when I was a teenager. Don’t think I ever hit anything except bottles and cans, but it was fun.
Cali, I guess we’ll always have Perris 🙂
I still post over there, still spend time there. Let’s face it, the action never ends there. If you want to get wide attention on a particular subject, there are few substitutes. It’s a fascinating place but the coin has another side. The potential for flame wars is always just under the surface. If I post here the worst that will happen is that it may be ignored. The worst that can happen there is, well…you know.
As far as I’m concerned, the bulk of the ill-will towards Markos and the Orange Blog has been brought on by himself. I don’t really know where the tipping point for me was – maybe it was the Donna Brazile smear, maybe it was the cavalier treatment of the very folks that make up the Dem party’s base (I can guarantee y’all that if the hippie peace freaks, sanctimonious women’s studies set, etc., decided en masse to boycott the next round of elections, the Dems at the national level would see their real estate on the House and Senate floors shrink significantly). Yeah, I’ll still look around periodically just to get a feel for what the 401k Dem crowd is thinking about, but that’s been pretty much my involvement since probably last summer (altho if I do catch wind that someone I know of and respect is catching shit over there, I’ll do a quick fly-by and uprate their comments, recommend their diaries and so forth).
DailyKos is basically a microcosm of what passes for the Dem party. The same bs that I see there is rather reminiscent of the bs that I recall during my student activist days a couple decades ago.
All that said, any “beef” that I might seem to have about DKos has precious little to do with the individual personalities and a whole hell of a lot about the dysfunctional mentality that continues to grip the party as a whole. When I do mention DKos, I try (perhaps not perfectly) to use whatever’s going on there as an exemplar of what’s going on with the Dems. And I’m sure I’ve pretty much leveled with y’all on more than one occasion that my views of the Dems and the direction they’ve taken are at best tepid.
“dumbass”, more than occasionally applies to his own writing. Kos is in it for the conflict, the “politics as sport”.
As far as political philosophy, his posts are often “dumbass”. As was the case with his invocation of utilitarianism as his basis for being a democrat. When I tried to educate him on the history of utilitarianism, he dropped the “dumbass” bomb. Not on me but on those who have used utilitarianism to justify policies that are, shall we say, not very progressive. I was going to bring up John Rawls and all that, but I just saved my breath. Kos is all output, input not so much.
AG
A strategy that I think should be seriously explored. We’re fucked either way, as the two parties stand, and just b/c the Dems promise to use lube and a condom doesn’t leave us less fucked.
The naderites used it and gave us Bush in Florida in 2000. That hasn’t worked out real well.
I find that very unlikely. One of the things I like about Kos is that it is a rebellion against the prissy self-absorbtion of the upper-middle class “left”.
As for Donna Brazile, she’s terrible.
One of the things I like about Kos is that it is a rebellion against the prissy self-absorbtion of the upper-middle class “left”
Really?! Please don’t take this the wrong way, I am not in any way trying to tell you you are wrong, we all have our perceptions, after all.
I am just really surprised to hear this because to me, dKos epitomizes the “prissy self-absorption of the upper middle-class “left”” — seriously. From my perspective, 90% of what is written there is even MORE out of touch with “regular folks” than our politicians themselves….
I’m curious, do many people see dKos in the way that citizen k does? Not trying to be judgemental, I am just sincerely curious.
IMHO, the prissiness at Kos is less than the prissiness in DC. It also depends on what each of us chooses to read. Some of the diaries are excellent, including many that never make it to the recommended list. My focus is on diaries, not front-pagers, though I sometimes scan those.
There are things I choose to ignore (snark, name-calling) to get the benefit of other people’s thoughts. At 57, I enjoy reading the ideas of thoughtful younger people and remember my immaturity well enough to read past that. I’m hoping for a generation of activists and will encourage them any way I can.
Just my .02, brinnainne.
I’ll pay a buck for your 2 cents any day, cotterperson!
😉
It’s less the prissiness than the self-absorption that hhas been grating on my nerves of late, but I suppose there are many degrees of that as well!
The learning aspect is a helpful one to keep in mind though, I’ve always said the day I stop learning is the day my life is over.
Thanks!
rebellion against the prissy self-absorbtion of the upper-middle class “left”
when the bland, vineyard-owning, cell phone venture capitalist is touted as the progressive miracle for ’08.
Which one is this?
Guess I’m more clueless than I thought! 😉
answer
Perhaps its just my history and it may be my limited reading of DK – I read it more when it was smaller. But I had enough of “sensitive” to last me a lifetime and maybe just the crassness of DK is pleasant. I came to expect in a certain type of “progressive” that “that Condi is a witch” will get a “It’s disrespectful to refer to people of color by a first name and you’ve offended all wiccan-oriented people.” To me, that “you must speak a certain way liberalism” is essentially class snobishness and self-absorbtion. And it goes along with the DC political class’s fear of incindiery or even non-comatose language. There is a lot of nonsense at DK, but that’s because it has become so big. And I applaud that too.
I’m no Brazile fan either. I just thought the way she was treated was pretty crappy.
As for the “prissy upper-middle class left” I’d be curious to know what that consists of. I guess as a guy who’s lucky to bring in 30K a year and has kids on the reduced meal program at the public school, I don’t really get to rub elbows with them, whoever they are.
So what was bad about how she was treated? What I saw was that she (a) failed miserably running Gore’s campaign, (b) was unable to even articulate the Democratic party’s position on choice, and (c) lauded Bush at NOLA. The combination is enough to deserve pretty rough language. No?
You decide:
The original Kos post here and Kid Oakland’s reaction here. Her “Sista Souljah moment” long overdue? Boy that bordered on racism from where I sit. I have a problem with that – just funny that way.
So everyone is sensitive to something, and I’m sensitive to sensitivity. Kos posts a note from some insider and it makes some very critical valid points. Donna Brazile, the highest ranking black person in the Democratic party is a disgrace. The anonymous correspondent is validating what has been obvious for a long time. That’s the important issue. Is the person quoted borderline racist, crass, ugly, and so on ? Sure. But I just don’t care all that much. If someone wanted the party to have a Sister Souljah moment by denouncing the great Barbara Lee or even Sister Souljah (and Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment did offend me), I’d be offended. But this seems just prissy. I don’t get the importance.
Let’s just say we’re talking past each other at this point. You find being sensitive to racial slurs etc. “prissy”? Good for you. Wish you the best of luck.
I must write very poorly indeed.
dKos gives me a lot of information, fast. I like that. I need to know…
Yes, it gets hardcore over there at times… that’s why I mostly stick around in C&J, Happy Story, WTFP and PD’s stuff… Then I go migrate to BT, SP, MLW… Though the new Armando has caught me off guard… kinda weird.
