I’m tired this morning, my daughter has to be taken to the doctor at 8:00 a.m. (EST), and I really should try to find an important story to write quickly about, but…
Did I say I was tired? LOL.
Anyway, I’ve been noticing the trend around the blogosphere (including at our own dear little frog pond) of diaries by people, or on behalf of people who have been banned from participating at various blogs, though one blog in particular comes to mind. So this being Friday, and the aforementioned fatigue preventing me from writing anything constructive, I’ve decided to ask the community here to out themselves as it were.
Specifically, I’d like to hear who has been banned from any blog, including of course, Daily Kos, and if you have the time, why you were banned. So ‘fess up. Who here has felt the heavy hand of bloggy oppression, where did it happen, when did it happen, and why?
As always, everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of public opinion. (That’s snark, by the way). Let the Friday morning meta begin!
Update [2007-5-18 11:23:14 by Steven D]: In the interest of full disclosure, I should add I have not been banned from any sites that I know of (well I may have been banned from Free Republic, but I only posted there once and never went back to see what happened after my less than “party line” commentary), though I have made the conscious decision to no longer post any diaries at Daily Kos. My reasons for this decision should be obvious to anyone who followed the Kathy Sierra controversy, which was the straw that broke this camel’s back.
from DKos under three names. However, I am somewhat reluctant to use those names, considering that behind me. If you wish, I will indicate the names under which I was banned.
I will say that I was banned
No need to say which names you used if you don’t want to. This is voluntary after all.
I’ve been banned from DU, for being unenthused about certain candidates, and over I/P issues.
I was banned at kos the first time in the big purge of people who recommended the wrong diaries. I recommended one that pointed out that some historical conspiracies turned out real, like the standard oil conspiracy to take over oil refineries, that resulted in passing the Sherman antitrust act, and the Tuskegee experiment, where black men with syphilis were left untreated.
Then I was banned 3 other times because I had already been banned that first time, but the discovery of my signing up with new accounts generally involved flamewars with Dhinmi. I also know the conspiracy theory pet peeve is his, so the first purge banning was probably his doing too.
that is why I am very concerned about this overzealous Hunter purge. Those who have been banned for no reason can now be banned for having been banned, despite the fact that Hunter admits he has no reason to ban them other than the fact that they expressed the wrong opinion.
The dkos suckups will lie about these posters and claim they were trolls, just like they did me.
Yes, the sock puppet problem. The second time I was on, I made the mistake of admitting that I had re-registered. This was far more serious to some of the mafias than I realized, and probably contributed to the banning of that sock puppet.
In fact, I don’t really agree that a re-registration is a sock puppet. I always thought that a concurrent registration would be a sock puppet.
Nonetheless, the re-registration business is taken WAY too seriously by many idiots at DKos.
One other component of DKos which I found insanely moronic: Members there would SAVE MY COMMENTS FROM, SAY, 18 MONTHS AGO, and bring them up again. Insane.
I wasn’t banned, but as a member of the sacntimonious women’s set- one who thinks degrading pictures of women in a discussion setting makes everyone take our comments less seriously- I was invited to leave.
Oh- and to let the door hit me where the good lord split me.
Ayup.
I banned myself from dkos, after the pie wars. I was new to the blogosphere, and have since learned to largely keep my personal feelings out of it. Blogs are important to the political discourse, and even essential, but its the individual members of a particular blog, especially at dkos, that take themselves way too seriously.
It is about exchange of information and view points, and not about controlling the view points of others, as far as I’m concerned.
Most of the headliners at DK are pretty good.
Bill in Portland Maine is a national treasure as I see it.
DarkSyde is smart, Devilstower is smart, McJoan isn’t bad as I see it, and Meteor blades is good too. And who can say anything bad about Al Rodgers?
As for Kos, he’s been with the baby, and out of sight for awhile now, and his focus has been netroots/gate crashing for sometime now.
The problem is the self-appointed “referees” like, and disruptive “troll hunters” who act like pompous jackasses and are probably cons screwing around with “the libs” anyway. Ideological purity is a sign of a defective mind.
I stay out of meta pie fights, and would only hurl key lime pies anyway, except for Coulter, and for her a suitable “pie” is likely found at a site like “scatbabes.”
