(The following was originally written in response to one of way too many negative posts and downratings by the entity known on this site as “marduk.” The site is now at war with itself, just as the U.S. is at war with itself. God only knows how all of this will turn out. Read on if this matters to you.)
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Marduk: You have apparently been tasked…by yourself and/or perhaps by others… with turning this site into dKos Jr. Tasked with turning Booman Tribune into a lockstepping, DNC-approving, Yesman site that will once again help elect another faux liberal like Obama into power.
You…and centristfield and the rest of the neocentrists…seem to think that you speak for the Booman Tribune “community.” You do not. You say nothing of substance. You don’t say shit, you just snipe. Take a look at the posts below that appear in the “Recommended” section. Posts that people actually thought through instead of kneejerking downrates and two-sentence insults.
Here is tonight’s lineup:
“Wealthcare Vote in the Senate This Week“: Essentially a post about how the so-called “representatives” of this country shine on “…constituents who do not approve of these bills. We appear to be in the majority, even in my own red state.”
“Washington Post on the Millennial Left“: An observation about how the mainstream media tries to spin the awakening of younger U.S-ians to the centrist attempts at maintaining the status quo by any means necessary.
I have bolded part of this because it expresses the core beliefs of the young I encountered on the Sanders campaign.
In general Sanders is not taken seriously with establishment DC types. You can even see that in Booman’s reaction in his thread on neo-liberalism.
In this he badly misreads the contours of the generational politics on the left of center all over the world.
I will admit I am surprised at how much legs this has on twitter.
“Europe’s Socialism Beats IMF Forecast …”: A refutation by perhaps the most thoughtful accumulator of anti-neocentrist info in this site regarding the mass media meme idea that “socialism” is headed nowhere fast.
The true long-term political battle is the attack on democracy itself from within the US itself by the GOP billionaires (Koch bros.) and the policy set out by James McGill Buchanon. The neo-con militaristic agenda is intact due to U.S. Congress and the complex of right-wing think tanks, the Pentagon, CIA and the whole IC. The president is a prisoner in the White House.
“Believing Alternative Facts: Spicer – Bannon – Conway. Why?”: By the same poster, this time outlining the shaky evidence from the spooks about what is really going on. Read the entire interview with Seymour Hersh here. Like Assange and Snowden, Hersh’s rep has taken direct hits from the mass media…described as a tool of Russia, etc. Non-personing is their major tool.
Their only tool, when you get down to it.
Same as yours. Post enough zeroes and ones and you think that you can make people disappear. You are just mass media writ small. Very small.
“Khodorkovsky, Browder and the Magnitsky Act“: Another broadside from Oui, this time taking down the other side of this ongoing hustle, Putin and his own gangsters. As I have been saying here for several years, both sides of the hustle…domestic and/or international…need to be examined with a jaundiced eye.
Just because one side is demonstrably crooked does not mean the the other side is demonstrably not crooked.
Wake the fuck up.
“Why Dems lose: the new DCCC slogan (it’s changed)“: A simple demonstration of how the cowherd middle cannot even hire slogan makers who can cut the mustard. Groupthink at its worst.
“Senate Parliamentarian Delivers Blow to Any GOP HCR Hopes“: A paean to the Sanders forces that are trying to move the DNC further left.
The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled the following are required to comply with the filibster rule, and are not subject to modification through the reconciliation. Put another way, the GOP now needs 60 votes for the following:
—snip—
It was Sanders staff that did the bulk of the arguing before the Parliamentarian. Topher is from the Center for American Progress: in no way is he a Bernie guy.
And so on.
You downrating children are not “the community” of this site. You do almost nothing but snipe while people with real ideas…TarheelDem, Oui, Marie3, The Voice In The Wilderness, myself and others…try to make clear what is really happening in UniParty America.
You want to say something in opposition to what is being recommended here on a daily basis?
Go ahead.