I myself am registered and booked for YKos… and have volunteered, though not put to use yet, tho I know I will be… I so need to get involved NOW… Right NOW…
BT is the smaller and more intimate community that I desire… closer to what I find in C & J… Damn, do I so love them now. Not to dismiss BT at all, I’m just still very much a part of what Bill has created… And I’m new to BT I feel… But fucking goddamn… this just feels like home on so many levels here… You guys are so in my heart, sincerely…
What happens when all of the miscreants have been frogmarched away? What do we do then?
that we deal with that problem when it comes up 🙂
Well, there’s Jerome’s posts on energy, and various posters commenting on environmental issues, and what are we going to do about NOLA, how we’re going to correct the budget and trade deficits, what to do about affordable healthcare and drugs, etc. The real issues that a civilized government addresses; the things we tried to address before our nation was hijacked by terrorists (and yes, I mean that in at least two senses).
And if we ever address all of that, there’s always the Froggy Bottom Cafe, Boran2’s Saturday landscape painting, Carnacki’s happy stories, Friday night jazz jam, dove’s fiction, and what to name the absinthe lady, LOL.
And a big pair of mournful brown eyes are asking me right now “How could you forget dog blogging?”
then we move on to the next set of miscreants…there will always be people out there who need frog-marching. I for one would love to nail some of the “poverty pimps” (great line from an activist for the homeless up in Contra Costa County) who are more concerned with lining their own pockets than helping the people that need help…
There are ALWAYS more.
Why…some of ’em might even be…GASP!!!..DEMOCRATS!!!
AG
and you may have to say it again. If so, I hope you do.
Better here, very grateful for that.
repudiated third way politics. I prefer your site and would like it to lead the progressive community. I think because you are not third way, you can do a better job than kos.
I also don’t agree with the focus on the right stuff. That is what the dlc always says, as they slam the ship into the reefs. It is actually important who steers.
I already got the dhinmi crap off my chest and I am not privey to the latest broohaha.
BTW, my site is more open to discussion of kossack issues than yours and people are welcome to spill there all they want.
Caveat: I’ve had a few beers, and just got through reading this (http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-11-24-voa31.cfm), and several of the ever-ongoing rape discussions on so-called progressive sites. Not related to the current Kos blowup, but anyway.
No, not everyone loves DailyKos. I, for one, gave up on the site after the oh, 400th version of “let them repeal Roe, it’ll serve those red-state bitches right” and other enlightened political debate. That site has been going steadily downhill since the pres elections, and if that is the way the Dems are going, we need to be yelling about it.
I read the diary by Stark and thought it was a good reminder for people of where Thanksgiving actually came from, and of what life in our wealthiest nation is like for people not white and privileged, for the people this country was stolen from. And a reminder that phrases like “trail of tears” evoke specific and powerful images for people. Sure, it happened a long time ago. It still hurts. It’s still important.
The censorship bug at Kos has been building and building. It sounds more and more like the DOP over there – any deviation from approved party line is squashed. F*ck that. I’ll fight it wherever I find it.
Cindy Sheehan is a wonderful example of standing up and speaking your mind for what you believe. She’s not a cult hero, I am not required to worship her to be a Democrat. That is the same sort of cult of personality that has been built around Dubya, and that’s worked out great. I can respect someone and still disagree with them. I can respect someone and still get damn angry about something they said.
I’m sure I have more ranting to do, but there appears to still be some wine in this bottle….
“….Sure, it happened a long time ago. It still hurts. It’s still important.”
and it’s STILL happening. That’s really the most important point, and it’s happening so much and on so many fronts that it’s almost impossible to get a grip on where to start in informing people about where and what is happening and what might be done to help.
Keep trying to get around to that, but keep getting stalled in my tracks, especially in light of such glaringly obvious indicators that most of the so-called “liberal” community doesn’t give a fuck, and doesn’t even want to know…worse: most of the liberal community would prefer to simply see the “Indian problem” just go away: the deletion of that diary (and today’s ongoing drama) was just a microcosmic expression of what is really going on and what the REAL stance of the Democratic party (and most of its constituents) is w/ re this “problem”–and that is not by any means specific to dKos. Would that it were.
It’s pretty fucking depressing.
is simply that if you let EVERYBODY post their opinions, and let EVERYBODY who yells loudly be heard, what you often end up with is an irritating mess. Like all day public input at a Berkeley City Council meeting.
The Big Orange often becomes more of an ego battlefield than a political community. But perhaps that is the nature of the “open” blogosphere beast. As long as some people are more concerned with “winning” their arguments than making their points, there will be conflict and strife on open blogs. As booman gets “bigger,” one might imagine the same issues arising here.
I have that fear, but I sure hope not. I thik that since our demographics are older and more female versus Big Orange we may have some protection in that regard. But a certain amount of that is inevitable. Having a publicly posted “prime directive” of “Don’t be a prick” also probably helps a lot. Sparks that might burst into an Orange flame war usually tend to damp out here, in part because the public consensus is to ignore something offensive rather than rate it 2 or less and fan the flames. Even the choice of front-page topics by Boo and Susan helps set a more thoughtful (and I mean that in at least two senses) tone here. The behavior of “the management” also sets expectations as well; I’ve very rarely seen Boo or Susan lose their cool with a poster and resort to name calling.
I’m hoping you’re right about the demographics of this place being fundamentally different than DKos(“being older”) (which i would hope merely means being more “mature,” as my mom used to put it) having something to do with the “tone,” but I have no idea if that’s true about booman, or it is simply just a small town compared to the Big Orange. In the big city, you gotta yell louder and be more obnoxious to get noticed sometimes.
I’m not even sure there’s an obvious political diff here. I think more likely booman’s very newness has kept it from forming such an ossified enemies list, and still being “small” the extra space has allowed the postings to stay more thoughtful.
Let’s hope it stays that way. But it will be interesting to see what happens.
Assuming I don’t get pissed off and move on to another blog…
The first blog I chanced upon was Instapundit, not long after 9/11. I read that every day for at least six months, and then left, because the author (I can’t remember his name) is an asshole.
Before long I was a regular at DKOS, for quite a long time. Eight months ago I left, and haven’t been back. Again, I think the core problem is that Markos is an asshole. He’s not worth my regular attention.
I don’t think he gets that much credit for being a boy genius. I founded an Internet company myself in 1995 and was doing network programming long before Markos learned about blogs. I think he’s a great example of being in the right place at the right time with a lot of energy, but not much depth. I predict that nobody will remember DKOS five or ten years from now.