The troops are dying for the lies of Bush and his mob. That is more important to me than the blazing egos among the “faithful” at DK or anywhere else.
I forgot Georgia10, she’s good too!
I banned myself from Kos as well, but it took me a bit longer. After the pie wars, I would go there occasionally to recommend someone’s diary. But the attitude toward choice, the censorship, the lack of civility, the blog roll purge, and finally Kathy Sierra convinced me that I would not contribute one more hit to that site.
someone feels I need the chop from DailyKos.
I’ve just joined My Left Wing as a front pager.
Frankly, I don’t post at DK as much as I used to. There have been too many fights, oustings and too many blind spots to coverage of certain issues to the detriment of others. I try to shy. I include New Orleans in that. I’m glad that some people with more expertise in hand have taken care of certain areas, but no one reads them as much any more with as much interest. I’m sure if the Crescent City sank beneath the waves tomorrow, that interest would return, but only because it would be too late.
I remember seeing that one entry of mine had been promoted for diary rescue, but whoever read it for promotion got the whole issue wrong.
If BushCo can be guilty of crimes against humanity, the Dems, especially Blue Dog Dems, are almost aiding and abetting the crimes by inaction and neglect, except for some heroic congresspeople, minus Mary Landrieu and Nagin, who in imho would gladly revert back to the Republican Party whether or not they screwed him.
It’s not that I have completely given up on Kos as a viable community. I have given up on Kos as a person, which is why there are so many new political bloggers out there, including this one. It was a starting point for me to not to feel so alone in 2004; I’ll always feel grateful for that. But DK is not the end-all, be-all for me any more. There are too many issues that I feel Kos is incapable of grasping because of his own vested interests, blind spots, and prejudices. It’s not just criticism but fact. It’s also not a pretty picture I want to spend time on, either.
If I post there, it is because I hope a lot of Leftblogostan sees what I have written. That’s the kind of access it still commands. Too bad the MSM doesn’t know yet that DK’s zenith was three years ago. The grassroots impetus is going to places like Firedoglake, Steve Gilliard (before his recent illness), My Left Wing and others.
Yup , I’m with this crowd. After the “pie wars” I banned myself as well. Anyone not willing to even listen to a point of view in a community site is not worth giving my time and opinions. However, I still scan the site from time to time (very rarely) to see what they think. I never post.
Honestly, I think the revenue hit they would have suffered thru taking the ads down was the real reason behind the closed minds but that’s only my feeling. We were asking something that would effect their wallets.
How unfair 🙂
I was bounced from Red State for arguing with a blockhead about how there were no WMD. Screw Krempaski and his pack of goofy head-in-the-sand characters who refuse to do anything other than toe the Cheney/Rove/Bush line. That’s not conservative, that’s stupid and ill-advised ideological silliness.
I was thrown off Free Republic years ago, and it was like a good flea dip as far as I am concerned, I never felt better and there has been no re-infestation of right winger fleas since!
I don’t have many problems at Daily Kos, as my focus is primarily in ending the Iraq fiasco, bringing this administration to bow before the law of the land, and awareness of what is real, and what isn’t in the Global Warming dust-up.
Ideas concerning gay rights must be addressed by a public ready for such issues. Ideas about Israeli/Palestinian issues must proceed, but in this administration, screaming about the issue being an index for everything Middle Eastern is going to go nowhere. For God’s sake, As’ad Abu Khalil at Angry Arab can’t even talk of his preference for Palestinian hummus as opposed to Lebanese hummus without someone screaming Anti-Semetism, or some else issuing a Fatwa-wa-wa-wa-wa over the matter. Conditions have to change. But I vehemently disagree with some at DK that I/P issues cannot be discussed! That’s cowardly, and stupid. However, I am not so blind that to see in this atmosphere of intense propaganda, discussions of the I/P issue amounts to piss on a rock.
So, “I tip my hat for the new revolution”
“Take a bow for the new Constitution”
“Smile and grin at the change all around”
“Pick up my tools and work today”
“Just like yesterday”
“Then I get on my knees and pray”
“We don’t get fucked again!”
But I expect to be at some point. I was critical of Edwards for a lack of support for the two bloggers that had to quit (fired, let-go, resigned, whatever). With over 300 backbiting, knife-stabbing comments and a load of hate mail from Kossacks, I expected to get it then.
