As we enter the 2020 Democratic Party Primaries, this is a good time to review BooMan’s answers to Frequently Asked Questions so we may seek to participate in the sorts of discussions Martin wished to host at the dawn of this blog.
What’s This Site All About?
This site is not affiliated with the Democratic Party. However, the Democratic Party is the only institution in this country that is capable of combating the Bush administration’s agenda, or of offering a realistic alternative to the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress.
Therefore, this site is committed to building the Democratic Party, raising money for the Democratic Party and its candidates, finding and promoting promising candidates for state and local offices, helping to shape the Democratic Party’s agenda, and holding Democratic office holders to account for their votes and their ethics.
The site is also committed to doing some of the investigative work that is so desperately needed with the GOP in control of the oversight committees.
It’s extremely safe to say that BooMan’s front pages have continued to express these priorities, with “Trump” neatly replacing “Bush” in the first paragraph. (Thankfully, the House has returned to Democratic Party Caucus control.)
I am highly interested in hearing from this community during the upcoming Party primaries. The most electorally viable part of our Movement is about to make a very important decision, and good faith arguments for and against candidates will be had. Many of those arguments will be passionate.
With a ton of candidates running and preparing to run for the Party’s Presidential nomination, it’s important for all of us to concede a crucial fact. While there will be candidates who have a greater or lesser chance to win the nomination, every single candidate enters with the odds against them. That’s the math when we have more than a dozen candidates running to be the next President. To a lesser degree, this same math will also be in play in many campaigns for Congressional and other elected offices.
I dearly hope that this indelible fact allows us to avoid the damaging rhetoric that could come when the favorite candidates of many community members drop out and the candidates most disliked by many community members advance in the campaign. It is exceedingly clear that there will not be a single “favorite” candidate of Democratic Party institutions. Regardless of which candidates prominent Democrats choose to support, the candidate who persuades the most people to vote for them will be the winner. What the voters do will be the measure of the campaign. What Party leaders do will not be the measure of the campaign.
It’s also vital for all of us to concede another crucial fact. Literally every single candidate for President will be better than Trump. I don’t care for much of Tulsi Gabbard’s rhetoric, policy priorities and voting record. I also do not have confidence that she would be a strong general election candidate. However, if the Congressmember overcomes the large Democratic field and wins the Party’s nomination, that would be a strong sign of her viability. And, most importantly, she would be a far, far better President than Trump.
That’s why I’m going to refrain from making arguments against Gabbard or any other candidate which stand a chance of damaging their general election prospects. Sure, this is a small Pond, but we should model behavior here which helps the prospects of our Party nominees for President and other offices. Rhetorical habits we establish here will form our habits elsewhere. It’s also important to consider how our expressions affect other community members. Let’s try to avoid saying things which are hard to take back, particularly things which are not well supported by the record. Let the conservative movement and Republican Party be the ones which engage in factually dodgy baloney.
Finally, it’s going to be a challenging task ahead of us. It’s going to be important for us to engage in the best faith. Here’s another portion of the FAQ’s here:
If I don’t consider myself a Democrat, am I welcome at the site?
Yes. You are. Everyone is welcome at the site regardless of political self-identification. I don’t care how you are registered to vote, who you have voted for in the past, or who you plan to vote for in the future.
The only restriction on non-Democrats is that they be respectful of the mission of this site, that they don’t post Bill O’Reilly-like talking points, and that they don’t engage in trollish behavior.
If you are pro-life or anti-gun control, no one should down-rate your posts or make you feel unwelcome at this site, or in the Democratic Party. This site is not for the enforcement of any orthodoxy on its members. Principled disagreement is always allowed. Just don’t act like Sean Hannity and be an idiot.
Let’s repeat this portion, for emphasis:
“The only restriction on non-Democrats is that they be respectful of the mission of this site, that they don’t post Bill O’Reilly-like talking points, and that they don’t engage in trollish behavior.”
I believe the mission of this site is captured in the “What’s This Site All About?” section. This sentence is particularly pertinent: “However, the Democratic Party is the only institution in this country that is capable of combating the (Trump) administration’s agenda, or of offering a realistic alternative to the GOP’s control of…Congress.”
It is vital for community members to engage the community honestly about what they wish to accomplish, and how “…the only institution in this country that is capable of combating the (Trump) administration’s agenda…” can effectively and realistically respond to their wishes.
I’ll make a declaration which responds to these vital needs; this declaration is largely consistent with what I’ve shared here in recent months and years.