In contrast, there are many writers on the net who are not assholes. Billmon. Marshall. Neiwert. Riverbend. Hundreds or thousands of them.
P.S. Actually, and unfortunately, I remember Instacracker’s name. I keep hoping to see him get caught up in the Abramoff scandal.
And boiling down your criticism to “Markos is an asshole” is not particularly persuasive. And I am glad you remembered Glenn’s name though I marvel at anyone who could read Instapundit six months in a row without realizing the fundamental vacuum in play there. ‘Heh’
I’m relieved to see I did not get blasted too bad for my comment here. I woke up this morning thinking: “OMG, I can’t just call Markos an asshole, without giving sensible reasons!”
Why do I think Markos is an asshole? I’ve read many of his comments over a long period. He reminds me of a junior lawyer I hired for a while, who lied to me and stabbed me in the back. He reminds me of a guy I knew in college who was always inventing an angle, earning your confidence, but you found out he stole your stash. He’s an operator. I don’t trust him. He is proud and never displays humility of spirit. Moreover, I don’t think he has a vision for progress. I may be wrong, but I also have the impression that he’s an atheist, and that also lowers my opinion of him (because I think that’s usually–not always!–a mark of a bloated ego). I also think he’s a poor writer. I also think he sounds sneaky, defensive and defiant–just like Tom DeLay– whenever he is called on ethical questions. In short, if he applied for a job at my law firm, I would not even give him an interview. I don’t understand why so many politicians seem to be influenced by him. I think his influence is on the wane, not the rise.
Yeah, I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth from my DKOS days.
And Armando–any chance you’re reading this?–let me go out of my way to say: Fuck you! You’re the biggest asshole there. You are a bully. You probably have something like Asberger’s Syndrome combined with attachment disorder.
However, DKOS also has an incredible constellation of really good and really bright people, and I intensely miss the good sense of community that kept me there for years. Sigh. Internet’s a mystery.
But I was down in the blog equivalent of the foxhole when to be a pro-military yet anti-war Democrat put you into slim territory indeed. And Kos and Steve Gilliard were down there with me. Steve has taken some incoming over his Steele Oreo piece and Kos may not be the wetdream that most left progressives imagined him to be, but by God they were exposing the truth about Iraq and WMD and calling Bush a liar when 90% of the country was cowering in the closet crying out “Mr Bush protect me!!”
I am a strong environmentalist, and a male feminist and care deeply about gay and civil rights. But forgive me for caring more about Americans and Iraqis being blown to bloody fragments to get Ledeen and Wolfowitz’s fantasy of American Empire going than ideological purity. Where were you all then? Because you sure were not registering in the polls.
This is one of the things I find funny about Booman (and I ironically, his right wing critics within the Democratic Party and outside): that Kos is a passing phenomenon. I’m sorry, but that is so obviously not the case. His traffic has increased 100% in the last year, and he is by far the most important political blog on the internet. Kos is and will continue to be one of the most important forces in Democratic Party politics for the foreseeable future, and will shape the party for the next generation.
You might not like Kos, because he is too conservative for your tastes. But, as such, he is considerably closer to the center of the Democratic Party and the electorate as a whole. Indeed, keep in mind that the right wing views Kos as a crazy lefty. So I highly doubt Booman can get similar traction taking a much more explicitly left wing stance.
Ben P
Actually, I think of Kos as too left for my taste, not too right. But that’s not the main reason I soured on the site.
Why would anyone want “traction” with the right wing, and if we are so insignificant why are you here?
.
Daily Kos’ perception is different for each individual due to personal experience.
For top echelon writers in the mainstream it’s the place to be. Quite similar to the real world where opposing views and minorities get trampled by the hordes of majority rule. Too often debate is stifled by rotten remarks at the outset of a new diary, offering arguments or a topic to the reader in need of some reading to understand. Usually what you see in a large metropole is the hit and run style of comments.
Many topics are just ignored or thrown into the trash bin. Dkos is not a forum where freedom of speech in true sense is made possible. I entered Internet for the first time in Oct. ’04 on the Kerry site for Democratic Action. As many others, we transferred to dKos one day after the election as UID 32,000 and change. I was happy and enjoyed the reading and some writing, especially the community spirit with the Valerie Plame project PropaGannon series in Jan-Feb earlier this year.
In March after a blog death threat at dKos, I found BooMan and have been here ever since in the warmth of a village community where it’s easier to say hello and inquire how the kids or kittens are doing. I will never to forget the single most important issue of political action at BooMan and the Frogmarch of all criminals from the White House.
Early May I was banned from dKos and was fortunate to be able to write about it in my diary, summarized: Thought Police at dKos.
It is nice to mention my nemesis at the time Plutonium Page, when we met later and made up with no hard feelings over the incident. Even exchanged some personal emails with her, just trying to focus on the issues we all pursue and have common ground.
In Augustus I was banned from dKos once again, for reasons unknown to me, but a 2nd time I didn’t much care anymore and just logged in for a new account and stayed anonymous without cross-posting my diaries. This isn’t much fun though and due to priorities in blog time, I haven’t visited dKos much recently. I just want to keep the account to be able to recommend diaries and now and then to … hit and run!
I just love life at BooMan’s Place and the Frog pond with al it’s diversities and richness in biological life as the Great Spirit meant it to be.
Recently at European Tribune I expressed my personal feeling in blogging, compared it with the border collie!
«« click on pic for photo gallery border collie »»
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Well I guess you had to be there.
“For top echelon writers in the mainstream it’s the place to be.”
Believe me it was not always “in the mainstream”. When dKos first started coming to the attention of the wider blogosphere it was pushing the then white-hot message “Bush lied”. And while I am sure it is tempting for everyone to look around and say “Well everyone knows that”, well everyone didn’t know or Bush wouldn’t have been scoring 75% approval in the polls. Kos stayed anchored in the same position and with what started out as a small fairly tight community has finally dragged the Democratic Party kicking and screaming over into actual opposition. Kos was never a revolutionary, he just wanted a Democratic Party that would confront the lies of Bush head on. And by and large we are getting that and if that makes Kos and supporters ‘mainstream’ then all the better.
There was a time that you could hover your cursor over someone’s name and find out their UID. That was changed, and rightfully so, because there was a little too much “Who are you Mr. 52,354 to tell me Ms. 26894 what it means to be a Kossack” going on. I don’t spend a lot of time over there, as Yogi Berra said “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded”, but the only reason my UID is only 317 is that I was hungover and slept in the day Scoop was turned on. (And our host Meteor Blades UID is I believe 5, because I think he was running the main page that day.)
dKos was a tight community at one time, and I for one am going to cut Kos a lot of slack because I was there when Marisacat ruled. Kos’s openly stated goal from day one was to be a player in a reformed, reshaped Democratic Party. Well he is on course to do just that, and to the extent it has made Anarcho-Syndicalists sad so be it.
