The achilles heel of the partisan democrats: A case study of DailyKos.

I used to spend a great deal of time reading and commenting on DailyKos. I liked the way the site was set up. At the time I was hungering for a healthy dose of liberal media, since I didnt think such a thing really existed anywhere. Needless to say I was happy when I found dKos. So many people that shared so many of my views! I was enchanted, one might say. But I eventually began to notice certain things were a bit unusual. I first began to suspect something wasn't quite right with the site when the Plamegate affair began to take hold. "Fitzmas" was a term that became quite well known. And that bothered me, because I knew nothing would come of it, and yet so many people were spending soooooo much time on it. I was left wondering if these people think about anything else? I had this crazy impression... like "this is the liberal version of the Natalie Holloway story." I was thinking "this is like Scott Peterson on tv, only the colors are inverted."



But I ignored all that because I still shared the views of most of the people there. But it just sorta kept happening over and over again with every issue. You see, I enjoy debate. I enjoy attacking right wingers when they say stupid things like "the media has a liberal bias." (Yeah that's why they wont touch Chomsky with a ten foot pole? Duh, it all makes so much sense now.) Or when they say lower taxes create wealth. (Yeah that's why people are moving to low-tax Mexico in droves.) But I don't generally respond to crap like that with personal attacks and name calling. (At least not till after I've responded with facts and logic, hehe.) But at dKos you'll find almost no one who doesn't know what a "freeper" is. (A member of their arch-nemesis FreeRepublic.) When a poll shows up on some random website, they tell everyone to go to that website and "freep" that poll. It's fun and it's ego-stroking, but it also clearly underscores the notion of some kind of ethereal ideological divide that may or may not exist. All freepers are bad? All "Kossacks" are good? (Four legs bad, two legs good?)

This "herd mentality" was really more profound than I had originally noticed. I began to grow weary of it since the herd mentality is something that I've dispised long before I ever knew what "left" and "right" meant in the political world.

One other thing I noticed. The people at DKos are really "plugged in" to the mainstream media. They're like watchdogs, in a way. They will attack certain stories and criticise "Bush" on minor things but they will NOT step out of their "democrat pods" and see the bigger picture very often. In fact if democrats were in control of washington I'd be just as frightened of DKos readers as I am of the neocon shills at the right wing sites. Most of the time, they are both sides of the same coin. For example take the whole Bush-bashing phenomenon. Yeah there's no doubt he's a terrible president, but come on. Like Clinton was some kind of saint? How many corporate handouts were given under his watch? How many jobs were outsourced during his watch? How many ports were turned over to foreign governments during his watch? And one other thing, ever heard of Mena, Arkansas?

Needless to say that when you start to mention such things, the wonderful open minded people over at dKos tend to transform themselves into something else entirely. And I'm not talking about butterflies here.

My final conclusion? DKos will not grow much beyond what they are now. In truth, DKos is lost, because the censorship there has reached epic proportions. The simple fact is if you make too many posts that offend the die-hard partisans on that site, you will soon be unable to post anything at all. That's right they just shut you right up. All it takes is a few people "troll-rating" you, and you're done. I've seen the problems get progressively worse until I finally just stopped visiting the site. Their unique system of self-policing seemed like a good idea at first, but now they have become so corrupted that it needs to be rethought. (Big surprise eh? Power corrupts, even pathetically small doses of power.) Right now, it is something that can only be described as some kind of "liberal gestapo". Yes, they got forum Nazis!

That more than anything was what I was really seeking to avoid, and it's a bit disheartening seeing it happen on both sides of the fence. But I have since fully realized the truth of why these things happen. The "fence" itself is a fraud. There is no such thing as a rightie or a leftie. Most people are both in some way. So one can only conclude that the whole left vs right game we play is just a game of divide and conquer. And THAT is a big part of the reason why we as a country are where we are right now. We are naive.

As a curious side note, I've gathered some interesting insight into the "group-think" of self-described liberals. It is indeed rather fascinating what I've learned from the dKos people.

The achilles heel of partisan democrats: Liberals in general are so used to being "hunted" by the media, they will not stray too far from the herd. You can easily spot this odd behavior on dKos. The site is rife with it. For example, take the odd distribution of traffic for the site itself. Liberals tend to congregate in the same spots (DU & dKos by a fair majority). In there they overwhelmingly read and recommend only a select few diaries. Most diaries only get a few reads and a few recommends, but then some get like 500 recommends and 500 comments. And believe me it has nothing to do with the quality of the diary. I've seen some pretty awful diaries get onto the recommended list. I always thought there was something suspect in this behavior but couldn't put my finger on it till much later. But really, after McCarthy, who can blame them? Damn pinko commie libruls! You'd think this would be the ultimate incentive for these people to take that final leap of reason and accept the fact that the words liberal and conservative don't mean a damn thing.

But I guess that's what we get when we allow a few large corporations to supply us with our worldview. To all partisan democrats, I say join the ranks of the majority of your fellow Americans and wake up to the fact that politics as we know it is a fraud. It's about control. Wealth. Domination. Feudalism. Serfs vs feudal lords. That's how it is and how it has always been. It's just a lot more complicated nowadays, thanks to technology and the power of organized social movements. The elites have to make concessions. And one of the concessions they have made was to allow us to enjoy the illusion of control. In reality we have precious little of it. Most at dKos fail to realize that. And those that do are quickly disposed of. That is why I feel my time at dKos was mostly wasted. Granted, I have learned some things. I know more than I need to about this corrupt regime in control of washington right now. But I also know that Hillary is the most likely alternative, and that's clearly no alternative at all. To their credit, most at dKos realize that much at least. But what they do not realize is that the system which gives us Hillarain vs McCainary is not something they can change from one side of the fence. A real candidate would get swiftboated into oblivion, and I'm almost certain dKos would somehow play a vital role in making that happen. And I doubt they'd even notice being played for fools.

So what is my advice for people who don't want to get sucked into ego-stroking yet blindly partisan groups? Well, it's simple. Don't look for ego stroking! Just stick with the facts and point out hypocrisy wherever you see it. And don't get all your news from one source, especially a biased source.