Fairleft recently posted a piece called Daily Kos Abuse/Censorship of Arabs.
In it, he wrote:
Meteor Blades still refuses to say why he banned Tom J, the secret censorship decision that inspired the Arab Writers Strike at Daily Kos. Weird, anti-openness must an important value for him and/or site property owner Markos Moulitsas, definitely more important than free speech. I mean, what is the problem, even the Daily Kos apparatchiks have lined up massively in favor (64% versus 28% against) of making banning an open process.
This sounds somehow…familiar…to one of the early dKos bannees.
Ahhh, good old Meteor Blades.
And good old dKos as well.
Nothing new to see here…keep on walking, folks.
Or is that wanking?
Daily Kos is, has been and always will be a farce masquerading as a force. If y’all want to really understand the coming election results this year, look no further than the methods that dKos has used to centrify (and thus decertify) the so-called left wing of this country. Make any real waves whatsoever on the site and banning is absolutely, positively going to be the result there.
Not only “banning”, but banning with no recourse except total surrender. Banning with a stonewalling mentality that refuses to clearly state why people are being banned.
A digital 1984.
Read on.
I went through the process early on, during The Pie Fight and resultant July 4th Massacre in 2005. I was one of the early victims…I think that I scared Meteor Blades and the rest of the inner circle Kossacks to death by my refusal to buckle to their wishes…and many more followed.
The short term result?
…by August, traffic at the site, as measured by reach and page views, had tripled what it was in June.
Good for business.
And that’s what really matters at dKos.
Business.
Nothing more.
Bet on it.
The longer term result?
The witchification of Hillary Clinton (and deification of Obama) on the leftiness blogs, something that has been Dkos’s only real contribution to the political life of this country.
The long long term result?
Obama’s…and the Democratic Party’s…current plunge and the Tea Party’s rise to power.
Why do I say this?
It’s simple, really.
The digital Stalinism of the dominant leftiness blog put the lie to everything that “the left” is supposed to represent. Freedom of speech. Freedom of ideology. Freedom of thought. Instead of those things it produced a clomp-clomp-clomping group of mostly white, mostly middle-class leftiness zombies. Left wing like the NY Times and the Washitclean Post. In word only. And this helped to nominate and then elect a talented amateur politician to the most highly pressurized political tightrope act in the world, the Presidency of the United States of America. Now said amateur status is going to take down that presidency.
He blew it.
Sorry, folks, but there it is. All of the Dem “Oh!!! In the long run this will help us!!!” spin in the world will not affect the truth of the matter.
Obama has blown it.
Big time.
How? Why?
He mistook philosophy for politics, rhetoric for power and image for position.
So it goes.
Down like a motherfucker!!!
Watch.
Hillary Clinton might have made other mistakes, but this one? Not taking enemies off at the knees while they were still relatively powerless? I think not.
The comic philosopher genius Lord Buckley once said in one of his pieces “If you get to it and you can’t do it…there you jolly well are, aren’t you.”
Well…here we jolly well are, aren’t we. Centrified, gentrified and decertified right out of business.
I hate to say it, but I will anyway.
I tol’ ya!!!
All of the Daily Kosian-like palaver about the ins and outs of local races, who is “acceptable” and who is not?
Just so much spittle blowing in the wind.
Booman is worried about the fact that Russ Feingold is going down?
I’m trying to adjust to the idea that maybe Russ Feingold, who is probably the most principled politician in Washington DC, is no longer supported by the people of Wisconsin.
Booman still frequents dKos, I believe. He also opposes much of what the only effective truly leftist politician in the US has done in terms of publicly fighting the right. (Alan Grayson) Grayson’s going to lose, too, brought down by the same movement that is going to take Feingold out.
Faux leftinessism is as destructive as faux newsinessism, and the ongoing popularization and trivialization of real left-wing work by people like the Kossacks and the whole MSNBC/Comedy Channel crew…ably abetted by president Obama, I might add…has only weakened the movement over the long haul. An increasing number of voting Americans are beginning to equate the word “Democrat” with the word “lightweight.” With disastrous results, I might add. But “lightweight” is precisely what dKos really represents. Lightweight leftinessism.
Kos himself is a lightweight.
Bet on that as well.
The only thing heavy about him?
His bankroll.
So do not decry dKos banning procedures as something that is somehow new.
It’s what’s for dinner there, and it has been so for over 5 years now.