Bruce-
I think you’ve done a good job of explaining the history of dKos and why people might have felt he was more radical than he is.
But, it still is too dismissive to suggest that the only reason people have become disenchanted is because he is too centrist.
Most exiles have some other specific complaint, and usually it is more about the tone than the policy positions.
For example, almost no one left over the Gilligan’s Island advertisement, but hundreds left over his dismissive attitude toward the women’s studies set. That attitude wasn’t progressive, centrist or right-wing. It was just an attitude.
Overall, though, I think you understand the dynamics of what happened (changed) very well.
Marisacat offered more insight in a couple of quick lines than kos ever did in all of his front page writings combined.
They have, of course, banned her, and driven off several others of the early, insightful and iconoclastic posters. It’s all about being a party organ now.
Indeed. Marisacat is one very smart, sharp person IMO.
She has some insight, but she is also a condescending asshole. Her writing comes off with an attitude like “I know . . . if only you knew . . . silly kids . . . ” I’m sorry, but a collection of Marisacats might make a good left-wing magazine – with plently of “insightful” commentary – but its not going to achieve any real world goals.
Bne P
as opposed to, say … you?
One thing the world could use more of is “insight”, and there is precious little there these days.
“No real world goals.”
I have no intention of defending Kos and Marisacat in every particular, but in the biggest issue or our day – the War on Iraq – they got it right when a whole lot of people, even people I admire, were getting it wrong. Almost everybody on the Left and growing numbers on the Right are coming over to their, our position. And we can freely concede that back in the day Bruce Webb was known to be a condescending, know it all, dismissive asshole.
All true, yet this blind pig found the acorn buried in the Bush manure pile.
I don’t disagree.
My problem has nothing to with Iraq – Markos or Marisacat’s positions.
My problem has more to do with how “poor Marisacat” got run off Kos. Well, I’ve interacted with here a number of times (I’ve been a Kos member going back to Dec. 2003) and seen here interact with others on threads, and frankly, there is much to feel sorry about. Good riddance, frankly.
Ben P
“back in the day Bruce Webb was known to be a condescending, know it all, dismissive asshole.”
“I don’t disagree”
Great minds think alike.
you say
and I for one am going to cut Kos a lot of slack because I was there when Marisacat ruled.
can we get a little more explanation on exactly what you mean by that? looks to me like a slam on marisa.
explanation please.
I was and always have been a big fan of Marisa. She was there and saying the right things when I was the newest of newbies.
I did find it deeply ironic when on what had to be the third wave of dKos, after a long hiatus, Marisa reposted and some self-important person who thought he was the voice of dKos challenged her with a “Who the hell are you?” response. He got a rapid reeducation into the history of dKos and Marisa’s place in it.
Not that Marisacat needed any help defending herself, this guy thought he was confronting a kitten and find himself facing a tigress.
I see you were annihilated on DKOS by Hamletta, who led the charge to utter death threats against you and to get you troll-rated into oblivion for not pleasing Hamletta. That person Hamletta was the same person who did the same to me in March 2005. She’s quite the wicked self-righteous mob leader.
She is the welcome wagon.
She pounces on newbies to see where their alligences lie and how far are they willing to go to protect their beliefs… there is a method to her madness… all in the name of “mapping” who is who…
Sorry to see how yu were treated there. If you ever want a new ID I have two that I will gladly donate.
You get from dKos what you put in it.
I put in wonky diaries, and I get wonky commentary back.
I sprinkle “4”s and recommends around, and that’s pretty much what I get back.
I am always polite with everybody, and everybody is polite with me.
I am always respectful of others’ opinions, and I think most are respectful of mine.
And it it the giant megaphone that everybody wants to have a shot at. So everybody tries to shout and to get attention. That’s the game. If you don’t like big bustling crowds, don’t go to dKos. But you can’t have the audiance without having the people that make that audience. Don’t take everything personally, treat people like you expect to be treated, and only get involved in things that you actually want to be involved in.
Good advice, Jerome. I steer clear of the place because I find it hard to cope with insane redneck support for ‘our boys over there’.
What people have their hard time wrapping their minds around is that dKos got its start as a Democratic pro-military, anti-war site. The first two points got submerged in the third and when the country finally started coming to consensus on the anti-war thing a bunch of people apparently became frustrated and angry that Kos remained a Democrat and fundamentally pro-military. Yes plenty of people invested a lot of their energy over there, because it was pretty much the main vehicle for expressing your inner Buck Fush. But that doesn’t change who Kos is or was.
He is a Democrat and a veteran and proud of both. Me too, on both counts. It is understandable that people who have tightly coupled Buck Fush & Fuck Corporate America & Fush your Free Trade & BTW GI’s are war criminals into one tight package don’t feel entirely comfortable spending time in Markos’s house. But as canberra boy implicitly points out it is a big blogsophere out there.
Punish Kos by withdrawing your page views. Easy as that.
I don’t buy the idea that as the BT grows there will be more conflict. There may be some, but it doesn’t have to rage out of control. I see dKos as the place for youngsters to express their passion, a population of boys and girls. Booman Tribune is more a community of people who have grown up and learned how to live together.
The question is – how long do we let our world be dominated by the immature? That’s why many of us say we don’t visit there so often.
The US is a big country, not anymore the youngster we used to be. Somehow this is how we progress toward a peaceful world, learning to put away the weapons of our youth. It’s true – all you need is love.
Plus honesty.
I recover from Orange rage so quickly and easily these days. Booman Trib is my HOME! I was a little ticked when he said that Marching Protesting Hippies were……gee, what did he say about that? Seems kind of silly now, now that the Congress has started fighting about Iraq and members of the House are making SNL now! It has to start somewhere though and well placed marches and protests only lead to the Iraq War being placed further and further in the forefront. After Yellow Feather I must say that Alito is calling to me and on Monday we have our first brainstorming diary. Of all the fights on our hands Alito is the one that we have the least time to fight. Will it be our biggest challenge or will it take off like Yellow Feather and grow into it’s own animal too. Rock on you feather painters!
Tracy, I’ve got an image of Alito as a chameleon, changing his colors to match the mood of the time (thinking of his “Oh, I just said that to get the job” comments to DiFi). Might be a way to tie that in…?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled rant…
a fairly successful sociopath!