Write some standalone posts. Let’s see how many get recommended. But don’t just sit at your computers and potshot away with downratings…unless of course you have no real ideas but the continuation of a failed democracy by any means at your puerile power.
You disgust me.
AG
[Update-1] Added comment:
My conclusion: I’ll stay on the ‘right side’ 😉
Poor poor Arthur.
People are so mean.
What makes you believe you are a thinker? Will we ever see any indication of this being true? The future will vindicate you? Good for you, you can sit back and wait, since you have been thinkening and have it all figured out.
Or is this just you acting out, your inability of dealing with your feelings of not being appreciated enough by others making you see others as “not thinkers”. You sure like to blame others, and never see yourself as a factor in how people react to you.
I dont believe you are dumb, you seem like a very intelligent person, you just use that intelligence to be effective at stupid behavior.
AG and Oui are terribly concerned with ratings by readers. I don’t understand why. Oh, I guess it somehow affects where their diaries appear in the “recent diaries” list, but big deal. They both respond by denouncing their critics as “neocentrists” or using some other term indicating our alleged ideological failings.
Just to emphasize, AG has a self-referential system going. Disagreeing with AG makes one a neocentrist by definition. He’s called me that lots of times, but never bothered to ask my actual opinion about policy matters. He just assigns the label, then proceeds to project upon me all kinds of silly stuff about Nancy Pelosi, the DNC, and so on.
Yeah, the use of neo-centristTM seems to equate to shit talking.
Not that they would ever come up with a convincing argument, convoluted distractions is what we get instead.
Nothing new ofcourse, the new thing is the “war”
It seemingly gives them permission to attack everyone that dares to criticize their shit.
I guess they hope to drive a wedge between people.
Ratings abuse is abusive and nobody should ever be subjected to abuse. Even if it’s just meaningless ratings abuse on a low readership blog. Abusers are bullies, and while I don’t much like meta-diaries, it’s not inappropriate to call out bullies.
I am rolling my eyes so hard it hurts.
More evidence that you don’t get it. Kindness and tolerance of differences and minor irritants that are of little to no consequence begin with the small stuff. If absent there, they don’t exist when necessary for the big stuff.
Ofcourse i dont get it.
I will never get it.
Its impossible for me to get it.
I dont want to get it, i dont try to get it, if i got it i would try to get rid of it.
I dont know what you got, but you may want to have it checked out.
If you say kindness and tolerance of difference and minor irritants i agree. I get that.
What i dont get is how you can ignore your own intolerance, or more obviously, the intolerance of AG. Does he behave like a tolerant person? is it strange that some react to that intolerance?
Thats why i rolled my eyes, it sounded like manipulative bullshit what you said. Not at all like someone with superior honesty.
If you do find your honesty back, we could try to discuss what you think and feel in a reasonable manner.
Or we could disrespectfully play fight some more.
please offer your definition of ratings “abuse”.
This isn’t dkos. The people who are offended by receiving low ratings are not getting banned because of it.
Frequent use of the troll rating button by a small and identifiable group of users on comments made by a few that are known not to be trolls.
I’ve already stipulated that it’s of no formal consequence here, but that’s not cast in concrete. Plus it ticks me off that if I upgrade a decent comment that a troll rating abuser jumps in to insure that it’s down-rated. I don’t like bullies whether they’re at this little pond or occupy the Oval Office; to tolerate the former while decrying the latter is hypocritical.
Who were the original Centrists that the Neo-Centrists are the “new” of. And who are the non-kneejerk neocentrists?
Every time I think of The Thinker, yes Rodin’s famous sculpture, I think of the park in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and of that original DFH (back when they were called “beats” (pre-1957) or “beatniks” (post-Sputnik), Bob Denver’s original Maynard G. Krebs.
This and Anybody Got a Match are Max Schulman’s contribution to America’s cultural conversation.
There was a recent article about how the Boomers knew cultural references because they were saturated in the cartoons of the 1930s through 1960s in order to keep adults interested as their children loved the slapstick fun. There is no doubt that the most recent generation might recognize Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster or Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, but they draw a blank on Androcles and the Lion and the Venus de Milo (and the dada version of the Venus de Milo with a clock in her belly).