Deal wid it.
How?
Just walk away.
I often talk about a NEWSTRIKE!!! idea on the web?
Here’s another one.
DKOSTRIKE!!!
Now there’s an idea whose time has come!!!
AG
A good, old-fashioned Amish shunning, perhaps?
Dkos does it.
Why not some of you?
(As you must, of course. As you will. Or won’t.)
Later…
AG
Gee.
I’ll bet that made a dent in dKos.
Not.
The intention is to damage the ‘progressive’ image of Kos, and for me to publicize the site’s 1984 atmosphere, the bannings and the abuse.
That comment was not aimed at you. It just seems so paranoid of KosCentral to push a very small group of people off the blog.
900,000 hits/day?
How many Arab writers?
Miniscule.
AG
900,000 hits a day? The top-read diary had 3,200 hits on the day I posted my Arab Strike diary, which was 7th on the hit parade and had only 550 hits or so. So, we’re not talking about a lot of action on the diary list, and nearly all of those 900,000 (?) readers just clicking on the front page and seeing the same old same old and moving on. Makes me feel good.
Kos is political in the convenient sense, but there is no question that, with 900,000 daily visitors today, he has been extraordinarily successful.
I don’t think even Kos could have predicted that if can give thousands of bloggers with keyboards a venue, they will come. And they did. Now we have Kos sports blogs, religious blogs, and anything blogs, blogs capable of bringing in more money. But no political blog has been as successful as Daily Kos, even for a one time Republican.
and
What on earth does that mean? In a moral sense.
What are you saying here?
Do you equate web success and Kos’s political “convenience?” Are you saying that one excuses the other? With a sig slogan that reads “Palestine. Peace Not Apartheid?”
Please.
He has thrown the whole weight of his 900,000 hits a day directly against the meaning of that phrase.
For “convenience.”
Hell, Shergald…the massive murder sprees of our government since Vietnam have been “convenient” too. So are the Israeli apartheid policies.
When does convenience end and criminality begin?
How many Palestinians will pay for Kos’s added daily hits and the money/power that they bring with them.
A hit for a hit?
Tit for tat?
Clicks for:
Nice.
There is no excuse for dKos’s ongoing actions.
Except of course…”convenience.”
Disgusting.
AG
Hold the phone.
Shergald is a kossack.
Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore friend…
Emily
P.S. Talk about your cultural dissonance!!!
I have very great difficulty believing Kos has 900,000 visitors who actually click on anything. What’s your source?
My diary ‘Arab Writers Strike’ was the 12th most read on Kos on its day and only had 533 readers. The number one on that day had about 3,000 readers.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/28/104313/85
Seeing those numbers, the strength of the ‘just walk away’ argument gets stronger. But we’ll see, and certainly Kos is a 50-100 times bigger megaphone than boomantribune, or pffugeecamp, or freespeechzoneblog. Jane Hamsher’s site, my.firedoglake.com, is probably much closer to Kos’s in readership.
And to those small sites add European Tribune. I just joined as one of the banned from that little place, run by Jerome a Paris, who use it and DKos as a base to run his wind turbine financial service.
But yes, DKos is now having 900K daily visitors, and even had 2 mill daily visitors just before the 2008 election. My source is the Truth Laid Bear, Ecosystem site which apparently keeps track of site visits across the internet.
http://truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php
Still petty and whining and vindicative, are you?
Sorry Jerome, but you just let ET go to hell by giving it over to a clique of conservative people who have no interest in liberal principles. But you are a tiny blog and I’m afraid it is no longer worth the trouble. Thanks for having me while it lasted, even though I was from the start, a persona non gratis.
Keep up the good work on wind turbines, however, whatever your motivation.
a clique of conservative people who have no interest in liberal principles
LOL. I don’t see how your constant and in no small part deliberately false accusations against other blogs in all your posts across the blogosphere are help for the Palestinians, rather than an attempt to sow discord in the leftist blogosphere, using the plight of the Palestinians merely as cover.
Censorship is not a cover, DoDo. Oui left, Fairleft left, and now I have left, all for the same reason: diary hijacking by meta purists who believe they should determine the content displayed on a site.
Censorship is not compliment for a site like ET that claims it is left of center. Far from it. Bye.
here being boomantribune…
No, Oui has just reduced his output, but he recently posted a diary and is active, if less so right now. Oui, like Fairleft, like myself were just targeted with harassment by a small clique of bloggers that now run European Tribune.