It is possible that a good Medicare for All Bill could be created which would likely improve health care quality and access and reduce costs; the last outcome would be particularly likely. It is also possible that a bad Medicare for All Bill could be created which would not improve health care quality and access; these bad outcomes could destroy any political popularity which might come from cost savings. More problematically, the American voting public is simply not sufficiently supportive of Medicare for All or other single payer options at the State level.
We need to continue to change public opinion before committing our Congressional representatives to make a real Legislative attempt to pass a Medicare for All Bill. Public opinion at this time makes it certain that such a Legislative effort would be crushed by the sustained and extraordinarily well-funded attack it would get from the businesses which have vested interest in our current health care system.
My opinions in this area have me strongly supportive of prioritizing improvements on the ACA such as a public health insurance option which could be offered on the State and Federal marketplaces. My opinions also have me ready to support candidates who do not have Medicare for All as their top priority.
This doesn’t mean I will oppose candidates who have Medicare for All on their platform. It simply means I’ll be disinclined to have faith in a candidate who promises to work with Congress to pass Medicare for All in 2021. That will be what an energized portion of the Party primary voting base will want to hear, but I believe such a promise will be happy talk which fails the test of being real with the voters. We won’t have sufficient majorities entering the next Congress to to pass Medicare for All. We will need a few more years to get voters more comfortable with public health insurance programs before we make a serious attempt to pass M4A into Law. We should make use of those years to debate and form the best policies.
I’m ready to hear from community members who have different opinions on this and other issues. I’m ready to oppose the views of community members who attempt to demonize candidates running for our Party’s nomination. I’m also ready to call out community members who attempt to cloak their own ideology, policy preferences and social views behind demands of Party leaders which are in substantial opposition to the community member’s own views.
Exceedingly clear call-outs have been made by me against a community member here who continually attempts to demonize Democratic Party institutions and leaders for being, by his claim, destructively “centrist”. This community member claims he wants the Party to move “…way Left and way quicker…”. All the while, this same community member holds a number of policy positions which are radically right wing, such as his frequently defended desire to break up the United States. This strikes me as remarkably dishonest behavior which meets common definitions of trolling.
I’ll concede that in exasperation I’ve made attempts to demonize this community member in recent months. My rhetorical escalations have happened after repeated attempts to get this community member to engage honestly. To repeat from BooMan’s FAQ’s:
“If you are pro-life or anti-gun control, no one should down-rate your posts or make you feel unwelcome at this site, or in the Democratic Party. This site is not for the enforcement of any orthodoxy on its members. Principled disagreement is always allowed. Just don’t act like Sean Hannity and be an idiot.”
I’m ready to hear the arguments of non-Democrats and other people whose policy preferences run counter to the interests of the coalition the Party represents and which are not in the current Party platform. I simply ask that if, for example, you make the case repeatedly that all Federal social welfare programs and Civil rights laws and rulings should be discontinued, you participate in an honest community discussion about the outcomes which would result from that policy position, and a consideration of whether those outcomes have any chance at all of being supported by today’s Democratic Party coalition.
This isn’t much to ask. I expect that community members, whether they hold views which are far left, far right, centrist, or a mix of these, can meet this request for honest, respectful engagement which gives us the best chance of winning the 2020 election and getting good things done through that victory. I think it would be healthy for the community if we managed to achieve this.
I confess that in the several years, on and off, that I have read and commented here, I had never read Booman’s FAQ, so thank you.
I do not recall our resident Ron Paul fan calling for breaking up the US. Honestly I don’t consider that idea a far-right position at all. Indeed, when, in 2009, the opposition to Obama was taking the form of neo-Confederate craziness–with people like Rick Perry talking about secession–my initial reaction was, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” I’m sure I’m not the only person sick of the fact that the American Civil War has never ended and wishing that the neo-Confederates would just go foul their own pond and let the rest of us build a society where progressive values dominate.
The fundamental problem with our Randroid commenter is that he never makes good-faith arguments in favor of any position. His rhetorical strategy is purely destructive. Ridiculing him makes no difference. Demanding that he present good-faith arguments makes no difference. As I have remarked before, his approach is to emulate Roger Stone: Admit nothing; deny everything; attack, attack, attack.
There were other commenters who were equally nasty as Mr. Randroid, but they at least tried to argue for a position sometimes. Hard to admit that I sort of miss some of them.
Yes, Mr. Randroid is pretty much purely a troll. He only tears things down. It’s beyond tiresome.
So, good faith is parroting the party line.
Glad you made that clear.