The Thinker was a cultural archetype that looked a lot like the figure in the background behind Bob Denver. Today it means “person who can be ignored as impractical”.
I think of William Scranton or George Romney or Scoop Jackson as centrists. Does that make Tony Blair a neocentrist? Political taxonomy has gotten thorough squirrely of late because we are slowly escaping the shadow of the Enlightenment. That means that left and right now thoroughly have lost their meaning. Center as well.
The right, you will remember, was the clergy. The center were the nobles. The left (or Third Estate) were the poor and townspeople (bourgeoisie).
So the neo-centrists are the aspiring aristocrats, oligarchs, and nobles. The landed military as it were.
I don’t think that taxonomy works at Booman Tribune. Everybody seems pretty Third Estate types to me.
The neocentrists are those Republicans and Democrats that have (publicly) allied with each other to prevent change from outside of the the Deep State box. They have been under effective attack since at least the Perot candidacy. Now? Last year? Sanders and Trump more effectively then ever before attacked them from both sides of the political spectrum. This was a first. This success of this set of attacks was economically-driven. More and more U.S. citizens have begun to suffer economically than at any time since the Great Depression, and they are beginning to see that both parties are owned and controlled by an oligarchical .01%, the greed of which now has no legal bounds.
The response of the neocentrists to Trump’s win…caused largely, in my opinion, by the success of the Sanders candidacy in stripping the leftiness costume off of Hillary Clinton and revealing the Democratic Party as it now stands to be nothing but another vessel of the Deep State…was to double down in opposition to the new threat to its decades-long hegemony that the Trump right represents. Thus the unprecedented media war against him from almost all sides of the political media. WAPO, the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Time and Newsweek magazines, the Associated Press, all major News TV purveyors except Fox, the front page of Google News? All unanimously agreeing that Trump must be destroyed and cooperating with each other and the intelligence services to try to do so?
Absolutely unprecedented in American history.
“Neocentrism” isn’t really new, Tarheel. It successfully fixed every threat to its existence from the ’70s on by using the media to demonize every effectively dissenting, non-centrist politician from George McGovern and George Wallace right on through Ross Perot, Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders. Assassination by media. Non-personing. So much neater and safer than a bullet to the head, and just as effective. All this time it managed to preserve the fiction that the Democratic and Republican parties truly “opposed” each other. They did so only in terms of who got the lion’s share of the winning money. WWE writ large. One party the villain, the other the good guy. And then…when that setup begins to lose public interest…they switch. Like dat.
But this tactic failed with Trump, and in doing so…helped by Trump, who quite clearly took the cover off of the magician’s table from the very beginning of his campaign with the story of how he could pretty much force the Clintons to come to his daughter’s wedding because he had given them money…it had to further publicize what had really been going on by publicly allying both parties and their media in opposition to Trump.
U.S. politics will never be the same again. The UniParty secret is now out; the evill genie has finally escaped its bottle.
Watch.
The next national election? 2018? If the Dems do not field candidates who are clearly and effectively left-wing, they will get their asses thoroughly kicked. Previously reliable Dem segments of the population will either stay home in even greater numbers than they did in 2016 or vote for Republicans. If that happens (provided the whole political system doesn’t break down before that, of course), the Dems are done. It will be too late to reorganize and become an FDR-level, semi-socialist party.
And the whole electoral fix system will disintegrate as a result.
Watch.
AG
P.S. You also seem to be asking about who the neocentrists might be here on Booman Trib.
They include anyone who supports in any way the continuing move to the right of the Democratic Party, including those who seem to be applauding the latest Schumer/Pelosi-led, faux-leftiness rebrand. It’s just the same centrist Coca Cola in another can. Still poison. Bet on it.