In truth, ET is too small a voice to worry about.
In truth, ET is too small a voice to worry about.
But apparently not small enough to not be worthy of persistent denigration on other blogs. Can you do anything other than meta? Or is it not “can” but “want”?
When a site that pretends to be progressive systematically censors and harasses progressive voices, it should be called out on that. In addition, Jerome de Paris is a well-known ‘progressive’ voice who also needs to be called out for his betrayal of progressive values. That’s all shergald is doing and that I’m doing right now (me for the first time). Yeah, I know, I can hear the ‘libertarian progressive’ refrain now: it’s his site and he can do whatever he damn well pleases with it.
Anyway, I/we move on from a tiny blog, with ET soon to be similar to myleftwing.com (similarly, founded by a very well-known DKossian, Maryscott O’Connor), which decided not to be progressive and now no progressive need focus on or care about.
The fun thing is that regarding dKos, I wouldn’t disagree with a questioning of even liberal, not to mention leftist credentials, or that volleyboy is a pretender to left wing IP solutions. Then again, your expressed positions on Afghanistan have been similar, i.e. closer to the imperial wing of the Democratic Party than Chomsky — which made me wonder really hard why fairleft and you never got into a dispute about Afghanistan…
Frankly, discussion centered on idle speculation and feigned future-predicting powers doesn’t interest me much, so that’s likely why I avoided that ET discussion, especially when such discussions get heated. I think I might agree with Shergald that, generally, things would be worse if the alternatives REALLY are, a., restoring the 2001 Taliban vs. b., keeping the current warlords/kleptocracy+U.S. mess. Many decades of British, U.S., Soviet, Pakistani, and Iranian intervention, all of which will continue (with Soviet replaced by Russian) whether or not NATO pulls out its actual military on-the-ground, added to whatever is the complicated state of the 2010 Taliban versus its 2001 version, makes predicting the future of a non-occupied Afghanistan nearly unpredictable.
Should NATO be killing the native resistance, their families and nearby civilians massively, and spending massively to prop up a foreign occupation? No.
Yup.
AG
Duh.
Sorry.
I should known better
From the Sitemeter dKos page:
Still pretty impressive numbers, though…for advertisers.
29,390 page views per hour. that’s 488 each minute and 8 per second.
(Money money money money mohuhhuhney)
Wanna understand Kos?
Follow the money.
Bet on it.
Follow the money.
AG
Gilroy, if I found that you ever recommended an IP diary of mine, or anyone’s, anywhere, I would change my mind and conclude, yes, Gilroy does believe in human rights, anyone’s.
But….someday we may learn just what it is that you are all about, as a lefty, of course. A lefty?
I am about a lot of things, Shergald. But I am not about you, for sure.
Politcally? I am not a “lefty.” Or a righty or a switch hitter either. I’m not even playing the same game.
I consider myself a nonarchist/panarchist. That is…the panarchist part means that I am not so much about the form of any given government than I am about its actions, and the nonarchist part means that (sadly) in my own life experience I have seen damned few governments of any kind that were not much more than purveyors of nuisance taxes and collators of power.
But…human rights?
OH yes!!! Among the most important of which are the freedom to think originally, the freedom to express that thought and the freedom not to be banned from saying it because some small-minded hustler thinks that it it might interfere with his cash flow/power flow.
A wonderful musician named Trummy Young once wrote a song called ” ‘Tain’t Watcha Do, Hit’s The Way Atcha Do It.”
Dkos professes to be a left-wing blog. Now…there are left wings and then there are left wings. The “left wing” of Stalin courted maximum power through censorship of the worst kind. As in censorship by imprisonment or death. Other “left wings?” Not like that.
Dkos?
‘Tain’t Watcha Do, Hit’s The Way Atcha Do It.
Profess freedom while practicing censorship?
‘Tain’t whatcha do, it’s the way that you do it that is the real message. And the real message, the real long-term message of the dKos political generation is appearing right in front of our eyes right now.
As I wrote above:
Dkos is a lying cesspool of mediocrity, and mediocrity breeds…well, it breeds not just contempt but eventually, failure.
Bet on it.
You also write:
I must confess that I usually have no idea what you are saying or where you are going with your diaries and comments, Shergald. They wander and blather all over the place, which I suppose it to be expected from a supposed Palestinian rights activist who continues to belong to (and also defends) a Zionist-domnated website even after it comes out of its closet.