And I was actually very easy on Edwards. I am not a sycophant for anyone and if I think a candidate, especially one of our candidates, needs a kick in the pants, I will gladly perform that duty. If we don’t, we get a replay of the 1994 Congressional elections.
I have this wierd theory that bloggers (and other journalists) are the Fourth Branch of Government. We ARE oversight. We have no voting power, but we have our voice and voice is a very powerful tool. So powerful it is the first thing fascism must silence – the right to free speech.
So the banning of folks over at Kos worries me. Yeah, some I am sure are warranted – spam diaries and such, but I have read some of the diaries of that got folks banned and I am at a loss. These were polite, well written and important. Some may disagree, but disagreement should not be a reason for banning.
Palestine is such a topic that seems to get a lot of folks booted. I would ask that everyone should keep an open mind about this issue. I would also like to recommend to everyone a film titled A Wedding In Ramallah.
And watch it with an open mind.
I saw that.
On the one hand it is good to see such passion so far out in advance of the primaries. However, I think it is bad for such angry passion from the three camps, Clinton/Obama/Edwards for I fear that things will become so heated that the most fervid will boycott the winner, or go to some stupid third party if their candidate doesn’t get the nod, and that is suicidal.
The focus must remian on repairing the nation following Bush, and ending the frivolous wars and concentrationg on a real solution to terrorism, both from without, and from within too. We will not focus if we are screaming at each other about whose candidate is better.
Pandagon. 🙂
For a whole bunch of comments, I suppose, all in one fatal late night comment string.
Lets see, first I confessed I once found the dreaded Ann Coulter hot. (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”) That got the collective community’s back hair up.
Then, in the face of a withering barrage of attacks that got very ad hom, I made the mistake of using the word “strident,” which I was unaware was verboten in feminist circles. Then I called my Mom the original MILF, and confessed I was raised to open doors for women.
Then I got mad, went off, got mean (but still not personal!), and sort of dared them to ban me, and they did. I felt bad the next day. I really like that site, to this day.
Pretty shrill, though. duck/cover
you think Ann Coulter is hot?
Haven’t you ever seen the steam coming out of her ears when she rants?
that’s not steam, it’s sulfur.
dkos still has potential, but the site’s been losing its touch. They’ve got some very real threats that they have recently not been responding to well: (for sake of grammatical simplicity, I’ll be using the word “they” to refer to the collective dkos administrators and “front-page posters”)
Which brings us back to the banning:
That’s enough, thanks for listening. I’ve probably written too much, so feel free to delete this post and ban me 🙂
I wear that as a badge of honor!
Every once in a while, Dean Esmay purges his rolls in a drunken fit of unreasonable vitriol in order to make the world resemble his personal psychosis.
But with me, it was personal. I had the audacity to defend Michael Moore.
There are many effective ways to encourage (unwanted people) to leave a blog besides actually “banning” them. You can pile on the sexist crap a half mile thick and tell them if they don’t like it, they can leave. You can take solid, contributing members for granted, then refuse to hear anything they have to say when trouble comes, and play your favorites instead. You can form little power cliques that all stick together against any incoming “troublemakers”..(ie.. those with perspectives not on some unwritten lists of “acceptable views”.) You can get corrupted by your own perceived “power” as a blog owner, and start to think you know all there is worth knowing, which also tends to make some folks take to the road without waiting around to be “banned”.
I still read blogs, comment now and then, and write an occasional piece. But after one too many pretty miserable experiences trying to belong to any blog “community” and to help it grow as a regular contributor, it’s clear that casual, free lance blogging is the only sensible road for this ol scribe!
I stopped posting diaries & comments at MLW because it, like DKos, is afflicted with a number of problems including:
My thinking is that it is possible to disagree without being entirely disagreeable. While I believe that a blog owner is entirely within their rights to run their blog as they see fit, I recognize my responsibility to spend my time on blogs that I can reasonably and rationally participate and I simply don’t see DKos or MLW as blogs that are suitable for my time.
Being banned at some site is probably not a big deal but I would probably withdraw from that site long before it came to that because it’s indicative that my opinions are not going to get through anyway.