Some are just crafty politicians…crafty in the old ways, blind to the new. They are living in the past. The others? The downraters, the two-sentencers, the ones who continue to believe that the Democratic party is anything at present other than the left arm…the weaker arm as well…of the Deep State?
Them.
Them.
Is our host Martin a neocentrist in your opinion?
If he’s not, he is certainly putting on a good act.
He never struck me as a “centrist” of any sort before…I’ve been here quite a while, and I would not have stayed if I had thought that…but since the DNC/Sanders boondoggle, he has certainly leaned towards “the lesser of two evils” idea which is the main calling card of the neocentrist Dems, and he seems to have swallowed the Intelligence-based “The Russkies did it!!!” thing hook, line and sinker.
He has also allowed a number of questionable entities to push/pull this site centerwards by means that he would not have tolerated from any posters as little as several years ago.
Change is the only constant, I guess…
AG
What questionable entities are you talking about?
The two sentence posters and automatic downraters.
Why do you ask?
AG
People who dont like you, pretty much.
I dont get the impression that there is too much substance to this whole thing, like i have so often with your posts.
My take is that you are behaving like a dick too often, so they got sick of your BS.
And lately you seem to have ramped up the dickishness too.
The “dickishness,” as you put it, has ramped up here over the past year or more. It has gotten much worse over the past several months. You are part of the reason it is happening.
I looked you up, bazzz. You are one of the two-sentencers. Well…maybe four or five, sometimes. You have only been here about a month, apparently…at least, that’s when you started rating and making comments. Your entire function has been to uprate the Russian Collusion angle and oppose anyone who thinks it’s a load of shit.
You have never posted an article.
You have never…ever…made a cogent argument.
And…you are as “dickish” as they come.
Welcome in.
Another downstep for the site.
AG
I guess you dont like your reflection very much, it isnt pretty indeed.
Thank you for your interest Arthur, now that i have your attention, please tell me where you would like me to be clearer, i would have appreciated it if you had told me at the time, when it was fresh, but i promise you now, i will clarify anything you ask me to clarify, within reason ofcourse.
How would you like to do it? shall i make a diary where we can explore each others views? Would you prefer private communication so we dont have to worry about posturing and other BS that comes with politics?
If we do this there need to be a more respectful tone, wouldnt you agree?
And we would have to trust each other to be honest about our intentions, and probably some other stuff too, like no overly convoluted posts, or other distractions from the issue we discuss. We would need to be patient with each other, stop assuming the worst when we disagree and forgive another if we make mistakes, not hold grudges. If we are both reasonable and honest, i believe we could come to a sensible set of rules we can agree on.
Do you have any additions, questions or disagreements so far?
Number one: I prefer public dialogue. Other people read it and learn whatever it is that they are capable of learning.
Number two: My posts are only “convoluted” to people who do not read well and/or are too lazy to spend several minutes thinking about something.
Don’t tell me how to write.
I won’t tell you not to write short posts, either.
Number three: I don’t like your act. That earlier faux polite, failed trap post (“Is our host Martin a neocentrist in your opinion?”) followed this stinker to Marie3.
Honesty becomes you, bazzz. You oughta try it more often. A more honest précis of the eyes-wide-shut, neocentrist mindset on this site could not be written.
Thank you.
AG
It can be sarcasm if you wish it to be, or it can be the honest truth as i see it.
I would be happy to clean up my act, if you would care to improve yours.
I am honest about what I believe. Honesty is cleanliness. Your disapproval of what I believe does not make it dirty. I am respectful to all who are respectful to me.
You don’t have to agree with me to get my respect, just be straightforward in your disagreement. The neocentrist two-sentencers and downraters have not been respectful here…not to me nor to any other people who seriously question the wisdom of the neocentrist Dems’ policies…so I no longer respond to them with respect. That’s part of being honest, too.
I wish Bernie Sanders had been as publicly disrespectful to the neocentrists who torpedoed his candidacy as I have been to those here who run the DNC line in the same cowardly, backstabbing way that the DNCers used on Sanders. Maybe things would be different in the United States now if he had simply stood up and told them to go fuck themselves.
