Daily Kos is Dead. I know, it still gets a lot of traffic. And a lot of the Democratic establishment stop by to rally their little neofascist soldiers. But as a hub for progressive change, as a base for the people power movement: Daily Kos is Dead.
It died when Markos Moulitsas came out and threatened to primary challenge one of the best progressives in the Democrat party. Though the site’s downfall as something useful for anyone other than Moulitsas’s wallet and the party hacks to wanting to spread propaganda and raise money had been ongoing for some time, especially after the site started getting airtime mentions on teevee and every nutjob from here to moon city started spamming their nonsense there (it kind of reminds me of that scene in “Contact” with the alien people) Moulitsas’s attack on Kucinich kind of sealed the deal. Moulitsas is now working for the other team, fully incorporated into the corporatist media complex, and hilariously, sounding not much differently from his arch nemesis Joe Klein. And there will be no way that anything that challenges the probama hegemony will ever thrive there. The game is rigged.
But that’s okay. Daily Kos’s 15 minutes are up. He may very well turn it into another Politico or some other corporatist friendly site. But as a progressive hub, it’s over. Get over it. Move on. Orange is an ugly color anyway.
And besides, progressive is a bad word there now. Haven’t you heard?
I had hoped this site could become more than a shadow of the GOS. A hub of its own. If that’s not possible, I just registered three new domain names (dailyprogressive.com, .org, and .net). I’d rather start from scratch then keep suffering through the sloppy seconds of a site that has become a parody of itself. You guys decide what you want to do. We can replace DKos and be the new hub for real progressives who aren’t still deluding themselves about what just happened in the last election, or we can keep wallowing in orange shadows and letting this war against the corporatists party hacks distract us from real political solutions. You can guess what I’m going to do.
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I signed up a few months ago when it looked like it was getting better over there and the Health Insurance fiasco happened. I had no idea it was racist to oppose a Republican Health care plan, because that is what those crypto-facists have wrought yet they are so busy tossing the Presidents salad to fucking realize it.
Seriously, Daily Kos may be worth something someday again, but a whole lot of posters there are going to have to spit out Obama’s cock first.
BTW, my first post here and I hope that it is not the last. The Tea Party jerkoffs are having a party in my little shit ville and I will make my first essay here a report on their activities. Since I’m already considered a teabagger at the GOS, I might as well go all the way. LOL
(Naw, I’ll be tearing those assholes a new one. LOL)
Jackson
To do so requires a certain specificity of action. As an intention, I agree, but then …
I’m not so fond of the word “progressive” either. If electing Connie Saltonstall is progress, so what? I’m rather fond of the word “radical.” Means getting to the root. Thus implies a certain attempt at specificity, to determine what the root is, what to actually do.
We have to go beyond defining ourselves as merely what we are not.
Eventually, be a Republican. In everything but name, and possibly, that, also.
There are no ways around it.
and all you like but I do not think this essay is helping us to calm the inter blog flame war that has erupted, especially those of us who still comment there.I f you wish to complain, I respectfully ask that you take it ot e-mail. TMC
There were a lot of good people there and I never would have discovered DD without it but the OFA brigade was just too much.
And blackwaterdog….
I hate blackwaterdog’s posts with a passion. If I could point to one person that hastened my retreat she would be it. I have never seen a more disturbing display of unabashed hero worship. Whenever I would see those posts I could see why the left isn’t taken seriously… Daily Kos is an embarrassment to the American left (mostly because it is NOT a leftist site but everyone but the left THINKS that it is).
All these meta wars do is give Kos more traffic than he deserves and waste valuable blogging energy that should be going to build this great site.
Let dKos go folks. Trust me, you’ll feel much happier and more empowered when you do.
the Democratic Party won’t save us and the concept of electing ‘better Democrats’ has severe limitations. The best thing for progressives to do, IMO, is to focus on issues and a lot less on candidates.
regarding dkos has changed from a essay you wrote several months ago saying that fighting the bots at dkos was important.
https://www.docudharma.com/diar…
“Lastly, does Daily Kos even matter? Some would argue that it is slipping into irrelevancy anyway and we should just ignore it. On this point I respectfully disagree. Daily Kos, for better or worse (worse I think) is like a hub for the progressive netroots. Not only does it have the most readers (among community blogs), it has the most powerful readers and contributors. A lot of power players drop by to urinate on the Daily Kos lawn. It is true Kos is slipping. But Daily Kos is the face of the Democratic netroots. And until that changes, it is the theater of operations for the fight to reform the Democratic party – or destroy it if need be.