When I read the FAQ, I actually thought centerfieldj was apologizing for his conduct. Silly me.
No, Voice, you’ve misinterpreted my call here.
To repeat a section:
…My opinions in this area have me strongly supportive of prioritizing improvements on the ACA such as a public health insurance option which could be offered on the State and Federal marketplaces. My opinions also have me ready to support candidates who do not have Medicare for All as their top priority.
This doesn’t mean I will oppose candidates who have Medicare for All on their platform. It simply means I’ll be disinclined to have faith in a candidate who promises to work with Congress to pass Medicare for All in 2021. That will be what an energized portion of the Party primary voting base will want to hear, but I believe such a promise will be happy talk which fails the test of being real with the voters. We won’t have sufficient majorities entering the next Congress to to pass Medicare for All. We will need a few more years to get voters more comfortable with public health insurance programs before we make a serious attempt to pass M4A into Law. We should make use of those years to debate and form the best policies.
I’m ready to hear from community members who have different opinions on this and other issues. I’m ready to oppose the views of community members who attempt to demonize candidates running for our Party’s nomination. I’m also ready to call out community members who attempt to cloak their own ideology, policy preferences and social views behind demands of Party leaders which are in substantial opposition to the community member’s own views…
Many here will make their cases for the candidates they believe would be good or bad nominees during the primary campaign. Once the primaries end, let’s throw down for the best viable general election candidates.
I don’t want a repeat of 2015-16, here at the Frog Pond or in the United States. I hope you agree with my observation that it’s vital for all of us to concede that literally every candidate for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination would be better than Trump. If you don’t agree, make your case for why Trump would be better, and prepare for responses.
Please click the link to read Arthur lay out his case to “BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!” As you’ll read in the comments and links, he defends this radical position doggedly. Since then, he has defended these views from time to time here when called to account. He called for New York State to split in two in 2018.
AG appears to sense that his view is unpopular and contradicts his “DNC NEOLIBERAL CENTRIST” attacks, so he spends most of his time slamming away at other issues which might persuade the community and obscures his calls for The New Confederacy.
Breaking up the United States is very much a right wing position, the ultimate expression of their Federalist dreams. For a half century and more, entitled and inflexible conservatives in the several States have claimed the right to nullify Federal laws, regulations and judicial decisions which displease them. Liberals do not typically offer such responses to decisions which displease us.
After the Obergefell decision, Arthur essentially defended Kim Davis’ months-long nullification of the right for same-sex adults to marry in Rowan County, Kentucky. AG claimed that those who were fighting to defend their rights would be responsible when, in his fever dream, he wrote “…Are their civil rights going to be “enforced” when people drive by their house and throw things at it? When their faces and names are published in the local fundamentalist press? When some hooligans…just as likely to be local cops as anything else…pull them into an alley as they are going to dinner and beat the shit out of them?”
Drunk with his dream, Arthur went on to write “…I personally believe that this union in which so many of us seem to passionately believe should be broken up into smaller countries. Someone wants to live in a country where homosexuals are stoned to death? Great…”.
That’s pungent writing, eh?
My reason for wanting to keep the United States together is that I don’t want to abandon anyone, liberal, conservative or otherwise, who live in Texas, or Utah, or West Virginia. For the same reason, I want California to stay together because I care about the people who live in Republican-leaning parts of the State just as I do any other American.
My experience has been that conservatives are the ones who express eager acceptance of the concept of taking things for themselves while denying those same things to others. My rights are less secure when the rights of others are taken.
Thanks for this diary. There have been more than a few occasions where I have seen something in a comment or diary where I have just muttered to myself, “Read the goddamned FAQ, read the goddamned FAQ, read the goddamned FAQ.” Admittedly the FAQ in its current form is a bit dated, but the basic gist works quite well. Keeping the basic gist of the FAQ in mind moving forward as the 2020 primaries and general election near strikes me as crucial. Heated conversations will happen. The stakes are higher than they were for 2018 (and they were pretty damned high then too). The outcome, to state the obvious, will influence our ability as a nation to undo the damage to institutions and international relations that have been thoroughly trashed and looted while simultaneously tackling serious problems (climate change, economic and social inequality) that have been allowed to fester for generations. Sorting out how to triage all that is going to be messy. Is what it is. Last thing any of us need are bad actors, gaslighting, etc. that made this site nearly intolerable in 2015/16 and the immediate aftermath of that electoral college debacle.