Respectfully…
Arthur Sheridan Gilroy
Does honest means interpreting things solely one sided? Especially wrt the ideas that you attribute to others you dont agree with?
It doesnt feel honest to me.
I know you dont like it, and seem to feel its dishonest when i do it to you.
Is honest projecting your feelings onto others? Which again you dont like when its done to you.
Maybe we have different ideas about honesty, and different attitudes towards what the word means.
Maybe its just impossible for us to trust one another, you think i am an evil asshole, while i think you are extremely silly for not realizing its your reflection you look at.
If you feel i am dishonest about something, you would not hesitate to specify what it is, or would you?
If its about respect, its a two way street for me. And you dont have to be a nice sweet caring person, if someone has the decency to listen to whats actually said, and not think the worst right away, its good enough for me.
And if someone has a temper, i would happily fogive some outbursts, provided they display some awareness of what happened. I assume there are no perfect people in this world, and there are very few who are beyond hope, and deserve no respect ever.
There are many behaviors i loathe though, and do not wish to play along with. I suspect thats something we have in common.
You may be interest this site that I discovered yesterday. The charts are interesting.
Particularly the one on political discord. Yeah, it’s getting like the ’60s. Everyone shouting, no one listening.
“Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. “
“A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly saying, “hooray for our side”
“Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the Man comes and takes you away”
Fifty Year Cycle?
Thank you. I will look into it in greater depth..
But right off the bat it occurs to me that if…as seems to be the case…we are traveling through “time” at an ever faster rate, those 50 year things (and Bannon’s fave, the 80-to-100 year Fourth Turning cycle) will compress. Our speed is greater but years remain the same temporal length, thus “cycles” diminish in terms of years. We only need to look at the time cycle of Trump’s accession, reign and (probable) to see how compressed our own time has become. It only took 3 years for him to go from nothing but a TV punchline with some mney to president of a nuclear-armed giant, the United States.
Before him? Obama did it in what? About 12 years from a being a junior Illinois State Rep to the White House? And that speed at the time was considered very fast.
We shall see…quicker than we think, in my estimation.
AG
That should be “(probable) fall” above.
AG
The ones who either cannot or will not see the obvious truth regarding the whole Russiagate media tidal wave.
It’s a hype.
AG
Are there obvious truths about the russia thing? i dont think so, and it seems like most people get this. You seem to think there are many obvious things that people purposefully ignore.
Is the hype here at the pond so bad? i dont have the feeling it is, obviously anything that hurts trump is popular.
He is a dick with attitudes that go against what anyone on the left would find acceptable, he lies and cheats, isnt respectable at all, why should he be treated in the best possible manner?
“Are there obvious truths about the russia thing?”
Not that I can see.
Questionable on many levels.
Of questionable intelligence.
Of questionable aims.
Or both, most likely.
If indeed some of them are not bots.
All is possible in this Brave New World.
Even Caliban as President.
What’s a bot or two or three on a progressive website?
Cheaper than hiring agents to do the dirty work…like they used to do on dKos.
AG
DHinMI is a real person. Outed long ago as a low level Democratic Party operative.
He is indeed. He is on twitter and I argue with him occasionally.
He was very wrong about the Michigan Primary.
Was he outed? I don’t remember it being a huge shock.
Interesting that he continues to be very wrong. A reason that I stopped reading anything he wrote very early on.
He was outed back in 2003 which led to what was probably the first banned contributor. (He later acknowledged that his professional status.)
Well in fairness not many were right about Michigan.
Did anyone get that one right? However, I would expect a ‘local’ political junkie to at least have come closer than observers from distant locations. (Absent a situation when some solid data surfaces that a ‘local’ is too biased to appreciate it and a far away objective observer can correctly read it.)
He was wrong that night. I was working for the Decision Help Desk and knew the margin wasn’t there in Wayne and he still was saying Clinton wasn’t going to win.
Being on the ground can actually make it harder to see the truth.