As I write this there are about 50-60 comments, and it’s interesting to see the names of the posters; some are recent arrivals or folks that we don’t hear from very often.
Unfortunately for Boo’s agita, I expect that we’re always going to have a certain level of displeasure with Big Orange over here; every time there’s an uproar over there and some newcomers come to the pond they bring their wounds with them, and wounds take time to heal.
When you live in the neighborhood of a big city, there will be toxic plumes or benzene flowing down river from time to time. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect the atmosphere here to be pollution-free 365 days a year, although that’s a goal to work towards, and it’s the reason many came to the pond in the first place. After all, they’ve even detected PCBs in antarctic ice. 🙁
Having said that, I think the periodic rounds of uproar are of smaller and smaller size since the pie exodus, which reflects both the dilution effect as the “refugees” find their place in a larger existing BMT community, and the fact that more and more of us have an online existence which only tangentially involves dKos. I go there maybe twice a week to check headlines and poll numbers, spending maybe 10 minutes there, unless someone from the community here specifically suggests I go there to see something. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the news, the scientific literature, my off-line life, and trying to make a meaningful contribution to this community.
Boo, I expect that I’m not that unusual in that regard, and that as newcomers settle in and spend more time here they’ll find whatever history brought them here fades from immediate thought and they’ll croak in harmony with the rest of the pond denizens. I know that I find dKos issues rile my blood pressure less and less, as I have virtually no personal investment in that site anymore. And even the most die-hard among us eventually figure out (with some helpful suggestions from their friends, perhaps) that picking their scabs is not conducive to healing.
Pond life has many charms that life in Orangeopolis never had.
And since it cannot be said often enough: Thank you Boo, Susan, etc. for who you are and all you do to make this community the place it is.
are killing me with your analogies and synonyms.
“Croaking in harmony”
“Orangeopolis”
“benzene” in the pond.
Brilliant.
Aw, shucks! All I did was have a little coffee this morning before blogging…
😉
There are a number of things that have been stated by others here that I agree with. I’m simply going to write about something I don’t believe anyone else has addressed here, but that I know is a source of contention for some people, including one who posts FP material at this site, as well as some of the former Kossacks who were banned and post over at Liberal Street Fighter.
What has finally pushed me into the contra-Orange camp after 3 years of posting is the habit of the site’s proprietor and his First-Among-Equals front pager to cannibalize diaries to make front page postings of their own without so much as a “thank you” to the people who did the legwork. This has been going on since the eariest days of the site, prior to the Scoop software and diaries. In those early days comments from Open Threads would be used. On quite a few occasions, someone (like me) would post a comment about a newly published article found elsewhere on the web, a comment that contained a fair amount of quoted material as well as an attempt at analysis. Not long thereafter there would be a front page post mentioning the same article, with the main analytical points and quoted material of the comment being matched almost exactly by the FP post. There would be no credit given to the person who’d posted the comment.
The first through third time this happens, you tell yourself it’s coincidence; after that you become progressively more suspicious, until there can no longer be any doubt as to what’s going on. Finally, you (that is to say “me”) stop doing such a conscientious job of trying to alert people to interesting material. Once the Scoop site was introduced and the diary entries got going, this practice became even more obvious. So I pretty much gave up on doing diary entries. If they weren’t being used by others to float their own boats, they were vanishing in the flood of trivial material that has made the site so difficult to negotiate.
Now I have never had a desire to be a front page poster (don’t have the time, inclination, or personality for it), but a simple “thanks to So-and-So for bringing this our attention” goes a very long way. So when it happened to me yet again two days after the recent elections (I did my first diary entry in months on a topic no one else had covered and found an FP item by Kos on said topic go up about an hour later), I finally reached my tipping point, or whatever you want to call it. I did not, incidentally, make anything like an obvious complaint, post a GCW diary, or anything else. I simply posted a comment in the FP thread saying roughly “I diaried this topic a short while ago, glad to see it was of interest to some people.” I just decided that’s it, no more diaries, whenever I do feel the urge to write up something about a topic people might find of interest, I’ll post it elsewhere. And I also decided I would finally force myself to do what I’ve tried to do for months – spend most if not all of my websurfing time on other websites.
A couple of days later, I saw Armando do the same thing to someone else, so I posted a comment in the FP thread and was treated to the usual abuse from El Caudillo, who brought along a couple of his bodyguards for backup.
Which brings me to another point – ever notice how Armando always manages to have several of his sycophants around during these arguments to give him “4s,” downrate his adversaries, and tell him what a great guy he is? You really think they just happen to show up in these threads?
Anyway, when Kos had his short-lived Guardian column last year, he’d usually post something a day before deadline and ask people what they thought he should write about. As I recall, at one point he more or less said “I’ve got a deadline and can’t think of anything to write, do it for me here.” I found myself thinking “what else is new?”
I could go on about the thuggish attitude some people are responsible for engendering, the bannings of some people who had been posting there for years, etc., but others have already covered those topics and I’ve probably gone on too long anyway. Just wanted to make sure that topic got covered as I know that a number of other people feel the same way about it.
Hi JJB. I noticed this as well on various occasions, and it was mentioned in a comment over here (I don’t think it was you), and I have noted since that they have made a real effort to credit diarists when they use their work.
I always put comments linking to the earlier diary when I see it happen, of the polite kind “you might want to read x’s interesting comment on the same topic in his/her diary (link)”. Shaming them discreetly might actually work…
But I have tried the discreet method myself many times, and I didn’t see it yield the desired result.
Thanks for noting this pervasive behavior. Happened to me pre-Scoop in the summer of ought-three – I posted a comment with excerpts and a link to an infamous (at the time) anti Bush-Rumsfeld editorial in the Army Times called “Lip Service”. Within a day Kos had posted on it, Atrios and Eric Alterman were not far behind. I don’t claim they all ripped off my comment, but Kos couldn’t have missed it, the site was still relatively small back then.
OK – end of wounded-ego-outburst. :^)
I was planning on taking the MeteorBlades-style high road, but what the hell. This is group therapy, right?
Only twice has Armando ever directly responded to a comment from me, and both times he was complimentary. But I’ve seen him just be flat-out insulting too many times. And DHinMI, IMO, is just as bad. How many people with valuable contributions to make decide to lay low (or simply go elsewhere), rather than risk such treatment?
I also remember when Marisacat was such a valued DKos contributor, losing her was a canary-coalmine moment if ever there was one.