It’s worth beating in mind that when competing candidates themselves start into slamming each other, their partisans tend to do the same. Think about the acrimony of the Obama/Clinton contest in 2008 or the Clinton/Sanders contest in 2016. Our challenge is not to repeat that situation in the likely situation that the 2020 contest narrows down to 2 or 3 choices.
I understand what centerfielddj was getting at in regards to Medicare For All, but he should not lose sight of the fact that politics is largely an aspirational business. We’ve got a pretty clear example in Hillary Clinton of a candidate who spent much of her time in the primaries attacking other candidates for being impractical, for being too pie-in-the-sky. No candidate ever inspired a crowd by saying her opponents’ proposals were impractical.
Bearing in mind. Whoops.
I agree that electoral campaigns are usually best when they are aspirational. Legislative campaigns are, by definition, attempting to create a new law or budget priority, so they are aspirational as well.
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign platform was, by far, the most across-the-board progressive platform of any viable general election Presidential candidate in the history of our Nation. I choose to define a campaign which meets that description as aspirational.
Nevertheless, Clinton was labeled an Eisenhower Republican and worse by many. She got no credit from many on our side for her platform, all while the other side declared her a dangerous communist and worse. The propagandizing on her record was extraordinary, in the literal sense of that word.
Did Clinton’s platform become more progressive in response to very effective pressure from the Left, pressure which was leveled by Senator Sanders’ campaign and other sources? Damn right she moved. Literally every single major politician and political campaign from the dawn of electoral politics has moved in response to campaign conditions. I’m glad my vote for Sanders in the primary helped in its small way to level some of that pressure.
Regarding the sentiment that being real with voters is not inspirational: there is a flip side to that. Recent history shows that when you run on unequivocal promises that you will get things done which you do not have the power to accomplish, you cripple inspiration, use up credibility and open yourself up to charges of corruption even where those charges are unwarranted.
Think of President Obama’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan you will be able to keep it” under the ACA. He overpromised in order to move public support for the Bill, but ended up being labeled as the author of the “Lie of the Year.” The President managed to overcome the political damage well enough to get re-elected, but many in the Democratic Congressional Caucuses, who had to run on the promises made for the ACA as well, lost their re-election bids. Barack’s failure to keep his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison is one that many people attacked him for, from progressives to Arthur Gilroy himself.
A problem with our Movement right now is that there are an unfortunate number of people who react to the failure to pass single payer health care insurance and other policies by declaring most Democratic Party politicians personally corrupt, and if they were all replaced by True Believers everything would happen that the Left wants. Often, that is not a factually accurate summary of the challenges we have in a particular area. Those broad corruption charges also toss a sopping wet blanket over inspiring the voters to elect Democrats up and down the ballot.
You and I might agree that a single payer health care system would save Americans money, that their increased tax payments would be much less than what they are currently paying to private insurance companies. Unfortunately, most voters are not moved permanently by such appeals, particularly since we’re telling them that we want to take away their private health care insurance and replace it with an insurance plan which does not currently exist in a literal sense. It’s extraordinarily easy to make voters fearful when that is the real choice before them.
The main challenge we have is that the voters have not been persuaded to make the leap to substantially more socialistic policies and programs all at once. Most of those who dislike the ACA oppose it from the right; they consider the Law much too socialist. We’ve got work to do to move the electorate first.
I observe that a certain individual who repeatedly accuses the Democrats of being too centrist is suddenly cheerleading for one of, if not the, most centrist of the major candidates under consideration for the 2020 nomination.
Hmmm.
(Not to ding that candidate, who I consider to have compensating advantages. But still…)
It would also help if the potential candidate in question would formally declare his candidacy. At the moment, his candidacy is merely an abstraction. Would love to see how he’d do in debates and how he’d deal with oppo research, same as with those who have already declared.
In the spirit of Thomas More, I’m inclined to give AG the benefit of law for my own sake.
my feeling is that if you ran this zoo it would quickly turn into another dailykos, where insufficient loyalty to the infallible Party gets people banned. BooMan is choosing not to take his blog down that path.
Esquimaux:
Precisely!!!
Only…
We shall see who the “devils” are…here and elsewhere…probably by the end of the primaries and certainly by Election Night, 2020.
My own position regarding the 2016 fiasco is that it was the fault of the mainstream Democratic organization. Had it not bullshitted Bernie Sanders out of contention, we most likely would never have even been in Trumpist danger.
They are about the same game now, as well. Why do I say that? Watch their captive media…especially the Washingtoon Post…as they attempt to denigrate AOC, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and whomever else sticks their neck out in pursuit of a corruption-free federal government.
At first subtly.
But if that doesn’t work?