See my prediction for Iowa….
Now you’ve confused me. Are we speaking of the MI primary or general election? If the former and DH was saying that Clinton wasn’t going to win, then he got it right.
Can’t recall your IA prediction — only that you seem to rely heavily on the Des Register polling. However, reporting from one of the caucuses you seemed to see the truth.
Primary night. He was holding onto the idea that Clinton was going to win because he “knew” they were more votes in Wayna, and those would put Clinton in the lead over Sanders.
I though Clinton was going to win by about 5 – in part based on my experience going door to door.
Thanks. It’s one thing to go with one’s gut before an election, but ignoring the tallies in favor of the gut is will blindness.
You only did slightly worse than the pollsters that had it Clinton by 3. Projecting from a door-to-door sample is problematical. But so too is the IA Democratic caucuses in general. Seemed like such a good idea way back when the nomination process was reformed. Looking back at 2004, 2008, and 2016 it appears to me that the IA Democratic machine is most effective when turnout is low, but it also seems to have gotten weaker and that is easier to see in the recent general elections.
Your Clinton +5 projection didn’t blind you to what you observed at a caucus.
Its long been clear that you have an irrationable way of looking at things you hate, that doesnt mean that everything you say or argue is nonsense. But it makes it difficult to take you seriously when you let your paranoia take over and go on aggressive and mostly pointless rampages.
Insulting people constantly works for very few people in life, there better be a good reason if you choose to do so.
Take that to heart.
I think Booman thinks you need to win (I agree with him about that).
I also think he, like a lot of Obama people, thought Obama had defined the left and felt comfortable with thinking of themselves as on the left as a result.
And then came Bernie – and suddenly the entire debate changed. I never thought of myself as on the the left – like many Sanders people I have encountered. We have moved left in the aftermath of the financial crisis. If you had told me 10 years ago I would have gone door to door for Bernie in Iowa I would have said you were crazy.
So there are a good number of people who for any number of reasons don’t like Bernie, but were never really in the right of the Party either. They are attempting to create space between themselves and Bernie on the left and what remains of the DLC types on the right.
I think their project is mostly doomed. They haven’t come to grips with 2016: that had Bernie run he would not have seen the defections among the young or among downscale whites. So they try to solve a problem that in the end already has a solution.
They are desperately trying to find a non-Bernie liberal. Today’s flavor is Kamala Harris – an interesting candidate in her own right. There will be others. They will wind up being for her largely because she is not Bernie.
If you lose by “winning,”, you do not win.
If Obama defined the left, that means that the left is shallow, imperial and murderous.
The best early description of Back Obama came In The Village Voice dated January 16, 1996. Adolph Reed Jr. said of Obama:
Prescient.
AG
You think people are desperate to find a non-Bernie liberal? There’s not going to be a shortage of people running in 2020. Maybe that will help him should he choose to run.
Bernie still has to prove he can win in the South. So, there won’t be a coronation either. He’s going to have to earn it.
I think DC based consultants are trying to find the non-Bernie.
Regarding the South Bernie ran ahead of Clinton in polling in both North Carolina and Florida, neither of which you need to win if you carry the midwest.
Mblockquote>The right, you will remember, was the clergy. The center were the nobles. The left (or Third Estate) were the poor and townspeople (bourgeoisie).
I don’t think that was ever correct. It’s only recently and after over 500 years that the UK clergy all for the most part sit on the right or status quo side of the political spectrum. (And it’s still not the case in N. Ireland.) As “church” controls the message to a lot of ears, guess it shouldn’t be surprising that coalescing on the right has kept the Tories and faux Tories in power for almost forty years.
However, I agree with what I think is your point which is that ‘neo-centrist’ is a meaningless term. The only thing they define is something in-between whatever prevails on the left and right at any point in time with a predisposition to disfavor change and to favor themselves and their close associates. Any shift on either the left or right, necessitates a shift in the center. Not many periods of any length when shifts on either right or left are non-existent enough for ‘centrists’ not to continuously be ‘neo-centrists’ but that’s because they define themselves spatially and not ideologically. It would be more proper to use ‘neo’ for a right or left shift, but we don’t because the shifts are gradual and multi-factorial.