I haven’t seen MSOC on dKos for a while, but I’ve observed that some of the worst cliques in dKos come out when MSOC is around. I avoid her diaries like the plague.
You haven’t seen MSOC on DKos lately because she too was banned from DKos…
I certainly have no problem with MSOC whatsoever and in fact she he absolutely no impact on my ‘banning myself’ – in fact, it had nothing to do with any specific people at all and I am certain that MLW will do fine without me and I wish them well…I just came to the conclusion that membership was sort of genetic and I am not willing to lengths necessary to make up for my genetic mismatch. There are some good people posting there.
I think her diaries can be overly dramatic, excessively wordy but rarely lack a passionate point of view.
I self-banned me from DKos (handle there was tbrucegodfrey). I have no idea whether Kos or his people may have banned me after the fact. My reason was substantially similar to Steven D’s regarding female bloggers’ experiences including those of Kathy Sierra – more of a conscientious objection to participating in his shop.
What’s ironic is that I was an extremely minor player in helping to organize one phase of one project of YKos 2006, but did not attend, and had been looking forward to attending this year. Pity.
I have not been banned to my knowledge elsewhere.
I was banned at Democratic Underground, after I told a guy to “blow it out his ass.” He was giving me shit for suggesting that a (picture of) a Virgin Mary figurine was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. I was told that I shouldn’t insult “our lady.” Well, I’ll say it again: Blow it out your ass, whoever you are!
As to Kos, I agree that Markos really jumped the shark on the Kathy Sierra thing. But Daily Kos is much bigger than Markos and his enormous ego. I see Daily Kos as two different sites: the front page, to which I pay little attention, and the diaries, which are the only reason I keep coming back. Steve, I would encourage you to rethink your self-imposed exile. Really, who gives a shit about Markos? I find your diaries to be timely and illuminating. I think your thoughts deserve all the exposure they can get.
Your boycott hurts you, and your readers, more than Markos.
I haven’t been banned anywhere, but I make a conscious effort to not visit either MLW or Firedoglake.
Why? Just curious.
I stopped visiting MLW for many of the same reasons that white n az posted above. In addition, I don’t really feel that it’s as much a political website as it is about liberalism outside of a political context.
FDL is for reasons that I’d rather not disclose (although if you go back in my comments archive at dKos around 7 months ago, you can pretty much infer why).
I’d forgotten about that little brouhaha.
What a delightful diary. Get it off your chest.
Well, needless to say, I have probably been banned more times than I can count. My first experience with political blogs was at Daily Kos. Being interested in values issues, like civil and human rights, poverty, etc., my readings of the front page and diaries were disappointing. Perhaps I was too impatient, but I eventually left for the more exciting world of being a liberal, often troll, on right wing blogs. As a troll, being a progressive/liberal Democrat from adolescence, I was very unsympathetic with the right wing Republican plate, and I was quite obvious about it in my posts. I did not last long on many of them as shergald.
Not in any order, my stay at Red State ended when I suggested that Lynn Swan’s candidacy in PA may signal a turning point in the Republican party’s dependence on Jim Crow Republicanism in the south to attain national offices. The end was swift. I never went back.
At Little Green Footballs, for some reason, my stay was prolonged in spite of intense arguments with Charles Johnson about his bigoted nature and prejudice against Arab peoples and Muslims, especially, Palestinians. I was particularly incensed at his prejudice against lizards and his use of the term lizardoids for everything and everyone he disliked. What have lizards ever done to deserve such treatment. Charles was also pushing the Huntington nonsense about the West’s conflict with Islam, a badly research piece of trash, and my critiques were not pleasant for the true believers that populate his site. My debates with Charles eventually ended when he outed me because my IP address corresponded to a State of Michigan site, my employer at the time, and I got the hell out of there, but not I called him and his site the most bigoted one on the internet. After I left, he banned me, as I never succeeded in getting back in to make a pain of myself, especially on the Palestinian issue.