And I was struck with a intense moment of cognitive dissonance when Kos actually put up a DKos-sponsored religion-oriented site for PastorDan, remembering the whole Melanie business. Though if Kos’s actual intent (as I suspected at the time) was in part to divert most religious discussions elsewhere, it failed spectacularly…
Though I know others have not. I really don’t know what the hell I ever did to get on Armando’s feces list, doubtless something trivial. I have made a point of mentioning that his good buddy Josh “Tacitus” Trevino is far less of a gentleman (and far less intellectually honest) than some suppose, maybe that’s the reason. I really don’t know, and don’t care. If he wants to go out of his way to antagonize someone who agrees with him on (more than likely) 90% of the issues of the day, that’s his business.
Banning Marisacat, wilfred, and assorted other LSFers really was a wake-up call for me, but there is something about dKos that has kept me coming back time and time again, it’s a hard habit to break. But broken it must be, I fear, because I really don’t like what it’s become.
People are not going to go to a smaller audience when they can go for a bigger one…
But as to the crediting part, the change I noticed is really recent. Who knows, maybe some messages got through…
Jerome, I hope you’re right! For better or worse, DKos has it’s Upper Crust, and receiving one’s due in this regard is a crucial part of making people feel part of the community.
I have gone back and read Armando’s entire “10 months ago” diary. I hope he can sustain his kinder, gentler mode. With so strong a personality, he can be a great force for unity in that community, just as he can occasionally be a hurtfully divisive force.
JJB, I’ve rarely crossed swords with anybody over there, myself – partly, I guess, because I don’t offer too many opportunities. But these days, I rarely see DH appear in a thread without some conflict ensuing. Sad.
If you enter in a fight with DH, you know what to expect. I mean, if you are commenting in the kinds of diaries where these things take place, you must have been around dKos for a while…
So I have no sympathy to those that are hurt by insensitive comments when they are making the exact same kind of comments themselves. DH is a solid adversary for these games, one could say…
If you think one is a bully, the best way to intereact with that bully is to be infailingly polite and provide arguments ONLY on substance, and never on form. This annoys the hell out of them, but they have no pretext to lash out at you. If they do, they are clearly in the wrong (and that will be noted, and rated, by others) – and you SHOULD NOT follow suit. There is no more scathing retort than a very polite and to the point one to insult and injurious stuff…
And if you don’t like these games – don’t play in them, for fuckssake.
And if you take these things too seriously, don’t bother.
If you think one is a bully, the best way to intereact with that bully is to be infailingly polite and provide arguments ONLY on substance, and never on form.
I think we all saw how that worked out with GWB.
“I think we all saw how that worked out with GWB.”
tou-fucking-che! Debraz! Bravo.
(course I’d never so much as imply that anyone over there bore any resemblance whatsoever to anyone in the Republican party. Never.)
Sorry, folks, I’ve been picking fights with bullies all my life. Just can’t seem to get over it: call me David, I guess.
I think Jerome’s advice serves to illustrate the problem with bullies and how we still think about bullying. While it’s solid advice for dealing with rational human beings, the bully bullies because he cannot operate in the world of reason. Reason only pisses him off because facts are not his friend.
The fallacy is that the bully acts when provoked, the “you made me do it” defense, and that the object of the bully’s wrath could have avoided confrontation had he or she played nice. Bullies thrive on others playing nice, they know no boundaries, they want what they want.
Can anyone imagine how the Iraq might have been different if those we elected had stood their ground? Shown some courage, some backbone, some actual interest in the welfare of our country? Instead, they made nice, asked no questions, the old go-along-to-get-along.
Look where that got them and more importantly, look where that got us.
Yep. Best thing to is stand there (preferably in stillettos and a mini-skirt), draw back and kick the motherfucker square in the balls. Hard.
What’s that about?
I’m new here. No beef with Kos, though I’ve never posted more than a couple there. Just never could connect with the place. The pond, on the other hand, is a very nice place, instantly inviting. I especially enjoy Larry Johnson and Patrick Lang. The level of discourse is excellent. I appreciate your work.
Daily Kos? What’s that?
It’s a place where one occassionally goes to remind oneself why they love BMT… 🙂
oooooooh. So they don’t have frogs, dessert diaries, or cute babies?
I heard they eat baby-flavored frog legs, and you don’t even want to know what they do with dessert…
😉
Why that’s just silly. Everyone knows that dessert, like a good pie – for example, is the first course of any meal!
You had me laughing from your first comment:
“Daily Kos? What’s that?”
Priceless! 😀
I’ve let everything lapse over there except my ability to read. I can’t rate, recommend, comment, or diary, and have no desire to go to the effort of changing that situation. One of the last times I commented I got responses from people mocking me in a way that would never happen here. Life’s too short for that, and for the duration of said short life I’d rather spend my time with equally smart and funny, but kinder people. Now, all I can do is rate and vote in polls. It’s interesting. In other words, all I can do is “listen.” I like it like that. As I said on Arthur’s diary, I’m grateful for that other place. It keeps them busy so they don’t come over here.
P.S. Personally, and I don’t think this can be repeated too often, I think Boo’s Rule about not being a prick, and his common sense way of enforcing it, makes ALL the difference.
Sorry, that should have been “read, and vote in polls.” One thing I can not do is rate.
First off, it was the first political site I discovered, back before the elections of ’04. It was nice having a forum for my opinions where I wasn’t shouted down as being a tool or a traitor, as I was after 9/11 when I suggested that carpet bombing everything from Casablanca to Jakarta was merely becoming a bigger batch of terrorists than the ones we were fighting.
Second, like it or not, Big Orange is the Big Time. Last time I checked, readership of Sunday Griot on Daily Kos outstripped readership on Bootrib and My Left Wing, combined, by about 8 to 1. It may have channged in the few months since I last checked, but probably not by much if it has. And remember the (almost certainly imperfect, but still interesting) study last summer that showed that Daily Kos was bigger than the top fifty conservative blogs, combined?
When Cindy Sheehan posts something for the world to see, where does she post it? Kos. John Conyers? Kos. Barbara Boxer? Russ Feingold? Harry Reid? Louise Slaughter? No other weblog that I am aware of pulls in such a constellation of Lefty luminaries.
I know there are people who have an issue with Kos and how he runs his site, and that’s inevitable, and I would never tell them they have to accept his way of doing things or go there if they feel unwanted or unloved. But to my mind, Kos is like this guy at work who is sometimes abrasive and sometimes an ass, but he throws great parties. I don’t always agree with him on everything, and on some things I probably never agree with him. But it’s easy enough to go have a side conversation and voice your own opinions, and they’re considered on their own merits, not on whether they toe the Kos party line.
That’s been my experience, anyway.