But remember, this isn’t really about Daily Kos the website anyway. Nor is it about Docudharma. It is about the people there. Many are still good progressives. And there are a lot of people who have been mislead. Some sense that they’ve been betrayed. Some are hurt. Others are lashing out. Some are just volunteers or paid operatives who have ulterior motives. They live to attack critics. They sit there sometimes 18 hours a day waiting to attack anyone who is perceived as a threat. Some of them form email lists so they can tag team opponents and exaggerate their numbers. I caught on to that when I was there.
Throughout this essay, as I’ve described the principle of political force, I have only referred to differences of opinion. But what we’re dealing with is far more nefarious. We’re dealing with people who will lie and distort to protect political power. They must be challenged.
I implore you to get back in the fight. Retake the rec’d list of Daily Kos. Stop letting yourselves get bullied and discouraged from participating. Daily Kos used to be the home of People Power. Now it’s just an extension of the PR arm of the Obama campaign and those who benefit from his presidency.
There can be NO CHANGE without force. Without conflict. Without resistance. Without some pain. It’s as much a law of nature as gravity”
Why has your view changed so much? I am torn about this latest mega battle in that it involves negotiations that seem to me to be being brokered between parties that are assuming and deciding rules of engagement which no one will adhere to. We are told this is a way to level the playing field and it’s not. The flame war cannot be put out by giving equivalency to diametrically opposing political sets of belief that are fighting for the heart and soul of the left, and the Democratic party. Meta cannot resolve these differences as the sides are irreconcilable. The heart of the matter which is really not tactics or rules of engagement, the rift is a reflection of what is going on in the country regarding politics and power. I am not ready to concede them equivalency let alone consider them Democratic or democratic. It’s delusional to fight with these people in order to convince them of your worth in their debate over who is enemy of the good.
…. people’s browsers on certain OS. If I had been on my old computer, I would have been really upset with that, it’s rude.
•2nd, that diary is over 24 hours old and the thoughts in it date from the Pleistocene era. That is 10 minutes of my life I just wasted looking at something which is not original and is just another piece of meta, comma, flamish, DNC apologist. So what.
•3rd, you didn’t offer up anything that we haven’t heard here over the weekend, or the past week, either, and this could have been made as a comment in another diary.
•4th, yeah, they are still there, and either gunning for a mass banning of all of the ones crossposting that they haven’t gotten yet, or say they are taking “breaks,” including the ones who I know were the sub- operatives and not the followers, and we both know that means making new identities because they’ve used up the goodwill of the old ones and or been exposed for what they really are. But they’ll be back. It’s what they do, after all. No shit. And I’m sure the management of the other site understands my opinion on this and really doesn’t care. Because it works out to their advantage.
•Okay, so we are graced here with another site to post on.
Try not to muck this up, because I’m not going to spend the rest of my writing life responding to whatever crap they post on that blog nor to people dragging shit over from there constantly.
•I don’t even want to see the ***sddamned word “progressive” anymore because it is starting to remind me of Progresso, the brand of spaghetti sauce.
I am a fvcking liberal. Deal with it. This country’s politics has gone so far right I am sounding like a conservative used to, which ought to frighten people. I talked to hundreds of people during the last campaign cycle and I do understand how completely clueless the DC beltway is. Really. Without being a polling expert.
•I don’t run the site, and I am a guest here just as many others, and it is up to them with what the site ends up being, but just to desire to be the
Anti- kos , imo, is going to be the most fvcking boring thing in the world.
•Now, back to the trenches. The harder I work the more I can drag the conservation back to what I feel is closer to true liberalism, which asks why governments waste so much money on killing other people while having hissy fits about sex and phony vapors about morality. But it is necessary to realize that about 30% of the country is never going to get it and I’m not wasting any more time on them.
powerful emotions, from nearly everyone that uses it, or at least the most vocal people about it. It’s one of those things that just evokes really strong feelings.