For example, the south didn’t reject New Deal socialism in 1964 and after. They liked that, along with their traditional Democratic Party — racist, misogynist, and pro-war. Lots of jockeying between the two parties on those issues with the big losers being socialism and peace as the centrists kept moving in the direction of shifts on the right as there were no shifts on the left.
So, basically, you can’t fit politics into three neat boxes or even any neat sliding rectangles.
I believe the Left-Center-Right paradigm came from the Estates-General in Royalist France, not the UK Parliament. Bishops of the Catholic Church sat in the Estates-General and were the equivalent of feudal lords. However, their agenda was different as they served not just the King, but also the Pope. I don’t think the poor were represented at all. The “common people” were the rich non-titled burgers and tradesmen, “common” because they had no titles of nobility. Peasants and laborers were regarded by their “betters” as cattle or beasts of burden i.e. domestic animals, pretty much like today.
Yep. Per Wikipedia:
“The First Estate represented 100 Catholic clergy; the Church owned about 10 percent of the land and collected its own taxes (the tithe) on peasants. The lands were controlled by bishops and abbots of monasteries, but two-thirds of the 303 delegates from the First Estate were ordinary parish priests; only 51 were bishops. The Second Estate represented the nobility, about 400 men and women who owned about 25 percent of the land and collected seigneurial dues and rents from their peasant tenants. About a third of the 282 deputies representing the Second Estate were nobles, mostly with minor holdings. The Third Estate representation was doubled to 578 men, representing 95 percent of the population. Half were well-educated lawyers or local officials. Nearly a third were in trades or industry; 51 were wealthy land owners. (emphasis added)
Wank on.
Wank off.
As a woman of a certain age – old enough to have personally experienced sexism in operation in school and work – your comment cuts right to a very old wound of mine. It’s similar to what men, both peers and superiors, would say when I pointed out the disparate and unequal treatment for women and that the tolerance for sexist jokes was very high. Those men were unconscious of how disparaging and demeaning their words and behaviors were — it was just how men were. With women teaching them that it was a form of abuse, most slowly changed and became better men, but that first required calling them out on their abuse. As gently as possible seemed to work best, but if that didn’t get their attention, stronger measures, including legal actions, were required to make it stop.
I don’t know why you tolerate rating abusers, but that’s your choice. Way back in the early days of blogs, there were real trolls that derailed comment threads and it seemed like such a good idea to have a troll rating button for the community to quickly shut them down. Unfortunately, once created it quickly became a means for bullies to silence those not in lock-step with them. A sad development that has become ubiquitous throughout social media and that has had a few real world tragic consequences.
It’s a Karate Kid reference.
I agree with him on nothing I am aware of, but Don was at least calling attention to the danger wrt to HCR. That is not trivial.
I post here because because I see ideas and I find writing about them helps me understand what I think, and there are some people here who are smarter than me and from whom I learn. And I like to argue.
There is nothing to be won here. No great victory in the offing – just people who like talking about politics. I try to ignore some who are clearly just trying to provoke – mostly successfully.
Online discussion is nothing like it was – and that is sad. The people who comment at DKOS is down from about 5K in 2008 to 1.2K today. Many of the people who were in threads some years ago, and who had something to offer, have left.
DKOS has turned into a wasteland. For all my disagreement with Martin he hasn’t cracked down like Markos did on the left. The bannings at DKOS hurt a good many people who were active members of the community. There certainly has been realization among many of the Sanders people at DKOS that we need our own place, and I suspect one will emerge in the next few months.
online discussion is difficult because it’s so easily derailed by trolls. You have to have a group that very closely agrees or all agree to discuss in good faith. The amount of bad feeling in this very small group is a fine example.
a lot of very good people have left dKos, mostly because of Kos being a huge asshole and throwing them out. and now the purges are secret and you don’t even get told why you’re suddenly PNG. That place is the home of the people who think Hillary won the election and the Democratic party must never change.
very true. There is now a private group of Sanders people – it is a relief not to have to worry about being banned or trolled.