Watch.
AG
Arthur…
AOC, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders are fierce advocates for a large and proactive Federal government.
YOU WISH TO DISSOLVE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
You claim appreciation for these politicians at the same time you oppose their policy platforms entirely. It’s pure baloney you’re bringing us here.
You write:
I answer:
I want to decorrupt it!!!
I want to free it of excessive corporate control, which is presently a plain fact regarding the controlling interests of both major parties.
Your wild lies about my beliefs are McCarthyite on every level.
So far…since the assassination coups of the ’60s…corporate control of this government and both major parties has grown exponentially.
Eisenhower tried to warn us of this in his farewell speech.
It did no good.
You are correct about one thing, though. I will not support corporate-owned and operated Democrats. Not before they are nominated and neither after, as well. Does that make me a bad Democrat? If the Democratic Party is so corrupted that it cannot nominate an effective and honest opponent of corporate corruption, then I am not a “Democrat” of any type or kind whatsoever. Deal wid it. Another Scylla and Charybdis election will likely be the end of this nation. The last one brought us to the brink of destruction. Deal wid dat as well.
I am, however, supporting those nationally recognizable prospective Dem candidates who appear to me to be otherwise. They presently include Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders in the presidential sweepstakes and the many new breed Dems who were elected to the house in 2016, especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Why AOC? Because she has massive political and communicative talent, that’s why, and also because she is plainly trying to decorrupt this political system. If any of the other candidates convince me that they are not…as Adolph Reed Jr. said of Barack Obama in the The Village Voice, January 16, 1996?
I will cease supporting them as well. Certainly neither Elizabeth Warren nor Bernie Sanders can be accurately described in that way.
O’Rourke?
Let us pray.
I am not going anywhere, centristfield. Not unless Martin bans me, which over many years he has not done despite my general outlier status regarding the DNC and its candidates. If you and your allies try to zero me out, I will simply post my replies to you as standalones.
Freedom of speech above all!!!
As Lenny Bruce so accurately noted decades ago:
That goes for both parties.
Bet on it.
Over and out…
AG
P.S. If things keep going the way they have been going since the Clinton-operated DNC cheated Bernie Sanders out of contention, I do not need to “wish to dissolve the federal government.” It is apparently almost there already. Only a win in 2020 by a hugely popular Dem candidate…one with long, long coattails, one who can motivate some appreciable part of the 40% of this electorate who have not chosen to vote to come to this country’s rescue…will change what has been happening since at least the Clinton I years and probably more accurately since the Reagan years.
Your “pragmatic politics,” DNC-favoring centrism…hell, centerfielddj, it’s in your damned handle…has (since Clinton I’s selloff of this country’s industrial power to the lowest wage-bidders) brought the U.S. to its knees, both economically and socially.
Time for a new deal.
The old one’s coming from the bottom of the deck.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
P.S. Just a little reminder to you and your allies here:
Zero this reply out and it will simply reappear as a standalone post.
I will be ensconced in semi-rural Pennsylvania all of next week, working nights, free to explore the population’s attitudes up close and personal, and with plenty of time to write.
Y’all don’t like my posts? JDW complains that I have written more of them than the rest of the population here combined recently?
Gird your loins.
There’ll keep coming.
Bet on that as well.
The Donald Trump supporter plans to campaign for Donald Trump and his Congressional enablers in 2019 and 2020. Got it.
The Donald Trump supporter also outrageously lies about his record here. He’s called frequently for the break-up of the United States. In 2018 he called for the break-up of his New York State. A sample:
“As far as dissolving the union…this country is now too big, too diverse culturally and too populous to be adequately governed by a centralized federal system. If one truly believes in rule by majority consensus, then decentralization is the only way that it is going to happen.”
In 2015 he wrote that it would be useless for Americans to enforce the Obergefell SCOTUS ruling. This is part of what he had to say about that:
“Are their civil rights going to be “enforced” when people drive by their house and throw things at it? When their faces and names are published in the local fundamentalist press? When some hooligans…just as likely to be local cops as anything else…pull them into an alley as they are going to dinner and beat the shit out of them?”
The relentless lying from the Donald Trump supporter is tired as fuck.
The Donald Trump supporter will be bothering us for a while. Community members familiar with his recklessly regressive ideology will help new community members understand what the Donald Trump supporter is attempting to accomplish here.
. . .
Go ahead! Knock yourself out! Who cares?
. . . here has nothing to do with “the DNC and its candidates”.