I had my longest stay at John Hawkins’ place, Right Wing News. John can ban people but it is so easy to come back as with alterego that he had difficulty keeping me off. To his credit, he does allow a small number of left wing bloggers on his site, so long as they are not too effective in representing liberal Democratic positions. I lasted as shergald for many months. Thus, I had ample opportunity to argue with the right wing about all sort of things liberal Democrat argue about, such as poverty, wealth inequality, lack of universal medical care, Republican dependence on racial bigotry, evil Reagan politics, economics (about which I knew only a little), and all sorts of things. When I was eventually banned the first time, I came right back, and when discovered, I returned again, many times in many guises. I realized after a while that fraudulence and democratic principles were my fortes. You put them together. I never felt entirely comfortable about it, but after continually hearing the right wing’s addiction to division, hate, and demonizing the poor, disadvantaged, the least able to defend themselves, it was no problem.
Returning to Daily Kos eventually, to sum up a long story, I defended the poor, those subject to bigotry, and illegal immigrants, those people that progressive/liberals typically defend. I felt that illegal immigrants were not any different from other Americans, given our immigrant heritage. But it was in the IP area, where I defended the Palestinian cause that I was eventually banned, twice, after being what I felt was an effective advocate. I won’t go into the details. After the first occasion, I was rescued by a group of Dkos members who felt that it was unjustified, and eventually got me reinstated. I never knew why I was banned in the first place, but of late I notice that some dimmi administrators at Daily Kos are still searching for some rationale, going for the big one, criticism of Israel is antiSemitic (have a diary on board right now about that issue). Out of feelings of injustice, especially after noting that other Dkos members were being similarly banned for trivial or no reasons at all, I returned under the guise of altered identities (sock puppet is actually the wrong term to apply). In any case, those false identities enabled a continuation of advocacy for the cause, and resolved the problem of silence that erupted after my banning, on both occasions. With the publication of Jimmy Carter’s courageous book on Palestine and the progressive lifting of the veil of propaganda Americans have been subject to for the past 25 years, it was no time to be squeamish about trivial blog morality.
If you don’t like it Kos, get your own internet, was my attitude. Daily Kos is afterall a political blog and the members collectively determine the content.
So that’s my history of being banned. Thanks for letting me tell it, and I hope that my friends and compatriots who felt deceived by my altered identities, whose diaries they sometimes unknowingly recommended, will understand. I also apologize to Jay Elias, often an opponent, who likewise complimented and recommended many of my altered identity diaries.
Don’t know if you know about this book, but it was written by Jacobo Timerman, a jewish and political prisoner (actually dissapeared there). I think you might like it.
No, I don’t know Timerman’s book, but I read the excerpt available. What seems to be missing is the backstage agenda not recognized or ignored in these observations, that from the early 90s and Oslo, when there were backstage peace talks, Israel continued to quietly pursue its colonial plan to make the West Bank part of Greater Israel, and this was done when Labor was in power, and Sharon ahead of settling the Palestinian territories. There was a short hiatus before Rabin’s assassination, but settlement activity resumed in degree that by time of the Camp David/Taba negotiations, the rate of settlers moving into Israeli only villges, towns, and cities in the West Bank and Gaza had doubled. Talk about the two faces of Camp David/Taba when Barak knew damned well “settlements were off the table,” and that because they were off the table, no Palestinian state was conceivable or possible. Only a small group of Bantustans, the generous offer.
Thanks.
Never been banned anywhere, mostly because I’m a relative blip, contribution-wise, compared to any of the rest of you, and because I’ve been able to substantially repress my latent blogospheric-outrage impulse (though I did send DKos to Hell yesterday in an epic time-waster of a diary).
I enjoy all these sites, I really do (including the so-called paparazzis), except the wingnut ones like RedState and Freeperville. Oh, and I’ve never actually visited DU. Don’t really care about it. Maybe that means that I stand for nothing in the eyes of some, or that I’m hopelessly sold out or compromised in x or y way, but that’s how I feel.
Now that we’re all at a point where many of these blogs have, for good or ill, solidified, I pretty much know what I’m going to get at a given high-profile blog, and adjust my expectations accordingly. On DKos, for example, I have and will never expect Markos to say anything about so-called “women’s issues” without sticking his foot in his mouth, but I don’t think everyone there- high or low profile- behaves that way, so I’m not going to write off the whole site for that reason or because of the I/P flap or the blogroll flap or whatever.
People are people and they’re never perfect. I would guess that all of our expectations have been running a trifle high for a number of things, since the last 15 years have been so bizarre (and the last 7 have been so soul-deadening), so when people we thought we knew (itself a silly concept even if we’ve met blogiverse people in meatspace) disappoint us for one reason or another, it’s awful easy to just jettison everything and look for some new haven.