I have a friend who I suspect of closet Republicanism. We talk baseball, not politics, but one day she mentioned surprise that I visited Daily Kos because “they are pretty much wrong about everything over there.” My response was, “Well, Daily Kos isn’t for everyone. Some days it isn’t for me. But I am tired of having my country hijacked by a cabal of kleptocratic thugs who seem to think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are inconvenient obstacles on the way to wealth and power, and Daily Kos is the best place I’ve found so far to hook up with people who can help me get my country back.” That pretty much sums it up as far as I’m concerned.
Oh, my. Another flap. Another kerfluffle. I seem to have missed it all. But I find that if I’ve gotten into reading a diary full of invective, I generally go away.
Lots of interesting comments, thoughts here, and the long, thoughtful comments are so particular to the frog pond. Comments at Kos tend to be shorter, and lots of them aren’t very substantive. More along the lines of, “Yeah, so’s your old man.”
I go there to read the headlines, much as I do the Times or the WaPo. And, I must admit, for Saturday Garden Blogging.
At BooTrib, I settle in for a substantive read, and discussion. Just looking at the front page this morning, I realized that I wouldn’t have time to read all the excellent postings, I’d have to pick only a few.
I seem to recall being told somewhere in earlier ’04 that many of the original dKos posters were military types. Whether that contributes to the frequently antagonistic tone, I don’t know. The atmosphere here is much more welcoming and less angry.
While reading all the comments here, I’ve also been listening to a CD of John Gielgud reading from Alice In Wonderland, which seems to have a strong resemblance to current political life in this country and these blog discussions. Especially the section on the Red Queen’s croquet game.
I confess I quit reading the comments to this article about halfway down. Kos was my first political blog and I still drop in almost every day. There’s pretty much the same mix of views there always were, near as I can tell.
I don’t post there much simply because the joint is too big, and if the timing isn’t just right I get predictably ignored and start resenting that I wasted my time. There seems to be a small “elite” that kind of hogs the bandwidth, but that’s pretty inevitable when a site outgrows the limitations inherent in blogs. dKos is worth visiting for its updates on the polls, candidate news, and horserace analyses. If it’s important to political junkies, it’s pretty certainly going to be there on the front page. For me, it’s not a great place to discuss ideas — it’s kind of the Slashdot of politics, where folks shoot their ammo and go away with no followup. Which gets pretty boring, IMO. That’s why I spend more of my time at BT these days.
Other than that, I don’t know what all the hooha is about. I don’t see this raging inferno of personal attack going on here, either. Guess I don’t read the right diaries. To claim that something as big and diverse as Kos has one point of view seems transparently silly. So does inter-blog gossip in general. So I fully agree with Boo that it’s all pointless, but don’t understand why he then violated his own insight by stirring the pot with this article. Maybe somebody more tuned in can do us fringers the favor of a brief explanation.
I have a limited amount of time to look for news and to sit(relatively) still in front of a screen; the classroom/tv/movie sitdownandshutup training didn’t take, thank Lord Buddha. I appreciate this site and sometimes dk but get into trouble when I start reading comments and feel that I’ve descended into geek hell. If what’s written in print media is just ink and paper fiber, this isn’t even that corporeal and yet people are so serious about these light impulses and the ones they think are on the receiving end. And all the acronymns drive me crazy, like if you’re in with the in crowd you’ll know all of them. And it’s always been way too easy to be snarky with someone who’s not there in front of us. My workplace had major troubles with that when they first installed email years ago, the biggest problem being that we actually did have to work together in real time after the virtual nastiness. The spiritual community I used to belong to had their yahoo group pretty much taken over by a malajusted software developer nerd member who can’t connect with others any other way. He’s a “no offense but you suck” sort of person and can’t figure out why nobody much likes him. People like some of the commenters on dk or other blogs may not actually have real lives for all I know.
My original beef with computers was that unless we actually write code or are messing with linux stuff we’re think we’re being so creative but it’s not much different than some boxed craft kit. Some folks like my boss think that if they just bring some issue to everyone’s attention, that’s all that has to be done to resolve the problem-well, that’s a start. Not that people here don’t actually do other things.
Of course I think internet “communities” have some value, especially for shut-ins or those without other resources but I just can’t take them as seriously as they take themselves.
Sorry if I offended anyone-you all do seem like a nice bunch of folks.
As is often the case, I’m not able to comment when things are hot-off-the-stove. DK is a regular part of my reading, though not daily anymore: I don’t like all of the tone changes over time, e.g. a rise in hostility, thuggish behavior as others have noted above. And I miss the voices of some that I valued there a great deal: Marisacat comes to mind specifically.
On the other hand, there are excellent diaries on scientific work, especially about the environment, energy. And many distinct, inspiring voices, such as Meteor Blades (who I thank for also gracing us with his writing here) & Kid Oakland (when he is there).
My fundamental problem with DK is a difficulty with any interactive blog-writing, just magnified by the speed of comment, the anger and frustration that many feel with our current government, and, yes, the competitiveness of diarying and commenting for attention. We can’t hear or see each other as normal conversation and debate requires, so we depend on our words. For me, at least, words in blogging are to communication what old English is to modern speech – the words are there, mostly, and the meaning, surely, we hope. But much is not known, or lost entirely or held hostage to less than splendiferous speech.
And few of us, (certainly not me) are as skilled as SusanHu or Meteor Blades to write and comment with such articulation and feeling and authoritative excellence that they are rarely misunderstood.
There are also issues that the DK community does not afford much time IMO: education, welfare, poverty, healthcare. I wish that big audience for DK were seeing those issues frontpaged more.
The great thing here is that people have been able to take the time to listen and learn what we cannot see – the nuance, emphasis, sarcasm, skepticism, sadness, frustration, etc. seem clearer. And there is less offense taken and given. The “act locally” part of maxim is quite visible here, as well as the “think globally”, and that’s the best thing I like about all of the various pads and pond-divers here at the pond.
I liked Armando’s post.
I have also always liked Armando’s stands on torture and any number of other issues.
Wishing him well …
and may the past be the past. We’ve got a lot of big issues to fight for, and it’s draining and demoralizing to let the negative stuff — meanness or “goodbye cruel world” diaries or shunning — to seep into our discussions.
what did I miss? I go outside for an evening… and take a nice faceplant on the ice to boot (remind me again why I left SoCal…) and come back to this??
I said it once and I’ll say it again… Oh WHAAAA!!
Phew, that feels better. 😉
And I personally like Armando quite a bit… I can be a jerk sometimes too, but he does own up to it and isn’t afraid to apologize when he needs to. But then again, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I have my issues with dkos but, like Boo, it was my first home and I wouldn’t have found the frog pond or you all without the Orange Empire.