But I will recommend any post that speaks to real human rights action if it seems to me that:
1-The writer is sincere.
and
2-The writer is not a fool.
And that I have done.
Many times.
Not yours, though.
So it goes.
Refer to numbers 1 and 2 above for more on the reasoning behind my actions.
AG
One point (the rest is beyond me): “governments of any kind that were not much more than purveyors of nuisance taxes.”
Social security and medicare, for example? I’m a liberal-socialist (social democrat if I were European), who believes in the need for a government supported security blanket. What do you believe?
If social security really provided “social” security and if Medicare actually provided good medical care instead of spewing Big Pharma’s poisonous drugs and Big Med’s unnecessary/incompetent hospital work and surgery into the healthosphere I would consider them less “nuisance” and more “security.”
But as things stand now?
Fuggedaboudit!
A “government supported security blanket!!!???” Are you really so blindered that you do not see what is happening in this country? That “blanket” is rapidly coming unravelled, Shergald. As it shrinks it covers less and less of the population. One more round of corporate-owned DemRat/RatPub rule and it will barely be sufficient to cover anyone but the truly rich.
You know…the ones who do not need it?
Nice.
You are a “social democrat,” eh? I suppose that I would be one too if the government provided real socialist services under real democratic rule. Like…one person, one vote? A truly free press?
But…that’s not how it’s working here.
Bet on it.
In fact, it’s hardly working at all.
Compare what is happening in say Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Finland or even…God help us all…France. (At least the French are not so sleepified by their media that they have lost the will to protest governmental incompetence.) All 5 of which countries I have visited for substantial periods of time over the last 3 years or so. Periods of time when I was in daily contact with many intelligent people who live there.
The US?
Besides the lowest IQ segment of all…the Tea Party, which is really only a well-funded attempt to keep the US in the current dark age of corporate dominance that is using the stupidest people available to make its point…no one is saying much of anything.
I have travelled through every continent of this world, and not as a stupefied “If-it’s-Tuesday-we-must-be-in-Denmark” type of tourist but as a working musician playing mostly for the people, not for the rich. I have been in Russia, in Japan, in North Africa and South Africa, all over the Southern hemisphere of the Americas, all over Europe and all over the US. Just for starters. I have seen a lot of shit, Shergald.
And I repeat:
I stand by that statement.
AG
I wouldn’t call Sweden’s taxes a nuisance, Gilroy, given that it is a model social democracy, which Swedes take pride of. What problem could you conceivably have with them? They are just what we in America, liberal Democrats, one day hope to be. Even Canadians hope to one day get there.
That’s right.
Duh.
I quoted someone whose reading comprehension is sorely lacking.
I wrote:
And from that you deduced that I was critcizing Sweden?
If your lips are not too tired from moving while you read, delve into the above passage again, Shergald.
It’s never too late to work on reading comprehension.
Unless of course…maybe it is.
Or…go blog on The Daily Tweet. Not much in the way of challenging syntax there.
AG
Ah hell, stop arguing with and putting down each other. You’re both good folks, trying to shout out “INFORMATION” needed by the masses, just do it in radically different ways.
“Average Visit Length: 0:01”
Do advertisers read that sitemeter data?
http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-17
Yeah, that’s more like it . . . .
The rankings on quantcast, anyway, accord much better with my own common sense, with wikipedia number 1 and so on. I note that sitemeter and the site Shergald points to both accept advertising from those they rate … with the usual suspicions raised.
I thought 1/2 of the members on this blog were banned, blackballed by Dkos…that is old news.
No, you may be living in lala land. I for one became a member of Booman Tribune at the same time, roughly, that I joined Daily Kos. Most of the Kos departed do not blog here; most have just faded away.
maybe you were not part of the progressive exodus from Dkos, it appears to happen before you time here at the pond. You may not know that many progressives were getting low rated than banned from dkos. truly old news.
Bet on it.
AG
Well now that Daily Kos is part of the mainstream Democrat establishment and Kos an established talking head the site has to play by the accepted rules of the party/country.
That is how it goes. As the site developed it moved to the center and then to the right as it grew even more. Oh and Im sure it makes a few dollars too.
If you want radical, different, liberal, progressive, or even left, you will have to look elsewhere. If you want to see a voice for Palestinians etc, you will have to look elsewhere.