It’s hard to not get emotionally invested in this stuff, but maybe people shouldn’t take everything so personally (or, hell, assume that someone’s taking something personally!). We can’t really know anyone via this medium- and not just cause no one knows you’re a dog on the web- because of the ease of making impersonal snap judgements in this medium.
Not like I should have any credibility on this, of course. Most of the time I feel like a mere armchair activist fatally ensnared by my cushy western lifestyle. What was the term BooMan used from some article somewhere? “Chickenhawk Protestor?” Something like that.
Sorry for the ramble. Short answer: never been banned, and not looking to be, from anywhere.
I’ve managed to avoid being banned mostly by being too lazy and disinterested to ever sign up for anything. I thought I was going to get myself kicked off of this site last summer. I had gotten myself piss drunk and full of anger and fired off a fairly vicious email to BooMan after seriously misunderstanding something he said to me earlier that evening. The next day I couldn’t remember my password here and just assumed I’d been booted. On the other side of the equation, I once tried to ban every BMT user with the number 5 in their phone number. Sadly, I couldn’t convince booman to bump up my admin rights high enough to start booting people.
That was the funniest post EVER.
I can’t remember if making me blush is still a banning offense around here…
It’s funny cuz it’s true.
I asked to be banned after Stark’s diary was deleted without notice. I did not like the idea of being related to a place that would censor people. I went to a diary Armando had written and he responded to me as he usually does (ie like a prick)> I kindly asked him again to ban me, and again he was his usual self.
So, I decided to be a little more persuasive: I started posting comments all in gibarish,for example,
alskdlkdjflksdjfkdjkslkdfjlsdkjf.
Paragraphs and paragraphs like that. I could post comments like that much faster than they could TR them and delete them.
Finally Supersoling posted that it was not cool, and to come to the pond.
Finally I saw a comment by King Kos and told him that if he would not ban me, I would restart my disruptive behavior. So, he finally did.
Since then, I got another ID so I could go there and recommend BTers diaries.
I don’t know if I was banned per se, but I did have a series of brief comments of mine in one thread removed after an inexplicable tiff with the proprietor of Mahablog.
I say inexplicable because I always really liked most of the insights expressed by that person, (I think she’s a woman with the last name O’Brien), and I was surprised at what I regarded as an excess of antagonisim in response to a post of mine where I expressed, (in what I thought was a respectful way), a subtle disagreement on something she had posted.
I still read Mahablog and still appreciate the often brilliant insight shown by the proprietor, but I don’t bother to comment there any longer.
I haven’t been banned, but my superego is so domineering that even a troll-rating is traumatic. I got many at dKos when on one late night I wrote with no sensitivity to speak of that a beloved elder of a particular ethnic group was hypocritical, politically self-serving, and lacking in empathy. One of my unforgivable acts was to cite Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk for supporting evidence.
I’m still trying to live down having to leave the class in 3rd grade for jumping up to touch the flag, so be kind.
Well I have never been banned anywhere..yet…probably because heretofore I didn’t have time to comment a lot and mainly just read some blogs for information and to see which way the poitical wind was blowing.
I am new to this place and landed here because someone at a policy site I do comment on regulary mentioned a post here and after reading some it seemed like a fairly well rounded pretty open discussion site.
BUT….I have to say that a year or more ago I made some comments on a blog, a well known one, not DKos though or any overtly political one..and I guess the management didn’t appreciate my “inquiring mind”.
They didn’t ban me but sent me an email saying ..”you MUST quit asking our foreign policy experts questions about their personal political backgrounds or you will not be allowed to post comments”…..heheheh…sig heil!…I took that as bad sign and deleted it from my reading list. I am pretty sure they would have banned me if I had gone back because no way would I have been able to resist not asking a question again after that.
I’m just going to add here as this diary scrolls off into oblivion, that it was painful to see this on the front page. That’s because it makes me think of those that I miss right here at BT who were either banned or who banned themselves from this place. Unfortunately the former are not able to come and talk about their stories.
I love your writing Steven, and I know you would never intentionally hurt anyone. But its just hard for me.