The majority of the diaries are jejune and the preponderence of comments infantile. I lump Dkos in with DU: for people who like that sort of thing it is the sort of thing they would like and leave them to get on with it.
I am a pretty much a long time lurker at both sites, rarely taking the time to post or comment, but I visit each site every other day or so. It was (and remains) very refreshing to find so many other people who are so concerned about were our country is going especially post 9/11.
I expect a certain amount of friction when you begin to get as many people in the tent as dkos. I expect people to disagree, and sometimes to get sharp. Still, I have always hoped that the Dems could become a true big tent party which embraces diversity of opinion and values, that can respect, learn and grow. I will not always agree with you, but I will listen and I can be convinced.
There have been occasions were the dkos big tent turns into a full on, three ring circus. I generally don’t participate as it’s not something I enjoy either in person or over the Internet. I too joined booman when it seemed that dkos was getting a bit big. Yet, it’s safe to say that dkos stays orders of magnitude above the level of discourse found at freepers.
It must be much easier on the old nogin to be a Repub nowdays. You’re told what to think and do and if you blog it’s pretty much to parrot what you’ve been told. The freewheeling exchange of views and information offered by blogs like dkos and booman has been (and I hope will remain) a game changer. Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant for our current WH lies.
It has been interesting to watch dkos evolve. Blogging is still new. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how big it would become when dkos was first started. I’m sure I cannot tell you what it will be by 2008, but it’s obvious with how the WH has manipulated the MSM that the Repubs have been very successful at controlling the free exchange of information required to have a functional democracy. And honestly, if the Dems are running everything by 2012, I’m hoping booman is still here to pull the curtains back and let the sun shine in.
There will always be factions at dKos who try to define the “correct” mindset. Being an odd duck who always runs far far away when I see too much agreement, I love the fact that those who wish to define what is “politically correct” exclusive of other progressive opinion get shot down by other Kossacks who are articulate and able to argue another perspective admirably … and occasionally by Markos himself.
But Markos generally stays out of the fray unless the major thug elements take over the discourse. As a memorable example … the pie wars. Yes women too can be thugs … and sometimes hide behind “victim drag” while being total bullies.
My opinion will probably be a minority opinion here but it’s mine.
This is my first comment here and I’ve only made one comment at DKos. I agree if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. However, some of us are new to the Internet, blogs, etc. are here to learn. I found in the very short time I’ve been reading Dkos and here I agree with a lot that’s being said. I hope to become a contributing member to both communities, but until I even get the terminology right I hope you bear with me.
and I don’t care if I’m just one of the unwashed mob. I was asleep at the wheel until I found DKos. Now I’m informed, pissed off AND activated.
I love the variety. I love the intergenerational aspects – the college kids just waking up to politics and the old farts pontificating or moderating.
And I love Kos’s generous spirit – he seems quite modest about his own amazing contribution to the vibrancy of progressive politics on the net and frequently praises the work of bloggers from other sites.
I don’t see the need to put another site down. If you don’t like it, don’t go there.
New Armando takes notice of this thread:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/26/21337/309
.
A new personality?
Or is it maturity and a new perspective when he writes about his daughter. Hmmm …
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Since the topic is The Daily Kos, I’m reaching out to my fellow bloggers at DK, to help me find out why my password is no longer recognized there. I’m not a frequent poster so it is possible that I forgot my password, but I can’t get a response when I try to communicate with the tech support to help me retrieve my password. The site is probably too big to help someone not as computer oriented as the majority of the posters. I don’t believe that I could have been banned as I’ve only posted about 5 times in 1 1/2 years and usually about Senator Feingold as I’m from Wisconsin. How does one become banned? Although I’m mostly a reader of the posts, I do want to be free to make a comment here & there. As it stands now, I feel like a second class citizen without a voice. Could someone please advise me what steps I should take to get my password back? My handle at DK was Left of Center just the same as here. Thank you.
I am permanently logged in to dKos on one Mac and not logged in on another. If you are not logged in the seventh item under ‘Menu’ is ‘Lose your password?’ Click on that and the system will send you a new password to your e-mail box. You can then use that password to log in and either keep it or make up a new one. It is automated and there is no human intervention.
There is a lot of loose talking about ‘banning’. In my experience on dKos on and off over the years there have only been a couple of cases of actual banning, and never for four or five comments. Generally what has happened is some foul mouthed clown getting his comments hidden by the readers, and not understanding how a Scoop system works, thinks Kos is riding around on a dark horse picking and choosing who gets to post. If there was an active banning system we could round up any number of screennames to put on it, yet somehow they still manage to post.
I don’t visit kDos enough to be a TU anymore but for those that do take a little trip around Hidden Comments Land and report back on those that really didn’t need to be hidden. It would be very difficult to actually ban someone without leaving lose ends, like offended comments linking to nowhere. This comes up periodically but somehow there is rarely any forensic evidence.
Even paranoids have real enemies. But I don’t think you are on Kos’s list.
Although I have a 700 UID, I did not really stop by hereuntil a month ago. What relly got me hooked here was the quality and the diversity of the diaries. My jaw droped to the floor and bounced three or four times. Just loved it. And then I began to meet the community, and fell in love with it. Have to admit you folks are the best in the e-world (the entire world)I think of this place as my second home and of you as family.
And I guess this is a good place to give an explanation of what I did In DK: I got so upset about Stark’s diary that I went balistic. I asked Armando to bann me, and since he did not take me seriouly I became seriouly diruptive (ie a prick, an A-hole, jerk what ever you want to call me).
I gave no explanations until Super called me out and aske for me to cut it out, and to come to BT. until then I had not given any explanations except that I was ashamed to have ever belonged there. Since he mentioned BT, I only then began to provide an explanation as to why I was doing what I was doing.
I never intended to have that tracked down to the Pond. And I am really sorry if it came back here in any way. I never intended to make waves here not even a ripple.
But what is done is done, And I still have to do what my heart tells me to do. since Armando told me that Kos is the onlyone who can bann me from that place, I left him a post in his latest comment (not in his latestdiary, so it wont be noticed by anyone but him)
So, if he does not do anything about it I will become disruptive once again. Therefore I am thinking of leaving the pond for a while so it can not be traced back here in any way.
I also know that some people might have been offended by what I did, and I may no longer be welcomed here. And, if that is the case, as much as I will hate it, I will leave permanently.
As for the DK, I simply have no feelings for it. I do wish them well. As for the 800 pound gorila, that means noting to me. That gorila might just be nothing more than fat, while this 300 pound gorila is lean and nothing but muscle.