From mid to late 2003, nobody should have had any illusions about Kos. As long as he needed the eyeballs and scribblers, they were tolerated. I would have preferred to hang at Duncan’s place, but he had more readers/commentators which made his threads too time consuming to read. Then dKos upgraded to Scoop and that made conversations possible.
Bingo! Disagreement is okay. It’s simply part of being human. That said, that is sustainable only if we adhere to some basic ground rules. Discussing in good faith would suggest being honest about one’s perspective/intentions and avoiding, say, personal insults as a substitution for more substantial conversation. I love the gadflies in my personal life, but that all works because we accept each others’ boundaries. I try very hard (although I don’t always succeed) at remembering that there is a living breathing human being behind the pixels on a computer monitor, and have tried as best I can to avoid being intentionally hurtful. Most folks here seem to do the same.
And when I say hurt, I mean hurt in a very personal way. People like Delphine and MO were very hurt personally as they had invested a great deal in the site, and had relationships that they valued severed.
While it was a shock for me to be banned from dKos — mostly because I’d been there for a decade and was contributing back when there were only a few dozen there who were the seeds that facilitated the growth in the site — it didn’t take long for me to be grateful for it. And more so as time went on as I completely avoided the 2014 and 2016 irrational group think.
The need for happy talk is something I have thought about since the election.
The truth is happy talk diaries on polling sell. I didn’t post many at DKOS in 2016 as a result. But I was as prone to wishful thinking as anyone I guess.
It is a very real issue that clouds a lot of thinking. We are consistently underestimating the other side – with disastrous results.
I think there is a ton of stuff in the liberal press selling the idea of a trump impeachment. The odds of that are very long: but people want to believe there is a way out of this mess.
In her interview with Glenn Greenwald, Masha Gessen described it as ‘magical thinking.’ The more one is exposed to it without healthy antidotes, the less one is able not to succumb to it.
I did exile/self-censor myself from the dKos towards the end of the 2004 election cycle. Didn’t want to say anything that would dampen enthusiasm because that’s a component of success. However, as in 2002, it wasn’t that difficult to project the Senate results and I was unconvinced that Kerry could beat the GOP cheat spread in OH.
Its pretty clear that DK is a wasteland. But I’d like a place for leftish politics, not one for Sanders people. Even though I agree with most of what Sanders says, I believe in arguing issues, not fawning over people. Fawning over a party (perhaps along with the party deciding that it was a cool way of telling people what to think) is what made DK the wasteland it is today. I wish I shared your optimism that some popular site will emerge since fragmentation seems to be the way things are going.
Writing helps you formulate your thoughts and understand your beliefs better – many is the time when I’ve started writing something and realized by the end of my post that I really make no sense and hit cancel. The problem with trollish behavior that gang-downrates posts or misinterprets what you say (most likely intentionally) is that it sidetracks discussion.
I have no idea whether what will emerge will be popular or not – it isn’t really the point. It just needs to be safer than DKOS is – of this place to be honest. Political blogs are a much tougher sell than they were 10 years ago and I am under no illusion that it will grow beyond the group of people who are starting it.
There is a bit of hero worship of Bernie, no doubt. I don’t know if I even will wind up supporting him in 2020.
About 8 years ago there was a period I wrote on the front page of a blog that had a decent following – which meant I put a fair amount of effort into what I wrote. I was amazed how often where I wound up was completely different from where I started. I also found how often emotion drove what I wrote – and as the emotion subsided I sometimes concluded I really didn’t have a point to make other than that I was mad.
That blog was blissfully troll free in the comments: Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller made sure of it. There is one blog (eschaton) that has very little if any problem with troll behavior, though the conversation is very different.