That is a bald-faced lie, definitively refuted by the only persons in possession of the requisite factual knowledge to do so, nearly as often as you’ve lied it.
Persistently repeating definitively refuted lies is yet another toxic trolling behavior thoroughly meriting trollrating.
The trait that actually renders you an extreme outlier (and deservedly a pariah) here is hideous, grotesque dishonesty.
WaPo‘s captive to “the mainstream Democratic organization”!!!!!
I hesitate to ever suggest “it can’t get stupider than that”, but . . .
Yeah, it’s a free-for-all now. Just cast around whatever claims you want. We don’t need no stinking substantiation!
It’s worth noting that there is one group which fervently believes the WaPo is in the bag for Democrats.
Trump supporters.
I don’t want anyone banned, and I certainly don’t want to run this zoo. I want us to have a conversation about what comprises good faith efforts from community members, in order to encourage healthy conversations which aren’t destructive to the aims of this progressive community. That extends well past Party loyalty and into the realm of what policies we want our Federal, State and local governments to pursue and how we as political actors should pursue them.
That said, BooMan has defined this blog as one which seeks to strengthen “…the only institution in this country that is capable of combating the (Trump) administration’s agenda, or of offering a realistic alternative to the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress,” the Democratic Party.
That doesn’t require that community members offer l00% support for all Party institutions and leaders, but it does infer that community members should not be campaigning against the Party’s nominees after the primaries. In this era where the most liberal Republican is in whole more conservative than the most conservative Democrat, to campaign against Democrats when talking to progressives while refusing to criticize Republicans when talking to conservatives is exceedingly bad form.
I’m completely fine with people who offer critiques of the Democratic Party; I’ve got my own criticisms. But when a community member has detailed a number of policy preferences are far to the right of almost all of the Party’s coalition while that community member simultaneously levels bitter broadsides against the Party for being insufficiently leftist, that seems to me the definition of bad faith argumentation.
I recall having a flirtation with the Libertarian movement and party in the early part of the Reagan presidency. I was strongly attracted by what felt like a highly principled anti-interventionist stance. It took a few months for me to grasp that the Libertarian Party’s more important animating belief was,”I’ve got mine, Jack, now you fuck off.” Take that and add a generous helping of racism and misogyny and you have Ron Paul. And that’s where Arthur Gilroy has decided to hang his ideological hat.
Think my flirtation (I read at least one of Rand’s books, and actually found it attractive at the time, though I shudder now recalling that) was a bit earlier than Reagan, which suggests to me I’m probably a bit older than you (i.e., your adolescence was a bit later than mine).
Then we grew up. Learned decency and took up residence within the Reality-Based Community.
Which is what Randroid glibertarians never do.
-John Rogers
. . . and it perfectly captures precisely the phenomenon I mean. [Says one who still loves The Hobbit/LotR, though it’s been quite a few years now since my last re-read, and my initial tolerance of Peter Jackson’s liberties taken with the source material steadily evolved to disgust by the second installment of The Hobbit — I simply refuse to subject myself to the third.]
I’m a big sci-fi fan, and some years ago picked up what looked like a promising book from an unknown to me author. After a chapter or two of an impossibly brilliantly superior heroine* totally rolling over every lesser mortal while nattering endlessly about “contracts” I hurled it into the trash bin and vowed never to read another libertarian’s yammer again.
Except Heinlein, of course; when he wasn’t off on extraneous philosophizing he could tell a helluva yarn.
* Think Heinlein’s “Number of the Beast” on steroids.
Having been a mod in a previous life, I would say running this or any other zoo – either individually or as part of a team – is definitely an unpleasant task. The decision to ban or block someone is difficult, at best (the exception of obvious spam duly noted), if you have a conscience. If you do find a need to ban someone, odds are some subset of individuals will be upset, and you’ll get an earful. Been there, done that. Would not want to do that again.
That said, the calculus comes down to what is in the best interest of the blog itself. Do those who appear to be obvious bad actors detract from traffic overall? Do they detract from interaction overall? If I were making part of my living off a blog, I would almost certainly be asking those questions, if only because I probably would not be in a position to afford to sustain losses over any significant period of time. Beyond there business side, there is the human side. What toll does someone who seems hell-bent on trolling behaviors have on others who frequent a community? What right does one have to expect them to simply “take it” rather than walk away? There is no satisfactory way of dealing with someone who obviously argues in bad faith and who abuses the goodwill of those who try to converse more honestly. Comes down to which of the bad options is the least unsavory, I suppose. I do know this: I don’t have Booman’s patience. Just my two cents.